A new low

February 3, 2005

The first season of The Apprentice was pretty good. The second not so bad. The third is rapidly becoming a bad melodrama. Now comes word that in addition to casting for The Apprentice 4 and The Apprentice 5, NBC executives are looking for people apply for The Apprentice: Martha Stewart.

What's next The Apprentice Dennis Kozlowski or should we just have The Apprentice Enron Eddition? Does the fact that a business leader doing time in prison for crimes that involve violating the public trust not bother any of the executives at NBC? Maybe somebody should be looking into the finances there, or even at General Electric? If they openly promote dishonesty and encourage financial shenanigans perhaps we should be taking a second look at the financials.

Phishing phun

February 2, 2005

I was just reading one of the oh-so-frequent phishing scams purporting to be from eBay. It reads in part

Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us.

And here I thought the whole idea was to buy and sell goods through auctions, including transactions of money, aka a legal liability (assuming the auction was not fraudulent). If only it actually said something so humorous.

No PowerBook G5 for now

January 31, 2005

Apple's announcement today of new PowerBook G4's puts to end anticipation that they might release a PowerBook G5. It seems unlikely that with the new machines being released today that a PowerBook G5 will arrive any time this year. The next logical place to announce one would have been WWDC, but the new powerbooks would seem to make that a long shot.

MarsEdit/DirecWay problem

January 30, 2005

I've started using Ranchero Software's Mars Edit and am pretty happy with it. This post, however, is happening the old fashioned way - via the web page. This seems to have to something to do with a conflict between Mars Edit and my DirecWay Satellite Internet Connection. It works just fine on my laptop at work and elsewhere but when trying to update over the satellite link it fails to parse the XML. My guess is it has something to do with the "web page optimization" that DirecWay is doing causing problems.

Even so I'm still posting. There seem to be those who are too busy with new toys to remember all their fans.

Which version of reality do you see?

January 30, 2005

About a year ago the coverage of the Howard Dean scream points out an important question for all journalists (those writing for traditional media and those writing for blogs and other media outlets). A journalist should always ask themselves if they are accurately representing the situation. The coverage of Dean was part of the truth, but not an accurate representation of the situation. The microphone singled out Dean's voice and did not show it accurately in context. WIth more unedited reporting in blogs and podcasts it is important to remember that a single point of view in a situation, or a single microphone in a room, may not accurately reflect what is really happening.

The "Yahoo" Problem

January 28, 2005

It is funny how the side you take influences your position. Dave Winer spends a great deal of time talking about the need to properly give credit to those who create solutions. When it comes to the unintended consequences of a "solution" - aka a problem - he is quite happy to pass the buck. He sites The Yahoo Problem. Wait a minute though, what product was it that started the trend towards putting a little icon on the page for each different news-reader? That's right it was Userland's Radio, which Winer was a key intellect behind.

How did this become the Yahoo problem anyway? They are amongst the latest to pile on the "add this to whatever" bandwagon. And is setting up a collection of competitive directories for people to store their RSS subscriptions in one of several centralized data vats really the answer? The solution proposed by Winer has a clause stating there should be open competition. So for a while everybody plays nice, and then when AOL and Time Warner split they setup competing services. And very soon we're back to a whole bunch of buttons that don't do much for anybody but clutter up the landscape.

In fairness, Winer has removed the Radio button from his main website, but the orgins of the problem lie in the early foundation of the idea there should be a button to subscribe to specific news readers.

9 mm

January 28, 2005

We had our 9 mm qualification today. It was a really cold day to be out on the range so, by the time I got to shoot I was shivering pretty hard. The army issues 9 mm Barettas to officers, referred to in military parlance as the M-9.

The range consists of pop-up targets at various distances. They are pretty close because the M-9 is definately a close range weapon. My first attempt did not go well but I believe there was something wrong with the targets. I knew that I was hitting some of them but they were not going down.

Range control told me that I failed to qualify and had to go again. This was frustrating because I was getting cold and it seemed like it should have been easy. It made it worse when the Sergeant in charge of the range began to talk to me like a slow child, explaining how to aim the gun.

Luckily I redeemed myself. I shot at different targets and they all seemed to be working properly. I scored "expert", the highest possible and better than just about everyone else. No pop-up target is safe with me around.

Take care,

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