Category: observations

5 &#10029 &#9835« Mondays

The idea came from JWZ in late 2005: why not rate all the music in your jukebox? If your jukebox is iTunes, you create an “unrated” smart-playlist containing all the tunes with no stars, then you set up the Party Shuffle to draw from it, then you rate them as they go by except when you’re not listening, and after a few months, you have them all rated. I haven’t got them all rated, but I have quite a few labeled &#10029&#10029&#10029&#10029&#10029, which means “a tune that in some way gives me as much pleasure as music can.” I care a lot about (and am reasonably literate about) music, so I decided I to share some of this five-star stuff with the world. I’ll try to post something most Mondays.

Yeah, why not? But not this Monday.

A side benefit to this is that as you listen and perhaps find tracks that <*koff*> arrived in your collection through means other than retail, you will be moved to buy them from the artist.

Now playing: Caring Is Creepy by The Shins from the album “Oh, Inverted World”

Some people think this whole Presidentin’ business is fun and games at best , and at worst a job with regular hours, a nice house, and a lot of speeches and such. The war is just a big game of “capture the flag”, ya know, especially for Doughy Pantload, the Krispy Kreme Kommando.

But for more serious-minded people, it’s not much fun at all. It will be interesting to see how un-fun it becomes over the next few months to 2 years.

Continue reading “it’s not a game”

As the robotic Scott McLellan reminds us in response to Osama bin Forgotten’s latest communiqué, we will end [the war in Iraq] at a time and place of our choosing.

Now seems as good a time as any, don’t you think?

Continue reading “the war of choice with no end”

Hollow Inside / The Buzzcocks / A Different Kind of Tension
Pick Up the Pieces / Average White Band / Average White Band: The Essentials
Radio Song / R.E.M. / Out Of Time
Down The Dip / Aztec Camera / High Land, Hard Rain
The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill / The Beatles / The Beatles [White Album] (Disc 1)
Harborcoat / R.E.M. / Reckoning
Reflecting Pool / Let’s Active / Big Plans for Everybody
The One I Love / R.E.M. / Document
Cruel to be Kind / Nick Lowe / Labour of Lust
Rudie Can’t Fail / The Clash / London Calling
Mean Mr. Mustard / The Beatles / Abbey Road

3 R.E.M. tracks? How random/unlikely-to-repeat is iTunes anyway? 3,615 tracks, 54 genres, 425 artists, 504 albums, and this is the best it can do?

Spencer Sundell – Mugu Brainpan » Seattle and King County Libraries Offer Free Online Access to Tech Books:

If you have a valid Seattle Public Library card, you can get free online access to books from O’Reilly, Peachpit, AdobePress, Macromedia Press, New Riders, Microsoft Press, and many more.

[via]

What’s the lesson here?

Scott Loftesness: Musings on Apple, Dell, and Google:

Two stock comparison charts struck me yesterday.

The first chart shows Apple vs. Dell. The second shows Apple vs. Google.

Both charts [and one more –ed] are included below. This is fascinating stuff.

Continue reading “Innovators and imitators, part of an endless series”

A friend writes:

Mark the 27th of this month on your calendar – you turn exactly 16,000
days old then. 🙂

16,000 days and what do you get?

Seriously, it might make more sense to mark off our time in days and think what we can do with each one, rather than in years. Easier to think of something worthwhile to do on a daily basis than look at a whole year to fill or worse, back on in regret . . .

I suppose this spikes my membership in the Optimists . . . .

Now playing: The Storm by Big Country from the album “The Crossing”

So the US army is tied down in Iraq, Iran is determined to build weapons that give it the same status as Pakistan, India, and North Korea — to join the Nuclear Club — and at the same time Ariel Sharon is incapacited by a massive stroke.

Meanwhile China continues its massive growth, fueled by oil from — you guessed it — Iran. To sum up:

Telegraph | Opinion | The origins of the Great War of 2007 – and how it could have been prevented:

The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq’s Shi’ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran.

Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.

Israel attacks Iran, pre-emptively, Iran returns fire, China readies to come to Iran’s aid, to protect it’s lifeline, and the US and rest of the West finds itself marginalized and impotent.

Heckuva job, George.

[tip]

This borders on splenetic for the NYTimes . . .

The Imperial Presidency at Work – New York Times:

You would think that Senators Carl Levin and John McCain would have learned by now that you cannot deal in good faith with a White House that does not act in good faith. Yet both men struck bargains intended to restore the rule of law to American prison camps. And President Bush tossed them aside at the first opportunity.
Mr. Bush made a grand show of inviting Mr. McCain into the Oval Office last month to announce his support for a bill to require humane treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other prisons run by the American military and intelligence agencies. He seemed to have managed to get Vice President Dick Cheney to stop trying to kill the proposed Congressional ban on torture of prisoners.
The White House also endorsed a bargain between Mr. Levin and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which tempered somewhat a noxious proposal by Mr. Graham to deny a court hearing to anyone the president declares to be an “unlawful enemy combatant.” The bargain with Mr. Levin removed language that stripped away cases already before the courts, which would have been an egregious usurpation of power by one branch of government, and it made clear that those cases should remain in the courts.
Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous “signing statement” on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.
Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush’s morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.
Both of the offensive theories at work here – that a president’s intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress – are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.
The administration’s behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush’s expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

Only 16.76529% . . . I lost a lot of points on the lack of gaming and Trek experience, I think.