Author: Aaron Weber

News of the Obvious

Every year they publish another story about how college kids drink too much. Wow. Were these study-conducting people never in college? I suppose they were, but weren’t at the parties, because they were in the library doing statistics homework that has enabled them to go back years later and conduct studies measuring the average number of drinks a partying college boy can toss back in an evening.

I know I was holed up in my room, periodically calling security at 2am because someone was setting off fireworks in the parking lot or throwing up in the bushes. But I also know that kids drank to excess. Most of them at one point or another. Five drinks in a sitting? Five drinks (a.k.a. five twelve ounce cups of watery beer) is a baseline, although it was more than I could do by about two drinks. Ten is what the men would drink. Then there’s shots of Jaeger, throwing up, and more beer. The trick is to throw up before you get too drunk, apparently, to breathe.

The ultimate goal is inebriation sufficient to forget that you’re in a position of absolute irrelevance in the world, that you’re wasting your parents’ money and more importantly your life and privilege and youth.

Music Pick O The Moment

Sample MP3 CocoRosie: Good Friday from Touch and Go Records. Check additional samples at Insound and CocoRosie reviews at Pitchfork.

The music has an off-kilter sweetness to it that I can’t quite describe. There are definite processing effects on the acoustic guitars and seductive, almost reedy vocals. But on the other hand it seems a little lo-fi… anyway, really good. Reminds me of Sparklehorse, some of the tracks from Tom Waits’ “Mule Variations,” and of September 67.

Starship…

I have a profound and growing distaste for the phrase “… in the enterprise,” used to mean “in big businesses.” Just say “in large business environments” or something like that. There’s a million ways to say it.

Besides, “enterprise,” like “professional” is suffering from inflation. Last weekend I saw a review of a giant multifunction remote control which comes in two editions, basic and “Pro.” Do they really mean to suggest that this is a remote control suitable for professional channel surfers? That it is aimed at the lucrative professional television reviewer or censor? Same with the Roomba, which comes in a “Pro” edition. No professional cleaning outfit would use a roomba. Call it deluxe, max, super, extra, ultra, plus, elite, or even (ugh) extreme, but what you have there is very much a device for the consumer market and calling it “professional” will only confuse your marketing and that of everyone carrying anything that actually is aimed at the professional space.

Think before you name a product ,folks. What does this word MEAN?

Decline and Fall of Real Estate Industry

At the movies the other day, one of the preview/ads was for realtors in general, as in, the professional association of property promoters. It’s quite the field to be in. As the NYT notes, it’s getting more crowded by the day:

More than 350 people take the state real estate exam at 9:30 a.m. every Tuesday at 123 William Street in New York. According to the New York Department of State, 13,609 people took the sales license test between Jan. 1 and June 25, up from 9,680 for the corresponding period in 2002. There are so many newcomers in the field that another test time has been added to accommodate the overflow.

Too many sellers may mean that the service fees have to drop. As is, I’ve already decided that I’m going through ZipRealty or Isoldmyhouse.com if and when I buy. I mean, realtors have inherent ethical conflicts, plus you could really replace several hundred of them with a competent DBA and a half-dozen data-entry temps– if only the main association didn’t have such a lock on the damn database.

Misnomer

Rightists in and outside of the party claim Kerry is an “out of touch ultraliberal from Taxachussets.” Facts: Massachussets is actually about 26th in overall tax burden, right in the middle. Housing is expensive and that makes property taxes burdensome, but the fact is, “Taxachussets” is a big lie.

While we’re at it, have I mentioned that Dennis Hastert may be a pedophile cultist? We don’t know that he isn’t, anyway. He has never discussed membership in a child-molesting cult, nor has he disavowed the molestation of children and attendance of cult rituals involving human sacrifice and the Reverend Moon.

We can’t prove that he’s not a serial killer, but we do have very strong evidence that he is a lying sack of shit and that he is also the Speaker of the House. Oh, and he’s fat and ugly. So there.

(Why do people make fun of Michael Moore’s looks, anyway? I mean, he won’t win any beauty pageants, but he’s not exactly running in any either– he’s a filmmaker, not a model. His weight isn’t the issue.)

Application Development Ideas

The relatively simple perl script mencal is not a very useful application: it basically displays a text-based calendar and highlights several days each month. That’s OK, I guess, but it’s not what I would expect from a real app. A period can vary in date and duration, and your predictions may be more or less accurate, so it really needs more flexibility. Also a GUI display would make it easier to use. A good mensturation application would have the following features:

  • Integrate with Evolution for information display. Ideally implementation would be an EPlugin, but it could be a separate app that exported an icalendar file.
  • Display predicted and actual menstruation dates separately.
  • Improve its prediction algorithym as it is corrected by the user.
  • Display days of ovulation, estimated maximum and minimum fertility and other hormonal events. Display of these events should be customizable.
  • Export graphs of estimated hormone levels and fertility events.

I’d suggest that it be written in C# with Mono, like all the cool apps are these days. Besides, Evolution has great C# bindings.

That would be an app worth shipping!

Wingnuts of the Right Wing

Incredibly, there are people who feel that George W. Bush is not deeply enough in the pockets of the religious right. They are voting for Peroutka and the Constitution Party. Unsurprisingly, many of them have voted in the AFA’s latest attempt to skew an online poll. Cute, as usual.

It reminds me of The Economist’s recent headline, Ariel Sharon is a Sissy. Oh yeah, bring it on! Of course, the difference is that for The Economist, that’s supposed to be a droll little joke, whereas the Constitution party is apparently sincere in its tax denial and insistence that Church and State be unified.

Why does the RNC Hate Ms. Cheney?

I’m beginning to wonder if the Republican Party really has it in for, say, Dick Cheney and his family. Who knows. Atrios comments on the opening speaker of the convention, who wrote a Godwin’s-Law-violating article comparing gay rights to Nazism. Sure, the pressure to grant basic human rights to gay people, and the pressure to join the Nazi party are social and political pressures. And I’m sure that they both seem threatening to people who oppose them. The difference is that gay people aren’t actually trying to, say, TAKE OVER EUROPE, KILL ALL THE JEWS, AND ELIMINATE DEMOCRACY. In other words, you may disagree with both genocide and homosexuality, but that doesn’t make them equivalent.

Now, the RNC is convinced they have God on their side, despite the rifts between groups that claim mutually exclusive holds on truth. This should be as interesting as watching the fiscal conservatives and libtertarians battle the “deficits don’t matter” don’t-tax-just-spend crowd.

I’m surprised the Log Cabin’s refusal to endorse Bush hasn’t gotten more coverage. It’s certainly more legitimate news than claiming that Kerry was actually fighting on the side of the communists, or that George Soros is a drug smuggler. Given the right wing’s support for felon and alleged drug importer Ollie North, you’d think they’d hold off on name-calling, especially given that Soros has an extremely well-documented career as a commodities trader and brilliant investor and Ollie’s got a well-documented career as a shady fixer and a financer of violent terrorism. Oh, excuse me, violent “freedom fighting.”

What’s this? You’re not familiar with US involvement in Latin American civil wars in the 1980s? Of course not. US history courses in the US end at 1945 and at the Rio Grande.

Here’s how it was:
Oliver North ran drugs to Miami to fund the Nicaraguan paramilitaries. The paramilitaries were running around killing doctors and nurses and teachers. This was to destabilize the Nicaraguan government, which had suspiciously left-leaning rhetoric. At the time, the Sandinista government wasn’t really communist– probably no more Socialist than, say, France or Germany or Canada. Of course, the US-backed paramilitaries were going to show you how badly the socialists were doing and how a North-America-backed dictator would do so much better (nobody suggested a democracy at this point– that was what got them into this mess in the first place, just like Chile in 73. God forbid they should elect someone– they might pick the wrong guy!). Anyway, the Sandinista literacy programs didn’t work very well once the teachers were all dead. Nor did the economic system function very well when the peasants were hiding in the jungle. Nor did the health system do very well when most doctors outside of Managua were in hiding or in shallow graves.

That’s what Ollie did, but now he’s a respected Republican again with God on his side. Because that’s what it’s all about, you know. Hating, killing, imposing your views on the rest of the world that isn’t as well armed as you. Yay Neocons! We’re going to impose our society as far as our army will reach! It’ll be great!