Month: May 2004

A little excitement

In the middle of catching up on home improvement projects, yesterday was pretty damn bad. While trimming a bush next to the house, I was stung by a bee. —I grew up next to honeybees. Who knew I was allergic? Suffice it to say, it was a mild reaction, and after a quick dose of Benadryl and a ride to the ER, I was OK.

Today: finished painting, a little lawn mowing, fixed a transition piece over the sill of the bathroom, stained a few pieces of wood around the house. Except for a little soreness at the sting site, everything’s good.

How absent-minded! How forgetful!

Esta (in a rare post on Tuesday—congrats on finishing the first year, chica) says she wants to see accountability in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. Meanwhile, conservative politicians and their apologists are running every possible way to point the fingers anywhere but to the administration and the people in charge.

Timothy Noah in Slate rounds up a who’s who of finger pointing, in which various conservatives rush to blame “moral relativism…gays…pornography…feminists…Quentin Tarantino…the Farrelly Brothers…women in the military…the academic left…the liberal media/entertainment complex…journalists…[and] our sick society.” (All attributed, with links). And Josh Marshall calls Senator James Inhofe on his thuggish statement that we should be more concerned about the Red Cross blowing the whistle on our mistreatment of prisoners than about the abuse itself. It’s a good thing no fluffy bunnies were near the prisons; I have a feeling they’d get some of the blame too.

What astonishes me is that anyone gets away with it. I don’t believe you can make a few individual soldiers and contractors a scapegoat for the torture (let’s call a spade a spade) of these prisoners. As Mark Kleinman points out, the principle flaws in the argument can be expressed almost completely in words of one syllable:

Our … troops … work … for … us.
Their … acts … are … our … acts.
We … are … res – pon – si – ble … for … what … they … do.
We … get … to … vote … on … their … boss.

Except, of course, we don’t get to vote on Rumsfeld.

Where’s William Bennett’s sanctimonious moral clarity when we need it? Oh, never mind: that was a joke.

So, in the spirit of Mark Kleinman, here’s my brief version of the argument: Isn’t accountability part of responsibility? Isn’t responsibility part of holding office? Isn’t upholding the law (and the Geneva Convention) part of being the President? As I’ve said before: How absent-minded! How forgetful!

Camera follow up

As I had hoped (go go mini-Lazyweb), posting about my camera consideration brought some good feedback from readers. Paul Strasma suggested in a comment that I was undervaluing optical zoom as a feature, and after some thought and research I think I agree with him (unless I want to continue to limit myself to taking pictures of flowers, which are about the only images that work well from one of my two existing solutions). George agrees and suggests that megapixels aren’t everything, provided you’re careful with your composition. One can, after all, take a 1600 by 1200 pixel picture with a 2.0 megapixel camera, which would be more than sufficient for web publishing and most print work that I can imagine myself doing.

Returning to BestBuy.com, it appears that there is a camera that makes that precise trade-off. For the same price as the Olympus that I was considering, which is a 3.0 MP camera with digital zoom, I could pick up the Nikon CoolPix 2200, which has 2.0 megapixels and optical zoom. It’s coincidentally the little brother of the model that Paul was considering and has the same one-hand ergonomic design. Unfortunately my local Best Buy doesn’t have it, so I would have to order it sight unseen…

Two web apps, two blogs, two stories

One of the things that I wasn’t able to blog earlier this week was Google’s first official corporate blog, named the GoogleBlog (I guess I’ll have to call Aaron’s unofficial version the Google Weblog to keep them straight). The blog managed to stay out of controversy for one post. Mark Pilgrim and others observed that in the second post, which discussed Google’s offices around the world, a paragraph about outsourcing in Bangalore mysteriously disappeared.

This was a fairly foolish thing to do on several levels. First, what was Google thinking in the first place by starting an official corporate weblog during the quiet period before their IPO? Second, redacting an entire paragraph of content which was, frankly, not that controversial in the first place seems foolish if one is seeking to establish a legitimate weblog.

And it’s really not much of a weblog, either. No bylines (except on the first post from Evan Williams), no comments, no TrackBack. At least it has permalinks. (Dare Obasanjo covered some more of the GoogleBlog’s non-blogginess on Tuesday).

Contrast this with Kinja’s blog, which hasn’t had nearly as much fanfare. Bylines, personal voices, commenting on things their customers have written about their service (including, yes, something by me. Bias disclosed!). Which is more bloglike? Which is more interesting?

Believe me, as a Microsoft blogger (even if I’m not hosted at blogs.msdn.com), I have a lot of sympathy for the Google blog folks. It’s hard to walk that line of being an “official” corporate blog, and the temptation to edit to preserve the company’s voice and image must be really high. Which is why I wonder: why did they launch an official blog at all? Weren’t they better off just having Evan blog occasionally about his day job?

Long day

It’s been a long (albeit fruitful) day at work, and I’ve had no time to blog at all. All I have to say is, this is an interesting week in the blogosphere to be away from the blog. More later.

If I’m to be your camera…

It was only a matter of time before the spectacular image quality evinced by sites like Then You Discover and 101-365 made me look twice at my photo equipment. Which currently consists of my trusty Nokia 3650 camphone, whose images, while occasionally artistic, are generally oversaturated and a little smeary, and the still camera on our Sony Mini-DV camera, which turns out images which are usually flat and lacking in detail. Both cameras max out at 640 x 480 resolution.

Put that together with an unexpected gift card to Best Buy, and I’m thinking about picking up some gear. The catch is that I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg. I’m not going to be printing photo quality stuff, so I don’t think I really need a five-megapixel camera. I just want something that will take decent quality, high(er) resolution images. I’m thinking about the Olympus Camedia D-395, which is a 3.2MP camera, but it’s new enough that no one has any feedback about it. Ideally $150 is the most I’d want to spend. Anyone else got any suggestions?

The miracle of caulk

Another project (nearly) completed. I finished caulking the new baseboards in the guest bathroom. The caulk serves two purposes: it prevents water from running down behind the baseboards in the event of splashes, and it also hides the fact that some of the walls weren’t exactly flat by filling any gaps between the boards and the walls. Everything looks really good now. Except for the transition between the bathroom tile and the hallway floor. I need to lay a transition trim piece over that. Tonight.

Wrinkling

It’s weird to see A Wrinkle In Time as a kid’s Disney TV movie. Good weird, some of the time. But the transformation to the screen makes even the mean stuff of the book, the scenes on Camazotz (which used to give me nightmares as a kid) look cheap and somehow funny.

Madeleine L’Engle agrees:

NEWSWEEK: So you’ve seen the movie?
Madeleine L’Engle: I’ve glimpsed it.

And did it meet expectations?
Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

But for all that, it’s actually not awful. Watching it recalls the power of the book, the tremendous contrast between family and awful hate, the fierce cynicism of IT and its servants and the aching love of family no matter how fragile.

One down, twenty to go

I’m speaking of course about the items on my “fix the house” list. Yesterday’s porch repair went pretty easily, if tediously. After verifying the extent of the damage yesterday, I squared off the damaged section to a 33″ x 4″ rectangle using my trusty jig saw, then trimmed a 3/4″ x 6″ x 6′ hardwood board to match the dimensions and nailed it to the floor studs. When I was done, the patch had less give than the rest of the sections of original flooring. I spent the rest of the late afternoon, until about 7 pm, cutting the replacement carpet to shape and getting it snugly into place with my trusty staple gun. It now looks a hell of a lot better than it did. I was even able to fix a loose step or two while I was at it.

Tonight’s project: either clean up the library (where months of processed bills wait for me to file them) or finish the trim in the guest bathroom. Both, maybe, if I’m lucky.

Hide your vinyl, I’m on the loose

Today’s listening comes courtesy of Cellophane Square, the excellent used music store in Seattle’s U-District about which I’ve written before. I grabbed a handful of really nice vinyl there Thursday, including today’s listening, the Beatles’ Help!. Judging from this guide, the record I got was not an original pressing—it probably dates from after 1976—but it’s still a kick to listen to the music the way it was meant to be heard.

Other finds included the Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, Get Happy!! by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and David Byrne’s Music from the Knee Plays, a soundtrack of sorts to a Robert Anton Wilson play that I don’t believe has ever been reissued on CD. In fact, as luck would have it, I have never heard any of these albums (except excerpted on greatest hits), so I’m in for some good listening if I ever get some time near my record player.

Homework

I finished cleaning out the rotted wood on the porch today. When all was said and done, the only damage was confined to a 33″ x 4″ strip along one edge. It strikes me as safer and easier to square-cut the hole and drop a replacement board in than to pull up the remaining 4 foot by 5 foot by 1″ board—especially now that I realize it’s (a) got the railings nailed into it and (b) is tongue-and-groove mated to the adjacent piece of decking.

So it’s off to get my jigsaw to cut the board out and then some nails and I should be done.

New mix: I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs

New theme mix, catalog number JHNCD009, “I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs.” Inspired by too many Friday nights listening to Shake the Shack on KEXP. It actually covers a lot of ground, from British dancehall comedy to Swedish drinking songs to country and western to the inevitable Tom Waits. Not sure how well it coheres but I’ve been sitting on it too long already.

CD copies are on the way to all subscribers. Others can purchase a subset of the songs on the iTunes Music Store.

Ha! The magic power of the Kinja is about to reveal itself

I’ve been using Kinja on and off for the last few weeks, ever since I made a Kinja digest for both Hooblogs (see here) and Sloanblogs (see here). The digests were an afterthought, inspired by the press that Kinja was getting, but now (to my surprise) they’re the most useful features of both lists.

What’s cool about Kinja is that it’s lightweight, loads quickly, provides an attractive UI, is intelligent about providing excerpts of the item descriptions, and provides a “read anywhere” view of your set of sites. Radio, which was the first aggregator I ever used, provided an attractive UI but wasn’t especially lightweight (particularly in its Mac OS 9 incarnation) and provided full descriptions of the items in each feed. It’s funny how much I like the abridged description feature, in fact, since my own feed provides full text descriptions and since I normally hate having to click through to get the full story. But Kinja’s apparently simple algorithm of grabbing the first two or three sentences of the description if it’s above a pre-set length is remarkably effective. It’s also made me more conscious about not burying the lead of my posts; in short, it’s improved my writing.

Estonia, moving forward with WiFi

Catching up on an item I pointed to almost two years ago: a new BBC article today discusses the progress made toward unwiring Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Currently over 250 free public WiFi hotspots have been deployed throughout the country. Interesting note at the bottom: “Many Estonians, especially the younger ones, are embracing wireless internet access wholeheartedly. That is especially true now that the economy is starting to improve, and more can afford laptops.”