Month: July 2006

Forget the polar ice caps, now theyre messing with wine

Treehugger: Climate Change Threatens Vineyards

Climate change is making more and more areas unsuitable for growing grapes to make wine.  This is an outrage.  Who cares about dumb jaguars (Note – it’s more fun to say jaguar in Spanish – the “j” sounds like an “h”.  Try it!) and worthless giant pandas – they can’t mess with my wine!

Actually, I’m just kidding.  I care deeply for jaguars and giant pandas.  And the article is making predictions for 2099.  By then, little nano-machines will be making wine from raw carbon without all that work of growing grapes and fermenting them and all that.

I wonder how long it takes before climate change starts affecting something that everyone cares about?  I mean, it’s easy for someone to say, “I don’t care about the rainforest” if you’ve never seen one.  The whole “we need them to survive” thing doesn’t seem quite real.  It’s the same with melting ice caps.  They’re far away.  Not to diminish the impact they have on our lives, but it is certainly easy to ignore.

Maybe someone should get Al Gore on this.  He could make another movie called “A Sobering Picture” all about how wine is good for you, but the Republicans are trying to destroy it.

I've been waiting for this for all my life

Newsvine – Political Strategists to Launch Web Site

Well, not quite all my life.  Looks like “Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, and Joe Lockhart, former White House press secretary under President Clinton” are starting up an “Internet information venture designed to interact with America’s opinion leaders and serve as an antidote to the right-left clash that typifies political discourse on the Web”. 

It’s supposed to be a social networking site for grownups.  And it’s supposed to be bipartisan, focusing on informed debate rather than the self-serving crap we get from the Democrats and Republicans now.

It remains to be seen if it will be anything worthwhile, but I would love to see this work out.  Imagine!  A place to get real information from both sides of our political spectrum.

Anyway, keep your eye out in October for HotSoup

Does the AP do it on purpose?

CNN.com – Bush heralds improved deficit figures – Jul 11, 2006

Bush says:

These tax cuts left nearly $1.1 trillion in the hands of American workers and families and small business owners. And they used this money to help fuel an economic resurgence [leading to higher tax revenues and a smaller deficit]

The AP says:

Impressive profits and big income gains by the wealthy are largely responsible for the surge in [tax] revenues and, in turn, the deficit drop.

Does the AP mean to point out the half-truth here, or are they honestly just trying to add some analysis?  I have to think the former, because I can’t imagine that the AP would be that clueless.  But I don’t really know for sure.

Materazzi is uncultured

SI.com – 2006 World Cup – Materazzi admits insulting Zidane but denies ‘terrorist’ – Tuesday July 11, 2006 12:03PM

“I did insult him, it’s true,” Materazzi said in Tuesday’s Gazzetta dello Sport. “But I categorically did not call him a terrorist. I’m not cultured and I don’t even know what an Islamic terrorist is.”

I wonder – was this quote translated from Italian? Does Materazzi speak English? If he does, how fluently? Regardless, the fact remains that Zidane is a douchebag.

It looks like Ten isnt Pearl Jams only worthwhile gift to society

Treehugger: Pearl Jam Announces Carbon Portfolio Strategy

Pearl Jam has announced that they are giving “$100,000 to nine different non-profits ‘doing innovative work around climate change, renewable energy, and the environment'”, and hope to get to 0% net emissions for their tours and business.

I haven’t listened to much Pearl Jam lately, mostly because I haven’t liked much they’ve done since “Ten”, but “Ten” was one of the top five or so albums released in the last 20 years, and ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE IS STUPID. Just kidding. Anyone who says otherwise isn’t necessarily stupid. They’re wrong, but not necessarily stupid.

This does make me want to go out and buy the latest Pearl Jam cd. Do you think they’re selling a DRM-free copy?

64 pages of Hillary – I still dont like her

Unfortunately, I can’t really say why yet. I’m curious, though – in 64 pages, we’ve gone from the birth of her grandmother to Bill proposing – what the heck is she going to talk about for the next 450 pages? One thing I’m sure of, she’ll mention wonderful people who’ve become lifelong friends. And she’ll probably pat herself on the back for being so gosh darn eager to change the world through dialogue and diplomacy!

New tax on VOIP to go to . . . nothing

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Guest Blogger: Daniel Berninger – “Universal Service Fund generated remarkably meager results for $50 billion spent”

I’ve been using Vonage’s VOIP service ever since I bought my condo in March 2005. I’ve been pretty happy with it, although their tech support is less than perfect. Now, the link above is an open letter to Congressional Commerce Committees about the decision of the FCC to apply the Universal Service Fund to VOIP. The USF is supposed to bring telephone service to poor rural areas, a noble goal as far as I’m concerned. But the gist of the letter is that what the USF really does is make it that much harder for Vonage and other VOIP providers to turn the phone industry into a real competitive market.

I think one of the real problems is that, too often, little bits of data transmitted over our internet connections are treated as different objects when they really aren’t. Somehow, it’s totally different, according to some, to transfer voice instead of video, or data instead of voice. This is ridiculous. It’s all the same stuff. It’s as if we decided that you needed one highway for automobiles, and one for SUVs. Never mind that many small car drivers would love this, that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t matter what you’re sending. This device produces this data, and sends it to that device, which receives it. Does it matter if the first device was a webcam or a VOIP phone?

Apparently it does, and the FCC is going to tax it. I don’t have a problem with the FCC taxing communication to raise money for things that need to be done, but the USF has spent $50 billion over the last 20 years to increase phone penetration in rural areas by about 3%. I would hereby like to volunteer to accept $50 billion and spend the next 20 years trying to get a phone for every person in America. If I don’t have 99% coverage by 2027, feel free to put me in jail. I’ll deserve it.

Still digging Ubuntu

As I near the internet geek abyss, posting to my blog using Flock on a box running Ubuntu, setting up an account at del.icio.us, spending the afternoon learning about apt-get, I realize that I’m enjoying myself.  My fiancee thinks I’m crazy, but that’s nothing new.

I haven’t cut the cord to Windows yet, although I’d like to.  I’ll probably keep my laptop dual-booting (Currently it’s XP only) just in case.

On a related note, speaking of fiancees, I’m wondering how I can convince her that a new monitor is a reasonable investment.  I’m currently using a 17″ CRT from 1998 when I’m not on my laptop, and it’s pretty painful.  It was cruel of them at work to buy me a 24″ widescreen, because now everything else seems like an insult to my eyes.  It’ll probably have to wait until after the wedding, though.

When two things I love come together

Sales of organic beers start to hop – Yahoo! News

And those two things are Yahoo! News and dumb headline puns.

Actually, the two things I love are organic and beer.  I was in Giant yesterday because I was out running another errand (recycling cardboard, actually – I’m so environmentally friendly) and I was right next to Giant.  I never used to think there was much difference between one supermarket and another.  But now that we have a new super Safeway nearby, plus the Harris Teeter and Whole Foods, where I can get all kinds of cool organic food, the fact that Giant seems to have watched the organic bandwagon go flying by without so much as a wave is a big deal.

Now, I don’t buy everything organic.  I’ll buy “conventional” if no organic is available.  But it’s always nice to be able to get the organic.

So now organic beer is starting to pick up.  That’s great.  I do love beer.

Organic beer sales increased 40 percent in 2005, tying it with organic coffee as the fastest-growing organic beverage, the Organic Trade Association says. By comparison, overall U.S. beer sales fell slightly last year.

Awesome.

Increasing my nerd quotient

First, there was the Slashdot post about Mac nerds switching to Ubuntu. Then I saw that someone I’ve met in real life uses Ubuntu. Since I’ve always thought that I couldn’t really claim that I was a computer geek unless I had at least one computer running Linux (And my previous attempt at running Debian was a failure), I thought, why not follow Cory’s lead and check out Ubuntu.  So far, it’s pretty cool.  I had some issues getting my resolution to display at anything but 640X480, and I still don’t have my wireless card working (Although I’m not sure it ever worked that well when I was running Windows, either), I’m liking the Linux.  Ubuntu comes with a pretty slick GUI, and a lot of the stuff you need – Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp . . .

And it’s keeping my old Dell P3 500mhz from sitting in a corner collecting dust.  I bought the computer in 1998, and it’s treated me well.  Now I think I can get a little more use out of it.

My fiancee tells me that I’m running Linux because I want to be able to look down my nose at you silly Windows users, and she’s not entirely off-base.  There is a certain part of me that yearns to be snooty to everyone else.  But I try to keep that part in check.  Sometimes I even manage to do it.