Month: April 2008

HRC has fired her chief strategist and pollster, Mark Penn. This is this guy who thought the best place to be on Potomac Tuesday eve was doing a book reading in New York City. He may not be TSFGOTFOTE, but he’s on the podium.

The question is, has he been sacked too late? Had he been catapulted into a swamp after the Super Tuesday split, somebody with a little more sense might have put together an actual plan to close the deal down the stretch. Instead, Team HRC lost eleven straight contests and gave away the perception of inevitability – and then the perception of being the lead horse. Once people accept you’re in second place, you can’t get back to first just by saying you are over and over.

Meanwhile, I can’t believe that the clowns I saw stacked fifty-deep in Punxsutawney are going to be decisive in determining who the Democratic candidate is. Somewhere on that great sideline in the sky, Coach Radi is laughing his ass off.

Rock, chalk, oh I’m sorry is that a foot in your nuts? This is like watching the first half of Vanderbilt-Kentucky II again. Roy Williams looks like a man who just got force-fed an entire box of Frosted Mini Ass Whoopins.

This isn’t a game, it’s an autopsy.

Meanwhile, I was going to mention blue. I bought a pair of sunglasses today with blue lenses. OK, they’re blue-coated, they don’t actually make everything look blue. But I ran over my last pair of blue-lensed shades. No, really. We borrowed the van from my in-laws when we were collecting boxes to move into the house, it were dark, there were a crunch, BITTER!

For the last two years, basically my only sunglasses have been a pair of tortoise Ray-Ban Wayfarers. They are a classic timeless look, and I love the polarized amber lens because of the way it enhances contrast and just makes things pop. But they do have that big plastic look, which doesn’t always go with everything, and they will not sit on top of my head without falling off. So I wanted something metal-framed, lightweight, with blue lenses. Why blue? Because I think my eyes are my one reliably attractive feature, and I want to keep the same color where my eyes should be even when I have shades on.

I told you it was irrational. Anyway, now I have blue lenses in a half-rimmed metal frame with spring hinges and which will sit on my head without constantly feeling like it’s going to come flying off. I can only justify this because I have leftover birthday money that has been burning a hole in my bank account for a month.

Well, Carolina seems to be waking up. Never let your foot off the throttle. You can go to jail for point-shaving.

Of the teams in the Final Four, 3 of them are among THE flagship programs of college basketball. Any list of the greatest programs has to include UCLA, North Carolina and Kansas. (I would also throw Kentucky, Duke, and Indiana in there – I think that’s your top 6 hands-down.) I find it singular that every one of them but Indiana has blue as their primary color.

And all four of the teams this time are blue-based. Hm.

I’m pulling for Memphis, as they are the closest thing to an underdog here. They were everyone’s pick for the 1-seed that wouldn’t make it, and instead they have caught fire in a big way. The Conference USA and state of TN connections also help – love for ConfUSA going back to its roots as the Great Midwest and UAB’s last turn as a big-time program. In fact, a Memphis-Kansas final would suit me right down to the ground.

Yeah, this is a strong Final Four. I just wish they would catapult Nantz and Packer into a swamp and give us Gus Johnson on play-by-play. Seriously, he’s this generation’s Dick Vitale – just electrifying without having become self-parody yet.

There will be more about blue later.

If you’ve never actually read the test of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, knock off for about 20 minutes and click the link. It seems like all we get 45 years on are sound bites and quick clips – you need to read the full text to realize that this wasn’t just some random “black leader,” this was somebody with three degrees and an unimpeachable background in sociology, theology, and Western philosophy, whose argument knit together everything from the Fiery Furnace to the uprising in Hungary and who quoted everybody from Reinhold Niebuhr to T.S. Eliot.

This guy was good.

More later, on why 40 years isn’t as long as it feels like.

…let this be true about Apple and Wal-Mart.

Lately it seems like I’m gauging Apple’s success not by how good the product it, not by any imagined edge in “elegance”, not by the impressive resistance to malware, but solely on market share and stock value. Does that make me some kind of raging narcocapitalist?

EDIT: YEAH, SON. Take that you Arkie swine!!!!

1) Anybody using WordPress and hosting it yourself, rather than using wordpress.com?

2) How difficult is it to install the WP infrastructure on a system that’s already rigged for Movable Type 3? Can you use the existing install of MySQL or is there more stuff to set up on the server?

I do not have the chops to redesign this thing myself, and the stuff I can get to with StyleCatcher resolutely fails to blow my skirt up. However, I have not found anything in iWeb or Sandbox to be suitable for blogging, and it really seems that everyone who’s anyone is using WordPress. But if it’s not going to be simple and instantly rewarding, I don’t want to put my brother-in-law through the whole reconfiguration and install process.

So…y’all holler ;]

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Grey’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

They need to teach you this on Day One in tech support class.

EDIT: And now, the epitome of Gen-X Zen:

“If Ponch and Jon had to arrest Bo and Luke, who would win?”

Plugging away at home and at work. I seem to be on a productive streak lately in both cases – not only am I churning through a lot of paperwork at the office (which deadline is approaching like a freight train) but I have also scheduled an eye exam, a CSDC appointment, come up with an anniversary plan (of sorts), replaced the filter in the icemaker and finally ploughed through the enormous backlog of dirty laundry and dirtier dishes.

Coming up on the to-do list: schedule my first 10.5 certification test, see about changing to a credit card with a lot of travel benefits, switch all my automatic monthly payments over to said card, and finally, dig through my wardrobe and see what I really need to start looking like a respectable human being on a regular basis. See, my last job entailed a good bit of manual labor, and by “a good bit” I mean “I had my knee scoped and am still going to the chiropractor regularly.” As a consequence, my normal apparel ran to increasingly-roughed-up jeans, an endless stream of company T-shirts, and of course nice stylish black steel toed boots that would make me look like Frankenstein even if I hadn’t got size 13 feet.

Now, I know what system administrators are expected to look like. However, I like to think that I and my crew are a cut above the typical knuckle-dragging troglodytes that normally reside in the basement tending the machines. Hell, we once turned out in suits for happy hour to try to impress a pack of girls in the next department over. Much good it did us, but still, we cleaned up real good, and the PC hardware guys went to great lengths to look sharp on a regular basis (much to our frequent chagrin). Anybody who saw the spectacle of Del Boca Vista Social Club should know that we rolled in style.

So I want to look a little nicer than the typical Sleestak you see in the server room. Problem is, a lot of my wardrobe is black. And fading from overuse. A string of coincidences meant that I went out for a walk last night in head-to-toe black – jacket, sweater, jeans, boots – and every piece was a different shade of black. Not too money!

Oddly enough, I found myself mixing a lot of brown and gray in the last year or two. I thought maybe I was really botching it. However, on Timbuk2’s website, pretty much every new bag for 2008 is in some combination of brown and gray, so who knows, maybe I’m ahead of things. I still walk around wondering whether I’m on safe ground with a black jacket and brown shoes, or vice versa, but I made sure to buy a reversible belt so I’m covered there.

Maybe I should stop with all the black, but look here, my main influences were St. Johnny Cash, St. Roy Orbison, and Darth Vader, so what do you want from me?