I’ve been busy since this afternoon working to move my site from Mike’s place over to my new space. My gratitude to Mike for hosting me and inspiring me to strike out on my own. He’s really a great guy and I miss him now that he’s out in SFO with the rest of those EA bums.
WordPress is pretty amazing. I’m glad Movable Type gave me the necessary incentive to try something new by changing their license. WordPress is a free, open-source application. You can’t beat that. I’ve also moved from a table-based layout to CSS (cascading style sheets). Yay!
Anyway, if you notice anything weird that’s not working, or any dead links, or anything you don’t like, or anything you miss, please let me know. That’s a good way to let me know what I need to change. By the way, some things are not going to work properly until the dns changes have propagated. This should take roughly 24 hours.
Okay, for extra credit can you name the woman in the new banner? It’s not that hard. If you look at the eyes I think you’ll get it! I am sorry to see Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable go, but they were there for several years. It is time for someone new.
General
12
Jul 04
Migrating to WordPress
12
Jul 04
Kerry / Edwards on 60 minutes
Did anyone else see John Kerry and John Edwards on “60 Minutes” last night? I thought they did a great job together, and showed a lot of good team work when handling some of the pointed questions Leslie Stahl threw out them. When asking about a criticism levelled by Bush toward Kerry, John Edwards jumped out to his defense allowing John Kerry to appear to take the high ground.
I think maintaining the approach of optimism and reserve will help them with the Republicans. Judging from last night, I think they will do a good job of fighting in the election.
07
Jul 04
Allawi and martial law
There has been increasing talk of Allawi declaring martial law in parts of Iraq. In the following Christian Science Monitor article it states that: “the Iraqi government has repeatedly postponed its unveiling, because of US concerns that it grants Mr. Allawi too much power.”
On the contrary, It seems rather obvious that the US would have liked to have declared martial law itself and only refrained from doing so to prevent any negative consequences with regards to its already battered image as Iraq’s occupier. The hand-wringing over giving Allawi too much power is disingenuous. The US simply did not want to impose martial law themselves.
But other Iraqis reject the idea of martial law, seeing it as an extension of the US-led occupation and a reprise of Saddam Hussein’s regime. “If there is martial law, there will be arbitrary searches and arrests,” says Abu Ghayeb al-Kubaisi, a chicken farmer. “They will use the excuse of fighting terrorism or national security. If someone has an enemy, he will use that as a pretext for getting this person arrested.”
Mr. Kubaisi had just spent three hours at a checkpoint on Baghdad’s outskirts. A resident of Ramadi – a prime candidate for martial law – he described baking in the 120-degree sun while Iraqi troops held him at the checkpoint. “I think they took them to Egypt and Israel to teach them Israeli methods,” he says with disgust. (Egypt has been under emergency law since 1981).
Indeed, in many Arab countries, emergency laws, once declared, have dragged on for years or decades. “Emergency rule is often the Achilles heel of Arab constitutional systems,” says Nathan Brown, an expert on Arab legal systems at George Washington University in Washington. “In many countries, emergency rule becomes a permanent state that allows rulers to bypass the constitutional order completely.”
06
Jul 04
Personality bits
Beyond mess: Cluttering, anxieties linked:
“One of the feelings in states of depression is that you feel lethargic,” Huntley said, “so picking up after yourself or straightening up is way too much.”
Likewise, people with ADD know they have to sit down and pay the bills, but they are easily distracted and that keeps them from completing tasks. “People with ADD also have to keep their stuff out where it’s visible; otherwise, they forget it.”
The knowledge that the task must be tackled or the item must be tossed is lost on people with OCD, who cannot determine what to keep and what to eliminate. “They can’t remove it,” Huntley said. “There’s a great deal of difficulty about decisions: ‘Am I going to need this or not?’ It’s really labored. So they keep the stuff around while they’re making the decision.
My own feeling is that much of this is caused by a lack of purpose and a lack of sense of place. Human beings in this country have become too fragmented and overstimulated. It is harder to recharge and gain quiet and peace.
Personality Profiling: Shrink to Fit?: As more entrepreneurs use psychological testing to screen hires, psychologist Ben Dattner warns against putting too much weight on the results:
Ample research has shown that organizations are “strong” situations, and that situational variables — like, for instance, the demands of a person’s role, incentive structures, team norms, and organizational culture — are much better predictors of behavior than are individual attributes. In order to add explanatory value, tests should explain the impact of personality or style on behavior, and also the impact of behavior on performance. Establishing the link between personality or style and behavior is difficult enough — many studies are unable to establish any link between personality or style and actual performance. …
I think, in general, people have a predisposition to make personal, rather than situational, attributions for behavior. We are all susceptible to “the fundamental attribution error,” meaning that we discount situational factors when trying to explain why other people behave as they do. Personality tests therefore confirm what we have a natural tendency to believe — that individuals create and influence situations, not the other way around.
These tests are also memorable, simple, intuitive, and often confirm what we already know about ourselves and others, even if that knowledge is, to some extent, built on simplified, stereotype-like categories of personalities and styles. This type of classification of people is an integral part of American popular culture, marketing, and politics. Just as many of us use movie and television stars as points of reference when describing others, marketers have well-developed “psychographic” categories that they use to target advertising, and pollsters segment the electorate and tailor candidates’ messages accordingly.
06
Jul 04
Editorial on journalism and Hitchens
I’ve been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven’t met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn’t literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media, and that includes Hitchens, knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.
One friend I know describes working in the media as shoveling coal for Satan. That’s about right. A worker in a tampon factory has dignity: He just uses his sweat to make a product, a useful product at that, and doesn’t lie to himself about what he does. In this business we make commodities for sale and, for the benefit of our consciences and our egos, we call them ideas and truth. And then we go on the lecture circuit. But in 99 cases out of 100, the public has more to learn about humanity from the guy who makes tampons.
02
Jul 04
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando is dead. I found out today. Another legend of the silver screen gone. Who will be tomorrow’s James Dean or Marlon Brando? My favorite Marlon Brando role is still Don Vito Corleone in “The Godfather”, but I also enjoyed him in “On the Waterfront” and “The Wild One”. One thing I always appreciated was his quietness.
01
Jul 04
For extra credit:
Can you identify the following Spiderman villain? Leave your answer in the comments.
01
Jul 04
Spiderman 2: Quickie Review
Spiderman 2 was very enjoyable although I amped myself up so much before I saw it that I couldn’t help but come away the tiniest bit hungry for something more. The best part was Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus. He was a lot more likeable, and therefore more tragic, than Dafoe as the Green Goblin. Being in the same theatre with the rest of your coworkers was weird in that you realize when you have to sneak out in the middle of the movie because you have to go to the bathroom really, really bad due to drinking the large Cherry Coke everyone knows exactly who you are. It’s like being a celebrity without all the good parts.
01
Jul 04
Chapi Chapo
Ah, there is an eBay auction for a Francois De Roubaix Chapi Chapo 7″ record featuring two tracks from the animated short, “Chapi Chapo”. It is bid up to $70 at this moment with five hours left to go.
Luckily for you, I have an entire page dedicated to Chapi Chapo where you can download these two tracks (“Chapi chapo Theme” and “Cubes Multicolores”) in their entirety in mp3. The music of Francois de Roubaix is enchanting, especially in his use of the organs and analog synthesizers. It’s a must listen!
If you view the movies associated with it, be sure to take note of the wonderful French cursive script titles, which really remind me of The Little Prince. I would love to make animated features like these. Stop-motion animation can create a sense of magic unlike any other type animation since you can animate objects within the world, so that they appear to interact with the world in a way that cell animation is hard-pressed to compete with. Remember “Teeny Little Super Guy” messing around in the cupboard while everyone was out?