Links of the Day - August 31, 2007

Gonzales being invested by DOJ - Justice Department investigators are examining the truthfulness of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' testimony to Congress on the firings of federal prosecutors and domestic wiretapping. The effort, disclosed in a letter released on Thursday, is a sign that political controversy over Gonzales' conduct will continue well beyond his resignation announced this week.

Gonzales exit not speedy enough - "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has finally done something important to advance the cause of justice. He has resigned."

The Suspension of Belief - Were (Idaho Republican Senator Larry) Craig not a social conservative who made restricting the legal rights of homosexuals a key part of his platform, then I would not care about his private behavior. Hey, as I stroll into middle-age it is encouraging that a guy that old is still so horny that he can't control himself at a public toilet. But the hypocrisy makes Craig and his ilk need to be shot down. This country cannot have our private and sexual lives controlled by people who want to make illegal what they do in bathrooms because they are ashamed of it.

Has iTunes gone too far? - NBC is reportedly pulling its offerings from iTunes after price negotiations fell through with Apple - not good news for Apple at all when NBC content supposedly accounts for up to 40% of iTunes video downloads! After a couple years with Apple in an utterly dominant position with iTunes, are the minions finally gathering the nerve to fight the system? Are we about to have a coup on our hands?

Did Joba mean to Throw at Youkalis?

WasWatching has an excellent analysis of yesterdays Yankees/Red Sox 9th inning, when rookie pitcher Joba Chamberlain was ejected for throwing two 98/99 mph fastballs over the head of Red Sox Kevin Youkalis.

Consider the facts:

Joba Chamberlain threw 12 pitches in the 8th inning today. Two of the twelve were shown by YES via the camera behind home plate - the 3rd pitch to Hinske and the 2nd pitch to Pedroia. So, we don't know much about these two pitches - in terms of whether or not they were on target. But, we do know about the other ten pitches in the 8th inning from Joba.

Chamberlain threw four pitches to Hinske - all seemed on target with Posada's glove, with the exception of the aforementioned 3rd pitch (which we just don't know about). If anything, the 2nd pitch to Hinske missed low, if at all.

Chamberlain threw one pitch to Cora that appeared on target.

Chamberlain threw three pitches to Pedroia - all seemed on target with Posada's glove, with the exception of the aforementioned 2nd pitch (where we could not see it). If anything, the 1st pitch to Pedroia ran in on him, but not terribly in.

Chamberlain threw four pitches to Crisp - all seemed on target with Posada's glove. Maybe the 1st pitch, if anything, missed low of Posada's target. But, the 2nd and 3rd pitches to Crisp hit Posada's mitt exactly where he placed it.

In a nutshell, Joba showed very good control with his pitches in the 8th inning.

In the bottom of the 8th inning, with one out, after the Yankees took a 5-0 lead, Edwar Ramirez started to warm in the Yankees bullpen. By the end of the 8th inning, Ramirez was done warming and was standing there, ready, and tying his shoes.

However, Chamberlain comes back out to pitch the 9th inning. Joba throws one pitch to Big Papi Ortiz, that appears on target and retires him. Next, he's facing Youkilis.

The first pitch had a bit of a low-and-away break to it. Probably a slider. The second pitch is on target with Posada's glove - if anything, it breaks a bit inside.

The next two pitches from Chamberlain to Youkilis are up around the batter's head.

For what it's worth, in the last three games, Boston pitchers came inside to Yankees batters on several occasions. So, if someone from Red Sox Nation does want to bellyache about anything suspected with Joba's or the Yankees intent here, they should take into account the dangers of throwing stones in glass houses, before they go nuts.

I have to admit I am glad to see pitchers like Roger Clemens and now Joba Chamberlain willing to throw inside (and maybe at) opposing players, since for years Yankee players would get plunked and there would be no retailiation. I would never advocate throwing with the intention of hurting a player, but to hit someone in the back, like Clemens did to Alex Rios in Toronto or for Joba to throw over the head of a Red Sox, whose pitchers have for years been drilling Jeter, is a welcome relieft.

Throwing inside is and has always been part of the game. MLB and the hitters have done what they can to take that area of the plate away from the pitchers. It is good to see some are still willing to back off hitters or stick up for their teammates. On the whole, this is good for baseball.

I apologize, Quechup.com is a sham

Last night I made a major Faux-Paus and would like to apologize for falling into a trap, that an experienced web user should have avoided like the plague

Chances are you just received an email from me inviting you to join something called Quechup.com, a new (to me at least) social networking platform. In my professional as well as private life, sites like these have become more and more important. And since I work in interactive advertising, and I am constantly checking out new social platforms to find out what new features they come up with and how they could be put to use for our clients. When a friend of mine invited me to join Quechup.com , I tried it out.

I’ve been online now for about 15 years, and still, I’ve been had like a newbie. I am frustrated, furious, whatever but I can only expect anger, ridicule and a total loss of respect from colleagues, correspondents and friends.

The long and short : disregard and delete any invite you have received from me, inviting you to join Quechup.com. I did not send you this email, nor did I knowingly approve of it being sent to you. What
happened was this.

During the signup process, Quechup.com suggests it search your address book to check if some of your email contacts have already
signed up as well, so as to give the networking process a head start. We’ve seen this before with bonafide websites like LinkedIn or Facebook (which, incidentally, i do vouch for, since they have never sent me any spam nor sent mail on behalf of me without my consent — so far, that is). So call me gullible, I gave it my details and indeed, found a couple of people already on the site (amongst whom the woman who had invited me).

What the site doesn’t mention, however, is that each and every address in your address book is invited to join as well, as if you agreed to it.

I smelled fire when I received invites at some of my other email adresses, and quickly checked the mailbox I had used to sign up to Quechup.com. By this morning, I had received enough replies and complaints, asking what this was all about, ridiculing me for being so stupid or actually spewing abuse for sending that email. I have since activated my own out-of-office assistant, with an apology in the message.

What is even more troubling, in my opinion, is that the site then goes on to search for any offline mail clients, such as Outlook or Outlook Express on your PC and suggest doing the same search with the address data it finds there. As I don’t use any offline clients, I didn’t use this “feature”. I can only shudder at the effect that would have, and what other havock sites like these can wreck in your email client.

I have deleted my own membership. If you or anyone receive an invitation to join, from me or anybody else, I advise you to delete the email.

I took this almost verbatim from http://www.sparehed.com/ , since it expresses my feelings exactly

Links of the Day - August 28, 2007

Here we go again:

Ding Dong the Witch (or Warlock) is Dead - Gonzalez resigns - Good riddance and goodbye, hopefully this opens up the Justice Department to a more unbiased leader who is more interested in legal justice and prosecution rather than partisan divisive politics.

Map of the Internet from my friend See-Ming, definitely worth a click it is pretty cool

Mike Mussina really does suck, as I have already said back in May, and is now fighting to stay in the Yankees rotation.

He's not Gay

Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig is now screaming up and down the halls of the Congress that he is not gay, not there is anything wrong with that unless you are a conservative lawmaker caught with your pants down or offering to take your pants down in the Minneapolis airport. This obviously seems like an effort to cover up something he believed would be quickly swept under the rug when he plead guilty to a lewd act in June, considering he did not do what TV has been telling us to do for years when he was arrested, consult a lawyer.

My first question around this whole situation is how does one know, or find out about that by rubbing another persons foot in the men's room in the Minneapolis airport that you are asking for some kind of perverted or lewd (in the legal sense) act. (Apparently this is a well known tactic in the gay community, not being a member of the aforementioned gay community, I am not aware of this.) Is this information available on the Internet? Not that I am interested in having lewd acts performed on or by me in any airport restroom, let alone the one in Minneapolis, which I have been to once (the airport, not the restroom).

My second question is why do all these conservatives like Craig, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, David Vitter and Bob Allen who claim to represent good old fashioned family values, then wind up in bed with lots of other folks besides their wives. To quote Nobody's Business:

Lovely. That's four cases (not including Vitter) of smut-fighting, morally superior, adamantly heterosexual, family-promoting, hard-right Christian Republican leaders who love taking it up the ass from male prostitutes, or who sexually proposition young boys in their charge, or who offer blowjobs to complete strangers in some public crapper. Four cases in the space of less than a year.

How exactly are these people elected year after year, and supported by the GOP. Does anyone else see the hypocrisy but me? When are the people going to stand up and say this is ridiculous politics as usual and not hold our elected officials to the standards they claim to stand for in their own campaigns. It is sickening, but hey maybe that is just me.

Where are the Fireflies?

So last night I let the two older kids stay up late (8:30 or so) until it got dark, so we could catch some fireflies. My 6 year old son has been asking for a few weeks do to this, and with school starting this week and my job having settled down a bit, it was now or never. So we sat outside for almost an hour and we never once saw a firefly.

I remember even a few years ago, my back yard would be full of fireflies during the summer, with their tails shining so brightly all over the place. It just makes me wonder. Is the end of August already too late in the season? Or has there been some massive decline in the firefly population that has gone completely unreported in the scientific community?

Where does the firefly sit in the great ecological food-chain? Do they serve any other purpose other than the simple enjoyment of watching them flittering around on a lazy summer day? Will my children never get to enjoy this simple childhood pursuit of catching bugs in a jar?

Just say no to Real ID and human implanted RFID

So it is strange to see a couple of different viewpoints on this subject, considering I have not really delved into this in the recent past, but here goes:

I read in the Stamford Advocate this editorial written by Froma Harrop:

Let the Central Intelligence Agency summary of its failings before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks be a lesson to everyone — above all, politicians. Today's missed opportunities — for example, promoting a secure form of ID — could haunt them tomorrow.

Congress forced the release of the 2005 document against the agency's wishes. In it, the CIA's inspector general recommended that former Director George Tenet and other top officials be punished for neglecting to draw up a smart plan against al-Qaida. The previous CIA director, Porter Goss, opposed disciplining them because it "would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks."

Unfortunately, not taking risks was one of the CIA's major failings. Former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke wrote in his book "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" that risk aversion was a big reason why top managers at the CIA did not forcefully go after al-Qaida before Sept. 11....

Now a private consultant, Clarke recently criticized the widespread efforts to frustrate Real ID, the 2005 federal law that pushes states to create secure driver's licenses. Without such solid identification, he wrote, "potential terrorists here illegally can easily use phony licenses or, in many states, get real ones issued to them, along with credit cards and all of the other papers needed to blend into our society."

Politicians of both parties have latched onto a misguided populist revolt against these secure driver's licenses, and they may rue the day they did. You need just one terrorist waving a fake driver's license at airport security on his way to committing mayhem, and public opposition to Real ID will vanish.

Accountability is a good thing, and there's no reason why it should stop at the CIA. The administration's lame response to the pre-Sept. 11 threat remains open for inspection. And elected officials should know that voters could hold them accountable for failing to support something as simple as a sound ID card.

As a strict libertarian, it is not the feds responsibility to track this information and keep it in a national identity tracking database. This is absolutely not an effective counter-terrorism solution. The Real ID proposals will still be administered by the local DMV's and anyone paying attention recently knows that is often quite easy to get false identification.

A more secure licensing system and one tracked at the federal level will do more to restrict my civil liberties than protect us from terrorists. Perhaps the DHS should be more concerned about prevent fraudulent activities from occurring, that allow bad guys to get fake ID in the first place, rather than trying to keep track of the 80-95% of the law abiding citizens. Why the government always tries to focus their efforts on cataloging the many, rather than focusing efforts on the few remains a mystery to me.

You can help stop the ReadID initiative by going here or read about the initiatives here.

Someone at work sent this link around and I tend to agree with the opinions posted. Even as a parent of three children, I don't think I would ever stick a GPS devise into my children to track their activities and locations. I guess under some circumstances (mental deficiencies?) I might, but what happens when the wrong people (the government) get control of the homing devise. Then it one more level of civil liberties which has been eliminated and takes us closer to a country that I no longer recognize.

A Little History Lesson - The Star Spangled Banner

Back from the abyss of a difficult project at work, and two months of sleepless nights. Hopefully this gets the juices started, thanks to Barbara for sending this along...

Unless you know all four stanzas of the Star Spangled Banner you may find this most interesting. Perhaps most of you didn't realize what Francis Scott Key's profession was or what he was doing on a ship. This is a good brush-up on your history.

(Editor's Note- Near the end of his life, the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about the four stanzas of our national anthem. However brief, this well-circulated piece is an eye opener from the dearly departed doctor......) " I have a weakness -- I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem. The words are difficult and the tune is almost impossible, but frequently when I'm taking a shower I sing it with as much power and emotion as I can. It shakes me up every time."

NO REFUGE COULD SAVE : BY DR. ISAAC ASIMOV

I was once asked to speak at a luncheon. Taking my life in my hands, I announced I was going to sing our national anthem -- all four stanzas. This was greeted with loud groans. One man closed the door to the kitchen, where the noise of dishes and cutlery was loud and distracting. "Thanks, Herb," I said.

"That's all right," he said. "It was at the request of the kitchen staff"

I explained the background of the anthem and then sang all four stanzas. Let me tell you, those people had never heard it before -- or had never really listened. I got a standing ovation. But it was not me; it was the anthem.

More recently, while conducting a seminar, I told my students the story of the anthem and sang all four stanzas. Again there was a wild ovation and prolonged applause. And again, it was the anthem and not me.

So now let me tell you how it came to be written.

In 1812, the United States went to war with Great Britain, primarily over freedom of the seas. We were in the right. For two years, we held off the British, even though we were still a rather weak country. Great Britain was in a life and death struggle with Napoleon. In fact, just as the United States declared war, Napoleon marched off to invade Russia. If he won, as everyone expected, he would control Europe, and Great Britain would be isolated. It was no time for her to be involved in an American war.

At first, our seamen proved better than the British. After we won a battle on Lake Erie in 1813, the American commander, Oliver Hazard Perry, sent the message, "We have met the enemy and they are ours." However, the weight of the British navy beat down our ships eventually. New England, hard-hit by a tightening blockade, threatened secession.

Meanwhile, Napoleon was beaten in Russia and in 1814 was forced to abdicate. Great Britain now turned its attention to the United States, launching a three-pronged attack.

The northern prong was to come down Lake Champlain toward New York and seize parts of New England.

The southern prong was to go up the Mississippi, take New Orleans and paralyze the west.

The central prong was to head for the mid-Atlantic states and then attack Baltimore, the greatest port south of New York. If Baltimore was taken, the nation, which still hugged the Atlantic coast, could be split in two. The fate of the United States, then, rested to a large extent on the success or failure of the central prong.

The British reached the American coast, and on August 24, 1814, took Washington, D.C. Then they moved up the Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore. On September 12, they arrived and found 1,000 men in Fort McHenry, whose guns controlled the harbor. If the British wished to take Baltimore, they would have to take the fort.

On one of the British ships was an aged physician, William Beanes, who had been arrested in Maryland and brought along as a prisoner. Francis Scott Key, a lawyer and friend of the physician, had come to the ship to negotiate his release.

The British captain was willing, but the two Americans would have to wait. It was now the night of September 13, and the bombardment of Fort McHenry was about to start.

As twilight deepened, Key and Beanes saw the American flag flying over Fort McHenry. Through the night, they heard bombs bursting and saw the red glare of rockets. They knew the fort was resisting and the American flag was still flying. But toward morning the bombardment ceased, and a dread silence fell. Either Fort McHenry had surrendered and the British flag flew above it, or the bombardment had failed and the American flag still flew.

As dawn began to brighten the eastern sky, Key and Beanes stared out at the fort, trying to see which flag flew over it. He and the physician must have asked each other over and over, "Can you see the flag?"

After it was all finished, Key wrote a four stanza poem telling the events of the night. Called "The Defense of Fort McHenry," it was published in newspapers and swept the nation. Someone noted that the words fit an old English tune called, "To Anacreon in Heaven" -- a difficult melody with an uncomfortably large vocal range. For obvious reasons, Key's work became known as "The Star Spangled Banner," and in 1931 Congress declared it the official anthem of the United States.

Now that you know the story, here are the words. Presumably, the old doctor is speaking. This is what he asks Key:

Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

("Ramparts," in case you don't know, are the protective walls or other elevations that surround a fort.) The first stanza asks a question. The second gives an answer:

On the shore, dimly seen thro' the mist of the deep
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep.
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
'Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

"The towering steep" is again, the ramparts. The bombardment has failed, and the British can do nothing more but sail away, their mission a failure. In the third stanza I feel Key allows himself to gloat over the American triumph. In the aftermath of the bombardment, Key probably was in no mood to act otherwise? During World War I when the British were our Staunchest allies, this third stanza was not sung. However, I know it, so here it is:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

(The fourth stanza, a pious hope for the future, should be sung more slowly than the other three and with even deeper feeling):

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation,
Blest with victory and peace, may the Heaven - rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause is just,
And this be our motto -Publish Post-"In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I hope you will look at the national anthem with new eyes. Listen to it, the next time you have a chance, with new ears. Pay attention to the words. And don't let them ever take it away ... not even one word of it.