The Farbissiner Paskudnyak

Apologies

2005-07-27T20:40:00.000-04:00

I'm spending a lot of time working on my current project and a side diversion, so unfortunately the blog is suffering a bit. However, I've scheduled a vacation that'll recharge my batteries, so I anticipate a bit more posting in the next few weeks.

Today's unbelievable item of the day for every executive who was downtown on 9/11 and still believes in outsourcing - Indian Police Arrest Insurance Execs For Motivating Employees With Osama Bin Laden Posters.

Un-fucking real....

RIP Jimmy Doohan

2005-07-20T19:09:00.000-04:00

No "beam me up" jokes here. I had the privilege of meeting Jimmy on a couple of occasions and he was always gracious and the total gentleman. He did indeed live long and prosper.

RIP.

Overrated Music

2005-07-19T16:16:00.000-04:00

A post on great rock covers on Blogcritics led me to a blog with a few observations on the most overrated rock songs of all time. Needless to say, I couldn't resist the opportunity to exercise a meme (I know, cheap post not requiring thinking, but then again, I'm busy, so I really don't have a lot of time to craft one of my trenchant missives). Without further adieu - my list:

"Imagine" - treacly stuff from one of Lennon's more hypocritical periods. An instant dial-changer for me if it pops up on the car radio. It's used all too often as an anthem by the naive and for kinderspiel school shows and the like. No one dislikes the notion of whirled peas, but any semi-sentient individual knows that playing "Imagine" in some of the terror-sponsoring areas will likely get your head chopped off.

"Proud Mary" by Tina Turner - Everyone knows that Tina's one of the two best female R&B singers on the planet (Aretha being the other) and that "River Deep Mountain High" should be enshrined in the top three of R&B records (the other two being Aretha's "Respect" and Otis' "Try A Little Tenderness"). But frankly, this version has never done anything for me - it's a stage production number and if anything subtracts from the song with the annoying arrangement. It's been said that the reason John Fogerty started doing Creedence songs again was to counter the perception that everyone thought "Proud Mary" was a Tina original...

"American Pie" - Tripe, pure and simple. Cutesy lyrics with sophmoric allusions, and McLean's prejudices on the evolution of rock come through loud and clear. If you want to remember Buddy Holly, may I suggest playing a Buddy Holly song (my personal favorite Buddy Holly covers other than the obvious one if you've been reading this blog for any length of time are Marshall Crenshaw's version of "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" and a live cover John Fogerty did of "Rave On").

Pink Floyd - Practically everything by Dave, Roger, Nick, Rick and Syd. "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" was unlistenable, "Dark Side Of The Moon", "Animals" and "The Wall" are giant soporifics (the only thing that keeps me awake during "Dark Side" is the damned alarm clock going off). The only Pink Floyd piece I really like is "Wish You Were Here".

More later....

In The Throwing Out The Baby With The Bathwater Department

2005-07-18T19:25:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted to Blogcritics.

Sunday's New York Times (registration required) had a very interesting article about spyware-infected PCs being thrown out instead of being repaired. The introduction to the article provides much fodder for comment

On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker's Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware - stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user's machine - he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He threw out the whole computer.

Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine. He is not alone in his surrender in the face of growing legions of digital pests, not only adware and spyware but computer viruses and other Internet-borne infections as well. Many PC owners are simply replacing embattled machines rather than fixing them.

"I was spending time every week trying to keep the machine free of viruses and worms," said Mr. Tucker, a vice president of Salesforce.com, a Web services firm based here. "I was losing the battle. It was cheaper and faster to go to the store and buy a low-end PC."

My initial reaction was sheer amazement that the holder of a Ph.D. in computer science would not invest any effort in trying to salvage or repair the machine. Admittedly the spyware wars are getting much nastier, where the active countermeasures against removal have been accepted and implemented by the more "mainstream" malware providers (e.g. Direct Revenue's Aurora, a nasty piece of work that is the constant topic of discussion on spyware removal forums), however, isn't it odd that someone who should be providing thought leadership toward academic and commercial computing wouldn't wish to even take the simple expedient of formatting his hard drive and reinstalling his operating system? Surely as an Internet executive he has access to some resource in his company capable of performing that relatively simple task, or his academic connections could certainly find him an intern or student willing to wipe and restore the machine. The idea of throwing a perfectly good computer out merely because of a spyware infestation is so astonishingly wasteful (perhaps some student or deserving organization could use it?) that it boggles the mind.

Although many organizations (especially in financial services) will swap out a PC at the first sign of this kind of trouble, the infected PC will quickly be wiped and reimaged and put back into service as soon as it's needed by another user. It's somewhat instructive that a computer science Ph.D. could not think of taking the simple precaution of having something like Norton Ghost at the ready to reinstall his operating system in the event of a massive meltdown, nor is there any mention of his data protection strategy. There are many, many good and dedicated volunteers on various anti-spyware forums that give many hours of their time to eradicating these pests from strangers' computers, and yet I find it interesting that someone such as the gentleman mentioned in the article would not even expend the effort to keep his own system free of malware much less even try to seek out a solution to his issues and share that experience such that hopefully another person will not be as impacted as he was.

Then again, consider the environmental impact. Lord knows I'm not a tree-hugger, but I really am appalled that someone would simply throw out a computer, fill up landfills, and not consider his actions - it's obvious that more people are taking this course of action, and it says something rather sad about our society's need for immediate gratification and not taking the long-term view.

Sometimes a bit of bile is necessary....

2005-07-14T11:17:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the insensitivity of the Left, who make a point of wearing their "sensitivity" on their sleeves is appalling. Witness two of today's Letters to the Editor in the Sulzberger Entity, on the subject of the "International Freedom Center" and the "Drawing Center" at Ground Zero. Amazingly enough the Times published the majority of letters saying simply and eloquently to the "healing and therapy" types to take their "centers" someplace else (it ran 78% to 22% in favor of STFU). However, two letters bear special "approbation".....

With deepest respect for those who lost family members and friends on 9/11 and for their grief: respect is always reciprocal. This means that in no case should one set of families, one group or one community defer to another under such grievous conditions of loss.

All of us need to arrive at reciprocity of understanding of our deepest feelings, which we share in remembering and memorializing this event.

The ground zero discussion must be taken out of the political realm. This does not mean that we defer or submerge our memories. It means that we must recognize that we are all bound together through our responses to the tragedy, however diverse those responses are. It is especially important for a memorial of this kind to find a center of harmony for all individuals and all groups.

Communally, therefore, other cultural representations must be allowed to be present on the memorial site.

Vivian Darroch-Lozowski
Toronto, July 13, 2005

Miz Darroch-Lozowski is very good indeed at spouting every cliche in the liberal playbook, so let's dissect her screed a tiny bit. First of all, just to (re)establish my credentials, I was there that day - I saw the first plane hit, and I ran for my life. While Miz Darroch-Lozowski was probably sipping her coffee and listening to the traffic report about the Don Valley (or is it Don Pardo) Parkway, I was praying harder than I ever did, praying that if it was my time, that I at least get to see my kids once more before G-d took me.

Reciprocity of feelings? Lady, you have no standing in the matter. I barely consider myself to have standing in the matter, and I was there. My only mission in this is to be a witness for those who cannot speak, and to stand with their families. Do you want reciprocity with those who would call you a Crusader or a Zionist infidel pig and who would slit your throat? Or is it your secret hope that if they do become overlords they'll put you at the back of the line for decapitation because of your imagined service to them in getting their obfuscating lies across?

Other cultural representations? Every farking culture in the world was in that staircase evacuating the World Financial Center with me. Every race, creed and color. And all of us had only one thing on our minds, whether or not it was the end. Let me tell you something Viv, we only cared about one thing - getting the hell out of there. The only prejudices expressed that day were the ones we instinctively knew - the Islamofascists had decided to throw la mierda at el ventilador, and we were in the middle of it.

My deepest sympathy goes out to all the families who lost a loved one on 9/11. These families have endured much. Their opinions about the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site should be recognized, but not at the cost of one of the most integral parts of the site.

The Drawing Center is supposed to be a place of artistic freedom, where artists are able to express themselves in their creations. Trying to censor this institution by calling for reassurances that its programs "will harmonize with the concerns" of a group of 9/11 family members is a blunder of great proportions.

Patrick Devery
Bronx, July 12, 2005

Artistic freedom? What the hell does that have to do with a mass murder? Patrick would probably like a Drawing Center at Treblinka and Majdanek, too - surely artists would like to "express themselves" at the site of millions of murders, after all, the Trade Center was penny-ante stuff if you look at the relative scale of things.

Back in April or May, I happened to be downtown, and I walked over to the pit. A few passers-by came and clucked over it, and I just stood there. I found myself silently saying Kaddish for those souls who were silent, who should've been rushing past me trying to get to meetings, or to grab a bite. I wished I had been able to do more than that for them, and I knew that had things gone differently that day, perhaps I would've been one of the silent ones. Drawing Centers and the like won't do a damned thing to assuage those of us who remember.

CNN: Blair 'Shocked' That London Bomb Suspects Are British

2005-07-13T11:32:00.000-04:00

Somehow this comes to mind:

Tout insignifiant avec une touche de travail

2005-07-12T00:03:00.000-04:00

Still much heaviness at work with the preliminary design for the SOA architecture we're going to bolt on to our existing service offering. Good part is that there's considerable impetus to do it right with realistic time and budget constraints, so no complaints other than I really have to get up to speed quickly with some things that have been a bit outside my bailiwick (for instance, setting up the document router do I use a SAX parser to extract enough info to route the document, or should I just use one of the lower level APIs to read just enough of the doc. Gut check is to use the SAX parser and throw some very fast hardware at it, anything else is going to be too convoluted - I want this thing to be ultimately maintainable.).

The Montrose album was a great listen - some very fine chops indeed by Ronnie Montrose (although I could've sworn he was a Les Paul type back then there are some decidedly Strat-ish sounds on this record). Sammy Hagar is just about right for this record, the bombast is kept in check. Production is typical Ted Templeman - pretty ghastly early 70s, so don't expect a lot from the sonices. "Space Station #5" is my current favorite.

The Redwalls album is also a good listen, a bit more consistent than the Blue Van (there are plenty of decidedly Beatlesque moments on both CDs, one song reminding me of "Lies" by the Knickerbockers). A bit gratuitous on the language, a Tipper Gore warning was found on the label. Having grown up in Brooklyn, language of the sort doesn't faze me. See episode one of the Sopranos - "What, no fuckin' ziti?" for an illustration...

A Borders coupon for 25% off DVDs led me to purchase a recent Lynyrd Skynyrd concert DVD over the weekend. There's method to the madness, as we're adding "Tuesday's Gone" and "Free Bird" to the band's setlist (I can hear the chortles now, but come on, this stuff is harder to play than you think!) Great show, although it's needless marred by having a string section on stage. It isn't chamber music, folks - you need string sounds, get another keyboard player. Biggest excitement of the show was Gary Rossington breaking off his Bigsby's arm from his Explorer while going nuts at the end of "Free Bird" - I hope that was only one of the new Gibson signature models.

Keine gut, heute.....

2005-07-08T09:58:00.000-04:00

Quietly raging over yesterday's events in London. Plenty of condemnations, no actions from our alleged leaders. If some people with stones were running the show, there'd be a few daisy cutters dropping into places like Medina and Qom (notice how every place the Islamofascists have is a "holy" or "sacred" place....) to get the point across to the mullahs who fan the fires of this thing that we have and will use the power to hurt them badly if they hurt our innocents. However, realpolitik strikes again and there'll be nothing done to address the situation - after all, we have to keep the banlieus quiet, non?

And consider this interesting factoid - Paris Hilton's great-aunt is Zsa Zsa Gabor.....

You say it's your birthday...

2005-07-07T11:22:00.000-04:00

And the happiest of birthdays to Richard Starkey, MBE. Many, many, more, good friend.

And if you want to feel old - today is Ringo's 65th.

All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.

2005-07-06T21:18:00.000-04:00

Lots of work stuff this week and next, with the dreaded semi-annual assessment process (in other words, the window dressing that the HR vermin go through in order to justify not giving you any increase because you're above the mean for your "peers") also interfering with my life and sleep patterns. The work stuff is actually very interesting, with some interesting comparisons and blueprinting for the enterprise services bus architecture for my current project. I must give Sun an attaboy for their excellent Java docs and downloads, as I really haven't been on the development side of an SOA before (I haven't done serious development work in years, although I can still code C with the best of them - it's just that I've never had the time, inclination or for that matter the opportunity to do anything with Java other than install Weblogic, Websphere, Oracle, Tomcat and all of the other various toys written in Java; I made a half-hearted attempt at trying to get an applet to work from the Visual Studio Java compiler - I know, I know - some years ago and I couldn't get it to run no matter how hard I tried). Needless to say I will be doing some boning up on various Java related things this week (JAX-RPC and DOM processing of XML docs) so the blog once again takes a back seat.

I've been playing with some of the PD content management systems to put together some internal portals to mess around with for things such as RSS feeds from our various system statuses (I have access to the good stuff, thanks to site licenses at work, but they're a pain to install and configure, so it boiled down to a few PD choices - the current one under test is Xoops, which isn't bad, but I'll reserve opinions after I finish playing with a few more. So far I like Xoops and Mambo, and PHP-Nuke is up shortly for test).

Upcoming short take reviews will be on the Redwalls and Blue Van CDs, plus the first Montrose album.

Short Takes

2005-07-04T11:37:00.000-04:00

A couple of quick mini-reviews for today - first being the Eagles' "Farewell 1 Tour - Live From Melbourne" DVD. I'm not a big Eagles fan by any stretch of the imagination but as I was standing in line at Borders with the subject of the second review here the DVD caught my eye and I decided to take a chance on it. Don Felder's no longer with the band, however, the replacement guitarist is certainly competent. The thing that positively intrigued me was seeing a couple of James Gang classics in the set list, and being an old James Gang / Joe Walsh fan way before Hotel California I thought it would be very cool to see them played live (how many times on the old bar band circuit did we hear "Walk Away" - I finally learned to play it the right way just recently; Walsh does some very funky stuff on that original record). I popped the first DVD in and navigated straight to "Walk Away", and I hate to say it, that great classic was presented in a totally wimpified laid back Eagles arrangement. I should've suspected something was up when I saw Walsh playing a Strat on it. Funk #49 was no better, with horns playing the lead part (inexcusable - Walsh really does play well on this show when he's given a chance to cut loose). The Eagles' stuff is well performed and tight - "Already Gone" being a particular favorite of mine. It's just that it's the Eagles - if you prefer California Pizza Kitchen to the genuine article I guess that's fine.

DVD #2 is the exact antithesis of the laid-back Eagles show (which to its credit did have many gratuitous audience shots of well-endowed women with low-cut tops) - a smoking "Live at Montreux 1990" by Gary Moore. The former Thin Lizzy axeman works his way through a great blues set (including a few numbers with Albert Collins as a guest). Particular highlights for me were "The Stumble" and "All Your Love" - great takes on the John Mayall versions of those two classics ("All Your Love" on this DVD certainly cuts the version on Mayall's 70th birthday concert offering). The closer of the set is Moore's take on Roy Buchanan's "The Messiah Will Come Again", one of those set pieces that you would've thought was impossible to cover (quick, name a cover version of "She Loves You"), but unsurprisingly Moore absolutely blazes through the song and makes it his own (while making me not want to look at either my Les Paul or Telecaster for a few weeks). The bonus tracks include Moore's own "Parisienne Walkways", another tour de force for this underrated guitarist. Recommended (it was on sale this weekend at my local Borders for ten bucks - if you happen to be near Borders, see if they've got it at that price; you can't get hurt, as they say).

Finally, a Happy Fourth of July to all - have a safe, fun holiday....

I was at this restaurant. The sign said "Breakfast Anytime." So I ordered French Toast in the Renaissance.

2005-07-03T13:06:00.000-04:00

For someone who thought no new posts until Tuesday I'm sure loquacious (perhaps the simple act of relaxing away from the rather busy times at work is opening the creative spigot a bit), but needless to say I felt the urge to comment a bit on the Live 8 concerts. Point blank, other than happening upon the tail end of Brian Wilson's performance (which royally amused me as he stepped away from his keyboard and gave the audience a stiff-armed salute; I'm sure it was quite unintentional but I inwardly chuckled as it was right in the heart of Berlin - looked like the Tiergarten to me), I didn't watch any of it and I had no desire to.

Oh sure, there were plenty of dinosaur acts for me, but I was quite unprepared to listen to some pompous ass on either MTV or VH1 pontificate on just how much it means. It doesn't mean shit. It's a bunch of multimillionaires alleviating their guilt at their good fortune by being horrifically preachy and telling us that we're the biggest swine if we don't immediately cancel all of Africa's debt and pour a significant chunk of our GNPs into the continent because of all the bad we cause by being consumers (except for all of the petrodistillates that go into compact disk production of course).

I've known many folks from Africa who've come to the NY area. Invariably, they are good, industrious, religious folk who are assets to this country. Invariably, they've all told me what kind of a toilet Africa is and how every place there is ruled by some piss-ant despot who doesn't fail to steal every dime produced by the industrious people as well as the foreign aid blindly shipped in by well-meaning, naive Westerners. Does the name Robert Mugabe ring a bell? There are cultures where thievery is ingrained (a good friend of mine from college is originally from Nigeria, and he always regaled me with tales of how corrupt the place is). Until there's a sea change in the attitudes in Africa, aid money spent there will go to any cause designed to line the pockets of the despots and their apparatchiks, or be stolen by people whose only objective is to separate money from its owners or intended recipients.

I don't have a huge desire to see most of the acts on the bill (I really wish that Mr. Combs and Mrs. Ritchie would pull a Judge Crater; other acts such as Snoop Dogg are merely worthy of ignoring in my opinion) so I don't want to waste any of my time actively seeking new musical horizons here (I've heard good things about some new groups called The Redwalls and The Blue Van, neither of which are on the bill, so I'll put my energies into checking them out). As far as seeing Macca, well, I can pull out lots of DVDs with Macca on them where there's far less pontificating going on. These shows aren't the Bangladesh concert - George wisely kept the preachiness to a short dose before the show and a brief film during intermission. Twelve hours worth of four songs with lots of bombastic rhetoric about how horrible we are interspersed didn't seem like a fun way to spend my Saturday.

Now if they had the Gert Jonnys band on, I might've taken a look.....

New Blogroll Addition

2005-07-02T13:53:00.000-04:00

Although it's not a blog per se, Ben Edelman's site is one of the most valuable resources out there for the dissection and analysis of spyware and malware. Please welcome him to the blogroll, and visit often.

Gert Jonnys!

2005-07-01T00:11:00.000-04:00

Someone brought up really bad band photos in a thread on one of my favorite forums, and hands-down, the winner was this bunch of wild and crazy guys from Sweden, the Gert Jonnys:

You really have to admire these characters for having the stones to actually be photographed in those Santa's Workshop Meets Bad Polka Band outfits, not to mention the seriously goofy looks, everyone looking in a different direction, and hair styles that have been condemned by Amnesty International and the Red Cross.

Here we see the band in one of its more conservative moments, however, we note again the photographer doesn't seem to know how to gain the attention of his subjects or there are some serious distractions in the room (if these guys have groupies......)

A final sartorial nightmare from the Gert Jonnys band. I couldn't resist and did a bit of research about this band, and other than the few other posts out there recognizing them for supreme achievement in the field of bad taste in apparel not to mention courage under fire, as near as I can dope out from the one article in Swedish that seems to recount their tale, they were a local dance music outfit in (as far as I can tell!) the Goteborg region who played occasional residencies in places like the Canary Islands. The leader was Gert Jonny Hansson, the husky fellow with the extremely bad pompadour. Apparently Hansson left the band in the early 80s (these photos date to the 70s, surprise, surprise) and the band is still playing together with a new kappelmeister named Freddy - they can be found and booked here. They've got some real toe-tappers on their various albums, I'm particularly fond of "Jag vill ge dig en dag" and"Jag vill ge dig min sång", along with their lively rendition of "Good Golly Miss Molly".

Still, someone's got to track down Gert Jonny Hansson. We've got to get these guys back together and in front of an audience - I'd actually pay good money to see that!

Cöme see the scenic mööse....

Assorted rants....

2005-06-30T11:14:00.000-04:00

Since I'm about to spend the next six and one half hours on conference calls, it's time for a quick commentary just to let you all know I'm still breathing (occasionally....)

The Sulzberger Entity reports this morning that MSFT is in negotiations to buy Claria. In Claria's defense, I'll concede they haven't adopted overly obnoxious countermeasures against removal (it's more along the lines of sly wording and "pretty please with sugar on it", so it merely gets the Frankly Unctuous award, named after my favorite crooner) so they're not to be classified with Aurora or Cool Web Search, however, the implications boggle the mind. The boys in Redmond owning the tracking technology and databases is scary enough, and if the marketing types (Sales and Marketing being somewhere in the general vicinity of moral fiber of the Sturmabteilung) decide that they should embed this technology in the OS, it's BOHICA time. It won't be removable except through major surgery (ever try uninstalling IE?) if at all, and it could be not only embedded into the browser, it could be embedded into MS Office, Money, the whole shebang. Broadband Reports had the amusing yet frightening scenario of Clippy popping up with "You look like you're writing a resume. Would you like to post it on Careerbuilder.com?".

The Police Ineptitude Of The Week Award goes to the constabulary in Aruba. Seemingly channeling the JonBenet Ramsey investigation team or simple wussiness, they still haven't found that poor girl's remains yet. A New York City detective would've had a confession already. Says an awful lot about the mentality of the Euros (even though it's the Carribean) - it's not as if these thugs are going to swing for it, odds are they'd get a couple of years with weekends off given the typical European approach to criminal justice nowadays. Give her family some closure, dammit.

Probably no more posts until Tuesday. I intend to enjoy the holiday weekend. To all, my best wishes for a safe and sane Fourth of July.

Remember boys and girls - once the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend

2005-06-27T09:52:00.000-04:00

RIP Paul Winchell. Rather interesting if you compare some of the real celebrity birdbrains to some of the old timers like Winchell, who had a ton of US patents and actually invented a prototype artificial heart (Hedy Lamarr was another smart one - she came up with the concept of sonar). James Woods is probably the only real smart one these days (and he also provided crucial evidence to the FBI about what might've been a dry run for 9/11 - good thing this guy is very observant). Winchell, well, everyone thinks of him as Tigger's voice, and those of us of a certain age think of him for his ventriloquism - certainly a lost art. His characters (Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff) were gentle and beloved by children. Thinking back, I think the revival of Winchell-Mahoney Time actually replaced Soupy Sales in NYC (then again it's probably just failing grey matter). Sigh. I wonder if Jimmy Nelson is still around (Nelson had a similar shtick, with Danny O'Day as the fast-talking puppet and Farfel the dog instead of Knucklehead as the slow-witted comic relief.

A minor problem involving character sets on my current project is threatening to snowball, so I'll probably be a bit quiet this week as well. We've got to get it resolved by Friday. It's actually very simple to resolve, a back-end database instance needs to have its data backed up, a simple ALTER DATABASE issued, and then restore the data, however, since this definitely constitutes a major change event (and who knows what systems that will impact). Change control, here I come....

The AFI List of Best Movie Quotes

2005-06-23T12:07:00.000-04:00

I couldn't resist.

1. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
GWTW never did a lot for me. Too cliched.

2. "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," "The Godfather," 1972.
Even though overused it's a classic.

3. "You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am," "On the Waterfront," 1954.
Ditto.

4. "Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.
I've begun to run hot and cold with The Wizard of Oz, it's no longer that special occasion that it used to be to watch it. In small doses it's fine, but when it gets ubiquitous its oleagenous qualities come out.

5. "Here's looking at you, kid," "Casablanca," 1942.
I'm a sucker for Casablanca, so my only quibble is with the placement in the list.

6. "Go ahead, make my day," "Sudden Impact," 1983.
A personal favorite.

7. "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," "Sunset Blvd.," 1950.
Not one of my favorite movies by any stretch. However, it is a great line.

8. "May the Force be with you," "Star Wars," 1977.
Dreadfully overused. Mel Brooks skewered it properly.

9. "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night," "All About Eve," 1950.
Ditto #7.

10. "You talking to me?" "Taxi Driver," 1976.
Dreadfully overused.

11. "What we've got here is failure to communicate," "Cool Hand Luke," 1967.
A personal favorite.

12. "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," "Apocalypse Now," 1979.
Another big personal favorite.

13. "Love means never having to say you're sorry," "Love Story," 1970.
Never liked the movie.

14. "The stuff that dreams are made of," "The Maltese Falcon," 1941.
Great stuff.

15. "E.T. phone home," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," 1982.
Ghastly syrup.

16. "They call me Mister Tibbs!", "In the Heat of the Night," 1967.
Absolute dignity. Great stuff.

17. "Rosebud," "Citizen Kane," 1941.
Overrated.

18. "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!", "White Heat," 1949.
Another great personal favorite. Although my personal favorite Cagney performance is in another film ("One Two Three") this is perhaps the best gangster film of all time.

19. "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!", "Network," 1976.
Aged badly.

20. "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," "Casablanca," 1942.
Casablanca. What else can I say....

21. "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti," "The Silence of the Lambs," 1991.
Best line in that movie, but the rest of it wasn't that great.

22. "Bond. James Bond," "Dr. No," 1962.
Fuckin' A. The epitome of cool.

23. "There's no place like home," "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.
See #4.

24. "I am big! It's the pictures that got small," "Sunset Blvd.," 1950.
See #7.

25. "Show me the money!", "Jerry Maguire," 1996.
Never liked the movie.

26. "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?", "She Done Him Wrong," 1933.
Classic stuff. Great attitude.

27. "I'm walking here! I'm walking here!", "Midnight Cowboy," 1969.
Not one of my favorites by a longshot.

28. "Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By,"' "Casablanca," 1942.
The line from Casablanca.

29. "You can't handle the truth!", "A Few Good Men," 1992.
Not one of my favorites.

30. "I want to be alone," "Grand Hotel," 1932.
Classic, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.

31. "After all, tomorrow is another day!", "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
I've already expressed my opinion of GWTW.

32. "Round up the usual suspects," "Casablanca," 1942.
The reaction shot and Claude Rains' delivery make this one of the best moments ever on film.

33. "I'll have what she's having," "When Harry Met Sally...," 1989.
One of the best one-liners ever. Brilliant casting of Estelle Reiner.

34. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow," "To Have and Have Not," 1944.
Still smoking after all these years.

35. "You're gonna need a bigger boat," "Jaws," 1975.
Although the movie's aged badly, I still like the line.

36. "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!", "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," 1948.
Yeah, it's a cliche, but I love it.

37. "I'll be back," "The Terminator," 1984.
I suppose this one's going to be in the same category as "Rilly Big Shew" eventually.

38. "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth," "The Pride of the Yankees," 1942.
How can any baseball fan watch this without choking up? The recent book shows that Eleanor Gehrig didn't get along at all well with her in-laws, so I'd rather just remember Lou this way - besides, Teresa Wright was a babe. Ludwig Stossel and Elsa Janssen are favorites from Casablanca as well.

39. "If you build it, he will come," "Field of Dreams," 1989.
A bit overused.

40. "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get," "Forrest Gump," 1994.
OK, I guess.

41. "We rob banks," "Bonnie and Clyde," 1967.
A classic. Haven't seen it in years.

42. "Plastics," "The Graduate," 1967.
Great line.

43. "We'll always have Paris," "Casablanca," 1942.
Casablanca. Needs no elaboration.

44. "I see dead people," "The Sixth Sense," 1999.
Not one of my favorites.

45. "Stella! Hey, Stella!", "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951.
Cliche.

46. "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars," "Now, Voyager," 1942.
Not one of my favorites.

47. "Shane. Shane. Come back!", "Shane," 1953.
I had an overwhelming desire to scream this at the end of "Pale Rider".

48. "Well, nobody's perfect," "Some Like It Hot," 1959.
Good line, but it's not my favorite Billy Wilder movie by a long shot.

49. "It's alive! It's alive!", "Frankenstein," 1931.
Great stuff, even if overacted.

50. "Houston, we have a problem," "Apollo 13," 1995.
Perhaps not eligible, as it's taken directly from what happened. Still an inspiring film - I met Gene Krantz a few years back, and he's a top-notch guy still - very inspiring.

51. "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?", "Dirty Harry," 1971.
Great stuff.

52. "You had me at 'hello,"' "Jerry Maguire," 1996.
Yawn.

53. "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know," "Animal Crackers," 1930.
Why the first Groucho quote is all the way down at #53 is totally beyond me.

54. "There's no crying in baseball!", "A League of Their Own," 1992.
One baseball film I don't particularly like, primarily because of the presence of Mrs. Ritchie.

55. "La-dee-da, la-dee-da," "Annie Hall," 1977.
This film's loaded with great lines. This one isn't all that memorable.

56. "A boy's best friend is his mother," "Psycho," 1960.
It's become a cliche. Next.

57. "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good," "Wall Street," 1987.
Great stuff, especially if you work in financial services.

58. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," "The Godfather Part II," 1974.
Good stuff. Not great.

59. "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again," "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
I've expressed my opinion of GWTW too many times already.

60. "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!", "Sons of the Desert," 1933.
And why the heck are Stan and Ollie so far down on the list?

61. "Say 'hello' to my little friend!", "Scarface," 1983.
Never liked this version.

62. "What a dump," "Beyond the Forest," 1949.
Ehhhh.

63. "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?", "The Graduate," 1967.
Perhaps my favorite line in the film.

64. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!", "Dr. Strangelove," 1964.
A real classic.

65. "Elementary, my dear Watson," "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," 1929.
Basil Rathbone was so freaking cool as Sherlock. And someone should tell the AFI that it came out in 1939, not 1929.

66. "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape," "Planet of the Apes," 1968.
A favorite.

67. "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine," "Casablanca," 1942.
Casablanca. Great stuff.

68. "Here's Johnny!", "The Shining," 1980.
Too pat. Sorry.

69. "They're here!", "Poltergeist," 1982.
Too cutesy.

70. "Is it safe?", "Marathon Man," 1976.
One of the reasons I avoid the dentist like the plague.

71. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!", "The Jazz Singer," 1927.
Historically important. I never liked the film.

72. "No wire hangers, ever!", "Mommie Dearest," 1981.
It's become a cliche.

73. "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?", "Little Caesar," 1930.
Great stuff.

74. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown," "Chinatown," 1974.
Aged badly.

75. "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers," "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951.
Yawn.

76. "Hasta la vista, baby," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," 1991.
Arnold should be very grateful.

77. "Soylent Green is people!", "Soylent Green," 1973.
Eddie G's the redeeming feature of this film.

78. "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," "2001: A Space Odyssey," 1968.
A great personal favorite.

79. Striker: "Surely you can't be serious." Rumack: "I am serious ... and don't call me Shirley," "Airplane!", 1980.
Funny indeed.

80. "Yo, Adrian!", "Rocky," 1976.
Cliche.

81. "Hello, gorgeous," "Funny Girl," 1968.
Anything with that horrid woman in it is going to get a negative reaction from me. End of discussion.

82. "Toga! Toga!", "National Lampoon's Animal House," 1978.
Not my top choice from Animal House, but the film is definitely a personal favorite and the archetypical slob comedy.

83. "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make," "Dracula," 1931.
Great stuff. Bela was very cool.

84. "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast," "King Kong," 1933.
Classic.

85. "My precious," "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," 2002.
A great realization of Tolkein's vision.

86. "Attica! Attica!", "Dog Day Afternoon," 1975.
Not one of my favorites.

87. "Sawyer, you're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!", "42nd Street," 1933.
I never liked the Busby Berkley type of film.

88. "Listen to me, mister. You're my knight in shining armor. Don't you forget it. You're going to get back on that horse, and I'm going to be right behind you, holding on tight, and away we're gonna go, go, go!", "On Golden Pond," 1981.
Not one of my favorites.

89. "Tell 'em to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper," "Knute Rockne, All American," 1940.
OK, it's a cliche. It's still great.

90. "A martini. Shaken, not stirred," "Goldfinger," 1964.
Another Fuckin' A for Mr. Connery.

91. "Who's on first," "The Naughty Nineties," 1945.
The entire routine should be enshrined.

92. "Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac ... It's in the hole! It's in the hole! It's in the hole!", "Caddyshack," 1980.
Another personal favorite slob comedy.

93. "Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!", "Auntie Mame," 1958.
Eh.

94. "I feel the need -- the need for speed!", "Top Gun," 1986.
Uh, yeah.

95. "Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary," "Dead Poets Society," 1989.
Never liked the film.

96. "Snap out of it!", "Moonstruck," 1987.
I don't like the rest of the film, but this line is great.

97. "My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," 1942.
Not my favorite Cagney film.

98. "Nobody puts Baby in a corner," "Dirty Dancing," 1987.
The food is terrible, and such small portions!

99. "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!", "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.
Perhaps my favorite line from "Wizard".

100. "I'm king of the world!", "Titanic," 1997
Although the film wasn't as gruesomely schmaltzy as I thought it would be, remember one thing. Everybody knows the boat sinks.

R.I.P. Leon Askin

2005-06-22T13:12:00.000-04:00

I've just been made aware that Leon Askin has passed away a few weeks ago. Most folks remember Askin as the nasty General Burkhalter, who was Colonel Klink's nemesis on "Hogan's Heroes" (when he wasn't trying to marry him off to his ghastly sister Gertrude), but I remember him fondly as the absurd Russian Commisar Peripetchikoff in "One Two Three", one of my top three funny movies of all time. Askin suffered greatly from the Nazis, escaping just in time, and having to deal with the pain of having his parents killed in the Holocaust. G-d bless him, he was still going strong until just before his passing.

I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is: when I go, they go too.

2005-06-22T10:31:00.000-04:00

A Jack Benny quote is most appropriate for today's missive. My friends will tell you that I'm usually a pretty generous guy and I rarely squawk about matters financial (other than my utter contempt for Respected Employer's remuneration policies over the last few years) but every once in a while my cheapskate streak kicks in and brother, did it kick in today.

Needless to say, a lot of enterprises are looking for new revenue streams, and when I opened what an AT&T long distance bill I noticed several new fees tacked on(service charges and such), retroactively applied that added a solid thirty bucks to the tab. Needless to say since Vonage arrived we haven't done anything with any traditional landline carriers for LD, so I'd imagine there'll be some bills popping up over the next few months with some insane monthly inactivity fees. A great example of the old adage that it takes a long time to get a customer, and only moments to lose a customer.

Since there's a lot of choice in the voice game, I have little inclination to brood over the matter other than to bemoan the needless spending of thirty bucks (I've spent far more on crummy entertainment and meals that should probably irk me more), however, I don't particularly have a lot of choice in the toll facility game. Say what?

I opened my E-Z Pass statement yesterday and found a yellow slip inserted into the envelope. Said slip begain "In order to maintain the high level of service...." at which point the BOHICA reflex kicked in. Needless to say there's a few points here which bear dissecting.

One egregious little point is "including providing tags to customers at no cost". True you don't pay for them, however, there is the small matter of the deposit on them which you have to pay in order to get a tag. Lots of $25 deposits on these tags, let me tell you. Then there's the simple matter that every account is prepaid, so someone's earning the float on all of those account balances and deposits. Not to mention the recent toll increases (For some reason it utterly galls me to pay four bucks to cross most TBTA bridges - a 1600% increase over their original tolls) that subsidize everything in creation besides than keeping the bridges maintained. Not to say they aren't keeping the bridges maintained, there's ample evidence of that as the Triborough, Whitestone and the Throgs Neck are all being worked on simultaneously, with the concomitant problem that there is no alternative route to accommodate midday traffic. I did want to note the work on the Whitestone in particular, as they've removed the stiffening trusses from the bridge in favor of making the deck more aerodynamic. The interested layman that I am, I note that the trusses were put on the span after the infamous Tacoma Narrows collapse in 1940, for the simple reasons that both bridges were stiffened with plate girders instead of trusses at the time, and that the designing engineer for both spans was one Leon Moiseiff (also known for the Manhattan Bridge). The Tacoma collapse couldn't be attributed solely to Moiseiff (after all, aerodynamics wasn't as exact a science in those days), it was also partially the fault of under-financing (the only anticipated traffic really was for the Navy installations on the Gig Harbor side of the Tacoma bridge - it really wasn't thought that the bridge would be a financial success. Contrast that to nowadays, the replacement span is overcrowded, and a new twin span is being built next to it)

Yet Another Greatest List That's Worthless

2005-06-21T07:57:00.000-04:00

Spin Magazine, one of those rags that I usually only open if there's an excessive line at my local Borders has put out it's idea of the 100 Greatest Albums of the last 20 years. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised at the Top Ten, with Radiohead's "OK Computer" taking the top slot. I should note that I rather liked Radiohead's "The Bends", not that there was anything that hummable or memorable on it, but it was a decent piece of guitar rock at a time when there was precious little of it out there. "OK Computer", well, I think it's just the same "bleep blorp" stuff that European music has been descending into since Kraftwerk and Klaus Schulze were in their heyday - the "life is getting too mechanical so why not protest it by locking us into incessant beats and spacey sounding riffs" shtick is getting old fast.

That said, I think Radiohead could be a modern day Roxy Music - all of the elements are there (save of course those great album covers) if Thom Yorke would simply get it - Bryan Ferry knows when to be pretentious and when to head for the pelvis.

I was completely surprised at not seeing any U2 albums in the top ten. As much as they can be a touch pretentious, there's been a lot of great music out of them, far more so than anyone in the top ten, and the only other album in the top 10 which can even come close for staying power and influence is Nirvana's "Nevermind". And of course another egregious omission is "Appetite For Destruction" - the only album in the last two decades that said, yes, it's OK to play a Les Paul through a dimed Marshall.

As the list isn't fully available yet at this point, I can't do a line item dissection. I understand about 20-25% of the list is in the rap/hip hop classification, which'll earn a simple abstention from me (it's simply not my groove, a lot of it turns me off, and rather than expound on something that's tough for me to relate to, I'll leave it to the cognoscenti).

I had a wonderful experience on the golf course today. I had a hole in nothing. Missed the ball and sank the divot.

2005-06-20T12:43:00.000-04:00

Many conference calls, and added duties are consuming my bandwidth for posting, so it's going to be a bit of a slog for the next couple of weeks. Something had to give, and unfortunately it's the blog, however, I'm still with it, it'll be back in force come July.

The listen du jour is the Flamin' Groovies "Jump In The Night", a 1979 effort that's quite retro for its time, reminds me a lot of its contemporaries, The Records "Starry Eyes" and the Seachers' reunion album. Lots of jangly electric 12 string work, and of all things, a nifty, respectful cover of the Beatles' "Please Please Me". Interestingly, Amazon refers to the Beatles cover as "Please Please Girl", a track the Groovies recorded years before, which sounds nothing like the Fabs' tune nor does it reference it. Nice cover of "Absolutely Sweet Marie" as well - in a lot of ways that's my favorite Dylan song (the fact that George H covered it at the Dylan 30th anniversary show didn't hurt with that choice either). The vocals are a bit nasal and the recording, well, it ain't exactly Glyn Johns turning the knobs.

And I still haven't finished "Francis The Talking Mute" yet. Too busy doing super-secret stuff with my test site. The background music is just my current computer-based selection, and given the DRM stuff that's on a lot of CDs, I'm reluctant to put the disk into my computer (and yes, I do have Autoplay disabled, but trust being a superfluous weakness in matters relating to entertainment I thought better of it).

VMWare Workstation 5 is here. Looking forward to playing with that.

Be patient friends, I shall be posting sporadically for a bit, but I'm not going anywhere.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

2005-06-15T16:15:00.000-04:00

The incessant parade of meetings continues unabated today, so little time for posting.

Took another listen to Mars Volta while in the car this AM, and there was some interesting stuff, sort of like a cross between King Crimson and Pink Floyd (albeit with one extremely annoying keyboard riff that sounded sort of like Daryl Hooper crossed with Keith Emerson - Hooper of course being the keyboardist for The Seeds, who used the "Pushin' Too Hard" riff in every other song they ever cut). One very interesting song sung mostly in Spanish, but the lyrics were pretty rough - I caught a line in there about "I'd like to kill you" and something about "my ass". I suppose I'll finish it soon...

Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.

2005-06-13T17:30:00.000-04:00

Seeing as how I've been busy getting a life and busy with work stuff, no surprise on the slowing down of posting, but since things are relatively cool, I have no major complaints. A rather interesting twist to my current project this afternoon has got me skulling out a very neat conversion of an existing solution to an Enterprise Service Bus scenario, which will keep me busy for the next couple of days doing a feasibility study. My kind of work, pure brainpower, lots of pretty Visios, and researching whether or not some half-baked idea might turn into something totally useful.

I anticipate a couple of PEBKAC problems this week, as I helped a couple of friends out (who are unfortunately as clueless as they come - one good friend ended up doing something very dumb, putting a P2P client on a work machine - said friend is the boss of the applicable business, so nothing to fear from management, but when I pointed out how vulnerable that thing was, said friend had a cow). Said friends are utterly competent in their professional endeavors, however, they haven't a clue about technology. Besides, why put a P2P client on anyway? Be a mensch about it and buy the damned CD if you absolutely must have it, or listen to the snippets on Amazon and make a decision.

Which brings me to the CD du jour, the Mars Volta's "Francis The Talking Mute". I got through the first track, about a 15 minute opus that reminded me of lower-case Dream Theater while in the car this AM, and while there are some interesting concepts there, it's also like Dream Theater for me in the sense that it's complicated stuff that is not what you want to put on just for a relaxing, fun listen. It's got that industrial rock thing going, which for someone like me whose idea of out there is King Crimson makes it a tough go. I will listen to the rest of it either tonight or tomorrow and report back. I do have to admit that I like the pun in the title - once I saw a couple of Francis The Talking Mule movies I never really liked watching Mr. Ed again (although Connie Hines was indeed hot).

According to CNN, Mr. Jackson has been found innocent as I write this. Someone's lack of erudition is showing (or is it perhaps a touch of bias?). No such thing as an innocent verdict - it's "Not Guilty". My natural assumption is that there will be a recycling of a comment often heard about the OJ Simpson verdict - "We the jury find the murderer Not Guilty". At this point, I can only hope that the jury felt that the prosecution did not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. I sincerely hope that this entire affair causes Mr. Jackson to reform his ways. Beyond that, it's all over but for the pontificating by the talking heads.

I suppose I'll probably go off on an Ayn Rand jag with post titles now.....

Monotony, Bureaucracy, and Other Ephemeral Inconguities

2005-06-11T10:33:00.000-04:00

Much ado at work, of which I have little energy to repeat today, save that it's a bit droning and repetitious. However, no huge issues save for bureaucracy, one which impacts me mightily, however, I have absolutely no control over it, and were it not for a simple bit of rational thought, it could be resolved in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, there are audit trail requirements involved (puhleeeze, we're talking soft dollars here - funny money) so the bean counters are insistent upon doing things in the least expeditious manner possible.

Took the young'uns to see Shark Boy and Lava Girl (at least that's what I think it was called) last night. I had a whopper of a headache from the 3-D scenes. The kids loved it, I was bored silly. Kristin Davis, who I found extremely annoying on Sex And The City, played the mother in the film. She managed to be only mildly annoying in this Spy Kids clone. Lots of kinder in the theater as one would expect, and they were quite loud. I kept expecting to see the brood sitting behind us plugged into Crown power amps at the volume they were commenting / cackling / cheering (not to mention a crossover set to extreme treble).

Found myself with an interesting problem yesterday - a friend's primary business application had been moved to another computer, and for some reason, even though the data files had been copied over (and were current), my friend was missing two years worth of transactions. Needless to say the "Oh shit" key was pressed, and I was called in, after the software vendor struck out. A bit of detective work found the correct file locations, and after a heart-stopping Btrieve moment (I can't believe they still make that thing!) my friend's data popped up. Unfortunately, said friend decided to copy the application to a personal laptop as a DR measure, and lo and behold, I got a call just as I was hustling the kids into the car for the movies to try to reimport the data. Needless to say my head for this sort of thing turns off sometime around 4pm on a Friday, so we left it for Monday AM to resolve. Sigh.....

Thursday

2005-06-09T16:30:00.000-04:00

A couple of conference calls today plus un exercise de feu Chinoise keep me from a long posting this AM. A hosting provider search is also in the cards (no I'm not moving this blog, however, I'm helping out a friendly site), so even though it isn't the obnoxious day yesterday was, there's enough to keep me thoroughly busy. The High Altar is acting a bit slow for no obvious reason - there was a false positive from Norton AntiVirus yesterday (I went into panic mode and did Housecall and a few other online scans and they reported the box as clean, so I'm OK on the malware front, but I do get antsy. Perhaps there's been some patch downloaded from MS Update - I can tell you that Norton's AutoProtect seems to be disabled upon login, and despite following all of the suggested steps from our friends at Symantec, it just seems that I'll have to reenable AutoProtect at each logon - one more thing pushing me toward blowing Norton off the High Altar and putting in AVG or Kaspersky). Between Norton and ZoneAlarm (on my Respected Employer's laptop) I'm ready to scream....

I'm From The Entertainment Industry And I'm Here To Help

2005-06-08T10:27:00.000-04:00

The sad word came today that those solid citizens in the entertainment industry, you know, the people who endorse Hollywood's amorality and depravity as long as it keeps the analysts happy and we the sheeple buy their product have managed to shut down Lightning UK's DVD Decrypter forever. If you don't have it, Google's cache is your friend. Doom9.org seems to have it still, so grab it while you can.

This of course royally sucks moose, in that people who've nothing better to do than denigrate democracy invoke conservative principles when it suits them. Point blank, a kid can destroy a DVD or game console disc in a matter of minutes, then you're SOL. Are you buying a license, because if you're licensing the rights to play content as the industry contends, replacement media should be handled the same way it is by companies who play it fair. You lose the Oracle or OpenView CDs, give the license number to your rep and you'll have replacements. What's wrong with a replacement policy along these lines? The entertainment types don't have a huge marginal cost on duplication, so providing proof of a license should be enough to obtain replacement media at a reasonable fraction of the original license cost. Of course, their margins are slashed to the bone by the discounters (globalization you know, for all of those poor people who Barbra wants to help, but G-d forbid they should be anywhere near her home unless there's a leaf blower attached).

I really don't give a rat's ass who Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise is fucking. I really couldn't give a rat's ass about most of the movies I've seen in the last 20 years. I have no desire to watch network television, in fact other than news and talking heads, the occasional forays onto the Hitler, er History Channel and the Food Network the only TV show I actually want to watch is The Sopranos, and I've got the DVDs (which reminds me to order the fifth season - just came out today). However, the entertainment industry has taken it upon itself to dictate its weltanschaung to we the people, and that weltanschaung is of course take our liberal agenda, but don't fuck with us - we're capitalists when it's convenient for us. Of course, it's well known that the entertainment industry has put out bogus content onto file sharing networks in order to demonstrate its displeasure with file sharing, what do you want to bet that the marketers and the entertainment industry are behind some of the spyware / malware that's getting increasingly pervasive and difficult to remove. They're at war with us, gang.

Take a look at what a new band goes through if they get signed - the mathematics are inherently stacked against the artist (that little bit about taking royalties off because CDs are "experimental" technology is perhaps the biggest crock since Howard Dean first opened his trap). The entertainment industry is structured such that its favored few will be indulged to the tune of millions even if there's no hope of recovering the investment (Ms. Carey, Ms. Lopez and Mr. Jackson's recent albums come to mind), but heaven forbid that a Spock's Beard or Glass Hammer actually get airplay and distribution. They're not hip and "urban" enough.

Frankly, sooner or later I hope Eliot Spitzer or someone like him decides to turn his attention to the entertainment industry. There's probably quite a lot of stuff to base a RICO case against them. Even though Spitzer's a Dem, he seems to be a man of integrity (hey, they did have Zell Miller and Pat Moynihan, so there is such a thing as a Dem with integrity and honesty).

Today's not going to be fun. I'm pissed from the word go.

Finally, RIP Anne Bancroft. Both as Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Brooks she was part of our times.

Yorick had it right....

2005-06-07T09:10:00.000-04:00

Alas and alack, time constraints still keep me away from using the keyboard for more interesting purposes, however, I shall briefly expound on a couple of issues of regional importance. First is the stadium brouhaha in New York City, without which apparently there will be no Olympics in 2012 (or for that matter, skyboxes so that my favorite market data providing mayor can go to a football game without the ghastly necessity of crossing a river away from his beloved Manhattan). Needless to say the local punditry and spin doctors have been warning that failing to approve the stadium posthaste will destroy NYC's chances for the Olympics, something perceived to be of cataclysmic import by the stadium's promoters (obviously, there's little sympathy for the Jets since they vacated Flushing ages ago; then again, there hasn't been much sympathy for the Jets since the days of Sonny Werblin). Being totally honest about it, there is no logical reason for New York City to want either the games or the stadium in Manhattan. There is probable cause for replacing both Shea and Yankee Stadiums, however, the odds on the taxpayers or the markets funding either endeavor are pretty low. As far as the Olympics go, frankly, London and Paris' transport systems are a bit better laid out as far as access to areas where large events could be held (the nearest mass transit stations to the proposed Manhattan site are a long walk away from the stadium - about the closest would be the 8th Avenue and 34th street subway, which just happens of course to be one of the feeder subways for Penn Station). The gridlock in the area on event days would be phenomenal (ever see just how bad it is getting in and out of the Lincoln Tunnel, whose portals are mere blocks from the stadium?). And to be brutally honest about it, who needs the disruption? The Republican Convention was bad enough, with huge impacts to normal workday flows of traffic. The Olympics would probably impact things by a couple of orders magnitude worse than the convention. Finally, who needs the target temptation for the RoP? Let the Surete deal with it....

Next up is the not-unexpected format change of NYC's WCBS-FM from oldies to the so-called "Jack" format. "Jack" of course is the flavor of the month in radio, allowing on-air talent to be dispensed with for the most part (about the only time on-air talent being needed of course would be for news and station identification), a very attactive option to the penurious folks at Infinity. Most of WCBS-FMs on-air talent was locally famous, but nationally obscure (the only one definitely known nationally would've been Micky Dolenz, lately morning man, and the only other possibility would've been "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, probably only to Beatlemaniacs). The reason I thought the format change was not unexpected was of course the totally directionless playlist that had been implemented, sounding like the faceless suburban oldies stations, much more 70s content that I didn't like the first time around (I mean, come on, who really wants to hear "Billy Don't Be A Hero" again?), dropping some of the features that actually gave the station some personality (the late lamented "Doo Wop Shop" was perhaps the best deep dive into that genre ever) and just in general having a feeling of lassitude about the programming that was screaming "Impending Format Change".

Not that WCBS-FM was perfect, far from it. The program directors were absolutely criminal in their choice of playlist. Stuff like "Sugar Shack", "Mr. Lee" and "Take A Letter Maria" getting on ad nauseum, when the Stax catalog was ignored, no Yardbirds, Who, the Beatles choices were painfully obvious, likewise the Motown selections (a bit heavy on the Motown lately for my taste, but then again, I've always made it known that I prefer Stax). Sometimes they went a bit too far in recreating the ambience of the old AM stations, which were of course incredibly annoying - especially the Top 40 era of WABC - hearing Ron Lundy and Dan Ingram was fun for a few times, then it got stale, fast.

The interesting thing of course was the Arbitrons. WCBS was pretty high up in the Arbs from what I could see (#8 in the city overall, certainly way better than classic rock WAXQ, which was tied for #15). The only music stations that were besting WCBS-FM were urban contemporary, Spanish and adult contemporary, formats which hold no appeal to me at all). It really gets interesting when you compare it to WQXR, the city's classical music station (and herein lies a minor rant). WQXR is tied for #18, surely the equivalent of Purgatory in the advertising sales game, and has a demographic that skews in the general vicinity of Polident and Depends buyers. However, that demographic is also rich older Manhattan folks who tend to go to the opera, and hence if you are an opera fan, WQXR is the place for you. If you aren't an opera fan, listening to WQXR will give you an interminable headache. Puccini, Rossini, the Luftwaffe Serenade, all of your favorite screeching and shrieking. I utterly loathe opera (and I should state forcefully that I love classical and baroque music).

The question of course is how in any sort of rational analysis is WCBS changing its format when it's one of the only music two stations in the top 10 that isn't catering to the hip-hop demographic? Surely WQXR would be a better candidate for a format change, and if you listen to the longer programs, they tend to be sponsored by oil companies and such, outfits that underwrite this sort of thing as a feelgood community service kind of thing rather than actually advertising. I suspect of course that the reason WQXR stays in business is the fact that it is indeed the Radio Station of The Sulzberger Entity (as it so often reminds you in hushed pretentious tones), and that the Sulzbergers don't mind its drag as they probably feed advertising in from the paper's pipeline to subsidize the content (not to mention catering to their Upper West Side core audience). Unfortunately, anyone in the music business will tell you that classical is about the biggest money-loser out there (Slobbovian folk dances probably make more than classical), and if a classical record sells more than 5K copies, it's a bloody miracle. Funny how music with proven staying power has been marginalized to the point that it requires subsidies to air (and of course with those subsidies come the insidious viewpoints of the Sulzberger editorialists and the NEA types). Funny how even commercial music with proven staying power cannot survive in a commercial environment, unless it's wishy-washy dentist office stuff.

Ugh.

Born on the bayou....

2005-06-06T09:44:00.000-04:00

In other words, stuck in a swamp. Much nonsense from work is keeping me hopping, and multitasking is the order of the day. I need to clone myself.

I'd rather be in Philadelphia....

2005-06-02T17:05:00.000-04:00

Much project nonsense has consumed my last two days, plus my right ear is numbed and cauliflowered from having a headset semi-permanently attached to it (my ear rings more after the end of a round of conference calls than after a loud band practice). I suppose I shouldn't say nonsense, as the project is relatively interesting, the people are friendly and understanding, and other than bureaucratic nonsense that impacts my project's critical path, I'm in a pretty good situation.

As much as I've wanted to finish reviewing "House Of Lies" I haven't had the bandwidth to sit and write the review it simply demands. While I have finished reading it, I do want to circle back and mark off some of the salient points for inclusion in the review (his glossary of consulting terms was dead on). Although some people might feel that there are exaggerated points in this book, in my experience, this book is totally accurate. The confrontational clients who feel threatened, the turning around of a hostile meeting with a simple "it's your business, you're the experts, what do you think?", the team dinner, and my personal favorite, eating from vending machines for a whole week during the implementation.

The annoyance this week is a scumware outfit called eXact Advertising. A friend of mine from the commuter train, one of the nicest individuals you'd ever want to meet, found her computer totally unusable due to a malware infestation. My friend is unfortunately totally clueless when it comes to computers, and she casually mentioned to me that her new computer had become totally unusable due to spyware. Once we sync'd up our calendars (there goes that consultant-speak again) I went over to her home and took a look.

The computer was a disaster.

I could see that there were many, many infestations of competing scumware, and IE had become totally unusable. No address bar was visible in IE, and the popups were completely out of control. I started out with SpySubtract in both real and safe modes, and got a bit of control over the box, then I went to Microsoft AntiSpyware. It took three hours, and at that point the box looked clean, but something didn't seem quite right. Another quick MS AntiSpyware scan confirmed my suspicions - eXact had a couple of entries in the registry. Back to Safe Mode, and HijackThis came out. A couple of suspicious entries stood right out, and I zapped them. Reboot, there they were again. At that point, I had to get back home, and left the machine with eXact running. In the grand scheme of things, eXact was less obnoxious than other things out there, popping up an ad when it recognized a keyword in the URL or page content (I wonder if they've gone after Firefox), and the pops did indeed close when the 'X' was clicked, but I loathe leaving a machine in that state.

A bit of Googling and asking around has gotten the cure for eXact, and I would like to get my friend's machine fixed, but a couple of observations are in order:

Why does eXact build their software in such a way that it is impossible to remove without either their misleading and intrusive process or without manual edits to the registry and use of process killers?
Why doesn't eXact publish their contact information on their web site?

Justice, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and persona

2005-06-01T11:06:00.000-04:00

I suppose I've finally arrived. I got my first 419 e-mail yesterday. A quick look at the headers showed it came from Portugal, a somewhat unusual place for a mugu (I thought nothing ever happens in Portugal other than fleecing tourists in the Algarve) but since I'm a bit busy at the moment I don't have any huge desire to do a scam bait with him (thinking out loud, I'd have to adopt a persona, but I'd suppose any use of Milburn Drysdale or that ilk would be quickly Googled and the Ibo equivalent of "yebat mashu vat!" hurled my way).

I reviewed the Yellow Matter Custard CD back on September 13, and a recent note from Neal Morse's Radiant Records indicated that they had DVDs of the performance available (Mike Portnoy's site is the primary source for these, but since I rarely venture there, I had no idea about this DVD until I got the e-mail from Radiant). Good thing I ordered it when I did, as Radiant only had a few of them available. Overall, it's a pretty low-budget production, only two cameras, decent sound and editing, but I wouldn't say it's a great rendition of the show visually, as the camerafolk were clueless (focusing on Portnoy during guitar solos, that sort of thing). A couple of interesting tidbits that I didn't particularly realize from the recording - Morse was playing a brand-new (at least it appeared to be) Rickenbacker 360/12 for some numbers, Matt Bissonette was playing an Epiphone clone of a Hofner (which of course is a nice little irony, since the Hofner was probably originally intended as an el-cheapo version of a Gibson EB-1), and Paul Gilbert was playing a couple of pointy Schechters (he had both a 6 and a 12 string). Portnoy looked like he had Blue Oyster Pearl Ludwigs, close enough. I could pick out one Vox AC30 on stage (probably for Morse) and it looked like Gilbert was playing through a Laney rig. My comments about the performance still hold, a very nice effort, sounding just a touch off, though. It's forgivable in view of the effort and respect that these musicians put into the performance.

Stupid bloody Tuesday...

2005-05-31T14:32:00.000-04:00

Much-needed R&R Sunday and yesterday chilled me out nicely, however, today brings the usual corporate nonsense which has kept me away from the blogging keyboard for the better part of the day. Sunday was an exceptionally good day, seeing good friends in the afternoon (along with a very pleasant surprise - thanks J), taking the young'uns out for a couple of special treats - including the Star Wars movie that evening. I have to say that I loved the visuals in the film, but true, it's not for younger children. Darth Vader's transformation was especially tough, along with the scene where he ahem, makes resource modifications to the Jedi's future cadre. Still, it's a worthy part of the canon. My main bitch about the evening concerned the coming attractions, which amazingly enough only lasted 15 minutes. There was an entirely inappropriate trailer for a theater full of young children, which annoyed the hell out of me. Some piece of nonsense about a married couple who are hit men, but there was enough stuff in the trailer that raised questions from my youngsters that I really didn't want to start answering at that moment. Besides, wasn't Kathleen Turner in something like this a couple of decades ago?

On top of it, a wisdom tooth is killing me, and I will freely admit that the first words that come to my mind when this sort of thing happens are "Is it safe?".

Items for review in the next day or so include "House Of Lies" by Martin Kihn, a great description of life as a management consultant, and the DVD release of "Yellow Matter Custard".

One Year Later....

2005-05-28T07:32:00.000-04:00

Amazingly enough, I've been doing this blog for an entire year. I had no idea about whether this was going to be a short-term adventure, or whether this thing would gain some traction, but here I am, a year later. Certainly quite a bit more cynical than I was at this point a year ago, if such a thing is possible, but with the advantage of hindsight and another year's seasoning, I'd suppose it is indeed a positive thing. As to my original concept of commenting largely on the corporate fools surrounding me with only a smattering of observations on other matters, like all well-managed projects (ha!) the vision has changed a tiny bit, merely for reasons of trying to maintain a bit of distance and not brooding on those matters which make normal business hours the stressful event that requires liberal application of Caldeonian produce and Bayerische Getränk to alleviate the day's nonsense. However, as things warrant, of course there will be plenty of observations and stories from the arena.

Interestingly enough, I did find Respected Employer's blogging policy, and officially, we are permitted to blog (as long as we don't discuss confidential information) and we're encouraged to identify ourselves and Respected Employer. I have a suspension bridge connecting Lower Manhattan and the Borough Of Churches with stone towers to sell you if you think that they don't have a concerted effort to see what people have to say about them out there, be it on blogs or places like Vault. While I'm pretty sure that they don't have dedicated Personalungeziefer monitoring for these things, I'm sure that it's definitely within someone's scope of defined duties to see if too much information is out there. Nope, I shall maintain my privacy, and not identify Respected Employer nor the dopey entities I interface with on an ongoing basis.

Heroes and Villains Part 2

2005-05-27T07:14:00.000-04:00

This is an extraordinarily well-produced concert set, I must admit I'm very impressed. Considering Brian's mental state at the beginning of rehearsals for this incredibly complex suite, the fact that this band nailed all of this complex music is doubly amazing. The performances are utterly incredible all the way around. The standouts, unsurprisingly, are Our Prayer, Heroes and Villains, Cabin Essence, Child Is The Father Of Man, Surf's Up, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow and Good Vibrations. The way this band pulls off reproducing some of the really wacky stuff like Workshop is mind-boggling. The vocals are top-notch. Darian Sahanaja did a fantastic job coordinating and arranging this music for this band, and surf music guru Jeffrey Foskett brings a great presence to this music. While there aren't enough closeups of the musicians' hands to make this a perfect DVD, from an image and sound perspective, it's a quantum leap from most others I've seen. The big problem of course is that Smile isn't for everyone, and this might be something you might want to watch once, but it simply demands to be seen, as an example of how to bring a legend to life.

One thing that was incredibly touching, you saw Brian break into a huge smile many, many times during the show. It's obvious that even though he was scared out of his wits, he was very pleased with the way this show came off and with the love and affection it received. The word that keeps coming to mind when I see him is "haunted", but I think this really did exorcise some of his demons.

Somewhat related, both Neal Morse and Mike Portnoy's sites are selling a DVD of their Yellow Matter Custard Beatles tribute, which I reviewed last year here and on Blogcritics. Although I had my quibbles about how some pieces were played (Portnoy was playing more like Carl Palmer than Ringo at times, plus Paul Gilbert's fretboard tapping had no business appearing in the set), I generally liked the set, it was eclectic enough to keep me happy (although woefully light on Revolver from my perspective). Neal Morse's site describes it as an "official bootleg", shot with two cameras and very good under the circumstances (I take it there's a bit of expectation management in that description), but then again, neo-prog isn't a high-budget area for music, so I wouldn't expect a huge investment in the production values. The Spock's Beard DVD had so-so video, however, it was definitely a great document. I'm not expecting wonders, but I think it'll be very cool to see how the band looked at work. The DVD can be ordered from Morse's Radiant Records or from Mike Portnoy.

Heroes And Villains Part 1

2005-05-26T07:34:00.000-04:00

The Smile DVD set has two discs, one with the "Beautiful Dreamer" documentary, and the second with the complete live performance of the reconstructed "Smile" suite. So far, I've only had the chance to watch the documentary DVD, which was indeed interesting for not only the background but some of the at-work glimpses, which are indeed moving. The documentary isn't afraid to point the finger at least partially at Mike Love (although it's done in a circumspect manner, probably because of the then-pending litigation between Mike Love and Brian Wilson) for the abortion of the original Smile project, however, it doesn't unnecessarily dwell on that. There are many cool insights, especially from Carol Kaye and Hal Blaine, the Wrecking Crew bastions who anchored the sessions, along with many other observations from friends and interested parties (including interestingly, Sir George Martin; there's a very heartwarming scene at the concert venue just before the show with Paul McCartney greeting Brian). I was incredibly impressed with Brian's touring band, who's absolutely amazing in pulling off this rich, difficult music. Some of the instrumentation is intriguing, lots of el-cheapo instruments that you wouldn't have expected (e.g Danelectros, low-end Fenders) pulled together in what's probably the first rock symphony. The band's previous live recordings with Brian (the Roxy album, plus the complete Pet Sounds CD and DVD) were nothing short of amazing, recreating sounds that I thought simply couldn't be duplicated on stage.

One rather interesting theme in the backgrounder portion of the documentary is that there's a bit of disingenuous denial on the part of some observers that drugs had something to do with the original album's eventual demise. Brian's honest enough to admit in the documentary that he was indeed gobbling down certain substances (although the documentary makes the point that LSD was legal until sometime in 1966 in California) and that he might've indeed been impacted, but the external observers are more blameful of the rest of the Beach Boys and Murry Wilson for Brian's state than anything else. I can only say that Brian seems a very haunted man as a result of everything he's been through, however, there are just some moments when he opens up and it's as if a spotlight begins shining. For whatever it's worth, this does indeed seem to be healing this genius.

The only thing of course is to watch the actual concert, and I'll admit to having mixed emotions about it. While I love Pet Sounds, and was blown away by Brian and the band pulling off reproducing it live, Smile's an album that really isn't for everybody. It's definitely a mood thing with me, as the Dumb Angel concept is something that's just a bit out there, and the travelogue theme (which I'd never heard about until Van Dyke Parks mentioned it in the documentary) is just a bit forced. There's lots of music I like here, but truth be told, there's much more filler and interstitial stuff here than in Pet Sounds, which I just relate to on the basis of being an angst-ridden kvetch. The snippet I saw of them reproducing Cabin Essence was indeed awesome, as in many ways I regard that as Brian's vocal magnum opus (during the "Who ran the iron horse" bit). Other bits, such as Roll Plymouth Rock, or Vega-Tables, just leave me cold, to be honest. Perhaps the inclusion of something like Til I Die might've changed my opinion, or for that matter, the live arrangement of Heroes and Villains (as done on the 1972 In Concert album) might change my opinion. The album is a bit lethargic and monotonous in tempo, unlike the much more dynamic Pet Sounds.

Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks

2005-05-25T08:40:00.000-04:00

It has been an extremely busy four days. Visiting relatives alone are enough to suck the life out of you for a week afterwards, but there's been a lot of interesting stuff happening at work that's kept me occupied and away from blogging. Not to mention a Sunday night gig, although that was fun and doesn't count even if dragging myself out of bed on Monday was painful (midlife's a drag, a well-known drag).

I happened to get myself sucked into a meeting yesterday that had to do with a new paradigm for delivering information to our customers. The paradigm was interesting (and I must admit the data model was a hell of a lot better thought out than the existing ones I've seen out there), but a couple of things really caused me to raise my eyebrows about this. The first was a totally outrageous performance claim; the rocket scientists presenting were claiming a sustained throughput of over 1 gigabit per second over a single NIC on a Wintel server. Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't bus limitations throttle that performance? I don't care how good a Wintel server you've got, but I really don't think any PCI-based box is going to give you sustained 1Gbps throughput. I can easily see 700 Mbps, maybe 800 if you push it, but filling the pipe? I don't think so.

The second claim was rather interesting. Since the performance discussion started out talking about Wintel boxes, I asked how the code performed under Linux (supposedly, the code is pure ANSI C or C++ depending on who you talk to; the only Java going near this thing is in the management interface, performance is critical) and I was very surprised to hear that the developers found that they were getting better results with Microsoft's Visual Studio compiler going to a straight EXE file rather than with any compiler under Linux (I would've expected some variances in performance between gcc and commercial compilers under Linux, but then again, gcc is the de facto standard). It's just always been my experience that Visual Studio will link everything in creation into the final EXE (I mean, why do you need to link in half of MFC for a character-based program?). I also got the rather surprising viewpoint that Red Hat was the preferred Linux environment for running this product (the wind has been blowing towards SuSE from a professional and management standpoint in my neck of the woods).

The third claim was one where I have to call BS. This particular solution involves delivery of external information to our clients, who generally are very risk averse, and have tons of internal auditors and risk managers looking at ways to prevent any sort of nasties from entering through supposedly trusted channels. The usual method here is of course a couple of layers of SPI firewalls plus intrusion detection, perhaps not as heavily protected as a straight Internet connection, but still fortified. The presenter yesterday claimed that my esteemed client from last year, Colditz, felt that this was a trusted solution and did not need any firewalling (needless to say, firewalling would take their vaunted performance numbers to the proverbial toidy). Now, it just so happens that I've got tons of docs and standards from Colditz and our work products from there, and I've got a very nice PDF file that specifies exactly how that external connectivity should be provisioned, and of course the word firewall is mentioned about 853 times in the document. The only difference being that Colditz has migrated to Nokia firewall appliances in the interim instead of vanilla PIXes - the standards and rulesets are still the same. Presenter called BS. I called a risk manager friend over at Colditz. He said, "ain't gonna happen without a firewall, tell him he's full of it". It was an interesting conversation. When I asked for who they're talking to in the engineering group over at Colditz, they refused to give me a name. I dropped a couple of names (CTO and CIO's office, plus head of engineering) I dealt with over there, and offered to call them. Storm clouds quickly descended.....

Only one conference call today, so I should count myself lucky. Heading out to pick up the Brian Wilson Smile DVD this AM, review tomorrow.

Monday Monday Can't Trust That Day

2005-05-23T10:18:00.000-04:00

I noticed that Something Awful decided to replace the Michael Jackson image with an incredibly obnoxious image and text. As far as I'm concerned, they are officially on my shit list. One thing to say knock it off, but to display something that obnoxious, I have decided to neither visit nor recommend them anymore. I've pulled the link. Most of their content is pretty damned childish anyway, and I shan't belabor the point. They've won the coveted Schweinhund of The Week Award.

It's only Monday AM, and I'm already in a shitty mood....

Tomorrow's probably going to be even worse....

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall piss you off

2005-05-20T08:41:00.000-04:00

My project's respectful disagreement over standards selection ended up with a pretty brutal meeting where some of our partners were insisting on the Betamax, while the consensus on our side was VHS. The big problem I have isn't so much the two standards, but I can't make a business case to accommodate the Betamax solution (which as I noted will require will require a fair amount of time and effort associated to accomodate it), but the partners would like us to commit resources to accomodate their preference. The marginal revenue just isn't worth it for us at the time, and going forward, we will indeed look at accomodating the competing standard as we implement enterprise service buses for this and other related project. Funny enough, data formats aren't that much of an issue here, but there are significant protocol differences which will undoubtedly keep Sanjay and Ramesh very busy when the interface does become viable to build.

Interesting domain squatter issue on a friend's PC yesterday. Kid mistyped an URL for a site, and ended up at some cockamamie search engine. The problem was that the kid had started messing with the privacy settings on IE, so I swung into action. Although there were a couple of trace bits of spyware based on scans by MSFT AntiSpyware and SpySubtract (seven or eight registry keys, one DLL) the system was clean. HijackThis was clean. However, every time the kid logged in, he kept getting messages saying "Do you want to change your home page to IncrediblyObnoxiousSearch.com?" after a message from MSFT AntiSpyware said a toolbar was trying to install. There was obviously something screwed up in the kid's profile settings, but since I needed to get a life last evening, I saved the kid's My Documents, and blew away the account and created him a new one. It's not like there was anything that required a heroic effort, but being the type who hates to admit defeat (more like admitting fatigue), it's been bugging me that I didn't solve the issue. Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Motti...

In the weird department, consider the following conversation between Shmuley Boteach and Mr. Jackson as recounted by the good rabbi in yesterday's Jerusalem Post:

SB: What if they were like the Nazis, just evil people?
MJ: I can't imagine that I couldn't reach their hearts in some kind of way.
SB: So you believe that if you were face to face with Hitler you could...?
MJ: Absolutely. Absolutely! He had to have had a lot of yes people around him who were afraid of him.
SB: You believe that if you had an hour with Hitler you could somehow touch something inside of him?
MJ: Absolutely. I know I could.
SB: With Hitler? Come on. So you don't believe there is anyone who is completely evil and there is no way to touch them? So you don't believe in punishing the wicked because then...?
MJ: No I believe you have to help them, give them therapy. You have to teach them, that somewhere something in their life went wrong. They don't see what they do. They don't understand that it is wrong a lot of times.
SB: But Michael, there are clearly people who are irredeemable. Like Hitler. He was evil incarnate. There was no humanity there for you to address. You'd be speaking to the abyss, to a darkness like you never before witnessed. What about someone who has killed a lot of people? Don't you believe that there should be no therapy for them? They are murderers and they need to face extreme punishment.
MJ: I feel horrible about it. I wish somebody could have reached their hearts.

As much as I really seriously don't want to get into anything relating to MJ's trial, the only other person I ever heard talk this way was Yoko. She said she would've fucked the Fuhrer for peace. Needless to say any mental visualization of that event is something to be avoided, however, there is of course proof of Mr. Jackson's healing therapy with Adolf.....

Image Deleted

(Image courtesy of Somethingawful.com)

Much doing this weekend, company, band rehearsal and gig, plus taking the kiddies to Star Wars. No posts till Monday......

My muse is temporarily indisposed, so instead you get this nonsense....

2005-05-18T08:03:00.000-04:00

Quoth Thomas L. Friedman in this AM's Sulzberger Entity:

The best way to honor the Koran is to live by the values of mercy and compassion
that it propagates.

Quoth the Koran:

Slay them wherever ye find them and drive them out of the places whence they
drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. - 2:191
When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds, then set them free, either by grace or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens. - 47:4

Er, Tom, you been reading a different Koran?

I found myself in a bit of a standards war on my current project, where a client is insisting on one particular standard that we don't support (at least not without about 60 man-months of effort, by my reckoning), not to mention that none of our other customers or partners are looking at this particular standard for any implementations. so there's no huge business imperative to support the effort (unless our client's willing to fund this of course). Nevertheless, it's fallen to me to be the pro from Dover when the relationship manager is going to break the bad news to the client, so it's time to steel myself for what will undoubtedly turn out to be a very stressful meeting.

Listening to Bruce as I write this. No, not the new album. A bootleg from 1975 from the Bottom Line. Instead of this dreary stuff he's writing nowadays, I hear someone with wide eyes still singing "Then I Kissed Her". I need a bit of optimism at the moment.

I demand my rights under the Volstead Act....

2005-05-17T09:10:00.000-04:00

The new Linksys router locked up last night (I happened upon it sometime within twenty minutes of when it happened) and I was quite annoyed over it. The SMC it replaced locked up perhaps once over the last four years, certainly way after I bought it originally. A quick power cycle brought it back once I checked the other computers on the LAN here, but I've heard enough tales of random Linky lockups to make me nervous. Funny thing, I bought a WRT54G for my mother's cable modem connection last year, and it's been completely trouble-free. The only difference of course is that we have the newer firmware plus the voice ports on this puppy, but it's got me a bit nervous at this point. Perhaps Vonage was attempting to upgrade the firmware, or perhaps it was just a glitch, but me, I'm used to Linksys' parent company's routers. Assuming you keep those in a proper environment and don't mess with them, they run uneventfully for years (worst case you might have to replace a power supply or a fan, but BFD in that case).

The odd thing was that Layer 3 connectivity was hosed, but you could see the LAN activity lights flashing. Couldn't ping any interfaces on the router, internal or external, nor access the admin page. I know that we had briefly called out over the VoIP just before it happened, so it's possible there could've been some SIP glitch, but being the anal-retentive troubleshooter that I am, that sets my mind to focusing (where it will go.....).

Fark happened to point to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times that only eight Howard Johnson's restaurants are now left, one within less than an hour's drive. Other than some eighty-something lady putting her car through the glass doors the other day, the place seems fairly safe, as the local paper describes it as "popular". I'll have to drag the young'uns over there soon, just in case. It seems only inevitable that it'll become a Bennigabees or something when someone unlocks the value in the place, but I really do miss the franks grilled in "creamery butter" and the ice cream (although I hear it's down to 16 flavors, but then again, I only eat vanilla anyway). I happened to mention the article to a friend and he reminded me that Howard Johnson's only sold their own house brand cola, which wasn't quite up to the standards set in Atlanta and Purchase. I'd imagine with only eight outlets now those days are long gone, but tell the truth, I'm on a nostalgia kick with this, and I'll have to scratch that itch soon.

I Was Married By A Judge, I Should've Asked For A Jury

2005-05-16T09:27:00.000-04:00

My final observation on Vonage for the moment - the light background crackle that characterized some of the calls disappeared entirely on Saturday night, so I definitely think that that's a function of my ISP's backbone load and peering. The calls were eminently acceptable, so I suppose I'll just have to live with the odd crackle during the week (it isn't impacting any of the conversations, so I can certainly live with it, and the QoS features of the new Linky router are letting my VPN and other web activities happening without impairing intelligibility). Overall, the only big question about Vonage is if they will eventually be taken over by someone, however, the bang for the buck is certainly well worth it at this point.

Frank Rich decided to opine on the Stones in this AM's Sulzberger entity. He correctly say the Stones were fun. The operative word there is "were". I'm still firmly convinced that the Stones haven't had a full album's worth of good material since "Exile On Main Street", that they've only had one good single ("Mixed Emotion") in the last twenty years, and that for most of the last thirty years they've totally blown as a live band. The recent four DVD set showed them with a bit of regained teeth (dentures?), but as much as Ron Wood is a nice guy and good guitarist, he plays too much. Too many little fills when a chugging chord will do. Last time the Stones really cooked on stage, Mick Taylor was up there. And for heaven's sake, save the girl background singers for Tumbling Dice, and keep 'em offstage for the rest of the show....

Even Shorter Shrift

2005-05-13T08:44:00.000-04:00

Quite a bit of activity will consume today and the entire weekend. Lots of documenting, lots of band stuff, and an ill relative are keeping me busy.

The CD du jour is a two-fer "#1 Record / Radio City" by Big Star. For those unfamiliar with Big Star, they were the third member of the retro junta of the early 70s (the others of course being Badfinger and the Raspberries). Big Star was the brainchild of Alex Chilton, better known for his work with the Box Tops (neither "The Letter" nor "Cry Like A Baby" ever did much for me, tell the truth). While Big Star is critically beloved, it doesn't have the same impact for me that Badfinger or the Raspberries had. There's just no power single on these two albums. There's a lot of the same influences present (plenty of Harrison-esque slide, jangle rhythm), but there's no song comparable to "I Wanna Be With You" or "Baby Blue". It's definitely pleasant to listen to, but I can't even hum a hook at this point.

Hier spricht die Gruppenfuhrer!

2005-05-12T09:26:00.000-04:00

Obersturmbannfuhrer Buchanan's done it again. Some lovely quotes from the article:

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?

Sil il marche comme une canard.

Defending Hitler isn't exactly good for the conservative movement, Pat. Please fuck off and die.

Slightly Short Shrift

2005-05-12T09:09:00.000-04:00

Vonage continues to remain unremarkable, and the crackliness seems to have slightly abated, so I'm still OK with everything. In fact, a case of backhoe fade at Mom's led me to add another line yesterday. Her next door neighbors were trenching to install something surely essential, and managed not only to cut their own cable and POTS service, but Mom's POTS service as well. The ILEC determined that a truck roll was necessary, but seeing as how only two customers were affected it's way low on their priority list. Mom's got a lot of stuff doing right now where she needs vox comms, but she's in a cellular dead spot, so that's not an option, so being a good son, I headed over to Staples and picked up the Vonage kit with a Linksys PAP2 phone adapter (no way I was going to replace her router, a Linky WRT54G that I put in about a year ago). Went through the web activation in a matter of minutes, including setting her up for Vonage's version of 911 (she is elderly, after all), and plugged in the PAP2 into a router port. It looked like the provisioning was done in a matter of two minutes, but we waited for five, and lo and behold, dial tone. A nice paradigm, if I do say so.

My project's got a couple of major deliverables in flight, but the architecture we're using for those deliverables is based on an older one-off design for a project which just happens to be fairly close to what we need to get to the clients. It's not bad at all, actually, based on Tomcat, but it needs to be a bit more flexible and extensible (we're thinking about an eventual enterprise service bus implementation, and rather than writing adapters for this thing, it would be nice if it spoke ESB out of the box) but we're too close to delivery to make that sort of radical change. Oh well, next release......

Wall Street, n. A symbol for sin for every devil to rebuke

2005-05-11T08:33:00.000-04:00

Day 2 with Vonage, and again uneventful, the way I like it. Their SimulRing feature works nicely with my cell phone. I reran the speed tests and sure enough, they were better in the evening, back up to my normal up/down levels. The VPN shouldn't chew up that much bandwidth when idle, so I was a bit puzzled as to the drastic speed reduction, but since I know it's an instantaneous measurement, it's nothing to get excited over. I will trend it for a while to see if there's any pattern I can uncover, but so far, things are as uneventful as I like. There is a little crackliness on certain conversations, but not as bad as some cellular or cordless conversations.

Unusual amounts of management administrivia yesterday interrupted my constant flow of conference calls (although I was able to duck a particularly soporific one with some of our EMEA business partners as a result, so I can't complain too loudly). I'm supposed to complete some training class, however, every time they want me to take this class I'm too busy doing real work (little things called clients do tend to take priority in my schema) and every time I'm free to take said class, they've either got busy work (proposals) or there's some freeze in the training budget (which is of course the biggest load of crap; I could understand it if it was an external class, but this is something which is internally developed and pretty much canned curriculum). Training is of course a huge sore point with me, as there were times back in the late 90s when you could actually get some hands-on training with some of the external providers (I remember taking the Cisco network troubleshooting course from Chesapeake back then - the bosses were squawking at the cost of the course, under $2K IIRC, but damn, that was a great course with a great instructor. Not only that, the course was held about eight blocks from my esteemed asset management client, Happyland, so I was able to walk over on my lunch breaks and actually get some billable work done to keep the bean counters happy).

In the process of skulling out some major architecture decisions here. This isn't going to be easy...

Photo With Minor Snarky Comment

2005-05-10T13:44:00.000-04:00

Yoko addresses the UN on nuclear non-proliferation.

Funny, most people would think she used the nuclear option on some of her husband's friends.

Los mas que cosas cambio.....

2005-05-10T09:52:00.000-04:00

CNN reports Saturday Night Live let an f-bomb through on System Of A Down's performance last weekend, the censors having missed an ad-libbed one.

Gilda Radner got away with it back in the late 70s on SNL doing a goof on Patti Smith. About 4 times during the song.

Oh the humanity....

I haven't had this much fun since Don Ameche invented the telephone

2005-05-10T08:34:00.000-04:00

The Vonage experience so far has been unremarkable, which is at it should be.

The first step was to set up the account with Vonage, and I chose retail activation. They asked for the router's MAC address and where I bought it, collected the usual contact info and a credit card number, asked for where I wanted my phone number to reside, and moments later I had an e-mail with my new phone number.

Step two had me clearing out the old router, access point and desktop phone and connecting everything to the Linksys router. Nice to have a couple of extra outlets back, even with a UPS with eight outlets and two power strips, I was running short of outlets. I fired up the Linky, then brought the High Altar back up, and got to configuring it. I have a static IP from my provider, so I got all of that good stuff keyed in, and saved the info (having put in many Linksys routers before, I knew to save the info on each page I changed on the admin interface). I then had an "oh shit" moment - Vonage makes it very clear to not turn off your router for five minutes after you get connectivity, as it autoprovisions. When I hit "Save", I got a dialog box that said the router needed to be rebooted, and without remembering Vonage and Linksys' injunction, I agreed to the reboot. I sat agonizing for a good 15 seconds, then checked the status page of the router, and lo and behold, my new number was there on the status page. I picked up the phone, and dial tone. A quick test phone call, and I was rocking.

A few more bits of administrivia (changing the admin password, SSID and encryption key), and the rest of the home network was back up and running. My somewhat problematic HP Deskjet 5850, which has a nasty habit of refusing to connect to the network upon occasion, instantly linked up the instant I got the crypto and SSID worked out (I'm wondering if it just didn't like my old WAP11 access point).

The voice quality on the calls has been in the same ballpark as a regular wired POTS line, perhaps a scratchy noise or two here or there, but nothing you wouldn't get with POTS. It's early in the game, and I haven't really done that much with it yet, but I'll keep you updated on it.

One thing that I noticed which I didn't particularly like was that I ran a throughput test on the router and I was down almost 10%. OK, I know, throughput tests are instantaneous, and of course, there might've been something going on in the background even though I thought I had everything quiesced, so I'll have to recheck that tonight.

My Dopey Software Of The Week Award goes to my buddies over at Zone Labs. My work laptop has ZoneAlarm installed (company policy), and for the most part it's been unremarkable (another good thing). A bit of a pain getting around the company policy for some local sharing issues, but I handled that. Apparently, the security policy got corrupted when I shut down on Friday, and it started asking me for permission to allow various programs (including little things like VPN clients) to do their thing. Nothing I didn't recognize so I said OK, but the damn thing totally hosed my VPN connectivity. I shut ZoneAlarm down, and everything works fine. Not wanting to get into trouble with the auditors, I called the First Ghurka Helpless Desk (dang you berry much vor galling tegnical subbort, have you dismembered your system?) and my cheerful interlocutor on the lobster shift in Mumbai earnestly suggestly that I dismember ZoneAlarm and reinstall. I'm very reluctant to do so, as the last time I uninstalled ZoneAlarm, it left me with a completely unusable IP stack (admittedly this was on another machine with another OS). I'll just disable the thing until I get around to fixing it (too much change in one week already....)

Rock Is Dead They Say, Long Live Rock

2005-05-09T10:26:00.000-04:00

Last week, the Sulzberger Entity posted this horrific article:

Fade-Out: New Rock Is Passé on Radio
By JEFF LEEDS
Published: April 28, 2005
Major radio companies are abandoning rock music so quickly lately that sometimes their own employees don't know it.
Troy Hanson, the program director of WZTA in Miami, said that he first learned that his station's owner, Clear Channel Communications, had ditched the rock format - and his staff - when he tuned to the station one morning in February and heard talk-radio. His rock domain, known as Zeta, had vanished. "We didn't even get to play 'It's the End of the World as We Know It,' " the R.E.M. anthem, as a sign off, he said.In the last four months, radio executives have switched the formats of four modern-rock, or alternative, stations in big media markets, including WHFS in Washington-Baltimore area, WPLY in Philadelphia and the year-old KRQI in Seattle. Earlier this month WXRK in New York discarded most newer songs in favor of a playlist laden with rock stars from the 80's and 90's.

Music executives say the lack of true stars today is partly the reason. Since rap-rock acts like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit retreated from the scene, none of the heralded bands from recent rock movements, be it garage-rock (the Strokes, the Vines) or emo (Dashboard Confessional, Thursday), connected with radio listeners or CD buyers the way their predecessors did.
This sudden exit of so many marquee stations has not only renewed the perennial debate about the relative health of rock as a musical genre, but it also indicates that the alternative format, once the darling of radio a decade ago, is now taking perhaps the heaviest fire in the radio industry's battle to retain listeners in the face of Internet and satellite radio competition. Many rock stations may be in for another blow when the shock jock Howard Stern departs for Sirius Satellite Radio next year.
There are still signs that a fervent alternative scene survives. This weekend, for instance, 50,000 people a day are expected to visit Indio, Calif., for the sixth-annual Coachella Valley Music Festival, the biggest rock event of its kind in the United States, to cheer bands like the Arcade Fire and the Secret Machines. Moreover, while alternative programmers are searching for a solution, for the moment they have the benefit of new music by a clutch of reliable stars from the genre's heyday: Nine Inch Nails, Weezer and Beck are releasing their first albums in two years or more, and songs by each rocketed to the top of Billboard magazine's modern-rock airplay chart.

But many musicians in the newer bands on the alternative playlists "could be your waiter tomorrow night and you wouldn't know the difference," griped a radio promotion executive at one major label, who requested anonymity for fear of offending bands on his label. Ratings for rock radio stations have been languishing for years. The share of the 18-to-34 age group that is tuning in to alternative stations has shrunk by more than 20 percent in the last five years, according to Arbitron, while stations playing rap and R&B or Spanish-language formats have enjoyed an expanding audience.

As a result, many rock programmers aren't sure what to play. "The format in the last couple of years has gone through an identity crisis," said Kevin Weatherly, program director of KROQ, a closely watched alternative powerhouse in Los Angeles. "You have stations that are too cool, that move too quickly and are only playing the coolest music, which doesn't at the end of the day attract enough of the audience. Or you have the other extreme, dumb rock, red-state rock that the cool kids just flat out aren't into."

Such scrambling to strike a balance has cost many alternative programmers large chunks of audience. Some radio executives said that they made a fateful choice in the last few years to jettison the pop-rock side of their genre to concentrate on heavier-sounding bands, and now are afraid to turn back. As part of that shift, many stations also decided to eliminate women from their audience research. These stations decided to aim at men almost exclusively because of the heavier sound. "You got yourself into a corner that you can't get out of," said Tom Calderone, senior vice president for music and talent at MTV, and a former radio programmer and
consultant. "When you listen to alternative stations do their 90's flashback weekends, you can hear something as meaningful as Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden to something as silly and quirky as Harvey Danger and Presidents of the United States of America. When you become 65-75 percent guys, you're leaving a huge audience on the table."

At WZTA in Miami, the decision in 2003 to remove women from the equation "was definitely when we started to see Zeta's attrition," Mr. Hanson said. Days after Clear Channel took Zeta off the air, a rival company, Cox Radio, flipped the format of one of its Miami-area stations to rock.

Mr. Hanson also suggested that land-based radio had been too slow to respond to satellite radio, which offers access to dozens of commercial-free music channels for a monthly subscription fee and to digital music players, like Apple Computer's iPod. He said that he balked when a supervisor suggested running an on-air contest to give away an iPod loaded with 949 songs. (Zeta's frequency was 94.9-FM.) "I was like, 'Then they don't need to listen to Zeta anymore.' " Mr. Hanson wound up forgoing the contest. "The people that are leading-edge technology consumers are not being embraced by terrestrial radio," said Jim McGuinn, who was program director of WPLY in Philadelphia, known as Y100, before its corporate parent, Radio One, flipped the station to rap and R&B in February. "The outsider image disappeared," Mr. McGuinn said.

Mr. McGuinn and a handful of other former WPLY employees have started an Internet radio station, y100rocks.com, to play music they say the terrestrial version had been missing, including songs by Interpol, Moby and Queens of the Stone Age. But for now, Philadelphia has no terrestrial alternative-rock station. Some analysts fear that, when radio stations switch from alternative rock to programming aimed at older listeners, they may be making a sacrifice. "Radio has ceded the younger demographic to other media," said Fred Jacobs, president of Jacobs Media, a radio consulting company in Southfield, Mich., specializing in rock. "I just don't know how we're going to get back people who didn't get into the radio habit in their teens," he said, adding, "It really becomes problematic down the road."

Rock radio has been ossifying for years. I happened to read Richard Neer's wonderful book "FM" recently, with a lot of great stories of the history of WNEW-FM, the greatest rock station of them all (apologies to all you Kid Leo fans), and it was a very sad coda to the fond memories I had of listening to the radio on headphones back in high school (while most of my class was listening to tripe, I was grooving on Renaissance, King Crimson and Yes, courtesy of the crew at WNEW). The thing is though, it's a bottom line thing. Kids that listen to the radio want some artiste that includes a turntablist who can keep their tootsies in terpsichorean mode. Stevie Ray Vaughn and Annie Haslam wouldn't stand a chance against the bitchho shouters, because the shouters influence the kids who spend money.

I'll go cry now, and put on Beggar's Banquet.....

This AM is the big Vonage test. I picked up the Linksys WRT54GP2 at Staples yesterday (plus a new 5.8 Ghz cordless phone), and it looks like a fairly simple matter to sign up (the MAC addy and the S/N is on the outside of the box), so I'll sign up for it in a few moments, then I'll start configuring the router. Reports later on....

Pastime, n. A device for promoting dejection. Gentle exercise for intellectual debility.

2005-05-07T10:32:00.000-04:00

The last two days have utterly consumed me with a veritable firehose of conference calls for my new project, just trying to get up to speed with the players and what's happening, so my head's spinning. The great thing about this project is that it's highly virtualized, meaning a lot of working at home (nice not to have to take the train in for a while), and that means I've got to do some upgrading of the voice situation. While I've got a dedicated POTS line for my home office, plus Skype, I've thought about going with Vonage for the home office to take advantage of some of their cool voicemail and forwarding features, not to mention the unlimited calling in the US and Canada (I will be calling all over both countries) plus the odd international call (both EMEA and ASEA). SkypeOut is an option of course, and I'll A/B them with Vonage to see which is more suitable.

The one thing that was holding me back was the firewall situation, as I have everything locked tight here, and have no desire to start punching holes in the configuration to accommodate VoIP, but the customized Linksys WRT54G solves that problem, plus it'll let me redeploy my access point (my home router is hard-wired) to a better location in the house to extend my range. I'll probably pick up the retail package on Sunday and set it up, a report on Monday AM if the thing doesn't ring off the hook by 0800.

Last night I took my older young'uns to see Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. They finally understand now why I answer "42" every time they ask one of those deep kid questions. Overall, I rather liked it, although it dragged a bit. I must admit that it was a masterpiece of casting. Mos Def played an unexpected, but very credible Ford Prefect, Sam Rockwell channeled Nicolas Cage wonderfully as Zaphod Beeblebrox, and I found myself drooling over Zooey Deschanel, who out-Karen Allens Karen Allen as Trillian. Martin Freeman was suitably befuddled as Arthur Dent, and Alan Rickman was another unexpectedly credible choice as Marvin's voice. There was a moment when I was half-expecting the two mice to start singing
"Mosura ya Mosura dongan kasakuyan indoo muu rosuto uiraadoa, hanba hanbamuyan...", but that's just my warped sense of humor (for the kaiju-impaired, Google "Mosura" and click the first result).

Short Shrift Thursday

2005-05-05T18:21:00.000-04:00

Project kickoff meetings today and tomorrow, so little bandwidth for posting.

Perhaps DLA is affecting Quicken's interface with the XP CD Burning Wizard, so I'll test that out after the kickoff meeting and reading the load of documentation I need to absorb.

Odds are I'm going to order Pinnacle 9 with the goodies pack. Less than half the price of Ulead, and I know the UI already. A couple of very cool canned menus that will work well with my upcoming video projects.

Big revisions to my band's set list over the last couple of days, plus a personnel change. That should make for some interesting rehearsals the next couple of weekends. Oh well, at least they're all songs I want to play....

Kvetching Made Difficult...

2005-05-04T11:28:00.000-04:00

I decided to be a bit of a pill and complain to the Discovery Channel about their list of "100 Greatest Americans", but I made the interesting discovery when searching through their web site for some form of contact information that you must specify the show you're inquiring about. Needless to say, this show isn't listed in the drop down list, and without specifying a show I can't get to the complaint form (and no I don't feel like hacking the response). Cute, especially when they've got a potential controversy on their hands.

Dang you for galling tegnigal subbord, have you dismembered your system?.....</Punjabi>

And I Thought It Was Going To Be A Dull Day....

2005-05-04T07:59:00.000-04:00

Someone on Blogcritics posted about the Discovery Channel naming its 100 Greatest Americans, and a cursory look through it inflamed me enough to dissect it at bit. Oh, there are the usual good guys on there, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and I shan't bother those good people who deservedly are on this list, but there are several whoppers that need to be skewered.

Muhammad Ali - Stood up for his principles, true. Rosa Parks he ain't.
Maya Angelou - The Vogons write better poetry.
Lucille Ball - Yeah she was funny. She was also a Communist. Also clueless - she thought Star Trek, a series which she had a business stake in, was about entertainers in the South Seas.
Johnny Carson - Yeah he was funny. But one of the greatest Americans ever?
Cesar Chavez - So where's Albert Shanker?
Hilary Clinton - Don't get me started.....
Tom Cruise - Appeared as a Navy fighter pilot in a movie. Risky Business. What else?
Ellen DeGeneres - Yeah, she's funny. I liked her shtick on the dinosaur ride at Epcot. But one of the 100 Greatest Americans just because of who she prefers to sleep with?
Thomas Edison - Great inventor. Miserable person. Did anything and everything to undercut George Westinghouse, who was a far more important person from an engineering standpoint. His relish in associating Westinghouse with the electric chair was quite noteworthy.
John Edwards - Trial attorney and failed vice presidential candidate. Paging William E. Miller....
Henry Ford - Wonderful peachy keen guy. Just happened to be an admirer of Hitler, spied on his own workers, dedicated union-buster, avowed anti-Semite.
Mel Gibson - Another actor. He likes the Three Stooges, so he's OK in my book, but one of the 100 Greatest Americans?
Tom Hanks - Another actor who's OK in my book. Great supporter of space exploration, done lots of movies I've enjoyed tremendously, but does an actor warrant this honor?
Michael Jackson - I presume they're not referring to the gentleman who reviews beer and spirits (besides, he's English). Real great role model.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - Got where she was by marriage - both times. Dignified widow. Did a bit for artistic preservation. Vu den?
Charles Lindberg - Another pal of Der Fuhrer's, made the same mistake as Ford by accepting a decoration from Die Dritte Reich. Accepted the decoration from Fatso Goering personally. Another avowed anti-Semite. Had we listened to his views, the world would've been immeasurably harmed. I hope he rots in hell.
Madonna - Another great role model for our kids.
Malcolm X - A controversial choice to be sure, but Dr. King he wasn't. Consider the slobs he hung around with - Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan.
Dr. Phil (McGraw) - A pop psychologist? Bwahahahahaha!!!!
Marilyn Monroe - Other than facilitating Mr. Hefner's career, I never particularly thought she was funny or sexy.
Michael Moore - Don't get me started.
Barack Obama - Flava of the month.
Frank Sinatra - Greatest saloon singer ever. Hanging around with people named Gambino, not so good....
Martha Stewart - A convicted felon?
Oprah Winfrey - A talk show which makes Lifetime seem like Cosell, Keith Jackson and Frank Gifford calling the '58 Giants playing the Lombardi-era Packers, makes one of the 100 Greatest Americans. Sigh....

To be sure there are a couple of other iffy ones on the list (Brett Favre is on the list, but Vince Lombardi isn't? Sacrilege!) but I'll save those for another dissection....

Unrelated but found on Fark, it seems that Kenya is introducing castration as a penalty for rape. They actually get it - make the punishment fit the crime:

Eldoret East MP Joseph Lagat (Kanu) suggested that rape convicts be sentenced to death by shooting as they were beyond rehabilitation.

Roads minister Raila Odinga said sexual offenders should be shown no leniency whether they were first-timers or repeat offenders.

My sole quibble with this is merely procedural, as I'm a known fan of hanging. Kudos to Messrs. Lagat and Odinga - perhaps we could persuade them to emigrate to the US and shake up certain state legislatures?

Malefactor, n. The chief factor in the progress of the human race.

2005-05-03T07:36:00.000-04:00

Grouchiness abounds today in my neck of the woods. This one picture from the Cream reunion exacerbates it:

Eric's using a Strat. With Cream. Surely the apocalypse is upon us with this sacreligious sight. A Strat... (and yes, for the record, I own two Strats, and play them regularly, and love them. They just aren't right for playing Cream.......)

The Quicken upgrade went fairly uneventfully, although there were a couple of anxiety-ridden moments. It needed to uninstall the previous version, which of course left me sweating the accidental death or dismemberment of my data, however, that proved to be a non-event, and the registration failed on the first attempt with a 404 Not Found error. The second time proved to be the charm, and Quicken 2005 went live. Nothing extraordinary here, although it does look nice, and one of the highly trumpeted features of the upgrade proved to be a bust. Said feature, an improvement to the backup capabilities of the program, so that CDs could be burned directly instead of shuffling fifteen floppies in and out of the High Altar merely had the data files copied over to a directory somewhere so that the Windows CD Burning Wizard (whatever the hell that is) would be able to quickly and effectively back up my data. Since I've been burning CDs for a very long time without the assistance of said wizard, I had absolutely no reason or desire to find this "feature", and in fact, I'm a bit miffed that I have to go digging for some external tool to do the backups.

Needless to say, finding the directory in question is going to be interesting. Rather than putting it someplace easily locatable, like My Documents, they've necessitated searching the hundreds of files and directories touched in a normal day's computer access. Perhaps the settings are tweakable (my only concern was getting my bills paid and such), but so far, I fail to see the utility of this new backup paradigm.

Monday Morning Blues And Greens

2005-05-02T08:39:00.000-04:00

An incredibly busy week awaits me work-wise, so I'm still going to be keeping a low profile.

Some software upgrades await me this week, Quicken being the most imperative (I'm rather annoyed with Intuit for sunsetting every version prior to 2004, although my 2002 installation has a couple of odd behaviors here and there in reconciliation that drive me up the wall). I'll have to take care of that today or tomorrow, as the first of the month always has a couple of high priority financials that need to be addressed. The second upgrade is Pinnacle Studio, which really doesn't need to be upgraded at all, but migrating to version 9 and some of its goodie packs will give me a better selection of menus and FX for my next DVD production which is upcoming in the next few weeks. I've also resolved to get my video stuff over to a dedicated drive, as I've got something like 20 gigs from the last effort taking up space and I would like to keep that drive free for backups and storing things that don't need to be on the primary drive on the High Altar.

My good friend informs me that a certain high-end guitar shop we're acquainted with has parted ways with Gibson guitars, somewhat unsurprising since Mad Dog Juskiewicz's initiatives have managed to piss off most of his retailers. My local shop's Gibson specialist told me a rather interesting story; he confirmed that his Gibson rep told them they had to pony up $100K for new inventory, which he (my local guy) would gladly do except for a small problem - Gibson doesn't seem to have stock to ship. $100K - that's a lot of wood at dealer prices. I may be making some calls to former Gibson dealers this week about a Les Paul Standard - I'm just too tempted.

Then again, guitargai has a gorgeous Epiphone Byrdland for sale. It's a Japanese Elite, not an Elitist, and has me drooling, although short of doing the Clapton at Bangladesh thing, I can't see for the life of me what I'd use it for. And if you watch the film, it looks like Eric's using Brownie for most of the show anyway.... (considering the Gibby is probably $5K at a minimum, the Epi is fairly priced at $1900; probably better QC, that's for sure)

I kicked myself a bit for not seeing "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" this weekend, but I suppose I'll manage sometime in the next few weeks (hopefully before Star Wars comes out, I don't want to be within five miles of the multiplex when that thing comes out; I'll definitely wait for the hoopla to pass, but with my luck, "Hitchhikers" will already be relegated to some second run theater that's astonishingly inconvenient for me to get to, necessitating a wait for the DVD).

I've decided against buying the new Bruce Springsteen album. From what I've heard, it sounds like a bunch of "Ghost of Tom Joad" rejects, and I need something positive to listen to. If I want dreariness, I'll read Steinbeck. For sheer amusement, I modified Dack's Web Economy Bullshit Generator Javascript code to generate Springsteen cliches (using phrases like "little girl", "darkness", "highway", etc.). Perhaps I'll modify this site's template to include it (you can't imagine the heat I took for doing this from some friends who are die-hard Springsteen fans; don't get me wrong, I like his stuff up through "The River". After that, there's just too much filler and dreariness).

Score One For The Good Guys

2005-04-28T14:13:00.000-04:00

Ordinarily, any time a New York Democrat opens his mouth, I immediately shield my eyes and ears from the bombast and check my pocket to see if it's being picked, but Eliot Spitzer may be the exception to the rule. He's announced that he's suing spyware vendor Intermix for that thing they do. I personally would've preferred an indictment (a few perp walks would do wonders for spyware execs, not to mention all the exercise they'd get in some pound-'em-in-the-ass correctional facility), but hey, hitting them in the pocketbook is always a good way to start.

Needless to say I doubt any serious action will take place (uhh, Eliot - an injunction, please?) for a while, but I'll be darned, this guy is actually showing that he's actually interested in enforcing laws for the benefit of everyone. True, it's likely grandstanding for his upcoming run against Blandburgers Pataki, but any serious legal threat against the spyware types is always a welcome ally.

A rant I'd hoped not to write

2005-04-28T11:02:00.000-04:00

I would ordinarily let l'affaire Jackson pass without too much snarky commentary for the reason that it's entirely ridiculous to waste time on such matters, however, a cursory look at some of the news coverage and a couple of threads on Blogcritics showed that Mr. Jackson has either an astonishingly partisan fan base (or more likely some remuneration, not necessarily monetary, has been promised to people who will vociferously defend him either through standing in front of the court or by attacking on any online forum that dares analyze Mr. Jackson's actions). For the record, innocent until proven guilty, and that will be my sole comment on the trial.

The quote unquote fans screaming for Mr. Jackson's canonization and decrying his detractors or even observers as virtual Klansmen are an interesting matter though. Needless to say, the race card was played almost immediately in the affair, with Mr. Jackson's demonstrably false claim of being manhandled. Mr. Jackson and his attorneys are not stupid people by any sense, and an attempt to introduce a perception of racial taint, even if it is demonstrably false, is a cunning tactic to taint the entire proceedings and potentially lay the ground for a reversal down the line if the case goes against them, or to merely reinforce the opinions of some observers that the case is a cockup from the get-go. The perceived motivation of course for Mr. Jackson's defenders is that Mr. Jackson is a good, charitable man who happens to be the greatest thing ever in popular music who is being persecuted because of his race and personal affectations. This of course bears some deconstruction.

A quick look at history provides us with another famous trial of an African-American popular singer who was undoubtedly prosecuted because of his race. Objectively, that singer was of far more lasting importance and influence than Michael Jackson. I refer of course to Chuck Berry, whose influence is still pervasive fifty years down the road. Mr. Berry managed to get himself in trouble by violating the Mann Act (transporting a woman across state lines for "immoral purposes") in a case that had plenty of room for conjecture and interpretation. Berry had been charged with a similar offense with another woman more or less contemporaneously and had evaded jail time on that charge, but in the Mann Act case, the judge made several references to Mr. Berry as "this Negro" and other similar pointed references to Mr. Berry that evoked the worst prejudices of the time (remember of course that Mr. Berry resided in Missouri, hardly a bastion of the nascent civil rights movement). The judge's actions were deemed so egregious by the federal Court Of Appeals that a new trial was ordered, however, there were still ample references in the local papers to Mr. Berry's race and occupation (he was described in one screed as a "negro orchestra leader" and "tavern owner", presumably to attach the air of disreputability to him) and Mr. Berry did indeed serve a couple of years in the pokey after again being convicted (although by most accounts the second trial judge was all business and kept the proceedings to the facts of the case).

The interesting thing is that although one could easily see parallels as a disinterested observer, the vociferous loudmouths supporting Jackson do not point to Berry as a precedent. True, Berry has had other legal issues dog him and as such is no saint, but it actually points to a bit of historical revisionism on the part of Jackson's fans. They simply don't acknowledge that there might actually be some antediluvian history before Jackson. They proudly point to his ownership of the copyright catalogs of the Beatles and tons of others as proof of his superiority and genius, when the simple fact is that he was presented with an opportunity to make a good investment. Mr. Jackson had nothing to do with the creation of the catalogs he owns, unless he pulls a Morris Levy and ends up putting his name on everything. He owns the assets, that's it.

Levy of course was a crook who conveniently expired while waiting out his appeals after his conviction for some record industry no-goodnik-ism, and his name appears in the most improbable places (he's now of course listed as the cowriter of "Why Do Fools Fall In Love", which was probably written by Frankie Lymon and Herman Santiago on a stoop somewhere). Levy managed to steal the ownership of most of Chuck Berry's songs, and one of the more notorious episodes in Beatles history had Levy threatening to sue John Lennon for the similarity between "Come Together" and "You Can't Catch Me", which resulted in Lennon hurriedly recording what became the "Rock And Roll" album to placate Levy. Levy, being a gonif of the first order, had the tapes stolen and prematurely released on his Adam VIII label as "Roots" (quite a collectable piece, BTW) in order to grab whatever revenue he could before the Lennons and Apple unleashed their legal firepower against him. I well remember the day after Lennon's murder, discussing it with someone familiar with such matters, and that person said that he wouldn't have been surprised if Morris Levy had something to do with it. Obviously it wasn't that at all, but the prospect was chilling.

Getting back to Mr. Jackson's partisans, there's little they're doing to add value to the proceedings. The maxim that the best defense is a good offense is one that Mr. Mesereau knows quite well, and I'm sure that whatever the outcome is, justice will be served. Mr. Jackson's fans only prove themselves to be obsessed imbeciles who cannot differentiate between the concept of probable cause and persecution.

Reflections upon cheapness

2005-04-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

And more madness consumes every fiber of my being. Two potential engagements other than the possibility of First Voodoo Bank are vying for my services, one a rather boring but necessary technical documentation job, which despite its droning characteristics at least offers little dangerous exposure, and the other one an internal project rife with politics, however, it actually has a chance to do something useful for clients and ourselves, and might even get some positive exposure for me. Decisions, decisions. The big problem I have with the former project is that it's located on the exact opposite side of the metropolitan area from me, and it's almost 100 miles one way to drive there. Not terribly bad, in that I used to commute 80 miles one way to a client some years ago, however, I have one problem with this client which may be a showstopper. SOP used to be if you were going to a client that was further away than your office, you would be reimbursed for additional commuting expenses over and above your normal commuting costs. Needless to say, folks who lived in the Garden State quickly shifted their official offices to the west side of the river, and started hitting clients up for the difference in the commuter tickets plus the subway. It was a nice way to keep commute costs manageable, and back when I was driving the 160 mile round trip, the extra mileage reimbursement took care of the extra maintenance costs (when you drive that much, oil changes come very fast). Not to mention the tolls, of course. However, this new client, a very well-known financial services player, refuses to pay for driving commutes to their location. I'm not asking for them to pay for the whole thing - it roughly costs $27/day for me to commute into Manhattan.

Figuring a mileage reimbursement rate of $0.365, I would be entitled to $73 plus tolls (figure seven bucks if I go via the GWB and one of the north-south toll roads) per diem, minus the $27 it normally costs me to go to work. I should be reimbursed $53/day, which will cover the wear and tear and outrageous gas costs incurred on the Proprietormobile (which I've decided to keep running for another year). Never mind the personal wear and tear of a 200 mile roundtrip commute (at my previous client, I had the eighty mile trip down to about 90 minutes, and was usually home at a reasonable hour for dinner; this client is down in the traffic zone, and somewhere around mile 83, things back up big time (in the AM).

I must ponder.....

Blinding glimpse of being too busy

2005-04-25T14:50:00.000-04:00

Proposal writing took up much of the weekend and today, and there are a few other logistical and business challenges to deal with, so I shall be a a bit muted in my blaring ignorance for another day or two. Some amusing bits on the proposal had to do with someone not remembering to do little things like checking generator operation at data centers, checking the fuel for contamination, that sort of thing.

A Quick One While He's Away

2005-04-23T09:22:00.000-04:00

My deliverable for Tuesday consumes most of the next couple of days. Next update Monday AM.

Debauchee, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it.

2005-04-22T09:32:00.000-04:00

Blogger did it again, lunching today's post, and its much-vaunted "Recover Post" feature did bupkis to recover my carefully worded missive, so I'm a touch crunched for time to dash this one off.

First Voodoo Bank is indeed considering engaging my team's services, however, we're facing some resistance on the ground there from the First Ghurka Regiment Of Competing Consulting Firm Based In The Most Populous Former British Colonial Possession (FGROCCFBITMPFBCP isn't a great acronym, that's for sure). The good thing about First Voodoo Bank is that they recognize where their core competencies are and aren't, and know where the holes lie in this particular endeavor. Since the First Ghurka Regiment merely says "Yes" to everything First Voodoo Bank says, their credibility is shot due to them not asking questions and pushing back when outlandish or impractical requirements will impede or cripple the project's end state. I love this kind of thing, even when it does involve a bit of travel. Besides, I do a pretty mean Punjabi accent myself, and can probably talk to them in terms they'll understand :-).

The unfortunate part is that I have to have a fairly detailed analysis of the situation ready for Tuesday AM, so of course that clobbers my plans for the weekend for the most part. I'm hosting the Seder this year (well, let me qualify that. I have little patience for the full-blown ritual. When I sit at the dinner table, I want to eat. So, basically, the kiddies will read the Fier Kashes - quickly - and then we eat. My family's never had the patience to sit through the whole thing and I still chortle to this day at the memory of my father, a very pious man indeed, at a Seder at some family friend's house muttering "Enough already! Let's eat" as the ritual entered its second hour). And thankfully, band practice tomorrow - I need a chance to wail a bit....

Assorted Ephemera

2005-04-21T09:09:00.000-04:00

Archipelago merging with the NYSE. About time. SuperDOT is showing its age. Interesting business scenario, almost like an insurance demutualization in the handing over of equity to the owners (in this case seat holders instead of policy holders). The interesting question is what will happen to two stalwarts of the open floor, the two-dollar broker, and the specialists. Going to an electronic paradigm will minimize the need for the two-dollar broker, probably eliminate it. The specialists are another story, since they (at least in theory) maintain orderly markets, and by going to a newer paradigm, they might not be able to react quickly enough to perform that function. Fascinating scenario - I'd love to get involved in a project such as this. It'll certainly make life very interesting for the market data providers.

While channel surfing the other night, I came across a cute comedy called "The Party". I'd never seen it before, but when I tuned in I got Peter Sellers doing a broad Punjabi accent, and the ever-droolable-over Claudine Longet in a towel. Not to mention an oddball Morgan (an English kit car with three wheels, two in front, one in back. I never understood the odd European predilection for three-wheeled cars and trucks, remembering things like the Unimog; surely thrifty on petrol, but horrendous from the driving and safety aspects). I might actually pick up this DVD (there are a bunch of character actors in there I recognize but can't name off the top of my head; the only other cast member I can cite was Gavin McLeod of Mary Tyler Moore show fame). Lots of silly sight gags, totally dated of course, but the combination of deflating Hollywood pomposity, phony Indian accents and one of the great hotties of all time may make me pick it up.

Speaking of said trigger-happy hottie, a couple of useless trivia points. You might remember the memorable Saturday Night Live skit about the Claudine Longet Invitational ski meet, where of course footage of various skiers was accompanied by gunshots; by an interesting coincidence, that skit was aired on the same show where Lorne Michaels made his famous $3000 offer to the Beatles to reunite (and as both John and Paul confirmed, they were together watching the show, and almost made their way down to the studio to call him on it). The other interesting point was that I thought that Ms. Longet had only appeared in the McHale's Navy movie, but she's credited with a couple of appearances on the series as well. Her recordings are interesting lounge type stuff, with a couple of covers that make me vacillate between laughing and actually being interested. Her cover of "Here There and Everywhere" was painful, but her breathy proto-Olivia Newton-John cover of "God Only Knows" actually was pretty good.

Time for a drool.....

Let's Dissect Another Meme, Shall We?

2005-04-20T08:49:00.000-04:00

This article shows England's Channel Four's opinion of what the 100 Greatest Albums of all time are. Needless to say, I can't resist the opportunity to tear into this one given some of the idiocies present (well, it was the result of a poll, which of course can be manipulated any which way the pollster prefers; I recall having a rather heated argument with a professor who insisted that a random sample of people polled on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway would give a more accurate result than a random sample of phone numbers - his logic being that my insistence on phone numbers disenfranchised those without phones from participating in the poll....)

Anyway, to the list:
1. RADIOHEAD - OK Computer
Dreary, bleep blorp music. I actually liked "The Bends", though.

2. U2 - The Joshua Tree
Yup, a classic. Not #2, but up in the top ten or fifteen all-time classics.

3. NIRVANA - Nevermind
Minor chord melancholy. Way overrated.

4. MICHAEL JACKSON - Thriller
Well crafted. Not my cup of tea, but I'll give it it's due. More credit should go to Quincy Jones for his work on this.

5. PINK FLOYD - Dark Side of the Moon
Yup.

6. OASIS - Definitely Maybe
Ahead of the Beatles??????????

7. THE BEATLES - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Obviously the people they polled just parrot what they hear. Most real Beatles cognoscenti would rate this as their third or fourth best.

8. MADONNA - Like a Prayer
Not my cup of tea at all. Well crafted. Less likable than Thriller.

9. GUNS N' ROSES - Appetite For Destruction
Deserves a top ten or fifteen just for "Sweet Child Of Mine" and "Welcome To The Jungle". The return of the full-out Les Paul through a Marshall sound.

10. THE BEATLES - Revolver
The best album of all time, IMO.

11. R.E.M. - Automatic for the People
I run hot and cold with R.E.M. Too much pretentiousness, but then they go ahead and do something that shows they still know who Roger McGuinn is.

12. THE BEATLES - The White Album
Toward the bottom of the pack of Beatles albums. Desperately in need of editing down to a single killer album.

13. QUEEN - A Night at the Opera
Great stuff.

14. COLDPLAY - Parachutes
Who?

15. OASIS - (What's the Story) Morning Glory
It's OK, not a classic.

16. ALANIS MORISSETTE - Jagged Little Pill
Whiny and annoying.

17. LED ZEPPELIN - Led Zeppelin IV
Top Five.

18. THE VERVE - Urban Hymns
Don't know it.

19. JIMI HENDRIX - Are you Experienced
Top Five.

20. THE SMITHS - The Queen Is Dead
Yawn.

21. JOHN LENNON - Imagine
Overrated. Lush sounding, the title track is an instant dial changer for me. Jealous Guy is by far the best song on the album.

22. RADIOHEAD - The Bends
Nice record.

23. BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS - Exodus
Good stuff, but the vocals can be wearying to listen to.

24. THE STONE ROSES - The Stone Roses
Not bad.

25. SIMON AND GARFUNKEL - Bridge Over Troubled Water
Overrated. Too lush. I liked Bookends and the two previous albums better. Best tracks are "The Boxer" and "Keep The Customer Satisfied".

26. BJORK - Debut
Yumping Yiminy. Yawn.

27. THE DOORS - The Doors
Top Five.

28. ABBA - Arrival
Some of Abba's singles are still OK in my book, but a whole album's worth makes my teeth hurt.

29. MICHAEL JACKSON - Off the Wall
Well crafted. Not my cup of tea. Perhaps a better album than Thriller.

30. DURAN DURAN - Rio
Yawn.

31. SEX PISTOLS - Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols
Blecch. Dreadful stuff.

32. DAVID BOWIE - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
Top 10.

33. THE BEACH BOYS - Pet Sounds
Top 10.

34. JOY DIVISION - Closer
Thank you for playing, and where are those lovely parting gifts....

35. THE ROLLING STONES - Let It Bleed
I'm running out of Top 5 slots....

36. BLUR - Parklife
Yawn.

37. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Born to Run
Top 10. Pure magic on this record - it's Friday night on the Jersey Shore in less than 40 minutes.

38. BILLIE HOLIDAY - Lady Sings the Blues
I'm more of a Dinah Washington fan personally.

39. THE WHITE STRIPES - Elephant
Nope.

40. BLACK SABBATH - Paranoid
Goofy stuff, but I like it.

41. THE SPECIALS - Specials
Leaves me cold.

42. THE ROLLING STONES - Exile on Main Street
Top 10. I waffle on whether it should be edited down, but there's a lot of good stuff here.

43. FRANK SINATRA - Songs for Swingin' Lovers!
Great stuff.

44. THE CLASH - London Calling
Much, much better than the Sex Pistols.

45. THE PRODIGY - The Fat of the Land
Don't know the record.

46. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - The Velvet Underground and Nico
I prefer "Loaded", but it's good to see that the Velvets cracked the Top 50 on this cockamamie list.

47. DIRE STRAITS - Brothers in Arms
Great stuff.

48. PIXIES - Doolittle
Nope.

49. ARETHA FRANKLIN - I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Great stuff.

50. THE LIBERTINES - The Libertines
Don't know it.

51. HAPPY MONDAYS - Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches
Yawn.

52. PATTI SMITH - Horses
I run hot and cold with Patti Smith, so it's probably a bit highly ranked for me at the moment.

53. THE WHO - Tommy
Over "Who's Next"???????

54. LOU REED - Transformer
About right.

55. BOB DYLAN - Blood on the Tracks
Over "Blonde on Blonde" and "Highway 61"?????

56. PRINCE - Sign 'o' the Times
About right.

57. DIDO - No Angel
Nope.

58. AIR - Moon Safari
Nope.

59. ELTON JOHN - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Great stuff. I haven't listened to it in a while - I'll have to pull it out and take a listen.

60. THE JAM - All Mod Cons
Not bad, but it would be much lower down on the list for me. Still, anyone who uses Rickenbackers through Vox amps is OK in my book.

61. JEFF BUCKLEY - Grace
Does the name Phil Ochs ring a bell?

62. FLEETWOOD MAC - Rumours
About right. Overplayed. I still like "Go Your Own Way", though....

63. MOBY - Play
Yawn.

64. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
I'm really just starting to listen deeply to the Chili Peppers now, so I can't comment on which of their albums grabs me. Some of their stuff is pretty cool, some of the rest is nasty.

65. THE POLICE - Synchronicity
Good stuff, but overplayed.

66. JONI MITCHELL - Blue
Yawn.

67. CURTIS MAYFIELD - Superfly
Where's "People Get Ready"?

68. ELVIS PRESLEY - The Sun Sessions
Yup.

69. OUTKAST - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Nope.

70. PULP - Different Class
Dunno it.

71. KRAFTWERK - Trans-Europe Express
Bleep blorp.

72. MASSIVE ATTACK - Blue Lines
Quien?

73. BECK - Odelay
Yawn.

74. STEVIE WONDER - Songs in the Key of Life
A classic. It was overplayed back in the day, but it's a cool listen now.

75. KATE BUSH - Hounds of Love
Yawn.

76. TALKING HEADS - Fear of Music
Great stuff.

77. EMINEM - The Marshall Mathers LP
No. A thousand times no.

78. MARVIN GAYE - What's Going On
Top 10, easily. Always in heavy rotation with me.

79. GEORGE MICHAEL - Faith
Yawn.

80. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER - The Original Movie Soundtrack
It's grown on me over the years. About right in the rankings, IMO.

81. PRIMAL SCREAM - Screamadelica
Who?

82. JOHN COLTRANE - A Love Supreme
Coltrane is an intense listen, and I really have to be in the mood for him.

83. LOVE - Forever Changes
Great stuff. Top 15.

84. PAUL SIMON - Graceland
Blecch.

85. NICK DRAKE - Five Leaves Left
Nope.

86. MEAT LOAF - Bat Out of Hell
I love the Bruce meets Phil bombast of this record. Personal favorite "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth"

87. DUSTY SPRINGFIELD - Dusty in Memphis
Great stuff.

88. DE LA SOUL - 3 Feet High and Rising
Who?

89. THE STROKES - Is this It
Mneh.....

90. MADNESS - One Step Beyond...
Ditto.

91. ROBBIE WILLIAMS - I've Been Expecting You
Saying "ditto" again would be merely boring and declasse.

92. NEIL YOUNG - After the Gold Rush
Great stuff.

93. PUBLIC ENEMY - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Not my speed.

94. BLONDIE - Parallel Lines
Good stuff. Saw them back in '78 or so at Belmont Racetrack - good show. I always cracked up at their cover of Randy and The Rainbows "Denise".

95. THE EAGLES - Hotel California
Overrated.

96. JAMES BROWN - Sex Machine
Should be higher in the rankings.

97. THE STREETS - A Grand Don't Come for Free
Who?

98. DEXY'S MIDNIGHT RUNNERS - Searching for the Young Soul Rebels
"Come On Eileen". And what else?

99. ROD STEWART - Every Picture Tells a Story
The Faces, man. great stuff.

100. The HUMAN LEAGUE - Dare!
Oh for crying out loud.....

When you come to a fork in the road, take it

2005-04-19T09:15:00.000-04:00

In one of those, goes around, comes around things, Esteemed Client (you know, the one up in that commonwealth, er, state that perpetually elects a Kennedy of their choice) may be doing a full-blown look at their IT strategy (about farking time if you ask me), so since I've got some experience with them, I may get the nod to lead this. Not looking forward to it, as there's some travel involved to other locations, but hey, the only difference between myself and a call girl in these matters is that the call girl is frequently more articulate.

My other current client, a bank in an area known for beaches, is about to make a major misstep with a system designed to upgrade and support a lot of their key processes. Said system doesn't have a terribly long track record with big banks, and most of its installations are in very small outfits in very out of the way places. The risk factors are all but screaming here, yet the bank's very confident that their selection process picked the best candidate (guaranteed if they weren't, someone's head would have rolled already), so someone's got to make it work. It's a mid eight figure project, so it's not as if they're trying to do this on the cheap (although there was a disconcerting amount of verbiage about how this could be rolled out in a Wintel environment if required....), but these guys are going to need a lot of hand-holding on this one.

Michael Jackson To Sell Beatles Catalog - Except For "This Boy".....

2005-04-17T22:37:00.000-04:00

Forbes of course has a more cogent explanation of Mr. Jackson's financials than the tabloid screaming. The encumbrance on the Sony/ATV catalog (aka The Beatles catalog) isn't due until the end of this year, the current crisis is predicated on Jackson's own publishing outfit, Mijac.

And won't someone, please, please make this trial get off the news and talk shows.....

Yes, I know I've been somewhat remiss in my duties as a blogger over the last week, however, I've had a boatload of stuff happening, and something had to give, not to mention my muse has somewhat left me due to just a whole bunch of unrelated crap that doesn't bear mentioning (yet) in the blog. Just leave it at everything's OK by me, but my available bandwidth and my inclination to post was just at a minimum for the last week.

One totally cool thing happened on Saturday that did pick up my mood. I've been sitting in with a second band, and we've been puttering around trying to put a set list together. My dear friend and bandmate from my primary band has also been sitting in, and he was goofing around on an A to D chord progression, and we ended up kicking the band into Van Morrison's "Domino". It's been ages since I've listened to Van, I probably turned off because every oldies station plays "Brown Eyed Girl" ad nauseum, but damn, I had a blast playing "Domino". Great song. I usually vacillate between "Domino" and "Jackie Wilson Said" for my favorite Van Morrison song, but I guess I've made my decision (at least for the moment). And yes, we played "Brown Eyed Girl", and you know, I really got off on that one as well. A bit of distance did wonders for me on that one (it's also a lot cooler to play it yourself than listening to some station where you know the next song is either going to be "Judy In Disguise", "Take A Letter Maria" or "Sugar Sugar").

I had to do a fair amount of video editing recently, and I ended up downloading Ulead Media Studio's 30 day free trial version to A/B against Pinnacle Studio. No question, Ulead has a lot of neat features, but for a single camera shoot that doesn't require a lot of fanciness in the finished product, I'd still go with Pinnacle Studio. I was able to cut about 3 hours of raw video footage down to a 90 minute finished film in about 3 hours (most of which was just getting the cuts and transitions right), and it simply worked. It took another 30 minutes to do the titles and menus, and I hit the render button (it took the High Altar about 4 1/2 hours to render the video and get the DVD image ready). I really have to find a couple of hours to sit down and play with Ulead with the same raw source material (shot on my new Mini-DV cam) and see if I can get the same product out (I have my notes on my edit points on a bunch of sticky notes, so it's a fairly simple matter to get the same cuts), but for the type of video shoots I do (fairly infrequent, single camera), Pinnacle is hard to beat for KISS.

Ecce Blogdom

2005-04-15T09:25:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, like most bloggers, I get hit with writer's block, and today is no exception. This week has been a real roller coaster on a lot of fronts, and in prioritizing my time I've got little left for reflection to create incisive posts, and frankly, other than immediate business stuff that's interesting me I'm a bit burned out at looking at the yentasphere. Oh, I have a bit of bile saved up, it's just a matter of finding the time.

That said, I was a bit annoyed that Mr. Bush came out this AM against the new regulations requiring passports to enter the US from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, etc. I'm rather sure that it's an easy matter for a bad guy to procure what is currently acceptable to enter the US from those jurisdictions, and as such, I fear that we've got some major bad actors already in place through those entry points. Don't get me wrong, I generally approve highly of the president, but I think there's a bit of pandering to two constituencies here that could adversely impact all of us. Excedrin headache #436.....

I'm baaaack...

2005-04-14T07:59:00.000-04:00

Lots of administrivia and client issues have conspired to keep me from blogging for the past couple of days, so I've been pretty much incommunicado. Needless to say, enough's been going on for tons of commentary, however, I've only got a few minutes to dash today's entry off.

The recent Comcast broadband outages have proven just how bad their first level tech support is. No, I don't have them, but a lot of friends and family do, and needless to say after their frustrating encounters with tech support I was deluged with pages and calls on what to do. A few DNS changes, a few Treewalk installations, everyone's happy (except for those folks who had an outage caused by a downed ATTBI router and the shmucks on first level support telling them to reboot their cable modems as if that was going to fix the problem).

RIP Johnnie Johnson. For those of you who don't know the name, Johnnie was Chuck Berry's pianist on his classic Chess sides, and played with him until the mid-70s. Johnnie was allegedly the inspiration for "Johnnie B. Goode" and as recently as a few years ago actually claimed co-authorship of some of Berry's classics. The judge in the case ruled against Johnson, saying that too much time had passed to determine the facts in the case. He was awesome in "Hail Hail Rock 'N Roll", that wondrous celebration of Berry's music (which is criminally unavailable in any home video format at the moment; contrast that with the newly schwanger Mrs. Federline, who has fifteen, count 'em, fifteen DVD titles available at Amazon). Most interesting, consider that most of Berry's classics are recorded in piano keys (B flat and E flat), not guitar keys (A and D) as most often played by covering guitarists. Johnnie Johnson's influence, friends. Coincidentally, Chuck Berry doesn't travel with a band, preferring to use pickup musicians provided by the promoters at his concerts. These musicians are often flummoxed by Berry's choice of keys for his songs.....

Short Shrift Tuesday

2005-04-12T08:35:00.000-04:00

Business stuff overwhelms me today. I just knocked out a superficial gap analysis for the First Voodoo Bank, and they're looking for a quick and dirty solution to their problem (read as cheap) so that they can proceed with their new project, which I've cheerily code-named DoomedToFail. Supposedly they've got a budget for this thing in the mid eight figures (maybe for all of the IT in the bank, but just for this project, I frankly doubt it - I figure at the outside 3 million, more likely 2). Oh well, it keeps them on their toes, that's for sure.

A Sad Visit Today

2005-04-11T15:40:00.000-04:00

I happened to be downtown today, and walked over to Ground Zero. It's been a while since I've been there, and I had to stand for a few minutes to take in the enormity of it. All I could do was silently say Kaddish for the victims.

Forgive me if I'm a bit tongue-tied, as the sight of the pit always chokes me up.

Back to normal posts tomorrow.

Offline for the weekend

2005-04-09T16:38:00.000-04:00

Lots of stuff doing, combined with a bad cold, so I'll be back to blogging after the weekend. Late post on Monday due to loads of business commitments.

Commerce, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.

2005-04-08T11:21:00.000-04:00

Blogger's been astonishingly peripatetic today, and their only suggestion is to clear the cookies in my browser. I hate to point it out, but there are actually some very useful cookies in my browser that I really don't feel like zapping (more out of sheer laziness than anything else) but it's simple enough to walk over to another computer here to get this done.

Today's very eloquent post, which I made the mistake of composing in Blogger's default interface, was nicely lunched when I hit "Save As Draft". I know, I know, do it offline in Word or some such, then paste it in, but the muse hit me suddenly and I was off and running before I realized I was riding bareback. Yuck. The post even had some cool 4, 7 and 8 letter words, to indicate how pissed I was. Oh well. Tomorrow's another day...

A bit of a Chinese Fire Drill has come up, where a colleague has found himself having to present to a bank in an area far better known for beaches than finance, and I've been asked to identify some deficiencies in what the bank is intending to do with its latest set of toys. Said identification of deficiencies may need to be done over the weekend, and of course I've got company who will be royally insulted if I actually work while they're here, so I find myself in a bit of a bind. Then again, it's blatantly obvious how said bank is about to screw up, so it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to write up the bad news, so I just might get up early on Sunday and get it over with. I need to face off with the CIO of a seriously major bank on Monday morning (totally unrelated) so I have to be focused on that, and I really don't want to be bothered with First Bank of Voodoo Witch Doctors when I've got a major player to deal with.

For your amusement, check out this article about an advertiser's confessions about using adware.

A 'liberal' is someone who presses for motorcycle helmet laws, and then bemoans the shortage of donor organs

2005-04-07T08:45:00.000-04:00

Today's NY Daily News notes that 50 Cent, whoever the hell he or she or it is, now has four records in the Top 10, and is closing in on the Beatles' legendary chart monopolization in 1964. Compare:

For week ending April 9, 2005:
1. Candy Shop - 50 Cent featuring Olivia
2.Since U Been Gone - Kelly Clarkson
3. Hate It or Love It - The Game featuring 50 Cent
4. Obsession (No es Amor) - Frankie J featuring Baby Bash
5. Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day
6. Disco Inferno - 50 Cent
7. Let Me Love You - Mario
8. Caught Up - Usher
9. How We Do - The Game featuring 50 Cent
10. Rich Girl - Gwen Stefani featuring Eve

For week ending April 4, 1964:
1. Can't Buy Me Love - The Beatles
2. Twist and Shout - The Beatles
3. She Loves You - The Beatles
4. I Want to Hold Your Hand - The Beatles
5. Please Please Me - The Beatles
6. Suspicion - Terry Stafford
7. Hello, Dolly! - Louis Armstrong
8. Shoop Shoop Song - Betty Everett
9. My Heart Belongs Only to You - Bobby Vinton
10. Glad All Over - Dave Clark Five

Notice that three of 50 Cent's top 10 entries are collaborations. I cheerfully admit to not knowing a single song on today's charts, unless "Disco Inferno" is a remake of the old Saturday Night Fever chestnut. Tell the truth, though, other than the Fabs in the 1964 chart, there wasn't that much great stuff. Terry Stafford was a mere Elvis pastiche, Louis Armstrong had much better stuff than that ghastly show tune, and Bobby Vinton, well 'nuff said.

Oh Goody. The Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator.....

2005-04-06T08:24:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Broadband Reports, we report the following from Court Briefs:

A class action lawsuit claims that the Defendants are involved in installing "spyware" on millions of computers without the computer owners' consent, utilizing it to track the Internet browsing habits of the owners and then send them intrusive targeted "pop-up" ads. Plaintiff Stephen Sotelo, individually and on behalf of all persons similarly situated, sues Directrevenue, LLC, DirectRevenue Holdings, LLC, Betterinternet, LLC, Byron Udell & Associates, Inc., d/b/a Accuquote, aQuantive, Inc., and John Does 1-100.
The Complaint claims that the Defendants, who are allegedly either members or advertising supporters of the Internet "spyware" industry, have unlawfully used and damaged many individuals' computers to make money for themselves, while willfully disregarding the computer owners' rights to use and enjoy their personal property.
Defendant DirectRevenue allegedly deceptively downloaded "harmful and offensive" spyware to the Plaintiffs' computers which tracked their Internet use, invaded their privacy and damaged their computers. Relying on DirectRevenue's spyware as the key to getting inside Plaintiffs' computers and learning their Internet browsing habits, Defendants Aquantive and AccuQuote allegedly bombard the Plaintiffs' computers with intrusive advertisements. (...)
DirectRevenue allegedly engages in "uniformly deceptive misconduct" to secretly install its software onto consumers' computers. It allegedly bundles its spyware into other legitimate software which is available to be downloaded for "free" on the Internet, such as a video game. When the consumer installs that "free" game, he or she allegedly simultaneously (but unknowingly) downloads DirectRevenue spyware bundled into the game being downloaded, without consenting to the installation of that software.
The Defendant then allegedly bombard users' computers with ads that constantly "pop up" over whatever web page a user is viewing. The ads are allegedly sent in a manner that breaches the security of affected computers through bypassing commonly-used "pop-up" blocker software, designed to stop ads like those sent by the Defendants. The Complaint quotes an estimate by Newsweek magazine that DirectRevenue may have as many as 1.5 billion advertising impressions (i.e., pop-ups) per month. If a computer infected with the spyware is viewing music-related Internet sites, the spyware sends a signal of such activity back to DirectRevenue, which then allegedly targets the computer user with advertisements from competing music companies.
Some of these ads allegedly deceptively give the user the appearance that there is a "Security Alert" being sent by the user's computer itself or from Microsoft Windows, which states that "Spy Software may be installed in your Computer." DirectRevenue allegedly claims access to 12 million computers in the U.S.
The spyware allegedly destroys other software programs on a computer, and it and the ads send allegedly cause computers to slow down, take up bandwidth over an Internet connection, use up memory on a computer, utilize pixels and screen space on monitors, and frustrate computer users. The software and pop-up ads allegedly decrease productivity by requiring that hours be spent figuring out how to get them off of a computer, closing ads, and waiting for a slower machine to operate.
Class action status is sought on behalf of all persons or entities who had BetterInternet install spyware on their computers located in Illinois on or after April 1, 2002 and who had advertisements sent to their computers as a result. (...)

The complaint can be read in its entirety here.

As to whether this action will be effective, it's anyone's guess, but I assume that "BetterInternet" (a euphemism that ranks with the best of 'em) and DirectRevenue have shielded themselves from any US legal action, or are prepared to bug out if they are not. The only thing that will stop this sort of thing happening is meaningful penalties for the advertisers.

I Know, It's Henry's Company And He Can Sponsor If He Wants To

2005-04-05T11:16:00.000-04:00

According to Yahoo,

Universal Studios has sold naming rights to its Universal Amphitheatre concert venue to Gibson Guitar Corp. in a 10-year deal valued at more than $14 million, the companies announced Monday.

The naming rights agreement is part of a wider deal that includes putting the Gibson name in other parts of the park and in sales and marketing materials, the companies said.

(snip)

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But sources familiar with the agreement said it calls for Gibson to pay a little more than $1 million per year for a total of between $14 million and $15 million.

Gibson will get a new skybox in the arena, its name on employees' uniforms and branding on the Universal Studios backlot tram tour.

A Gibson Guitar Garden will also be built and be used to honor artists and host visitors.

Please tell me how this is going to increase sales when Henry's pissed off most, if not all of his high-end dealers.

Let's see, $200 price increase on a Les Paul standard, figure they only have to sell 70K of them to pay for this Geschaftvergnügen.....

Wit, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out

2005-04-05T08:39:00.000-04:00

Mojo Magazine, that paragon of hipness that wastes space in your local Barnesandborders has come out with its idea of the Top 10 Rock Films, which I present for your edification:

1. This Is Spinal Tap
2. The Last Waltz
3. A Hard Day's Night
4. Gimme Shelter
5. The Wall
6. Ray
7. The Filth And The Fury
8. Quadrophenia
9. Westway To The World
10. Help!

Of course, any such "Best Of" or"Top Ten" list is an incredibly subjective affair, with of course Von Finnagle's Corollary being applied, to wit, "The are at least n+1 opinions for every n lower digestive orifices in any given discussion"), therefore a touch of observation is in order.

I don't suppose that any rock fan could or would quibble with the top four films being in those slots, although of course their relative rankings would differ given preferences (obviously in my case AHDN is #1, and to be brutally honest about it, I haven't listened to or seen "The Last Waltz" in ages, as there's a lot of soporific stuff in it to counterbalance the great moments). I still haven't gotten around to seeing "Ray" yet; I saw the man himself in Las Vegas about 12 years ago and still marvel at the performance, so any biopic might be a letdown, yet my cognoscenti friends tell me I'll enjoy it, so it gets a tentative OK from me. The Sex Pistols and Clash films are curious entries, and I'd probably drop them from this list. I'd probably replace them with "The Kids Are Alright" and the Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense".

"The Wall" probably wouldn't be included, as it's not my favorite Pink Floyd album, I find Geldof annoying, and it's just too contrived. If "The Kids Are Alright" replaced one of the other films, I'd drop "Quadrophenia" (not because I don't like the film, it's just that I'd probably consider the overview provided by "Kids" to be a better inclusion). "Help!" is problematic, in that as much as I love it, and it is really the prototype for every music video ever seen, it's just not as good as AHDN as a film. I would probably replace that with "The Concert For George" if I had to keep to a top 10 format.

But then, some of the more egregious omissions really invalidate using a Top 10 format - consider the following, all very likely candidates for any such list:

Monterey Pop
Woodstock
Wattstax
Standing In The Shadows Of Motown
The Buddy Holly Story
Elvis' 1968 Comeback Special (OK, OK, it's a TV show, but still, you've got to have something from EP, and if you leave it to the average Elvis fan, you'd probably get "Roustabout" or some such nonsense)

Saigon........Sh*t

2005-04-04T07:44:00.000-04:00

A very busy weekend, combined with a head cold and other early morning blues and greens are already making today an iffy proposition. On top of it all, I was informed last night that I'm expecting company next weekend, an occasional houseguest of the in-law persuasion who can be a bit difficult. I'm already preparing my diplomatic headache to go along with the two-Napoxen variety I've got now. Tomorrow's not going to be fun either.

CA Rethinks Claria

2005-04-03T08:04:00.000-04:00

Before anything, the life and works of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II should be celebrated and commemorated. He deserves the highest of honors, to be remembered as a good man. The man was a force for good.

Last Tuesday I noted Computer Associates' temporary (with a heavily implied quotes around the temporary) delisting of some of Claria (f/k/a Gator)'s foistware. A post by Eric Howes on Broadband Reports brings the good news that not only has CA reinstated the foistware in question, it has also relabeled other Claria products as full-blown spyware. Eric's observations are quoted below:

Still worse for Claria, in a number of cases the products that CA already knew about have received updated classifications that are more damning than they were before.Here's a summary of the updates, changes, and additions to the Claria
products included in CA Pest Patrol's definitions:
* Dashbar was: Adware now: Spyware/Toolbar/BHO
* Date Manager was: Adware now: Adware & Spyware
* PrecisionTime: was: Adware now: Adware & Spyware
* Weatherscope was: Adware/Home Page Hijacker/Search Hijacker now: Adware & Spyware
* WebSecureAlert was: Adware now: Adware & Spyware
* Claria/Gator/GAIN was: Adware/Search Hijacker now: Adware & Spyware
* GotSmiley (new) was: n/a now: Adware & Spyware
* Screenscenes (new) was: n/a now: Adware & Spyware
* eWallet (new) was: n/a now: Adware & Spyware new

Looks like the boys from Islandia have grown some cojones. (Well, they always had them, they just used 'em the wrong way). Their criteria for evaluating crapware can be found here (I hesitate to call it a scorecard since I don't see the weighting or scoring criteria, however, it's a darned good listing).

"Day By Day" on Sandy Berger

2005-04-02T08:43:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Day By Day.

Harangue, n. A speech by an opponent, who is known as an harangue-outang

2005-04-02T08:32:00.000-05:00

Much ado today, so little time for ranting.

Biggest rant is the AMT. This is an issue that's going to bite the Republicans in the ass in '06 and '08 unless something is done about it. We all know the history, how it was designed to "close tax loopholes for the rich", but frankly, it's been biting me for years and I hardly fall into that category. Salaries of average professionals are in the range that gets snagged by the AMT, and the threshold gets lower every year. Not that the Dems will do any better about it, it's not in their interest, after all, they've got to fund their Commune-ity (for the folks from Noumea, the spelling is quite intentional; I figure New Caledonia is probably the only place one can make a joke about in these PC days) Development Programs and other such nonsense. I happened to be chatting with a dear friend who is an arch-nemesis (politically speaking) about this and he was likewise totally fuming over the bite taken by the AMT. Libertarianism looks much more attractive after getting back from the accountant at this time of year, let me tell you.....

From this morning's Sulzberger entity on the proposed extension of the Flushing line to the Javits center:

The authority's board faced tremendous pressure to justify its acceptance of about $210 million from the Jets over the offer of about $400 million upfront from Cablevision, the owner of Madison Square Garden. Members of the board who had rarely, if ever, mentioned the No. 7 extension in the past described the project as top priority.

"It's very important that the No. 7 line get built," the board's vice chairman, David S. Mack, said. "That would be jeopardized by the M.S.G. bid."

It's pretty obvious that the people running transportation in this area don't understand what a traffic matrix is. Who the heck is going to use two billion dollars worth of subway extension on days when there isn't a football game? Maybe a couple of thousand heading to the Javits Center? Don't make me laugh. The out-of-towners going there will cab it, it's in their T&E budget for whatever event is there (assuming of course that any real event gets held there, exhibitors don't want to pay for the unions and the mob). Football games? Who holds the season tickets? Manhattanites regard football as hopelessly declasse, so it'll be people from the burbs and the boroughs. The bridge and tunnel crowd isn't going to wait for public transportation on a Sunday schedule (even though there might be extra trains on the 7 line to the stadium, there won't necessarily be extra trains on the LIRR or Metro North, or for that matter the other subway lines), so why not dump twenty or thirty thousand cars into midtown Manhattan?

Day By Day

2005-04-01T07:59:00.000-05:00

Another great Day By Day commentary from Chris Muir.

Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it

2005-04-01T07:26:00.000-05:00

The rant du jour is occasioned by my new Mini-DV camcorder. I had lots of points on American Express' Membership Rewards and decided to redeem a chunk of them for a camcorder (my old Hi-8 just about having given up the ghost). No big deal, a nice new DV camcorder would make my life a bit easier in transferring stuff over to the computer for editing, and it had a few nice features to make life interesting. The only problem was that like every other camcorder, it comes with a battery suitable for about 30 minutes of doing anything, and being the natural procrastinator that I am, I had an action item (somewhere around 629th on the priority list) to pick up an extra battery or two for the thing.

An e-mail earlier this week from a friend requesting assistance videotaping an event on Sunday forced my hand, and when I had a few spare minutes today, I found myself in my local CircuitBuy looking for an extra battery. Imagine my chagrin that the battery was not in stock. A quick trip over to Radio Schlock, and no cigar. A camera store chain's local outlets got me nowhere. There were plenty of OEM batteries and clones out on the web, but by the time I had gotten to check them out, I was closed out from getting it tomorrow. One store in Brooklyn had them in stock (according to their web site at least) but since they're a frummie place, I would've had to have gotten there pretty darned early to pick the thing up and make it back in time for an afternoon commitment I have tomorrow. Not to mention that I trust the inventory reports on those frummie electronics shop web sites about as far as I can throw a Sun E15K, so I'd have to wait until 10am tomorrow to call and see if they really did have one in stock, and plead with them to hold one for me until I got there (best case, 2 hour drive; forget about the return trip - I'd never make my afternoon commitment with Friday traffic). Since that was a non-starter, I figured I'd try PC Connection, which I knew took orders until 2am for overnight shipping. By pure dumb luck, they had the high capacity battery I was looking for in stock, and eighty something dollars later, I'm waiting for the battery to come from some indeterminate overnight shipper.

I should expand the story a bit. One local camera shop did indeed have a battery that fit my camcorder, however, it was the same low-Ma job that came with the camcorder, and since it was an OEM battery, he wanted a really unreasonable amount of money for the battery (about $125). Since I didn't want to be caught totally with my pants down, I sprung for it (although not with pleasure - I just got the news from my tax preparer that the AMT had bitten me yet again, and my anticipated refund was going to be far smaller than I was hoping for) and it sits here on my desk, waiting for its compadre and the event on Sunday afternoon.

The funny thing of course is that said camcorder is not a current model according to CircuitBuy and RadioSchlock, however, its importer does indeed recognize its existence (unlike a couple of ancient cameras I have from Bell & Howell and Polaroid, which are orphans, or renumbered specials) and it's at least nominally available. The problem here is that the batteries in question are of a different form factor than anything else the importer brings in, and the garden variety batteries readily available from my local friendly retailers don't stand a prayer of fitting. My camera, however, is identical in form factor to the quote unquote current models and it wouldn't have been a huge stretch to keep the existing battery form factor. I know, planned obsolescence keeps the EPS up there...

I suppose had I not been such a cheapskate and actually gone and bought a new camcorder I wouldn't have had this problem (Heinlein was right - TANSTAAFL) but then again, at least it's something tangible for all the grief I've put up with to run my Amex point level so high (could've been a lot worse, I guess). Then again, who knows what This Year's Model will be...

Some minor local aggravation on top of it all - not worthy of mention here other than in passing - yet. I suppose I'm going to be an eminent grouch this weekend. And for crying out loud, I couldn't even come up with a decent April Fool's post. Grrrr...

A Value-Subtracted Post

2005-03-31T10:47:00.000-05:00

RIP Terri Schiavo. Presumably the posturing will continue from all concerned parties, however, I doubt the affair could've been handled any more distastefully than it was.

Administrivia continues to consume the day, however, it hasn't turned out to be as odious as I predicted. The true stress comes back on Monday, full force...

Since I have three relatively urgent things to do in addition to the administrivia, I shall be somewhat loquacious tomorrow instead of today. Depending on my mood, I might even try to be funny - I did manage to be somewhat believable in one April Fool's prank some years ago, but it would be incredibly tasteless now to repeat same (don't even ask why).

Another Great Day By Day

2005-03-30T14:59:00.000-05:00

Once again, Chris Muir hits one out of the park. Check out more at Day By Day.

We're Back

2005-03-30T14:27:00.000-05:00

Blogger finally put up a post on status.blogger.com saying that the system dyspepsia of the last couple of days was caused by a bad kernel upgrade rolled out across the infrastructure (uhhh, hello, have we heard of relatively obscure concepts called integration and load testing?), so a rollback has gotten us back to previous status quo. I didn't realize they were using Tomcat as an application server until I saw some of the errors generated over the last couple of days, but then again it makes sense. The license fees for WebLogic or WebSphere would kill them on a scale such as this.

Some interesting talk on Broadband Reports yesterday of the UN trying position the ITU to take over some of ICANN's role, you know, for a more global approach to things. Of course, if the ITU weren't part of the UN, there probably would be more support for them getting involved, as they've done much good over the years (and they long predate that cesspool on Turtle Bay, one should remember), however, the very fact that the UN has administrative authority over the ITU nixes the idea as far as we're concerned. I mean, look at how well they've done in Darfur and with Oil For Food, for crying out loud? (Then again, most of the General Assembly is populated with rattle shakers who believe in evil spirits, for whom anything more abstract than voice mail is an indication of a conspiracy against them, so what do you expect?). Reminds me of one of the more delicious jokes out there about New York City's bid for the Olympics. The next time they tell you how easy it will be to get to the new stadium by the new extension of the number 7 line on the IRT, ask the MTA how it's doing with the Second Avenue Subway (for the non-cognoscenti, the Second Avenue Subway has been planned for something like sixty-five years, and actually has all of about eight blocks' worth dug. The MTA has decided in its infinite wisdom to reroute the trains proceeding downtown over to the Lexington Avenue IRT somewhere in the vicinity of 59th Street, rendering the line completely useless).

Administriva consumes the next two days, so I shall be a touch less loquacious than usual.

In the folding like a cheap camera department....

2005-03-29T12:40:00.000-05:00

Never one of my favorite companies to deal with, Computer Associates has dropped the ball in the spyware wars:

CA's Vendor Appeals page carries the news, which indicates that all Claria products - including Dashbar, Date Manager, Gator/GAIN, GotSmiley, and Precision Time, have been temporarily removed from their detection database pending further analysis
(snip)

While Pest Patrol is on Claria hiatus, they've failed to offer users any sort of removal tool, instead - as Eric Howes notes - offer a dead link to removal instructions (now fixed). This of course is assuming Pest Patrol users make the product's Vendor Appeals page part of their daily reading in the first place.

Links courtesy of Broadband Reports.

It Ain't Me Babe

2005-03-29T07:58:00.000-05:00

Blogger's been especially peripatetic over the last day, seemingly not publishing, then double publishing entries. Lots of timeouts and Java exceptions reported. Rather than fight it as I did all day yesterday, I'll just watch the situation today, and post if it seems to be fixed. I'm surprised that status.blogger.com hasn't said anything about it (doesn't say much for their monitoring capabilities, unless it's very localized, in which case take the affected server[s] out of the DNS rotation). Beastly bore sometimes.

Most Inept Phisher Award Du Semaine

2005-03-28T15:58:00.000-05:00

Goes to this idiot trying to phish Paypal information.

A quote from the e-mail:

Dear PayPal user!
At 28.01.2005 our company has lost a number of accounts in the system during the database maintenance

Notice the exclamation point and the lack of personalization for starters. The date format is European, and notice how they say "At", not "On". Likely of Eastern European origin, notice the unnecessary "the" before "database maintenance", very characteristic of Russian and other Eastern European speech patterns.

But take a look at this whopper of a domain registration!

Domain Name.......... securessl-paypal.com
Creation Date........ 2005-02-07
Registration Date.... 2005-02-07
Expiry Date.......... 2006-02-07
Organisation Name.... Don Corleone
Organisation Address. 3357 E. Covenanter Dr. Apt. 7
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. Bloomington
Organisation Address. 47401
Organisation Address. IN
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
Admin Name........... Don Corleone
Admin Address........ 3357 E. Covenanter Dr. Apt. 7
Admin Address........
Admin Address........ Bloomington
Admin Address........ 47401
Admin Address........ IN
Admin Address........ UNITED STATES
Admin Email.......... xjust@securessl-paypal.com
Admin Phone.......... +1.219680399425
Admin Fax............
Tech Name............ MSN NOC
Tech Address......... One Microsoft Way
Tech Address.........
Tech Address......... Redmond
Tech Address......... 98052
Tech Address......... WA
Tech Address......... UNITED STATES
Tech Email........... MSN-PA-TECH@msn.com
Tech Phone........... +1.4258828080
Tech Fax.............
Name Server.......... pdomns1.msn.com
Name Server.......... pdomns2.msn.com

The registrar for this outfit is Melbourne IT, Ltd. DBA Internet Names Worldwide. You mean to tell me that no one in that company recognizes "Don Corleone"? Puhleeeeze.

LSP-Fix Added To Security Links

2005-03-28T14:31:00.000-05:00

While not a security tool per se, LSP-Fix is useful for restoring the Winsock stack in the event it is farked during an adware removal. Please throw these folks a donation if you can.

Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher

2005-03-28T05:45:00.000-05:00

Major Investment Bank Madness consumes this week. It involves a cool project from my standpoint, with lots of computer horsepower and bandwidth (Accept No Substitute^TM), however, unfortunately, more of our Crack Sales Team is involved. I happened to run across one of these characters a couple of years ago, and we had a rather interesting meeting with said character and a C-level type. The C-level guy was very interested in hearing about my experiences at Stalag 13, and being a typical person in his position was uninterested in anything other than the matter at hand, to wit how Stalag 13 did certain things, how I helped them do it, and how I could help them do it. Crack Salesperson wanted to sell a much more lucrative product than your humble writer's knowledge, and was told to keep quiet and not bring up any other deals during the meeting, resulting in a hurt look. That deal was killed over an internal turf war, and I strongly suspect that said internal turf war is still going on. Fortunately, we do present One Face To The Customer (ahem) so that shouldn't affect perceptions all that much (I hope), but then again, Ich bin einfacher soldat in die gesellchaftkrieg....

Album du jour is Skip Regan's "Welcome To My Head", a cool little home-brewed album with lots of Hendrix-flavored licks. Especially recommended are the title track, "Into A Dream", "Spontaneous Combustion" and "Pain". It's got all your favorite out-of-phase Strat tones, univibe, wah, reverse effects and fuzz to give you an acid flashback.

Short Shrift Sunday

2005-03-27T09:19:00.000-05:00

To everyone celebrating Easter, my best wishes for a joyous holiday. Me, I've got a belated Purim party to go to this morning.

Interesting link of the day is from Carter Steel Guitars, with a 20 minute video on pedal steel guitar for 6-string players. Both Windows Media and Real formats (anyone still actually using Real Media for anything?), so pick your favorite format from the URL. While it isn't as in-depth as Bruce Bouton's instructional tape, I rather liked it as it put things into terms I understand as a standard guitar player.

Oddball note du jour is that I decided to check my startup entries with msconfig, and found a completely blank entry, yet the HijackThis log looked 100% OK, nothing I didn't recognize or couldn't find with Google. I wonder what could've caused it (alternate data stream in NTFS? The very thought scares me; you'd think someone would've come up with a tool that quickly points something like that out)? I know, switch the box to Linux and run Windoze in VMWare...... (actually, might make an interesting exercise to test out Acronis' bare metal restore, which I still haven't gotten around to. I must at least give it a try to a VMWare image....)

Quote With Some Comment Department

2005-03-26T09:22:00.000-05:00

From this morning's Sulzberger Entity editorial page:

Many of the problems that have tarnished the U.N.'s reputation in recent years have been self-inflicted, including the scandalous maladministration of the oil-for-food program and the sexual assaults committed by U.N. peacekeepers in Congo.

Pas des merde, Sherlock.

But the overriding problem has been Washington's virtually unremitting hostility. The United Nations simply cannot function effectively when it is being cold-shouldered by its most powerful member and largest financial contributor.

Uh, if they were being cold-shouldered, Con Edison would've turned off the lights and heat by now (not that there's anything wrong with that). Rather than pontificate, as the Times seems to think that actually works, we simply call it as we see it. The place is a cesspool inhabited by a bunch of third-world toadies who only want to settle their tribal grievances with weapons that produce fallout.

Not all of Mr. Annan's specific suggestions will be popular in Washington. But by helping to negotiate a strong international consensus behind a meaningful set of reform proposals, President Bush can give substance to his repeated vows to work more cooperatively with other nations in his second term.

You mean like la belle France?

For all of the Times' bashing of the US, they never seemed to read an article I saw in one of the other NY tabloids a couple of years ago. Since everybody seems to be wanting to come to the US to work and make their fortune, a couple of reporters started calling consulates of various third world cesspools to see what it would take to immigrate to their worthy paradises. Needless to say, the reactions were on the order of "you want to move to our country?????". Very few of them even had procedures in place for such a thing. And if you want to see just how generous and civilized the rest of the world is, try being a regular solid citizen and asking about immigration - you'll be very low priority. Put a keffiyah on, and you move to the top of the list.

As far as the French go, just consider the reason the Champs Elysees has trees planted on both sides of the street. The Germans can always march in the shade.....

Marxian Manifesto Madness

2005-03-25T08:29:00.000-05:00

Despite my near-certainty that no Attorneys General nor other political movers and shakers read these pages, I thought I would present the outline of a manifesto regarding adware that might possibly be useful for some realistic form of legislation down the road. Realistically of course, any such legislation would immediately cause a relocation of any corporate presence of adware "providers" away from the jurisdictions in question (presumably offshore), however, a bit of teeth in the legalisms around it might actually force some form of equitable resolution. To be brutally honest about it, some form of legitimate pervasive adware is likely, perhaps not inevitable, but advertisers will do anything to get their message across (been to a movie lately?) and while there's still time, the situation should be addressed through strong legislation (sure to be opposed by every marketing constituency) that would make things a bit less onerous on the end user.

First and foremost is identity. Any adware producer should clearly identify themselves, not only in any installation attempt, but there should be updated contact information in any adware control panel that will enable anyone to contact the adware provider, either in the business or technical domain. This must be complimented by strong controls on code-signing (are you listening Verisign and other CAs?) that verify the company is who they say they are, that any digital certificates issued to the company are short-lived and that there is an ongoing recertification process by the CA to continue to verify that the holder of any certificate is indeed reachable. This could of course be a win-win proposition, in that it would allow for increased fees to the CA or such other agency that would vouch for the adware provider's identity (perhaps Choicepoint?) , and that any truly legitimate provider of adware would be glad to pay for to establish that it's being constantly vetted. As to the overall economics of the situation, somebody will end up paying those fees (the advertisers of course) and as to whether it would remain economically viable is a matter of conjecture. The stick of course is that whoever issues any identity documents to an adware provider is on the hook for the adware provider's actions, and if they go rogue, the affiant will get hung for any damages incurred.

The matter of identity can't be overstated enough, as any adware component must be clearly indicated with a positive indication to the customer that they are installing adware from XYZ Company, and that they are going to receive adware as part of the bargain in getting whatever else they've been promised. There's been some legal talk here and there that clicking an OK button is indeed an electronic signature indicating affirmative consent, but of course given the penchant for the installers to put phrases such as "Required Update" and the like in bold on the installers, the average PEBKAC will merely click and not think about the consequences. I would think that something requiring an affirmative response would be much more appropriate, for example the technique used by some web sites of presenting a distorted set of letters and numbers that must be keyed in by the user in order to proceed or access content, or for that matter requiring the user to respond to an e-mail, where they would need to click an URL and again affirm their desire to install the adware. Again, win-win situation. The adware guys are protected as they have a record of affirmative actions taken by someone to actually get the thing installed on their PC, the end users have multiple chances to stop any installation, and even just doing nothing will abort it.

Adware should have a control panel visible to the user, be it in the system tray, some application, or even an applet in Control Panel (pardon me for sticking to the Windows paradigm for purposes of this discussion). This control panel should have the ability to turn ads on and off at the user's discretion. Of course, if there's a program such as a P2P client or other such nonsense that depends on that adware running, it of course should have the option of refusing to start or shutting down if the ad generator isn't running. Fair is fair, after all. If the PEBKAC desires the use of that program, he/she puts up with the ads. Said control panel should also provide for the complete uninstallation of the adware. That means everything, DLLs, config files, data caches, registry entries, you name it. The program should also be uninstallable through the standard mechanisms (Add/Remove Programs) and in addition, there should be instructions for manual removal if all else fails (the vast majority of people won't be able to use regsvr32 but if they have a friendly techie nearby there will at least be a step-by-step checklist available on how to get rid of the thing). Absolutely nothing must be done in a stealth manner, everything must be done through the highest-level APIs possible.

The concept of an independent code review for adware is appealing, but probably wouldn't fly just on the basis of trade secrets, but the thought of putting someone on the hook for the code analogously to Underwriters Labs for electrical equipment is appealing. The question is who would best be capable of doing such reviews, and what would such reviews entail. The purveyors of certifications such as TRUSTe, BetterWeb and WebTrust would probably be logical places to look first, but their own risk management rules would probably prohibit them from engaging in this "do no harm" certification, which of course would entail lots of integration testing in various configuration permutations. In essence, this would involve creating a new insurance product, but the carrot and stick would be carefully defined in such a way that any failures demonstrably linked to an adware product will have consequences for both the adware producer as well as its certifier/insurer/assurer. Needless to say I can easily envision no-fault laws quickly being drafted if such measures were taken.

The behavior of adware would need to be carefully defined. The Hippocratic paradigm of first doing no harm would be essential, so at least the following characteristics would have to be required of any adware program approved for general use:

Not to obscure or interfere with any other open programs on the desktop environment. Simply put, no windows for GM products obscuring your attempt to view the Ford site. Something along the lines of a small sticky note sized window (in a corner or a user-defined location), possibly flashing to get your attention (in the same manner as a program with an open dialog box might flash the taskbar) might be acceptable if unobtrusive enough
Not to transmit any identifiable URLs to a central database. I know it'll seriously undermine the data mining that they want to ahem, add value to their ahem service, but there may be session IDs, CGI parameters and the like that aren't stripped out when reporting. I would imagine that aggregated domain information would probably prove acceptable (I don't think that anyone would much care if adware said Joe Shlabotnik checked CNN eight times today, but a deep-dive into the URLs is bordering on unacceptable. Imagine checking your portfolio and having the URL reported to a central database and suddenly getting targeted investing spam.....
Not to hook the keyboard interrupt. Goes without saying, as you're dangerously close to a keylogger here, and not everything is for data mining purposes.
Limit the amount of ads served up. Even though they're getting increasingly longer on commercial TV, there should be a finite number of ads served up in any given time period. I would suggest that a maximum of one ad in ten minutes would probably be the absolute upper limit. Anything more will degenerate into annoyance or confusion for the user who might actually be trying to do something useful. Once an ad is dismissed, it should stay dismissed.
Allow types of ads and individual advertisers to be banned by the end user. Goes without saying, as ads for porno shouldn't be popping up when the kiddies want to see Mickey Mouse. Bans should be pervasive and cannot be lifted remotely by the adware provider.
No undocumented APIs should be used in the software or in its installation process. In other words, no rootkit installations.
There should be no obfuscation of the adware's location, filenames and registry keys. Filenames should not be randomly generated for purposes of frustrating removal or disabling the software. All GUIDs associated with the software shall be published so as to facilitate troubleshooting systems impacted by installation of the software.
There should be no changes or impairment to system function by the adware. Specific no-nos would include installation of hosts file entries designed to redirect legitimate traffic to affiliated adware sites, changes to the IP protocol stack, installation of any Browser Helper Objects, installation of dialers, installation of any toolset designed to limit the functionality of the system with respect to its status prior to the adware's installation, no attempts to "phone home" other than to pass non-identifiable aggregated data (an unlikely scenario, as the source IP addy will be quite visible on the receiving end, therefore it will still be somewhat identifiable), no attempts to download and install updates or upgrades to the adware without the express consent of a privileged system user, and no attempts to download or install any other adware or similar software

A quote unquote legitimate adware provider should be required to be an active participant in computer security efforts, as their systems do provide a new infection vector for various net nasties, and increasingly often, virus writers deliver adware as a payload in addition to their other nasties, so the onus should be placed on adware firms to cooperate with CERT and the like to provide uninstallers and other toolsets to facilitate any unintended installation of their software. Then again, those virus writers who are doing this sort of thing are delivering payloads from companies that are definitely operating on the shadier side of the curtain (iDownload, anyone?), so it leaves open the possibility of a "joe job" being done against an adware company that might indeed be playing by the rules.

I would imagine that some adware companies might actually approve of some of these suggestions, particularly the more visible ones such as Claria and Cydoor in order to legitimize their perception, and there have been some steps taken such as joining COAST (an anti-spyware consortium), but given the track records, there's a perception amongst the user community that this is a window-dressing tactic. The bottom feeders will of course operate on the outskirts of any legal framework imposed, and the marketing lobbyists will fight any such attempts to impose sanity on these cowboys with all of their considerable resources.

I'm shagged out from ranting so much.

And since the title of this prolonged squawk demands it, the one, the only....

Slightly Diluted Venom

2005-03-24T09:40:00.000-05:00

Line 6 are on my zoid-list due to their asking you to register to see their manuals. Not to belabor the point, but if you want to buy a product, access to the manual is an important pre-sales step, as it'll give the end-user a pretty good idea of what he or she's getting themselves into. I get enough spam that I can deal with the odd email from Line 6 (even though I specifically made sure to opt out from any obvious CRM stuff there), but I'm still annoyed that I had to give them the contact info just to take a look at a darn manual. I was specifically interested in two toys by Line 6, the Echo Park delay pedal (I have no need for a delay pedal given my Boss DD-20, but I'm not terribly happy with its reverse delay; the Echo Park had a pretty nifty reverse delay when I heard it at Guitar Center a few months back), and the Pro ProXT Live. I like the floorboard paradigm, and something with a bit more granularity on the settings than my Boss ME-50 might be just the ticket. Then again, it's $400, and the ME-50 has given me quite nice tones, and I already have a Pod 2.0 if I'm absolutely jonesing for amp emulation, so it seems like an unnecessary expense (especially since the ProXT Live includes a connection for the Variax, which I'm very unlikely to ever want).

I wanted to stay out of the Terri Schiavo maelstrom for the simple reason that a lot of people far more eloquent than I have expressed their opinions so adding to the noise level is unnecessary, however, it's bothered me to the point that I have to say something. Put simply, Jewish law and custom recognizes the concept of medical futility, however, the tradition is that all life, even one lived in pain, has intrinsic value. These are my values, and frankly, I haven't heard any convincing evidence that Terri is anything more than cognitively disabled, therefore I don't see a case of medical futility here. I might be wrong, and since all I'm getting is from every media source with its own agenda, I don't have enough information to make any judgment call other than a life is in danger, and that innocent life has an intrinsic value.

In the mild amusement factor department, Enterainment Weekly has enumerated their opinion of the 20 best Monty Python sketches. To be brutally honest, are these people on drugs, I mean, come on, Spanish Inquisition as #1? And Ministry of Silly Walks better than Dead Parrot? And what about The Bishop, or The North Minehead By-Election?

Finally, RIP Rod Price of Foghat.

Me Likey!

2005-03-23T14:52:00.000-05:00

New Shelby Cobra Mustang. 450 HP. Yep, Carroll Shelby's back where he belongs.

Drool.... (Torque, accept no substitute)

Now returning to our regularly scheduled curmudgeonliness.

Imbecility, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this work

2005-03-23T07:53:00.000-05:00

The loopholes of the Do Not Call list annoy me today, as I've received several calls from my bank this week trying to sell me their latest financial product. Although truth be told, I might have a slight interest in said product, I really dislike the sales methodology. The phone rings, and the caller introduces himself or herself as a representative of the bank. Having been the victim of an identity theft once, I carefully (and admittedly aggressively) question the caller and try to ascertain whether there's some sort of problem, but once I've thoroughly flustered the telemarketer, they launch into their script telling me all about Latest Financial Product that will cure halitosis and ensure reaching nirvana, and that it's all ready to go if I just merely confirm my address and some other... At which point we do a Dick Tracy cartoon-style "Hold everything please" and I quickly but firmly say, "Sorry, not interested" and hang up the phone. It's obvious that the script and process have been written to get some form of affirmative consent from people without their realizing they're committing to something, and when they call "Customer Care" (an expression rife with euphemism) they hear "But you said yes to our wonderful product....."

Reminds me of a friend who sent out an e-mail the other day that he was dropping AOL, and not two days later said he was back on the service. I inquired quizzically, and he said "Everything's negotiable". Customer retention at its finest.

For purposes of comparison, as well as a brief sanity check, I decided to try Webroot's online spyware scanner to see if it picked up anything missed by the AdAware/Spybot/MSFT AntiSpyware combination in force at the moment on the High Altar. It picked up about 60 cookies that had been missed by the previous three (nothing horrendous, but I was a bit suprised that the combination in place didn't pick them up). I've got SpySubtract running on two other machines here at Schloss Scheisse, but haven't tried it on the High Altar as I haven't seen a particular need for it - yet. I'll probably try it just to validate the observations from Webroot. I'm getting a bit paranoid about rootkits, and I've just tried RootkitRevealer from Sysinternals. The good thing was that MSFT AntiSpyware immediately picked up on RootkitRevealer's attempt to install a service (actually a good thing, as the spyware types have picked up on the executable name, so RootkitRevealer's service generates a random executable name). RootkitRevealer did a full scan of the running High Altar and came out clean, but the paranoid (read as "careful user") would do well to be vigilant. This lovely article at rootkit.com shows a fairly reasonable methodology for avoiding detection by RootkitRevealer. A Knoppix distro with this functionality would make me a lot more comfortable, but I guess that Strider GhostBuster will provide the equivalent, assuming it ever sees public distribution...

That Wall Street is a den of thieves is a belief that serves every unsuccessful thief in place of a hope in Heaven

2005-03-22T08:12:00.000-05:00

Administrivia and interviews taking up the day today. A client wants to check me out to manage an important project for them, so I have to put my best foot forward (which is a bit difficult in my case). Unfortunately, I didn't get to check out Acronis yet (I have to get an extra backup drive anyway, as data seems to be growing exponentially on the High Altar; I'm sorely tempted by that LaCie 1 TB external drive, but considering how I was burned by them before, I'll wait until Maxtor or another vendor I'm comfortable with has one before I jump into that level of storage - jeez, I remember when a Seagate 4096 was a big deal.....).

Looks like DirectRevenue are the latest foistware vendors to threaten SLAPP suits. Please support Eric Howes if you can....

I'll repost the following Blogcritics article I penned yesterday on the late, great Roy Buchanan.

I had just come home from a dreary day in junior high school in 1971 and flipped on the television for a quick look when I happened upon something completely unexpected on Channel 13. Our local public broadcasting station, as staid and frankly boring an outfit as one could imagine, having all of the hipness of an appendectomy, had some live rock gracing its airways. School books forgotten, I was fascinated by the taciturn guitarist playing a beat-up Fender Telecaster, coaxing some astonishing sounds out of it in ways that seemed even beyond what Page and Beck were doing. The show of course, was the now legendary "Introducing Roy Buchanan", commonly (and very incorrectly) known as "The World's Greatest Unknown Guitarist".

"Introducing" was a bit of a holy grail for me to find, as it was seemingly nowhere to be found. I frequented various record shows and conventions and came up with bootlegged copies of various items of interest from the sands of time but my mention of "Introducing" only induced blank stares from most of the purveyors in the dealers rooms at these shows. I began to doubt my memory, and let the matter fall by the wayside as other priorities took over. About two years ago, when perusing eBay for various items, on a whim, I searched for Roy Buchanan video, and I was delighted to find a VHS copy for sale. No Buy It Now, so I had to sit there and snipe for it, but less than a week later the tape popped up in my mailbox, and I was once again hooked.
The show had several distinct parts intercut, a rare visit home to Roy's parents in Pixley, California, which (somewhat disingenuously) tried to show his roots, a series of jams with influences and favorites, including Merle Haggard, Johnny Otis and Mundell Lowe (the latter playing an unbelievable duet with Roy on "Misty"), and a live concert staged at WNET's Manhattan studios that showcased Roy and his band at the time, the Snakestretchers. Future E-Streeter Nils Lofgren even joined Roy and the band for an extended jam on the show. The Snakestretchers were a bar band, first and foremost, a bit sloppy here and there, and a bit goofy as well (percussionist Marc Fisher's exaggerated movements make Ray Cooper's shtick seem sedate).

The music is what wows you in this show. Aside from the aforementioned "Misty", Roy shows off his gentler side on his parents' back porch with his Telecaster plugged into a small amp with an astonishing display of circle picking, pedal steel-inspired licks when playing along with Merle Haggard, "chicken pickin" while backing up a church service, plus his concert tours de force, "Sweet Dreams" and "The Messiah Will Come Again". "Sweet Dreams" takes the old Patsy Cline song to another plane, with its exquisite slow bends and volume swells, and "Messiah" runs from anguished country blues to Page-like excess, again with Roy's lightning neck runs, pinched harmonics and his uncanny ability to make the guitar seem like it was crying and talking. Timing concerns caused WNET to fade out "Messiah" on the broadcast, but every time it aired, the performance generated a lot of phone calls asking about this awesome guitarist.

Buchanan's career was very checkered, and other than his very first album, his records didn't really capture Buchanan's smoldering passion for playing. Most of his records were disjointed jams, and frankly, his singing was better left unheard. The recordings were corporate affairs, trying to capitalize on the "guitar hero" aspect of the times, but looking for something commercial, which truth be told, Buchanan wasn't. He was a player's player. I saw him on several occasions at places such as The Bottom Line and My Father's Place, with bands that were looser and sloppier than the Snakestretchers (if such a thing were possible). Roy could be a bit infuriating to watch if you were looking to hear only "Sweet Dreams" or "The Messiah Will Come Again", as he played whatever came into his head that evening, and maybe, if we were lucky we'd get one or the other (on one rare occasion we did get both pieces in the set), but as a guitarist sitting in the front row eagerly absorbing every note, you know you'd be challenged, frustrated and ultimately awed by seeing Roy in concert.

Roy's death is still the subject of conjecture, and to some extent his recorded legacy needs to be managed better. I would imagine that releasing this and perhaps some of the other extant footage of him would go a long way to acknowledging this legendary player's talents.

Finally, RIP Bobby Short. I never cared for the cabaret scene, it was always a bit stuffy and the old Tin Pan Alley stuff can grate upon occasion, but when you acquire an appreciation for a crooner in that vein, be it Sinatra, Tony Bennett or Bobby Short, some of that stuff can be incredibly relaxing and uplifting to listen to.

Maximum Short Shrift

2005-03-21T08:52:00.000-05:00

Various and sundry tasks are keeping me busy today and tomorrow, so likely very little in the ranting department at this point. Action item on the agenda for today is to check out Acronis True Image, as it's got good word of mouth, and I'm always looking for a better alternative to Norton Ghost. I like their "bare metal" restore paradigm. Somewhat interestingly, there was a very noticeable drop in spam over the last couple of weeks, but it's come back with a vengeance over the weekend. Interestingly, Eastern Europe has been generating more of it lately, although our "friends" at Chinanet and Kornet are again contributing....

Machination, n. The method employed by one's opponents in baffling one's open and honorable efforts to do the right thing.

2005-03-20T08:30:00.000-05:00

My last post on the subject of "How To Save The Internet", from CIO Magazine. Cue the sighs of relief from the readership.

A blinding glimpse of the obvious here -

Catch Some Bad Guys
Time and again, security types bemoan the light sentences hackers get. If the penalties were harsher, perhaps people wouldn't be so fast to spread their mmalicious code.

But penalty is not a deterrent; arrest is. Right now, the bad guys know the risk equation is favorable—that it's extremely unlikely they will be caught. A higher capture rate would dissuade them.

Creating higher capture rates has a lot to do with anonymity on the network—or, more specifically, removing it. Many of the Big Ideas in this space propose less anonymity—licensure, for example. Microsoft's Charney wonders what effect automatic traceback packets— knowing quickly and reliably where data came from—would have. "It's an astounding thought," he says.

And then, he immediately comes up with the problems it presents. Traceback tells you where, not who. And privacy issues get thorny quickly. "Can you use the highway anonymously?" Charney asks. "No. But you also can't be stopped for no reason. More complicated than that, the Supreme Court has already ruled that you can't force someone to attach their name to political speech if they don't want to. So do you create an anonymous part of the Internet to ensure free speech? And if so, what stops bad guys from just using that?"

Still, if privacy issues could be worked out, and capture rates went up, attempted attacks would go down.

Pas de merde, Sherlock. Although we're dealing with a higher order of intelligence here than your average criminal, like most criminals they believe they are immune to any legal retribution, and that if indeed they are caught, they will get a slap on the wrist. Mitnick of course was the exception to the rule, but even Mitnick's sentence wasn't terribly odious in the hierarchy of things (unless you're in a blue state, where you usually get a slap on the wrist for homicide, but kill a snail darter or some other minor component of the food chain, and the liberals will be googling for the proper way to tie a hangman's knot). The problem of course is that a successful prosecution entails presenting evidence to a jury, and the vast majority of jury pools are too stupid (let's be blunt about it) to deal with a case involving technology (although, rather interestingly, the last time I was summoned for jury duty I found myself in a small kaffeeklatsch with a couple of other tired looking types who turned out to be IT consulting types as well; needless to say we would probably be proffered to jury pools involving auto accidents). I'm not arguing that there should be professional juries (as apparently there are in some places in Europe), far from it, but any prosecution of this type should require a highly literate presentation of the facts to a jury such that they can make a fair assessment of the events in question, and if indeed a person happens to be somewhat literate in the discipline, that person should not be excludable through challenge for cause (nothing we can do about preemptory challenges, though....). As I noted before, the only thing that's going to stop spammers is the threat of sure, severe punishment, and it likewise goes for cybercriminals.

Another glimpse of the obvious here -

Dictate What Software Shouldn't Do
Specs rule the development process. They dictate what a new software application should do, yet they rarely include what an application shouldn't do—like run code by itself or allow anonymous access or allow the destruction of data because of bugs. What if, from now on, all specs documents were required to include antirequirements, such as a laundry list of common features, potential unintended consequences and bugs that the application must actively eliminate from occurring before the product ships?

Absolute truth that specs rule the development process, however, detailing every single "do no harm" scenario in an app dev context is thoroughly impractical, unless the application is sandboxed. Most real-world stuff isn't going to be sandboxed. It's the job of the specification writers and reviewers to make sure the spec is detailed down to the nth level, and if they miss something, woe betide them. It's an organizational thing also - the people who will test and verify the application have to be involved from the get-go in order to determine what behaviors are quantifiable. The business which funds development and project management will often impose unreasonable timelines on these projects, leading to incomplete specs (or burnt-out teams drawing them up) and the ensuing project trainwrecks.

There are a couple of calls in the article for initiatives along the lines of the "Big Dig" and the Manhattan Project. Using the Big Dig is a pretty poor example in that there are still lingering project issues that need to be resolved, and the internal controls established by the project were notoriously faulty. The Manhattan Project (and for that matter the Apollo project as well) were vast projects designed to get to a well-defined deliverable (a big boom, or landing a man on the moon and getting him home in one piece). Internet security is not a well-defined deliverable, it is a concept, and has many components, some of which might (and I emphasize might) be achievable through projects of this sort, but as an overall goal, it's a touch amorphous, and unless there are those quantifiable business benefits that result ultimately in a positive cash flow, no one in the private sector is going to fund it.

(Yup, all excerpts from the article are quoted verbatim only for fair use purposes, and are the property of the copyright holders. I gratefully acknowledge their courtesy in providing the material for public examination and comment).

Spyware: Follow The Money

2005-03-19T10:02:00.000-05:00

Extracted from my post up on Blogcritics -

What circumstances could bring pornography, Air France, Apple Computers, Vonage, Netflix, and J.P. Morgan Chase together? The installation of adware on your computer....Ben Edelman documents this behavior in articles entitled Advertisers Supporting eXact Advertising and Documentation of Gator Advertisements and Targeting. Mr. Edelman specifically notes that in the case of eXact, a file is downloaded to your computer which has detection rules for URLs, and matches them with the "appropriate advertiser". If you read The Motley Fool, that URL is paired with an ad served up from a URL that starts at Real Media entitled "BullsEye Network Offer"....
Out of 818 ads, approximately 281 ads (just over 34%) served up were for adult-oriented (pornographic, gambling and sexual health) advertisers. The consequences of ads of this sort showing up on a PC used by the entire family are not difficult to imagine....

Mr. Edelman's pages provide a valuable service, in telling us which advertisers think so little of us, their ultimate customers, that they would support adware to get their message across. Conversely, some of the good guys, such as Verizon and Wells Fargo, who eschew adware are identified.......

Theosophy, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science

2005-03-19T08:33:00.000-05:00

Some more tidbits from "How To Save The Internet" dissected.

Here's a lulu.....

Pry PCs from Their Cold, Dead Hands
Guns are dangerous; therefore, we license them. We give them unique serial numbers and control their distribution. James Whittaker says programmable PCs are dangerous, so why not treat them like guns?

"Let's make all end user devices nonprogrammable," he says. "No one can connect to the Internet on a machine that creates code. If you want a computer to do programming, you would have to be licensed. We could license software companies to purchase programmable machines, which would be completely traceable along with the code created on them."

That would blunt the information security problem—suddenly all that intelligence at the edge of the network that Amoroso wants to pull back in isn't just gone; it's physically stripped. On the other side, new levels of accountability and liability are created through licensing developers and eliminating anonymity from coding.

In many ways, I regard the greatest heroes of the computing revolution to be those who provided essential tools to grow personal computing to critical mass. Think of Phillippe Kahn of Borland. Fifty bucks for a compiler that not only produced damn good code but also immediately generated a user community dedicated to supporting and extending the language. Digital Research's compilers brought computing within the reach of a lot of small developers and businesses who desperately needed solutions. Even MSFT got into the act (although the first incarnations of Visual C were a disaster) - BASIC did its job quite nicely, thank you, and for all of its runtime piggishness, VB provides an excellent environment for quick prototyping and even proprietary solutions. McNealy did a real public service making Java readily available. A lot of customized solutions for corner case business problems are solved by having these tools available for people who think outside of the box.

I could cite many other examples, but think how well gun control works. It's next to impossible for a law-abiding citizen in many jurisdictions to get a pistol license, and even getting a long arms license in places is a severe PITA. However, criminals have absolutely no trouble obtaining firearms, and the populace has no means to defend itself. You're going to threaten a goblin with the cops when he's holding a gun on you? Spare me. Goblins don't get guns through gun stores the way citizens do. It's a feel-good farce perpetrated by the Democrats because their fucking Kennedy icons got blown away by a couple of goblins. Oswald would've gotten the chair, and Sirhan would've been dragged off to the "green room" had justice taken its course, but the glorious Democratic party is so committed to its quote unquote principles of patronizing the public while taking away what it has earned that they would easily hang the good folk of this country out to dry to further their own nefarious agendas (any time the subject of Kennedys comes up I get pissed off). However, I digress.....

The idea of traceable code isn't all that horrendous, however, it requires a code signing function to be built into untamperable hardware, and that raises the question of how PCs are upgraded or for that matter replaced. Think of XP's voting mechanism for example. When an XP machine is booted, several code functions "vote" on the changes that the machine has seen since the last boot (i.e. new hardware or software) and if there are too many changes as per Microsoft's definition, the XP license needs to be reactivated. The problem right there is that we have no idea as to what the quantitative and qualitative criteria are for the voting, and we are dependent upon Microsoft's gatekeepers to tell us whether or not our previously legally paid for license is still in force despite the fact we hooked something up to the USB bus on the box. We also know that computer hardware has a finite lifespan, and that if there's a catastrophic failure, how do we recover from a backup to get a new developer-capable machine up and running while maintaining the audit trail (presumably the untamperable hardware would not be transferrable between machines).

This bears even more dissection. To be continued tomorrow.....

And again, all excerpts from the article are the property of the copyright holder, and are excerpted for fair use purposes....

A Modest Proposal, Redux

2005-03-18T08:46:00.000-05:00

My taste for Jonathan Swift was utterly killed by the egregious Fleischer rendition of "Gullivers Travels", not to mention the lack of patience I had for older dialects of English (I actually had a nice bound version of Gulliver ages ago, but it vanished in one move or another), but in my first freshman English class in college, I read Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and I fell headfirst for the grouchy satire. I wonder, however, if this missive in CIO Magazine on "How To Save The Internet" isn't merely such satire, or is the result of C-level and wannabes who read those rags and actually starting to believe the crap that pundits and people like Respected Employer's Crack Sales Team are pushing.

While there are some elements of sense in the article, others are merely hysterical, to wit -

Hire a Czar
A surgeon general-like figure for security is not only a Big Idea; it's a popular one. Several folks suggest creating some kind of "government leader" or "public CIO for security," none more vocally than Paul Kurtz, the executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance. "We need more leadership at a higher level of government," he says. At the Department of Homeland Security, he says, cybersecurity has been buried, and he believes DHS should have an assistant secretary-level person for cybersecurity.

At press time, that proposal had been floated but didn't make it into the intelligence reform bill. Meanwhile, a succession of notable leaders for cybersecurity resigned from their DHS posts—some suggest because of frustration over the low status of the role within the agency. Congress even explored the possibility of moving government oversight of cybersecurity from DHS to the Office of Management and Budget.

"Somehow, the surgeon general has this special place with us," says Scott Charney, chief security strategist of Microsoft. "We don't have the focal point in security that health care gets with the surgeon general."
One of the surgeon general's best-known successes is found on the side of cigarette packages. The smoking analogy cropped up repeatedly with big thinkers. Once upon a time, society believed that if you chose to inflict harm on yourself by smoking, you were free to do so. The concept of secondhand smoke changed that equation and now smoking is anathema in many public places.
Networks are no different than smoking in the sense that your bad security habits can adversely affect innocent bystanders. Online, in fact, it may be worse since the secondhand smoke of cyberspace doesn't dissipate with time or space. It debilitates every machine it touches equally, as if everyone was forced to take a drag.
We propose a high-profile surgeon general for information security, who reports to the secretary of DHS. Imagine labels on software like those on cigarettes—Infosecurity General's Warning: The use of software and hardware that is not certified secure can harm your system and other people's systems, and you may be held liable for those damages.

Oh brother. All together now, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help". Perhaps the last time the Surgeon General actually did something was the cigarette labeling issue, and for crying out loud, that was before Cream broke up. The Surgeon General is a public policy harrumpher that in general has been stunningly ineffective due to the partisan politics (neither Koop or Elders did anything worth a damn except pontificate, and not all that well, either).

And who in the industry is going to play Surgeon General, or for that matter, capi di tutti di capi to the kingpins of the industry? Gates, Palmisano, McNealy, Chambers and their peers are not about to surrender any of the hard-won territory nor intellectual property to control of a government czar. Czar-hood usually doesn't do a heck of lot of good (ask the Romanovs, ha ha) other than it gives one single person the ability to act as a lightning rod for criticism from all sides. Can you imagine if a government czar will suddenly have to start approving RFCs?

There's quite a bit more in this article worth dissecting. The gist of it is to start regulating computing, an idea which scares the hell out of me as a technologist, a free-markets supporter and a conservative. We'll take more of this up tomorrow....

All excerpts from CIO Magazine are the property of their respective owners, and are quoted only for fair use purposes.