Nicest of the Damned

Buchanan, Dowd, John Paul II, Natalie Maines....

Whose War?/ Print

Back Off, Syria and Iran!

I give the Bush administration credit for their spinning skills. The tone of the coverage has suggested American support for the Iraq invasion, but Pat Buchanan and Maureen Dowd are both against it (and, thank you Michael Moore, the Pope and the Dixie Chicks, as well). I think there's a tendency to conjoin support for the troops with support for the administration, which is just silly.

I have tremendous faith in the military's capabilities to achieve a clearly stated administration objective. I have zero faith in the current administration's ability to choose between peaceful and military alternatives and clearly state an objective.

If it turns out that the military was overruled on the necessary forces to get the administration's job done, we need regime change at home. Nineteen months and counting....

Also:

15 Stories They've Already Bungled

Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher (one of the leading magazines for journalists) critiques the fog of war passing for reporting, and notes that 14 times out of 15 so far, the stories have been reported in a way that favors the US/UK/Aussie invasion.

For days you're too lazy to blog...

The Brunching Shuttlecocks | The Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator

I got:

Not that it matters

My mind is like a fog. Basically nothing noteworthy happening today. I've just been sitting around waiting for something to happen. Not much on my mind to speak of. I can't be bothered with anything these days, but shrug.

Current Mood: stagnant

Seen at MetaFilter.

Project Fu

Reforming Project Management

I used to totally disrespect project management as a discipline. I saw it as needless bureaucracy, as paper pushing control freakery. The hard stuff of software is the technology, right?

As I've gotten older, and earned a collection of development bruises, I've changed my tune. In technology, the soft skills are the hardest thing. Getting multiple hotshot programmers to agree to a single standard, creating a timeline that's anything more than a pure guess, and creating a project structure that minimizes the chance of a political logjam are really difficult.

Hal Macomber offers up a project management weblog, that looks at new developments in project management theory. If you're not married to a PM methodology, you'll find plenty of ideas from which you can pick and choose.

Myth II: Soulblighter OS X native

Myth II: Soulblighter Version 1.3.2

Myth II is an awesome game created by Bungie back in their pre-Halo, pre-Microsoft days. A squad-level tactical game, it was one of two games I immediately verified would work on my new miniBook (under Classic, but both worked well).

Now a group has updated the game to full Carbon libraries, and added support for new servers (for multiplayer mode), so you never have to drop into Classic mode. This means the game loads faster and runs faster.

There’s also a version 1.3.2 for Windows, adding everything but OS X compatibility. If you own the CD, go download the new version ASAP.

Atkins update: Down 38

As of this morning, I’m at 230, down 38 or so pounds. I highly recommend that people go on diets when their weight ends in a 2, 3, 7, or, 8 — it gives you more mini-motivators. Since I started at 268, I got a little mental boost after 3 pounds at 265, then at 5 pounds lost, again at 8 pounds for crossing the 260 threshold, and again at 10 pounds for losing 10 pounds. If I had started at 270, I would have had half as many ego boosts over the last 4 months…

I had a pleasant chat with a reporter from Boston’s newspaper of record on Thursday. His editor located the site through Google, and suggested a story. I got the decided impression that the story suggestion was “How about a story on food nuts?” since the reporter was also planning to talk to a “whole foods” advocate. He was interested in any religious aspects to Atkins — “Do you see this as a cult? Is it something you intend to do for your whole life?”

I told him I see Weight Watchers (no link, since their site tells me to upgrade from Camino .7 to view it) as more of a religion than Atkins. My parents have both done Weight Watchers, and part of what makes it work is the structure: the rules for eating, the peer pressure of the weekly semi-public weigh-in, the motivation and lessons of the group leader.

Christy and I are doing Atkins out of empiricism, not faith. In case the skeptics are right, we’ve increased our supplement intake (multivitamin, calcium, fiber supplement) and our water intake (and how). I’m still not convinced that I understand why Atkins works, but I’m pretty certain that, for the two of us, at least, it does.

Check out my Atkins archive for even more on low-carb eating.

Staff of life, now with 50 percent less carbs!

Other than a couple of cheats, I haven’t had bread since November. A family member who has been on Atkins recommended Nature’s Own Reduced Carbohydrate bread. Each slice has 7 grams of carbohydrate, but 2 grams are fiber, so only 5 grams per slice count against your daily total.

I put two slices around some roast beef and swiss, and enjoyed it. The texture is just a tiny bit different than regular bread, but much softer and fluffier than gluten bread.

Interestingly, over at BoingBoing, I found a new link to this story about the grain growers launching an anti-“Fatkins” campaign, also aimed at affecting the upcoming revisions to the RDA food pyramid.

Maybe even more dangerous than Richard Perle

CDC | Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)

There's a new illness spreading in East Asia. It's being reported as 'atypical pneumonia', but is officially called severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS.

A number of early cases have led to dozens of hospital workers also developing the syndrome, and doctors have yet to find a successful treatment. The syndrome is probably airborne, so CDC is recommending hospitals take both airborne and contact precautions.

The winnah...

So it was down to the wire, but I just registered:

NetNewsWire

I decided on NNW because, of all the apps on my machine, it's the one I use the most that I haven't paid for. Which brings up an interesting point -- when I entered my serial number, it was all anticlimax. Brent doesn't disable any functionality before you register, and I still had 2+ weeks on the evaluation copy.

I would have preferred a blast of trumpets, or something.

Early candidates for next week are:
• Konfabulator
• Watson
• Entourage Email Archive X (I'm a very happy registered user of Softhing's Outlook Email Archive)

This last almost beat out NetNewsWire tonight, since Entourage (and any other Office app) was crashing on open. A quick Google search led me to a page documenting how to rebuild the Entourage database. It's exactly what you would think: just hold down the option key when you double-click on the application, then select "Typical" or "Advanced" from the resulting dialog box.

I kid you not. Nevertheless, it recovered my e-mail, 21 megabytes in all. Now I need to archive it before it does it again.

I've never been so proud to be from Ohio

DDN | 14th Amendment possibly snagged in Ohio House

The Ohio state senate finally got around to ratifying the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights regardless of race. They did so unanimously, with every senator as a co-sponsor.

Unfortunately, the Ohio state House of Representatives isn't quite ready to leap into the late 19th Century just yet.

State Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, is proposing to instead proclaim: "Resolved that the General Assembly rejects those judicial interpretations of the 14th Amendment that unreasonably restrict state governments from promoting the free exercise of religion, defending the sanctity of unborn life and ensuring the equitable distribution of education dollars to aid students enrolled in schools sponsored by religious institutions."

Seen at How Appealing.

Putting my money where my mouth is

I'm eliminating MyPod from this week's "Frank Antes Up" competition. It's a great idea, and shows tremendous promise, but it's still in beta, despite the 1.0 tag.

My copy has stopped synching, hanging on a "File or resource not found" error. The support for lyrics is cool, but if you try to synch more than one lyric at a time, you'll get all the titles, but they'll all show the same lyric. Also, the program needs to break up longer text entities (like an RSS feed) into smaller bodies, since long text fields scroll badly on the iPod. Oh yeah -- I also get a duplicate help menu after the real one. All posted.

I've also had a couple of unexpected quits. Even so, I am looking forward to the 1.0.2 release.

The current frontrunners are NetNewsWire (with which I'm posting this entry), URL Manager Pro (which loses points through no fault of its own because Safari doesn't support shared menus), and Konfabulator, for which I discovered a cool Beginning Widget Writer's Guide yesterday.