You Too Can Debate. You Betcha!

Voodoo Donuts

I tend to stay away from Voodoo Donuts. But I dashed into Coffee Time on NW 21st yesterday to get out of the rain, and there they were in the case. Just above a tray of so-called healthy, peanut-cranberry "cookies". If you've never had the pleasure of a Voodoo donut...

They are kind of the culinary equivalent of that Neil Young performance I just blogged about. Coffee Time's a good place though, in spite of some of their choices in pastries and cookies.

Worst. Idea. In. Music. Ever.

I'm crazy about the Beatles and really like Neil Young. However will I ever be able to remove this performance from the recesses of my mind? Ever?

Oh dear.

Fools Errand

Says the Motley Fool...

"The genius financial products that kept your eyes deep in Cristal and
vacation homes nearly caused the global financial system to seize up."

(via Steve Dekorte... http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3619)

But, hey. There's still time for the whole system to seize up. $700b
is just used grease to try keeping the gears spinning a while longer.

Oh, yeah. Anyone thinking this is going to do any significant, lasting
good doesn't understand:

* the financial system (which I *don't*), or...
* how the US Congress works (which I *do*, sorta-kinda)
* human nature (ditto).

How Oregon voted in the massive debt giveaway

It's about time to get rid of Wu anyway. Now that he's voted yea on
the bailout, all the more reason.

Defazio and Blumenauer vote no. Thanks for trying!

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml

You're Darn Right

Tim Riley, funniest newsman on the planet after Jon Stewart...

"84% said Palin did better than expected.

"Yur darn right," "Doggone it," "say it isn't so Joe," "Ya" instead of
you were just of few of the folksyisms used by Palin to appeal to the
Tonya Hardening crowd. It had no substance. Therefore, it worked
flawlessly as planned. Her base ate it up like a heapin' bowl of
mashed 'taters.

Proving one needent wear red high heels to run a household, modern man
Joe Biden teared up like a woman."

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/745/

What's On The Cloud Vs. What The Cloud Is On

No one but Microsoft would *run* their cloud on Windows. That's a big
distinction. Amazon will run Windows for you. On their
non-Windows-based cloud.

Meanwhile Microsoft will come up with a new OS for their cloud. Will
that be for everyone's cloud. Or just their cloud? Is this another
attempt to carve out a proprietary product that no one else can
(easily) emulate? As in "my code is written for Microsoft's
proprietary Windows Cloud OS. It won't run on the Windows Server that
Amazon supports."

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/web_services_browser/ballmer_looks_to_the_cloud_and_says_windows.html

This Is Science

""When I teach about messenger RNA carrying information from the cell
nucleus to sequence enzyme production," Borass added, "I could care
less what you feel about it. I want you to learn it. The issue is how
well does theory account for observable phenomena and so far nothing
better than evolutionary science has emerged to explain biological
processes.""

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/26/palin_science_creationism/

What About The Whips

Phil Windley...

"I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I find it hard to believe
that Pelosi is stupid or naive. That leaves me wondering why this came
up for a vote today if she thought it would lose."

http://www.windley.com/archives/2008/09/did_pelosi_screw_up_or_is_she_crazy_like_a_fox.shtml

I'd say she either knew it would lose (if so, good for her) or she
thought the vote would pressure enough fence sitters to land on the
yea side.

I'm not sure why Phil's putting this all on the Dems though. There
were more Republicans voting no than Dems. And there are majority and
minority whips whose job it is to ensure they have the votes from
their own members.

Either way though, good for each of them for voting no.

At Least REST / Atom Is Now A Marketing Ploy?

Roy Fielding...

"REST (as in Representational State Transfer), happens to be defined
by my dissertation. I am getting tired of big companies making idiotic
claims about REST and their so-called RESTful architectures. The only
similarity between CMIS and REST is that they both have four-letter
acronyms....

REST is an architectural style, not a protocol, and thus announcing it
as a protocol binding is absurdly ignorant behavior for a group of
technology companies. The RESTish protocol binding actually being
proposed by CMIS is AtomPub, or at least it would be if not for the
huge number of unnecessary protocol extensions that tunnel the Web
Services interface through fake-Atom and fake-HTTP... Are there any
REST constraints that this binding doesn't violate?...

It is obvious that the SOAP binding was designed first and the AtomPub
binding added for marketing reasons."

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/no-rest-in-cmis

Iggy and Ziggy on the Dinah Shore TV show

Iggy and David Bowie perform and talk with Dinah. I think that's Rosemary Clooney to Dinah's right. Yes, George's aunt, the big band singer.

"But you cut yourself with a bottle." -Dinah to Iggy

"Iggy invented punk rock." -Dinah to Rosemary Clooney.

Gimme Danger - Iggy Pop and the Stooges

Thank You Local Representatives

"Oregon's Democratic Representatives Earl Blumenauer (3rd District),
David Wu (1st District) and Peter DeFazio (4th District) opposed the
plan in Monday's floor vote...

"It was, at the core, not the best bill," Blumenauer said in a
prepared statement. "I am convinced that it would have passed if it
were paid for with a fee on the finance industry to pay for its own
bailout, and if homeowners were given the same bankruptcy protections
as rich people's third and fourth home, and business properties."...

The Portland Tribune/Fox 12 News poll showed Democrats in the
tri-county area are evenly split over the bailout, while Republicans
are solidly against it. Independents registered the most skepticism,
though, with 33 percent supporting the bailout and 63 percent opposed.

Partisan differences about the bailout dovetail with anxieties about
the economy, the poll showed.

Among Democrats, 93 percent said they were somewhat or very worried
about the national economy, compared to 75 percent of Republicans.
Democrats tend to have lower incomes than Republicans, on average, in
the tri-county area."

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=122274756905171200

"Gotcha! Journalism"

I love the talking point being used to protect and defend the hapless Republican VP candidate. I heard Palin use the phrase a week or so ago. And now, following the link below, McCain and Palin use it more than once in this interview. McCain says...

"I understand this 'gotcha! journalism'..."

As if it is not legitimate to question a candidate's ability to think
and speak clearly about the responsibilities of the desired office.

Gotcha!!

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/718/

LinuxCon - Portland - September 2009

From th Silicon Forest blog...

"The Linux Foundation plans to announce Tuesday that it will launch a
big, new annual conference in Portland next September....

Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin told me this afternoon that the
conference aims to link up Linux users and developers and to focus on
providing resources for them all to use Linux more efficiently for
whatever it is they need.

"We're going to have tracks, or little mini-conferences, at the
event," he said. Some will focus on mobile computing, some on embedded
systems, some on desktop Linux, etc. The Linux Plumbers Conference,
which brought 300 to Portland this month, will be held concurrently
with the new LinuxCon next year.

What you won't see: "All the big booths and the marketing pitches,"
Zemlin told me."

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/09/linuxcon_the_antioscon.html

September is a great month to be in Portland. Usually.

Mark Watson: "Sometimes our system works"

What he said. Thank you, congress.

http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/09/sometimes-our-system-works-house.html

Mobile WiMax Arrives - But Still Not In Portland

Dang.

"Baltimore got the first taste of commercial WiMAX today, when Sprint
launched service there...

At one time, Portland had been slated to be the first city to get
mobile WiMAX. Intel and Clearwire have been testing WiMAX here for
many months, but for unexplained reasons service has never arrived.
The company continues plugging away, though, and says it'll launch
here sometime by year's end."

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/09/mobile_wimax_finally_arrives_b.html

lightbot

Avi Bryant just twittered (tweeted?) this game... it's great...

http://games.wegame.com/puzzle/lightbot/

http://twitter.com/avibryant/statuses/938769774

Pier CMS, well "next generation wiki" really

Pier is a "next generation wiki" really. It's called a CMS. The
presentation on the home page briefly shows a number of good looking
sites built with Pier.

http://www.piercms.com/

Built on Seaside in Smalltalk. Now with more documentation, supporting
videos, etc.

Any Seaside component is a component that can plug right into Pier.

And it's far easier to build a component in Seaside than any other web
framework.

I tinkered with Seaside a while back, but recently tried it again.
There is a lot more documentation now. Whole books and tutorials on
the web.

From iTunes' genius playlist

iTunes' genius play list just dished up for me...

Tower of Power	"You're Still A Young Man"
Al Green	"Take Me To The River"
The Temptations	"How Deep Is Your Love"
Al Green and Lyle Lovett	"Ain't It Funny How Time Just Slips Away"
Timmy Thomas	"Why Can't We Live Together"

The one from Green and Lovett is from "Live on Letterman" - there've been great
performances on Letterman for decades going back to NBC.

Yes, that's The Temptations covering the Bee Gees. I actually have a
handful of good covers of that song. Another good one is by Adeaze,
with great harmonies, but also with a great acoustic guitar
arrangement.

I have fond memories of "Saturday Night Fever".

Absolutely Fabulous

This Wii commercial shakes out into the youtube page. Wow...

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

via James Robertson...

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Cool_Ad&entry=3399882592

JVM Language Summit

Ted Leung has a good write-up of the recent JVM Language Summit...

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/09/27/the-first-annual-jvm-language-summit/

oops

"Chinese regulators have told domestic banks to stop interbank lending
to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the
financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday."

http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3602

Mark Watson's Book

Mark Watson has a draft available for the 3rd edition of his Java AI
book. The book is and will continue to be freely available. I've
enjoyed enough of it so far to know I will happily pay my good money
for it.

http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/09/looking-for-reviewers-for-my-book.html

Very pragmatic and educational.

People not interested in "AI" per se could still be interested in
several chapters. One is on the semantic web, RDF, etc.

Another chapter on rule systems has a good section on Drools. There've
been a couple projects in our office here that had a good experience
with Drools.

Defazio - An Oregon Congressman to be proud of

Rep. Peter Defazio, (D) Oregon, on the bailout...

I've always appreciated Defazio from down in the valley. Now more than ever.

"We should not be rolled by our Wall Street exec who's masquerading as Secretary of the Treasury." -Defazio

The Legislative Language of Thieves

Legislators are pointing out the new bailout compromise withholds
"golden parachutes" from companies bought out with taxpayers' money.

However most companies will not be bought outright. They will have their
bad debts purchased.

For these companies who get to sell their bad debts to us, well, their
executives will have some less severe restrictions on their
parachutes. But forget parachutes for the moment, what about all the
bonuses and so on they've been paid over the last few years while
driving the economy and their own companies into the ground?

If you're not yet thinking this is a great scam, what do you think of it?

"All of this was done in a way to insulate Main Street and everyday
Americans from the crisis on Wall Street," Ms. Pelosi said at the news
conference.

Uh-huh.

Secretary Paulson, preeminent "socialist". When and how it suits him and his buddies.

Can we talk about the problem with *their* sense of entitlement?