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December 4, 2002
Joe Mahoney is going cold turkey. He’s not going to read the first page of the newspaper for a week:
I read the newspaper every morning. Two of them often. By the time I finish the front section I have a kind of brain sickness. I feel like God just before the flood…
God speed, Joe.
The Most Clueless comments of the young millennium come from Rev. Robert V. Meffan as reported in today’s Boston Globe. (You can read them today here and here. The Globe will soon lock them in its Vault of Public Ignorance.)
Rev. Meffan had sex with teen-age girls entering a nunnery because “I felt that by having this little bit of intimacy with them that this is what it would be like with Christ.”
This wonderful man doesn’t even bear any grudges against the young women whose trust he violated: “They were wonderful girls. I have no hatred toward them, no animosity toward them or anything like that. To me they were just wonderful, wonderful young people.”
And I thought that I was at the point in this outrage where no further revelation could get me to yell “Holy shit!” while reading the morning paper. I should have known better.
According to an article at the BBC site (pointed out by Greg “L-Man” Cavanagh), if you want to hack the online game, Everquest, all you have to do is get a Linux box, network it to your PC, and set up some special packet sniffing software called ShowEQ that decrypts the hidden information about where the monsters and other characters are. It’s just that simple! (I myself prefer the single-player Quake technique of typing tilde to pull down the console and then entering the phrase, lemme think, oh yeah, “god” to make yourself invulnerable.)
According to the article:
The fact that ShowEQ sits on a separate computer has made it impossible to detect. Sony has tried to stop it in other ways by improving the encryption used to make the packets of data unreadable.
However, it took only a week for the ShowEQ programmers to get round this improved encryption.
The programmers found that the new encryption was easier to break than the old one and meant that ShowEQ worked faster than before.
This is very cool. Unless, of course, you’re one of the players who doesn’t have a spare Linux box sitting around on her network.
December 3, 2002
The new Get Your War On is out and climbing the DayPop Top 40, as it should. After all, how can you not love a strip that begins:
“Well, at least Timmy had a good ten years without having to know who Henry Kissinger was. There’s something so precious about a young child’s first encounter with Henry Kissinger…”
Will someone please give David Rees a Pulitzer? Or better: contribute to Landmine.org to which he donates his royalties.
It must have been in the early ’90s that I got briefed by Microsoft about their next-generation operating system, code-named “Cairo.” It was going to be a complete re-write. It had to be, because it was going to be “object-oriented.” Between what Microsoft told me (as the marketing guy for a “strategic partner”) and what my desire-fueled imagination assumed, I thought we were heading for an OS that at last got rid of files.
Just in case you’ve been using Windows so long that you’ve forgotten just how bad an idea files are, consider:
Things that should be treated as separate objects but are instead smushed within a single file:
Email messages
Attachments to email messages
A file in a zip file
Things that should be one object but are instead a mere set of files:
A web page with its associated graphics and CSS file
A word processing file and its backups and previous versions
Files rely on user-editable names and extensions to indicate how they are to be associated. Bad idea. They should instead be like the tracks and sectors on your hard disk: something you never have to think about.
So, whatever happened to Cairo?
Google to the rescue: In March of this year, Steve Ballmer announced Microsoft is returning to the Cairo idea.
(If in carpentry, the idea is to measure twice and cut once, in weblogging I guess it should be: Google twice and write once.)
According to Masha Geller‘s daily send:
According to eMarketer projections, 2003 spending will rise slightly to $6.70 billion, up from $6.38 billion this year. The expected bounce-back is due to a combination of factors, researchers say, including traditional marketers devoting larger slices of their ad budgets to online advertising as well as a general easing of the economic recession. By 2005, online ad expenditures will hit $8.10 billion…
I guess I should be happy about this.
Joe Conason previews an article about to be published in Esquire about how policy decisions are made in the Karl Rove White House. Here’s a summary of Conason’s summary: You know how on The West Wing everyone knows everything about every policy issue? Good. Now imagine the opposite.
And here‘s the source of much of the information apologizing, but not recanting.
December 2, 2002
Say what you want about Halley’s comments on “girlism,” they sure hit the mark in describing our 17-year-old daughter: She assumes the truths of feminism but is totally into being a girl.
From Betty Friedan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer…
For what others are saying about “girlism,” you can jump into a blogthread here where you’ll find Shelley Powers, Mike Golby and Jeneane “NY Times” Sessum engaged in a discussion of Halley’s original post … a discussion as difficult as its topic deserves.
Adina Levin writes, in an email:
Have you ever read Sources of Power by Gary Klein? The book is badly named; it is not a neomachiavellian business manual; it’s fascinating social science research on how people (really) make decisions, in contrast to how we think people make decisions, influenced by our mental models of people as computers.
Spoiler: people make and share decisions with stories
Blog summary here.
Sounds fascinating.
“What would Jesus drive?“?? While I like to see the religiously-motivated jump in on the right side of the environment debate (and can someone remind me why we have to debate this at all), this phrase smacks of the Offensiveness of Marketing we’ve come to take for granted. So…
Top Ten Questions Not to Ask Jesus:
1. How many clowns would have to come out of the car before Jesus would say “How the heck do they do that?”
2. Can we assume that Jesus’ favorite Beatle is the one that dies last?
3. If Jesus were still a carpenter, would He measure twice and cut once or just go ahead and cut?
4, How long could Jesus stay married to JLo?
5. If Jesus were dieting, would he cheat on his birthday?
6. Who would be Jesus’ favorite post-WWII US president (besides Jimmy Carter, of course)?
7. If Jesus were gay — not that He is, of course. I’m just asking if — which of the N’Sync guys would He find the hottest?
8. If Jesus and Superman fought, who would win?
9. What would Jesus choose as His PIN?
10. Mac or Linux?
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