Month: October 2006

Slim with the tilted brim

‘Snoop Dogg’ faces gun, drug accusation – CNN.com

“An investigation revealed Calvin Broadus to be in possession of marijuana and a firearm,” a police statement said. . . .  “There was no basis for this arrest,” said the rapper’s lawyer, Donald Etra. “We believe that once this is cleared up, all charges will be dismissed.”

Numerous things here.

First, if I were Snoop, I would legally change my name to Snoop Dogg so the media would have to stop putting it in quotes.

Second, taped to the monitor on my old PC at home is a picture of Snoop from the Wall Street Journal about eight or nine years ago when he publicily made a big deal out of quitting marijuana.  It appears he’s started again.  Anyway, I was taking Public Finance in college, and we had to have a subscription to the WSJ for class, so I would usually read it during lunch.  As an aside, that was just after one of my roommates taught me how to make grilled cheese, and to this day I associate reading the WSJ with eating grilled cheese.  As for Snoop, I couldn’t resist the little picture of him – it seems so out of place next to big time politicians and important people.  So it’s been taped to that monitor for all that time.  I don’t know what I’ll do when I replace the monitor.

Third, Snoop needs to remember that a 2:1 arrests-to-albums ratio is safe, but if you get much higher than that, they stop calling you “rap artist ‘Snoop Dogg'” and start calling you “convicted felon Calvin Broadus, who rapped under the name ‘Snoop Dogg’ before his arrest”.

Fourth, as far as I’m concerned, rap doesn’t get much better than “Doggystyle”.

No substantial relationship

John Scalzi on gay marriage in NJ

Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose.

John Scalzi has a nice bit on the NJ Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. The above is my favorite line from the quote from the decision. It looks like the Jersey Supreme Court has sent a nice not-so-subtle message that the government is not in the business of spreading homophobia and discrimination. I think “no substantial relationship to legitimate governmental purpose” is a lovely turn of phrase, and I applaud the court.

I’m not so sure I’m happy with their failure to rule on whether you can call it marriage – this is an important issue for many, and not calling it marriage leaves them open to “separate but equal” challenges. But I suppose that leaving some of the decision to legislators is what the whole system is about. Hopefully New Jersey’s legislature will work something out that most people can live with.

Everyone else is posting it

outside.in

outside.in is designed to change all that, as a bridge between information space and real-world space — a place to see in a single glance all the interesting things that are happening around you.

I’ve read about this on at least three blogs already, so I figured I might as well check it out. It’s user-based content, so there’s not much there yet, although with all the pimping it’s getting from big shots like John Battelle and David Pescovitz at BoingBoing, it shouldn’t be long before they have a good user community.

The idea is that you will go and provide local information about where you live, and be able to find similar information about other places.  Or you might find that little hole in the wall restaurant around the corner that you’ve never noticed.

Nice idea.  Execution looks pretty good, although I didn’t poke around too much.  It’s certainly designed better than HotSoup.

Im very dusty

Dusty hallwayWhen I moved in to my condo, the seller swore that we could easily paint over the ugly venetian plaster he’d had put up. “But, of course, you’d never want to”, he said. I beg to differ. Brown bamboo floors and brown walls just don’t do it for me. So the wife and I painted over the walls, and it just peels right off. Now that we’re trying to sell, we’re sanding the stupid walls so we can paint them. We tested a little spot, and sanding actually makes the primer stick.

Unfortunately, sanding also makes a horrific mess. I’m at work now, and my hands still feel like they have plaster dust on them. And I haven’t sanded anything since last night. I’ve taken TWO showers since I touched a sander.

Oh, well.  I think we can finish sanding tonight or tomorrow, then we’ll paint, and forget this horrible dusty mess.  The cat will no doubt appreciate that, as well, so she can go back to being black again.

This is what they mean by liberal media

Bush’s New Tack Steers Clear of ‘Stay the Course’ – washingtonpost.com

But the White House is cutting and running from “stay the course.”

Oh, how clever.  Use the phrase that the Republicans use to attack Democrats and then the phrase the Republicans used before the Democrats used it to attack Republicans.  Where does one go for neutral news reporting?  I get Fox News at the gym.  Fair and balanced, they say.  Yes, fair to radical conservative nutjobs, and balanced between Republicans and other Republicans.  I tried Daily Kos, because that’s one of the first names in political blogging news.  If you take Daily Kos, and reverse the adjectives – that is, replace “bad” with “good” and all that, you have Fox News all over again.  I tried the Wall Street Journal, but they hide behind a pay wall, and I don’t want to get a subscription.  The Washington Post can’t possibly claim to be unbiased after allowing a line like the one above to be printed. Where do you get your news?

Yeah, remember what we said before? We were lying

Beltway Toll Plan May Need Va. Funds – washingtonpost.com

“I think it demonstrates the risks involved in seeing privatization as a panacea,” said Gerald E. Connolly (D), chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. “We can’t simply hope that the tooth fairy, in the form of the private sector, will make all of our problems go away.”

No, but you can hope that a plan that you agreed to doesn’t go $100 million over budget. The sequence of events seems to have gone like this:

  • Private industry says, “We can make an HOT lane without using any taxpayer money, thereby easing congestion and making a profit!”
  • Virginia government says, “Sweet, go for it, dude.”
  • Private industry says, “Oops, when we said ‘no taxpayer money’, we really meant ‘$100 million in taxpayer money’. Our bad.”
  • Virginia government says, “Looks like you’re not the tooth fairy! Here’s some cash.”
    Great. It probably won’t even help traffic.

New stuff coming soon

I’ve been working this weekend to bring you some new features here. Once I get it all working, you’ll be able to submit your own complaints, and view the complaints of others. It will be pretty low-tech at the beginning. It will probably involve you emailing me through a form on the site, and then I’ll add your complaint somewhere. The goal eventually is to take me out of the equation, and allow you to interact somehow with the complaints of others.

To that end, I’ve been working in Prado, a PHP framework. I started using them because they offered AJAX support, and you can’t be a cool website without AJAX, right? But it turns out that AJAX was supported in version 2.X, and will be again in 3.1, but the current version is 3.05, and it does not really have any AJAX support. I thought about going back to 2.X, but then I’d have to redo things when 3.1 came out, which they claim should be in about two weeks. So, thanks to Mo for showing me how to upgrade to PHP5 on Dreamhost (Great inexpensive web hosting company, by the way), and I’ll get the new stuff out as soon as I can.

This also gives me the opportunity to say how much I like developing on my Ubuntu box using a lighttpd server.  For some of you, I know this is like a foreign language, but I honestly thought you stopped reading when I started talking about Prado.  Anyway, it was a real personal accomplishment for me to get PHP 5 and Prado installed on lighttpd and have a small web app up and running over the weekend.  I’m quite pleased with myself, actually.  While I do web development for a living, the server configuration and things like that are not my strong suit (Or even, really, my suit at all).  I never really learned anything about managing a server, and our enviroment at work was set up before I got here.   So I’m just going to pat myself on the back here for figuring it out and getting it all working.

Hey, that might be a good idea

My wife is going to be out of town for the election this year, so she dutifully applied for and received her absentee ballot.  I was looking at the propaganda they send along with it (Apparently both the Democratic and the Republican parties are notified when you get an absentee ballot, because both sent her some literature).  Have any of you read how far-reaching the proposed gay marriage ban in Virginia is?  It doesn’t stop at banning gay marriage.  It doesn’t even stop at banning civil unions.  It bans anything that might resemble marriage, or carry some of the same benefits of marriage, for anyone who isn’t a married couple of opposite gender.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think a good lawyer could argue convincingly, based on the wording of this law, that I can’t enter into a verbal contract with a buddy to help him move some furniture in exchange for a case of beer.  Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

However, I think this may be a brilliant move on the part of those against a ban on gay marriage.  They may have realized that there was no way they could avoid putting it on the ballot.  Instead, they made it so far-reaching that even if it passes, it should be ruled unconstitutional.  Of course, as shown by the second question on the ballot, that doesn’t mean much.  The second question proposes removing something from the books that has, actually, been ruled unconstitutional.  Shouldn’t that be automatic?  I mean, as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Virginia, I’m okay with allowing the VA government to remove unconstitutional laws from the books without asking my permission.

Maybe this will move them to act

GOP terrorism ad sparks Democratic furor – CNN.com

I haven’t seen this ad.  I don’t need to see it.  I’m voting, and whatever the ad is, it won’t affect my vote.  But I hope people are angry about it.  I hope it pisses off hundreds of thousands of people and maybe some of them will actually get up and vote.

I would rather see 90% of the registered voters elect Bill Frist or Hillary Clinton President than 10% of the registered voters elect someone who isn’t a minion of Satan.  If the vast majority of the country disagrees with me on who should run the country, fine.  I’ll accept that.  But if we don’t know who the vast majority of the country prefers because most of them don’t bother to exercise their Constitutional right to tell us, then I’m pissed off.