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Archive for November, 2006

In Chicago for Apple

November 8, 2006 9 comments

I am sitting in my room in the Marriot hotel in Chicago.  This is the view from my window:

Amazingly, the sliding door opens a couple inches so I can get fresh air and hear city noises 18 floors below. 

I got to walk around a bit this afternoon – maybe more pictures later.  This evening and all day tomorrow is an orientation session for Apple computers.  I am astoundingly ignorant about Apples but since they are coming up more often in the support context that is why I am here. 

I still like my Thinkpad better though. Actually I have two Thinkpads; one runs Windows, the other Ubuntu Linux.

UPDATE: here’s the view the next morning, looking in another direction…

It would be so cool to hang-glide off one of these buildings toward the lakeshore.  Suicidal, maybe, but cool.

And here’s a pic from the Apple briefing center 34 stories up.  The building under construction in the background is Donald Trump’s latest effort.

Just one more…

Categories: Personal

Election night - did anybody win?

November 8, 2006 2 comments

Though I’ve been too busy to follow the election in detail, it doesn’t seem to have turned out well for the party masquerading as conservative Republicans (IMHO they are neither). 

Amazingly (but paradoxically, not surprisingly) the Republicans are blaming everything bad that has happened in the last 6 years on liberal Democrats.  This is a species of delusion that I cannot begin to fathom.

I am NOT happy with language that the Democrats have “taken” the house and/or senate.  This is a continuation of the destructive idea that “us against them” means Americans against other Americans.  Our enemies, since nearly everyone appears to have forgotten, are foreign.  Domestic disagreements are natural and to be expected in a healthy democracy. 

I would like to see the Republican party reclaim its old identity and purpose.  It seems to be in some kind of trance and I cannot vote Republican until it wakes up. 

One new experience for me: I voted for a Green candidate, Rich Whitney, for Illinois governor.  He didn’t win, but I really liked him and there is always the chance that the votes cast for him will give the weiner winner something to think about.

I am in Chicago for an orientation session, and mentioned to one of the other attendees, that I would like a Republican house, a Democratic Senate, and a Green president.  He said “But then the government could hardly get anything done at all!”

Exactly.  Unless they work together and learn to compromise. 

Categories: Politics

Busy week open thread

November 7, 2006 1 comment

Lots going on at work this week, and I am going to Chicago for two days.  Will probably come home with a full load of exhaustion so posting may be light.

Voted today, with the hope of a split government.  We have seen enough of one party drunk with power, haven’t we?

Also voted for Rich Whitney, the Green candidate, for Governor of Illinois.  Our other two choices were dismal and I’d love to see third parties take a bigger role.

Categories: Politics

Security solution

November 6, 2006 4 comments

Boarding an airplane poses two huge problems; what you can’t carry onboard, and then the long boring flight.  So why hasn’t the TSA thought of this?

Categories: Humor, observations

Our old buddy Saddam to die by hanging

November 5, 2006 3 comments

Along with a few of his buddies, guilty, sentenced to death by hanging.  There were celebrations in Baghdad but it was a different story in Tikrit…

Thousands of people also defied the curfew in Tikrit – but there it was to voice support for Saddam Hussein and to denounce the verdict. Sunnis in Tikrit marched through the city, chanting “We will avenge you Saddam.”
- BBC News: Saddam Hussein sentenced to death

He put on quite a show in court, but I have the feeling that it would have saved us all a lot of trouble – and a photo op for the Sunnis – if the soldier who found him had done the obvious thing. “Sorry, it was dark down there and I thought he was going to fire his gun.”

It’s a good time to remember that he was our guy in the region right up until a few months before the invasion of Kuwait.  The Arab proberb; “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” leads to waking up in bed with people like Saddam.  We need to be more careful who we hang out with in the future.

Funniest sidebar:  some Democrats think the timing of the verdict was set to help the GOP in Tuesday’s elections.  It’s nice to know the GOP hasn’t cornered the market on total whackos.

Categories: Politics

I apologize if anyone was offended by this post

November 3, 2006 22 comments

Consider these two famous political gaffes:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t you get stuck in Iraq.”
- John Kerry, October 2006
  “There are some who feel like that the conditions are such [in Iraq] that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on.”
- George Bush, July 2003

By now everyone knows about Kerry’s “mangled joke”.  As the expression goes, the switchboard lit up.  Democrats wondered; what was he thinking?  Kerry’s enemies were certain they knew. 

Bush lost no time condemning Kerry’s remark as a slam against the intelligence of American soldiers.  A storm surge of bloggers, media commentators, and cartoonists washed over Kerry’s explanations.  Bill O’Reilly has been going on for days about how this one comment will turn the election back over to the Republicans.

When I heard the comment I was certain that Kerry had intended a slam against Bush, not against the soldiers.  The implication was that a smarter president, one who had paid attention in his more difficult classes, would not have invaded Iraq.  Later this was exactly what Kerry claimed: 

Mr Kerry’s office said he had intended to say: “You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”

It’s all too easy to leave out the most important connective tissue of a sentence when it conveys an idea that seems perfectly obvious to the speaker.  Just ask Neal Armstrong

But the SwiftBoats did their damage a long time ago.  While Bush can say “Bring it on” without the slightest consequences from his base, Kerry cannot sneeze without someone making it into high treason.

Kerry is inept at apology.  After counterattacking, he trotted out the old; “I’m sorry my words were misinterpreted” stuff.  The last public figure to apologize well was Bill Clinton: 

“What I want the American people to know, what I want the Congress to know, is that I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds,” Clinton said. “I never should have misled the country, the Congress, my friends and my family. Quite simply, I gave in to my shame.”
- Bill Clinton, 1998

None of that “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” two-step.  He said “I am sorry for what I did.” It was a real apology.  His friends were sure he meant it; his enemies dismissed it out of hand.  Personally his apology didn’t mean much to me because I was furious with him.  I knew his personal foible would overshadow his presidential record, and some total loser would occupy the Oval Office in 2000.

As someone once said; “In politics, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.”  The result is a delicate balance between the candidate who weighs every word so carefully that he is accused of being “wooden” and “scripted”, or the one who speaks extemporaneously with the risk of giving negative sound bites to his opponents.  Rare is the candidate who combines spontaneous speech with enough charm to weather the inevitable storms. 

If you hate John Kerry, you can take comfort from the fact that his political career is pretty much over.  Because…

“Political image is like mixing cement. When it’s wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there’s almost nothing you can do to reshape it.”
- Walter Mondale

Personally, I’m not deciding my votes on the ‘outrageous gaffe of the week’.  And the vast amounts of money candidates spend attacking each other on TV is completely wasted on me; I don’t watch professional wrestling. 

I make no apology for that.

Categories: Politics

Million-dollar floor

November 2, 2006 11 comments

I like to believe that I’m pretty clever.  After all, I can make sense of the physical sciences and even write recognizable HTML code.  Once I used a part from a long-dead centrifuge to fix a broken tennis racket stringing machine (don’t ask).

But I am way too stupid to begin to fathom how a painting by Jackson Pollock could possibly be worth $140 million dollars

The Pollock work features the US artist’s famous drip-and-pour style…

Ooh!  Drip and pour style!  Isn’t that a coffeemaker?

Jackson Pollock’s work had a major influence on art in the latter half of the 20th Century, sparking the emergence of abstract expressionism.

But the artist battled alcoholism and depression and is generally regarded as a self-destructive, tortured genius. He died in a car crash in 1956, aged 44.  (BBC News Online)

I can see abstract expressionism anytime I want a cup of coffee.  In fact, I can walk on it…

If Pollock’s painting “No. 5” really is worth $140 Mil, then this floor from The Coffee House at 114 East Beaufort St. in Normal, Illinois, must be worth at least a million.  Just look at it!  Such line, such form!  Genius!  And much bigger than Pollock’s little creative dribblings.

Any takers?

Categories: Art