Ridiculous Mumblings of a Pirate

03:32 pm - Collaborative text editing for the web!

For years I've been a fan of SubEthaEdit, and I still recommend it highly to anyone doing text editing on a Mac.

But now for people who want the collaborative capabilities of SubEthaEdit but who don't have a Mac, there's EtherPad -- a web based text editor that does collaboration.

http://etherpad.com

07:28 pm - Now I Get It

Aha! Argentina's economy had trouble in the earlie nineties because they couldn't float their currency against other currencies. Thailand's economy blew up because they'd pegged their currency to the dollar. Japan's economy collapsed because they were hugely leveraged and they were vulnerable to Thailand's economy. So it's a chain.

08:55 am - Econobummer

I'm listening to Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 and I'm getting annoyed by two things. The first and by far the least important, is the narrator's enunciation. My own accent gives "er" in the middle of a word such as "interior" and "material" the same sound as the word "ear". This narrator, Don Leslie, sounds like he's trying to turn all such sounds into the same "er" as normally appears in "her" or "intern". As I listen to the book, I find myself imagining supertitles: "...maturrial..."

On the upside, he does pronounce all the syllables in "industrial".

But the thing that's really bugging me is that Krugman has so far asserted that the Mexican and Argentinian economic crises of 1994/95 have something in common with the Asian crisis of the later nineties and that all of these are somehow the same as the current recession in the United States. And yet, he's finished telling us about the Mexican and Argentinian crises and they seem to have been caused by governmental unwillingness to manage the currency properly. Mexico pegged the peso at an artificially high exchange rate to the U.S. dollar and Argentina had a policy of fixing their peso to the dollar, so neither country was able to let their currency float. That meant that when they finally did adjust their exchange rates, their domestic economies kind of got whiplash in addition to all the punishment they'd been taking before (the various problems that come from having an overvalued currency).

My understanding is incomplete, of course, and Krugman has a Nobel Prize in economics and I don't. So I'm eagerly looking forward to the part in this book where he tells me that our current crisis isn't coming from phenomenally overleveraged consumers and banks, nor from criminal negligence or ignorance at banks and hedge funds, but from some domestic policy of overvaluing the dollar.

10:04 am - Give Me a Dollar

There's a guy who's been pinging me on Twitter. He follows me, then stops, then follows me. So every day I get an email saying that this guy is following me and here's a link that will let me follow him.

I checked out his profile and he's some guy I don't know who's all about telecommuting. He's pimping his website. Okay, I get that's how people are using Twitter. So I check out his website.

Get this "free" PDF that describes the three applications you need to telecommute. All you have to do is give him your email address and sign up for his free newsletter.

What kind of crap is this? People! World! I'll tell you this for free, and you don't have to send me your email address. In fact, I'd prefer if you didn't. You need a telephone so you can talk to your coworkers. You need some kind of secure network link so you can exchange confidential or proprietary documents with your coworkers (Google virtual private network and you'll find all kinds of commercial VPN products). That's it! The rest is all about job environment specific details. *I* need Remote Desktop because I'm driving a Windows machine back in the office. You might need a VNC client or ssh or Word or NeoOffice or a database explorer. All those specifics are really down to your work situation, and I guarantee you that your situation is not covered by the free PDF this guy wants to use to scam your email address so he can telecommute by selling email addresses to spammers.

If I were really in a bad mood, I'd suspect the three applications of being trojans to subvert your laptop and incorporate it into some botnet.

11:02 am - Sherriff Joe

I've been hearing about Sherriff Joe for a few years, as junglemonkee's family live in Phoenix. But guh-dang, even the flippin' BBC have noticed him. Yikes!

Oh, and in the obscuring-the-truth department there's this quote from the story:

FBI figures for 2006 and 2007 indicate an overall drop in crime rates in Arizona of around 2%, while in Sheriff Arpaio's Maricopa County crime rates increased by a fifth over the same period.

08:20 am - News...

From the, "Ice makes drinks refreshing," newsbin comes this gem delivered by the Yahoo! Spanish world news feed:

"Los jóvenes obesos son más propensos a morir prematuramente"

Shock. Surprise. Obesity is a health risk and can lead to death. This is news?

08:53 am - Git your Free Speech on!

So, here's a troubling story about the erosion of our rights. I agree with one commenter who wrote, "Allowing geographically limited jurisdictions increased control over online communications is one of the terrible problems of our time..."

I think he scoped his comment too narrowly. Imagine I'm on vacation and I'm riding a train from...oh, Berlin to Tehran. Let's say, for the sake of this imaginary situation, that it goes through Turkey. Let's further imagine that I have been so bold as to say that the mass slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks at the beginning of the 20th century was genocide. Hey, presto - my online speech that was posted from my comfy house here in California is suddenly Not Protected according to my own government and I'm therefore S.O.L. when the Turkish authorities throw my ass in prison.

Better not travel anywhere. And better not insult anyone in power. Ever.

God damn. Quick, send some money to the ACLU and the EFF because this shit must not stand.

08:45 am - Bail this

What bad thing happens if the big three auto makers have to cut way back or even go out of business?

Yeah, people will be out of work. But you know, there was this other sector that went through a huge collapse, not even ten years ago. People were out of work, there was collateral damage as unemployment took off -- shops closed, space was suddenly cheaper -- but where was the government bailout of the dot bomb?

Since we didn't get a bailout, pets.com went out of business. Kozmo couriers no longer deliver videos by bicycle. Webvan stopped driving around. But you know what? People still feed their pets. Netflix and Blockbuster will mail DVDs to you. Safeway.com will deliver groceries to your house or your office.

This whole auto thing is such a joke. Chrysler isn't even Chrysler any more, it's DaimlerChrysler - not an American company but a global company. What bad thing would happen if Toyota took over Ford and somehow coerced Ford plants to make cars that don't suck?

That's right, citizen, your tax dollars are at work.

08:11 am - Hard core gaming

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7521044027821122670

I feel so left out, that I don't have a platonic life partner.

07:09 pm - MacBook Woe

This new MacBook Pro is swell. It's fantastic. Except for the part where I can't use it in my office. Or the part where I can't use it to work remotely because the VPN applet my company uses doesn't work on this system. *sigh*

01:43 pm - Communication Breakdown

Chanting "God is Greatest" and "Death to America" some 1,000 people rammed the metal gate to the [Danish] embassy.

12:22 pm - Help, I've been thoughtcrimed!

"When people use words that are hateful and mean-spirited, people are empowered to act violently," said John Vasconcellos.

note_to_asshat

dot_cattiness

01:48 pm - The art of the possible

So, as threatened, Venezuela has expelled a member of the U.S. mission for spying. President Chavez may be given to flamboyant public statements, but he's probably right that there's U.S. spying going on in his country.

On one hand, as a U.S. citizen, I certainly hope that the U.S. has spies all over the world, keeping a bead on what's going on.

On the other hand, as someone utterly repulsed by the U.S. government's track record of destabilizing countries to "protect" U.S. interests, I kind of hope that Mr. Chavez expels the whole embassy.

03:56 pm - Deep in "Doy" territory

( Scientists show that with nothing to talk about, people stay quiet... )

Man. I know that the scientific model of epistemology means that until you design and run an experiment that proves a hypothesis you don't actually know the truth of that hypothesis. But still, I want to nominate this one for an IgNobel award. Research that shows that people who only have their age or gender in common don't have much to talk about...wow. Earth shattering.

Edit: Okay, so it's actually deeper than that, and it lays some groundwork for social networking analysis. Even so, this is the sort of thing that companies like Plaxo and LinkedIn are very well-positioned to know already. Did the researchers consider asking them?

12:06 pm - I'm an ingrate

About 11 years ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about why we liked playing Civilization and where we thought it was weak. We were really interested in the dynamics of political power and we thought that the diplomacy options in Civ were ridiculous. Civ II and Civ III made trade and diplomacy a little better, but those things are still pretty rudimentary and there are major flaws in the diplomacy still. I haven't yet played Civ IV (it's not out for the Mac) but from what I've read, it's continued down the road of turn-based unit management rather than exploring a richer trade and diplomacy game.

So, I still harbor this idea we talked about in 1995. Then, yesterday was my birthday. I went to the Apple Store just to look around and see if there was anything I wanted. Lo, for a mere $30 there was a game, Republic, which looked like it was everything I'd been thinking about. I bought it. Sure enough, reading the manual and looking through the tutorial, it's everything we had discussed. Well, we'd also talked about foreign trade, but that really doesn't count -- it was a way to inject money into the domestic economy and the focus of the game we'd designed was a domestic power struggle. Everything we'd talked about: agents, different power bases, the turns...it's all there.

And it's utterly unplayable on my computer. Yes, my computer meets the requirements for the game. Yes, I've configured the game to be as miserly with the graphics as possible. And yet, when I try to play, it hangs. I have to restart my computer. This makes me incredibly bitter. Here, someone built exactly the thing I want, a game that is not about building and micromanaging huge numbers of units, and I can't play it.

07:58 am - Gottum a Big Ol Pipe

We have wireless broadband to our house now. It's like 4 times faster than the DSL, and it costs the same. Gonna cancel the DSL account and the second phone (fax) line. Maybe go entirely VOIP if the service is good.

Now, I just need to figure out how to hook up the one desktop computer to the router. Run the cable over the house? String wire around inside? Give it a wireless card? Hmm.

02:58 pm - Aha

So this is why Sharona "went back to New Jersey."

12:40 pm - If I Should (fail to) Die Before I Wake...

Dude. What are the tax consequences of spending some time dead?

10:43 am - Go, Vatican!

"Intelligent design" not science: Vatican paper

Noice!

11:17 am - Lily pad, anyone?

We recently got a piece of unsolicited paper mail advertising a wireless ISP. According to the flyer, they've just started up coverage in our area. So, I went to the website to check it out. Very cool. They're not in the office on MLK day, so I guess I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow to find out if we can upgrade our house. It would be so cool to have a really fast VPN at home.