Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2013

Nine years of blogging

Filed under: Administrivia, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Nine years is a very long lifespan for a blog. The vast majority of blogs don’t even make it to a first anniversary before the blogger loses interest and stops updating it. As I have no other particular claims to distinction, I’ll hang my hat on longevity. If I were to do it over again, I’d probably have come up with a different name for the blog, but for a spur-of-the-moment joke, it’s held up well enough. I guess.

One thing I don’t regret is not specializing in a particular area. I’m not an economist, or a military historian, or a political theorist, but I have interests in those areas that crop up relatively frequently here on the blog. I don’t generally post personal items, as there are lots of other venues (like Facebook) which are better suited to that sort of thing … and I live a fairly boring life, so exotic trips and exciting adventures are things I read about rather than experience directly. I especially don’t post about (past) employers or (current) clients in a way that they could be identified: that’s the sort of thing that tends to have only negative repercussions.

I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, the “best of 2005″ for 2011, and posts from 2006 last year. To stay on that path requires a look at what I posted in 2007 (and may still have some relevance or interest):

January, 2007

February, 2007

March, 2007 (a very busy month, resulting in very low blog output)

  • Our dystopian future?. “Brad Warbiany takes a moment to glance into his crystal ball and finds . . . shite”
  • “Good job, buddy!”. An extended comment from a regular reader becomes a full blog post.
  • Very disturbing development. “These guys are not exemplars of “warriors”. They’re parties to conspiracy and murder. That is not what soldiers do. The distinction may be a bit subtle for those raised on anti-war protests and anti-military propaganda, however. “

April, 2007

  • Toronto to export garbage at retail level. The social and political side of garbage collection.
  • The diet dilemma. The inevitable result of two trends: more sedentary adult life and cheaper food.
  • Why have an army at all?. A letter to the Toronto Star suggests that Canada has no actual need for any armed forces at all.
  • Everybody’s talking about it . . .. Some conversations just repeat on a regular basis. This discussion of how a criminal got his hands on the weapons he used in his crime could be copy-pasted into any month of the last decade.
  • Somehow, I’m not convinced. A long-standing problem with using US college students as guinea pigs for sociological experiments is that they’re not truly representative even of Americans, never mind non-westerners. Your results will be biased due to the sample you’re using.
  • Potential outages. Jon switched ISPs at the end of April. It took several days to get the blog up and running at the new ISP. An abortive effort was made to update to the then-current version of MovableType, but eventually he had to admit it wasn’t working properly and revert back to the older install.

May, 2007 (a death in the family meant another month of irregular updates)

June, 2007

July, 2007 re-employment took its toll on blogging output

August, 2007

September, 2007

October, 2007 (the job was consuming all my waking hours this month, so blog posts were very light indeed)

  • There’s no place like Florida. There’s just something … special … about Florida.
  • Voting day in Ontario. The election John Tory had to work really hard to lose. But he somehow managed the trick.
  • Micro microeconomics. I explain “Russon’s Law of Economics” as applied to the Ontario economy just before the entire North American economy hit the skids. In hindsight, this was a flashing red light about the near-term performance across all retail sectors.
  • The anti-age-effects movement. Rather than working toward mere longevity, put efforts into reducing or even eliminating the worst aspects of old age.

November, 2007 (deadline pressures at work kept blogging light)

December, 2007

April 18, 2013

PVFW heroically takes the fight back to disparaging military bloggers

Filed under: Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

You’ve got to admire their willingness to continue their fight against reality:

The Phony Veterans of Foreign Wars, the nation’s leading military fakers’ organization — representing fake members from all service branches — has gone on the offensive in the fight against military bloggers.

PVFW fired back with a public relations offensive, speaking with reporters and establishing a password-protected blog on their website devoted to peer-reviewed development of members’ stories of their superhuman valor and heroism.

“Because of these milbloggers’ relentless assault on our First Amendment-protected right to lie about brief, unglamorous or nonexistent military service,” PVFW chairman Michael Spurwick told reporters, “several of our members have suffered irreparable damage to their reputations, and a few have even had their businesses and careers ruined, after being exposed as frauds. Something had to be done.”

Spurwick, a former Army sergeant, who was promoted to General before retiring as a Captain, has a long and impressive career of made-up military service.

“We lost a lot of good men out there,” Spurwick said. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”

Born in 1965, he’s a veteran of every U.S. military action since his birth, from the Vietnam War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Boasting unearned Special Forces and Ranger tabs, Spurwick served with both Delta Force and the Rangers during Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, Somalia. He’s participated in every combat parachute jump since 1967, when, at just fifteen months of age, he parachuted into North Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne during Operation Junction City — as well as a top-secret high altitude, high opening jump from the International Space Station during OEF VI and a LANO (low-altitude, no-opening) jump from a B-1 bomber during OIF V.

[Editor's note: According to Spurwick's DD214, obtained by The Duffel Blog through a FOIA request, he was discharged from the Army in 1986 during basic training at Fort Sill, Okla., as an E-2.]

I’m sure there is — or soon will be — an anti-bullying law of some stripe that will allow these brave imaginary heroes to launch legal counter-attacks against those who would deny them the ability to wear uniforms, medals, badges, and awards to which they have no actual right.

March 17, 2013

Proposed British press regulation will apply to bloggers as well

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Guido Fawkes offers a warning to those bloggers cheerleading for the British government to impose controls on the tabloid press:

One thing that surprises Guido is that his comrades in the liberal, progressive blogosphere have seemingly not noticed that the proposed Royal Charter aims to control and regulate them as well as the tabloids.

Schedule 4, Point 1 of both the government and the opposition’s versions of the Royal Charter will bring blogs under the regulator’s control:

    “relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: a. a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or b. a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)”

[. . .]

To all those bloggers who support this press control Charter because they hate Murdoch and Dacre, Guido offers this cautionary counsel, remember that the new regulator will cover you as well. You will have all the expense and bureaucracy of compliance as Murdoch and Dacre face, without the means. Unless like Guido and the Spectator you plan to become media outlaws too…

March 15, 2013

Will the death of Google Reader also be the death of RSS?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Felix Salmon on the knock-on ramifications of Google’s announcement that it is killing Google Reader:

But whether or not Reader was ever going to be a good business for Google, it was from day one a fantastic public service for its users. Google started as a public service — a way to find what you were looking for on the internet — and didn’t stop there. Google would also do things like buy the entire Usenet archives, or scan millions of out-of-print books, or put thousands of people to work making maps, all in order to be able to get all sorts of information to anybody who wants it. [. . .]

The problem with the death of Reader is that it was the architecture underpinning lots of other services — the connective tissue of just about all RSS readers and services, from Summify to Reeder to Flipboard. You didn’t even need to use Google Reader; it was just the master central repository of your master OPML list, all the different feeds that you were subscribed to. Google spent real money to provide that public service, and it’s going to be sorely missed. As Marco Arment says, “every major iOS RSS client is still dependent on Google Reader for feed crawling and sync.”

Arment sees a silver lining in the cloud, saying that with Google gone, “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” I’m less sanguine. Building an RSS sync platform is a hard and pretty thankless task, it costs real money, and it might not work at all — especially in a world where less and less content is actually available in RSS format. (You can subscribe to my Tumblr feed in RSS format, but there’s no such feed for my posts on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Path or even Google+.)

RSS has been dying for years — that’s why Google killed Reader. It was a lovely open format; it has sadly been replaced with proprietary feeds like the ones we get from Twitter and Facebook. That’s not an improvement, but it is reality. Google, with Reader, was really providing the life-support mechanism for RSS. Once Reader is gone, I fear that RSS won’t last much longer.

March 14, 2013

Toronto school board deploys police to intimidate bloggers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Arnie Lemaire, who blogs at Blazing Cat Fur is becoming a bother to the great and the good at the Toronto District School Board. After a recent comment on his blog, the TDSB sent police officers to his door:

Can writing a sarcastic but clearly tame blog comment really land two cops at your doorstep?

It happened to Blazingcatfur blogger Arnie Lemaire Wednesday for musing “OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective.”

He’s, quite rightfully, upset about it.

But, often critical of the Toronto District School Board and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Lemaire said he will not back down from efforts to “intimidate” him.

“Dear TDSB, You Can’t Silence Me,” was a headline on the blazingcatfur.blogspot in response.

But, what they clearly can do, is bring in the police to investigate.

In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany.

Update: As Mark Steyn puts it “Nobody Expects the Toronto District School Board Inquisition…“

It seems a wee bit over-sensitive for a school board that promotes murderous goons like Che Guevara and cop-killers like the Black Panthers as role models to its young charges to get its knickers in a twist over a blog post. But, of course, for leftie social engineers, the glamor of the revolutionary aesthetic is mostly a useful cover for inculcating a bovine, unquestioning statist compliance from which no deviation is permitted. There was barely any pretense by the cops that there was a legal justification for what happened yesterday; it was just a friendly warning: “Nice blog ya got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.“

One of the most disquieting trends in western Europe is the state’s increasingly open intimidation of those who dissent from the official ideology. Sad to see it on this side of the Atlantic.

Google Reader to be scrapped

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

I started using Google Reader about a year and a half ago. It quickly became an invaluable part of my online toolkit. Yesterday, Google announced that it was going to be dropping the service. Charles Stross posted this as his reaction to the awful news, and I feel very much the same way:

March 1, 2013

Ken at Popehat really does attract the most fascinating legal threats

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:50

If your Friday routine is a bit dull, go see what sort of crackpots Ken gets to interact with these days:

Today, I received a legal threat purporting to be from Ken Matherne, owner of the Global Wildlife Center. Using people smarter than I (a large set), I confirmed the email came from the Global Wildlife domain. In the email, Mr. Matherne threatens me with litigation and attempts to insult me. It has to be read to be believed.

    OK – your fun was enough – since your cute story, you have hurt my Foundation, I am divorced over this thing that you think was funny. The dad that OD.

    The University that I supported used state university equipment – this will be a test of how the justice system will work. I gave the same people $150K+ to support your liberal views at least that year. And yes I am a conservative, because I am paying all the taxes!

    I gave you the last one. But, you are still playing with my foundation , so you give me no choice You are fucking with my daughter and I will not put up with that – I will not support the Universities and scholarships I give every year. I have given more than 52 percent to democrats over 10 years – don’t care how liberal your group is or have much dope you smoke & drugs you do – nor witch one of you is screwing who – if y’all are all boyfriends on the side – matters not to me.

    You just gave me a new mission in life – to bring the real truth out!

    And this is not a threat , this is a promise – I will spend the rest of my life investigating you and your partners and associates that slander people and companies, even non- profits . I am hiring a team now to work on you and your team. I want to know how your guys can be so sick to do things like this to children.

The crazy goes high octane as the exchanges continue. Oh, and do read the comments at Popehat where Ken’s readers try to make sense of the original and follow-on messages.

Update, March 6th: Now it’s Techdirt getting the crazy legal stalker treatment from the same person who had Popehat in his sights.

Today is Wednesday. At 12:49am California time this morning (2:49am in Louisiana, where the Global Wildlife Center is based), it appears that Ken Matherne subscribed to our daily email. Three minutes later, he unsubscribed. One minute after that, the general catchall email address that is the “from” in the subscription confirmation email, received a message from Matherne with the following subject line and no message:

    you are saved and wait for me!

Leaving aside the vague notions of religious salvation, we waited. Not for long. At 1:39am our time, we received a “reply” to the unsubscribe notice that just said:

    Get ready!

With anticipation building, we continued to wait (actually, we were all asleep). Eight minutes after that email, we got the following:

    What state are you registered in? And if any of your two companies are affiliated – we should start to proceed. My daughter asked me not to last night. But after you new post — I am coming!

    Law is the Law !

[. . .]

I like how he is emailing us after 2am California time, where we are located, and giving us less than 6 hours to respond. While we are curious how reporting on facts means that we have started “a conspiracy,” and find it even more interesting that he appears to directly be admitting that his intention is merely to tie us up in court, we believe that he probably should have heeded the original advice of his daughter that this was not a productive path to take.

He might also want to look up the definition of what a “threat” is, because saying that he will spend the next 20 years taking us to court is pretty much the definition of a threat.

When I read through the messages both Popehat and Techdirt have received, I can’t help hearing them in my head as if read by Mr. Plinkett.

February 25, 2013

The difference between professional journalists and mere bloggers

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

Ken at Popehat explains “the game”:

Here we have the heart of the matter. “Professional” journalists may, indeed, be brilliant, talented, well-trained, professional, with an abiding appetite for hard-hitting but neutral reporting. Yet professional journalists also depend on relationships. Ms. Caldwell calls that fact out, sending law enforcement’s core message to the press: if you want access, play the game.

The game colors mainstream media coverage of criminal justice. Here’s my overt bias: I’m a criminal defense attorney, a former prosecutor, and a critic of the criminal justice system. In my view, the press is too often deferential to police and prosecutors. They report the state’s claims as fact and the defense’s as nitpicking or flimflam. They accept the state’s spin on police conduct uncritically. They present criminal justice issues from their favored “if it bleeds it leads” perspective rather than from a critical and questioning perspective, happily covering deliberate spectacle rather than calling it out as spectacle. They accept leaks and tips and favors from law enforcement, even when those tips and leaks and favors violate defendants’ rights, and even when the act of giving the tip or leak or favor is itself a story that somebody ought to be investigating. In fact, they cheerfully facilitate obstruction of justice through leaks. They dumb down criminal justice issues to serve their narrative, or because they don’t understand them.

This “professional” press approach to the criminal justice system serves police and prosecutors very well. They favor reporters who hew to it. Of course they don’t want to answer questions from the 800-pound bedridden guy in fuzzy slippers in his mother’s basement. But it’s not because an 800-pound bedridden guy can’t ask pertinent questions. It’s because he’s frankly more likely to ask tough questions, more likely to depart from the mutually accepted narrative about the system, less likely to be “respectful” in order to protect his access. (Of course, he might also be completely nuts, in a way that “mainstream” journalism screens out to some extent.)

January 17, 2013

BargainBinBlasphemy

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:53

Satan and Garfunkel - Sounds of Pestilence

A Tumblr blog that might be of interest: BargainBinBlasphemy.

H/T to Boing Boing for the link.

January 3, 2013

Better late than never, the annual stats post

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:09

Despite seeing lots of folks posting their annual traffic counts over the last few days, I forgot to even look at the Quotulatiousness stats page until just now. On the numbers, I think it’s safe to say that the blog continues to grow (but don’t ask me why):

Quotulatiousness visits 2009-2012

Quotulatiousness hits 2009-2012

Those are the internal WordPress numbers, starting from 10 July, 2009 when I switched over from the original site. Notional nationality breakdown, courtesy of Flag Counter:

Quotulatiousness Flag Counter 20130103

Generally speaking, every other visitor to the blog is American, one in five is Canadian, one in 20 is British, and the rest of the world combines for the remaining quarter. No wonder I have so many stories with American angles…

The old site still gets some traffic, but you’ll notice that the total traffic there (including from sometime in the late summer of 2004 down to today) doesn’t add up to a particularly large number:

Quotulatiousness old site stats 2004-2013

January 2, 2013

Oh, this is ironic…

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Several years ago, I got the only takedown notice I’ve ever received. The person objecting to me posting a short quotation of hers (with full attribution and link to the original) is now in the news herself:

An Ottawa wine writer used reviews from other writers on her website without properly crediting them. And as if that’s not ripe enough, a U.S. online wine magazine says she requires some wineries to buy a subscription to her website before she’ll review their wines.

Call it a tempest in a wine bottle. Writer Natalie MacLean has uncorked a debate about journalism etiquette and ethics online and touched off an oenophilic flap that’s produced underlying acidity and a bitter aftertaste in the usually genteel subculture.

“It’s all very tawdry,” says wine writer Tony Aspler. “The wine writers’ community is very close and collegial. To have someone behave this way, to take reviews and not attribute properly, it’s not done.”

MacLean, who writes at nataliemaclean.com, says she was surprised when Michael Pinkus, president of the Wine Writers Circle of Canada, objected to her use of others’ reviews. She got legal advice, she says, and has now gone back through past postings to fully attribute the reviews. She denies that wineries must pay to subscribe to her site to get reviewed.

“It’s been extremely painful,” says MacLean, named the World’s Best Drink Journalist in 2003 at the World Food Media Awards. “I’m more than happy to discuss the issues, to focus on the facts, but this has gone well beyond that. There’s been a lot of personal attacks. You can look for yourself on the blogs.”

So the person who objected to me quoting her was actually engaged in ripping off her fellow wine writers without attribution? That made my day.

December 4, 2012

Tumblr gets trolled

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

The Register‘s John Leyden on the JavaScript troubles inflicted on Tumblr the other day:

A worm spread like wildfire across Tumblr on Monday, defacing pages on the blogging website with an abusive message penned by a notorious trolling crew.

The outbreak was triggered by the GNAA, a group of anonymous troublemakers who get their kicks from winding up bloggers with offensive posts.

Tumblr temporarily halted the publication of new journal posts to prevent the worm from spreading further before restoring the service to normal a few hours later.

[. . .]

“It appears that the worm took advantage of Tumblr’s reblogging feature, meaning that anyone who was logged into Tumblr would automatically reblog the infectious post if they visited one of the offending pages,” wrote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“It shouldn’t have been possible for someone to post such malicious JavaScript into a Tumblr post — our assumption is that the attackers managed to skirt around Tumblr’s defences by disguising their code through Base 64 encoding and embedding it in a data URI,” he added.

November 15, 2012

The BBC’s 28 secret climate change advisors

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

The BBC has been prominent among media outlets for their relentless proclamations on the dangers of climate change. Despite the BBC’s charter requiring them to provide balanced coverage, in this particular area they have been cheerleaders for one particular message: that climate change is DOOM!

In 2006, the BBC convened a panel of climate change experts to advise them on the topic, and the corporation took the advice of that panel to heart and has been pushing the climate change = disaster meme ever since. Blogger Tony Newbery submitted a FOI request to find out who had been on the panel which had swung the BBC so far away from their charter, but his request was denied. Not just denied, but fought out in court at an estimated cost of £40,000 per day.

The BBC won in court, but the information was released by someone else:

Sadly for the BBC, another enterprising blogger called Maurizio Morabito unearthed the details anyway and published them on Monday via the website Watts Up With That?

So who were all these ‘best scientific experts’ who did so much to shape the BBC’s climate policy (and by extension, one fears, government policy too…)? Well, two were from Greenpeace; one was from Stop Climate Chaos; one was a CO2 reduction expert from BP; one was from Npower Renewables; one came from the left-leaning New Economics Foundation… Only five of those present could, in any way, be considered scientists with disciplines even vaguely relevant to ‘climate change’. And of these, every one had a track record of climate alarmism. No wonder the BBC tried so hard to keep the list of 28 a secret. Its claim that its policy change was based on the ‘best scientific’ expertise turns out to have been a massive lie.

September 9, 2012

Winner of the Democratic convention? Conservative trolls

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Dave Weigel on the fascinating fact that a few conservatives were able to successfully troll the Democratic convention in Charlotte:

Whatever lessons the Democrats take from Charlotte, whatever it did for the president or for the ambitious senators and governors who stalked delegate breakfasts and whispered “2016,” this is a fact: The convention was successfully trolled.

I don’t use troll in the pejorative sense. Actually, I may be trying to craft a neutral meaning of troll where none previously existed. The term, in its modern Internet usage, refers to people who want to start fights online to bring the universe into an argument on their terms. It comes not from Grimm literature, but from a fishing technique in which multiple lines are baited and dragged to haul in the maximum amount of cold-bloods.

Democrats did not expect to spend Wednesday arguing about the capital of Israel and the appearance of the word “God” in their platform. There were, reportedly, 15,000 members of the media in Charlotte, of whom maybe 14,980 could have given a damn about the party platform. On Tuesday night, when the Obama campaign and the DNC released its platform, none of the bigfoot media outlets in town spent time on the text.

[. . .]

Maybe the word “historic” is out of place for the modern convention. To say that they’re clichéd and staged is, in itself, a staged cliché. But who thought, just 11 months after the launch of the Occupy movement, that 99 percenters would have less influence on the platform than conservative media?

This is what I mean: We live in the age of trolling. Any comment made online, if it’s given the right forum, is as relevant as any comment made by some media gatekeeper. Think about a politician or a journalist on Twitter, and what he sees. If a colleague wants to tell him something, it appears in his feed with an @ symbol. If someone who just logged on and wants to bait a nerd logs on, he will send a message that appears with an @ symbol. Both are equally valid, at least in how they appear on-screen or on a phone. There is no ghetto-izing of comments into the bottom of a page, or into media that you don’t pay attention to.

August 25, 2012

Posting will be light for a few days

Filed under: Administrivia, Gaming — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 will be released to the general public on Tuesday, but everyone who pre-purchased the game has early access to the servers today and for the next two days. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the virtual world of Tyria as a result.

If you happen to be in-game, my main character name is Raphia Naon and I’m on the Darkhaven server.

Update: My first day’s gaming report is now posted at GuildMag.

Update the second: The next day’s activity is rounded up here.

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