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Archives for January 2003
The State of Oratory
Yesterday I watched yet another poorly-composed speech delivered by our commander-in-chief, who, incidentally, has still not learned to properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”
As always, Bush’s prose was completely uninspired. Aren’t there any good speechwriters left? What happened to the person who penned the following for Reagan in 1986?
Government growing beyond our consent had become a lumbering giant, slamming shut the gates of opportunity, threatening to crush the very roots of our freedom. What brought America back? The American people brought us back–with quiet courage and common sense; with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free.
It seems that the best Bush’s writers could come up with was the following awkward and clunky attempt:
Our fourth goal is to apply the compassion of America to the deepest problems of America. For so many in our country–the homeless and the fatherless, the addicted–the need is great. Yet there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.
Jesus Christ! It’s a speech, not an outline of newly proposed federal initiatives.
Protect Me From Your Followers
I watched Hell House on DVD tonight. It’s a documentary about members of a Pentecostal church in Cedar Hill, Texas organizing their annual fire-and-brimstone haunted house
As visitors walk through the Hell House they witness meticulously staged (and badly scripted) depictions of ravers getting date-raped, homosexuals dying of AIDS, drug deals gone bloody and the unrepentant burning in hell.
The event might as well have been the work of the Fred Phelps community theater. And yet almost 13,000 people went to see the haunted house last year.
Middle America can be a scary place indeed.
Oh, It’s A Tradition? Never Mind
Isn’t it just a little odd that Trent Lott gets skinned alive for making an offhand comment about Strom Thurmond while George Bush can send flowers to Jefferson Davis and get away with it? It’s amazing what you can do when it’s a “tradition.” (from MetaFilter)
Is It Sweeps Season Already?
I have to admit that I’m a bit of a CSI junkie. It’s a great show, but I’ve noticed that it seems to be getting more graphic with each episode. This week brought the following lovely visuals:
- A raven chomping on a human eye, with veins and nerves dangling
- A syringe extracting vitreous fluid from the same eyeball
- A severed and decaying human leg
- A decaying body with a missing eye-socket
- A student medical examiner making an incision in the chest of what was supposed to be a dead body
- The obligatory public hair evidence collection scene
- A lactating woman visibly wetting her blouse
I’m all for realism in television drama, but this is getting a tad ridiculous.
The Stamp Act
Note to self: Remember to purchase drug tax stamps before dealing anywhere in Kansas.
Free To (Think We) Choose
Over the past few days there’s been an interesting series of posts on the nature of free-will amongst several free-market bloggers. Will Wilkinson began it with a very poetic rumination on the difficulties and relative merits of attempting to live a fulfilling (and consistent) life while maintaining a belief in hard determinism. Gene Healy followed by commenting on the absurdity of those who implicitly deny the very position they are advocating through the act of arguing in favor of determinism. And lastly, Julian Sanchez countered Gene’s argument and made a very interesting phenomenological argument that “free will” isn’t necessarily incompatible with “materialism.”
I’ve always found the hard determinist position to be pretty solid, but if the proposition is valid, nothing follows from it. Knowledge of a determinist universe can’t logically affect your future “decisions” (which have already been determined since the big bang).
Besides, at the very least we are still left with some kind of fallacious perception that we make free decisions, so it seems pointless to even discuss the issue. Whether I “decided” to order a pizza this evening or whether I was “compelled by a chain of causation” to order a pizza, I still perceived that I made a decision to order a pizza.
Just my two-bits.
Macromedia Acquires Presedia
Today I received an email from the CEO of Presedia, a company I’ve done business with for the last two years. They’ve got a great enterprise-class product for converting Powerpoint presentations to Flash. The email was to inform me that they’ve been acquired by Macromedia, the 800 pound gorilla of the web development software business.
I pay Presedia in excess of $13,000 a year (for a corporate project) and I just renewed my contract. Macromedia makes a great product, but I’ve tried calling them for support in the past and I haven’t been impressed. Frankly, they’re no Rackspace–then again, neither was Presedia.
If the service goes to pot during (or after) the transition you can be sure I’ll be airing my grievances right here, for the whole world to see.
French-Fried Clams
From the Onion:
A “Check” on the RIAA
Quality control is one of the main problems with P2P networks in general. Between truncated songs and spoofed fake audio tracks placed on networks by companies like Overpeer, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find what you’re looking for without having to download and sift through a lot of shit in the process.
What we really need is a filesharing network linked to a public database of md5 checksums. A web-of-trust community-rating model could be used to allow users to assign a quality rating to each file/checksum record in the database. The checksumming integration could then allow prospective music thieves to find music by searching for highly-ranked checksums.
The system could also be used to report and moderate-down users advertising md5 checksums that don’t match the files they are sharing.
I’d imagine a single high-quality encoding of any given song would quickly proliferate. No more broken files. No more misattributed ID3 tags.
First Contact
Yesterday I saw a Segway scooter for the first time here in Dupont Circle. Two of them, in fact. I remembered seeing one of the riders from CNN. He was actually one of the first people in the U.S. to take delivery of the vehicle. The news segment showed him riding around wearing a helmet, which, interestingly enough, he wasn’t wearing yesterday.
If it really just is “an extension of walking” (as Dean Kamen likes to say) then I’d venture to say it’s going to be damn hard to get people to wear helmets while operating the devices. Who wears a helmet while walking?
The Satellite Office
My broadband provider was apparrently having DNS issues all day yesterday. We were unable to get any work done all morning.
So what did we do?
The three of us (CJ, Matt and I) went around the corner to Sparky’s Cafe with our laptops and spent the latter half of the day using their 802.11b wireless network. It worked quite well. So well in fact that Sparky’s is now my official contingency plan for such situations in general.
Wi-Fi kicks ass.
The New Sound of Music
I bought a new pair of cans from Headroom last week and I’ve been giving them quite a workout. They’re made by a company called Grado Labs in Brooklyn and they’re absolutely amazing. The model I bought (The SR60) has relatively high signal output so it doesn’t require a headphone amplifier, which makes it ideal for use with portable devices, like my iPod.
I’ve been listening to recordings I’ve known for my entire life and it’s difficult to explain just how much of a difference in clarity there is between the Grados and my trusty old Aiwas that served me well these past six years (God rest their soul).
I’ve really got to be careful though. Once you start with the audiophile shit it can be more expensive than a cocaine habit.
Trends To Watch (First In A Series)
I’ve been using etree.org lately to download Dave Matthews Band concert recordings. Under the band’s taping policy, such non-commercial activity is completely allowed.
When I first began doing this, I was a little suprised to find that downloads were predominantly available in a single format—and it wasn’t MP3 or Windows Media. It was the lossless variety of Shorten, or SHN.
MP3 and WMA are lossy compression formats. They reduce the fie size of a recording by eliminating data (and reducing sound quality). They’re good because they allow very efficient compression.
But bootleg junkies don’t like losing sound quality. As a result, they often prefer trading and downloading lossless SHN files, which allows all original data to be recovered when the file is uncompressed—you end up with a perfect copy of the original.
Unfortunately, SHN compression only results in a 30-50% reduction in file size. But with larger hard drives and more access to broadband, this will become less of an issue in the years to come.
The new Live Phish Downloads service actually sells SHN format recordings for a slight premium over the cost of MP3 downloads.
We’ll definitely start seeing more lossless audio distribution and filesharing online in the near future. And remember, you (probably) heard it here first.
