scottsimpson.net

RIP Francis Crick, Co-Discoverer of DNA’s Double-Helical structure.

So I’m kind of starting to wonder what’s up with people. Hummers, Segway scooters, the INDUCE Act, Al Sharpton, six-shot Grande Peppermint Mochas… will the madness ever end?

There is no reason for anyone without face paint and a gun to have a Hummer H2. Crossing mighty rivers to get to work? Take the bridge. I saw one of these things when I was in San Francisco. You try parking a military-spec vehicle in the City. I saw another when I went up to Camp Wolfeboro last weekend … parked at the top of the hill. Apparently the road (which is perfectly navigable by anything but a Carmen Ghia) looked too rough for their shiny orange monstrosity.

Apparently someone has started using the Segway Scooter (’electric ass-mover’) for Polo games. Why? WHY!? No one should have one of these things either. Watch them start using Razor Scooters in Football and see if that makes sense.

I can’t talk about the INDUCE Act without getting angry, so I won’t.

Al Sharpton is a nutjob. I saw a rerun of part of his speech to the Democratic National Convention (Can anyone who calls themself Reverend actually be a Democrat? Interesting… doesn’t it kind of violate the church/state division if the clergy is active in politics?) and upon seeing it, I realized it must be incredibly annoying to call the Sharpton household:

[ring]
Hello?
HELLO! THIS IS THE REVEREND AL SHARPTON!!
Um, Hi, I was calling for Mike.
MICHAEL? AS IN THE ARCHANGEL MICHAEL WHO DESCENDED FROM HEAVEN…
No, Mike my friend. I think I have the wrong…
THE BIBLE IS NOT WRONG!
I’ll be hanging up now…
HANGING? ARE YOU THREATENING ME? ARE YOU PRESSURING ME TO VOTE FOR THE REPUBLICANS? OUR VOTES ARE NOT FOR SALE!
Goodbye.
WHY HAVE YOU TURNED YOUR BACK ON…
[click]

As the snarky bumpersticker says, “It’s not God I have a problem with … it’s his fan club”

As I waited for my drink to be made this morning, reflecting on the Chai goodness of which I was about to partake, the guy in line in front of me stepped forward to get his drink. He knew he was next, which I think everyone that pays attention to the Barista knows, yet they still call out your name and what you got even though you’re standing right there. Anyway, the guy got a Grande Six-shot Peppermint Mocha. Six shots of espresso. That’s six ounces of espresso in a sixteen-ounce drink. Nearly 40% espresso. No one needs to be that wired. Mathematically considered, it takes about two shots [of espresso…:p] to get me going in the morning, be it of straight espresso (when I’m feeling particularly Continental) or mixed in some kind of sugary elixir), and I’m (unfortunately) edging toward 200lbs (couldn’t be the Starbucks or In-N-Out…couldn’t be!), so if this guy takes 6 shots, he either weighs close to 600lbs (making him about the densest person I’ve seen) or he has some kind of severe neurotransmitter reuptake disorder. Plus that’s a lot of diuretic in the morning.

And then there was the time I asked for a Chai Latte with an extra shot of chai. How did it come? With an extra shot of espresso. You don’t mix coffee and tea, people … it was so bad. Got a drink coupon out of that one.

Even after that little tirade, I’m still trying to figure out why people buy some of the stuff they do. I look at it like this:

I’ve added a poll in the top left. Please vote in it. Every vote counts. And I’ll be changing the topic every now and then too!

So I began listening to the BBC World Service (Thees iz the BBC in Jakahta… love that little commercial thing. Beep beep beeeeeeep!) again this morning, and it’s amazing how much relevant stuff is reported on the BBC that doesn’t even appear on cnn.com. Germany may face a referendum to ratify the EU Constitution. You’d think the good ol’ Americans would pick that up. People voting Democratically on a Constitution…

“All authority of the state is derived through the people, through the wotes” -German guy.

I like tea. Seems more cultured than coffee for some reason. Not sure why. Coffee is good too though. Just thought I’d share that.

It seems that referenda have been banned in Germany due to their misuse by the Nazi party in the 1930s. That’s about one of the worst reasons to ban something I can think of. Computers have been misused. Cars have been misused. Ought aircraft be banned? Especially because of something over 50 years ago? Yikes.

It’s strange to me how much coverage the BBC gives US elections… I don’t think they’d give many other countries the same coverage… I can’t imagine the BBC having a series of pages for Spanish or Italian or Swiss elections.

And in other news, Microsoft released a beta version of its news aggregator, which is clearly a copy of Google News. And it’s uglier. And less efficient. Kudos, Microsoft.

Visit Rock, Paper, Saddam for Iraq-in time.

The flash film making the rounds on the internet, ‘This Land Is Your Land’.

More stuff later, if anything interesting happens in the news.

Bush said his administration was stronger for the presence of black officials including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

Which by extension means that black officials are better than white officials or Indian officials or Chinese officials or gay officials or any other sort of officials. Stronger is a relative term, and the gradations of social interactions and prejudices play into the equation very much. Do I think the administration is stronger for the inclusion of a few non-white-old-men types? Absolutely. I happen to think that both Rice and Powell are great and could be better if not, erm, in the employ of Bush. But there are a number of folks out there that absolutely discredit what either Rice or Powell say simply because they look different. And that’s dangerous. And for the most part (warning: generalization) those people are in Bush’s (and by registration, my) party. And dissent within ones’ own party does not make the administration stronger.

Not sure where I’m going with that one, but I felt like sharing anyway. What needs to be done is to get rid of illogical racism. Wow, this is turning into an ad for Kerry. But it’s not. I think the only reason I’ll be voting for him is to get Bush out of office, but then I’ll be wracked for four years by angst, doubt and guilt for getting a wholly immoral vice-President into office. Edwards made his fortune by suing doctors in dubious mal-practice suits, claiming that babies delivered by C-section were at a great risk for brain damage. This is entirely unfounded in respectable medicine and I’m really sort of wondering how someone with a degree in law (not to mention a judge with a Juris Doctorate) would even entertain the possibility that the cases were valid.

It’s really starting to bother me that everything in the news and everything in the political arena is based on FUD — Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Terrorists are going to blow us all up! But we don’t know when, how, or really why. You’ll become fat, fat, fat if you eat that dish of pasta and no one will love you! You’ll be thrown in prison for downloading a song from the internet! The music industry will collapse if you download a song! You will be personally responsible for the death of the Arts (not to mention the ensuing horrible suicides of all vocalists)! Gas prices will become unbearable! If you don’t plaster American Flags over everything you own you’ll be branded a terrorist and taken to a secret prison!

Yeah… I’m gonna put the bullshit alert level at Orange. But then again, we’ve seen all this before. Deja Moo, as they say.

It’s a slow news day so far, so I’ll quote posters on slashdot relating to Digital Rights Management and the iPod:

Fortunately the iPod is at the popularity level where people say “wtf, this CD is broken because it won’t work with my iPod!” rather than “damn, this crappy Apple product won’t play my music right!”

No DRM for me, thank you very much. I will buy real CDs. If real CDs are not available, I will steal the music or buy it off of iTMS.

All it takes is one cracked copy to be leaked online for it to be proliferated for downloading. Copy protecting a CD just makes it more difficult for the masses to legitimately get it onto their computers and MP3 players, and it creates a greater demand to download songs illegaly. Not to mention a lot of music that people download are rare music tracks they can’t find at the local music store anyway.

I have a simple solution … make the disks adhere to the Red Book standard, so that can be treated as compact discs. Oops, that makes SunnComm International and Macrovision irrelavent, not that I care. Saves Apple loads of effort, and money, and the listeners a load of grief.

*All comments are the respective property of their owners. I did not write these things, I copied them from a public forum and make no claim to their accuracy. Now you can’t sue me. (sad state of affairs when I have to cover myself with a legal disclaimer to pass on what I ‘overheard’, isn’t it?)

It’s things like this that lead me to believe that monkeys write management books. If anyone uses these words around me in a serious tone, they win a free smack upside the head. Except ‘Tszuj’, which the business-language-terrorists stole from a popular NBC show. It doesn’t belong on the list, and corporate fat-cat types that love these inane terms wouldn’t use it if they knew where it came from (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy).

Some gems:
-White Space Opportunity:
New high-potential growth possibilities that are related to but don’t quite match the capabilities and skills of the organization.
(i.e. ‘goals’)

-Reverbiagize:
To reword a proposal with the hope of getting it accepted by people who didn’t like it the first time around. As in: “It’s the same concept, we’ve just reverbiagized it.”
(i.e. ‘fix’ or ‘reword’)

-Repurposing:
Taking content from one medium (books, magazine, etc.) and repackaging it to be used in another medium.
(i.e. ‘plagarism’ or ‘changing the presentation’)

-Air Cover:
When a senior manager agrees to take the flak for an unpopular decision, while someone lower in the chain of command does the dirty work. As in: “The CFO will provide air cover, while you reduce staff by half.” (A term borrowed from the military.)
(i.e. ‘responsibility’)

Now, we use them in a sentence:

Marketing has repurposed and reverbiagized their living documents relating to the whitespace opportunities of air cover.

(i.e. marketing is rewriting what they say about management responsibility goals)

You have no idea how much red my spell-checker put on this stuff.

Scott’s Tips to Business:
1) Fire any consultants or employees using this terminology
2) Smaller words are easier to understand and take less toner to print, thereby reducing costs.

Luckily, the author of the aforementioned article takes a somewhat cynical stance on the whole Business-Language-Terrorism (BLT!) thing:

Corporate jargon and clichés are so pervasive that their use - or abuse - has yielded a buzzword of its own: “Deja Moo” (the feeling you’ve heard this bull before).

Deja Moo. I like that.

Inmates go on a beer run, return to prison with beer, go get more when it runs out, and return again to the prison.

I don’t even know what to do with this one.

What geeks listen to, according to theregister.co.uk. It’s fun to note that Microsoft Certified folks tend to prefer Britney Spears.

Um… other than that, there’s not too much interesting going on in the world. I’m looking for an Apple Cube if anyone wants to give me one … I need something to attach my portable drives to at school.