Photoblog – I love Washington.

I Palin-drone I

I watched last night’s debate, like most of you, with NASCAR fascination. Sure I cared about the people behind the wheel, but I really came to see the crashes. I wanted to see a yellow flag moment, where everyone had to slow down as either Biden or Palin were pulled from the wreckage. I didn’t get that. What I got was a surprisingly informative look at both of the candidates. So, you know… good job debate…I guess you did your thing. But next time, try to have more people in jumpers on fire.

The debate itself was well presented. Gwen Ifill kept everything moving in a cordial manner, and quickly nullified any partisan concern over her pick to moderate. There were no surprises in the questions, and not really any in the answers. But who won?

Reading the papers this morning, it would appear the world feels it was Palin. Which is odd, because I was certain news people would have actually, you know, watched the debate. Her only success was that she didn’t fail entirely. But the bar had been set so low that not failing completely was all she needed to do to succeed. Biden outdebated her on every subject. Which is sad because he didn’t exactly bring the thunder in the first half.

Biden was metered and well spoken, save a couple of hiccups. For the most part, his facts were in order. There were a couple of gray areas that he pushed into his camp, as expected, and the repetition of a misleading line about a single company getting a $4B tax break when that break would go to multiple corporations (he did once add the word ‘like’, meaning he was aware that more than one company would be getting the break). But over all he stayed on message, stayed composed, and most importantly, he answered the questions.

Palin was also metered. Beyond metered. She obviously had about four topics on her sheet with which she was comfortable because she would blatantly fail to answer questions, instead directing them back into one of her comfort zones. The repetition on her side of the stage was nearly unbearable. Let me boil down her answers really quickly:

Energy! Reign in spending! Energy! I run Alaska! Wall street oversight! Energy!

When discussing foreign policy, she was pretty much worthless. She had obviously practiced saying Ahmadinejad’s name and perhaps was proud of that fact as, from her standpoint, he was the only foreign dignitary of note. She did mention Kim Jong Il once or twice, but only as a tack on at the end. She also took no time to learn how to properly pronounce ‘nuclear’.

Being a debate of supporting characters, the topic often shifted to each person’s primary and his standpoint on issues. I’m OK with this because, as Biden correctly pointed out, there are well drawn lines in the Constitution for the role and power of the Vice President. The focus should be on the presidential candidates and their plans for the next four to eight years. I was far more interested in the differentiations between the VP picks and the primaries. Biden was too hesitant to embrace the difference, which was disappointing. He should have been proud that he and Obama have different ideas. The red lights are important to decision making and should not be a point of shame or concern. A president with a cabinet of yes men is…well, it’s been going on for 8 years, hasn’t it? So I guess everyone knows how that works out. Palin, on the other hand, said a few times that because her and McCain were both mavericks, they would butt heads. The problem is, they are neither mavericks nor really any different from one another. McCain is far more experienced, smarter, and knows how to order off of a Sunset menu at Denny’s, but for the vast majority of important issues they are exactly the same. They are both party voters on major issues and more concerned about businesses than people.

The biggest non-surprise of the night was that Palin used the old GOP standby of potential loss of jobs when business taxes climb. I hear this a lot from the GOP, but I have yet to see any actual evidence. Clinton’s stint in the White House saw higher taxes on businesses than had been seen in almost 20 years, and it also saw the biggest drop in unemployment for the same period. The dollar was stronger and people were going home with more purchasing power in their pockets. But Palin kept whipping out ‘shoring up the economy’ and ‘tax breaks’ as being the only way to stop jobs from disappearing. The problem is, the tax breaks go to companies who offshore jobs (shore up, just not our shores). She pushed to ignite the fear people have of being unable to provide for their families in tough economic times. She needed that fear, because when people are afraid, they don’t think rationally. They react. And you can provide any solution. If you are falling off the side of a building and a person whom you know plans to kill you holds out his hand to help you up, you will take that hand. Because it’s a solution to your immediate fear. And that’s what Palin offered. Nothing but repeated soundbites in a quirky ‘folksy’ tone – a hand out to people she fully intends to feed to wolves.

As an aside —

Let’s talk for a minute about this whole ‘folksy’ thing. Palin, whenever backed into a corner, quickly shifts into a defense mode comprised of winking and dropping her tailing ‘g’s. It’s sickening and if you fall for it, you are an idiot. Folksy doesn’t belong in the White House. Someone who is JUST LIKE AN AVERAGE AMERICAN doesn’t belong in the White House. These people aren’t fixing carburetors or stocking shelves. They are running the goddamned United States. I don’t want a guy I could sit down and have a beer with talking to foreign dignitaries. I don’t want a guy who poorly retells Hustler jokes on his lunch break shaking hands with the leaders of the world. I want someone BETTER THAN. I want the BEST. And you should too.

–OK, rant over.

Over all, the debate itself held little surprise. Palin lost, but did not burst into flame. Biden showed he had experience and held on to his tongue. Palin contradicted herself more than that book from which she gets the entirety of her understanding of science and history. Biden held back too much – as he had to, under the circumstances. But to anyone who thinks Palin won, I ask you to do one thing. Pretend the exact same answers had been given by a male candidate. Seriously. Replay it in your mind with a man behind the podium. The reverse sexism in this instance is astounding. And it’s unfair to both candidates.

Think of the CHILDREN!

Rock band. Thou hast forsaken me.

I picked up Blood Sugar Sex Magik in the music store today. I picked it up because I’m old enough to have owned my first copy on cassette. I picked it up because I know the songs and I love them. I picked it up not expecting to have an abortion saved to my Xbox hard drive. Whoops.

To call the tracks edited wouldn’t do justice to the hatchet job done on the music. The very first song I played, Sir Psycho Sexy, was so butchered the vocals just disappeared for over half the song. Needless to say, I’m pretty pissed. I can understand the need to monitor content and make sure people are old enough to blah blah blah McYadda. The Xbox is dripping with parental controls. They are touted as one of the major reasons to pay for Live. Great… so let parents censor their kids that way. But no… the world is padded for breeders. Because they are a target demographic. Pandering to breeders and that nesting instinct is why a $700B bailout package is currently being tossed around by the legislature by the way. A bunch of people who HAD to have houses for their mouthbreathing bedwetters because that’s all ‘part of the plan’. Fuck your plan. And fuck you for making PG-13 the bar for Hollywood, making Miley Cirus a star, and making my video games sound like they were ran through a Kirk Cameron filter.

I mean, come on. The album is called BLOOD SUGAR SEX MAGIK. Jesus H. Christ on a Slip and Slide. Does that sound like a collection of lullibies or Wiggles b-sides?

To give you an idea of what was done…here are some lyrics from the Family Friendly version of Sir Psycho Sexy:

 

Deep inside the Garden of Eden      <– Note, Biblical references are A-OK!

Standing there ….. .. …. .. ……..

…….. . ….. .. .. …. ……. ……. .. .. ……

…. … .. that would be treason

Booty lookin’ too good …. .. .. …………

……. ……. …… …. . …….

I’m givin … …….. …… ………..

I won’t and I don’t hang up until I please her   <– I have no idea why this is OK but the rest isn’t.

Makin’ her feel like an over achiever

I take it ….. …. .. …….. ….. .. …… …

Then I give it back …. . …… … …….

 

No…really. That’s what was left of the lyrics. Absolute bullshit.

 

 

* Unabridged lyrics:

Deep inside the garden of Eden
Standing there with my hard on bleedin’
Theres a devil in my dick and some demons in my semen
Good God no that would be treason
Believe me Eve she gave good reason
Booty looking too good not to be squeezin’
Creamy beaver hotter than a fever
I’m a givin’ ’cause she’s the reciever
I won’t and I don’t hang up until I please her
Makin’ her feel like an over achiever
I take it away for a minute just to tease her
Then I give it back a little bit deeper

DRM, BluRay, and how Sony hates you

The percentage of sales lost to piracy is something of debate among the different circles of the Entertainment Industry. Some people will say it’s in the single digits in terms of percentage. Others say it’s nearly half. It’s no surprise that the first group contains researchers, surveyors, and scholars and the latter group contains executives and shareholders. Disregarding the beneficial effects of piracy (yes, there are some… the sales created through the viewing of pirated materials are swept under the rug but I assure you, there is a positive flow associated as well) and allowing the Chicken Littles’ extremely inflated numbers to have some sway, for the sake of argument let’s say piracy accounts for 20% loss. This itself is a false number, since many who pirate wouldn’t consume the material if piracy were unavailable. They simply have neither the means nor the driving interest to hear/play/watch these materials sans a free and easy delivery mechanism. Again, for the sake of argument we’re going to set the dial to 20%.

20% of Time Warner’s profits last year would have amounted to something in the key of $1.3Billion. That’s not a tiny (or verifiable) number, by any means! That also means that the profits they actually posted were $6.5Billion. So people paid to the company six and half billion dollars. People like you or me. Tack on the additional $20M they made from lawsuits against P2P users as well as likely unreported earnings, and you are sitting with a pretty profitable company. But something is wrong in the heads of the people making decisions at these companies. Severely wrong.

Somewhere along the way, someone thought that if you make it difficult to copy content, nobody would do it. And if people aren’t copying, then everyone who would have used a copied version would rush out and buy an original. This logic is completely flawed, but we’ll run with it. That being said, it costs $15,500 annually per property to license CSS. Add in the cost to produce the crappy anti-piracy ads (which only legitimate purchasers see) and the lawyer fees required to shake down the grandmothers and gradeschoolers the industry has been going after. Who knows how much is hemorrhaging to anti-piracy at this point. I know it’s enough to fund an entire sub-industry. But that’s not the point. The point of all of this is, 80% of people are NOT pirating content. The lion’s share of even potential profit is currently being forked over by people via legitimate channels. So why are we being punished?

Copy protection is only a factor for people who have NOT pirated. If you have a pirated copy of anything, copy protection has already been circumvented. So you are free to use that content as you wish. However, if you go to a store and lay down your money on the counter, the medium you are toting home in your little plastic bag is crawling with barriers put up assuming that YOU are a thief. Even though you just picked it up via a legitimate channel. That’s the crux of this whole mess. The RIAA, MPAA, and most major gaming companies assume everyone is a thief. They assume that the locks they place on content are the only things keeping every man, woman, and child from becoming a crazy, file swapping super crook. This just isn’t true. I have the means to get every movie I could ever want without dropping a dime. Yet, I have over 600 DVD/HDDVD/BluRay cases crowding my entertainment room. I could easily go to any of a thousand torrent sites and fill my harddrive with music. Yet I have thrown away hundreds of jewel cases and have books of CDs sitting in boxes. I have milk crates brimming with vinyl records of brand new music. Why? Because I enjoy movies and music. I enjoy video games. And I’m more than willing to pay for them. But it’s getting harder to justify.

Last Sunday I purchased a BluRay player for my PC. I was stoked to be able to watch movies in my computer room while tooling around on one of my other PCs. I installed the thing and booted up, ready to throw Superbad in the drive and have a laugh. Everything was set and in went the disk. An error immediately popped up telling me that my monitor didn’t support HDCP. I have a Dell 2305FPW and have no intention of replacing it. It’s a great monitor and I am not shelling out another $600 to play a format for which I’m already paying a premium. The reason your monitor has to be HDCP compliant is because Sony has decided that in order to protect their property, they must disable ALL channels through which a potential pirate could grab their precious content. This includes creating a DVI device which consumes the bitstream. Of which I could find none on the Internet. What I did find were nearly 20 torrents for Superbad in HD. So here’s a block put in by Sony which only negatively affects paying customers. A block which had me pondering piracy for more than a moment. Luckily I was able to find a program which easily circumvents the copy protection measures placed on the disk. Basically, I had to crack my legitimate copy just to use it in a reasonable way. Sony hates me. And they hate you too.

Wow, what a small world.

The outlets in my basement TV room went out today, so I had to find the number for the guy who owns the house. I tried looking him up online and got an odd surprise. Under his name was the name of a guy with whom I went to Highschool. Turns out, they work together. If I were still living in Spokane, this wouldn’t be a big surprise. I guess it shouldn’t be living near Seattle either. Still.

 

This has happened before. I saw a girl with whom I was infatuated throughout junior high in the caffeteria at work a few years ago. I’ve seen the occasional past accquaintence on the street. But it still always catches me off guard. I guess we are all really wired for the familiar.

ComASSTIC!

It’s no secret that Comcast has been pondering a monthly bandwidth cap for a while. The limits put on ‘unlimited’ internet all fall in line with the current trend in telecom. The major telecoms got a huge grant to improve the infrastructure and provide a faster base network and they passed the savings on to no one in particular. From the death of net neutrality to the per-kilobyte charges Time Warner is inflicting on the southern states, the promise of the internet dreamed by the pioneers who conceived it in the late 60s has died on the vine. Pocket monopolies give the vast majority of internet subscribers no choice – you get one phone company and one cable company in your area. The end. This stifles the competition promised by true capitalism and allows companies to get away with bullshit like monthly limits and packet diversion.

 

Comcast is playing up their cap as being a gift for people, practically. "The customers want a cap," says one of their press releases. Show me a customer who actually WANTS a cap and I’ll show you a customer that was given a question he or she didn’t understand. I’m sure the conversation went something like this:

 

Comcast: "Are you frustrated that the speeds we advertise almost never reflect the speed you experience?"

Customer: "Ayup."

Comcast: "You know, your network is shared by other people… other people who use up the bandwidth we sold you – but don’t actually have – downloading things! Things like we show on the commercials…music, games, movies…but probably movies with nudity in them. UnAmerican movies. With potty words. How does that make you feel?"

Customer: "They’s usin’ tha cables to get perNOGrafee? SINNERS!"

Comcast: "So do you think there should be limits to that?"

Customer: "Ayessir, I does."

 

The fact of the matter is, Comcast is right in saying that > 80% of their customers use barely any bandwidth on the system. These people check e-mail or surf news sites and that’s about it. Comcast claims that 1% of their customers are using over 90% of the total used bandwidth. Again, they are correct. That being said, think about this for a second. If 1% are using over 90% of the bandwidth available, yet they have sold a service promising bandwidth to 100 times that number of people, aren’t THEY actually in the wrong? It’s like the most epically overbooked flight in history. But instead of blaming the people overbooking the flight, they are blaming the people who are utilizing what they paid for. Gyms work on a similar principal. Memberships are sold based on the knowledge that only 3-5% of all active members actually use the gym regularly. So what if gyms started kicking you out if you used them actively? Would you stand for that?

 

The fact of the matter is, Comcast knows they don’t have enough product to cover promise. So to make up for that, rather than fixing their broken system, they take the smallest hit they can…punishing the people who expect the service they pay for.

 

"Oh!" they say, "250GB is SOOOO much bandwidth! You can’t possibly use it unless you’re downloading illegal software and media!"

 

"Bullshit!" says I.

 

A single HD movie is roughly 4-9GB. Netflix is offering movie rentals on the PC and on Xbox Live. A current gen video game through Steam or Direct2Drive is anywhere from 1GB to 12GB. Disk images are in the .7 – 4.5GB ranges. Music streams add up. Patches for online games, Windows, and software for 3 home computers comes in at nearly 10GB a month. Phone updates are generally another half a gig. I upload between 1 and 3 GB of photos to Flickr a month as well. Oh, and did I mention I have a Zune subscription? There’s anywhere from 2 to 10GB a month if I’m feeling eclectic.

 

So let’s break this down…

 

My download speed ranges from 25 to 33 megabits per second. That works out to about 3.625 megaBYTES per second at full speed. That means at full speed, I can download about 217.5MB in a minute. Comcast says I have 256,000MB a month. That means, assuming all downloads are at full speed (which they are not), I am allotted 1,177 minutes of downloads. 19.6 hours of downloads a month. Or about 38 minutes a day. 38 minutes, per day if I download at full speed. Yes, that’s 8.26GB a day. That does seem huge. But if you’re downloading as fast as that, you are more likely to stream movies and music. More likely to try game demos or use Steam instead of going to the store. Now share it out with everyone in your house. I have three active computer users in my house. That means each one gets 2.75GB a day. When the Olympics were streaming, I’d wager each of us hit that easily simply because the entire concept of digital delivery means we could all get what we wanted when we wanted it.

 

So there you have it. A completely legal usage pattern which could easily tip the ‘amazingly generous’ limit set by Comcast. As more media at higher quality becomes easier and more attractive to access online, more people will be brushing this limit. Within a few years, the limit will be laughable at best. Entertainment and communications will continue to demand more and more bandwidth. That’s just how it works.

 

Comcast should put their efforts into fixing their fucked up system, not punishing people who happen to utilize their network AS ADVERTISED.

 

 

 

A farewell to George Carlin

George Carlin passed away today at 71. While celebrity death is normally something to which I don’t give much thought, George hit me pretty hard. There have been a few that have choked me up a bit. Fred Rogers, Mel Blanc, Jim Henson, and Lorenzo Music to be specific. But George Carlin represented something deeper to me than any of the others. When I was three years old, my brother introduced me to George Carlin. His album, Indecent Exposure, had caught my eye. A silly man in a trench coat. At three, that was fucking comedy genius. My brother was always a bit of a anti-establishment supporter, so corrupting youth was right up his alley. At a little over 3, I sat in a darkened bedroom with huge headphones on my wee noggin, laughing at bad words and getting my first lesson in humor from some pressed vinyl at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. I didn’t get most of it. But he’d talk about farts or say shit and I was rolling.

 

I began sneaking the record into my room, almost ritualistically, over the next few months. I would gingerly set it on my FisherPrice record player, usually displacing 10 Little Indians or my Peter Pan picture disk. I would turn the volume down as low as I could and bury my face in a pillow as I cried with laughter. This continued for years. Slowly, more and more jokes made sense and my laughter only got louder. More records eventually joined the exodus from my brother’s bedroom (as well as the occasional Playboy). But every session began with Indecent Exposure. Carlin’s relevent and no-frills exploration of language and thought were responsible for my comedy upbringing. He nurtured and cultivated my sense of humor. He taught me that words have power because people give them power. But also that the power they held was easy enough to diffuse if you could see words for the symbols they were.

 

He cut through bullshit like a 1920’s explorer in a pith helmet cut through kudzu vines. And natives. So here I am, 12:30am…sitting in the dark and listening to Indecent Exposure. Laughing and crying at the same time. He was the most influential celebrity in my life, period; and I will miss him.

Don’t read this if you like church.

The clergy has some interesting history. History betrayed by vestigial linguistic markers in their lexicons. These go unnoticed by the throng of droning self-loathers who don their Sears specials once a week to go murmer half-remembered verses and feign piety. But they are there. Some are more obvious than others.

A pastor, for example, was traditionally one who tended sheep. Now I know the Christian masses have embraced this bullshit with open arms already. The lord is my shepherd and so forth. But to actually name the position of one who is to be your vassal to divinity after a guy who went home every night with sheep shit on his sandals seems a bit much to me. And any Scottsman will tell you what a shepherd does to his sheep when he’s not at home. I guess that imagry makes the whole thing more accurate.

A minister on the other hand is tasked only with ruling over others vicariously. They provide authority by proxy, if their name is to be taken at face value. So I guess these are the ‘go to’ guys for God. It exposes a fairly weak omnipitence if he needs some goon in a used car salesman suit to dole out his memos. "Mr. Pemberton, write this down: I’ve noticed lately that persons around the office – who shall remain nameless – have been failing to adhere to the ten posted rules at the entry. Owing to this, a huge pit of eternal suffering has been constructed and all shall be thrown into it unless they get back to me by end of life. Please respond via any one of my admins, as I will not be taking calls directly.

Dictated, not read –
God.

 

Go ahead and read that back to me Mr. Pemberton."

A bishop is nothing but a jailhouse guard for the Lord. Bishop, at its root, means simply ‘watcher’ or ‘overseer’. But does one really expect anything less from the established tyranny of organized religion? If you are making a run for the fence, the bishop is tasked with putting a bullet through your skull the moment you cross the Dead Line. Or at least clubbing you with some incense on a chain.

Sacred comes from a root which means both holy and accursed. Both usages rely on a root which means to bind or restrict. Faith will set you free – by tying the bonds just a bit tighter. Once your hands stop getting blood, you won’t even remember that they are there.

Sacrament, also sharing the ‘binding’ root is also a translation of the greek word for ‘Mystery’.

"What is it?"
"I don’t know!"
"Is it the body of Christ?"
"Fuck man, could be…"
"Well…eat it…find out!"
"But, what if it’s not? Won’t He be pissed?"
"It’s a mystery…"

Satan is a funny one. It just means ‘one who opposes’. That’s it. "This just in Tom… the President has vetoed a bipartisan spending bill, as promised months ago in his State of the Union address. When asked of the impact and possible majority challenge to the veto, majority leader Dick Gingerly responded, "The President is a great satan. His satanic nature knows no bounds." Minority dissenter Benjamin Dandtaket replied, "All hail satan."

I’m considering switching from atheism to literal Christian.

That way, next time I’m sitting in church and my shepherd or overseer tells me to open my book of psalms, I can tell that fucker that I need a harp. Because that’s what a psalm is…a song sung to a harp. And if I don’t get a harp, they can suck my blaspheming* ass.

*To utter hurtful speech. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will cast me into a lake of fire vomited from the maw of an ancient evil with no name.

Mac RDC 2.0 and the console

Microsoft has released the newest version of their Remote Desktop Client for the Mac and, for the most part, it’s pretty damned smooth. It has a better interface and a few bells and whistles over 1.x. What it lacks, however, is a built-in Console connection option. For most people this doesn’t matter. The option was in place for admins who wanted to access the logged-in session for administrative purposes.

 

In 1.x, the console could be reached by either holding the Command key when clicking ‘Connect’ or by adding /console to the connection string. Additionally, a setting of ‘connect to console:i:1’ in the RDP file would do the trick. None of these tricks work in 2.0, however. Falling in line with the Windows RDC, /console has been deprecated. In Windows the client can be logged into the console session on legacy platforms by adding the /admin switch when starting mstsc, but this doesn’t work on the Mac client. So what can be done?

 

Well, here’s a trick that I was able to use which worked like a charm:

 

In the ‘Applications’ tab, add a command to execute on logging in. The command is:

tscon 0

 

This is the command line terminal services console switching app and it will immediately shuttle you into the console session (0).

 

While Microsoft should definitely add the ability to directly access the console when logging in, this should provide most admins a quick and easy way to remote in until they do.

Microsoft Reporting Services and the Ampersand of Doom

We use MS Reporting Services on MSSQL2000 at work to produce our customer reports.

We also have no restriction on special characters in customer names. This means a customer can have an ampersand in their name, which is known to blow up reporting service JumpTo links.

 

Our link was something along the lines of: http://website.com/reports/reportname?parameter=somevalue&account=accountname

 

It is generated by JumpTo code:

=reportname & Parameters!parameter.Value & Parameters!account.Value

 

What is a girl to do?

 

We had a dev guy who spent about four days looking at the issue, banging his head.

 

Today I decided QA was going to shine. I looked at the back end a bit to determine if there were anything to do on the DB. There wasn’t. The link is generated via the .NET code on the web server. 

 

I found a couple of people with the issue who just adjusted it in Javascript when they did their open. We don’t use javascript and want a raw link, so we were stuck using just the report link code.

 

I found another blog which discussed adding a reference to System.Web and then doing an htmlencode on the value. That fails, however, as IE tries to be smart and piece it back together in links. So I tried something.

 

New Jump code:

=reportname & Parameters!parameter.Value & Parameters!account.Value.ToString().Replace("&","%2526")

 

Bingo.

 

Basically, once cast to a System.String, all of the .NET string methods are exposed, so replace works. In addition, the %2526 tricks IE. %25 becomes % and leaves the ampersand encoded. It worked like a champ.