Disorderly Content

From Boing Boing comes mention of Shaenon Garrity's LiveJournal, wherein the author imagines The Trouble With Tribbles if Edward Gorey had written it. Mr. Gorey was a fan of old Trek, it appears. Wonder what he'd have done with I, Mudd.

The Huffington Post's RSS feed has way too many entries, so I can understand if you've tried it and given up. Still, every now and then something shows up and makes it all worthwhile. Herewith is one such example:

I am not gay with a coked up page
I am not gay with the underaged
I am not gay when I tap your foot
I am not gay keep your big mouth shut
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

I am not gay with a wide, wide stance
I am not gay in my senator pants
I am not gay with a cat in a hat
Here's my card--what do you think of that?
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

I am not gay in an Idaho paper
I am not gay please hide my caper
I am not gay in my childless marriage
I am not gay in a baby carriage
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

I am not gay with an undercover dick
I am not gay--no, not a lick
I saw some paper on the floor
I picked it up--no, nothing more
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

Let me be clear, I am not vague
I dearly love my Mrs. Craig
I am not a sad old perv
My only desire is to serve
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

That's a Python reference, but not a particularly good one, so don't feel bad if you didn't get it. Anyway, this isn't about the Pythons, or French cities, or turn of the century painters either. It's about time, and the loss of it. Because according to the LA Times, AT&T is shutting down its time service. Maybe you aren't old enough to care, but there was a time (yeah, I know) when we would call a phone number and have a woman's voice tell us the time. That was before the Network Time Protocol; before the Internet and home computers for that matter. There's been a voice giving us time (to do what?) since the 20s. But no more. I guess when many of us carry half a dozen devices with time displays, there isn't much point in that voice giving us the time of day.

(Reported on Slashdot.)

From Boing Boing comes word that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage servers, the ones your PC calls to prove you aren't trying to deprive Bill of a few more pennies, are dead, and likely to remain dead for the next few days. That means that anybody running XP or Vista whose system phones home will have a very expensive paperweight. Me, I'm just glad I refused to install WGA on my work laptop, no matter how many times Microsoft tried to sneak it into a Windows Update. Even if it means I can't install Windows Media Player, at least I don't have to suffer from "features" like this. And of course, it's one more reason to love my Mac, which doesn't make me prove I'm not a thief.

Stephen Collins (yes, that preacher guy from 7th Heaven) blogs an interesting and frightening factoid on his Huffington Post blog: the percentage of Americans who approve of George Bush is the same percentage who think Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream. That number, in case you haven't been paying attention, is 28%. Which is too high for comfort in both cases.

"America, America, oh how I fear for thee..."

Among the too many podcasts on my iPod and iPhone are The Slate Explainer Podcast, which answers some interesting and often topical question, and The Onion Radio News, which, despite what you may have heard, can generally be distinguished from real news headlines by its believability. But today I tought I might have had the two reversed. I began listening to a Slate Explainer from a couple of days ago and couldn't believe my ears. The question? "Why Don't Miners Carry GPS?" Hello? Do we really need three and a half minutes to explain that GPS satellite signals don't penetrate through walls, much less a mile of rock? Makes me wonder how The Onion can write satire when reality is so self-satirizing.

Mac owners are often accused of being fanatics. There's some truth to that, although I wonder how much of the alleged fanaticism is just reaction to the taunts of the Windows world. PC people frequenty attack anybody who dares Think Different^TM, which suggest to me that they're feeling just a teeny bit defensive.

What brought this to mind was an experience waiting to board a flight from Seattle back to San Jose a couple of days ago. I took a moment in line to pull out my iPhone for one last email check. The fellow in front of me turned around, noticed my phone and, I assume, attempted to be clever. "Wow," he said, "an operating system even less stable than Microsoft." I replied that that wasn't my experience, that so far my iPhone had been at least as stable as friends Windows-running Treos. "They've had two million iPhones shipped back," he continued. No, I said. First of all, there haven't been two million iPhones shipped, so how could that many have been returned? He tried to argue, but backed off when I used my web-gleaned knowledge of sales and activations to show that he was off by at least a factor of ten, and that there were no reports of large numbers of returns. Then he tried claiming that lots of phones had touchscreen problems. I had heard a few reports online, but nothing indicating more than a handful of such problems. (In other words, an area of concern but not one for mass hysteria.)

At that point he stopped trying to rain on my parade or piss in my pool or choose your own favorite metaphor. I got into my seat, away from Mr. Buzzkill, and noticed the people around me. And among all the iPod wielding frequent flyers, I noticed a lone Zune user, the first I'd ever seen outside of a Microsoft ad. I wondered if he was in fact a Microsoft employee, not an unreasonable guess on a flight from Seattle. Which made me wonder if my (verbal) attacker was as well. Which would explain the hostility. And I hope it's true. I certainly hope he isn't a doctor or an architect or something. Because if he jumps off like that based on partial and mis-information in his career, just think of the trail of corpses he must surely leave behind.

It really is an honor just to be nominated. But of course it'll be an even bigger one to win.

I refer to the Second Annual Parsec Awards, which will be given out at Dragon*Con in Atlanta in a couple of weeks. The Parsecs honor podcasters in the SF realm, which for some reason includes The ScapeCast, in which I play a small but inconsequential part. By some freak accident, we won the award for Best Fan Podcast last year, despite having barely released the minimum number of episodes to qualify. This year we're finalists both for Best Fan Podcast and for Best Audio Production, for which I can claim even less credit. Unless of course you count my voice as a special effect.

There's a subtle truth to that remark by the incomparable Yogi Berra. How much goes by without comment because we never notice it? Case in point is something I finally noticed recently on a drive I've made dozens of times. On Interstate 880 in Emeryville you can spot a building that's covered in road signs. Since I've taken quite a few road sign pictures for my stock portfolio, I was intrigued when I spotted it driving home from Wine Country. So on Saturday I made it my mission to give it a closer look. Turns out they're in the business of printing road signs, which I guess should have been obvious. I particularly like the one at right; wonder if they sell a bunch of these...