Month: May 2007

phrase of the day: War Trolls

For Whom the Bell Trolls:

Perle, Bolton and co often pontificate on the unique moral evil of terrorism. But in their contempt for human life and their appetite for war they are not that different from Osama bin Laden. Unlike Osama, they will not be found in the Hindu Kush carrying a Kalashnikov. They are war trolls, endlessly manipulating the public from TV studios. In this sense they are more like the Roman senators who grew rich and fat while the legions went out to ‘create a wasteland and call it peace’, as Tacitus once put it.

[tip of the straw boater to Wolcott]

links for 2007-05-27

links for 2007-05-26

a tad extreme?

E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’ – washingtonpost.com:

The supposed convenience of electronic mail, like so many other innovations of technology, has become too much for some people. Swamped by an unmanageable number of messages — the volume of e-mail traffic has nearly doubled in the past two years, according to research firm DYS Analytics — and plagued by annoying spam and viruses, some users are saying “Enough!”

Those declaring bankruptcy are swearing off e-mail entirely or, more commonly, deleting all old messages and starting fresh.

I just read through all mine, by the sender and subject, read the ones I need to, then set them all to “Read.” Then I can go back and review anything if I have the time and inclination, without feeling like I am behind. Of course, I don’t get anything like the volume I used to get but still, filters — set all email from people I don’t know, ie not in my address book, to one side and filter stuff out by company so people I work with are in their own mailbox — can really help. Makes me wonder how savvy these self-styled technocrats really are. Are they managing their inputs or are the inputs managing them?

markets in hardware

I read a blurb some weeks back on replacing the hard drive in an iPod mini with a flash card of the same size or larger. A busted mini arrived today and it seems that the drive is the problem. Amazing little things, those microdrives.

But in hunting up a new drive to put in it, I never expected the microdrives to be cheaper than the flash drives. I’m not that wedded to the idea of a flash drive, since one of the big arguments is that it would be cheaper as well as more durable. I’m inclined to go ahead and put in another microdrive and let it go until it fails: who knows how big and cheap flash cards will be then?

<update> Well, I just scored a 6Gb MicroDrive from an iPod mini, and I have a couple others I have an eye on.

more genre grasping?

Lethem annoints director for “You Don’t Love Me Yet” copyright experiment:

Lethem, a Macarthur-winning sf novelist,

I haven’t read any Lethem (any recommendations?) but I don’t see any of his books classified or described as SF. Post-apocalyptic, perhaps. <sigh> Why take the trouble to type those two characters? is it that much more cool to be an SF writer than just a plain old MacArthur-grant winning novelist? Or any kind of published novelist?

It bugs me as much as Apple bothers the perpetrator of the above, but at least I know who’s responsible for the offense.