January 28, 2005
Did I mention Condi was black? Because she is.
Shorter Charles Krauthammer to black people: "Hey, there's a black guy who goes to my gym! Do you know him?"
Every time I hear a Republican deride how Democrats "take the black vote for granted", I remember discussing the runup to the '96 election with some well-heeled white Republicans who claimed Clinton was on his way out as the eventual GOP nominee would pick Colin Powell as his running mate to "get the black vote."
Could the Democrats better represent African Americans? Absolutely. Consistently standing up for their voting rights would be a great place to start. But at least Democrats don't just run black faces up the flag pole and expect African Americans to salute.
And speaking of taking things for granted...
January 27, 2005
More like this, please
Democrats are introducing the Stop Government Propaganda Act.
Golly, who are these "Democrats" I've been reading about recently? Some new party? I like the cut of their jibb.
January 26, 2005
Yes, we are all doomed
The juxtaposition of these two posts struck me today.
During the Clinton years, conservatives grieved the supposed decline of the moral fiber of the United States that they believed was the result of having a... well, I guess since Republicans are adulterers and liars too, they must have thought it was just from having a Democrat as president.
Now under Bush we are left to grieve the decline of the United States' economy, the legitimacy of its political process, its international standing and its ability to look itself in the mirror.
You know, an actual decline instead of one ginned up by politicians and right wing ministers.
Bush's ardent supporters believe that A) America can do no wrong and B) America is so good it doesn't even have to try. Perhaps this is the logical result when you believe that your country was chosen alone by god to do his bidding.
It angers me that while we find ourselves forced to spend our time fighting their control of the rhetoric (let alone their control of the implementation of policy), our country continues to to be sold down the river by shallow and greedy men and women.
The audience that they play to - one that they have successfully trained to jump like trained poodles through a hoop come election day when they yell about foreigners and butt-fuckers - longs for a fantasy version of 1954 where all is Mickey Mouse and Howdy Doody and sock hops and ice cream socials and America is an island unsullied by unsavory ethnic types or anyone who made the mistake of being born different. It's a fantasy of a nation that never existed, where America single-handedly won World War II and black people would be happier if they just kept to themselves.
Where America never needed France's help to win its independence from Great Britain, there was no French resistance to German occupation during World War II, the Soviets didn't lose millions of people on the eastern front and more and more of our ass isn't owned by foreign crediters every day.
But America is not an island and the rest of the world is fully capable of accomplishing things - important things - on its own without us. While we arrogantly strut and posture and mortgage our future, young Koreans and Thais and Vietnamese are no longer learning English, they're learning the language of mortgager: Chinese.
I love this country. I was born and raised here and my time abroad has only made me appreciate what we have. That's why this administration makes me angry. Because I hate to see them tear it down.
January 23, 2005
Wrong
I think Apple gets more users per product sold who believe the company should be giving things away out of the goodness of their hearts than any other company in the history of capitalism. I'm pretty left wing, but even I don't think Apple should have to just toss in a mouse and keyboard at the same price point.
Sorry, Bill, but you need to brush up on this classic CARS post.
Bill also suggests throwing in a PS/2 adapter. Jeez, I can't even remember the last time I saw a PS/2 mouse. Seems kind of a pointless expense to capture a sliver of luddites.
Also, Bill spends a great deal of time on the eMac, which has essentially become superfluous with the introduction of the Mac Mini. He does point correctly to one problem however. You can't get a complete Mac Mini solution from Apple. I think they should have an option to bundle a cheap monitor, keyboard and mouse, even if it's restricted to the Mac Mini.
But even more wrong is this post over on the Apple Blog. You can read my comments over there, but the post is so poorly defended it doesn't really even deserve the dignity of a response. It's so bad that I'm seriously left to assume that it's flame bait, which is a shame from an otherwise enjoyable blog.
I believe each of these guys is wrong about each product. I'm quite certain Apple is going to sell a bazillion Mac Minis. I have no need for one and I've already spent time pricing out different options and trying to convince myself that I do need one. I've been less certain of the iPod shuffle's success, but the word on the street is they're flying off the shelves. I think there's a substantial backlog of people who've wanted an iPod that more fits their budget. Well, here it is.
I'm not always right, but I was right about the iPod mini. And in that post I mention what was wrong with the Cube which is exactly what's right with the Mac mini.
Apple's on a roll.
January 22, 2005
And here you thought they were extinct
First it's "fightin' Dems", then it's "fightin' pro-choice Republicans".
Next up, "fightin' blue-footed boobies".
Deja vu
A number of Mac news sites have reported this week that OpenOffice.org is no longer actively developing a native Aqua version for OS X.
Um, yeah, I think I've seen this episode a month ago.
NeoOffice is the ongoing effort to make a native Aqua version of Open Office for the Mac. I'm fairly certain this made the rounds around Christmas, just before we left for China. I'm not sure why this is news again.
Another Apple-related note: I took my 12-inch G3 iBook to China and when I first started using it again regularly I thought, I really like the compact form of this machine compared to my 15-inch PowerBook. But when we got home and I first fired up the PowerBook, I remembered why this is my machine of choice. The screen real estate is exquisite compared to a 12-inch machine. It's like driving on an open five-lane highway after being stuck on a one-lane road.
January 21, 2005
Oh, la-dee frickin' da, I work for Apple!
If anyone needs a reason to hate Albert McMurry and Lane Dunlop (or Phil Schiller for that matter), here you go.
Bastards.
The company I work for gave me a thermos once.
January 20, 2005
Traffic was hell.
Yesterday I received an email from John Kerry informing me that he would vote against Condoleeza Rice's nomination for Secretary of State, partly because of her poor job architecting the Iraq war.
That's good, I thought. If only you and more Democrats had voted against authorizing the Iraq war in the first place and created some actual debate about it, maybe we wouldn't be losing more lives each day over nothing.
Today I received an email from Terry McAuliffe telling me how Democrats "won't stop fighting" even though Bush is being inagurated today. That's nice, I thought. But I can't help but think also that if you had simply started fighting when we were all screaming "FIGHT!" at you, maybe a Democrat would be being sworn in today.
So if Dems are finally fighting back, my question is simply, what took you so god damn long?
January 17, 2005
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
After an unscheduled night in Portland due to what we from the East Coast would call an "ice storm", Karen, Hank and I are back home (one of us for the first time). It's frustrating to travel for 16 hours and maybe five thousand miles and then get stopped short just a two hour drive from home. But the ice closed Interstate 5 so there was nothing to be done.
But we're here now! We're still dealing with a jet-lagged 1-year-old, but hopefully posting will pick up here and on CARS soon.
January 12, 2005
Macworld Reaction
My thoughts on Apple's Macworld announcements:
- iLife and Tiger - Yay. Good stuff here. Being able to group items in the side column in iPhoto is great and so is the calendar. Spotlight is still cool and so is Dashboard, even if you think they ripped off Arlo Rose, which I don't think is really accurate.
- iWork - Hmm. I really wanted more. Keynote's great, but I have no use for it. I like the look of Pages, but as many have noticed, it's more of a page layout application than a word processor. I need a word processor, a spreadsheet and an easy to use database application. iWork does not let me do my work.
- Mac Mini - Very nice. I actually think they'll sell a boatload of these suckers even though they need more RAM at the very least, and are likely to need the things you're supposed to bring - the monitor, keyboard and mouse. What happened to making the whole widget? I do prefer a three-button mouse and ergonomic keyboard, and while I dearly would love to own a Cinema Display, they're too expensive for me. Overall, though, *I* prefer the expandability of the Power Mac, so I'm unlikely to get a Mac Mini. But it does fill a need, just not mine.
- iPod Shuffle - At first I was very put off by this. Then I remembered when I owned a Rio MP3 player before the iPod came out. It was flash-based (held about twenty songs) and the order and selection of songs was controlled from iTunes. The only two things the Rio allowed me to do the the Shuffle doesn't was see the name of the song that was playing and scroll down a list to select a particular song. Well, I usually know the name of the song that's playing so that doesn't seem like a big deal. Being able to scroll through the list and select a song is a big deal to me, but if I had an appropriately sized playlist that had all my favorites, I probably wouldn't care that much. Plus, this can be controlled from the ordering of the songs in iTunes. It does completely shift the interface from the iPod to iTunes, but that's largely how my Rio worked. So, call me cautiously optimistic about the iPod Shuffle. The price is completely right and combined with the size, how it plugs right into the USB port and the ability to use it as a flash drive, I think it'll fly.
Note that I've also turned comments back on. I'm headed home the day after tomorrow! It's been great, but we're ready to get back.
January 07, 2005
Thoughts for the day
- The state of Republican discourse can apparently be summed up thusly: because I had a proctologic exam once, we should be allowed to anally rape Iraqi prisoners.
- I know it's considered hyperbole for a Mac user to call Bill Gates evil, but if he'd just stop actually being evil it'd make it easier not to.
January 05, 2005
January 04, 2005
Be still, my foolish heart
Think Secret talks about the possibility of an Apple Works replacement called iWorks.
Sheesh, it's about time.
On a side note, I missed a golden opportunity to snap a picture of what had to be a copyright violation here today. We sped by a store called "Apple Music Shop" (or something close to that) with a red Apple Computer logo next to the name. The font was not Apple corporate standard and it looked like there were CDs in the window.
Perhaps this time I should call Apple legal instead of the other way around.
January 03, 2005
Xi'an
We're in Xi'an today to see the terra cotta warriors and then off to Chengdu tomorrow morning where we'll meet our son in the afternoon.
Here are some pictures of our time in Beijing.
January 02, 2005
iPods, but no Macs
Through a hi-larious mishap that I won't go into in order to protect the innocent, our Sony MiniDV camcorder has bitten the dust, just days before we meet our son.
After having battery trouble with our Minolta digital camera and quickly buying a backup camera (which we did NOT get a good deal on, but c'est la vie), we went back to the electronics store to get a movie camera.
Our guide was not with us this time, and communications with the staff were minimal. They did their best, though (actually, everyone has been great, except the hustlers selling crap outside the temples) and after much humming and hawing we realized we needed to buy the cheapest available option. None of the sales people knew what a Mac was - one of them thought it was some kind of microphone. Not forty feet away there was a case full of iPods surrounded by Windows machines, but no Macs.
I managed to ask them if the cameras used i.Link (Firewire) and they indicated that none of the cameras they had did - all were USB 2.0. I thought that was weird and probably unlikely - perhaps they meant they just didn't have any of the cables.
Finally we just jumped on the cheapest option - a $400 Panasonic - figuring we will at a bare minimum be able to convert the video to VHS and have some record of this important moment in our son's life.
After getting the camera back to the room and being a little put off that it has European-style power plugs, I noticed a DV out port that looks exactly like the DV out port on the Sony that I use to connect to my Firewire port. So, it does look like they were just talking about the cables.
Anyway, I have to say, I'm not impressed with Apple's penetration into the Chinese market. Seeing five sales people looking at the Mac logo and scratching their heads was not impressing the Windows-using couple that was with us.
January 01, 2005
Beijing
Greetings and Happy New Year from China!
New Year's Day here was pretty much a non-event from what I could see. The big show is the Chinese New Year which isn't until February this year.
On our first day, we dragged our jet-lagged asses out of bed to go see the Temple of Heaven. After spending about a year and a half living in Japan, the scale seems more impressive here. I'm eager to see the terra cotta warriors when we travel to Xi'an on Tuesday.
We've had three excellent meals so far - including dim sum for breakfast, Sezchuan for lunch and a great eel and garlic dish for dinner - and the fact that you shouldn't drink the tap water is just a good excuse to drink beer (although I did lay off at breakfast).
Other than our guide, the most impressive English we've heard was from the barista at Starbucks who got "double tall non-fat hazelnut latte" with no problem. When the waitress at our western-style hotel who couldn't get "Perrier" without bringing us the drink menu and having us point at it, you have to hand it to Starbucks.
I did manage to order us rice at lunch by writing the character for it (which, of course, is the same as the Japanese character) on my palm with my finger, so I'm doing what I can.
Interesting note: it looks like Blogspot is blocked from China, or at least from this hotel. I can't get to Atrios or any of the other Blogspot blogs to the left.
