Why We Split Up: The Terrible Toad That Led To A Difficult Decision

May 14 2013

After a long, complicated relationship, autocorrect and I have parted ways. It was a very difficult decision for both of us, but in the long run we’ll be happier.

I know autocorrect has been seeing a lot of other people, and has developed a rather sketchy reputation. But that’s not why we split.

We just realized that we don’t see the world the same way. When I type its, i mean its. I grew tired of constantly being told that “it’s” was a possessive. It’s not.

Perhaps the final straw was the constant bickering over autocorrect’s constant efforts to make me use “we’ll” instead of “well”.

Oh well!

We tried a number of things to make life better. For a short time, manual shortcuts worked to jumpstart our relationship. In the end it just wasn’t enough.

I wish autocorrect well, and hope it finds someone special.

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Rob Portman’s (Opportunistic?) Reversal on Gay Marriage

Mar 15 2013

So many people are chattering wildly about Rob Portman’s conversion to a pro-same sex marriage (SSM) position.  ”Game changer” and “this changes everything” are just two of the Facebook updates I have seen on this.  While I appreciate him coming around, I just can’t get all that excited about the news.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that the sands are shifting (and that is a very, very good thing) to a place where SSM is starting to be seen as a winning issue for GOP candidates, rather than an unquestionably losing one. Portman, however, seems to be someone who is opportunistically exploiting that.

In 2004 Portman supported a Constitutional ban on SSM; not just a ban against it. He wanted it enshrined in the Constitution.  He has defended DOMA. In 2009, he opposed a law that would have allowed gay couples in DC the right to adopt.  He has actively opposed gay rights for a decade at least.  But then there is this:

“[W]hat happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.”

Huh?  You were that active in voting on an issue you really hadn’t thought a lot about? So your default position on issues you don’t think about is to deny people rights?  Really?

Reconciling his past opposition to SSM and his current conversion is almost impossible. His explanation is that his son Will came out two years ago and that profoundly changed his mind.

But less than two years ago, at a speech to the University of Michigan law school, a full third of the school got up and walked out of his speech in protest of his positions on gay rights.  That was, if his timeframe is to be accepted, after his son came out.

Granted I am a reliable cynic, but it seems to me that Portman, who is bandied about as a potential POTUS contender in 2016, is seeing the writing on the wall.

A poll out last week notes that Republicans oppose gay marriage 69-23.  There is a relatively small wing of the GOP that will support candidates who are openly in favor of SSM.  However, if properly aligned, that small minority could be enough to win a fractured primary field.  Getting a base of 23%, and being able to cobble together enough support among the remaining 77% to provide a winning coalition – especially in a field of 6-10 candidates – could be winning math.

Portman’s dramatic reversal may be real.  I sincerely hope it is. Even if it’s not, it is certainly cause for those in the GOP that think like me to be happy. The party is, slowly but surely, being dragged toward its stated position of personal freedom on this issue.

But I have seen enough in politics to be more than a tad jaded.  I suspect that Portman may be looking at electoral calculations, more than personal or moral ones, in announcing this dramatic reversal at the beginning of a Presidential cycle.

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Hotel Finds Dead Girl in Water Tank Because of Low Shower Pressure

Feb 21 2013

Ok, if you are easily grossed out, this may not be the post for you.  You might want to skip right past it and move on about your day.  If you’re a sick, twisted puppy like me, keep reading.

As I am skimming the news this morning, I happened upon what might otherwise just be a routine report of police finding a missing person who was unfortunately dead.  But then you get to the detail that really makes the story cringeworthy.

The corpse was found on Tuesday after hotel guests complained of low water pressure.

You read that right. The body, it seems, was found in a water tank on top of the hotel. A water tank, that by implication, seems to have been feeding the showers.

Let that sink in for a few minutes…. I’ll wait…

Now here’s the really foul part…  The girl had been missing for three weeks.

So what does that tell you?  It tells me that every guest who stayed in that hotel – for twenty-one days – had been showering in dead girl.

If that doesn’t gross you out and make you want to carry your own one gallon jugs of stream water to bathe in, I just don’t know what would.  From now on when I check in at hotels, the first question I will ask is whether their showers are certified to be dead body free.

Now my challenge will be figuring out what categories to post this under…

UPDATE: A friend on Twitter shared this additional link to the story including the best passage ever in a news article.

Guests at the Cecil Hotel, famous for having hosted serial killers Richard Ramirez – nicknamed the Night Stalker – and Jack Unterweger, are likely to have bathed, drank and brushed their teeth using water from the rooftop tank where Canadian tourist Eliza Lam’s body was found floating. …

Disgusted guests have expressed their horror at the discovery of the body, with one British tourist telling CNN: ‘The water did have a funny taste’.

Sabrina Baugh, a British tourist told journalists: ‘We never thought anything of it. We thought it was just the way it was here.’

That is so disgustingly awesome.

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When Science Fiction and Science Are Indistinguishable.

Feb 21 2013

I have been a big fan of Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books since I started reading his books as a teen.  Among the passages I remember the most was an offhand mention of the Great Green Arkleseizure.

Jatravartids are small blue creatures of the planet Viltvodle VI with more than fifty arms each. They are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented aerosoldeodorant before the wheel (though their wheels are the wrong shape; a bike with literally square wheels can be seen).

Many races believe that the Universe was created by some sort of god or in the Big Bang. The Jatravartians people, however, believe that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call “The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief” (their version of the End of the Universe). The theory of the Great Green Arkleseizure is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI.

So I got to thinking earlier today that our theory of the Big Bang is really no different.  If you accept the fact that the universe exploded into existence and is traveling outward at great velocity, you have bought into a theory that is, on the surface, the Big Sneeze Theory – one big event and all the stuff in the universe goes flying.

But as I was thinking that, and browsing the net for randomness (as I am apt to do), I came upon a related theory. A physicist has suggested that a “bubble” moving at the speed of light could simply wipe us all away before we even knew what happened.

According to Discovery News, Lykken said if this happens, it’ll happen at light speed, which means if anyone is around to witness it — our solar system will be long gone — they’ll be gone before they realize it.

So despite our best science, we actually haven’t advanced much beyond the sneeze and hanky wipe theory that Adams attributes to the primitive, body odor-challenged inhabitants of a backwater planet.

Granted, we haven’t attributed the big sneeze and to a much larger alien (unless you count God), but it kind of makes me feel a little less confident in our scientists.

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Open-Source vs. For-Profit Tech and Activism

Feb 19 2013

So last wek I made a point in my Spectator piece that the GOP has a tech problem, but it’s a tech problem that can be addressed through a significant investment in money and culture.  As I argued, you can address a lot of tech shortcomings if you invest in being better, smarter, and bringing people to the table that have the skills and letting them run with those skills.

My former colleague Patrick Ruffini, on Sunday, seemed to take issue with at least part of that when he chided Stuart Stevens – Romney’s brain trust – for suggesting that money can solve our tech problems.

What really troubles me about Stevens’s comments is his dismissive statement that “technology is something to a large degree you can go out and purchase.” No, it’s not. Technology is not about the tools. It is about people. It’s about creating a culture that drives metrics over hunches and BS “message of the day” fire drills.

Stevens will be the last general strategist of his kind not because he didn’t tweet, but because he thought of technology and data as some cool toy you could buy, not as the very foundation of a strong organization.

I would actually challenge Ruffini on that to a degree.  If poor tech is the problem, you can, in fact, invest in better tools.  But part of the GOP’s problem is it has not recently invested heavily in tools.  The period when it did (roughly 1996 through 2006) was marked by a significant improvement in tools.  The RNC database that eventually led to Voter Vault and microtargeting, and scared the Democrats into stepping up their game, was a result of that investment.  The GOP Team Leader program, the Bush re-elect effort, and many, many wins at the state and federal level were all a result of that investment – better data, better tools, better ideas.

Like the hare that naps and lets the tortoise win the race, however, the GOP got complacent.  It seemed to believe the headlines after 2004 that said the Dems may never be able to catch up with our data and microtargeting supremacy.  Those same headlines are being written now about the Dems, and I find them absurd. No party has a lock on tech, ideas, or success. Tech, especially, is a fickle beast and steer erratically between the latest good idea.  The GOP began to learn that when the 2008 Obama campaign took what the right had done and built on it.

So do I agree with Stevens that we can simply spend our way to competitiveness?  The answer to that requires a bit more framing.

We need to think of our problem differently. In politics, like technology, there are two camps. One, we’ll call it the open-source approach, creates a larger more vibrant community (of either activists or technologists).  The other, for-profit model is still perfectly legitimate, but doesn’t invite as many to participate and becomes much more expensive to maintain.

Think of the left’s activism as Linux, MySQL, and Drupal and the right’s as Microsoft or Oracle.  One innovates faster and has a larger community, one is limited in functionality to what they’re willing to invest in, rather than what the crowd can come up with.

There is nothing that says the right cannot compete with a Microsoft model.  They can, quite reasonably, invest huge sums of money in closed platforms, and be competitive.  That was Stuart’s point, and I agree that it is a viable – though certainly not the best - option.

One way or another – whether we follow the Stevens model, or something much more open and inclusive – the right must undergo a major attitudinal change.

If we want to follow Stevens model and closely guard the source code and hardware for GOP 16, then the donor culture on the right still needs to stop thinking in two-year cycles of TV ads and invest heavily in organizations that will be continually innovating, continually coming up with new, but still largely proprietary products.

What you cannot do, in Stevens model, is what the GOP has done for the last six years. You cannot release Windows Vista and expect it to keep you viable for a decade.

We would need to follow something more closely resembling the Apple model – a locked down platform that meets the needs of 90% of consumer (jailbreakers excluded), but one that still guards the source.  Voter Vault, in many ways, originally took that approach.  It protected the kernel while still meeting the needs of the users.  The problem is the GOP didn’t innovate when the needs of the users began to change.  Rather than enabling Voter Vault to be integrated with state, county, local, and issue advocacy campaigns through tools that would connect to the data, and share the benefit of all that data collection – Voter Vault became the iPhone without the ability to add apps.

Would it be possible to succeed with a tool that is still a walled garden, but one that meets the needs of its users?  Just ask Facebook.  They have made a huge business from that model.

So while I respect Patrick’s view, and agree with him that a more open model would be better, I disagree that there is absolutely no other option.  The Stevens approach could be successful, but it would still require a major cultural shift, and would be less likely to produce good outcomes.

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