July 2010 archive

Pour a cup of coffee or brew some tea and try not to get too depressed

Glen Greenwald continues holding journalists feet to the fire on transparency

Journalists like to claim that they are devoted to transparency, but it’s striking how so many of them exempt themselves and their own media outlets from those “principles.”  Here are five recent, somewhat similar episodes illustrating that syndrome:

Joe Conason tells us to listen to Niall Ferguson on the Federal deficit and then ignore his bad advice

Before the inquiring minds at the Aspen Ideas Festival go totally gaga over Niall Ferguson, perhaps they ought to know a little more about the British historian’s keen desire to punish our pampered working families, and how he would prefer to see us spend our dollars.

As a celebrity intellectual, Ferguson much prefers the broad, bold stroke to the careful detail, so it is scarcely surprising that he endorsed Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s “wonderful” budget template, confident that his audience in Aspen would know almost nothing about that document. For Ferguson, the most beguiling quality of Ryan’s budget must be its bias against the working and middle classes and in favor of the wealthy. But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities revealed in a scorching review, the plan doesn’t work even on its own terms.

As my regular readers know I have 5 or 6 lives and one of them is as a computer technician.  I started out writing poetry for machines and some of my earliest training is in COBOL on Hollerith Cards.  My favorite set of tools a ‘C’ compiler with good symbolic debugging.

But there’s no money in that anymore and I got trapped in the world of hardware, building and fixing machines which there is also no money in anymore when you can buy a disposable piece of junk for $400.

For some people that’s just a month’s phone bill.

But you can get acceptable results just from assembling the piles of parts people accumulate and the resulting systems were quite wizzy bang in their time and you only have to use one quasi reliable but very common OS- Windows XP.

I don’t recommend running it in an environment of less than 256 Mb or a 450 Mhz + processor, but there’s a ton of non-dual core tech that works just fine for the usual things.

What are those?

I use Office ’97.  What else do I need?

If I’m doing a really professional presentation I use Pagemaker 6.5.

I use Firefox 1.5.0.12.  It still works, why fix it?

These all work just fine in that environment, the limitations are your memory (sometimes less than 768 Mb) and your bandwidth.  Sometimes they will only handle 60 Gb hard drives without BIOS fixes and run at the slower 33 and 66 ATA rates.

Of course my own problems fascinate me more than most and I’m still dealing with massive load time fail with Yahoo News and the kona29.kontera.com element.

My current line of attack on that may seem a little round Robin Hood’s Barn, but it serves several goals.

I have some drive space for an install of Ubuntu.  Ubuntu comes with a more up to date version of Firefox and has some organizational tools that would be helpful in producing the content.  Ubuntu is stable and virus free and has some good cross OS scans available which I could use on my own system and my nephew’s (pretty surely virused, and a laptop to boot).

So I look at this as kind of an information exchange.

Whether yesterday could be called a good day depends I guess on if you are rooting for Lance and how hard.

It is easy, as Lance himself suggests, to look at the 17 riders ahead of him in the GC (General Classification or overall standings) and say- that’s a lot of people to get past, but it’s not really as bad as all that.

First he’s only 2:30 behind the race leader, Cancellara, at all; which makes up about 30 seconds of yesterday’s 3:+ deficit.  Secondly, not all of those 17 are contenders in the overall race.  A majority of them are sprinters who have been helped out by the fact that 2 of the 4 stages so far (including yesterday) have had dead classic ‘Sprinter’ finishes where the Peloton has caught up any break aways and teams have used drafting and team tactics to position their sprinters for a mile or less dash to the line.

The winners of these stages rarely gain more than :30 to :45 over the main body which all get the same time because of the ‘neighborhood of second base’ NASCAR scoring.

Today’s 116.5 mile ride from Epernay to Montargis is fairly flat with 2 climbs rated at 4.  It is one of the last 2 Stages before the Alps, where Tours are won and lost.

In related subjects, accusations of doping continue to dog Armstrong (who has never, ever tested positive).  He was heckled by a protester at the finish, evidently for the second day in a a row, and the Landis accusations have been taken up by the World Anti Doping Agency.

Let Freedom Ring. Your morning open thread

On this day in 1776, a 2,000-pound copper-and-tin bell now known as the “Liberty Bell” rings out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, summoning citizens to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. Four days earlier, the historic document had been adopted by delegates to the Continental Congress, but the bell did not ring to announce the issuing of the document until the Declaration of Independence returned from the printer on July 8.

In 1751, to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of Pennsylvania’s original constitution, the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly ordered the bell to be constructed. After being cracked during a test, and then recast twice, the bell was hung from the State House steeple in June 1753. Rung to call the Pennsylvania Assembly together and to summon people for special announcements and events, it was also rung on important occasions, such as King George III’s 1761 ascension to the British throne and, in 1765, to call the people together to discuss Parliament’s controversial Stamp Act. With the outbreak of the American Revolution in April 1775, the bell was rung to announce the battles of Lexington and Concord. Its most famous tolling, however, was on July 8, 1776, when it summoned Philadelphia citizens for the first reading of the Declaration of Independence.

You may think this just a vanity until you have your free TV Guide channel sucked to nothing so you can watch repeats of Ugly Betty.

I hate to talk trash, but what turned me against Arnold Schwarzenegger and his movies entirely is the misogyny revealed in True Lies, but Eraser is a close second.

9 pm Futurama is a repeat of the last original of the new batch.

10 pm Dinner Impossible is usually entertaining.

• FX– Doomsday “28 Days Later” meets “The Road Warrior“.
• Hist– American Pickers & Pawn Stars.
• Discovery– 2 Hours of Mythbusters Duct Tape plus Chicken Busters.
• ESPN– Cincinnati @ Mets.
• ABC Family– Edward Scissorhands.

Last day of Rachel from Afghanistan.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 35 Top Stories.

1 Gaultier celebrates strong, seductive women

by Gersande Rambourg and Sarah Shard, AFP

44 mins ago

As many here in the Northeast already know, it’s hot. Temperature in many places are in triple digits, coupled with high humidity and stagnant air. It can be life threatening. The entire region is under a heat alert and many cities have poor air quality alerts.

Most people know to wear cool, loose clothing, drink plenty of non-alcoholic, decaffeinated beverages and stay in the shade, air conditioning or a room with windows open and fans. Take cool showers. You should also limit exercise to very early morning hours. Although in this heat with temperatures already pushing 90 at 7 AM, it might be a good idea to forgo exercise altogether, especially for those on medication for hypertension, cardiac disease or diabetes. Many cities have cooling centers for those without air conditioning and places, like NYC, are extending the hours of municipal pools and beaches keeping lifeguards on duty until dusk.

If you have pets, keep their water bowls full with clean fresh water, keep them indoors or provide an airy, shaded place. Limit their exercise, as well, to early morning and after sundown.

Relief is expected on Friday when a cold front pushes through bringing thunder showers and cooler temperatures for the weekend. Meanwhile stay cool and wet, inside and out.

As with Formula One, small time margins at the begining can magnify throughout the race into insurmountable advantages.  Lance Armstrong is hoping that is not the final story of yesterday’s Cobblestone Carnage.

It’s not that he fell, there were a lot on equipment failures among the leaders.  It’s that he was involved in a fall that split the lead pack at the end of the stage and gave his major competitors a significant opening.

The fall was Frank Schleck’s (the less famous one, not the one in 6th place) and took him out of the Tour with a broken collar bone.  Matter of time really, he was badly beat up in Stage 2 the day before.

From Armstrong’s standpoint what happened is that he was all of a sudden a minute and a half behind about 6 contenders including Contador.  He drove real hard over the finish to cut that to about 50 seconds, but this is definitely a result after 2 scoreless draws.

Today’s stage is an unremarkable 96 miles from Cambrai to Reims.