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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "thegameiam" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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05:41 pm
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Why I don't subscribe to the Washington Jewish Week
So I don't normally read The Washington Jewish Week - I find that "weakly Jewish" would be a better characterization, and clearly they're describing a world in which I don't much find myself.
However, Sarah brought home one this week because of a cover story involving a brouhaha in the suburbs, and I read it after I finished Axis. In particular, the story "http://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=4&ArticleID=11065">Music enlivens Friday nights at local shuls</a> got my attention.
Of note, the term shul (lit. "school") is a Yiddish term for a Synagogue, and usually describes smaller Orthodox synagogues. Very few Reform or Conservative congregations refer to their houses of worship as "shuls" - Reform typically use either "Temple" or "Congregation," and Conservative congregations typically use the term "congregation" or occasionally the Hebrew beit kenesset (house of assembly). You do find folks using the term "going to shul" in the Conservative world, but I have not encountered that formulation much in the Reform world (of course, I don't hang so much in Reform circles, so perhaps I've missed something).
Anyway, the article goes on to talk about how musical Friday night services have been attracting lots of folks at various synagogues, and includes the following howler:
Still, while using musical instruments is considered chillul Shabbat (desecration of the Sabbath) in the Orthodox domain and among some traditional Conservatives, lively Friday services filled with singing, dancing and clapping -- "Carlebach services" (after the noted "Singing Rabbi," Shlomo Carlebach) -- have been adopted in some Orthodox shuls, although WJW was unable to locate any in the Washington area. (emphasis added)
Let me Google that for you.
So I filled out the contact form, saying:
Apparently the WJW did not look for Orthodox Carlebach services in the greater washington area with any degree of thoroughness, because several exist and are easy to find.
The first google hit for "carlebach minyan dc" points to the service at Kesher Israel every Friday night - this Carlebach service has been occurring weekly for the past 6 years. There are several other Carlebach services at other Orthodox synagogues in the area - each of them is listed on their respective synagogues'' websites.
to which the WJW editor (!) responded:The article featured musical services that use multiple instruments. Does that Kesher service use instruments?
Now, this is what I'd call piss-poor journalism.
First, there's a description of the Kesher Israel Carlebach minyan on the Kesher web page. Research is your friend.
Second, how in the world does that paragraph refer to Orthodox services which use multiple instruments? Reading comprehension is a good thing for those who work as editors. Furthermore, had the paragraph simply ended at the comma it would have been factually correct and merely showed that the Orthodox approach wasn't the focus of the story; pointing out that research was unsuccessfully attempted simply shows the poor quality of the research. Finally, there have been services at various Orthodox shuls in the Washington area which did use instruments: there have been drum circles and even musical hallel pieces (I'm not a fan, personally, but they're not too hard to find); those services just weren't on shabbat.
So hopefully they'll try a little harder in the future before giving up.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  snarky
Current Music: Jimi Hendrix, "Once I Had a Woman"
Tags: rant, religion
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10:33 pm
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Dealing with contractors is like sleeping with prostitutes
You never know what festering sore will turn up later.
In our case, the festering sore left over from the multiply-bungled basement renovation (what? you wanted the closet finished? We never planned to do that!) was uncovered this morning.
But I'll start at the beginning.
A few weeks ago, we started hearing a chirping noise in our house. This is normally what happens when smoke detector batteries go bad, and given who who my family is, we have a whole bunch of smoke & CO detectors. We changed a zillion 9V batteries, and all was settled. Except that it wasn't: it turned out that something continued to chirp - the human annoyance is dwarfed by the effect on poor little Kacy, who would shake so hard that it looked like her tail would fall off. Once the chirping started, she'd go hide under the boxwoods in the backyard.
On Shabbat a few weeks ago, it got bad, and we figured out that there was something going on with the alarm system. We found a neighbor who was willing to take the battery out of the alarm panel, which caused it to change the chirps to more human-annoying beep series. After shabbat, we got the company to send out a tech who told us about the virtues of the "status" button. All well and good.
On Friday, when we returned from the beach, we were greeted with more chirping. We discerned that the powered smoke detectors in the basement, along with the alarm system were causing a problem, and once everything was hard-powered down the chirping stopped. Yesterday morning, we plugged in another detector, and turned the alarm back on. A few hours later, we were rewarded with incessant chirping - faster this time, and after I got home, I timed it to every 36 seconds. We spent about 4 hours last night trying to track it down, basically unplugging every powered device on the first and second floors, and removing batteries from everything that has them.
Still no luck, and the dog was worse for the wear: we "slept" with an air purifier on at about Cessna-engine volume, and I spent another three hours this morning searching for what it could possibly be. We called the alarm company to come out, and the tech put back all of our disconnected pieces and wished us luck, but conclusively showed that it wasn't their stuff.
I pulled out some insulation from the ceiling through a utility closet, and was looking between the finished ceiling and the joists (and the floor above) (this required a flashlight and mirror), and lo and behold, there was another smoke detector, sitting on the wrong side of the ceiling.
Well, #$%&.
The detector isn't attached to anything - it looks like it was just tossed up as the last act before the ceiling was closed up.
I spent another hour attempting to fish this out - it's a full 68" into the ceiling (thus closer to the other wall than to where I can get at it (I was using a tape measure to try to hook it, because there's a wicked 135° angle to make). No dice. However, the detector's battery has stopped for now, so perhaps it's finally given up, and we won't have to rip open the ceiling anyway.
So here is a good example of how a contractor can waste your time and sanity years after the project is completed. The moral of this story is "inspect EVERYTHING yourself."
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  tired
Current Music: Relient K, "High of '75"
Tags: house, kacy, rant
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08:56 am
[Link] | So Sarah let me back in the water yesterday, and there were no incidents. The woman who had been sitting next to us on the beach asked whether I was okay, and mentioned that she thought the whole thing was awesome. I guess it's like "baywatch" for middle-aged women...
Even better, she and I are going Para-sailing in a couple of hours before heading back home. w00t! Look for me on the evening news, when I do my "up" impersonation...
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A /. poll has made me think about something. One commentator put it thusly:Are you sure you're an American? I grew up in a suburb where only "safe and sane" fireworks that didn't blow up or fly were allowed.
People lit off rockets and M-80s all over the place.
I always used to think, "Breaking laws we don't like. What better way to celebrate the true spirit of Independance Day?"
This is sort of the "radar detectors are a libertarian blow for freedom" argument - while it doesn't work in all cases, the ironic use on Independence Day does have some appeal.
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The Washington Examiner points out a thoroughly inappropriate action on the part of the Washington Post. Perhaps they could use a refresher on what it means for a newspaper to be independent, rather than merely a propaganda arm of entrenched interests.
Newspapers should not just be grease in civil society - they should be the watchmen on the walls of freedom, ever vigilant, and working to ferret out corruption wherever it appears. Instead, the Post, the NYTimes, and many other venerable institutions have become lap dogs rather than watch dogs.
The only actual asset that a newspaper has (other than the office building) is its credibility. It's sad that they squander it, and even sadder that the price is so low.
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Viking Mini Golf is awesome. Four of us went, and while the "viking facts" became less and less credible as the course rolled on, it was still fun. It was good to spend some time with cousin E and her fiancee M (who has the coolest-sounding job ever: roller coaster designer).
Current Location: Bethany Beach, DE
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: none
Tags: family, politics, rant, travel
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05:57 pm
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thoughts from a long week
I'm glad that President Obama has finally come around to something which approaches my position (in the way that a beverage made from powder out of a jar can approach "tea"). If only he could have realized sooner that the reward for coddling or negotiating with thugs is more thuggery...
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It is better to to enable OSPF on an interface via a network statement and set it to passive than it is to redistribute a connected or static route. A single type-1 LSA and SPF run is less taxing on a network than the E1/E2 LSA which is carried to all of the non-stub areas.
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If the environmentalists are correct, and carbon insertion into the atmosphere is a serious problem, then the best and most effective way to minimize those insertions is to make it vastly more expensive via a tax. This will necessarily result in higher energy prices all around. "Cap and trade" is a way of camouflaging the cost - however, like all forms of camouflage, it does not change the underlying reality. If energy prices do not substantially increase, the amount of carbon inserted into the atmosphere will not decrease substantially.
So once again, we're pursuing a bad idea in the stupidest possible way. d'oh!
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I care a lot more about what's going on in Iran than I do about Michael Jackson. Judging by media coverage available around here, that makes me uncommon.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: none
Tags: networking, politics, rant
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09:18 pm
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Do I have to say "I told you so?"
So I now own a lot of GM bonds. Regardless of the fact that I am in fact a very conservative investor (I only invest in companies which are recently acquainted with the idea of "profit" and "dividend"), I too get a piece of the bloated corpse of an automobile company which hasn't been good at making cars which people want to, you know, buy for quite a long while.
As a relevant aside, the last two times when I went car-shopping, I disproportionally preferred American car companies: I bought a used Geo Metro (with all of about 12 squirrelpower in the 3-cylinder engine [it looks with jealousy at a typical lawnmower]) and had that until it could no longer pass inspection; after that, I bought a 2000 Saturn SL2. It's been decent, and I've enjoyed it, even though I could have gotten more car for the money if I had gone for the Toyota which I had looked at at the same time. I've sucked it up and paid when it requires disassembling the engine to replace a thermostat. I've cheerfully kept the car running, and hope to do so for a while longer.
So if I was going to buy a car company, it wouldn't have been GM.
Is there anyone who thinks that it was a good idea for the US Government to borrow money to give to GM, so that we could walk them through bankruptcy where they don't shed as much as the bankruptcy task force thought they should, and then leave the US Taxpayers with owning a majority stake in a company which has a zero percent chance of making that investment profitable?
I'm so glad that we elected the smart guy last year - who knows what damage the other guy would have done!?
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  cynical
Current Music: Yes, "Changes"
Tags: politics, rant
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01:16 pm
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Chasing the wind
Yesterday, Rolling Thunder came through DC, and that's always an awesome thing (in the original meaning of "awesome" - that it inspires awe). I personally am quite touched at the use of the quintessentially American symbol - the motorcycle, which normally carries with it images of freedom and mobility - put to the task of honoring those who have died defending that very same freedom. There is a circularity of meaning there which I appreciate a great deal.
We got a chance to talk to a couple of riders from Chicago while we were walking Kacy - this was their third year or participating, and they remarked on the good reception they received here. I think that's great, because I remember the stories of the mistreatment that the Vietnam vets got at the hands of those who did not themselves serve, and I remember how all of the jobs that I got in the 80s and early 90s had mandatory paperwork about how vietnam-era veterans could not be discriminated against (!). Personally, I've noticed that veterans make great employees - the ones who have worked for and with me understand both how to give AND how to take orders, and that sometimes you give them and sometimes you take them. Anyway, I'm glad that these guys get a warm welcome (although Kacy attempts to chase away motorcycles, which is funny in that she probably weighs less than a single motorcycle tire...).
Sarah and I have an understanding about motorcycles - we both think that they're about the coolest mode of transport possible (with the possible exception of spacecraft), and we'd both love to ride, but her nerves would be shot through and through if I were to start riding (not because I'd be unsafe, but because there are a lot of idiots on the road, and motorcycles don't offer the kind of idiot-protection that a steel cage does). So she says that when I'm in my 70s, it'll be okay to ride (with the thought that a guy who gets killed riding a motorcycle in his 70s is "he died doing something he loved" but a guy who dies in his 30s the same way is a tragedy). Now that's something about getting old to which I can look forward...
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I finished John Scalzi's The Last Colony last week, and it was excellent. I know that this was meant to be his last story of the John and Jane, but I also have Zoe's Tale in the hopper, so that abstention was short-lived. It's an interesting thing to chart the progress of John Perry through the books as his feelings toward the Colonial Union change: he begins as hostile to this unknown power, sees how their methods work, appreciates it, and only later begins to experience the disillusionment which all large organizations foster. Scalzi is probably my favorite author right now, and the only tinge of regret I feel reading his books is that there's one fewer for me to read in the future...
Last night, I finished John Steakley's Armor, and it was good. I found some of the overdone machismo to be offputting, and I think that Steakley waited too long in the book to explain some of the motivations of the characters, but the end result is worth the read, and worth waiting for.
There is a commonality in these books - the ineptitude of governmental beaucracy as applied to individual cases. In TLC, the ineptitude is on full display in the patronizing attitude of the Colonial Union and their inability to grasp the magnitude of the problem they're in. In Armor, the ineptitude is personal: in a Heller-esque sense, this is what happens to the man who falls through the cracks in a system which does not understand the nature of the war it fights. This commonality rings true to me - I've seen just enough bureaucratic systems to see how their interdepartmental politics often completely swamp the overall objectives of the organization, and how meaningful positive change is resisted to the last breath.
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this is something I've been saying for a long time - we need fewer people going to college and more plumbers and electricians. A good plumber who does radical things like "return calls" and "show up when he says he will" can charge pretty much anything he wants to. Thar's gold in them thar hills...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Cream, "White Room"
Tags: books, rant, sf
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09:41 pm
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Experiment
Sarah and I saw Tom Stoppard's Rock & Roll at the studio theatre on Sunday. It was pretty good, but the love story in it didn't quite jell; I liked the characters, they were believable, and I wanted good things for them, but their interrelationship to each other wasn't quite fleshed out enough to be convincing. Interestingly, Syd Barrett's music and persona play a major part - this was a happy accident for me, because when I was young, I owned not only Opel (not just a car company!) and The Madcap Laughs but even Barrett and a first edition Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It's been a long time since I even thought about his work - while "golden hair" worked well in the context of the show, my favorite of his has to be "Word Song," which is exactly what it claims to be: a series of words (mostly nouns) which don't themselves form sentences. Anyway, as the play involves Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination, several of the characters are pretty serious communists, and proceed to make coherent and sincere arguments regarding the virtues thereof... it's a little bit like reading a book by the best plogiston chemist.
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I also finished reading Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (I totally want to write that with an enya), and it was good. The novel is the story of a friendship formed at Barnard in the 60s betwen a woman from a poor family (the narrator) and a woman who was from a wealthy family but rejected her roots (Ann). There is a lot of unpleasant activist-ese in the book - enough that there are some ponderous portions early on. Things get a bit more interesting later on after the narrator leaves college and deals with some of the disillusionment in the post-60s era. In the last half of the book, Nunez gets quite a bit more conversational, and her style flows in a less rigid manner - this is definitely the best part of the book, and then I had a hard time putting it down.
I found myself in some very uncomfortable passages in this book; I remember when I was a kid how I ran with the Socialists and assorted hippie-wanna-bes in SLC. Some of the slogans and attitudes touched painful nerves - I don't remember precisely how I came to encounter this. Actually, that's not true: one major catalyst for several years of self-loathing and anger directed at "whitey" has a single name: college. However, it didn't just start there - I remember the Mondale/Ferraro presidential campaign ad which included (with CSN's "Teach your Children" in the background) alternating clips of children crying and missles (presumably nuclear) launching. I remember being sensitive to this: I looked at nuclear holocaust as a foregone conclusion, which is pretty bleak for a 12-year-old.
At the University of Maryland, I remember encountering Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and being wracked with collective guilt over what I presumed were the crimes of all white people. When I went back to Utah, the socialists pretty actively recruited me, and I got familiar with Malcolm X and various Palestinian liberation writers - I internalized the deeply racist attitudes they preached (that white people were guilty of all of the crimes ever) and remained trapped in anger for several years.
Coming out of that experience took a long time - I was certainly insufferable, and I'm glad that some friends and family at least were willing to suffer my presence through that.
I finally had a cognition: any approach which attempts to apportion blame for the condition of the world, rather than exhorting each of us to do our small part to improve the little part of the world in which we find ourselves, is far more likely to be complete horseshit than to be enlightened truth.
Anyway, the Last of Her Kind is quite good, and definitely worth reading. There are some very frank moments where ideologies clash with reality, and in those moments the author lets the characters shine with their internal truths; this in turn makes them all the more human. Good stuff.
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I read the final installment of Marc Andryko's Manhunter, and this also is quite good. It's a shame that DC killed the story - I'd happily read the adventures of Kate Spencer indefinitely, and while I like Javier Pina's artwork more than Michael Gaydos, the latter is certainly no slouch (I had encountered his work on Alias previously), and he does a fabulous job.
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I just encountered Rob Gonsalves artwork, and it's really cool. It's somewhere between Escher and Margritte, and given that I like both chocolate AND peanut butter there, it's no surprise that I'd find his work very much to my taste.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Led Zeppelin, "In My Time of Dying"
Tags: books, comics, rant, reviews
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09:07 pm
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Excellent, Great, Good, and Terrible (spoilers)
The new Star Trek movie is excellent. That sound you hear? It's the sound of many long-time-fans complaining that stories "don't count" any more. BAH! You people don't read enough comics, where rebooting the characters every generation or so is the NORM, not the exception.
First, folks get entirely too worked up in the precision of continuity - this is fiction, not scripture (hell, there are plenty of continuity issues in scripture, but I'll leave that aside for now). Given that all of the other ST stories are from a 3rd person point of view, why would we presume that the 3rd person is entirely reliable, or even any more reliable than the average eyewitness to a crime?
Second, even if one is a continuity nut, and one discounts the issue raised above, pretty much all of the existing canon would still be possible (with the obvious exception of Amok Time, and anything else set on Vulcan). NOTE: I said "possible" not "inevitable" for a reason: this reboot creates the equivalent of Earth-1 and Earth-2 Trek: Kal-L and Alan Scott give way to Kal-El and Hal Jordan, and that's just fine with me.
(heresy)
Third, what exactly is this attachment to the Star Trek continuity anyway? Did folks forget the exceptionally high number of completely crap elements which had been introduced for a quick gag and then had to be massaged into the ultra-mega-mega timeline? Is "transparent aluminum" really something we should worry about losing? Most of the individual shows suffered from the "we have several bad years before getting good" pheomenon, and those bad years clutter the continuity of the entire universe with their lameness. For every borg, there's a betazoid. Perhaps it was time for a housecleaning?
(/heresy)
Anyway, the movie alternated between funny and serious, while still maintaining the essence of the "Star Trek" spirit - this is an adventure story after all, and that spirit should not be forgotten. I think this is the best Star Trek since Khan (because nothing will ever be able to top Ricardo Montalbahn - notice that he did not live to see this...), and I think this blows the "even is good, odd is bad" approach to Trek completely out of the water. Awesome space battles, time travel, fistfights, and Karl Urban calling Spock a "green blooded hobgoblin." What more could you want?
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Orphans of Chaos by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) johncwright is good. I haven't read any fantasy for quite a while, so I might be out of touch with regard to the various tropes, and I was leery of starting a series, but it's worth it. The point-of-view character is a girl who is portrayed as late adolescent in temprament (her actual age is not something which is entirely clear), and there are some uncomfortable pages as she encounters various malefactors, some of whose luridly lewd desires spill across the pages. Her own reaction to encountering these malefactors is comparably uncomfortable, but at no point feels untrue to the character.
The book does suffer from the "first of several" phenomenon - it doesn't end so much as take a short hiatus - the connection to the sequels is probably more like Tolkein than like Rowling. I'll probably read the next book in the series once I'm done with the other books in my path.
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Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is quite good, even though it can be a bit heavy-handed at times. He is very interested in the relationship between security and tyranny, and this book reads very much like a libertarian anthem. There are a couple of points near the end where it feels like he's trying a bit too hard to make a point about modern society, but that can be forgiven for the exquisitely gripping story - I finished the entire book on the plane from ABQ to IAD - this is definitely worth a read.
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Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the worst piece of crap I've picked up in a long time. I will never get those hours back, and I feel cheated.
I had, in my youth, enjoyed a production of The Day Room enough that I had actually bought a copy, and read it several times. At the time, I knew nothing of DeLillo - he was just another obscure author - so the discontinuities inherent in a play about mental illness were ignorable. With Falling Man, however, there is no semblance of a plot or coherent storyline, while at the same time there is a feeling of verisimilitude that one is actually reading a novel. This book could have been written by a new version of ELIZA and not suffered in coherence.
Yuck. This is to modern literature what Piss Christ was to modern art: proof that critics have no actual taste, and that the emperor has no clothes.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Irving - I Can't Fall in Love | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: books, rant, reviews, s-f
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09:36 pm
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Got a rash
actually, it's more of an abrasion on my left ring finger. You see, it'd been a while since we had band practice, and I prefer the Orthodox grip. I apparently had fallen out of practice enough that I lost my callous, and thus, painful hand follows.
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I saw picketers today.
One thing which I noticed again was that the picketers completely failed one apparently-not-so-obvious concept: people should be able to read your signs. Marching around with a placard full of 1" high words written in yellow on white posterboard is not a recipe for conveying a point. I, for one, have no desire at all to approach protesters to determine what their sign says. kal v'homer (a fortiori) if I'm driving by...
Suggestion: 6" high black block letters.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  sleepy
Current Music: One Third Dork - On The Bah | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: music, rant
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07:11 pm
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bailout
I think the current bailout stimulus package pork-fest is really terrible.
Many of the things on the list may be reasonable on their own merits, but they have nothing to do with "stimulating" the economy: e.g. increased funding for STD research. (well, maybe something will get stimulated, but probably not in the way most people want...
Worse, wasn't it candidate Obama who said not too long ago that our problems were caused by American overconsumption? That we coulndn't continue to drive our SUVs and keep our thermostadts at 72°? (heh) What exactly is this "stimulus" supposed to do other than restart our binge-consumption? I see this as like trying to help an adulterer by giving out free Viagra.
I was am against the bailout of the big three automakers, and was against the bailouts of Citi, BofA, AIG, Merril, Fannie, Freddie, and all of the others as well. Our approach of trying to have a soft landing in this matter is akin to cutting a dog's tail off an inch at a time because doing the whole thing off at once would be "too cruel."
President Obama is not off to a good start, in my book, by continuing the bad ideas from the end of the Bush administration. Sec. Paulson had behaved like chicken little, provoking the very crisis of confidence against which he warned, and the medicine he prescribed violated the start of the Hippocratic oath: "first, do no harm."
Yuck.
Current Location: home
Current Mood: bitchy
Current Music: The Sounds, "24 Hours"
Tags: politics, rant
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10:22 pm
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Tradition
What is it about Georgetown which causes otherwise concerned people to not shovel the sidewalks in front of their houses? Folks who have carefully manicured tree and window boxes during the spring and summer, and who artfully decorate their houses for halloween and Christmas seem to forget that water, when it gets too cold, becomes ice.
And walking on ice sucks.
Of course, along with the above pet peeve is the large number of folks who put down salt at night and then don't actually remove the snow/ice - so that it melts and re-freezes to the consistency of polished glass. Excellent!
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A couple of interesting articles
talk about whether academic research is worth the investment. I think they have a good point - we as a society should re-think our approach to education. The rest of society has changed tremendously in the last 100 years; why should education not follow suit?
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: none
Tags: politics, rant
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10:04 pm
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I don't have a brain the size of a planet
But apparently some other folks do.
Bill Willingham talks about his rededication to heroism. Willingham has been a favorite of mine for a long time, and I consider him a substantially inspirational influence on my songwriting.
And johncwright pointed out Tom Simon's essay on why ironic approaches to literature fail to create beauty. This essay is an absolute must-read, and I wish I had read it sooner.
And just to show that I don't enjoy good mockery along with the rest, Stuff Geeks Love includes this lovely bit:Geeks of course need this energy because of their demanding lifestyles. Sitting in front of a television set or computer screen and eating junk food can really take a lot out of you. Rather than actually eat food that provides nutrition or turn off the anime and go to sleep, they’d prefer to pour more junk down their throats and continue running around Azeroth. Some geeks have gone so far as to suggest that they need so much caffeine to keep their amazing minds working at full speed. One fewer Red Bull and their argument about why Batman would win against Iron Man will suffer.
(confession: I have, and enjoy wearing, a caffeine molecule T-shirt, although it's really theobromine which is my chemical stimulant of choice)
(second confession: Batman wins because he would have boobytrapped Iron Man's armor ahead of time, duh)
And of course Cracked lists the 6 creepiest comic book characters of all time.
Current Location: home
Current Mood:  sick
Current Music: Augustine - This Is An Expert Bomb | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: books, comics, rant
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10:04 am
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Barnes & Noble sucks
Why do I say this? On Dec 25th, there wasn't a whole lot for Sarah and I to do, and we had decided to get a couple of things using a gift card. We placed an order for a LoTR Return of the King DVD and Fables TPB #11 at bn.com. Now, this movie is from 2003. The ultra-mega-DVD set was released later, but still, this is hardly a brand-new item. The Fables TPB was released in November.
Yesterday, we realized that we hadn't received anything, and we should take a look - so I checked and the order was set to be mailed on the 13th. Ok.
Today, I received an email that everything was shipped, followed 2 hours later with an email that only the DVD set was shipped, and there is "some delay" in processing the TPB.
Um, why is this hard? And why did we not go with Amazon? No idea for either one, but I know I won't be ordering from bn.com again anytime soon.
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Alon pointed out this little bit of awesomeness:The Taxonomy of Heavy Metal band names (Cobolt RULES!)
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: Times New Viking, "Drop Out"
Tags: music, rant
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09:40 am
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Three wholly unrelated items, and one which is related
P and I finally jammed a bit last night - we're going to do some looking for additional musicians, but my fingers sure were out of practice!
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ShrinkWrapped discusses the current war in Gaza from a psychoanalytic perspective. It's an interesting and lucid piece, unlike many things which are written about that portion of the world.
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TJIC performs a fisking on the comments of the SEC official who missed the Madoff fraud. Ouch. His/her comments are pointed and snarky, but all-in-all they are actually true. The official's statements are actually concerning - if taken at face value, they imply that the people charged with regulating these industries (finance) have no actual expertise in the basic tools of the industry (advanced math).
Perhaps one of the takeaways from this episode might be that legal or management acumen (or credentials) do not translate into acument in any other arena - I have seen a lot of folks imply that being a lawyer makes someone better at X (where X != practicing law), and that can lead to some spectacular failures of reason. (the same argument goes for da'as Torah, by the way - Rabbi == "lawyer of halakha" and a Rabbi is possessed of no special wisdom or insight in extra-legal matters by virtue of their title).
TJIC also pointed out the US's FICO score
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Current Mood:  contemplative
Current Music: R.E.M. - Finest Worksong (Mutual Drum Horn mix) | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: music, politics, rant, religion
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03:20 pm
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Speaking of doing it wrong...
Michael Newdow is back, and he's still a whiny, simpering fool. Guys like him make Athiests look bad.
His argument is "I can't watch someone do something with a possible religious connotation, or else I will ..." Of course, the ellipsis is left unfilled - he is demanding an accomodation to his particular religous practice which requires that the entire world change before him.
But wait! Isn't this an establishment of religion? Um, asked and answered, earlier, when he tried this in 2001 and 2005. He even says of his most recent effort "I have no doubt I'll lose" - okay, so why waste our time? Don't the courts have better things to do than put up with this?
Newdow needs to have his "Grinch" moment - his heart clearly is a small thing, unable to imagine that religious expression is as important for other people as his lack of religious expression* is for him.
* - of course, his Athiesm is a religion too, and it seems a lot more dogmatic & close-minded than any other organized or disorganized religion I've encountered.
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Current Mood:  hungry
Current Music: Ra Ra Riot - Each Year | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: rant, religion
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09:28 am
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You're doing it wrong
Doubtless everyone has heard about RNC leader candidate Saltsman's latest claim to fame.
My response: you have got to be kidding - what in the holy hell could possess someone of otherwise normative intelligence to do something THIS stupid?
Rather than licking their wounds after the '08 election results, and enjoying some schadenfreude about the New York and Illinois Senate seat problems which the Democrats have made for themselves, we get THIS?
I'm not even sure which is worse:
1) That this song was written and published
Yeah, the title is from an LA Times editorial. Big whoop. It's still somewhere between tacky and offensive, trending toward the latter. Yes, it's intended as a joke, but the author seems to have forgotten component of a joke: "humor." Free speech, of course, wins here, and there's lots of offensive stuff out there - the author should be free to write, perform, and publish, but it does say something poor about us as a society that there is a market for stuff like this.
2) That Rush Limbaugh played this on his radio show
Yikes. Yeah, I think the best strategy for reaching out to non-white voters with similar issues and agendas is to play a song which uses offensive racial language. Good job! However, Limbaugh isn't elected to anything, and does have a history of saying "edgy" things to stir up some controversy - his response could well be "this isn't so bad, and it's funny." Obviously, it didn't affect his listenership base, so repeat lament from above.
3) That a well known politico thought that this should be included on a CD sent to professional colleagues
Dude. DUDE. This qualifies Saltsman to win the most recent "slink off into the sunset" award, and no matter what his intentions were, his lack of judgment completely undermines any credibility he could have in any attempt to expand the Republican base, which is of course *THE JOB* of RNC chair.
I like offensive music: I think that Bob & Tom's Prisoner of Love is one of the funniest things I've ever heard on the radio (thank you 98 Rock!), but would I give a copy to my co-workers? Um, NO. This is such a basic understanding of professional behavior that I'm stunned that Saltsman could possibly break it, and even worse, when it was brought to his attention that this was (charitably) "edgy," he didn't apologize for his judgment, he doubled down.
So my RNC chair candidate is "anyone but Saltsman" - and who even thought that I would give a rat's ass who held that position (in fact, I don't, as long as it's not someone who has demonstrated incompetence in interpersonal relations).
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Current Music: Reed Kd - Empty Bottles | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: politics, rant
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09:39 pm
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Grading teachers
I had a discussion this morning with a friend of mine who is a high school teacher, and it brought up something I don't really understand: I know the various teachers' unions have rigorously opposed things like merit pay or any of the proposed standards which could be used to evaluate teacher performance (praising the good and getting rid of the bad) - but for the life of me, I don't get what is it about teaching precisely which makes it so much harder to evaluate individual performance than it is in other industries.
I'm a consultant - how does my boss decide whether I should get a raise or hit the road? If I'm better or worse than another consultant at what I do, how would someone objectively prove it?
How do I know whether researcher X is better at what they do than researcher Y? Or how about programmers W and Z?
Obviously, there are the trivial measures (attendance, hours worked, puts cover sheets on TPS reports, etc), but on a more serious level, your performance is only as good as your boss (and to a smaller extent your coworkers) think it is. Yep: it's subjective after all.
And this gets to the heart of the matter: teachers suffer from a serious case of what Sarah calls "terminal uniqueness" - they think that what they do is SOOOO different from everything else that no lessons from any other line of inquiry can be applied to them. We all know that some teachers are better than others, and it's very hard to predict whether someone will be good in advance: quality of the teacher isn't linearly correlated with years of experience, nor is it linearly correlated with certification (we all have had long-time, certified teachers who suck; that said, rookies make rookie mistakes, and certification probably does teach something useful).
Here are a few brainstormed ideas which some enterprising person could probably tweak until they worked for a school (system):
1) GE's model was the force-rank: your top 10/20% get bonuses, your middle 80/70% get mentored, and your bottom 10% get laid off. Do this at all levels of an organization, and those folks who really suck will be gone pretty soon. You could perhaps give teachers their first two years as being exempt from this, and you could let those 10% apply for jobs at other schools (because maybe it just wasn't a good fit where they were).
But how do you rank people?
This is straightforward, but not always pleasant: aggregate the feedback of the department heads, VPs and principals, and while there will be a lot of disagreement about where people fit in the middle, the outstandingly good and bad will be obvious: in fact, you'll likely see something approaching a normal distribution (if you see something else, then it requires more investigation).
2) Supply a standardized test at grade level. Compare the grade point average a teacher gives with the performance of his/her students on that standardized test. If they have similar mean and deviation, then the teacher's grades are an accurate assessment of the level of achievement of the students. If not, then the teacher is not grading appropriately - this should be acted upon. Perhaps this could be something tracked over a few years (going down on your permanent record), and after enough time has passed, either a carrot or stick could be used.
3) Who are the customers of the teachers? If it's students, survey them, and use those results to identify problems and successes. If it's parents, do the same (although that's easier, because parents are hopefully more mature than their children).
I think change will be coming to the school systems, and teachers have the opportunity now to make some constructive suggestions about what they'd prefer to any of my ideas. As far as I can tell, the teachers' unions have taken the attitude that the only thing you can do to improve performance is pay teachers more. This obviously has not worked: DC spends more per pupil than any other jurisdiction in the US. They also take the position that the only judge of the quality of a teacher is seniority, and we've seen the results there too. it's time for this to change.
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Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Byther Smith, "I'm a Mad Man"
Tags: politics, rant
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08:26 pm
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In which I examine a public figure
Anne Glusker wrote an op-ed in today's Post (why I still read that rag I don't know - oh that's right: dynamite comics page...)
The thesis of her article is that Caroline Kennedy's star turn as a possible Senatorial appointee should be cause for examining issues of women in the workforce, and she is sympathetic to the idea of Kennedy being appointed to the Senate as an example of embracing a "non-traditional CV"
This is a sufficiently farcical line of reasoning that rebuttal should not be necessary, but let's have at it:
1) Appointment to the US Senate is not like hiring an employee at a company. Why not? Well, if it turns out you made a bad hiring decision, you can fire the employee. Last I checked, a Governor can't fire a Senator (now THAT would be out-of-the-box thinking...), so the stakes are a LOT higher. Therefore, one should require MORE of a track record when making this type of appointment.
2) If Caroline's last name were "Smith" there is a 0% chance that she would be considered for this position. My evidence is the large number of thoughtful people who have also never run for office who are likewise not being considered. Glusker says that if you take the fame away from Kennedy, "she's a lot like me" - well, except the expatriate bit. So is this supposed to be a qualification for something? What exactly does this tell us about where Kennedy stands on trade policy? Or on immigration reform?
3) Glusker posits a discrepancy in how candidates are treated:This woman, like Kennedy, is running smack into what social psychologists call the potential vs. performance split. It works this way, according to Kathie Lingle of the Alliance for Work-Life Progress: "The guys in charge say, 'Oh, John can do it, we know he can.' They're assessing his potential." Whereas, when looking at a female job candidate, they're likely to say: " 'Oh, Sue can't do it; she's never done it before.' " They're basing their evaluation on her past performance.
Now, I don't know how it is everywhere, but this just doesn't jive with my experience in the technology field. Where I live, people's internal assessment is the most compelling: if you project yourself as being competent, you will be treated as though you are. Occasionally you get the "Phony" condition, but those people eventually get found out and exposed (much to their detriment). I assume that no candidate has ever actually done what I'm going to ask them to do - what I want to know is how they handle being over their head. (hint: the quickest way to blow a tech interview is to guess wrong on a tech question - just admit you don't know, and move on, or, even better, ask what the right answer is - I'm always surprised by how few people do that).
But in any case, do we want the standard for an appointment to US Senator to be on "potential" or do we want it to be based on past performance? Obviously, I think that the latter is the only sane option of those two.
Let's take this a step further: there are obviously some jobs which are more important to be done right than others - airline pilot, for instance. Would you hire a pilot who hadn't flown for twenty years? Other jobs - reporter, for instance, are a tad more tolerant of on-the-job refresh. There are some jobs where "potential" is absolutely, positively the wrong approach to use, such as the aforementioned airline pilot. There, past experience is the only reliable indicator.
So what would you do with the airline pilot who hasn't flown for a two decades? Or the civil engineer whose PE license has lapsed? How about a spy who's been out of the field for 20 years (remember the Berlin Wall? That was up 20 years ago...) Well, you wouldn't hire them into a top job, that's for sure, but you might let them start at a lower place on the totem pole with the assumption that talent works its way up.
And that brings me to my last point: I am totally sick of whining* about lack of opportunity coming from folks who haven't put their time in the trenches to earn it. Occasionally someone gets obscenely lucky, but that's not something on which to rely. If you want the success, you've got to be willing to slog through the muck to get there. If it's not worth it to you to slog through it, then guess what: it wasn't worth it to you. It will be worth it to someone else instead. A first job won't be meaningful work, it will have crummy hours and low pay; set your expectation there.
* I was in a recent off-line conversation where that was the general thrust. There was much lamenting that flexible, interesting, part-time jobs at non-profit agencies don't pay what working at a lawfirm 70+ hours/wk does. Sheesh. If it was just complaining, that would have been okay - this was from people who sincerely believed that the entire world needed to remake itself to accommodate their desires. Good luck with that. Clearly the advanced degrees had sapped their common sense...
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Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Rush - Digital Man | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: politics, rant, work
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05:54 am
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something wrong with the world today
I've seen several murder/suicide things this year. The most recent being this one. If only we could get these people to reverse the order...
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I just dropped Sarah off at DCA - early morning flights are a drag, because once I'm up, I really can't go back to sleep...
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: none
Tags: rant, sarah
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02:35 pm
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slog slog nog nog
The Ferrett does a Nog-off - no, that isn't naughty (but it should be) - it is, however, hilarious, and worth a moment.
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Why are people unwilling to say "I don't know" in an interview? I've gotten some awful guesses from otherwise smart folks on what are easy questions if you actually know the answer.
As an example, two answers to "how big is an ATM cell?":
"48 cells" (huh? Is that like the name of the WINE project [WINE Is Not an Emulator] or what?)
"56K" (maybe you mean modem speed? Or perhaps AMI-formatted DS0 channel?)
Sigh.
The right answer is "53 bytes, with about 10% overhead."
Current Location: Herndon, VA
Current Mood:  busy
Current Music: Love Is All - Talk Talk Talk Talk | Powered by Last.fm
Tags: networking, rant, work
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