Disorderly Content

Is anybody else creeped out by those eHarmony ads on cable? They're so omnipresent even a DVR-er like me has seen way too many of them. And there's just something wrong about them, about the slightly glassy-eyed look of these tenaciously happy couples, to say nothing of that weird Warren character who's trying to pair everybody up.

But not everybody, I guess. I've been reading various blog postings on Consumerist with interest. First there were the people who were rejected because they're only legally separated and not yet divorced. Now I read about someone who got kicked out because he's a regular drinker, as if one beer at dinner makes you an alcoholic. Which is a problem with multiple choice; what if the choices don't let you give an accurate answer? But more disturbing are reports of people who were found unacceptable because they identified themselves as atheists. Apparently, Dr. Warren's perfect world of two-by-two is reserved for the God-fearing. And I'm willing to bet that certain interpretations of God are more acceptable than others, if this confession of a former employee is any indication.

Years ago, my Chassidic sister told me that if I became religious, she could have me married in no time. I didn't know what repulsed me more: being religious, being married, or being married to somebody like that. Now I have no doubt it's Door Number Three.

I'm sure atheists all over the world are breathing a sigh of relief. Just imagine if this study had come out some other way! I speak of course of a study of 1800 patients that was published in the American Heart Journal, as reported by those fine folks at Boing Boing. And which the Huffington Post got from the New York Times a mere six hours later. Not that being first is anything important.

Anyway, to the study. Groups of six hundred surgical patients each were prayed for but not told they were or weren't, not prayed for and also not told either way, and prayed for and told about it. The folks doing the praying were a combination of Catholics and Protestants. And the results: the first group (prayed for but unaware) had complications after surgery in 52% of the cases, the second (no prayer) had 51% and the third (prayed for and knew it) had 59%. Which is a good argument for not letting anybody pray for you. Or it would be, if the results 30 days after surgery weren't the same for all three groups.

So prayer doesn't work. Or maybe it's just Christian prayer that's the problem. Can we get somebody to fund a study around the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

I'm generally now sure growing up is a good thing. Heck, I've held out against it as long as anybody. But sometimes it's a good thing. Maybe.

Today I got together with a friend from my SGI days for lunch. We met in downtown Mountain View, which is full of ethnic restaurants of all kinds. Used to be mostly Chinese, then suddenly it was lots of Indian places, then a handful of Thai. Now there's a little of everything, including a few more upscale spots among the fast & cheap lunch options.

Anyway, when I arrived at Castro and Villa I turned around and noticed a new Vietnamese place where an Indian restaurant used to be. So that's where we ended up. And it was quite a surprise, I must say. The food was very good, the presentation elegant. The service was a little bit slow, but nothing to get upset about. But I'll give them some leeway; turns out they've only been open a few weeks. Besides, neither one of us was in a particular rush to get back to work.

Okay, Xanh was more expensive than our usual lunch choices. But it made a nice change from the usual Mountain View quick lunch. I'm looking forward to going back.

One reader likened it to SETI@HOME, where computer users all over the world donate their spare cycles to analyzing radio signals in hope of finding extraterrestrial intelligence. And there's a definite similarity, even if intelligence isn't exactly what they were looking for.

I refer to a picture that San Diego Congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian posted to his website, a picture of a quiet and peaceful scene in Baghdad that he took on a recent visit and which demonstrates clearly and well that the chaos and disaster reported by the media is nothing near the truth.

Except... Eagle-eyed bloggers began immediately to question the photo's credentials. Baghdad? Then how come there's no Arabic anywhere? And would the woman at left really be dressed quite so provocatively in today's Iraq? And aren't signs like 2.NOTER and Edo indications that the picture was taken in Turkey (where a Noter is a Notary Public and Edo is a brand of ice cream), rather than Iraq? It's fun to read the back and forth between those who are convinced that Kaloogian, who hopes to replace convicted lying weasel Duke Cunningham, may be just as much of a lying weasel, only without the Duke's convictions; and those who are determined to stick with their party right to the bitter end, or at least not to believe until the evidence is irrefutable.

Which it has now become. Talking Points Memo has another picture, this one identifiably from an Istanbul suburb called Bakirkoy, that matches the one in question in way too many places to be mere coincidence. So it really was Turkey. Which of course raises new questions. And as a firm believer in the old adage that one should never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity, I'm left wondering if Kaloogian actually knew where he was when he was there. Assuming of course that he was there. And that he took the picture. And that he knows how to use a camera. Or even owns one. See, lots o' questions.

At my last visit to the dentist, the guy with the smock announced that one of my wisdom teeth was getting way too friendly with its next door neighbor. Time for that sucker to come out! So I hemmed and hawed and finally made an appointment with an oral surgeon. That was supposed to be today. By this point I'd have been Valium-ized and about to be drugged into insensibility.

Alas, it's not to be. Not yet, anyway. While I was at LAX waiting for a flight home, the dentist's office called. The surgeon had a family crisis and had to reschedule all of his appointments for today. So my tooth stays in my mouth a couple of weeks longer. And, much as I'm looking forward to getting this over with, there's a certain sense of relief as well. After all, the last thing you want is a distracted guy attacking you with sharp implements...

Amazing the stuff that goes on in your neighborhood, if only somebody would tell you about it. I've lived in Mountain View for sixteen years. And I never knew about the Portuguese community here, or the amazing crab cioppino dinners they offer a few times a year. Fortunately, a friend and former coworker's wife has a distant cousin. And that cousin's husband is of Portuguese descent. And they get a group together for one or two of the cioppino events every year. To which I've been invited recently. As recently as last night, as a matter of fact.

Here's the scene: there's this huge meeting hall that's set up with long tables with paper on them. You sit down, tie on a plastic bib unless you're very careful or very brave (I am neither), have some wine, salad and garlic bread. And then they deliver these huge metal bowls of crab that's been cooking in this amazing aromatic sauce. And you dig in. And keep digging in as crab after crab is turned into a pile of broken shells. Oh, there's also cold crab, which makes a nice change every couple of hot ones. And after we've all had our fill, we all head off for more drinking and maybe some dancing. Gotta do something to work off all that food!

What fun! And too bad there isn't another one until December. Then again, the last thing I need is the temptation of all-you-can-eat crab in the neighborhood. Because I can resist just about anything but temptation.

No, not me; not this time anyway. I refer to a blogger named Ben Domenech, who was hired by the Washington Post as a conservative antidote to the extreme liberal views (in somebody's opinion, I guess) that were polluting their website. So they hired Domenech, whose major credential is his creation of something called RedState.com, and whose blog began appearing this past Tuesday. And ended today, with the announcement of his resignation. It seems that the beloved technique of stealing story ideas from other blogs (while always giving them credit -- well, almost always) wasn't good enough for Mr. Domenech; he preferred to, in the words of the great Tom Lehrer:

Plagiarize.
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it, please, research.

And so we have a small victory for the liberal press imbalance, as one more conservative commentator is shown to be the dirtbag he is. Now, I'm not saying that being conservative automatically makes you a crook. (Although it may very well make you a loon.) But it's getting harder and harder to find good counterexamples.

As you may have noticed, I've been using Google's AdSense to make a few pennies from visitors to my site. Although if you're reading this with an RSS newsreader, you won't have noticed; AdSense doesn't have an ad system for blogs yet, or at least not for blogs using weird software like Blosxom. So when Yahoo! announced that they were starting their own ad network, I decided to sign up. They didn't have a problem with my running ads on my RSS-fed postings. And who knows? Maybe somebody (or maybe lots and lots of somebodies) would click on those ads and make me fabulously wealthy!

Okay, maybe not. But I did try Yahoo! Publisher for a while. And gave up after a few weeks, when the only click to register was mine. Guess I'll wait until Google supports roll yer own blogging software. Which isn't the point of this post. That's about a piece on Boing Boing about a new policy at Yahoo! Publisher. It seems they now require you to keep ads from being viewed by them damn furriners. How you keep 'em out is your problem. But keep 'em out you must!

Which raises a few good questions. Like, how do I know for sure where a visitor is coming from, in this world of proxies and other magical technologies? Okay, that's really the only good question. But it's such a good one, it ought to count as several. And suddenly I'm feeling pretty good about abandoning Y!P. Better a visited blog with no revenue than one that only Murrkuns can see. Assuming of course I actually have readers from outside these United States. Or inside for that matter. Maybe I'm just talking to myself. Good thing I have that split personality to fall back on...

Not everything from the Good Old Days was any good, as this pre-MTV music video will demonstrate. It's also a little experiment; I've not tried to embed a YouTube video clip before:

In case you're curious (and why wouldn't you be?), the singer is called Joi Lansing, the song "Trapped In The Web Of Love". Which I guess explains the spidery and heart-y trappings.

Sometimes a layover is just what you need.

The human traffic Atlanta's airport on Monday was as bad as my departure from San Jose on Friday, although they were better able to deal with the mess. And it was nice to see all my maternal relations. But the weather could have been better; after carrying my Nikon and a couple of spare lenses all that way, I got a handful of good shots. Rain and gray skies, the photographer's nemesis. Or at least this photographer's.

So having to hang out at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport for two and a half hours between flights turned out to be a nice break. It was sunny at the airport, for one thing. And for another, it was my first experience with the airport's Skyway, an elevated train system between gates and terminals that replaced the one American used to have their. The Skyway has the advantage of going in both directions, rather than a single counterclockwise loop. And it had one other advantage to me that day: it runs on the taxiway side of the terminal. That gave me the chance to ride the circuit and take pictures of all the planes, the taxiways, the runways and all the other support buildings and equipment that litter a major airport. Between my picture-taking and a rather nice lunch at the brand new (to me, anyway) Terminal D, I was almost sorry when it was time to board my flight back to San Jose. Which was every bit as wet as Atlanta, although with more interesting clouds and a couple of incredible rainbows. Which I was too tired to stop to photograph, sadly enough. Another time.

I was down at San Jose Airport first thing this morning, on my way to Atlanta for my cousin's son's bar mitzvah. (Yeah, I know: he's my cousin too. Just go with it.) I arrive the requisite hour and a half before my flight, where I am confronted by the Security Line From Hell. Which, as I discover later, actually loops around the parking garage a few times before it gets to the part I saw. Fortunately, I was once an extremely frequent flyer on American, which gives me an advanced status that lets me use the First Class line. That took a long time, relatively speaking. But nothing like what the folks in Cattle Class had to deal with.

So what's the deal? Since when did St. Patty's Day become a big travel day? Or was there something else going on that I might have known if I still read newspapers? Internet, you failed me...

I've mentioned Television Without Pity before. And I've mentioned their Tubey's Kids auctions as well, where devotees compete to win a recap of a favorite episode of a favorite show, with all the proceeds going to a worthy cause. This last auction (which we Scapers lost) was followed by a second chance auction (which we won). And this morning I'm enjoying the recap of A Human Reaction, a pivotal episode of Farscape. Part of the fun of winning one of these things is the debate over which of TWoP's recappers we should ask to do the job. Should we pick among the already converted? Or someone discovering the madness for the first time? We chose the latter for the recap of the Premiere episode. But this time we went for a seasoned Scaper, the kind of guy who bemoans the loss of our show whenever he can sneak it into his recaps of other, sometimes worthy programming.

Anyway, he done us proud. And if you think this recap is entertaining, how much better is the real thing? That's one thing about us Scapers: we can't resist the chance for a conversion.

I got a card a few days ago from Children International, a charity through which I've been sponsoring a few kids around the world. The card was a thank you, and an acknowledgment that I'd been donating through them for five years now. Which would be nice, and unimportant too, except for one thing. I'd never heard of Children International until after the memorial for a good friend from my Sun Microsystems days. His name was Chris Winters, and he died most unexpectedly at the age of 45. (I was told later that it was his use of an organic supplement that did it, which is irrelevant except in the way it makes his death even more pointless and tragic.)

Anyway, Chris had been a long time sponsor through CI, and his family had asked for donations in his name. Which I did of course. And which led to my sponsoring one, and then later two, and now three children of my own. Which I don't mention to make myself sound virtuous or anything; it's a small enough gift to those who need it more than I. I just want to remind the world that Chris was here. And that he made a difference. And that he's still making a difference, because of those of us who knew him and miss him.

Almost makes me want to believe in a heaven.

Or at least the late 20th. Although I'm pretty good about upgrading most of my gear, whether it needs it or not, one piece of equipment is pretty ancient. That's my printer, an HP Laserjet 4ML that cost me well over a thousand dollars once upon a time. And which hasn't given me a bit of trouble from the day it arrived to this one.

Which is kind of a shame, since I've been dying to replace it forever. It's slow for one thing, not so much in the speed with which it delivers pages, but in how long its underpowered processor and limited memory can take to render a page. And it's only 300 DPI, if you can believe it. But the thing that's driven me crazy since day one is the way it curls paper. The paper path was misdesigned, creating a route so tight that its results just refused to lie flat.

Anyway, you get the idea. I wanted to get a new printer, but just couldn't bring myself to do it as long as this one continued to churn out perfectly readable text. (It's not like the lack of resolution was really an issue, what with my decreasing ability to read tiny type.) And so the situation might have remained, if my work environment hadn't required a change. You see, I work for a small software firm. And, although they had an office here, it had been vacant for quite a while before I joined, the only other employee in the area preferring to work at home. Not that I can blame him; even my fifteen minute commute is long compared to the walk from bedroom to living room. So when they decided to close the office and have me work at home, I was agreeable. The only real sacrifice in losing the office was giving up access to a copier and a fax. Which, and I'm sure you're already ahead of me, was only a problem until I got one of those modern do-everything multifunction printers. And so I did: a Brother 7820N networked printer/copier/scanner/fax. And, having just gotten it mostly installed (I just need a slightly longer phone cable), I did a test print. And was blown away by the speed and the quality.

Shoulda done this last century...

I used to watch Inside Washington on PBS, back when I watched anything that wasn't prescreened by my ReplayTV. (Which will get replaced eventually by a TiVo, now that Replay is effectively no more. But I digress.) Inside is more balanced than the usual politics panel show, any of which demonstrate that the bias in TV news is anything but liberal. It does (or did; as I say, it's been a while since I've seen it) have its house Conservative in the fire-breathing Krauthammer, who can always be counted upon to take the Republican consensus view of any issue. That's what started to make me suspicious of Krauthammer in particular and Conservative columnists in general: that I knew their take on the topic at hand even before I started reading. Which to me means they're shoehorning the facts into their prefab position, never reconsidering their positions in the light of new facts.

Which is why I so enjoyed Jim Emerson's film blog, which was linked from Roger Ebert's website. Jim writes about a recent Krauthammer column in which he sees support for Osama bin Laden and the terrorists in the films that have received Oscar attention. What I enjoyed is not that Jim sees the column as errant nonsense, which he does, but that his dissection of the column demonstrates pretty clearly that Krauthammer is condemning films for positions they don't actually hold, which he might have known if he wasn't more concerned with his viewpoint than the films', or if he had actually seen the work in question. Jim's evidence suggests that, like many a good censorship advocate before him, Krauthammer has not experienced Paradise Now, Munich or Syriana, the films he decries.

In a spirit of full disclosure, I haven't seen them either. Then again, I'm not making any claims for what the filmmakers did or didn't attempt to portray. Which is a pretty important distinction, I'd say. I wonder if I'd be so meticulous if I were being paid for my opinions.

A good friend, who swears he never forwards email crap (and in all the years I've known him, he hasn't -- at least to me), sent along a link to a blog posting that he claims was referenced in Silicon Valley's own Murky News. The post, which you can find at www.directionzero.com, describes what happens when the author decides to test out a pocket-sized Taser on himself. It is, I must say, a funny tale.

And probably a crock. As one of the commenters to that blog points out, there's an earlier and not nearly as grammatically correct version out there. And, like the Bible, there are probably a wide range of versions that might lead an enterprising detective to the original. Which was probably as much a work of fiction as the one the Merc found. Still funny, though.

I don't mean my particular work sucks, so if anybody at my present employer should happen to read this, I'm not talking about you. Unless you think I am, in which case it's quite possible you're right. But you're not, so don't go telling anybody I said otherwise.

No, I'm talking about the concept in general, and the way it interferes with all the important things like blogging and catching movies and going out shooting. I refer not to the Dick Cheney lawyer-winging style of shooting, of which I'm not a big fan (if it moves under its own power, I won't shoot it), but instead of the photographic kind of shooting. Suddenly, being back among the employed means I have to make the most of weekends. Which is what I was doing today out at Baylands Nature Preserve, shooting all sorts of migratory birds, along with some of the airplanes taking off from and landing at Palo Alto Airport. Which they were doing in reverse today (the planes, not the birds), I assume because of the winds. At least that's why big airports reverse the direction of their runways, and I assume little ones have the same issues.

Anyway, this was a first chance to try out the 70-300mm lens I just bought. Which did a pretty good job, although a little more magnification would have been nice. My partner in today's photography has a 100-400mm lens, a monster that probably outweighs my lens by a factor of three. I'll be interested to see her results.

I feel pretty good about mine; I got a bunch of new shots to send to the stock photo sites. Took a while to figure out just what kinds of birds I was shooting. Thank goodness for the web-based wizard at WhatBird. They only let me down regarding the sample at right. Anybody want to take a guess? Kind of hard to try to sell a picture when you can't tell people what it's a picture of.