The New Road

Megan's working it

Megan is a natural born trick'or'treater. I think she got that from me because growing up I would stay out until ten canvassing the whole neighborhood to bring home multiple bags of candy. And I had it down to a science.

Megan, at the age of three, already knows how to work the door, the words, the costume, the cute look. She has it all and she came home with a great haul.

Pictures to come later, but they are mostly of Megan's butt at the door. The outfit is super cute though. Lori did an absolutely awesome job on the Piglet costume.

Dorsey starting for the 49'ers

Dorsey is going to start for the 49'ers this weekend. Hopefully he can put some life back into that team.

Nothing new under the sun

The word is out, Libby has been indicted.Robe and Cheney are to come as Libby proves that he isn't strong enough to do the 20-30 years and rolls over on them. But is any of this new? No. Republican administrations always set the benchmark for corruption. Nixon was a crook. Reagan was a crook. And now Bush is a crook.

Which leads me to believe that for all of their blustering about values and respect for the law your average Joe six pack Republican believes deep inside that it's ok to break the law to serve the greater good. Which I suppose is why Clinton was so offensive to them. He didn't break the law in order to create some corrupted version of a new world order, he just wanted to hide his infidelity from his wife.

I'm bored of these Republicans. Their ideals are stale. Their methods are corrupt and often cruel. Their philosophy is just canned hate. And their vision is a white homogenized world that would be just... dull.

Republicans scared of their own shadow

Republicans are now finding demons in every corner. They are getting all heated over a photo of Condi that was in USA Today. The photo was obviously boosted in contrast and posterized in order to save on the file size. Simply do a get info on the two images on the page. The contrasted version with the white eyes, 4k, the other version, 20k. No big deal when you are serving 1,000 hits. But for a publication like USA Today, every penny counts, so they got the image down to 4k.

Duh.

Anyway, more moonbat theories from the right wing that are debunked in two seconds.

I just spent an hour with 4.1 million people

When I was booked for the David Lawrence Show I really didn't know what to expect. Turns out that the show is great, David is a hoot, and an awesome interviewer, and the audience is huge.

My heart was pounding like a rabbit before I went on but David put me at ease immediately and I think I was able to make a cogent point or two. They are going to send me the MP3 so if it's ok with them I'll post it and you can judge for yourself. I'm on the podcast that follows so you can get that for free.

David and his producer seemed genuinely happy with the performance and said afterwards that I was welcome back anytime to talk about podcasting or anything else. So I think I did fairly well.

Wow. I'm really on a high. This was great.

Stephanie Miller Show

I've become an instant huge fan of the Stephanie Miller Show. She is hysterical. The show is light, funny, fresh, extremely engaging and intelligent. Better yet, they Podcast so it's easy to subscribe even if you don't get them on your local radio. Turns out the Quake, my local Air America Station, does have her, but only for an hour on Saturday. Ugh.

Humming, waiting for the indictments

Man, I'm just humming waiting for these freaking indictments. On the one hand I think it will be a heavy hit to the administration because Rove and Libby will get indictments. But then I think that Fitzgerald is a Republican appointment and thus it will be a totally depressing "it's just a couple of little guys" thing.

Update: Nothing today on the leak case. Bummer.

A little bad advice goes a long way...

I went out and shot 130 balls last night. The good news is that I woke up this morning with just a little pain in my left shoulder but that was it. The bad news is that my driver shots were absolutely horrible. They were consistently going straight off to the left. The only good part being the consistently.

I was thinking about it when I went home and it occurred to me that I was keeping my left arm straight at address but probably reverting to my old bad habits when I was impacting the ball. Which would turn the club face and thus give me the bad direction. So I figured I needed to work on holding my arm straight through the shot.

I got to the range this morning to try it out and, wow, it was far far worse. It not only felt bad, but the ball was now hooking severely. Still consistently, which is good. But the shot was completely unplayable. I'd have to address the hole at a 90 degree angle off my left shoulder to play that shot.

So I hit the web. Turns out the whole "keep the left shoulder dead straight" is a load of crap. None of the pros do it. So why was I trying to? Because a far better golfer than myself looked at my swing and told me to. Ok. But I didn't heed the advice of another golfer who just days later told me that it really wasn't so important.

Lesson of the day. A swing needs to feel good and I should be confident enough with my swing to figure out for myself if the advice I'm getting will help or hurt.

For the second time this year...

I've sent out email to folks in Miami about their status after a major hurricane.

Doesn't this seem odd to anyone? When I was in Florida it was less than one every couple of years. Now it was four last year and two this year.

Chicks with guns

I hadn't seen this type of stuff since Australia. When I saw it there I thought it was because their restrictions on guns added an extra kind of kink to it that made it all the more erotic. Nah. It's apparently erotic wherever you go. BTW, whatever she is firing is some seriously heavy type of gun. I like the AC/DC in the background too. Perfect choice of music there.

More about sewing machines

Friend Jeff wrote me yesterday to tell me that I was sadly off them mark when it came to my amazement about programmable sewing machines.

Me? Off the mark? No....

Anyway, turns out these things have been around for a while and it's just me who is late to getting clued in. Actually it was Gizmodo or Engadget since that's where I got the reference, and they were amazed. So I was amazed. Hah!

Still it's cool that you can get sewing machines on the consumer level that can be programmed by a PC. That rocks. I'm happy to see new tools coming out that allow people to realize designs in their computer to more than just paper and bits. I really like these new low-end physical printers which are literally creating 3D shapes on the fly from CAD drawings. Very cool.

Trying the get the consistency down

I'm working on getting a consistent swing and result down with the whole golf thing. So basically I'm taking a single club, like the 7 iron or 5 iron, and if I can take a bucket of balls (around 40) and hit at least 35 of them pretty much straight and to distance then I move on to the next club and so on.

So here are my learnings of late. First, speed, not so important. Except when you go too fast. Which is easy since we all watch Tiger and his 112 MPH swing, which in turn generates 180 at the club face. Woo hoo! (BTW, he has been doing this since he was 6 pretty much continually. He could sleepwalk a scratch game at TPC Sawgrass too!)

Anyway, so the whole speed thing, turns out that my ideal controllable speed is just above the speed at which I used to pitch. Which is way, way, way, lower than I thought I had to swing it. Which is cool because it's not as much effort, thus not so much joint and muscle pain, woo hoo! I can do a really easy swing and get the 5 iron between 180 and 200. Nice.

Ok, second big thing I learned this week was posture. I was really bent over into the ball which made the whole mechanics of the swing really goofy. Fixed that. Check.

The third thing was getting my left arm shotgun straight on the setup. And that seems to have done a miracle job on my consistency as well.

Anyway, long and short of it, feeling really good about where my irons are right now. Next step is to get into the hybrids and the drivers.

Is it just me or do drivers freak everyone out? I mean, come on, it's the hardest club to hit in your bag. It's the one shot that starts off all of the others. And you do it all alone after making this long walk to the tee box with everyone looking at you. That gets my heart racing every damn time. Makes me want to take out a 4 iron that I can hit pretty dependably, hit it 210 straight and give up the extra 30 yards.

New blog graphics

I need some new graphics for the blog. The current top and side bars are getting old. Megan is a lot older now. There are no pictures of Oso. I need some ideas for something cleaner and simpler.

If you have any ideas or blog designs you like send them along.

BTW, has anyone checked out MySpace yet? Looks like yet another {Friendster|Linked In|Orkut}.

Megan is a MSTie

After two long weeks of downloading I finally got all of the AVIs for the first half of season three of Myster Science Theatre 3000. It was a very exciting moment. So while I was waiting for Megan to finish her milk before going to bed (a process that is taking longer and longer as time goes on) I started up an episode of MST3K.

Megan, was, enthralled. She danced to the theme song. She clapped and hooted when the characters did. Which is cool on two accounts. First, that she has great taste in crap TV. Love it! And second, that my entertainment level preference is the same as that of my three year old. Yes!

Oh, man, eight episodes of Joel, including four, count them four, Godzilla movies. Oh, man, I love it.

These are truly the salad days. Tom DeLay will be doing the perp walk today. Indictments will be coming for Rove, Libby and possibly even Cheney. And I have these sugar plum fantasies of watching MST3K on some lazy Saturday morning with Megan geeking out with Joel and the bots. Love it.

...There was a guy named Joel. Not too different from you or me. He worked at Gizmonic institute. Just another face in a red jump suit. He did a good job cleaning up the place. But his bosses didn't like him so they shot him into space...

We'll send him cheesy movies. The worst we can find. He'll have to sit and watch them all while we monitor his mind. Now keep in mind Joel can't control where the movies begin or end. Because he used those special parts, to make his robot friends...

Robot Roll Call... Cambot, Gypsy, Tom Servo, Crow....

If you're wondering how he eats and breaths and other science facts. Then keep in mind it's just a show as you breath and just relax... For Mystery Science Theatre 3000!

Sweet! BTW, in one of the episodes I watched yesterday we find out why the mad scientists (mads) do the experiments. It's so that they can sell the results to cable TV operators. Yep.

This is far, far better than the Buck Rogers kick I was on a month ago. Buck Rogers sucked. But MST3K rocks. No doubt. How could I have been so, beedee beedee beedee, wrong?

Export to sewing machine

This is very cool. It's a sewing machine that you can hook to your computer via USB. It comes with a bunch of characters preloaded. And you can most likely create your own designs and have them sent across. Wow.

Harriet Miers

I'm of two minds about this Harriet Miers hoopla. On the one hand it could me a simple mistake by the administration. On the other it could have been an amazingly well choreographed scam, that so far has gone very wrong.

How could it have been a mistake? Ok. The President genuinely thinks that Harriet is a good candidate. So he nominates her without first informing the pundit headline through the talking points fax. Bad move, the pundidiots love that fax machine, because at the other end of it is Karl, and Karl is all things good. You see, they don't have loyalty to the party, or to Bush, they have loyalty to the talking points. Without the talking points on Harriet the pundidiots had to actually look at the candidate and, lo and behold, she is a total incompetent. So into smear mode they go.

I actually think that's unlikely. Partly because Karl was, at some point, behind this. He talked with Dobson. Remember? The guy who said he had special knowledge that he couldn't share, but then when threatened with an appearance before the judicial committee simple recanted what we all already knew and what he had said a week earlier on a TV show.

Yeah, so I think the plan was this, have all of the pundidiots come out and slam her. Then re-launch with some arcane knowledge and have the pundidiots all reverse course. That's half baked because first, she isn't legislation, you can't fix her and then re-submit her. And primarily because pundidiots never change their mind. Remember the Republican credo; "We are never wrong, and when we are wrong, we never change our mind." The great leader Bush can't change his mind, so neither can druggy Limbaugh, or Michelle "I would have had my parents killed" Malkin, or Mann Coulter.

Of course, I could be wrong. This second scenario does seem shaky and ill-planned. And either that's because it's so amazingly obfuscated a plan that it's completely impenetrable, or because Karl, who is facing mucho time in an orange jumpsuit, is a little busy at the moment. It's fascinating to watch either way.

Frankly, as Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, whatever we want to call ourselves, we deserve to loose the reproductive freedoms offered by Roe vs. Wade. We didn't fight hard enough, we didn't organize. We lost. And you can't win this game on a technicality. We need to create a structure, just like the Republicans, that presents a solid reinforced message continuously. Then take back over Government and once again ensure that everyone has the ability to control their own bodies. Sometimes you have to loose what you value in order to understand why you had it in the first place.

Boom crash opera

You would think with all of the mayhem unfolding in the White House and in the broader Republican ranks that I would be jumping for joy. And you are right. But probably not for the reasons you think. Yes, I hate Bush. Yes, I think he has done serious fiscal and social damage to this country.

But here is the kicker, what he is really bad at is what people think he is best at. It's his national security decisions that trouble me the most. The worst one of late has been the non-response to the Pakistan quake. Osama bin Ladin, head of Al Qaeda, is located in Pakistan, we know that for a fact. Pakistan has a major quake. 76,000 are dead. And what is our response? $50M and some helicopters. We had a chance to really help these people and to turn them away from their popular support of Al Qaeda, and we blew it. Now, unfortunately, it's Al Qaeda helping these folks and that will only cement their hold on that country even further.

What I really want is for our government to take it's job seriously. (Not be run by a bunch of jackasses who don't even believe in government.) Our government should protect our national security not just by blowing people up, but by helping people to create a more peaceful world. Think I'm some liberal pacifist type? Nope. Rumsfeld agrees with me. War is only a tool. A means to an end. It's not the solution to every problem. In fact, it's often the worst solution of all.

We are a powerful country. We have a lot of people. We can afford a a number of mistakes in our national security policy. But with this mistaken invasion of Iraq, the mistakes in Afghanistan, the mistakes in Pakistan, and on past that, one has to wonder just how many mistakes we can afford before this President does more damage than Al Qaeda could ever hope to.

It could be argued that the relentless prosecutions of corruption dogging this administration are what's hampering their effectiveness. Frankly though, they were incompetent before all of this stuff, and they are only limited in their capacity to be actively incompetent now. What's worse, a stalled administration making no decisions, or an active one making really bad decisions? Bad choice either way. Best thing to do is to get the yokels out of office.

Terrific review of Podcasting Hacks

Lori turned me on to this review:

The book is full of good advice for podcasters of all levels. They actually went out and talked to podcasters and technology folks to get some great ideas. That's the real benefit of this book -- they talked to these people so you don't have to spend a lot of time researching. They've tested out the microphones and mixers. And they're willing to tell you when an inespensive solution works as well ...

This is great because it reinforces what I have tried to do in my books. To research topics in depth, talk with a lot of folks, and then condense all of that into a genuine resource for the reader. So you aren't just buying my opinion, you are buying a lot of research and the condensed opinions of a lot of folks.

The reviews so far have all been great, but I really like ones like this. It validates what Brian, James and I did, and all of the contributions from folks like Jay Allison, Craig Patchett, Jeff Towne, amongst others.

I actually don't know what the sales numbers are like, but I think Podcasting Hacks is going to start slow and then grow as the reviews come in and I do more PR work for it. Podcasting is a fascinating topic and I think the book stands as a good reference work for it.

Impeachment, the impossible dream

Doesn't story mean that Bush knew about Rove's leak two years ago? Doesn't that mean that he was in colluding to cover up the leak? Impeachment! Impeachment!

Klutzy day

Oh yeah, it's klutzy day today. I've been bumping and slamming into stuff all morning and generally feeling completely discombobulated. I love days like this. Not.

On another note I watched some Jon Stewart last night and saw O'Reilly make a complete ass out of himself. The crowd boo'd. He called Jon a "Pinhead". Screw him. I hope he does quit. Loser. That's what you get when you lie for a living.

And I'm not the only one who is really happy about Bill O'Reilly quitting.

Keeping on target

The Bush administration and his cronies in Congress offer a lot of tempting targets. And like so many shiney objects Democrats are jumping at them all and failing to hit the big targets... impeaching these incompetent crooks.

Sure, watching the chimp screw up a pre-scripted video conference is funny, but it's distracting. Stay on message! Cheney outed a CIA operative to the press. He should be gone! The President started an illegal war on lies and false pretext. He should be gone! Frist... should be gone. DeLay... should be gone. All of these crooks and cronies should be gone.

Arm and joint pain

I've been working on my golf swing a lot recently. I'm trying to get into a groove with it so that I can depend on a smooth and accurate swing every single time. To that end I've been swinging at the range, at home and at the office up to about 200 times a day. Yeah, it's a lot. And I'd say I've been doing this for about two weeks straight.

So... I've been having some muscle and joint pain, and my hands are gaining some callouses. But it's the muscle and joint pain that worry me.

Here is what I am doing to try and solve this. First, I've taken a day off. That's helped. Second, I'm slowing down my swing a lot. Which is upping the accuracy and also lowering the punishment level. I'm also swinging less because I'm thinking about each more and trying to analyse each on to see what's up. Third, I'm much more accurate now than I was in the beginning, so I'm hitting the mat a lot less. Which is causing less of a jarring at impact. I'm also using a heating pad, which is helping.

So the question is, what else should I do? Should I ice before I heat? Should I get a brace for my wrists? Will the pain go away as I get better at this? Anyway, thoughts, idea, whatever, requested. I've never been much of an athlete, so understanding the basics would be cool.

This just in, pot calls kettle black

Here is a choice quote from one-time Presidential nomiee Pat Buchanan talking to Imus:

BUCHANAN: I mean, really. I was talking with a friend of mine in the green room last night, and we were talking about this -- you know, the criminalization of politics is appalling. It used to be good enough that you'd go out there, and you beat the guy, fair and square. And he's out for four years, and you have a good laugh. But, now's it's, uh, it's not satisfactory or if you can't beat him, you put him in prison.

No, seriously, Pat. You don't know who created this atmosphere? Look in the mirror, buddy. You and your man Newt Gingrich and his politics of personal destruction against Bill Clinton. Shit, Newt was on Hannity last week frothing at the mouth over Clinton and this bullshit story in some tell-all FBI book. It was like 1996 all over again.

Delay is going down because he broke the law. Frist, going down, broke the law. Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, traitors to the country. Going down. And these are real charges that are important. Not cooked up stuff like a blow job in the White House.

Tom Delay through his actions rigged the Texas elections. Bill Frist had a chief financial stake in a company that was directly impacted by legislation he was authoring. Karl Rove and Scooter Libby outed a CIA operative doing WMD work to protect this country, and in so doing caused the destruction of the WMD operation of which Plame was a part.

This isn't penny anty stuff. These people commit crimes and need to pay for those crimes.

I'd like to support the new Iraqi constitution, but...

I'd like to support the new Iraqi constitution, but... it's Sharia law. Two thousand US soldiers dead (that were officially declared), tens of thousands of soldiers injured, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded, our foreign policy and crediblity in shambles. All that, and we create Iran west. And that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is a civil war on top of the largest oil field in the world.

How is it that anyone still thinks this war was a good idea?

Blind leading the blind, literally

Every morning I get up between 5:30 and 6 to get ready for the day. My first chore is to go outside and collect Sadie's pee so that I can check the sugar levels and manage her insulin. Because we are getting into Winter and the days are getting shorter I literally do this in the dark. This morning at 6 it was so dark that it was basically night. The stars were out, there was no moon, and I couldn't see shit. Which left me, well, blind. Following around a blind dog, waiting for her to pee.

There is also some dog poop in the yard. So I have to walk close behind Sadie trusting on her nose to guide me away from the poop. It's literally the blind leading the blind.

Food porn

A couple of weekends ago Pam and I were hanging out watching the Food Channel and we watched "Everyday Italian". While we were watching the show it occurred to both of us that it was food porn. The driving backbeat, the composition of the shots, the use of wetness and fluids. It's porn. Just, with veggies.

Turns out that this wasn't lost on Brooke Gladstone either. She had a segment on her show On The Media with Frederick Kaufman where she covers this phenomenon in detail.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: It's also shot very differently. It's actually shot single-camera as opposed to a four-camera television format. And so it's almost shot like a 35-millimeter film. You get an amazing angle on Giada, who is beautiful, and who always is wearing a very close-cut sleeveless top. And then you get the food, and then you get Giada, and then you get her fingers on the food. And oh, it's so moist. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

GIADA DeLAURENTIS: Mmmm! Peaches are juicy, crunchy from the amaretti cookies. The sugar's caramelized, and it's creamy with the whipped cream.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Part of the big lie of porn and part of the big lie of The Food Network is things are made to look extremely simple when in fact they're extraordinarily complex. So, for instance, if you're seeing something like oral sex in pornography, it looks like the easiest thing in the world, when in fact there are all sort of issues with the way the camera is low and the light is to the side. And it's extremely difficult to actually pull this off. This is a wildly choreographed event, just as the food is wildly choreographed. And the big lie is "taste life," have a real experience when, in fact, this is the most unreal experience.

Mmmmm! Indeed! Food porn. Love it.

The whole piece is great. There is some terrific stuff about the Iron Chef, about how men are now watching the network, but not to learn about cooking. It's very informative. And it's funny to see someone picking up on this other than just Pam, Lori, Yvonne and myself.

BTW, even Megan is hooked on the Food Network, but she likes to cook.

Our national bombing habit

We like to bomb people too much. The people on the video first provided no real reasons for bombing these people. And secondly, well, if you can't see the problems with their indications about where we should bomb, well, that's indicates a serious educational issue.

A book I wrote but didn't know about

I got a copy of the Podcasting Pocket Guide in the mail yesterday. I had never heard or seen anything about this book and it seems... I wrote it. Or at least part of it. Cool.

Actually the book is really cool and I recommend that you check it out. Even though I have no idea if I will have any financial connection to it. ;-)

Another good talk, I think

I gave a meandering but good talk at the ACCU last night. At least, I thought it was good. I gauged this in two ways. First, I didn't sweat buckets the way I normally do. Which means that I'm coming to grips with public speaking. That's a good thing.

The other positive sign was that the crowd was interacting with me and we created conversations between different parts of the crowd.

That being said. I was pretty rusty on the topic. And some of the questions at the end showed my ignorance about the high end "Executable UML" stuff that some consultants are doing. All I know is that it's expensive and only loosely defined. That being said, I should know more about it.

New Ruby Site

Artima just published a new Ruby site called Ruby Code and Style. I'm on the advisory board of this site and have contributed three articles which should appear over time. I think it looks good. I hope it gets Slashdotted soon.

Come on! Give us a Slashdot!

Wallace and Gromit

I took Megan to see Wallace and Gromit in the "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" yesterday. She really enjoyed it. Though she wasn't too keen on the four trailers at the start, the Fandango ad, or the five minute short with the characters from Madagascar (boy those folks thought that movie was better than it was.) The animation was excellent. The plot was sweet, though plodding at times. Gromit was, as always, the best non-speaking character ever.

Tiger at Harding

I got a glimpse of Tiger playing at Harding yesterday on ESPN. It looks like that course is too easy for the pros. The talk about the angles but it's just too short. Anyway, I was intrigued by one of his tee offs. It landed all of about eight feet from the hole! Impressive! But what was interesting was the club he used. It looks like one of the 450-460 cc drivers that are so popular with the weekend warriors nowadays. I was expecting that he would use on the older drivers because he can still get the distance and have more accuracy. I guess he can get both even with these new monster head jobbies.

More Megan Pics

Meeting workshop review

Hey! Check it out! A great review from my presentation at the NCMUG meeting!

The best hands-on workshop, in my opinion, was the podcasting session by author Jack Herrington. He shared many tips on recording the best audio you can for your podcasting product. Such tips as using two microphones when doing an interview (one for the interviewee, one for the interviewer), are very valuable to those of us exploring, or just curious about, the world of podcasting. Jack will be our speaker at the November meeting.

That's great! I'm always so nervous doing this kind of stuff and it's nice to know that it worked for people. I was super psyched afterwards.

Some things I learned from golf recently

Here are a few things I learned from my time practicing and at the range recently.

First, I can't understate how imporant stretching is. I really screwed myself up yesterday by working the long irons before being completely warmed up and now the muscles in my lower torso are killing me. I need to warm up every time.

Second, balance is critical. I've had a physical lean to the left of about 15 degrees for my entire adult life. And I make almost all my movements from places well beyond my balance. I keep my feet to close together, and a compensate by flaying them out to the side.

This is going to be a tough habit to break, but it's critical since the essnse of golf is keeping yourself balanced as you throw a weight around your head. The idea is to use centripetal force instead of physical force to leverage the ball off the ground. In order to get that whip action and control it your head and the center of your body need to be still and be within the center of your balance.

And third, spin can definitely applied, at least by me, up to about 80 yards out with a nine iron. That means I can get the ball to stop around where it drops by adding reverse spin, or get the ball to bounce and roll forward using reverse spin. One of the guys here says that he can get the ball to back up, which could be a lot of fun.

Anyway, this is fun stuff. Or at least, I think so.

O'Reilly on the bloggers

Falaffel boy is all upset about the bloggers. Apparently he doesn't like being fact checked.

Here is a portion of it:

Babbin: Well, it was fairly typical of what they always do. They disagreed with something I said on television. It was about the Iraq war and the fact that we did not find Saddam's weapons of mass destruction proved absolutely nothing about whether he had them before the war, because we gave him six months to fiddle and diddle with them, and Charles Deulfer's report probably shows that they were taken somewhere else, perhaps into Syria. Basically, by the time that I got home, they had somehow found my email address and posted it on their website, saying that I was a liar and I'd gotten, oh, I don't know, 100, 150 emails, all on the basic eloquence level of liar, liar, pants on fire.

And the point is what? By appearing on television you shouldn't be fact checked? How does that make any sense at all?

Then there is some more of the usual attack the messenger stuff.

O'Reilly: I mean, these are the people who damaged Bennett. And they tried to damage me.

Yeah, it's the bloggers fault that the guy said that every black baby should be aborted to reduce crime.

Then there is the fun part where he slices a thin line between Limbaugh and the blogosphere:

O'Reilly: Here's the danger. You know, you're making a good point. You've got a big variety of voices out there. It's better than just The New York Times and the network news strangling people and ramming stuff down their throat.

Kline: Right.

O'Reilly: Absolutely valid, excellent point. But here's the problem: these people are so vicious, and they -- the media is so corrupt in taking their uncorroborated, as Mr. Babbin pointed out -- defamation that most people now won't run for office, sir. They won't do television and radio commentary...

So it was ok when Limbaugh came out and became the drug-abusing voice of the right to try and offset the mythical left wing media. But now that everyone is involved... That's just not right. Boo hoo hoo.

Then he talks about something that has never appeared on Fox or on right wing radio:

O'Reilly: You see, you don't want to get stalked either. So put yourself in a position of somebody running for office or somebody trying to do an honest analysis of the news and they don't want to do it.

Who on Fox is trying to do an "honest analysis of the news"? Ann Coulter? Sean Hannity? Bill O'Reilly? Brit Hume? Give me a break. These people are as slanted as slanted gets. They spin, lie and distort continuously without any ramifications. There is nothing honest about it.

Frankly, if blogging does have a chilling effect on people like O'Reilly, fine! I'd love to see his lying, sexual harrassing, character assasinating ass out of his bully pulpit. My country is going down the drain and it's because of him, people like him, and the idiots that follow him.

I wonder if he will threaten to boycott us all, like he did France. Yeah, that was effective.

Hah, hah, what goes around comes around

I loved how when it came to Roberts the righties were all on about how little oversight the Congress should have over judicial nominations. Basically relegating Congress to a rubber stamp. Hey! Bush won, right! Get over it!

Now the righties are all upset about Miers. Here is George Will, bow tie guy:

"...The president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution. ... It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends."

Wow! George! That's strong stuff.

So now he wants Senatorial oversight. Nice. You can't have it both ways George. Either Congress has a role (it does, actually, check your Consititution), or it doesn't. You can't just ask for oversight when you need it, and shun it when you don't.

Moron.

Indiana trying to ban reproductive rights

Republicans in Indiana are trying to ban artificial reproductive rights to people it deems unworthy. That worthiness is heavily dependent on your 'faith-based activities' including going to church. The state of your marriage. Your personality. And much more. Read the PDF of the proposed legislation here. This is classic Republican. This infuriates me at a whole new level. These people are sick. Really.

Mac User's Group Interview

The Mac User's Group Resource Site now has an interview with me about Podcasting Hacks. That interview was a lot of fun. I hope it turned out as well as I think it did.

Football and Megan

Before I gave Megan her bath last night we had some free time so I turned on the Monday night game. I started telling her about the game and she was enthralled. We had all kinds of fun saying "Go, go, go!" before the ball was snapped and seeing how it turned out.

I asked her if she liked the guys in the yellow pants or the black shirts and she said the yellow pants. So she is a Green Bay fan. Unfortunately Green Bay didn't do all that well last night. Though a late fumble recovery turned what was a blow out into a tight game as it lit a fire under Farve's ass and he scored two touchdowns in quick succession to bring the game within a field goal.

Megan was, of course, asleep by that point. But she enjoyed what she saw.

Range craziness

Sundy was a pretty lazy day, so I decided to go to the range. The range I went to is a double decker. Which means that one row of people tees off on top of another row below. I decided, wrongly, to go below because it seemed like there weren't a lot of poeple around.

I got about 3/4 of the way through the bucket, thankfully, and then a father and his two kids showed up. The father went into the spot behind me, and the two kids went ahead of me. Before I knew it balls were flying everywhere. Jumping up to hit the ceiling. Bouncing off the back of the wall. It was actually dangerous. I looked up to see the kids teeing off with putters.

I hit a few last balls and got the hell out of there. As I was on my way out I watched the dad tee off. He literally took two steps during the backswing to walk up to the ball, swing and hit, then walk a little forward. He was doing this with a driver that as a result made around a 45 degree slice and went about 100 yards, at best.

How is it that people who go to the range and have no idea how to hit always want to use the driver? It's by far the hardest club to hit with any accuracy. It's one of the heaviest. I guess it just looks meaty.

Anyway, next time I'm definitely heading upstairs, even if it is windy and cold.

Truth

Here is a prediction for 2006. The theme for that year will be truth. And I don't mean truth in the co-opted Christian sense which is as a synonym for myth. I mean the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why? Because of this.

(And believe me, I could have picked pictures a lot more gruesome than this.)

I talked with a guy from Britain last night and asked him if they would have let people rot in the river is Europe and he just shook his head and said, "No. No. Of course not." Of course not. And nobody would have thought it would happen here either.

Pictures like this just make me angry. And the lying of the people in this administration sounds so ignorant, out of touch, and meaningless. People died in the streets. In America. That's completely unacceptable and yet there are these lying apologists going around yammering how it's anybody but the President's fault. They make me sick.

And the more I hear lies the more they make me sick. And people lie about everything.

They lie about how we got into Iraq. The lie about why we are in Iraq. And they lie about how Iraq is going.

They lie about the economy. They lie about our history.

They say horrible unthinkable things, like that every black baby should be aborted, and then they lie about having said it.

They cheat at business and lie about it. They destroy the functioning of the government and then lie about it.

They lie about their political opponents. And their pundidiot apologists lie and lie and nobody ever calls them on it. Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, it's 100% fabrication and lies. 2,000 buses? They didn't exist. And they lie and lie, and nobody ever calls them on it.

And it's not just the administration and their cronies. Lying is systemic. I hear it everywhere. It's in ads; "The first ten people to call will get a special discount." Bullshit. Everyone will get the discount. We aren't idiots. And I don't like the fact that it's just a lie. My mailbox gets filled with spam that's all lies and scams. I put my car in for service and I get a questionnaire back on how the service was, with the unspoken understanding that if I put bad marks on it I will get no end of questions about it. So I'm forced to lie, because the service is never as good as it could be.

I'm fed up with the lies. How much bullshit are we supposed to take? I mean, seriously. The next pundit who spews the same old crap about how we are 'bringing freedom to Iraq' needs a straight punch to the face.

We need to call an end to the era of lying and spin that seems to have a hold on our national polity.

We need to start talking the truth. Talking the truth about Iraq. Talking truth about Katrina and Rita. Talking truth about the culture of corruption in the White House and the Congress. Talk the truth about how Bush is little more functional than a vegetable. It's time to stop sugar coating the wave of Christian fascism that's taken over this country wrapped in the flag and call it what it is.

Give me a plan to fix Iraq that is actually connected to reality, or pull the troops out. Fix FEMA so that it's an agency that works, or disband it. For the christo-fascist neocons out there, just fess up, your trying to create a theocracy.

Excellent podcasting talk yesterday

I gave my first talk on podcasting at the Northern California Mac Users Group yesterday. It went really well. Instead of doing the powerpoint presentation thing I worked with the group to create a podcast. They really enjoyed it, got a lot out of it, even though we didn't finish. And it was a lot more fun than the powerpoint bullshit most often done.

Why do we do the powerpoint things to ourselves? Nobody likes it, and yet, we all do it. People like to see stuff demonstrated, not talked about.

Megan's ABCs

Every time Megan sees my microphone she wants to sing into it and do her numbers, abcs, and tell everyone she loves them. Here are numbers and ABCs.

More republican government hating itself

As I keep saying, the Republican's administration is more about chopping up government and selling it off to the highest bidder than it is about performing government functions effectively. The hurricane response is one of the most obvious points, but the other is the public education system. Republicans have been trying to kill it from the inside for years.

Here is an excerpt from a run-in with ex-education secretary Bill Bennett:

He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.

This is the same guy who postulated recently that every black baby should be aborted to reduce the crime rate. Now that's compassionate conservatism for you.