Author: Aaron Weber

Going Places

OK, I’m out for the weekend, back part of Sunday, out til Thursday, back for Friday, out Saturday and Sunday, and back in June. Expect intermittent posting. Also, expect me to get around to posting some pictures.

Nautilus Spatialus

Great article on ByteBot about the latest Nautilus, which seems to actually understand the point of the past year or so of GNOME development:

So rather than posting to the mailing lists, or writing factually incorrect articles, it seems that the time has come to move on from the fact that Nautilus by default, has become spatial. The GNOME Desktop has started breaking down the myth of the “average user” and the “power user” and instead focusing on “good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience”, and drastic changes like this is only going to push the open source desktop further.

Debt

I owe props to Daniel Gross, whose articles on Slate I’ve been reading while I spill last night’s leftovers onto my keyboard. I’ve been learning about recent Geenspan and Bush nonsense and how Bush owes what little credibility he has to Greenspan, while Greenspan owes his credibility to his interest-rate-related power to soften economic pain. That power will be sorely tested if the general consensus grows that we really are in a housing bubble that’s going to collapse any day now.

Then there’s one by Michelle Leder about really depressing high-interest short-term debt, a.k.a. “payday loans,” with a link to one about the legal grey areas surrounding loan sharking and usury.

Non-debt-related is one on gas prices and their effect on convenience stores, with a link to The National Association of Convenience Stores Fact Sheet on Gasoline Theft.

(Jackpot! Not only a trade magazine, but a trade magazine’s report on a weird crime whose frequency is affected by international relations! Obviously designed just to tickle my bizarre-data fetish.)

Sucker

Via Low Culture, the following quotation from a shining example of the trade magazine, Broadcasting and Cable:

“I’m not gonna get suckered into voting again,” she says. “Why should we sit here and waste two hours of our time when our votes aren’t going to be counted?”

As the snark notes, “The article, subtitled ‘An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed voting system,’ might have better read, ‘An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed America.'”

For more bitchiness, look for reviews of the latest from Ken Haruf and David Brooks, both of whom have committed the mortal sin of producing more of what worked so well last time.

Standard Goods

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology does things like help define measurements and standards. Things like the exact volume of a gallon, or the official number of calories in the average tomato. Useful, very dry, stuff. Except they have the NIST Store, where you can buy things like, say, the government’s official standard peanut butter for your adhesion, peanut-butter-removal, and calorimeter tests. Or, say, a bag of official standard household dirt to test your vacuum cleaners with. Awesome.

Told You So

The Star Tribune (reg. required), apparently from Minneapolis/St. Paul, has coverage of the economic benefits of gay marriage. I know a trend when I see it: big parties are expensive, and expensive parties are good for the party business. Protest signs are mostly home-made, though, so that won’t get much. Lobbyists are having a field day, as are fax and printer toner salesmen.

Also, your complaint is off-topic

Michael Meeks has a blog. He’s affiliated with SUSE in one way or another. So his RSS feed is picked up by Planet SUSE. All well and good, but what if his content isn’t really on-topic for the aggregation, which is mostly software-oriented? Or, for example, me. I have a blog and it’s picked up by an internal Novell employees aggregation, but my posts have NOTHING to do with work. The whole point, for me, of getting a non-work blog was posting non-work-related stuff on it.

I don’t think Michael signed up for Planet SUSE– I think they just added him, as he invites anyone to do by posting an RSS feed. I certainly didn’t request to be on Planet Novell (not that I mind, but I didn’t agree to any terms or anything). Unless someone signs up promises a particular sort of content, there’s no good reason to demand that they produce it. If my RSS feed is off-topic for your aggregator, then don’t carry my RSS feed, or ask politely for me to split out the topics into two feeds, one for tech and one for everything else, like John Fleck has done, after getting too many complaints about his content from Planet GNOME.

Honestly though, nbody promised you a perfect walled garden of on-topic content. Don’t like it? Don’t read it. Also, your discussion of topicality should be taken elsewhere, since it’s not on-topic for this site.