Category: Uncategorized

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.

More autism

TIME.com: Why We Need to be Careful in the Search for Autism’s Cause — Page 1

The week also brought a more definitive, though less splashy finding on the causes of autism, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. A team led by Levitt found that a fairly common gene variation-one that’s present in 47% of the population-is associated with an increased risk of autism.

I just posted about the research that this article is responding to. This Time article sounds a little like blogosphere hate – because many bloggers read the article I did and talked about it, the article must be based on wild conjecture and made up data.

I think it’s great that scientists take the research of others with a grain of salt – if it looks contrary to what you’ve seen, you should certainly investigate. And I understand the feeling of many experts in various fields that the internet has allowed everyone to think they are experts, and spread their opinions all over. But isn’t it at least worth investigating? They’ve found some strong statistics suggesting that increased TV watching corresponds with a rise in autism. Isn’t that at least a good starting point? Why can’t the geneticists and medical researchers talk to the economists about their findings? Maybe that would be helpful.

The fact that something is blogged does not make it right or wrong. Many smart people blog many smart things. And many not so smart people blog misleading or untrue things. Actually, I’m sure smart bloggers post false information, too. Anyway.

Time had this to say about the previous research:

Could there be something to this strange piece of statistical derring- do? It’s not impossible, but it would take a lot more research to tease out its true significance. Meanwhile, it’s hard to say just what these correlations measure.

A lot more research? Well, lucky us, we have 300 million people in the country. Surely some of them could do research. Maybe they could look for reasons why or why not TV watching affects autism. Maybe a kid has to be genetically predisposed to autism to get it, but that watching a lot of TV at a young age makes it more likely. Meanwhile, it’s hard to say what ANY correlations measure. We don’t live in a vaccuum with only one or two outside influences acting on our bodies and lives at a time. If we did, cause and effect would be easy to determine. “Look, that guy who likes to swim in a pool of mercury is looking a little unwell.”

Edit: Time has now changed the title of the story from “Why We Need to be Careful in the Search for Autism’s Cause” to “A Bizarre Study Suggests — Irresponsibly — That Watching TV Causes Autism“.  I don’t know how much they changed the article since this morning – I think the opening paragraph is more skeptical of the report, but the rest of the article looks the same.  I’ll leave it to you to decide what that all means.

Creative Commons – not just for hippies

MediaShift . Digging Deeper::Creative Commons + Flickr = 22 Million Sharable Photos | PBS Link via John Batelle

“I think Creative Commons is a huge thing and I attribute a lot of my success to it,” Krug said. “Since the beginning I’ve given all my photos away on the Internet and they’ve been used by other bloggers and people all along the way and it’s gotten my name out there.

Article is about a photographer who has shared his high quality photos under a Creative Commons license, and how it’s gotten his name out there.  Are you listening, music industry?

I have about 1500 photos shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license.  That means anyone can use the photo for whatever they want as long as theygive me credit, don’t make money from it, and keep the license the same.  I’ve never had anyone I don’t know use a photo (To my knowledge), but I know at least one friend has used a few as desktop backgrounds, which is cool.  And I’m not a professional photographer or anything, but I have an expensive DSLR and I more or less know how to use it.

Anyway, good to hear Creative Commons success stories.

The age of stingrays is upon us

Stingray leaps into boat, stabs man in chest – CNN.com

This is somewhat worrisome.  The number of stingray attacks that I’m aware of has risen from zero in the first twenty-eight years of my life to two in the last two months.  The percentage increase in stingray attacks is so large we can’t express it in numbers!  It has to be expressed in abject terror.

Did you see the Simpsons episode where Lisa frees the dolphin, who then brings the other dolphins back to enslave the world?  This is what’s happening now with the stingrays.  You’ll see.  All this talk about the 2008 elections will be moot when Stingy the Stingray is our tyrannical leader, and we’re all slaves in his palace.

HOTSOUP.com is open for business

HOTSOUP.com – Home

HOTSOUP.com was created by four Democratic strategists, three Internet entrepreneurs, two Republican strategists and one journalist. But it’s not about us …. It’s about you….

HOTSOUP finally launched today.  So, my first impressions . . .   First of all, they don’t have RSS feeds for anything that I saw right away.  I suppose the point of the site is community involvement rather than just content, so in some sense letting people use an RSS feed instead of having to come to the site is counterproductive.  But it’s probably not a good idea to travel down the “AOL Walled Garden” approach and force people to interact with you in your little playhouse.

I have to say that I’m likely to forget about a site if there’s no RSS feed.  If it has a regularly updated feed, I’ll put it in my Google Reader and follow along.  If not, I’ll probably forget to check back.

Another thing, and I suppose this is just my perception, is that I get this feeling of underhandedness.  As if they’ve got some agenda they’re going to spring on us as soon as they reel us in.  And I can’t quite explain where that comes from.  Perhaps paranoia.  But it seems a little artificial.  As if they’re trying to make a MySpace for politics, and they’ve drafted some big names to get the first accounts and attract the people.

But this so far is all negative, and I don’t think the site is bad.  And I’m sure, if they really are serious about it being community-driven, that they’ll tweak it if things don’t work.  So I’ll keep an eye on it, and see how things go.