Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

No, it isn’t April 1st. A company is selling “business bibs”, which are a faux suit that a man can wear during a video conference. At a cost of $150 it makes me wonder why someone wouldn’t just buy a suit instead, but I’m strange that way — I like my pants with a suit jacket.

I recently played around with an avatar tool from Yahoo and was able to create the following likeness to myself in the “real world.”

It is rather fun and fairly versatile. It effectively captures me, dressing more formally than required (or probably expected) in a Library environment. I would choose some better shoes and I would wear a pocket square, but on the whole it is pretty accurate looking.

Who would have thought? In addition to being a tasty morning drink, Coffee could provide shield from radiation. First I find out that coffee may be good for health and that it wards off liver cancer and now this!

How much longer can it be before coffee spam makes it way to my email box?

Today, while attempting to pay a property tax bill online with Albemarle County, I noticed that they have a “convenience fee”, amounting to 3% of the bill. I’m not sure what is convenient about this, but the page cites Virginia Code 2.2-614.1 as justification for the charge.

I mailed them a check. Sure, it is less convenient, but I hardly feel motivated to pay for the privilege of paying property taxes.

Essays: ‘Hammer & tickle’ by Ben Lewis | Prospect Magazine May 2006 issue 122

You can’t imagine Stalin or Khrushchev telling a joke about his own unpopularity, but Gorbachev did. In 1996 he appeared on the Clive Anderson show in Britain and told this one, whose lineage can be traced back through the 20th century: A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he’s had enough. He turns round to his friend and says “That’s it. I’m going to kill that Gorbachev,” and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” replies the other, “there was an even longer queue over there.”

The full article is a great for anyone interested in cultural issues surrounding Communism. If you want to poke fun today, consider a good-natured contest to remix The Internationale — probably the most widely translated and known song in the world, promoting worker solidarity.

As tax day approaches, I would like to share a suggestion for our politicians who crafted this byzantine system whereby we tally our civic dues.

I propose that all members of congress should be required to prepare their own returns and certify, under penalty of perjury, that the documentation is accurate. If it’s good enough for SEC filings for our corporate executives, it should be fitting for our politicians.

Apple continues to surprise and shock me, what with their two button mouse and recent switch to Intel processors, but now they have made it easy to dual boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new hardware. Can the apocalypse be any more at hand?

One thing is certain though. Apple has a much better sense of design and aesthetic than Microsoft. Take a gander at the Microsoft Windows logo, as seen on all official product packaging:

Now look at the svelt redesign from Apple:

I think Apple could make the devil look good. Apocalypse, indeed.

A BBC article reports that Americans know more about The Simpsons TV show than the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Only one in four could name more than one of the five freedoms it upholds but more than half could name at least two members of the cartoon family.

About one in five thought the right to own a pet was one of the freedoms.

I’m sure there are a good number of things of which I’m ignorant about, but this is basic stuff. I’m glad we are exporting Democracy elsewhere, because I don’t know how it can continue here.

The American Library Association is endorsing a political button for Librarians who object to the Patriot Act. I’ve met my share of radical Librarians, but militant? Not unless they are Conan the Librarian (also embodied in a Macintosh application).

As an aside, I work in a Library so this is all in jest.

Microsoft ads aim to erase ‘huge’ image

Microsoft Corp., the world’s biggest software maker, will spend $120 million a year on an advertising campaign to fight its image as “a huge American company.”

“Because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me!”

Big companies get a bad name because they lack agility and no matter what image they want to project, they are remembered as they were, not as they are. You can short cut this to some degree by throwing money at the problem, but it doesn’t change the underlying facts.

Microsoft isn’t evil incarnate, but big companies who try to act like they aren’t big are as phony and embarrassing as adult men who wear baseball caps (backward) or balding men who do the comb over thing. Or maybe it is like the person who buys into the whole vertical stripe clothing angle — it may fool the eye for a moment, but it t’aint foolin’ nobody.

For the love of God, Microsoft — act your age and be yourself. These corporate make-overs are not necessary and they only end up hurting you.

To all merchants:

As we approach the Christmas season I’m sure that you are eager to sell a good number of baubles and whatnot. I’m told that you do about half of your business during the holidays. This is a big time for us all, which brings me to my request.

If it isn’t too much trouble, would you kindly refrain from pitching Christmas-related items before I’ve properly enjoyed Thanksgiving? It is crass and poor taste to upstage the turkeys and pilgrims. They don’t like it, and neither do I.

And another thing — kindly stop reminding me how many “shopping days” it is until Christmas, as if shopping were the sole function of the holiday. I seem to recall a celebration of a birth, but amid the tinsel and secularism the memory escapes me. Maybe you can do something helpful about this.

This writing space gives me practice for communication, which I like to think of as a useful life skill since I neither live on an island (apologies to visitors from Hawaii) nor am I antisocial. The Poynter Institute has a fantastic guide to 50 writing tools for improvement. In the coming months I hope to stamp out that passive voice and seek out my inner grammarian.

For some fun, check out a guide to writing good (sic).

Read a charming anecdote from Elliotte Rusty Harold on how he suggests that Apple should test software:

I graded a recent applet homework for my Intro to Java course on Safari 2.0 using Java 1.4.2 (not the recent update). 4 of the 20 assignments managed to crash my browser at least once. If Apple wants to debug their VM, they could do worse than ask a bunch of undergraduates to write some applets. I suspect the students tend to do things no experienced programmer would be likely to do, and hence uncover bugs that would normally be missed.

This reminds me of a professor I had back in college for a database design/programming course. We were tasked to write our own database and demo it in front of the class. He had the uncanny talent of instructing the student to enter in bad data or to press buttons out of order to corrupt data and to crash the program. Needless to say, my program failed badly, along with most others.

Therefore, to follow on to Elliott’s clever suggestion, after Apple recruits undergraduates to write applets they should find a pernicious instructor to walk said applet through its paces.

Language Miniatures 124: The pronoun ‘y’all’

Something odd seems to be going on here. Whether we think it should be that way or not, the fact is that southern speech is the most strongly stigmatized dialect in the U.S. And yet
it is a ’southernism’ that is indisputably spreading far outside the South. As it does, it is clearly losing its status as a distinctly southern form. A former hallmark of southern speech is more and more being used by persons with no roots in the South.

How do y’all like that?! As a reformed southerner, I think it would might help a little, but I doubt if the yankees will be able to apply the proper twang and intonation. :)

Secret life of the OpenSolaris code

A cursory search through the code [for OpenSolaris] revealed almost a complete lack of commonly-used profanity. This is in contrast with other examples such as the leaked Windows 2000 code and the Linux kernel project — which are famous in coding circles for the number of rude words programmers have included in an adult-rated effort to describe how a particular portion of the code works.

While I’ve been a Sun fan for years, having run the Solaris Central site between 1988 and 2003, this cracks me up. Someone should put together a code metric on LoP - Lines of Profanity.

Today I share with you two great ideas, courtesy of the nice folks at Boing Boing that could have made me a millionaire if I would have thought of them first:

1. Hot dog buns packaged with the same number as hot dogs. What a simple idea that is overdue.
2. Electrical outlets that can swivel so that phone charges and the like don’t cover up two slots.

CIO Today: Cuba to switch from Windows to Linux

Cuba will gradually switch to the open-source Linux operating system for its state computers, eliminating its exclusive use of Microsoft Windows, the government daily Juventud Rebelde reported Tuesday.

I wonder how this will jive with Bill Gates’ view that open source advocates are communists. Well, in this case, he might be right.

Times Online

In every age and in every country older people complain about the rudeness of the young %u2014 but rarely is the gulf between the two as great as in contemporary Japan. Exposed to the corrosive crudeness of Western popular culture, young Japanese are abandoning the sometimes stifling codes of politeness for which their country is famous, while older people look on in horror.

I’m an etiquette enthusiast, which is to say that I actually enjoy reading about it from Emily Post and George Washington’s Rules of Civility. That said, I think it is a sign of bad times that even I find the above article to be a little humorous. When twirling one’s umbrella is an offense so grievous to warrant the creation of a government study group it must mean that Japan is a fantastic place to live. Unless, of course, you are a gaijin, in which case the place may not seem as polite. Who knows, maybe it is all a misunderstanding.

Indiana House passes daylight-saving time bill

Daylight-saving time is coming to all of Indiana for the first time in more than 30 years.

In a history-making drama, the Indiana House voted 51-46 late Thursday to pass the controversial issue, which has dominated the legislature, coffee shops and kitchen tables for four months.

Indiana is both out of touch and boring if this is the talk of the town. As much as I chide about Indiana, as it was the place where I grew up, I do think daylight savings is a non issue. On a deeper level, I think it says something out society when it is easier to make everyone change their clocks than to just shift our life schedules a little. It seems to me the equivalent of an adult asking for a hall pass to use the restroom. Are we so regimented that we need to change our clocks to realize that daylight is coming sooner or later?

CNN.com - A Python gets serious

In the book he [Terry Jones of Python fame] takes on the phrase “war on terrorism” with a Python’s sense of the absurd: “But how is ‘terrorism’ going to surrender?” he writes. “It’s well known, in philological circles, that it’s very hard for abstract nouns to do anything at all of their own volition.”

One might say that the war on terrorism (I prefer the phrase war on terrorists, by the way) is much like the war on poverty. It has no definable end in sight. This speaks to the power of terminology and how it can shape public policy.