Below is a list of recently authored blog entries, generally categorized as American Soccer stuff (natch) in "Before I Forget" on US Soccer Review; News, Media and Technology in Turn On The News, Politics, Music, Culture and Misc. in New Number 10, and finally my best guesses at how Politics and Media really work in Sausage Works, all 3 of the latter on Blogger. Hopefully anybody interested in any of the above subjects will find at least something useful in what follows.
This decision, if taken to it's logical extremity would massively change the video-on-demand of the future. This could actually make the long-promised anything-ever-released-anywhere available on-demand reality. read full text
08/09/2007
Wall Street Journal Online Has a "Null" Problem | Turn On The News
link to full text In case you are unfamiliar with the mostly geek-oriented term "null" used in the title of this piece, it is used to refer to an unknown value. Apparently the website of the Wall Street Journal, looked at by many in the newspaper industry as representing a site that "gets" what it is to make money online, has a bug somewhere in the system that prevents me getting to their home page to look up an article or two I was wanting to post to my del.icio.us profile.
I'm a self-confessed dork, so I memorized the non-intuitive web address, online.wsj.com, and tried that first. Results? read full text
07/27/2007
Another Portrait of the Bush Administration Asleep at the Wheel | The New Number 10
The Bush Administration appears to be doing a pretty spot-on, unintentional Spinal Tap parody. Only here the question isn't how much more black can an album cover be, but how much more tone-deaf can his administration be about the damage his policies and actions (and as here, inaction) are causing to America's image and interests abroad recently?
I know that's saying a lot, but I don't know how else to characterize being seen as kidnapping foreign nationals, and not to bring them home to the US do our menial labor. We've already got people illegally coming here for free to do that, plus many of them are actually skilled to boot! Instead we shanghai these hapless souls and drop them into a deeply unpopular war zone instead of a Persian Gulf paradise awash in glitz and golf (you've seen all of the Dubai ads on CNN and what-not, right?).
Don't think that because it was a Kuwaiti subcontractor at the pay end of the abuse allegations, the Kuwaitis will be the ones more reviled. The Kuwaitis are seen here as clearly doing America's bidding in supplying work on the American Embassy in American-occupied Baghdad, after we did Kuwait's bidding kicking Saddam Hussein out of their country in the early '90s. Those kinds of contracts don't go to non-friendly, or even a-political organizations and everybody knows it.
Even worse, the Kuwaitis were clearly violating the principal law of capitalism, that of supply and demand, part of the very bedrock of all that it means to be Republican. If you can't get people willing to work for what you're willing to pay them to do that work and you have no alternatives, you are clearly offering too little and need to offer more money. What's left unsaid is that in modern Capitalism you generally don't have the ability to compel your work force to show up as much as you used to, say in at the end of the 19th century (Lattimer Massacre).
At least that's how it works here. In the wealthy US, where the vast majority of citizens at even the low end of the economic pole are no longer having to deal with 3rd World poverty (exceptions granted, as John Edwards recent "Poverty Tour" amply demonstrated Edwards on Poverty - washingtonpost.com), we have private citizens who are volunteering to work hellish stints in Iraq (Civilian Contractors Face Perils in Iraq -CBS News). Only they aren't making "as little as $240 a month", more like $8,000 a month for generally non-combat support job, like running recreational facilities (see CBS again).
I'll grant that running recreational facilities is quite a few notches in importance above day-laborer, but that is still on the low end of the American contractor food chain I'd imagine, behind those operating on the front-lines, running force-protection and other missions, so maybe not that far off of an analogy, though I guess that might depend on whether or not we import or use local clerical support.
I'm not sure if we do or don't import purely administrative staff to Bahdad, like some modern-day version of a "Three Coins in a Fountain" world (IMDB link) where big American companies actually moved secretaries to exotic locales to work in the typing pool*. The only difference is there's a long way between "exotic" and "hellish" and I can't see many American women today that willing to make that sort of leap, so I'm guessing these two positions are likely far closer in terms of where their recipients are in the pecking order.
How could this most Republican of Republican administrations have allowed this ridiculous situation to occur? At some point there have to be some Republicans in Congress and party activists starting to question on balance whether President Bush's limited ability to promote any of their agenda any longer, coupled with revelations like this, mean that he and Vice President Cheney may actively be causing long-term harm damage to their party far greater than in the 2008 Presidential election.
How soon do you think the American people will be able to forget Iraq, Katrina, and the fact that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are still alive? Especially if a Democratic President in 2009 actually re-commits significant troops and diplomacy efforts away from Iraq and towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, managing to capture or kill either of the masterminds of 9/11?
Combine that with an economy teetering on the brink of a collapse due to the lengthy and ongoing weakness in the housing market, negative real-term salary growth that means most people don't personally feel better off today than 8 years ago, despite the supposed strength of that economy overall. Most people see record corporate profits, yet little if any more money in their pockets, and do the math that if the economy is good and I ain't getting my share, that means somebody else is, and guess which party that "somebody else", the rich, are closely associated with promoting the economic interests of?
* Remember typing pools? My mom used to work in one, I think, if my family memory serves me correctly. She even met my father when she was working in one back in 1969, and now I don't know what the modern equivalent could possibly be. Maybe the people who respond to those "make money working at home on your computer" ads?
How NOT to publish a mobile/WAP version of your site | Turn On The News
link to full text Now that news publishers are ramping up their mobile web staffs for the iPhone and other entrants in the burgeoning smart-phone world, it's time to start thinking more about exactly how well they're servicing that market. Unfortunately right now, many publishers seem to be making some of the same sorts of kludged solutions they did back in the early days of the web, where you had sites divided up into versions targeted towards browsers that could and couldn't handle frames (remember frames?).
One specific "kludge" I'm referring to is taking the time to sniff out whether a browser is a mobile or desktop browser, but not then going the next step and finding the page that browser was trying to access and giving it to them directly if it exists instead of just dumping them on your mobile portal home page. read full text
04/12/2007
Un-Corrected Correction | Sausage Works
link to full text If that makes you say, 'Huh?", it should, just as the inspiration for that did to myself. The online version of the WashPost's recent Page 1 article regarding the recent deal with North Korea "To Prod N. Korea, U.S. Relents in Counterfeiting Case" link heads with a bright red correction:
The brilliance of the Name of the Year concept is that it is like reverse Mad Libs, friend of long, boring car ride/trip sufferers everywhere, except here you start off with all of the funny parts, then have to work a reasonable narrative around them. In other words: very entertaining and silly. read full text
03/15/2007
Robot Love | The New Number 10
link to full text Seth Green is the man! I never thought I'd say it, but I can think of nothing more appropriate to describe the comic actor who got Adult Swim to bring us "Robot Chicken," a show that brings the toys of childhood to a semi-permanantly infantiized culture.
I love it, really I do, and what's not to love? Tonight's early episode, "Gold Dust Gasoline," had a Cannonball Run between Knight Rider's KITT, Speed Racer, Ponch and Jon of CHiPs, the Mario Brothers, Bo & Luke Duke et al, and a parody of "That 70's Show" as "That 00's Show" featuring the actual cast doing the voice acting, while other themes generally touched by typical child-hood play absurdism, the kind forced on you simply by not having all of any toy universe. read full text
03/12/2007
Proposal for Fair Use Extension for Online Usage | The New Number 10
link to full text Was thinking about what I could do with my online posting that would really demonstrate my understanding of what the medium is capable of and where it should be going, and it became obvious that it was in figuring out some way to think differently about how multi-media content is included in the general narrative, i.e., how it doesn't just become dots on a screen instead of ink on paper, when those dots can do so much more. I obviously don't have budget/time to create all kinds of original content, just as most don't, which is why so many bloggers quote everybody and their brother at length, like junior high kids padding out their essays. Sure occasionally there are the blowhards like me who can ramble on and on about just about anything, even when they don't know anything about it, but the blogosphere is still dominated by liberal quoters. But you can't quote movies and songs like that. I would love to be able to throw a couple of bars from the Replacements "Bastards of Young"
in an article rather than just their corresponding lyrics:
"God, what a mess, on the ladder of success Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled It beats pickin' cotton and waitin' to be forgotten"Full lyrics but I can't. read full text
Did anyone seriously think that there was going to be any response from the White House to the newest proposals from Congress regarding the Iraq war? At this stage of the game it is not really all that newsworthy that White House counselor Dan Bartlett said, ""It's safe to say it's a nonstarter for the president." read full text
03/07/2007
Free-Fall for the Fall Guy | The New Number 10
link to full text "Three reporters heard [Libby's wife, Harriet Grant,] say what sounded like, "We're gonna [expletive] 'em.""
They're gonna [expletive] whom? Cheney, Rove and Bush for making him the fall guy? Fitzgerald for prosecuting only Mr. Libby for what the Libbys believe is ultimately only a technicality in the end? The jury for having the temerity to convict someone so un-concerned about what the general public might think (and not in the honorable rebellious way of say "Wild One" era Brando), despite being in his mid-50s and this no longer being the 1950s, he publicly is referred to as "Scooter"? The dirty jackals of the Press for not lying to protect his lying? read full text
03/01/2007
The Great Louse Detective | The New Number 10
link to full text Wiggum: If I can tranq out just one freak on stilts, I know I've done my job. Lou: You're living the dream, chief.
Still Reliable, Sources Now Also More Convenient | The New Number 10
link to full text While listening to CNN's podcast of this past Sunday's "Reliable Sources" program for 37 minutes and 50 seconds of my drive home today, I began to wonder whether I still needed to keep my Season Pass scheduled for the same program on my Tivo at home. It's the exact same show content-wise, minus the commercials, thus it is much shorter than the 60 minutes of broadcast time that the Tivo chews up for it. Of course Tivo makes it pretty darn easy to skip through the 22 minutes and 10 seconds of ad pitches, none-too-revelatory "updates" from talking head du-jour, plus the lead-ins/hand-offs to/from preceding/following shows, but you can't get any easier than not having to do anything at all.
So what's in Tivo's favor? First, it's always plugged into generally one of the largest pieces of screen real estate in the house (our tvs still dwarf the size of even the most gargantuan computer monitors, though theoretically they share much of the same hardware). Second, if you have more than one Tivo and a home network, you could theoretically share programs between them. read full text
02/28/2007
Just a Collection of Tubes in the Sky | The New Number 10
link to full text To parapharse the eminent Senator Ted Stevens (Google Query: Tubes Internet Senator), the satellite radio network is just a bunch of tubes in the sky, but unlike the "tubes" of the terrestrial networks, the satellite kind of XM and Sirius are much, much more expensive, and in general unlikely to any time in the next 10+ years be considered anything resembling a competitive market.
BusinessWeek: New Conditions May Ease XM-Sirius Merger I say this as subscriber to both services, and appreciator of various aspects of each, that I wish the two would just merge their technology and let me subscribe to a package of the best of each that I could share between each of our two stereos, rather than accept the compromises forced on me by the current situation: read full text
The Good, The Bad and The Big Audio | The New Number 10
link to full text Saturday night's 1 a.m. broadcast on Encore Western of "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" IMDB quotes, a quote from Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan-Maria Ramirez, "Who the hell is that? One bastard goes in, another bastard comes out!" reminds me of hearing it in a different context, as a sample in a song by Big Audio Dynamite called Medicine Show from their debut album This Is Big Audio Dynamite.
This album was an important part of my early musical education, recommended for me early in my college days by my best friend, deceased just for a year as of 2 weeks ago, so I'm understandably nostalgic about things like it. read full text
02/25/2007
The Modern Media Consumer | The New Number 10
link to full text The Modern Media Consumer: A study in the annoyance, frustration, and overwhelming feelings of betrayal felt by this humble customer in my dealings with media publishers, the owners of the ultimate object of my desire, their product, and the consumption of it in some form or other.
The recipients of today's indignity: the one and only, Mr. Tony Bennett, and Bugs freaking Bunny. read full text
02/25/2007
Should You Trust Local Real Estate Ads? | Sausage Works
link to full text Should you pick your Real Estate Agent for your next purchase or sale from an Advertisement in Your Local Newsletter/Newspaper?
The easy answer is that no, an answer that can make the difference in thousands of dollars of unnecessary cost/lost income needs more research than just what you get by seeing an ad. In theory at least real estate agents advertise because they believe those ads do help influence us into choosing their services, but should they? What follows below is a road map that just about anybody can follow to see with how large of a grain of salt they take when considering their local real estate agents. As recent purchasers of a home shortly after what had been a peak in local home values, we are more than casually aware of the current softness in the market, and so try to pay at least some attention to recent sales trends so we have it in the back of our heads should we ever need/choose to start looking to move. But then each month I saw the real estate ads in our local community newsletter, the All Fairlington Bulletin put out by the Fairlington Citizens Association, and the journalist in me kept wondering just how creatively the local advertising community might be in trying to avoid discussing the reality of a market where property value assessments went over the course of 1 year from a 19 percent increase from the previous year to a 5 percent decrease. read full text
02/23/2007
My Earliest Memory of Bullwinkle | The New Number 10
link to full text It's not the most explicit of memories, for it occurs back in the fogs enveloping my third and fourth grade years, a Memphis, Tennessee interstitial in my St. Louis-based childhood, but it's the best I got.
Like many working class families, my parents had to leave for work before the school day started, and didn't return home until after it ended, meaning we had babysitters. The first that I can really remember was back in St. Charles, Missouri, when I would have been approximately 5-7 years old, first and second grades (Kindergarten started the year after I would have taken it), Becky David Elementary. read full text
"Which leads to a wrenching dilemma: News organizations clearly need to build up their online offerings, big-time. But if they bleed the old-school core product in the process, that can cause problems both editorial and economic." read full text
01/16/2007
Why the iPhone Matters to the Media | Turn On The News
But cynics may note that instead of Apple’s instant-messaging program iChat, there is that aforementioned SMS messaging program. On the screen, when you send and receive messages, the display resembles the way you view them on iChat, in colorful text balloons. But because each message is an SMS text message, depending on the billing plan, users may get charged a few cents each time they say "wassup." (iChat lets you gab all you want for free.) Maybe this won’t be a problem?Jobs hints that Cingular may offer different billing plans for iPhone, though for now he isn’t saying for sure. In any case, Jobs say, "There’s no reason we couldn’t have iChat on here." So bring it on.
Not ALL of the news, just all that fits | Sausage Works
link to full text "if it was edited out of the report that aired, then doesn't that mean it's probably not necessary?"
I never cease to be amazed by how many professional journalists make fundamental mistakes like Tom Shales's rhetorical question above deriding the additional content news producers include in their online components. read full text
12/22/2006
The Art of Cognitive Dissonance | Sausage Works
link to full text So three Congressmen send a letter to the President reminding him that they'd like him to stop acting as though he has no possible idea how much it's going to cost to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of which has been ongoing for 3 years and that he claims to have no intention of leaving any time soon, certainly not within the next budget year, and the other has been in the same situation for 5 years now.
All this after the entire Congress attached an amendment to the last "emergency" appropriations bill it passed at the President's request requiring him to include the cost of those two wars along with the rest of his Defense budget. Why would they feel the need to reiterate pointedly what Congress would desire of him? read full text
12/13/2006
"Do not archive your mail." | The New Number 10
link to full text That was a quote from a Jim Allchin email advising Microsoft employees of the company "retention" policy. At the bottom of the same article we find that The Bill actually has an assistant whose sole job is to make sure that his little paw-prints aren't visible on any of the creepy things that he does in the course of his job.
Come again? I was under the impression that publicly traded companies had document retention requirements somewhere North of "feel free to delete everything immediately." Yet another example of those in charge trying to make sure that us peons don't have any way of knowing what all they are up to improving our lives, keeping us safe, etc. read full text
