The arrogance of journalists

I should stop being surprised that the arrogance of American journalists which knows no bounds. I've gotten used to this absurdity with political journalism. David Brooks bizarre hit piece, "The Liberal Inquisition", on bloggers supporting Lamont in the NYT this week no longer surprises. Brooks inhabits of world sophmoric pundrity so he can't surpise me any longer.

Foturne's article, "The New Rules" where a business journalist proceeds to rewrite Jack Welch's playbook is nothing short of astonishing. Welch's playbook brought GE amazing success during his tenture. What qualifies a writer for Fortune to so much as add a comma to Welch's rules I don't know.

The article then proceeds to try to pin corporate frauds on Welch's concept of shareholder value which is absurd. Emphasizing creating real value is not the same as cheaters and frauds who's only method to post good numbers is to cook the books.

Hard Drive Surgery Successful

My new hard drive came today and I successfully replaced the dead one in my 12" Powerbook. Probably the most difficult computer repair I've ever done. I've built many PCs from scratch but there weren't many tiny little screws to worry about. I would have been lost without this really helpful guide from ifixit.com

After this expirence, I can say I'm glad on not a surgeon. This disassembling a laptop was hard enough for me.

Collector, another word for Jackass

I really hate the word "collector". If people who collect rare works of art are collectors. People who collect random junk expensive or not should be called jackasses.

MacBook Pro Whine

While my personal 12" Powerbook is dead, waiting for a new disk to arrive, I'm fortunate be able to use my work MacBook Pro. I've had the MacBook for about 2 weeks. While there's a lot to like about the machine, the whining noise that's been widely doucmented is really irratating. For me, it goes away when I load the cpu so for me it's definately from the processor frequency reduction.

Hoepfully Apple will do something about this soon. At a minimum, a config should be added to "Power Settings" in "System Preferences" When I'm plugged in, I'd like to disable the feature. Saving power is good but not at the cost of my sanity.

Personally, I think this problem is siginifacnt enough that buyers should hold off on discretionary purchases until Apple gets it resolved.

S.M.A.R.T. Status: Drive Failing

In the process of copying all the data off my drive, thank you Carbon Copy Cloner, my S.M.A.R.T status went to failing. This was near of the end of the almost 24hrs it took for me to copy 65GB off the drive and I feel fortunate to have saved all my files. I shut the machine off once the copy completed so I don't know if the drive still works or not. The moral of the story may be that once your S.M.A.R.T status goes to failing, you probably really have very little time left to save your data.

A new Samsung 120GB laptop harddrive is on its way from NewEgg so I know I how I'll be spending my Saturday. From reading instructions about how to replace the drive, I'm sure I'll have a rant about how Apple should think about making their products more easily servicable. I thought about upgrading to a Superdrive while I was in there but you basically have to dissemble the enitre machine to do that so a Superdrive will have to wait till my next machine purchase.

Powerbook Hard Drive Failure

Turns out that yesterdays rant about memory bloat was misdirected. While memory bloat with Firefox and Safari is a really annoying issue and should be fixed by the respective development teams, the reason it was causing me so much trouble is that the hard drive in my Powerbook is dying. My machine has one of the Toshiba 80GB POS put in Powerbooks. MacTouch has documented how lousy Toshiba laptop drives are.

While it's true that disks can fail at any time, most of the disk failures I've had are all from models that had a massively elevated number of failures. Last drive failure I've had on a home machine was from an IBM Deskstar which was such a POS that IBM settled a class action suit over the Deskstars.

My backups of important stuff are pretty recent and I'm in the process of copying everything off the drive. It's going really slowly as I'm about 10 hours into the process and I've only got 19GB. SMART reporter still shows the drive as green so perhaps its got enough life left it to complete the remaining 40 GB on the drive.

Considering that Apple products are priced as premium products, using crap for hard drives is really irrating. Lying about it is even worse (see MacInTocuh link above). If used Windows machines, I'd certainly switch vendors on the next purchase.

Wanted: Mac OS X browser without memory bloat

I'm sick and tired of the spinning rainbow beach ball on Powerbook because it's swapping due to my web browser turning into a memory pig. Here's what Safari got up today for me (ps output, edited for column length):

%CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS 
0.0 17.2   841404 135104 

That's a 821MB vmsize and I've often seen it over a 1GB. And while the resident size appears to be small, the working set is not evidenced by the constant beach ball from paging.

I use lots of tabs and this causes huge memory bloat on Safari and it's not just space for the tabs because Safari gets bigger as I use it even if I hold the number of tabs constant. Firefox does the same damn thing. There was a Slashdot thread about the Firefox behavior a while back. It gets better in Firefox with browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers config change detailed in the thread comments but it really just bloats slower.

Browser developers, I don't want ANY memory caching of ANYTHING in the history. I pay $45/month to my cable company for a 6Mbps connection. So if I need to go back to something in the history (which I rarely do because if I wanted to go back to something I probably left it in a tab), get from disk cache or the origin server.

Angelides vs Westly Debate

Caught the tail end of the Angelides vs Westly debate tonight. While I was already planning on voting for Angelides, I was surprised by how much I disliked Westly in the debate. With the all the talk about tax increases and small business, Westly sounded like a Republican and a petulant one at that. CBS 5 has a fact check up and it looks like Westly is a serial exaggerator. Reminds me that I used to work with some who went to Stanford with Westly and asked him what he thought of Westly and my co-worker replied "He's a personable guy but I wouldn't trust him with my wallet.

Best Job In America?

Money Magazine has declared Software Engineer to be the best job in America. Money is just wrong on this one. They overlooked that fact that software turns into a very poor career when you hit 40. They underrate the amount of stress. The stress factor depends on the company but unless you work for a very large shop, things tend to be stressful. They also overate creativiity. Sure there is some fun design work in most jobs but much of the time, software engineers spend their days adding boring check box features that no one will ever use because some product manager wants useless feature parity with the competitors. Money's methodology also heavily weights job growth which I believe they are dramatically overstating at 46% over the next ten years. The outlook for American software engineers has considerably dimmed as work moves to India and China. As such, I just don't believe 46% growth.

To add humor to their article, Money as says Release Engineer is the top job in the field. Clearly, these writers know zero about the industry. Just because their salary numbers inexplicably put release engineer at top of list does not make it true. Anyone with any experience in the industry will know that release engineer is neither at the top of the prestige ladder or the pay scales. Not the it's not a valuable function. I've really appreciated the talented release engineers I've worked with. The untalented ones just tend to get in the way.

More on Justice Ginsburg

For what ever reason, the conservative hullabaloo about Justice Ginsburg's comments on referencing foreign law has really irritated me, more so than the usual conservative nonsense out of Powerline and the like. Perhaps it's 1984 of "Slavery is Freedom" aspect of this bloviating. For the all the ridiculous screaming about Tyranny On Horizonl, none of these sycophants has one example about how exactly liberal justices are leading us to to tyrannical state. However, Justice O'Connor has warned about how the Republican denigration of the judiciary can lead to dictatorship.

Thinking about the freedoms of the Constitutions as more powerful ideas rather than mere words will only protect against tyranny. Those who advocate literalism of the Constitution do not really mean it has they magically find inherent powers of the President that allow suspension of the Bill of Rights during war time. I'm still looking for the asterisk in the Constitution that says "the 4th amendment does not apply during times of discretionary war." Thinking about the experience of other countries only serves to enrich our ideas about freedom.

Then bloviators always go on to say to how the Court will impose policy choices. The court has only prescribed anything resembling "policy" remedies to address willful and long-running disregard of Constitutional rights. The only example that comes to mind for me is school desegregation.

The best test for conservative judicial philosophy is how it would have handled segregation. If true to originalism, a conservative court have may found nothing wrong with segregation since it had existed for over 80 years even with the 14th amendment so there's an easy argument that segregation allowable under the original intent of the 14th amendment. If any conservatives actually read this, they are sure to howl but consider their zeal to deny homosexuals equal protection under law. It's the same impulse as racial segregation. The only difference is that today open racial bigotry has become socially unacceptable. We can only hope its not too many decades till we can say the same about homophobia.

Idiots at Powerline

Powerline is complaining about a Justice Ginsburg where she defends using international law as a point of consideration in US jurisprudence. Powerline takes offensce at the idea that the Consitution is at it's core about basic fairness.

Not surprisingly their logic is utterly flawed. One claim is that liberal justices will shop for foreign law that suits them. Scalia and Thomas love to do with dictionaries when looking to finds words defined in ways that suit them. The hypocrasy of the law shopping argrument is even more galling than when one realizes that originalists should never use a modern dictionary and by their own login must use 1780s except when interpreting later admendments. Of couse, the morons at Powerline can find no examples of foreign shopping except a silly argument that homosexuals should be executed criminalized because thats what Mulism countries do and that's foreign law.

One my general critique of conservative thinking when it comes to the law is that conservatives apparently believe Americans have too many rights. They especially hate the right the privacy since it prevents telling other people how to live. The citing of Lawrence v. Texas is a great example of their obcession the private lives of others.

Unfortunately, our corporate controlled media never asks conservatives about the logical implications of their views. One is that many of the rights we take for granted like freedom for segregation are based on an expanded view of the our Constituional rights and not directly by admendment. Those who object to Lawrence v. Texas also ought to object to Brown v. Board of Education. Both found new meaning in clauses of the Consitution that were written over hunderd years prior. Of course, I 've seen a conservative even address this flaw in their reasoning. There are too busy trying ot make sure that no new rights are ever found in the Constitution.

Ice Dancing

Watching the Olympic Ice Dancing competition last night, I was stuck by both how awful in terms of style and how revealing some of the costumes were. I'm not a prude but the Olympics should be family entertainment. The couple with the worst attire fell so I'll refrain from from singling them out but suffice to say good taste was notably absent.

Food Porn

I've come across two good pieces on food in media recrently. One is On the Media's Pornucopia which shows the similaries between the Food Network and porngraphy. The bit about Iron Chef is particularly amsusing. The other is Food Slut by Ann Bauer in Salon. Bauer's pieces chronicles her journey from novice food writer to elitist food critic.

Great Radio - Heretics

This American Life did a fantastic show called Heretics a couple of weeks back. I'm a huge fan of the show and Heretics is one of their best shows of the year. It's the story of Carlton Pearson who was a big name evangelical preacher who was declared a Heretic for saying that Jesus will save everyone, not just those who go to church.

What's a fascinating about this piece is that gives the listener a view into the evangelical mindset that I haven't seen before. I came to the conclusion that the belief that those who have not been born again are all going to hell, is really a form elitelism. It's why hard-core evaneligcals think they are better than everyone else. They excuse the moral issue of most humans suffering for eternity by meekly claiming they didn't make the rules but then refuse to consider may their view of the rules in incorrect even when their trusted pastor preaches another interpretation.

A great companion to Heretics is Bart Ehrman's The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew which I'm reading now. Ehrman shows how the today's Christian beliefs about Jesus and God were not always the only or even the predominate beliefs but rather the set of beliefs that won out after a protracted struggle in the 3rd century.

Harmony Remote

One of Christmas gifts was a Harmony 520 remote. Harmony's website which is necessary to set up the remote was down for the most of the day yesterday. I finally got the remote programmed around 11pm. This morning I discovered I needed to make a few adjustments, and the site is once again down today, again due to "heavy traffic." What incredibly poor planning on the Harmony people's part.

Great Articles

I've been very infrequent in my postings, to remedy this, I have new set of topics. I'm going to post links to articles or audio clips I thought were particularly interesting or worthwhile. The first is a

NPR Segement with Clotaire Rapaille.

I like this segement because it is hilarious and Rapaille has great insights into the American mind. Rapaille is riot every time I've heard him. And yes, the clip is a bit dated in terms of the election Rapaille talks about the principles involved are not.

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Last week, I saw Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibit at LACMA. First, let me say the exhibit is has some really impressive artifacts and I'm glad I saw it.

However, the lines to get in were horrible. The tickets were sold for entry at a specific hour which should have kept waiting down. I arrived 20 minutes early for my hour and had to wait over 2 hours to get in. Tickets were oversold which made the whole experience much less pleasant than it could have been.

Second, exhibit does not include the famous King Tut Golden Mask. I understand that maybe it was too fragile to travel. What I find inexcusable is the deceptive advertising, which makes ticket buyers think the mask will be there. The web site linked above as well as all the all the banners and other advertisements I’ve seen show an image that almost everyone will think is the golden mask. However, it’s actually of an artifact that’s a small sarcophagus used hold an internal organ. There were plenty of impressive artifacts on display and it’s wrong to confuse people in this manner. Shame of National Geographic for participating this deception

First Post

Here's my first post and it's of course a rant. A bit of background first though. About the name: I think monkeys are hilarious. And while there is a certain "In Chief" who is the real "Monkey In Chief" for generally looking and acting like a chimp while sending the country down the tubes, he has not claimed the name so I've taken it mostly for my own amusement.

Second order of business, I can't spell well. I tend to leave words out when I write. I don't have the time or the energy to proof these posts so that's just the way it is.

Now for my rant. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and make it a good income but it's impossible to find a decent place to live at anything approaching a reasonable price. I'd really prefer to buy something but $700,000 for a starter house in a decent area is insane and beyond my budget. I'm not willing to commute the hour plus each way to get a cheaper area. Though rental market is supposedly softer after the Internet bust, rents are still insane by the standards of anywhere else in the country except Manhattan.

What really pisses me off about all this is the houses in this area were mostly built in the early 1950's to be easily affordable on one blue collar income. These days is it's a stretch to buy a starter house on 2 professional incomes. When this real estate bubble bursts and all those who supported the insanity with their interest only loans are in deep shit, I'm not going to have sympathy for them