Sign spotted on the men’s room at the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City, where NJ state law has outlawed smoking anywhere but on the casino floor:
“No Smoking Permitted: Violators will be subject to fine and/or termination.”
I presume the latter clause is referring to employees. If not, sheesh, smoking really is hazardous to your health.
How not to sell George Lucas on a creative idea.
Writing from the Iron Gate Theater on Penn campus, where I have just learned the following equation:
Let x = guy who traveled the world in high school and college playing the clarinet (badly, it must be noted).
Let y = 13 years, two months, and 16 days since the last time said clarinet was picked up.
Let z = approximately 3,468 packs of Marlboro Mediums.
x + y + z = making a 2½ single reed vibrate with your lungs is roughly equivalent to making a two-by-four vibrate by thinking really hard at it.
So I read this article about Woz driving to the South Pole, and my first thought: “Yeah, those tires are big enough to float.”
Key words Jeff missed: “from McMurdo.”
Every once in a while I read a news story which is just so breathtakingly unbelievable that I find myself having to pause a moment, lest I spend the next fifteen minutes running through the streets naked and screaming. Here’s today’s: on the front page of the Washington Post, it seems that the Democrats are concerned and arguing internally, about whether they’ll have sufficient turnout in November to win the election.
Put another way, the Democrats believe that their voters are insufficiently motivated to actually get off their butts and vote. Pelosi and Dean and Emanuel are feuding over the best way to resolve this problem.
In other news, the Democrats are uniformly agreed on the policy of “wait for George W. Bush to boil a dozen puppies in white wine and garlic on live television, and then issue a press release noting that this isn’t polite.”
Nancy. Howard. Rahm. In the alternate universe where the Democrats routinely show the mental acumen to find their asses with both hands, their problem isn’t turnout. Their problem is investing millions of dollars upgrading the polling stations of America so their tidal wave of support doesn’t simultaneously violate 10,000 local fire codes.
For example, here’s some of the ammunition your multidimensional counterparts are using. I’ll note that all of this comes from today’s stories. Who knows? If you’re really lucky, you might have more stories to use tomorrow.
A flailing Iraq reconstruction effort that has been dominated for more than three years by US dollars and companies is being transferred to Iraqis, leaving them the challenge of completing a long list of projects left unfinished by the Americans. More than 500 planned projects have not been started, and the United States lacks a coherent plan for transferring authority to Iraqi control. (A1)
Veterans of the fighting in Iraq are more likely than other US soldiers to suffer mild memory and attention lapses back home. [This] could signal more serious mental health problems down the road. (A2)
President Bush has promoted voluntary measures to curb greenhouse gases, but has consistently opposed mandatory targets. (A3)
The Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the commission debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. (A3)
A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and who are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism. The plan would also allow the Secretary of Defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. (A4)
The Senate approved yesterday a bill that would open more than 8 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling, but it must be reconciled with a vastly more permissive House measure that would end a 25-year-old moratorium on drilling off the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. (A7)
More than 2/3rds of the Army National Guard’s 34 brigades are not combat-ready, largely because of equipment shortfalls that will take as much as $21 billion to correct. (A7)
US District Judge Elizabeth Laporte [approved the Forest Service when it] reversed a Clinton administration rule banning new roads on nearly a third of federal forests. But she questioned whether the agency violated federal law by skipping environmental studies. (A7)
A series of bombings and shootings, most of them targeting Iraqi soldiers and police, killed at least 44 people in Iraq on Tuesday in a new surge of violence against people changed with stabilizing the country. (A11)
Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s western Anbar province, has sunk into virtual anarchy under the stranglehold of a skilled, well-financed, and ruthless insurgency. Now, for the first time, US and Iraqi forces are engaged in a block-by-block campaign to retake the area. (A12)
Acting FDA Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach struggled yesterday to convince a Senate committee that he deserves to lead the agency on a permanent basis, but his efforts were repeatedly undercut by tough questions about the agency’s flagging reputation and its snail’s-pace review of the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B. (A13)
A member of the [Kansas] state Board of Education who approved new classroom standards that call evolution into question held onto his seat Tuesday, turning back a challenge from two defenders of Darwin. (A14)
Apparently, this is not quite enough for a coherent Democratic turnout strategy. Bring on the puppies!
But while you’re waiting for Bush to do something so egregiously stupid that even you can’t screw up your message, I suggest you pick up the phone and call a professor of history. There are quite good ones at Georgetown, it’s a local call. Ask them about the Whigs, the Populists, and the Grange. Ask them about the usual fate of parties which are so stunningly bad that their members routinely have bumper stickers that say “Wake me in 2008” — an implicit admission that we expect nothing worthwhile of you until then, and maybe not even then.
And then you can while away some time measuring drapes for your inevitable dustbin of history. They’re rather drab, and they’ll need some decoration.
This just came in on my “available gigs” mailing list:
I am looking for a dedicated programmer. Please do not apply if you are a company, looking to subcontract a programmer. Must have experience with PHP, and HTML, MY SQL and Linux a plus.
MUST be willing to work 40 hours a week.
Pay for this project is $650 per month
We have a amazing company that is dedicated to employee satisfaction, it is a great place to utilize your skills and grow!!
I’m not sure how much growth or employee satisfaction you’ll experience when you’re starving at $4.06 an hour.
Looking for the AppleScripts I mentioned in my TidBITS GTD article? Here you go. And here’s the readme, which you really should read.
Jeff’s GTD AppleScripts
© 2006 Jeff Porten
Thanks for reading my GTD article and downloading these scripts. This readme provides a walkthrough for using these scripts on a day-to-day basis. You’ll need to do some setup to get them working on your Mac — but you only need to set them up once, and then they’re good (nearly) forever.
These scripts are all battle-tested on OS X 10.4. They might work on 10.3; no guarantees. They might break on your Mac, in a non-damaging way. If so, let me know and I’ll try to post a fix. But notably, the long-suffering people at TidBits haven’t seen these or edited this document, and I’m providing the standard “no warranty express or implied” disclaimer should anything go wrong. Backups are your friend.
Setting up your Mac for easy AppleScripting
You’re going to want to have a quick method of launching your scripts. The easiest way to do this is to activate your script menu. In Tiger, run the AppleScript Utility (in the Applications > AppleScript folder), and choose “Show Script Menu in menu bar”; a scroll icon (it’s an S, get it?) will appear in the upper-right section of your menu bar. (In Panther, look for an application called “Install Script Menu”, which does the same thing.)
You can organize your script menu as you like; Apple’s documentation for how this works is here:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/scriptmenu/02.html
Finally, I strongly recommend an AppleScript launching utility so you can fire off a script with a keystroke. I like Quicksilver, which is powerful and highly complex. There are about a thousand other options, which are discussed in detail in the 43 Folder list archives and website.
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
Editing these AppleScripts
Double-click on an AppleScript and it will open in Script Editor. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use AppleScript; these instructions will walk you through the process. However, it’s useful to know three things:
1) Script Editor will format the text of a finished script to make it look pretty. When you make changes, your changes appear in a different font. This is normal.
2) Comments in AppleScript start with “–“; look there for my notes on what to change.
3) When you’re done with your edits, click the “Compile” button; if everything gets reformatted pretty, you know you have a working script. It might not do what you want it to do, but it “works”….
Comment and label selection
This script will set the label (i.e., the background color) of a Finder selection to yellow, and will ask you for a comment to add. If you have multiple files selected, it will do this to all such files. Probably a good idea not to have 300 files accidentally selected when you launch this script.
If you don’t like yellow, you can change the number 3 to something else at the commented line of the script. If you want multiple colors, copy the script a few times and set each one to a new color. I deliberately did not do this because I thought it was a bit too complicated, but have fun.
Get Alias URL
This is one of those things that should be simple, but is really complicated. At least, the AppleScript is complicated; running it should be simple.
This script will create a new folder called AliasFiles in your Application Support folder, and will stash aliases there so any URLs you create will continue to work no matter where you put the original file. There’s no cleanup utility, so you’ll have a lot of files living here; on the other hand, they’re all tiny and it’s hard to tell when you’re finished using them, so I just leave mine there forever.
Select a single file and an alias will be created to it alone. Select a group of files and they’ll be put into a single folder, with an alias created to that. The URL for this alias will be placed on your clipboard, so you can paste it wherever you like. (Note: don’t have anything you care about already in your clipboard — this will replace it.)
If you have Growl installed, a popup window will tell you that the alias was created.
Open Some Someday Item
This was definitely a case of making pretty stacks of sandwich orders, but it’s fun. Point this script to your Someday folder, then launch it and it’ll randomly pick out a waiting file and ask you if it’s okay to work with it. If you agree, it’s labeled and stashed on your desktop. If not, you can tell it to pick another. The script is preset to look for a “Someday” folder in your user folder. You can edit it to look for another.
Tickler folder setup
This script will create one folder for every day from now until whenever you like; by default, it’s the next 90 days. Set it to 365 or 3650 if you really don’t want to think about this again for a while. By default, it looks for a folder called “43 Folders” in your home folder.
Tickler file management
This script is designed to launch once a day to move files from your 43 Folders to your desktop. Note: there’s no error-checking in this script, so if you get an error message in the morning, it probably means you already have a file on your Desktop with the same name as a file in your tickler folder. I’ll bet you a dollar you’ll do this sooner or later with a file named “Picture 1”. If this happens, go ahead and manually move your files around for today.
By default, this script looks for ticklers in a folder named “43 Folders” in your home folder. If you changed this in your setup script, you’ll need to change it here too.
Once the script is set up, you’ll need a way to launch it on a daily basis. I have a repeating daily event in my iCal set up to launch this script for me, which is very similar to what is mentioned here:
http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/poor_mans_cron
Troubleshooting
All of these scripts have been in extensive use on my Mac since sometime after the Industrial Revolution. They work fine here. Whether they’ll work on your Mac, I have no idea. But I’ll be glad to make reasonable efforts to that effect, especially if many people have the same problems.
Again, there’s nothing dangerous about these scripts — the only thing that ever gets deleted is an empty tickler folder. That being said, you assume all risk and responsibility yadda yadda yadda.
And while it’s not required, folks who’ve made a PayBits contribution will probably get more attention if they have a problem with the scripts. For example, they’ll get an email when I post an update to the scripts. If you’ve already contributed for part 1, don’t worry, you’re already one of my favorite people.
PayBITS: Has Jeff helped bring order to your life? Show your appreciation via a PayBITS donation! http://www.paypal.com/xclick/business= civitan%40jeffporten.com Read more about PayBITS: http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/
Hat tip to Brian Greenberg on this celeb face-matching site. I ran my own photo, and would have given props to the site had it matched me with Robert Downey, Jr., whom I’ve been mistaken for. No dice.
No, instead, the celebrity I resemble most is: Robin Gibb. You in the back, stop snickering. Coming in second is Larry King, who I think bears a terrifying resemblance to my father, so I guess the site scores points there.
Third, Oliver Stone. Is this thing matching faces or politics?
Fourth and fifth, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PLO, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, president of Denmark. Ooookaaaayyyy.
Sixth, Clark Gable. Now we’re talking.
Seventh through tenth… are you sitting down? Marilyn Manson, Dizzy Gillespie, Yogi Berra, and Deborah Kerr. No, I am not making this up.
Greetings from beautiful downtown Washington, DC, where it’s nearly 1 AM and I’m writing from the very scenic Gate C of Union Station. As in the “Stranded at Gate C” Gate C of Union Station.
I suppose I’m not really stranded; after all, I could have boarded my train when it departed 90 minutes late, and arrived in Philadelphia too late to make my connecting train to Atlantic City. So I had my choice of which train station to be stranded in, which I suppose doesn’t completely meet the definition of stranded. I stayed in DC because although the Starbucks is closed, the wifi is live, and there’s a power outlet here. Besides, for some reason DC seems to have a better class of homeless people scattered about than 30th Street.
So I’m passing the time waiting to get to Atlantic City by playing poker online. I would probably think that’s ironic if I gave it much thought.
I wish I could say I’m surprised to be here, but really I’m not. After two decades of being an adult non-driver, and happily carting myself up and down the East Coast via planes, trains, and (other people’s) automobiles, it’s gotten to the point where pretty much every traveling experience has been a negative one. And I’m a guy who’s been stranded by transportation companies on three continents; it really takes a consistent effort to annoy the hell out of me.
Amtrak seems to pride itself on raising surliness and inconvenience to an art form, along with their ticket prices. You can just tell they’re itching to say, “Screw you. If you don’t like it, you can take the bus.”
Which would be tempting, since the train routinely costs three times what the buses charge. But the buses — yeesh. After the gate agents get finished treating you like a suspected terrorist criminal psychotic, you board your bus and spend the trip dealing with the federally mandated quota of terrorist criminal psychotics, whose presence makes you too frightened to sleep, or makes it too loud to sleep without spackling your eardrums.
The only consistent positive experience I’ve had recently is with the “Chinatown” buses, which cart you from one Chinatown to the other for truly dirt cheap rates, and who generally maintain an air of professionalism in the process that exceeds Greyhound’s. But it sort of feels like “hard seat” tickets — bring your food and your nicotine patch with you when you board, because that bus ain’t gonna stop until it gets where it’s going.
I think I’ve had enough, sitting here at 1 AM in downtown DC. I think it’s time to finally do my bit to promote global warming, prop up the economies of countries that donate money to radical Islamists who hate me, tell Amtrak to ram it up their caboose, and send the Greyhound to the glue factory. I’m just too tired of you.
So — does anyone know of a Driver’s Ed class that isn’t filled with teenagers and alcoholics?
Kevin Poulsen at Wired News posts a wrap-up on what’s known about the AT&T wiretaps, and demonstrates the lie as to why this isn’t just targeting the suspected terrorists.
Also of note, pointing out what domains in a traceroute indicate that you might be getting sucked into the NSA data maw. I just ran a check from my Comcast cable hookup to Google, and yup, I have to cross an AT&T network to get there.
There are few things in this life that make me feel like I’m seven years old again, but one of them is sitting in darkened movie theater in the seconds before the John Williams score introduces a new Superman movie. Of course, the last time I felt this way was just before The Phantom Menace started, so I was sort of ready to be bitterly disappointed again.
I wasn’t, although this movie is definitely a mixed bag for aficionados. As anyone who has read a review knows, Superman Returns was directed by Bryan Singer, who did a hell of a job of peppering the first two X-Men movies with winks at the comics-reading audience. Superman is a different story; the winks are at those of us who remember the first two Reeve films.
As for the comics continuity, forget it. Jonathan “Pa” Kent is dead; Lois is engaged to someone else (as opposed to being married to the Big Guy in the comics), and has a child old enough to make you wonder if she was knocked up in high school; and Superman himself has been away for the last five years or so on a homecoming jaunt to see the ruins of Krypton.
That’s the first thing that rings oddly about this flick—Superman is underpowered compared to the guy the comics readers are used to. In a breathtaking early scene, he saves both the space shuttle and a 747, but just barely; the print Kryptonian wouldn’t have strained nearly as hard. Likewise, it’s unclear why it would take five years to get to Krypton and back. In the movie he appears to have some sort of Kryptonian ship; in the comic, he gets around pretty well on his own with wormholes and the like, and can probably crack light speed on his own steam.
At the same time, he’s a bit too powerful to make for interesting movie villains. No human weapon can scratch him, as we’re shown during a great display of “faster than speeding bullet time”. Lex Luthor is dastardly as usual (and not the president, as he recently was in the comic), but all he’s got going for him is a few shards of kryptonite. Which, as per usual, is more darned easy to come by than fragments of a dead planet a galaxy away probably should be.
Kryptonite is another thing that gets the weird treatment. Canonical green-K kills Superman through radiation poisoning, but doesn’t take away his powers—although he might be too weak to use them. There was this scene recently where Superman and Batman got buried alive in a grave together after Superman got shot with a kryptonite bullet (bear with me, it made sense at the time); Batman frees them both by setting off a large explosive to blow them into the sewers, using Superman’s body as a blast shield. Naturally, both of them were in pretty bad shape by the time they made it back to the Batcave. Singer’s Superman, though, does seem to lose his powers when exposed to kryptonite; or at least, he loses them just enough for dramatic effect.
And that’s my biggest criticism of Superman Returns. This Superman just doesn’t seem all that heroic. DC has done a great job of coming up with storylines that challenge Superman’s powers, and he’s certainly gone through plenty of stretches without them—and he’s still the guy who the other heroes routinely refer to as “the best of us.” There are any number of characters flying around with Superman’s powers—off the top of my head I can think of two Supergirls, Superboy (a clone of Superman), Captain Marvel, Black Adam, Power Girl, and theoretically the entire population of Kandor if they could just get out of that bottle—but what made Superman a hero, to those who know him best, wasn’t being born on Krypton, it was being raised in Smallville.
Not so with the screen Supes. The married Lois in the comics didn’t marry Superman, she married Clark; it was only after they were engaged that he revealed his identity to her. Not so onscreen; this Lois has eyes only for Superman, and Clark Kent is as bumbling and annoying as ever. This follows in the footsteps of Christopher Reeve, but give me the comic Clark any day over this one.
Or the comic Superman. That one has too much sense of responsibility to Earth to fly away for five years. That one wouldn’t get the crap beaten out of him by three punks who wouldn’t make Batman break a sweat, kryptonite or no kryptonite. That one wouldn’t use X-ray vision and super-hearing to spy on an ex-girfriend in one particularly creepy scene.
So, you might think by now that I don’t like this movie. And you’d be wrong. I thought it was great, had a blast, looking forward to the next one. It’s just that this isn’t really the same guy I read about in the comic books, and I had a few things to get off my chest. You could say the same about Batman Begins, a great movie in which the hero clearly isn’t the Caped Crusader I know, because he wouldn’t reveal his secret identity to some floozy he used to date.
But, hey, Singer? Next time? Give the guy a proper S. This one is a little scrawny. (Illustration by Alex Ross, from JLA: Liberty and Justice.)
My top ten fave search phrases that landed people here, month of May:
I’m starting to realize that by naming my blog “Conspiracy” I’m probably getting an even greater share of nutbar eyeballs than my politics would predict. Incidentally, the real Hershey conspiracy accident appears to be a speech by Helen Caldicott, founder of an organization I speak highly of.
“Jeff is an idiot” tracker: now 7 out 6,110,000. It appears that what’s put my rating back up in the top ten are these posts talking about my Google ranking. Bizarre. Perhaps asking Google to rank your own idiocy is a sign of greater idiocy?
Apparently, the archive of your tax records, if you live in the USA, is being outsourced. Which sounds like a fine idea to me, because nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
The office pool is open — how many weird stories will we be reading in tomorrow’s newspapers about 6/6/6?
Neil Gaiman co-writes an essay for Wired on the myth of Superman. I disagree with Gaiman on several of his thoughts, the biggest one being about Clark Kent being the “disguise” for Superman. To my thinking, it’s the other way around — it’s because Superman is Clark Kent, and has the classic American upbringing and mores, that makes him a hero and not a tyrant internally to the storylines, and externally a part of the American mythology. It wasn’t his powers that made him part of our culture — those keep changing. It was his Kansas.
Still on the topic of superheroes, check out this gallery of Photoshopped art from which I’ve illustrated this post. You want proof that modern standards of female beauty are very different than they used to be? Ask yourself if you can imagine seeing any of the women dressed up as Wonder Woman in a modern comic.
Some people have far too much free time in both the real world and a virtual one. (I wasn’t aware that watermelon was a popular fruit during the Middle Ages.)
I am officially too old to have any idea what this sounds like.
Speaking of too old, I thank God Almighty I can’t remember what I was eating in 1971.
I think this is the best $200 you can possibly spend. Bloodsucking bastards.
Don’t even think about going to this mindbending Flash site while drunk or stoned. It’s hard enough to deal with sober. I’m now wondering if I’m living in an atom in my own eyelash.
With all the hoohah about Boot Camp and Windows on Mac, I’m amused as heck by this discussion that shows how frickin’ difficult it is to run Mac software earlier than OS X on an Intel Mac.
‘Course, I haven’t had the need to run Mac OS 9 or earlier software since well before I upgraded to Tiger last April, so I doubt many people need to do this — and if you do, chances are good that you’ve got an old PowerPC Mac lying around for the purpose. But just in case you need it, have fun with your ROM files.
1. Someone younger than you compliments you on your iTunes playlist.
2. A reverse IP lookup says that someone really interesting is reading your web site.
3. A tourist asks for directions, and you know the Secret Local Method of getting there.
4. Making an exceptionally brilliant call or an exceptionally astute laydown.
5. Finishing the IKEA furniture without any extra grommets, flimflams or whatchamadoodles lying around.
6. The shareware you downloaded yesterday for “someday” testing purposes turns out to be perfect for today’s 3:30 PM crisis.
7. Figuring out a great method of transmogrifying your EyeTV movies onto your new Palm, which provides both portable entertainment and excuse to buy a faster transmogrifier.
8. It’s 4 AM, a mile to the 7-11, and a serious nicotine craving is setting in, and you find one more cig in the “empty” pack of smokes you left lying around yesterday.
I’ve written before about the absolutely wonderful Project Gutenberg, which provides free electronic copies of 18,000 books that are out of copyright. So, for example, if you have a desire to read the complete Sherlock Holmes in the original, with illustrations, it’s all right here for you to enjoy.
The technologically savvy among you might wonder how these century-old (in some cases, millennia-old) works came to be available in electronic format; the answer is, through the magic of optical character recognition and lots of proofreading by dedicated volunteers.
Turns out, there’s a great system for people who want to dabble in such volunteerism. It’s called Distributed Proofreaders, and you can be one of the worker bees. There are a number of ways to get involved, but at its simplest: find a book you’re interested in, ask for a page, edit the OCR text against the scanned image (both of which appear in a convenient web page), and submit your edits. Simple and easy.
In terms of bang for the buck, this is about the best activism around; spend 15 minutes proofing a page, and after you’re done you’ll have played a part in making this book available forever. Tens of thousands of people might someday benefit from your work, which you can do in your bathrobe. Hard to beat that math.
Just by way of example, here are the books I worked on today:
Check out one of the footnotes I found today; this is from a British encylopedia discussing World War I at a time when no one thought it would ever need a number:
[1] The use of gas, as already pointed out, had been forced on the British by its adoption by the Germans. Ultimately the methods invented by British chemists and physicists outgassed the Germans.
I just love this phrasing: of course the only reason the British used poison gas was because the bad guys were just so darned evil about how they used theirs. But when they set their minds to it, of course they were better at it. I’m sure I’ll find similarly interesting quotes if I stick with the pro-slavery book.
Postscript: in case you’re wondering why you might find this interesting yourself (assuming we share the same interest in historical trivia), I have since edited a passage referring to “Bagdad” as a modern Turkish province; a history of Copenhagen; an entry for Copernicus; and I’m currently reviewing the life of Henry Coppée, Penn history and literature professor from 1855-1866, and the first president of Lehigh University. Maybe I’m weird, but I think this is damn cool.