Brain Squeezings

You are a hard man to reach, Professor Falken...

2010-12-30T01:04:00.000-06:00

Over two years since the last post. High time to remedy that, methinks...

Yes, the template's changed. I'll be restoring familiar elements like the Brain & Juicer soon, but it was long past time to get current with Blogger's preferences as regards site design. Consider the site "under construction" for the nonce.

I'll be going with Blogger-style comments, too. I seem to have lost the old comment data thanks to YACCS's freebie system going offline, but there's nothing really to do about that. We'll see whether the new method is workable.

Stay tuned!

-Rich

There will be more posting, soon, I promise...

2008-12-19T17:05:00.001-06:00

...But coming across this (about 75% of the way down the page) made my day. I knew I liked John Carmack for reasons other than being a demigod unto programmers, gamers and Space-2.0 buffs alike.

He's recently acquired a Tesla Roadster and has this to say, among other things:

[...]Internal combustion drive trains, with all the gears, clutch, oil, and exhaust start seeming remarkably primitive in very short order. I have hopped back and forth between BMWs and the Tesla for a couple weeks now, and while there are plenty of creature comforts that are much better in the BMWs, every time I pull away, I wish I was in the Tesla. I am using it as my daily driver now, whenever I don't have to haul any big packages for Armadillo. As I am driving it, the range is only about 150 miles on a charge, but that is still plenty for what I need, and I just plug it in every night.

I do also confess to enjoying the irony of my driving an electric car. I am fairly hostile to most of the environmental movement, finding it generally a modern tribal religion that justifies condemnation and control of others in the name of protecting the environment. I care nothing at all for the environment in isolation, only for how it positively impacts human life -- civilization is all about beating the environment into forms that suit us better. An "electric car" used to be a conspicuous sign of righteous sacrifice, but you won't get any self-flagellation points for driving a Tesla. Too much fun.

Abso-freakin'-lutely.

-Rich

Better Make Sure your Nose Is Clean...

2008-10-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

...If you want to question a Democrat.

Consider our good friend Joe ("the Plumber") Wurzelbacher.

Gracious, Joe owes back taxes. (So do many, many Americans.)
Goodness, Joe isn't licensed. (He doesn't need to be, unless he's a plumbing biz owner.)
Land sakes, he's a registered Republican. (Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war!)

It's Kafkaesque: Obama decides to talk to a random guy, the guy asks a question about how Obama's tax plan will affect him if he actually realizes his version of the American dream: buying a plumbing company that he intends someday to make more than Obama's "soak the rich" threshold of $250,000.00. Obama, in a rare moment of boneheaded honesty, responds with a perfectly articulated Socialist bromide about wealth redistribution.

Oops. (Over 100,000 Google results as of this writing for "joe the plumber tax policy.")

Sinner!
Naturally, the Democrat response has been to demonize Wurzelbacher: suddenly it's the Hillary-protecting-Bill treatment (and they say Hill and Barack never talk any more!): find his tax records; investigate his family tree; publish his address; misrepresent how his current tax status impinges on Joe's original question; find anyone anywhere who has anything less than sterling to say about the man, and give them furrowed-brow airtime.

This from the penumbra-peering party that found a Right to Privacy in the Constitution.

Would that this sort of curiosity might stir in the Fourth Estate regarding Ayers, ACORN, Fannie/Freddie, Wright, et al.

Sickening.

-Rich

The Long Game

2008-10-10T16:15:00.002-05:00

HumanEvents.com, "The Media's Vendetta Against Palin":

The media have learned their lesson. They generally tolerated the rise of Ronald Reagan. They didn't take him that seriously. And when he astounded them by trouncing Jimmy Carter, it wasn't that big of deal.

[...]But Reagan fooled them. His campaign wasn't only about him. He ushered in a new generation of conservatives who won local and federal elections. They eventually captured both sides of Congress in 1994, stopping Bill Clinton in his tracks. The Reagan conservatives led to right-leaning judges who started to rule in favor of gun owners and parents and the military.

Reagan was not, as the media thought, a slow-witted actor who gave a good speech. He orchestrated an unprecedented move to the Right that changed America and the world.

[...]Bush was never a movement conservative. He is not creating a new generation of young conservatives. But Palin can be. That's what makes her so dangerous. Her convention speech which so dazzled the Republican base was all the evidence the big media needed.

If Palin were a liberal Democrat touting the same achievements she would have achieved sainthood by now in the pages of the New York Times.

She went from mom, to mayor, to governor -- an astounding rise to power that should be applauded by feminists. But because she is a conservative, none of that matters.

Exactly.

Actually, Gov. Palin is a bit populist to call her a Reagan-grade conservative (windfall profits tax on oil companies in AK, for one), but she's a proudly conservative-leaning Republican, and one who makes it look sexy and cool, which is no mean feat compared, for example, to Tom Ridge. (Amy and I watched his speech during the convention, and while he was obviously earnest, he struck us as frightfully, well, Rotarian. Domesticated, you know? The opposite of dangerous.)

Most importantly, Palin's a fighter for those Republican values, which is something the party's been sadly lacking at the executive level, well, since Reagan. Watching Bush (either Bush!) just roll over while Democrats lie and impugn him at every turn has been demoralizing, certainly, but watching Maverick McCain brag about "reaching across the aisle" while dropping "my good friend" names like Ted Kennedy, and failing to attack the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Community Reinvestment Act/ACORN/Obama connection is infuriating.

Sarah Palin is a welcome counter to all this bloody collegiality (well, she is now that McCain figured out that keeping her under wraps and obsessively on message was...unhelpful). We Bitter Clingers out in the hinterlands are tired of our values and priorities being spat on and worse by the likes of Olbermann, Matthews, Couric, Pelosi, Reid and Obama: having a pit bull in lipstick breathe a little fire in their direction is a tonic we've been craving for some time.

Republican strategists, please learn the Lesson of Palin: we're going to get called racists, sexists, bigots, hicks, hatemongers, idiots and worse by our opponents, no matter what we say. How many points has Bush or McCain won for politeness? To make matters worse, we've taught Democrats in the past that profligate namecalling works, and shuts us Republicans up. The delightful temerity of Palin, to actually hit back! That's the reason she's been speaking to venue-overflowing crowds.

But back to the point about bringing new, young people into the party, and lastingly bumping American politics over to the right a bit: could happen. First, though, Palin will need a few victories under her belt, and right now this election is looking like an outside chance, despite all the revelations about ACORN, Ayers and other nontrivial embarrassments coming to light of late. The economy is just a little bit in the tank, of course, which never bodes well for the party in the White House.

I'll see whether I can put together a coherent post about that in the coming days.

-Rich

Well, Maybe it Ain't So Bad After All...

2008-09-04T17:16:00.000-05:00

My, my, how things can change in a week.

Sarah Palin's addition to John McCain's ticket was announced last Friday, and in the meantime we've been treated to one of the more impressive orgies of panicked journalistic feces-throwing I've ever witnessed, and while I haven't been paying attention as long as some, I've seen quite a bit.

By now the "exclamation points" of Palin's background are well-known: hockey mom; rose to her VP candidacy through the PTA, school board, and mayor's and governor's offices; lifetime NRA membership holder; moose hunter; beauty queen; mother of both a four-month-old Down syndrome child and a pregnant teen.

She's also been a ruthless reformer in Alaska, taking on large corporations and entrenched (Republican) party bosses alike, wielding both her veto pen and eBay seller's account with equal aplomb to cut spending and eliminate government waste.

Well, nobody's denying now that Sarah Palin has changed the game. Her speech last night was perfectly delivered, revealing a facility for authenticity, accessibility, humor and openness that we haven't seen behind a podium for a very, very long time. On either side of the Right-Left divide.

Of course, lest anyone think I've gone squishy on my distrust of McCain amid all the hagiography and detailed recountings of his horrific treatment by the North Vietnamese, I haven't forgotten. In fact, I swore I'd never donate to That Man's campaign, but the Palin pick changed my mind, and McCain/Palin received $100 of Amy's and my money on Friday.

Why?

Here's why. Longtime readers here know that I've consistently (and only) been excited about true conservatives: Pence, Thompson, Jindal, et al. Redstate.com alerted me to Palin as a possibility for a McCain pick some months ago, and I was enthused at the possibility, seeing as she's One of Us, but Johnny Mac didn't strike me as the sort who had the guts, or the ideological fortitude.

You see, since the 2006 election and especially this year, the mood in Washington and the McCain campaign has been one of Okay. Democrats have won the hearts and minds of the people. We need to cross aisles, go along and get along, make peace with our time in the wilderness and try to compromise our way to what power we can glean. Country-club, domesticated, lap-dog Republicanism--I can't stand it, and neither can voters.

So, real conservatism, in its fruitings in Alaska, Louisiana, Indiana and many other "elsewheres" (Eric Cantor, Jeff Sessions, Jeff Flake, John Shadegg, I'm looking at you), has been shunted to the back of the room, told to sit down and shut up, declared dead and irrelevant, relegated to "annoying pain-in-the-ass who won't leave well enough alone" status.

I'm not privy to the workings of McCain's mind, but whether he picked Palin for her conservative bona fides or as a last-ditch "Hail Mary" to shore up a dangerously unexciting ticket, it scarcely matters now. Because if McCain and Palin win this year, then she's first up for the Presidency in 2012 or 2016, and that opens the door to like-minded conservatives as running mates from the pain-in-the-ass group above. By then, of course, Bobby Jindal will have undone (as much as any one man is likely to) the damage from decades of neglect that Louisiana and the Big Easy have suffered at the hands of Democrats, and be looking for something else to do, and I think we know how I'd like that to turn out.

McCain/Palin - Palin/Jindal - beyond? Could happen, or some other combination. Especially if Obama is the caliber of politician that the Left keeps producing.

Thus, and for very little other reason, I feel compelled to vote McCain/Palin in November, and (hallelujah!) can do so with a smile.

-Rich

A Tough Year to be a Conservative

2008-08-18T14:17:00.001-05:00

I haven't done much political blogging this Silly Season, since the primaries played out the way they did; for many reasons, but most importantly because this year the choices we conservatives have are demoralizing, to say the least.

Granted, among all the primary candidates John McCain was arguably the most stereotypical choice, but good grief, is it difficult to trust the man. Pretty much the only way he made headlines before becoming the nominee was by shafting the Republican base.

Seventeen months ago, I said of "Johnny Mac":

"Maverick." The Straight Talk Express. Campaign Finance "Reform." Sops to illegal immigrants in his home state. Gang of 14. "Torture" legislation that governed nothing of the sort and insulted our soldiers.

All the distinguished service, all the years in the Hanoi Hilton, and all the foreign-policy hawkery in the world won't wash the taste of betrayal out of GOPers' mouths that Maverick McCain has left over the years. Still better than Hillary, but he's been talking out of both sides of his mouth for too long. Very unlikely to win the nomination. Nose-holder extraordinaire.

Well, he got the party's nod, but Lord, not mine. And now there are rumblings that he may be searching for a pro-choice running mate, so as to make himself more palatable to Democrats. I wonder how much dumping-on the base will take before simply deciding to stay home en masse. Won't take much more for me. Hey, it took a Carter to win us a Reagan.

Oddly, Barack Obama hasn't exactly been covering himself in glory, either. McCain is riding high after having done a very confident and good job in last night's--whatever it was--at Saddleback Church with Rick Warren. Even pundits like Rush Limbaugh are forced to admit McCain did better than they expected him to, though expectations for Obama (recent Hawaii vacation notwithstanding) weren't but so high, the format being something other than "read inspiringly from a TelePrompTer."

While it may be fun to rejoice in McCain getting something less than complete opprobrium from the press (talk about "Battered Ideology Syndrome"), bear in mind, the party-loyalty equation still stands thusly:

Perception: Obama got slam-dunked like a Nerf ball last night. Jeez, McCain might be a principled guy!
Reality: Gang of 14, McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, "Maverick," etc., ad nauseam. His record stands.

Maybe performances like these will be enough for McCain (though I highly doubt another will be allowed to take place). McCain's veep choice will be interesting, if not conclusive.

Funny thing is, I just don't care much: either way, Conservatives are looking at a trying four-to-eight years.

-Rich

Epilogue: An X-wing takes off from the steamy swamp planet of Endor.
Obi-wan Kenobi: That boy was our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.

No great surprise here...

2008-06-16T11:01:00.003-05:00

Hat tip to Tripp...

Your results:You are Iron Man

Iron Man		75%
Spider-Man		70%
Hulk		70%
Green Lantern		70%
Robin		62%
Superman		60%
Supergirl		60%
Wonder Woman		45%
The Flash		45%
Batman		45%
Catwoman		30%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

-Rich

Hop Shortage

2008-05-14T17:39:00.001-05:00

Read today that there's a worldwide shortage of hops, the spice used to give beer its bitter flavor.

It's a sordid tale of supply and demand, that would be very dry if its effects weren't so dramatic. Basically two years ago there was a supply glut of hops, compared to demand--lots being grown, lots being made into hop extract and "put up," which kept prices low: lots of hops around, easy to get, and so they stayed cheap. Problem is, being cheap, hop farmers have had less and less incentive to plant hops each year, and so acreage planted (as well as laid-up hop-extract supply causing the glut) has dipped for the past several years. Put in a bad growing year for a few regions' hops in 2007, and you've got a recipe for a shortage.

The effect of this shortage for beer drinkers is that beer prices will rise for a few years, probably through 2010, and craft brewers (known for making high-hop beers like Imperial India Pale Ales and others) are having to scramble and scrape to get the hops they need to make their beers according to style, or even to make them at all.

For beer makers, the big brewers like Miller and Bud will grab almost all of the supply for the years in question, with little practical effect. Specialty and craft brewers will have a harder time, having to get by on the leavings once the big boys are done, and may have to jack prices dramatically, or even reformulate beers with signature hop-taste profiles. Homebrewers like me will likely wind up simply unable to get the hops we desire, or having to pay prices as much as two to five to ten times the price we paid a year or two ago, for hops we might not have given a second glance.

Luckily for me there are other fermentable options. I foresee more meads and wines to come over the next few years.

-Rich

Genre, Faddishness and Verisimilitude

2008-05-13T16:11:00.002-05:00

(Reading: steampunk - the new genre by James Roy.)

In working on Myriad (the novel in question), I'm constantly running up against detail that the world needs. One protagonist is a female blacksmith, for example: cue research on metallurgy, forge techniques, Victorian-era machining and other important punctilia.

Oh? "Victorian-era"? Yeah, looks like most of one storyline is going to have a steampunk setting. Got a problem with that?

Defining the Term
For those who aren't familiar, steampunk (Wikipedia treatment) is a subgenre of both science fiction and fantasy, wherein much of the technologically interesting world of the 1800s (brass, glass and steam power) is crossbred, sometimes with elements of science fiction like cyberpunk (techno-dystopia, a century "early"), or the speculative fiction of Wells and Verne, or even fantasist elements of magic and the occult a la Lovecraft. This is all done to create a storytelling environment with the the earthiness and gentility of (frequently idealized) Victorian England; the technological racing of today's Moore's Law age; and a brass gear, iron piston, velvet coat, top hat aesthetic.

I had a great steampunk discussion with my chemical engineer brother Matt a few years back: there are lots of problems with the way most authors do steampunk. One of the major differences between then and now, for example, is metallurgy: we're just better at alloys and the like, now, and not by accident: computers and many other trappings of our current information age were pretty much required to get us to the point where our car engines, for example, are as light, heat resistant and strong as they are. Ditto materials science in areas like aluminum, plastics and glassmaking; steam turbine power-to-weight limitations we've discovered, and a thousand-thousand other areas that permeate so many areas of modern life that we can't see past them when we posit, for example, a steampunker flying a steam-powered prop airplane, or driving a flywheel-powered car, or building a clockwork robot. For that matter, many of the achievements and conveniences of modern life arose from technological lessons we learned in the Victorian and later periods--it's not like England didn't have geosynchronous satellites in the 1870s because the Brits were lazy!

Still, in the realm of fiction there are ways around the historical limitations (if not the technological ones, if you're trying to stay honest). Part of the fun in writing this story will be getting there from here while staying as scientifically accurate as possible.

A Tiger by the Tail
Problem is, steampunk, in many ways, is becoming the new black. Per Wikipedia, the genre's name was coined in 1987 (by K.W. Jeter), but it was most definitely popularized in 1990 with publication of The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

So now, 18 years after Difference Engine, we've got steampunk'd jewelry, laptops, even electric guitars, and it's beginning to merge (as a style for the kiddies) with punk and goth infuences. It's an old, well documented progression (first pointed out to me by Ann Crispin in a writing course I attended last year): around fifteen to twenty years after something is cutting edge, it becomes trendy and "in." Happened with Mars fever (from Robison's Red Mars to Mission to Mars), happened with cyberpunk (Gibson's Neuromancer to The Matrix), happening now with steampunk.

Brass Polish
One of the truisms regarding writing is that there are no new stories, and there are precious few truly new things at all. Exciting as steampunk may be now, it may have passed from its flavor-of-the-month status by the time I'm ready to publish. C'est la guerre: the trick is to avoid being boring by telling one's story in as brilliant and as true a way as possible: look at the way China Miéville (Perdido Street Station, and others) and Patrick Rothfuss (Name of the Wind) have exploded old conventions: Miéville by being as wonderfully weird and different as he can while spinning beautifully thought-out plots, and Rothfuss by taking Old Fantasy Chestnut after Old Fantasy Chestnut and relentlessly deploying them new and nonboring ways.

I look forward to playing in the steampunk yard. I have a lot of backfill reading to do, though.

-Rich

Lurching in a New Direction

2008-05-09T16:56:00.001-05:00

Long-running fans/followers of Brain Squeezings may or may not be aware of my ambitions to become a published novelist.

Well, work on accomplishing exactly that has begun, and the specific plan is to have a completed manuscript (ms) ready for a heavy revising pass come the end of September, and to have something making the agent-fishing rounds by the end of 2008.

So it has been inscribed, and so promised. So shall it be done. I'm jazzed.

I've also decided to chronicle the process's ups and downs at a new blog: Scribing and Imbibing (http://fermentalist.wordpress.com/), where I plan to log my adventures both literary and fermentational. Brain Squeezings has really become the place I do political and technological rambling, and as such I felt like putting a bit of a partition up between the two halves of my online self.

I'm also cross-posting this (via BlogIT and Facebook) among Brain Squeezings, Scribing and one or two other blogs I've set up. I may engage in some sort of Grand Reunification at some point down the road, but until then I plan to cross-post freely among all my blogs as I see fit. :-)

-Rich

That Pesky Social Web

2008-04-03T17:53:00.000-05:00

Longtime readers here may notice that my entries here have been getting longer and less frequent. I tend to think of Brain Squeezings as more of my long-form expression space, and it seems to take an increasingly long time to contribute to the poor blog with every entry.

Sadly this has robbed the site of one of its main functions, that of apprising friends and family of what's going on in my life. I've been in a "reestablish contacts with friends" mode of thinking for a while, and so I figured I'd investigate some of the vaunted "social web" sites like myspace, Twitter, Facebook, and the like. A brave new world indeed!

Facebook and Twitter have seemed to fit me the best, so I'll post links to my pages in my sidebar to the left. (Caveat: in order to view my full Facebook page, you'll need to have a Facebook account yourself, and to be marked as a "friend." Such "sticky" membership requirements are common these days. Ah, well.)

Twitter
Twitter is the prototypical "microblog"; basically for every "tweet" you're given 140 characters to express oneself, so quick status updates and pithy comments are about the best one can manage. 140 characters also fits neatly within the 160-character limit of the SMS text messages sendable from almost any cell phone, so of course many Twitter users use text messages to tweet all day long.

Twitter's real magic, though, is that one can also follow others' tweets. Presidential candidates, tech luminaries, pop stars and of course one's own friends can be kept track of this way. Twitter's text-message immediacy has led to some impressive emergent behavior, too, like massively Twitter-interlinked crowds summarily abandoning boring presentations for more engaging ones at the recent South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, or even texting VIPs in content-lacking interviews with more interesting questions than those being asked by the rent-a-journalist.

Facebook
Facebook started life as a way for college kids to keep in touch with one another between and after classes. It's since expanded to a way for anyone to keep track of anyone--provided they'll "friend" you.

Facebook is (potentially) as elaborate as Twitter is simple: if there's a political affiliation, singing group, special interest or ad-hoc gathering, you can bet it's on Facebook, and can be "joined." If there's a high school, college or corporation, there's a Facebook presence wherein one can network, touch base, and give props or diss those involved.

Where Twitter is the moment-by-moment microblog, Facebook might be seen as the total-picture macroblog: it's a way to say, very splashily and in great detail, "this is what I'm up to, involved in and associated with." It's even got a Twitteresque "status" that you can update for people to see, and means of trading friendly "pokes" with one another to rouse someone who... hasn't updated their Facebook page in the last 20 minutes.

Facebook is also great for trading videos and photos, and other bits and snips of interaction. It really must be seen to be comprehended. It's also a bit much for many people--your mileage may vary.

Excelsior!
Lots of "social web" applications like these wind up able to talk to one another, so I can do things like have my Twitter "tweets" update my Facebook status, and even carbon-copy messages to the blog here.

It's a bit more work to keep all my online-presence plates in the air this way, but with luck I'll be able to sync everything together with clever programming.

Me on Twitter
Me on Facebook

-Rich

And the Third Giant Comes to Rest

2008-03-19T13:50:00.001-05:00

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008.

Not too much to say, here, other than that Sir Arthur C. Clarke is responsible for much of the direction of science fiction (and a surprising amount of the nonfictional science) that shaped the 20th century.

The idea of using geostationary satellites (in what have come to be called Clarke orbits) for telecommunications relays? Clarke's.

2001: A Space Odyssey? Clarke's.

Space elevators? Well, not completely Clarke's, but he was one of the primary proponents of the idea. ("It will be built about 10 years after everybody stops laughing." People are working on the materials science now.)

Wikipedia.

YouTube video of his last public statement to his fans.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, requiescat in pace.

-Rich

Feeling Irrational Today...

2008-03-14T13:59:00.001-05:00

From Wil Wheaton: "when come back, bring π."

Yep. Posted early, but what the heck. Time's right.

-Rich

Called... To the Home of the Giants?

2008-03-05T16:30:00.000-06:00

Lower the flags and ring the bells, across the Flanaess from the Sea of Dust to the old Great Kingdom: The Free City of Greyhawk knows mourning tonight.

(From Websnark. It's a long but good read.)

Gary Gygax has died. Creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the Gen Con gaming convention, Dragon magazine and a thousand thousand other things related to role-playing gaming, and fantasy's position in the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" section of bookstores. And video games. And movies.

To wit, from the linked article:

You know what else wouldn't exist now? World of Warcraft. In fact, the entire computer RPG, MMORPG, Action RPG and a Hell of a lot of Platforming games wouldn't have existed without Gary Gygax -- certainly not in the form they do now. Any time you level a character, it's because of Gary Gygax. Hell, Knights of the Old Republic used actual mechanics derived from his writing.
So, take out Gygax, and take out Final Fantasy at the same time. Take out Dragon Warrior. Take out Adventure and Zork and that Atari game with the bats. Take out WarHammer and City of Heroes and absolutely core and seminal elements of essentially all modern video gaming. Without Gary Gygax, that whole industry would look radically different today, if it existed at all.
You want to know what else disappears? All three Lord of the Rings movies from the 90's and the turn of the century.
Oh, you don't believe me? Look, right when Dungeons and Dragons was coming out -- and before it became well known or popular -- there were adaptations of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit was a Ruby/Spears cartoon for children most known now for the cloying song "The Greatest Adventure" (which is a bad rap -- The Hobbit wasn't bad for what it was -- a 70's childrens cartoon special meant for the family hour). The Lord of the Rings was a Ralph Bakshi trip and a half that was a commercial failure at the box office, leading to the story being finished by Ruby/Spears once more. The Lord of the Rings was a failure in the mainstream.
And Fantasy? Fantasy was a subsection of Science Fiction. A small subsection of Science Fiction. Most of the great fantasists were also Science Fiction writers, or were so crossover that it made no never mind (Michael Moorcock was at heart a true Fantasist, but somehow you could buy his work as New Wave SF too, for example.) Even The Dragonriders of Pern was a science fiction novel at heart (seriously. They're colonists on an alien world who lost their culture thanks to DEATH SPORES FROM ANOTHER WORLD).
[...]
Flash forward to the turn of the century. Most "Science Fiction" sections in bookstores are primarily Fantasy, along with a whole rack of licensed tie in books that sometimes is as big as the entire section. And alongside the (fantasy/horror) Buffy books, Star Trek and Star Wars books and the like are the books based on Role Playing Games.
The biggest chunk of that section? Dungeons and Dragons.
And those huge fantasy fans remade the marketplace. Fantasy movies started doing better. Ultimately, The Lord of the Rings was done again, this time (mostly) live action and epic, and it made more money than Ecuador.

My own time in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons was far briefer and shallower than I'd have liked when I was younger, thanks mainly to being a fairly insular kid, and not living close to too many other D&D-obsessed kids. But my brother Matt and I had the first-edition rulebooks, and then some: Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Deities and Demigods, Unearthed Arcana... I could recite over half of the Websnark article linked above verbatim. Many a teenage afternoon was whiled away by running Matt through die-roll-determined dungeon crawls from the few pages in the "random dungeon generation" section in the well-leafed-through back of the DMG.

Later in life (a scant few years ago, actually) I drove frequently from Richmond to the Washington, DC area to hang with some good friends there and battle orcs and the like using the third-edition rules. The comedy relief to be had by watching our motley delving crew do something so simple as scale a rope ladder was well worth the hours on the road. Note to self: reestablish contact there--there are far too many highly intelligent, funny and good-hearted people in that group to leave left-behind the way I did when I moved to Birmingham.

This barely scratches the surface: the roleplaying habit I acquired thanks to Gygax's work extended to the collection of more than forty GURPS rule- and sourcebooks I now own, a large segment of the videogames I play, the books I've read and want to write, the fact that Amy and I are now regular Dragon*Con attendees, and finally many of the good friends I've acquired over the years.

Gygax the man I never met, but by many accounts he was an iron-willed visionary within his games, a kindly mentor to the legions of gamers he inspired and led, and an industrial-strength son of a bitch when dealing with the gaming industry's business vicissitudes and turf squabbles.

His work, though, has influenced millions, made fortunes of billions, and shifted the dreams of a generation.

E. Gary Gygax, requiescat in pace.

-Rich

PS. Amy's a believer that things like celebrity deaths come in clusters, usually of three. Makes me wonder who's next.

A Giant, Called Home.

2008-02-27T15:25:00.001-06:00

William F. Buckley, Jr., thinker, writer, conservative luminary: requiescat in pace.

Of all the people I want to look up and have a chat with in the afterlife, Bill Buckley resides right next to Ronald Reagan amid my top ten.

He died at his writing desk, "in the saddle" according to his son. This, more than any other detail, chokes me up today.

-Rich

Mooning About

2008-02-20T22:37:00.003-06:00

For those of you that don't keep up with such things, tonight is/was a total lunar eclipse for most of North America. Amy and I sat outside and watched, despite forecasts of rain to come and rather daunting cloud cover as the event kicked off at 7:48 PM CST.

Patience paid off, though, as she and I sat, enjoyed some truly excellent tobacco (I succumbed to the lure of a gorgeous little briar pipe while in Gatlinburg, story to come soon) and a bit of Jamaican rum, and oohed and aahed as each progressively-larger rent in the clouds gave us a better glimpse of Luna as she coyly ducked behind Earth's shadow.

Finally, about half an hour into total occlusion, the clouds fell entirely away (leaving a clear-as-a-bell sky), and Amy captured a truly remarkable photo (click the pic to zoom in when you get there) with her several-year-old digital camera on a tripod.

Impressive for an amateur, no? My Princess is a woman of many talents--who knew that astrophotography was among them?

-Rich

...In With the New, and Many Happy Returns!

2008-01-25T16:00:00.000-06:00

2008, the new year, has dawned and is now well and truly under way.

A Birthday!
It's Amy's birthday today! She's celebrated with a new blog template of her own (actually, I shamelessly stole the blog-modernizing idea from her), and is enjoying her day. It's been a wonderful, year, Princess, and I look forward to celebrating scores more with you!

A New Year, a New Blog Template
I've wrought a few look-and-feel changes around here, going for a vaguely newspaper-reminiscent format, with a little better visual organization and less clutter. I've also tamed the ever-lengthening list of archive links, packing it into a drop-down list over at top right, under Old Glory. I'm gonna put a blog-search button over there, too.

Current Events
Well, Fred dropped out of the Presidential race, Rutan and Branson have shown the world their new SpaceShipTwo design, Amazon's Kindle is still sold out, and we actually got snow in Alabama last weekend! Never a dull moment, I suppose.

More Toward the Personal
Amy and I visited my parents in Pennsylvania over the post-Christmas-pre-New-Year week, after which she and I had fun trading colds. Finally, possibly weakened by two weeks of sneezing and coughing, my back went out. All that has gone by the wayside--the back's all healed up now--and we're charging into the new year! Got a novel manuscript in progress, a vacation in the Smokies coming in February, loads of unread books on the Sony Reader, and a whole year ahead!

-Rich

Writing: the Writers' Strike, e-Publishing, DRM and Amazon's Kindle

2007-11-27T19:15:00.000-06:00

The Strike
As a faithful capitalist running dog, having to sympathize with the motivations and actions of a union is almost physically painful to me. So, gentle readers, please understand my position on the strike in that light.

I'm also a technologist, by profession and by avocation. One of the very few constants in my 37 years on the planet has been the rush of technological change: vinyl to eight-track to cassette to CD to MP3; typewriters to text editors to WYSIWYG word processors to HTML web page authoring to blogging; telephones to faxes to e-mail to IM to text messaging; movies to TV to VHS to DVD to streaming video; one gets the idea.

As someone who plans to make at least part of his living through novel advances and publishing royalties in the future, I've watched the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) strike with less than detached interest, and tried to do my homework as regards the players and issues involved.

To wit:

VHS. The WGA, through gross failures in negotiating, won (through the last writer's strike, the one that fatally wounded Moonlighting) royalties for its members of four 1988 pennies for each VHS tape sold of a writer's movie, accepting the line from studios that "we're unsure how this 'videotape' thing will perform--let us test the waters before we allow you a cut of this experimental thing that may never pan out." Also, VHS tapes were pretty expensive to produce.
DVD. The WGA in the '90s managed to score residuals on DVD sales of...the exact same four-pennies-per-disc back to the writer. The reasoning for this sad figure, unadjusted at all for the inflation of the intervening years? "We're unsure how this 'DVD' thing will perform--let us test the waters before we allow you a cut of this experimental thing that may never pan out." Oh, and DVDs cost almost nothing to produce when compared to VHS tapes.
Through the magic of Hollywood accounting, these four-penny units have only occasionally translated into actual money paid. Anecdotally, successful Hollywood writers can go for months or years without encountering another successful Hollywood writer who's actually seen a check for DVD residuals.
Internet streaming is, within 5 to 10 to 20 years, going to sweep the content industry as its dominant means of distribution. The song from the studios? "We're unsure how this 'Internet' thing will perform--let us test the waters before we allow you a cut of this experimental thing that may never pan out." This time, the deal included no percentage for the writer at all.

No percentage. None, as in when DVDs and high-definition discs go the way of VHS, and Internet download or streaming is all that remains after a movie's or TV show's initial run (presuming it even has one; studios and channel-based TV broadcast are starting to show signs of being in real trouble), the writer will get no compensation for his work. Zero.

The standard rebuttal when unions and union members whine about losing money or jobs to technological progress (I should know, I've used it) is, "Well, technology marches on! Find a way to adapt, to add value, retrain, move to another market segment. Suck it up!"

Sadly, this isn't a case where the jobs writers do are being outsourced, or automated, or somehow have become inherently less valuable. It's an industry collaborating (all six content producing corporations are operating through a single entity, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers [AMPTP]) to shut writers out of residual compensation for their work, because the work has the misfortune of being distributed via another medium.

Which brings me to e-books.

From Printed Pages per Minute to Downloaded Bits per Second
The paperback industry's days are numbered, according to Jerry Pournelle, a guy who's been writing SF, I think, for more years than I've been alive. His argument goes that the moment a ubiquitous device exists that allows for a comparable reading experience to that of paper, and is cheaper for publishers to use for distribution than dead-tree methods...

...There will come a time when everyone will be carrying an instrument on which one can read a book with about as good an experience as you would have reading a paperback. The instrument will be your telephone and telep0hone book [sic], as well as GPS locator, email access, video and still camera, notebook, and music delivery system. Nearly everyone will have one. Downloading a new book will be painless and cheap.
When that day comes, the paperback book market will implode. Paperback books will no longer be the "mass market" delivery system for entertainment books such as detective stories and science fiction. When that day comes, the entire financial compensation system for authors will change with it.

I own a Sony Reader e-book viewing device and I love it--it's got over 165 e-books on it now, both purchased and public domain. I've got 50 or so e-books on my Cingular 8125 cell phone, and I've carried e-books of one type or another on every PDA or smartphone I've used. I've read thousands of pages, probably hundreds of thousands, on electronic devices over the years. I love e-books.

Sadly, the conventional wisdom (espoused by Pournelle, too) is that only way that e-books (or any digital media) will continue to be reliable moneymakers for their creators and distributors is for them to be digitally locked down. This means digital rights management, or DRM.

Protection, Software and Litigation-Based
A few months back, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFFWA or SFWA) got into some lamentably hot water when they (quite correctly) served a takedown notice to Scribd.com, a site where people can post any e-text they choose, and which had accumulated an impressive library of pirated e-text versions of books written by authors whose interests were protected by SFWA.

The hot water fell when it came to light that some of the e-texts on the list SFWA posted for takedown were in fact not texts that SFWA was authorized to protect. One of the authors whose works appeared on that list is Cory Doctorow, who wants his work posted everywhere, all the time, for free, and has licensed it accordingly. Doctorow, a notorious loudmouth and pot-stirrer, lambasted SFWA for acting too zealously and precipitously, and the teapot-tempest spread like wildfire.

SFWA apologized, obviously, and wound up disbanding its ePiracy Committee, rendering its protected authors--at least temporarily--less so. In the end SFWA was merely guilty of acting clumsily while doing its job.

Oddly enough, the pirated e-texts on Scribd.com weren't illicitly distributed copies of unprotected e-books, for the most part: they were scans or transcriptions of paper books that were created by ordinary people with either flatbed scanners or lots of time (or lots of friends). It's common knowledge that within hours of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, complete e-text copies of it were circulating, having been scanned and transcribed by networks of thousands of people, each of whom had only to type out and/or proofread a few lines.

So: even in cases where the only legitimate copies of a book are digitally protected, unprotected versions will surface if demand is high enough. I'd venture to say that most paper books with any sort of popularity are available online if one knows in which dark corners to look. So the cat is out of the bag--DRM is at best a holding action.

Contemplating the Shackles: DRM
Because of facts like the ones above I've come down, after much internal wrangling, on the anti-DRM side. Not in the "information wants to be free" info-hippie sense, but in the sense that I despise being treated by my duly-bought media as though I'm a thief. When I'm told by the people from whom I've purchased an e-book that I can read it on this device and not that device, or am treated to an unskippable FBI warning on every DVD, or am prevented from playing Apple iTunes Store media I've paid for on more than five "authorized" computers (happened the other day), and on and on, I feel like I'm being maltreated by the businesses I'm patronizing.

DRM also gives control over the use of content you've paid for to another party, which may change the terms, go out of business, or simply screw up, possibly rendering your content inaccessible. It's happened before: Google discontinued its Google Video service, and was in the process of making its customers' purchases unviewable when consumer outcry pressured Google to offer refunds. Major League Baseball changed its DRM provider, and actually did render its customers' paid-for content inaccessible, no recourse given.

Fortunately, the digital music industry seems to be seeing the light: the EMI label has authorized its titles to be bought without any DRM protection on iTunes and other online music stores, with promising results.

As regards e-books, the people I've seen who've made money by selling unprotected e-books so far seem to fall into categories like authors such as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross who've already made a name for themselves, or organizations like the Baen Free Library and Fictionwise.com, which offer many unprotected, excellent titles for free or inexpensive download. The theory goes that unprotected e-books in effect serve as elaborate ads for the physical versions of the works involved, and the concept has historically been a mostly sound one: to one degree or another, a paper book will always have advantages over an electronic one.

This situation does raise the question, though: what if the paperback implosion Pournelle foresees above happens, and the only cheap books available are electronic ones? Either every silo-like store from Amazon to Sony and its reading device will need to have all books from all publishers available for download; or (as now and far more likely) some publishers' products will be available through some vendors and some others. Thus the balkanized e-book market will continue to hobble along until the ability to read books on more than one device will eventually win out, and unprotected e-books will eventually win the day.

That, or some licensable DRM protection standard will rise from nowhere and be adopted across many devices. Don't see it happening, though, if the music world and current reader world is any indication. All the e-book reader makers still want the whole pie (c'mon, all you publishers just sell exclusively through us!), even though it ain't gonna happen. Not even for Amazon.

You can always buy another copy, kid.
That's the solution proposed by all content producers in the digital age (as they try not to be seen rubbing their hands in glee): just buy another one! Never mind that one of the benefits of a medium being digital in the first place is perfect reproducibility. Leverage that benefit, for Pete's sake; don't expect us to pay again to re-download the the exact same bits!

There have been occasions in the past where re-buying a work was justifiable to me: the move from VHS to DVD caused me to re-buy several titles, because the DVD format was demonstrably superior for my purposes. Ditto records to cassettes, and cassettes to CDs. Value was added at each change of format.

What I refuse to do is pay for another copy of a work with no value added aside from the accident of the device it's chained to. Music files fail this above added-value test because they sound the same on both an iPod and a Zune. E-books fail the test because the text of Moby Dick will always be the same (or had damned well better be) from edition to edition, analog or digital. Now there may be some published forms of Moby Dick that do add value: lavish tomes with illustrations; leather-bound editions on creamy paper; signed copies by Melville(!). I'll pay extra for, or even re-buy those, but for the simple, elemental text? Nope.

Right now, most of the e-book reading devices on the market (Sony Reader, Kindle, etc.) will display some form of unprotected file: BBeB, Mobipocket, LIT, PDF, RTF, TXT. But if device makers decide to disable or simply not include that functionality on their devices, then we're stuck, and pay-per-device or even pay-per-read may even become the reality. Not for me, thanks.

My own Battle with DRM
I've learned over the years to be a bit cagey about the content I pay for. I always buy music that I'm likely to care about on CD, because it's unprotected and I can thus rip (convert) the high-quality master to whatever format I need for whatever player I choose to use. I've been one of Apple's iPod faithful for some time now, but if the third version of the Zune, or any other player catches my eye after my current iPod bites the dust, then I want the freedom to transfer my faves over to the new unit with as little hassle as possible, or at least without re-buying!

The e-book situation is similar. I was very lucky, for example, that the eReader e-books I'd bought when I was a Palm user were readable on my Windows Mobile device--if the eReader.com company hadn't chosen to make a cross-platform reader application, then that money would have been lost, unless I had chosen to crack the DRM on those e-books--an illegal activity. As it is, I still can't read those books on my Sony Reader, because Sony hasn't made their device compatible with the eReader format.

In the same vein, I have a few titles that I've purchased from the Sony CONNECT e-book store, but except in rare circumstances I've stopped buying there, because Sony's DRM locks their books exclusively to Sony devices, meaning that if I decide to move to another device, my Sony-bought books can't make the trip. The Fictionwise e-book store, by comparison, has more titles, and offers them in both DRMed and unprotected formats. Not all books are available unprotected, but I try to stick with the ones that are, because I know they can be moved among devices.

This is my hedge against the paperback implosion, which I happen to agree with Pournelle will happen sometime in the next five to ten years. I also want to be vendor-proof: if Sony, or Mobipocket, or Amazon tank tomorrow or fifteen years from now I still want to be able to read all my e-books.

Sad, but true: if I'm to be said truly to own content I've paid for, then it needs to be free of digital shackles. I'm not going to share or trade these books; hell, all I want is to be able to read their text on whatever device I've decided will be my reader of choice.

Amazon's Kindle and the Changing Game
Speaking of which, the Kindle is a compelling device. Not because of its looks (it's pug-ugly to my eyes), but because it's the first device to combine an e-ink device with an online e-book store and wireless access. It's also got the ability to enter text for searching, annotating, and other activities that the Sony is unable to match. It will read unprotected Mobipocket and TXT files, too, so those would comprise the majority of the books I'd put on one.

Sadly, the Kindle's just as locked down DRM-wise as the Sony when it comes to purchased e-books. Given that the major feature it offers its its cellular-download capability, I'm not likely to get much out of it considering my anti-DRM stance. Bummer, eh? Unless someone breaks the Kindle's encryption and I choose to use their tool to break the law and strip my purchases' DRM.

Sigh.

Anyhow, my boss at work has ordered a Kindle, and will be bringing it into the office this week. I plan to do my own side-by-side comparison with my Sony, and if I like the device's user interface enough I may actually grab one, allowing Amy to inherit the Sony. Because the wireless functionality is DRM-only, though, I doubt Amazon will be getting much money from me.

Here's hoping the anti-DRM eye-opening occurring in the music world extends to the e-book world soon. Sadly, though, indicators aren't good: Amazon owns (having bought it a year or two ago) the Mobipocket e-book format, but the Kindle won't read protected Mobipocket files (only unencrypted ones). Amazon isn't offering to convert protected Mobipocket books to Kindle format, even those bought from Amazon itself.

Just buy another copy, kid.

-Rich

NaNoWriMo Goodness

2007-11-04T01:59:00.000-05:00

Three days in, and 5,902 words written. At 1,667 words per day to reach 50,000 by the end of November, that puts me 901 words ahead.

Feels good, despite not having more than a character sketch, an interview and a few action scenes written--I want to keep my words counts high early in the month and start strong. The month's going to be busy (what November isn't?), and I want to have some buffer prepared in case writing time goes down the toilet come week three or whenever.

As for the story idea? Well, it's sort of Gothic Horror (complete with Byronic hero!) meets SF thriller. Sorta. We'll see how it hashes out. :-D

-Rich

Let My Platform Go

2007-10-22T17:47:00.001-05:00

Walt Mossberg, "Free my Phone"

Background
I have been watching the progress of Apple's iPhone for some time. A good friend of mine has one, and aside from my difficulty with typing on its touchscreen keyboard (which would vanish with practice, no doubt), it's one of the sweetest pieces of hardware I've encountered. My buddy has said that the iPhone is one of the first devices actually to look like it's come from the 21st century. I agree.

The progression:

the incredibly hyped "JesusPhone" release
the far-too-soon-for-comfort $200 price cut to maximize the Christmas numbers
the $100-in-store-credit "apology" to early adopters for the precipitous price cut
the explosion of software unlocks that both freed phones from AT&T's network hegemony and allowed third-party applications to be loaded
the 1.1.1 firmware update that "bricked" many unlocked iPhones and blew away said apps
the re-unlocking of the phone by not-to-be-denied hackers
the decision by Apple to (finally) release an official software development kit (SDK)

I've also seen and seen reviewed some of the amazing third-party applications that have been cobbled together while the world waited for Apple to come to its senses.

Tipping Point
But it was the last bullet-point there, the SDK, that finally cemented my desire to buy an actual iPhone. Until Apple declared its intentions NOT to destroy the efforts of (or otherwise make life difficult for) anyone trying to develop for the iPhone, they prevented the well financed eBook reader makers, the custom-calendar makers, the e-mail-client makers, the RSS-feed-reader makers--all the myriad developers out there, most of whom have been salivating to port or develop their applications for the pretty little device--from ever taking the risk of adding value to Apple's new flagship product. Stupid, and shortsighted.

Until an SDK was announced, there was no way Apple was getting my money, no matter how sexy the device. And I'm sure I'm not alone: there's too much functionality on which I rely on my current smartphone that Apple either didn't implement, or implemented incompletely. Without third-party developers being allowed to develop fixes for or alternatives to these omissions, I wasn't going to spend good money to lose capabilities to which I'd grown so accustomed.

Why This Matters
I'm going to go with many of the prognosticators and pundits out there and declare the desktop computing world as having reached a plateau. There will always be a market for powerful workstation-class machines, but for the most part it's been saturated. The laptop computer market is still growing well, but in my assessment that's because most desktops are being replaced, and when you can get cheap, very capable lappies from Dell, Toshiba and Gateway for about what you probably paid for your dying desktop PC, why not get the smaller, sexier device?

The real growth is happening in mobile devices, finally. People (me included) have been preaching the gospel of "convergence" for years now, and at long last, hardware is beginning to make possible the holy grail of a phone-GPS-camera-browser-emailer-organizer-photo album-music player-book reader-calculator-otherwise generic miracle widget in the pocket, that will run for a day or several on a charge and talk to almost any wireless LAN or cell network. For a few hundred bucks.

In ten years (possibly five), my prognostication is that sales of thumb drives (small flash-memory devices that have replaced the floppy disk for "sneaker-net" file-carrying purposes) will begin to decline, because everyone will be carrying around several gigabytes of general-purpose, compute-enabled storage in their cell phone.

The iPhone, and especially its next generation with 3G speed and more storage capacity, is the current most complete realization of this dream, because the software doesn't suck. It's no use having all the capability in the hardware, if it takes a bull geek like me to keep the thing running, as my current Cingular 8125 [still] does. The iPhone's interface is so elegant, so "well, of course" obvious for most of the things it does, that people literally play with them in the stores and giggle with delight.

The hardware for these devices was coming all along: it took Apple to make them accessible to the ordinary person. The iPhone, simply, is a platform--the best one--upon which the next generation of mobile applications is already being built. Two minutes of play with Apple's Mobile Safari browser ought to be enough to convince anyone: this is how everything should work, and will work in the not-too-distant future.

(The unit is actually amazingly rugged, too: it's built to take real punishment. There are videos and testimonies out there of people doing horrible things [drops, slides over pavement, runnings-over with cars] to their iPhones that I wouldn't dare try with my 8125, and the iPhones not only working perfectly afterward, but showing barely a scratch.)

Fly in the Ointment
...All of which brings me to the reason I cited Mossberg's article at the top of this one. There are lots of reasons why the United States' cell network is one of the least impressive in the industrialized world, but foremost among them is the fact that cell service providers today get to treat their networks like Ma Bell did its own back before deregulation in the 1970s and '80s. They dictate what capabilities the devices on their networks have; what hardware features are crippled or half-enabled; they impose service contracts of such length as to be almost punitive to prevent customers voting with their feet. Did you know that we wouldn't even have our own answering machines (or their successors, voicemail boxes)--they had to be rented from AT&T itself; sound familiar?--without Ma Bell's rules having been first ignored by consumers, then brought to heel by antitrust legislation?

None of these are measures are illegal, by the way, and I'm not sure they should truly be illegal, in my opinion; but the fact remains that countries like Japan, and most of the nations of Europe, and dozens of others, have prevented situations like these either through regulation or trustbusting, and they have had 3G networks for nearly a decade, while we're barely getting them rolled out now. They've had excellent signal coverage, excellent 3G rollouts, the ability to switch from network to network, from phone to phone, from provider to provider. They've had reliability; cheap unlimited data plans; shoot, the Japanese have had TV on their phones since the late '90s, while Cingular/AT&T's best marketing campaign--since dropped for being less than completely truthful--advertised the fewest dropped calls! (Hey, we suck the least!)

Mossberg makes the point that our wired Internet situation is pretty much exactly as it should be (leaving out questions of broadband speed and availability, where we're also getting our booties kicked worldwide; it's still pretty good for all that): your ISP by and large can't and doesn't dictate what programs you run; what computers you buy; what sites you visit.

Cell carriers can dictate those things, and do.

(It's perfectly legal in the U.S., by the way, to unlock one's phone from its current carrier network. Sadly, it's also perfectly legal for the carrier to penalize you monetarily for doing so, or to implement software or hardware measures to make it extraordinarily difficult to do.)

Arguments can be made about the vast distances over which American cellcos have to extend service; the daunting costs of tending and extending service. To all of which I say pish-posh: if everyone could buy any cell phone and download any amount of data for a low, low price per month, the market for such data services would explode, and money to make the upgrades would be pouring into coffers.

The toll-road, "walled garden" approach of downloading only XYZ company's content on only XYZ devices, and then pay a penalty for using anything of ABC's, or even for using up too much time on XYZ's network, has been proven unintelligent and short-sighted. It didn't work for AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy or any of the others in the wired world; why should it be looked upon as an advantageous business model for the wireless?

The Exception that Proves the Rule
The iPhone is unique among cell phones because Steve Jobs demanded freedom from most of the constraints that cellcos impose on their device manufacturers. Verizon Wireless is said to have turned down the iPhone for precisely that reason. AT&T Wireless was willing to do the deal (possibly setting a business-model-endangering precedent); and so they got the device.

Not without hooks, though; much as AT&T entered into a Faustian deal, so did Apple. Apple has been aggressive in protecting the iPhone's carrier-lock-in to AT&T, both through software updates that relock or break unlocked phones, and through denying warranty service to customers who have run unlocking software. Whether this is catering to AT&T's wishes or Apple's is debatable (Apple's widely known to be receiving a percentage of AT&T iPhone subscription revenues, so both companies profit by keeping the unit carrier-locked), but it's an ugly note in what could have been a beautiful, unspoiled melody.

There's hope, though: all the hubbub around the iPhone's lockdown, in both the hardware and software realms, has attracted the attention of the gadget-buying public. Several class-action suits are pending as regards both the locking of the phone to AT&T's network and the lockout of third-party apps that still applies until Apple's SDK is released in February. It could be the iPhone's sheer awesomeness that heralds the downfall of carrier lock-in for good.

Well, maybe. It could happen.

My Plans
Luckily, I don't particularly care about the lock-in to AT&T: they're the only carrier in the area that has halfway-decent coverage at my house (this only makes AT&T the best of a bad lot, however; see above). As I mentioned, though, I was waiting for the SDK. An iPhone without third-party app support was one I wasn't ever going to spend money on. Yes, ever. But that's fixed, now. An iPhone is in my future.

I'm not getting one immediately, though: I want at least 16 GB of flash RAM and third-generation network speed, which will mean I can truly replace both my current Windows Mobile smartphone and my iPod. That will make the iPhone pretty well my ultimate device, but it'll also mean that I'll be waiting until sometime next year. Next summer, possibly, which will also mean that the third-party, well, party will have started in earnest, and that apps should be available by the dozens.

Can't wait.

-Rich

In which the narrator wonders whether he's a prima donna

2007-10-16T18:41:00.001-05:00

In recent months (specifically, since I got serious about attending the Dragon*Con Writer's Workshop last month), I have been organizing my computers and retooling my computer room into a writing study and office instead of a glorified server closet.

In this vein, I've rebuilt a secondhand Windows 98-vintage Compaq laptop (dubbed "Whitman") that I bought on the cheap from Hunter, spent some time revitalizing machines around the house, new and old, for writing: the Mac laptops (Tangy and Galactica) and my Mac Mini (Frost), and then came up with an effective set of methods for synchronizing them all through the use of a thumb drive.

For once, this isn't even procrastinating behavior! I've been brainstorming and organizing story ideas for use in next month's NaNoWriMo (not allowed to write any actual prose, though, until November 1), working on critiques of the manuscripts submitted by other members of the writing group that formed from the attendees of the Dragon*Con workshop, and continuing to read SF both new and old, and now trying to supplement my fiction diet with true classics, like the Iliad type of classics.

I have found, though, that I truly do love writing more when my tools are beautiful ones. When I hand-write, I use a Waterman Philéas fountain pen in a Moleskine or similar notebook; when I type, I increasingly want to use one of my Macs, and specifically using a truly wondrous bit of writer-oriented software called Scrivener.

I also am working hard to convert my office, as mentioned above, from a very technoid server room with fans a-whining into more of a study, a writing nook, a library. I'm not certain as yet what I want to do about the whining-fans thing (the house's computers have to go somewhere), but the environment in which I create has begun to become important to me, and optimizing the place where I do my thing does make sense: the more comfortable I am writing in a place, the more of it I'll do, and most likely the better I'll do it.

Excellent Article, and one of the things that got me on this writing-space kick: Writer's Rooms.

-Rich

An Omnibus Post to Bring Everyone Up to Speed

2007-10-15T17:15:00.000-05:00

Abject apologies for the dearth of posts lately. It was a full and trying summer, though the fall is looking much better.

Here's a partial list of all that's happened in our lives since last I blogged.

Death of Sebastian, our dog
Sebastian was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of cancer called hemangiosarcoma that usually manifests first in the spleen, but spreads quickly to the rest of the body. The lesions/masses can grow so quickly that they deplete the body of iron, so the primary symptom Sebastian showed was acute anemia.

After the first occurrence of anemia (in June), we had the vet remove his spleen and put Sebastian on a plan of iron supplementation. This bought us another four or five weeks with him in good, jumping-around health.

We came home the night of July 6th after a night out to discover that Sebastian was unable to move well, and had obviously had a seizure during the day. Seizing typically means that the end is near, so we made him comfortable and prepared for the inevitable. Around eleven o'clock he began seizing regularly. The emergency clinic was far enough away that making the drive might take longer than Sebastian had, so we decided to keep him in familiar surroundings.

Sebastian died gasping, at about three on the morning of the 7th of July, after many seizures. It was fairly horrible to watch.

We buried him in an area of Amy's parents' property reserved for pet graves. It was raining--the first rain showers Birmingham had seen in nearly two months.

Acquisition of a new puppy: Shasta!
About two weeks after Sebastian's passing, Amy suggested that we go puppy shopping. Reese (our other dog) hadn't shown too many symptoms of grieving or pining, but he did seem confused, often, when Sebastian would ordinarily have popped in front of him on the way to the back yard, or sat next to him on the couch, and failed to. In short, Reese was coping well, but we didn't want him to become too used to being the only dog around the house. At over twelve years old, Reese is an old dog, and was becoming a bit set in his ways.

Amy and I had discussed another puppy, and I was definitely all in favor, though only two weeks seemed fairly short to grieve properly--the topic was still painful. Anyway, we went to the local humane society and visited with a few dogs, but we eventually settled on Shasta, a black lab/husky mix with white toes and a shock of white on her chest. She also has one pale blue and one brown eye--very striking. :-) Amy was particularly taken with her because she was more easygoing and loving than most of the puppies we "interviewed," without being too energetic or overly fearful.

Shasta is a wonderful dog: extremely intelligent, and quite affectionate. It took her a few weeks to sleep through the night reliably, and to be sufficiently housebroken not to require "puppy pads" or frequent towel changes in her crate.

She's also been good for Reese: he's a bit arthritic, but now that we've got him on glucosamine supplements he's able to tussle and play, and honestly I think he enjoys wrestling with Shasta more than he ever did when he was a puppy himself.

The plan for Amy to leave her job
Amy had been eager to leave her desk job for some time--the commute from our house in Alabaster to her office downtown was punishing. Several factors both financial and interpersonal came together to allow us to have her leave her job in mid-August, having given notice in mid-July.

This would have worked out better if the beginning of August through the middle of September hadn't become a constant march of expenses, repairs and travel needs. Of course, this came after spending some impressive money on the first heroic rescue of Sebastian from the effects of his cancer, and after the wedding and honeymoon expenses of the spring.

The air-conditioner breakdown
The summer of 2007 contained one of the longest streaks of 100-degree-Fahrenheit high temperatures in recorded history. It was also an extremely dry summer, in terms of rain, but with periods of high humidity, to make the heat interesting.

Naturally, once Amy came home, the house's air conditioning began to malfunction.

The condensation overflow pan under the refrigeration unit kept filling up, so the floater switch that kept the pan itself from overflowing kept tripping, meaning no chilling of the air. Temperatures in the house routinely reached 85 and higher. I rigged up a siphon system to drain the pan until we could afford repairs, but I wound up having to empty the pan about every other day. Very trying conditions for Amy, and our animals.

At long last we determined (with the help of my new brother-in-law Greg) that a pipe that normally allowed the condensation to drain had become clogged, and after flushing that pipe all has been well.

Breakdown of Gladys, the Mercury Mystique
Gladys, the Mercury Mystique, was bought with several known problems. Electrical issues--check. Leaky tires--check. "Moosing" hum that emanates from under the hood when the car's not yet warmed up--check.

In late August, though, Gladys's alternator died, taking her battery with it. I appear to be hard on car alternators--I seem to lose them at a disproportionate rate to the rest of the car-driving world.

The Mercury Mystique, however, seems purpose-built to cause alternator pain. Not only is the alternator located near the bottom of the engine (and exposed to the elements, making it more prone to failure than other placements would make it), it's located such that one actually has to remove the car's front axle and hoist the car's engine to replace or otherwise service the part. Thus a $160 part can require $500 or more in labor to replace.

Luckily, having family in town who's been in the area for generations enabled us to find an alternator-specialized place that would cut us a deal on the part (repairing it rather than replacing it) and the labor. We made out for hundreds less than we were originally quoted by a more conventional place.

After waiting for the following payday, we got the alternator repaired, and all has been well.

Breakdown of Betsy, the VW Beetle
...which was just in time for Amy's beetle to lose its battery, another $90 expense and bit of installation headache right on the weekend where she was going to drive out to Atlanta to join me at...

Dragon*Con!
Dragon*Con was actually an enormous amount of fun, if getting Amy there was more grief than planned. We got to visit with my brother Matt and his wife Amy, hang out with throngs of our fellow geeks, and generally relax among the rampant absurdity.

I also got to attend a writing workshop taught by Ann Crispin (aka A.C. Crispin) as regards the craft of writing the science fiction novel. Very, very, very useful time had, there. And yes, I will be participating in NaNoWriMo this year. :-D

There was also a brief workshop, off in one of the rear rooms of the Hyatt, where there was an impromptu homebrewing discussion that cropped up...

Gentleman Meadmaker
One of the stars of the Dragon*Con homebrewing panel discussion was a quiet guy who had brought three bottles of mead (a beverage made by the fermentation of honey, and sometimes described as honey wine) to the con, and of course pulled the corks on them for the audience to sample. One of the samples Amy and I didn't quite care for, but one was sublime: exactly the sort of taste you'd expect from a fermentation of honey: sweet, alcoholic like a wine, aromatic like... well, like honey. :-)

About two weeks ago I dropped by Alabrew, my local homebrew supply store, grabbed 25 pounds of truly excellent Alabama orange-blossom honey and some suitable yeast and other sundries, and then went home and broke out the fermenting equipment.

Amy and I have two batches going: the first is a six-gallon batch of "traditional mead" that's just eighteen pounds of honey, water added to six total gallons, yeast nutrient and yeast. We didn't boil it, didn't filter it, didn't even heat the honey: we just sanitized the heck out of all equipment, dumped the honey, water and nutrient into the fermenting bucket, agitated with a stirrer that was driven by power drill, added the yeast and covered. The bubbler's still going at a pop every two seconds or so, weeks later. (Mead takes a good while longer than beer or wine to "ferment out," or exhaust the yeast.) Should begin to be drinkable at around six months, sometime close to St. Patrick's Day.

The second batch is much smaller (just one gallon), but also more elaborate. It's a melomel/metheglin-style mead (containing fruit and spices) called "Joe's Foolproof Ancient Orange, Clove and Cinnamon Mead," found here at GotMead.com. It should be ready by Christmas, and Amy and I can't wait to try it--we scored whole nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and other spices from our local Whole Foods grocer, not to mention a decent bottle of Chaucer's Mead to sample while we set up the ferment.

Wedded Bliss
Amy and I are, despite the craziness of the summer, doing better than ever. People frequently say that the first year of marriage is the hardest to get through, and if this is the worst we ever see, then we're in good shape. Certainly it's been external problems that have caused the most commotion: coming home to my new wife has been the easiest part of this past summer by far. :-D

Well, I feel better
Whew! Lots of history to get through, but this covers the high (and low) points. I plan to do more blogging about issues great and small from now on (knowing that I had this huge thing to do made it easy to procrastinate on other posts I want to do), so keep an eye out!

-Rich

[Edit: Wanted to make a note for precision's sake that the batches of mead were started on 9/30/07. Just for my own future reference.]

Six Years!

2007-06-25T15:26:00.000-05:00

Brain Squeezings turns six today!

I haven't marked too many of the anniversaries of the site's inception, but this year it seems appropriate. After all, one of the several reasons I started blogging in the first place was to help assuage the grief and pain attending dissolution of my first marriage. It, and the people who've read and commented along the way, have indeed helped me, beyond my wildest dreams of success. Amy, beloved wife of mine, I'm looking at you. :-D

Along the way I've made a few new friends; lost a few friends; done a fair amount of dating; learned a little about beer; got fired and hired; moved; held forth on subjects from parenthood to webcomics to technology to politics to wine; killed a pair of cars; and even, this blessed spring, managed to remarry, and this time it's going to stick.

(Yes, yes, I know there hasn't been an actual wedding post yet, but since getting back from the honeymoon there's been more than a little bit of drama to our lives, and it's only mostly been from the Altima's terminal wreck. More detail [and wedding photos!] to come.)

Leading the bloggèd life (even if Brain Squeezings's posting frequency has varied wildly with my mercurial need to opine before the world) has been a cleansing, eye-opening, educational experience, and an enriching one as well. I can't wait to see what the next six years of Squeezings will bring.

Thanks to all my readers, past and present, for hanging with me through whatever part of this journey you've hung through. I'm a happier, healthier person for having undertaken this little exercise, and it's largely because I've had great people out there reading, commenting and sharing the ride.

(Lifts a glass of Sangiovese)

Prost!

-Rich

The Mercury Mystique, Long May She Drive

2007-06-08T14:30:00.000-05:00

Meet the new addition to the Miller family. A silver 1999 Mercury Mystique, acquired through a friend of my new parents-in-law. It's the little sister to the Mercury Sable/Ford Taurus: sturdy, reliable, but at nearly eight years old, rather lived-in. It came with a few quirks: no radio; only a valet key (unable to unlock the car's doors); some trim damage inside the car (and lots of dust and "age patina").

Still, for $2,500, not too shabby for being paid for. A trip to the local Mercury dealership, a locksmith, my local Circuit City and an inside-and-out car wash, and the car's looking presentable and behaving well.

It's also the V-6 "sport" version of the Mystique, which is surprisingly zippy, and since it's a late-'90s American car, it's still got enough heft that I'd feel safe in another crash. Amenities are good, too: power windows and locks, AM/FM/CD/iPod/Aux sound (now), air conditioning, sun roof.

It's also got some goofy faux-woodgrain panels on the dashboard. Since the steering wheel was looking fairly ratty (you know that beaten-up look that softer steering wheels get after a few years), I found one of those cheapo steering wheel covers at Wal-mart that was a great shade of black "leather" and an exactly matching hi-gloss faux woodgrain pattern. Stylin' now!

Anyway, I'm nearly entirely mended from my little brush with automotive disaster: aside from some remaining tenderness in the form of an upper-shin bruise and stiffness in my right shoulder and neck, I'm approaching 100%.

Coming this weekend: moving hijinks, as space for Amy's stuff is made among mine!

-Rich

What it Means to Be Blessed

2007-05-17T15:11:00.000-05:00

That would appear to be that for the Altima. I am, miraculously, battered and bruised but okay. Nothing broken, no serious damage.

Prelude
Friday night, after driving Amy home after a sushi dinner and a shopping trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond, I decided to head over to Lowe's to pick up a vent-shunt of some type for the air-conditioning register over our bed.

As I was driving on County Route 12 toward Route 119, I saw a police car coming toward me, but slewing in the light rain. He swung to his right, off the road, then his left, into my lane. We were each going about forty-five miles an hour, and brakes on the wet asphalt seemed to do little good, so the aggregate speed when we hit was nearly ninety.

The Altima gave its life, violently, to save mine.

Dramatic Tension
After coming to a stop, I inventoried all my body parts, found that everything still worked, resolved to move as little as possible until I was checked out, and proceeded to call Amy, though I was still hyperventilating mildly. The "key in ignition" four-beep pattern sounded, over and over. Around the airbag I could see that smoke and/or steam was wafting from the region of the engine.

While I was on the phone with Amy, the officer who'd cut me off, staggering a bit, came over to my car. I waved an "I'm OK" arm out the window, NASCAR-style, not realizing until later that I hadn't had to roll it down.

"You all right, buddy?"

"Yeah, I'm here and I can move okay."

"Okay, I've called an ambulance. They'll be here before too long."

I returned to my cell phone. Amy was immobile--her car was still at her old apartment, since we were going to reclaim it the next day (we'd planned to collect her cats and introduce them to my dogs), so she called her brother-in-law Greg, and said she'd meet me at the nearby hospital where we'd agreed I'd go.

An Attempt at Comedy
As I waited for the ambulance, another police car arrived and the new officer started asking me questions about my identification, a little belligerently, but as I explained that I had not been drinking, that this was my car, that I was a responsible citizen, employed here in Birmingham, and that I was in general not some random lowlife, he became a little more sympathetic to my position. In his line of work (I believe he was an Alabama state trooper) I'm sure he has to deal with a lot of shirkers and lowlifes, so I could understand a bit of his attitude, but I thought it was remarkable that he was being so gruff toward a guy who was possibly badly hurt, and going to need cutting out of his car.

Speaking of which, we had found by then that my driver's-side door wouldn't open. Nobody wanted to take the risk of moving me over the console in the middle of my front seat, so they began cutting the driver's-side door from the car's frame. A paramedic leaned into the passenger side, and covered me with a blanket as the guys pried and sawed at my door, to shield me from any glass or other debris that might have been flung at me as they worked. The phrase "negative LOC" was tossed around a few times, which I discovered meant that I hadn't lost consciousness during impact, as I'd mentioned to them earlier. Everyone agreed that "negative LOC" was a desirable thing.

The paramedic in the car with me was a good-natured type, and chatted with me as the door-cutters did their thing: recently married; yes, Jamaica was awesome; to which hospital I wanted to be taken; how he liked the GPS he had, and that he'd be careful to pull mine out of the car so as to keep it safe (we've still got it, but it turned out not to have survived the impact).

Progress
Eventually after much crunching, popping and grunting the door came off the car.

"All right, Mr. Miller, we're going to take you out of the car now. Do you hurt anywhere?"

I told them that the left side of my neck felt strained, and that I felt like I'd been punched in the chest. I also left like glass from the window might have worked its way into the left side of my pants' waistband, as I had a number of small, sharp pains there. Eventually these injuries would all be shown to have come from the lap belt, shoulder belt and air bag.

They put a neck collar on me, and smoothly worked me out of the car and onto a gurney. There was some brief debate about to which hospital I wanted to be taken, as the one closest to me (for which I'd expressed a preference) didn't have certain types of equipment, and for head-ons (I'd been in a head-on!) they typically liked to hedge their bets a bit more and take people farther into Birmingham.

I insisted on my first choice, mainly because I was pretty sure there wasn't anything too exotic wrong with me; I did mention, though, that I would defer to their expertise if they thought I seriously needed a longer drive.

At that point I was rolled into the back of the ambulance, and driven to the hospital (my first choice, as it happened). It was my first (and hopefully last) ride in an ambulance, and while the experience was actually pretty nifty, the circumstances could have been better. In order to check me out, they wound up cutting my shirt and pants off, and after that I was pretty shivery (not from shock, thankfully, but it had been an exciting evening, and the back of the ambulance was chilly).

Assessment
Once I got to the hospital they took me to one of their trauma rooms, and after a series of palpations and checking-overs (and another description of the events of the collision, and taking-down of my information) I was told that I'd be getting a head-to-pelvis CAT scan in lieu of any X-rays. I was also given an IV, both because it's evidently standard operating procedure, and because I was eventually going to need some "contrasting agent" injected for one of the CAT scans. Let the record show that despite having given blood to the Red Cross several times, I'm not a fan of IVs.

At about this point Amy and Greg arrived, and we had some very welcome chat and additional goings-over of the events of the crash. I have to give Amy credit--I'm sure I looked like absolute hell, and she was steady and together through the whole thing.

Denouement
Eventually the orderlies whisked me off for my CAT scans, which took the better part of 45 minutes, and then back to my little trauma room to await the results. To make a long story a little shorter, I was cleared of any serious trauma, and released. Amy and Greg had bought me new clothes to wear home, but it took a little doing and ginger handling to help me limp out of the place and get into Greg's SUV.

Since then, Amy's been a superb and patient nurse, and I've been recovering both faster and slower than I expected. Lots of stiffness, LOTS of very spectacular bruising, but you don't get to see pictures of that, because it's all in areas where my lap and shoulder belts hit me, and this is a family-friendly blog.

Finally, there have been two doctor's visits so far for precaution's sake, and an orthopedic visit scheduled for tomorrow to check on some persistent grief with my right shoulder (did I mention that I tensed against the steering wheel when I saw the hit coming?).

Fundamentally, though, I am whole and only lightly hurt. Similar crashes claim the lives of thousands a year. There have been many thanks offered to the Almighty over the course of this past week from the nascent Miller household.

-Rich

Yes, Virginia, There is Such a Thing as Evil

2007-04-20T16:20:00.001-05:00

This past Saturday I had my bachelor party--I, my brother, and three other friends started the afternoon by heading to an indoor pistol firing range and visiting rather convincing violence on myriad paper targets. I'd fired a .22 rifle in the Boy Scouts when I was 16 or so, but this was the first time I'd ever fired a handgun; it was a great thing, to demystify pistols--my rental was a 9mm Springfield XD. Load the magazine (no mean feat, when you've got a 15-round magazine with a stiff spring), chamber a round, aim, fire until the paper target's taken all the punishment you want to deal out or the magazine's empty, repeat. Just a tool, just a machine. Feeling the thing kick in my hand, hearing the ring of its report in the small building, seeing the targets punched time and again, instilled instant respect for the thing, the weapon.

In any case, great fun was had by all. Shoot, while prepping for the weekend I joined the NRA, something I've been meaning to do for years.

Then news broke on Monday regarding the shootings at Virginia Tech, and I figured that for decency's sake I should sit on the tale of our wild & wacky shooting hijinks at the pistol range. But after watching the (entirely appropriate) coverage of the grief and pain of the moment, I then was treated to the usual (entirely inappropriate) avalanche of "how could this happen?" hand-wringing stories and "who let this happen?" finger-pointing stories.

Blaming the SUV for the Accident
And, of course, there have been the usual calls for increased gun control: "when will it be enough?" "how many of our children must die before we admit to ourselves that the Second Amendment is a bad idea in the modern age?"

And, from Tripp, "We have established a system in which our children are sacrificed for our right to own a firearm...our supposed right to protect ourselves. We are willing, intentionally or not, to allow people to go to K-Mart or Dick's sporting goods and purchase handguns just like the ones that Cho Seung-Hui possessed."

Geez, where to start?

Just because the aphorism "guns don't kill people, people do" has become trite doesn't mean it's wrong. Cho was a disturbed person with violence on his mind and evil in his soul; he'd set fires in his dorm room, stalked women, written disturbing poems and plays, and of course there's the lovely little multimedia presentation he sent to NBC. This was someone who, deprived of firearms, might have set a bomb, lit another dorm fire, charged people brandishing an ice pick, or even laid in wait among the campus's bushes with a length of piano wire. Cho's murderous urge is the problem, not the fact that he had no prior convictions and thus was entirely legal to purchase firearms in Virginia.

Well, Cho's urge was at least half of the problem. You see, Virginia Tech recently managed (all the while thumbing its nose at the Second Amendment) to render itself a gun-free zone, granting itself the power to expel students and fire its staff for possessing any variety of firearm on campus.

I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with this phrase, but this amounts to trying to keep people safe by rendering them defenseless. Does anyone seriously think that the same degree of carnage would have resulted if even one of the professors or students had had a weapon to oppose the madman? Yes, there were armed guards on campus, but they obviously arrived too late to affect the outcome.

Can't We All Just Get Along?
Gun-control advocates seem to think that by making law-abiders (otherwise known as prey) give up their only real means of defense from law-breakers (aka predators), we'll all be safer.

"But, culture of guns! Assault weapons available over the counter at Wal-mart! Surely if guns were harder to get, we'd see less violence using them! It's simple math!"

Sorry, no. Countries enacting strong gun control laws (as in "everybody surrender your weapons under order of the government") almost without exception see increases in all varieties of violent crime, because A) criminals don't surrender their weapons, and B) the knowledge that nobody around them has a firearm with which to fight back emboldens the predators of the world. If I were greedy or desperate enough to try and burgle a house, would I choose one with a "proud gun-free home" sign on the lawn, or one with a "this house defended by Smith & Wesson" sticker on the window? There's probably a reason why I've seen several of the latter kind of decal, and had to make up the former.

Besides, my brother Matt lived in Kennesaw, Georgia for a time: a municipality in which every landowner must own a gun and ammo for it, by law. Interestingly enough, there's very, very little crime there. As one article I found put it, "most criminals don't have a death wish."

The Root of the Problem
Most criminals have no death wish, of course, but not all. Cho is that exception, the irrational actor, but at the same time, he was very methodical about certain aspects of his atrocity. He chained doors shut to keep his targets inside the building; he carried huge amounts of ammunition (none of those killed were hit fewer than three times, and there were another 30ish wounded); he bought his pistols some time apart, and took the time to write his little manifesto/screed.

While Cho may not have been sane, he was day-to-day capable. And as to his motivations and deeds, the only word that I can apply is evil. He was a man who hated deeply and consumingly, and channeled that hate into words and actions that ruined and ended lives, including his own.

I refuse to understand those who advocate defenselessness in the face of a world rife with the sort of evil that consumed Cho, even ones who advocate Christlike cheek-turning, which I take to be a condemnation of revenge more than a pacifist injunction. Proverbs 25:26 reads "Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked," and in my opinion failing to defend oneself or others from one bent on doing ill would be doing just that.

-Rich

So Close, and Yet So Far... Keep Trying, Abortion Lobby

2007-04-11T07:30:00.000-05:00

"Diabetics cured by stem-cell treatment"

First off, let me say a hearty congratulations! to all those who appear to have had their Type 1 diabetes cured by this treatment, and who will be helped by this treatment as it is perfected and made suitable for application to the rest of the diabetic population.

Second, since the article only expresses this in a roundabout way ("stem cells drawn from [the patients'] own blood"), let me amplify: these were adult stem cells, and required the destruction of no human embryos.

The usefulness of embryonic stem cells (and thus justification for the idea that unborn babies might not only be disposable, thanks to Roe, but their flesh useful) is still awaiting any sort of proof.

Yet the authors of the article can't resist getting their digs in:

Previous studies have suggested that stem-cell therapies offer huge potential to treat a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease. A study by British scientists in November also reported that stem-cell injections could repair organ damage in heart attack victims.
But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

Those eeevil Republicans and their opposition to baby-killing. How dare they?

-Rich

Quiz for a Friday

2007-03-30T09:00:00.001-05:00

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Gamer/Computer Nerd You enjoy the visual stimulants of a video game, chatting on AIM, or reading online comics. Most of these types of nerds are considered dirty who lack hygeine, of course they always end up being the ones who make a crapload of money. And don't worry, that's just a stereotype; I'm not calling you dirty. ^_~
Literature Nerd
Drama Nerd
Science/Math Nerd
Social Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Musician
Anime Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

I consider my high Literature Nerd score to redeem, at least partially, my Gamer/Computer one. :-) And I hope Amy will attest to my cleanliness. ;-)

Hat tip to Tripp.

-Rich

On the Prospect of Fred Thompson Running for President

2007-03-23T17:30:00.000-05:00

The more I hear from and read about Fred Thompson, the more I appreciate him. He's a communicator, which would be a refreshing change from the current White House, and a conservative, which, well, would be another. As the new banner to the right of the page shows, I really, really think he should run.

One of the things I find fascinating about the idea of Thompson running, though, is that he really doesn't need to for personal reasons. In fact, there are several reasons why being elected President could actually be negatives for him: he makes excellent money acting; he's got a recently married wife (2002) and a very young child (three-and-a-half years old); he's already spent some time in public service; finally, he gets to conduct his life at the intensity and pace he chooses, to an extent that few of us ever do. By most measures of success, Fred Thompson should be deep in proverbial "fat & happy" territory.

So if Thompson gets himself elected President next year, he'll be condemning himself and his young daughter to miss between four and eight years of one another's lives. He'll take a heavy pay cut. He'll also be signing up for the most stressful job in the world. Finally, he doesn't have that career-politician air about him, implying that the pursuit of power isn't foremost in his mind. The move would thus be a significant personal sacrifice, in several ways.

For that reason I'm becoming convinced that if Thompson does run, he'll do it for almost purely ideological reasons. He's being coy and playing patty-cake with the decision for now (which is also very intelligent: by the time primary elections begin in February 2008 we're all going to be sick, sick, sick of the current crop of candidates), but most indicators show that the response from all over the Right has been overwhelmingly positive. Thompson even said as much in an interview with Laura Ingraham earlier this week.

Lots and lots of comparisons are beginning to be made between Thompson and another actor-turned-President, and while many of them are a bit breathless and ill-thought-out, the point is that Thompson doesn't have to run, and indeed has several good reasons to avoid running. There's a nobility in that, and an opportunity for a little ideological housecleaning among Republicans (read: butt-kicking of laggards and milquetoasts) that I find promising.

-Rich

2007-03-20T18:05:00.001-05:00

Two weekends ago Amy and I had a blast visiting the Birmingham Zoo. I hadn't thought to bring along my better digital camera, but DontPanic managed to serve decently in the other cam's absence. A great time was had by all, and while over 85 pictures resulted from the trip, the seven I uploaded to Flickr were the cream of the crop in terms of subject matter and picture quality.

Click the ruggedly-handsome image above for the mini-gallery.

-Rich

On the 2008 Presidential Race

2007-03-17T12:05:00.000-05:00

It is certainly passing strange that attention has become focused on the 2008 Presidential campaign so early (20 months early as of this writing, to be exact).

I am, of course, not without opinion on the matter, so I'll spout for a bit. ;-)

Rudy Giuliani
Rudy is America's Mayor, of course. One of the louder voices of reason and clearmindedness in the wake of September 11, he's also got a reputation as a fighter, and a guy who's not cowed by the press and its invidiousness toward all Republicans.

Rudy's willingness to actually combat his critics is a bonus for him, and in my opinion the reason he's enjoying the popularity he currently is: many Republicans are very, very (very) tired of the Bush white house's maddeningly passive attitude toward the hits they take from their "loyal opposition," both in Congress and from the press.

Sadly, as a Republican Rudy's an odd duck, and a caustic choice: pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gun-control, two divorces, estranged family members, and that's just the short list. He's attempted to mollify his critics by promising to pursue strict constructionist judicial appointments and to prosecute the Global War on Terror vigorously, and by appealing for privacy in personal matters, but this is a guy I and many GOPers would vote for as a vote against Hillary. Real nose-holding material.

John McCain
"Maverick." The Straight Talk Express. Campaign Finance "Reform." Sops to illegal immigrants in his home state. Gang of 14. "Torture" legislation that governed nothing of the sort and insulted our soldiers.

All the distinguished service, all the years in the Hanoi Hilton, and all the foreign-policy hawkery in the world won't wash the taste of betrayal out of GOPers' mouths that Maverick McCain has left over the years. Still better than Hillary, but he's been talking out of both sides of his mouth for too long. Very unlikely to win the nomination. Nose-holder extraordinaire.

Mitt Romney
Anyone who's had LDS proselytizers knock on their door knows that Mormons can tend toward the "creepy and a little weird" end of the spectrum--especially when someone brings up all that 19th-century polygamy business, and of course the underwear. I've known people from most faiths who spike my creep-o-meter, though, so for me that's a wash, and Mitt himself doesn't register on it anyway. Mormons actually represent some of the best family-values practitioners out there (Mitt's the only candidate so far who's still on his first wife, for example), so the LDS "factor" isn't one for me, though it may very well be for some.

My issue with Mitt is that he's got the potential to be a Republican Kerry--a flip-flopper. I know that he was governor of the People's Republic of Massachusetts, but that doesn't mean he gets a pass on his past abortion support, or other left-of-center positions that have seen a turnaround since he left office and began looking at a Presidential run. I need to know more, but for now he bothers me in that "voted against it before voting against it" way. Another nose-holder. Better Mitt than Hillary.

Newt Gingrich
Is Newt Gingrich Back?
Now we're getting interesting. :-) On the surface Newt has one of Rudy's weaknesses--the three-wives thing--but the times being what they are, finding an unblemished candidate on that front is becoming difficult.

At the very least, though, Newt has an established record of conservative legislation and voting. He's got good conservative ideas and ideals, knows Washington and its ins and outs, and has a rep for going on the attack when it's necessary. See Rudy, above, for our tiredness with passivity in the face of attack at the White House. Newt's the first candidate in this lineup that I'm anything like enthused to vote for, as opposed to simply being a way to keep Hillary out of the Big Chair. Now if only he'd actually run.

Fred Thompson
Lights, Camera ... Candidacy?
Please, Lord, please, may we be so lucky.

Okay, negatives first. One divorce in the 1980s from a wife he married when he was 17. Support for McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform, which he seems to regret, from the article "Lights, Camera ... Candidacy?" linked above:

Conceding that McCain-Feingold hasn't worked as intended, and is being riddled with new loopholes, he throws his hands open in exasperation. "I'm not prepared to go there yet, but I wonder if we shouldn't just take off the limits and have full disclosure with harsh penalties for not reporting everything on the Internet immediately."

Hell yes. On to the positives: Fred's pro-life, pro-second-amendment, pro-muscular-defense, pro-free-market, pro-conservative-in-general, and a strict constructionist. Other than wanting a more thorough repudiation of McCain-Feingold I have no serious policy issues with the man.

As a candidate, he's well-spoken, has a commanding physical and personal presence, is known as a straight shooter, and has a proven conservative track record in government. He's also well-known and well-liked thanks to his long tour on Law and Order, and has the distinction of having uttered the line, "Russians don't take a dump, son, without a plan" in the movie version of Hunt for Red October. Fantastic. Avuncular, even.

In case you can't tell, I really like Fred Thompson. Now if, like Newt, he'd only state for the record that he's running.

-Rich

PS. Re: the divorce thing, as a divorcé myself, some might argue I have no business bringing the matter up, or thinking it important, but it's become a minor sub-issue around the Republican candidate race, so I figured it made sense to include it here. Shucks, Reagan was our first divorced President, and Clinton is still married to his first wife. Goes to show that it's not that simple a gauge. Newt and Rudy, though, also have well-known and documented affairs on their records, which is IMO a much simpler gauge, and a substantive black mark against both candidates.

A Family-ful Weekend; Bachelorhood on the Wane

2007-03-05T16:51:00.001-06:00

Had a great time with family and friends this weekend!

My brother Matt and his wife Amy made the trek to Birmingham this weekend so that Matt's Amy could attend my Amy's "bridal tea" (a wonderfully Southern take on the bridal shower), as thrown by a longtime friend of my soon-to-be-mother-in-law. In the interim, Matt and Amy stayed overnight with Amy's parents, and Matt dropped by my (soon to be our) house and we geeked out with the Xbox 360 and generally had an excellent afternoon.

After the major part of the tea was finished, Matt and I traveled to the tea's Location of Note to load up our cars with the gifts: the cargo areas, both of two smaller cars and of my newly-renosed Altima, were filled nearly to capacity by the beneficence of the tea's attendants!

Much fun was had by all, and my Amy took the opportunity afterward to reconfigure my/our bathroom and bedroom with some of the accoutrements. Shaving and showering were made as new this morning as a result... Negotiations as to the minutiae of bathroom layout will likely ensue, debating the merits of of formal and functional punctilia. ;-)

One of life's few constants is change, and my own life is rife with changes welcome and joyous. I am happy as I've seldom been.

-Rich

Mobility; Lent

2007-02-22T17:33:00.000-06:00

Lent
Yesterday was of course Ash Wednesday, if you're the sort of person who celebrates it. For those not in the know, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent for many Christians.

It's customary during Lent to give up something you like to do, or would normally do, in order to remember Christ's sacrifice for us, and also to get into the purifying spirit of Lent, wherein we focus on our spiritual development and ask God and ourselves, "so how am I doing?"

We're not supposed to brag about or make much of our sacrifices (wouldn't want to be confused with scribes or Pharisees, who already have their reward, having sacrificed openly), but one of the things Amy and I are doing is abstaining from TV on weeknights. This has already precipitated a few very good third-order effects, like doing a lot more reading and journaling.

I've finally picked up Mere Christianity again, for example, and am enjoying another trip into C.S. Lewis's mind. I had forgotten that it was written as a palliative for the English as they were being bombed during the German Blitz in World War II. Intense.

What do you want in a mobile device?
Of course, being back in a "reading mode" has got me doing more of it on my smartphone, and in turn thinking about how DontPanic functions.

I'm still very much enjoying the Spb Mobile Shell interface, and have rearranged a lot of the program shortcuts in DontPanic's Start menu for easier, categorized access. I'm getting more out of the device than I have since buying it, and so I've begun putting some thought into how I use the little guy, and what more I might be able to get out of it, with a little effort.

The central question, I suppose, is: given a pocketable computing widget with a cell phone radio and data access, what are the things it's most useful to have it do?

Here are the things I use DontPanic for right now, in rough order of importance to me:

E-mail and text messaging
Telephony (phone calls and voice mail)
Calendar management and reminders/alarms
Address-book management
To-do list management
Calculator
Checkbook balancing (less frequently than I should)
Web access (from news to maps/directions to weather)
Note taking
Digital camera use
E-book reading (mainly Bible reading and lookups, but also some classics)

I don't currently use DontPanic for music storage or playback (too little space on the 1GB storage card I bought for it), or video media (same problem, only moreso, and it's underpowered for most video, to boot).

I also don't do as much writing or blogging on the beast as I might otherwise, which I think is a real shame. I like the unit's built-in keyboard well enough for short messages, but a Bluetooth (wireless) keyboard would help get around that issue.

I'd really like to be able to use DontPanic more effectively for things like online shopping. Sadly, most commerce sites (eBay, Amazon, etc.) work very badly--if at all--in Internet Explorer Mobile, and the few alternative browsers I've tried have provided very little improvement. Still, the last time I tried was a few months ago, so I should probably do so again.

[Edit, 8:30 PM - Looks like Opera Mini has solved most of its problems, making it my one-stop-shop now for Amazon, eBay, My Yahoo! and other heavily cookie-dependent and session-heavy sites. Huzzah! It's still a Java app targeted at Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition, though, which means it's wasteful of screen space and doesn't support soft-keys natively, but for online-commerce ability I'll put up with those!]

What do you, my readers, use your phones (smart or otherwise) for? What would you use a portable info-widget for, if it was arbitrarily well-connected to the internet, or capacious, or otherwise unlimited?

-Rich

Deer Damage to the Altima

2007-02-09T15:07:00.001-06:00

Back on the 27th of last month I had the misfortune to hit a deer while driving to pick up my lovely fiancée Amy. It was dusk, and rainy, and I never even saw the poor animal until my hood was flipping up from the impact. I saw a brief flash of the deer's head--no antlers, so this time of year I think that means a doe--and then I couldn't see anything but the top of my flipped-up hood.

The impact was at around 45 mph, so I don't have much hope for the deer. I never saw it leave the scene, but it was nowhere to be found by the time police arrived to take my report. I was unhurt, though briefly freaked out. The airbag didn't even deploy.

Cracked radiator, replacement hood, broken hood hinges, paint matching, damaged airbag sensor, cracked air ducts... The list goes on. The bill for the repairs has so far come to just shy of $6,000--GEICO has been fantastic, as has the repair shop recommended to me by my soon-to-be-brother-in-law.

These are some pictures the adjuster took of the damage. I confirmed with GEICO that posting them was OK, so now everyone gets to see the results. Oddly, it doesn't look so bad; the headlights were even functional as I limped the car the mile back to my house.

Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, I'll have the car back by the end of next week. I'm driving a rented late-model Volkswagen Jetta in the interim, after trying and rejecting a PT Cruiser as entirely too small. Nice car! Decent pickup, and full of nice VW appointments.

-Rich

Why I Will Always Love Steve Jobs's Apple, Inc. for Being a Disruptive Influence

2007-02-07T17:10:00.000-06:00

Now this is what I'm talkin' about.

I rhapsodized about the goodness that is (will be) the Apple iPhone a few posts ago.

It looks as though one of the other third-order iPhone effects I've been hoping for is coming to light, too: pressure on other vendors to improve their products.

Viz.: I downloaded yesterday and installed Spb Mobile Shell, a blandly-named but important application for Windows Mobile 5 by Spb Software House, a development outfit whose offerings figure prominently in my daily smartphone use. Spb Mobile Shell is what will eventually be a replacement for the stylus-heavy Start Menu and its ugly sibling, the scroll-to-see-more-info, squint-to-see-the-tiny-text Programs application.

Examples
Compare these two screen shots:

Before	After

The leftmost shot is the standard Windows Mobile "Today" screen, with a few plugins I've installed to show the information most people would want to see. It's actually pretty clean compared to some. Bear in mind that my Cingular 8125's touchscreen is only 57mm tall by 44mm wide (a little less than 2.5"x2).

The shot on the right is the new "Now" screen from Spb Mobile Shell. Much simpler and clearer, no? It eschews loads and loads of data for the stuff that is most important to show on a cell phone, and I can even hide the weather data or show the next upcoming calendar appointment if I choose. It also, by default, is the first thing you see when you turn your phone on.

Now, consider these two shots:

Before	After

The benefit of the new approach is more subtle in this case. On the left you have the default Favorites (web bookmarks) view presented by Internet Explorer Mobile. Neat, orderly, clearly organized, but small, small, small, and requiring lots of scrolling and navigational effort to see more of the list. Heaven forbid you only have one hand free, or are working without your glasses, or what have you.

On the right you have the Favorites view as presented by Mobile Shell. Much less information, but each of the lines is big enough to be touched easily with a fingertip on a small screen. Also, take note of the white-on-green "Back" and "More" entries at the bottom of the screen. They're touch-sensitive areas, though small, but more importantly they represent actions that are mapped to "soft buttons" on the smartphone itself. There's actually a little physical button (mandated by the MS Smartphone spec) located beneath each word that, when pressed, triggers the action in question. So I can now go forward and back in the list of Favorites, quickly, using physical buttons I can find in the dark. Back on the touchscreen, touching a folder jumps me to a list of that folder's Favorites, and so forth. When I finally touch a Favorite, it opens Internet Explorer and I'm taken right to the web page in question. Also, I can get to the shell's Favorites list without having to open the browser first: I pick the Favorite I want, and then the browser opens. Much faster, and more efficient.

Basically, it's much quicker to use almost everything on the phone using the new shell: the touchscreen is useful, suddenly, without pulling out the device's stylus; buttons on the device become much more functional for navigation; it's possible to see what you're doing while holding the phone at arm's length; the list goes on and on.

Here are a few more examples:

Before	After

The navigation scheme is becoming more clear now. From a denser, scrolling list with hierarchy expressed on the same screen, we move to sparser lists (more space for each item, making hitting areas with a thumb easier) that express list length and hierarchy through Back/More navigation rather than having to hit some far-off, small area on the screen (a scrollbar and/or tab, as above, or the "plus" to expand a tree as in the Favorites example) with a stylus.

Okay, last example, but easily my favorite.

Before	After

On the left we have the "Start" menu, staple of Windows navigation everywhere. It's meant to serve as the first-stopoff point for launching frequently-used applications, and as a most-recently-used list of the same applications. Great in theory, lousy in practice, because the elements are small, again, and tedious to navigate, again. Even with the directional button-pad on the device, it's just too laborious to do quickly, or efficiently. Forget trying to pick from the menu with a fingertip. Ain't happening, or at least not correctly more than about 60% of the time. I've been using this unit for a while, and the touchscreen is exquisitely calibrated. I know whereof I speak.

On the right we have Mobile Shell's approach: the same three-by-three grid as before, with good jumping-in points for common smartphone activities. Finger-navigable, fast, clear, efficient.

Summary
Spb Mobile Shell is a simple little app, that does a few important things extremely well. I've only had it installed for about a day, now, and it's already changed the way I use my Cingular 8125. The individual parts of the Windows Mobile experience haven't been fixed or changed (I still hate the MMS message-composition app), but the navigation "glue" among them has been revolutionized.

I've even started using a few little apps that I knew were part of Windows Mobile (Notes instead of Word Mobile is the best example), because they're so much easier to get to through Mobile Shell that they're worth using.

Kudos to Spb for making it happen, even in SpbMS's current 1.0 state.

Demerits to Microsoft, Spb, and the entire smartphone universe for requiring the iPhone to debut before getting it done.

-Rich

Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence...

2007-02-02T15:10:00.000-06:00

I can stop any time I want. Truly. :-)

Yep, I've acquired a tea habit. This scene depicts the lamentable state of the shelf above a part of my cube at work.

I'm still adjusting to the barky taste of rooibos herbal tea, though a nice Twinings Earl Grey, Tazo Zen Green or Irish Breakfast will always brighten my day.

It's probably at least partially psychosomatic, but I'm feeling more awake and more creative, and little things about my health have taken turns for the better (not that they were bad) since beginning to slurp down four 20-oz. cops a day instead of carbonated aspartame-water.

Plus, hot water is free around the office. I'm saving money over sodas, honest.

I do need to bear in mind the admonitions of Robert Frezza's character Raul Sanmartin as regards tea, however. I'm in the middle of a reread of Frezza's seminal A Small Colonial War of late, and when I run across the relevant quote I'll post it here.

-Rich

You Know, Once Upon a Time Muslims Were Known for Their Scientific Acumen...

2007-01-29T16:50:00.000-06:00

"Muslims urged to refuse 'un-Islamic' vaccinations"

Yes, every sect of every religion has its nutjobs, but we really do need to express outrage at garbage anti-science like this that endangers lives. Not just the lives of individuals, either, but the lives of everyone around them, thanks to communicable diseases gaining footholds in undervaccinated populations, and then endangering those among the vaccinated with weakened immune systems.

Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, says almost all vaccines [emphasis mine] contain un-Islamic "haram" derivatives of animal or human tissue, and that Muslim parents are better off letting childrens' immune systems develop on their own.

Appalling. As someone who might be reproducing in the not-too-distant future, the risk to kids from this is just unconscionable.

-Rich

Apple's iPhone, and What I Hope Happens

2007-01-22T17:45:00.000-06:00

This is the sort of thing that tends to interest only the truly nerdy among us, but a week ago Apple Inc. announced the iPhone, their entry into the cellular phone market.

Big deal, right?

Well, possibly. At right is a picture of the thing. You can't easily tell from the picture, but it's a touchscreen device, about 4.5" long by 2.4" wide, by a little less than half an inch thick.

The keynote address during which Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone is here, and Apple's product page for it is here. Put simply, it's an impressive-looking product: it's got all the media capability of an iPod (and then some), it makes phone calls, and it's got most of the e-mail, text messaging and web browsing capability of a typical smartphone--more in some areas, and less in others.

iPhone is an exercise in design minimalism in some ways (as Apple products frequently are): aside from volume, mute and power buttons along the edges of the device, there's only one "hard" button on the thing, and that's the circular depression with the square in it near the bottom, for "home." The rest of the buttons on the thing are images displayed behind the touch-sensitive glass screen.

But there are already lots of touchscreen smartphones out there in the wild. Heck, the one I have is pictured at left. It doesn't even look too dissimilar, if you slide it closed to hide the keyboard: few hardware buttons, decent touchscreen, a fair bit bulkier; but it does calls, multimedia, e-mail, texting, browsing, the whole smack.

I've been happier with my Cingular 8125 (dubbed "DontPanic") than with any other phone I've owned--the smartphone concept works, at least for technoids like me. But, you see, that's the rub: current smartphones require a technoid like me--I back the device up at least once a week, and every eight weeks or so I wipe the thing's memory and restore it from a backup, just to clear out the cobwebs. All of the core bits of DontPanic's smartphone functionality--calls, media, texting, browsing, even the camera--need babying and customization (I frequently refer to it as overcoming use friction) to work well. Also, it's bitingly clear that different parts of the device were developed by different teams, even different companies: the MMS (multimedia) message composition program is glaringly different from the rest of the e-mail system, for example. Also, Internet Explorer Mobile can handle simple, static pages without much trouble; but complicated pages, or ones that require user interaction (like the login mechanism for the Bank of America site, or the Blogger post editor) work awkwardly or fail to function at all. The experience feels patched-together and just-working. It works, but it's not clear, it's not simple, and it's certainly nothing I'd call elegant.

Put another way, the hardware is willing, but the software is weak. :-) All these myriad bits of friction add up to an occasionally frustrating user experience, but I don't really mind, because I'm a tech geek, and to an extent I enjoy the involvement in my device's functioning, and because I can get the elephant to dance and dance well the vast majority of the time.

But most people do mind the friction. Most of us hate the interfaces our cell phones present to us; most cell phones can do text messaging and simple mobile web stuff these days, and some of us (mostly savvier teens and geekier gen-X'ers) use that capability, but the majority of us don't. Ditto address books, ditto calendars and reminders, ditto simple web tricks like checking the weather or finding the closest movie theater and its movie listings.

Apple might indeed be poised to change that expectation of friction. I hope dearly that the iPhone does for expectations of cell-phone usability what the iPod did for portable digital music players. Apple's known for putting wondrously elegant and usable interfaces on its hardware, which is itself often merely better-than-average. The demos I've seen of the iPhone leave many questions answered (how well can an onscreen QWERTY keyboard, with no physical feedback, work for heavy text messaging?), but the slickness of the address book and call-making functionality are already miles better than anything else out there. The demo Jobs did of the web browser nearly brought a tear to my eye: not a subset of the web, but a full browser (Apple's Safari: not the best, but leagues better than IE Mobile), with zooming in and out to facilitate use on a phone-sized screen. This is the sort of software innovation that smartphones need to be truly useful, and accessible to the non-geek crowd.

Basically, if I can get 85% of the functionality of DontPanic on an iPhone, and it wreaks the kind of interface havoc I expect it to, I'll buy one. The price will have to fall about 30% first (they debut at $499 with a 2-year Cingular contract), but I'll pay a certain premium for elegance.

There's another factor, here, too. Sales of desktop computers are in free-fall, and notebook/laptop computers are now responsible for most of new-computer sales, which are flattening year-to-year. There's one device that nearly every adult in the industrialized world carries, though, and that's their cell phone. There's no reason that cell phones have to resemble current models, however: they can look like pretty much anything, so long as it fits in a purse or a pocket. You don't even really have to hold them to your ear any more, with the advent of hands-free headsets, both wired and wireless.

I posit that the iPhone can be the harbinger of the next generation of computer. Small, portable, internet-aware, presenting a mutable-by-need touch interface to the user, packed with solid-state storage. Also, possibly in future models, dockable to a bigger display, connectable wirelessly to a keyboard and mouse, capable of being (or mirroring) one's main computer, and available anywhere you carry it.

Here's hoping.

-Rich

Hmm, Perhaps a Meme to Keep the Fires Burning

2007-01-17T18:50:00.000-06:00

Seven Things, via Tripp.

1. Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Also Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone.

2. Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music. Flower by Moby. Actually it introduced me to his entire catalog of beauty brought from unlovely noises. Took a while to acquire the taste.

3. Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue. Heh, almost any Pixar movie will do, but most especially The Incredibles.

4. Name a performer for whom you suspend all disbelief. Interestingly, Jack Nicholson. He sells every line so completely that they can be complete crap and I'll still love his performance.

5. Name a work of art you’d like to live with. Whew--Picasso's Guernica has always spoken to me, but it'd be tough to live with. I've also been a longtime fan of Michaelangelo's Pieta, but a copy of Gutenberg's Bible or the Book of Kells would be more treasured.

6. Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life. William Gibson's Neuromancer. It was the first book that really, truly made me want to write. Then there was Crichton's Prey, which convinced me that hell, even I can write that. ;-)

7. Name a punch line that always makes you laugh. Always? Dunno, the best ones tend to get overused. How about "Ooh, aah. That's how it always starts. Then later there's running, and screaming."

-Rich

Oh, Look, it's 2007!

2007-01-15T16:40:00.000-06:00

Wow, talk about a busy holiday season! Work, shopping, travel... it was a mess, but a happy mess, all around.

Plots and Plans
Well, it's a new year, and there's lots to do in the Rich and Amy camp, from plunging wholesale back into wedding event-prep to cleaning my house sufficiently for Amy and her two cats to move in. Loads to do and waning time in which to accomplish it. Expect more of a wedding-plan slant here in the weeks and months to come.

Farce and Foam
As for blogworthy political news, there's been lots. Speaker Pelosi became a reality; Barack Obama out-popularized Hillary, who's busy acting fossilized [hat tip: the GGB, via e-mail]; Saddam stretched a rope, leaving the world no poorer, but drawing traffic to Google Video and YouTube.

Geeks Bearing Gifts
Amy and I had a blessed, bountiful and gadget-filled Christmas, with much lavishing of fun stuff on one another, from a video-playing watch Amy found for me, to a portable XM Radio unit I snagged for her, to many other fun and unique things. Toys, toys, toys!

Nesting Instinct
I've been having a little too much fun preparing for the eventual uniting of Amy's and my home gadgetry.

I've finally built a competent home-theater PC (or "HTPC"--a TiVo replacement)! TiVo recently raised their subscription rates, and considering I maintain three TiVo subscriptions, that increased expense finally spurred me to investigate alternatives. Amy's got a Windows Media Center Edition computer, and I've been impressed with its performance, so I repurposed an unused Windows 2000 machine of mine, added some TV capture cards, and it's become a very potent GB-PVR box. GB-PVR is the software the HTPC uses to provide its TV-recording functionality.

Thing is, video takes up a fair amount of space, so I've also built a NAS (network-attached storage) computer, basically a big file server, upon which to store all the HTPC's recorded shows. The NAS uses four hard disk drives in a RAID-5 array, yielding just south of three-quarters of a terabyte of usable space, made robust and fault-tolerant by the RAID hardware. When one of the four drives fails, the other three can limp along, with no lost data, until I procure a replacement and "hot-swap" it in. The box has special hard-drive bays that allow drives to be added and removed while the computer's running; thus, hot-swap. The machine never even has to reboot, which is great, because I've got a battery-powered UPS (uninterruptable power supply) maintaining its electrical power.

I've also been restructuring my home network, which now has both 100base-T (hardwired) and 802.11b/g (wireless) segments. Eventually I want to move all the network cables into conduit piping within the house's walls, but until then I'm making excellent use of the CAT5 crimper my brother Matt got me several birthdays ago for long cable runs.

Another beneficiary of the bumped-up home network is Amy's and my new Xbox 360. It will serve as a signal extender for Amy's Windows MCE box (allowing the computer to be located in a different room from the main TV), but it's also been getting a lot of load testing through frequent play of Jewel Quest, Robotron:2084 and Burnout:Revenge. Heh. :-D

-Rich

PS. This just in--as of today, Amy has chosen her wedding dress (though I dont' get to see it, obviously)! Congrats, Princess!

Our Row to Hoe: Why Doing it Right is Hard, but Necessary

2006-11-21T14:50:00.000-06:00

(Article: Killing the GOP Brand by Mac Johnson, courtesy The American Thinker, archived here, sorry for the broken link!)

This article is so on the mark, so pithily written, so correct that I want to staple a copy, text-in, to the forehead of every member of the House that voted against Mike Pence and John Shadegg. Read it. Please.

Back? Great. I've been doing a lot of thinking in recent weeks about where politics has gone over the past decade or so, and I've come to the conclusion, along with Rabbi Aryeh Spero, that one of the major problems Republicans have (and they are legion, and largely self-inflicted) is that we've chosen to play the Democrats', the liberals' game of pandering, big-government influence-peddling. Problem is, we stink on ice at it, and have rightly been ushered out of office by an electorate that remembers the Reagan years as the lifting of a musty, moldy veil of malaise from our faces.

The name of Reynaldus Magnus has been invoked a lot of late, but not without good reason. Reagan was far from perfect (as regards illegal-immigrant amnesty, for example), but what was best about his presidency was his unrelenting optimism. The stories he told (and sold, wonderfully) to the American people were beautiful ones, from the idea of its being morning in America to that compelling symbol of a shining city on a hill.

Ronald Reagan managed to present, in that broad-shouldered, cowboy-hatted, avuncular way, an image of that ancient oxymoron the trustworthy politician. I have no illusions that he was any more a saint than I am, but he was a damned sight better than the Republican or Democrat Congressional leadership of the day, and he honestly reduced taxes, strove for reduction in the nonmilitary size of government, prosecuted the defense of the Union from enemies both foreign and domestic, and most importantly put forth the idea that America is good, that unalloyed American ideals are good, that jingoistic faith in God and country are good.

And it worked: the U.S. bootstrapped itself out of the shamefaced "put on a sweater and let's tune in the hostage crisis" Carter years. The Reagan years, and policies arising from them (RIP Milton Friedman, by the way), unleashed the United States in myriad ways, leading to the longest, best period of economic expansion we've ever experienced. Think the productivity and dot-com booms of the 90s would have happened with any remnant of the tax structure and stagflation of the '70s? Think stock prices would have rebounded from 9/11 in five short years? Americans benefited, America benefited and the world benefited, both from the unbelievable wealth that resulted (and couldn't help spilling over our borders), and from the fall of Soviet Communism, having been outevolved and outspent into collapse.

Put simply, Reagan wrecked the curve for all would-be lazy Republicans after him. What the United States wants and demands from the Republican party is what it's wanted ever since: laissez-faire capitalism; muscular defense; government constrained by the unfashionable principle that rights are God-given and otherwise "Congress shall make no law"; and finally, that infectious, melt-the-heart, fire-the-soul Reaganite optimism.

Measured against that yardstick, very few GOP politicos make the grade. Even with an understanding and patient Republican base (after all, how many real Reagans can a nation expect in a lifetime?), Republicans in office from W down managed to cover themselves and their principles with sufficient mud to render themselves electorally indistinguishable from Democrats. And here we are.

The world is burgeoning with threats again, from unsophisticated threats like the encroachment of liberalism to Gordian knots like the Global War on Terrorism and the impending demographic collapse of Europe. A little infectious avuncular optimism might go a long way, right about now.

-Rich

Out With the Old, In With the New

2006-11-10T13:30:00.000-06:00

It's high time Republicans take action to get truly conservative leadership going in our new minorities in the House and Senate.

To get started, any conservatives with congresscritters in a position to go one way or another, call them to register your support for Mike Pence and John Shadegg.

Mike Pence
The first part of this article (originally linked in a comment on Redstate, but found in full on South Carolina Republican) tells a very encouraging story about Mr. Pence:

Good Mood Conservatives

John Shadegg
This article Shadegg wrote in January of this year tells me a lot about who he is, and why I'm all for getting him into more of a leadership position:

The Spirit of 1994

Both of them cite Ronald Reagan as an example. Considering the rather castrati notes emanating from the White House since Tuesday, I think a Reaganite focus is something Republicans can use.

-Rich

As Republicans Begin Our Years in the Wilderness

2006-11-08T14:46:00.000-06:00

Well, that would be that.

As I write this, Republicans have lost 26 seats in the House of Representatives, and thus the majority. Four seats in the Senate were lost as well, and the remaining two Senate seats are too close to call, but leaning Democrat at the moment, and both will likely go to recounts. I expect both seats to fall to the Democrats, because they're simply better at making recounts mean what they want to mean than we are, the 2000 election notwithstanding.

Some want to call this election a referendum on the Global War on Terror as it's being prosecuted in Iraq. The White House, evidently believing such reports, has sacked Donald Rumsfeld. I disagree violently with the Iraq explanation, as well as any explanation that paints this election as any repudiation of conservatism, or any blessing of liberalism. Libs had to hide their agendas at every turn to avoid defeating themselves, but in the end that worked fairly well.

Republicans lost this election because we lost our way, turning our backs on the conservatism that won us our positions back in 1994. We allowed ourselves to be led, if the term applies, by milquetoasts like Denny Hastert and Bill Frist, by allowing spending and governmental expansion at a level that elevates drunken sailors, and by getting issues like illegal immigration and prescription drug benefits so wrong that we were beaten like red-headed stepchildren last night.

Lincoln Chaffee I won't miss. Rick Santorum I will. I hear, today, that Hastert won't be trying to stay on as minority leader, while Pence, Shadegg and other strong conservatives are running for minority leader and whip. All good moves, in my opinion. If we can accelerate these sorts of trends for 2008, then perhaps we can retake the House and Senate, and field a Reaganesque candidate or two for president against the likes of Hillary, Pelosi, Kerry and Obama.

No, I don't want McCain. See above re: conservatism. Lord, I wish that Tony Snow could be convinced to run...

In the meantime I'll try not to think about the damage that can be done by a Democrat Congress: trumped-up impeachment proceedings in a time of war, rolling back of tax cuts, defunding of Iraq, public rape of judicial appointees, the list goes on and on...

-Rich

PS. To amplify, after a note from the lovely and acute Amy, President Bush is doing himself and the GWoT no favors by throwing Rumsfeld under the bus. Appeasement has never been a workable strategy when dealing with one's enemies, and I do consider the Democrat caucus enemies when it comes to the war and Iraq. This seems to me to be the first step of Bush's presidency into lasting ignominy. Thanks for doing it right to start with, Mr. President, but continuing in this vein will consign records of your second term to the category of embarrassing footnote beside those of whomever finally finishes this conflict.

If and when Republicans keep both houses of Congress, I'm sending this man a fruit basket.

2006-11-01T15:14:00.000-06:00

-Rich

Soon to Vanish Within My Garret

2006-10-31T13:35:00.000-06:00

NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month) kicks off tomorrow, and I'll be participating. For those who missed my attempt last year, NaNoWriMo is a completely insane quasi-competition in which people from all over the planet use the month of November to write a 50,000-word novel. It doesn't have to be a good novel. It doesn't have to be publishable, or literary, or even particularly coherent. It just has to be 50,000 words or longer by midnight in your time zone November 30th, with no prose having existing for the novel before the start of the month, for you the writer to "win."

There are any number of reasons why this can justly be called crazy: November is, at least for Americans and most westerners, the second-busiest month of the year, with a holiday, traveling, shopping, family obligations and the like all impinging. It's also a shorter month (30 days), and (well, for some this is an issue, not me) happens November right after the switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time, so circadian rhythms can be off.

Why do it? I participated last year, and while I didn't win, having topped out at 28,500 words, it was a seminal event for me as a writer: I'd never generated so much prose at one prolonged whack before. Some of it was even pretty good, and the corpus from last year's effort should be editable into something interesting down the road. I'm not sure whether all the rest of the prose I'd ever generated in my life before NaNoWriMo '05 added up to 28,500 words. It had a miraculous effect on my confidence as a budding writer and eventual published novelist.

So this year, I'm going to win. I've picked a slightly less esoteric subject for my novel this time, so existential and other issues won't be the ones slowing me down. I've put together a mind map of the rough plot, characters, themes I want to explore, and other minutiae so as to clear some of the logistical that roadblocks that slowed me down last time.

On top of all that, the stalwart and steadfast Amy is on board and being wonderfully supportive. Changes the entire landscape when you've got such a lovely cheerleader on your side.

-Rich

PS. And, via Tripp,

You scored as Reformed Evangelical. You are a Reformed Evangelical. You take the Bible very seriously because it is God's Word. You most likely hold to TULIP and are sceptical about the possibilities of universal atonement or resistible grace. The most important thing the Church can do is make sure people hear how they can go to heaven when they die.

Neo orthodox

57%

Reformed Evangelical

57%

Roman Catholic

43%

Emergent/Postmodern

32%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

29%

Fundamentalist

25%

Modern Liberal

21%

Classical Liberal

18%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

One of Those Weekends

2006-10-16T16:35:00.000-05:00

You know, when you have one of those crazy good weekends, when you throw a big engagement party, invite friends and family, and everything goes incredibly swimmingly with everyone getting along, wishing you and your intended the best, and celebrating your coming life together (together with cheese chosen by her and wine by him, pairing fabulously with one another and the hors d'oeuvres from her mother)?

You know, that sort of weekend? The kind where your parents visit your soon-to-be parents-in-law, visit for hours on end, tour their house and land, and laugh and tell stories into the night?

Yeah, that kind. You know the sort. Amy and I had one of those.

-Rich

On Reestablishing Contact with the Handwritten Word

2006-10-05T17:35:00.000-05:00

I have been having an inordinate amount of fun lately with writing. With journaling, plot, theme, character and all that, too, but specifically with the simple, human act of writing by holding an ink-bearing stylus of some kind in my hand, and wiggling that hand in a more or less (usually less) disciplined way as I move it across a sheet of paper.

Most of the rest of the world figured this out back last year or so, what with the Moleskine craze and Getting Things Done movement taking off; but this is the romance of hand-writing, come home to roost in my personal nest.

Typing vs. Writing
Typing has a lot to recommend it, and I type for several hours each day in my day job. But typing, being a digital activity, both in the sense of using the digits on the ends of one's hands, and in the output (these days) being stored in a digital computer, exercises certain linguistic and manual-dexterity parts of your brain, yes. But typing is primarily a process of selection: your brain selects sequences of individual letters and punctuation (representing in their effect the words you want to convey to your target medium) and engages your hand and arm muscles to push the buttons on the keyboard in front of you, in more or less the proper sequence.

Writing, by contrast, is an expressive effort. You and your body are responsible for every contour of the words you write: we draw our handwritten words, and so every person's penmanship is unique, just like his or her fingerprints. Our handwriting's looseness, flow and tidiness vary with our state of mind. It's actually a wondrous thing, considering how each of us is so different from one another, that we can read one another's handwriting at all. Of course, each of us has tried and failed to read a particularly badly scribbled prescription on occasion, so we know it's hardly foolproof.

Everything Old is New Again
I've written a diary entry and/or bit of prose and/or series of story-idea notes every day after procuring my first Moleskine notebooks. It started as a sensual thing: pretty notebooks, nifty pens, but it's since become a comforting end-of-day routine. Feed the dogs, eat dinner, do an errand or two, shutter the lights in the rest of the house, perhaps read for a bit, and then scribble in my notebooks for an hour or so in bed on my lap desk before turning in.

I find, that since typing is faster and more efficient (due to its digitality), I've really had to slow my thinking down when it comes to writing. It's thrown off my e-mail communication rhythm with Amy (poor Princess!) something fierce, but she's been very understanding so far. Typing up this blog entry has helped me reacquaint myself with thinking and typing, actually.

The brain is a funny place. I'm having a blast, and prepping for NaNoWriMo at the same time.

-Rich

An Aside about Writing, and Posh Writing Implements

2006-09-25T16:18:00.000-05:00

NaNoWriMo 2006 is coming soon (it starts November 1), and as such I'm trying to be a little better prepared this year than I was last year. I've already got a good classic-sci-fi theme I'm working on involving cloning and time travel, and I collect notes daily for the eventual firing of the starting gun. Very exciting, and I can't wait for the month to start!

One wrinkle that's afflicted me of late is an obsession with hand writing (yep, grabbing a pen and wiggling its pointy end against fibrous sheets of wood pulp), and with a particularly functional and pretty wood-pulp binding: the Moleskine notebook.

Moleskines (some people pronounce them "mole-a-skeen-a," to rhyme with "ballerina," but I prefer "mole-skeen" to rhyme with "nifty keen") are a triumph not only of marketing (it is laid on particularly thick), but also of functional, uncompromising design. The pages are creamy and sturdy without being too thick; the black "oilcloth"-wrapped hardcover binding is buttery to the touch, yet tough; it's got both an inbuilt ribbon bookmark (like in old-school hardcover books and Bibles), an attached elastic strap to flip around and hold the notebook closed a la the Grail Diary in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and a slim pocket in the back cover to hold loose pages or other slips of paper. Moleskines have been called the functional-yet-attractive "little black dress" of notebooks, and after filling a number of pages in the few I have, I can heartily agree.

(For those that will eventually say so, yes, Moleskines are also very faddishly "in" at the moment, but that doesn't mean they're not all they're cracked up to be, and besides, they're available from my local Books-A-Million, and they've got me jazzed up on writing, for which I'd pay twice the price.)

Of course, having stumbled upon what may be the perfect notebook, one's choice of writing implement becomes important. Longtime readers will recognize this as a dawning of a New Hobby, and I plead guilty.

Back in the halcyon days of my youth I was into (and decently good at) calligraphy, and as such I've gone through many a Sheaffer No-Nonsense calligraphy pen and chisel-tipped marker in my day. Tripp in particular will remember that my writing derangement actually had me doing dip-nib-in-inkwell work during our sophomore year at the University of Richmond, and looking up obscure hands like Luxeuil Minuscule in which to copy out strange poems in blood-colored ink.

I told you that to tell you this: I'm currently using Pilot G-2 "gel" rollerball pens to write my thoughts and prose in my Moleskines (and I'm particularly enamored of the burgundy-inked one that Amy bequeathed to me from her assortment), but I'm looking to fountain pens as the ultimate match. I snagged a Sheaffer ViewPoint Fine Nib (direct descendant of the NoNonsense Calligraphy Pen) and a Manuscript "Italic Pen" over lunch today, and both are good, but a little ink-heavy, leading to either slight bleed-through of the page, or illegibility on the narrow lines a Moleskine offers.

I also ordered a restored-vintage 1950s Sheaffer Snorkel Admiral fountain pen from eBay (thankfully they're available cheap--no $100 pens for me, thanks), with which I plan to go berserk later, and Amy went with me to pick up some exquisite dip-nib pens at our local "Ambiance" store in the mall over the weekend.

Pray for me. :-)

-Rich

Bonfire of the Inanities; A Sheepish Return

2006-09-16T19:35:00.000-05:00

1. Pope expresses dismay at the tendencies of modern and historical Islam toward violence.
2. Offended Muslims riot and burn churches.

Seriously, I'm looking for Jay Leno with a microphone, doing "Man on the Arab Street" interviews. You can't even really parody this stuff any more.

Many apologies for my lack of blogging activity of late: it's been a crazy few weeks (and for half of the last one I was laid out in bed with a gone-out lower back), but during this same crazy period Amy has managed to blog over a dozen times, so I have no excuse. :-)

So, pending blog entries:

My 2,993 September 11 entry. Inexcusable that I didn't get this done (despite being in bed with the aforementioned bad back), so I'll get this done ASAP.
A piece on how the news media is cheerfully being used as the foreign-propaganda arm of radical Islam.
A lengthy (been in draft form for months) rant on Digital Rights Management or DRM, and why it's such a wrongheaded idea, which we'll regret as a culture before too many decades have passed.

Stay tuned!

-Rich

The Won Hand and its Bauble:

2006-08-16T15:20:00.000-05:00

Photo the First

Here's a heavily color-corrected photo of Amy's digits and their new adornment. Our first attempt at macro photography (the better to show off the ring's three-dimensionality) was unsatisfying to say the least, so we'll attempt a better photo soon.

There has been much showing-around of the item, not to mention well-wishing and congratulations from all and sundry, though Amy and I wound up using this past weekend more for respite from proposal excitement than for an exhibition tour.

This weekend will be different! Amy has a great deal of family and not a few friends in the Birmingham metropolitan area, and few of them outside of her parents and coworkers have yet seen the Bling, so remedying that has taken on new importance.

For our part, Amy and I are very much enjoying visiting old haunts with the new Bauble, and the happy delirium has yet to subside. Plans for the Event (still looking to arrive in late April or early May '07) proceed apace, but as yet there's still an awful lot in flux. Exciting!

I'm over the moon, everyone. This has been a bit of a trying week at work, but knowing that my fiancée is out there and eager to see me imbues each day with that right sort of purpose, relegating the rough spots in life to simple background noise.

-Rich

A Wonderful Day

2006-08-11T15:10:00.000-05:00

The deed is done, the Bauble presented, the question popped and answered in the affirmative. Amy and I are engaged!

I wish I could have chronicled the particular ins and outs of the shopping for the Bauble, the customization of the Bauble, the merry paper chase that was paying for the Bauble after my identity-theft troubles last year (jewelry isn't exactly a purchase for slipping past the pattern-recognition algorithms they use to catch ID thieves), but none of those particularly matter now: I have a fiancée!

I had a plan of my own all lined up (with props, patter and everything!), but circumstances, schedules and other factors kept me from being able to implement it. In any event, Amy and I wound up heading to a favorite Persian restaurant of ours last night to watch a bellydancing friend of hers perform. I managed to get the friend to give me a cue, and proposed to Amy in front of the entire restaurant, to great applause and appreciation.

We're both deliriously happy, and by all accounts Amy is having a grand time exhibiting the Bauble to all with eyes to see. We also have a birthday party to attend tonight, and I have to imagine that her shoulder muscles will receive further exercise there.

A photo of the Won Hand and its Bauble is forthcoming, once taken.

-Rich

A Shout Out

2006-07-21T14:48:00.000-05:00

The lovely Amy took me to meet some good friends of hers last night, Tom and Mindé Briscoe, and their young son. (Tom's got his last name on his website, so I don't think I'm giving away too much by mentioning his last name. The son in question shall remain unnamed for the time being, though.) We all had a great time.

Tom, it turns out, is the cartoonist over at Small World, and I'd be quite remiss if I didn't, having establish personal contact, establish blogly contact as well. Tom and Mindé are fellow geeks, and I foresee many fun evenings of gaming, computing, movie-watching and other geekery with them in years to come.

-Rich

NASA, Damned with Its Own Faint Praise

2006-07-18T16:30:00.000-05:00

For NASA, a Long Road Ahead After Discovery’s Success

Youth
I've had spacefarer's stars in my eyes for my entire life, or at least as much of it as I've been out of diapers. My bona fides are many and varied: I built plastic models of the Saturn V rocket, the lunar module and the Space Shuttle through most of my childhood, I watched as much (classic) Battlestar Galactica as my parents would let me stay up for, I collected obscure space toys, I had the freakin' Mission to Mars suit for my Six Million Dollar Man action figure. I had a subscription to Odyssey magazine for years, and read and watched as much science fiction as I could get my hands on.

I was born in 1970, so I wasn't really old enough to pay proper attention until the Space Shuttle was the current spaceflight deal going. I remember collecting photos of the test-shuttle Enterprise, watching Columbia's first liftoff. The shuttle was supposed to be the glitzy new spacecraft. It was over budget, overdue and costlier to run than forecast, but then what NASA project wasn't? Liftoff after beautiful liftoff reinforced my opinion of the Shuttle as a good, modern design--the dependable, reusable "space truck" we'd all hoped it would be.

This is all to say that I'm a very, very, very easy taxpayer to please when it comes to United States spaceflight. I'm a middling-strength space junkie.

Loss of Innocence
Then, of course, came Challenger. Of course, I was only 16, and had led a sheltered enough life that I met assurances from Real Live Adults that the shuttle was fixed with trust and wide-eyed optimism. Turns out a reminder that rubber gets brittle in the cold wasn't enough, though: it bought us nine more years and a half-completed International Space Station.

Then, Columbia. Columbia's breakup, for me, was more painful than Challenger's, because it made me look, really look, at the criticisms that had been leveled at the Shuttle design from its infancy: too complex, too delicate, too much institutional sickness at NASA.

If It Was Easy, Everybody Would Be Doing It
I'm well aware that spaceflight, especially manned spaceflight, is a constant dance of needle-threading the likes of which few of us can truly grasp. The speeds and temperatures of orbital insertion and reentry are hellish conditions, and every time it's done successfully is a testament to the steely-eyed missile men and women who've coaxed every last part of the million-element technological symphony to its assigned climax precisely on cue. The tolerances of the devices and vehicles we build for the tasks must be exacting.

Even so, there are ways to mitigate risk, especially when building such an ethereally defined component as a heat shield. The shields used by the Apollo capsules were designed to ablate, or boil away, and damage to the component was similarly irreparable to that happening to Shuttle tiles, but the Apollo engineers evidently realized this, and so protected the heat shield within the spacecraft (sandwiched between the command and service modules) until right before it was time to reenter the atmosphere.

We Have What for a Backup Plan?
By contrast, not only is the Shuttle's heat shield exposed to damage throughout its mission, it's designed to be reusable, and so it's composed of thousands of tiles, in theory to make any individually damaged tile easy to replace, once on the ground. Sadly there's an issue with how they approached this bunches-of-tiles issue. Take, for example, this jewel of a quote, from the "The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual" published in 1982 (ISBN 0-345-30321-0):

Altogether, nearly 32,000 [heat-shielding] tiles cover Columbia. No two tiles are alike and each must be installed by hand. ... These glass-covered silica tiles are rather brittle and cannot flex or bend without breaking.

The above means that, short of carrying along a replacement for each and every one of the 32,000 tiles used, it's functionally impossible for astronauts to repair a shuttle that gets damaged during ascent, which is the period in which falling tank foam, unlucky birds and the like are most likely to inflict said damage.

What kind of brain-dead fool constructs a heat-shield system with 32,000 fragile, non-interchangeable, non-user-serviceable parts, and then hangs it next to a pressurized, supercooled tank known to shed parts of its insulation while traveling at multiples of the speed of sound, then puts people aboard and fires it into space? A government-employed fool, that's what kind.

I've worked on sane teams, and I've worked on insane teams. There's a certain level of institutional dysfunction required to greenlight a system as delicate and fault-intolerant as the thermal-tile system on the Shuttle. Even moreso to greenlight it now, considering that the foam-loss problem hasn't been solved, only alleviated.

The Definition of Insanity
Right about now defenders of NASA will start asking, "okay, wiseguy, if the tile system is so bad, how do we fix it?" I don't know how to fix it: I'm a computer programmer. I do know, however, that you don't continue to deploy a proven life-threateningly-bad design. Either you fix it, or you pull it out of production until it's been either fixed or replaced. You don't keep using it because you've added sufficient spit-and-baling-wire that it appears safer. And yes, dozens of cameras and less dangerous foam constitute spit and baling wire, no matter how much has been spent on them. Risk can never be eliminated, but bad design should simply be labeled as such and then never used again.

There are even schools of thought positing that the very idea of a heavy-lifting, reusable manned cargo transport is a bad one and we should always lift humans and equipment separately and with lots of small launches, but that's theory that I'm unable really to critique.

All of the above was to say that the fact we're rejoicing in the successful launch, observation and return of a spacecraft whose design was conceived when Gerald Ford was president is not a great victory. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Shame on us all for not demanding more from our space program.

The Next Generation
Personally, I was much more enthused by the successful launch and deployment of Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis I inflatable spacecraft this week, and of course all the activity going on around Virgin Galactic, SCALED Composites and the successor spacecraft to SpaceShipOne.

My faith (and investment money, once I score some) are with the growing and energetic private spaceflight sector, even in its infancy.

-Rich

Matrimonial Status Report

2006-07-14T11:33:00.000-05:00

Because I haven't posted one in a while, here's an update!

We haven't gotten to actual question-popping yet, but the lovely Amy and I did our first round of "bling shopping" last Friday, and the picture at right was one of the favorites of the evening: emerald-cut center stone, with princess-cut flankers and some channel-set baguettes, if memory serves. Luckily Amy is a size 7, which seems to be the size most display rings share.

It was Amy's first time being taken ring shopping by a beau, so the experience was evidently quite special for her: she spent the first part of the evening in "happy stunned" mode (probably in part because I made the shopping expedition a surprise), but when we got back to the car she was very eager to get calls made to her mom, sister, friends, and the like. Much giggling and even a little squealing: all in all, a very satisfying reaction from my standpoint. ;-)

Tomorrow begins another round of ring shopping at a few stores that were specifically recommended by friends and family. Actual purchase of the bauble will not be with Amy present, though: purchase and presentation will be accomplished within the next month or so. Stealth is my watchword, and surprise my destination.

Amy has acquired an account for us on TheKnot.com, and has been sending me frequent status reports on how things are going there. The tentative "date" is for mid-April of next year, so the schedule winds up being fairly aggressive if we keep to it. Nothing like having a website generate a task list for you, a third of whose items are already overdue.

Exciting times!

-Rich

The True Utility of the United Nations

2006-07-12T17:16:00.000-05:00

The Unreality of U.N. Reform: What if "Later" Never Comes?
Head of nuclear inspection in Iran removed
China-Russia introduce new UN N.Korea resolution

The United Nations has not showered itself with glory over the past decade-and-a-half, and I'd argue that there's very little noteworthy the U.N. has accomplished in its history in terms of statecraft or reining in the actions of rogue states. "You'd better stop that, or we're going to really sit down and discuss the problem...again" seems to be the modus operandi; even agreeing to something as straightforward as economic sanctions in response to flagrant violation of treaties and international agreements seems to be impossible, especially in recent years.

The United States pays (or is supposed to pay; we've played fast and loose with that obligation over the years as a form of leverage) $440 million in dues to the U.N. annually: a little over a fifth of the U.N. budget. Given that the U.N. appears to be overwhelmingly corrupt, largely ineffectual and increasingly irrelevant, one has to wonder what in the world we're paying for!

For those of us who think the United States Constitution is more than a set of guidelines and suggestions, the concept of almost any overarching world government is abhorrent. The United Nations is a world government, after a fashion, but most importantly it's a largely impotent world government. By comparison with an effective world government, perhaps, say, one imposing a mishmosh of Sharia and laws from the old Soviet Union, the United Nations looks vastly preferable.

$440 million amounts to about 0.0163% (163 ten-thousandths of a percent, 'tain't much) of the $2.7 trillion federal budget for 2006. Sounds like a very wise investment, given the return of a do-nothing world government. Clean up the corruption so its "passive harm" is curtailed, but otherwise I'm very happy with the U.N.'s current blowhard status and do-nothing role.

Just don't be tempted to use it as a means of getting anything done, or as any sort of yardstick for legitimacy.

-Rich

Major HTML Revamp--I Hope No One Notices!

2006-07-05T20:06:00.000-05:00

The visual changes are slight, but I'm doing so much surfing from my phone these days that I decided to rework Brain Squeezings' Blogger template (i.e., its HTML page layout) to be more mobile-browser friendly.

Of course, it still looks like garbage in Pocket Internet Explorer's "Default" mode, but if you use "One Column" mode the site is very clean indeed.

Everyone please hit Brain Squeezings with every OS (Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, PalmOS), and every browser (IE, Mozilla, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Pocket IE, Blazer) and let me know if anything broke!

-Rich

Text-Only Test

2006-06-17T12:00:00.000-05:00

This is a text-only Squeezings entry, testing how Blogger will handle it for formatting and the like.

I'm thinking about using Blogger Mobile for my all-text entries, and Flickr for my photoblogging. When you upload photos to Blogspot they seem to vanish into some sort of Google storage limbo. That, plus I <i>like</i> Flickr. :-)

-Rich

[Edit: Blogger Mobile escape-encoded my attempts to italicize "like" above, and the paragraphs automagically skip a line under themselves rather than retaining my line breaks. Verrry interesting.]

Sepia Sample

2006-06-17T11:32:00.000-05:00

This is a sepia-toned snapshot of a cluttered bookcase in my bedroom here at Squeezings Central. This is a test post, verifying that my Blogger Mobile capability is working.

-Rich

State of the Windows Mobile Art

2006-06-15T16:50:00.000-05:00

I have enjoyed my first month with my Cingular 8125 greatly. Sadly, though, the device, like so much in life, isn't perfect.

Actually, the device per se isn't the problem, though there are some aspects of the hardware that I'm not crazy about. The issue is Windows Mobile 5 (the spawn of Windows "Powered," and even further back, Windows CE).

Windows Mobile 5 (WM5) is actually a surprisingly capable operating system, coming as I do from both the Windows development world in my career and the Palm OS device world in my past PDA preferences. As I've raved before, it does very well as a phone (good call retention in low-signal areas), very well as a PDA (thousands of applications out there, PIM apps are good), very well as a mobile communicator (e-mail, SMS and MMS messaging), and very well as a mobile web-browsing platform.

History Lesson
That said, it's been a real adjustment moving back to a Windows-y PDA. I bought my first PDA, a PalmPilot Professional, back in 1998 (I still have it, and it still runs, given a pair of AAAs), and was hooked. I have an unbroken string of digital breadcrumbs back to data I entered into that first unit. I even bought a RAM upgrade and firmware update kit to keep it moving.

Back in 1999 or so, Microsoft finally entered the PDA game with a special version of Windows CE for the "Palm-sized PC," and I bought a Casio model that was actually a pretty sexy little beast (despite being slow and getting abysmal single-day battery life compared to months on a single pair of AAAs for the PalmPilots of the day). Sadly I cracked the Casio's screen when I leaned on a pool table with the unit in my pocket, and getting the unit fixed would have been as expensive as a new unit, so I dumped its data back into the old PalmPilot and soldiered on.

I've gone through a succession of Palm units since then (from the upgraded PalmPilot to a Palm IIIc, to a Palm m505, to a Tungsten T3, and most recently my Treo 650), primarily because I enjoyed the move back from the more cluttered Windows interface to the Zen of Palm, and no longer feeling like my device was underpowered for what it was being asked to do.

But that was then, and this is now. Palm, either through mismanagement or simply being outspent by competitors like Microsoft and RIM, has dwindled in market share to a shadow of its former self. The last version of the Palm OS was in testing for years, and rather than actually being released in a product, was sold to a Japanese company, and was last seen being broken down for parts for use in a Linux-based PDA OS.

On top of that, the convergence trend, after years of promises, has finally come to fruition, and a device that is only a PDA is no longer sufficient to compete: a device must be a cell phone first and a PDA second, and most likely also a communicator (meaning fluent with e-mail and other messaging) and a camera and multimedia machine.

The Treo 650 was, I predict, the last big Palm OS-based success, though the Treo 700p may well continue the love. The problem with the 700p is that there's also a Treo 700w, which runs (you guessed it) Windows Mobile 5. The use of WM5 in a Palm device, for me, was the deathknell of Palm as I've known it, and at best its capitulation to life as yet another Windows-Mobile-reliant hardware company. Time to switch back!

So Why was the Transition so Tricky?
Palm OS and Windows Mobile reflect radically different approaches to software design.

Palm OS, at its roots, is a single-tasking operating system. That means, absent some hackery, that its programs never have to worry about something running in the background and consuming resources that it might need. It has very little need to worry about programs "stepping on" one another while running, or doing any complex interleaving of execution context between programs doing different things simultaneously. Thus, Palm OS programs tended to be simpler and to store their contexts constantly (little need for the user to click a "Save" button) because they could never know when the user will exit your program to start another. In short, Palm apps tended to operate simply, like web pages. The best of them stored their contexts very completely, so that when you reentered that program, it looked like you never left, and felt like something more sophisticated than single-tasking was taking place.

Palm OS also allowed programs to execute "in place," meaning you didn't have to load programs from storage into RAM to execute them, you just ran them right where they were in the device's memory.

Windows Mobile is a multitasking operating system, and began its life as a cut-down version of the 800-lb. gorilla Microsoft Windows NT. There are many good things about being able to juggle several programs at once, but simplicity isn't among them. Another weakness of the multitasking approach is that having several programs running at once means they must all be consuming resources at the same time, which necessitates more powerful CPUs and more capacious storage. So Windows Mobile apps tend to be more elaborate in their OS demands and needs, and more like desktop applications than the web-page simplicity of Palm OS.

Speaking of storage, one nasty bit of legacy to Windows Mobile's genesis as a desktop OS is that storage is split into "storage memory" and "program memory." Yep, that means the old load-the-program-from-disk, run-it-in-RAM paradigm is alive and well in WM5. More complexity, and less flexibility for how memory is used on the device.

This would all be well and good if RAM and flash were free, and powerful CPUs consumed no battery power and emitted no heat. Sadly, we live in a world of limits, and Windows Mobile devices tend either to be underpowered, affordable and balky; or powerful, expensive and battery-starved.

The Cingular 8125, sad to say, falls into the former category. So why am I so happy with it?

Finding the Sweet Spot; Acceptance of High-Maintenance Tendencies
The good news is that the solution to Windows Mobile's woes on the Cingular 8125 is to flout its multitasking nature as much as possible: being almost powerful enough to multitask means that it's one hell of a single-tasker.

This flouting is tricky, because WM5's default behavior is to "minimize" programs that you choose to close, or render them invisible while keeping them running in the background. Minimizing like this means that the second startup of an application is blindingly fast (because it never left memory), but of course that means that it's very easy to wind up with lots of programs running in the background after a while, chewing resources and making the device sluggish. WM5 tries to handle this by truly terminating programs that haven't been used for a while when RAM gets scarce, but despite this being version 5 of Windows Mobile, it doesn't seem to be very good at keeping resources available. Throwing more CPU power and more memory at the problem can help, but for a guy like me who's always running different programs, it's like digging a hole in water.

Thankfully there are all sorts of third-party hacks out there that change the default behavior to terminating programs rather than minimizing them, and thus keeping as much of your device's mojo available for your use as possible.

There're also the little usage-patterns that you internalize when acclimating yourself to a new OS: the accretion of myriad "if it hurts when you do that, then don't do that" lessons that any software has to teach its users. It might be because I was a Palm user for so long, but Windows Mobile seems to have more bumps, quirks and rough spots than Palm OS does, even in its fifth iteration. Also, some of the programs (like ActiveSync--bad Microsoft!) tend to lock up. I typically have to soft-boot the device every other day or so.

A Man Who Knows Where His Towel Is
So, my Cingular 8125 (dubbed "DontPanicBeep" and given a Hitchhiker's Guide wallpaper because it was the hoopy thing to do) is a high-maintenance, twitchy device that's prone to constipation if I don't use it properly, and occasionally goes foom.

But I don't mind, because for the most part I know where the landmines are, and the ability to do so many things so well with so few compromises in the hardware realm is worth it to me. Also, there's a lot of active development going on in the Windows realm, and it's my belief that a lot of the crashy/locky software issues will be fixed with time.

-Rich

Will the Union Survive?

2006-06-11T16:15:00.000-05:00

Will the Union Survive?.

Tropical storm Alberto is currently menacing the Gulf coast of Florida. Fox News and other news outlets are keeping us all abreast of the developing crisis.

Winds of up to 35 miles per hour are forecast, as well as possibly as much as six inches of rain.

In related news, umbrella availability is dwindling across the state, and Sade and Barry White CDs are reportedly in dangerously short supply. The popularity of "Alberto" as a baby name is said to be skyrocketing, despite record sales of Trojan and Lifestyle prophylactics.

-Rich

You Know, It's Really Very Simple.

2006-05-18T15:08:00.000-05:00

Either immigration laws have meaning or they don't.

Either national borders have meaning or they don't.

Either American society has the self-confidence to preserve itself or it doesn't.

This has been a difficult few weeks to be a conservative Republican, because I'm a firm believer that we as Americans get the government we deserve. To be fair, Bush isn't the source of the problem, though he's far from helping with its solution. I knew W was iffy on illegal immigration when I voted for him, so his continuing to be so in the face of open revolt by his conservative base is hardly surprising, or even too disappointing, though his use of Vicente Fox to vet plans to move our own troops is worrying in the extreme.

What's boggling to me is the naked insouciance that (primarily Senate) Republicans have shown when presented with the clear opinion of their electorate: secure the border. Don't play patty-cake with how many illegals we're going to offer a decidedly amnestic "path to citizenship." Don't hide behind canards about whether it's feasible to deport 11 million illegals when depriving them of sympathetic employers would cause them to self-deport. Don't, for God's sake, extend Social Security benefits to illegals who attempt to qualify with fraudulent papers, or with time spent successfully avoiding the INS!

I'm very patient on the subject of immigration: at least one of my grandparents came over on a boat--I'm a relative newcomer in terms of genetic time in-country, but my ancestors obeyed the rules. One of America's strengths is that we assimilate and integrate new blood from all over. It's great: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." I'm down with that.

But (shame this even needs saying), there's a war on. We have a crater in downtown Manhattan, and newly-released footage of the attack on the Pentagon. United 93 is in theaters. We've seen a little bit more of the far end, now, of what happens when immigration laws aren't enforced. There're also the little matters of wage depression, an increasing tax burden on communities where great numbers of illegals live without paying income tax, chaos in border communities, and sightings of men in Mexican Army uniforms violating the border.

I'm going to put this as clearly as I can, elected officials: keep this up and you will pay with your jobs.

There's a real chance of a bloodletting this November. I just hope it's in the name of replacing incumbents with young bucks rather than Republicans simply staying home in droves...

"Speaker Pelosi." Brrr.

-Rich

Of Distribution Methods and Kings

2006-05-08T15:08:00.000-05:00

Pity the synchronous entertainment industry: movies, television, newspapers, radio. No, really.

Take movies (please): it's getting harder and harder to make a consistent profit by hitting the targets that used to draw audiences into theaters. Mission: Impossible III is doing fairly lackluster business (though the sheer manic insanity of Tom Cruise might have affected its receipts a smidgen), there are braindead sequels of sequels getting made right and left, there's an increasingly barefaced preachiness and liberal bent to movies and to actors these days, guaranteeing alienation of a certain portion of films' potential audiences, and on top of that home theater equipment has moved into the mainstream (62.3 million hits on Google as of this writing).

I realized this afternoon that I haven't darkened the door of a movie theater since sometime in December, 2005 (Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). There simply hasn't been a cinematic offering since then that's been suitably compelling. I have, however, bought about a dozen DVDs (though none for a non-Pixar movie made in the past five years), subscribed to Netflix and watched hundreds of hours of TiVo- and/or Windows Media Center Edition-recorded TV in that time.

Then there's advertising-driven TV. Between (again) DVRs (TiVo, Windows Media Center Edition, etc.), Netflix (again) and the ability to download pretty much any TV show, movie, interesting video clip or photo from the internet, ads just aren't getting watched the way they used to be. There are more product placement deals being made, more technological hurdles being placed in front of TiVo and its cohorts by the more litigious TV content producers, but the technological trend is clear here.

Newspapers? Oy. I know I haven't subscribed to one of the dirty, bulky, fire hazards since the early 1990s. Internet, internet, internet, mobile internet, mobile internet, internet funnies! It's embarrassing how poorly physical newspapers serve my needs.

Radio: there are some bright points here (conservative talk radio, subscription satellite radio), but I know I find commercials amid my songs pretty well unbearable after nearly a year with XM. I download close to a half-dozen podcasts on a quasiweekly basis (only one of which is a recording of a radio show), and pretty much every talk radio show that values its audience publishes a podcast now. Again, asynchronous media is winning, and winning big.

Needing to show up or tune in at a specific time for media is so 1998.

Part of this is probably just me, and the fact that I have a beautiful woman to occupy my attention and my time, and that she and I are internet, DVD and timeshifting fools. But demographically I have to imagine that I'm not such an outlier. The coveted 18-to-35 male audience segment (which I exited only yesterday) is watching less synchronously-aired, mass-produced entertainment and occupying its time with more technologically tricksy stuff like TiVo-d media, iPods (containing everything from simple music to podcasts to video), videogames, and plain old websurfing.

Case in point: this past week I acquired a truly remarkable device: a Cingular 8125 Pocket PC, which is actually more of a smartphone than a full Pocket PC. I used to use a Palm Treo 650, and it did a decent job as a phone, camera, organizer and e-mail device, but a poor one as a web-surfing platform. Well, how bad can that be, you ask? It's a stinkin' phone! True, but now that I have a unit that excels at being a phone, a camera, an organizer and a web-surfing platform (I know, I scarcely believe it myself) I will never, ever, ever go back. Shoot, for the fun of it I streamed a Harry Potter trailer over the thing's cellular modem, and while it was hardly HDTV, it was impressive nonetheless. And it'll look positively Jurassic in a year.

Give me a flatscreen monitor and broadband connection for comfort, but the ability to get the latest news via RSS and WAP from a Panera Bread over coffee and croissants without even needing to lug a laptop around is where it's at, baby.

-Rich

The Big Reveal--Meet Amy!

2006-04-20T14:24:00.000-05:00

After a brief spate of frequent blogging, followed by a return to sporadicity, I'm moved to introduce everyone to "A," the woman who's keeping me entirely too happy to get blogworthily excited about all the myriad ways the world is circling the bowl of late.

Her name is Amy, her nom de plume is the Geek Girl Blonde, and I am well and truly over the moon about her, and, wonder of wonders, she about me.

As Amy writes in her latest post, she and I visited my parents over the Easter holiday, and everyone was splendidly impressed with one another (whew!). She's already met Matt (of occasional commentarial note on this humble site) and his wife Amy*, and gotten along famously with them. She has yet to meet my sister Meagan, or much of my extended family, but we're working on that. :-D

I have met Amy's parents (as they live, conveniently, here in Birmingham) and a fair amount of her close and extended family over the past month or two myself, and been well and truly impressed.

It'd be fair to say we're both excited, in that knot-tying kind of way.

It'll be the end of the summer at the earliest before any pointed questions get asked, if I make myself clear, but it's also safe to reveal (since Amy has) that we've begun discussing "bling" designs (we're both fond of emeralds). Yes, it's an exciting time around Squeezings Central, with Spring in the air and all, but sadly that isn't likely to translate into too many impassioned-yet-cogent rants on the socio-political-economic state of the world. It is likely to translate into moony-eyed accounts of the ups and downs of our two lives and their convergent journeys down this exhilarating and sometimes-daunting road.

Hopefully that'll be entertaining anyway.

-Rich

* Yes, Matt's wife is named Amy, and that means we're well on the matrimonial way to Amy-squared. That's actually nothing: my mother and both her sisters married Richards, and two of the three had sons named Richard, of which I'm one. Call it Kismet, call it tradition, call it God having a big hearty laugh, but as Dad put it we seem to seek an economy of names in this family.

I Meme, You Meme...

2006-04-11T16:53:00.000-05:00

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Pretty spiffy, though it highlights how much more of the world I need to get busy and visit. :-D

Courtesy Tripp.

-Rich

Abdul Rahman is Safe, but the Problem Persists

2006-03-29T14:40:00.000-06:00

Italy Takes In Afghan Convert

I'm very glad that Rahman wasn't torn to pieces by an Afghan mob after being released. I'm also glad that the man (currently--we'll see how long the situation lasts, given the Religion of Peace's propensity for ignoring national borders when inconvenient) doesn't have to live like some homeless fugitive, because Italy took him in.

However, I'm very unhappy that Rahman had to be gotten off the Afghan legal hook on a technicality. If "insufficient evidence" rings false to me (the man converted to Christianity sixteen years ago with the full knowledge of his family--if the guy hasn't left any discernable breadcrumbs since the Soviet Union fell, then I'm a ballerina named Fifi), then it's got to ring false to the Muslisms calling for Rahman's head, and the decision will carry neither public-square nor legal weight.

It's simply unacceptable that people don't have freedom of religion without fear for their lives in a infant democracy that we're still spending blood and treasure to protect. The President and his administration have been disturbingly mealy-mouthed on the subject: the words held to account may be some of the most ill-chosen in the President's verbal history. And why on God's green Earth did the Italians need to offer sanctuary? Good on them for doing so, but Rahman should have been given a first-class seat on the first Boeing leaving for Hawaii.

It's been said before elsewhere, but I'll amplify: we're seeing nothing more than the fruits of allowing Islam's Sharia law to be installed as fundamental to the Afghan and Iraqi constitutions. This business of death being the penalty for renouncing Islam isn't some Afghani or even Islamofascist concoction: it comes straight from the Hadiths, or accounts and quotations of Mohammed:

Narrated 'Ikrima: 'Ali burnt some people and this news reached ibn 'Abbas, who said, "Had I been in his place I would not have burnt them, as the Prophet said, 'Don't punish (anybody) with Allah's Punishment.' No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, 'If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.'" — Volume 4, Book 52, Chapter 149, Number 260. p. 160-161.

(quoted from the Wikipedia Article on Apostasy in Islam)

This is something we'll see more and more of as time goes on: there are thousands of people in Afghanistan alone who are in similar danger to that which Rahman has just escaped.

-Rich

Enemy of My Enemy

2006-03-22T15:13:00.000-06:00

This post is not about foreign policy, for a change. It's about domestic policy, and how it seems to create strange bedfellows lately.

To start:

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (known affectionately as "Sarbanes-Oxley," "Sarbox," or merely "SOX") is quickly becoming the prototypical example of well-intentioned legislation whose effects as a cure are worse than the disease for which it was fashioned.

From the OpinionJournal article:

Recent estimates from the American Electronic Association, for example, show that U.S. companies are spending $35 billion annually simply to comply with the law as opposed to original federal estimates of $1.2 billion. A University of Nebraska study found that audit fees for Fortune 1,000 companies, on average, increased a staggering 103% from 2003 to 2004. The costs of being a U.S. public company are now more than triple what they were before the law passed, according to a study conducted by the Milwaukee-based law firm of Foley & Lardner. Some smaller firms report that they are spending 300% more on Sarbox compliance than on health care for their employees.

And:

Beyond the direct cost of compliance to individual companies, a recent University of Rochester study concluded that the total effect of the law has reduced the stock value of American companies by $1.4 trillion. That is $1.4 trillion that could be invested in infrastructure improvements, jobs, innovative technologies or research and development. As Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy says, Sarbanes-Oxley throws "buckets of sand into the gears of the market economy."

"Sand in the gears" is a phrase I first heard my father apply to anti-business (or merely confiscatory-via-tax) policy a few years ago; the thrust of our discussion at the time was both awestruck and cynical: "Isn't it amazing that the U.S. economy is so immense, so powerful, that we can pour incredible quantities of regulatory sand into its mechanism and it not only continues to work, but to work well enough to shame the other economies of the world?" The metaphor does raise a few questions, though: just how much sand can the mechanism take before it fails, and good grief, imagine what it could do without all that sand!

The company where I work has recently completed its Sarbanes-Oxley compliance audit, and passed. It took an incredible amount of work, and diverted truly flabbergasting resources away from our core business: i.e., selling things. Yet we still turned a decent profit this quarter; earnings were down slightly from forecasts, but still, as I said, decent. More vindication of the strength of the mechanism, I suppose, but was this trip necessary?

Here's my whole problem with the very idea of legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley: it presumes guilt until convinced of innocence. It points a legal shotgun at the forehead of every publicly-traded company in the U.S. (and their compliance-auditing firms) and says, "Prove to us that you're not a bloodsucking, fraudulent bastard!" Of course, this is designed to protect investors from falling prey to the real bloodsucking, fraudulent bastards out there in the world.

The problem is that there are already laws on the books to prosecute the living Hell out of people who defraud both small and large investors, not to mention the securities market and the government. Those laws even seem to have worked: where are Enron * and WorldCom ** today (or for that matter Arthur Andersen *** consulting)? Two effectively had the death penalty exacted on them, and WorldCom re-renamed itself to MCI, and is a shadow of its former self.

All in a world before the blunt instrument of "justice" that is Sarbanes-Oxley.

There are those who believe that such safety measures are necessary for the protection of the investor, and since everybody has a 401(k) or similar stake in the market of late, even the "little guys" are investors now, so the Enron and WorldCom scandals robbed lots of little people of considerable sums of their money. Even so, I'd argue that risk is simply part of investment. There's very little reward in this life that doesn't have risk involved, and the stock market, offering some of the most impressive monetary rewards, also comes with some of the highest levels of monetary risk.

When I buy stock in a company, I'm professing my faith in that company. This means that I take on a whole slew of risks: its business model might be flawed; it might get outcompeted by other companies in the same business; and, at its helm, there might be a slack-off, an idiot, or even a crook. Risk is part of the package, and trying to mitigate that risk limits the possible reward: in forcing all public companies to comply with its purposely vague requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley consumes those companies' resources and diverts those resources from serving the companies' goal of actually making money. That figure in the second quote is haunting: $1.4 trillion dollars that might have been plowed back into the economy (and generated tax revenue, for the socialists in the crowd), instead poured down the comparative drain of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance auditing.

I've looked around as much as I can this afternoon, and the estimates I can find of the total damages caused by the Enron and WorldCom scandals amount to around $10 billion. (If anybody knows better numbers, please let me know.) Based on these napkinback numbers, we get an amount of 140 times the original cost of the problem to "prevent it happening again," which is sadly Quixotic: all Sarbanes-Oxley does is penalize the rule-followers. Diehard rule-breakers will find ways around the auditing process, and in the meantime we've thrown a massive quantity of sand into the machine, hurting the law-abiders, to little positive effect.

My hope is that articles like the above (and why are Democrats leading the charge to neuter Sarbanes-Oxley?!?) are harbingers of a change in opinion now that the real costs of the legislation are becoming apparent. I'd love to see Sarbanes-Oxley struck down or made ineffective (or less onerous) soon; the fewer fetters we have on the American prosperity engine, the better.

-Rich

PS. Speaking of risk and reward, I am in love. The inimitable 'A' will need to watch herself if she doesn't want to become the future Mrs. Rich. :-D

* From the Enron website: "Enron is in the midst of restructuring various businesses for distribution as ongoing companies to its creditors and liquidating its remaining operations."

** From the MCI site: "MCI, formerly known as WorldCom, has paid a penalty consisting of $500 million of cash and 10 million shares of new common stock of MCI, Inc. in connection with the settlement of charges brought against WorldCom by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."

*** From the Wikipedia entry on Andersen: "On June 15, 2002, Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding documents related to its audit of Enron. Since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission does not allow convicted felons to audit public companies, the firm agreed to surrender its licenses and its right to practice before the SEC on August 31."

In Case Any of Us Had Forgotten the Meaning of the Word "Courage"...

2006-03-14T14:25:00.000-06:00

Muslim’s Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats

Dr. Wafa Sultan has set herself against all that is modern fundamentalist Islam. I can hardly imagine the shadowy tendrils of Hell that are scratching at her door in the wake of her Al Jazeera interview.

-Rich

A Many-Splendored Thing

2006-03-13T15:37:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the posting hiatus--it's been a nutty few weeks at work, and between that and a few other factors I haven't made posting here a priority.

The primary thrust of this entry is 'A,' my lovely, exotic, red-blonde-haired girlfriend. She and I are doing extremely well, and this weekend was a particularly agreeable one. I finally gave her a chance (read: got the place something approaching clean enough) on Saturday to drop by Squeezings Central in Alabaster, Alabama, and get introduced to the dogs and experience all the multifarious geekery around my place. We also spent a lot of time at her apartment yesterday, reading, drinking dark coffee, and enjoying a gorgeous afternoon.

One intriguing tidbit about A is that she's a henna artist. Henna "tattoos" have become trendy of late, but "mehndi," or the art of applying henna paste (made from the leaves of the henna plant plus an acidic liquid like lemon juice) to skin in order to stain the skin temporarily in artistic patterns, has been around for thousands of years. She mixed up a batch of paste while I was visiting yesterday and reading a book of hers on the subject, and I'm quite intrigued. A's going to do some designs on herself for the Indian Festival of Colors tomorrow evening--we have reservations at Taj India here in town.

My Princess is a rare flower indeed. :-D I'm sort of smitten.

-Rich

PS. More on henna at Wikipedia and HennaPage.com.

Reaganomics, A Quarter Century Later

2006-02-28T17:18:00.000-06:00

The 25 Fat Years

Sadly my 11-through-19-year-old skull was too full of mush to appreciate Ronald Reagan while he was in office, though I do recall my parents and lots of other adults I knew and respected liking him.

Here are the points made in the above article:

The changes made to the way the American economy was managed (most obviously in taxation) during the Reagan years have both stabilized and allowed the American economy to grow at a rate unequaled in modern times.
Making the Bush tax cuts permanent would allow the economic growth and unemployment shrinkage we've seen during the past five years to continue.
A Forbesian flat tax would continue and solidify Reaganomics' legacy.
Stop the growth of the federal government as seen under Bush (and pushed for by big-government types on both sides of the aisle).
Finally (and I like this greatly), we should move to a form of dynamic calculation when forecasting the impact of tax cuts on government revenues. When taxes are cut (leaving more money in the pockets of Americans), the economy receives a stimulus. The resulting growth in wages and increase in people's spending bring more cash into tax coffers, not less, as static, zero-sum calculations forecast.

These all seem like dandy conclusions and measures to me... A flat tax will be a tough sell because it's so easy to demagogue "regressiveness," but anyone looking honestly at the way the American economy has exploded over the past 25 years has to admit that something good happened then, and is worth perpetuating.

So, argue with me! Tell me why lower taxes are bad, why Reaganomics was the disaster liberals claim it was, tell me how the growth of the past two and a half decades is not traceable to changes made during the Reagan years.

-Rich

Greetings!

2006-02-28T16:44:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the lack of updates... I have an update to my thoughts on the Port Kerfuffle coming, and one or two other things.

In the meantime, a hearty welcome-back to A, who has been sorely under the weather until recently.

It's going to be gorgeous out pretty much all week here in Birmingham (finally) with sunshine and temperatures in the 70s well into the weekend. These are the times when I really enjoy having moved to the Magic City.

-Rich

If you can't win the debate, jam their transmission

2006-02-23T15:01:00.000-06:00

Michelle Malkin's website seems to be the target of a Denial of Service attack by a group of "cyberjihadis" located in Turkey today.

Seeing as how Michelle's going to be back up within a day or less, what message is this going to send other than the same old "Islamofascists are a bunch of immature geekboys who vandalize and make noise rather than arguing their case" point that we get every night by watching the news?

You need to vary the message, guys. The rest of the world gets bored when we hear the same thing over and over again.

-Rich

One Thousand Words, With Interest

2006-02-22T13:49:00.000-06:00

Toonophobia from Cox & Forkum.

-Rich

PS. They do explain why cartoon pigs are holding the signs.

Let We Forget

2006-02-21T18:07:00.000-06:00

Google Maps display of the Cartoon Jihad
(Hat tip Malkin, who really deserves a fruit basket or something)

It's pretty boggling how big a deal this has become. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims the world over, either rioting of their own accords, or being convinced/coerced to riot in protest over twelve cartoons.

Press on the matter has been flagging a bit, but the violence, deaths, cowardice and mayhem continue. When you look at the sheer scope of the unrest, can anyone truly deny that this is another exchange in a culture war?

Freedom of speech is simply a must for any seriously free society. Immunity to the depredations of the whims of other countries is a primary tenet of national sovereignty, and also the foundation of any safety a nation might guarantee its citizens from foreign incursions, physical or otherwise. What we are witnessing is the adherents of an ideology (we'll call it Islamofascism) trying not only to abrogate free people's freedom of speech, but to do so across national boundaries, and even according to a double standard, since Iranian and Palestinian newpapers are known to publish inflammatory cartoons regarding Judaism, Christianity, America and other Western institutions and symbols.

It's been a scary week or two, watching the relatively weak showing that American and European papers have made as regards publishing the cartoons, but it's worth remembering that A) there have been exceptions [good], and B) the enemy in this conflict has shown himself to be very patient, and very sly [bad]. The shelf life of this crisis in American media won't last another week unless more deaths occur (and places like Pakistan and Nigeria do keep fanning the flames, to be fair), but the fundamental conflict of values won't have altered one iota.

-Rich

So Glad to See It...

2006-02-20T16:15:00.000-06:00

More and More Moderate Muslims Speak Out in Denmark
(Hat tip Little Green Footballs)

One has to imagine that regardless of the danger to the original publishers and cartoonists, a person standing up to his/her own imam (and thus unable to be anonymous or otherwise avoid the fallout) would be endangering him/herself in an entirely different way. Bully for all Muslim moderates speaking out.

Cheney Watch
This is simply masterful:
Bonfire of the Inanities

In Other News
The lovely and gracious 'A' is under the weather with what appears to be a seasonal über-sniffle, and IMs are zipping furtively between Squeezings Central and the doctor's office where she is being examined. Fervent wishes for her speedy recovery.

-Rich

I Wash and I Wash, but the Stain Won't Come Out...

2006-02-17T15:33:00.000-06:00

I'm forced to agree with Chuck Schumer on something.
More are questioning port transfer
(Hat tip Malkin, again, via the Geek Girl Blonde)

I'm simply at a loss. What possible reason could we have for turning operation of the ports over to ANYBODY other than an American corporation? If we're trying to save money, try cutting taxes, growing the balls to cut entitlement programs, or attacking other crazy pork like bridges to nowhere, instead of nickling-and-diming critical national infrastructure!

I need more soap. God, why Schumer?

-Rich

Yawn... :-)

2006-02-16T18:05:00.000-06:00

Seems like a slow news day today. Oh, there's plenty happening, but the top stories pretty much everywhere are the same as yesterday: the Cheney shooting flap, the Cartoon Jihad, the Abu Graib issue recycle, the largely ignored prospect of a nuclear Iran, the U.N. bloviating about Guantanamo Bay being, against all actual evidence, a hellhole of torture and degradation. In short, business as usual. :-p

So, a departure from politics. How'm I doing?

I, in short, am great. Work is tooling along well, if at an overall sedate pace. I'm seeing a beautiful, intelligent, funny and fascinating woman who seems to be functioning wonderfully as my blogging muse. Work on the Bowflex has granted me better energy and (I'm told by a highly cute and reliable source) a cuddlably muscular bod. Stocks are up, weather is mild, and spring feels just around the Alabama corner.

In sum, I'm good. Got laundry to do tonight, and a living room to clean. Gonna chat with my Princess for a little while, sip a decent Sauvignon Blanc, and enjoy the evening.

-Rich

I'd Ask...

2006-02-15T16:48:00.000-06:00

But I think the sad, sad answer's pretty clear.

Why is the media so hot to publish the latest Abu Graib photos (and in the process offend Arabs and U.S. military servicemen and -women alike, while neither making new points nor righting new wrongs), yet for the most part too protective of the sensitivities of those poor, defenseless, rioting-by-the-tens-of-thousands Muslims to publish the Mohammed Cartoons?

Well, if in your mind the source of all real evil in the world is Westernism and/or Americanism in all its forms (with a liberal spicing of Bush Derangement Syndrome for good measure), it's easy to take sides. Rest assured, though, palaver like "speaking truth to power" and fair-weather freedom of speech will be touted as defenses, when anyone bothers to make them.

Disgusting, sad... I'm running out of sufficiently loaded emotional terms. Luckily A and I are heading out to the Lakeview Oyster House here in town after work.

-Rich

Talk About Fish in a Barrel...

2006-02-15T15:16:00.000-06:00

The Shooting Party
Hat tip Michelle Malkin

You know, it's tempting to let the Left's propensity for own goals go unremarked, but hell, this is a blog, so remark I shall. Does anyone seriously think that harping on Vice President Cheney for not having the mainstream media on speed dial (just in case he accidentally shot a friend in the face while on a hunting trip) will gain any traction with anyone other than the "Daily Kos" crowd?

How does piling on to what is undoubtedly a moment of personal anguish for the VP (and momentarily mortal danger for his good friend) reflect positively on the pilers-on? Didn't the PR disaster that was bringing the newly-confirmed Supreme Court Justice Alito's wife to tears teach the Left anything? Evidently not.

And besides, it's not like there's anything else going on worth reporting on in the world. From the linked RCP article:

In the absence of any pressing news these days -- other than Iran's nuclear weapons development crisis, the election of Hamas terrorists in Palestine, ongoing worldwide Muslim riots and killing in reaction to a cartoon, Al Gore's near sedition while speaking in Saudi Arabia, the turning over of our East Coast ports to be managed by a United Arab Emirates firm, the criminal leaking of vital NSA secrets to the New York Times, Mexican military incursions across our southern border, the Iraqi crisis, Congress's refusal to deal with the developing financial collapse of Social Security and Medicare, inter alia -- the White House press corp has exploded in righteous fury over the question of the vice president's little shooting party last weekend.

There's really not much I can add to that.

-Rich

Happy Valentine's Day!

2006-02-14T16:50:00.000-06:00

Herewith a departure from our regularly scheduled polemic to wish everyone a happy Day of Evil Emotionally Manipulative Corporate Incitement to Patriarchially Sexist Consumerism.

Naw, everybody enjoy loving on their squeezes today. A and I have a nice dinner planned for tomorrow evening, but as she's under the weather this evening I'm having a pizza delivered to her place, and planning to go over and engage in some nurturin'.

Oh, and in case anyone was curious:
I'd rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy.

-Rich

Water-Kerryer: What Part of "Aid and Comfort to the Enemy" Does This Man not Understand?

2006-02-13T18:19:00.000-06:00

Well, Al Gore decided to try for an Al-Jazeera headline today:
Gore Laments U.S. 'Abuses' Against Arabs
(Hat tip Michelle Malkin)

Basically, Gore accuses the U.S. of inconveniencing and delaying Arabs in America during the process of confirming visa applications, investigating green card irregularities and the like.

Well, no, actually he accuses us of something entirely different:

Gore told the largely Saudi audience, many of them educated at U.S. universities, that Arabs in the United States had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."

Invoke painful World War II imagery much? I thought ham-fisted dredging up of old racial shames in the name of political pandering was Hillary's job.

Anyway, Michelle does a better job of exploding Gore's claims and exposing their counterfactual basis in her post than I'm likely to.

I continue to be amazed that anything Gore does commands the attention of a Kindergarten class, let alone the international media. But if there's any way you can squint at it, point a finger and blame Bush, it's newsworthy, right?

-Rich

Danish Intestinal Fortitude

2006-02-10T11:36:00.000-06:00

Danish Kids Don’t Get Pork
(Hat tip Michelle Malkin and NeanderNews)

Apparently Danish kids have only Halal-butchered meat (the Islamic version of kosher meat) available to them in their school cafeterias. Until now. In the wake of the cartoon fracas of the past week or two, politicians are demanding that Danish kids now have pork chops and pork-containing meatballs available on their lunch menus. No word on whether this will in fact happen, but I love the fact that amid a punishing boycott on Danish goods from the Muslim world it seems a bipartisan call for flipping off Muslim sensibilities is now in effect.

I'm going to have to learn more about the Danes and their culture of stick-it-to-em-ness. This shows a level of courage and pluck I wasn't aware still existed in Europe. :-D

I feel like having some bacon for lunch, myself!

-Rich

All those with ears to hear...

2006-02-09T13:11:00.000-06:00

What would Muhammad do?

Again, let's continue to lift up the Muslim voices calling for sanity.

-Rich

You know, I keep trying to avoid making this into some Randian morality play...

2006-02-09T10:49:00.000-06:00

EU mulls media code after cartoon protests
(Hat tip Little Green Footballs)

Yes, that would be a proposed EU media code "encouraging" that the media show "prudence" when covering anything religious. It apparently won't have the force of law... Anyone want to take bets how long that will last, having come from the EU itself?

Thank goodness part of our Constitution reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Is anyone still not convinced that this is about the exercise of free speech?

And yes, this is another story perpetuating the falsehood that depicting Mohammed is forbidden by Islam. I'm seriously considering coming up with a little logo for stories that do this.

-Rich

Much Ado About...Nothing?

2006-02-08T13:24:00.000-06:00

Bonfire of the Pieties: Islam prohibits neither images of Muhammad nor jokes about religion
(May require free registration)

In this article, OpinionJournal commentator Amir Taheri makes some great points, both that there is no scriptural prohibition in Islam of depictions of Mohammed, and that the prevailing Sulafist (also called Wahhabist, or Islamofascist) attitude of humorlessness and intolerance of parody is also unsupported, either by the Koran or by other anecdotes of Mohammed's own life.

At his article's end, Taheri takes a final parting shot at both sides of the debate:

Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.

Sadly, this misses the larger point of the debate, and glosses the deafening near-silence from the non-rioting Muslims of the world on this latest smear of their faith by what one would hope is a highly embarrassing, if vocal, minority.

This crisis/debate/farce is not about some Danish cartoonists' decisions to offend Islam, and never has been. It's about whether we in the West will stand up for our own nations' interpretation of the right to a free press, and freedom of speech, and we allow this fact to be obscured in the debate at our peril. Reactions of our governments have been mixed, but largely disappointing aside from a few bright points, which leaves it up to braver newspapers and people in the blogosphere to make the stand. It's not so courageous a stand as some might think (I'm fairly certain I have little to fear from cartoon-mad crazies on U.S. soil), but I'm big on standing up to be counted when issues like this one arise. In situations like this one, failure to take a side is to stand aside.

And as regards the near-silence of the nonviolent, tolerant majority of Muslims we're assured are out there, we need to see more of the sort of story I blogged about below. Like dozens or hundreds more. I hopped over to Aljazeera.net to see what it's saying about the matter, and its lead story as of this afternoon is of President Bush effectively strengthening the case of the Islamofascists and rioters with quotes like "With freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others," and perpetuating the canard about Islam prohibiting representations of Mohammed. I want to see the top five stories on Al Jazeera to be denunciations of the riots, and exposés of Iranian and Syrian state support of the rioting.

I would hope that such material would, in modern parlance, be newsworthy.

-Rich

About Bloody Time

2006-02-08T10:30:00.000-06:00

We definitely want to encourage this sort of behavior from the sane Muslims of the world...

Islamic Groups Call for End to Riots

-Rich

Yep, Get Yer Tolerance and Decorum Right Here

2006-02-07T15:06:00.000-06:00

King eulogists jab Bush at funeral

I really have no words for the disrespect this shows. Bush Derangement Syndrome on display at a funeral where the man is in attendance.

Free speech, yes, but here's my free speech deploring their speech back at them: grow up!

-Rich

Freedom of Speech, Offense and Civilization

2006-02-06T18:30:00.000-06:00

It's very tempting to look at the outrage and hysteria that's erupted over the infamous twelve Jyllands-Posten cartoons and dismiss it as just another example of Those Crazy Islamist Hijinks™, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that we're looking at exactly the sort of culture clash I was beginning to worry about a few posts ago when I waxed prosaic about the demographics of Western and Muslim countries.

I've read several attempts by commentators to explain this strange Muslim tendency to counter offense with violence: it's an Arab thing, it's an extremist thing, it's an "unused to the rest of the world having free speech" thing, it's a "well, if we hadn't compromised all our principles maybe we'd riot too" thing.

I think all these analyses miss the mark. It's a civilization thing. Or the lack thereof.

Stimulus and Response
Anyone remember Star Trek: The Next Generation, specifically the frequently-recurring moment when someone would impugn Worf's manliness or strength or honor or whatnot, and he'd bark a reply along the lines of "I should kill you where you stand!" This was both a source of dramatic tension and of humor, because it's the mark of a civil throwback, of complete overreaction, of the belligerent rube among more sophisticated, more civilized people. Put simply, we tend to equate maturity, both of a person and of a culture, with the ability to respond with grace and, if not understanding, tolerance toward viewpoints we consider objectionable. It's fundamental to getting along with one another--grade-school stuff, the sort of thing we try to cultivate in preschoolers.

Still, there's a line we all have to draw, at the individual and at the societal level: the delineator between grin-and-bear-it and kill-the-bastards: some transgressions cannot justly be borne. Those of us in civilized society have for the most part put that line somewhere between "an eye for an eye" (i.e., in response to grievous injury) and "when it's almost, but not entirely, too late to salvage matters" (i.e., the position of the United Nations on pretty much anything of import).

So what constitutes grievous injury? Well, the loss of life through malevolent action (say, flying a plane into a complex of inhabited office buildings) seems to qualify. So, I hope, does menacing one's neighbors by researching and threatening to deploy WMDs of any stripe. There are gray areas along the regions that encompass sovereignty issues like genocide within one's own borders, or violations of international treaties. Does offending religious sensibilities qualify? Well, 500 or 600 years ago it certainly did in the Western model of things: witness wars of the Reformation, the Crusades and the like. It's been a while since that sort of thing happened on a wide scale, though. No, for the most part among cultures that consider themselves civilized, it's primarily violence that merits violent response.

Civilization Here at Home
The American Constitution's enshrinement of freedom of speech is a strong indicator of the ideal of tolerance of opposing viewpoints (that would be offense) that is expected of Americans. Pretty much all other representative governments around the world have adopted something similar to this model, and for good reason: if a people is to be entrusted with the task of determining its government through deliberation, then the ability to deliberate freely is essential to that process.

The U.S. occupies a funny place in the annals of history: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, atheists and others can and do work and live under the same roofs without engaging in swordplay, mutual grenade exchanges or other "kill the unbeliever" activities. This is largely because we've all signed on to the ideal that actions of loyalty to one's nation-state trump actions of loyalty to one's religious denomination. American first, and Christian, Raelian or Scientologist second. The state not being permitted to make any law respecting any religious denomination means that it must not privilege any faith over any other, or even over an absence of faith; and from the point of view of position and privilege within the state, neither must we. I.e., Christians can't just go depriving Jews of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or vice-versa. It's a powerful sort of relativism, and an important ingredient of the mix that has made the United States the most powerful geopolitical entity on the planet.

Those Crazy Extremists
But back to the toon-happy members of the Religion of Peace that have been gracing our TV screens. This all ties into one of the things I've had to realize about Islam: it's not just a religion, it's a social order, and one that extends all the way to political and national and even global dimensions. Islam has teachings within it that simply can not coexist with most of the constitutions of the world that mandate faith-neutrality (primarily having to do with the concept of "dhimmitude," or the doctrine of how to deal with adherents to other faiths who happen to be living in Muslim nations). This is one of the reasons why, for example, the new Iraqi Constitution has as one of its tenets that Islam is the basic foundation of the country's laws.

Here are a few facts about the cartoons and the surrounding craziness:

1. The 'toons were first published months ago, in concert with an effort by the Danish Jyllands-Posten editors to highlight the self-censorship everyone seems to be engaging in these days to avoid offending members of the Religion of Peace. It's only in the past few weeks that the rest of the world even took particular notice of them, after a few other European papers, in an uncharacteristic fit of free-speech pique, republished the cartoons. This appears to have fanned the dying embers of the issue back into life, evidently giving the Middle East an excuse for a good riot.

2. There were some initial signs of backbone from the French, Danish and English, but the repeated calls for the deaths of the cartoonists, calls for the deaths of the editors of the papers, vandalism and burning of embassies and lovely moments like threats of a new holocaust have cowed the French, the Danes, the British and even our illustrious State Department into mealy-mouthed beseechings for calm and reasoned discourse.

Stimulus and Response, Again
It's my opinion that we're past the time for reasoned discourse, and forceful response is needed. An attack on an embassy is an attack on a country's sovereign soil, i.e., an act of war, and the last time I checked the Danes were our allies. Not that our actions in the arena of embassy defense have been exemplary, but what we have is Muslims around the globe up in literal arms over the fact that something was done, somewhere on the planet, that offended them. I don't recall Hindus rioting because we eat hamburgers in the U.S., or Christians around the world burning embassies when the illustrious artwork Piss Christ made its debut. It is, quite simply, an attempt to privilege the sensitivity of Muslims over the free speech of the rest of the world.

Since, as I've mentioned, free speech is pretty integral to the functioning of our sociopolitical lives out here in tolerance-land, this attempt might be construed as a big, clash-of-civilizations sort of deal.

-Rich

Meme Me Up, Scotty

2006-02-06T12:12:00.000-06:00

Picked up this quiz from Tripp

I imagine there's precious little surprise here as well, though I imagine some of my audience thinks I'm a lot more socially interfering than these results would indicate.

You are a
Social Moderate
(41% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(90% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Capitalist

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

-Rich

And Now for Some Disobedience

2006-02-02T14:33:00.000-06:00

For those who may not know, there's been an enormous uproar over the course of the past few weeks over some drawings of Mohammed and other muslims by some Danish cartoonists. People are getting sued and issued with death threats for having the gall to post or publish them:

Cartoon Rage vs. Freedom of Speech

Here they are, cached from the above article:

Aren't the cartoons scary and evil? Seriously, why should Islam be exempt from the satire and freedom of expression that the rest of us are subject to?

-Rich

State of the Union

2006-02-01T12:12:00.000-06:00

All in all, it was a good address. Dubya was on form, and did an excellent job of abjuring the American people (and Congress, not that they're likely to listen) to stay focused when it comes to the War on Terror. The domestic part of the speech was less strong (wind power and more ethanol subsidies?!?), but I'm all for increased investment in nuclear power and in research into the remaining hydrogen-fueled-car problems.

A and I had a grand ol' time time watching it, but easily the best points were when the Fox News camera crew did artful cut-aways to Hillary, McCain or other ...um, let's call them "personalities of note"... in time to show their ate-a-lemon faces at appropriate moments. We also found it quite amusing to see how half the room failed to stand up at some of the most optimistic and patriotism-inspiring moments. (Some acoustical anomaly of the room, perhaps.)

Great to see Justice Alito there. The man does cut a figure in black. Just sayin'.

Also, Bush made a point of mentioning earmarks, which is as close as he can really get to dissing Blunt in the race for DeLay's old spot. Can only be good for Shadegg, IMO.

Then there was the "rebuttal," during which milquetoast governor Tim Kaine of Virginia blithered for 10 minutes or so about how he didn't materially disagree with anything Republicans were doing, but that he (and the sunshiney and daisy-fresh bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans that make up the Virginia legislature--how things must have changed since I left!) wanted to let us know that there was A Better Way. Verdict: creepy, and strange. The man's left eyebrow looked like it escaped from a campy '50s sci-fi sitcom.

A and I were quite disappointed in the after-show: we were expecting all sorts of hecklable material, and instead we got the Democrats' C game. I'm guessing there's good reason for that--Biden out getting styled, perhaps, or Kennedy inspecting the strategic ethanol reserves.

I've been reading and not watching my news for a long while, now: A's influence, and watching Brit Hume's masterful performance last night is changing that. :-D

-Rich

That's Justice Alito to You

2006-01-31T13:25:00.000-06:00

58 votes. The exact inverse of the Bork vote. A dish best served cold.

It's going to be a good State of the Union address tonight. A and I will be watching it together over pizza and beer, and plan to heckle the Democrats afterward, MST3K-style.

-Rich

A Post, and News!

2006-01-25T15:30:00.000-06:00

Hey, everyone. Yes, I'm posting, finally. :-) It's been a hectic and fun month, between a busy time meeting our Sarbanes-Oxley goals at work, and spending an ever-increasing portion of the rest of my time chatting via e-mail, IM, text-message and even actual voice commo and in-person conversation with the new woman in my life, whom we'll simply term 'A.'

Cue applause, oohs and aahs from the crowd...

A and I have been orbiting one another for a little more than two months now, and so far indicators are coming up scarily uniformly positive: she's a political conservative; she's a fellow technologist and gadget freak; she's quite the fabulous fashion maven; she's smart as a whip (and still seems to think I'm funny); she's a fellow lover of excellent food and fine wine; oh, yeah, and she's hot as an oven-fresh Alabama biscuit and spicy as Indian curry--simply intoxicating. %-D

It's far too early to say with any pretense of certainty, but my INfJ compatimeter (shut up, it's my fictitious instrument name, and it rhymes with perimeter) is telling me very promising things about our prospects.

And--today's her birthday. Happy birthday, Princess!

-Rich

PS. More to come before too much longer on the twin subjects of the merit of Western Civilization and the ongoing fecundity race among humanity's many sects. I haven't forgotten! :-D

Friday's Feast, courtesy Emmaus Theory

2006-01-06T11:05:00.000-06:00

Tripp tagged me, so I must comply:

Appetizer
Have you ever seen a ghost or an angel? Nope. Not that I'd mind.

Soup
What is your favorite board game? There are many, but probably the one I consistently enjoy most is Settlers of Catan, with my brother Matt and his wife Amy and their friends. Chess is always a sentimental favorite, as is Go, though I rarely have the chance to play.

Salad
What was the last movie you saw that made you cry? I get weepy more easily than I should, but Narnia got me.

Main Course
What would you do if you had 3 months off from your job? I'm ramping up a new novel; I'd probably focus on that. If not that, I'm thinking a wine-and-sightseeing trip to Italy.

Dessert
What kind of shoes are you wearing today? A pretty generic pair of American Eagle black dress shoes--loafers, I guess, since they don't have laces. They have a buckle, though!

-Rich

It's 2006--Time to Stir the Pot

2006-01-05T00:00:00.000-06:00

This will get me vilified and pilloried like nothing else I've ever posted, I imagine, but please read this long article:

It's the Demography, Stupid
(This link will probably go defunct before too much longer; I plan to archive the article in my own web space when that happens--it's that important.)

The primary argument that Steyn makes is that a lot of the worrying we do as pampered citizens of the West is pointless: by the simple fact of the birth rates we're achieving (if the word "achieving" can be used with a straight face), the less-multiculturally-enlightened cultures of the world (read, Sharia-adherent Muslims) will have bred the West out of existence by the 2040s.

Here's one of the scarier pairs of paragraphs:

[..]When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. [...] And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.

Steyn is harsh with some of his rhetoric, but I've been following these sorts of demographic trends for a while, and I think he's on the money with his predictions: absent some form of basic shift in the Western attitude toward reproduction, Western civilization as we know it will not survive the next hundred years, if even the next fifty. I see this owing to one reason: the major factor making the demographically successful cultures successful is their ideology. Simply put, Sharia (as most widely interpreted and applied) holds little respect for a woman's right to choose, or indeed many of the familial morés Westerners embrace as more or less equal-rights societies. This means that what displaces us won't be a new Muslimized form of the liberties and privileges we enjoy, it will be something inherently more Muslim and likely harsher, because that Muslim-ness is what will have made it succeed over our model in the first place.

I find myself wondering whether historians centuries years from now will be forced to conclude that social liberalism (in the classic sense, not the current political sense) is incompatible with societal success. If a culture enshrines personal freedoms and reduces the importance of family to the point that A) women become free to decide not to have children, and B) the perceived value of childbearing depreciates below the point of desirability for most women, does a culture doom itself? I'd argue that it does.

Here's a closing bit from Steyn:

I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"

Again, his rhetoric is rough-edged, but I think the larger point is valid: if basic personal freedoms are worth fighting for and preserving (and I think they most definitely are, please don't misunderstand), how do we reconcile that with the observed tendency of freed women to deprioritize reproduction? To an extent we have a "tragedy of the commons" situation, wherein the free-female societies are playing by one set of rules, and another group of societies are emphatically not, and are profiting by it.

So what's the solution? I'm not sure there is one--we can't start mandating or incentivizing breeding; to my knowledge incentives seldom have worked (and I'd imagine they aren't sustainable as an indefinite trend), and we can't start revoking freedoms without destroying an integral part of ourselves.

There are only two ways out of the situation that I see: either A) we somehow make big families and babymaking desirable and "cool" again, and tell "slavery to the patriarchy" feminism to take a running jump, or B) we go all Sci-Fi on the problem and develop artificial wombs, mandating/incentivizing the contribution of genetic material from everybody so we can let machines do the heavy species-propagation lifting. Day care in either case would become a growth industry, though the quality of childrearing would likely suffer if there wasn't also an increase in stay-at-home mommery (I'd say "parenting," but I'm feeling too demographically honest).

Okay, that's my piece mostly said. I imagine there will be truckloads of commentary (provided I get any). If you're moved to respond in the negative, please A) be prepared to provide evidence that we're *not* being outbred by factors of three by societies choosing to limit the reproductive freedom of their women, and B) try to avoid ad hominem attacks on Steyn as a horrific conservative kitten-hater, or bloviating multicultural red herrings to the effect of Western societies deserving to be bred out of existence because of our rapine and pillage of Mother Earth, and/or displacement of other impoverished and thus less-culpable cultures. Also, C) I don't want to get into any sort of overpopulation debate--in any event, a replacement birthrate like the U.S.'s would be much better for any overpop scenario than a triple-replacement rate like Somalia's. Finally, D) I fully expect the diehard multi-cultis to start labeling me as an evil racist white male reparations-owing so-and-so. Whatever.

-Rich

Christmas Tree!

2005-12-10T21:10:00.000-06:00

Those who have visited me over the holidays (and you are few; I don't entertain often) know that since becoming single I haven't yet put up a Christmas tree.

This has been rectified. Click if you want to see a larger version.

-Rich

Belated Thanksgiving Post

2005-12-08T07:53:00.000-06:00

I took several photos of the festivities this Thanksgiving, and wanted to post the non-incriminating ones here for all to enjoy.

Mincemeat Pie
I just had to share Mom's artistry with everyone. Is it even necessary to mention it tasted as good as it looks?

The Tree
Matt and I agreed to help Mom take the first steps in decorating the Christmas tree this year in exchange for room, board and, of course, pie.

Mom will have added three times as many ornaments to the tree as seen here by the time it's finished.

The Spread
This is a (sadly after the fact) picture of the table Mom set for the dinner proper. Mom never does anything by halves.

Turkey Centerpiece with Mums
Mom was especially proud of the new centerpiece she received from a friend this year. Matt and I procured chrysanthemums with which to fill it.

Previous Centerpiece
This is another centerpiece Mom received from a friend. It's about four feet tall, so in order to facilitate conversation over dinner, Mom moved this to another room.

Christmas Tree Angel
It just seemed like a good idea to snap a close-up of the tree's topping angel.

-Rich

Well, an End, of Sorts. And, of Course, a Beginning

2005-12-01T00:00:00.000-06:00

Final NaNoWriMo word count: 28,534. Far short of the goal, but I'm pleased anyway.

I've updated the excerpt on my NaNoWriMo profile page with the end I settled for, in order to have one. It's clunky, and a bit more of a summation than a narrative, but I love how it came out, and the thematic stuff I figured out to do with everything, moving forward.

There's lots I need to do to finish this story. But I will do it. I haven't been so excited about writing in... Well, ever.

Gonna get me a novel wrote. :-D

-Rich

PS. Changed the working name of the thing to Braintape Dreaming.

Reflections on Undertaking Massive Projects in November

2005-11-28T23:22:00.000-06:00

Ah well, the hard realities of time show themselves. 26,169 words as of this evening.

I was all prepared to berate myself for lack of progress while traveling, but then it occurred to me that failing to shut myself away for an obscure project--after going to great lengths traveling to see family and friends--might not be such a bad thing.

Anyway, my goal for the project has been revised down. I'll be very happy if I can make 35,000 words for the month, and settling for 30,000 won't be so awful. If I could bring myself to call in sick for the next few days and make a much higher number, I would, but I can't, really, and they can't spare me at work at all this week (especially after sparing me all last week).

This month has taught me a number of wonderful things, not least that I'm capable of generating verbiage en masse and at a much higher quality than I expected.

I'm halfway considering setting myself a New Year's Resolution goal of a thousand words a day. After some of the 2,500-word days I've pulled this month a single thousand nightly ought to be no trouble at all.

-Rich

Party On, Garth

2005-11-16T01:15:00.000-06:00

Well, after my weekend hiatus, I have pulled off two straight days of word counts higher than 2500. Go me!

Poor Sarah (my main human character). I've really set things up for maximum pain once things go to Hell for her.

Tomorrow I start the parallel narrative of her brother Brian, who's participating in the Singularity and has gone posthuman. I'm kind of intimidated to write from his point of view: after all, he's supposed to be dozens of times more intelligent than I am, and getting moreso all the time.

(That's part of the concept of a technological Singularity: self-perfecting superintelligence. Imagine the headlong pace of advancement we've seen in computer tech over the past thirty years or so, only applied to human health, longevity, intelligence and discernment.)

Anyway, I plan to have another, similarly productive day tomorrow, after which is Harry Potter, the midnight showing on Thursday, and the trip to Atlanta on Friday, so those will be two evenings lost. Perhaps I can use my lunch breaks at work.

-Rich

Oh, Dear, Where Did the Weekend Go?

2005-11-14T07:50:00.000-06:00

I had such plans for my word count this weekend. :-(

I ran into a plot problem, which froze me up, and then I neglected to correct for the fact that I had a more social weekend than usual planned: dates Friday and Sunday, and a visit from friends Saturday evening. I did much thrashing about in notes to myself (wish I could count those words!), and seem to have got around the plot problem, but the all-important Big Number hasn't moved since Thursday. There I said it. Sigh.

The wonderful thing about stll having a goodly portion of the month left is that I can still get through if I average 2,350 words a day. Obviously getting some big-word-count days over the course of this week (2,500 or even 3,000) would build in some padding, so I intend to do some of that tonight and tomorrow.

Of course, when you're trying to get something accomplished is when Life decides it wants a bigger piece of you. Watch this space for the comedy!

-Rich