Summer's here and the time is right for declaring independence.

Last Saturday was, as my (2) American readers know, Independence Day here in the USA. It's a good day to be deafened by the alarms of firetrucks or by fireworks, professional and amateur, and to (weather permitting) celebrate our freedoms with hopefully sufficiently cooked hamburgers from the grill.

It turns out summer, particulary July, is a popular time to throw off the chains of colonialism or general oppression. Witness:

Algeria	07-05 July 5	Independence from France in 1962.
Argentina	07-09 July 9	Independence declared from Spain in 1816.
Bahamas	07-10 July 10	Independence from the United Kingdom in 1973.
Belarus	07-03 July 3	Liberation of Minsk from German occupation by Soviet troops in 1944.
Belgium	07-21 July 21	Independence from Netherlands (Belgian revolution). Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld takes the oath as first king of the Belgians in 1831.
Burundi	07-01 July 1	Independence from Belgium in 1962
Cape Verde	07-05 July 5	Independence from Portugal in 1975.
Colombia	07-20 July 20 and August 7	Independence from Spain in 1810.
Liberia	07-26 July 26	Independence from the United States in 1847.
Malawi	07-06 July 6	Independence from the United Kingdom in 1964.
Peru	07-28 July 28	Independence from Spain in 1821.
Rwanda	07-01 July 1	Independence from Belgium in 1962.
São Tomé and Príncipe	07-12 July 12	Independence from Portugal in 1975.
Solomon Islands	07-07 July 7	Marks exit / independence from United Kingdom in 1978.
Slovakia	07-17 July 17	Declaration of Independence in 1992 (only a remembrance day), de jure independence came on January 1, 1993 after the division of Czechoslovakia (public holiday).
United States of America	07-04 July 4	(Fourth of July) Declaration of Independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1776.
Vanuatu	07-30 July 30	Independence from United Kingdom and France in 1980.
Venezuela	07-05 July 5	Declaration of independence from Spain in 1811.

This list, selectively pulled from the Wikipedia page as of today at 9:34 pm EST (if I were to brush up on my MQL skills I could have pulled more interesting results from Freebase - maybe some other time), proves my point. I'd like to use the examples set by all these brave people who fought and in many cases died as inspiration to get rid of shit I don't need in my own little life. Here we go:

The arrogant and ignorant

The arrogant I can suffer to live, if they have something to bring to the table. The ignorant who make an effort to overcome it are OK with me. The both arrogant and ignorant can fuck off and die. Unfortunately, I currently work in the corporate world, where the density of arrogant ignorance reaches neutron star levels.

Stuff

As I near 40, it is clear I have accumulated far too much stuff. Not only that, having a job and a house means I continue to buy stuff I don't need, because I have money to buy it, and a place to store it (for now). I recently got a Kindle, which, like my iPod, stores rooms full of old-style content within its tiny case, yet still I pick up new books at a rate that never slows down. I need to cool it and start spending more money on food, because a good dinner might not last particularly long, but neither do you or I. I should also probably move into a smaller house, but that might be a tough sell.

My crushingly oppressive reading queue

The Kindle didn't really help here. I'm not blaming my Kindle (and definitely not giving it up), because as mentioned previously, I somehow manage to accumulate enough books, magazines, and crap I printed out from the web to ensure I will never, ever catch up.

Too many interests

There is something to be said for being the kind of obsessive who works on one job or idea 90 hours a week with no other interests or variety in life. At least you have a chance to get good at one or two things. Unfortunately, outside of the constraints of grad school or a startup, one is free to be interested in absolutely anything that strikes one's fancy, and to never really get deeply enough into anything to make any grand or even minor progress.

It doesn't particularly help having a boring, relatively easy job. Why not replace the shitload of old, crappily configured SQL Server systems with an awesome Hadoop cluster? Why answer moronic support calls when you could probably hack together a chatbot that could handle 75% of the tickets? Why write code in Java, or, god forbid, Visual Basic.NET when Python is much, much more interesting? Why use Windows when you can use MacOSX or Linux? Why have one machine for that matter, when you can run a server room's worth of virtual machines?

I should just pick 2 or 3 things and burrow into them in a deranged trainspotterish obsession.

My 3,000,000 online identities and accounts.

You OAuth and OpenID people need to sort this out. I got too many passwords, too many places to go to read stuff. I can't believe I still have a hotmail account.

Fortunately, many of the forums I used to frequent have become so shatteringly dull that it's been easy to dump them, so I guess that's a small victory.

Sloth

I know healthcare in the US is fucked up, and it looks like maybe somebody in Washington will try to do something about it, but I've already got enough crap to take care of that I don't know how I can save Health Care, certainly not with lobbyists for the small minority of people who actually benefit from the status quo paying over $1 million a day to preserve that sorry status quo. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do (aside from throw money at the problem), nor whether I'd do it if I knew what it was. So there's sloth. Healthcare is just a specific example here, not the only place sloth is keeping me down.

You Don't Do What You Want To Do, But You Do The Same Thing Every Day

I think that line was in one of the Dead Kennedys' songs. It sufficiently describes the rut I need to get out of somehow. Give me liberty, or give me some free novels on my Kindle! I'll take what you've got!

Social Media Games Episode 1: LinkedIn

William Gibson famously said 'the street finds its own use for technology'. This is true, as the television show 'The Wire' has shown us. It's even more true that the bored and underemployed find their own uses for technology. Presented here are just a few games for those who want to use social media without being social media douchebags.

LinkedIn Schadenfreude Games

Ostensibly, LinkedIn is a tool for networking, kind of a 'Facebook for professional adults'. While looking for pictures of drunk and or naked people doing embarrassing things on Facebook is a fun social media game for kids and HR personnel, LinkedIn can similarly be used as a source of Schadenfreude and other dubious glee.

The 'who's an independent consultant' game:

Notorious B.I.G. said 'You're Nobody Until Somebody Kills You'. Anybody who's been in 'the game' (whatever your game is) long enough has made a couple enemies. If you're feeling down, sometimes it's fun to look up your enemies on LinkedIn and look for those magic words, 'independent consultant', which 99% of the time means they lost their job (some people do in fact work as independent consultants, but the kind of corporate/political douchebags that are more likely to make your life miserable are, like balloon animals, not really suited to life in the wild).

Possible pitfalls:

You might find out somebody you really hate is now in your dream job. Now what're you going to do? Go down the list to the next asshole in your past, that's what you're going to do.

The Magical Disappearing Company Game:

This is one I've mentioned before. Again, everybody who's been around the block a few times has worked for a company that was shady (or, as Method Man might say, sheisty), possibly a small ramshackle mom-and-pop deal that was run like a family featured on the TV show 'Intervention'. You might not even want to put that company on your resume (although if the company has folded, what's your worry?) It is interesting to track down old co-workers and see if they include the company on their employment history. Usually, they didn't.

The Douche-errific 'Leadership' Blog Search:

On your LinkedIn profile you can provide a link to your website. Sometimes this website is a blog. While trench-level colleagues probably have techy blogs about stuff that's interesting to them (and maybe to you), managerial types are different animals. They provide the most laffs when the main subject of their blog is 'leadership', especially when in day-to-day life their leadership skills are raggedy at best. Then it's like reading that Martin Amis book 'Success' with the unreliable rich kid narrator who it turns out at the end is a complete wreck and has been lying all along.

I had a particularly fun session of this game recently when I passed a link to a douchebaggy middle manager's leadership blog along to a friend who also knows the D.M.M. in question. He didn't bother to see who was the author at first (nor did I say), so he had a good unbiased initial reaction, which in this case was: 'This is bullshit! Why did SDC send me this bullshit?'.

In the next episode: twitter, blip.fm, Facebook, and so on.

Chapter the Last of 'How Open Source Ruined My Life', or 'What am I gonna do with all these $%)(#^*% CDs?'

Back in the 90s I saw Larry Ellison on the TV talking about how much he hated the PC. He used those words: 'I hate the PC'. His problem with it: you have to go to the store and get software, then you go home and install it. It would be so much better if you could either download the code, or use a 'network computer', Larry's pet idea of the time.

Of course, around that time virtually everybody outside of industry and academia had dial-up modems, so even hearing a 10 second snippet of the Wu-Tang Clan required a good 10 or 20 minute wait. As for the Network Computer, that dog didn't hunt, although with the Cloud billowing up, the idea has some merit and may be coming back.

I didn't understand the software in physical form hate until I got a job where I was given an MSDN subscription. I got the job at a great time, b/c the new head of IT had just started, and he was spending money left and right, so anybody in sprinkler distance of the guy caught some of the overspray. Since I was a developer type, I got to have a nice double-monitor set-up, a monster desktop machine with a monster hard drive and monster fans that made noise like a monster jet, and an MSDN subscription. Like I said, I started during a really good window, as not long after that it was kind of like the Simpsons episode where Homer gets elected chief garbage man, and Springfield has the best sanitation service imaginable for the one week it takes Homer to piss away a year's budget. That episode featured the voice of Steve Martin as the original garbage man who Homer replaced.

I got right on the project of learning about Microsoft's 'ecosystem'. Specifically this meant the not-too-shabby language, C#, the nifty .NET framework, and in some cases the very shabby abomination that was VBScript. Oy vey. Every month, Microsoft sent me a nice packet in the mail of CDs, color coded to indicate were they O/S, Server software (e.g. SQL Server), or Development Tools. At first everything was lovely b/c there was some shiny new-ness, and I had plenty of drawer space, too.

Eventually I'd come to hate those fucking CDs, esp the 'MSDN library for June of 2003' or whatever. WTF was it, 1989? We don't have the internet for this kind of info? I had a nice CD folder that quickly filled up, so I had to tend to keeping that up to date like it was an extra job. Co-workers kept bugging me for freebies of MS software and I had to tell them to buzz off and get their own MSDN subscription, b/c I was a good MS citizen that way. I'm not gonna piss off Steve Ballmer by violating a license and have him make an example of me. Also, I'm not the fucking ice cream man of Microsoft software! I got shit to do!

Even worse, I started to experience a combination of the usual Microsoft rot and decay, accompanied by the MS geniuses' ADHD. 'Access databases like this. NO! Like this! Wait, here's how you really should! That previous version of .NET? What are you, one of those guys left on a Pacific Island who thinks WWII is still going on? Get with the program, Margaret.'

I grew weary of that quickly. I have always wanted to learn new things, but constantly learning new ways to do old and, let's face it, trivial things doesn't really get me jazzed. Wow, if I drag and drop this icon in my IDE I can READ data from the DATABASE? Holy fucking shit, don't tell the NSA about this or they'll shut you down for making this technology available to our enemies!

Additionally, since Homer dragged his feet on all efforts to get other developers suited up for MS greatness, including getting MSDN for them (as surely as I was buried in CDs and the telling ppl to leave me alone, in addition to other responsibilites, Homer was sucking on a fire-hose of tasks and complaints and general pleas to save the world by this time), I was stuck maintaining and modifying all this crap myself.

Being a not particularly negative (really!) type, I said fuck that, downloaded Eclipse for any Java Dev needs, started using Python for scripting (and virtually everything, actually - using Django after fucking with ASP.NET was like being allowed to use both of your arms to type after having to use only one), and let the MSDN subscription expire. And now everybody's happy, even Homer, b/c we never pester him to get us the software we'd need to do our job, if our job was to develop to the Microsoft ecosystem, which it absolutely, positively, is NOT. He and his crew are happy figuring out the ins and outs of Exchange Server from here to eternity.

So how did open source ruin my life in this case? Well, again, it set my bar of tolerance for MS's monkeyshines really low, possibly even lower than that of the EU. So my potential for making big bucks running around cleaning up the messes of .NET 'developers' who got too far outside of the corporate demo code comfort zone and made a godawful hash of things was DESTROYED! Curse you, RMS! Curse you, Linus! I weep for what could have been.

Actually, that's just some sunscreen that got in my eye. Never mind.

I'm gonna take a break from techy subjects now! That's enough! There is too much frivolity I've been neglecting.

Sucka Java Developers

(Apologies to RUN-DMC the ODB, and GZA/Genius)

Sucka JD's

When I grab the mic with intent to damage ya
better drink the red bull to build your stamina
I'm here to drop some truth and some science
about sucka JDs and the way they do violence

They went to school to get the Java knowledge
But sometimes they act like they flunked outta college
They know web frameworks for days and days
But when it comes to DB's they got lost in the maze

Got mad ORMs but they don't know SQL
But my shit is cane sugar and your code is Equal
I know how to write it functional or declarative
but when it comes to codin' all you got is imperative

You think Selects are something Bud makes
that's why you're a meatball, but I'm a steak
so take your API and get the hell out of town
You're just a sucka JD, you sad-faced clown

Sorry about that blue template I had.

I don't know what I was thinking with that.

'Science involves confronting our absolute stupidity'

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/05/the_importance_of_being_stupid.html

From the Journal of Cell Science, by way of The Make Blog.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid - that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

So...the next time you hear some knuckle-dragging creationist haul out that hoary old cliche about 'Scientists think they know everything' or 'Science can't explain everything' or 'You scientists may be smart but you're still going to hell', point them to this article.

Actually, don't bother. Just tell them to fuck off. It's not like we have time to put up with that bullshit.

Good evening!

The long awaited Part 2 in the Series: How Open Source Ruined My Life

After the government job that introduced me to Linux, I took a job with a consulting company in New Jersey. The salary was higher, but the cost of living was WAY higher, so the joke was on me. The company sent employees to bodyshop, seat-warmer jobs all around the country to support the elite group of 3 working on what was to become Sapphire/Web, a Java-based Application Server that had the first-mover advantage of getting a couple clients before the next wave came along and ate their lunch.

Mostly what I remember about my time there is roller-blading and watching the Rockford Files. I also remember some locals telling me to 'get my hocking playing ass the fuck out of here'.

The next gig involved testing embedded software for a medical device company in Indianapolis. We had to use those god-awful PCs with the abysmal Windows 3.x, but I had the sense to install Perl for a lot of my testing (to compare results to the expected results and so on and so forth). This was cool for a while, and I was surrounded by some smart and interesting people, but I was young and stupid and didn't know a good thing when I saw it. Also, with the dot-com boom heating up I felt like I had to get in on the web development game, and the opportunity came in the form of a job with some research scientists at a major pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis (the reader gets 3 guesses as to that company's name).

After an initial 2 week period of waiting for the corporate IT slugs to get their shit together enough to give us machines to work on (PCs again, f00k!) we hit the ground running. All the real work, fortunately, was to be done on UNIX machines, and an order was put in for us to get SGI workstations of our own. In the meantime, I figured out a way to get X Wndows running on my crappy PC, but before I knew it our O2s were in, and I was back in the high life again.

This job totally ruled at first, because we were working for and with very smart people on very cool stuff, and were pretty much set loose to use what we wanted to do things as we saw fit, but even early on I sensed something wasn't right.

There was an official corporate-sanctioned IT department that allegedly served our bosses, but I guess he got impatient with them and picked up some temp/consultant dudes to get his project rolling. This was all well and good, but the head of said department was Darth-Vaderesque in his enmity toward free and open software! A million years ago he had written software focused on his research domain (I think when he was a lowly grad student), and a few newsgroup searches revealed unhappy users wishing they could get a hold of the source so as to make necessary modifications to keep the software relevant to their field. Too bad for them, because dude didn't have time for coding, he was too busy playing the political game, and he for damn sure wasn't going to let anybody see or change his precious (although rapidly losing value) code.

Meanwhile I convinced my boss we needed a proper database b/c the text files of his hacked together version 1 just weren't going to cut it. He saw the light, but quickly got discouraged after we met with one of a thousand Oracle DBAs employed at this corporation. He (my boss) could see that the future involved many weeks, months, and perhaps years of waiting for the schema to be finalized, so he insisted on going back to text files. We (the team) saw the app hitting the ceiling really quickly, and the solution we came up with at the time (about 10 years ago) was to use MySQL (recently bought out by Oracle after first being bought by Sun).

Development barreled ahead. A clumsy assortment of HTML files assembled nightly by the monster batch script from hell were replaced by dynamically generated pages using Perl, the wonder language of the 90s. The researchers were pretty happy, but Darth and his gang, not so much.

Also around this time the company brought on a new CIO. He made his mark on the company by taking the Macs away from the Scientists and Programming types so he could 'standardize' on Windows (NT in this case: the NT stood for 'Nice Try'). This was a great way to make it look like he did something of value, when really all he was doing was pissing off all the people the company relied on to find new products so that the people on the business/marketing side (who loved them some Windows) could keep making money off the nerds' labor. Of course, this kind of thing was happening all over corporate America at the time, so he was not outstanding in his lameness, it was more the case that he was standing proudly atop the mountain of mediocrity!

Things gradually and slowly but surely slid downhill from there. Somebody caught wind that my boss was being a rascal and using us instead of the wonderful internal corporate IT resources, so I was thrown to the wind again. I ended up finding another job with the same company, but the stage was already set for more and more decrapitude as the result of a 'perfect shitstorm':

• The Mac to Windows migration made all the scientists grumpy, so working for them sucked ass
• The Mac to Windows migration made the 'senior' programmers grumpy, so working for them sucked ass
• The imposition of standards from above enforced a 'not the best tool for the job, but the tool I told your sorry ass to use' policy
• The dot-com explosion had the effect of 'bright flight' - all the bright people in corporate IT ran for the hills in search of millions, leaving the spiritually and mentally bereft behind.

It was a mess. Within 6 months I ran away screaming. Maybe a week or so before I left, a helpful Oompa Loompa from IT informed me that something I'd asked for whilst on the previous project (which by now seemed like a previous lifetime) would be ready REALLY SOON. Maybe he was joking. Maybe one day they did take care of my request, or perhaps their successors in India fielded the request. It didn't really matter anymore. But that's enough for now, and another installment will follow.

Now a moment of hero worship: Chuck D at Neal Marshall, Sat April 4 2009

On Sat. April 4, 2009 I had the opportunity to see one of the heroes of my college days (and today), Chuck D, founder of Hip-Hop legends Public Enemy, give a lecture at the Neal Marshall Black Culture Center Library on the IU campus. This event was somewhat under-publicized, and I was only lucky enough to hear about it thanks to some tweets from the Bloomington 'twitterati' on twitter the day before the event, specifically from deejayspikes and IUwebmonkey. Having mentioned it to a few friends since, they expressed regret at missing the chance to see Chuck's talk.

I met deejayspikes and another twitter friend, Allison, at the library shortly before the show began. I saw Chuck D and some of the event organizers outside, but left the man alone out of a mix of respect and shyness.

The talk kicked off with some rhymes by a student named Patrick. He was a white dude, and referred to himself as 'Hip Hop's Doogie Howser', and also had several other good lines, including:

you treat me like I fired God/hired Rod Blagojevich and gave him the job

He delivered two a capella rhymes, and then an event organizer introduced Chuck. He was dressed rather unassumingly, in a t-shirt with wings on the back, slightly baggy pants, and very white, new-looking shoes. He graciously gave props to Patrick in his famous baritone, and began by discussing the significance of the day, the 41st anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. I knew this was the case, but admittedly had been unsure until I remembered that the U2 song goes 'Early morning April 4/a shot rings out in the Memphis sky'. Chuck talked about being a child in the 60s, a time of much turmoil, with Vietnam and the assasinations of Malcolm X, Dr. King, and John and Robert Kennedy. History was a major topic of the lecture, as he covered the origin of the term 'Rhythm and Blues' (a more sensitive term than 'Race Music', which offended African Americans who had just come back from fighting in World War II and rightly demanded more respect than had been given them), and the history of black music in general, from the songs of the fields ('look out love music') to the evolution of hip hop from it's Jamaican dub and reggae origins.

Chuck stressed the importance of education and a disdain for anti-intellectualism and the 'dumbassification' of our culture. It's a message similar to the one Bill Cosby delivers, delivered in a different way. Chuck made an appeal to black students at IU: if you pay for a Hummer (he made the aside the 'the Hummer is a wack-ass car, I'm saying if you pay for an expensive car'), and you get a Hooptie, that is going to lead to frustration. So he emphasized the importance of making the most of their time at IU, getting the best GPA possible, learning as much as possible, and praising 'being a nerd about the stuff you like' something I, as a nerd, really liked hearing.

Chuck also covered the (welcome) dissolution of the record companies, saying that while record companies are dying, music itself is as strong as ever, with the internet giving the artist more power than ever to get their music out. He acknowledged that there may be a window that will close if for example Network Neutrality is over-ruled, and we find the free-flow of information we enjoy today restricted. Two phrases recurred like refrains: Chuck railed against 'the exploitation of scientists and artists' and being subjected to 'the radiation of a radio, TV, and movie nation'. During this discussion of artists and music, he gave a shout-out to deejayspikes, who he remembered as the DJ of Muncie's R.H.Y.T.H.M. Chuck has probably performed with a few thousand bands and artists, and met millions of people, but he remembered R.H.Y.T.H.M., and I thought that was really cool, and needless to say DJ Spikes dug getting a shout out from a hip hop legend (Chuck referred to him as an example of artists doing their own thing back before the Internet had made it easier, the D.I.Y. spirit one saw with punk and indie rock bands in the 80s and 90s and of course with hip hop crews).

And yes, Chuck talked about Flav! Of course he talked about Flav! He said essentially 'if you look at the structure of the black family, everybody's got somebody like Flav in the family' and said 'people asked what happened to Flav, I say what do you mean? That's Flav. He was that way from day one. Now, I never thought I'd see the day I'd see grown women on TV crying over him, but those women are more hung up on the drug of fame than anything to do with Flav.'

Obviously he said plenty more, and was funny and entertaining without backup music or dancers or lights. He displayed oratorial skills honed over years in both the rap and speaking circuit games. Afterwords he did a Q&A, and was asked about the Reverend Wright dust-up ('If you look at it, that guy was saying things a lot of people had been saying and thinking') and also about his more recent appearance on D.L. Hugley's show with Michael Steele. Chuck was asked why he didn't say more during the discussion, and he replied that as a general policy he doesn't want to be on a show that's just going to be black men yelling at each other. He said Michael Steele could put his foot in his mouth anyway without him participating in some sensationalist show of people screaming at each other for ratings (and he was right. See also: super-cool Obama in the debates with 'barely keeping a lid on it' McCain). Obama came up a couple of times. Chuck referred to him as 'possibly the greatest rapper ever. He has a great voice, great delivery, and he moves people. Have you ever seen an M.C. move so many people to tears with his words?'

After the lecture Chuck came over and shook DJ Spikes' hand and said 'hey how are you doing' and shook my hand, too. Afterwards he did a signing of his book, Fight The Power. I bought a copy as did Spikes, and I got to talk to Chuck for a couple minutes and do the gushing fan-boy thing, talking about how I was in college when 'It Takes a Nation of Millions...' came out and how much it rocked my world. Chuck was super-cool and friendly and altogether an awesome guy. I said it was great he was still getting the word out and he said 'I'm gonna keep getting out there getting the word out until they shut my ass up', which I thought was awesome. The man has plenty to say and says it with the skill of a legendary M.C.

How Open Source Ruined My Life, Part I

My life came off the rails in my mid-20s, right on schedule. I was either evicted from or rejected the academic world, depending on how I'm feeling when I tell the story. I flamed out of the Ph.D. program (Mathematics) in I.U. - not too shabby a program to flame out of, really.

At this point I had an apartment in Bloomington, also known as the town where people with Master's Degrees wash dishes at the Waffle House (which is now, and always has been, and always will be hiring). I worked for a bit for the University, teaching 'JumpStart' classes (basic computer skills) and got to teach classes on Netscape before Netscape went public.

While being a perfectly reasonable job (which, as a side effect, actually taught me some teaching/presenting skills I sorely lacked in grad school and was never taught while there) it was part-time, so I needed a 'real' job. I found one at a Naval Base in Southern Indiana (I'm not making this up). It paid 20K/yr (I'm not making this up either). When I told my father about it, I thought he would disown me, he was so disappointed I would even consider taking such a shitty paying job. For whatever reason, I wanted to stay in Bloomington, and that overruled free market highest bidder considerations.

The less said about the job, the better. However I did have a grand awakening there in that we used Linux. A previous contractor had switched everybody from the horrendous version of Windows in use at the time to Linux, instead of doing what he was supposed to be doing. So we all got to have the UNIX environment I'd gotten used to (spoiled by) while in grad school. I used Emacs (written by the great Richard Stallman) as my editor while coding. We all had Netscape, too, and got to waste time on the Internet before everybody else did.

Linux made the job tolerable. Interesting, even. I was so inspired that during Christmas break that year (I took numerous days off) I installed Slackware Linux (3.0) on my own machine, which was running the slightly less horrific Windows 95.

I really can't overstate either how horrible Windows was back then, or how wonderful Linux was by comparison. Had I been forced to use Windows on the job, I would not have tolerated it at all. I might have been forced to go into another field instead of staying in the IT gutter back when I was younger and had less to lose. So this is one way open source ruined my life. But it's not the only way. More shortly.

Elitist Liberals Visit The Creation Museum

Update 1/12/2025: Alex, the young man the museum made very mad, went on to acquire a Ph.D. at Harvard and now works as a chemist in the Boston area.

I am not particularly unusual in wanting to be there when history is unfolding. Last month I was excited about playing a tiny, tiny role in Obama's victory over John McCain. A few weeks ago, I went to the Creation Museum with my wife, two friends, and 3 of the friends' kids: one a junior in high school, another a seventh grader, the other ten years old. A bunch of smirky liberal-types making a trip to mock the Creation Museum was definitely not an historic event, but it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, we can look on the existence of such an embarrassing abomination in our nation as a 'high water mark' for the fundies' efforts to take over the show.

I may be completely wrong about that. I hope not. What I do know is we wanted to see this thing for ourselves, and since it is merely a few hours away, it was no big problem to fit a visit into a Saturday. The museum is located near where Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky meet, and Kentucky was the big loser here, as it is located within that state. There's some question as to whether the locals are happy about it, as evidenced by the bullet holes in a sign near the Museum (see above. Notice the Stop sign is unscathed).

Our first impression: it is a rather large building, and the grounds with the topiary christmas-light adorned dinosaurs are extensive. The parking lot was maybe half full. There were security guys out front directing traffic, assisted by their bloodhound.

Inside there was sticker shock when confronted by the ticket cost, which is about $20 a person, but we coughed it up. I'm sure some will be horrified I gave money to these folks, but I did it for science, so cut me some slack. The Amish or Mennonite people in front of us had no trouble with the admission, and we saw other patrons sporting beards or bonnets (but never both) throughout the day, so it appears to have caught on with that demographic, as well as with Ohio State graduates. We sure saw a lot of OSU sweatshirts that day.

Our first encounter with the generally helpful and friendly staff was with a guy named Steve. He told us the place was really only half finished; there were big things in the works. My wife said 'so, you're evolving?' and he said 'yeah', and told us about a soon-to-come attraction that was secret, but he could tell us it involved a man and a boat. We did the math, and I know that you, the reader, can too. We inquired about the 'Live Nativity' at 2pm. He told us the one at 2pm had no drama, but there was one at 6pm 'with drama'. It involved traveling to Bethlehem with a Roman Centurion so you could be taxed, and on the way you could see the baby Jesus and the manger and all that.

We got tickets not only for the museum but for something called 'created cosmos' in the Planetarium. More on that later. Near the ticket counter was a planetarium which apparently was involved in the space program somehow. It seemed rather random as it wasn't part of a bigger exhibit and didn't seem to have much to do with dinosaurs or floods, but it looked pretty sciencey I suppose.

We didn't have to walk far before encountering the first of many animatronic exhibits. A girl with a sly smirk fed a squirrel a carrot while a dinosaur who was clearly a carnivore hung out nearby, and across from them an Apatosaurus munched on some greens and made roaring noises. Here's a picture of the happy milieu:


To give you a better idea of the 'Uncanny Valley' quality of a lot of the humans, here's a close-up:



This was the first of many times I was really happy I'd left my 5-year-old daughter in the care of her grandparents.

Near this area we got schooled as to the many ways Adam's sins messed up life for everybody, causing everything from a switch from a strict vegetarian diet to Meat-Lovers Mania to the sudden transformation of once-harmless frogs to poisonous frogs:





This is in direct contradiction to the claims of a later room, where the theme is 'designed to _______'. Designed to swim. Designed to fly. Designed to cause bloody diarrhea and death. Just kidding about the last one - Ebola is not featured in the creation museum. We are to believe animals with teeth obviously 'designed' to tear flesh from bones used these teeth for vegan diets before Adam sinned.

After these insults to intelligence and common sense (the kids, particularly Alex, repeatedly remarked that the museum made them angry because some of the assertions made were so dazzlingly stupid), we went to an exhibit about the Grand Canyon. The main point of this exhibit seemed to be that no, it did not take millions of years to create the Grand Canyon, because sometimes when there's flooding a ditch can be created in a few hours. This was illustrated via a looping video which was about 40 seconds long. We watched it a few times because we wondered if we were missing something, but we weren't. There was nothing there. Repeating loops of audio or video were used rather liberally throughout the museum. It felt a bit like brainwashing.

Next we saw an exhibit about a fundie paleontologist and his Asian heathen friend. The Asian heathen is a recurring theme of the Creationists - a book in the gift shop tells the story of a young Christian girl whose Asian friend develops leukemia - caused, of course, by Adam's sin. The point here, such as it is, is that the two 'scientists' draw different conclusions because they have 'different starting points'. The Asian guy uses the scientific method, and the creationist says all the fossilized animals died in the flood because that's what it says in the Bible. Why he bothers getting dirty when he already knows all the answers is a question this exhibit doesn't answer.



It's not really clear what the point of this exhibit is. At the typical natural history museum, there are awesome skeletons of real dinosaurs, not mannequins representing imaginary paleontologists, let alone real ones, but again, this is not your typical museum, it is like a museum but without any of the science.

Later, we see a vision of what happens when the world 'turns its back on God'. Apparently, it looks like the alley of a big city, only, as my wife pointed out, 'without the urine smell'. She jokingly suggested I could fix that, but I did not. This city featured a preacher's idea of what graffiti looked like, and instead of fliers for bands, articles about Terry Schiavo and 'Gay Teens' were plastered on the walls. Apparently the theory of Evolution makes teens gay. At the end of this section, there's a bit showing pictures of Asian(?!) soldiers, a woman screaming, and audio of a Hitler speech, so Evolution is responsible for Hitler, too. Apparently the creationists aren't too up on Godwin's Law, and several signs like this suggest technology in general vexes them:



At least they have a sense of humor about it.

There was generally too much reliance on signage throughout the museum. Some rooms contained nothing but sign after sign regurgitating text from the Bible or the various ad hoc paste-on hypotheses young Earth creationists have used to paper over the gaping holes in their view of the Universe. As a museum, it really lacked the visual appeal and inspiration I got from the favorite haunts of my nerdly youth: Indianapolis' Children's Museum was chock-full of hands-on exhibits to demonstrate concepts and let a youngster experience them directly, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry had A REAL GERMAN U-BOAT YOU CAN GO INSIDE!, the Field Museum of Natural History featured huge, honest-to-goodness dinosaur skeletons, and the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum had its assortment of air and spacecraft. Those were places that told young me it was an unbelievably rich and wonderful, unfathomably old world I lived in, not a world that serves merely as a bothersome stop on the way to a Disneyland in the sky. The world those museums showed me was a world where, while we knew a lot, there was no shortage of unanswered questions, not a world where if you asked questions you put your immortal soul at terrible risk. I felt really bad for kids who, unlike the youngsters we'd brought along with us, get dragged to this place on a regular basis because their parents bought an annual pass.



The 'Created Cosmos' show at the Planetarium was also cognitive-dissonance inducing. After walking around for a few hours, it was great to sit back in the chairs, but the show was somewhat blurry. I later noticed the lens was dirty - this blunted the dazzling effects of the Cosmos. The show discussed the nearly unfathomable scale of the Universe, and interestingly enough didn't gloss over the fact that the Earth is not the center of the Universe, or even the Galaxy. Several facts are raised as 'big trouble for secular Astronomers', without much elaboration - more a sign the makers of the film had a sorry lack of understanding of how science works than anything else. There were observations that were 'big trouble' for the 'secular Newtonian theories of Physics', but fortunately his books weren't all burned, instead Einstein's Theory of Relativity explained many of the problems with Newtonian Physics, which is still fine and dandy at sub 1/10 the speed of light.

What really caused the dissonance for me was the assertion that 'here, in this corner of one of many galaxies, is the jewel of God's creation' - that's right, Earth. Everything else, all that empty space, all those galaxies? Something for the chosen people to look at at night, something they could use for navigation. Somehow, we are also to believe godless heathens like myself, fully aware of the grand scale of the universe and our tiny insignificant place in the grand scheme of things, both time and space wise, 'only believe in ourselves' or 'worship ourselves', yet here I was being expected to have some kind of orgasm of self-importance because the whole universe is all about little old me. I suppose after this I, too, was angry.

After that show, we all went out and checked out the gardens featuring topiary dinosaurs and a live Nativity scene (the baby Jesus was fake, which is good because it was so cold), and when Joseph asked what brought us to Bethlehem and my wife said 'the path' to his befuddlement, it made me laugh a bit, and the sheer absurdity of the whole place made me think maybe, just maybe reason will win out over ignorance in the end. If not, the world is going to turn into a big city alley that smells like piss, I fear.

I leave you with a delightful image of Adam hanging out in the Garden of Eden with all the animals of the world, including a penguin! WTF is a penguin doing there? God put him there, you Theologodummy!

Python 3.0 and making it happen on MacOSX

Python 3.0 was released last week to much commentary both pro and con. I would place myself in the pro column, for reasons best articulated here: Let’s talk about Python 3.0. The story about the monkeys beating up each other is one you'll want to file away for use someday, in the event you haven't already heard it.

The big deals seem to be the all Unicode all the time, dammit, text and extensive restructuring of little annoyances and things the Python people wish they had done differently, knowing now what they do. The fact that it's admittedly 10% slower than v2 is driving some people nutty. To others, the idea of stepping back and restructuring Python so that the foundation is more sound is a worthwhile effort, especially to those of us watching the Perl saga unfold, with no schadenfreude at all in my case (I still think Perl is awesome. Perl is the language used to build the web, and in fact the universe). Having read a very long and acrimonious discussion thread re: why the hell is Perl 6 taking so long written in...2004, one of the big takeaway points was that Perl 5 had reached a point where the limit had been reached as far as building on it and tweaking it and so forth. Having not plumbed the internals of Perl 5, I can only say the guy saying 'the internals of Perl 5 are a disaster' appears to know his topic really well.

So anyway if you'd like to try out Python 3.0 and like me are a MacOSX user, there's some immediate annoyance in your future. You've got to build the thing from source, not a terrible thing, but a DMG installer would be nice. Additionally, caution is necessary if you are just wanting to install alongside 2.x, as is the case unless you are completely mad. This article provides helpful guidance. It's all well and good, unless like me you have been just using the python that 'came with' and never went through the business of getting Darwinports installed, installing readline, and so on and so forth. After a bit of Googling, this article over on zopyx proved most helpful, and now I'm up and running.

In the event Google brought you here because of similar woes, now you should have what you need.

Kids say the you-are-damndest things!

Yesterday I discovered an exciting sub-genre of youTube videos, the 'Baby Preacher' video. The kid preacher in 'Jesus Camp' apparently went over so well, they are expanding the outreach to infants.

Probably the most famous of the baby preacher videos is this one, Kanon Tipton. There's nothing that quite puts the shivers in your soul like somebody who craps his own pants telling you you're going straight to hell.



This one's billed as 'baby TD Jakes', but he's maybe 8 or 9. When he talks about losing all his money, you can tell he's been there.



Here's 'The Little Man of God', rockin' an awesome pink suit. I want that suit. More importantly, I want that band to punctuate everything I say with a stab.



Back to the infants now, here's Ethan, rockin a more conservative suit. I have to listen to what he says, because he says it loud, and he's well dressed:



These all remind me of a bit Andy Kaufman used to do where he spoke complete gibberish, but with the phrasing, gestures, and facial expressions a comedian would use. Though there were no intelligible jokes, it was funny, and people laughed, thanks to a lifetime of being trained that in that setting, when somebody on stage talks like that and moves like that, it's supposed to be funny. The words don't really matter, as it turns out.

Of course, by analyzing it, I drained all humor value from it, but trust me, it was funny.

Pakistan's Truck art is like the sticker of Calvin, pissing on US truck art

Via the wonderful web urbanist blog, I was introduced today to the beautiful Truck Art of Pakistan.

The under-appreciated, indigenous Pakistani tradition of truck painting has an extraordinary history, starting in the days of the Raj. As early as the 1920’s, competing transportation companies would hire craftsmen to adorn their buses in the hopes that these moving canvases would attract more passengers.

Seriously, look at this:
Contrast this with a sample of American Truck Art:


Globalization and the Internet, once again providing a splash of cold water in the face telling us to try harder.

For more beautiful truck art, see:

Pakistani Truck Art
Art On Wheels Pakistan (flickr)

The Really Minor But Not Completely Insignificant Part I Played in the Great Victory for the US, and the World.

As Election Day approached I found myself increasingly anxious and agitated. Things looked OK over on fivethirtyeight.com, but it was still too close. The thought of four years of Bible Spice and Old Spice was unbearable. I thought of how I'd brought my poor daughter into a world where we had an incompetent moronic clown of a president who'd dragged us into an ill-advised, seemingly endless war. Sorry, wars. She certainly deserved better. My new nephew isn't going to be a baby forever, and I'd just as soon he not be sent overseas to die for some dubious cause. I had heard somebody say 'Obama is America's last chance. If we get this wrong, it's over', and it kept bouncing around in my head. It was unbearable. I had to do something.

So first I gave a bit of money to Obama's campaign. Not much, but as we saw, a whole lot of not much can be significant. Then I voted early as part of the effort to keep lines down on Election Day after being urged to do so by a friend. I knew people who were working the phones and knocking on doors for Obama's Get Out The Vote effort, but I found the prospect of interacting with potentially hostile strangers terrifying. I wanted to do SOMETHING, though, because time was running out, so I talked to a volunteer friend, and she said I could be a 'data captain' and possibly a driver on election day.

Saturday before Election Day I reported for data captain duty. This essentially amounted to data entry work, using an ASP.NET (!) application called votebuilder. Canvassers brought in packets detailing what they'd found out, and we'd record it so as not to waste further time with inaccessible people, people who'd moved, or McCain supporters. This was relatively easy, and hanging out at Bloomington campaign HQ was great for my general hope for the future. The kids (college kids) working there definitely were what you'd call kids who had their shit together, and the operation was being run better than many corporate operations I'd seen. It wasn't all kids, though - there were middle aged people like myself, and older folks, too. Food had been donated for lunch, and it was good - better than a standard catered meeting.

These folks had a sense of urgency and much energy, and it was being harnessed and used for good, while presumably folks in the other camp were e-mailing their latest twists on the Obama sounds like Osama joke back and forth to each other. This made me feel much better about the future. None of that 'when these kids take over, were fucked' mentality for me. I signed up to work on Election Day.

On Election Day I arrived in the morning and found the parking lot completely packed, but was directed to a 'secret parking lot' by a sleep-deprived but helpful volunteer. There wasn't much in the way of data entry needed, I was told, but I was encouraged to give canvassing a go, frightening as it seemed. I hesitated for a few seconds at most, then grabbed a packet.

We were given a brief training session, which was mostly a pep talk. We were told 'if we can even get it where Indiana is 'too close to call' late into the night, that'll be great'. Then we were sent off with 'Yes We Canvass!' Everybody cheered and moved out. It felt like the start of a marathon.

The packet had a handy Google Map on the front showing my territory. I was to cover part of 17th St on the West Side, spending most of my time at an apartment complex where most residents were students. More often than not, nobody answered, in which case I left the info about where they were to vote (Assembly Hall) on their doorknob (unless an earlier volunteer had already left the info on the doorknob).

I encountered several people who had voted for Obama or were intending to do so, and those contacts were pleasant enough. A couple people indicated they had voted for McCain, but were not jerky or confrontational. My fears of having an 'M' carved into my cheek were unfounded. A few people didn't answer their door - I could hear the TV and conversations in the room through the door. One woman talked to me through the door. One guy said 'hey, it's some old dude!' before opening the door, so I introduced myself as an old dude with the Obama campaign. A couple people made a point of saying 'you people have been here 3 or 4 times', which made me feel bad, because I hate the idea of being an annoying pest to people, and I was starting to wonder if all the repeated contacts were turning people off.

At one point a dog rushed up to me, but I didn't freak out, and the dog didn't bite me, he just sniffed around and moved on.

It took me maybe 2 hours to finish my list, at which point I had to record # of doors knocked and # of contacts made and return to campaign HQ.

Despite the general positive tone, as a super-introvert, my nerves were quite jangled by the experience, so I sought out a more 'back-office' task I could do. Data dude was still waiting for orders for a printing, and another option was working the phones, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do that either. I was told my assistance would be needed around noon and that I could check out all the free food in the meantime.

The spread was really great - local restaurants were very generous. I had some sandwiches from Jimmy John's, and some of the mashed potatoes donated by Bloomingfoods, which we were told were vegan. I wandered around a bit to see what was going on and take in the atmosphere. Most of the kids were operating on a couple of hours of sleep at most, and their nerves were maybe a bit frayed, but there was no reality show drama, everybody kept their cool (like Obama does) and kept going on some mixture of excitement, hope, enthusiasm, and energy drinks.

While I was out front, some coward in an SUV drove by and yelled 'you fucking socialist bastards!', and people kind of laughed at him and carried on with whatever they were doing - making calls, getting newly arrived volunteers settled in, or eating. He carried on reinforcing our nation's dependence on foreign oil.

I eventually worked up the courage to inquire about getting on the phone, but was told there were plenty of phone people. I offered to drive, and my number was added to a list of potential drivers. I called a woman who needed a ride to the polls and scheduled a time when I'd pick her up.

She had emphysema, and an oxygen tank. She got around in a wheelchair. She was sweet and was very excited to get a chance to participate in the historic election. The wheelchair fit in my Prius easily enough when it was folded up, and she knew exactly where the polling place was, so she acted as our navigator.

The line at the polling place was not long - a few people - and the attentive and helpful volunteers got her set up with a machine she could use. The morale amongst the volunteers at the polling place was good - they had to stay there from 6am to after 6pm, but they too had been provided with some really good food.

Everything went smoothly, and I took her home. She thanked me repeatedly, I thanked her repeatedly. It was a beautiful day, and being around all these great people all day really did wonderful things for my mood. I was ready to deal with the potential disappointment of watching election returns.

Only this time I wasn't disappointed. Oh no. It took a while for it to sink in that Obama had in fact done it. Sometime during his speech I finally was able to let go of the dread fear that things would turn horribly wrong. On 'twitterific', I read tweets from all over the world congratulating the USA on a job well done. The following morning, I pulled up fivethirtyeight.com, and where Tuesday morning there'd been a pink Indiana, today I saw it had turned blue. Yes we can. Yes we did.

Cold Gettin' Stupid or: Google Didn't Start The Fire

Back in July of this year, Encyclopedia Britannica board member Nicholas Carr's article 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?' appeared in The Atlantic. It was a phenomenal hit. As the new Borg, Google is the company to hate right now. Right now, hating Microsoft is as passe as hating N'Sync or The Spice Girls. It kind of has an air of un-necessary kick 'em when they're down meanness, even, like the Britney Spears jokes of last year. So, be like the cool kids, be like Nicholas Carr, who I must grudgingly admit has pretty good taste in music, and get on the Google-bashing bandwagon.

Another reason for the success of Carr's article is that stupidity is everywhere. Computers have boosted people's productivity in many ways, and in one category particularly computers have shined. They have enabled stupid people to do more faster, and reach a wider audience for their stupidity, than ever would have been thought possible as recently as 1983. The explosion in stupidity and all the technologies which have enabled stupid people to reach each other and be stupid and make stupid plans to do stupid shit has profound and far-reaching ramifications.

Facebook, for example, has a phenomenally, illogically stupid valuation based on essentially helping stupid people get in touch with morons they went to high school with, or other idiots who share their moronic passions, so that they might join together under the sacrament of most holy matrimony and bless the world with their stupid spawn. Facebook sucks the intelligent people into their vortex, even pulling some really smart people from Google, so that they may spend the best, most productive years of their brilliant, hot as the surface of the sun minds on things we didn't even know we wanted or needed, like Beacon or those gawdawful (except for the delightful, copyright-violating Scrabulous) widgets. Facebook (and Google, and Apple) suck the intelligent out of the brain pool to work on trivial, candy-ass bullshit.

There's a whole lot of stupid on display in the halls of academia, in our corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street, and in Congress. Somebody must be held responsible, because accountability is important, so how about Google? Google is the 12 million immigrants taking our jobs of stupidity.

Unfortunately, Nicholas Carr is full of shit. Google isn't making us stupid at all. It's aging that's making us stupid. The stars are not going out, the Astronomer's vision is failing. Look, son: that being the case, I can compensate for my failing (and it was never that great, let's be honest) memory via Google, just like I can get from here to Vermont really fast even though I have bad knees, thanks to a little thing called the airplane. Perhaps you've heard of it? Google Reader DOES overwhelm me, but I've resigned myself to the fact I can't read everything in my feeds, kind of like I resigned myself to the fact I wouldn't read every book in my little town's library when I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD!

I still read books. Good writing still pulls me in. Maybe I read 8 books at once, jumping back and forth, but I read books. I will never give up the books. If I want to read for an extended period of time, I want paper, dammit! I even read Infinite Jest, and I even read the footnotes. All of them (R.I.P. and Infinite Respect, David Foster Wallace).

So from where I stand, as a kind of over the hill dude who in Roman times would be dead by now, and as recently as 1977 would have been pushed to the margins with the millions of other nerds whose profession hadn't been invented yet, I have to regard the Google-bashing with considerable skepticism.

Many people, mostly really, really bad comedians, like to mock the Amish because they shun technology. If, like me, they'd take the time to read the 10 page pamphlet you can pick up at the store in Amish Country for free (but don't be a cheap bastard, buy something), they'd know the Amish see the automobile as something that tears communities and families apart. It enables the construction of suburbs, artificial communities where one of the luxuries is not having to know or talk to your neighbors (you can talk to people on Facebook, remember), it encourages dependence on foreign oil, and it threatens our environment. Does this mean the automobile is evil?

Oh well, never mind. Rather than go further down that path maybe you should find some YouTube videos of a dude getting hit in the nuts with a football.

Rebel Girls You Are the Queens Of My World!

A couple tidbits on RNC '08, and then I'm getting the hell out of the crowded world of political blogging again. If you don't like it, go to Russia!

The shouting-heavy ending of McCain's acceptance speech reminded me a lot of Howard Dean's campaign-derailing 'We're going to New Hampshire! And Georgia! And Kentucky! and etc!' minus the 'WAHOO!' at the end. Everybody jumped all over Dean and even compared him to the H man for that. In this case I guess it showed the old man has got some life in him yet.

Every time I hear the GOP harp on 'we're close to victory' and 'don't give up when victory is in our grasp' I think of some schmuck up to his eyeballs in gambling debt begging his bookie to take one more bet. Pathetic.

The guy with the 'Mavrick' (sic) sign was good for some laffs.

The balloons were pretty.

The pink protestors are my heroes.

Django 1 is coming, so get ready

You can consider Django for inclusion in the category of things that make your life easier instead of more difficult if you find yourself needing/wanting to do web development for some specific purpose, but you find web development with Java based frameworks tedious, and consider PHP hokey (or, if, like me you are a former Perl freak who is still pissed at PHP for stealing Perl's thunder).

For all its greatness, it's been avoided by many for reasons including:

• It's not Java based
• It's not ASP.NET
• It's not Ruby on Rails
• It's not PHP
• The version number < 1.0
  

The final item in the list can be scratched off soon as 1.0 is apparently out next week (the alphas and betas have been around for a while now). If you are in Mountain View, there's a release party.

Now that the magic 1 number has been reached those wishing to join in the fun can find out what it's about via this tutorial wherein SOFENG builds a blog. You will want to know Python, of course. The Django Book is nicely laid out and organized. It's worth purchasing, and is also freely available on-line.

It's 'the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines' (tm). From my own admittedly limited exposure to it so far, what this means is:

• It's pretty easy to learn
• It provides a really nice built-in admin framework saving you from having to write the same code you've written a hundred times before one more time
• You can get the basic outline of your app up and running quickly.
• It's got a nice template system
• It's got modules for doing things like adding RSS or Atom feeds for your site with such ease it oughta be against the law.
  

This blog post has been far too lopsidedly positive. I hate it when the Herald-Times Editor does that Orchids and Onions thing, but doesn't give out Onions. Onions to Comcast for our overpriced internet connection that keeps dropping out. Onions to humidity. Onions to people on the cell phone while driving. I feel better now.

The Sad Sad Story of Zines are Dead

Before the internet and outside academia, zines were a way somewhat disaffected and alienated people of like minds found and communicated with each other. The letters section of Maximum Rock-n-Roll, featuring writers from all points on the intelligence continuum debating everything from is racism bad to should you eat meat was a precursor to the punky's punk forums on the Web today. In Maximum Rock-n-Roll's Letters section you could read both the insane ramblings of GG Allin and the very poorly spelled rants of Courtney Love. You could also get your letter published even if you were an absolute nobody.

As a grad student in ultra-religious South Carolina, I could ignore the pile of Chick Tracts in the Post Office on the way to fetch a zine full of detourned comics written by a guy in the UK that I found out about in FactSheet 5. At $1-$2 a shot, they were low-risk, but since they weren't completely free you had to take that risk, however small, and hope for the best. More often than not, there'd be a brief personal note from the zine's author in the envelope (as were sometimes found in orders from Dischord or K records).

Bloomington's best Bookstore, Boxcar Books (now at the new location next to the Runcible Spoon) has a good-sized zine collection, but if you look closely you'll notice many of the zines are a year or more old. I picked up a couple of zines and didn't notice this until I got home. It's not bad that they're old, but why aren't there enough new zines to fill the shelves?

It's the foul internet that's destroyed them. Factsheet5.com has helpful info about signs you have gonorrhea or other STDs. There are plenty of e-zines, but they aren't made of paper. If you read a story about strange shit happening on a long Greyhound Bus ride, like I found in an issue of Big Hands, it works a lot better on pieces of paper that have been folded together and stapled by hand than on my MacBookPro's glossy screen. It might work on a library computer's monitor, but the kids doing their damn MySpace and playing games hog those terminals. Damn kids.

The internet is everywhere now, except maybe parts of Mongolia. You could start and publish an e-zine from Antarctica. You could keep up with what's going on in the outside world from Greenland. In some ways you can't be disconnected at all in the ways that made people want to publish and read zines at one time.

Of course being out of it I have no idea how alive and vibrant today's zine scene really is. People are publishing zines about Ruby on Rails and their favorite podcasts. Hypermilers publish zines that share tips for using as little gas as possible. Disaffected but comfortable white youngsters put out Zines about Ron Paul. Or something.

Well, I'd best turn it over to the youngsters. Here are some jumping off points:

Action Girl Newsletter - How do you find zines? How do you make zines? Plus: a manifesto.

Portland Zine Symposium - You've already missed this year's. Plan ahead for 2009.

zinelibrary.net - nicely designed. professional. multi-lingual

sordidzine - no idea. from page 23 of the Google search 'zines'

Talk to your Doctor about Leon Redbone

I missed a lot of work this week due to Lianard Bones, something I got in my ankles from excessive running. I had not run for a long time because of ennui and knee pains, also people would not leave me alone all day at work, so I could get nothing done, and I was overwhelmed and paralyzed by guilt at not getting anything done. I did not deserve burritos. I did not even deserve browned iceberg lettuce and Ranch dressing. I could possibly eat Jalepeno Cheet-os, but I would hate myself afterwards.

The past couple of weeks the temperature has been down below 80 again. My horrible peeling sunburns were gone and forgotten. So I went out at lunch and ran hard. It felt good. Better than watching baseball highlights on the elliptical. Better than riding the bike downhill and keeping a car behind me for a while. It felt hard enough that I felt like I was struggling all the way, and that was great. The truly great part was when I returned and had some water and sat down. I felt fully narcoticized. I wanted to feel that way forever and never stop. So I ran too much and I fucked my bones up. Getting old really sucks.

Why oh why does anybody ask Rob Enderle about anything?

I was enjoying this article about a grad student's plans for a $12 computer until the Rob Enderle quote showed up on page 2. His appearance in an article or the sound of his voice on a 'Marketplace' segment is the signal to stop reading or listening. This 2002 (2002!) posting from Dave Winer explains it as well as anything:

Michael Williams: "That guy has always struck me as all hat and no cattle. Drives me nuts to see him quoted as an 'expert.' I'd be shocked if he's ever installed anything more than Windows on a laptop or written any code other than pseudo in an e-mail."

John Robb: "The guy is a carpetbagger quotemill of the worst sort. Nobody ever called him on it until today."

Joe Rotello: "Why don't we just replace him with a large switch marked OFF, and be done with it."

Assembly-line journalism

Got a couple of emails from Enderle, unfortunately he doesn't want them on the Web. They were long. I would love to publish them. See how the mind of a quote mill works. 1300 quotes per year. I guess he counts. Anyway, he's not that interesting. I hope Cydney writes a piece about this. And I also hope she keeps developing sources who know what they're talking about and avoids assembly-line journalism.

Actually according to this JargonWatch article on workbench, Enderle was the original quote mill. He's the DJ Kool Herc of sloppy tech journalism. The first of his kind.

Seeing as the article mentioned earlier was from ABC, we can maybe understand some newbie journalist not doing any kind of homework and thinking Enderle is some kind of authority on something, but you'd think a tech type company like Dell would know better. No such luck.

In other news, Dell has hired moron-hack-hall-of-famer Rob Enderle of "the Enderle Group" (also known as Rob and his Wife) to consult on their sure-to-fail iPod+iTunes competitor. Man, they sure are getting taken for a ride by this idiot.

and

That's astonishing. Michael Dell must have a screw loose somewhere. It could be a good thing, though, in the sense that it might shut down the "Enderle Quote Mill" that consistently spews out the most incorrect propaganda the Interwebs have ever seen. Who's going to go to him now? If he's on the DELL payroll, how can he pretend to be objective in his "anal-ysis"?

Enderle. DELL. BWAHAHAHAHAHA

Rob gained a bit of fame in the hysterical hyperbole arena for comparing Linux users to terrorists in this really awesome tour de force of bad writing and bad logic fusing together like 'Wonder Twin Powers, ACTIVATE!' - 'Pros, Priests, and Zealots: The 3 Faces Of Linux'.

When he's not being wrong about Linux, he's leaving his peers in the dust being wrong about Apple. His wikipedia article, as of this writing, credits him with

predicting the demise of the Macintosh more times since 1995 than any other industry observer.

Technology observer John Gruber has described Enderle's predictions on Apple as "nearly always completely wrong (at least regarding Apple), and that "the only way it would be worthwhile for tech reporters to continue to press Enderle for quotes would be if they were willing to describe him as “almost always utterly wrong”, thus letting readers know that the opposite of what he claims is probably the case"

In conclusion, if you are reading an article or listening to a segment, when the name 'Enderle' comes on, treat what follows with the same reverence and seriousness you would give to investment advice from a cracked-out Amy Winehouse.