BillSaysThis

Does it strike anyone else as odd that Jon Udell seems to tag all his articles to del.icio.us? Is this going to be the next egoboo? I hope not. Jon’s stuff is usually interesting but the next 10,000 people to have the same idea are less likely to achieve the same quality, and then there’s the ticking time bomb of spammers.

Jon Carroll’s recent column in the SF Chronic, Unitarian Jihad, is really funny. Carroll says something important, that I want to say, but with far more humor than I’d be able to muster. George Packer pointed out last year that The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged and I agree with him yet for the time being this is our platform. Some good examples: Matt’s rant yesterday on privacy, Garret’s bit today on Frist, Karl’s on the bankruptcy bill expose the lies from the other direction.

These movie set photos of Brandon Routh as Clark Kent don’t do much to get me excited about the upcoming Superman Returns flick. Did Routh get cast because he looks so much like a young Christopher Reeve? Given that the film is directed by Bryan Singer, should be plenty good. Just sayin’.

For the first time in a long time, with the possible exception of the most recent Mustang, I’ve seen an affordable American car that looks hot: the Saturn SKY. Should show up at dealerships next (2006) Spring as a 2007 model year offering with a price tag around $25,000. One question, at least for now, is: How come none of the pictures feature the convertible top closed? All the websites have the same half dozen photos. Not claiming this sporty coupe will compete on performance or overall with ‘low end’ Mercedes, BMW or Toyota models (does the Solara convertible fit here?) but if General Motors can produce a decent quality car this should sell.

NBC is putting Third Watch to sleep after a few more episodes but from the promos being run you’d think this was the proud end of the second coming of, oh, Hill Street Blues rather than the nearly invisible petering out of just another mediocre series. Not to be singling out this show or even NBC because almost every network does it for every show that lasts more than two seasons. And the more times the suits do this, the more annoyed I get.

I’ve watched the first two shows of new PBS globalization newsmagazine Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria and can only say that the idea is great but the execution is less so. Zakaria, who’s come across as a pretty intelligent guy on The Daily Show and elsewhere, isn’t (yet) a graceful presence and since his background is writing that’s not too surprising. But it does take focus away from the content, the way a nail on blackboard does.

The second and possibly more significant problem is that the producers are trying to shove too much into their 23 minutes. PBS may not have commercials but that doesn’t mean shows get the whole time slot. Instead of covering three or four topics splitting the time 2/3-1/3 on two should work much better, especially if the two pieces covered different aspects of one larger issue. The video report last week on the American woman living in the Russian wilderness, for instance, was kind of sweet and not the usual reporting but, seriously, who cares?

Like I said, Zakaria is an intelligent guy. That’s a big plus. He knows how to present complex stories and (in two episodes) has brought in other smart people to discuss and present the material. The story selection is also very topical. Probably the team needs to get a few shows under their belts and work through this stuff. Good start.

Who is Kristi Leskinen and why haven’t I seen her before?

Sun Microsystems stock is trading down a couple of cents as I write this, at $4 even, so I guess this means Wall Street is not expecting much from today’s after the close quarterly earnings announcement. Sure those were the days of the dot com bubble but I remember when the share price was surging almost every day. If the change was only 25 or 30 cents we’d be grumbling after work. Up, up and split, up, up and split. The stock was $48/share on Sep. 1, 1998, the day NetDynamics offically became part of Sun and peaked at a (split-adjusted) $514.56 exactly two years later. Just reminiscing, not likely to ever see such things again. Except that investor psychology does get caught up in itself and so maybe we will.

I installed WordPress at work today and man, that was unbelievably easy; can’t point you to it since it’s behind the firewall. They claim to have a Blogger import tool, the instructions are pretty straightforward, and if it doesn’t choke on my 3,000+ entries this might be the time I change systems. We’ll see.

I don’t know what they did but Comcast made some change in their broadband net access system and instead of improving speed we are now seeing constant service interruptions. Swell.

Full-time Report: Juventus 0 – 0 Liverpool. Liverpool played to a scoreless draw at Juventus in the second game of their home and home Champions League series without Steven Gerrard but with the surprise early returns of Xabi Alonso and Djibrille Cisse from injury. Since they won the first game last week 2-1, the Reds make it to the Final Four. Of course, the competition doesn’t get any easier because the next opponent is Chelsea (best team in the EPL by far this season) in two weeks and then the week after, the day before my birthday–what a wonderful birthday present winning this match up would be! But W00T for today, because almost nobody expected us to come home from Italy with this result.

Rising Son, part of the post-television relaunch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is an example of how publishers force (mainly) science fiction writers to fit stories into a marketable, brand name universe to get published. Sometimes, despite the formulas required by such structure, the author’s talents and ideas meld with the characters and we get a story well told. S.D. Perry made that happen with this book, published in early 2003.

Set in the months after his father Benjamin returned to life with the Prophets, Jake Sisko has found an ancient prophecy and then been tossed an enormous distance into the Gamma Quadrant. Nearly dead, Jake’s crippled ship is snatched out of space by the crew of a freebooting ship named the Even Odds. Perry has put together an interesting, diverse crew and framed the situation in the GQ that doesn’t ignore the Dominion but doesn’t put them in an overwhelming position.

Overall, this reminds me of the New Frontier books by Peter David, at least the first few of which (I think I stopped reading after nine or ten) at least were decent. Other than Jake, and an ‘guest starring’ appearance by a long lost Bajoran religious leader, all the characters are new with this title, all the settings are new. I have no doubt Paramount and Perry would’ve been happy to make this into more than one book but for whatever reason that didn’t happen.

recommended

My two buddies: Garret gets a digital smooch from CJR Daily while Karl gets an even bigger one from Jay Rosen’s PressThink. Rosen especially is on target with his suggestion to stop inviting the same usual suspects over and over.

File under small world: A fellow MeFite is in media all over the world as he is the next groom after Charles to be wed at Windsor Guildhall.

Economic View: A Tax Increase That Bush Didn’t Mention: “By about 2008, Mr. Burman estimates, the alternative minimum tax will generate so much money that it would be cheaper to abolish the regular income tax.” Basically, this will turn into another way the Bush Crew will put one over on the masses by claiming to do otherwise will raise taxes. ReformAMT, indeed.

HyperHistory Online, a very interesting experiment in UI design and definitely something not possible before the web; one wonders if this presentation style could be (easily) applied to a bigger data set (I’m guessing) like Wikipedia. Not that there isn’t a useful quantity of information already at HHO with more added regularly but one wonders if merging would be in the best interests of both projects. Wikipedia doesn’t have an article on the project so after hitting the big orange Publish Post I think I’ll break my cherry by adding one. [via paradox1x]

Later: Well, let’s just say that for all the pages of helpful material and tutorials, creating a (good) new page on Wikipedia is less than easy. Searching again, however, shows that several pages already mention this site and so I didn’t go futher than adding it to the Themed Timelines page.

The New York Times has a brief interview with Steve Van Zandt, The Boss: A Rocker Redux, about how many years in the music business it took him to understand the money side. Probably would have been different, taken less time, if his (amazingly underrated!) solo records had sold better.

We were at the U2 concert tonight at the HP Pavillion. Awesome music, great stage and lighting design, I can still smell the weed my neighbors were getting toasting on. I had a stomach bug, though, and between our seats being pretty much at the top and in the middle of a row, the sound at a volume I’m just not used to any more and the concrete shaking, I was dizzy and naseous, thought the secondhand pot might relax my tummy but no dice. So we bought a couple of t-shirts (Viv got a black one with a big slashing V on the front) and a couple of buttons and called it a night as they played Sunday Bloody Sunday. I would have been more upset but since we bought an extra pair of tickets and sold them for what the four cost me, and because Viv is such a sweetheart, I’m not. Vertigo and New Year’s Day were great to hear.

To some degree I’m surprised Garret didn’t link this William Safire essay covering Robert O’Harrow Jr.’s No Place to Hide and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, the subject matter’s right up his discomfort zone, but this being the weekend and all he probably deserves some slack. Safire, recently retired from his OpEd column, is clearly uneasy at the increasing destruction of any remaining personal privacy by the converging interests of government and business and so uses this piece, nominally a book review, to have his say.

You may remember that Safire has generally been a member of the small government/poweful military faction of the American conservatives, not a Neocon or evangelical. He always seemed to favor engagement with any and all, as long as Americans interests were served, but not in the arrogant, dismissive manner of the current Administration. Safire certainly has not been a proponent of the Big Brother invasiveness coming to light in recent days.

So when he sees the problem as sufficient to return to political punditry, I have to sit up and take notice. Since becoming aware of such government programs as Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness and CAPPS 2 and corporate chicanery at ChoicePoint and LexisNexus, I’ve done a bit of thinking on the topic and decided there’s little to be done (besides voting and writing against Republicans, which I already do) other than to accept it as another distasteful yet semi-necessary aspect of modern life.

As someone pointed out to me in a discussion a few days ago, other than the hassle factor, what real consequences result from being an identity theft victim? The banks or their insurers will generally make you whole and pay for credit monitoring services to make sure the damage has stopped. There is a cost at the aggregate level, admittedly, of insurance and systems to manage the problem, spread among all of us. Then one also wonders about the psychic and emotional costs and whether the easy availability through technology of the means to commit these crimes is the last straw between temptation and crime for some people.

I wonder too if we will soon reach a place where individuals will need to prove their are, well, themselves and have trouble at times succeeding. If their are no real secret identifiers such as social security number or mother’s maiden name because those facts are in hundreds or thousands of computer files, what will we do? Biometrics may suffice when we’re in the same room as the person testing our identity but not necessarily over the phone or the Internet. Current schemes for securing communication, SSL and the like, are too easily defeated.

Already I see trouble brewing by Googling my name, with another Mountain View resident and several others around the country showing up with it as well. ChoicePoint and their ilk may claim to have some new digital fingerprint that uniquely idientifies everyone but excuse me if I doubt their ability to prove that. And of course these companies are no more willing to allow outside experts to examine the validity of the systems, no more than the voting machine manufacturers or proprietary operating system vendors.

In the end, this is another element which will only contribute to a time of troubles that I see coming soon.

Last night in line at the supermarket the woman (Asian) in front of me purchased two five pound bags of frozen corn. Off the kernel. Nothing else. What recipe could possibly require that?