Author: Jon

Maybe that’s why everyone loves Wall-E

WALL-E: Cute robot or liberal propaganda? – ParentDish

“From the first moment of the film,” wrote Shannen Coffin, former general counsel to Vice President Cheney, “my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.”

So, Wall-E has been described as “a 90-minute lecture on the dangers of over consumption, big corporations, and the destruction of the environment.” The cynic in me is wondering if the blogs I read, predominantly pretty liberal, pick up on that, and overstate how good the movie is because it speaks to some of the issues they believe in. That is, it’s getting “good movie” points for “good message”. It’s only natural to come away with a more positive perception of anything – a movie, a person, a work of art, whatever – if that thing supports views you already hold. I certainly don’t mean to imply that the reviewers of Wall-E are being dishonest, even unconsciously. But it’s something to think about. Especially if the conservative reviewers consistently have lower opinions of the movie. I guess I’d have to check out some of them to be sure.

Five Guys is a delicous disaster

I’m working from home today, which gave me a chance to check out our new Five Guys for lunch. It was busy, but I got through the line quickly. And then I waited. They seemed to be getting orders out pretty fast, but I was number 88, and they served 79 right as I paid. So I waited. When I finally got my lunch, I checked the bag to find two burgers instead of one. Since no one else would eat a second burger (I’m home alone, the wife wouldn’t eat the meat anyway, and the cat probably wouldn’t care), I took the bag back to the counter. As they were trying to figure out what happened, a woman missing a burger from her bag came up beside me. It wasn’t difficult to figure out what happened, and they quickly fixed it. So I came home and ate my delicious pile of fried calories. And now I have to get back to work.

Women give funny looks

Let me paint you a picture. You are at work in a large office. You don’t know nearly everyone who you see every day, but you recognize most of the faces. You pass by a woman in the hall. She looks at you and makes a face. This face is not a smile. It is as if she has started to smile, but her lips are stuck together, and she forgot that smiles usually convey happiness. This look simply acknowledges your presence. You can make this face, too. Start to smile, but stop yourself before the corners of your mouth turn up, and think of something you don’t care about very much. I believe that this is the female version of The Nod, a universal greeting between males who recognize each other but have never spoken. This Nod can speak 1,000 words. It is a conditioned automatic response. With The Nod, you can say, “We have made eye contact. I do not know who you are, but I have seen you enough times to know that we must have something in common, even if that thing is only that we work in the same building. However, this commonality brings with it a small amount of respect. Since we occupy the same space so often, in order to uphold my self-image, I must assume that your presence here is for some lofty purpose or goal. To deny you this respect is to threaten the foundation of my own self-respect. This I can not do.” I don’t know what the female-equivalent look means. I could guess, but I’d be wrong. If you are a woman, or if you understand women (Read: you are a liar), feel free to leave an explanation in the comments.

The MVNO road is not the one you want

Blogging Stocks | Google’s one chance for Android – become a wireless carrier

The competitive landscape is so tightly controlled that Google’s mantra of “open access” just won’t sit well with wireless carriers used to telling customers what they can and cannot do with their phones.

This is very true. Time and again, the major US wireless carriers have rejected anything they can’t control. But there are a ton of things wrong with this article. First, Verizon announced last year that it’s opening up its network. I’m sure it won’t be as open as it could be, because Verizon is a bunch of jerks, but it’s still a step in the right direction. Second, I think Google’s name will drive some openness. You know how all the carriers want a piece of the iPhone? Look for that to happen again when a few sexy reviews of Google’s phone operating system start cropping up. Like Apple, Google has a sometimes irrational following. People will assume it’s good just because it’s Google. The article continues to state, “the MVNO model has largely failed in the U.S.”. That’s very true. Amp’d? Helio? Bye-bye. It doesn’t seem to be a sustainable business. Google isn’t really into failing, and they’re not stupid. But the dumbest thing the article says is the final line. Google should buy its own space on someone’s network and “give them anything they want. Like, mobile search results with ads next to them.” This is just a fundamental misunderstanding of some or all of the words in that sentence. I think he means “location-based search”, not “mobile”. I want my phone to do a Google Maps search, and I want the default location to be right where I am, right now. Simply making search “mobile” just means making my computer small enough to carry with me all the time. The real “synergy” of phone and search is that the phone already knows where you are. Now it just has to tell your search engine. It’s nice that Google Maps remembers my default location, but with a location-aware wireless device, there’s so much more it can do. Even worse is the idea that people want ads next to their search results. Search customers don’t want ads. We put up with them because they’re unobtrusive, they’re likely to be relevant to what we’re looking for, and they’re a small price to pay for an otherwise free service. If the ads went away and the search stayed the same otherwise, you would get no complaints from anyone not making money on the ads. I’d like to see Google completely skip the US market. Just go to Europe where the networks are open. Verizon and AT&T; and Sprint will come around pretty quickly when everyone who comes in to buy a phone wonders why they can’t have a Google phone. Well, everyone who isn’t there to buy an iPhone, anyway. Or maybe Sprint’s Samsung Instinct, which is apparently doing really well. Certainly Google has the cash to throw at their own chunk of network. But they didn’t get this successful by throwing money at dumb business ideas. I can’t imagine they’re going to start now.

That’s TWO doubles this year

Brandon Fahey Originally uploaded by dnkbdotcom

Brandon Fahey got another extra base hit! That gives him two this year, and brings his slugging percentage to a torrid .241. The Orioles almost blew another one to the miserable Royals, allowing two runs in the 9th before closing it out. They’re still outperforming their Pythagorean win expectation, although not nearly to the extent that Toronto is missing theirs. But at least they’re competitive, which is more than I can say for the Nationals, and more than I expected out of the Orioles this year.

Unexpected consequences of killing the gun ban

Techdirt | Supreme Court Decision On Guns May Cut Promoting Progress Out Of The Constitution

Again, so whether or not you’re happy with the way the court decided the Heller case, the fact that it has no problem deciding that a clause in the Constitution can be ignored as “preamble” could have very bad consequences for those of us pointing out that dangerous innovation-hindering intellectual property systems are against the Constitution.

A lot has been said about the Supreme Court’s decision that the DC gun ban is unconstitutional, but this is the first time I’ve heard mention of the effects that this precedent might have on other legislation. I don’t much like guns in the house. I don’t want them in my house. I don’t think you should have them in your house, either, but I think you should have a right to have them if you want to. And I don’t think the repeal of the gun ban is going to have a significant effect on the number of guns in the city. My feeling on the constitutionality of the law is that it probably wasn’t. As written, I think you can make a strong argument that the amendment doesn’t say that everyone should be allowed to have a gun. However, it has been interpreted for years to say that it does. Unless we amend the amendment, I think we have to allow people to posses guns. I think we should amend it – not necessarily to ban guns, but to remove the controversy. It should be very clear what the amendment does and doesn’t allow. We’ve been arguing over it long enough. I’m not sure I’d be happy with what the present political climate in the federal government would come up with, though, so maybe we should wait until things are a little more sane. In any event, I hope this doesn’t open the floodgates to picking and choosing which parts of the Constitution are relevant and which aren’t. Awful intellectual property laws are bad, but there are a lot of other parts of the Constitution that we’d all be even sorrier to be without.

Delicious frozen custard

We waited too long to try out the “new” Rita’s Water Ice in Columbia Heights. Their frozen custard is awesome. It’s like ice cream, but creamier. If that doesn’t sound awesome to you, you must be either crazy or lactose-intolerant. Or vegan. But probably crazy. As we were walking, the wife and were talking about how nice it is to see so many people out and about. The intersection of 14th and Irving is full of people, all the time. Even a year and a half ago when we moved here there weren’t half as many people around. Of course, that was before Target and everything opened. And it doesn’t hurt that this is the nicest evening we’ve had in a while – it’s cool and breezy and we’ve already opened the window in the bedroom in anticipation of sleeping without the air conditioning.

Maybe Wall-E really is good

Seth’s Blog: Bravery and Wall-e

Pixar, recently purchased by Disney, could crank out multi-billion dollar confections. . . And yet, instead, they make a great movie. A movie for the ages. A film, not 90 minutes of commerce.

blackrimglasses.com – Wall-E

See this movie, as it is film history in the making.

I don’t know what the deal is with this movie. I know people love everything Pixar does. But with a few exceptions (people, not movies), I figured it was just that people like to watch stupid garbage like American Idol and I Survived a Japanese Game Show. But the reaction to Wall-E is ridiculous. Everything I’ve read about this movie has been superlative.

I guess the wife and I will have to go see it. We haven’t been to the movies in a while.

Drupal and the Blog API

I wish someone had told me you had to enable the Blog API module before you could use all the cool blogging tools like Flickr’s “Blog This” or Firefox plugin ScribeFire. I tried setting up both, and kept getting unhelpful errors. It looked like my username and password were wrong. This was frustrating, because I was sure my username and password were correct. After significant Googling, I finally found a helpful explanation. And now it works perfectly. You can see the previous post, which I sent straight from Flickr. So, hopefully now this page will be one more Google hit explaining that, if you want an external site or application to access your xmlrpc.php file, you’d better turn on the Blog API module.