Category: Other

Seen on typographi.ca: “Sometimes a bad font choice can send an unintended message.”

In case Neiman Marcus takes down the page in question:

Sometimes I think I should rename my Other department Humor and get it over with.

I’ve been too blown away by the horror of the sniper story to post a lot about it (I lived for six years in Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the last killing in Seven Corners). But the Slacktivist has provided some grim perspective on the identity of the killer:

“…one thing we can be pretty sure of: the sniper isn’t a black man.

…. How can we be sure of that?

The killer’s vehicle is described as ‘a white, Chevy Astro van with a burned-out or broken left tail light.’

No black man could drive around for two weeks with a busted tail light without getting pulled over by police.”

Thanks to Evan, whose blog I’ve inexplicably not been reading, for the pointer.
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Susan Gotthelf: What They Were Thinking: On Barely Getting By in Argentina. Photos and interviews with three Argentinian women about their situation. One is photographed digging through garbage for her children. Another ran a soup kitchen until her family became unable to feed itself. The third has lost all her savings but still has a house, and is “still in the top 10 percent of the income bracket in Argentina — just because I have a job and I haven’t had my salary reduced.”
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Couldn’t sleep last night for a lot of reasons. Part is the ongoing transition from school and short semester horizons to work and the long series of relational interactions. (Can’t say more, really, right now.) Part was an ill-conceived decision to go to a happy hour with some fellow returning interns—not that that was so wrong, but it resulted in my eating a dinner consisting of fried calimari and one oyster Rockefeller, washed down with a couple beers. Not the best thing to try to go to sleep after.

So I’m trying to regain some perspective this morning, and found this line from Huey in today’s Boondocks helpful: “Relaxing thoughts? … Can I think about Al Gore and Joe Lieberman beating each other silly in a pay-per-view steel cage death match to determine who’s the biggest loser of all time?” Not that far away from what I was trying to think about to relax me.
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Lance Knobel: Scandal map. Draws the lines between Enron, Worldcom, Merrill Lynch, Martha Stewart, the California Energy Crisis, and emerging financial scandals. Dense and engrossing. Needs dice and cute player tokens (“no, I want to play as the decoupage! OK, then I’ll be the big oil barrel!”).

It could only happen in America: Barney the Dinosaur vs. Wil “Wesley Crusher” Wheaton, boxing for charity (the Electronic Freedom Foundation). I’m surprised Wil hasn’t blogged about it yet.
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It was only a matter of time. Greg got his coverage of the Cynthia McKinney horror show noticed by InstaPundit. Enjoy the Greenehouse Effect while you can, kids, before it becomes too hot to be indie.
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Thank God for payday. Context: I started work on July 8 and got paid for the first time today. Not normally a big deal, but a bit of a stretch if you’ve bought a house and had work done to it, bought a car, and moved across country (not necessarily in that order). I’m not normally a guy who freaks out about money, but today is good.

To quote Beck (whose discography and lyrics section is currently down in his own website; shame):

We like to ride on executive planes

We like to sit around and get real paid

Word to your moms.
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NY Times: IBM to Purchase Consulting Group for $3.5 billion. I think that’s a little more realistic than the $18 billion PwC would have gone for in 2000, had HP bought them.

A drought in the services industry is an interesting time to go shopping for additional consulting capacity. On the one hand, the capacity is cheap, and may come with a decent roster of clients to tap for more business. On the other hand, it’s an almost certain signal of layoffs at both the purchased and the purchaser as the org structures get rationalized.

Still, I’m glad IBM picked up PwC. It saves me the trouble of suing them when they change their name to Monday:. After all, this weblog has been Jarrett House North: for quite a while, marking prior art in the innovative use of the colon in branding and titling. (Okay, so it’s just because I’m too lazy to add another title to this page of links, since each post is titled. But bear with me, OK?)
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Forwarded from a co-worker:

If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1,000.00. With Worldcom, you would have less than $5.00 left.

If you had bought $1,000.00 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

Of course, the math is dependent on the beer you choose. If you take Guinness in a can instead of Bud (about $8 for a four-pack), you’d have $50 when you got your deposit back. But it’s still a better outcome than buying any of these stinkers. 🙂

UPDATE: As usual, my fellow bloggers are ahead of the curve. Others who have already told this joke (in different currencies with different beers): Nick at BootBlog, Jake of Jake’s Jive, “Wally Street” in the guestbook of FootballPoets.com… and others, I’m sure.

Holy cow, what’s up with the market? Dow up 200, NASDAQ up 18, S&P 500 up 23… Oh wait, now the Dow is only up 168. It’s clearly going to be one of those days.

The Guardian: IRA statement apologizing for “30 years of murder.” The statement directly addresses the fact that the IRA’s terror campaign caused “deaths and injuries” to “non-combatants” as well as “grief and pain” to “combatants.”

While the statement is questionable from a standpoint of historical accuracy (thirty years ago, you can be damned sure that the IRA wanted to injure or kill whoever it had to, “combatant” or not, to make its point–this is the essence of terrorism), it says volumes about where the IRA is today. That is: engaging in a peace process, coming to terms with the interests of the other parties in that process, and trying to put the legacy of violence aside despite continued terror from groups like the “Real IRA.” Or, more cynically, dealing with the reality of a massive anti-terrorism war fought by the US and the UK following September 11, and accordingly changing with the times.

But that possibility shouldn’t overshadow the significance of this release. It doesn’t come close to absolving the IRA of past actions, but it’s a necessary move to build credibility as they head away from that legacy toward a more sustainable drive for peace.
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Salon: Debunking Deep Throat’s debunkers. Hilarious article by Ken Hughes, associated with the University of Virginia Miller Center for Public Affairs project on the Nixon tapes. Hughes takes on a series of arguments made by two recent books that attempt to claim that Deep Throat and Bob Woodward could not have exchanged messages by marked newspapers and balcony flags by actually going to Woodward’s building and trying it out himself. A sample:

“If Deep Throat wanted a meeting — which was rare — there was a different procedure. Each morning, Woodward would check page 20 of his New York Times, delivered to his apartment house before 7 a.m. If a meeting was requested, the page number would be circled and the hands of a clock indicating the time of the rendezvous would appear in a lower corner of the page. Woodward did not know how Deep Throat got to his paper.”

Woodward’s a bit dim, Hughes thought, not for the first time. Deep Throat did not have to get to his specific copy of the Times. He just had to get his hands on a copy of the Times before 7 a.m. and leave it outside Woodward’s door. In American society, such work is often given to children. They are called “paperboys.” Or “paper carriers.” Or “newsies” by those with a taste for archaism.

Hughes had been a paperboy once, long ago. He knew the things that paperboys know.

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I’m currently blogging from SeaTac over a paid wireless connection—it’s been a week for blogging in new places. For those of you who frequent the North Satellite Terminal, there is an electrical outlet on the right hand side of the sports bar as you face the bartender, by the row of booths in the back. But tonight you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers to use it. I’m charging my cell phone and once I finish my blogging and surfing, I’ll be watching Akira before my plane boards. Life is good.

Life is not quite as good at home. Lisa is trying to watch our new Harry Potter DVD, but her Win 95 laptop (yes, 95. She works for a company that, for a number of reasons, has never upgraded past that nostalgic number) does not have DVD player software. I was able to find the right places for her to go by looking at VersionTracker, but it looks like she will have to download DirectX (11 MB), then the DVD software (9 MB), all over her 56K modem.

God, I’m looking forward to having broadband when we get moved into the new place.

Slashdot: Atari Announces Official Portable 2600. “Portable” is an exaggeration; the unit has no screen or batteries. It’s just a joystick that plugs into your TV and plays 10 classic Atari games. It’s also an exaggeration to say that Atari is making the thing; they’ve licensed the rights to JAKKS Pacific, a company that have already made a similar product. Press release here; get it before it succumbs to Yahoo bit-rot.

Personally, I would only consider such a monster if it had the entire Atari library in it (considering that each game was only a maximum of 4K in size, that should be feasible) and if the “joystick” were identical to the old Atari 2600 joystick. Super retro kid stuff…
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