Archive for: March, 2008

Worst Places To Stash Your Stuff. Your Rectum Is #1

Mar 28 2008 Published by Turk under Craziness, Disease, Food, Miscellany, Society, Stuff That Sucks, The Internet, Yuck!!!

Ok, I was kidding about the rectum part. If you’ve seen Pulp Fiction, you know the story of the watch Christopher Walken smuggled in his anus. Well, not counting Walken’s ass vault, MSN has a list of 16 places where you should not put your stuff. Some of these actually confirm long running beliefs I have had.

For instance, I can fall asleep very easily (almost instantly). Mrs. Quip has trouble falling asleep. The difference? Apparently it’s her tendency to completely cover herself with blankets. I always keep my legs outside.

Being overheated can keep you from nodding off, researchers say: A natural nighttime drop in your core temperature triggers your body to get drowsy. To ease your way to sleep, help your body radiate heat from your hands and feet… Don socks to dilate the blood vessels in the extremities ‚Äî then take the socks off and let a foot stick out from under the blankets.

The article is actually full of a lot of good information. Want to avoid airsickness? Avoid the tail section and sit near the wing. Want to avoid germs in public bathrooms? Stay away from the center stall. Where’s the worst place to store medicine? The medicine cabinet where high, steamy temperatures can exceed your medication’s safe storage temp.

My personal favorite, though was this little statistic.

[S]wabs showed up to 10,000 bacteria per square inch on purse bottoms ‚Äî and a third of the bags tested positive for fecal bacteria! A woman’s carryall gets parked in some nasty spots: on the floor of the bus, beneath the restaurant table ‚Äî even on the floor of a public bathroom. Put your bag in a drawer or on a chair, Gerba says ‚Äî anywhere except where food is prepared or eaten. (emphasis mine)

That’s right. Your wife’s or girlfriend’s purse is likely trekking the poo right into your house and kitchen – and they say men are the unclean gender.

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A Credible Third Party? Go Bull Mooses!

Mar 28 2008 Published by Turk under Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

I found this really amusing. I was searching for the source of this quote, which I have seen attributed to both Alexander Fraser Tytler and Alexis de Tocqueville at various points.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

I stumbled upon an interesting essay by a lawyer in Georgia named Loren Collins who had apparently done the same exercise. Having found no source for the quote himself, he concludes:

Who, then, is the author of these quotes? Even after all of my research, I am afraid I still cannot say for certain.

All of this extraneous information is merely prologue for an odd side note about Mr. Collins. In 2006, he ran for Congress in Georgia as a member of the Bull Moose Party.

You may be surprised to learn that anyone other than Teddy Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose (ok, technically, Roosevelt ran as a member of the Progressive Party – but not in the dirty hippie sense of that word.)

Well, the Bull Moose Party is trying to organize from the ashes of its former self and describes itself this way.

We are conservatives, libertarians, and liberals (in the classical sense) who, like Roosevelt, have seen the Republican Party move ever further in practice from the principles it ostensibly supports in theory.

They also throw in a brief not explaining who would be attracted to the Bull Moose philosophy.

If you’ve ever felt that you were too “conservative” for the Democratic Party, or too “liberal” for the Republicans, too socially and environmentally conscious for the Libertarians, too economically conscious for the Greens, too grounded in common sense for some of the smaller parties and not xenophobic and isolationist enough for the others, then the Bull Moose Party might be for you.

Well, that covers just about everyone, doesn’t it? Sure, there may be a few people hanging out in the wings of both parties, but everyone to the right of Ted Kennedy/John Kerry and the left of Alan Keyes should feel right at home in the Bull Moose Party.

Granted, their website hasn’t been updated in nearly two years and may have been set up solely for the purpose of Collins’ long-shot Congressional race. That should not dissuade you from entering “Bull Moose” on that voter registration form the next time you update it. After all, if it was good enough for Teddy, it should be good enough for you.

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Great Animated Short Films

Mar 26 2008 Published by Turk under Animation & Short Films, Miscellany, Movies, The Internet

About 17 years ago, or so, I went to a short and animated film festival. They had some really great work on display and I was particularly impressed with two films – Juke Bar and Balance. It has been nearly two decades since I first saw them, and I had not seen either one since. Occasionally, though, something would remind me of one or the other and I remembered them fondly.

Something got me thinking about them today. I figured I would put the power of the Internet and YouTube to work and see if they have since resurfaced. I found Balance on YouTube. It’s below.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Juke Bar turned up on the website of the National Film Board of Canada and is linked below. You should check them both out.

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The Essence of Online Communications

Mar 26 2008 Published by Turk under Bloggers, Business, John McCain, News Media, Politics, Technology, The Internet

The Washington Post today has a (far too) long piece about Meghan McCain and her blog. The piece is fairly unremarkable in its writing, and the blog, from what I’ve seen is fairly unremarkable with the exception of the angle.

There is, however, one passage that jumped out at me as I was reading.

There’s a genius, too, to Meghan McCain’s style of saying so much without divulging anything truly intimate — a balancing act perfected by her dad on his Straight Talk Express. The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

The disdain the reporter has for McCain (both Meghan and her dad) is barely masked. Lines like the first one above are an example, as is the piece’s title – a take off on Credence Clearwater Revival’s famous song Fortunate Son. Given John McCain’s staunchly pro-war position, it’s obvious the writer is mocking Meghan’s similarity to the child in the song.

Some folks are born made to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays hail to the chief,
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, lord,

It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no,

Ignoring the subtle digs at her and her dad, the reporter did, in that brief passage above, capture one fascinating aspect of the Internet. It’s the piece that most politicians and corporate clients don’t get and it bears repeating.

The more you talk, the more people start to feel as if they know you. The more you talk, the more you minimize the reverberations of any one thing you say.

Communications types who do not spend a lot of time online fail to get this. They assume that every word you say is going to be twisted, distorted, and manipulated. They worry that some random blog post will send stock prices or poll standings plummeting downward.

Yet that statement is the essence of this new era of Internet communications. Allowing people to see you, and to understand you, actually protects you from the random out of context quote. As your comfort with exposure increases, and you open your dialog more and more, you will guard against the misstatement. Your allies will have more ammunition to protect your back and your enemies will have less of a vacuum to fill with an errant remark.

For anyone interested in communications, I would suggest you read the McCain article for two reasons. First, it’s a perfect example of the veiled hostility visited upon anyone Republican by the mainstream media. Second, it does illustrate someone taking the right approach to their online brand – be who you are and accept the fact that not everyone is going to like you.

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Renting From iTunes? Not so fast.

Mar 25 2008 Published by Turk under Business, Craziness, Gadgets, Technology

Mrs. Quip is heading out on a trip and decides to download a couple of movies from iTunes. She’s got her iPod all set, purchases a couple of rentals and starts the download at midnight. Her flight is at 6:00 AM, so she’ll grab the laptop on the way out the door, transfer the files to the iPod at the airport, and be all set for the flight. Sound great, right?

EXCEPT, iTunes rentals don’t work with just any video iPod. They only work with the current generation. If you’ve got the old 5G iPod, you’re out of luck. But how can that be? The iTunes movies work with the older iPod, so why not the rentals? Any difference between the formats should be a function of software, right?

Well, I was surprised to say the least and went trolling Apple’s site. Surely, given the millions of 5G devices in the hands of consumers, there would be warnings and caveats all over the site and iTunes store, right? Well, no. I found one reference buried at the bottom of this page.

Rentals to go.

Movies you rent from the iTunes Store transfer to your iPod1 or iPhone to watch on the go. Either device remembers where you stopped watching on your computer and picks up where you left off.

Notice that little subscript “1″? That points you at a footnote in about a 6 point font way down at the bottom of the page.

1. Movies rented on the iTunes Store will play only on the current-generation iPod classic, iPod nano, and iPod touch.

The best part of this little story, though, is buried even further down the hole. If you view the source code for the page, and look at the CSS style for that disclaimer, the style name is… wait for it…

sosumi

Read that as a disgruntled customer who finds they just downloaded useless movies might and you get, “So, Sue Me!”

Not that I don’t appreciate Apple’s sense of humor at my expense, but it really is pretty crappy thing to do. Release a new function, limit it to only the current devices (despite the fact that it should be a simple software fix to enable it on the old ones), and force people to buy even more expensive hardware. It’s a brilliant move for a corporation, and one I would expect from Microsoft. Congrats, Apple. You’ve become everything you used to disdain.

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