John Strong hits close to home, or to my home anyway:

[A]t no time in the 16 years I worked as a programmer did I ever have the slightest doubt that technical merit would be rewarded. Software development managers have a chronic and urgent need for talented engineers who can solve real business problems, and this gives the engineer a relative immunity to politics. If the engineer thinks of politics, it is probably because he has an ambition to obtain a role of influence beyond his technical niche.

Late in my career I became a technical writer. Suddenly, I noticed that office politics mattered. You had to be more careful about what you said in e-mails. You had to worry about not offending people on the outskirts of your professional orbit (editors, production people, even secretaries). The sort of technical writing I did requires a lot of knowledge about operating system internals, but the measure of performance is less objective. As Eric Raymond noted in a previous podcast (The Cathedral and the Bazaar), a computer program either works or it doesn’t.

Lacking any such ambition, I ignore office politics, except to note that I’ve already been through high school once already, fercrissake, and I refuse to endure it again.

(Via Sophistpundit.)

H1N1, you say? A ridiculous name:

What if this thing takes off and wipes out all of mankind? How embarrassing would that be when intergalactic lifeforms stumble on a pig-filled earth and read that it was a little ol’ H1N1 that kicked our humanoid butts? No, if there’s even the slightest chance of some virus killing us all, it should have a cool name that sends chills down your spine; like Black Death, Human Plague, or Obama’s Mama.

April being over and done with, I propose “Puerco de Mayo.” Let the intergalactic lifeforms figure it out for themselves, if they’re so damn smart.

No, no, not Mrs Partridge!

Shirley Jones just turned 75, but she hasn’t slowed down since she starred in Oklahoma! in 1955. The grandmother of 10 goes topless in an upcoming episode of A&E’s The Cleaner. Playing a washed-up, alcoholic chanteuse, Jones, who won a 1960 Oscar playing a prostitute in Elmer Gantry, opens up her blouse in a climactic scene.

Couldn’t they have gotten a real washed-up, alcoholic chanteuse instead?

Meanwhile, here’s to more pleasant memories:

(Article via Lawren. Photo courtesy of Andrew Crossett.)

But that trick never works.

The Germans must really be serious about that “Cash for Clunkers” business, even when it doesn’t involve actual cars:

A giant image of Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing just bra and pants has been attracting intense attention on Berlin’s premier shopping drag, the “Ku’damm.”

The 100-metre-square mocked-up image of the half-naked world leader is part of a nationwide advertising campaign for an underwear company aiming to cash in on the success of a “cash-for-clunkers” scheme for old cars. Punters trading in their old underwear will get a €5 discount on a new pair, the advert promises, under the slogan: “The country needs new undies.”

Merkel isn’t the only one in her skivvies; several other German politicians are portrayed similarly, if not so prominently.

Two thoughts:

• Why couldn’t they have done this in France? Everyone’s already seen Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s underwear.
• What are they going to do Stateside with our “cash for clunkers” program? Put Jennifer Granholm in a bikini?

(Via Fark.)

Doesn’t sound particularly joyful to me, but then I’m not the person trying to support a crapload of office computers. Among them, the underwhelming choice is Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 6:

This news may come as a shocker to the tech-savvy folks in the house, but 60 percent of companies use Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser, according to Forrester Research. Meanwhile, your IT department spends a decent amount of time erecting barriers to prevent browser upgrades. Bottom line: companies need a browser policy, or they will risk productivity losses.

Welcome to the wonderful world of enterprise browser adoption. While the tech press spends a lot of time talking about Web 2.0 and even 3.0, Corporate America is on Web 0.5.

How is this possible? It shouldn’t surprise you:

Companies are worried about custom apps that may fail on new browsers and security and compliance. In addition, companies limit the ability to upgrade. Seventy percent of companies restrict browser choice and Web content. Forrester notes that “IT control trumps technology populism.”

I must note here that Trini, who is the person trying to support a crapload of office computers, sets everyone’s default to Firefox. Even the Macs.

Evidently it is believed in some circles that women need to be told these things:

Businesswomen clueless about how much leg to show at the office can now turn to Forbes for advice. The magazine’s frothy new spinoff, ForbesWoman, out next week, advises females to avoid showing “the beauty minefields: scaly skin, poorly maintained toenails and cracked heels, to name a distasteful few.” Also verboten is the dreaded “shrimp cocktail effect,” in which toes hang over the front of the sandals. “That’s the worst, isn’t it?” Manhattan stylist Sarah Shirley tells the mag. “Nothing looks trashier.”

It’s hard to imagine how ForbesWoman could be much frothier than Forbes itself, whose Web presence is saturated with slideshows of stuff like “Ten Best Places to Overpay for a Latte.”

On that first question: if you’re thinking you might be showing too much leg for the office, you’re probably showing too much leg for the office. And how much I would appreciate it should not be one of your criteria.

(Via JammieWearingFool.)

A story from last year:

Some years back, house wrens conducting reconnaissance in the area discovered that the underside of the second building’s full-width metal awning would accommodate their particular nesting style with ease, and gradually they took over the place, defending the premises with great vigor and carefully disassembling the nests before migration, lest some interlopers take over.

A few birds had been wandering in over the last couple of weeks, but yesterday they were back on site in full force. About a dozen were perched on the edge of the building like small grey gargoyles, standing watch; others were gathering straw for nest construction; still others occupied the bank of trees along where the curb would be if we had a curb, presumably to make sure no one else got the idea of settling in this zone.

Yesterday around noon, a platoon’s worth was lined up in the parking lot, which is not the usual place for flying creatures generally. I was somewhat puzzled by this until I’d reached a stretch of sidewalk, when it became obvious what they were watching: a member of the family Colubridae, slithering its way along the concrete. I don’t think your garden-variety Snake on the Plains can climb painted brick walls all that well, so I doubt the nests were in any particular danger, but the wrens weren’t going to let this farging reptile out of their sight for a moment. Just the same, they kept their distance: six feet away from the five-foot snake.

Various reasons have been advanced for the relative paucity of women in IT departments. Zoe Brain covers the bases:

Part of the problem is the discouragement talented girls experience at school because IT is a “male field”. Part of it is that businesses are set up with men in mind, with stereotypically male aspects of bonding after work, of stakhanovite hours with no concession for having a Life, with hierachies and competition for “fastest gun in the west” rather than teamwork. The latter is particularly important in Open Source development.

Part of it is straight old-fashioned misogyny and the glass ceiling, but I think that’s not as important as the other issues. It can get pretty bad though as a consequence of the other causes, trust me on that one.

I don’t doubt that. There remains, though, the question: how in the name of Ada Lovelace did this become a “male field”? Andy Skipper opines:

[W]hat I believe is the core of the problem: inherited social stigma and media reluctance to portray work in the tech world as anything other than rooms full of bespectacled virgins, socially inept, unhygienic, and, almost invariably, male.

This is not a world where the blossoming teenage girl, about to choose her career path, and, perhaps more importantly, her future social sphere, is likely to base her aspirations.

And I have enough personal experience with that whole bespectacled, socially-inept virgin thing to verify that it’s not a huge draw for women. (I am, however, comparatively hygienic for a guy.) As for media reluctance, the rule has always been “When in doubt, exploit the stereotype,” and that’s not likely to change any time soon.

(Title inspired by Roberta X.)

Today is World Naked Gardening Day, and it’s been raining since about one in the morning, so I regret to announce that there’s not going to be a whole lot of official recognition of the event here at Surlywood: it’s not, after all, “World Naked Falling Into The Very Cold Mud Day.”

This is a good, useful product, one of the best in Brooklyn’s growing product line, though they have a long way to go to catch the all-time market leader. Then again, mighty Acme started out with but a single offering: the anvil.

(Floated away right past Vanderleun.)

The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Feulner, remembering the late Jack Kemp:

I remember standing with him in Moscow’s Red Square in 1990. The Cold War was starting to thaw, but few even suspected that the Soviet Union’s days were numbered. Jack knew. As we stood on the square, in view of the Kremlin, he pointed out an astonishing sign: The line for the new McDonald’s restaurant was longer than the line for Lenin’s tomb.

And now Jack Kemp is gone and I’ll bet you more people are waiting for the return of the McRib than the debut of the Chrysler Cinquecento.

Heed this well, O drivers in Oklahoma:

Upon a roadway which is divided into four or more lanes, a vehicle proceeding at less than the maximum posted speed, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, shall not impede the normal flow of traffic by driving in the left lane.

That much you know, or should have known. As of the first of November, the following also applies:

Upon a roadway which is divided into four or more lanes, a vehicle shall be driven in the right-hand lane except when overtaking and passing another vehicle proceeding in the same direction or when preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway. Provided, however, this paragraph shall not prohibit driving in a lane other than the right-hand lane when traffic conditions or flow, or both, or road configuration, such as the potential of merging traffic, require the use of lanes other than the right-hand lane to maintain safe traffic conditions.

As passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor Henry on Thursday.

This has the potential to make my afternoon commute interesting, since it involves two exits from the left lane.

News Item: The price of a one-ounce first-class stamp will rise to 44 cents on May 11, the U.S. Postal Service said.

Anticipating the jump, yours truly, back in March:

During post-Christmas cleanup, I turned up a sheet of 18 first-class stamps from (probably) 2006, which, unlike today’s spiffy Forever Stamps, are never going to be worth more than 39 cents.

The letter rate is scheduled to go from 42 to 44 cents in May, so I had basically two options: find some 5-cent stamps and use up the 39s then, or find some 3-cent stamps and use them up now.

And so it came to pass that I ordered a sheet of twenty 3s from the US Postal Service’s online store, and over the next several weeks I paired off a 3 with a 39 on every one-ounce letter I sent.

With the deadline one week away, I have now exhausted my supply of 39s, although they were 18 to the sheet and therefore I still have two 3s left: it’s the old hot dog vs. buns controversy, albeit flatter. Perhaps aware of this — hey, it could happen — the USPS store is now packing twenty Forever Stamps to a sheet. (I ordered two sheets along with the 3-centers, to save, um, postage.)

Rhode Island goes on the attack, sort of:

The House of Representatives today unanimously approved legislation intended to add a little more protection for auto insurance customers who may need to file a loss claim with their insurer because of a minor fender-bender.

Under current state law, an auto insurance company can refuse to renew a customer policy if the company has to pay out more than $1,000 for a claim in any one policy year. The legislation approved today by the House [pdf] will raise that limit to $1,500.

It also increases to $1,500 — from the $1,000 figure in current law — the property damage claim limit below which an auto insurer is prohibited from assessing any premium surcharge against a policy holder.

This is being billed, of course, as a consumer-protection measure. But notice:

“The current $1,000 threshold has not been increased in more than seven years, and yet repair costs have grown incrementally to an average cost of $2,800,” said Representative [Brian Patrick] Kennedy [who sponsored the bill]. “We want drivers to take personal responsibility for their actions, but it’s important for insurance companies to realize that minor accidents do happen, and they should not be dropping a customer for what amounted to a relatively small insurance claim loss.”

If the average repair is $2800, what possible good is a $1500 threshold?

And there’s this:

Representative Kennedy said he was aware of an individual whose car was struck by a deer, resulting in several thousands of dollars in damage. “Even discounting a policy holder’s deductible, the work that needed to be done was going to result in a loss claim of more than $1,000,” he said. “For an accident that wasn’t even the driver’s fault, suddenly the policy holder is put in a precarious position, in that the insurance company, under state law, would be allowed to refuse to renew this customer’s policy, based on the monetary claim.”

Now if there’s one thing I can relate to, it’s having a car struck by a deer. As I recall, they quit counting the damage at the $6000 mark. Fat lot of good even a $2800 threshold would have done me.

And no, my insurance carrier didn’t cancel me. Then again, I’m not in Rhode Island.

(Via Justin Katz.)

I mean, just how many allegations are there in this one sentence?

An off-duty Essex police officer could face charges for shooting his allegedly neighbor’s dog after it tangled with his Pug, state police say.

As analyzed at Coyote Blog:

Is the fact that he is a neighbor in doubt? Or is the ownership of the dog in doubt? Or is it the species of the animal that is in doubt?

I call upon Vermont Governor Jim Douglas to establish a task force to clear up these matters once and for all.

Which line? The line between acceptability and unacceptability, as determined by whoever the hell determines these things at Apple’s iPhone Apps Store:

Apple has apparently rejected an update to Nine Inch Nails’ iPhone app because it found the contents of The Downward Spiral to be “objectionable,” according to Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor. History repeats itself.

But what’s odd here — and what continues to be odd about the App Store approval process — is that the first version of the Nine Inch Nails app was already accepted into the store a few weeks ago. In fact, I have it. Guess what’s on it? Content from The Downward Spiral. I’m listening to “Closer” right now. Let me assure everyone, this is not the radio edit version of the song or the album. So what gives, Apple?

“Like an animal,” mutters Reznor. And apparently this situation is hardly unique:

We’ve seen dozens of apps that are approved the first time, but later rejected for a seemingly small update. And we’ve seen others that are rejected, make almost no change, yet get in the next time they’re submitted. It would seem the life or death of an app is entirely in the hands of the App Store inspector who checks it out. Sometimes they catch things that they don’t want in the App Store, sometimes they do (baby shaking app anyone?). But I’m really not convinced that it’s not just a personal decision on those people’s behalf which apps get through and which don’t. I’ve seen way too much evidence telling me that is exactly what happens.

If you’re thinking, “Well, this doesn’t affect me, I don’t have an iPhone,” you might want to contemplate whether the same seemingly-arbitrary kind of decision-making might impact on some other aspect of your life. We already have inscrutable movie ratings; the House has passed a measure which further expands the nebulous concept of “hate crimes.” I can’t speak for the rest of you, but if I have to deal with a gatekeeper, I believe I have the right to be shown the key.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “the going may get rough:
We’re going through referrer logs, retrieving funny stuff.”

how to change head gasket on merc 120 hp in board:  And make it snappy, we’re sinking.

sperm tattoo:  How do you get them to sit still long enough to apply the needle?

\\\\\\\”self righteous bitch\\\\\\\” cheerleader:  Well, that’s one way to draw attention to a search.

jessica simpson long toes pictures:  The girl works her whole life on her rack, and this is the thanks she gets?

where to buy haggis in temple texas:  The two uniquely-Texan food operations are H.E.B. and Dairy Queen, and I don’t think either of them keep the stuff in stock.

“flasher” oklahoma 2009 convenience:  Not all convenience stores are participating, and the supply of flashers is limited.

why pate is bad for your stomach:  It’s a lot better for yours than it is for the bird’s, believe me.

is sun myung moon the owner of a costco warehouse:  They certainly wouldn’t have sold him a Sam’s Club.

first lady wearing $700.00 sneakers:  Didn’t help her jump shot, either.

having fun causes cancer:  The guiding principle of all government health care.

does larry king wear shoulder pads?  Either that or he’s buying bone spurs from the Home Depot.

constipation among operating room nurses: flatulence as evidence:  This is why you never, ever question the anesthesiologist.

what are those things in fields that vent?  Pissed-off farmers.

I am, I believe, slightly less indecisive than average when faced with a restaurant menu, especially if there are only a few offerings I can reasonably expect to tolerate: lingering prejudices and newly-discovered food sensitivities have knocked some things off the “I’ll try this” list.

I don’t think, though, I’ve ever been this precise:

I ordered a turkey burger, well done, on a sesame seed-free bun, mayo, lettuce and tomato only, swiss cheese, with a side of ranch, no onions, no pickles, wedge shaped fries with ketchup, and an unfiltered wheat beer in a very frosty glass if you please.

Ah, if only dates were like this. (Not that I have any dates, but, well, you get the idea.)

This is the Edgewater Walker by Propét, a simple slide with a nubuck upper (you can also get it in black or taupe leather) and a removable insole, which will accommodate orthotics if needed. It’s even machine-washable (cold water). A mere $64.95 from Zappos, which sold a pair yesterday to a woman in New Orleans.

And how do I know that? The Zappos Map, a standard Google Map of the US, on which actual purchase data is displayed in something resembling real time. As I was typing this, a picture of this shoe showed up, indicating a buyer in Dallas. It’s almost mesmerizing. Even the Manolo thinks so:

The Manolo has found himself staring at it for hours on end, despairing when someone in Pittsburgh purchased the pink crocs, thrilling when someone in Topeka choose the Stuart Weitzman strappy sandals.

I hope I don’t get to the point where I keep that tab open permanently.

You don’t think so? Just wait:

Who’s going to pay for the bailouts and the massive porkulus bill passed by Democrats in Congress? Oh, don’t worry, we’re told. It’ll just be “the rich.” Which reminds me of the Soviet-era joke: a rabbit is caught trying to flee over the border. He’s asked why by border guards. “Because I’ve heard they’re going to castrate all the camels.” The guards scoff, “But you’re a rabbit.” To which the rabbit replies, “Just try telling them different when they say you’re a camel!” So don’t worry: when they come to need the money, you’ll be rich enough.

But not for long.

Not exactly random factoid: The Forbes 400 for 2008 had an aggregate wealth of $1.57 trillion. Confiscating every last cent of it would cover the budget deficit for less than two years.

Crossroads Mall, which was sold at the beginning of 2007, is now in the possession of the lender, and its future is unclear.

Or maybe it isn’t. This is what’s left of Kansas City’s Bannister Mall. The pattern was similar: the anchors (JCPenney, Dillard’s, The Jones Store, Sears) bailed out one by one, and eventually the bulldozers came. They haven’t come for Crossroads yet, but it’s just a matter of time, and when they do, nobody’s going to build something like this in its place — unless someone figures out a way to relocate both the landfill and the town of Valley Brook, neither of which are the slightest bit conducive to redevelopment.

Once in a great while, the sysadmin goes looking for kewl stuff, and apparently over the weekend he discovered that the Domino package we’ve paid for includes rather a lot more than just support for (gasp!) Notes. Since his favorite variety of kewl stuff is kewl stuff he doesn’t actually have to code, he tossed up the idea of a corporate wiki for the sixty or seventy pages of procedure manual that have been converted over to HTML, and the sixty or seventy thousand pages that haven’t. Nobody was particularly horrified at the thought, and he had the sucker up and running in an hour or two.

Where this gets interesting, of course, is the point at which we shift gears out of HTML and into some dialect of wikitext, a movement made even more interesting by the fact that there isn’t anything like the W3C to manufacture standards for wikis. The DominoWiki is an open-source package, and its markup is similar to that used on Wikipedia. Inasmuch as I’ve actually done some small amount of editing on Wikipedia, I managed to turn out an acceptable page on the first try, though it took several minor edits to compensate for my klutziness/inability to read/obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Trini was unhappy with the default orange text used for some headings; I proposed an alternative, and rattled off a not-entirely-random RGB string.

“What color is that?”

“Puke green.”

Nobody actually hurled, but hey, I tried.

“When it comes to females,” observed Sir Mix-A-Lot, “Cosmo ain’t got nothin’ to do with my selection.”

Robert Stacy McCain goes a bit further: Cosmo ain’t got nothin’ to do with anybody’s selection. To wit:

Among his various conquests, the fellow who rides the romantic rodeo circuit will tend to have the most favorable opinion of the drop-dead beauty with the bitchin’ bod. That’s just how guys are. But the stuff that Cosmo is selling — the clothes, the shoes, the jewelry, the cosmetics — has very little impact on this evaluation. Ask any guy.

A really sexy girl is sexy even when she’s in sweats and an oversized T-shirt, shopping for groceries. And women’s near-universal embrace of the cosmetics/fashion industry is kind of like escalation in the Cold War arms race: At some point, everybody’s got enough nukes to destroy the entire planet, and the argument for additional nukes is attenuated by the problem of diminishing returns. If every girl’s made-up like a fashion model, a little extra skill in applying make-up isn’t really going to gain you any advantage.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania today, there is at least one beautiful 19-year-old Amish girl who has never worn make-up, never worked out in a gym, never read Cosmo. And that girl, in her homemade plain dress, is more truly beautiful than any of the styled-up, decked-out hotties hanging around the most fashionable nightspot in Hollywood. Like I said, ask any guy.

Well, perhaps you shouldn’t ask me: I never racked up many miles on the romantic-rodeo circuit and therefore claim no particular expertise in this matter. I have, however, been witness to a couple of incidents wherein the young lady in question decided to eschew all that stuff and was promptly quizzed by guys: “What happened to you?” They couldn’t distinguish workaday cosmetics from depleted uranium, but they could definitely detect that something was missing. Which demonstrates nothing, perhaps, except that superficiality is probably more or less evenly distributed between the sexes.

It can be argued — almost certainly will be argued — that in a competitive dating market, you need every advantage you can get. But one woman’s advantage is another woman’s drawback and might go totally unnoticed in a third; while we men are a comparatively uncomplicated bunch, we don’t all respond to exactly the same stimuli. But that only illustrates McCain’s point: someone’s going to fall hard for that young Amish lady. It’s times like these that I am (slightly) grateful for my failing vision.

And unfortunately for me, the Cosmo cover accompanying McCain’s essay contains, in large, readable print, the ghastly nonce word “va-jay-jay,” a word I can happily live without ever hearing again.

Lynn checks out this Good Morning America exposé, and raises some questions:

Based on the “shoe autopsy” it was easy to see that the $600 [Christian Louboutin] shoes are better quality than the $20 [Payless] shoes but are they better than $75 to $80 shoes? At what price do you start getting good quality shoes and at what price does the quality top out and the higher price become merely about the name?

Last fall I did a piece called “Where the price points are,” which linked back to this article at Manolo for the Big Girl. This time I quote a different section from the same article:

[C]heap shoes are a false economy, so we do not recommend cheap shoes. Ever.

We believe it is far more economical (and environmentally friendly, and ethical and stylish and …) to save and own two pairs of quality shoes that will outlive you than an entire closet of plastic and cardboard that will need replacing every year or two. You may feel free to disagree personally, but that is the stance of this blog and it’s not changing.

Oddly enough, I argued the same point back in 2002:

Confined to catalogs and specialty shops, neither of which is inclined to sell cheaply to their captive customers, I go to as little effort as possible to appear fashionable. The $19.99 pair of shoes, therefore, is an essential ingredient in the wardrobe. However, if you buy these things on a regular basis, you know there are hidden costs beyond twenty dollars and change. There is no real social stigma attached to them except in the snootiest circles, yet somehow you feel as though you have done a disservice to your feet. And three months later, when the shoes seem to be disintegrating with every step, you know it.

Then again, as a person of the male persuasion, I have never spent more than $120 on a pair of shoes, and if I spend that much, they’d better last a lot longer than three months.

A. S. “Mike” Monroney, who represented Oklahoma in Congress for thirty years, came up with the Automobile Information Disclosure Act, which mandates certain information be provided to the car shopper on what is now called the Monroney sticker. The sticker is provided by the manufacturer; should the dealer wish to tack on additional equipment, it is spelled out on a separate sticker.

When do the tacked-on items become tacky? When they include stuff like this:

It was a [2010 Chevrolet Camaro] V6 RS with no sunroof and auto. Not what I’d want, but it was nice. List was $27K+. Get this: the dealer added a $5000 “market adjustment.” But wait, there’s more! How about a $695 “Desert Protection Pkg.”? They also added … you’d better sit down … $999 for Nitro Tires. It was explained on another car’s sticker that it’s a lifetime supply of nitrogen for the tires. Wow, just wow. This at a dealer that’s got one foot in the grave, too.

“Market adjustment” I can understand: it’s a brand-new model, and demand is demonstrably high. But a thousand bucks for nitrogen? I’ve got nitrogen in my tires. Cost me $6 per tire. I had them refilled once, when the tires were rotated, since the recommended pressures differ front to rear. Assuming I continue to have them rotated every 7500 miles as recommended, a thousand dollars would get me to the 420,000-mile mark. As I drive maybe 11,000 miles a year, I’d have more than one foot in the grave long before I used up all that gas.

And does anyone know what goes into that “Desert Protection Package”?

It’s a bright cold day in May, and Winston Smith has been busy:

Given the widespread belief that Obama invented the Internet, many will scoff at the idea that the Bush White House had a Twitter account. But it did — and the administration handed over twitter.com/thewhitehouse at noon on Inauguration Day, just like it did with the whitehouse.gov website. Google still has the old account, with Obama’s tweets, in its cache.

Valleywag alum Paul Boutin suggests on Gadgetwise that this is a simple rationalization of accounts, matching the definite-article-free “whitehouse” username the Obama team uses on Flickr and YouTube. But Obama’s Twitterers didn’t just change the username on the account; they started fresh, wiping out all of the White House’s existing Twitter followers, and the entire archive of messages.

In fact, they did more than that. Forget the Google cache:

Actually the Google cache just points to the now-blank pages where the tweets used to be. The actual content has been permanently erased. So if you’re a Communication scholar or historian studying early Presidential uses of social media technologies, you’re screwed.

Not to worry. No matter what you heard, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

(Via HeatherRadish.)

Here’s the pitch for CyberAlert^®:

CyberAlert’s local, national and worldwide media tracking services offer today’s most comprehensive, time-efficient, and economical way to find and “clip” what’s being said in the news media and/or by consumers about a company, its products, people or competitors.

Okay, fair enough. Nobody with actual work to do has time to comb through the Web looking for stray references; outsourcing this tedious task makes a certain amount of sense. But one of their clients was sent this link, which lands on this week’s Strange Search-Engine Queries.

So: who’s spending good money to find themselves mentioned? Possible candidates:

• Jessica Simpson
• H.E.B.
• Dairy Queen
• Rev. Sun Myung Moon
• Costco
• Sam’s Club
• Michelle Obama
• Larry King
• The Home Depot

I think we can safely eliminate Mrs. O: she’s got, um, more extensive resources at her disposal these days. And someone’s already run a Google Blogsearch for Rev. Moon.

Larry King, maybe?

When last we left the Grand Wiki Adventure, things were more or less under control, though Trini was waxing wroth about various duly-marked horizontal bars that failed to materialize on a page she’d written. (Which turned out to be a page I’d written several years ago and forgotten about; however, she did all the wikificationary stuff.) I played around with the code for a few minutes, elicited no improvements, loaded up Safari, where it looked just fine, and pronounced it “Mozilla’s fault.” She professed to be content with that explanation.

Inevitably, management hopes for Phase 3: Profit. Unfortunately, this means there has to be a Phase 2, and it will incorporate intracompany bloggage as a supplement to (not in lieu of, alas) the usual staff gatherings. And while the blog system in Domino is geared toward getting complete idjits posting stuff in no time at all, not an inconsiderable virtue in most environments, those of us who resent the hell out of default templates that don’t yield easily to modification (translation: “those of us who are spoiled by WordPress”) find ourselves sputtering in frustration; if this goes on, I may have to bribe/cajole/clone/kidnap Ed Brill.

The operative word is “No,” as in “no raises, no new services and no new positions” in the proposed $839.6 million city budget for next year, which projects a mere 0.5 percent increase in revenues.

Budget Director Craig Freeman says that all city departments except police and fire were asked to submit budgets 1.5 percent below last year’s. (Unlike some places I could name, we don’t cut public-safety personnel in an effort to scare up tax revenues.)

You can download the entire 660-page Budget Book (12 MB pdf file) here.

This picture has been showing up on billboards around town, though I clipped it from the Gazette: it’s part of the current ad campaign for a a local gaming establishment. What I can’t fathom is the actual relevance of the image, though I have come up with a few possible explanations:

• It’s gotta be the shoes.
• Made you look, didn’t it? Now shuddup and gamble.
• It’s the Kickapoo Casino; this is the “kick” part.

On an actual billboard, this tends to make me wonder whatever happened to the 49.958-Foot Woman.

There’s an old real-estate quandary: all else being equal, do you buy the biggest house on a blah block, or the smallest house on a block you otherwise couldn’t afford?

History records that I did the latter. However, I’m not quite sure how this rule translates to automobiles, especially now that there are actual Tata Nanos being built. And there is serious demand for the lowest-priced car on earth:

About a month ago, Tata Motors began accepting pre-orders (through a lottery/booking slip form) for the World’s Cheapest Car, the Nano. In the first week, Tata announced it had sold over 81,000 booking forms but Tata has even better news to report this week: 203,000 fully paid bookings. Now that the pre-order window has closed, Tata will use a computer to randomly pick the first 100,000 people who will get to take possession of [the] tiny car in July.

Are all these people buying the stripper version? Not even:

Tata Motors says that the Nano Standard makes up 20 percent of the bookings, while the Nano CX snagged 30 percent, leaving the remaining 50 percent of the orders for the top-end Nano LX. The LX apparently offers metallic paint as well as power windows, fog lamps, air conditioning and heater.

And that most bodacious of the Tatas is selling, not for the $2000 or so of the base version, but upwards of $4000. At that price, you have to ask yourself:

If the price tag is going to cross Rs 2 lakh [Rs 200,000] for the Nano, should you consider plonking in even more and look at any of the alternatives such as the Alto, or even the Chevrolet Spark?

Obviously, if you are someone who decides to go in for the Nano LX, you are not exactly the low-end customer who is looking for “just a car”. You want your luxuries, and you are willing to pay more than Rs 2 lakh on the road for a little car — why not go in for a bigger, more powerful car that is also reliable? That is a question you should seriously consider.

The Chevy in question is a ten-year-old Daewoo design that can be had in Mexico, for instance, as the Pontiac Matiz G2; the Alto is a kei-class buggy by Suzuki.

Meanwhile, Tata says it will sell the top-end version in the States, for a price as yet undetermined. At, say, the $7k point — it costs money to meet Federal standards, after all — you have a choice between a brand-spankin’ new Nano and a four-year-old Hyundai Accent.

And it’s even sorta accurate, at least at the top. A current thread at SuperiorPics is called Women in Short Dresses Cutting Down Telephone Poles with Chainsaws.

These days, Austin and San Francisco each have somewhere around 800,000 people, though the entire Bay Area is far more populous than the Texas Hill Country.

I wouldn’t count on this being a permanent condition, though:

When comparing California with Texas, U-Haul says it all. To rent a 26-foot truck one way from San Francisco to Austin, the charge is $3,236, and yet the one-way charge for that same truck from Austin to San Francisco is just $399. Clearly what is happening is that far more people want to move from San Francisco to Austin than vice versa, so U-Haul has to pay its own employees to drive the empty trucks back from Texas.

On that basis, if you’re going to Detroit they should probably just give you a truck.

Used to be, if you rolled your own smokes — tobacco, anyway — you forked over a little more than a buck a pound to the Feds for tax. Now it’s closer to $25.

Which means the next step shouldn’t surprise anyone:

A buddy of mine gave me some tobacco seeds he got from an “old indian feller o’er yonder”. Said it smoked like Marlboro.

So, I took some and started them in little styrofoam cups.

In about a week, these sprouts will be large enough to transplant outside in my large planters. Then I will transfer them to a larger, tilled area. I hear they get very large and have beautiful flowers.

One word of warning: the government is getting very large, and it may decide to tax Styrofoam.

Bill Peschel traces the history of the phrase “going postal,” which seems to have been first cited in the St. Petersburg Times, circa 1993. Wikipedia has the citation:

“The symposium was sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen so many outbursts that in some circles excessive stress is known as ‘going postal.’ Thirty-five people have been killed in 11 post office shootings since 1983.” Some USPS workers do not approve of the term “going postal” and have made attempts to stop people from using the saying. Others feel it has earned its place appropriately.

There were two such outbursts on the same day (Seis de Mayo) in ’93, which prompted the Postal Service to take action:

As a result of these two shootings, in 1993 the Postal Service created 85 Workplace Environment Analysts for domicile at its 85 postal districts. These new positions were created to help with violence prevention and workplace improvement. In February 2009, the Postal Service unilaterally eliminated these positions as part of its downsizing efforts.

Nice to know we don’t have to worry about that anymore.

As a resident of central Oklahoma, I am required here to mention our own, um, contribution to the cause, one Patrick Sherrill, who shot up the Edmond post office in 1986. As is our wont, we eventually got to the point where we could make fun of it: the 2003 film Making Arrangements (reviewed here) describes a period of upheaval at a flower shop as “going floral.”

Addendum: Live from Muskogee, Oklahoma, courtesy of regular reader Mel:

Susan Boyle and Carrie Prejean, objects of scorn:

In both cases we find people being treated as beneath contempt — as not meriting the slightest basic human decency — as, essentially, unpersons — unless and until they meet certain conditions. It so happened that Susan Boyle met those conditions by demonstrating an unsuspected and unlikely-seeming artistic talent. Carrie Prejean, meanwhile, excluded herself from those conditions by demonstrating an incorrect opinion.

This is graphable:

And the combination thereof:

The lesson for us all:

The priorities for someone wishing to be treated decently are clearly:

1. Conform to the correct opinions.
2. Have some artistic talent of some sort that will impress people.
3. Be beautiful.

At the very least, make sure you conform.

I am so screwed.

(Via Tatyana.)

This week’s Carnival of the Vanities, the 333rd in the series, is, says Andrew Ian Dodge, a Gale of a CoTV.

I was a Navy brat, so “gale” to me means high sustained winds, something I see a lot of here in Oklahoma, although I’ve seen winds far in excess of gale force: the massive tornado outbreak in central Oklahoma, ten years ago this week, is generally believed to have reached F5 status, though by the time it got to my neighborhood, it was down to F4, a mere 333 kilometers per hour.

Some time Wednesday evening, one of the Neighborhood Babes dropped off a sack of newsletters, which I, in heavy crash mode after a busy day at the shop, didn’t notice until this morning. So the first order of business once I got home today was to deliver the newsletters to the folks on the block — and, intermittently, to irritate a visiting puppy who objected in principle to people on foot — which would be followed by a perfunctory (all it deserves at the moment) mowing job out back.

Bad idea. The combination of multiple vehicles and narrow driveways means occasional trips across the grass, and at the moment, what with five inches of rain in the past week, the ground is, as Trini puts it, “squishy”: the ridiculously-small wheels on the ol’ Lawn Hog would sink all the way to the axle were I to try such a thing. Fortunately, we’ve had maybe six hours of sunshine in two weeks: the darkness, as it were, plays hell with my sense of well-being, but it also retards lawn growth. (The weeds of course don’t give a damn, but I’ve done a fair amount of de-weeding already.) And it’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow and probably most of the rest of the month.

Of the four major auto-buff monthlies, I subscribe to three, and for the first time I can remember, all three of them arrived on the same day. So I had lots of fresh statistics to examine, and at some point, I found myself thinking, Does anybody really give a damn about zero to sixty?

Well, obviously the guys (or girl, in the case of Automobile) who run these mags think so, or they wouldn’t keep hammering away at it month after month. I did a quick scan of Car and Driver’s Road Test Digest, and the 0-60 numbers vary over nearly a six-to-one range: the Bugatti Veyron does the deed in a stirringly-negligible 2.5 seconds, while the smart fortwo in Passion trim will take a sluglike 14.4. (The online version hasn’t been updated all year. Go figure.)

Even allowing for the grandly-general “faster is better,” what’s fast enough? Sandy, my late, lamented Mazda 626, saddled with a tiny (just under 2.0 liters) four-banger and a Ford slushbox, was rated by the manufacturer at 12.5 seconds, easily the worst showing of any 2000 mid-sized sedan. It didn’t seem that slow, I thought, and once I actually attempted to do the measurement; I came up with 11.6, which does not inspire anyone but which didn’t sound quite so slow. And truth be told, I never felt the car was all that slow, especially since it didn’t complain much with the revs up. (The maximum 130 ponies could be had at 5500 rpm, a thousand short of the redline; above 6000, the little engine mostly processed gasoline into noise.)

Still: what’s fast enough? Only once have I seen this addressed in a car mag: in an early-80s (I think) issue of C/D, in which L. J. K. Setright explained why he’d bought a Volkswagen Scirocco: one reason, he said, was that it met his requirement of zero to sixty in ten seconds. The Scirocco, back then, was considered speedy. Nowadays, family sedans break nine seconds; give them six cylinders and they’ll break eight, even seven.

Before you ask: Gwendolyn knocks out 0-60 in about eight seconds, though I haven’t put a stopwatch on her.