Category: Personal

Tonight’s movie: Ocean’s 11

I had been reluctant to see this remake of a less-than-classic 1960 Sinatra film once I read the reviews. But I got a good review from my sister and there was nothing else that seemed interesting so off we went. My sister was right and we enjoyed this film. Although director Steven Soderbergh would have been better off without the useless coda; I guess he felt the need to show Julia Roberts and George Clooney kissing. Why was Don Cheadle speaking with a Cockney accent? Casey Affleck and Scott Caan nearly steal the movie as a pair of bumbling brothers who take on almost all the crucial supporting tasks. Carl Reiner, still great at age 79, shows superb timing and delivery. Still, the point of the original was to give the Rat Pack a chance to work together and this crew doesn’t quite match the cohesion and chemistry, even if this film is better made. Recommended if you want to come out feeling good.

Get the quarterback!!!

Author’s note: this was just a headline but a few minutes later the Raiders made the first of three interceptions against Doug (I’m Old) Flutie. Which I predicted as the ball was being snapped–just ask the friend who was watching with me. Is the author cool or what? Hey the Raiders won, that’s what counts.

Ashcroft, others making me wonder

[Via Booknotes] Attorney General John Ashcroft has been widely condemned in the past few weeks for his ridiculous outburst that anyone who opposes his (the Bush administration’s) proposed changes regarding privacy and civil rights is only helping the terrorists. Add my voice to those who think he’s living on another planet. But just what planet might that be? As Alice Cherbonnier of the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel writes, “AN IMPORTANT TENET of journalism is that you should always ask, ‘Who benefits?’”

Clearly, a large group of former Republican officeholders like ex-Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci (college roommate of current DefSec Rumsfeld), ex-Secretary of State James Baker, Fred Malek (George Bush the First’s campaign manager), and–presumably–George H.W. Bush himself are raking in the dough through The Carlyle Group, one of the largest privately held companies in the world. One which owns many companies feeding on the public defense trough. As Shannon Jones writes on International Committee of the Fourth International website, The Carlyle Group: ex-government officials cash in. Here’s one group of rich and getting richer Republicans who benefit.

And possibly our terrorist enemies as well. The bin Laden family owned a stake in Carlyle until just after the 9/11 attacks. When the FBI wanted to investigate members of the bin Laden family, the White House allegedly made the Bureau back off. Are we all living on the same planet?

Micro-advertising experiment, day two

Yesterday was a little better with five clickthroughs after 418 accumulated views (to use mefi’s term) for a 1.2% clickthrough ratio. Maybe it’s a momentum thing as the CTR has been higher today than yesterday and yesterday than Thursday. And I did have a nice email in my in-basket this morning from a woman who most likely came to the site through the ad and like my poetry. Of course the whole thing is one big woo-fucking-hoo, but still…

LotR: Greeting cards

More tantalizing Lord of the Rings tidbits five days ahead of the FotR release. Media Highway International’s RealGreetingCard site has a selection of LotR e-cards; I mention them because they were nice enough to search out my site and send a link request. I tried their site and there are no popup/popunders and they don’t appear to use the email information for spam, which is very nice. The NY Times went a little meatier into the subject with a special Tolkien site.

HP/CPQ: Rising to the absurd

Yesterday, Hewlett pere sent an open letter to the boards of Hewlett Packard and Compaq asking them to end the merger without a shareholder vote and HP and Hewlett Foundation board member Richard Hackborn resigned from the foundation, citing irreconcilable differences, though Walter Hewlett finds no such conflict and retains his seats on both boards. Also yesterday, The Register published an HP memo directing employees to “Be a Voice for the New HP” by allowing their names to be used publicly to show support for the merger. The result? Today’s SJ Mercury News has an article where several top execs do just that. One HP exec must have had advance notice of the directive. Good doggies.

Micro-advertising experiment, day one

Not so good so far. 108 impressions, zero clickthroughs. For better or worse, there doesn’t seem to be any way to change the text of the ad to see if any improvement can be had.

That was tasty water, baby, tasty water!

My Micro-advertising experiment, part 2

Last month I experimented with Pyra Labs’ Pyrads text advertising service on Blogger.com; while the results weren’t overwhelming they were a kick in the pants (that is, I was amused). Other folks have reported good results with Matt Haughey’s MetaFilter text ads, so I decided to give them a try. These are a little cheaper, 5,000 impressions for $10 versus 3,333 for $10 (although Pyra is running a sale on their’s just now). I hope PHPWebHosting is up to the coming flood<LOL>. Here’s what it looks like:

Steven explains why America isn’t signing treaties

A curious European fellow named Maurice wrote Steven (has it been a month since I linked to him?) and asked why Americans think Europeans are against them in the current struggle while the Europeans seem to feel it is the Americans who aren’t team players when it comes to many recent international agreements. Steven’s answer is simple and direct. The treaties in question–Kyoto and the international court of justice–violate the US Constitution. The President can’t sign such treaties without violating his oath of office and the same goes for Senate ratification should a president be foolish enough to sign. Excellent analysis.

James Morrow, writing in Reason, looks at a similar question from another perspective.

Seeking the others

Astronomer, cosmologist, and author Carl Sagan famuously calculated how many other intelligent life forms ought to exist in our universe and when the number turned out to be reasonably large, wondered where they all were. Now NASA has announced the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos as part of the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field right here in Mountain View. The Sagan Center will initially consist of three labs: genomics and microbiology, biosensors, and nanotechnology. “No honor would have meant more to Carl than this,” said Ann Druyan, his wife and collaborator for 20 years. Sagan dreamed “that we, as a civilization, would turn our genius to the deep questions of life in the cosmos.” This is cool!

Joel on strings, XML, and Shlemiel the painter

Joel Spolsky goes deep into the byte manipulation to show why XML will get beat by relational database technology every time there is a non-trivial anount of data involved. And Joel’s company has released their new content management product and you can get the Starter Edition for the downloading. Shlemiel the painter is an old European joke about a painter.

Loving the Internet for the fun free things

The good folks at ACME Laboratories have been providing free software and fun tools for a long time. One of their latest is the License Plate Generator, so of course I made my own:

Not to mention the Religion and Sexual Ethics chart, which compares seven major religions on their level of acceptance of 13 sexual practices, and the ACME Chocolate Registry, which is just what it sounds like.

College Football: Everybody runs screaming from Miami

What the heck is going on in college football the last few months? Is everyone scared of Miami? The way number two’s have been losing that’s what you’d think. Except for Colorado but the Buffaloes got screwed by the BCS. Well, my predictions went out the window with all the losses (thanks Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and BYU). Oregon’s coach and QB are screaming that they got ripped by the BCS as well but their lack of quality wins (hello, they lost to Stanford’s backup QB) belittles the bellyaching. So my picks ended up being a little off. Undeterred, here are my bowl picks:

• Rose Bowl: Miami over Nebraska by at least two touchdowns. If Colorado can beat them by four TDs, Miami should have no trouble finishing undefeated and taking the Sears/AFCA National Champion Football Trophy.
  

• Orange Bowl: Maryland has to be this year’s positive surprise but I think Rex Grossman has too much going with weapons like Ernest Graham and Jabar Gaffney against Maryland’s no-name everything team. Grossman and Gaffney are sophomores and Graham a junior, they are likely to see this as setting the table for another national title run next year. Florida recovers from Tennessee in front of what is sure to be a partisan crowd and wins by at least 10.
  

• Sugar Bowl: Illinois over LSU. The Tigers are playing a home game here but Illinois wants respect, they’re the Big Ten champs and no one has them in the Who Plays Miami controversy, and LSU has gone much further than anyone expected. Illinois wins by less than a touchdown but both teams score between 26 and 39 points.
  

• Fiesta: Colorado over Oregon. Buffalo offense keeps Duck defense on the field all day. Colorado wins by a lot of points. ‘Nuff said.

BST Update: Stock page

With time on my hands, I added the Selected Stock Quotes page to BillSaysThis. Based on code from Christopher Heschong’s Pecos content management framework, the page shows several bits of information for an assortment of stocks as well as linking to the relevant Yahoo! Finance page. The exercise did give me a little bit more insight into PHP’s array handling mechanism as well. If there’s a stock you’d like to see added to the list, just let me know.

Happy Chanukah, everybody

Celebrate the Festival of Lights!

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS: Myths and Realities

In a major essay, David Matas examines and refutes 21 anti-Israeli criticisms perpetuated by Palestinians and their supporters. Matas is a lawyer and senior legal counsel to B’nai Brith Canada and wrote this in advance of the recent (Aug. 31) UN conference against racism; the outome of that conference could have been much worse but fortunately the US and other countries were able to prevent the ridiculous wording. In brief, he discusses and demolishes the criticisms that Zionism is racism and that Palestinians have a right of return or entry to Israel, supported by international law and convention. Key quote:

“The solution to the problem of statelessness of Palestinian refugees is the grant of nationality by the states in whose territories Palestinians have been born. It is the failure of these Arab states to grant nationality to Palestinians, as well as the failure to reach a peace agreement that would establish a Palestinian state, which created the problem of statelessness for the Palestinians, and not the existence of the State of Israel.”

I’ve never understood why over 50 years later, the Arab ‘host’ countries force most of the Palestinians to live in refugee camps. I highly recommend you at least thoroughly scan this essay for yourself.

Update: After passing this on to a few family members and friends, I received an email with a few interesting questions and perhaps posting them here, with my answers, will be useful:

> Is Zionism just the belief in the need for a Jewish state?

More or less. Zionism was a movement that began in Europe in the late 19th century as some Jews gained a measure of freedom, both economic and political, in the then-more liberal climate.

> Were other places considered besides the area that is now Israel?

I believe there was some debate in the early days but the activists felt that Palestine, the historical land of the Jews, was most appropriate as the land promised to Jews by God thousands of years before. Not to mention the only place where there ever had been a Jewish state.

> After WWII, did Zionists consider taking a chunk of German as reparation?

Zionism, as mentioned, pre-dates WWII.

> Does Judaism include a belief that the Jews are God’s chosen people?

It says so in the Torah.

49ers: Good but not great yet

In the SJ Mercury News this morning, columnists Mark Purdy and Skip Bayless take opposing sides on whether or not the 49ers could beat the St. Louis Rams today (note that links will almost surely evaporate in seven days). With 2:52 left in the fourth quarter, San Francisco has the ball on the St. Louis side of the field but is losing 27-14 and seems headed for a loss. Looking back at the two columns, I feel they were both wrong; something was physically wrong with QB Jeff Garcia today, his throws were just a little off all game. And holding the Rams to 27 points should have been a good enough performance on defense, with the 49ers averaging 28 points a game this year (and scoring 26 against the Rams earlier this season). Will they meet again in the NFC championship game? With the Bears losing to the Packers today, seems like a possibility. Check back in January.

Economics of the future

Economics has historically been the study of allocation of scarce resources. But some scientists and philosphers have been arguing for the past few decades that technological and political developments have moved humanity passed scarcity and into an age of abundance; people are starving in Africa now because we can’t get food to them, not because the food can’t be produced. Back in 1983, G, Harry Stine (writing under the nom de plume of Lee Corry) published Manna, a novel which took this change as its inspiration. I wish the book was not out of print, I’d love to re-read it in light of the last 18 years.

In an interview in reason, economist Paul Romer, one of the most important thinkers of recent years, explains the New Growth Theory, one of the first attempts to transform eonomics to deal with the new reality. One question cuts to the heart of his proposition: why has such substantial economic growth occured in the past two centruies and not in, say, ancient Rome or Ming China? Romer says that the institutions (universities and corporations) and political systems (freedom and capitalism) of today give the economy the ability to operate on a different basis, especially freedom. A very interesting read, recommended

Goodbye: George Young

One of the great football executives died today after a short illness. George Young brought a semblance of peace to the feuding Mara family immediately after being named general manager of the Giants and then brought championships to a team that spent the ’60s and ’70s in the cellar by drafting Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor and hiring Bill Parcells as coach. I remember spending many Augusts and Septembers debating the personnel choices he and Parcells made but in the end they delivered playoff wins and two Super Bowls. He was quiet and never looked for the spotlight. leaving that to his coaches, but he knew the game and how to win. AP sportswriter Stephen Hawkins has a nice remembrance as well. Thanks for the memories George, I hope your lifting a brew with your dad in his new tavern in the hearafter.