BillSaysThis

ROFL: My Springsteen page is number one on Google for bruce springsteen a fucking liberal!

I was invited to attend a recruiting schmooze with nearly a dozen ‘Softies tonight from the US BMO Server Marketing team and, as with so many other things, Microsoft does it differently. Not only was this a very different, interesting way for them to meet candidates (and vice versa), when I spoke with the recruiter managing the event just before leaving to say thanks she asked me how they could do it better next time.

This was three hours in the cafeteria in MSFT’s Mountain View Building 1. The seven top managers of the group plus recruiters flew down for the day (they have a 6:30 AM flight home tomorrow) and about 60 candidates like myself were in attendance. A nice table of finger food was set out and there was an open bar well-stocked with name brand alcohol and wines. A bunch of giveaways were raffled off including an XBox–I won a copy of Office Professional–and everybody got some chatchkis to take home including a 64MB flash drive. My point is, the company spent some meaningful dollars for about 10 current openings.

I was really jazzed by the opportunities. There were three group managers who I spent private time with after an earlier walk around when all the candidates could get a couple of minutes with each of them. All the positions are in Redmond but for an opportunity to work on the major pieces of businesses represented here I’d definitely relocate. Scoble seems to be doing okay after making the move.

Don’t want to say too much about the specifics, the point here is for all the pointing and hatred directed their way, Microsoft seems to know how to do business and not just produce technology and this event is a good example of it.

Keep your fingers crossed.

• Karl: I swiped reused the post title from this disappointed, heavily involved Philly rocker–Morning report–and especially recommend to you his 10 point checklist at the end of this post. For #2 I think that we need to find a way to express ethics and morality without tieing them so closely to (a specific) religion.
• TalkingPointsMemo: Don’t forget the 10 Year Plan to build a Democratic infrastructure to compete at all levels, if we aren’t too late. Will the second term see widespread visible suppression of our First Amendment rights in the name of national security? Don’t count on the Supreme Court to protect us, not unless the Bush Crew makes the kind of mistake Eisenhower did with Earl Warren, and I’m sure in this age of utter scrutiny that’s just not going to happen.
  
• Dan Gillmore: Four More Years asks, as Karl does, where did the center go? How did the Republicans convince so many people to vote against their own economic interests? Especially since Bush comes across to so many of us non-supporters as more talking the talk than walking the walk on the values that supposedly won those votes.
• Andrew Sullivan: Demonizing gays was a (terribly sad, IMO) tactic used in many states but I hear a little voice saying it could end up backfiring if Bush continues to largely ignore the social issues legislatively in favor of War and Corpocracy (two sides of the same coin).
  
• Kristof: Living Poor, Voting Rich has a key point, that “the Democratic Party’s first priority should be to reconnect with the American heartland.” Goes back to Karl’s list.
• Doc: The people spoke, he says, but I wonder about Diebold, Sequoya and ESS in ways that can never be proven.
• Garret: How this Democrat is feeling at the moment is flat on his back in the middle of the road waiting to be run over.
• Matt: Stages, I can’t see most of the people on our side considering the second stage. We have nothing to bargain with except maybe Senate filibusters and Bill Bennett, telegraphing the Administration’s view of the 51-48popular vote split as an overwhelming madate, is already calling for a decimation of the secular Left.

Oh what a beautiful morning indeed!

Man, sitting here watching the election returns, small numbers trickling in. Races here and there going as expected, some surprises. Barama making mush of Keyes in Illinois. Georgia showing true Republican colors. Lines out the door past the closing time in Ohio. Cool NY Times Flash results.

Looks good for Kerry, 77 to 66 on CNN as I write this.

5:35 PST: Bush 87 to 77 but no surprises in the states in so far. Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) will leave polls open an extra 90 minutes to accomodate voters in line, PA is still too close to call.

6:21 PST: Dewey Beats Truman! Oops, that was the wrong headline 56 years ago. Mongiardo is eating The Bun. The South looks solid for Bush, if Kerry wins do we move closer to a Second Civil War?

8:47 PST: Gay marriage is going down in flames all over, which is stupid and sucks. FL for Bush is same as last time. Polls, schmolls. Ohio, we count on you to keep us from four more years.

10:22 PST: Sad, sad, sad. Ohio went red and even if Kerry takes every electoral vote left, that would only throw the decision to the House. So four more years. Thanks a bunch, Ohio and Florida. People have said that if Bush was re-elected they’d hit the road to Canada, Europe or wherever but I wonder where you can go to get away from the effects of this outcome.

Kottke: How’d your vote go?

Dear President (______): Appropriate for Halloween, the government economics of the next few years are scary no matter which candidate wins.

Unable to connect on passes through the midfield most of the night, the Earthquakes playoff run ended tonight with a 3-0 loss at Kansas City; San Jose lost the home and home round by a 3-2 aggregate score. Sad result for us fans, still not knowing who will control the franchise next season or if it will even continue in the South Bay. Almost certainly this was Landon Donovan’s last game wearing our shirt as Bayern Leverkusen, the German club that owns his rights (and has loaned him to MLS the last three years), needs his proven ability to control the ball to push them into the top four in the Bundesliga and possibly Champions League as well.

Referee Terry Vaughn made a number of questionable calls. Not the least of which was the non-issuance of a yellow card to Wizard midfielder Kerry Zavagnin in the 42nd minute that so outraged Donovan that our star screamed enough at Vaughn to get himself shown the yellow instead. All Zavagnin, LD’s USA teammate, did was nearly rip his jersey off to prevent him from getting free in the offensive zone.

In the end I go back to bad passing as the core reason for the loss. All night the ball was not hit properly–I’m talking to you Richard Mulrooney, Brian Mullan, Ramiro Corrales and Todd Dunivant–allowing the Kansas City players to disrupt nearly every forward move. Their three goals were mostly the fair reward to well-struck balls though the second was a gift from bad defending by Brian Ching.

Next year? One can only wonder about the fate of our Quakes.

Go to Guerrilla News Network and watch Eminem’s new video Mosh. Doesn’t matter if you are into rap or not, this is one of those songs that cuts across simplistic labels. The lyrics are clear and clean, the nusic is a basic beat and pulsing synth, and the message is straightforward: Bush must go. I really am beginning to wonder if get out the vote actions like this video, Rock the Vote and Puff Daddy’s Vote or Die will get out a substantial number of younger voters, exactly the people who don’t get counted in all those polls quoted in the news every day and probably more than enough to push the election to John Kerry. Take heart! [via Adam Rifkin’s Relax]

Once again Joe responded to my CSS issues–what a helpful, friendly guy–and gave me the push needed to find a useful answer to displaying a positive link to this website in the RSS feed. I did use the display: none CSS trick but in line with the daily Date headings, which do get picked up properly. Nice.

Just sending some love to my wonderful TS1 on the third anniversary of the first night we went out together. Boing boing boing, Baby V! Got to say thanks to my old NetD buddy Joel Henderson because if he hadn’t invited me up for a little Halloween Peanuts viewing I’d probaly never have met her. We went for dinner at Cha Cha Cha’s in The Haight early, a little stroll in the drizzle under a shared umbrella and then over to Joel’s apartment where we sat on the couch and held hands. To commemorate the day, she gave me a really lovely handmade photobook with some highlights of our time together.

When Joe helped me debug the CSS issue over at JHTC, he also mentioned “BTW — when one visits an individual post on your site, you have no navigation to your main page — the user has to literally edit the location to navigate — poor usability.” And he’s right. Uggh.

So I’ve been working this afternoon on correcting Joe’s heads up about the individual posts here and almost had the answer using a simple template fix until I found out that Blogger insists on sticking a trailing slash on whatever value one enters in the Archive URL field of the Archive Settings page. Which breaks my scheme.

I next thought I would use a CSS trick with <a class=”x” href=”http://www.blogger.com/app/full blown link”>text</a> where the class is simply display: none and URL is the one you would get as the item’s permalink on my page. That hides the text on the public web page as intended. But doesn’t help the RSS feed since, seemingly, Blogger only includes the text from the post body in the RSS item despite this extra template text falling inside the RSS div. Still no luck, sad to say.

Switched the feed from RSS 2.0 to Atom 0.3. Not sure why I thought this would help but seemed, somehow, that it would. No luck at all.

I guess this is a limitation of Blogger, at least as it exists now. Me and my zillion-plus readers will have to suffer.

Due to issues with Blogger, I’m repeating my endorsement of John Kerry to participate in Lessig and Winer’s Presidential Enblogments 2004. Every day more information comes out that strengthens my belief that a second Bush term would be disastrous for America.

Added a few more scanned in photos to the Family2 gallery: my Grandma Weiner, Dad with his antlers, Mom, Michael and Dad, and one of the few (maybe the only?) surviving photos from my Bar Mitzvah party.

You know, sometimes, even when the trailer gives up a key moment of the movie or episode, if the creatives do their jobs right the punch is still delivered.

Garret: Quack-quack, Mr Bush.

Not every movie is made so that people can sit in their seats and get 90 minutes of mindless enjoyment. Not that mindless enjoyment is a bad thing, just not what some people want every time. 21 Grams is not mindless entertainment, not even close.

The three leads–Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro–do outstanding work as do several of the supporting cast (Melissa Leo, Eddie Marsan). The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto does some great things with light and contrast. The underlying concept, connecting three people who have no obvious connections, is smart.

But what really takes this movie out of the ordinary and out of the mainstream is the almost random sequencing. I was completely confused until about half way in because director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was determined to strain the limits of comprehension. This will turn many people off but in the end leaving early will be their loss. To me the sequence is logical if you consider the emotional development instead of just plot.

recommended

Much appreciation to the proprietor of jenett.radio for his help with my little CSS problem.

Props to Landon Donovan! He’s been nominated for the Honda Player of the Year Award for the third straight year. DaMarcus Beasley and Carlos Bocanegra are the other two nominees and one wonders if one of them will knock Landon off his two year hold–he’s the only player to win this twice in a row so a threepeat would set a great precedent.

I’m too biased to give a real prediction but I will say Bocanegra is playing 90 minutes consistently for Fullham in the English Premier League while Beasley is mainly coming on as a second half sub for Dutch Eredivise frontrunners PSV Eindhoven. Both of the challengers are US National Team starters as well but Donovan is once again leading the American side with five goals so far this year.

My heart says Donovan is too easy for the voters, the sentimental choice will be to give him the hat trick before he leaves for Germany. Beasley, Bocanegra or perhaps someone else can drive the car home in 2005.

Hell is a half hour to kill and MetaFilter returning a Could not connect to JRun Server error instead of the latest links and comments.