March 2008 – Page 2 – Complaint Hub

I am literally floored by this stunning news flash

In Obama’s New Message, Some Foes See Old Liberalism – washingtonpost.com

But as Obama heads into the final presidential primaries, Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have already started to brand him a standard-order left-winger, “a down-the-line liberal,” as McCain strategist Charles R. Black Jr. put it, in a long line of Democratic White House hopefuls.

OMG, I am totally in shock. The Washington Post is breaking the staggering, unforeseen, and totally unbelievable news that Barack Obama is a liberal! Tomorrow, they plan to announce that water is wet, the sky is blue, and George W. Bush is a miserable excuse for a President. Does this come as news to anyone? Really? And then the Clinton camp is jumping on the bandwagon and saying he’s too liberal. That’s like the Yankees complaining that the Red Sox spend too much money on player salaries. I can’t speak for all of the Obama supporters, but I can speak for me. I am not supporting Obama because of where he falls on the liberal/conservative spectrum. I often don’t agree with him on policy, especially fiscal policy, because I think he’s too liberal. I support Obama because I like where he is on the reasonable/unreasonable spectrum. I like where he is on the trustworthy/untrustworthy spectrum. I like where he is on the “I can see this person as the leader of my country”/George W. Bush spectrum. I think Obama understands that his policy isn’t always what’s right for America, and that sometimes, you have to listen to the other side and make some major concessions. I think if you can’t concede that there are times when liberal view is the right one, and times when the conservative view is the right one, then you aren’t being honest with yourself. More than either of the other candidates, I think Obama understands this, too. When Obama is President, I believe he will push for policy that I think is a bad idea. He will probably implement some policy that I think is a bad idea. But that’s okay. I think he will be a good President, and I certainly think he will be a better President than Clinton or McCain.

Why the save is a stupid stat

So, Oakland and Boston opened the baseball season with a game in Japan at what is, in the US, a ridiculous hour. The ten inning game just finished around 930AM Eastern. It gave us a good look at why the save is a ridiculous stat that tells nothing about the usefulness of a pitcher. Sure, good closers get a lot of saves. But that doesn’t make it a good measure of the quality of the closer. Take Jonathan Papelbon’s performance this morning. Now, I won’t argue that he’s not a good closer, because in his three seasons, he’s been utterly absurd. But this particular save he “earned” is absolutely in no way a reflection of a good outing. He came on to start the tenth, Boston leading by two. He began the inning by walking Daric Barton, who must have read Moneyball dozens of times. He then struck out Jack Cust (Who was 0-4 with 4 strikeouts. What a wonderful way to start the season). Then he allowed a double, scoring Barton. The hitter, Emil Brown, was thrown out at third trying for his 11th career triple in his 620th career game. Good job, clown. The next two batters singled, meaning that the game would have been tied if Brown had just held up at second. I didn’t see the game, so maybe he made the right call to try for third and it just didn’t work out, but I think that’s unlikely. Finally, Papelbon got out of the inning. Three hits, a walk, and only a baserunning mistake away from an eleventh inning or a loss. But he gets the save! Way to accurately measure the quality of a pitcher’s outing, save. Really. Nice job.

Why do I hate roller bags at work?

I am annoyed (probably irrationally, I know) by people who use the little roller bags instead of a briefcase or something at work. I’m not quite sure why I’m annoyed, but I hate them. Every time I see one, I think to myself, “That person thinks he/she is more important than he/she is”. I’m okay with roller bags when traveling, although I don’t really like to use them myself – they make too much noise and they bug me. But I see the utility, and occasionally even use them. Maybe if they had rubber wheels . . . Anyway, part of my irritation was the gentleman using the restroom on my floor who had left his roller bag in a particularly inconvenient spot. But it goes beyond that, and I’m at a loss to explain why. Part of it may be that people tend to be less maneuverable with these bags. They expand their personal space, sometimes infringing on mine in the elevator (And we all know I don’t like elevators). But I don’t think that fully explains it, because I don’t even like to see people far away from me with these bags. Any ideas? Do YOU like roller bags at work?

Family tree building

Main Page – GRAMPS

GRAMPS is a Free Software Project for Genealogy, offering a professional genealogy program, and a wiki open to all. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.

I’ve been trying to collect some family names in preparation for the baby. The wife and I wouldn’t mind using a family name for the baby if we can find one we like, so we’re trying to find one we like. A cousin of my grandmother gave her a copy of the Wolman family tree (My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is Wolman). And I spent most of yesterday evening entering it into GRAMPS, the above-linked genealogy program. It’s really just a graphical front end for some sort of custom database, it seems, but it’s a pretty cool product for creating a family tree. There are websites that let you do it, but they seem to want money. But since this program was developed for Linux (and is included in the Ubuntu packages, for those using Ubuntu), it’s free. I think the final count when I finished last night was 388 people in the tree. Some of them are unnamed, and there were a few guesses where the writing got cut off when it was photocopied. But it’s a pretty extensive picture of that part of the family. My next goal is to get something similar on my dad’s side, and then work on the wife’s family. And I’d like to get the important dates in – almost no one in the tree has a birth or a death date, and many of non-Wolmans don’t have last names. This is especially common for women who married in and stopped using their maiden names, and I imagine many genealogists have this problem. But it’s kind of fun to find out all this stuff. Even if we don’t find a name for the kid, I’d be happy with just having a big family tree to pass along.

South Park shares all the episodes

New South Park site debuts, with full episode streaming – Boing Boing

Eventually every episode and clip will be available everywhere in the world. There is a tangle of contracts that Comedy Central has with different cable companies and territories that are preventing us from that right now. But hopefully it won’t be long.

This brings me back to the glory days Chuckles. Chuckles was the name of the forgotten machine on the work network that the IT team didn’t realize was unused. It had every episode of South Park through season 8, gigs of MP3s, movies, and tv shows. Whenever I was bored at work, I could just watch something. And now the creators of South Park are doing the same thing. Shocking that the show that has never been afraid of pushing the envelope (BTW, did you know that “pushing the envelope” actually refers to the flight envelope, which is “the capabilities of [an airplane] design in terms of speed and altitude”?) is also not afraid of experimenting with new business models.

So what’s in it for us?

Shysterball | Can We Build It? Ev-en-tu-ally!

Know what? Something tells me slogans like “you gotta wait 10 years for this to work out” weren’t part of Evans’ pitch back when he and his colleagues were voting to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars from impoverished D.C. residents to wealthy baseball owners.

I’ve always thought that the public shouldn’t be on the hook for any part of the construction of a sports stadium unless the public is realizing profits above and beyond tax revenue. I may be totally making this up, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read that most studies indicate that the city doesn’t really benefit much from a new stadium. The team owners really benefit from a new stadium. As such, it seems reasonable that the city should get something back. If DC gives $100 million towards the new Nationals Park, it seems reasonable to me that the city get, say, $5 million a year in profit sharing. Certainly with $100 million, any marginally competent financial adviser could turn a 5% profit. So it seems fair that the Nationals should kick that back to the city. I don’t know the actual numbers here, I’m just making these up, but I think the argument holds. Still, I’m looking forward to checking out the new stadium. I drove by yesterday on the way to visit my family, and it looks pretty impressive.

Peanuts and Cracker Jack

ESPN | Humble Jones gives Orioles a face for the future

His name is Adam Jones, and the Orioles spent the better part of two months this offseason prying him loose from Seattle. . . If the camp buzz means anything, the effort was worth it.

Too bad “camp buzz” doesn’t win championships. Jones better be humble – he struck out once every four at bats at AAA last year, and he gets thrown out on 35% of steal attempts. And that’s by minor league catchers. I mean, he’s young. He’s going to get better. But what we gave up to get him was only one of the best pitchers in the league (I think Bedard led the league in strikeouts per batter faced last year, picking up 221 in only 182 innings). I’m all for going young – if the Orioles want to totally rebuild, and realize that they have to let Bedard go to pick up the prospects to make us competitive in three years, fine. Rebuild. But then why is Melvin Mora still on the team? You can’t go half way on rebuilding. Ditch everyone over 25. Orioles fans really will stick with you if you’re making a real commitment to winning. We’re just getting tired of this pretending. The team hung on to Mora too long. They hung on to Tejada too long. They seem to be stringing Brian Roberts along over a trade to the Cubs. I do like Jones’ attitude, though.

“I hate it when people say, ‘Look at all the stuff you’ve done,'” Jones said. “Well, I did it in Triple-A. When I got an opportunity in the big leagues last year, I hit .246. I didn’t do everything I could with the opportunity I had.

That’s exactly what you want to hear from your new 22-year-old outfielder. He’s not coming in cocky, crowing over his .968 OPS last year. He’s putting it on himself to perform and prove he deserves to be there. The season starts pretty soon, and I’m getting into the baseball mood (At least I will be as soon as I’m mathematically eliminated from my NCAA tournament pool). I’m curious to see how Bedard does in Seattle. Part of me is hoping he strikes out 350 with a WHIP of under 1 and wins the Cy Young. That way I can say, “I told you so”.

Alternative means of transportation

As some of you may know, I drive out to Falls Church for work every day. As I go down 14th Street NW in the morning, I look fondly at the bike path, trying to ignore the frequently double-parked cars, right turners, and other obstacles, and imagine biking to work. How smug I would be, getting some exercise, some fresh air, shrinking my carbon footprint. I mean, in terms of yuppie street cred, commutes go something like this, in increasing order of smugness:

Drive
Carpool
Metro
Long bus ride
Metro from a “sketchy” stop like Brookland or Navy Yard
Telework
Full time grad student (Only if you’re at least 4 years older than most of your classmates)
Short bus ride
Walk
Bike
I was thinking, though, how much longer it would take to bike than drive. And then I passed a guy on a bike. I passed him around P St, or maybe T. I thought to myself how it must take him forever to get to work. I wondered if I had that kind of dedication. And then, I got stuck at the light at N St. And he passed me. The light changed, and I nearly caught him, but then he was off as I waited at the light at the circle. I lost track of him after that.

Unfortunate name, interesting product

Tobias Buckell Online | Blews

I’m quite intrigued, as I’m always trying tools that will blunt any attempt by myself to surround myself and read only people who think exactly like I do. I think of all the outraged liberals in ‘04 who thought there was no possible way Bush could win because they didn’t know of anyone who was going to vote for him. Or conservative friends who still think Bush has been the greatest president evar!

I keep hearing about this Microsoft Blews thing, and, as Buckell says, this could be the coolest thing Microsoft has ever done. I’d add “since Windows 3.1” to his statement, but whatever. I have mentioned before that I’d like a nice unbiased news source that leans in the direction of exactly none of the political parties. I’ve tried foreign publications, since they probably lean towards parties I’ve never heard of, and I figure that’s better than ones I have heard of. But foreign news always seems to have this undercurrent of, “Oh, jeez, look what the Americans did now”. Maybe that’s just me – I do have a not-entirely-irrational fear that the entire world laughs at us all the time. Anyway, the one thing that I don’t see anywhere is whether it’s a website or a desktop application. If this is going after Google Reader or some other web-based news aggregator (My Firefox dictionary doesn’t have “aggregator”?), then I think it could be very successful. However, if this is some desktop application (Windows only == fail), then I’m getting interested for nothing. Desktop applications are best suited for things that are too resource-intensive to be done in your browser. Consuming news articles through a desktop application is only a half-step above (shudder) reading a newspaper.

Yay, Nashville!

I wrote about this a little while ago, and now Boing Boing says, Copyfighters beat down Tennessee bill. Well done, Tennessee. People in the comments point out that this is not a total victory – it still requires universities to police their students, which is a dumb idea. But at least it’s no longer a horrible, despicable idea.