Results tagged “Random Thoughts” from Bill's Words
This article tells how Americans are a bit peeved that Obama took a vacation to Maine instead of sticking around to run the government into the ground manage the BP oil crisis.
I don’t like Obama. Never have, never will. But I think what I like even less is the stupid American public whose perceptions are apparently that (1) their leaders are “supers,” (2) their leaders don’t deserve a break, too, and (3) their leaders can’t lead effectively from somewhere else.
Look, Stupid American Public (you know who you are):
(1) Obama isn’t water resistant to 5,000 feet. He can’t go down there and fix the leak himself. The best he can do is talk about it, and the likes of CNN and Fox are doing enough of that already. His noise would just get lost in the “news.”
(2) He deserves a break—from what, I don’t know exactly, but even I get vacation from my relatively calm job. And did you ever wonder what a Presidential vacation is like? Do you think the job ever really stops? If Obama had to schedule his vacations around every crisis, he’d never be able to take a vacation in the first place and he’d be stuck paying all kinds of cancellation fees. (I wonder if he got a discount with the USAF for a Saturday night stay?)
(3) If you think that Obama has to be in the White House to govern effectively, then you are living in the middle ages when the castle was the seat of the king’s power. This man is more connected than any other person on the Earth, this I guarantee. He can launch a nuclear first strike from Kennebunkport, from Kalamazoo, from Kankakee, or from kilometers in the air. He can get E-mail, text messages, and top secret FLASH messages wherever he is. He can call a press conference anywhere he is because the doggon’ press travels with him. And since he—one man with one body—is one entire branch of the government unto himself, he doesn’t even require a quorum or majority to be present to get action.
Good grief, people. It almost sounds like you’re expecting him to do anything different than any other President in any other administration.
I can’t believe I’m saying this: Get real and give him a break.
A wonderful single panel which reminds us just how good the guy really was.. Do not miss the hovertext.
While the Internet has, by and large, replaced the Yellow Pages, it has not replaced the White Pages.
I find it very handy to be able to find somebody’s phone number based on knowing about where they live (i.e., the town), and a vague idea of how their name is spelled. And because wildcards can only go so far, having a compact, readily-accessed list to scan works significantly better than trying to figure out what to tell the search to get an equivalent list.
Until somebody has a phonebook app or website that can deal with phonetic spellings, the dead-tree phonebook wins hands down, every time.
Others have many thoughts regarding the installation of Adobe Flash Player on Mac OS X. Others have opinions on why Flash is an anathema to the web. I have an opinion on the webpage for it, which brings to mind the image of a barge. Maybe the SS Adobarge.
Hmm. There’s an interesting image for you, a company as a barge. But why a barge? Well, first of all, it’s slow and plodding to make progress. If it weren’t for a tug, it would drift aimlessly with the current. Granted, it can carry a lot along with it. I got this feeling this morning when I downloaded the Flash Installer for Mac OS X from the Adobe website and it told me it would take 7 minutes “@ 56K modem.” Huh?
Sorry, did you say, 56k modem? First, why a 56K modem? Why not, say, “donkey cart” or “FedEx” or “carrier pigeon” or “smoke signals?” Oh, I get it… it’s the “lowest common denominator” for download time estimates. Because everybody thinks about their download speed in terms of “times faster than a 56K modem,” don’t they?
Second, unless you’re actually using a 56K modem, you probably don’t give a rat’s ass about the download time at 56K, so why bother telling us in the first place? All modern browsers will tell you pretty well how long it will take to download the file if you simply start the process. If you see “29 minutes remaining” and you only have a few moments before your parents send you off to bed, you’re probably going to stop the download process and cover your tracks before going to bed and your parents see you’re downloading a porn video.
Really, you don’t care how long somebody else’s download is going to take; you only care how long your download is going to take.
“We do it for the non-broadband users.” Even if you are still dialing up, if you want Flash, you’re going to download it, no matter if Adobe tells you it will take 45 minutes or 45 seconds “@56K modem”. Besides, you’re going to be able to look at your browser and tell that it’s going to take “about 5 minutes” when you start it.
Sigh. As I said, slow to move forward.
And talk about momentum! There’s no change coming anytime soon, nosiree! Not when yesterday’s webpages would do: when you click the download button, you’re redirected to the “Thank you” page where you are told “If a dialog box appears with the option to run or save, click run.”
That never happens on a Mac OS X machine in Safari. Never has, never will. I’m not so sure about Chrome or Firefox or Opera, but I’d guess they don’t do it either since this is distinctly a Windows Internet Explorer behavior. Now, there’s nothing really wrong with this, exactly, but it’s just untidy. It’s like seeing bra straps showing on the red carpet. Untidy, and easily solved with a little bit of change.
Get with the times, Adobe. As much as you may think Flash is the greatest thing ever, its time has passed. Redirect your energies to making a great HTML5 content creation tool and sell it just as you have the Flash toolset. Well, not exactly. You could do a better job of that, too, but I’m just covering old territory on that.
I like these guys. It seem that what I’ve read so far is “Just the facts, ma’am.” Check them out for yourselves.
[via DaringFireball.net, if you can believe it]
Drill, baby, drill! indeed.
As it turns out, so the linked article says, the biggest disasters aren’t drilling platform-related, they’re shipping related. So, what would you rather have? Oil rigs which are close to home, requiring less transportation (or even having a direct connection to shore)? Or oil rigs in the middle-east monopoly states which require transportation of vast quantities of oil over significant distances?
Yeah, yeah, I know… but until you stop driving a car to work on a road made of asphalt and you stop using plastic and until you understand that we’re all dependent on the stuff, which would you rather have?
In record time: eight days. Article here.
I predict Apple will do one of two things: two WWDC’s per year, one for Mac OS and one for iPhone OS, or (more likely), one WWDC per year with alternating Mac OS and iPhone OS content. There will be some items in each for both platforms, but really, Apple has set itself up nicely for a major delivery per platform every two years.
Until Apple jumps into another market, or until there’s a major shift in the content/capabilities of either OS, I don’t think we’ll see the rapid pace of development that requires annual developer conferences as we have in the past.
Classic case of my ignoring “look before you leap” and “think, then speak.” AT&T made a Quicktime movie of the site for iPhone users. It’s not HTML5, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Mea culpa.
But… really, AT&T? Was Comcast’s move so inspirational that you had to follow suit?
I’ve been on Facebook for something like a year now and I must say that I have enjoyed the experience. It has been fantastic for loosely reconnecting with old friends and friends whom I have known for a long time. (Ha! See what I did there?) Therein is one of the reasons I like Facebook: it allows a loose connection to people. By “loose connection,” I mean a connection that you don’t have to maintain like exchanging E-mail addresses and occasionally pinging them to see if it still works, etc. It’s a nearly maintenance-free connection that’s there for use if you want to use it.
Why else might I like Facebook?
Another reason I like Facebook is that it provides something of a performance venue where we interact with our audience. After reading a years’ worth of updates from 400+ people, I have reached the conclusion that, for the most part, we post status updates for our own entertainment. We throw something out there and hope that we get a response. Sometimes, we expect the audience to laugh. Other times (especially when deriding our favorite politicians), we hope the furor is kept down to a dull roar. Nonetheless, it’s fun to make a ripple in the pond and see what happens.
The other very interesting aspect of the pond that is Facebooks is that I’m getting to know a bunch of very diverse and fascinating adults who grew out of the kids I once knew. There’s the French Horn player who became a music teacher. There’s the wicked-cool guitar player and A.A. Milne fanatic who grew up to own a recording studio and label. There’s the kid who always liked bikes and grew up to be a personal cycling coach. As adults, all three like cycling, just like I do (though with different degrees of intensity), something I wouldn’t know without Facebook. We occasionally discuss gear and rides. And perhaps, one day, I’ll get to ride with one or two of them, which would be neat because, as adults, they sound like very interesting people. As kids, we never really got along.
And who knows? Perhaps today, as adults, we wouldn’t get along, either. Some of my reacquaintances (as I call them) were frontin’ and hatin’ as recently as our ten-year high-school reunion, which was a little over a decade ago. But I had a civilized discussion with one of them regarding one of the finer points of grammar (neither one of us could figure out who was right). It was fun.
My point? We grow up, most of us, and since I can’t know these people in person, it is most excellent to be able to know them via the interwebs. There are some really cool people in this world, and I went to high-school and college with a fair number of them. Not that they might think I’m all that cool. Heck, I’m pretty much still the same geek I used to be. Or that’s what I tell myself, anyway. But perhaps I’ve grown up, too.
Anyway, Facebook allows that loose reconnection to occur, and I have enjoyed it.
US plots retaliatory strikes against al-Qaida in Yemen over plane bomber | World news | The Guardian
Apparently, surprise as a military tactic went out with the last administration. That’s “change” for you…
(The 787, that is.)
Here’s an article which explains in terms of AAPL why the stock market is an amazingly risky thing to be invested in.
Bottom line: if you can afford to lose it, put it in the market. If you can’t, take it out.
Remember, folks: you’re not trading real value of anything. You’re only trading shares of nothing whose value is based on what someone else is willing to pay for it. And this article shows pretty clearly that what someone else is willing to pay for it has no basis in reality.
That having been said, I do like my position in AAPL right now…
The article says:
The top UN climate official says hacked e-mails from climate scientists that appear to cast doubt on their research do look bad, but studies of global warming are solid.
Really? Were the studies done by the “scientists” of University of East Anglia, a bunch of self-serving job preservationists, also “solid” until it was revealed that they’re not quite as solid as a Jello Pudding Pop in the Sahara?
And I have another question for you: When you write a paper or a study, don’t you quote other sources to bolster your conclusions? That’s what I learned to do in college. So were the conclusions of these U of EA “scientists” cited elsewhere? And how many of those papers were cited? Are they all therefore “solid?”
How many other “scientists” will have to redouble their efforts to cover up their own “work” and “research” now that a few of the cards in this tenuous house of cards have fallen?
Look, I’ve got nothing against energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions reductions, etc., but we don’t need a cadre of money-grubbing Al Gore sycophants to invent a reason at our expense to conserve what God gave us. We should be doing that just because we’re supposed to be good stewards of the Earth and all that is in it.
(An excellent treatise on our responsibility to God to take care of His creation can be found in this article by J. Patrick Dobel.)
From Regina Brett of cleveland.com, here is some excellent advice. Do go read it.
Now.
(Thanks, Dad!)
But because I know you’re lazy too busy to click on that link and wait for it to load, this is what she wrote (which can be found at the URL above).
Regina Brett’s 45 life lessons and 5 to grow on
By Regina Brett
May 28, 2006, 10:13AM
To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I’ve ever written. My odometer rolls over to 50 this week, so here’s an update:
Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
When in doubt, just take the next small step.
Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
Pay off your credit cards every month.
You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.
Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
You can get through anything if you stay put in today.
A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
Overprepare, then go with the flow.
Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
The most important sex organ is the brain.
No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”
Always choose life.
Forgive everyone everything.
What other people think of you is none of your business.
Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
Believe in miracles.
God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.
Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.
Read the Psalms. They cover every human emotion.
Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
The best is yet to come.
No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
Yield.
Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.
The last eleven years have been full of some huge changes in the world. Presidents, wars, terrorism, the Internet… There’s been a lot of big change, and it can all be overwhelming if you think too hard about it.
So I laugh at the happy recognition that change doesn’t have to be big and complex and overwhelming. Other, simpler, more delightful things have changed too, as my my eleven-year-old pointed out the other day when he pulled a paper towel off of an old roll.
He said, “Dad, are paper towels supposed to be this big?”
I’m still smiling.
It took me quite a while to figure this one out, but my opinion was solidified when I read that Chief Poet to the Obama Administration Garrison Keillor thinks that Conservatives are crying in envy and through sour grapes over the Anointed One’s election. Maybe, but the real reason we’re unhappy with him is not because of who he isn’t—i.e., he’s not John McCain—but because of who he is, a liberal through and through whose supposed values run contrary to their own beliefs.
Liberals, on the other hand, seem to think they like Obama because of who he is, but really elected him because of who he isn’t—namely, George W. Bush. Consider his campaign slogans, “Hope” and “Change,” and you’ll see that fully half of his slogan is devoted to who he isn’t. The other half is very difficult to implement with policy, as our country is discovering the hard way.
…
Strangely, I find myself in agreement with the majority of Keillor’s piece. In it, he essentially tells Conservatives to get off Rush’s crazy-wagon and get our house in order. That’s so that when 2012 arrives, we’ve got someone who supports our values and will win because of who he or she is… and not because of who he or she isn’t.
And that will be better for the country as a whole, no matter your political leanings.
As the husband of a pediatrician whose records are all electronic, catastrophic data loss—an “epic fail”—like the kind that Microsoft/Danger and T-Mobile are dealing with is the kind of thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night.
Again, Tolland makes the list of Best Places to Live.. I love it here.
Yes, taxes are high. And getting higher. But compared to income taxes, they’re nothing. At least the money we pay gets put into things we use.
And yes, the roads wind around and some are dangerous as hell, thanks to SUV-driving, cellphone-toting soccer moms (and dads) and troopers whizzing around to make it from Troop C to arrest criminals or whatever it is they do at high speed.
But has it lost its charm? I’d argue “No.” You see, there are still a helluva’ lot of trees in Tolland. And the subdivision rate seems to be decreasing dramatically, except for Capstone Builder’s apparent “subdivide even if nobody’s buying my houses” approach. But he’s just one guy trying to make a living.
The schools are good. The neighbors are nice… if you can see your neighbors, that is, since we all seem to have good elbow room here. Town services are just fine. Did I mention that the schools are good?
And being 20 minutes from Hartford is nice, or an hour from Boston is great, or a short drive plus a train hop from Broadway is really cool. But, quite frankly, none of that will make a difference to you if you don’t get out and do it. And that can be said of living in Manhattan.
Buy a bike from Tolland Bicycle, ride at Crandall’s Park. Take a stroll on the hundreds of acres of town-preserved greenspace. Swim in the ponds. Play tennis. Walk to the library.
Or sit on your steadily-increasing-in-size butt and ignore the world around you, complain bitterly about it, and eventually leave. Good riddance.
Us? We’ve been here for 10 years next month, and look forward to the decades to come.
The FTC will get involved in those horrible car warranty robocalls. Finally.
Indeed, this is good news. Senator Charles Shumer (D-NY) got a robocall and got the FTC involved, which apparently, means that the FTC will actually do something about the problem.
But the article mentions that 30,000 other Americans have already complained to the FTC, too, and yet the FTC has done nothing.
So let me get this straight: 30,000 Americans… taxpaying Americans… complain to the FTC, and the FTC does nothing. But one senator who happens to get a robocall in the middle of a session complains to the FTC and they not only jump but ask “How high?”
Does anybody else see a problem with this?
Yeah, I thought so.
They’re comic strip characters who might be falling in love.
One more time: Comic strip characters.
So why do I care?
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