Month: August 2010

Am I the only person who sees purple spots and has to go outside and walk around for 20 minutes when the thought occurs that your freedoms are subject to veto by retarded hicks and their amen corner on TV?

…is because his opponent is certifiably, clinically, batshit loonball crazy.

Otherwise, in every meaningful way, the only reason Harry Reid is not a total pussy is because to call him such would be to sully the good name of pussy.

If you want to know why the Democrats have struggled for two years, it’s because they have a worthless sack of jelly as the Senate Majority Leader. Hopefully someday he’ll be able to get his testicles out of the blind trust.

“Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore.”

Safari 5 has support for “extensions” – something Firefox has had forever and which Chrome jumped on right away. These are what we used to call “plug-ins” – bringing additional functionality to your browser. Unlike the old days, though, when you needed plugins for a slew of different media formats, these are mainly to add things like a GMail Inbox indicator or an ad blocker or an “Add To Amazon Wish List” 1-click button.

And then there’s “Shut Up”, which is a plugin that uses common bits of HTML to know where to find comments on a website – and remove them from view.

I’ve been keeping a blog of some sort for over eleven years now. It’s bopped around different places, using different formats and things, but for the first five or six years – barring a six-month experiment with Blogger as the back end – I didn’t have comments available. In fact, of the blogs I read, some of the most critical once don’t have comments at all.

It’s a tough thing, comments. Occasionally, if things break just right, you have something like Deadspin Up! All Night, which for a while was the closest thing to the old Zone I’ve seen since (it spawned at least two other blogs just from like-minded groups of commenters on this one last post per day). Or EDSBS, which has long since stopped being a Florida football blog and turned into some sort of collective performance art. And supposedly Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has quite a well-curated comment section that actually brings something to the table.

And then, at the other end, there’s…well, everything else. The comments at al.com are pretty much rock bottom, and YouTube is right there alongside, but for the most part, venturing into the comment section of any major news website is a complete waste of time and may make you want to stick a gun in your mouth. Especially if you ever taught high school English. Hell, middle school English. I probably wouldn’t have comments if I had my druthers, but I can’t be arsed to figure out how to turn them off. Besides, it’s not really an issue for most individual bloggers.

Because here’s the thing: I’m basically standing on a platform I built myself (with help from my brother-in-law) and I’ve put up a body of work which I like to think reflects my knowledge, experience, and ruminations over a period of – gosh, four years or so now. It’s not particularly sharp, it’s not particularly insightful, and it probably doesn’t add too too much to the world’s storehouse of wisdom – but it’s mine, and I pretty much stand by it.

Here’s the thing, though: the opportunity cost of a blog is exactly zero relative to a comment. You need a computer and Internet access anyway, and Blogger and WordPress and Tumblr and TypePad Micro and Vox and Livejournal and I don’t know what else – they’re all free at the point of use. Basically, when you post a public comment on a blog, you’re saying “I am entitled to the use of your platform and bullhorn for my own opinion.” And for a personal blog which pretty much nobody reads, that’s fine. However, on bigger blogs or sites, it deteriorates rapidly – because given Internet access and practical anonymity, the average individual turns into a 14-year-old boy, with all the intelligence, wisdom, sensitivity and grammar that implies. The caliber of graffiti on the back wall of my high school was an order of magnitude smarter than the kind of bullshit that accompanies most any online news story, and God help you if you venture into the darker corners of the Internet.

I say that to say this: I think that for the most part, website comments are part and parcel of an extremely unfortunate trend of public life in this country. We have reached a point in this Year of Our Lord 2010 when we give everyone an equal right to be heard, irrespective of maturity, qualification, or even sanity. In the real world, if you’re parked at a stop sign and a crazed homeless person starts to crawl into your window screaming about Majestic-12 and the alien menace, do you enter into a discourse with him and try to reason with him and show him the flaws in his logic?

No. Hell no. You stomp the gas and lay a patch right through the intersection and peel out of there. If necessary, you whack him in the face with your coffee mug to make him let go of the window.

The problem is, on the internet, there’s an army of deranged nutters, and they’re everywhere. If you want to enter into a serious discussion on CNN.com, or ESPN, or (fill in literally ANY newspaper’s website), well, God bless you, but you’re not going to get it. You’re going to sink into a steady swamp of trolls, flamers, and outright morons who are still relying on that free AOL disk they got on a copy of George magazine.

We’ve made serious public discourse impossible in this country, because we’ve allowed everyone to play. You don’t have to be reasonable, you don’t have to be logical, you don’t even have to exist in the same reality as those of us who have green grass and blue skies in our world (well, at least in November and December). And for those of us who want public life to be carried on at a slightly more erudite level than a shit fight at the monkey house, we’ve been reduced to two and a half choices. We can either not go to that part of town at all, or we can go there with the windows rolled up and blacked out, resolutely staring forward and ignoring the bumping and banging outside.

Or you can lean over and punch your hanger-on in the face. The downside of that is that once you engage in the shit fight, the monkey invariably gets shit all over you.

OK, I admit up front this may be the most offensive thing I’ve written – well, maybe ever, but here goes anyway. I regret nothing.

If you’re not from Lower Manhattan, or Arlington, or didn’t have a friend or a relative on one of those four planes – if you’re just some random from some square state somewhere – and you feel the need to start lecturing people down around Park Place about “anguish” and “catastrophic pain” and “self-deception” and “surrender”…

You need to shut the fuck up. Right. Fucking. Now.

This is a thing that happened. “9/11” is not Rudy Giuliani’s political mascot. It is glib shorthand for an actual event, with actual consequences. And the last thing on Earth that is necessary, or appropriate, or even tolerable, is to have somebody else lecturing those of us WHO ACTUALLY HAD TERRORISTS CRASH PLANES IN OUR CITY LIMITS about how we ought to feel, or react, or respond, or view the world.

I mean it. Step off. Zip it. KNOW YOUR ROLE, SHUT YOUR HOLE.

Opinions are like assholes – and I couldn’t be less interested in yours.

Steve Wozniak is 60 years old today. That’s probably not as bone-chilling as it should be.

If all he’d ever done was create Breakout, or the floppy disk controller for the Apple ][ , Woz would be remembered as a genius. But he also had a dab hand in the creation of the Macintosh as we know it, and his is the DNA in Apple that keep the Jobsian drive leavened with perspective and a sense of humor. Infinite Loop – hell, the world – is a better place for the efforts of Employee #1, and if he wants to spend his years now as the court jester of Silicon Valley? Nobody is more deserving – or suited.

Cheers, Woz. Hope next time you go drinking with Gray Powell you get more than a lousy T-shirt. ;]

…I said at one point that I couldn’t think of ANY superhero team movie that hadn’t gone down the chute. Obviously I whiffed on X-Men and its sequels. The first two were pretty good, especially in making the whole thing accessible to non-comic folks, but the 3rd was just egregious. Bryan Singer left to do Superman, leaving X-Men for Brett Ratner, which killed both franchises dead.

I guess what I was thinking was that there’s never been a film that combined a bunch of established characters – thinking of something like Justice League of America, which would have Superman AND Wonder Woman AND Batman, all characters that would carry their own movie normally. The lineup for Avengers seems a little more daunting since everyone will have had at least one movie of their own – and Robert Downey Jr. has almost pulled Iron Man to the level of a Spiderman or Hulk, where the character is at least beyond the “huh?” level with normal civilian non-genre types.

Looking back, if you consider Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in 2008 to be the start of the unified Marvel film universe, it’s remarkable that they did two Fantastic Four, three Spiderman, a Daredevil and (by some count) four X-Men without ever doing any sort of overlap between them. Of course, factor in two Iron Man and (sigh) two Hulk, and since 2000, we’ve had fourteen Marvel pictures, damn near two a year most years. DC’s had two Batman (which reinvigorated the franchise) and one Superman (which damn near killed it, if it wasn’t only the best known of all superheroes) and I suppose broadly speaking you can count Watchmen, although I suspect everyone involved is running like hell from that one. And V for Vendetta, while I liked it, isn’t any part of the normal DC universe.

I guess the point is, don’t look for a film adaptation of Challenge of the Superfriends anytime soon.

Papermaster’s out. This is quite a turn of events, barely a year after IBM actually sued to keep him from going to Apple. But as the top iPhone exec, if somebody had to pay the price he was the obvious choice.

According to the WSJ, he’d lost the confidence of Himself and had delegated a lot of things that, by Apple standards, he should have been on top of personally. Personally, I don’t think it’s the antenna as much as the white iPhone 4 that sealed his fate – the fact that there’s still no ship date for half the product line is too glaring to ignore.

Starting to wonder whether Apple will be able to effectively hire from without…the “cult of Apple” is a lazy shorthand for the paste-eaters, but it’s also something to consider inside Infinite Loop. There is definitely an Apple Way, and those who cannot adapt to it will probably not do well – makes you wonder how quickly they realized this guy was not a good fit.

It’s still too soon to panic. AAPL is a long term hold, and as for the haters – well, until I see somebody pitching a “Droid killer” phone, I’m not hearing it.

The RNC has approved a resolution making dramatic changes to the way the GOP picks a presidential nominee, moving primaries to later dates and requiring states to allocate their delegates on a proportional basis.

Who called it? Your boy. Flash back to February 20, 2008: “If you don’t think there are going to be MASSIVE changes to the GOP selection process for 2012…I’ll take that bet.”

I AM the straw that stirs the drink.* Don’t let anyone tell you different.

*It’s amazing what a genius you can be (and what an ego you can develop) just by “predicting” something as obvious as the nose on your face. This is also a tacit admission that John McCain was not the desired outcome in 2008 – although again, I maintain that anybody else would have done as bad or worse, running on the “double down Bushism” platform. The older I get, the better I was.

Today, the VP of my old group at FirstJob is retiring. At long last, the principal source of our torment for years on end is gone.

It’s a completely hollow victory, of course. The guys who gathered in the basement in January of 1998, with nothing on the org chart between us and the enemy, are for the most part scattered to the winds. Only a couple are even in the same job they had then.

Everyone who was on staff with years under their belt and talent had pretty much flown the coop before. All that was left were the people who had just started, the people who weren’t going to walk out on their generous defined-benefit pensions, and the people who didn’t actually have the skills to go elsewhere – and this was at a time when Hooters girls were being hired at $50K to sit the help desk because everybody more technical had a better job. So it was down to just us, organized two by two like Noah’s Ark: PC hardware, PC software, Mac hardware, Mac software, PC rollout, plus a guy to handle the avalanche of incoming equipment and our lead. The Dirty Dozen, in a place with PCs running 3 or 4 different operating systems and three different forms of networking in place (four if you count the modem pool that fully half the user base needed to get onto the Internet) and three completely separate email systems, all administered by former big-iron operators who got the job because a study said their salary was commensurate with that of an email administrator.

When I say we were in Tech Vietnam, I’m only serious. And the VP was head of the Viet Cong. Petty, arbitrary, oblivious to any concept of workstation support, and interested only in not having his phone ring – despite the fact that two PC software techs plus a dog’s breakfast of systems plus a thousand users meant a nine day wait for your Windows trouble ticket to be addressed, let alone resolved – which makes the phone ring.

We fought like hell. We had to be smarter, faster, better, and more conniving than the users OR the management. And when the VP finally relented after orders from the C-suite to bring in contractors and reduce the number of tickets, one middle manager after another was brought in as well, with orders to subjugate us. And invariably, they turned on him, because we were right and he was wrong.

In the workplace, I reserve my lowest contempt for a manager who has no discernable talent or skills or knowledge, but just stirs the shit constantly – either in hopes that some order will spontaneously form out of the chaos, or so that there’s a constant stream of things that aren’t his fault so that he can roll the aforementioned shit downhill. This guy got away with it for fourteen years – finally retiring with most of his power and responsibility gone, standing up for a retirement ceremony that he didn’t deserve, because any one of a half-dozen people he fired or quashed did more in a year to save the IT infrastructure than he did in his whole tenure.

I suppose I should thank him. The chaos and bullshit he engendered forged a team like none other. But we could have burned steady for twenty-five years instead of flaming out in six. So instead, I will send him on the way from afar with the worst curse you can lay on a human being – that he gets precisely what he deserves.