On death, destruction, voting, and hope

A conservative reader just challenged me (in the comments to this post) to respond to a quotation from an anti-war activist that was printed in NewsDay:

“If the election touches off even greater violent conflict, engaging U.S. troops even more,” said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of the Manhattan-based anti-war group known as United for Peace and Justice, “that could be a kind of shot in the arm for us.

“Even if the election is considered ‘successful,’ but our troops remain on the ground [for a long time], that, too, would call into question the purpose of our presence. Either way …”

First, let me say, as I said in the comments, that you should never assume that one liberal speaks for all of us, just as I’m working on never assuming that all conservatives think alike.

Second, I am glad that any elections at all happened in Iraq that were more open than those under the previous regime, and I hope—with all the purple-fingered voters of Iraq—that the elections are a sign of better things to come.

Third, because I am glad and I hope does not mean that I forfeit my right and duty as a citizen to ask questions. Such as: we have now completed the elections, the last rationale for our presence in Iraq (after WMDs were proved not to exist), but the country is still wracked with unrest. Does the President have a plan for continued US presence after the elections? If so, for how long? If anything, the early reports after the voting suggest that we now have two large groups in Iraq: moderates and radical fundamentalists, where the moderates are willing to give democracy a shot and the radicals reject it out of hand and are willing to use violence to prevent its taking effect. Is our mission now to stamp out radical Islam? Is that an achievable goal? Are our troops ever coming home?

Last, regarding the post on which this comment thread started. For the sake of my gay and lesbian friends, I don’t ever make the mistake of taking lightly people who reject their claims for fair treatment, tolerance, and equal protection. Because I think that in a democracy, the civil rights of the individual citizen are the most precious thing we have and that they must be protected.

Round the block

Once again, I come up with reasonably snappy one liners about the things in my aggregator so you don’t have to:

  • SJ’s Wiki Hut of Horror: Feats of Clay. No, we aren’t slouching towards Bethlehem as software designers; no one knows where perfection is or what it looks like, so we just have to do the best we can. (If there’s a better analogy between agnosticism and software design, I don’t know what it is.)
  • Daily Press: Oysters bring rare bustle. It’s a long way from the James River kepone spill in the 1970s, apparently long enough that they’re opening a new stretch for harvesting.
  • Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine. Well, that’s one way to go for an office for a software startup; just park your butts, and your laptops in a coffeehouse with free WiFi. (Also nice to see they have plans for social networking your Delicious Library data.)
  • New York Times: SBC’s Acquisition of AT&T Is Completed for $16 Billion. Guess AT&T ran out of things to spin off.
  • Adam Curry teases with the description of a new drag and drop podcasting app—but doesn’t make with the link.
  • Jeff Jarvis points out that the scary media complainers have an ally on the FCC commission in Democrat Michael Copps, who seems nostalgic for the days before cable.
  • Finally, Ethan Zuckerman does some cool Technorati math on the dissemination of BBC articles through the blogosophere. Turns out that technology articles are the most likely to be disseminated and African news, UK local news, and entertainment and business stories are among the least likely.

Job hunt as personal philosophy

Wil Wheaton writes compellingly today about the outcome of his latest audition. There are a couple of things here that spoke to me. First: Wil, like me, is in an industry that is playing the hiring game in a very risk averse way. In Wil’s industry, Hollywood, it makes a lot of sense—people literally make the part. In my industry, the software startups are coming off a multi-year venture funding “nuclear winter,” and now more than ever the old rule applies: A companies hire A players; B companies hire C players. That leaves people who aren’t picture perfect matches for product management jobs (including competitor experience, or industry experience, or multiple successful product launches, looking for the one position that they are the exact right fit for.

These fiscal realities don’t make managing the inevitable downtimes any easier, though. As Wil writes today: “I still haven’t heard anything about the amazing movie, and it’s getting harder by the day to maintain hope.”

This is the hardest part of the search. Last week I had what I think was a turning point: I was talking to Lisa after one particularly frustrating interview and started listening to myself as she offered some responses and helpful thoughts. I was rejecting everything she said out of hand, speaking very negatively, preemptively shutting her options down before she had a chance to elaborate on them.

And I realized. I wanted to shut down the options because I didn’t want to hope. I was afraid to get hurt again.

I decided two things that day:

  1. I shouldn’t be afraid to fail. There is at this point nothing to lose.
  2. I am going to start writing down when I think negatively about myself, and diving into why.

With any luck, doing both those things will help me catch some of my negative thinking before it paralyzes me again.

Links in odd places

I feel a bit odd just now, as though I’m part of the machine or something. Here’s why:

  1. Go to the Sub Pop home page, which currently offers a link to a site for the new Low recording.
  2. Click on the Low splash page.
  3. Click on the link in the navigation that says “>S>P info page.”
  4. Scroll down the list of reviews for the new album, and click on the one that says “Blogcritics review of ‘The Great Destroyer.’”

And there you’ll find me. Guess I’m really part of the star making machinery now.

On dressing for the occasion

I went into Boston yesterday to audition for a part time gig while I continue looking for my next opportunity. My preparatory instructions said, “Treat this like a job interview, because it is one.” Okay, I said, and put on the suit I normally wear for first interviews. It wasn’t the smartest move, because I ended up having to walk eight slushy blocks when the Red Line slowed to a crawl two stops before Park Street, but when I got into the room I felt like a million bucks—and like I was intimidating the other people who were there. It was kind of cool.

Then there’s our vice president, who decided that the appropriate way to dress to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz was to dress like he was going to clean the streets I walked down last night in Boston:

Sources: Washington Post, Dick Cheney, Dressing Down; Oliver Willis, Vice President Disgrace; Tin Man; Wonkette, In Defense of Cheney.

Suspicious Cheese Radio

Everyone’s favorite men’s renaissance a cappella group, the Suspicious Cheese Lords, will be on Washington DC classical station WETA on Sunday night, doing the “Millennium of Music” program hosted by Robert Aubry Davis. The station has a streaming audio feed (Real or Windows Media Player only, unfortunately) so you can preview parts of their amazing new disc of previously unrecorded works of Ludwig Senfl. Set your tuners for 10 PM; it should be a really good show.

Sixty years

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Allied (Soviet) forces at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

While I can’t find words to express the mix of sorrow, rage, disgust, and shock that still fills me when I contemplate what happened in that camp and others like it across Nazi Germany, I have to try. Because we’re mistaken if we think it will never happen again.

On a more optimistic note, I was encouraged to read Putin’s remarks at the ceremony to the effect that Russia still has anti-semitism and that he is ashamed to have to acknowledge it.

More Holocaust resources:

No rest for the wicked (cold)

Another day, another shovelful. Having grown up in a nominally warmer climate where it only ever really snowed once every couple of years, I never really learned how to deal with snow. It turns out that it’s all about maintenance. Every morning after the snow falls, you go out and shovel the walk and snowblow the driveway. Shoveling doesn’t have to get to the pavement, just close. Every morning thereafter, you keep scraping at the path to get ice, drifted snow, packed snow, etc. clear and give the sun a chance to do its work. Snow shoveling is like living, it’s a journey rather than a destination.

.Mac and XML-RPC

Apple has released the .Mac SDK, allowing developers to integrate their applications with Apple’s members-only suite of web-hosted applications. Interestingly, the “Using the .Mac SDK” page says that “.Mac supports network access via WebDAV, HTTP, XML-RPC, and other open standards.” The focus of the SDK however appears to be on a set of Cocoa classes that wrap an access API, and there isn’t any documentation on what XML-RPC services are exposed by .Mac.

I would imagine that doing things like membership checking and so forth require a lot more work in XML-RPC, but it would still be interesting to see what the service calls looked like. Other than the one mention in the page I cite above, there’s no further mention of XML-RPC anywhere in the docs.

Anyone got any ideas?

Newspaper archives want to be free

Dan Gillmor: Newspapers: Open Your Archives. Right on. This is not only the right move from a business model perspective (more in a second) but from a Public Good perspective.

Why is it a good move from the business model perspective? Three things. First, keeping archives publicly accessible increases the newspaper’s share of voice in Google (as Doc Searls and I argued a long time ago). Second, it dramatically increases ad inventory. Third, it lowers the transaction costs for people interested in older information, increasing the likelihood that they’ll go in and find your content—and maybe click on an ad.

Capacity planning for digitizing CDs

I keep forgetting to document the set of assumptions I’m using to size the hard disk requirements for my home music server. This might be helpful to someone, so here goes:

On average, Apple’s lossless codec (ALAC) compresses files to about 58% of their uncompressed size. This means that to do capacity planning for moving CDs to digital storage as ALACs, you might think about it this way: a CD holds about 700 MB for 80 minutes of music; most CDs come in closer to an hour; and ALAC files are 58% of the full size representation on the CD. So the formula would be:

number of CDs × (700 × (60÷80) × 0.58) =
number of CDs × 304.5 MB =
number of CDs × 0.297 GB

So my library will weigh in at 929 × 0.297 GB = 275 GB. Which, honestly, isn’t as big as I thought it was—but is a lot bigger than you can fit on the existing Mac Mini. Or, for that matter, most external drives—the biggest I can find on Outpost is 300 GB, but most drives seem to be weighing in at around 250 these days. Maybe it’s time to look at RAID based solutions. You know, for future growth.

BTW: Why lossless? Because I’m a music bigot and like to hear all the frequencies in my music, not just the ones that lossy algorithms preserve. (No, I haven’t been able to figure out how to reconcile this with purchasing 128-bit-encoded AACs from the iTunes store.) Or, maybe, putting a better spin on it, I want to preserve the entirety of my investment in the physical CDs. Yeah, that’s the ticket.