nanaze.com

The oldest professions

2008-03-11T09:18:00.001-07:00

"Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." - Ronald Reagan

I was in a meeting yesterday. As the topic veered away from relevance, I pulled up the New York Times and read that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had been outed as having used the services of a prostitute.

For a generic politician, such a scandal would be difficult to survive. For Spitzer, it will be fatal. The story arc of his career is that of high-minded reformer, battling corruption and crime, including his now-ironic busting of organized prostitution rings.

It's a war one can only wage from the moral high ground, which he has now lost. His detractors couldn't have asked for better ammunition. The hypocrisy is clear. Piled on top of his already tumultuous time in Albany, he's been defanged and can't be an effective governor.

It's a sad reminder that even the best of us are human. I had admired Spitzer and his moral crusading. This is a wholly unfitting end to that crusade. Though it might be naive to be surprised over being disappointed by a politician, this scandal is a bit more disheartening than most.

Psychoanalyzing Soglin

2008-03-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

Like pmed, I'm a Waxing America reader — now that Paul Soglin (the former and long-time mayor of Madison) has hung up his (campaign-)running shoes, he passes his time opining publicly on his blog.

Not that he didn't while he was office, but now this is a clearly a man no longer subject to the self-censoring restraints of a public official, and he seems to relish the freedom.

I'm at the coffee shop, cleaning out unread stories in Reader. Soglin writes a lot. And while many of the topics aren't as relevant to Wisconsin expats like me and pmed, they're still interesting. Since he's a very prolific blogger, I tend to read the entries in batch mode, picking out the ones that interest me most.

But I think we hit a new high in getting inside Soglin's head this week. He posted his dream from the previous night in which he is a lost bus driver in Seattle and comes across a bowling alley with two armies rolling bombs at each other.

Perhaps it's his subconscious telling us that we're spending too much on defense and the war in Iraq and too little on our underfunded public transportation?

The man dreams in terms of public policy.

Liveblogging My Big Fat Greek Wedding

2008-02-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

There's a terrible storm coming in over San Francisco and ruining the Chinese New Year Parade. As such, I just walked over to the library and picked up a DVD. So, for today's rainy day, I passively watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding and updated my status messages accordingly.

Watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding, like five years later. 3:51 PM
Uh oh! The family is having trouble accepting her non-Greek boyfriend! 4:34 PM
OMG! Now they're engaged and the parents are furious! 4:38 PM
Oh! But now the family is coming around! 4:45 PM
...not sure, but I think everybody has learned a valuable lesson about acceptance. 5:07 PM
Aw. So happy. I think I'm going to cry. No, just kidding. What's for dinner? 5:20 PM

My liberal bleeding heart beats only for you.

2008-02-14T09:16:00.000-08:00

Via Wired.

Apparently in an effort to be hip with today's net culture, the GOP has posted a number of e-Valentines you can send to your friends and loved ones. Watch your back, Blue Mountain.

My favorite? The Obama bleeding-heart one, which I send to you, my blog friends:

Bang-up job on harnessing the netroots, Republicans. Now that my grandparents have AOL, there's no stopping you.

On the Democratic primaries

2008-02-12T08:56:00.000-08:00

What would you think of a democracy in which the presidency has been held by four people from only two political families for 28 years?

Sounds like a dispatch from a unhealthy third-world democracy. Or the United States in 2016.

The idea of democracy is our representatives are chosen from and by our fellow citizens. We're electing from our peers, and, ideally, we're doing so on the basis of merit.

But look at Congress. Look at our President.

First, if these are the most capable and intelligent members of our citizenry, it speaks rather poorly of the intelligence of the rest of us to the left on the bell curve.

Second, these people don't look a damn thing like America. Kennedy's election was notable because he was Catholic — other than that, every president has been rich, protestant, male, and white. Barack Obama came into the Senate as its only black member, and only the fifth ever (the first two served during Reconstruction), out of, oh, 1,900 or so.

It's a blessing that the two remaining Democratic candidates are either female or black. We're potentially going to heave a brick through the highest of glass ceilings.

I turned 18 shortly before the Democratic Presidential primary of 2000. The party had already coalesced around Gore as the nominee, but I still cast my ballot for Bill Bradley. In Madison in 2004, I gladly voted for Howard Dean (and a few hours later, walked down the street to see him give his last speech before withdrawing from the race).

The Democratic primaries are my chance to throw a rock at the party — pushing a candidate that moves it in the direction I want it to go. With Bradley, it was against Clinton-DLC triangulation, shrewd calculation, and compromise (this was before Gore's self-distancing during the general election). With Dean, it was against a spineless party of me-too hawks.

This time, well, I'm against the Clintons again. There couldn't be a candidate that represents party establishment more than Hillary — it's the other half of the Clinton presidency seeking to run the second half of the Clinton presidency.

I'm supporting Obama.

The world is flat, and I'm on the other side of it.

2008-01-26T17:45:00.000-08:00

I was eating lunch at the Google office in Bangalore, India.

"You look familiar," said the engineer across the table from me. I suggested that he might have watched an archived video of a talk I'd given. "No, that's not it," he said. We continued with our lunch. Fifteen minutes later, he mentioned he once lived in Madison, Wisconsin. I mentioned I had went to school there. He said he did as well, as a grad student for two years. He recognized me because I was a coordinator for the Undergraduate Projects Lab.

I've read, maybe, the first third of The World is Flat (I found the book needlessly verbose, geared more for someone knowing little about technology and globalization), but the beginning of the book talks specifically about Bangalore. This was part of my interest in coming here. It feels as if large, imposing, metallic office buildings have dropped from the sky to accompany the similarly airlifted shops among the older buildings: grand and elaborate homes, shacks, seedy shops, and neglected and garbage-covered vacant lots.

Interestingly enough, I found a copy of The World is Flat in a bookstore in the Garuda Mall.

But what struck me most was that while, outside the office, the environment was exotic and foreign (walking along the uneven slabs laid down as a sidewalk and dodging the chaotic stream of cars, scooters, and autorickshaws when darting across intersections), inside the corporate confines, I might have well been working in a office off University Avenue in Palo Alto. Before leaving, I had copied my files to Bangalore, and, when I got there, I sat at an empty terminal, logged in, and was just as productive as I would be in my chair in Mountain View, California (and more productive in my dealings with the other Bangalore engineers, being able to spin around in my chair rather than send an e-mail and deal with the time difference).

Anyway, the next leg of the trip is a flight to Delhi (I'm actually finishing up this post in my hotel room), and then visits to Agra (to see the Taj Mahal) and Chandigarh (to attend a coworker's wedding).

Why are we still arguing about physical media?

2008-01-08T23:42:00.000-08:00

Hey kids. I'm killing time in the dentist's waiting room. Why not write a blog post?

I broke down and bought a big LCD TV the other day (I've never really bought a TV before — I don't watch that much TV and a roommate has always had one). But the recent price drops, the HDTV switch, and my Wii-initiated return to video gaming prompted the purchase.

When I was home for Christmas, I spent some quality time with my brother's Xbox 360, and was quite taken with it (and its HDMI outputs). While I'm naturally skeptical of any Microsoft product, I'd certainly purchase an Xbox 360 before a PS3. There are some great Wii-exclusive games (most of them from the Nintendo franchises), but most anything released on the PS3 is released on the Xbox 360 and vice versa (save for some glaring omissions — damn you Konami). In addition, the Xbox 360 is cheaper and PS3 adoption in the US has been anemic.

Years ago, when my brothers were gifted a PS2 (I was in college), my mother was swayed to purchase by the fact that it also functioned as a DVD player. The PS3 functions as a Blu-Ray player, but the Xbox only plays HD DVDs with the addition of a $179.00 add-on drive.

Why there are two different HD formats is beyond me. At some level, it's greed, as each format has the backing of industry players (read: licensers). It's VHS vs. Betamax again.

But in the age of iTunes, why are we delivering content on disc? Even Netflix, with its giant Sneakernet (190,000 discs a day, times 4 gigs or so per DVD is roughly 8.8 GB a second — roughly an OC-192, though one that's connected to more than a million mailboxes), is moving to network delivery. They already do in-browser streaming, and just announced plans for a set-top box.

Anyway, as of late, Blu-Ray seems to be pulling ahead. It's good for me in that I can finally drop some green on a player, but my vindictive side wants to see both formats get whupped by networked media devices.

Of course, that's a source of disappointment as well. Why can't my Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3 access Netflix or the iTunes store? Why is the Apple TV so absurdly overpriced?

Stupid walled gardens.

Obviously, given the timestamp, I finished up this post in the evening and not at the dentist's. Poor guy broke his foot the other day.

Christmas Card 2007

2008-01-03T00:22:00.000-08:00

This year, instead of sending out purchased Christmas cards, I drew one up and had it printed.

States' rights my ass

2007-12-21T08:46:00.001-08:00

Bush on Thursday defended the decision of his EPA administrator.

"Is it more effective to let each state make a decision as to how to proceed in curbing greenhouse gases? Or is it more effective to have a national strategy?" he said.

Schwarzenegger: California will sue federal government, CNN

I'll grant that "size of government" is something you can classify as partisan issue. However, I'm not so swayed by the popular notion that Republicans are for "states' rights" while Democrats seek to strengthen the power of the federal government. Appeals to federalism are generally politically pragmatic.

That has a lot more to do with the fact that the Democrats held the entire Congress from 1957-1981 (not to mention most state legislature seats). No surprise that "states' rights" became a GOP/Dixiecrat rallying cry (say, for example, during the civil rights movement).

Legislators are most concerned about getting their hands on levers, and once they do, they don't much care if they're federal levers (if so, all the better). So if Bush says that California can't impose its own emissions requirements, I say, "hey, states' rights, buddy."

Nathan's New Year's Weight-Loss Program

2007-12-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

My tonsils (particularly my left one) had been giving me problems for a long while now. I had seen the doctor when it started (who assumed it would go away in time), but the annoyance never really seemed to go down. So, last time I was in Wisconsin, I stopped by to see the ENT. Given the length of time that they were giving me problems, he just said "let's take 'em out."

Tonsillectomies are performed most often in children, though they're not as common as they used to be. They're also easier and less painful in children. For adults, the tonsils are larger and are likely already quite scarred.

The most likely complication is heavy bleeding, so the doctor requested I not fly for 12-14 days after the surgery. As a result, I came home for Christmas a week early — I'll be taking it easy, playing video games, watching movies, and doing a small amount of work (since I'm on painkillers, I can't legally drive a car, but I can write code that runs on millions of people's computers — I suppose it's significantly harder to kill people with JavaScript).

The surgery was yesterday. After the initial tonsillectomy, I woke up in the recovery area. I apparently was still bleeding a lot and ended up swallowing a lot of blood, as I began to feel nauseous. The nurse came in and asked "Are you feeling nauseated?" I responded by vomiting the contents of my stomach into the emesis basin, mostly bright red blood and a clot or two (surprisingly, it didn't phase me much. Seeing my blood is less disturbing than seeing others').

Since the blood was so fresh, it must have been from a fresh bleed, so the ENT was called back. He used suction to remove the clot and tried to stop the bleeding with silver nitrate, but it was insufficient. So the anesthesiologist was called over to put me back under, and I was wheeled back to the operating room, where they did more cauterization and put in some stitches.

The first surgery started at 12:30 in the afternoon. I had gotten to the hospital at 11 or so. I finally was rolled out in a wheelchair (they wouldn't let me walk) at 8:30 at night.

Today, I'm finally able to eat things like pudding and cottage cheese, which is great, as there was about at 36 hour period in which I ate nothing but popsicles and Sierra Mist (non-diet, for the calories). I've actually been able to put some work in today.

This will probably be my least calorie-dense Christmas ever.

For all of you that are concerned, don't be. As you all know, I'm a tough guy.

Ding! Poppin' fresh binary in the oven!

2007-12-12T09:05:00.001-08:00

Remember, nothin' says lovin' like bakin' in the oven.

Somewhere along the line, I figured out that 5551234567@vtext.com would send an SMS message to a Verizon cell phone at 555-123-4567 (which, obviously, is not my number).

Anyway, a month or two ago, when staring at a console window waiting for a compilation, I remembered this fact, and wrote a little script called sms that looked like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo $1 | mail 5551234567@vtext.com

I also wrote two other scripts named smsdone and smserror that would send the strings "done" and "error" (sms "done" and sms "error").

Then, when need to do a compilation, I string together whatever commands I need to run and form a boolean expression that will call either smsdone or smserror:

([[[cmd1] && cmd2] && ... ] && smsdone) || smserror

Then I walk to the kitchen, go on a walk, or swordfight on office chairs until I get a text message to come back.

Oh hey, you just caught me blogging

2007-12-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

(thanks, Gabe and Max)

Call it egoism, but I like to think I'm pretty good at making software.

So, oftentimes, when using various software, I think to myself "You know, I could make something better than this." Or at least something that better serves my needs.

And most of the time, this is true.

The problem is, I don't have time to make something better. Nathan is a finite resource, and I've found that, when I get home from a long day of programming, I find I don't want to do, well, more programming.

So here I am, back on Blogger. Sorry for the hassle.