again, sorry for the noise

sorry for the noise

There comes a time every year or two when I screw up my feed settings terribly. In fairness to myself I must add that sometimes it’s Feedburner’s fault. Sometimes their instructions are opaque, and in one instance while they were being digested by the Google borg they actually hosed up my feed themselves. Really.

So this is an annoying test post to see if I’ve reset my 2010 feed options for listics properly. The only way I’ll know is if this post shows up in the feed.

If you’re a subscriber and it doesn’t, well… this is one of those “please let me know if you don’t get this message” kind of things. Seriously… subscribers? I’ve probably goofed everything up again.

The weekly race to the bottom in the OpEd section of the New York Times ended in a dead heat today. Ross Douthat shares the prize with that perennial favorite, the odious Stanley Fish. Among the reasons I find Mr. Fish detestable are observations like this: I’ve now learned two things about New York Times readers. They don’t believe in God, but they do believe in, and in fact, worship, democracy. Also repugnant is Fish’s favorite narrative device, an analysis of the comments he received on a prior post. The device is vaguely reminiscent of the kind of Germanistik literary criticism given to counting adjectives and matching them to nouns. And nouns to verbs. And, best of all, drawing a conclusion about a literary work based on that data. Did you know that “the first record of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times.” It’s true. I read it in the Wikipedia. You can look it up.

Yesterday, Stanley Fish wrote about politics to add weight to the idea that people remember the George W. Bush administration fondly and miss the ringleader. It must be true. There’s a billboard on a freeway in Minnesota that makes it implicit.

This weekend, Ross Douthat wrote that true religion is dying under the weight of bourgeois mystical practices:

By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

This kind of rhetoric goes over well with the bishop. It provides grist for the diocesan fundraiser PR mill. I wanted to point Douthat toward Mystic Bourgeoisie, a four and a half year study that pulled together chapter and verse regarding the spiritual bankruptcy of the American middle class flirtation with matters numinous and self-help. Douthat suggests that the cost of this dilution of the currency of faith is paid by a wandering away from the one true faith, that old time religion that somehow should bind our faith and practice. Nonsense, of course, but sadly, I would have had to log-in to leave a comment and the ennui around here is pretty thick today.

Have I mentioned that Dickens coined “boredom” as a neologism in the mid-nineteenth century. Fascinating…

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
– Bob Dylan, 1964

Steve Jobs, Disney Director and famous iCrapper, is a baby boomer. Bram Cohen, who wrote BitTorrent, Shawn Fanning, who developed Napster, Sergei Brin and Larry Page who founded Google, and Linus Torvalds famous Linux dude are all much younger than Jobs. Steve Jobs represents entrenched interests. The aforementioned Millennials famously promote open systems and free exchange of ideas. Jobs is a “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) kind of guy, the sort who believes the Disney copyrights on that mouse should be extended to the corporation in perpetuity.

Jobs leads a cult of dedicated customers, people who will buy his products regardless of performance because they’re marketed so well. In upscale malls across the US you can get Apple products the day they are released simply by standing in queue at the Apple outlet and reinforcing the belief of those around you that the iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad or iWhatever is the NEXT BIG (retail) THING. Sadly, the Church of Apple’s profits are tied to a strict program of Digital Rights Management and it’s getting harder and harder to come up with the NEXT BIG (retail) THING, patent it, and control its release in the marketplace.

Okay, the iPods, those stored music thingies, were pretty cool. Initiates and communicants could identify each other by the little white carbuncles blossoming from their ears, growths that presumably excluded the echoing chant and drumbeat of the marketing weenies who tweet and IM and Facebook, and blog the news that the NEXT BIG (retail) THING that you bought last month will soon be passé, because the NEXT BIG (retail) THING is about to be introduced by Jobs at the next big iHoopla and Marketing Festival (BTOBS).

For the last month or two, under pressure by the need for big numbers on the iPad launch, Jobs has been on a tear spreading fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about competitive products. Now he’s added injury to insult with a patent infringement suit against HTC, his leading competitor. Well, it looks a little like an iPhone, but wait! It’s so much better!

Some of Jobs’ success is based on his creative adoption of Xerox’s mouse and graphical user interface. Will he prevail against HTC which seems to be taking a page from his own book?

“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.” — Noam Chomsky

Thus begins a new blog with the preposterous and passé name Class War. The author? Yours truly, of course. Who else would hurl a dead skunk into the marketing meeting then chain the door shut?

Class War is a blog where I can post my perhaps outré but passionately held political opinions. This blog (Listics) isn’t going away. It will remain an eclectic collection of links to good blogs, good food, journalistic criticism, the Interwebs tech community, and basically anything I want to share. But from now on I’ll be banging the drum for progressive politics and meaningful social change at Class War. I’m just tuning up over there, finding my voice, finalizing formats and layout, that sort of thing. Drop in. Leave a comment. Subscribe.

The Republicans are growing ever more strident in their opposition to Health Care Reform. Many have already begun to hold their breath until they turn blue. Palin is speaking at the NRA convention. The lines are being drawn… there’s a lot to write about as the 2010 political season gets underway.

Cathy Erway, the author of The Art of Eating In is in Madison this week preparing meals with friends and spreading the word that we can benefit from getting in touch with where our food comes from and how it’s prepared. Cathy’s blog Not Eating Out in New York sports the tag line “Consuming Less, Eating More.” Sunday she’ll be cooking dinner with Madison’s Underground Food Collective and Monday night she’ll be the guest chef at the UW-Madison’s Slow Food Chapter.

A freelance writer, Cathy also blogs at the Huffington Post which this week is promoting “a week of eating in.” I met her this afternoon at a book signing at Rainbow Bookstore. Confession: in addition to buying an autographed copy of Cathy’s book, I also picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto and Who Rules America, Power Politics and Social Change by G. William Domhoff. The latter will of course provide food for thought.

The Senate held hearings today on Blackwater and the shell companies they contrived in order to share lucrative contracts with Raytheon. The Blackwater testimony was misleading, vague, and at times seemed close to perjury. More hearings will be held to sort out the mess. I doubt that Cheney or Eric Prince will do any hard time in prison, but it’s a possibility.

Hearings were also held today to hector and harass the CEO of Toyota, an honorable man who traveled to the US to express remorse for his product’s recent spate of defects and the deaths that resulted. It’s alleged that Blackwater contractors were flat out murdering people in Iraq and Afghanistan. If I was producing the evening news I’d want at least to balance the Toyota hearing with the Blackwater hearing, even if it meant I had to cut another story short. The Littleton, Colorado school shootings used a lot of air time. Maybe the eyewitness testimony of the precocious 12 year old Littleton eighth grader could have been edited.

For me the Toyota brand is all about quality, dependability and integrity. The mats in the luggage area of the hatchbacks have bound edges. The comparable Ford economy hatchback has die cut mats with rough edges. I’ve never been stranded due to a mechanical failure. The sales and service people have always dealt with me honestly.

I bought my first Toyota Corolla in 1973. Drove it from San Francisco to an Association for Institutional Research gathering in Michigan. I didn’t see many Japanese cars in Michigan. After the meetings, I circled out through New Hampshire, then back home to San Francisco via Wisconsin where I tore out the backseat to make room for gear and to improve the reclining angle for better sleeping. Left the backseat in the cellar at dad’s cabin on Jordan lake and journeyed onward home. Homeless actually. I was between apartments, working a day job at UCSF, showering at friends’ houses and sleeping nights in the Toyota in Golden Gate Park.

A year or so later, that little car was totaled on Highway 101 northbound near the East Blithedale exit in Mill Valley when the traffic came to a sudden stop but the truck behind me didn’t. There were a bunch of people in the car, but no back seat. Happily no one was hurt. After a brief meeting with the Highway Patrol officer who was trying to untangle the pile-up, I limped on to Novato where I discharged my passengers in Bonnie Peterson’s driveway. An onlooker would have thought we were rehearsing a circus act: clown car. I left that car in Bonnie’s driveway for the insurance adjuster’s perusal, and then had it hauled away to the junk yard.

I was living in a nice little place on Castro Street at 18th, above the all night donut shop across from the theater. Buses roared outside my windows 24 hours a day and I needed a car because I was consulting at the Stanford med school, a lengthy commute down Highway 280. I bought a Fiat, an awful car. In the years since then I’ve owned a lot of cars and pick-up trucks. That Fiat was one of the worst, and the Toyota was one of the best. I’ve lost count of how many Toyotas we’ve owned, but they have always been flawless.

Right now we have a Toyota Matrix and a Rav4 in the driveway. I expect them to last for a long time, longer than the rude and abusive congress-critters I saw on the news tonight. Oddly enough, Fox News has a fair and balanced story on Akio Toyoda’s testimony before congress today. It’s worth reading.

A message from the upgrade bunker…

I’m heads down into my third and final day of upgrading this PC from Windows XP Media Edition (SP3) to Windows 7 Ultimate. It’s about a three hour job and–yes–I am a terrible procrastinator and foot-dragger with the flighty attention span of a carefree chickadee on a summer day, so let that disclaimer explain why I–a seasoned systems professional–continue to dither around and about a project that should have been done on a Monday morning.

I blame it on twitter. General Motors International Operations has a “social media” team. Who knew? The news makes me feel like someone slapped me in the face with a trout. It only took fifteen or twenty years to get the message out to the corporate culture that the mediating influence of this internex thing is central to global communications. Next thing you know the corporate marketing types are cluttering up the twitter stream.

GM Social Media Team member, Gluten Free, chocolate loving, shoe crazed, newlywed twenty something. Follow my global travels: annalisabluhm.posterous.com

Must one not explore the nuanced tweets of such a person? Must one not follow her on her gluten-free gastronomic adventure in the far east?

It’s easy to lose track of the data migration path from XP to the external hard drive and back to the local drive after Windows 7 Ultimate is installed. Windows 7 Ultimate sports a feature called “aero.” Ford has a van named Aerostar. I wonder if Ford marketing is as twitterfied as GM International Operations. One way to find out…

Bada bing! Hey there! ScottMonty is using twitter.

Head of social media at Ford Motor Company, husband, dad, host of http://ihearofsherlock.com, and a generally nice guy. Formerly from Boston.

Yes, Scott Monty is using twitter, has been for the last three years. In that time he’s pumped out over 18,000 tweets, befriended over 32,000 people and attracted almost 38,000 followers.

Fascinating.

This dreck can keep you thrashing about in your own head and prevent any work from getting done. So, where was I?

Photo by Jurvetson

Rootkit? Oh. I didn’t tell you. Malware forced my upgrade to Windows 7. I had a rootkit hiding somewhere, a nasty piece of code that randomly redirected my searches to searchfindsite.

Anyway, the whole upgrade process was easy as pie. The file transfers worked fine. The reinstallation of programs, while not easy as pie nor even a piece of cake, went fine. Windows loads updates and patches all the time, and eventually I hope to be caught up. Every day in every way I am getting PCier and PCier. Seriously, the OS is so feature rich I’ll have to study to take advantage of it. I’ll also be studying MS Office 2007. Since Office 2010 is out there in the hands of brave early adopters and since I didn’t really pay all that much attention to the bells and whistle on Office 2003, I figure getting up to speed on 2007 will prepare me for 2010. Really…

I think I’ll upgrade the Vaio next, and then maybe the netbook. Glutton for punishment? Masochist? Not really. It’s just that the tool set is ever changing and it pay$ to keep up.

Owen Slot, the Times head sports reporter, had this to say about Shaun White:

“…neither fear nor physical frailty, nor indeed self-awareness nor the remotest glimmer of self-deprecation seem to interrupt the rise of his fame or the expansion of his personal empire.

The Double McRecovery [Mr. Slot's obscure name for White's amazing "Double McTwist 1260"] served only to crank up his rise to the top of the chat-show establishment.”

Dry humour.

The London Times called the bobsled run “the death track,” and styled Vancouver 2010 as “the calamity games.” To underscore the nature of the calamity, Slot cites the case of the Zamboni breakdown. It seems that the ice surfacing machine had some mechanical difficulties, since repaired. It’s ironic that London, perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the English speaking world, is served by ill-informed and provincial sports hacks such as Slot. Planning and presenting a gathering as complex as the Olympics is a huge challenge. The Brits, more familiar with Goldie Lookin Chain than with Gold Medals, will have their challenge in 2012. One can only hope that the world’s press treats London 2012 better than the London Times has treated Vancouver 2010.