Category: everything

Ahhh, we haven’t had a good bashing in a while!

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly calls The Globe and Mail, our most conservative national newspaper, “far-left” and calls Canadians “pinheads”, and some of the more rabid of the Fox viewership herd send the Globe and Mail some interesting hatemail:

“In an nice touch, a man from somewhere-in-the-USA opened by cheerfully calling me “sonny bub” and, after some confusing name-calling that involved the word “intellectual,” he rose to a great rhetorical flourish — he asked if I had served in Vietnam!…My point was that we have a great deal to learn from the Fox News Channel. And I am proved right.”

Some additional comments are available from my DSLRreports thread.

“Yesterday morning started out with Wade Cunningham in the cafeteria of building 4. He’s the guy who invented the Wiki. He told me he’s learned about 100 computer languages from SmallTalk to Visual Basic to Perl. He likes denigrating himself: ‘I’ll forever be known for writing 1000 lines of Perl code.'”

– Robert Scoble, Microsoft tech evangelist

Speaking of the devil, a clever hacker ran a spider against all English Word documents on Microsoft.com and identified some juicy and potentially embarassing bon mots that were deleted but retained by MS Office’s oh-so-helpful revision tracking feature [via BoingBoing].

“Naturally, publishing documents with “collaboration” data is not unheard of in the corporate world, but the fact Microsoft had became a victim of their own technology, and had failed to run their own tools against these publications makes it more entertaining.”

From Amazon.ca: Michael Jackson’s Malt Whiskey Companion. I suspect this page turner is not penned by the jewelled glove wearing, baby dangling popstar we all know and love, but as you can see, there is no accompanying picture, which only adds to the mystery.

First stop: David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a book on the the concept of the web as a community, has transmogrified it to a 16-page version for kids, which means even I can understand it. It uses simple, natural language, yet remains engaging and uncondescending.

Second stop: terrible metaphors. They’re as amusing as watching Disk Defragmenter on your 10GB partition.

Last stop:

“I thought perfume was supposed to mix with the delicate natural scent of a woman’s own skin, creating a heady sublimity that gently whispered compliments to the nose’s ear; but no, apparently perfume is meant to be hosed into the air in regular increments as a sort of romantic nerve gas.”

– Gizmodo on the SNIF, an electronic perfume dispenser to be worn by women

It was an episode of “Behind Closed Doors with Joan Lunden” in 2002 that first acquainted me with the now infamous President’s Daily Brief, or PDB. It’s a summary of all intelligence collected by the FBI and CIA for the past 24 hours. Agents work throughout the night to compile the most relevant data they believe should be brought to the Commander in Chief’s attention. In the morning, they head over to the White House to deliver their written reports before going home to bed. The first thing that the President sees in the morning are the PDBs.

The big news right now is that President Bush Jr. had received a PDB on August 6th, 2001 that suggested that terrorists were planning to hijack aircraft and attack buildings in New York and Washington. What perturbs people is that it appears that these warnings were ignored. (Aside: What perturbs people even more is that the next day, Bush went on a 30-day vacation. Apparently, he’s spent 40% of his presidency on vacation. A curious way to run a country where many Americans work overtime due to downsizing.)

Airbag’s Greg Storey suggests that the information disconnect could have been rectified if the PDBs didn’t look like book reports you typed out in elementary school. Slate’s Daniel Radosh playfully suggests that PDBs should be done in PowerPoint instead and offers a sizzling glimpse into his vision. Slide 4 is to your right.

Alas, their efforts are all for naught. According to The Guardian, Bush doesn’t even read the PDBs. He gets George Tenet, the director of the CIA, to summarize it even further, in his own words. Out loud.

Said by the Guardian’s Sidney Blumenthal:

“I know he doesn’t read,” one former Bush national security council staffer told me…It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD…Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department’s 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq…

And that is what perturbs me. The leader of the mightiest nation on earth, a nuclear superpower and financial powerhouse, doesn’t like to read.

We live in the Information Age, where knowledge is power. Knowledge breeds intelligence and wisdom. The pursuit of knowledge is why you’re reading this blog now – because you want to learn something. You may disagree with my views, but that’s fine – the whole point in attempting to fully understand something is to obtain as many perspectives as possible.

But Bush apparently isn’t even interested in other people’s opinions; in fact, he doesn’t even read newspapers, a fact pointed out by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In my company, we have all been directed to read. Our VP has helpfully assembled a library of recommended books that cover a variety of topics, including effective leadership, telecommunication fundamentals, and business dynamics. When people argued that they don’t have time in their busy schedules to hunker down and read a book, he strongly suggested they start taking books home with them if they wanted to stay in the loop. Learning is a lifelong process.

Don Ellis: Hong Kong through a PowerShot G2
Kleptography

James Rigg: Defining the panoramic shot
Panoguide.com Gallery

Henning Conrad – Shades of Northern Europe
Lofoten Photogalerie

I can’t figure out why it’s called Fruit at the Bottom yogurt. The fruit (such as it is) is at the bottom because of gravity and lousy emulsion technique. Why advertise that fact? Do you see anyone advertising salad dressing as “Oil at the Top”?

Your weekly dose of net.couture: Super Mario Reloaded where Mario does the Burly Man, and the Penny Arcade Japanese Remix, where Penny Arcade comic strips are mutated by Japanese highschool students. Fiction truly is stranger than fact.

When your Windows box just doesn’t seem to be working right, relieve your stress with this Flash file. Or else end up like this guy (MPEG).

“There isn’t much to watch on American TV now unless you are into violence and/or canned laughter. Did you know that most of the laugh tracks they use are so old that the people you hear laughing at the sitcom are mostly dead? It seems appropriate.”

The Guardian interviews sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin. Sadly, my only exposure to Le Guin was a mini-series of her novel Lathe of Heaven on A&E, an American television network.

It was a good concept: a man whose dreams can alter reality, and his psychologist who finally decides to use this power to his advantage. In the interview, Ursula explains that Taoist philosophy was the primary inspiration.

Francis Wheen’s Top 10 Modern Delusions

1. “God is on our side”
2. The market is rational
3. There is no such thing as reality
4. We mustn’t be “judgmental”
5. Laissez-faire capitalism is the prerequisite for trade and prosperity
6. Astrology and similar delusions are “harmless fun”
7. Thin air is solid
8. Sentimental hysteria is a sign of emotional maturity
9. America’s economic success is entirely due to private enterprise
10. “It could be you. . .”

Jeffrey Veen’s Seven Steps to Better Presentations

1. Tell stories
2. Show pictures.
3. Don’t apologize.
4. Start strong.
5. End strong too.
6. Stand.
7. Pause.

So apparently, Clinton had only sent two pieces of email during his presidency. And one of them was only a test. (The other one was sent to John Glenn while he was on the space shuttle, which admittedly is pretty impressive.)

I wouldn’t really single out Clinton on this – I doubt Bush is an Outlook fiend either. It does make sense, if you consider that emailling is a fairly menial task and time is better spent, say, running a country. Why should they have to worry about macro virii or Windows crashes or herbal Viagra spam? That’s what their entourages of executive assistants and secretaries are for.

Of course, this begs the question: how in touch are they really with their people? They are all older, wealthy Caucasian men from large, powerful families. Many people remember the brouhaha over George Bush Sr. being amazed at the sight of a grocery store checkout scanner. The story may not be true, but it was apparently the first time that entire year he set foot inside a supermarket.

If you recall, Clinton did pass the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in 1996. It was a well-intentioned, but heavy-handed piece of legislation as it basically called for turning the net into a police state. Fortunately, it was later struck down in court as unconstitutional. However, other absurd laws exist – Canada’s recordable media tax levy, and the so-called CDA II. It makes you wonder, since these leaders probably never have to touch a computer, how can they understand what repercussions would occur from the laws they pass?

“All I know about the ceremony is what I saw on Monty Python.”

– Bill Gates, on what he’s expecting when Queen Elizabeth gives him an honorary knighthood