Category: Things

Quick Update, mostly from BoingBoing:
Weird advertising news.
Continued advances in psychiatric research of happiness, satisfaction, and inner peace.
Tax deniers. Some people call them tax protestors, or tax cranks, but they actually deny the existence of the income tax, sort of like holocaust deniers think the holocaust didn’t happen. When I grow up, I want to be a crank, but not like these folks.

Intellectual property and marketing: Bacardi and Pernod Ricard are fighting over the “Havana Club” brand name.

Housing: Housing bubble and coming crash as explained by Washington Monthly. Brad DeLong isn’t sure– he says that it is, in many ways, a matter of guessing the future movements of the real interest rate.

Criminal Law, Semiotics, Justice, Privacy: Home-made birthday cards sent from one prisoner to another are often clues about the social networks among prisoners, and are used to investigate gang violence.

This Is Broken is a blog about bad UI. I like examples of broken interfaces (software or otherwise), because they are both funny and educational.

This is an article about how screwed up our educational system is. Apparently Salman Rushdie wrote in to criticize the administrator for something else, but they’d never heard of him. Mind you, this is an arts college, presumably a place where people should have heard of major living authors. I dislike examples of broken social systems because although they may be funny, they are also depressing and enraging.

Plush Living claims to be anti-fashion but sells only hipster just-past-its-prime paraphernalia: trucker hats, beer cozies, quote-unquote-vintage t-shirts. Paul Frank, for crying out loud. What screams trendy fashion-chasing more than Paul Frank? Carrie Bradshaw? I do like the Utah shirt though.

1. Software patents blow. This endless debate about C# and .NET in GNOME is a huge waste of time– the hackers would rather be coding, I’m sure, or debating the technical merits of various languages, than worrying about the legality of their actions. The very idea that it might be a crime or even a civil infingement to create something new is by itself upsetting, but the fact that engineers have to play lawyer before creating new tools is very upsetting indeed.

2. Eric: When I said I needed a more serious machine than my Mac, I did not mean that Macs are non-serious machines. This laptop has served me well; however, it’s old and slow and for work I need to use an x86 system running SUSE 9.x and XD-Unstable. So, this machine, while great for most tasks, is not well-suited to me specifically.

3. MSFT has sponsored something of a furore over the EU decision to fine it and demand various behavior modifications. It insists that such demands from a foreign nation are a threat to US soverignty and to US-based international business. Bullshit. Businesses are always required to comply with local laws; that’s one of the challenges of being a multinational business and it’s not a new one. MSFT has a very clear choice if it does not want to meet the EU anti-trust strictures: stop doing business in Europe.

Another Slate article on gay marriage and portrayal of gay men, and it points to what looks like the worst possible show ever, Playing It Straight, which is as you might imagine a test of how straight a gay man can act. If he’s straight-acting enough, he’ll get a million dollars, and not get beat up in the locker room after school! Hurrah!

Anti-Mel Fashion, which is to say, The Fashion of the Christ. Favorite headline recently: Zombies Drive Christ From Box Office.

In Chville this weekend, visiting family. Having Brainshare behind me is like a weight off my shoulders; now I feel like I can actually get some work done: helping arrange blog-based communities of ideas within the company, working with the docs people from Provo and Nuremburg, etc. etc.

Banc of America Securities recently started rating Novell’s stock. They’re a subsidiary of Bank of America. That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I mean, homophones just don’t make sense in business– just too confusing! Remember that group-purchasing site Accompany? I didn’t think so (You got that from a company? Which one?).

Fabulous NYT article on the new “Game Over” sitcom about off-duty video game characters. That is, both a review of the show and an explanation of the rendering techniques that made the show feasible.

Apparently I’ve been picked up by a website internal to Novell that aggregates any blog by any Novell employee. How embarrassing: my outside-the-office venting is now an inside-the-office hot air supply. To balance my usual content of snarky fluff, here’s something somewhat serious: a genuinely insightful article about Novell and the risks it faces going forward.

The author points out both the advantages that we have and the risks, including our execution track record. I like to think one can learn from the past, and that we’ll be able to integrate our wide-spread resources quickly and efficiently. Novell has a better cross-platform story than anyone else and can really move ahead with that.

As the rowing teams ’round here say, “Our wake, your funeral.”

The problem with choosing a color is that of course it’s not websafe. I’m not concerned with my readers, of course– it’s legible and even if it weren’t it’s not like I’m really writing for anyone but me me me.

No, it’s that on my monitor at home, and on my monitor at work, they don’t look the same, and I keep changing my mind anyway, and I end up futzing with them on Friday nights instead of going out.

Well, Solo Boxeo is on Univision now, so I’m gonna make some canned soup and watch violent sports while my girlfriend’s out sipping wine with her lady friends. I was supposed to be at a party but I can’t get the energy together to get off the fucking couch.

“I wake up feeling fragile; it’s nothing the TV couldn’t cure, or lying here for my whole life.”

Fucking Carthage. I feel like I’ve been pillaged. We’ll salt their fields yet.