Author: JWL

Look at what CNN published tonight:

Ignoring his rival Democrats, the Massachusetts senator hammered the Bush administration, taking the president to task on the economy, health care, international relations and his military record.

This shows Kerry’s strategy is working. He’s carrying nearly every state with one platform: he’s willing to take on George W. Bush. He’s looking past all the other candidates; he’s assuming he’s already won the nomination, and the voters are reinforcing this view. Is this what is meant by “electability?” Howard Dean, apparently, was not electable. Kucinich never had a chance.

Tonight someone asked me what happened to Dean’s campaign. I’m not exactly sure. I think there are several factors at work. Certainly the media have impacted Dean’s plummetting campaign. In addition, as I’ve written before, Dean’s campaign peaked too early.

At this point, the “Dean is finished” meme has been hammered home so vigorously and repetitively in the media that everyone believes it. Dean is finished. But he made his mark on the American political landscape. The nature of the dialogue is different because of him. At least John Kerry is openly criticizing George W. Bush.

I got a new part-time job today. I’ll be taking incoming calls for AAA in Northern New England. It looks like a good job, one that I’ll be able to do well, and more importantly that I’ll be able to forget about when I leave. I’ll be working part time, 2-10:30pm, on Saturdays and Sundays. Though I’m not crazy about working every weekend, at least it won’t interfere with my “homeschooling dad” responsibilities.

It’s a seasonal position, but I was told that they end up keeping about 80% of their seasonal help based on scheduling and performance. I should do really well at this job (I learn fast and have all the necessary skills), and the fact that I’m willing to work every weekend should help a lot. So I think this will turn into a permanent position.

The extra cash flow will help, of course. In addition to putting money toward bills, I should be able to start thinking about a new motherboard for the studio computer, some new recording software for the studio computer, and also possibly a linux laptop for myself. When it becomes permanent, I may be able to afford to make car payments for us as well. Time will tell. Let’s get some hours in first, and see where things go from there.

It is interesting to see claims like this one:

The idea, borrowed from biology, is that Microsoft Corp. has nurtured a software “monoculture” that threatens global computer security. Geer and others believe Microsoft’s software is so dangerously pervasive that a virus capable of exploiting even a single flaw in its operating systems could wreak havoc.

being published in the mass media. This story is starting to get some serious attention, as well as some serious thought, in mainstream media.

I still say the writing is on the wall. The curve of Microsoft’s decline is exponential, even though it is early in the process. The next few years will be very difficult for them. Eventually they will have to completely change their business model, though admittedly it will take them a while to go through the billions they are sitting on.

In the past 5 years I have gone from not drinking coffee at all to being a coffee snob. I have the same attitude about coffee that I do about beer; I’m just not interested in Budweiser or Maxwell House or Miller or Folgers. If I want coffee/beer, I want something real, with depth and flavor.

There is a local coffee shop/roaster called Coffee By Design that makes the best coffee beans. I like their dark roasted coffees best; in particular, their Organic French Roast is quite good.

Up until now, I have used a french press for brewing coffee. It does yield a quite strong cup, though the maker has complete control over the brewing process (water temperature, concentration of coffee, brewing time, etc.). But today, my wife got me a new brewer, a double-loaded automatic drip kind. Way cool. I’m sipping the first results of it (using CBD’s Casco Bay Blend), and it’s pretty good. Let’s see if I can get used to this method of brewing…

I just posted the following on Lawrence Lessig’s blog. Lessig, a (dare I say) brilliant professor/lawyer who has written prolifically about the intellectual property crisis, has bought into the nonsensical claim that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000. Here is my response:

Professor Lessig,

I am troubled by your buying in to the hype of claiming that “Nader cost Gore the 2000 election.” This claim is nonsense by any scientific or analytical standard. While it is true that Nader received thousands of votes in Florida, and that Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes, your claim suffers from compounded causes.

A few points to consider: first, five third-party or independent candidates each received thousands of votes (Nader, Browne, Buchanan, Phillips, Hagelin), well more than 537, yet Nader alone gets the blame for costing Gore the election. The fact is that nearly every election in America has two candidates getting the vast majority of votes, with the non-duopoly candidates fighting for the few remaining scraps dropped from the table. Nader was firmly in this latter camp in 2000.

Second, your claim does not account for the impact Nader had on the political landscape in 2000. How many people who would not otherwise have voted were inspired to go to the polls in 2000? This group of voters undoubtedly includes voters from across the political spectra: progressive/green candidates disillusioned with the two-party system, right-wingers terrified of what Nader — or Gore, for that matter — stands for, and also disillusioned democrats who went out to vote because they were afraid that Nader would cost Gore votes. Though specific numbers from 2000 are impossible to come by, it is quite possible that Nader inspired MORE people to vote than the number of votes he received. Sadly, the breakdown of these numbers, of where these votes went, is impossible to know.

Third, Gore’s campaign was one of the most poorly run in history. Gore failed to inspire voters, performed terribly at the debates against Bush, and failed to go for the jugular in his campaigns. Gore should have blown Bush out of the water in the debates, but instead he came across as wishy-washy, spineless, and without his own vision. This fact, in my view, was most important as to why the election was even close in the first place.

Fourth, Gore technically did win the election. Bush was in effect appointed by the Supreme Court. But hey, this is America; just because you get the most votes, doesn’t mean you win the election.

I agree that it’s important that Bush is not reelected this year, and that Nader will, no matter what his decision about running this year, influence the election in 2004. But the fact that Bush is the current occupant of the White House cannot be blamed solely on Nader. There were too many factors at work.

This article shows just how mainstream solar energy is becoming. It’s quite interesting:

In one of life’s little ironies, solar power is gaining a toehold in the most unlikely of places – the world of SUVs, big-screen TVs, and two-fridge families – the ‘burbs. And if it can gain acceptance there, some analysts say, the technology is on the cusp of widespread acceptance.

“Even suburbia is starting to go solar,” says Richard Perez, publisher of Home Power magazine, the bible of the home-renewable energy crowd. “Some new houses and subdivisions are being planned this way. It’s not really common yet, but its happening.”

The number of people using solar power in the US can be measured in tens of thousands, so it’s still a small minority. But it’s catching on for a variety of reasons; it’s cheaper in the long run, it’s morally sound, and it enables you to sell electricity back to the grid.

I’ve always imagined using solar energy to heat my home. Of course, this presupposes that I become a homeowner, which hasn’t happened yet. Because we homeschool our daughter, we’re a one-income family for the time being, at least until some of my other projects begin to generate income. But I dream of this quasi-utopian off-the-grid communal living situation, with solar power, yurts, big gardens, etc. etc. The technology for this dream exists now; it’s just a question of resources from here on out.

Well, I’m thinking of reconfiguring my hard drives on my local computer. I still have Windows98 installed on one of the hard drives, which I almost never use these days. The only thing I use Windows for is to run ACID for songwriting, so I can make drum loops. Because at one point I was doing music production on this machine, I gave the faster hard drive to Windows. Now most of that data is just sitting there. I’ll probably keep Windows around for my daughter’s games and for ACID, but the rest is just fluff. I don’t need it. Everything else that I need works far better under Linux.

So what I think I will do is archive most of my Windows data, partition that disk (maybe 7 or 8 gigs for Windows, the rest for Linux), and reinstall Linux to that disk. Then I can take my other hard drive (currently partitioned for Linux) and use it for only storing ogg and mp3 files (this is what most of the drive is now anyway).

So when I reinstall, the question becomes “which Linux”? A month or two ago I installed Fedora Core 1, but the more I use it the less I like it. It’s just too slow, and it needs lots of stroking to get everything I want on it. So I guess I’m officially looking for a new Linux distro. I may give Debian another go, or MEPIS, or PCLinuxOS, or Libranet. Not sure… I need to think about this some more.

Yet another page of commentary on the Mozilla browser situation. This time, it’s from Dave Whitinger, who 4 years ago, in the midst of The Browser Wars Part One (just before MS Internet Explorer became dominant, back in the Netscape 4.x days), wrote The Battle That Could Lose Us The War, where he concluded that “if Microsoft was able to dominate the web on the desktop, it would be a short matter of time before they could extend and dominate the web on the server.”

But now, after plenty of (somewhat tumultuous) history in Mozilla, he is saying that The Tide Has Turned. An excerpt:

So much progress has been made, in fact, that today, more than four years since my gloomy outlook was keyed, with unspeakable pleasure I am now in a position to report that this tide has finally turned. The Gecko layout engine seems unbreakable and is reportedly more standards compliant than Internet Explorer. The Firefox browser is fast and stable, and supports the plugins out there that the users want and need, and, for the first time in several years, my wife is actually excited about her Linux desktop again. For the first time since Internet Explorer 3.0 was released, I am seeing people switching browsers in droves.

Definitely evidence that the browser wars indeed are NOT over. Mozilla is now clearly better technology than IE. However, inertia is on Microsoft’s side. We’ll see what happens….

A very flattering review has come out. See “Firefox 0.8 is the release that won me over”. A couple of interesting points. First:

My rule of thumb is this: the computer should try to be faster than I am. If I find myself waiting for the computer to do something, then I need to find out what’s the bottleneck. My view is this: the bottleneck should always be the human.

Interesting point. I wonder if this phenomenon is the motivation for Moore’s Law? I mean, why do computers always have to be faster and faster?

The conclusion of the review, by the way:

All told, this browser is an excellent piece of engineering and the Mozilla team must be very satisfied with the work that they are contributing to the internet community. It takes a lot to get me to switch software packages, but after over 2 years I have finally found my new web browser.

When I create some more hard drive space I plan to install it.

I just saw The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised, a column by
John Perry Barlow,
about the apparent demise of Howard Dean’s campaign. It’s very insightful, more in its general cultural critique — namely in the title — than in the analysis of Dean’s campaign. It’s main point in this regard is that television is the voice of the counter-revolution, and those of us in the revolution need to recognize it as such. A lot of power is wielded there; what has happened to Dean’s campaign is evidence to this:

I have seen the past, and it still works.

Politics as usual was working like God’s wristwatch in Iowa, where the RNC and various Republican PAC’s outspent many of the Democratic candidates on negative TV ads aimed exclusively at Dean. But more damaging, in my opinion, was the remarkably open bias that the traditional media seemed to display against Howard Dean in their presentation of the news itself. I don’t watch much television, but what little I’ve seen in the last month indicated to me that Dean was being systematically slimed.

I witnessed, for example, an astonishing are-you-still-beating-your-wife interview of Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi by CNN’s Paula Zahn. Zahn persisted in drilling in on Dean’s having said in an NPR interview that the notion the Bush administration had known in advance about 911 in advance was “an interesting theory,” refusing, despite Trippi’s protests, to read a bit further in the transcript to Dean’s unequivocal statement that it was a theory he didn’t share.

Dean was taken to severe task for having murmured something on Canadian television four years ago about flaws in the Iowa caucus system. Fox spent an entire day calling him a liar without ever being specific, in my hearing anyway, about what lies he had purportedly told. CNN repeatedly reported that some Iowa voters were referring to Dean volunteers as “Perfect Storm troopers.” Indeed, in my extremely random sampling of TV reporting before the Iowa caucuses, I never heard a single reference to Dean that wasn’t at least mildly derisive.

So Dean’s defeat by the mass media demonstrates the power they have, and more importantly, whose side they are on.