9 - 2004 | ***Dave Does the Blog

Conventional wisdom

I’ve intentionally (even desperately) avoided watching any of the convention coverage, but, as with SotU addresses, I find the disconnect between partisan viewers on both sides to be astonishing. A speech that one person describes as snarky, arrogant, hateful, stupid, clumsy, and/or utterly representative of every horrific cliché about the speaker’s party is described by another as thoughtful, profound, uplifting, classic, engaging, inspirational, and/or utterly representative of what’s best about the speaker’s party. And that was as true for the DNC as the RNC coverage.

It’s both amusing and disturbing.

Return of the Revenge of the Tricks of the Trade!

Matthew Baldwin found his Tricks of the Trade article (foreshadowed here) to be so popular, he’s (a) started up a new blog-style TotT site, and (b) looking at writing a…

Matthew Baldwin found his Tricks of the Trade article (foreshadowed here) to be so popular, he’s (a) started up a new blog-style TotT site, and (b) looking at writing a book. Cool.

And, of course, he’s taking submissions for more.

Almost certainly misquoted

As Neil Gaiman points out, this news story almost certainly misquotes the perp: A 6-foot-tall, 275-pound bearded man crashed a children’s birthday party in Oak Forest, identified himself as “vengeance,”…

As Neil Gaiman points out, this news story almost certainly misquotes the perp:

A 6-foot-tall, 275-pound bearded man crashed a children’s birthday party in Oak Forest, identified himself as “vengeance,” then helped himself to a piece of cake, police said.
[…] When the owner of the home asked the man who he was, the intruder replied, “I am vengeance. I am the knight. I am Batman.” Then the man went into the kitchen, cut a piece of birthday cake, took it into the living room and ate it.

I would be willing to bet a not-inconsiderable amount of money that the gent said, “I am the night,” not “I am the knight.”

How can we expect our criminal justice system to function properly when obvious homages to the growled utterences of a masked vigilante can’t even be transcribed correctly?

A slightly happier anniversary

Happy Birthday to the Internet — or, at least, to ARPANET, its predecessor….

Happy Birthday to the Internet — or, at least, to ARPANET, its predecessor.

“And the dungeon passage was up hill! In both directions!”

A conversation I will no doubt someday have with Kitten….

A conversation I will no doubt someday have with Kitten.

Anniversary

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over…

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
— W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

Today’s the 65th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, the formal beginning of WWII. France and Britain declared war on September 3. The Soviets followed the Nazis in on September 17.

Organized Polish resistance ended on October 6, 1939. Some 100,000 Polish soldiers would escape to form the Free Polish Brigade in England, where they would fight in the air during the Battle of Britain and on land after the Normandy invasion.
The Nazis appointed former SA stormtrooper Hans Frank to Gauleiter (Governor General) of Poland. Under his direction over 6,000,000 Poles died, including 3,000,000 Jews.
As Germany was near collapse in 1945, most of the forced laborers in Germany were French. There were no longer enough Poles left alive to feed Germany’s slave labor requirements.

(via Cronaca)

One-shot seeds

A fun collection of ADRPG one-shot game ideas that you can use (over and over again) as a break, to spice up an existing campaign, etc. Amazingly, quite a few…

A fun collection of ADRPG one-shot game ideas that you can use (over and over again) as a break, to spice up an existing campaign, etc.

Amazingly, quite a few of them would work in an espionage game. Imagine that.

(via 20×20)

Theological bits and pieces

My impressions and thoughts, on first reading, of the report of Bishop’s Task Force. Those who have no interest in religion, Christianity, the Episcopal Church, its Colorado Diocese, or other…

My impressions and thoughts, on first reading, of the report of Bishop’s Task Force. Those who have no interest in religion, Christianity, the Episcopal Church, its Colorado Diocese, or other such metaphysical stuff, can and should skip on to the next post, ’cause there’s a lot of material to wade through here and I’m thinking as I’m writing …

Continue reading “Theological bits and pieces”

Get … away … from … my … eyes!

Maybe it’s because I’ve had glasses since I was in the second grade, but I’m very protective about my eyes. I don’t want to put contacts in them. I don’t…

Maybe it’s because I’ve had glasses since I was in the second grade, but I’m very protective about my eyes. I don’t want to put contacts in them. I don’t want folks carving ’em up with frickin’ lasers. And, frankly, it would take a lot more myopia than I have for me to have artificial lenses installed. Yeesh.

Which reminds me — I still need to get my new presecription.

Branded

An interesting look at how folks associate commercial brands with the presidential candidates. The study reveals Bush supporters associate the brand called Bush with brands that evoke attributes such as…

An interesting look at how folks associate commercial brands with the presidential candidates.

The study reveals Bush supporters associate the brand called Bush with brands that evoke attributes such as … “reliable, humble, heritage, and solid.” Kerry supporters associate the brand called Kerry with brands that convey attributes of “high-quality, high-performance, hip, and young.” Undecided voters associate more trendy and upscale brands with Kerry and attach more common and mainstay brands with Bush.

As an example, everybody associates Bush with IBM, but while both Bush supporters and Undecideds link Kerry to Apple, Kerry’s supporters see him as more of a Dell sort of guy.

Conversely, while Bush supporters see his coffee attribution as Folgers, Kerry supporters and Undecideds think he’s more of a Dunkin’ Donuts sort of fellow — and they all agree that Kerry is Starbucks.

Hmmm. What if you prefer IBM and Starbucks?

(via J-Walk)

Howelling Mad

An entertaining (and, so far as I can tell, pretty reasonable) analysis of The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III, which answers the immortal question, “Why the hell do any…

An entertaining (and, so far as I can tell, pretty reasonable) analysis of The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III, which answers the immortal question, “Why the hell do any of the castaways on Gilligan’s Island care a whit for Thurston’s money?”

In later episodes, monetary exchange takes place in US paper currency. Was it impossible to recover the gold from the lagoon? Perhaps the writers found it more convenient to deal in the money the television viewers themselves were most familiar with. We might dismiss this as economic naivete on the part of the writers, but recent history provides evidence that fiat paper can, in fact, outlive its government. Not only that, but post-fiat money — dead government currency — can out-compete American greenbacks!

(via J-Walk)

The scorcher that (mercifully) wasn’t

A nice review of how this past summer in Denver was unexpectedly cool and wet. Rain totals since June 1 are 2.2 inches higher than normal. There hasn’t been a…

A nice review of how this past summer in Denver was unexpectedly cool and wet.

Rain totals since June 1 are 2.2 inches higher than normal. There hasn’t been a 100-degree day in Denver this summer. In fact, it not only rained on the first day of summer, but the high of 56 on June 21 broke a record for cold that had stood since 1947.
And fires? Let Larry Helmerick, spokesman for the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center, douse those concerns. “We just sent two Hot Shot crews to Alaska to help out with the fires up there,” he said. “We thought we’d have a lot of crews working fires here, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case.”

The mild summer has adversely affected river rafting companies, but everyone else seems pretty pleased. Next up …

So, summer has 21 days left, and there is little indication the weather pattern is going to change into a blazing furnace, Doesken said. He also said a cooler summer doesn’t necessarily translate into a harsher winter. In fact, the models show very little relationship between the two seasons.
“We’ve done some correlation studies in the past and what summer conditions may tell us about the winter,” he said. “It looks like a shotgun blast – basically anything can happen.”

That would seem to sum up Denver weather in a nutshell.

Diocesan task force report

More details, and commentary from Bp. O’Neill (et al.) here. The report itself is available here. More commentary once I’ve read it …….

More details, and commentary from Bp. O’Neill (et al.) here. The report itself is available here. More commentary once I’ve read it ….

This garage door opener was made for you and me …

A garage door opener company named Chamberlain sued another company, Skylink, for making generic garage door openers that were backwards-compatible with the “copyrighted” garage door opener microcode. The court seems…

Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use. It would therefore allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work-or even selected copies of that copyrighted work. Again, this implication contradicts § 1201(c)(1) directly. Copyright law itself authorizes the public to make certain uses of copyrighted materials. Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke.
[…] In a similar vein, Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow any manufacturer of any product to add a single copyrighted sentence or software fragment to its product, wrap the copyrighted material in a trivial “encryption” scheme, and thereby gain the right to restrict consumers’ rights to use its products in conjunction with competing products. In other words, Chamberlain’s construction of the DMCA would allow virtually any company to attempt to leverage its sales into aftermarket monopolies — a practice that both the antitrust laws, see Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Tech. Servs., 504 U.S. 451, 455 (1992), and the doctrine of copyright misuse, Assessment Techs. of WI, LLC v. WIREdata, Inc., 350 F.3d 640, 647 (7th Cir. 2003), normally prohibit.

Slowly, but surely, this beast is getting reined in.

(via BoingBoing)