Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Stop stealing my mornings

I’m not much of a morning person, and I have a very difficult time getting up if there’s no light outside. That said, I generally exercise in the mornings before work, so on most mornings my alarm goes off at 6:20am. Usually 6:20am isn’t too bad, since it’s around dawn or sunrise.

This morning, sunrise was at 7:19am. I’ve been waking up in the dark for the better part of a month, and now I’m waking up a full hour before sunrise. The problem is Daylight Saving Time — it’s moving daylight from when I need it (morning) to when I don’t need it (evening).

Don’t get me wrong: during the summer, DST is great. Sunrise is still early enough to wake me up, and I get the extra hour of light in the evening. The problem is that it isn’t summer anymore! We’re more than a month into Autumn.

When Congress adjusted DST in 2005, they went the wrong way. DST should have been made shorter, not longer. I would say that the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October would work well for DST.

If you make the mess…

…you clean it up. At gun-point!

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - A burglar in Montgomery chose the wrong family to mess with, literally. Adrian and Tiffany McKinnon returned home on Tuesday after a week away to find that thieves had emptied almost everything the family of five owned, Tiffany McKinnon said through tears.
. . .
“My husband Adrian caught the thief red-handed in our home,” she said. “And what is even crazier, the man even had my husband’s hat sitting right on his head.”

Adrian McKinnon held the suspect, 33-year-old Tajuan Bullock, at gunpoint and told him to sit on the floor until he decided what to do.

We made this man clean up all the mess he made, piles of stuff, he had thrown out of my drawers and cabinets onto the floor,” Tiffany McKinnon said.

Maybe he picked the right family to mess with, if this cop’s quote is any indication:

When police arrived, Bullock complained about being forced to clean the home at gunpoint.

“This man had the nerve to raise sand about us making him clean up the mess he made in my house,” she said. “The police officer laughed at him when he complained and said anybody else would have shot him dead.”

Funny.

Update: This story was also picked up at HotAir.

Nobel jumps the shark

All I can say about Al Gore and the Peace Prize is this: The Nobel Peace Prize has Jumped the Shark. What does climate change hysteria even have to do with peace? The Nobel Peace Prize was on its way out when it was given to a Palestinian terrorist. Now, it has fully entered the realm of irrelevance.

Odd search engine results

Checking my stats logs this morning, I noticed an interesting search engine term. Apparently, entering “cal poly band” 2007 pictures into either Google or Yahoo brings up my copy of the LA Times story Peacenik paper fawns over antiwar mom within the first few pages.

Odd.

Don’t report the good news

Last month saw a significant drop in casualties in Iraq (reflecting a downward trend since the summer). Obviously, this is very good news. Yet, you wouldn’t know it by the mainstream media’s reporting. Of course, they’ll report any uptick in casualties on the front pages without hesitation. But the mainstream press is “unbiased”, right? They wouldn’t favor bad news over good, now would they?

There is an interesting article today at NewsBusters about two “journalists” attempting to justify this discrepancy in reporting.

This question was posed to Robin Wright: “Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?”

Not necessarily. The fact is we’re at the beginning of a trend — and it’s not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.

There are combat deaths. There are sectarian deaths. And there are the deaths of criminal — from criminal acts. There are also a lot of numbers that the U.S. frankly is not counting. For example, in southern Iraq, there is Shiite upon Shiite violence, which is not sectarian in the Shiite versus Sunni. And the U.S. also doesn’t have much of a capability in the south.

So the numbers themselves are tricky.

Don’t want to jump the gun, huh? Right. What about an increase in casualties?

KURTZ: But let’s say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.

STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that’s certainly — that, by any definition, is news. Look, nobody more than a Pentagon correspondent would like to stop reporting the number of deaths, interviewing grieving families, talking to soldiers who have lost their arms and their legs in the war. But, is this really enduring progress?

We’ve had five years of the Pentagon telling us there is progress, there is progress. Forgive me for being skeptical, I need to see a little bit more than one month before I get too excited about all of this.

So, casualties going up is “news”, but casualties going down is something to be skeptical about. It’s almost as if they want us to lose.

As always, read the whole article.

Closing a file to save it: bad idea

At work, I’m experimenting with a code profiling tool called DevPartner Performance Analysis Community Edition from Compuware.

The user manual — a 410 page PDF file, yuck — contains this nugget of wisdom on page 228:

When you have finished reviewing performace data you can save the session file.

1. Close the session file window in Visual Studio. DevPartner prompts you to save the session file.
2. Click OK to accept the default file name and location.

DevPartner saves session files as part of the active solution. They appear in the DevPartner Studio virtual folder in Solution Explorer.

Telling the user to close an unsaved file in order to save it is very bad advice! Closing an unsaved file is a destructive operation, i.e. it will blow away your unsaved data. Just because most well-behaved programs will prompt the user to save first is no excuse for telling the user to close a file in order to save it.

So, what happened when I closed my profiling session without saving it? Mind you, this was done as an experiment, purely in the interests of science, or something. BLAM! Visual Studio and DevPartner dutifully vaporized an hour’s worth of work without a single hint of a save dialog.

Way to go, Compuware.

President Thompson

Here is an interesting article which argues that a Fred Thompson is not only desirable, but inevitable.

Conventional wisdom is hardening around the proposition that Fred Dalton Thompson is too lazy, ill-prepared, tired, old, lackluster, inexperienced, inconsistent and bald to make a successful run for President.

Of course, conventional wisdom rarely gets anything right. When it does, it’s only by accident.

In this case conventional wisdom is not just wrong but comically so. Thompson will win the Republican nomination for two reasons. First, he’s a very impressive candidate. Second, there’s no realistic alternative. He will win the general election for the same two reasons.

The author then goes on to compare Thompson to his Republican and Democratic rivals. He also asserts that Thompson is the best candidate to return the Republican Party to the ideals preached by Reagan. I don’t agree with the entire article (particularly “[Roe v Wade] is a travesty, which puts [Guliani] squarely on the wrong side of the culture war”), but it’s an interesting take on an interesting candidate. Go read.

Update, Feb 2008: Maybe conventional wisdom was right after all. Bummer.

Comment timeout

More than 90% of the traffic to this blog is merely spambots trying to post spam as comments and trackbacks. Akismet catches almost all of it, so I can mostly ignore it. However, that traffic places an undue burden on the server and clogs my access logs. Since there’s very little real commenting on this blog, I’ve decided to install the Comment Timeout plugin. This plugin will automatically close comments and trackbacks on old posts. I’ve set a timeout of 30 days, and we’ll see how that goes.




Bad Behavior has blocked 34 access attempts in the last 7 days.