Maureen Dowd, in (for some reason) a New York Times book review:
"His book is a desperate attempt to ingratiate himself with the Masons, rather than to interpret the bizarre Masonic rites and symbols that illuminate — as in Illuminati! — how the ultimate elite private boys' club has conspired to shape the nations' capital and Western civilization ever since George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol building in a Masonic ritual wearing full Masonic regalia, including a darling little fringed satin apron."
Remember, kids, it's cool to be edited. Ms. Dowd sure could have used some.
Also: who or what was wearing the Masonic regalia? A Masonic ritual? The Capitol building? The cornerstone?
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Joe Biden, in tonight's debate: “I don’t have a stomach for genocide when it comes to Darfur.”
I wonder where he does have a stomach for genocide.
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"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
—Hanlon's Razor Republicans seem to have a problem checking with musicians before using their music for campaigns. Once or twice could be explained as simple mistakes, but it's starting to look like a pattern of behavior. The latest? No one checked with Ann and Nancy Wilson before using "Barracuda" as Sarah Palin's theme song. The Wilsons aren't happy about it. To recap some previous incarnations of the same problem:
- John Mellencamp had to ask both Bush (in 2000) and McCain to stop using his songs.
- Jackson Browne is really upset that a Republican ad in Ohio used "Running on Empty." Browne, an Obama supporter, sued.
- Boston's Tom Scholz took issue with Mike Huckabee playing "More than a Feeling" at campaign events this year.
- In the 2000 campaign, both Sting and Tom Petty told Bush to stop using their songs in his campaign.
- In 1996, Sam Moore threatened to sue Bob Dole for turning "Soul Man" into "Dole Man" without permission.
That doesn't even include Reagan's tone-deaf use of "Born in the U.S.A.," a catchy song that sounds patriotic until you actually pay attention to it. Springsteen later complained that the campaign misused the song, but he never told Reagan to stop using it. Were these all simple mistakes? Or is it a strategy? Even when told to stop using a song, the worst that's happened is that the campaign had to stop using it, followed by a little bad press. Until Jackson Browne sued, there wasn't much of a penalty for using a song without getting permission first (I also expect that the Republicans, good friends of corporations that they are, checked with the songs' record companies before using them, but not the artists. Draw your own conclusions there). But how hard can it be for a campaign to call a musician and ask, "can we use your song?" It looks more and more unlikely that every Republican candidate since Dole in 1996 just happened to forget to check with artists before using their music. Maybe they think it's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission. As left-leaning as most musicians are, asking permission first might leave the Republicans with nothing to play except Ted Nugent and John Rich.
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Law and law school-related stuff:
- Self-promotion time: my student note has been published in the William Mitchell Law Review.
- I've also started a blog on law & security (which I will hopefully update more frequently than my LiveJournal account).
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From his blog:
I remember a few years ago, I used to play this computer game called “Civilization” where you were trying to start a civilization in ancient times, and you had to fight off raging hordes and build villages and learn new technologies and all of that … it was a pretty fun game in a geeky sort of way. But what I remember most is that there was this cheat mode on it where you could automatically own all the new technologies and you could have as much money as you wanted … so, basically in cheat mode these raging hordes would come at you with clubs and spears, and you could smite them with military helicopters and guided missiles and atomic bombs. That’s what I think it’s like to be a Red Sox and Yankees fan.
Yup. That's about the size of it.
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Dear world,
Still think the Jayhawks were a fluke this year?
(Seriously, though. Weird year for a longtime KU fan to be hoping the football team doesn't blow its lead in the Orange Bowl.)
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Want to make a really annoying printer? Here's how. Set a toner sensor or counter in the toner cartridge. When the toner runs low, instead of showing a "toner low" warning or other useful message, just light a "toner" LED and refuse to print. That way, if someone is trying to print three copies of a long paper due the next day, he'll have no way to print them! Then he'll have to go buy a new toner cartridge instead of squeezing more life out of the old one! Sure, maybe he'll have to struggle mightily to resist the urge to throw the whole thing out the nearest window he can find, but it's a small price to pay for pr0f1t!
Seriously. Printer won't let me print. Output looks fine; printer's just convinced it needs a new toner.
Oh, BTW - this is a Brother HL5250DN. Avoid at all costs if you like your printer to do things like, say, print.
I hereby name the printer Adlai Stevenson. Don't wait until the stores are open, gimme toner now.
Grrr.
Anyone know a 24-hour toner store?
ETA:
Internet for the win. Turns out there's a little window in the toner cartridge that the printer uses to sense toner level. Cover that window, and printer prints. Huzzah.
http://www.epiicenter.com/tips/toner.html
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So, what events are in the "Mussel Decathlon?"
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The parade of real-life people hopping onto SL continues. Judge Richard Posner ("the most influential American judge not on the Supreme Court since Learned Hand") is going to be giving a talk via a Second Life avatar.
I'm still not convinced that SL is that useful for this kind of thing. What does 3D and an avatar add over, say, a web chat, podcast, or other ways of delivering a talk? Second Life avatars don't have nuanced facial expressions, and there's really no need to simulate physical interaction. A virtual blackboard or slide show might be useful, but we already have ways of doing that online. There may also be a scaling issue -- a podcast or web chat can reach thousands (maybe millions, if you really plan ahead), but how many people can you cram in an SL sim? Do they have special code for things like this that prevents a distinguished lecturer from being "griefed?" Is the big benefit of an SL talk that it simulates craning your head over the people in the seats in front of you so that you can see what's going on?
There are some really good criticisms of SL for this kind of thing, particularly Camp Darfur. No, really. Camp Darfur. It's like it's 1985 and a college sorority discovers that people are starving in Ethiopia so they all skip lunch for a week so they know what it's like.
Meanwhile, I get really scared when I start agreeing with Justice Scalia. With any luck, they'll have patent law all straightened out by the time I get out of law school. Either that, or they'll have created all kinds of interesting new problems.
Finally, the lawsuits that come out of this are going to be fascinating. Some sites are allowing people to comment on houses for sale, with predictable results. This part, however, is grand:
If some people post misleading reviews, others will step in to correct them, predicts Patrick Lashinsky, a senior vice president at Zip. Homeowners also might reply to criticism and provide more information, he says. The potential for defamation suits is obvious. It's bad enough when people are just arguing about Egyptology on usenet, but imagine how much crankier people will get when property values are on the line. The real fun, though, is going to come when homeowners and potential buyers start interacting directly through this thing. There's a reason real estate agents do everything they can to keep buyer and seller from meeting until closing day. Here's a little scenario. Harriet Homeowner puts her house up for sale. Bob Browser comes to the open house, sees dark, loose wallpaper and what he thinks might indicate a serious leak and maybe a rotting foundation. He posts that on the message board, and the homeowner replies that it's something simple (the kid spilled grape juice there before the showing, and that's why it was dark and wet). Then Sam Shopper (I'm not good at making up names, okay?) views the house, and posts that he saw some rippling in the hardwood floor that he thinks is water damage. Turns out, though, it's really termite damage--but Harriet Homeowner doesn't say anything about that. Because Harriet has obviously been reading the comments on her house, does she now have a duty to correct any misconceptions she sees there, whether in her favor or not? Like I said, there will be lawsuits, and they'll be interesting to watch.
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So, Networkers has a blog this year. Or, at least, there are half a dozen officially appointed bloggers, and comments to their posts are vetted by Cisco moderators. The fact that it's the end of Day One and there are 15 posts and 8 total comments is a sign of something. Maybe it's just that people are busy doing conferency stuff, and that the blog location isn't prominently advertized.
But there is something antiseptic about a corporate blog. I'm not one to wax about the power of the blogosphere or any of that. It's just that the corporatized blog seems so calculated. "Hey, those blog things are the in thing with all the hip kids! Let's get one! Of course, we can't just let anyone post. Oh, and keep it on message."
I guess it's the same thing that bugs me about moderated "celebrity chat" sessions. The corporation takes a medium that's fundamentally an open many-to-many communication stream, and tries to make it act like the one-many marketing they're more comfortable with. Then again, there's good reason celebrity chats are moderated. No one needs to read what would happen if they weren't (someone with greater creative skills than mine can write the one-act play title Britney Visits IRC).
Of course, people can still comment on Networkers in their own blogs (hi), but it's not the same without some kind of central directory of blogs. Some conferences do that -- list all the web pages where people make comments.
BTW, no city that lives as nocturnally as Las Vegas should be on Pacific time. What's reeally going to hurt is when I get back and realize that my 2:30 am bedtime (give or take) is really 4:30 am.
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On the first day of Networkers, the vendors gave to me:
4 t-shirts
3 ballpoint pens
1 USB laptop light
1 USB-rechargable flashlight
1 canvas tote bag
1 CCIE cap
1 ball and magnet sculpture thingy
1 blinky ball
1 box of mints
1 USB 1.0 hub
Okay, so the numbers don't match up to the 12 days of Christmas. I'll work harder to make the World Of Swag work according to musical tradition next time. If motivated, I'm sure I could get the numbers of pens into the double digits, and the mints into the high single digits.
The best marketing bang for the buck has to be for the tote bag. Spend a little money on decent materials, and everyone in the hall is stuffing other vendors' materials into a bad with your name on it--which is the most seen name, other than Cisco's.
Best new thing (from a geek perspective): the "Binary Game" - it's basically just a graphical game of converting 8-bit binary to decimal or decimal to binary against the clock, but it's fairly addictive. It has the Tetris drop & speed up mechanic working for it. I want a copy for my laptop -- it's way better than Freecell. If you have access to the Cisco Certifcation Community website, the game is here. Okay, so maybe it's more fun if you're a math or routing geek.
Wierdest World of Swag booth: the Anaheim tourism board.
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The following should be told to every person about to sing the National Anthem:
It's not about you.
The next two minutes (five, if you're from the Whitney Houston School of Anthem Singing) are a time for a patriotic display and, for those who are particularly motivated, singing along. It's a tribute to the country. It's not your "American Idol" audition. So, please, don't try to make the anthem your own. It's not. You are also strongly cautioned against wild and fanciful departures from the score--including (but not limited to) funky timing changes, gratuitous glissandos, Be-Bop riffs, contrapunctal note changes, and scat jazz stylings. It's a tough song to sing, so it's understandable if you're eager to exit the high notes earlier than scheduled, but give those notes a fair a shot anyway.
Remember, drunken Englishmen in the eighteenth century used to sing this song, so you can too. Good luck.
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