How can you not find this funny. And that’s why I love reading Wonkette.

Since most of the “big” categories are based more on press and lobbying than quality, I look forward to the categories of best song and score. In particular, I love the live performances in the song category. I loved it when Queen Latifah and Catherine Zeta Jones sang last year and Robin William’s version of “Blame Canada” a few years ago was priceless.

This year had some great music. The song’s were all quality, even if I wasn’t totally enamoured by them all.

We’ve all heard the Counting Crow’s song. It is a good song, but I was never that impressed by it (I’m not a Counting Crow’s fan, so I’m sure that has something to do with it).

I was a little disappointed that the original artists didn’t sing all the songs. That being said, Beyonce did a very nice job on “Vois Sur Ton Chemin.” It was a pleasure to listen to. The choir was exceptional. I might go so far as to say that her additional vocals may have made the Oscar version better than the original. She was good on “Learn to be Lonely,” but it seemed less interesting to hear.

I was very disappointed with Antonio Banderas and Santana doing, “Al Otro Lado Del Rio.” Their version just didn’t have the smooth, melodiousness of the original. Fortunately, Jorge Drexler sang a bit when he picked up the Oscar (and it sounded awesome).

I missed the performance from “Polar Express,” but I wasn’t totally impressed by that song, compared to the other ones.

I have to say, that that Acadamy made an excellent choice. Al Otro Lado Del Rio is a great song and I can listen to it even without having seen the movie. Same with Vois Sur Ton Chemin. Both are now in my iTunes library. Hopefully next year we will hear stuff that is just as good.

School’s canceled again in DC because of snow. Seriously, what the F#$^! Boy, thank god they build those 4 days in because I’d hate for kids to have a day off when its good weather.

In other news, could you imagine if we got invaded on a day when it was snowing in DC?

“oooh, sorry, Ms. President, but I’m the only one here. You see, we got a snow day and I got the short end of the straw. Can you ask the British to come back later? Thanks, that’d be great.”

More ranting later…

Why didn’t anyone think of this before? When playing Everquest online, you can now type the Pizza command to have Pizza Hut deliver a pizza to your house…charged to your monthly Everquest bill!

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.games/02/28/sony.pizza.order.ap/index.html

A few thoughts on one of my favorite topics…Maurice Clarett.

Now, I know that in football sanctuaries worldwide, this week is one of the most sacred weeks of the off season, following shortly the actual Draft Weekend. (of course, all of you baseball fans know that it is a DISTANT 28th behind March 1st when Pitchers and Catchers report, but still, some of us don’t like baseball that much.)

Recently, people have asked me where I think Maurice Clarett, formerly of (THE) Ohio State (University), should go in the draft. With him finally having run the 40 for a combine that he’s DEFINITELY able to get drafted in (Editor’s Note: last year he was too young for the minimum age requirement to play in the NFL — Age 20 or 3 years post high school graduation), I feel very confident in saying this:

Maurice Clarett will not be drafted above the 20th pick of the 6th round or the 7th round, if he is drafted at all! (Not really going out on a limb, considering just 2 months ago, I was saying he wouldn’t be drafted above the 7th round at all, but still.)

Now before I begin to lambast him, I will give Maurice Clarett this, he showed up in really good shape. He was able to lift the weight bar (225 pounds) 22 times. He resculped his body in a professional way during the year since last year’s combine. That is really impressive. I’ll give that to him.

So, on what do I base my opinion? Well, beyond a “healthy hunch?” Not much. His 4.82 and 4.79 wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, except that he was beaten out by 3 Offensive Linemen, all of whom are more than 100 pounds heavier than him. And, he had another workout at OSU on March 8th or so (which, actually comes as a shock to OSU Athletic Staff, but that’s not important now. “Mo, did you even ask them?”) before he even went to the Combine, showing how little faith he had in himself for this weekend.

Clarett still shows the same public distrust and contempt that comes with being immature and arrogant without cause. One month ago, he had the chance to play in one of the post-collegiate season (all-star) games (of which there are like 20), and chose not only to pass on the game, but not inform the game planners until the friday before the game itself was scheduled to be played (that saturday!). Now mind you, they invited him, even though they were under no obligation to, nor had he played a game in more than 25 months (since the NCAA title game in 2003), he could have showed just a little bit more class than that.

Does it make sense for him to pass up an opportunity to play in a meaningless game? Well, I’ll grant that he wasn’t COMPLETELY out of his gord. He could have risked major injury, and for someone with fewer than 11 games under his belt (ie - a full season), that is a major chance to take, BUT, no one has seen you play in over 2 years, there, Mo. Why not get out there and show ‘em you still got some game? “Because you’re an idiot?” Yes, that sounds about right.

While we’re talking about other things that Mo hasn’t done, let’s talk about the other Combine drills….

Nope, I can’t, because he didn’t do them either. Had he performed well at the drills, his time could have been written off — its not as if he was much of a burner before anyway — but, he decided not to do them after his second run. Now, he’s relying on his performance at OSU as his make-or-break moment? “Uh…hey there, Mo, you sure that’s a good idea?”

I mean, seriously, who is this guy talking to for advice? Is he going to the Lawrence Phillips school of marketing? (”Well, at least I didn’t get arrested for cocaine before the draft”) Supposedly, he got himself one of the best agents and he already had a smart lawyer, but here he is pulling amateur hour at the Combine again.

Its really a surprise to me. Did he not realize how low the bar was for him to hurdle before? It was like all he had to do was show up with 2 arms and 2 legs, and be able to move forward, backward, left and right, and people would have granted him a pass into the 5th round. Instead, he shows up and embarasses himself, again!

I quote William “Bill” S. Preston from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, you’re “so totally screwed, dude!”

I swear that half the web is built on jury rigged silliness. Every so often we get a technology shift that comes along that has a profound effect on how we use computers or the Internet. Blogging software like Movable Type or Radio simply write out HTML files based on what you type in a web form. They focused on working with the simplest kind of web space given by ISPs. Because of them and dozens of similar packages, we have blogs. Blogs are trivial; I could’ve written this in college. The result, however, has been a new wave of media that may finally realize the dream of citizen journalism.

RSS, something I’ve been hot on for over a year now, is similarly simple. The aggregator keeps asking the site “give me your RSS feed.” It then checks if something has changed and alerts the user. It does that over and over and over again. It doesn’t actually “know” if something is new, it just keeps asking for the whole feed. Yet, this simple principle (ask, check, pause, repeat) is enabling some pretty cool ideas. It’s also making content sites rethink their core businesses.

What’s even more fascinating to me is the cascade effect of simplicity. The proliferation of blogs (and their frequent and arbitrary publishing schedules) drove (and is driving) the adoption of RSS. Two really simple ideas that taste better together.

What makes me feel like an idiot more often than not is that these same simple technologies are often lame for the same reasons they succeed. The simplicity of both blogs and RSS make it easy for people to understand the model. It makes it easier for the creative types and the entrepreneurs to say “eureka!” and put the pieces together. If they understand the pieces, they can use them.

As a software guy, though, these same technologies often seem painful. RSS wastes bandwidth by the truckload. Some sites that feature RSS spend more than half their bandwidth feeding RSS readers constantly asking for the feed, even though the feed doesn’t update. Heck, just imagine the bandwidth wasted overnight if your RSS reader is running. Sites in the U.S. will most likely not update between say, 2 AM local time and 6 AM local time, yet the reader is still going to ask for a file every 30 or 60 minutes.

RSS is also verbose (it’s XML, after all), but we’ll leave that alone for now.

The bottom line is that it works and that the best ideas often focus on enabling the user activity, not worrying over the best or the ideal implementation. It is something I struggle with. The software guy in me says make the most efficient solution. Reality says, make the solution the most people can understand and work with. Not that there’s no place for great code and good software design, just that it shouldn’t be the goal. The goal is a great product which often is facilitated by good code.

I often wonder what my brilliant idea will be (and I will have one, dammit). As I search for that idea, I keep having to remind myself of these principles. Often lame becomes perfection.

Alright, now I know I’m supposed to be inspired by things like this. But I have to tell you, it was a waste of time. As my sister put it, “its just some left over material on top of orange metal. What the hell is the point? Does it look cool? yes, was it necessary? hell no!” Then she uttered, “get the hell out of my city, tourists!” I’ll just assume she wasn’t talking to me (she has other names for me than “tourists”).

Although, this was a nice picture my friend took. So, I guess there might have been one redeeming quality.

Thank god for Morgan Freeman. An inspired performance, and a brilliant career (how did he not win for Shawshank Redemption?!). Congrats.

And now for something completely different…

Damn you, Scorcese!

Saw this on Slashdot and thought it was interesting. It’s about a bill to raise the FCC fines and how these fines would compare to fines by other agencies. Interesting perspective.

Wimps.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51558-2005Feb24.html

that’s all I have to say on that…

I’m thinking about switching from Safari to Firefox as my default browser on the mac. Any thoughts or opinions? I’m primarily thinking about it because the browser has more fancy features, is extensible and has some GREAT hacks and addons and is pretty nice in general. The main problems I have right now are limited to the fact that it doesn’t spell check text in forms (like, say, wordpress’s post tool ). Would be nice to have that feature, though I’m guessing their might be an extension for it.

Interested in any experiences or gotchas that I might want to think about.

There is an excellent explanation at Pressthink of why the Gannon/Guckert scandal is a sign of deeper problems with the White House Press Corp. He touches on wider trends about journalism that seem insightful to me, as well.

Did anyone watch?

President Bush and I agree that Iran should not have nuclear weapons.

Come on, that’s the best headline they could come up with????

Reading this, I can’t help but feel like we’re in some sort of time warp where we’re moving back into the Cold War mindset. A lot of people look at the war on terror as the same sort of cataclysmic struggle we had against communism, with nuclear weapons on both sides pointed at each other. Instead, the war on terror strikes me as a lot like the war on drugs. We address the symptoms (jihadism, fascist islamists, non-state groups like al Qaida) while ignoring the underlying problem (inequity and a history of poor U.S. policy in the region). Let’s also not forget that both the Cold War and the war on drugs have had their own bad long term side effects. The rise of the Taliban, for example, and the logistical training given to folks like Osama bin Laden owe a lot to the Cold War policies we pursued. This isn’t a criticism of Americans, by the way, as much it is a reminder of a principle that realists often ignore… the ends don’t justify the means. Often, the means end up biting you in the ass years later.

That being said, let me state for the record that I, too, am hoping that the ends are positive and that this policy seems to be bearing positive fruit. As a commenter said at the link above, the true test will be time as we see how long we can commit to being in Iraq, how long it takes for the democratic institutions to grow, and the difference between the two.

My friend, Jacob, reports from Montgomery County that all Greater DC schools are closed today, not at the presence of snow, but at the THREAT of 4-8 inches of snow. Another friend, Janis, reports that everything in Fairfax county, including the Target, is closed under the same threat.

God I love it.