Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

The black screen of death

by

My blog silence has many parents. There’s the book. And we did take a week off, off to the north coast of California, off the grid, off by ourselves. But there is also — signal the “Taps” bugle — the death of hardware.

Upon our return from Sea Ranch, I was catching up on my RSS feeds, wandering the Web aimlessly, and listening to some music. My gaze landed somehow on an URL I’d filed away to check out — the music of Mountain Goats producer John Vanderslice. And I found this page describing the amusing hoax he perpetrated in 1999, pretending that the minions of Microsoft had come after him for penning a song titled “Bill Gates Must Die.” (No, it’s not the rant of a crazed Linux hacker, or a cry from Gary Kildall beyond the grave — it’s sung from the perspective of a paranoid Net porn addict who blames the wizard of Redmond for his fallen state.)

Anyway, I fired up Vanderslice’s “Bill Gates Must Die” MP3 and started enjoying the fine distorted crunch of the guitar, when, with a sickening, decaying “whirr” of fans cycling down, my box died. Not the Blue Screen of Death, indicating massive software failure, but the Black Screen of Death — instantaneous cessation of all output, followed by permanent inability to reboot. Did my venerable Athlon XP chip, having served faithfully these three-plus years, simply fry a stray register? Did my North Bridge go south, or South Bridge go north? Did my system hit Mean Time Before Failure before its time? Or did the indomitable spirit of Bill himself reach a dark hand into my system’s innards and, seeking revenge on my choice of musical diversion, short out a random slot on my motherboard? I will never know.

I have learned a handful of lessons in 30 years of tinkering with computers; all my data (including every last bit of book work) is safe. But I’ve had to reconstruct a makeshift working system on an old box, swapping out hard drives and PCI cards in the dust of aged system cases, while waiting for a new system to arrive. Radio Userland, being a client-side tool, got swept up in the vortex of this system failure. If you’re reading this now, it means I’ve sufficiently recovered my system configuration to reestablish this small link with my former life, and you, dear reader. A resumption of normal life waits on the UPS person.

Consequences

by

The buzzphrase-du-jour in the right side of the national dialogue these days seems to be “Elections have consequences.” These words are brandished in the general direction of Democrats and liberals who have the temerity to ask questions about President Bush’s choice to replace Sandra O’Connor on the Supreme Court. The implication is that, having re-elected President Bush in 2004, the American people — even the 59 million (48 percent, for 252 of 270 electoral votes) who voted for the other guy — should now return to their homes, shut up, and let the Republicans have everything they demand.

The debate over John G. Roberts will proceed nonetheless, as it should; the Senate will ask questions, as the Constitution says it must. At the end of it all, it seems extraordinarily likely that Roberts will be confirmed. Unless there’s a video store somewhere that has records of some hitherto unknown proclivity on the nominee’s part for an unAmerican sexual practice of some sort (and that store’s owner doesn’t like Roberts), or some other skeleton comes crashing out of the man’s closet, there doesn’t seem to be much basis for the Democrats to unite to oppose him. Since his paper trail is limited, we won’t really know what kind of justice he’ll be until he’s on the court. By then, of course, it will be too late — too late for the conservatives to say, whoops, we just got another Kennedy or Souter, should he prove to be less radical than they wish; more likely, too late for the liberals should his conservatism prove as dependable and far-reaching as those of President Bush’s favorite justices, Scalia and Thomas.

If the consequences of the Roberts appointment and the almost inevitable second Bush Supreme Court appointment are to uproot significant tracts of Supreme Court precedent; if we see the Court writing a growing pile of blank checks to the executive branch in the “war on terror”; if the rights of individuals continue to be dismantled in favor of the rights of businesses; if environmental regulations and other protections of citizens’ health and welfare are struck down on the basis of originalist constitutional arguments — if all of that happens, I imagine, Democrats and liberals will be upset, things will get worse in the U.S., but political life will proceed as before. But if the Bush appointments result, as they might well, in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think we might be in for some “consequences.”

The conservative movement has deluded itself that its extremist anti-abortion stance is shared by the majority of Americans. Those of us on the other side believe that the majority of Americans continue to think decisions about pregnancies are best left in the hands of individual women, not courts and politicians. (Polls? Well, they tend to vary depending on the wording of the question, so you can really push them in any direction you want.)

If Roe goes down, then I think it’s quite possible that a wide slice of American voters who think of themselves as moderates, and who bought into the Bush/Rove positioning of the Bush Administration as essentially centrist, will finaly wake up and understand that they bought a Republican pig in a poke — that their votes for Bush and for other Republicans of his generation have ushered in an era of radical cultural overreaching on the part of religious conservatives, whose agenda is anything but mainstream. We’d have to wait until 2006, or 2008, maybe even beyond, for such awareness to “have consequences” — even longer, certainly, to restore the Supreme Court itself to some kind of balance. But those consequences could be potent and lasting.

I am not arguing that Democrats should welcome a decision overturning Roe because it will galvanize support for them; there’s too much at stake in individual lives and families for anyone with a heart to embrace that sort of intensify-the-contradictions thinking. But it’s time for those of us in the opposition to think about what happens when conservative state legislatures start outlawing abortion. Elections have consequences, indeed.

Rove v. Plame

by

I am way too deep in the weeds of my book to offer further extended thoughts on what we can now fairly call the Rove-Plame affair.

Fortunately, other people are saying what I would, and probably better than I could.

First, Frank Rich elucidates the essential fact that the affair is not inside-Beltway baseball at all, but the tip of an iceberg, and that iceberg is how a war was sold to the American people on false pretenses. If we had a stronger opposition in Congress we’d be having a real national debate; because we can’t, the opposition is leaking out around this sideshow-style prosecution.

Then, Jay Rosen digs deeper into the Bush administration’s war on the media.

  The president and his advisors have declared invalid the “fourth estate” and watchdog press model… “Executive freedom on the terrain of fact itself” is my way of describing what the Downing Street Memo said: “facts were being fixed around the policy.” … Limits on what liberties could be taken with the factual record — without triggering a political penalty — are being overcome. Joseph Wilson interfered with this project, forcing the White House to pay a penalty: the so-called sixteen words in the State of the Union speech that had to be withdrawn after his op-ed. So he had to pay. And that’s how roll back, freedom over fact, culture war, and the naming of Valerie Plame connect to one another.

I am glad to see Jay exploring more fully and deeply the notion I wrote about back during the Eason Jordan controversy, reaching back to Ron Suskind’s observations on the Bush team’s calculated campaign to undermine the possibility of being challenged by the media on the facts. In this White House’s Wonderland, words mean anything the occupants wish them to mean, and facts can be changed as circumstances require.

Jay concludes with an Iran-Contra flashback:

  A final thought: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” said Ronald Reagan on March 4, 1987. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” I wonder what caused him to say that, because whatever it was seems to be much weaker today.

It seems to me that what caused Reagan to say that was not any particular flash of conscience, but the determined, relentless effort of a team of prosecutors and congressional investigators to dig up the truth, forcing the Republican administration into a corner from which Reagan had no choice but to make a confession in an effort to defuse a crisis that was otherwise headed down the road to impeachment. In those days, we still had an independent counsel statute, and we had two-party government, in that Democrats had a power-base in Congress. Today, there’s a prosecutor, but he’s out there pretty much on his own, and I don’t have any great confidence that his efforts will bring the Bush White House back to its factual senses. This crowd is so far out in fantasyland these days it’s impossible to dream of what might restore them to sobriety.

Random links

by

## I can’t go to Blogher on July 30 because I’ll be away that week with my family — it’s the break week between two summer-camp sessions for the kids — but hey, it sounds great. The registration’s full but there’s a waiting list. The focus is on women bloggers and blogging; men, it seems, are welcome, too.

## Here’s a fun experiment in designing an interface that’s all rollovers, no clicks. Kinda limited, but makes you think. [Link via John Battelle]

## Kudos to Wired editor Chris Anderson for handling a messy little business — involving collection agencies pursuing auto-renewed subscribers — with transparency and grace. This sort of situation often provides executives with a chance to make excuses, point fingers or blame the customer. Chris just explained what happened, tells how he’s set out to fix it, and invites people to contact him with their problems. And instead of complaining about the S.F. Chronicle article that raised the issue, he thanks them. This is an example of how good customer service and smart PR-crisis handling (OK, it was a tiny crisis) can be one and the same thing.

## These examples of Nigerian Spam Poetry over at Making Light are hilarious. (They reminded me of one of my former colleague Doug Cruickshank’s funniest pieces for Salon, a literary analysis of the Nigerian spam — a rigorous form indeed.)

Rove: He shall not be moved

by

The blog languishes, I know, but it is for the greater good. Book work is intense right now. Regular programming will resume at some point down the road when a first draft is complete or within sight.

In the meantime, a thought for the day: I share the belief of many of my media colleagues that it would be a fine thing indeed for Karl Rove to leave government service, given the now-public record of his dirty trickster-ing, compounded by a White House press office cavalcade of cover-up lies.

But I’m willing to bet that, in fact, Rove is around for the long haul. He’s President Bush’s friend and closest adviser — the man hailed in quasi-Biblical terms by his foremost beneficiary, after last November’s elections, as “The Architect” of right-wing triumph.

If Democrats controlled Congress, they could perhaps make trouble for a public official caught so flat-footedly and foolishly in the machinery of a legally dubious political revenge play. But they don’t. They have no leverage. And the record of the Bush White House is one of digging in heels in the face of moral culpability and ethical collapse.

Accountability is anathema to these men. No one in the Bush administration has seen fit to resign in the face of a torture scandal that has set back the war on Al-Qaeda more than any bloody battle; Donald Rumsfeld is still in charge of the military that his misbegotten strategies have begun to wreck. Alberto Gonzales, who in his service as White House counsel helped approve the legal opinions that made that torture scandal possible, was rewarded with a promotion to the Justice Department, and may well soon sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he can further protect American soldiers from the scourge of the Geneva Convention. Dick Cheney’s escalatingly comical pronouncements on how well the war in Iraq is going have begun to achieve a Lyndon Johnson-esque width of credibility gap, but he doesn’t appear fazed in the least.

President Bush explained the logic here to us all when he declared that his “accountability moment” came and went last November. Karl Rove’s tactical political genius ensured the moment would come out Bush’s way. Now there’s no accountability at all. Unless there is hard evidence of perjury in front of a grand jury, which I doubt Rove was dumb enough to commit, I don’t think The Architect is going anywhere. The White House is his house now.

Of maps and Mountain Goats

by

Before our holiday weekend begins, a tip of the hat to two recent good experiences:

(1) On Wednesday morning I went off to the O’Reilly “Where 2.0″ conference, which was all about the new world of digital mapping and the mobile technologies and applications built upon them. That stuff is all well and good, but as a map geek from early childhood I was most excited by hearing the keynote from David Rumsey, a cartographic historian and collector of historical maps whose talks I’d heard superlative things about in the past. Rumsey did not disappoint. He put the current frenzy of excitement in stuff like Google Maps into a four-century perspective of the human quest to create maps that are not only useful and accurate but beautiful and meaningful. Then he showed us some simply astonishing techniques by which old maps can first be precisely positioned as overlays to contemporary digital satellite imagery, then transformed into 3D screenscapes — allowing, for instance, a fly-through of San Francisco as it looked a century ago.

As soon as I am off my authorial treadmill (only, aagh, two dozen more books about software to read!) I am sitting down with Rumsey’s book, Cartographica Extraordinaire, for a nice, long journey through time. (If you haven’t visited it already, Rumsey’s Web site is a jaw-droppingly amazing collection of historical maps.)

(2) Last Friday, fresh off the plane from New York, I high-tailed it over to the Bottom of the Hill for my second-ever experience of a Mountain Goats show. I’ve already logged my enthusiasm for the new Sunset Tree album from John Darnielle and his collaborators. It takes a lot, at my advanced mid-40s age, to get me to stand in a dim club until midnight to listen to somebody else’s music. (My five-year-olds will wake me at 6 a.m. regardless, so it’s a self-sentence of sleep deficit.) It was, in this case, utterly worthwhile.

What amazed me was that the set of maybe two dozen plus songs, which featured one catchy, clever, moving song after another, barely overlapped with the equally great set I heard from the Mountain Goats last year at the same venue. The two shows shared, at most, three songs. I can’t think of another artist (except for, you know, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, guys who are, uh, way older than Darnielle) who’s got both the back-catalog depth to pull that off and the will to actually do it, instead of playing the same handful of fan favorites over and over until both band and audience are bored with them. And I got to hear Darnielle play the song that first turned me on to his music, the rollicking downer “Palmcorder Yajna,” with a drummer borrowed from the band that preceded the Goats, and their producer, John Vanderslice, adding a second guitar and harmonizing at the mike on the chorus.

Darnielle established his reputation by recording songs solo on a boombox, accompanied only by a persistent capstan hiss. More often, these days, the Goats play as a duo (Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes). But for a couple minutes last Friday, they looked like a rock ‘n’ roll band — and like, for those couple minutes, nothing else in the world was quite as much fun.

Your laws? They are for the weak!

by

A good companion read to Gary Kamiya’s excellent cri de couer in today’s Salon:

Tony Judt, in the New York Review, writes of the current low ebb of the United States’ moral standing in the world and sees, as he puts it in his conclusion, a “bad moon rising.” It is a tough analysis to read, and a hard one to argue with. (Link via Rafe Colburn.)

This bit is beyond maddening:

  In March 2005 the US National Defense Strategy openly stated that “our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.”

At first I simply could not believe that the official document of our nation’s military strategy would lump “judicial processes” and “international fora” in with “terrorism”, sneering at them all as equally contemptible “strategies of the weak.” But here it is.

Looks like we’re in for nasty weather, indeed.

Wiki whacking

by

I have been away and offline, and so I missed the excitement around the LA Times wikitorial experiment imploding. I’m sorry to see it; I think newspapers need to be bolder about figuring out how the Web works, and good for Michael Kinsley for giving this a try. It’s too bad that a little bout of inevitable pranking (someone apparently incorporated an indecent image on the page) persuaded the Times to pull the plug. Sheesh, you’d think it would’ve taken a software developer (the LA Times must have a few, right?) just a little bit of work to block image tags in whichever open-source wiki software the paper had adopted.

I didn’t get to see the editorial in either its pre- or post-defacement state, so I can’t really comment on how the project evolved in its brief life. But I think that Kinsley & co. may have picked the wrong tool for the job. I’ve had the pleasure of exploring the origins of the wiki phenomenon as part of my book research; one of the things made clear by Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki a decade ago (with the Portland Pattern Repository) because he wanted to help programmers share experiences and tell stories, is that wikis work best when they present contributors with a half-finished canvas and an open invitation to fill in the blanks by adding new pages. So putting up a finished piece of writing in the form of a single editorial and then asking readers to edit it is a stiflingly constricted application of the format.

The other point is that wikis work by forming communities that care about what’s in them, and that serve as stewards or gardeners of the content. You can’t go from zero to 60 in a day; building such a community takes time, care and love. You can’t just throw up a text and expect it to stand on its own — if you want to tap into the collective ideas and energy of an online crowd, you’d better have built some personal relationships with some of its members. Otherwise, that crowd will turn into a mob before you know it.

Book of Jobs

by

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. “

Steve Jobs’ recent commencement speech is really worth reading in full. It gets about as close to the bone, and the truth, as we could expect from a technology CEO, or anyone else.

I find it very hard to reconcile the awareness contained in these words with the reality of the executive pettiness that Jobs’ Apple keeps displaying (suing bloggers, banning publishers from its stores, and so on). But then smart and creative people are inevitably complicated, and the more successful they are, the less pressure there is on them to resolve those complications.

Ergo gnomic

by

Two only vaguely related gripes:

(1) I’m left-handed, and I’m proud to be part of the sinister 10 percent, but I’m still waiting for my left-handed digital camera. I’m tired of either holding the camera in my unsteady right hand or having to shoot two-handed. There appears to be a left-handed film camera available, here, but I’m not looking for a retro novelty. In this discussion, somebody suggests holding the camera upside down. Maybe. But look, you manufacturers, there’s a market here! We’re ten percent of the population! That’s millions of potential customers — a big fat bulge near the front of the Long Tail, waiting to be served.

(2) I’ve always bought Thinkpad laptops, in part because they’ve been hugely reliable in the years I’ve had them, but also because I vastly prefer the Trackpoint device to the much more common — and, to me, clumsy — trackpad. Recently I realized that I actually think the Trackpoint is far superior to the mouse as well. As usability experts have long maintained, the big problem with mousing is that you’re constantly switching modes and losing efficiency as you move the hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. Wasted energy, wasted concentration. With the Trackpoint, you don’t have to do that at all — the “mouse” (pointer control) is right where your typing fingers already are. (Keyboard shortcuts are even better for those apps that support them, but they never give you 100 percent of what you need — unless, I guess, you’re a programming ace who lives and breathes emacs.)

So why aren’t desktop keyboards with integrated Trackpoint more common? I know IBM has made them over the years — I bought an old used one on Ebay — but they seem to be a hugely neglected market niche. Or is my Trackpoint preference even more of an eccentricity than my left-handedness?