Ever Becoming, Never Completed

Cablevision and ABC couldn’t reach an agreement so ABC got pulled from Cablevision. That prompted this terrible headline from CNBC. It’s terrible because no one in New York even remotely faces not being able to watch the Oscars¹.

I know it’s hard for people to envision living in a time without cable, but there was a time and thousands of people still do it. Do you still remember the whole Digital transition? Do you know what that was about? ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox/PBS/CW and others depending on your market are available via free over the air transmissions. Seriously and they’re in HD too!

Instead of whining about Cablevision pulling ABC subscribers could do numerous things:

A)

1. Figure out if your TV has a built in tuner (odds are if you bought it in the last 3-5 years it does. Both my cheap westinghouse and dynex sets have them)

2. Have it scan channels (my two automatically merge OTA and cable channels, otherwise check your manual – you still have that right?)

3. Watch the fucking Oscars in free HD*.

B)

1. Go to Best Buy or any other electronics store and pick up an OTA antenna (you can get them pretty cheap if you don’t plan to use it much).

2. Hook it up and set up your TV

3. Watch the fucking Oscars in free HD*.

C)

1. Call up Cablevision and tell them to shove it

2. Repeat steps in A or B.

3. Watch the fucking Oscars in free HD*.

4. Call up another provider tomorrow and resume cable viewing

D)

1. See A or B

2. Tell Cablevision to suck it

3. Watch the fucking Oscars in free HD*.

4. Realize you don’t need cable and keep watching the free OTA stuff

Seriously people I know it’s annoying that Cablevision pulled the channel on a day like this, but come on something like picking up ABC over the air should be understandable for anyone who owns a TV.

*Need an HD television of course

Ars Technica has jumped on the ad blockers are bad bandwagon and that those who use them are effectively stealing from them. Those of us (me included) who actively run ad blocking software are stealing resources from these sites without giving them anything in return. If we’re running ad blockers we do it with the explicit intent to get this content for free. Wrong. I block ads because for one a majority of them are intrusive and secondly because they have proven to be the weak link leading to viruses¹

But the funny thing is that the author contradicts his own argument with his solution. He says if we disagree with ads a site is running we should just not go there because “is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return.” Aren’t pageviews something in return? Aren’t pageviews still in some aspects a form of measurement for selling ads?

Let’s return to that idea of simply not visiting sites that show ads with don’t like. That is one of the most boneheaded and impractical ideas out there. It’s simply impossible to do and it’s going to do far more harm to the Internet than whatever affect Ars thinks ad blockers have. A lot of smaller content publishers (individuals, smaller blog companies) don’t have the reach or connections and are forced to use terrible ad networks like Adsense for their ads. I’m not a fan of adsense ads, but if I follow Ars’ model I should ignore all the people who use them, thus effectively silencing them solely because they’re using what they can. Ars wants to combat the superficial problem, people not seeing ads on their site, but doesn’t want to deal with the root issue; online advertising is terrible and until there is widespread commitment to change ad blockers will be used.

But this brings me to the bigger issue with this post, they want to pass the blame rather than innovating. If ad revenue is falling, one can figure out why and try to fix it, or create a new business model. The Internet loves to attack newspapers who fail to innovate when their old business model dies out so why don’t we do the same for the Internet? Mike Masnick over at Techdirt has the model of CwF+RtB (Connect with fans and give them a reason to buy), and it works. Masnick offered a T-shirt around Christmas that read The contents of this shirt have been removed because of a DMCA notice, it cost $25 and it sold like hotcakes (I own one for the record). Ars needs to stop placing blame and looking to the past, and instead look forward. There issue is that at best they are playing from behind instead of innovating.

Addendum

One thing I obviously didn’t mention was the fact that if Ars Technica was so upset about us “free-loaders” stealing their content they could easily throw the site behind a paywall. They wouldn’t do that because their revenue would plummet and page views would reach close to zero. The point here is that most of this post is hot air, they’d rather keep people with ad blockers around rather than turn them away because they still add something to their revenue stream.

One other thing, if people vote with page views and don’t bother telling sites why they aren’t showing up, what do you think will happen? Besides the site going out of business, people would be cut from the staff and the site would start adding more ads to make up for the lower page views.

I’m always hesitate to jump into things like this incident because in the end people like this are insane and far from anything we would consider mainstream. Attempting to label people like this “left-wing” or “right-wing” doesn’t add anything to a debate.

But two things struck me reading stories on this pentagon shooter. Media like Christian Science Monitor is asking if Right Wing Extremism caused the attack. From what I’ve read the shooter was anything but a right-wing extremist. If anything he was a far left-wing, 9/11 truther. So obviously CSM is wrong, and conservatives (namely those who like to label themselves right-wing extremists) are pushing back.

The idea here of course is to try to paint the picture that left-wingers are just are messed up as right-wingers and both go crazy. Yes both are equally crazy, but which do you see more of? Which one is having a more important role in current politics? Certainly not 9/11 truthers. Right wing tea party movements have seriously flirted with rebellion, not just behind closed doors but openly. Take back your country, Stop socialism, prepare, etc. etc. etc. you get the idea.

Left Wing extremists are just as insane as right wing extremists and should be treated exactly the same, but it’s not left wing extremism that has national pundits promoting it everyday.

I’m a fan of the macheist promo that pops up from time to time. They tend to be able to put together a few apps that really make it worthwhile even though you get a bunch of crap ones to go along with the ones you will use. This time they’ve released the nanobundle 2 which frankly is disappointing.

The software in the pack:

Macjournal: basically it looks like a desktop blog client that allows you to store notes and writings not necessarily just blog posts. For one I bought MarsEdit to do blogging and love it so there goes the blog aspect, and secondly everything I write outside of Marsedit is stored in plain text or docs to enable easy syncing.

Ripit: DVD ripper, the one product I was actually wanting from the bundle. Basically I paid $20 bucks for Ripit, which is well what it normally costs.

Clips: multi-clipboard app. Have never had a use for one in the past why now?

Flow: FTP client. Maybe it’d be nice be Cyberduck works fines for the little I need of FTP.

CoverScout: Nice idea, terrible program. Went to register the app and was prompted to sign up for an account. No No No.

Tales of Monkey Island: 1) I’m using a mac mini 2) not a huge gamer in general let alone a computer gamer 3) It got an 85 on gamespot so I guess it’s worth a play or two but it only unlocks at 50K downloads. Let’s hope it gets there.

RapidWeaver: Ok so a web design program for dummies? I don’t do web design outside of extremely limited fiddling so I doubt it would do much besides clutter my applications folder.

As with anything whether the bundle is good or not is subjective to your personal needs. I personally could have passed on the bundle but I’ve been looking at ripit for a while now so it gave me a reason to buy. Go check out the bundle for yourself at [macheist.com](http://macheist.com]

I tend to have at least heard of chain emails making there way around about Obama, but this morning at work I ran into one that was news to me. Full email is scanned here, here, and here, but basically it boils down to Obama wanting to force veterans to pay for war-related injuries out of pocket through private insurance. Of course he backed down on the idea, but according to the email he had no clue why people were so opposed to the idea saying

“Look, it’s an all volunteer force,” Obama complained. “Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn’t compute..” “I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country,” Obama continued. “I wasn’t asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I’d have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation’s deficit. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans.”

Real nasty asshole huh? Well yeah if it was true. I just got around to looking into this and of course the whole thing is BS. Yes there is a kernel of truth in that Obama wanted to bill private insurance companies for war-related injuries but not make the veterans pay for the injuries out of pocket. Oh and by the way? That happened in March of last year. The quote? Written by some comedian as satire. Factcheck’s report here and Snopes’ report here.

It’s still amazes me how much of this shit keeps kicking around on the internet, and even worse the unwillingness of the people reading this stuff to do a simple google search. Hell if they’re willing to read an email with uppercase letters and no citations why not read Factcheck or Snopes?

Secondly I’m amazed at just how old school these emails kick it. I mean citing ask.com as your only reference? Or how about the emails? I of course blocked out the addresses, but you can see some people still use Earthlink(!!) for email, along with aol (ok not as bad) and sbcglobal (It’s AT&T now dummies). These are obviously people who either are way too lazy to upgrade when it’s time or don’t have the ability to do so. I’m sure most of these people had their emails sent up for them by their kids years ago and that’s probably all they do on the Internet is read emails. Should we tell them the Nigerian princes aren’t real?

Lastly, and this was my first impression before hitting up google, is do the people see the irony here? They’re whining about troops (who obviously deserve the best) being forced to go with private insurance while at the same fucking time saying how they don’t want Obama to take their insurance from them. So which is it people?

If you don’t know where Enfield, CT is, or the controversy surrounding where to hold graduation ignore this.

It seems that the Board of Education in Enfield voted to rescind with their proposal to host graduations on the high school campuses. That decision was made in response to a frivolous and misguided threat by the ACLU over hosting graduations at First Cathedral (here and here for discussion of why the threats are both bad and pointless). Before the board voted to rescind their January decision they held an hour’s worth of public comment on the issue. One person spoke out against the proposal. One.

My first thought when I read this article (it’s paywalled so unless you subscribe to the JI ignore the link) was where are all the people who oppose First Cathedral as a graduation site? To be fair this wasn’t a discussion of whether to rescind not holding graduations at the cathedral, just to not hold them on campus. But still those people who supposedly oppose holding graduation at First Cathedral refuse to step forward and voice their opinions on the issue. They have so far refused to propose an alternative or simply explain why they oppose the measure. I’ll call these people what they are: cowards. They are cowards who feel big and tough when they hide behind the ACLU but when asked to explain themselves publicly they run and hide. That is the definition of a coward.

Secondly I want to readdress an issue raised by the one lone dissenter, one Robert Tkacz, who the paper lists as a former board member. I’m not sure when he was on the board but I’m almost 100% certain it wasn’t when we initially proposed First Cathedral as a graduation site in 2006/7. Mr. Tkacz stated in his dissent:

The only resident who spoke against the proposal to rescind the decision was Robert Tkacz, a former school board member, who said the graduations should be at the high schools because the school system can’t afford having an elaborate off-site graduation.

“We have a reality here,” Tkacz said. “The money is not there.”

Now I can’t confirm or deny whether First Cathedral raised their rates since we recommended them for the 2007 graduation, and my argument here is based off of information from then and I haven’t followed up on the school board meeting outside of what I’ve read in the papers. Anyway back to the financial argument. When we proposed First Cathedral in 2007 it was actually cheaper than a graduation on campus for a few reasons:

1. First Cathedral provided a flat rate for all their services (Building/staging/security/Audio-Visual etc.) whereas hosting graduation on campus or in town varied depending on rates for tents, chairs, etc.

2. Hosting graduation on campus or in town meant the town needed to pay janitors to set up and break down the equipment. The janitors were paid overtime for all of that as well.

Both of these issues not only applied to on-site graduations, but also anything done by the school board (so holding the graduation at an off-campus site in town would still require town employees being paid).

I know that if graduation where held on the campus football fields the town was quoted as needing close to $30,000 dollars in insurance to fix potential damage to the fields from heels, chairs, the stage. That alone presents a serious issue for those arguing that on-site graduations are more fiscally conservative. Again this vote wasn’t whether to hold the graduation on campus or at First Cathedral, but unless someone proposes a better site that doesn’t involve the high school gym as a back up (which rules out anything in town) then we’re back at First Cathedral.

So to those people who supposedly oppose First Cathedral, please step into the open and propose a reasonable solution to how to hold a graduation that not only ensures an adequate number of guaranteed tickets to students, but is also at the value offered by First Cathedral. My email inbox is waiting. Or even better tell Dr. Gallacher or the board of education. Both would love to hear from you I’m sure.

Last semester I had a class that annoyed me for much of the semester. I felt there was little student involvement and the professor was doing nothing to combat the issue. Those issues were not so much an issue with the class itself, but the people in it. This semester I have a class that has issues at the foundation of how the class is run, and it’s really depressing to see.

For one the class is in my field of study for history (20th century US/foreign relations) and the material assigned in the class is enjoyable. The professor has even proven time and time again that he understands the material and is incredibly well versed in the material (I have a laundry list of suggested books to read). Hell the guy is a nice guy and is more than willing to help students outside of class.

The issue with the class is how it’s organized, or more apropiately how it’s not. The class is a 4000 level seminar class over American Diplomatic history with a focus on the covert side of the issue. This is an incredibly interesting topic and again the books assigned are actually enjoyable. But the professor kind of seems like he’s not sure what to do in preparation for the class (outside of reading the material, or refreshing himself on it), he comes to class with no notes, questions, or set points to hammer home. We basically spend an hour and fifteen minutes discussing broad points in the books, basically as a test if we read it, rather than discussing how it fits into the larger scheme of things. There is some of that to be sure, but mostly we bounce around the books discussing what was in them. I’m paying hundreds of dollars for a glorified book club.

Secondly the class has two things working against it in tandem. First it’s from 3:30 to 4:45, the time of day when most people drift off and just want to take a nap. This isn’t an issue on it’s own, in fact I have a class at the same time on Mondays and Wednesday and it flies by and I love it. The issue working with the time slot is that there is no incentive or need to read the books or come to class. We have no final on the books, the only assignments are two book reviews and a term paper. One could in essence read two of the books, write the reviews and do a term paper without ever needing to show up for class. Those who do show up may have read the book, but seeing as how there’s no incentive to put the book in a larger context the discussion (if you can call it that) quickly loses steam and ends up with the professor all but rambling to a room full of semi-conscious students.

Again this isn’t my first seminar class, last semester I had one with the same basic layout, discussions of books every class, and I have one this semester as well. The one last semester was not on a topic that necessarily interested me, but not only did the professor pose questions that required you to read the book, but the questions drew out the major points and themes in a larger context. My other seminar this semester isn’t as good as the one last semester (namely because we also run out of steam discussing the works), but the professor knows how to keep the discussion moving along so as to keep people awake.

Again I like the professor in question and like the topic and am truly saddened to see a class that has so much potential turning out the way it is. I titled this post dealing with bad classes, but frankly I don’t know how to deal with this one. My first thought was well make there be a final of some kind (last semester we had a three essay take home final that covered the major themes of the semester), but thinking now that doesn’t solve anything really. People in the class are already way too confused by the professor’s lack of willingness to pin down explicit requirements or goals (the syllabus for this week stated we were to read the first three chapters, he covered the whole book in basically one day), so adding a final would only make things worse. This leads to the serious question of is the professor simply a bad professor?

I hate to call any professor bad, and I’m really hesitate to call this one bad because I don’t think it applies to him. He’s incredibly smart, he wrote a book that was informative and enjoyable, and he knows the topics he teaches. This under most circumstances would make him a good professor. The professor comes off as the kind of guy who knows what he wants to say, but not how to say it or go about it. In a regular lecture course he may get long winded but the class still moves, here it just dies out because it’s the job of the professor to lead the discussion. Under this definition the professor is a bad professor. I only wish I knew what to do.

It’s fun to watch the Tea Party ebb and flow with political events. Take for instance Scott Brown, who got elected with a large amount of support from the tea party movement. Today he voted to move forward in the Jobs Bill, and as you can guess he’s getting flack from the same people who voted for him to be the 41st vote. He’s being called such things as a sellout, turncoat, RINO (Republican in Name Only) and on and on. Go look at the response on twitter and see for yourself.

This only confirms the idea floated by people like Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight. When Scott Brown got elected he had one of two choices:

1. Moderate himself away from the extreme right and much of the Tea Party Movement and potentially win reelection as an old fashioned New England republican. He would gain the support of independents and more people in Massachusetts but lose the support of a lot of the tea party movement.

2. Fully embrace the right and become a rubber stamp for Republican policies, in essence becoming the 41st vote all the time not just on health care. Doing so would gain him the support of the tea partiers but would doom him to having a huge uphill climb to seek reelection.

Scott Brown was faced with becoming the most unpopular Senator or going against the ideology of a lot of people who supported him (but didn’t necessarily vote for him). Now this isn’t a final vote on the jobs bill, but it’s clear where Brown is going, and it’s not towards the extreme right.

This leads to the Tea Party Movement in general. I’m still truly not sure what to think of the movement overall, I think that a lot of it is simply hatred of the current President, but just as much are more Libertarian than they are Republican. The tea party movement was of course all but stolen by the Republicans and morphed into this faux-populism/grassroots movement we see now. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to this movement not only after 2010, but after 2012. Republicans are going to pick up seats in Congress this cycle and could very well win it all in two years. It’s naive to think that true “ideologically pure” tea partiers will carry seats outside the south let alone the presidency. So what happens when Republicans return to power and return to the ways of George Bush, running up the deficit and government spending? Do the tea partiers end up like many liberals with Obama, betrayed and downtrodden over promises never completed? Or do they just fade away now that all is “right” in their world?

I don’t think we can say one way or the other, but it’s clear that the tea party movement and the people in it have a murky road ahead of them.

Updated below with end result, skip down read that, then return to the top

I just wanted to let you know that you have forever lost me as a subscriber to your paper. I would have figured that given the state of your industry (though I know nothing of your current financial state) papers should be more than willing to listen to their customers and work out issues, but you have proven to do just the opposite.

My paper that I paid for, at the reduced TU rate, has not shown up for the last two weeks. I sent emails asking you guys to look into what was happening, and I called at least twice, and nothing has been done for two whole weeks. That’s not surprising though, because the circulation email you list on your site comes back as not in use even though you splash it all over your site. Is it your company policy to treat a paying customer so badly? Or do you just do this to TU students? I would figure you guys use the TU discount program as a way to pull in younger people who might not otherwise even look at your paper. If that was your goal you guys were doing good, I like your writers and you had a good sports section, but anymore it seems you want people to not subscribe. That you also do well.

Your paper is, in my eyes, an unequivocal failure. I have had nothing but issues with getting delivery on a daily basis and in a manner that doesn’t involve a paper boy throwing the paper from the ground floor up to the third. I was more than willing to pay you full price once I graduated TU to continue delivery of the paper, but seeing as how you show no interest in giving a paying customer what he needs I’ll just not subscribe.

So Tulsa World you can keep your paper, tell your paper boy to not even bother with the rest of the semester even though I paid for it. I don’t want it, it’s not worth the hassle or the time to continually call you guys or send emails that go nowhere. You might also want to look up what happens when someone writes publicly that your company is a business that doesn’t provide the services they promise, offers no form of communication, and employs unprofessional people.

Addendum

I got a call from my mom about half an hour ago telling me that the Tulsa World had left two(!) messages on her phone looking for me. Beside the fact that her cell phone hasn’t been listed as the contact number for me for two years now and the fact that my contact information is readily available if they checked numerous emails I’ve sent to them; it was a step forward. Then I decided to open my door and see if they did the simplest thing they could do, deliver the paper. They actually did that.

So yes the Tulsa World apparently is now delivering my paper as they should have been and as I was paying them to do. But I’m not going to take down this post because it shouldn’t take a blog post and hassle to get someone to listen.

Sidenote II: this doesn’t change my refusal to subscribe to the paper after this year. They’ve still lost me, but at least they listened at some point.

Sidenote III: I just realized my email address isn’t public on the blog. blogreply@bck.otherinbox.com

I generally don’t get scared or unnerved when I read an article about anti-government loonies, but when that anti-government loony movement is supported by one of the two major political parties as a means of grass roots opposition to their political rivals I get unnerved. That’s probably the point of the New York Times article on the Tea Party Movement, “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right“, and if that is the case it does a damn good job of it.

From the article:

Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books.

This is what literally scares me about the movement and has me convulsing about their idea of research. Many of us can remember the mid-90s and the rise of the militia movements and the anti-governmental fringe groups, it became so popular Time devoted at least one cover story to the topic. But that was then, in a time many members of the groups didn’t have the Internet let along blogs, twitter, youtube. I went back and found one such article from Time in which the best they could do was public access in Northern California. The Internet and it’s innumerable websites and communication methods has turned the bully pulpit for these kind of things national.

Add to the national reach the willingness of politicians and Television hosts to embrace words like socialism in ways that totally ignore much of the basis of the actual ideology and you got yourself a recipe for disaster. I’m sure many of these people are willing to take anything they read on the Internet that fits their thesis (The government is bad and has caused all my personal issues) wholeheartedly, even though any reasonable person will tell you wikipedia is not a valid source. This is a movement that has at it’s base people who state openly “I voted twice and I failed political science twice,” people who find research to fit their predetermined thesis, not people who base a thesis (The Republican policies of deregulation and out of control spending created the current economic climate and government deficit) on research or understanding.

In essence the Republican party and the news media have been willing to embrace a movement that would otherwise be written off as complete loonies as a serious entity. This is a movement that is not only a return of John Birch style politics, but also one based in chain emails, wholesale lies, and people who pretend to have a grasp on Constitutional law simply because they can recite bits of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. In the end you can’t argue with tin foil types because they’ll just ignore it.

The funny thing in all of these is envisioning the parents once they send their kids away to college. Imagine if you were raised simply on Internet rumors and went away to college only to be presented with concrete proof disproving everything you’ve been drilled to believe. Imagine the outcry over “Liberal elites controlling colleges” then.