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You know that scene in the beginning of Back to the Future where Michael J Fox gets a phone call from the Doc and discovers all the clocks have been set back an hour? (It's never actually explained how the Doc did this...)
That's me.
Damn! I'm late for school!
I was up late last night working. Tonight, instead, I caught some Kurosawa. Then I worked until blurry. I feel worse.
Did I mention I hate gentle people? I'd rather be pushed and pulled than lightly touched. Something about the intent bothers me. Too many violent movies, perhaps, but the thought of something taking place in near silence disgusts me to my very core.
There's a new quote on the main page. It has to do with the title of this piece.
My desk is currently filled with tiny scraps of paper with numbers on them. Many have boxes around them. It's been awhile since I took statistics, and the algorithm I'm designing is definitely not my finest. Hopefully it will reflect popular opinion and nothing more. A bastard flowchart, an abandoned matrix; I'm just happy I only wasted three sheets before I understood the heart of the problem.
Ever seen a work of art and said "I can do better"? That's how I feel right now. A simple change I thought I could make to a difficult system. Next thing I know, the whole system is coming down around my ears. Numbers everywhere. No sense. Entropy reigning supreme.
I can no longer expect my new eyes to fade as they did a month ago. Instead of knowing when to sleep, I merely blink and force myself not to look at the clock. Psychosis breeds psychosis, until I can't even bring my eyes to look near timepieces.
My keyboard went dead today. I changed the batteries. Now I can type forever.
I have a new cobbler. He's much cheaper than my old one.
Okay, so with the latest redesign, the way the site is structured has changed.
In the past, there were a series of sections entitled usefully "news" or "reviews", etc. There were also a group of useless sections entitled "icing" or "origins". Almost everything got thrown into the "news" subheading.
With the updated site, there are no longer hard-and-fast sections. Instead, each article contains a series of tags which allow you, the noble viewer, to wade through the site on your own. Much like our archive section, the new navigation system will allow you to modify the url to find articles you're interested in.
Yes, they're tags. There are currently some debates going on about multi-word tags, but in this case, because we'll be integrating tags into the url/navigation structure itself, the solution is simple: multi-word tags must utilize underscores. I'd rather not have a bunch of %20 symbols filling up the url for addresses.
So, in a nutshell, to see all the news articles, just type in http://dredwerkz.com/news/ and go to town. Yes, it's exactly like it used to be. Except, of course, you could now type in http://dredwerkz.com/news/washington_post/bush/poll/ and be rewarded with the subset of all articles containing the tags "washington_post", "bush" and "poll". Get it? Good.
I turned 18 while still in high school, which meant that one afternoon I came home from the dorms to fill out my green draft card at the post office. Not long after, I graduated and got ready to leave for New England, both for the summer and for the next four years.
Before I left, I had to get my booster shots updated. I went on Post with my mother to Kimbrough Army Hospital, where my father had been Chief of Surgery, to get them done. Shots aren’t a big deal for me, and as I waited I joked with the grunt who signed me in about having gotten tested for allergies there as a 6th-grader. After 22 pinpricks in my right arm, 20 in the left, and 5 painful shots in my shoulder, semi-regular boosters mean little. I got them taken care of, then sat there for the required waiting period, just in case there were any adverse effects.
When the girl came in, I noticed her because she was mousey but cute. She was a few inches shorter than my rather average 5’ 9”, with pale skin and a hint of freckles. Her fatigues made her look spunky, like someone’s tomboy little sister. I heard her tell the grunt that she was getting her boosters, too. She was going to Bosnia.
I stared at her, then looked away, then stared again for the rest of my visit. She didn’t notice; I was never really in her line of sight. But I watched her. I wondered how old she was; she was that kind of brunette that could have been 18 or 30. But she seemed my age or younger. She seemed like someone’s little sister. She probably was someone’s little sister. And she was going off to war.
Soon the grunt said could I go. So I walked out into the hot June sun, and thought about how wrong it all felt.
I’m a feminist, and was even more so eight years ago. But I’m also a Catholic and an Eagle Scout, and, first and foremost, I’m my father’s son. Meetings of my high school’s NOW chapter (supposedly the first in the country) and talk about equality didn’t mean anything when faced with the reality that I had spent the afternoon sitting inches from a girl who could potentially die while I went off to get drunk with America’s elite. It struck me as a great injustice. It struck me as a cosmic wrong. Down at my core, I felt like by all rights our places should be reversed.
This soldier was in my mind for weeks. I was still dating a girl in Severna Park at the time, which meant driving by Ft. Meade each way a few times a week. So I would think of this soldier every time I passed the base, and the hospital, and the commissary. Maryland nights are purple, and against them NSA stood lit up in sandstone orange and yellows, surrounded by satellite dishes, geodesic domes, and fences. Steam—the conspiracy-minded said it was smoke from burning documents—billowed skyward from the roof. I would think about the soldier, and Bosnia, and the heft of a rifle, and wonder where she was, and hope she was okay.
Then I moved away and forgot about her.
This week’s New Yorker brought her back to mind. It features a full-page photo of a brunette a lot like the one I sat next to in Immunology at Kimbrough. They have the same kind of face, and hair, and generic the-neighbor’s-sister appeal. The main difference between them is that the girl in this week’s New Yorker photo is missing the fatigues, and a leg.
First Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell is 24. My scan doesn’t do justice to the photo Martin Schoeller snapped of her. It’s truly beautiful, even the gray sheen of the prosthetic.
She didn’t lose her leg because of me. She didn’t save me from anything. And unlike the girl I watched get prepped for Bosnia, she wasn’t averting genocide or promoting the greater global good. Even if one accepts the notion that Saddam’s atrocities had to be stopped, Stockwell’s wound, received this year, is emphatically not a part of that conflict, because she received it confronting an insurgency that simple planning, foresight, and diplomacy—instead of grandstanding on aircraft carriers—could have avoided. She was fighting a stupid war in an empty place correcting the errors of an unconscionable ideology laced with more than a dash of greed.
I’m not the person I was at 18. I’m a lot bigger, and better, in many ways. But a lot smaller, too. I don’t wish it were me and not Stockwell. I don’t wish I could take her place. I’m a small man—an overgrown boy—who likes my legs, and my life, and my new apartment and my new pool table and my new polka dot-dappled Waterford Martini glasses. I have no reason to fight, and it’s doubtful I will ever be made to—in another few months, at 27, that green draft slip I signed will be just a scrap of paper.
But I want, desperately, for Stockwell—for Melissa—to have her leg back. For her not to have lost it at all. For her to be whole.
I’ll always pull for equal access, equal rights, equal treatment…even on the battlefield. But deep down, I’ll never really buy it 100%. Because I don’t want women to be in combat. I don’t want any of us in combat. I want all the neighbors' little sisters home, on America soil, standing there with two legs, where they belong.
There was a major coding error on the backend. I fixed it. Hooray!
Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld.
The defense secretary hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson concluded after asking again.
Well put.
As a loyal Southern Democrat, I've always fought the idea that we could "write-off" the South and be a viable party. Southern Democrats built this party. We are the ones who fought for the little guys during the New Deal.
Reading Governor Dean's latest speech made me remember that:
We cannot be a Party that seeks the presidency by running an 18-state campaign. We cannot be a party that cedes a single state, a single District, a single precinct, nor should we cede a single voter.
As many of the candidates supported by my organization Democracy for America showed -- people in places that we've too long ignored are hungry for an alternative; they're hungry for new ideas and new candidates, and they're willing to elect Democrats.
Read the rest of it.
To be honest, I was worried although I think Dean would be the best choice for DNC chair, that the animus of others might imperil his ability to lead. After reading this speech, that doubt has been fully erased. Having the DNC chairman be committed to winning every single race is a conviction in and of itself.
Arguments over why the d-trip and the DNC didn't help local candidates more pervaded many discussions I had this cycle. The depth of our bench was the issue: if we had only two or three good campaigners in a state, obviously the money would only go to them. By running in every race, we build up a reserve of people who are great for the party. We build up a reserve of volunteers as well.
In short, we rebuild the party.
Not by changing direction, but by focusing on our core beliefs: Providing health care for all. Giving people a fair chance to get ahead. Helping the middle class. Telling the American people the truth. Having open government. Cracking down on corruption.
Time to keep fighting.
Which Homer was it—the Greek or the Springfieldian—who offered the following paradoxical encomium: “Ouzo: the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems”? (I may by paraphrasing; forgive me.) Anyway, this article from today’s New York Times points to a central contradiction in my new career. Bad writing causes some 75% of my problems at work...but the very abundance of that bad writing is largely the reason I have a job in the first place…
(I should specify that I’m mostly working in the realm of business and marketing communications. All you government folk: is the writing in your realm better or worse?)
It seems someone in my old workplace was stabbed. Weird.
There always was a lot of tension over there...
Where did it come from—this indie rock convention that any remotely catchy tune must open with 20 seconds of sludge? Do they believe the remainder of the song will be taken more seriously (in the same way that the carnage that kicks off Saving Private Ryan obscures the fact that Spielberg remade E.T. as a WW2 film)? Or is it just to drive away any potential frat-related eavesdroppers? The world may never know.
Despite this, “Fallout” by Pidgeon, off the new From Gutter with Love, is still a Track You Should Be Listening To Right Now. Garage guitars churn behind really sweet twee-girl vocals that bounce around and push back against their content: “Did your heart wake up to someone else? / This morning mine did / I know I don’t belong.” Fans of Go Sailor! should be pleased; if you’re more mainstream, think Belly when they were practicing in the basement. (Alas, I’ve scoured the Web but failed to find a clip of “Fallout” anywhere. As always, you can request it here; otherwise, you can find more info and other tracks here and here.)
This is awesome.
WMATA's website would be incredible if one could track where your friends went, and where you went. Man, that'd be sweet. Throw in a credit card and I'm hooked.
The only thing better would be if you could get an RFID chip in your hand so that you wouldn't even need a card (smartrip or credit!) to board the metro or purchase a soda. That's the future. I want to see it today.
I'm now in...so if anyone wants an invitation to Netflix Friends feel free to e-mail me.
A special shout out to Mike over at HackingNetflix for his help. Everyone should go see his cool site to learn all the trix to hacking the 'flix.
On a side note, I've rated over 560 movies. Yet the premier netflix critic has only rated 967 movies. Hmm. You'd think a professional movie critic would've seen more than twice as many movies as I have. Let's see if I can catch him...
Thought that these are two provocative news stories that I could share:
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Scientists said on Monday they have come up with a cell phone cover that will grow into a sunflower when thrown away.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For customers who either love to plan ahead or hate monthly bills, a small Massachusetts telecommunications firm has launched a $999 offer of unlimited Internet-based telephone service for life.
The Pentagon Metro station has been evacuated...
A good time to remind everyone to sign up for the DC Emergency Alert Message System.
Those of you with a sound card and three minutes of your life to burn should head here. This is what you get links to when your dad retires and takes up surfing the Internet as his hobby. but it's funny... and just a bit subversive!
I currently have the odd feeling of knowing I've completed tons of work, under the hood, for the next big dredwerkz feature. But it's a mixture of pride (and wanting to show everyone the new Stuff) and anxiety (because it's not finished yet...and I don't want to ruin the surprise) which leaves me not quite certain how I should feel.
Regardless, I'm only a few hours of coding away from completion. Once I finish, it'll be a big addition to the site. And it will mean only two major coding projects left until the site is finally no longer alpha-version.
Here's a taste:
Array ( [0970742215] => on [B0000694ZB] => on )
Array ( [B00006SFM2] => 5 [B00009RGC6] => 5 [B00005LC19] => 5 [B00006SFM1] => 5 [B00008MTY4] => 5 [B00009PSDX] => 5 [B000063UYN] => 5 [B0000694ZA] => 5 [0970742215] => 4 [B0000694ZB] => 5 )
add? 0970742215 - on
Fun, eh?
Hooray!
Oh, the new name of the section is called "Stuff". Mull on that.
I don't normally comment on issues like this one. But the blogosphere seems to have gotten it wrong in this case, and I feel a correction is in order.
Put simply, Philadelphia decided to roll out free WiFi access city-wide. Verizon caught a whiff of this, realized it stood to lose millions, and fought back.
Governor Rendell, in order to protect the Philly plan, let Verizon maintain a "right of first refusal" across the rest of the commonwealth. This move has generated tons of idiotic criticism from across the blogosphere. Let's examine why:
First, Philadelphia, through this new law, will still be on track to provide free WiFi service. Even the law's detractors have argued that this is good. However, many feel that it is only a temporary victory. I think not. Once a major U.S. city provides free WiFi service to its residents, other cities will follow suit. This is why Verizon is so concerned. But there's no way they can stop such a movement in the long term. In the short term, they may be able to lobby to delay such a move, but the cost savings alone justify Philly's move. And best of all, once Philly has the WiFi in place, any town mayor can point to Philly and say "see, they did it...why can't we?" as a justification. Philly is the beachhead that establishes the WiFi revolution in cities across the U.S.
Second, some people have suggested that the rest of the commonwealth was served poorly by the new law. They're wrong. Here's why: the law requires Verizon to provide broadband service (we're not talking WiFi anymore!) to the entire state by 2015. That seems far off but constructing a statewide system that goes the last mile across the entire commonwealth is a huge deal. Best of all, the so-called Verizon Veto is not as it seems. Communities have until 2006 to begin with before Verizon gets the right of first refusal. Any network systems that have begun to be built by then are excluded from the deal. And after 2006, should Verizon exercise its "veto", it would be required to provide the same service within 14 months.
Read that last line again.
Essentially, it means that any community which doesn't want broadband internet badly enough before 2006, but does before 2015, can just draw up a plan to provide internet service to the community for a fee. Why for a fee? Well, because any communities that wish to do it for free are excluded from the verizon veto in the first place. Once they draw up a plan, should Verizon veto it, Verizon would be forced to build a broadband network in its place, well ahead of schedule. So in the end, residents get a broadband network within a year of 2006 regardless of who provides it.
Third, Verizon didn't win. They lost. Just look at the major complaint aired against the veto provision requiring Verizon to provide service within a year after a community proposes a plan. Some have argued that Verizon could ratchet the price of the broadband service up to a level that most people cannot afford it. What these people fail to realize is that the major price of getting broadband to everyone is laying the physical infrastructure. Once you've got dark fiber in the last mile to every home in Pennsylvania, the costs of operating the system are negligible. Therefore, requiring Verizon to put a network in place for every community that draws up a plan is a huge expense. Once Verizon has already built the network, why would they try to only recover some of their money? More likely, Verizon would charge prices as high as they could reasonably to get as many people as possible to justify the fact that they had to put dark fiber to the home in. Once you look at the law's requirement that Verizon provide broadband service to every community by 2015, you start to realize that the deal actually helps PA. When a local government grants a monopoly power for a public good, they make a trade off. In this case, PA told Verizon it could have control over broadband, so long as it provided it to everyone in the state. That's a clear deal. If PA had continued to require Verizon to provide broadband to the state, but had then demanded another ISP do the same, that would've been idiotic and wasteful. But if a local government tries the same...why is Verizon any less screwed than before? Don't get me wrong: Verizon is not a great company by any means. But when you require a private company to spend large amounts of money to build network infrastructure, turning around and stabbing them in the back isn't just bad policy: it's unfair.
So let's summarize:
- Verizon cannot block the Philly WiFi project
- Verizon has to provide the entire commonwealth of PA broadband access by 2015
- Any community in PA that provides broadband access and doesn't charge for it can do so
- Verizon has to provide broadband access to any community that wishes to start a broadband service for a fee, within 14 months
- Once Philly has WiFi, other cities will follow suit
It seems to me Verizon actually is fighting a losing battle. And this PA law will be viewed, in hindsight, as the first real step toward greater broadband access for all.