May Contain Nuts

From an Ars Technica piece that has the recording industry comparing music piracy to global warming (I wish I were joking):

… the music business has now tried its hand at being “innovative” and “customer focused.” It disaggregated albums, it allowed music to go up on everything from Amazon to iTunes to Spotify to Last.fm. It sued users, it launched education campaigns.

Because suing users is totally innovative and customer-focused… what planet are these people from?! (Also, I’m surprised that none of the commenters on the Ars piece have picked up on this little nugget of stupid.)

The RIAA, the MPAA, and the rest of the audio/visual media industry (TV studios, film companies, etc.) need to get it into their heads that the world today is not the same as it was in 1990. 20 years ago, it was perhaps maybe somehow acceptable (or at least, possible) to release a movie or TV show in Australia 6-12 months later than in the United States without negatively impacting the product’s performance, because the ability to openly connect Australia to the US was largely limited to phones, post, airplanes, and boats. Now, with the internet and high-speed connections to it, films can be read about, reviewed, and even posted online (albeit illegally) for advance consumption by people who haven’t been deemed worthy enough to get the product locally. The industries’ own refusal to accept that the world is more connected, and that staggering releases internationally is likely having a huge impact on their revenue in those countries because rather than wait for the studio to get around to releasing content in their area, people will go and get it wherever it’s available, and in most cases, it’s illegally obtained on the internet in a matter of hours (or even minutes, if you’re in a country that actually values its communications infrastructure, unlike the US).

The music industry can hardly be said to be behaving in an innovative manner by any stretch of the imagination. They’re reacting defensively to the encroachment of a new content distribution platform and its resulting global connectivity, doing only the bare minimum of what is necessary to appease the demands of their customers. It’s hardly surprising that their revenues and profits have shrunk in the past 10 years. When given the choice between buying a CD for $18.99 at Barnes & Noble and buying the same album on iTunes for $9.99, or even just buying the tracks I really want for 99¢ (which may be only one or two songs), I’m going to go with the cheaper option, especially now that music from the iTunes store is DRM free.

Further, the industry seems to be doing a pretty good job of colluding with one another to set prices at different levels for different online distributors (iTunes: 99¢/song, Amazon MP3: 79¢/song. Um, what?) in an attempt to try and force the market into the shape it prefers, rather than going where their customers are and catering to them there. They also fought with every fiber of their being against internet radio stations like Pandora by trying to bury them with drastically more expensive licensing fees than what they require of broadcast radio. These are hardly innovative behaviors, unless you define “innovative” as “acting like an asshole”…

Similarly, the TV and film industries are also failing to get out ahead of the needs of their customers, instead only choosing to do the least amount possible to not lose a portion of their revenue stream (which is selling viewers to advertisers). Efforts like Hulu are interesting, but ultimately disappointing, because while the Hulu team seems to understand the importance of their service to viewers, industry execs who are still fearful of time-shifted content distribution are stifling its ability to really flourish in a way that would please the people who are most willing to use the service and thus generate additional revenue for the industry.

Case in point: both the Hulu website and the Hulu Desktop application prohibit users from interacting with the service or installing the software on a device that is connected to your television, and Hulu has gone out of their way, at the request of the industry, to block applications like Boxee from accessing the service. The problem is, most people don’t want to watch time-shifted television on their computer. They want to watch it on their television, where they have a big screen, a really nice sound system, and a comfortable couch to sit on. Despite the sometimes horrific performance of Hulu’s Flash player in the Boxee builds for the Apple TV, I watched a considerable amount of content on Hulu, and sat patiently and understandingly through the 2-3 minutes of ads inserted into each show (though like many of the ads on TV, I ignored them as much as possible because they’re annoying). Since they blocked Boxee, I’ve watched two things on Hulu: an episode of Family Guy, and the Cosmos series from PBS. By trying to artificially restrict their content to specific platforms, the industry has lost revenue from ads it would have gained by showing them to me. Since often I watch time-shifted content because I missed watching it on the air, they’re also already not getting ad revenue from me looking at the TV when their show is on, so it’s a double loss on their part.

I also continue to be annoyed at the fact that I can’t rent a movie through iTunes on the day and date of the DVD release. I can go to Blockbuster, sure, but that’s often more expensive, and even has additional costs associated with it (gas, time, uncertainty about whether the movie is even available [which results in wasted gas and time], dealing with people [you'd be surprised how much this factors into my decision-making sometimes...], etc.). Warner Brothers has even successfully convinced Netflix not to allow the rental of WB films through their mail-order service for a month after the DVD release, so as to not negatively impact retail sales. That’s bullshit, plain and simple.

As an example, I’ve seen @ddfreyne post several times on Twitter about Moon, and decided that I should probably look into watching it since it sounded interesting, and the trailer piqued my interest. Lo and behold, it came out on DVD recently and is even available for purchase in iTunes for $14.99. However, not knowing if I’ll actually like the movie, dropping $14.99 on it seems like a bit of an outlay for me. I’d much rather rent it for $3.99 (or hey, $4.99 in HD! You hear me movie industry?) and see if it’s something I like, and then spend $14.99 on it (and yes, ultimately, I’ve spent more on it if I end up liking it, but I’ve saved money if I don’t). But I can’t rent the movie until some time in February (I forget when), and knowing me, I’ll have forgotten about it by then, which means the movie industry gets nothing from me.

The internet is a serious came-changer, and as it matures, it continues to impact industries in ways that seemed impossible (or at least, unlikely to happen outside of Star Trek) just a few years before. Music, TV, film, and even print media are all struggling to compete with each other and themselves in this space, but are hampered by obligations to older content distribution channels and an apparent desire to legislate the future away rather than embrace it. The media landscape is evolving at an astonishing pace these days, and the major stakeholders are doing a pretty poor job of keeping up. Maybe they’ll catch on, or maybe not. All I know for sure is that the one thing that isn’t going to work is shouting at the ocean as the time comes in. Standing still is irresponsible simply from a business standpoint, and it amazes me that the shareholders of these companies aren’t boggling at how ineptly their interests are being handled by those in charge as we march (or, in the media’s case, are dragged kicking and screaming) into the future.

The thought has recently occurred to me that there seems to be a rather considerable logical disconnect in the thought processes of deniers of global climate change (i.e. global warming), especially the anthropogenic (“man-made”) variety.

It has long been a pretty mainstream idea that the easiest way to terraform a planet like Mars into one which is habitable by humans is to set up a bunch of carbon-belching factories all across the planet’s surface and run them 24/7 for a couple of centuries to increase the density of the atmosphere and trap more solar radiation, warming the planet in the process.

So why is the idea that doing the same thing on Earth for over 400 years will cause a similar effect so unfathomably controversial? Science and reality rarely deal in special cases. If dumping mountains of CO2 into the atmosphere of Mars would make it habitable by warming the planet and increasing the density of the atmosphere, doing the same thing on a planet like Earth would logically cause the already habitable temperature to increase, perhaps to a point where the planet is no longer habitable.

People are constantly arguing that the Earth is too massive and too self-correcting to be affected by anything that we comparatively tiny human beings are doing. However, these same people seem to have no issues with the thought that mankind could terraform other worlds equally as massive as Earth by doing to them exactly what we are already doing here. Either terraforming a planet is impossible for mankind, or our ability to impact the environment of our home planet is far more substantial than people seem to commonly accept. We can’t have it both ways.

There are over 6 billion people on this planet. We are producing 29 billion of tons of carbon dioxide exhaust every year… even considering that the Earth’s atmosphere has a total mass of over 5 quadrillion tons, and that plant life on the planet can parse at least a portion of the CO2 we dump into the air back into oxygen, over the 400 years since the Renaissance and the ensuing industrial revolution, that’s a lot of CO2 to be dumping into a finite amount of space. It’s a proven scientific fact (the Mythbusters even tested it!) that CO2 traps radiant heat in a given space, and we only have to look next door at Venus to see just how far from habitable a runaway CO2 greenhouse effect can push a planet’s environment (for those unaware, Venus’s atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than Earth’s, and the surface temperature is over 900ºF). Realistically, Venus is an extreme example, but the extreme outcome is nowhere near what it would take to turn the Earth into a lifeless cinder as well.

People argue against the science of global climate change because 20 years ago there was a concern among scientists that the planet might be cooling off. Scientifically, there was a good reason to suspect this may happen: on a global scale, destroying things like forests to build roads, cities, and fields creates a brighter overall surface reflectivity for the Earth. More reflectivity means less light is absorbed by the planet as radiant heat, and thus the planet would cool. However, it just so happens that the result of burning millions of years worth of trapped carbon, releasing it as CO2, over the course of only a few centuries has greatly offset any change in reflectivity, creating a larger greenhouse effect and ultimately warming the planet at a considerably faster rate than is scientifically considered to be “normal” for this planet, based on the analysis of tens of thousands of years worth of geological data.

Say what you will about science sometimes being wrong, but science, like nature, is self-correcting; if evidence changes, so does the scientific consensus. If it weren’t for the self-corrective nature of science and its encouragement of free and open inquiry, we would never have landed on the Moon, or flown space probes to Jupiter and Saturn, or defeated countless ravaging diseases, or even have developed the technology with which I am writing this perhaps somewhat irksome treatise. Science, like life, must be taken as a whole, and as a whole science is right (or at least on the right track) far more often than it is wrong. You can’t pick and choose which scientific facts or evidence you want to adhere to, and ignore what doesn’t fit your preconceived worldview. Well, I guess you can, but you probably won’t get very far in the real world, which really doesn’t give a damn about your preconceived worldview. The Earth doesn’t stop being 4.6 billion years old just because you say it’s not, any more than saying that it’s flat, or at the center of the solar system, or the center of the universe make such things true (which they demonstrably aren’t).

The following is a letter I just sent to my representative in the House, Cathy McMorris Rogers (R, WA-05), on the news that she and a fellow Republican are now trying to terrify parents of disabled children into opposing reform on the unfounded fear that it would kill their children. I’m not playing anymore. This is serious, and the behavior of Republicans (and even some Democrats) in Congress is disgusting and completely inappropriate. Anyway, on with the letter.

Representative McMorris Rogers,

You have embarrassed yourself and our district by trying to intimidate parents of disabled children, many of whom already take advantage of government-run health care in the form of the S-CHIP program, into opposing reform of our health care system with baseless accusations against provisions and restrictions that do not exist in the bill, as you yourself have been unable to point out specific examples within the legislation of the threat you are pushing on these vulnerable parents.

I eagerly await your explanation of your behavior today, and fully expect factual justifications, not rumors and unfounded, un-sourced suspicions, justifying your stance against a public health care option.

Further, I wish to register my disgust at the clearly biased poll you have provided on your health care reform page on this website. Your distortion of facts and willingness to ignore the reality of the legislation currently being debated in the House speak volumes of your attitude towards reform, and your willingness to deceive the people whom you represent.

The poll I’m referring to is on this page of Representative McMorris Rogers’ website, as part of her “what are your thoughts on health care” feedback form, which for those of you who don’t want to trek to her site to check it out, asks:

When thinking about health care, would you rather…

Pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive

Pay less for your care, but potentially have to wait weeks for tests and months for treatments you need

There are no other options provided as answers to this question. No representation of the millions of Americans (and doubtless thousands of WA-05 residents) who don’t even have health insurance because they can’t afford it, and are unable to receive the “quality of care” she seems to think everyone in her district is already receiving. No presentation of the public option beyond the leading and obviously partisan second choice. No recognition that quality of care does not need to be sacrificed in order to bring down costs.

Representative McMorris Rogers, like many of her Republican colleagues in Congress, is in no way serious about reforming health care in any meaningful. It’s time that this fact got pointed out, and it’s well past time the Democrats in Congress figured this out and went ahead with their own plan, since Republicans aren’t going to vote for a gods-damned thing anyway. They’re more interested in scoring political points against the President and terrifying seniors, veterans, women, and parents of disabled children into opposing Democratic legislation based on nothing but FUD than they are in actually helping their constituents.

I’ve been mulling over exactly how to express my numerous thoughts on health care reform for some time now, and after finally managing to catch Keith Olbermann’s special comment from Monday on the subject, I’ve got it in my mind to write something now before I get otherwise distracted again. I might leave out the bits explaining the public option since I’d hope they already know what it’s really about, but I might leave them in anyway, just to be fully forthright in my communication to them. I will be sending something similar to this (probably condensed somewhat) to my senators, my representative, and to President Obama once I’ve posted it here.

First, let me start by establishing something. I’m married to someone with hyperthyroid and IGA immune deficiency. These are pre-existing conditions as far as the health care industry is concerned, and would either bar her entirely from coverage, delay her coverage entirely by an unconscionable number of months while I pay absurd premiums to NOT get the insurance I’m paying for, or delay the coverage of her treatments for those conditions and anything the insurance company deems to be related (which, as above, would probably be everything) for the same aforementioned period of time. I find it morally reprehensible to discriminate against people who need coverage simply because they actually need it. It’s absurd, and it ought to be completely illegal. An insurance company can certainly make a lot more money by only taking money from people they know will never cost them anything, but at that point, why not stop bothering with the “insurance” moniker and just start taking donations on the street corner?

I am actually offered health insurance through my employer. Unfortunately, while I could probably afford the 75% discounted premiums for myself that my employer offers, I don’t make anything even close to the amount of money needed to also cover the 100% of premiums it would require to pay for my wife’s coverage as well. Yet because I’m offered health insurance but “elect” not to take it (because doing so would prevent us from buying things like food), I’m considered by Republicans and even some blue dog Democrats as being someone who has freely chosen not to have health insurance, and thus not worth worrying about as one of the 50 million Americans left out of the current system. Furthermore, since that 75% discounted premium makes up most of what we spend each month on my wife’s health care in an already tight budget, even insuring just myself is a prohibitive expense, and one that I would feel unimaginably guilty about taking on at the potential cost of my wife’s health. Even this offer of insurance is ephemeral, though. My employer is looking at possibly having to cut benefits due to rising costs and the poor economy, so even if we were both insured through my job, there is absolutely no guarantee that we would receive the same level of coverage, if any, over the next few years.

I can’t even get on the Washington State BASIC health insurance program, because our limited income is still about $100 per month above the maximum permitted income level. Unfortunately, there is still a huge gap between the maximum eligible income for BASIC Health and the minimum required income to afford employer-provided or privately-purchased health insurance.

In my frank opinion, health care is a public service, like the police and fire departments, and should not be a for-profit industry that places more importance on money than the well-being of human lives. However, I also understand that moving from our current system to one more similar to those in Europe or Canada in one massive step is politically, socially, and economically impractical. Thus, I think that a public option for health insurance is the best option for people such as myself: a guaranteed program that can never be taken away for those who either do not care for or cannot afford to participate in the private insurance market.

Republicans have been making a huge stink about the public option, making all sorts of wild accusations about it being a government takeover of the health care system, or an intrusion of government bureaucrats into the health care decision-making process. They ask if we like going to the DMV, or the Post Office, and to imagine what health care would be like if it were similarly operated (some even bizarrely threaten that the public option will turn Medicare into a government-run system, when it already is, and enjoys widespread popularity despite this tragic “handicap”). I believe they are being disingenuous at best, or are outright lying at worst, about the purpose of the public insurance option, and do a disservice to the public discourse by spreading misinformation to their constituents and their colleagues. Its purpose is not to take over the health care industry, or even the health insurance industry. In fact, if it works as poorly as they claim it will, their fears about en masse migrations to its coverage seem bizarre and contradictory.

The public option will not replace employer-provided health care. In fact, provisions would exist to prevent most employers from switching to it (I believe there are exceptions for small businesses because paying private insurance premiums as a small business owner is very difficult – I know from observations at my own company – in which case switching would probably be preferable to losing your coverage entirely due to rising premiums, I would think). While the health care reform bill would also mandate that coverage be provided by employers, again small businesses (the ones Republicans are always concerned about) would be exempted from this mandate and the ensuing fines for non-compliance.

Yes, it will cost money to fund the public option, but if planned wisely, and given sufficient bargaining power, those costs can be properly controlled, and money can in fact be saved over the long term as the uninsured become the insured, and the average taxpayer stops footing the thousands of dollars in medical bills that are incurred every time someone unable to pay for a trip to the doctor has to go to the emergency room. Insuring everyone will lead to an overall more healthy country as illnesses can be caught in their early stages with inexpensive screenings, not when they’ve fully presented and are more difficult or even impossible to treat with advanced medications, therapies, and surgeries. And a healthier nation is a more secure nation, a more productive nation, and a happier nation.

Frankly, I would welcome the opportunity to have a government bureaucrat involved in my health care decisions if it meant I actually got to go to a doctor without it costing me an arm and a leg (the amputation of which would cost me further still, no doubt). It can’t be any worse than having an insurance company claims handler involved in the process for privately insured individuals… in fact, it might even be better, considering how good private insurance companies are at squeezing blood from stones. Unless you’re uninsured, there’s already someone standing between you and your doctor with a checkbook in their hand… if they don’t pay it, you have to, and if you can’t, you don’t get the care you need. Those who are afraid that the government is going to ration care should take a look around: insurance companies already do. The public option will not kill your grandmother or your unborn child, even if assisted suicide and abortion are procedures that may be covered. You, your loved ones, and your doctor will still be the ones making those decisions, just as if you were insured by a private insurer.

Quickly, I also want to make a point about the Post Office and the DMV. These places are often criminally understaffed, and/or run by the same apathetic people you encounter in ever other service-oriented industry in America. Think about it: how many more times has someone at McDonald’s treated you poorly compared to someone at the DMV? Sure, the DMV and the Post Office employees have no real motivation to care about you, but really, neither does the register monkey at Mc’Donald’s, FedEx, UPS, the concession stand at the theater, etc. It’s often just as hard to get fired from a customer service job in private industry as it is to get fired from a government job running a post office register. In fact, depending on where you work, it might be harder to get fired from a private industry job because of union protections. People have a bizarre tendency, it seems, to isolate only bad experiences as coming from government offices, while often minimizing the broad majority of decent (or even really good) ones, and at the same time doing the opposite with private industry. I think the constant Republican drumbeat of “government is always the problem” has contributed mightily to this, despite its demonstrable falsehood. A government is only as good as the people who run it, and if the people who run it are actively dismantling it from the inside, it’s obviously not going to work very well at all.

Those who favor deregulation of the health insurance industry rather than tighter checks on their behavior should look at the past decade and see what deregulation has gotten us. Health insurance premiums are skyrocketing while wages are not. Credit card companies engage in deceptive and even fraudulent tactics to extract money from people through late fees by changing payment dates without warning, or spiking interest rates when balances on other cards change dramatically (this one happened to me when we moved to Spokane, because we put a lot of the gas expenses on a separate credit card with rewards for buying gas). Mortgage lenders give enormous loans to people they know will be unable to pay for them. Lenders and their insurers repackage these crap loans until they seem to be made of solid gold, then sell shares of those loans as solid investments, destroying the entire economy when their bubble finally collapses. The SEC fails to investigate one of the largest Ponzi schemes in recent history. Food industries hire private contractors to inspect their food, and nationwide outbreaks of E.coli and salmonella result from contaminated spinach, tomatoes, and even peanut butter due to negligence and corruption in the inspection process.

Some argue that insurance companies should be allowed to offer the same plans nationally, and benefit from the economies of scale that come with a larger pool of insureds. The problem is that while it sounds good in theory, we already have a model for what happens when companies are allowed to incorporate in any state and offer services in another: the credit card industry. Many incorporated in Delaware, where the laws regarding credit cards are very lax, and their operations are regulated by the State of Delaware (and how many people in the US like their credit card company?). You can bet your left kidney that the same thing will happen with the health insurance industry if they’re allowed to go national: incorporation in the state with the laxest regulation laws and a continuation of their existing practices on a broader scale.

Private industry will always look for the quick buck, and cut any corners it needs to in order to make that happen. It’s just human nature, and industry is made up of nothing but people (very rich people who can buy a lot of influence and favors, but still people). When such corners start including things like food safety, or a person’s health, such behavior is inexcusable, dangerous, and deeply immoral. It is the responsibility of an independent third party with a vested interest in the common good, not the corporate good, to ensure that such corner-cutting abuses are prevented, because if they aren’t, people get sick, and people die. The health insurance industry has had years to get its act together, bring down costs, and actually insure the entire population of the United States. It’s well beyond the realm of second chances at this point. We’ve been talking about insurance reform since well before I was even born, for crying out loud, and none of the things people have complained about over the years have ever been fixed. It’s time for external corrective action, and the only mechanism large enough to drive such an action is the government.

We need a public option. It is borderline criminal that the richest nation in the world is millions, perhaps even billions of dollars in debt due to health care expenses; that 50 million people (that’s 16.7% of America) are uninsured, with millions more under-insured; that we spend more on health care than any other nation and have nothing to show for it; that one of the highest causes of bankruptcy in this nation is health care costs. Our system is broken, perhaps even fundamentally, and while this reform bill won’t correct the core problem of health care being a for-profit industry, it should at least level the playing field enough that everyone can afford to get the care they need.

The insurance industry is spending $1.4 million a day to defeat the bill being put forward by Democrats in Congress, just as they fought against the Clinton reform, just as they fought to prevent Medicare from negotiating prescription drug prices. The insurance industry will fight this reform tooth and nail because regulation and competition will cost them money and lower their obscene profits, not because it will harm patients or ration care. But the greatest insult and crime in all of this is that much of that money is going straight to our duly elected members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, in a desperate attempt to buy off their votes and thwart the will of the people who elected the Democrats in November to execute their agenda in overwhelming numbers. People want change (well, people who aren’t Republican, anyway), and they deserve to get what they voted for. Representatives, Senators, Mister President, don’t let the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital corporations take away our health care any longer. Don’t let them take away my wife’s health care any longer. Give us the public option, or get the hell out of Washington D.C.

Those who dislike listening to people gripe about the ever-advancing march of change might want to skip this post, because it’s largely a “get off my lawn” complaint aimed at NewsGator…

So for whatever reason, NewsGator, a seemingly popular online service to sync one’s RSS feeds between multiple platforms, is discontinuing its RSS sync services to focus on… whatever nebulously vague “enterprise” solution it is that they offer (I’ve read over their website a few times in the past, and aside from being big on the buzzwords, I have no idea what else it is NewsGator actually does). As a result, they’re transitioning everyone to Google Reader.

This is all well and good for most folks who are okay with the Big G knowing everything about their lives, but the way NewsGator has gone about this migration is asinine to say the least (and I swear to the gods, “asinine” should be spelled “assinine”, because it only makes sense). They essentially provided 30 days notice that they would be permanently shutting down their service, and don’t seem to have given the various developers that they employ – who create the applications relying on NewsGator’s services for their sync functionality – any more of a heads-up than their users, as the developer of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire iPhone has apparently been scrambling to get two new stable apps out before the deadline. This is especially crucial for the iPhone app since it’s useless without a NewsGator account to sync with.

In addition to shutting down their online sync, NewsGator is plowing rather large and obtrusive-looking ad panels into their desktop applications (with, of course, a way to turn the ads off if you pay for the privilege). Now, I don’t mind ads as long as they stay out of my way. In fact, I’m using the ad-supported versions of several iPhone applications, as well as the ad-supported version of Tweetie for the Mac. However, given NewsGator’s previous decision to axe its pay-only policy for NetNewsWire and FeedDemon only to reverse course and start saddling users with ads after that plan apparently didn’t work out as well as they expected, I don’t know if I can really trust them to keep providing me something I’m interested in using. The botched manner in which they’ve handled this forced migration to Google Reader is not helping their standing in my eyes either.

Now, I have a few options. First, I could suck it up and deal with the ads, wait until the end of the month, and continue on happy as you please once the iPhone app comes out and I migrate to Google Reader. This requires perhaps the least amount of effort, but NewsGator has gotten under my skin with this move, and I’m not really inclined to put up with it.

Second, I could pay to get rid of the ads, but that still has me giving money to NewsGator. Again, given their shoddy handling of this and past large-scale changes to their service (the move to the “improved” NewsGator Online feed reader last year was equally terrible), I’m not inclined to put a lot of faith in them not to screw me over at some point in the future. I love the way NNW works, but the company paying for the development presently drives me up a wall.

Third, I could stick with the current release of NNW – 3.1.7 – and sync it using MobileMe between home and work. It would, however, mean I’d completely lose access to my updated feeds on my iPod, and via the web in a pinch. I’m rarely in a situation where I need to pull up my RSS feeds without having access to one or the other machines these days though, and NNW iPhone’s inability to cache anything but the text of a feed item for offline viewing is annoying at best (please tell me somebody’s iPhone RSS reader caches images).

Fourth, I could move to Google Reader, which is pretty much my only other option for RSS syncing after August anyway, and replace NNW and NNW iPhone with different apps. Unfortunately, I’ve had little success so far today trying to track down a Mac app that syncs with Google Reader that isn’t NNW 3.2. I saw EventBox mentioned, and gave it a spin, but its handling of RSS feeds is for casual users at best; the UI is lovely, but the keyboard shortcuts are bizarre, there’s no way to sort the list from oldest to newest (I’ll admit, I’m opposite man. I like having new items at the bottom so I can arrow down from least to most relevant content quickly), and the “article preview” view is enormous. Running the app at a non-fullscreen resolution, the best I could do without making the articles themselves cramped in the in-app viewer was get two previews to display at a time. It makes plowing through a backlog of Engadget posts more difficult than it needs to be.

Besides EventBox, I can’t really find anything else that syncs with Google Reader that isn’t either Google Reader in Safari, Google Reader in Firefox, Google Reader in a Site-Specific Browser (i.e. Fluid or Prism), or Google Reader in a Firefox add-on. Considering that I really dislike the way that Google Reader displays its content (it’s perfectly acceptable, I just don’t like it personally… it doesn’t work for me), that pretty much nixes all of those options right there. No amount of Stylish CSS or Greasemonkey scripts are going to give me a list-plus-viewer two-up option in Google Reader. It’s either Article View, or List View, where clicking on a list item blows away the list view and displays the whole article inline with the list. Grr!

I guess if worst came to worst I could go back to reading RSS in Safari, and hope that MobileMe would sync the read status of the feeds between home and work, but that still leaves me without a mobile option, because I don’t think Mobile Safari supports RSS feeds.

For now, I think I’m going to try doing the MobileMe sync on NNW 3.1.7, disable auto-updates, and see how it goes for the next week or so of desktop-only sync fun. If anyone has any suggestions on where to get a NNW-like Google Reader app for the Mac in the meantime though, I’d appreciate it.

So Digg and Reddit have been ragging on this for over a day now, but as a web developer, I thought I’d chime in with some longer-than-140-character comments on Microsoft’s new “IE8 is the most awesome thing ever invented” comparison chart. While the “reasons to install” page is fairly reasonable,  the comparison chart is complete and total bunk, and also tremendously condescending. Taking it point by point:

1. Security - I’m tempted to give them points on this, since Vista and Win7 run IE in a super-restricted access mode. However, Firefox seems to be much faster in pushing out security patches when they’re needed, and neither it nor Chrome have such deep-seated access to the OS that compromising them has the potential to cause widespread damage to the OS. Also, IE’s restricted process mode isn’t available in WinXP, which I think is still the dominant OS by a wide margin. Further, IE8’s “ScreenFilter” (seriously, what’s up with the CamelCase features?) has already been implemented by Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. FAIL.
2. Privacy - And so the outright lying begins. Both Chrome and the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5 have identical private browsing features (and in fact, Safari’s had it for years), and Firefox 3 even has an add-on you can use to gain this capability now without downloading the Fx3.5 beta. FAIL, Microsoft.
3. Ease of Use – I have two words for you, Microsoft: Information Bar. This thing is a hyper-sensitive waste of my time and an extreme annoyance on a daily basis. Also, have you looked at your preferences screen in the past decade? Jesus Christ… Minor points for Accelerators (with deductions for stacking the deck with your other products), but Web Slices are arguably a complete waste of time, and the rest of the browser is just an absolute mess (good luck trying to uninstall an add-on by yourself, by the way… the IE dev team had to post a how-to on their site for that!).
4. Web Standards – Yes, I will give you congratulations for finally making it to where everyone else has been for the past 5 years. You do at least deserve that. However, your ongoing dismissive attitude towards CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript performance, and the ACID3 test are not encouraging. To be sure, ACID3 is not a test of established standards the way that ACID2 is (and lordy did you crow about passing that one). However, passing ACID3 is about much more than meeting obscure draft standards. Look at the blogs that the WebKit developers posted in their race to beat Opera to 100/100; they mention making deep-seated performance tweaks and fixing long-standing rendering glitches in order to attain the coveted perfect score. ACID3 is as much a stress test of a browser’s existing capabilities as it is a future-facing standards test, and on both counts, IE is failing miserably, and getting thoroughly spanked by Gecko, WebKit, and Opera. The competition isn’t standing still here…
5. Developer Tools - Now you’re just being insulting. Every web developer I’ve ever talked to considers Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar the gold standard in web developer tools. WebKit’s developer tools run a close second (they’re a bit more tedious to use when editing content on-the-fly). IE’s developer tools are junk. Sure, they’re bundled into the browser, which I guess is good news for the <1% of internet users who do web development, but they’re clunky, it’s difficult to add properties or make changes to existing attributes on-the-fly, and the enable/disable style feature seems to be completely unreliable in my experience: changing a style in the developer tools, uncovering a “fix” for a rendering issue, and implementing that fix often results in a completely different rendering outcome than the one implied by the developer tools. FAIL again, Microsoft. And an even harder FAIL for slapping developers in the face with your crappy tools and saying we should be thrilled about them. And why is this on the consumer-facing facts list? What average computer user is going to care about this? It’s like advertising Visual Studio Express on the Windows 7 features page…
6. Reliability - Another lie. Chrome supports both tab isolation and crash recovery (though not explicit automatic crashed tab recovery [which seems stupid... if a tab crashes, you're probably not going to want to automatically re-launch it, because odds are it's going to crash again], so you get a few points on a technicality), and both Firefox and Chrome are far more reliable than IE8 in my experience. You could possibly win points over Safari on Windows, but that’s like beating the kid in a wheelchair on a 100-yard dash. Uphill. Nobody’s going to give you any credit for it (yeah, Safari on Windows still has some stability issues, but I’ll still take it over IE any day of the week).
7. Customizability – Now I know whoever made this chart is a complete idiot. For all its awesomeness, Chrome is hardly customizable, so I’m not sure why they tried to make it look good by giving it a check mark. That said, IE’s customizability selling point seems to be that Microsoft has already done the customizing for you. That seems wrong somehow (it also seems like something they enjoy accusing Apple of doing)… And they then go on to mention the 1700 add-ons for IE in the Mythbusting section (which I’ll get to), while simultaneously denigrating Firefox’s much larger add-on library. Can’t have it both ways, Microsoft. Major FAIL.
8. Compatibility – I hate you so fucking hard… if it were up to web developers, IE would be the least compatible browser on the market, but we can’t exactly do that when it controls over 60% of that market and people expect their websites to work. And you have no idea how bad it looks to only give yourself a check mark for compatibility when developers are already building in progressive enhancements to support the more advanced rendering features in other browsers like CSS rounded corners and SVG canvas support. IE is only more compatible with SharePoint and ActiveX-reliant sites, and speaking from experience, I hate both of them, and want them to die in a fire. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL.
9. Manageability - Finally, something IE can honestly claim to have the upper hand in: enterprise distribution and lock-down support. I would frankly love to see Firefox pick up some enterprise-level GPO support, because it would only further erode IE’s market share (what are the chances of the GPO controls being impossible to build into open-source software though? Possible dick move alert…). The biggest base of IE6 users seems to be corporate enterprise and the US Government (at least, that’s what everyone cites when defending IE6’s ongoing existence). Get Firefox 3 with the IE Tab add-on on every one of those machines and watch public IE usage drop like a fucking stone. And they’d never have to upgrade off of IE6 for their internal sites (this is how I use SharePoint at work).
10. Performance – Please, this is just pathetic. From a usage standpoint, IE’s interface is painfully slow. Opening new tabs is glacial thanks to the tab isolation implementation that IE uses. And gods help you if you want to install more than a few add-ons from IE’s huge 1700-strong gallery, because they’re only going to make the problem worse (seriously, throughout IE8’s development process, the only fix provided by the IE team for slow application launch and tab creation was disabling your add-ons… that’s sure customization-friendly!). IE8’s JavaScript performance is at least a generation behind modern browsers, and the disparity is only going to get worse as web applications put a larger and larger strain on JS DOM manipulation, and HTML5+CSS3 take the place of Flash and Silverlight for most website glitz and glam. One more FAIL for you, Microsoft.

The Mythbusting page is just as bad…

1. “Internet Explorer is much slower than Firefox and Chrome.” – Again with the speed comparison. They even link to a video that uses the phrase “as it turns out” to prove their point (a phrase which my favorite author, Douglas Adams, once said made it possible to prove anything without backing up your statements… I think we have a case in point here). The video does nothing but compare page load times… no JavaScript performance comparisons, no comparisons of actual operations within pages like performing drag-and-drops, not even a demonstration of their Accelerators (which is what I thought the video was going to be about… when it comes to speed, pretty much the only point that could be made in IE’s favor is Accelerators, because they’re certainly going to be useful to some… though the lack of Google-targeted Accelerators is probably going to deter their use for many, because Google is synonymous with everything from search to translation to driving directions). As I said before, developers and other browser makers are not standing still. IE8 may meet today’s JavaScript performance requirements (and I personally don’t think it even manages that), but it’ll be at least another 2 years before we see even the beginning of IE9, and by then, who knows where things will have advanced? IE is definitely not leading the pack as it so bizarrely claims (and unlike Apple, whose claims that Safari is the world’s fastest browser are still questionable, IE isn’t even in the running for second place).
2. “Internet Explorer is less secure than Firefox. “ – I’m amused by their use of the phrase “catches almost twice as much malware”… sounds like an affliction the way they’ve worded it, but whatever. I also don’t think it’s wise to make a claim that you respond faster than any other browser maker to new threats when evidence to the contrary is easy to come by… even the NSS Labs report on malware blocking indicates that Firefox is faster to block new threats than IE8. Kudos on using a MS-written report on security fixes to back up a MS-written marketing blurb though, and points for being on top of malware problems. Is MS using a different validation system than Safari/Fx/Chrome? Would they be willing to share for the benefit of all browser users? (Fat chance there… this is like the only point they’re scoring on.)
3. “Firefox is a richer, more adaptable browser than Internet Explorer.” – Seriously, you’re going to try and refute this claim? For real? Are you on crack or something? Even if I give you the point for having more features out-of-the-box, half of those features you think I want are things I turn off during the setup process (Web Slices, Suggested Sites, virtually all of the Accelerators because most are pretty useless to me…). The things I do want, like spell check and ad blocking, are things I have to go find an add-on for anyway. Let’s also ignore IE’s lack of a download manager, and their absolutely worthless developer tools (I can’t really even say they’re better than shooting blindly at the problem, because of aforementioned discrepancies between developer tools-made changes and actual implemented code). Further, their boisterous claim of 1,700 add-ons is totally smashed by Firefox’s almost 7,400. Hell, there’s more add-ons in Firefox’s “other” category than in IE’s entire library. As to their claim that IE implements “almost all of the features [in] the most popular add-ons in Firefox” (their words, not mine), here’s a list of the top 10 most popular add-ons on AMO:
   • AdBlock Plus
   • FlashGot
   • Video DownloadHelper
   • NoScript
   • DownloadThemAll!
   • Greasemonkey
   • Personas
   • Firebug
   • IETab
   • Cooliris

   Of those, I think IE implements Firebug (sort of), and obviously IETab. Yep, that’s totally almost all of the features in the most popular Firefox add-ons. Isn’t there some sort of truth in advertising requirement FAIL going on here?

4. “Internet Explorer doesn’t play well with Web standards.” – Again, I’m willing to begrudge them a lot of points on this because they have come a long way even just from IE7, but they’re still not off my shit list. I spent a whole day building a new skin for DPWR in IPB3.0 and had to essentially reboot the whole damn thing because I hadn’t tested it in IE at the time (I was working on my Mac and didn’t want to have VirtualBox running), and when viewing the site in IE8 and IE8’s IE7 Compatibility Mode, the entire skin was almost entirely unusable (topic view especially was impossible because anything after the first post was simply missing). And this was after building it using validating XHTML code and CSS 2.1 definitions. AUGH!

I’ve harped on this before, but Microsoft seriously needs to get their shit together when it comes to IE. Rather than actually dedicate more time and resources to getting a quality modern browser on all fronts, Microsoft still seems to be taking the path of least resistance and over-hyping their accomplishments to the point of fabricating outright lies about the competition. Every other browser developer is pushing strongly into HTML5 and CSS3 territory while back-filling what are frankly tweak-level CSS 2.1 compatibility issues (I think supporting content:before and content:after on fieldset tags was brought up on the IE dev blog as an example of IE8’s awesome CSS 2.1 superiority… how many times have you needed to use that?), and pushing JavaScript performance into frankly obscene levels. Meanwhile, the IE team is trumpeting their support for CSS 2.1 (we’ve only been waiting for you at this party for 5 years now, guys) and deriding other browsers for focusing on JavaScript performance and supporting draft standards (when you’re already supporting the vast majority of the CSS 2.1 spec, there’s not much else to focus on but the future…). The problem is, IE is already still well behind the pack with IE8, and with IE9 easily 2-3 years away, they’ll be even farther behind on supporting those emerging standards and performance benchmarks, while every other browser will have them in spades.

Don’t even get me started on their mobile platform, which in 2010 will still based on IE6. Urge to kill… rising…

I’ve been contemplating writing something like this for a while now, and watching the unedited tape of Jon Stewart’s interview Tuesday night on The Daily Show has finally motivated me to speak my peace (piece? stupid English…). (Incidentally, why is Stewart one of the only people in the media actually calling this shit out for what it truly is and saying, unequivocally, that it’s wrong?)

I’ve been frankly flabbergasted at the framing and tone of the debate being made in the US media about the efficacy of torture. That there are people in this country, in America, who think that torturing people is acceptable (let alone useful), honestly makes my blood boil.

Now, I am hardly what I think most people would define as patriotic; I don’t pray – for our country, its leaders, or in general. I don’t even own an American flag anymore (and before that, the only ones I had were a desk flag and the flag on my Boy Scout uniform). I don’t have bumper stickers expressing my love for my country. I don’t go around telling other people how great this country is. I live here. I think it’s a pretty nice place to live, for all its faults (and perhaps most telling of my “lack of patriotism”, I’m willing to admit that this country has its faults and its dark chapters of history). I don’t put a whole lot of thought into how lucky I am to be living here, or how much worse off I could/would be by being born somewhere else. I am, frankly, one of those assholes who takes this country and my freedom somewhat for granted.

Perhaps the fact that I take for granted the freedoms that we enjoy in this country is precisely why I have been so dumbstruck by the arguments being made in defense of torture lately. The fact that anyone in this country could even contemplate doing something so unfathomably contrary to everything I’ve ever been taught that this nation stands for is so incomprehensible to me that I’ve had considerable difficulty in expressing my confusion, frustration, and outright outrage at what’s been going on and what was done in our names. It runs completely contrary to common sense and logic, and I can’t imagine how the people getting on TV and defending what was done over the past eight years can even stand to look themselves in the mirror every day (obviously, Cheney doesn’t have that problem, because he’s a fucking vampire).

This nation was founded on the principles of freedom, equality, justice, fairness, and mercy. It has not always lived up to those principles, even from day one. But we keep getting better. “We can do better than this” seems to be the mantra of this country as it continues a steady march towards those ideal principles upon which it was founded.

Torturing people is something which fundamentally undermines these principles. I don’t care who you’re torturing; doing it to anyone is a debasement of the person doing the torture just as much as it is a dehumanization of the person being tortured. We destroy our moral standing, our moral credibility, and our moral authority by engaging in the same tactics we have so long criticized and even prosecuted other people both at home and abroad for in the past. We also endanger not only our troops but our citizens abroad, who could easily be subjected to the same practices by the governments of other countries, and at that point, all they have to do is point the finger back at us and say “you guys do this too, what’s the big deal?”. What would be the response then, I wonder?

Before I go any farther, I do want to note that I am in no way seeking to condone what the people we tortured did to the citizens of this nation. Being outraged at the fact that we tortured them does not in any way mean that I do not want to see them prosecuted for their crimes, or that I don’t want to find out anything they might know about future attacks. The people who make this false comparison are being disingenuous and dishonest, and are attempting to polarize the discussion in their favor by putting those with a reasoned and rational approach to the situation on the wrong side of human emotion. As human beings, we want to do whatever it takes to get information out of people. When those people have also either confessed to or been implicated in the worst terrorist attack on our soil in American history, the urge to exact retribution or revenge on these people for their actions is all the more potent, and all the more capable of pulling us off the road to the fulfillment of the ideals that this nation was built on.

We don’t torture American citizens who have committed heinous crimes, like rape, child molestation, or murder, though. We don’t subject kidnappers to torture to find out where they’re hiding their victims (no matter what Without a Trace or CSI might have you believe). We prosecuted and even executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded allied forces in WWII. We prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding people when Ronald Regan was president. Even George W. Freaking Bush said in 2003 that torture is inexcusable, and that anyone who did it would be prosecuted for war crimes (he was talking about Iraqis at the time, though, so hooray for double standards!). Despite the fact that more than one person I know would personally like to castrate child molesters and shove their *ahem* down their throats until they choked to death, they also realize that such behavior is against the law and that they would be rightly subject to prosecution themselves for doing so.

The law exists to protect ourselves and those around us from our baser nature, even if those being protected are fully deserving of our most inhuman retribution, because the risk of subjecting even one innocent person to those actions is, we’ve deemed, a greater risk than the potential harm a guilty person may do in their absence. We are a nation that prides (or maybe prided, it’s getting hard to tell sometimes) itself on the presumption of innocence, speedy and fair trial by jury, and the ethical treatment of prisoners, both civilian and military. It is sad, frustrating, and more than a bit depressing that a single attack on our country has undone so much because of the frightened, rash, and erratic reactions of our leaders at the time that we are now actually engaged in a debate over whether the United States of America should torture people, simply because it might work.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the venerated Founding Fathers, said that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. I know it’s a quote that’s been used a lot by the Left over the past eight years, but it’s appropriate (I would re-phrase it in this situation to replace “liberty” with “humanity”, though). It also applies not just to our own citizens, but to everyone in the world. Yes, there are incredibly horrible people in the world who would probably kill us as soon as look at us. But to treat everyone like they may be one of those people, or to treat one of those people like they are less than human because of their actions, destroys our moral commitment to fair and equal treatment for all people. Torture is wrong not only for this reason, but because in conjunction with the other rulings and behaviors of the Bush administration, it became incredibly easy to round up innocent people and subject them to the same sort of treatment. Torture has no place in a free society, based in the rule of law and dedicated to the protection of freedom for all at the expense of absolute security. We can do better than this.

And I would rather die as a result of that statement being upheld than live knowing that the values this nation claims to hold so dear have been violated for my safety.

Sometimes I want to smack myself senseless.  Obviously, this requires a little bit of setup to adequately explain where I’m coming from, so I’ll try to start far enough back that it’s enlightening without being boring or otherwise unnecessarily detailed…

Oscy and I have, for some time now, been involved with a neighbor in our apartment complex who has, to put it lightly, been going through some really serious relationship-related issues.  On the side, she’s a complete technophobe who also happens to have a bizzare tendency to want to have all manner of technology in her apartment, then freaks out about it a few days later because she’s either unknowingly broken it, forgotten what it was there for, doesn’t actually know how to use it, or thinks that someone might be hacking into it (this includes being suspicious of the little circuit boards in her smoke detector, fearing that her apartment may be bugged).  Stay with me here, because I’m slowly getting to the point…

One of the less intelligent things I did for this woman was give her my extremely outdated Dell laptop in an attempt to assuage her fears about her computer being hijacked and get her to a functional state of computing again, both tech-wise and peace-of-mind-wise.  In the course of the month and a half or so that she had the laptop, I ended up re-installing XP three different times (once for the initial wipe before I gave her the system, and twice more after that because either she or someone in her family who promised to “fix” this perfectly operational system for her completely trashed it instead).  Finally, she ended up just giving the laptop back to me a couple of weeks ago (a blessing in more than one way, as I’d been missing the nicety of having a lappy around, and it meant I would no longer be dragged over to her apartment at 11 PM to “fix” something that wasn’t broken and listen to another hour or two of sob stories).  She then tried to get it back a couple of days later, only to then change her mind once more a few days after that, but that’s neither here nor there (just annoying).

Anyway, throughout this whole mess, she’s ended up becoming friends of sorts with the complex’s maintenance guy, whom she also had try to “fix” the not-broken laptop (which resulted in me having to re-align the pins for the power plug after both of them failed to realize they were forcing the jack in the wrong way… bloddy idiots).  At some point she mentioned me and my incalculable technological prowess to him, and about a week ago, he came by asking if I could take a look at his computer, because he was having problems with pop-ups and couldn’t get some of his games to run.  The end goal of this post is now in sight… stay on target!
I agreed to look at his computer after he promised to pay me for my time (something my neighbor has never done), and spent last Saturday evening merrily removing over 200 virus- or malware-infected files from his computer, deleting all of the crapware that came with it, and setting up a functional AV/Anti-spamware suite (in other words, Not Norton)… which was actually pre-installed, never activated, and probably damaged by a bit of malware because it wouldn’t run properly despite launching at boot-up).  All told, I ended up charging him $70 for the time spent, which is still easily half of what he would have been gouged for at Geek Squad.

It then occurred to me that I lived in an apartment complex that was probably full of lamers as hopelessly lost as these two people, and that there was probably a fair amount of money to be had fixing their problems for them at half the price of what Geek Squad would charge (still a fair amount of money by any estimation) without the hassle of lugging their computer off to a retail store and dealing with Best Buy’s interminably long wait times and generally clueless staff.  This led to the ad-hoc creation of the Computer Defense Force, an “on-site” computer service & repair operation for apartment tennants.  Now, I’ve prided myself on not having to deal with endless system maintenance since I bought my G5 three years ago (doesn’t seem that long, but maybe thats a good thing, hehe), so Oscy was understandably baffled by this decision to start servicing computers in my “copious” spare time outside of work.  There’s actually two reasons why I decided to get into this again after 3 years of just dealing with Oscy’s computer and the occasional service call from my clueless family members: 1) more money is always a good thing, and 2) it actually makes me kind of happy doing this to computers that aren’t mine.  I have to be a bit more careful with other people’s systems, obviously, but I’m helping people get their computers working again, and oddly enough, it’s good stress relief watching a virus scan or disk defrag run.  And did I mention I’d get paid for this?

Now we’re on the home stretch… I realized last night that my quaint little Pages document of a sales invoice was pretty cool and all, but that I’d need a real way to track expenses and payments, as well as services offered, services rendered, the costs for those services, and to whom I provided them (as well as who still owed me cash moneys).  The problem is that most of the apps that handle invoicing and billing on the Mac are built for web designers and other freelance-type people who have big projects for small number of specific clients.  Now, if there’s one down-side to what the Mac has done for me, it’s made me less inclined to try and shoehorn the way I want to do things into the way an application wants me to do things.  My growing tendencies toward programming my way out of a hole I’ve found myself in have done absolutely nothing to help this situation.  So, at a loss for an app that does exactly what I want (a surprising rarity on a platform that supposedly has far less software than Windows does), I decided on a whim to start up XCode and start dinking around in the hopes that I might be able to figure out how to build my own program.  For those of you who have been waiting for this moment, this is the part where I commence smacking myself senseless.

OS X apps are written in Objective-C, which is a related language in some ways (but obviously not others) to C, C++, and any of the other not-C# variants of C floating around these days.  I have nothing but bad experiences from my C++ computer programming classes, learning how to create MPG calculators that ran in the Command Prompt, which has made me extremely hesitant to try learning a C-variant language that has absolutely no practical use where I work.  My forray into XCode last night wasn’t exactly nightmarish, but I was just blindly following the instructions given to me by the Hello World tutorial, so I didn’t get much of anything out of it beyond learning that XCode/Interface Builder’s way of building apps and linking them to UIs is very different from Visual Studio’s (in some ways better, in other ways a lot more tedious).  I still know next to nothing about Objective-C, and I’m betting that by the time I’ve learned enough about the language to build my shiny little application with CoreData usage and iCal &Address Book integration, I could probably just make money by selling that instead of the services I’d be managing with it.

Plus I still want to make video games…

And I need to actually get Issue 12 of the Archiver done for TCT, which I was asked to help with 5 days ago…

And I’m still interested in trying my hand at C# desktop programming, just so I can have a potentially useful new skill at work if the need arises…

And I’m helping to plan Mysterium…

Which, speaking of, means I need to get the Room Share system finalized tonight and handed off to TW and Odo for assistance in developing…

See why I want to smack myself?  I mean, Learning New Skills for Fun and Profit is cool and all, but I’m still working on that “and Profit” part… I have a ton of ideas for things to do, and no time to finish any of them as a result.  And all the while I keep coming up with more new things to try and do.  It’s somewhat maddening…

I can’t say I’m an avid (or even staunch) supporter of the “Get Things Done” mantra that’s sweeping the corporate world and to some degree personal life across the country.  However, I do recognize the value in making lists of things to do that are small enough to keep you motivated but detailed enough to keep you organized.  Given that my entire job consists of a never-ending stream of projects with deadlines and due-dates, having a way to quickly and easily create and maintain lists of tasks for those projects is fairly important, and to that end, I’ve routinely tried to get a system together that works for me in that regard, with varying degrees of success.

I would like to take this moment to decry the state of Windows development when it comes to GTD software.  It’s just downright pathetic next to the myriad of options available for the Mac.  There are about half a billion (I may be exaggerating) different GTD-oriented apps on the Mac, ranging from free to about $80.  The stand-out winner for me thus far has been iGTD, due in large part to its flexible attitude towards “contexts” (which I rarely if ever use) and the degree to which it integrates with pretty much every other Mac application on the planet.  Need to keep a reference to an email handy for this task?  No problem, just drag it into iGTD when you’re viewing the task.  Want to have references to all the files changed by a specific feature addition?  No problem, just drop the files into the task from the Finder.  Have a website with the instructions for completing a certain tricky JS action?  Again, no problem, just drop the URL into iGTD from Safari!

Why is there not a single application on the Windows side of the fence that supports this kind of deep file-system and application-level integration?  Is it because the Windows shell isn’t flexible enough to support these kinds of drag/drop actions from Explorer?  Because Outlook is the single largest walled-garden application next to Windows itself?  Because IE is a pile of poop?  Because Windows’ drag/drop just isn’t robust enough to support cross-application tie-ins like that?  Seriously, why can’t Windows do all of these things?

Hell, I’d be happy to settle for a to-do list app that doesn’t make me want to vomit, let alone handle all the rest of these integration points.  Just give me something small, simple, and most importantly, free that I can use to create projects, put tasks in them, assign due dates to those tasks, and see an overview, by project, of the stuff I have to do today.  Why is this so god-damned hard?  Half of the GTD-oriented apps out there for Windows are Outlook plugins, and I don’t want to potentially break my copy of Outlook, lest the security nazi descend upon me like a ton of bricks.  The other half are either pay-only, or have such a crippled free version as to be totally worthless, or are the sort of open-source programmer-developed apps that have absolutely zero usability, or are apparently targeted at kindergarteners, judging from the insultingly overblown look of the UI.

Outlook 2007 has this thing called the Business Contact Manager that I’ve tried using on a couple of occasions, since it supports projects and tasks, and you can even link emails to specific tasks, but it’s tedious, bulky, slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use regularly.  I’d be totally gung-ho for this solution if they just made it easier to deal with by speeding it up, simplifying linking emails to tasks (or even creating tasks from emails), and took out some of the complicated cruft that I didn’t need (it’s oriented towards sales as far as I can tell [surprise...], which is decidedly not what I’m involved with).

I’m tempted to roll my own solution and run it off of my website at this rate.  It’ll have to be an off-the-job project, though, because I have enough else that I’m getting paid to do.  Though maybe I can pitch it to Brock as another service we can provide and/or sell outside of our core credit union demographic, and get paid to put this thing together for myself.  Yes, I’m devious.

All this infighting and he-said-she-said and bitterness and anger and talking about other people behind their backs and grudges and intentional “innocent” rule-bending etc etc etc etc is really starting to piss me off. It may not be tearing the community apart, but it sure as fuck is starting to fray it around the edges. This shit has got to stop. Why do people think that this is an appropriate way to behave? Why do we let them get away with it?

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been around for so god-damned long that I just don’t care if I’m ostracized or made fun of or put on any particular group’s blacklist, but I am sick and fucking tired of dancing around issues and grudges and problems and arguments just so that nobody gets upset and leaves. It’s stupid. We keep talking about how Uru (and Myst) is something that can be this huge commercial success that appeals to a zillion different people, but at the same time, we get so paranoid over making someone mad and having them leave because it’s one more person gone from this tiny little community we have here. We can’t have it both ways. Personally, I think that while this community may not be huge enough not to miss the contributions of any one individual, it’s big enough to get over it, and small enough that keeping problem-causing people around is eventually going to make it fall apart. It’s not worth it.

I like the Myst games, and I like this community… but sometimes the people in it make me wonder if I’ll even make it to my 10-year anniversary. But if I give in and leave, who else would be willing to put up with it? How many good people are these two-faced back-stabbers going to drive out before there’s nobody left but them and the people who don’t know any better?

And just to be perfectly crystal-clear on this, I’m talking primarily about the Slackers and their self-righteous ivory tower we-know-best attitude. They show up in droves when the situation suits their purposes, and they utterly destroy those who stand against them, argue with them, moderate them, or even just cough while they’re talking. Of course, they don’t do it in public, they do it privately, plotting in their little forum about who’s going to take the brunt of their next round of ass-hattery, and playing all innocent whenever someone calls them on their bullshit. I’m sick of playing in the undercurrent of implication and vague suggestion. Flame on. But know that I’m not leaving, no matter what gets said about or against me. I spoke earlier about all of the ills that came out of UU, well, this is the worst of it. And it needs to stop.