DubyaSpeak's favorite Bush quotes:
- "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."
- "I understand small business growth. I was one."
- "Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease."
- "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I believe is right."
- "In 1994, there were 67 schools in Texas that were rated "exemplorary" according to our own tests."
- "My mom often used to say, 'The trouble with W'—although she didn't put that to words."
- "No, I know all the war rhetoric, but it's all aimed at achieving peace."
- "You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."
- "I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well."
- "I've been to war. I've raised twins. If I had a choice, I'd rather go to war."
I just lost a game of Monopoly to my wife and some visiting relatives. Somehow I never played much Monopoly as a kid, so I wasn't surprised to lose, but I did a little surfing afterward to see where I went wrong.
The best advice comes from 1999 national champ Matt Gissel: "I try to get the railroads. If you get all four of 'em, you're just sucking money away from the other people. There's always a chance to land on them. ... And then I get at least part of as many color groups as possible [to prevent other players from getting monopolies]. Other than that, you just kind of work with what you got."
Truman Collins agrees. He's used C programming and Markov matrices to calculate the expected income per roll and payback times for purchases.
Collins also agrees with former world champ Christopher Woo on the value of the orange property group—New York Avenue, Tennessee Avenue and St. James Place. In fact, Collins says the best ROI in the game comes from putting a third house on New York Avenue: this has "the fastest payoff of any building on almost all of the properties." And Illinois Avenue is the second most frequently occupied space (Jail is first), so a hotel there will bring more income than anything but a hotel on Boardwalk.
I wonder if Donald Trump owns a tophat.
|W|P|108588284571648694|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
When the TV Critics Association announced its picks for "outstanding news and information program" last year, the nominees included 60 Minutes, Nightline, Frontline ... and The Daily Show.
At the time that sounded like nominating The Simpsons for "best dramatic miniseries." But now it may not be far off base. In a January report, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that the public increasingly gets its election news from the Internet and from late-night comedy TV shows.
As a source of political news for young Americans, the nightly network news has dropped 16 percent in the last four years, to 23 percent. At the same time, the Internet has risen by 7 percent, to 20 percent, and comedy TV shows leapt 12 points, to 21 percent. For Americans under 30, comedy shows "are now mentioned almost as frequently as newspapers and evening network news programs as regular sources of election news."
In short, young people are rapidly abandoning traditional media and showing little patience with packaged messages like campaign events, endorsements and debates. Daily Show executive producer Stewart Bailey told Canada's CBC Radio, "I think there is a tendency in news to go about a more traditional approach that people don't buy into anymore." He points out that Jon Stewart doesn't accept spin from his guests, any more than Tim Russert does. "I don't think it's a free ride. It's a different interview, definitely."
Satire can score points against hypocrisy and pretense, but it can't go into as much depth as a real news show. The first duty of "fake news" is to be funny. "If we didn't make it into something funny," Baily admits, "we'd be the angry people that you avoid at dinner."
And no matter how well written, entertainment shows are not the most effective means of staying informed. Pew found that 27 percent of young respondents said they learn things about candidates and campaigns from late-night and comedy shows that they did not know previously—but also found that people who follow entertainment programs tend to be poorly informed, especially compared to Internet junkies.
"We always recommend to those people that they should really go out and buy a newspaper and read the newspaper from cover to cover," Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee told the CBC. "I mean, we can't—it's so impossible—we can�t take responsibility if people are coming to a comedy show to get their news."
|W|P|108413156860898591|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Who made the most popular record of all time? The Beatles or Elvis, right? Probably middle-period Beatles, "Yesterday" or "Hey Jude"?
Nope. I'm not sure how this is possible, but Reuters reports that the most-played record of the past 70 years is Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale." That's according to the British performing rights group Phonographic Performance Ltd.
A couple of caveats: This includes all public performances, not just radio but also clubs, retail outlets and jukeboxes. And it's looking specifically at the United Kingdom.
But come on, that song sucks. It gets occasional airplay, but it was never a big hit. Gary Brooker said, "When poor old Freddie Mercury died, it gave a huge boost to 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' but 'Whiter Shade' has never been the subject of a lot of hype, and it wasn't when it came out." It's too hippie to live on oldies radio, and too dated for Muzak or films. Here are the top 10:
- Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"
- Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"
- Wet Wet Wet, "Love Is All Around"
- The Everly Brothers, "All I Have To Do Is Dream/Claudette"
- Bryan Adams, "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You"
- Abba, "Dancing Queen"
- Elvis Presley, "All Shook Up"
- Rod Stewart, "Maggie May"
- The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"
- The Beatles, "Get Back"
The lesson, I think, is that a marathoner covers more ground than a sprinter. The U.S. record for consecutive top-10 hits (according to The Straight Dope) is still held by Elvis Presley with 29, followed by the Beatles with 22, but neither of those acts reaches the top 5 on the most-played list. Songs top the charts when they're new and exciting, but apparently the real money comes from repeated play long after the novelty has worn off. And maybe that depends more on sentimental associations than on musical merit: Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" (1942) came in at number 16 on the most-played list, and his "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" (1943) is at number 58.
|W|P|108534002755421266|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom George W. Bush's official White House biography:
President Bush received a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School in 1975. After graduating, he moved back to Midland and began a career in the energy business. After working on his father's successful 1988 presidential campaign, he assembled the group of partners that purchased the Texas Rangers baseball franchise in 1989.
That's 14 years, ages 29 to 43, glossed over in three sentences. Put another way, 24 percent of his life fills only 10 percent of his bio. Bush's entire career goes like this:
- Worked on his dad's 1988 campaign.
- Bought the Texas Rangers.
- Governor of Texas.
- President of the United States.
Poor Jeb. His family's been on every ballot since 1984, but there's no way the Republicans would back another Bush after this debacle.
|W|P|108561760324445368|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWe moved to Raleigh two years ago because the data showed it matched the profile we'd come to want in a city. The American FactFinder shows that Wake County is still where we belong: Compared to the U.S. averages, it has a young, well-educated population, low commuting times, high per-capita income and very little poverty. I hope that continues. I suppose it does mean that there's stiffer competition for jobs here, but at least there are jobs to be had. That just wasn't the case in Bloomington.
|W|P|108455387421139390|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There's some people that just don't suck."—Billy Bob Thornton, on Joel and Ethan Coen
|W|P|108533320927841062|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I've been very tired this weekend—I think I'm still making up the sleep debt from last week. I'm holding my own with getting things done at home, which is good because next weekend we'll have visiting relatives and then I hop on a plane for the SSP conference.
Work should be okay as well. Now that the magazine is done I can try to get a jump on the next issue, getting some interviews done and hopefully picking a couple of books to review, so I can read them on the plane. Plus, I'll start getting some help writing the weekly e-newsletter, which has been a pretty big time sink.
So, overall, I think I'm in good shape. I don't know why I still feel under the gun; even if something goes moderately wrong next week I should have time to address it before I go. We'll see.
|W|P|108302843643415772|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI know I keep railing on Bush, but there's just so much to say. George Mason University just conducted an informal survey of 415 historians. 81 percent judged the Bush administration a failure, and 12 percent rate it the worst in American history.
Some of their comments:
- "He has trashed the image and reputation of the United States throughout the world; he has offended many of our previously close allies; he has burdened future generations with incredible debt; he has created an unnecessary war to further his domestic political objectives; he has suborned the civil rights of our citizens; he has destroyed previous environmental efforts by government in favor of his coterie of exploiters; he has surrounded himself with a cabal ideological adventurers."
- "Although previous presidents have led the nation into ill-advised wars, no predecessor managed to turn America into an unprovoked aggressor. No predecessor so thoroughly managed to confirm the impressions of those who already hated America. No predecessor so effectively convinced such a wide range of world opinion that America is an imperialist threat to world peace. I don't think that you can do much worse than that."
- "He is, by far, the most irresponsible, unethical, inexcusable occupant of our formerly highest office in the land that there has ever been."
- "George W. Bush's presidency is the pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of the planet. The worst president ever? Let history judge him."
Robert McElvaine of Millsaps College says many historians feel that "abuse of the patriotism and trust of the American people is even worse than everything else this president has done, and that fact alone might be sufficient to explain the depth of the hostility with which so many historians view George W. Bush. Contrary to the conservative stereotype of academics as anti-American, the reasons that many historians cited for seeing the Bush presidency as a disaster revolve around their perception that he is undermining traditional American practices and values. As one patriotic historian put it, 'I think his presidency has been the worst disaster to hit the United States and is bringing our beloved country to financial, economic, and social disaster.'"
|W|P|108517990609977026|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
George W. Bush is a president at the peak of his power who believes in military strength as an important instrument in advancing national goals. He feels strongly that he is personally good and that his enemies represent evil. Deeply religious, he tends to think in polar terms; he believes he is 100 percent right and his opponent 100 percent wrong, morally and otherwise. He feels that God is guiding him in a vital mission.
But Jan Oberg, director of the Transnational Foundation, points out that the paragraph above also describes Saddam Hussein before his overthrow.
Even more disturbing, here's a list of similarities between the United States and Hussein's Iraq:
- Both are monotheistic military cultures that accept the use of weapons of mass destruction to pursue civilizing wars against "morally inferior" nations.
- Both are modern cultures that believe they are chosen by God to play a unique role in history, and curtail internal civil liberties and human rights to advance that mission.
- Both are ethnically diverse societies with few political parties.
- Both really really need lots of oil.
After laying out 27 similarities, Oberg also points out some telling differences:
- Iraqis show much greater curiosity, education and knowledge about us than we do about them.
- Iraq used to have very few poor; its people have had free education and healthcare since the 1980s.
- The United States has existed for 228 years, Iraqi civilization for 7,000.
- Our military expenditures are 300 times those of Iraq. And we're invading them.
"In short, the parties share many underlying assumptions, cultural characteristics and aspirations. They share fundamentally important images of themselves and the other. One may say that they are, to quite an extent, mirroring each other. They seem strengthened when they have an enemy onto which they can project, psychologically, their own dark sides."
|W|P|108413153316974347|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI can't distinguish satire from reality anymore. Ashrita Furman, a 49-year-old health food store manager from Queens, N.Y., claims to hold the Guinness world record for holding the most Guinness world records.
"He also pogo stick jumped underwater in the Amazon River for 3 hours and 40 minutes; climbed 16 miles up and down the foothills of Mount Fuji in Japan on a pogo stick; and somersaulted the entire 12—mile length of Paul Revere's ride in Massachusetts."
"Jumping up Mt. Fuji was difficult, but nothing compared to the descent," said Mr. Furman, whose existential authenticity has been arbitrarily validated on seven continents. "I thought about trying to improve my time for skipping a marathon, but eventually opted to attempt bettering the time for running a mile while balancing a full pint glass milk bottle on my head."
|W|P|108463940281061392|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA note about the gay couples getting married in Massachusetts: My wife points out psychologist Gordon Allport's rule that "stateways precede folkways." That is, making laws against discrimination kills it faster. Racism might have gone down without Brown vs. Board of Education, but it wouldn't have happened as quickly.
And if thousands of new couples want to get married ... how does that hurt the institution? More and more I think "conservative" is just code for "Christian."
|W|P|108482860392073904|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
BTW, speaking of Return of the King, did anyone else see an uncomfortable resemblance between Gorbag and character actor Donald Moffat (Regarding Henry, Clear and Present Danger)?
|W|P|108491700812161169|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comReturn of the King has come to the local second-run theater, so we saw it again yesterday. Sharon liked it better the second time, but I still feel it continues the downward slide that so bothered me in The Two Towers.
Fellowship worked because it understood the value of verisimilitude to fantasy. It seemed to be about real people with real limitations. In ROTK Jackson throws that over entirely. Legolas and Gimli are still happily counting kills. Gollum sinks up to his neck in MAGMA with only a thoughtful expression. It's just another summer action movie, with spectacle, punchlines, hair's-breadth escapes and no real sense of jeopardy.
The storytelling is sloppy, rushed and cheap. The opening is a double stumble: Smeagol/Deagol and Isengard are irrelevant to this story and to each other. The Men of the Mountain, the non-lethality of Shelob's venom, Sam's feelings for Rosie Cotton—all of these are introduced just a few moments before they're needed. The action sequences are impressive but not moving (and the Oliphaunt fight is a retread of the AT-AT battle of The Empire Strikes Back 24 years ago). Compared with Rivendell, Mordor is laughably simplistic and unimaginative, a big valley with Barad-Dur, Mount Doom and a bunch of orcs.
So: overlong, overwrought and overacted, especially John Noble's discount Lear. The fatal, unforgivable flaw, which no one seems to mention: We'd been told that destroying the ring would put it beyond Sauron's reach. We weren't told that the earth would literally open and swallow up every evil thing in Middle-earth. Hey, pretty convenient!
I'll still buy the extended-edition DVD, because those have been very well produced, and perhaps Jackson can explain himself in the commentary. I hope he can.
|W|P|108473914763354299|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comStill confused by the opposite sex? Here's what the latest research says:
- Women want men who smell like their fathers. Women in San Francisco want money; in St. Louis they want emotional compatibility and similar interests.
- Men want women with symmetrical faces and a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7, regardless of weight.
- People in general want partners who look like their parents.
To succeed on a date, shut up, make lots of eye contact, mirror the other's posture, and go somewhere scary.
Questions? No? Good.
|W|P|108462765987936735|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comNoted in passing: Donald Rumsfeld flew to Iraq today to "improve morale" among the troops. That left Paul Wolfowitz to go before Congress asking for a $25 billion blank check.
Think that's a coincidence?
|W|P|108448673813146748|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA few months ago Wired offered to subscribe me for ten bucks, so I signed up. It's really terrible. It commits almost every cardinal sin that a magazine can make:
- Bad design. Hot pink and teal on safety-vest orange. Sans-serif body text. Tiny art. Huge art. A five-page spread for a half-page article. I gather someone thinks this is "edgy." It is, if we can agree that "edgy" means "bad."
- Greed. Set an ad-ed ratio worthy of Redbook, and never say no to a FF RHP placement. Run all the features at the back of the book.
- Editorial arrogance. Run a cover photo of Peter Jackson even if your interview was 10 minutes long. Compose your departments from freelance pitches, and then rewrite them in a breezy I-can't-help-being-this-cool voice, even if your research is shaky.
- Pitch subscriptions to gullible schmoes like me, to attract even more ads. Advertisers are more important than readers.
The worst offense, though, is a permeating air of self-admiration. Wired doesn't write about subjects, it favors them with its attention. And then congratulates them. It gives out awards that no one's heard of. It informs us gaily of what's wired, tired and expired as if we're all breathlessly writing this down. It all bespeaks a desperate insecurity that's obvious to everyone but them.
|W|P|108418811618655560|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I don't know how this happened, but I've been waking up at 5 a.m. lately. Then I'm so tired during the day that I can't stay up to get back to a normal schedule.
It was terrible on Monday. On Tuesday I just got up, ate breakfast and ran five miles. That gets the run off my list, and it's kind of nice to get so much done before anyone else is even awake. But then I'm too worn out in the evening to really do anything fun.
Last night I think I started getting back to normal. I still woke up at five, but I managed to get back to sleep till about seven, and as I type this I feel okay. I'll try to stay up to eleven or so and then I should be back to normal.
|W|P|108302852987724278|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"What the country needs is a leader who speaks clearly."—George W. Bush, Kalamazoo, Mich., May 3, 2004
I'll say.
|W|P|108388917737277693|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOsama Bin Laden is number two on the FBI's Most Wanted list ...
... and number one with the Dedham, Massachusetts, police department.
|W|P|108398117814740096|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMaybe the neocons are onto something. A mathematician right here at NC State in Raleigh has figured out that when you're playing Risk, an aggressive attacking policy is the best strategy.
In earlier analysis, a Turkish mathematician had favored the defender, but he wasn't considering ordering and pairing of the dice. So "the chances of winning a battle are considerably more favorable for the attacker than was originally suspected," the NC State researcher concludes. Hmmm.
|W|P|108405378335733114|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
It's increasingly clear that Bush is not beholden to the people, to the nation or even to history. I had taken his cockiness for stupidity, or stubbornness, or just desperately poor judgment. But Jeffrey A. Tucker explains that it's a product of his evangelical faith.
Since he was born again, Bush believes that he's saved no matter what. He might "backslide" into sins of the flesh, but of course he can recognize and avoid those without any introspection or reflection. And even they can't prevent his salvation.
So Bush believes he has a guaranteed ticket to heaven, and can spend his remaining days here attacking evil without much concern for the earthly consequences.
Tucker says this produces "a notably unreflective faith." In fact, it's self-supporting. Even to question it is to question the rationale of one's own salvation.
Worse, most evangelicals believe in direct revelation from God, meaning they base decisions on prayer. God communicates with them directly, through feelings and signs. Once an evangelical sees a "sign," he believes his chosen course is divinely blessed.
This explains a lot about Bush's notoriously impulsive leadership style, and I'm afraid it shows how cynical advisers might manipulate him. If someone you trust urges you to do something, and you look into your heart for the answer, what's it gonna tell you?
A discussion forum on The Ornery American quotes a 1963 lecture by Richard Feynman:
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.
So I have developed in a previous talk, and I want to maintain here, that it is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.
Like all religious convictions, Bush's are unfalsifiable. It would be impossible to get him to reconsider, or even to look inward. That's what's so scary.
|W|P|108302739476421054|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom a Sunday Times interview with Paul McCartney, 1966:
- "I was sitting at the piano when I thought of it. Just like Jimmy Durante. The first few bars just came to me. And I got this name in my head—Daisy Hawkins, picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been. I don't know why. I can hear a whole song in one chord. In fact, I think you can hear a whole song in one note, if you listen hard enough. But nobody ever listens hard enough."
- "One of us might think of a song completely, and the other just add a bit. Or we might write alternate lines. We never argue. If one says he doesn't like a bit, the other agrees. It just doesn't matter that much. I care about being a songwriter. But I don't care passionately about each song."
- "I can't play the piano, or read or write music. I've tried three times in my life to learn, but never kept it up for more than three weeks. The last bloke I went to was great. I'm sure he could teach me a lot. I might go back to him. It's just the notation—the way you write down notes, it doesn't look like music to me."
- "People think we're not conceited, but we are. If you ask me if I wrote good or bad songs, I'd be thick to say bad, wouldn't I? It's true we're lucky, but we got where we are because of what we did."
BugMeNot.com is a free database of valid logins for sites (like The New York Times) that require registration.
|W|P|108384442091428198|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJust read this in a George Will column, of all places:
"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."—Pat Moynihan
I'll have to think about that.
|W|P|108375933544713511|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
DOT employees can plan for April Fool's Day with Kurumi's SignMaker applet.
|W|P|108369175942105361|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comForget what I said about the lack of good film scrobblers. WhatToRent.com recommended The Way of the Gun for me, and I watched it last night. It got decidedly mixed reviews (Ebert called it "a wildly ambitious, heedlessly overplotted post-Tarantino bloodfest"), but I thought it was terrific.
I think that's because all I really care about is the music of the language. I've read most of Dickens' novels now, and I remember very little of the plots or characters. I don't care. I read Dickens because of the language, and I watch movies like this because of the dialogue:
Fifteen million dollars is not money. It's a motive with a universal adaptor on it.
Karma's justice without the satisfaction.
I think a plan is just a list of things that don't happen.
There's a grammar to the cinematic experiences that lets contrived lines like that seem cool. David Mamet understands that, and so do the Coen brothers. WhatToRent, to its great credit, asks about that in its survey.
Longbaugh: I've ... never killed a man.
Interviewer: I beg your pardon?
Longbaugh: I said I never killed a man.
Interviewer: I didn't ask if you had.
Longbaugh: You asked why I thought I was qualified. I think of that as a qualification.
Interviewer: And I'm just wondering why that in particular strikes you as an important qualification for semen donation.
Longbaugh: I would say that's a big fucking qualification—excuse me, a very important qualification.
Interviewer: No one's ever said that before.
Longbaugh: Have you ever asked?
Interviewer: No.
Longbaugh: You should.
Sharon watched it with me, and pointed out some plot holes, but I really don't care. I just love the dialogue.
Christopher McQuarrie directed this five years after winning and Oscar for The Usual Suspects, and he hasn't written anything since. But whatever he does next, I'm gonna rent it.
|W|P|108366805601614542|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The more I think about it, the more it seems all our current troubles arise from bending the idea of "war." It's been so malleable in the last three years that's it's difficult to know even what we're trying to do, or whether we're succeeding.
- The "war on terror." As many people have pointed out, terror is an abstract noun. We'll never eradicate terror in the abstract. Bush has said he will not stop until "every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." In that sense this "war" is like the war on drugs—a military metaphor for what's chiefly an international law-enforcement effort. What's troubling in this case is that the administration is appealing to "wartime" exigencies to justify deficit spending and curtailing civil liberties.
- Afghanistan. Here we went after al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but Congress itself did not declare war, so it's hard to know, formally, who's in charge or what the objective is.
- Iraq. Okay, leaving aside the whole business of justification, if we declared war on Iraq, then it was against the constituted government of Saddam Hussein, right? So, if that's gone ... who's the enemy? Famously there is no government in Iraq. We're fighting insurgents, but they're not organized; certainly there's not an Iraqi state.
At the same time, we can't adopt the terrorists' own methods. As Arnold writes:
Abandoning the rules invites everybody to play without rules. Ignoring national boundaries gives others equal rights to do the same. Killing people without trial or proof of guilt invites anarchy. Using assassination is an invitation to political chaos.
The answer is to recognize terrorism as a form of crime and to work with other nations to discourage it. That's not dramatic, but it's the only strategy that can work. I wonder how many more have to die before the Bush administration realizes that.
|W|P|108302732962852240|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn searching for decent movies to order through Netflix, Sharon and I have been relying on IMDb, MetaCritic, Rotten Tomatoes and Cin-O-Matic, plus local newspaper reviews. These are all good tools, but they share the same weakness: There's no guarantee that we have the same taste as the person giving the review. I've come to believe that tastes don't really yield to logic; you decide whether you like something and then look for reasons afterward. A movie can have vivid characters, a clever plot, great production values and big stars and still suck.
There's not yet a solution for that, as far as I know, for movies, but one is evolving for music. Working through a free plugin, Audioscrobbler sniffs what you're playing, all day, and builds a profile of your musical preferences—favorite artists and songs. Once you've compiled a big enough profile, you can start looking for others in the global community who share your particular tastes in specific songs, browse each other's collections and suggest new music to each other.
I'm just getting started with this—due to a rush of signups, there are some lags in the system at the moment—but it seems like a very smart way to address the problem: Don't try to understand why you like something, just amass many examples of what you like and then find someone else who feels the same way.
Plus, I can always supplement it with research through my old tools: AllMusic, Google Sets and java maps.
A telling side note: The plugin appears to recognize mp3s but not CD tracks, though Windows Media Player recognizes both. That means I can't record my preferences by using my existing CD collection, unless I want to rip everything myself. That's a little inconvenient for me, but it does show how widely established the mp3 economy has become—people don't really think in terms of CDs anymore.
|W|P|108335576010537099|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comMemo to Scott Simon: If you greet every single guest with "Thanks very much for being with us," it stops sounding gracious and starts sounding insincere.
|W|P|108342286072425580|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
I think I'm going to jump over to Gmail. Hotmail's been driving me batty this week, with delays of up to three days—three days!—while I'm trying to finish a freelance copyediting project. That's completely outrageous in any case, but they could at least have sent out a note explaining that there are problems. I got nothing. In three days I literally could have driven to the source and got a message carved into a stone tablet.
Anyway, Gmail gives you a gig of free storage space, and has some great features for labeling and searching mail. I've noticed vaguely that my biggest inefficiency is finding old e-mails. In Outlook there's just no clever way to do this; the best method I've found is to try to remember some odd turn of phrase that's probably not going to appear in other messages, and then search the archive for that. Searching the archive takes a long time—there are 10,000 messages in one of my accounts—and if you come up empty there's really no alternative, especially if the correspondent is someone you e-mail frequently.
Gmail gets around that by sorting threads into conversations. Outlook claims to do this, but I think it's really just searching for similar subject lines, which is not the same thing at all. We'll see how well Gmail handles it. Also, you can assign multiple customized labels to each message, rather than having to remember which folder you decided was most relevant. That's a good idea, if it works.
The main thing that concerns me is spam. That's really the main thing I like about Hotmail�it's fairly smart about blocking spam but making the quarantined files available if I want to double-check. I hope Gmail offers something similar, or I'll just fill up my free gigabyte with generic Vicodin offers. We'll see.
|W|P|108302858950268966|W|P||W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com