Friday, October 24, 2008

Check Your Sources!

One item that has left me so disappointed with the political process in the US is the negative tone of the invective thrown around by extremists on both sides. Perhaps its simply the reality of a two-party system, or maybe its just human nature; but the problem is exacerbated when such extreme partisanship spreads misinformation. I’ve been particularly disappointed in some of the libel spreading about Obama. Let’s consider excerpts from this chain email that’s been floating around:

email: “keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran.”
fact - This is simply not true (see below). While it is easy enough to manipulate imagery, this photo has been verified through several news sources and clearly shows Obama being sworn in on the Bible:

email: Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches. ed: The email typically includes the following image:

fact - This image comes from an event during the singing of the national anthem, not the Pledge of Allegiance. For proof of Obama’s ability to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, watch this video, or this one.

The emails that are floating around with such misinformation are frustrating because many people lack the wherewithal to evaluate the source in one way or another. This leads folks to build upon some very bad information and even perpetuates the nonsense. In fact the chain email states: “We checked this out on “snopes.com”. It is factual. Check for yourself.” Well, I did. And almost all of it is wrong - and the rest is certainly not factual. I guess the authors assumed most people would just believe them without checking. Unfortunately, they were right. (For more craziness see the snopes.com representation of misguided Kenyan missionaries.)

I’m sure we’ve all experienced frustrating and emotional political conversations where you simply have to stop the discourse because its not based upon any true and observable reality, but instead on mere hearsay and false information. What makes me so very sad is the good people will base their votes on such.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Case Against Sarah Palin

I was going to write a lengthy diatribe regarding the difficulties surrounding the Palin candidacy. But then time passed, and the circumstances made the situation clear…

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

New Macbooks

It’s a busy day in Techland. Apple announced a number of new products today that are very interesting. First, is the overdue update to the laptop line. Specifically, the MacBook Pro has received it’s much-needed update. With it’s new graphics chipset, I should finally be able to see some appreciable speed gains for my work. I am sorry to see the lack of a 17” model however, since I’ve enjoyed that form factor for many years now. Perhaps it will be forthcoming? In any event, my own laptop it 3 years old, and so now it’s time to replace it.

Also announced today is the new MacBook which implements many of the same features at a reduced price. The white plastic Macbook is now available for $999 street price, $899 educational.

Finally, a 24” display (with integrated mic, speakers, and camera) was also announced today. 

OpenOffice Finally Arrives

OpenOffice 3 was released today and it represents the release that we’ve all been looking for. Primarily, it reads all MS office files (though it cannot save to the newer XML format); but more importantly it runs natively on the Mac OS without the need for X11 (which normal every day users would be avoiding anyway). So, it’s here, it’s real, and you really don’t need to spend money on MS Office when you can get better functionality (on the Mac and Unix platforms at least) for free. Christopher Dawson has more details on his blog.

My point here is not that you should ditch MS Office, but simply that you don’t have to use it - especially if you don’t have access to a cheap educational version. In fact, I rarely use office. I simply have better options on the Mac (I acknowledge that there is a dearth of suitable replacement software for the Windows platform). Here are the tools I employ:

Word Processing - Nisus Writer, Mellel
Spreadsheet - Excel
Database - Bento
Presentation - Keynote

Monday, October 13, 2008

Bento 2

If you’ve been reading this fall, you no doubt know that I’ve been loving Bento - a super easy-to-use database for the masses. They’ve just released (today) Bento 2, with some nice features including added support for interoperation with Excel. Nice. For $49, you can’t beat it - by far it strikes me as the easiest database manager for casual users to employ.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

College Football

I love college football, even if I don’t have much time to watch it (thank you TiVo for taking a 4 hour event and making it skim-able to 2 hours). But this weekend was crazier than most. Ivan Maisel has a fun article up at ESPN.com for anyone trying to wrap their brains around what happened. Some of my favorite prose includes:

“Northwestern and Vanderbilt are no longer unbeaten. That doesn’t necessarily surprise anyone, but it’s not a sentence you get to write very often.

Michigan lost to Toledo 13-10. Repeat the last sentence of the previous paragraph.”

OSU is my team of course, and its been a tough season even though they are winning. I’m still struck by how easily they were handled by USC and it gives me concern for the Penn State game…

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Opening the Kindle

As I continue my love affair with the iPod Touch, I’m struck by how effective it is as a text reader. I wouldn’t want to read long books on it - much as I wouldn’t want to watch long movies. But, I love having books, photos and film on my Touch so that I can reference them in class or whenever the conversation calls for it.

I’ve been a critic of the Kindle since it came out - I’m all for the idea, but the implementation seemed rough to me. But, Joe Brockmeier has an article at ZDnet that does a good job of suggesting a solution that could really make the Kindle an interesting device: open up the Linux-based Kindle to third party developers.

Monday, October 06, 2008

Economic Meltdown

The economic meltdown that we’ve been witnessing has left me incensed at the incompetence of my government. Specifically, I’m frustrated that folks didn’t see this coming. I’m not an economist and I knew it was going to be bad (but I didn’t envision this). And, while I’m not a fan of the 700 billion dollar bailout, I do believe it needed to be done. I’m not sure that the drama served us well, but whatever…

What concerns me is that Congress as well as the administration seems to lack real understandings of what is going on and what can be done. Case in point? There seems to be a lack of understanding of what has been done as well as what would make the situation better - see this CNBC article. It furthers my misgivings about my elected officials ability to truly understand and effectively work on the problem. Simply throwing money at the problem is not going to help. After all, at this point, the National Debt has topped 10 trillion dollars.

I hope we all do our part to vote out most of the current office holders - regardless of party affiliation. Speaking of which, as an interesting aside, I found the chart of the debt trajectory on the Swamp site to be interesting. I’ve been arguing for some time that the Republican party has become deeply disconnected from its ideological views. As a fiscal conservative myself, I would appreciate a conservative approach to economics. However during the Reagan/Bush and Bush2 administrations we have seen the growth of government spending, size, and the national debt. This seems (to me) to be in direct opposition to conservative ideals. Ironically, the Clinton administration saw the shrinking of government and sizeable reduction in the National Debt. Some might argue that that was the result of the Republican legislature in the 90’s but that position doesn’t hold up f you consider the Republican majority enjoyed by the Bush2 administration.

What’s my point? I think that the Republican party doesn’t reflect true conservative values – well, at least not economic values.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Cool Mac Software

Here are a few applications I’m toying with right now:

Opacity
Picturesque
FotoMagico
WriteRoom
Fission

Most have free downloads, so try them and share your thoughts!