The evil of iTunes

posted by jack at 07:46 CET in / compute

OK, I don't really think iTunes is evil. In fact, I think it's a pretty darn great application for its original purpose: Organizing and playing mp3 files.

What this site points out however is that the iTunes Music Store, Apple's marvelously successful online music store, unfortunately does little or nothing to improve the situation of the artists who are screwed every which way by the giant record labels (a situation described surprisingly well years ago by Courtney Love).

The Political Compass

posted by jack at 15:07 CET in / politics

I've been wondering about Michael Moore's assertion that Americans tend to be more progressive than is commonly acknowledged. I figured it could be instructive to find some online tests, the kind of thing where you are asked a bunch of questions and then are shown where on the political spectrum you actually lie.

Here are some of the tests I found:

• Where do you stand on the liberal-conservative spectrum: A quick test that answers the stated question
• The Political Quiz Show: This test is nearly a decade old, but the questions on it are still pretty useful in today's political context.
• World's Smallest Political Quiz: This very short test test seems to be hosted by a libertarian organization. Perhaps its questions and results are skewed to move everyone that direction, who knows?
• Political Compass: This seems to be the most well-thought-out of the bunch. Rather than smashing everyone onto a one-dimensional left/right line, your answers place you on a square grid, where left and right correspond to the economic ideals of the left and right (controlled economy vs free enterprise), and up and down correspond to authoritarian vs libertartian social policies. Using this notation, George W. Bush appears in the upper right, Saddam Hussein in the upper left, with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama keeping me company in the lower left.

Take some tests, you may be surprised at the results! And feel free to post your results in the comments here if you like. All these tests easily labeled me as the wacko commie liberal I am, so no surprises there.

there it is

posted by jack at 12:54 CET in / reading

I finished reading Dude, Where's My Country a couple of days ago. It's a very quick read, and pretty much follows the mold of Michael Moore's other books , but there's some interesting new content in there, including:

• The concept of Dead Peasants Insurance. This was a new one to me, and if you haven't heard of this before, prepare to be disgusted: Large corporations including Disney, Dow Chemical, and Walmart routinely purchase life insurance insurance policies for their employees - wherein the company is the beneficiary! So if you work for one of these companies and have no life insurance of your own, and you have the misfortune of dying, your widow and children will be left penniless while your erstwhile employer rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars! I understand that this kind of thing is legal (so far), but man, that is sleazy.
• Moore claims that numerous polls show that Americans are, on average, more progressive on most issues than commonly believed. My standpoint is to initially assume that he's accurately citing poll data (based on the principal of "innocent until proven guilty"), so I'm not going to bother looking up this poll data. However, I'm really curious about whether people I know (family, friends, etc) might not also actually be more "leftist" than they consider themselves to be! More on this later.

call me "crusty"

posted by jack at 12:08 CET in / life

After nearly a year of visiting my doctor to try to find out what mysterious condition was causing bizarre patches of flaky skin on choice locations throughout my body, I was able to finally visit a dermatologist who looked at me for a few seconds and said, "No question, you've got psoriasis." Bleah. Well, at least I now have a diagnosis and a treatment plan; Prior to this, my regular doctor was just making it up as she went along, prescribing a random array of creams and ointments to see if any of them did anything.

Anyway, if you notice my hair is all flaky and it looks like there's been an isolated snowstorm on my shoulders, now you know it's not just run-of-the-mill dandruff or bad grooming (although that can't ever be ruled out either), I've actually got a diagnosed medical condition, bub. I just hope I can get it under control before I drown in a sea of skin flakes.

New pictures of Beanie and Squiggly

posted by jack at 12:02 CET in / life / pictures

New pictures of Beanie and Squiggly are online!

nuthole evolution

posted by jack at 11:53 CET in / compute / blogging

Thanks to the plethora of plugins available on the blosxom website, I've added more new features to this site. The most interesting is the ability for you to add comments! Now anyone and everyone can comment on the stories posted here. Feel free to let me know what you think!

Tarttilicious

posted by jack at 15:17 CET in / reading

I just finished reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I really liked her previous book, The Secret History when I read it a decade ago, so I figured I'd give it a go. It's a good read, with some really gripping moments and highly believable characters. The only complaint I have with the book is that the ending doesn't really tie up all the threads that are laid out during the telling; I suppose that's the whole idea, that the book is primarily a character study, but it's a shame that a fine, nicely written story has such a lackluster conclusion. It almost feels like the first four-fifths of a book rather than a complete work.

Mac OS X tech overview

posted by jack at 09:33 CET in / compute

Check out this technical overview of Mac OS X. It's written primarily for Linux geeks, and gives a nice wide picture of how the system is laid out, what happens during the boot procedure, etc. The author sums up with a little opinion piece explaining the pros and cons of Mac OS X vis-a-vis Windows and Linux.

Lord of the Nerds: Return of the Nuthole

posted by jack at 21:06 CET in / compute / blogging

Finally!

After nearly two months offline, nuthole.com is now once again available to the teeming masses. The story of our absence is the all-too-common, sad tale of broadband companies failing to live up to their commitments, which won't be retold here.

Anyway, we're now back in business. Let's celebrate with a link to a slightly aged article by Molly Ivins entitled "Is America Texas?" about the impending Texafication of the nation.