So, there’s this brouhaha over what Paul Wolfowitz said in Vanity Fair. His comments, as reported, were pretty damning.
The problem is, the quotes mean something entirely different in, you know, their original context. Pejman has the transcript passages here.
Wednesday morning I received word from the president of the Two Bits’ board that I was granted a 10% raise, retroactive to May 1, but that the board was not comfortable granting any more until after the position descriptions had been rewritten.
As my new salary is what I should have started at, before I started doing production and IT and, hell, the Executive Director’s job, I have decided that enough is enough and am looking to get out of Two Bits for good.
That very day, as it happened, I had an interview scheduled with the Rockville startup that had interviewed me twice before. This interview went smashingly, and every time I walk out of there, I always think how great it would be to work there.
Today, I receive a voicemail from the woman I have been in contact with there. Thanks so much for coming in, blah blah, [the CEO] was particularly impressed, blah blah, have a couple more interviews to do, blah blah… and then…
“We might actually need you to come in again, and spend more time with a few other members of our staff….”
People, Wednesday was my THIRD INTERVIEW at this place. I have been interviewed by no less than 5 of their current employees, quite possibly 6… and there are only TWELVE employees total.
Unbelievable.
But I want this job, so I will go through one more interview if necessary.
The dullest blog in the world- no, really. And from the same site: Oooh, Flannelgraph!
The flannelgraph, for those of you who didn’t go to Sunday School as kids, is the ultimate item of church-kitsch.
The life and times of Ronald McDonald.
The guys who play Ronald aren’t supposed to admit that they do it. I met a Ronald once, though. He was at one of my clown alley meetings. Nice guy, but didn’t talk much about his Ronald gig. Now I know why.
People are going absolutely nuts over the iTunes update, because it makes some changes with how the program connects to the network. One of the changes is that it no longer allows your music library to be streamed over the Internet. People are apparently pissed off about this.
I can see the point of people who were just using it to stream the music from their home computers to their work computers. But I still can’t get up in arms over having this “feature” disabled, because it was never supposed to be a feature. Apple promised iTunes sharing over Rendezvous, which is a local networking technology, not an Internet technology. Besides, the hole might have remained open except that people were bragging, loudly, all over the Internet about being able to use it like Napster to pirate music. Good move, guys. Apple finally convinces the recording industry to provide music in a format that is only lightly DRMed and relatively inexpensive, and you go try to turn the tool into another Napster, which could potentially blow the whole experiment. Thanks, assholes.
So of course Apple closed the hole. But the people who want to stream music from their home computers to their work computers can still do that by sharing their iTunes libraries and mounting them as network drives, or by SSH tunneling into their home networks, etc. It’s just not that difficult to set it up. Users who were streaming their music legally haven’t really lost anything.
So I just can’t get all crazy about this iTunes update, despite my general antagonism for DRM and the destruction of fair-use.
Courtesy of Dan Hon, go read an analysis of the most critical and confusing scene in The Matrix: Reloaded.
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet,
1. What are you waiting for?
2. The above link is extremely spoiler-y.
For those of you who have seen it, you immediately knew what scene I was talking about and have likely pounced on the link, because it’s the scene everyone is still scratching their heads over. This guy clearly has too much time on his hands, but it’s a very interesting analysis. It also caused me to say, “Oh. Source. Duh!”
I don’t care what kind of negative reviews this second movie is getting- I thought it was great, and I’m thrilled that the Wachowskis have actually put the effort into writing a trilogy of movies and then all the supporting materials that go with them to tell an intricate, philosophically interesting, thought-provoking story that also delivers on neat special effects and kung-fu.
Apparently, my webhost hosts some of its shared servers at the same Network Operations Center as HostingMatters, which is a company popular with the blogging set. This NOC happened to suffer a fire today, which means that my site was down, as was Frank’s, and even the Mighty Mighty Instapundit, along with much of the blogosphere.
Amazing how one small fire in one room on the third floor of a building in New York can affect so many people all over the country.
Samantha Bennett on the proliferation of privacy policies.
So, what i heard on the radio this morning is correct, in DC we really have gone a month without a sunny day.
Fortunately, there was some sun in Pittsburgh this weekend- I even got a little bit sunburned at the Sunday Pirates’ game. And while it’s true that when it finally does get sunny here, it’ll be humid and we’ll all be complaining and wanting it to rain, I think what we all really want is normal weather for the summer. Several days of sun and heat, followed by a couple of days of rain to cool everything off, and then more sun, etc. You know, weather like temperate climates get.
Really, there are only like 3-4 months a year in DC that aren’t miserable. April and May are generally nice (even though this May has sucked), and September and October are nice, brisk, and generally pleasant. Summer is sweltering, and winter is slushy.
Remind me why I still live on the East Coast?
I think that an underlying principle of art, specifically good graphic design, is the same principle that underlies good comedy.
Stick with me here, I’m trying to self-educate and I need to think out loud. Er, in type.
A couple of years ago, I went to an outstanding seminar on clowning taught by the legendary David “Mr. Rainbow” Bartlett. One of the reasons the seminar was so great was because it didn’t just focus on clown technique, like balloon animals or face painting or skit creation, though he did do quite a bit of that. The most valuable part of the seminar was when he explained Comedy.
That is, he explained to us why things are funny.
Comedy comes from an element of surprise. Things are funny when they aren’t what we expect them to be. Steve Martin, playing a banjo, with an arrow through his head is funny because it’s unexpected. Or at least it was in the 70s. We laugh because a man with an arrow through his head isn’t supposed to be able to wear a white polyester suit and play the banjo, and seeing it strikes us as ridiculous. Thus, we laugh.
He applied this principle to assorted clown gags. Mispronouncing words is funny because we expect words to be pronounced normally. The “Pride and Joy” cards are funny because we expect to see pictures of children, or even child-clowns, rather than pictures of cleaning products named “Pride” and “Joy.” The “Dear Moron” skit is funny because we don’t expect the letter to be addressed to the other clown.
Aside from considerations of technique, I think art is, um, art-y when it uses the unexpected to evoke a response. I think this holds true whether the art is commercial or not. An ad for a resort catches my eye because the picture of a family going snorkeling is made up of a bunch of other, smaller photos. I become curious about these other photos and look at the ad longer. Mona Lisa is smiling, which is weird first because no one else smiled in their portraits then, and secondly because she’s just smiling a little bit. I wonder why she smiles and walk away with Mona Lisa appearing in the stories my imagination makes up.
These are relatively scattered and incomplete thoughts, so feel free to add your own. I’m just at a point now where I’m asking myself, “What makes good design? What separates art from kitsch?” so I’m trying to work through these ideas.