Posts (page 2)

by the time you read this, I'll be gone. I know you don't like Bill Belichick and I know the Globe says anyone who complains about you is just a Pats homer who can't stand to hear a dissenting opinion about their Coach/ God, but when you sat down to write today's piece about how the team's free agent jewel may turn into a bust, did you forget the part where you called him the best available free agent on MSNBC? I know those aren't mutually exclusive propositions, but it still seems strange. Must just be me.

When the eventual Eve 6 Greatest Hits comes out (I can only assume they're still paring down the track list), they should call it "The Man-E-Faces of Eve 6". It's the perfect pop culture reference: from ridiculous to sublime without ever meaning anything. We can all laugh to acknowledge we're in on the joke and then go back to not saying anything to one another.

Entertainment Weekly told me for two years it was good, but one aborted viewing combined with the desire to decrease, not increase, the number of shows the DVR allowed me to watch left Veronica Mars on the bench. Like every nerd you know, the combination of TV on DVD and Netflix has allowed me to correct what appears, at a second glance, this horrible mistake. Of course, I've only watched the pilot at this point, but given the chance to watch a second episode or last night's taped copy of Lost, I'd watch the entire DVD and take the dog for a long walk before the DVR got its turn.

Which is completely unfair: the relationship between Lost and I has three years of baggage: disappointments, character flaws I've had to sit through whole episodes about, filler that doesn't tell me anything about the mythos behind the island. It's not like I'm blind to the potential failings of VM. The dog, for one, seems like a familiar plot device, the reverse of Superman's kryptonite. As long as he's around, she's indestructible, so any number of plots will revolve around trying to separate the two, with bonus points for using another blond chick to lure him away (if there isn't an episode where the crazy kid tries this, I'll be disappointed in a way). The flashbacks were overly long and melodramatic; of course they were setting up the plot plus she got date raped. Either way, I'm willing to forgive the flashbacks with a patience suspiciously missing when I hear That Sound on Lost.

I know it's not fair, but why do I have to pick the ever-shrinking good bits out of the 40 minutes of Lost? When did entertainment stop being entertaining and start being whatever it is now?

Why do home stores aimed at women have such open-ended names? It's not a sure-fire recipe for success: Kitchens, Etc. went under. Maybe people found the Latin pretentious, since they're ok with the forgetful guy down the block who says his store contains "Linens . . . and things." The clear winner in this field is the company that turned a line from The Collected Love Poems of George Lucas into a merchandising empire, Bed, Bath and Beyond! It makes you feel dashing to be in there perusing the crap, whereas the other names are more transparent stand-ins for the less attractive "odd lots we bought on clearance marked back up to list price." At least it makes me feel bold. Maybe it makes other people feel like an adventure movie for shut-ins.

Ever since the nuns told us God gave everyone a special gift, I've been keeping an eye out for mine. Tonight's candidate: the ability to infect minds with songs that get stuck in your head. Since I can't sing, it works well for me (tonight's victim: my wife, payload: Billy Joel's River of Dreams*). You think it's lame, but it's the kind of thing that separates you from the pack, e.g., "Oh, that guy? I met that asshole once. And spent the next six weeks singing Fernando on and off."

* Let me help you along: "In the middle of the night, I go walking in my sleep . . . "

It happened again yesterday: on some blog in the programming corner of the world, someone cited Wikipedia in the comments and the next response was a pissy "Don't think you've proven anything by citing Wikipedia." Worse, the original commenter apologized for his gaffe. I am not blind to the faults of the great encyclopedia in the sky, but the current agreement on the uselessness of Wikipedia amongst anyone who knows anything on the Internet gives me a great ache in the balls. It's now acceptable to simply respond as above. At least the original complaints came with links to examples of mistakes or counter-citations. The next generation of complaints came with links to articles and sites that aggregated the examples of mistakes. Now simply stating your opponent dared cite the site is enough to carry a counter-suit.

For the chattering class in question, the Internet is a place to argue. A most wonderful place, because you're never wrong (at worst you just find a different place to ride your same broken hobbyhorse). Rather than an actual deeply spiritual disturbance, most complaints about Wikipedia arise when it is used as proof of the other side of an argument. It is a high crime on the Internet to ever admit you're wrong; better to keep your tail high and piss right back on the other guy's lamppost. Fine. Hit me with a citation from a different authority then. Something. Anything. I'll hump it on over to the library if you've got a volume and page from Britannica for me.

I do not consider Wikipedia an unquestionable authority. If I promise never to commit that logical fallacy, everyone on the other side should stop with theirs. Because I do think there are a number of errors on the other side of the argument (one more if throwing the baby out with the bathwater qualifies as a fallacy). The economist in me always wants to simplify things: let's say Wikipedia is wrong 20% of the time. Heck, say 50% (ignoring the fact it would never have gotten to where it is if this were so). For the sake of this argument, all of the errors made are confined to the 50%. The other 50% are immaculate. What this means, oh great programming minds who haunt useful programming blogs with your useless chatter, is Wikipedia knows more about (0.5 * total number of pages) subjects than you do. So if there's an error on the page about Closures or Lexical Parsers or whatever, we can find a page under . . . let's go  Ad hominem and say . . . sex it can teach you something about. The problem, ass-face (I feel we know each other well enough that I can call you that), is you think of everything in Internet terms, me vs. you. The "fact" on Wikipedia isn't you vs. the author, mano a mano, it's you vs. the author and (on any reasonably meaningful topic, leaving political ones to one side) all the other folks who reviewed the page and didn't change his "fact". And the author of the original paper the Wikipedia contributor plagiarized. Ergo, it's ok for me to continue to use Wikipedia to guide myself through the Thursday, Friday and Saturday Times crosswords.

There's a larger issue here about the nature of facts and knowledge, what those words mean, but I am stale and small and terribly out-of-practice writing. Furthermore, it's probably well above me. Weighing the benefit of Wikipedia vs. the risk of the incorrect being accepted as fact, my personal justice scales tip toward the former, because I think the risk is offset (ever so slightly) by the (potential) review process.

Every Monday during football season (or at least for the first few weeks), I make the same mistake: I turn on Dennis and Callahan expecting them to talk about the Patriots' win the day before. Last week the game wasn't even on the menu because it was 9/11 and America desperately needed John Dennis' thoughts on the Mud People or whatever they were ranting about. Today it was the dreadlocks on Lawrence Maroney and Doug Gabriel. Callahan started off alright, pointing out the wildy inconsistent and questionable NFL clothing police have any number of stupid rules but no rules on hair. But his real "point" was they will be dragged down by said hair in the future. Call me oversensitive, but when two guys who went through the "METCO gorilla" incident talk like this, it seems like a friendlier way of saying, "This is a multibillion dollar industry. If you want some of this cash, cut your hair and look respectable like the white players."

Stunningly, someone out in the syncophantic audience called up to complain. Callahan beat him down with the usual logical fallacies. Asked why anyone would care, Gerry demanded the caller explain how he will feel when they get dragged down by their hair. Given both players are known as speedsters and players are taught to tackle by grabbing cloth, not hair, the caller just said, "I guess it'd be a tackle". Responding to D&C's homophobic mincing about how nice beads look in a player's hair, he asked if they were "the fashion police or something". This resulted in Gerry taking his one ok point, the illogic of the NFL clothing policy, and turning it on its head, asking the caller to explain why the hair wasn't against the rules. When the caller didn't know why the idiots that make up stupid rules didn't bother to add one for this, he was dismissed with "You're full of answers today."

And people listen to this all day. For the football talk, I guess.

Just fixed someone's new $1,800 Toshiba laptop for them. Now I get why people consider themselves computer illiterate. What the hell do you do with a new PC laptop nowadays? After you get the box from UPS, it's all pretty much downhill. Power it up and you're confronted with a desktop covered in promotional shit. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to get the wireless network working. I already know how to make wireless networking work on an XP PC. It still took me 15 minutes. Tried all the normal stuff; all I managed to do was put the wireless card's client in charge of the card (XP's client gives me agita). No matter what I did it wouldn't let me enable the radio on the card.

There's a goddamn physical switch on the side. Whatever. If I hadn't been so pissed I couldn't figure it out, I would never have noticed it. I went through everything trying to find it. Thought maybe the battery management on an unplugged laptop would disable the laptop: good luck figuring that out, n00b. Hit the power management and it tells you to close the power management and open the Toshiba power management console. Why not hide the other one or repoint the link if you're going to provide your own? And what the hell added value are you throwing in for the trade-off of me having to learn your native client and not having as many results in Google? The whole thing is a nightmare with a shitty looking screen. I did my due diligence and downloaded Firefox. It took 5 minutes to start installing after it downloaded because Norton took over and decided it needed to scan it for me. Fuck off and die. And I only got that far because I subverted the OS and Norton firewalls. Which I subverted because I knew that:

1. I was behind a router and pretty damn safe
2. Software firewalls fuck up more than they help

What do you do if you don't know? Why should you have to know? I shut the poor, stillborn thing off as soon as I could. Except I didn't. When I hit Shut Down, I was presented with three options, Restart, Shut down, Log off. Shut down had an asterisk on it, letting me know it wouldn't actually be shutting down, it would be installing updates and then shutting off when it felt like it. Good thing I didn't have a plane to catch.

I don't remember what this Powerbook's desktop looked like when I got it, but it wasn't covered in AOL and AT&T offers. And the Fedora Core 5 install I just set up might be a little spartan, but it encourages you to explore rather than scaring you off with too many options. Maybe that's only attractive to the kind of personality that would want to explore anyway, but maybe not. Maybe Dell and Toshiba and the rest are scaring off potential repeat buyers. God knows they're pissing off anyone who knows how it should work.

Dolphins v. Steelers is the same matchup they used to have in Filene's Basement for Ugliest Starter Jacket. Rich Eisen just informed me Rascal Flats is America's new supergroup. Take that Asia and Europe. We don't need a foreign supergroup no more. At least NBC figured out HD. I suffered through 2 years of Notre Dame in 480p, but a handful of hicks lip-syncing you can get me in 1080i. Fabulous.

Coors Light, it is so awesome when people cut together an interview with fake questions that match up to the responses in a goofy way. It is, however, not awesome when the interview is fake too. Minus an additional point for the interactions not being amusing anyway.

ESPN, take Berman out back and shoot him. You're with me, tired catchphrases. No one likes him. No one likes you anymore either ESPN. The S is fine. The E sucks. And when I have to consume the S with a sidedish of Joe Morgan eyeballing pitch speeds, you can fuck off with both.

Rich Eisen: "Wow, this place is going wild!" A. It's Pittsburgh. B. They're making noise exactly when they're supposed to, like people laughing at an SNL show. Not wild. Wild is 4 guys raping someone in a park. This is more like bigtime country line dancing. We're not that far from the games being an excuse for Madden.