…like myself. From a professional truck driver, rules of the road to remember when driving around truckers. Some of them apply to all driving situations, such as “you are not as good a driver as you think you are,” “SUVs are not suits of armor,” and my favorite, “If you’ve been cruising blithely along in the left (or center, on a three-lane highway) lane for a half-hour or so, please consider moving the fuck over, you selfish ass-pirate.” (I almost spewed soda all over my monitor when I read that one.)
Month: August 2002
The currency of the web, in an increasingly real sense
Jill Walker: Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, a very cool paper presented in June 2002 at the ACM Hypertext conference in Baltimore. The paper argues for a “political economy” of value created by links.
Whereas most valuation models for the web start from the advertising assumptions that impressions (views of the ad) are the basis for value, links to sites have value independent of the impression or even the clickthrough value. This is because of Google and other search engines that value the source and target pages of links through the link itself. Links are currency that may give value to giver and recipient: by linking to this article, I share some of my PageRank with it (and vice versa). This makes the article more visible in search engines and therefore more discoverable. How much is that worth???
There are a lot of people talking about this, including Roland Tanglao, and Jim McGee; thanks to Jim for the pointer.
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Twenty-eight years ago today…
…Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned as president of the United States when it became clear that he was going to be impeached for the Watergate crimes. Despite continuous attempts to claim executive privilege, in the end it became clear that not even the highest office in the land was above the law that it was chartered to uphold.
Happy birthday, Mom
My mom, who continues to be one of the most amazing women I know along with my wife and my sister, turns … well, discretion forbids. Anyway, it’s her birthday, and if you know her drop her a line and wish her well. One of the things that makes me unhappiest about being on this coast is that I can’t drop in on her without a lot of advance planning, but I know she and my dad will be throwing a great party tonight before she takes off for my cousin’s wedding in Pennsylvania tomorrow. So happy birthday, Mom!
Looks like someone’s a little too popular
What color is your philosophy?
Greg: Alex Cockburn, Arbiter of Black Authenticity. Greg unleashes some pointed thought on the issue of whether one can be “black in skin tone but not in philosohy” (I’m paraphrasing). Greg sez:
…you get to spell out what my fellow Alabamans — Condolezza Rice and Cynthia Tucker — and I have in common save skin tone, good looks and a firm conviction that Dreamland cooks the best barbecue ever.
And maybe then you can help me figure out why you and Pat Buchanan don’t seem to think much alike. How am I supposed to know which one of you is philosophially white?
An administration incapable of telling the truth?
Paul Krugman in the New York Times: The Memory Hole. Krugman discusses the origins of the “trifecta” quote (about Bush’s statement that he said he would only let the budget go into deficit in case of war, recession or national emergency; there’s no evidence he ever promised any such thing). Now evidence that OMB and other agencies may not be telling the truth in new budget deficit projections just disappears.
Every government tries to make excuses for its past errors, but I don’t think any previous U.S. administration has been this brazen about rewriting history to make itself look good. For this kind of thing to happen you have to have politicians who have no qualms about playing Big Brother; officials whose partisan loyalty trumps their professional scruples; and a press corps that, with some honorable exceptions, lets the people in power get away with it.
Lucky us: we hit the trifecta.
Thanks to Brendan Nyhan at Spinsanity for the link.
Update: Forgot I wrote about the trifecta already; just linked it in.
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What the hell is up with Amazon?
Amazon appears to have lost my complete order history, all my ratings, my wishlist, and just about everything else about me except the last order I placed. Don’t know what’s up, but I’m going to find out.
Cool morning, gray skies
This area never fails to surprise me. The morning is cool and gray here, but light. Driving in this morning the local DJ announces a request from an Internet listener in LA. The car hums up 520, almost a shame to take the freeway for such a short hop but it brings my gas mileage up to 21.5 for the trip.
Driving down 40th Street onto the Microsoft campus, traffic stops. What’s going on? A line of ducks, five ducklings following their mother, are crossing from where a drainpipe emerges from the edge of campus to the wooded apartment complex on the other side. Jeff Tweedy sings “I am trying to break your heart.”
George meets the penguin
George has been experimenting with the Red Hat Linux distro… on a 133 MHz tower. I would say an all text interface would be the right way to go on a machine of that vintage (though I remember happily running a GUI on my 16 MHz SE/30).
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Blogtree: the lineage of blogs…
The newest addition to the nav bar on the left side of this site is my Blogtree link. You can see the blogs that inspired me to start blogging; blogs that were inspired by the same “parents”; and blogs that I’ve inspired there. Kind of a cool idea—and when I checked about 1100 blogs had registered.
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Run it up the middle (again and again)
It would appear that the fans of my college football team, the Virginia Cavaliers, can’t take a joke. Greg thinks he caused the problem, but I’m sure that the original poster could have come across the poems in question through Google, where they are hit #6 for the good coach. (Note: The new link for the George Welsh poems is now on this site.)
For what it’s worth, I really respect Welsh. His work as a football coach made us cheer much more often than it made us moan. But in 1993, after watching yet another press conference after a win where he smiled about as much as a man with a gastric ulcer, Tyler, Joe, Patrick and I realized that there was something funny about the thought that this stoic man might have a secret literary life. Hence the poems. Of course half the fun was parodying the lit crit that might surround Welsh’s oeuvre.
Pork Products Transcend
It's fourth and ten, boys, Florida State... You gonna eat that 'wurst, Frank? Damn.
Doc: Know your customer
Doc: More on what’s fucked about radio. Doc lays the blame for the sorry state of commercial radio at the feet of radio’s business model, which treats the listener as secondary to pleasing the advertiser.
This is another reason I grew to dislike Ziff Davis magazines. After a while, I realized that the stuff in between the ads felt like an ad too, for things I couldn’t afford to buy.
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Credit where credit is due
The title for my previous post referred to “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” my new favorite way to say “fiddling while Rome is burning.” Credit for the phrase belongs to Eric Norlin, whose Titanic Deck Chair Rearrangement Corporation is required reading for marketing folks who fondly imagine that they understand their customer.
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Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic…
Time: Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented? Scary view into how the sloth-like, generally arteriosclerotic processes of government caused a plan to take out Al Qaeda to be lost during the transition between the Clinton administration and the Harken-Halliburton administration. The article details a series of missed opportunities, the detailed warnings that a big attack was coming–and the breakdowns in government function that caused a failure to act. Scary thoughts:
No other great power handles the transition from one government to another in so shambolic a way as the U.S.-new appointments take months to be confirmed by the Senate; incoming Administrations tinker with even the most sensible of existing policies. The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear.
Thanks to Scott Rosenberg at Salon for the link. While I was writing this, Dave summed up the essence of the nightmare here: “Sometimes when we bluster and attack aimlessly, we cement relationships between forces that wish us harm.”
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