Month: March 2004

adding trackbacks to published posts?

I just discovered a posting of mine that I should have invoked the Lazyweb’s collective genius on, but I don’t see how I can do that, now that it’s published. So this is a two-fer request: one for how to add trackbacks to older posts and one for a smarter email client that can offer to filter mail for you, based on observed patterns.

The original post is here and the content is below:

Feature request: mail filter suggestions
This is for all email clients on all platforms.

I keep running into people who moan about how much email they get and how they so far behind blah blah blah . . . . .

Do these people not understand what mail filters are for or how they work? I have to wonder if they understand the basics of filing paper documents: the principles are the same. What I have done for years is take my most frequent correspondents and filtered their email in their own mailbox, so a. I don’t miss any of their mail, and b. to unclutter my inbox. The stuff that doesn’t fall under any rubric stays in the inbox and can be dealt with as I get to it. But stuff from the people who I correspond with frequently gets filtered out so I can be sure I get to it.

Is this so hard? The people who tell me they have 700 or 1000 unread emails probably need it all printed out for them: perhaps they would find it easier to deal with.

So my feature request would be for an email client to review the corpus of already received email against new email and offer to create a filter based on the receiver’s sender’s particulars.

Apparently some folks need the help with this . . . . .

this just in: journalistic ethics on the decline

US reporter faked major stories

A leading American newspaper, USA Today, has said one of its star foreign correspondents made up substantial elements of a number of major stories.

Jack Kelley had been nominated five times for the most prestigious award in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize.

When I was a lazy reporter, I hated making calls sometimes, but it never occurred to me to make stuff up. I just figured I should find a more appropriate line of work. Wish more people thought about that.

you and whose army?

The Carpetbagger Report: Holbrooke’s Blitzer smackdown:

[Former US Ambassador to the UN Richard] Holbrooke: John Kerry simply said the truth. Everyone knows it. Look at…

Blitzer: Let me interrupt. When I interviewed Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, on Sunday, he pointed it out there’s an unprecedented coalition of the willing. Ninety countries have backed the president in the war on terror. And there are 30 or 40 countries with the U.S. in Iraq right now.

Holbrooke: Mighty allies like Palau and the Marshall Islands. Let’s get real.

This is pretty sad to see someone of Blitzer’s reputation simply parroting administration cant. I haven’t watched TV news in years, but my recollection of him during the first Gulf War and afterwards was that he was a capable journalist.
Continue reading “you and whose army?”

we have always been at war with EastAsia

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 14, 2004 – March 20, 2004 Archives:

The top counter-terrorism advisor, Clarke was briefing the highest government officials, including President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the aftermath of 9/11. “Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq….We all said, ‘but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan,” recounts Clarke, “and Rumsfeld said, ‘There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.’

0345308239.01.THUMBZZZ

I recommend this book, especially the section on Vietnam: somehow that quote from Rumsfeld calls up the way strategic decisions were made in that war, far away from the theater, by people with no knowledge of it, who felt they could do it all from satellite images, old maps, and possibly flawed intelligence.

retail therapy

CoffeeGeek – Consumer Espresso Machine Reviews

I am wandering through the cave of wonders known as CoffeeGeek.com (complete with RSS: syndicated caffeine, if you can combine vices seamlessly). I thought I would take a look at possible replacements for my dependable but aging Krups Novo unit. If you’ve ever looked at espresso accoutrement, you know how the prices can vary, from sub-$100 to over $1,000. What I am looking for is the sweet spot where price and quality start to diverge.

delonghibar40This unit seems to hit that spot: at $90, it’s sandwiched between one priced at $500 and one at $599, while all three of them were rated at 7.6 on a 10 scale.

But then if I re-sort the results by price, I find a significantly higher rated unit adjacent to it. Of course, the model is not specified, only the brand, and further research shows it takes some kind of pre-packaged “coffee pods” which mean I’m locked into the manufacturer’s coffee selection. My experience tells me the bean is more important than the machine and I hate “lock-in” so that’s right out.

I like these kinds of consumer review sites, but it helps to bring a little experience and perspective with you. I haven’t found the espresso maker I use now to be as bad as the reviews claim. I’ll have to look a little more . . . .

sidetracked

Dear Concerned Listener:

“When I made the decision to cancel ‘The Loh Life,’ I was not in possession of all the facts regarding this unfortunate incident, specifically that it had been Sandra’s practice to leave instructions for her engineer to bleep out certain words, and that this practice had never before gone awry,” said [KCRW GM Ruth] Seymour. “I regret having jumped to conclusions about what happened and for erroneously accusing Sandra of an ‘intentional’ breach of our broadcast standards.”

If you read the whole statement, you learn that this was a taped piece, not a live broadcast. So I’m not sure why the engineer who failed to follow the instructions (as had been done on prior occasions) wasn’t canned, instead of the commentator.

And of course, we can thank the FCC for this, for cracking down on free thinkers like Sandra Tsing Loh, Howard Stern, and Bono, whether you agree with them or not, while the broadcasting companies who license the airwaves from us — has the FCC ever revoked a license for irresponsible behavior? — can continue to create thirty-third rate programs and pay for them with stupid, inappropriate advertising.

stewardship

If I belonged to a community of belief that considered all life to be sacred and believed that the world and everything in it were under my stewardship, what would be my response to the news that many species of previously common creatures — not those on endangered lists — were in possibly irrecoverable decline due to human activity?

Would I be able to consider myself a good steward of the planet? Would I be able to look my Creator in the face and tell Him I had done my best to preserve His gifts to me and my brothers and sisters?

So why isn’t conservation and wildlife protection a religious issue? Why aren’t people of faith on the front lines in the few wild places we have left? Why does it always seem to be the godless non-mainstream types who put the health of the planet at the top of their list, while those who claim to be in regular communication with the force they think created it don’t seem to care?
Continue reading “stewardship”

help rebuild Iraq: you can help

STILL TIME TO SHIP TECH BOOKS TO IRAQ

This is your last chance to release your no-longer-needed computer books to Iraq! They must arrive by next Friday!

BookCrossing and the Freedom Technology Center of Mountain View, California are teaming up to help jump-start Iraq’s infrastructure recovery with computer software and hardware book donations.

Volunteers will meet at Mountain View’s Freedom Technology Center all day Friday, March 26 to pack and ship badly-needed computer books to Iraq. Today in Baghdad, up-to-date PC hardware and software are readily available, but computer books are not. Iraq’s new techies need books to learn.

How can you help? By shipping computer tech books to their California office so they arrive within the next 2 weeks! So go ahead, look on your shelves – anything related to computers will help. Register and then release them to:

Freedom Technology Center
278 Hope St. Suite E
Mountain View, California 94041-1308
USA

Let’s show them the generosity and responsiveness of the BookCrossing community, and have some fun tracking the progress of the books in Iraq along the way!

Read the official press release:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/pr/freedom-tech-iraq-2004.html

You don’t need that old copy of Learning Perl or UNIX in a Nutshell, do you?

unsafe for any age

My son and my wife were watching some NCAA tournament play yesterday but he got bored and went upstairs. No sooner had he left the room than three commercials came on: one for the performance enhancing medication that features a 4 hour erection as a side-effect, and one for an obviously family-oriented film called Hellboy (the trailer is playing over at Apple.com’s Quicktime repository).

* do I want to explain an erection, let alone one lasting 4 hours, to a seven year old? Maybe all the other seven year old boys are getting wood, but I’m OK with him remaining ignorant of that for a little longer.

* what does that say about the folks who watch NCAA hoops? Maybe they need to get off the couch a little more often?

* and I guess I’m just an over-protective parent but is cartoon ultraviolence really family fare? Ya know, sometimes kids can’t always tell the difference between fantasy and reality: while that can be a good thing (Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy strike me as benign aspects of that), crass money-making ventures are not.

<update> Actually, this is a good argument for a PVR to skip commercials entirely. If the broadcasters and their toothless masters, the FCC, won’t take a little responsibility, we can hit them where it hurts: in the pocket.

he said it

If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined.

JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA, who declined to recuse himself from a case involving his friend and hunting companion, Vice President Dick Cheney. This is but one pointed sentence in a 21 page memo defending his right to free association and excoriating the press for questioning his probity in the decision over the VP’s right to keep his secrets.

I’m surprised it has gotten this far. But then this is the same court whose involvement in the 2000 presidential election generated so much discussion.

The framers and their countrymen conceived the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and fought a war against one of the world’s most powerful empires for this?