Category: Personal

Another example of this mystery pops up with the report that Mike Riley will join the Saints as assistant head coach and secondary coach. Longtime Saints assistant Rick Venturi moves up to defensive coordinator from the positions Riley is taking. I just don’t understand how Riley can work for Venturi but also be his boss.

Other coordinator news: Bruce Coslet comes back into the league, as rumored, with the Cowboys’ offense. Coslet is a West Coast guy so how Emmitt Smith will respond is an interesting question but he knows that Coslet gets results. Kurt Schottenheimer turned down an opportunity to join brother Marty in San Diego and instead took the Lions’ DC slot. I believe this is the first major job for Kurt independent of Marty.

One of the core elements that defines childhood is the ability to build mental pictures of the world that seem logically complete as well as practical even though they are completely at odds with life as it really exists. Think of five year olds who just know their parents are perfect. Sad as it is, breaking through this mental wall is a big part of becoming an adult. Sherman Martin Austin, an 18 year old Angeleno found this out the hard way when an FBI raid silenced his anarchist website by raiding his parents’ home with lots of armed agents. This quote makes my point precisely: “In the interview, Austin acknowledged that he vandalized the Web sites and that he knew it was illegal to do so. But he defended the act by saying it was necessary to get his message out.” (Hmm is this my day to pick on teens?)

Sometimes I just wonder about my fellow humans. Not that they are greedy or violent, which are cause enough for wonder, but that they do really stupid things like the girl in this Yahoo! News photo and then go after publicity for doing it. Of course in this case the blame has to go to her parents for allowing the publicity. And yeah, like teenagers never found ways to run up huge phone bills before. Oh wait, they must have or else why would The Simpsons have lampooned it?

Since I wrote about this odd ad campaign a few days ago, I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people coming though Google and other search engines but I had no answer for them either. Now, though, thanks to eWeek we can

solve the “mlife” mystery and tell you it is coming from ATT Wireless. The “m” is for mobile and refers to a package of voice and data services that will be fully explained in some Super Bowl ads. Glad that’s been explained, eh?

In a speech today, President Bush enlarged his remarks on the American propensity to do what feels good. Observers say this is an attempt to talk us into moving away from the sexual excesses characterized by the Lewinsky scandal. People who complain about others’ pleasure are most likely scared of what they would see inside themselves or mentally locked into a rigid belief system that makes their life simple. I always wondered why Republicans (conservatives) are so eager to keep the government out of financial matters but so eager to have it intrude in personal relations; isn’t that an odd conflict?

I say to GWB and his corporate cronies, how about looking at your own excesses? That is, the “if we can get away with it, do it!” attitude that led to the Enron collapse and the $100 million Credit Suiss First Boston fine. How about letting Congress have the Cheney energy task force information rather than forcing a courtroom confrontation. Poor Mrs. Lay, going on TV sobbing poverty while her husband Ken hides behind his lawyers and, gee, they still have property valued at over $10 million. Puh-lease!

Hunger is a terrible thing to go unsated!

When one upgrades to the way-cool Blogger Pro part of the incentive in addition to the new features and such is a 8,000 impression Pyrad run. I had mine, it was over and done with in three days or so and I actually got about a 10% overrun (Ev, software needs checking methinks). But talk about your minimal results: two (2!!) clickthroughs for a CT ratio of 0.023%. This one was not much of anything. Tried new wording to no avail. Wonder if Ev is going to start making results available from all Pyrads so potential advertisers can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Dave W. has finally had enough and kicked WinerLog off his EditThisPage.com service. On the other hand, Dave also claims he hasn’t shut them down. Even WinerLog says they have not been shut down but are simply frustrated with the free service. In any case, Zaphod and gang aren’t going far. They found a new home at Userland partner Weblogger.com and are still using Manila. I suppose there will be some transitional issues with their archives but you can’t keep a good blogger down!

Humor is just a great thing. Not quite as good as sex with someone you love but hey. Check out SatireWire’s Australia Gets Drunk, Wakes Up in North Atlantic and you will be laughing for a damn long time.

And in other parts of the Commonwealth we can find completely different unintentional examples of the comic arts.

Gee Mike after all these years, all these rapes, and all the ridiculous behavior I would have never guessed. Amazingly, the Nevada State Athletic Commission looked a few hundred million dollars of Vegas casino revenue in the face and

denied Tyson request for license anyway. Good going guys, showing us the system can work once in awhile. Some jurisdiction will ignore Tyson’s track record and inability to behave like an adult and give the go ahead for his fight with Lennox Lewis but this is a nice thing to see.

Sorry, but I just am not a Marty Schottenheimer fan. Sure he goes to the playoffs often enough but has he even gone to the Super Bowl? No my friends, he has not. But

San Diego hired him anyway. No mention on how the player control dispute that appeared to hold up the deal was resolved. I agree with Kamla (author of the linked article) that the Chargers are unlikely to reach the eight win mark in 2002. And not surprisingly, Norv Turner ankled the OC job rather than work with the man who replaced him in D.C. Turner’s best bet is to go work as OC for buddy Dave Wanstadt at Miami and see if he can work a miracle on Jay Fiedler.

Once again a team goes for a comfortable retread instead of elevating an innovative, possibly minority assistant. Of the eight major coaching openings I tracked, with Tampa Bay still open, three assistants got hired, two college coaches moved, and Dungy traded up to what could be a new powerhouse in Indy if he can duplicate Lovie Smith’s defensive makeover. Rumor, which may or may not resemble reality, has Al Davis just waiting for Tampa Bay to fill it’s opening so he can dump disgruntled Jon Gruden with nowhere to go but home to play with his Chucky dolls. If he does, the other half of the rumor is that Denny Green will put down his fishing rod away. Let’s see.

The last two years have been a disaster for tech company stocks, I don’t need to tell you that. Through all of this, though, IBM stock held up fairly well and remained between $110 and $125 until the last couple of weeks when the stock went on a deep slide from $125 to $103 today. Why the sudden change? Miracleworker Lou Gerstner is retiring after nine years at the top in place of IBM lifer Sam Palmisano. The big change at IBM during Gerstner’s tenure is the move to push services revenue instead of hardware and software. I’m a little surprised at the stock price movement since Palmisano has been a leader of this change, his ascension was widely expected even if the timing was not, and IBM is largely producing what Wall Street expects. Oh well, just goes to show you can’t predict the market.

Moondog says his number one–number one!—overrated artist is Bruce Springsteen. Moondog has a pretty cool website called The Rock ‘n’ Roll Vault, with lots of neat information and lists. But anyone can see that, with a couple of exceptions, one can switch his “favorite artists” list for the “overrated” one and have a much more accurate picture. I suppose it’s all about taste, very subjective and personal, but how you say Jackson Browne and Manfred Mann are among your favorites and not love Springsteen? I was surfing through his site, expecting to see Springsteen at any moment and when I didn’t, used the site search to look him up. I found only two interesting mentions: the overrated list and a review of a book called Flowers in the Dustbin. The latter mention of Springsteen? “The remaining pages of Flowers in the Dustbin discuss Bruce Springsteen, punk rock and of course the loss of Elvis, none of which would have been missed.”

As a longtime Oz fan, I noticed that PBS was showing a modern take on Shakespeare’s Othello starring Eamonn Walker and thought I might watch it. Very interesting, Walker plays John Othello, a police commissioner in present day London who has the misfortune to be jumped up over his friend and mentor Ben Jago (Iago). Jago, played here by Christopher Eccleston, goes a little mad and plots his revenge. The dialogue–script is by Andrew Davies (Bridget Jones’ Diary, Emma, personal fave House of Cards)–is modern but echoes the original nicely. Walker and Eccleston, along with Keeley Hawes playing Othello’s wife, are all strong. Check out the PBS website linked to the title if you want some background and good reference material on this production and the original. Recommended.

One of my good friends, Roxanne Rosales, married her fiance Thomas Sutter recently and they forwarded this picture from the party:

Just want to send them my love and best wishes for a long and happy marriage with lots of little ones. My only advice: never go to sleep angry with each other. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Sutter!!

[Via garret] Perhaps this is going to be a recurring topic for me, though I can tell you it sure gets my goat. Recently, the New Mexico State Police conducted a DWI sobriety checkpoint in Santa Fe. While in operation the police stopped six drunk driving suspects and 17 “undocumented immigrants.” As the

Santa Fe New Mexican reports, the local immigrants rights groups are up in arms. Ooh, that’s not fair, they said. Cops can’t stop people at sobriety checkpoints AND see if they are in the ountry legally! One Undersheriff quoted in the article declared, “A sobriety checkpoint is for sobriety. We wouldn’t ask that. We shouldn’t ask it. We have enough to do with criminals without bothering people who are here just to try to make a better life.”

I say: Are these people in the country legally? Did the police violate some international treaty or convention by checking their documentation? Did the people of this country tell the federal government to repeal the laws regarding legal immigration? The answer to all is no. We don’t owe people in other countries the right to come here and break our laws, not even simply the ones regarding immigration. If people who are here legally want to change the laws, go for it. Otherwise, don’t complain when illegal immigrants have to leave.

In this article, writer Elaine Ackerman writes up the age old plaint that complex software gets shipped with bugs still remaining. Well gee. Slow news day? Writing more politely, I sent the following letter:

Ms. Ackerman,

Your article is correct in saying that the immensely complex software programs like Windows XP are nearly impossible to test completely with current methods. However, software could be significantly better tomorrow, though still imperfect, if the executives of the publishing companies implemented and enforced good coding practices. The example of buffer overflows is a good example; if the programmers had checked the return

values prior to using them there would be no error. Since the pressure is on programmers to deliver too quickly and on managers to keep costs down, simple things like code reviews and mentoring don’t happen, much less more complex improvements such as the SEI processes implemented are just not going to happen. I was amused after finishing your article to note that while a corporate shill like the Gartner vice president was quoted, there was no working programmer interviewed.

Regards…

All kudos for the War on Terror aside, Dr. David A. Sprintzen of Long Island University has compiled a sad, sorry

list of accomplishments for the Bush Occupation. These type of decisions plus the likelihood that he’ll get a chance to nominate two or more justices to the Supreme Court are exactly why I opposed his election. With any luck, this year’s midterm elections will hold to form and the Democrats will pick up enough seats in the House to block too much damage.

Have you seen the commercials on TV or heard them on radio? Are you annoyed too? Well, I did a little Googling and here are some of the English language results. One version is a statistical computer program “for survival analysis with emphasis on Cox regression with various extensions, such as allowing easy introduction of communal (external) covariates, etc, etc.” Another is a set of paintings by Charles Burchfield. A third is from eServ Global, a solution family for the mobile telecommunications provider and Internet markets. Not to be left out is the Meaning of Life, which seems to be about believing in God and perfecting man through that belief. Or is this the meaning of life? Anyway, none of these seem to be the one behind the annoying commercials.