ouch . . .

Seattlest: Seinfeld Canceled by Microsoft:

Valleywag is reporting that the $300 million Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld has been canceled as the company seeks other ways to remind consumers that its products, like the characters in the ads, were totally cool in the Nineties, but now, not so much.

Windows was cool? Musta missed that.

You know, the old-fashioned way of winning customer loyalty is by making stuff that doesn’t, you know, suck. $300MM could have bought some of that, I think.

ready to lead on day one?

This isn’t someone I want to have the nuclear launch codes.

Details have emerged about how Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account was broken into, including a hacker’s claim he was able to impersonate her online to obtain her password.

The hacker guessed that Alaska’s governor had met her husband in high school, and knew Palin’s date of birth and home Zip code.

Using those details, the hacker tricked Yahoo’s service into assigning a new password, “popcorn” for Palin’s email account, according to a chronology of the crime published on the website where the hacking was first revealed.

[From How hackers broke into Palin’s email – News – Builder AU]

9 nations, meet 11 representative communities

So where do you live, in the map of Patchwork Nation?

Campaign 2008: Patchwork Nation: Comunity Types > Monied ‘Burbs | The Christian Science Monitor:

The Monied ‘Burbs consist of 304 counties holding more than 84 million people, making them the largest and the wealthiest locales in Patchwork Nation.

Wealthier and slightly younger than America as a whole, this group also stands out for its educational attainment. More than one-quarter of the adults in these communities have college degrees, compared with 17 percent in the average U.S. county. The Monied ‘Burbs were an uber “battleground” group in 2004. They split their votes almost evenly between President Bush (49.4 percent) and John Kerry (49.6 percent) and figure to be crucial in 2008 as well.

The Monied ‘Burbs and their politics are represented by Los Alamos, N.M., in Patchwork Nation.

If “educational attainment” is the hallmark of this group, why the $%^&* did half of them vote for Bush in 2004?

This makes more sense than the Red vs Blue state map, since these patchwork elements are more likely to map onto voting precincts.
Continue reading “9 nations, meet 11 representative communities”

this sums it up

Sadly, No! » Best Advice Ever:

Don’t EVER let idiot whackjob wingnuts try to claim they are brave and Liberals are cowards. Let me put it this way:

One group has a huge need to walk around with guns and keep arsenals in their homes to feel safe. The other group has no such need, and doesn’t seem to suffer in the least by not being armed to the teeth.

Remember: republicans are cowards. They prove it with every gun they brag about.

A corollary: all bullies are cowards. Why else pick on the younger/smaller/unarmed?

not sure they get it

Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open-source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use.
The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical’s work on usability and to contribute to other free and open-source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

He wrote: “We are hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, Gnome and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop-experience ideas into reality.”

Shuttleworth has said recently that usability is the top priority for open-source software. Free Linux desktops should have “a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years”, he said at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week.

[From Shuttleworth: Open-source desktops need a facelift | Tech News on ZDNet]

This isn’t solved by a team, though some developers will be needed: what makes this work is a design czar, someone who can tell people when to stop. Citing Apple makes sense if they are going to get deeper than the GUI (and since all the projects named are window managers/desktops, it doesn’t look like it). Will the next two years be different from the last 10 or so?

stay on target

9-9-08 sarah palin is my reason to wake up

This morning I was lying in bed unable to wake up, and NPR came on with Sarah Palin’s shrill voice berating democrats and “community organizers”…

I happen to be a “community organizer”, and I work over 80 hours a week and i have a HUGE amount of responsibility, and people who count on me every day. I used to be a procrastinator, but at this job I don’t even have time to procrastinate, because there is always some deadline and people who will be let down if I don’t do my part.

And I know Barack Obama’s job as a community organizer had MUCH MORE responsibility than mine, he was working with large groups of people, different organizations within the community: churches, unions, neighborhood groups, unemployed workers, factories cutting jobs, blacks, whites, latinos, etc….

I challenge Sarah Palin to work for 102 days in a row 13+ hours a day, because that is what my current job as a “community organizer” is. I do not have a day off until after the election. No weekends. No nothing.

So anyway, hearing her obnoxious voice made me so angry I was wide awake and ready to jump out of bed and start my work for the day!

I decided her smiling face would be good motivation for us here at the office. This is what we will get if we don’t work hard enough — Someone who thinks the idea of organizing diverse groups and trying to come to a consensus about how to deal with unemployment and social unrest is a completely laughable occupation.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Take that step today!” is taped to my laptop.

The work we do here will save us from leaders like McCain/Palin. They claim to be “regular people”, yet Palin makes fun of community organizers and is married to oil wealth, and McCain come from a long line of rich Navy men and also married into wealth, and doesn’t even know how many houses he has.

There is nothing wrong with their life stories or their wealth OTHER THAN the fact that they continually claim to be “just like regular Americans”, and make fun of a Democrat who actually grew up in poverty raised by a single mother, and devoted his early career to helping a troubled community on the South Side of Chicago. I don’t understand how the Republicans try to brand Obama as “elitist” and McCain as “just a regular guy”, considering their backgrounds.

And though Palin may have been a reformer in her own state, her addition to the national stage made her decide that community organizing — volunteering for a campaign, working at a homeless shelter, or any other community-based occupation — is completely laughable.

Republicans say they want to get rid of big government and let people work things out on their own — pull yourself up by your bootstraps, deal with your own problems, be responsible for yourself and your family rather than counting on government handouts. Fine. Great. I’m all for it. But someone like Obama who chose a low-paying and difficult job to improve the lives of ordinary Chicagoins — that is somehow not ok either, event though he was not part of government at that time.

So what IS ok? No government.. No community organizers. What are we — as a community or as individuals — supposed to do about our problems? Pray that they will go away? Stop trying to work out solutions and retreat to our bunkers with our guns and hope that we never have a problem that is too big for us to figure out on our own? Hope that we never need the help of our elected government or our community or our neighbors? Because apparently that is the world that Sarah Palin wants to live in. God bless her.

THIS IS WHY I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING.