Archive for October, 2004
via William Gibson’s blog:
William S. Lind writes about the new sort of war. War has been the province of kingdoms and states. Now the capability to wage war is in reach of ordinary people - independent organizations like al-Qaeda or Hamas. Trying to fight the old style war in the new paradigm means you think you win when you are really losing.
U.S. and Iraqi government forces are announcing a “big victory” in taking the city of Samarra. This shows they still don’t get it. Following Chairman Mao’s advice, when we attacked, the Iraqi guerillas retreated. The victor is not whoever holds Samarra today, but who can keep hold of it for six weeks, six months or six years.
Enlightening and frightening reading.
October 27th, 2004
Eminem takes on Bush and Iraq - Rap is this generation’s protest medium. Let’s hope it does some good. The song is moody and relentless - this could provoke riots. This song takes no prisoners - it grinds them down and marches over them. Awesome!
October 26th, 2004
Holy crap - that’s a lot of casino spam!
October 24th, 2004
(via Neil Gaiman’s blog)
Because your food should be USB2.0 capable:
October 24th, 2004
The Google Desktop Search is very nifty - but they really need to fix the desktop integration. You want simple access to it where you need it, like the Lookout plug-in to Outlook. You want to reach it from wherever you are - having the context of your question inform the results you get. If I search inside Outlook, I want to search my mail - documents and mp3 matches are way less relevant. Making the GDS available throughout the user experience is no small job, but it should be done. GDS as it is now is cute, but not useful enough.
The deskbar search tool does not integrate the results, but the i.e. plug-in does. What’s with that?
It’s gonna be interesting to see what Microsoft are cooking up in response. It can’t be as bad as the Content Indexing Service they have now (truly a zero interface, zero response product - you can’t tell if it’s working or not, except when it crashes).
October 23rd, 2004
Canada digs up the dirt on Cheney … I was going to make a clever comment, but words fail me.
It’s Dick Cheney’s world, and we all just have to live here.
October 17th, 2004
Had a lovely dinner with Ingunn on wednesday. I was her beta-tester — she’s just moved into a huge new apartment, and needed to verify the kitchen and dining room worked. We discovered that the sink needs to be moved about three feet downrange from its present location, and that guests should bring woolly socks. Hundred year old buildings with original floors tend not to come with heated floors. The fireplace worked great though. Nice ‘n toasty - but it takes a while to get the room going - ten foot ceilings make for lots of volume to heat.
We had grilled salmon and pasta with tzatsiki, with a very nice white wine which I forgot to make a note of, and a portuguese red. Alicante Bouschet 2002 - Casa Santos Lima - Estemadura. Round, fruity, mild, and inoffensive. Very easy to drink lots of, something I regretted the morning after. It took quite a few cups of coffee to get my head going again. Augh.
Yesterday I tried the second bottle of Alicante Bouschet, and woke up this morning with another headache. My brain forgets to have water with the wine, leading to these hangovers being worse than necesary. Why my brain does this to itself is a mystery to me. It should have learned by now. Maybe it’s a masochist - a glutton for punishment?
October 17th, 2004
Went to see Wonderful Days yesterday — Korean animation. Very much in the Final Fantasy vein of storytelling that seems to afflict all asian animation. Evil humans destroy the environment, plucky humans (no mutants this time) turn off machines, environment magically recovers.
We watched an undubbed copy, with subtitling in finnish and swedish, which threw me for a loop. I wasn’t expecting the top line to be finnish, and was bewildered when the first lines of dialogue came out as an unfamiliar jumble of vowels and consonants. It took a couple of minutes to adjust to only reading the second line of the subtitles (the one in swedish)…
The wonderful days in the title refer to the days when the sky was still blue, and there’s a lot of Matrix feeling over the first act — lots of moody rain and thunder. The director does seem to have a thing for motorbikes, since the camera goes all swoopy whenever there’s one on screen. That would be every ten minutes then…
Still, the pictures are lovely, and the action stops every now and then to take in the scenery and let you soak up the atmosphere.
Since this is opera on a huge scale, the ending is suitably huge and intricate (hero, heroine and villain were all childhood friends, and two share a terrible secret) with lots of bad blood on all sides. The battle sequences are also quite well done - tight and scary and fast - with a slow wait for the first shot.
Worth seeing if you’re into animation, and you liked Princess Mononoke.
I’m off to try to catch House of Flying Daggers.
October 16th, 2004
Bush Like Me - Rolling Stone reporter goes undercover in the Republican party to find out what they’re really up to.
During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office — Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don — were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.
I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I’D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I’D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.
October 10th, 2004
Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Security - wonderfully portrayed as the
Minister of Fear!
Aaaugh !
Do not be alarmed - go about your business.
Waaaauh!!!
October 8th, 2004
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