Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Monday, January 30, 2006
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
DISCRIMINATION:
Boing Boing: World of Warcraft: Don't tell anyone you're queer
This is just ridiculous. So people who want to advertise their groups as being friendly to certain people aren't allowed to because some idiots might taunt the members? I would assume that WoW has an age limit and doesn't allow kindergarten age children on their game so why are all players being treated as children who can't either control their bigotry or be called names? I guess the real question is why doesn't Blizzard have a way of dealing with people who actually discriminate or taunt other players? They know what's going on in the game at all times. If somebody calls me a name because I'm a member of a certain group I should be able to tell an admin and the admin should be able to look at the logs and see what the other person said. Then that person should be kicked from the game immediately. Since the threat of physical violence and jail is removed in an online environment, there needs to be another way of keeping bigoted cowards in line and not let them define the acceptable behavior for the group.
This reminds me of what I read about the recent riots in France. Apparently the French position on multi-culturalism is to ignore differences between everyone. That sounds good in theory but in practice what it really does is erase the culture of people who aren't the mainstream group. So you have people who have had all expressions of their cultural individuality suppressed in favor of the majority. This obviously causes some problems in the long run. If these online games keep pretending that real world differences don't exist, it's just going to piss those people off and they'll find somewhere else to spend their time and money. As these games grow in stature and importance, the ones that find good ways of dealing with the idiots will be the ones that thrive.
Tags: grommes, games, discrimination, glbt, bigotry, warcraft
players who have advertised their guilds as "GBLT-friendly" have lately been warned off by Blizzard moderators, who cite a rule against sexual discrimination in censoring the players. When pressed for explanations, they offer the genuinely bizarre excuse that if queer players are allowed to tell other players about their sexual orientation, that it might arouse discriminatory or unkind remarks from those players, and that would violate the anti-discrimination rules of the game.
This is just ridiculous. So people who want to advertise their groups as being friendly to certain people aren't allowed to because some idiots might taunt the members? I would assume that WoW has an age limit and doesn't allow kindergarten age children on their game so why are all players being treated as children who can't either control their bigotry or be called names? I guess the real question is why doesn't Blizzard have a way of dealing with people who actually discriminate or taunt other players? They know what's going on in the game at all times. If somebody calls me a name because I'm a member of a certain group I should be able to tell an admin and the admin should be able to look at the logs and see what the other person said. Then that person should be kicked from the game immediately. Since the threat of physical violence and jail is removed in an online environment, there needs to be another way of keeping bigoted cowards in line and not let them define the acceptable behavior for the group.
This reminds me of what I read about the recent riots in France. Apparently the French position on multi-culturalism is to ignore differences between everyone. That sounds good in theory but in practice what it really does is erase the culture of people who aren't the mainstream group. So you have people who have had all expressions of their cultural individuality suppressed in favor of the majority. This obviously causes some problems in the long run. If these online games keep pretending that real world differences don't exist, it's just going to piss those people off and they'll find somewhere else to spend their time and money. As these games grow in stature and importance, the ones that find good ways of dealing with the idiots will be the ones that thrive.
Tags: grommes, games, discrimination, glbt, bigotry, warcraft
DEMOCRATS:
Molly Ivins - Not. Backing. Hillary.
I like Molly Ivins. One of the perpetual problems of the Democratic party is the members' inability to stand for their beliefs. Too many Democrats think that everybody is sympathetic to Republican ideas so they run after, trying to make sure everybody knows they support those ideas too. Nuts to that. We need Democrats who are proud of the name. People who aren't trying to be just Left enough of Right so they don't alienate either side of things. The Right is running this country into the ground. We need more intelligent, pragmatic people on the Left who don't cow-tow to anybody and who can stand up and say they are really a Democrat, not just Not-A-Republican.
Tags: grommes, politics, molly+ivins, democrats
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.
The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?
I like Molly Ivins. One of the perpetual problems of the Democratic party is the members' inability to stand for their beliefs. Too many Democrats think that everybody is sympathetic to Republican ideas so they run after, trying to make sure everybody knows they support those ideas too. Nuts to that. We need Democrats who are proud of the name. People who aren't trying to be just Left enough of Right so they don't alienate either side of things. The Right is running this country into the ground. We need more intelligent, pragmatic people on the Left who don't cow-tow to anybody and who can stand up and say they are really a Democrat, not just Not-A-Republican.
Tags: grommes, politics, molly+ivins, democrats
links for 2006-01-27
- This is an orrery I made to help explain to my children why we have so much light in the summer and not nearly enough in the winter (we live in Alaska)
- This Apache module is intended to reduce the load on your server & bandwidth generated by popular virtual hosts, directories, locations, or users according to supported polices (see below) that decide when to delay or refuse requests.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
FREY: Oprah Calls Defense of Author 'a Mistake' - New York Times
In an extraordinary reversal of her strident defense of the author whose book she catapulted to the top of the best-seller list, Oprah Winfrey said today she believed that the author James Frey "betrayed millions of readers" by making up elements of his life in his best-selling memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."
She added that she believed "I made a mistake" when she said that the truth of the book mattered less than its story of redemption.
Good for her. It was a mistake. It's pretty rare these days for a public figure to just say straight out that they were wrong.
Tags: grommes, frey, james+frey, oprah, truth
THE PRESIDENT: Fafblog! Q & A: Our Omnipotent President
Q. Things sure have changed since the innocent days of mutually assured destruction! But is it legal for the president to ignore the law?
A. Maybe not according to plain ol stupid ol regular law, but we're at war! You don't go to war with regular laws, which are made outta red tape and bureaucracy and Neville Chamberlain. You go to war with great big strapping War Laws made outta tanks and cold hard steel and the American Fightin Man and WAR, KABOOOOOOM!
HAHAHAHA
Tags: grommes, politics, spying, law, president+bush
PARENTING:
Welcome to MY world: Top ten reasons Geeks make good fathers
Except for #3 (Geeks are good at Math), this fits me pretty well. Of course I think the kids will be teaching me a thing or a million about technology in the coming years, it's good to have a head start. I'd hate to be one of those parents who just can't for the life of them understand why kids want to do Instant Messaging or have a cell phone at age 8. It's going to happen, you better be ready for it.
Tags: grommes, kids, parenting, geeks
9. SMART IS COOL. Having a Geek for a father instills the message into your children that smart is cool. They idolize Daddy. Hopefully, they'll want to grow up to be just like him.
Except for #3 (Geeks are good at Math), this fits me pretty well. Of course I think the kids will be teaching me a thing or a million about technology in the coming years, it's good to have a head start. I'd hate to be one of those parents who just can't for the life of them understand why kids want to do Instant Messaging or have a cell phone at age 8. It's going to happen, you better be ready for it.
Tags: grommes, kids, parenting, geeks
links for 2006-01-26
- FireBug is a new tool for Firefox that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.
- My tools consist of two everyday programs: OpenSSH and the GNU Bourne-Again Shell (bash). No other tool, whether console-based or GUI, has been so consistently useful to me as these two programs.
- This is the standard procedure for formal gifts.
- A great article on how to create a semi-transparent hovering effect when a user hovers over a link. It works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.
- We’ve seen in-browser SQL, a database administrator, and even a database designer. Now there’s a database monitor…AjaxMyTop shows active MySQL connections.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
PATRIOTISM: insomnia: Future American lawyers to be proud of.
Alberto Gonzales spoke before law students at Georgetown today, justifying illegal, unauthorized surveilance of US citizens, but during the course of his speech the students in class did something pretty ballsy and brave. They got up from their seats and turned their backs to him.
"When you're a law student, they tell you if say that if you can't argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you if you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue... to say over and over again "it's lawful", and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough.
In light of this, I'm proud of the very civil civil disobedience that was shown here today."
- David Cole, Georgetown University Law Professor
This is great. A large part of the reason Republicans are always attacking universities is that they're one of the last bastions of radicalism left in this country. These students and professors are true Americans in ways that the Right and the Bush administration will never apparently understand.
Tags: grommes, politics, spying, law, georgetown, civil+disobedience
IRAQ:
Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects - New York Times
I just finished the 2 books from Thomas Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint For Action) about reconfiguring our military into a war force and a seperate "peace force" that deals with rebuilding countries like Iraq after we take down their corrupt governments. Right now we're forcing our war force to act like a peace force with little or no training, no oversight, nothing. They weren't trained for this. We have nobody telling anybody how to handle things like, say $2 million dollars in cash. Without a dedicated group of administrators who can handle this stuff, we'll continue to have this crap going on. There are large parts of Baghdad who only have electricity for 2 or 3 hours a day while we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, money that belongs to the Iraqis, refurbishing an Olympic swimming pool for their Olympic team. I have a feeling some of the people in Iraq without running water would give up the chance to have a Olympic boxing team (for 2 years away no less) so they could take showers and drink clean water. I'd even go so far as to suggest that spending this money on water and electricity and not swimming pools might, just maybe, make people feel a little less like bombing the shit out of our guys over there.
Tags: grommes, iraq, military, pentagon, thomas+barnett
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
I just finished the 2 books from Thomas Barnett (The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint For Action) about reconfiguring our military into a war force and a seperate "peace force" that deals with rebuilding countries like Iraq after we take down their corrupt governments. Right now we're forcing our war force to act like a peace force with little or no training, no oversight, nothing. They weren't trained for this. We have nobody telling anybody how to handle things like, say $2 million dollars in cash. Without a dedicated group of administrators who can handle this stuff, we'll continue to have this crap going on. There are large parts of Baghdad who only have electricity for 2 or 3 hours a day while we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, money that belongs to the Iraqis, refurbishing an Olympic swimming pool for their Olympic team. I have a feeling some of the people in Iraq without running water would give up the chance to have a Olympic boxing team (for 2 years away no less) so they could take showers and drink clean water. I'd even go so far as to suggest that spending this money on water and electricity and not swimming pools might, just maybe, make people feel a little less like bombing the shit out of our guys over there.
Tags: grommes, iraq, military, pentagon, thomas+barnett
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
links for 2006-01-24
- My large tank is L shaped. The long part of the L is 36 feet, the short part of the L is 27 feet. The front to back of the long part of the L is 18 feet, the front to back of the short part of the L is 15 feet. The tank water is 9 feet deep.
- This idea is mainly geared towards college kids building a loft for their dorm room so that they can better utilize limited space, but we hope it inspires you to do more.
- [Horowitz's] argument is bogus in almost every way imaginable. His premise, that a balance of political party affiliation is necessary or desirable in major sectors of American life, would lead to an almost totalitarian quota system.
- In fifty years [Asimov] averaged a new magazine article, short story, or book every two weeks, and most of that on a manual typewriter. Asimov thought that The Last Question, first copyrighted in 1956, was his best short story ever.
- Practicing good typography is at the core to good design.
- "It's often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs are real," Metropolis writes.
- This text is a brief description of the features that are present in the Bash shell.
- Shining mud ball
- In this article, I will zoom in from that 10,000-foot view and focus on specific Ajax details.
Monday, January 23, 2006
TSHIRTS: I just found an awesome new tshirt store. It's called Iron-On Resistance. Here's my favorite from their stock:
Simple but awesome. I think I'll have to buy once my next paycheck hits.
And another from Threadless: Nerds Unite!
Tags: grommes, tshirts, nerds, robots
LINKS:
I've started using a new tool on Del.icio.us that automatically posts my links for the day to the blog. If you're interested in the sites I find throughout the day, this will keep you updated. I might not keep it but it looks useful. Plus it makes me look like I'm posting to the blog more. :) If you haven't seen del.icio.us, try it out. I didn't see the usefulness of it at first but it's now indispensible. Since I use different computers at work and home and I'm always giving out links to people, it makes perfect sense. Plus it's small and doesn't have a ton of functionality to get in the way. And it's written in Perl using Mason, the same technology I'm using on my new project.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
FUTURE FILM:
The Catalogue by chris oakley
This is the best science fiction short film I've watched in a long time. Now, it's not typically what you'd think of when you think science fiction. Or film, actually. There's no actors, no dialogue. Just a film of what happens in the mall of the future when your data is accumulated in databases and sold to the highest bidder. It's only a few minutes and it's mesmorizing. Watch it.
Tags: grommes, science+fiction, scifi, movie, film, future
This is the best science fiction short film I've watched in a long time. Now, it's not typically what you'd think of when you think science fiction. Or film, actually. There's no actors, no dialogue. Just a film of what happens in the mall of the future when your data is accumulated in databases and sold to the highest bidder. It's only a few minutes and it's mesmorizing. Watch it.
Tags: grommes, science+fiction, scifi, movie, film, future
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
IRAQ:
Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Aerial IEDs and Open Source Innovation
More bad news about how the guerilla fighters in Iraq are learning and using increasingly sophisticated tactics against our troops. They're bringing in experienced fighters from around the world who know about these things and teaching the native Iraqis the tricks of the trade. If we don't change the way we're doing things over there the situation is only going to get worse as this knowledge spreads around. Once you know how to do something you can always build on that to take it to next step of sophistication. Unfortunately I have no faith that the Bush administration will push for any real changes so hopefully the Pentagon will push back and start making the inevitable transition to a peace-waging force instead of subjecting our war trained troops to this god-awful mess.
Insurgents, who place these aerial IEDs along known flight paths, trigger them when American helicopters come along at the typical altitude of just above the rooftops. The devices shoot 50 feet into the air, and a proximity fuze touches off a warhead that sprays metal fragments, said Brig. Gen. Edward Sinclair, commander of the Army’s Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala.
More bad news about how the guerilla fighters in Iraq are learning and using increasingly sophisticated tactics against our troops. They're bringing in experienced fighters from around the world who know about these things and teaching the native Iraqis the tricks of the trade. If we don't change the way we're doing things over there the situation is only going to get worse as this knowledge spreads around. Once you know how to do something you can always build on that to take it to next step of sophistication. Unfortunately I have no faith that the Bush administration will push for any real changes so hopefully the Pentagon will push back and start making the inevitable transition to a peace-waging force instead of subjecting our war trained troops to this god-awful mess.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
TRUTH: Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways - New York Times
We live in a relativistic culture where television "reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the "reality-based community," can assert that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."
This is a great NY Times article about what the James Frey situation says about our society. It's something I've been talking and thinking about for awhile, the erosion of truth. The Republican right, and the Bush administration especially, as well as corporate America have been on a mission to make sure nobody really knows anything, as evidenced by the quote above. They openly mock scientists, pay other scientists to lie and create fake controversy, "spin" everything, put know-nothings in positions of power and then crow about it, anything they can do to push people towards not believing anything. The point is to get people to think that anything they are told is the true is the truth. It's the ultimate power-grab, the ability to define what is true and real.
At the end of the book 1984, the main character is tortured and is made to say he sees 5 lights when they are really only 4. Most people see this as the ultimate breaking of the character but it's meant as something else entirely. If you accept that there are 5 lights because you are told so by those in power it gives them the ability to define your reality. If you are made to believe, contrary to your own eyes, that there are 5 lights because the government says so, you will believe anything. This is the goal of this anti-truth agenda. They want you to believe that what they say is true because they say so, not because it really is true. The President keeps saying everything is going great in Iraq not because it is going great but because if he says it enough, people will believe it just because he says it. Something like 22% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, a completely fabricated story. They believe it because the people in power feel no compunction to tell the truth as it is, only the truth as they would like it to be. This is a very dangerous situation. Cases like the Frey incident only highlight the growing grey area. Those that would like to use and expand the grey area must be resisted at every step.
Tags: grommes, truth, frey, james+frey, bush, right+wing
TSHIRTS: Time for more cool tshirts from Threadless.
Tshirt puns are an acquired taste. The name of this shirt if you couldn't guess is 'Communist Party'. hehe
This one would be cool for a geek but I have a feeling I'd be explaining it to every 3rd person and since I'm not sure I know what the name is about (Alex & Me & Complete Harmony) I probably wouldn't be explaining it correctly anyway. Still cool though.
Monday, January 16, 2006
GOOGLE: ACM Queue - A Conversation with Phil Smoot - An engineer at Hotmail discusses the challenges of keeping one of the Web’s largest and oldest Internet services running 24/7.
In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. One of the oldest free Web e-mail services, Hotmail relies on more than 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day. What’s interesting is that despite this enormous amount of traffic, Hotmail relies on less than 100 system administrators to manage it all.While I'm pretty sure that Google is many times larger than Hotmail, it's still incredibly impressive to run 10K servers. Reading this rather geeky article (the ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, which I actually founded the NM Tech chapter of a few years ago) makes me appreciate how cool it would be to work in an environment like this. Google would be my absolute dream job in terms of working with huge server farms and the stuff you can learn in that environment. I've been doing mostly QA for about 2 years now after running an ISP for 5 years and I keep coming back to network administration as the thing that really excites me. I keep thinking of how I can build up my upcoming website if it becomes super popular and it hasn't even launched yet. That's why I'd love to work with Google. The world's largest distributed server farm, multiple applications running across it, by all accounts a group of the smartest people in the business; boy would that be fun and interesting. If anybody happens to be reading this from Google, I'd drop everything and come work with you guys in a heartbeat. I don't know if I'm smart enough yet but I'd jump in and learn what I needed to quick.
I've been trying to get my current job to think in terms of building out like Google does, using cheap servers and farming out pieces of computation to many servers rather than running a few big boxes. We're not at the point yet here that we absolutely need that kind of scale but it'll come I think, and that will be fun. One of our vendor's system falls down all the time and I keep telling our guys "We don't want to be the one being made fun of like we make fun of them." I've found I like QA and being involved in coding but this network/sysadmin stuff is really what gets my brain juices flowing.
Tags: grommes, google, hotmail, networks, server+farms
Friday, January 13, 2006
IRAQ:
The Global Guerrillas blog features this quote, illustrating one of the worst aspects of the war in Iraq:
We've turned Iraq into a terrorist grad school. These guys are learning "on the job" which is always the best way to learn technical skills. I just hope we can diffuse things quickly enough that the guys building and using these bombs will just go back to living their lives and not calcify into a permanent army. What a damned mess.
Tags: grommes, iraq, war, ied, bombs, terrorists
In the words of one British Army bomb disposal officer, "These guys have picked up in two years what it took the IRA a quarter-century to learn."
We've turned Iraq into a terrorist grad school. These guys are learning "on the job" which is always the best way to learn technical skills. I just hope we can diffuse things quickly enough that the guys building and using these bombs will just go back to living their lives and not calcify into a permanent army. What a damned mess.
Tags: grommes, iraq, war, ied, bombs, terrorists
KAWASAKI:
One of my favorite business people, Guy Kawasaki, has started his new blog off with a bang. Here are some good quotes from his recent post: Hindsights.
Tags: grommes, quotes, inspiration, guy+kawasaki
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth examining
If you are going to fail, you might as well fail at a difficult task.
Tags: grommes, quotes, inspiration, guy+kawasaki
Thursday, January 12, 2006
THUNDERBIRD:
If you use Thunderbird for email (and you should) you need to first upgrade to version 1.5. Then you need to go download this Extension to get rid of the idiotic 'Domain Mismatch' error that by default in the new version you can't get rid of.
Tags: grommes, thunderbird, email
Tags: grommes, thunderbird, email
FREY: The dustup about James Frey's largely made-up "memoir" A Million Little Pieces is in fact getting a lot of attention. Two NY Times articles just today. In one of them (Writer Says He Made Up Some Details), Oprah Winfrey makes a couple of statements to support Mr. Frey's book. She says "to me it seems to be much ado about nothing," and "What is relevant is that he was a drug addict who spent years in turmoil" which I don't think is a proper response. She's basically saying that because the very broad arc of his life is there, the book is fine even though it's mostly fiction. If he wanted to write a fictional book based on his life, he should have done that. If he wanted to put his fantastical inner life on display he needed to do it as a novelist, not a memoirist.
The other Times article (Doubts About Memoir Stir a Debate About Fact and Fiction) talks about the debate I'd hoped this incident would lead to, whether memoir and non-fiction should be fictionalized. I agree with the side that says memoir should not contain fiction. Just because an autobiography is based on the writer's recollection doesn't mean that they have full license to make up the whole story. If someone misremembers or can't recall exact conversations, that's fine. But to go out of your way to invent whole relevant sections of the story is just wrong. It's not that James Frey misremembered being in jail and befriending another inmate who was paid by a cop to beat him up, he invented the entire thing. And the worst thing is, he invented it badly. It's a lame story. I haven't read the book but just the idea of it should have set off alarm bells. The guy gets beat up by another inmate (who was paid to do so by a cop he had insulted), then befriends the guy and spends his sentence reading the classics of literature to his illiterate new bestest buddy. Come on. Give me a break.
It doesn't seem like this will end Frey's writing career or anything, which is good. He messed up, got caught, now we need to move on. The real test will be if his next "memoir" is published in the fiction or non-fiction section. That's the true test and it's really a test of his publisher's honesty more than anything else.
Tags: grommes, writing, frey, james+frey, oprah, ny+times
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
WORDS:
USATODAY.com - Linguists vote 'truthiness' word of 2005
Boy, if this doesn't describe most right-wing Republicans' view of the world, I don't know what does. Every aspect of right-wing policy reflects the words of Adam Savage from Mythbusters: "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
Tags: grommes, politics, republicans, mythbusters, words
A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.
Boy, if this doesn't describe most right-wing Republicans' view of the world, I don't know what does. Every aspect of right-wing policy reflects the words of Adam Savage from Mythbusters: "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
Tags: grommes, politics, republicans, mythbusters, words
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
FREY:
I'm glad to see that the Smoking Gun article about James Frey is getting around quite a bit. I even saw a short notice of it in the NY Times. In my post yesterday about it somehow I forgot my favorite piece about him, probably the first way I ever heard his name in fact.
Neal Pollack's You're Gonna Frey
Not quite as funny but still good and relevant is Minor Tweaks: What I Plan To Embellish For Obvious Dramatic Reasons In My Own Forthcoming Memoir.
Technorati Tags: grommes, frey, james+frey, writing
Neal Pollack's You're Gonna Frey
Not quite as funny but still good and relevant is Minor Tweaks: What I Plan To Embellish For Obvious Dramatic Reasons In My Own Forthcoming Memoir.
Technorati Tags: grommes, frey, james+frey, writing
Monday, January 09, 2006
WRITING:
A Million Little Lies is a remarkable article about the apparent lies that make up James Frey's celebrated autobiography A Million Little Pieces. It makes an incredibly strong case that the book that has made Frey an international best-seller and literary rockstar is almost completely made up.
If this book is fiction, and unless the Smoking Gun article is fictional the book should certainly be reclassified, then what does that mean for James Frey? His status as a sort of tough-guy self-help guru for addicts would surely go away but as far as the writing goes, what would it mean? From the small excerpts I've read of his work, it doesn't seem very good as fiction but as autobiography it certainly has a unique style. Does autobiography always have to be completely true? I don't know. Plenty of people have written faux-biographical novels, even starring characters with the author's name. And most autobiography is certainly a little embellished but completely made up is a different animal.
It seems to me like James Frey was too normal for his own tastes and the somewhat generic quality of his life led him to construct an elaborate alternate fantasy life. Everybody does this at some point, usually in high school. The difference is that Frey wrote his down and called it autobiography. Where the real James Frey had a drunken college run-in with police and was promptly bailed out, the "James Frey" of A Million Little Pieces hit a cop with his car, had a standoff with the officers and proceded to heckle and berate the cops before being sentenced to 3 months of hard time. It's easy to see how somebody whose boring upper middle-class life didn't match up to the grand stories he told people to impress them.
If this article were published in a magazine like Esquire, it would be all over the media. Since it's on the Smoking Gun website, I wonder how much play it will get. They've done just an awesome job of looking into this and I hope people check it out. I'd love to see a discussion on just how much fiction you can put into an autobiography before it becomes a novel and a lie. I'm also curious to see how people like Oprah, who have put Frey on a huge pedestal, react to the fact that the life they were inspired by only exists in one man's head.
Tags: grommes, writing, james+frey, frey, oprah, smoking+gun
If this book is fiction, and unless the Smoking Gun article is fictional the book should certainly be reclassified, then what does that mean for James Frey? His status as a sort of tough-guy self-help guru for addicts would surely go away but as far as the writing goes, what would it mean? From the small excerpts I've read of his work, it doesn't seem very good as fiction but as autobiography it certainly has a unique style. Does autobiography always have to be completely true? I don't know. Plenty of people have written faux-biographical novels, even starring characters with the author's name. And most autobiography is certainly a little embellished but completely made up is a different animal.
It seems to me like James Frey was too normal for his own tastes and the somewhat generic quality of his life led him to construct an elaborate alternate fantasy life. Everybody does this at some point, usually in high school. The difference is that Frey wrote his down and called it autobiography. Where the real James Frey had a drunken college run-in with police and was promptly bailed out, the "James Frey" of A Million Little Pieces hit a cop with his car, had a standoff with the officers and proceded to heckle and berate the cops before being sentenced to 3 months of hard time. It's easy to see how somebody whose boring upper middle-class life didn't match up to the grand stories he told people to impress them.
If this article were published in a magazine like Esquire, it would be all over the media. Since it's on the Smoking Gun website, I wonder how much play it will get. They've done just an awesome job of looking into this and I hope people check it out. I'd love to see a discussion on just how much fiction you can put into an autobiography before it becomes a novel and a lie. I'm also curious to see how people like Oprah, who have put Frey on a huge pedestal, react to the fact that the life they were inspired by only exists in one man's head.
Tags: grommes, writing, james+frey, frey, oprah, smoking+gun
WEB:
We use Salesforce.com at my work quite a bit and I usually find it a model of how to run a modern web services company. Unfortunately, they seem to have more server problems than I'd like to see in a company with as much money as they have. They just rolled out their new $50 million data center and here's what I get while in the process of using the site today:
Server Too BusyOops. This is on top of a "rare database bug" (as they described it) which took the site down for most of a full day just a few weeks ago. I know running a big data center (or two data centers now with the new one) isn't easy but sheesh, what does 50 million dollars buy these days? I hope when/if my website I'm building gets to the size of Salesforce I have a team of geeks up to the challenge. I'm sure Salesforce has quite a team and if they're having these problems, I'm worried.
The salesforce.com servers are temporarily unable to respond to your request. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience, and please try again in a few moments.
Friday, January 06, 2006
MONEY:
This is great. An article about how a seemlingly outlandish purchase of a Boeing 767 by the two founders of Google turns out that in context of having waaay more money that I'll probably ever have, buying a 767 in probably a thrifty move. It would be very fun to work with the people who make up Google.
Tags: grommes, google, money
Tags: grommes, google, money
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
BOOKS: I've restarted my book list today for the new year with one change, no more counting. I met my goal of reading 50 books this year in accordance with the 50 Book Challenge. I didn't cheat either, below is the list of books I read and most of them are pretty good sized. Even if you take out the Narnia books I re-read, I'm still at 50 solid books. I didn't include some comics because I didn't want to "cheat" but this year I'm not counting so I'm writing down everything. I toyed with the idea of keeping track of all the magazines I read and stuff like that but I'll never keep up with it. I did read a lot of non-fiction this year (closing out the year with hands-down the best science type book I've read in a long time, 1491) so I think this year I want to focus on fiction. Of course I always hear about new non-fiction all the time I want to read so who knows how it'll go this year. I also have my new web project I'm launching soon so even though it's book related it could eat a lot of my reading time.
As I've said before, I really recommend making a reading goal. Some people say they don't want to take the enjoyment out of reading by making a goal of it but I don't think that's the case. It forces you to focus, to make time, and really pay attention to your reading. Even if your goal is one chapter a week or month, make a goal. A book a month is very doable, even if you think you're a "slow reader". 10 minutes here and there makes a huge difference and having a goal makes you take that 10 minutes whenever you can.
So here's the books I read this year. I'm proud of this list. I learned a huge amount this year. My audiobook time was severely cut back by listening to tons of podcasts but that's okay. I learn enough from IT Conversations that I feel like I owe them part of my paycheck on a regular basis. I'm definitely becoming a member when they switch to the PBS style member system. It's totally, totally worth it.
Anyway, on with the new year!
Books read this year: 57
- 1491
- The Last Battle
- The Magician's Nephew
- The Horse and His Boy
- The Silver Chair
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
- Prince Caspian
- The Singularity Is Near
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- The Only Sustainable Edge
- A Whole New Mind
- The Well-Educated Mind
- The Republican War on Science
- Don't Think Pink
- Anansi Boys
- Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town
- Accelerando
- Seeing What's Next
- Love Is The Killer App
- The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again
- Finite and Infinite Games
- How Buildings Learn
- No Country For Old Men
- Mediated
- A Signal Shattered
- Beginning MySQL Database Design & Optimization
- The Art of the Start
- Deadhouse Gates
- The Circle of Innovation
- Chasm City
- What the Dormouse Said
- The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
- Six Bad Things
- Gardens of the Moon
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves
- Islands in the Stream
- The Amber Spyglass
- The Subtle Knife
- The Golden Compass
- The Chronoliths
- Holy Fire
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Ultramarathon Man
- The Great Bicycle Caper
- Drama City
- Fantasic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
- Under The Glacier
- A Changed Man
- Issac Newton
- Beyond Fear
- We The Media
- On Intelligence
- The Family Trade
- Cloud Atlas
- Getting Things Done
- Bicycling New Cyclists Handbook
Audiobooks this year: 6
- Captain Alatriste
- The Godfather Returns
- The Butlerian Jihad
- 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
- The Queen of the South
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
tags: grommes, ,
POLITICS: This could end up being like Christmas all over again.
From G.O.P. Lobbyist to Plead Guilty in Deal With Prosecutors - New York Times site:
Jack Abramoff will plead guilty to three felony counts in Washington today as part of a settlement with federal prosecutors, ending an intense, months-long negotiation over whether the Republican lobbyist would testify against his former colleagues, people involved with the case said.
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Monday, January 02, 2006
WORK: Funny quote from the article "How To Become As Rich As Bill Gates".
When I arrived at MIT as a first-year graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, I asked a professor for help with a research problem. He said "The reason that you've having trouble is that you don't know anything and you're not working very hard."
tags: grommes, bill gates, microsoft