Lunch with the President—updated

So President Casteen came to lunch. A few interesting bits. Apparently the General Assembly continues to cut funding for education, after what Casteen characterized as exceptionally stupid budgetary decisions in the late 1990s (*cough* repeal property tax *cough*). So public funding for Virginia is going from 12% of the budget down to about 7% over the next two years, and tuition, which has been capped in-state at $4,500 a year since about 1995, is going to rise over the next four years to about $7,500 a year. (To which I say, after having paid about four times that a year for my graduate degree, So what???) Anyway, the school is going to continue to work at becoming self-sufficient.

Other stuff of interest: one silver lining with the whole Pep Band/WVA flap may be that it raises interest in why Virginia has no marching band, namely (among other reasons) the lack of emphasis on the performing arts; another residential college is planned, to abut the new basketball stadium (which will also allow rock concerts, apparently. And there will be a new contracted promotional agency, resolving the painful PK German situation once and for all). And there will be another capital campaign to grow the endowment so the school can go completely to self sufficiency. Anyway, other than running into Monica Nixon, that was about it.

Last thoughts on “astroturf”

I’m letting the “astroturf” issue drop. For one thing, it’s not true astroturf—that is, it doesn’t represent some agency planting fake “grass roots” letters in newspapers around the country under phony names. Instead, it’s a letter writing campaign—one made transparent by Google, but a fairly normal occurrence nonetheless.

Greg pointed out yesterday that this sort of thing is fairly common practice on both sides of the aisle, and takes blame, or credit, for having done the same thing in support of environmental causes. I like his parting thoughts:

More citizens need to learn how to discern the difference between a real groundswell and the scripted kind. Politics would be healthier for it.

Crossing blogging lines

Heh. I’ve said before that we’re in trouble when I cover politics and Greg covers Mac software. Well, today it’s happening again, with the ongoing Republican astroturf saga here and Greg discussing Jefferson, the new Mac OS X front end to the Thomas legislative database. I had a chance to play with it last night, and it’s pretty cool. The first thing I did was to plug in my senator’s name, which led me to the long list of amendments to the appropriations bill currently under way (linkage once I figure out how to work Thomas’s web interface). Jefferson is definitely a useful tool to keep yourself informed as a citizen; I would never have spent the time to figure out Thomas, but Jefferson makes it quick and easy.

Dancing the Jigsaw: Power tools in Seattle

All my relatives should be fearing for my safety right about now. I got a jigsaw on Saturday.

My eye-hand coordination is somewhere south of dismal. You know how the kids who can’t play sports can at least play video games? I’m the one who always killed QBert in the early 80s because I couldn’t figure out which way the joystick went. So the concept of me + power tools = scary.

This is a first step to our first big post-housewarming project. We have a closet that was sheetrocked after the floor was laid in our sun porch, but the closet sits empty while our kitchen is stuffed. We’ll be putting in some shelving and storing a lot of barware in the new pantry/bar/whatever we’re going to call it.

But first I have to learn to operate the saw safely. My plan is to use it to cut the lumber that will frame the drawers I’m going to hang under my workbench. We have two kitchen drawers that were displaced when our dishwasher was installed, and no other place to put them, so I thought, why not? The answer is apparently “because there’s not much there to attach them to.” So the plan is to cut some two-by-fours to the length of the drawers and mount the slides on them, then put cross-boards across the tops of the drawers perpendicular to the drawer mounts and screwed into the drawer slide pieces. Then I’ll use the cross members to mount the assembly to the bracing members under the workbench.

Theoretically. The good news is that the plan doesn’t call for a lot of complicated cuts, so it should be just the thing to learn how to operate the saw. The only trick is finding the time.

QTN: Hale’s Ales Rudyard’s Rare Barleywine

More Northwestern beers for George today. The style known as barleywine is generally characterized by high alcohol level and high residual sweetness (it’s difficult to make a beer both very dry and high in alcohol, as substantial amounts of sugars are needed to encourage the yeasts to produce the alcohols).

This particular barleywine is a very limited edition from Hale’s Ales—so limited that it’s branded Rudyard’s Rare rather than Hale’s. Looking more like a British specialty beer than one of Hale’s usual brews, it nevertheless is clearly a Northwest beer, with high hopping balanced against the very malty sweetness. It’s perceivably strong, but remarkably balanced considering the high alcohol level (9.2%). Not a lunchtime beer. —Excuse me, I need a nap.

Remote update: Getting around statefulness

I’ve been continuing to play around with the Sony RM-AV3000 universal remote and may have actually found success. With a little help from RemoteCentral, I got around the gripe that I had about stateful buttons. Specifically, I found a setup that, from any input state, allows me to reliably choose the input on my Philips TV on which the DVD player and amplifier are providing input. It has nothing to do with the Input button, which is stateful. Instead, I can use the channel buttons. Use the keypad in the TV section to go to channel 002, then channel down three times for the cable or VCR (composite inputs) and four times for the component inputs. So now my DVD macro looks like: TV 002 Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- AMP (DVD input) DVD Play. It looks a bit naff but it works great.

Maybe now Lisa will use the remote…

QTN: Snoqualmie Falls Avalanche Winter Ale

This edition of the Quick Tasting Notes™ strays far from the Belgian beers that have dominated lately, back into the Pacific Northwest (at George’s request). Those who visit Snoqualmie Falls for the dramatic waterfalls, or head east to the pass for skiing, probably never knew that there was a brewery nearby. Okay, neither did I, until I found the Avalanche (see the bottom of the linked page). Malty, a deep copper color, no apparent spices, but quite hoppy—in fact, slightly bitter from the strong Northwest hops. Definitely a winter, rather than holiday, beer.

Astroturfing in our time

Paul Boutin breaks an interesting story: Someone’s astroturfing local newspaper editorial pages on behalf of the President’s economic growth package. Dozens of newspapers “from Boston to Honolulu,” different names (the list of papers is here). The astroturfing was turned up by Google. Same text every time:

When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest. Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President’s plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 – and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That’s not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the President’s new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

What were they thinking? There are no secrets in the blogosphere. How are the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe going to feel about being astroturfed? How seriously are they going to take statements from any official source who’s behind the Bush economic plan as a result?

Here’s a big clue: stop lying to us.

Busy day

Lots of stuff on the plate today. While I work, a few quick pointers to things going on elsewhere:

  • Thanks to Dave and Doc for the linkage on yesterday’s open-data release of the Weblogs.com data growth measurements. I was going to offer a clarification to Doc calling this “the diameter of the blogosphere,” but on reflection he’s right. This measures the total activity of the blogosphere, the growth of the content being given back to the web by its users. The fact that this is both existing bloggers being very chatty and new people blogging is important; being able to break down those percentages is probably less important. —I like Doc’s characterization that this is the diameter of the blogosphere rather a lot. This is why he’s a marketing professional and I… well, I am too, but one with a lot less experience. 🙂
  • Craig is back from vacation and blogging his cruise experience. It sounds like even the memory of the cruise ship food is enough to make him lethargic.
  • George reports that the Big Dig proceeds apace, with the I-90 extension, at $6.5 billion and 3.5 miles the most expensive road ever built, scheduled to open this weekend (connecting the Mass Pike to the Ted Williams Tunnel and making it possible to quickly get to Logan from the rest of the state). George, we expect a driving conditions report when you get the chance.
  • Finally, Esta is blogging her ongoing process of applying to the Presbyterian seminary. While there are plenty of b-school admissions bloggers that I know of, I think hers is the only one to blog about seminary.

George: Scrapple and beer

George writes today that he left his Scrapple in Philadelphia. He also notes that it’s hard finding the time to blog. George, the reason it’s so easy for me is I think in blog posts now. It’s all about practice, practice, practice. Plus I tend to want to write more when I’m drinking good beer, which is why I started doing the beer reviews. Right now I’m working through a backlog of Belgian and other brews from the beer club, but once I get the shelf cleared out I’ll be checking out some more local products…

Weblogs.com keeps rollin’ along

A week ago I thought that we might see an uptick in the slope of the growth of Weblogs.com activity, as measured by the high water mark, in coming months. All it took was one little Supreme Court case to do it. The site hit a new high water mark yesterday that was more than 100 weblogs higher than the previous mark (during the MacWorld SF 2003 keynote; this is a hint that increased activity on existing blogs is a major driver of the high water mark). The figure of merit is now 2.8, back to where it was in October.

I thought this was a good time to make my source data available. I will continue to post comments as new high water marks are reached, but I think it will be more useful if people can get to the data themselves. It’s now downloadable in Excel format from this site. (The spreadsheet is under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. Feel free to use it wherever you like, just give me credit and make any changes and additional research available.)

Remix

Confession: I’m one of those tiresome people that make mix tapes. Worse, I’m one of those people that go on making mix tapes after high school and college. Worse yet, I make them for myself and generally not for other audiences.

I think Nick Hornby missed out on this one. Mix tapes are worse than top ten lists. At least those are mostly spoken. Mix tapes live forever. And they come back to haunt you. Even if you trade, sell, or throw out the CDs from which the scary songs came.

I’m finding this in a big way at the moment. Now that my CD collection and I are reunited, I’m in the process of recreating all my old mix tapes as MP3 playlists. (There can be no deeper geekery.) In the process, I have to ask myself the painful questions. For instance: Why on earth did I precede that achingly lovely Górecki folk song setting with Dave Matthews’ “Jimi Thing”? (Granted it was before his cringe-inducing Alanis Morrisette duet, but still.) What was I thinking putting a twelve minute mind-numbing funk-jazz fusion number from Herbie Hancock featuring extensive electric piano pitch-bend solo on any mix tape? And why, why on God’s green earth did I put not one, but two album tracks from Jesus Jones on a mix tape—and why also two tracks from Ziggy Marley?

I guess it’s true. Reconnecting with one’s past means facing painful truths. I was a tasteless trend monkey. At least the tracks from the Pixies, Gastr Del Sol, Elvis Costello and others that also stud the tapes argue that there was an element of enduring taste as well.

I was going to claim that there is an art to sequencing a playlist, for tape or computer, having to do with maintaining mood, keeping appropriate tonal and rhythmic continuity (or contrast, as appropriate), and both pleasing and surprising the listener. But then I found there’s a web site that makes the argument for me: Art of the Mix. I suspect I’ll have to put up the mixes I’ve created so you can see how bad it really is. Another time. Here’s the list of mixes (in progress).