A message to the woodpeckers

This is where you get food. It is called a tree.

This is a house. I can assure you that there will be no food in the freshly-painted, completely unnatural siding.

Retards.

Signs of hope?

Both Glenn Greenwald and James Wolcott have recently pointed to signs of hope that there may be a "sea change" coming in our political discourse. I hope their right, but I find it interesting that both writers cited Jon Stewart. Specifically, Wolcott wrote

The thumping success of Rosie on The View, like Keith Olbermann's ratings insurgence and Jon Stewart's masterful fencing with John McCain, is testament that the feargrip headlock of the Bush era is well and truly over, the days of deference to daddy-knows-best authority are done.

I'm as big a Daily Show fan as anyone, but those guys have been doing what they do for a long time now. I don't think you can point to them as any marker of a larger change in politics or the media. Same goes for Rosie, who has also never been shy about speaking her mind (anyone remember the Tom Selleck/NRA bit on her old talk show?). I'm glad that Olbermann's getting good ratings, but perhaps because he's a sportscaster he's also something of an anomaly. The true test will come when the network personalities and Washington press corps start taking cues from the comedians and sportscasters.

Yay

Here's a fun way to start the day.

Hee hee

Humor unintended, I suspect. Art on the page probably NSFW, although to my eyes it's definitely tilts more "art" and less "smut."

The Secret Sketchbook: "If you feel uncomfortable when people catch you drawing them, imagine how hard it would be to draw the patrons in a strip club. If they caught you drawing them they would probably be upset, but then again maybe Searle didn't have that problem because their attention was firmly focused elsewhere."

Anyone talk to the sysadmins?

Something I don't get in all the coverage of whether Karl Rove and/or others in the White House did or did not delete their emails-- it shouldn't matter. As a rule, email doesn't go directly from one computer to the other. It goes from the sender's machine to a mail gateway, through the intertubes to the recipients email server, and only then is downloaded to the recipient's machine. These email servers are not controlled by Karl Rove. It shouldn't make a whit of difference whether Karl did or did not delete his emails. All of his email traffic should have been captured by the mail servers and tucked away, safe from his grubby little paws.

I'm not an email sysadmin, but it didn't take that long to find out how to do this for both SendMail and Exchange. Surely the White House and RNC sysadmins are well aware of this.

Redeeming qualities of sports reporting

I missed it this morning, but "It's Only a Game" took on both Imus and the Duke rape case, with a swipe at Guantanamo. Generally speaking I'm not a huge sports fan, but one thing I do like about sports reporting and commentary is that there is a strong streak of cutting through the bullshit to get directly to the point. Normally this doesn't break out of the confines of game mechanics, but when it does the sports guys can be a real breath of fresh air. I don't know why this is-- maybe because they normally discuss things that everyone knows don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, so there's no culture of pussyfooting around.

Heeya!

The Six Sigma course I've been taking the last couple of months is officially over, and I am now the proud owner of a bona-fide green belt...which I guess I'm supposed to wear while standard-deviating common variance into submission. Today's session was devoted to going over the quiz we took earlier in the week and doing presentations. Since we were given genuine issues to investigate, senior management came in to hear what we had to say. I didn't actually participate in the presentation itself, but it seemed to be well-received by the powers that be.

We were then challenged to use our newly-won sigmafied problem slaying skills within a month, which is all fine & dandy except that we're barreling into the end of the fiscal year and can't really take the time to seek and destroy. However, I've been told that the green belts are a sure-fire way to score chicks, so there is that.

Farting around

Lots of stuff on Kurt Vonnegut today, who joined Isaac Asimov yesterday. There's a lot of fun stuff getting put out there about him, which is great. My own favorite memory of him doesn't actually come from his writing, but from a speech he gave at Indiana University while I was a graduate student. In between remarks on his crush on the woman at the post office and whether he did or did not use a Macintosh, he emphatically declared that "People were put on this planet to fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different!" Whenever I start to feel guilty about wasting time, I eventually remember that and feel much better about whatever it is I'm up to.

Miscellaneous nerd stuff

Two things that I've been sitting on for a couple days now.

First, a basic post on WebKit, the engine behind Safari. The post itself doesn't have much meat in it, but there is a comment below that points out you can install WebKit on Linux, and therefore have a way of testing (sort of) how Safari will treat your web site, even if you don't have a Mac.

Second, a long list of Mac OS X applications, tips, and tricks. Definitely worth a peek.

Compare and contrast

Huh.

One little two little three little sigmas...

I've been taking a Six Sigma class the last several weeks, and today I took a quiz to see how much I could remember of the jargon. Yes, I'm sure others would disagree with that characterization, but c'mon-- 40 multiple choice questions? That's not going to really capture much now, is it? Anyway, it was an open-book test, but I was lazy & did it in my office without any references handy. I got 31 out of 40, for a 114% score. Yes, you read that right-- 114%. For each question I got right, I scored 3 out of 2.5. Neat, eh?

Prepping

This is telling.

WWJB

Fiscal year follies

Put this on the list of things that drive me crazy.

I don't talk about work much here, but I don't think I've made it any secret that I work in a university. More specifically, I work for a unit on campus that receives no state-line funding. Every dollar we bring in comes from a client who pays us to build them a web site or application. In that respect we work very much like a business does. However, there is one important distinction between how we work and how a business works. While a business gets to count up its profits, at the end of the fiscal year we have to make sure we don't show a profit. They have loosened things somewhat, but essentially come July 1 every year we start out with nothing in the bank.

Where things get nutty is that other units on campus have the same compelling need to zero out their accounts, too. This money is not spent uniformly throughout the year, however. Because folks don't know at the beginning of the year what their expenses are going to be, they tend to hang on to every cent they have. Near the end of the year they then have a frantic dash to spend everything in their account. As you can probably guess, this means that a lot of money gets sent our way as the fiscal year draws to a close. Unfortunately, there's only so much work we can do in the waning months of the year, so we sometimes end up getting paid in one year for work that we do in the next. As long as the cycle continues that's theoretically okay, but we end up doing a fair amount of work "for free," and some requests we just have to turn down altogether.

All that said, it turns out there's actually a loophole in the rules. Apparently the rule about spending all of our money only applies to income that originates from a university account. Money that comes from outside the university is not subject to that rule, and can be rolled over indefinitely. What that means is that in order to server our university clients better, we may actually be well-served to seek out non-university clients. It boggles the mind.

Uncle Sam's Suicide, redux

Back in the 2004 presidential election, I created a campaign poster of Uncle Sam threatening to blow his brains out with the caption "Vote Bush for president." Funny thing-- it turns out that I was giving Bush too much credit, and the same authoritarian streak that he has actually runs through the Republican party in general:

Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Mitt Romney can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today's Republican Party, Romney's openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note:

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

No word on how McCain might have responded, but given his constant genuflection to the Bush line one has to suppose that he would have a similar answer. What I would like to see is how the Democratic candidates respond to the same question. Assuming that they have a more reasonable ("American"?) answer, the next thing I want to see is for this to be a real campaign issue. Do we want this country to continue drifting towards dictatorship and totalitarianism, or do we want to return to the America that respects individual rights, and once upon a time was the moral leader of the world? I know where I stand.