Rogers/Yahoo is apparently having email issues today, so should anyone need to contact me, use the “quotulatiousness AT gmail DOT com” address.
Update: Yahoo’s mail servers appear to be up and running again.
October 19, 2010
September 30, 2010
QotD: Unintended consequences
Sometimes I think of the political blogosphere as a huge commons. An individual blogger can gain in readership or influence by attacking or ridiculing some enemy, but at the cost of making that enemy stronger in the world as a whole.
I also believe that every time the words “stimulus” or “fiscal policy” are blogged it helps the electoral prospects of the Republican Party, no matter what the content of the blog post.
Tyler Cowen, “Department of Unintended Consequences”, Marginal Revolution, 2010-09-28
Comments Off on QotD: Unintended consequences
September 29, 2010
QotD: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by malice and incompetence”
I used to publish in the National Post back in the day Conrad Black ran the show. It was a business run with integrity. The last time I had a call from their editorial board I had to explain the Post paid me 40 cents a word. The man was genuinely scandalized — I mean audibly taken aback and offended — when I told him I would not hand my work over to him for free (btw, Adam, how did selling your integrity work out for you? Looks like you got what it was worth).
These days they don’t bother to call. Last week, they took my Margaret Atwood story and ran with it uncredited. They lacked the decency to do something that would have cost them nothing.
[. . .]
I am a writer. I don’t expect to get paid much. But I do expect to get paid. If this country aspired to be something more than a grasping, pissant kleptocracy celebrating third-raters and UCC school ties my work — this blog and others like it — would be understood as part of the real Canadian cultural establishment.
Fortunately, I don’t require their acknowledgement.
Nicholas Packwood, “Neither honour nor courage: The National Post”, Ghost of a Flea, 2010-09-29
Comments Off on QotD: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by malice and incompetence”
August 17, 2010
Blogging will be light for a few days
I’m off on a short vacation, with uncertain internet access, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to update the blog regularly.
Comments Off on Blogging will be light for a few days
August 1, 2010
Woodbutchery
Sorry for the lack of postings, but I’ve been busy trying to get back on track for delivering a set of bookshelves I promised for earlier this year. I’m covered in sawdust, and not all that interested in browsing the web at the moment. Perhaps tomorrow . . .
Comments Off on Woodbutchery
July 30, 2010
Blogging will be light
I’m working to a client deadline, so normal blogging activity may resume later today or tomorrow.
Comments Off on Blogging will be light
July 26, 2010
July 25, 2010
QotD: Writing
Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke: ‘Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth'”, John Brown’s Notes and Essays, 2010-07-23
Comments Off on QotD: Writing
July 5, 2010
Spam comments try to be more persuasive
A bunch of spam comments accumulated over the long weekend and it’s noteworthy that there has been a general improvement in the quality of “writing” that goes into them. There are still plenty that are clearly not words or phrases in any human language, but others show not only words but actual comprehensible sentences. The most common pattern is one of general agreement with the topic of the post (always unstated, as these are generated comments, not written ones), along with something like “I’ve added you to my Google Reader/bookmarks/blogroll”.
They’d probably be more effective — in the sense of getting past the spam filter — if there weren’t so many of them following the same pattern.
That’s not a request, I hurry to clarify, just a comment.
Comments Off on Spam comments try to be more persuasive
QotD: Blogging and the spirit of journalism
I believe the blogosphere first truly gained traction in America for a good reason. There is something about blogging’s freedom from the constraints of conventional journalism that captures an American ideal: civic engagement totally free of anyone else’s influence. It is an ideal of a fourth estate hostile to authorities public and private, suspicious of conventional wisdom, and, above all, confident, even when confidence seems absurd, in the power of the word and the argument to make a difference . . . in the end. The rise of this type of citizen journalism has, in my view, increasingly exposed some of the laziness and corruption in the professional version — even as there is still a huge amount to treasure and value in the legacy media, and a huge amount of partisan, mendacious claptrap on the blogs.
But what distinguishes the best of the new media is what could still be recaptured by the old: the mischievous spirit of journalism and free, unfettered inquiry. Journalism has gotten too pompous, too affluent, too self-loving, and too entwined with the establishment of both wings of American politics to be what we need it to be.
We need it to be fearless and obnoxious, out of a conviction that more speech, however much vulgarity and nonsense it creates, is always better than less speech. In America, this is a liberal spirit in the grandest sense of that word – but also a conservative one, since retaining that rebelliousness is tending to an ancient American tradition, from the Founders onward.
Andrew Sullivan, “Happy 4th”, Daily Dish, 2010-07-04
Comments Off on QotD: Blogging and the spirit of journalism
June 17, 2010
New release of WordPress
I’ve been happily using WordPress since I moved over from the original site (under MovableType), and the latest version of WordPress has just been released. However, any software update can have unforeseen results, so it’s possible the site will be affected by some minor (or even major) glitch. Please excuse the mess as I try the upgrade and see what other changes I may need to make . . .
https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21
June 5, 2010
Light blogging today
I’m away from the computer, competing in an SCA rapier tournament near Peterborough, Ontario. Lots of interesting sites to visit over in the right-hand column.
Update: You know, it would have helped if I’d actually published this entry before heading off this morning. I’m now back, bruised yet unbowed, happy in my second-place finish in the tournament. Last time I competed there (before injuring my shoulder and having to take a few years off), I won the tournament. This time, with more fencers taking part, I still managed to claim second. That’s pretty good after such a long lay-off from competition. I’m more than satisfied.
Comments Off on Light blogging today
May 10, 2010
Six years of blogging
Six years ago today, Jon installed a copy of MovableType on his server and invited me to start my own blog. He got tired of his own blog fairly quickly, but in an odd sort of way it still lives on — I named my blog Quotulatiousness as a joking reference to his Blogulatiousness.
The very first post was pretty indicative of what I’d be doing on the blog for the next six years: a brief introduction, a long-ish quote from the linked item of interest, and a brief closing comment (in that case, no actual commentary).
2004 was a pretty busy year, so if you’re terminally bored, you can sample a bit of blog history here (most of these entries don’t follow the pattern of the first blog post):
- First wine post — 2004-05-11
- Attributing links correctly — 2004-06-14
- First attempt at political wonkery (Leaders debate) — 2004-06-16
- Exorcising the AVRO Arrow — 2004-06-26
- Analyzing the party platforms — BQ — 2004-06-26
- Analyzing the party platforms — Tory — 2004-06-27
- Analyzing the party platforms — Greens — 2004-06-27
- Analyzing the party platforms — Libs — 2004-06-27
- Election results reaction — 2004-06-29
- First “busted hockey stick” post — 2004-07-13
- Air security — 2004-07-16
- Remembering Apollo 11 — 2004-07-22
- First “sell off the LCBO” post — 2004-07-28
- First visit to PE County wineries — 2004-08-03
- Psychopathic Narcissists (politicians) — 2004-08-03
- The importance of property rights — 2004-08-09
- First rant on China’s economy — 2004-08-10
- Dieppe raid anniversary — 2004-08-19
- Paul Martin’s Peacekeeping Brigade — 2004-08-21
- First post on BMI — 2004-08-22
- First global warming post — 2004-08-23
- Blogging the cat (first photos) — 2004-08-29
- How big is blogging — 2004-09-02
- Redaction and domestic security — 2004-09-03
- What is a hate crime? — 2004-09-07
- Writing vs Technical Writing — 2004-09-09
- After Beslan — 2004-09-14
- Canuck ingratitude — 2004-09-20
- The over-protected generation — 2004-09-23
- Healthcare: pets vs. humans — 2004-09-23
- I’m in favour of — 2004-09-28
- Garnet Rogers — 2004-10-03
- French complicity in holocaust — 2004-10-04
- Calculating the NFL passer rating — 2004-10-08
- SAS versus Militia — 2004-10-09
- Macdonnell on the heights — 2004-10-14
- How Europe went left — 2004-10-18
- Healthcare — 2004-10-19
- Soldering woes — 2004-10-22
- Economic Feng Shui — 2004-10-25
- Scrooge to Bob Cratchit — 2004-10-28
- Scrutineering — 2004-11-02
- Greater Soviet Canuckistan — 2004-11-05
- Extended childhood — 2004-11-15
- Power — 2004-11-23
- Laws of war — 2004-11-24
- Ego-surfing — 2004-11-26
- Woodworking — 2004-11-26
- Criminals have more rights than victims — 2004-12-01
- Home-schooling — 2004-12-06
- Christmas music — 2004-12-06
- Retirement planning — 2004-12-07
- I’m a racist — 2004-12-07
- Lennon’s death — 2004-12-08
- French winemakers are revolting! — 2004-12-09
- Wine tour part 1 — 2004-12-12
- Wine tour part 2 — 2004-12-12
- Wine tour part 3 — 2004-12-12
- Wine tour part 4 — 2004-12-12
- Wine tour part 5 — 2004-12-12
- Corkage — 2004-12-16
- My first takedown notice — 2004-12-17
In short, I’m still one of the laziest bloggers on the planet, but I’m still blogging after half a century in blog-years (most blogs start up with a few quick posts, then fade out never to be updated again).
Thanks again to Jon, both for getting me started in blogging, and for continuing to host my archives from the first five years.
May 4, 2010
The lesson, kids, is don’t ask for colour advice
A colour survey gone very wrong:
Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.
First, a few basic discoveries:
* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
* Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
* Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.
And a selection of miscellaneous answers:
May 3, 2010
“Remember when reporters had guts?”
Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” sent this interesting link, suggesting:
This is sort of related to your “White House threatens to yank the ovaries out of those who would criticize The One” post [. . .] same tactics, really. And considering how reporters have become such wusses — perhaps they’ve all been hit with the German girlification spray — I believe it is accurate to say that all of them, especially the “males”, fear for their ovaries.
The White House post is here and the “girlification” post is here, in case you didn’t see them before.
Michael Malone is wondering where all the real reporters went, and remembers what it was like when he started in the field:
Remember when reporters had guts?
In the late Seventies, when I was just out of college, and even before I began my career as a journalist, I worked in public relations at Hewlett-Packard Co.
[. . .]
Simon broke insider stories, published internal strategy memos and pre-introduced secret projects, all with seeming abandon . . . leaving corporate PR departments, like us at HP, scrambling to do damage control and plug the leaks.
As the kid in HP corporate PR department, I both feared Simon for the damage he could do with his breaking stories — my turf was a hugely successful calculator business — and was in awe of his reporting skills. I also wasn’t allowed to talk much with him when he came into our offices for fear I would slip up and accidentally give my counterpart another news hook.It wasn’t until years later, when I was a reporter myself (and talked with Mark) that I came to realize that all Simon was doing was just good hard reporting.
So, what does this trip down memory lane have to do with modern reporters?
This week, Chen’s house was raided by officers from California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT), a special task force of police officers and federal agents created to combat computer-related crimes — and which just happens to have Apple on its steering committee. The cops took all of Chen’s computer equipment. Meanwhile, the San Mateo County District Attorney is considering whether to bring charges against Chen. It all hinges around whether California’s journalist shield law covers bloggers. Well, speaking as someone who was an investigative reporter for one of the nation’s top ten newspapers: of course it does.
This is appalling. As Instapundit uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds has rightly noted, this is basically “gangland politics” with one side getting to use to the police as its muscle. He’s also correct in noting that neither the police nor Apple would never have tried this against, say, the San Jose Mercury-News (I know because I worked there).
I’m still not clear if Apple played the role of Mafia don and ordered up a hit on Chen (to be performed by their soldiers in the REACT mob), or if someone with authority over REACT used them to attempt to curry favour with “Don” Jobs. Either way, it’s a very disturbing development.
Either way, it will function to continue and even accellerate the subservience of the media to (certain) corporate and political interests, which is not good for the public, the media, or even the temporarily favoured entities.
Comments Off on “Remember when reporters had guts?”
