Ace Mortgage wanted to settle, but they don't get it. They are trying to talk about settlement, but they want confidentiality and a time limit on the no-faxing rule. Hah. I don't think they get it. The reason I settle fax cases for money is that people who send junk faxes generally don't get ethics; all they hear is indistinct buzzing noises. This means they have to pay money, or they won't believe it's real. They also need an agreement not to fax, or they will anyway.
These incompetents ignored this lawsuit for most of a year, so they didn't get their lawyers involved until now. "Now" is about three weeks (well, two now) before our hearing to determine whether or not we get treble damages. They already defaulted. Legally speaking, we already won the case; they aren't invited to that hearing. From a practical perspective, they have a very hard case. This is not a well-handled case on their end. I don't know that the lawyers can be blamed; it seems that they weren't told about this until recently.
But the lawyers are the ones trying to get confidentiality and just pay money, 'cuz they think it's about money. Which is sorta counterproductive. Well, they can argue it in court, if they can get the judge to give them permission to do so.
This is a cool gizmo. It isn't perfect, but it's quite nice. I'm using it in Dvorak mode.
The keyboard has 40 finger keys, and 10 thumb keys; the thumb keys are mostly mode switches.
There are three modes. Normal mode has letters and common punctuation. NAS (numbers and symbols) mode is self-explanatory. Mouse mode has mouse movement, arrow keys, and function keys.
For reasons not clear to me, there's an unbound key in NAS mode, and no hyphen. I remapped this.
The adjustments are pretty flexible, but I wouldn't mind a tiny bit more freedom of movement for them. Still impressive. The left shift is maybe too sensitive for my taste. On the other hand... This is a seriously cool toy, and I anticipate a lot of comfy typing on it in days to come. I can touch-type on it, just very slowly, but I very rarely need to look at their charts.
More to come when I've had it more than a day.
In a post titled A call for unity, I put forward what was, ostensibly, a call to unite behind the current American President. Several people have expressed concerns about the wording. Let me help explain.
Much of the wording in that post was taken from speeches, not of the current Republican party, but of another party calling for people to back their vision of unity. They, too, were nationalists. Their party was called the National Socialist party, and the two men whose words I used were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.
Anyway, some of the original quotes: (Special thanks to infiel from #infidelchat, who tracked many of them down.)
"America comes first" is an effort at a semantically correct translation of "Deutschland ueber alles".
"Our Hitler" was a common phrase in Nazi propaganda.
"We are the example of faith, of bravery, of unchanging conviction. We are the old guard of the party that never wavers." - Goebbels
"The world is divided by love and hate. To be on firm ground, one must know whom to love and whom to hate." - Goebbels
"There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland." - Hitler
"Work makes freedom possible" is a reference to "Arbeit macht Frei", which was written in big letters over the gates of concentration camps.
"But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind." - Hitler
"Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions." - Hitler
"My country, right or wrong" is plain old nationalism.
I think this gets at something serious and important: Nationalism really is dangerous. And I think it really is fundamentally incompatible with morality. You cannot love your country more than justice and still have justice.
Today, in America, we have American soldiers and CIA agents torturing people, sometimes to death. We have soldiers posing with humiliated naked prisoners, grinning widely and giving a thumbs-up guesture. We have hundreds of people who are being kept in a military camp without any trial, charges, legal counsel, or in some cases even evidence! And, we find, there is credible evidence that they are being abused.
George W. Bush has simply papered over all of these. The first reports of sexual and violent abuse of prisoners were met with a proclamation that this was not to be endorsed or tolerated. However, since then, the man who wrote the letter describing the doctrine under which some kinds of torture were to be considered acceptable has been given the office of Attorney General. Sure enough, I've seen people defending the use of "certain interrogation techniques" as long as they're not "real" torture... But any time you find yourself justifying the infliction of suffering with the specific and stated intent of breaking the will and destroying any hope prisoners may have, that's torture, pure and simple.
This is not okay, and it is not going to become okay. What has made America great, in the past, is not our unity, but our diversity; our willingness to discuss alternatives, to disagree with each other, to work together to try to keep each other honest. When people demand that we withhold simple standards of accountability, then that is very much un-American. It violates the very principles we are supposedly defending.
In our rush to export freedom, we have run up rather a significant freedom deficit. We have less freedom at home than we used to, and we seem to be quite happy to let it go. We have people proposing laws that would allow certain government agencies to bypass any and all legal checks and balances when "necessary" -- in their own judgment, of course. We have people being held without charges; that we sometimes go so far as to do so on land we lease shows that we know it's wrong, but we do it anyway; another brilliant strategem from our new Attorney General.
Those of you who were deeply horrified by those words, I commend you; most of you didn't apparently recognize the words, but you recognized the spirit behind them. That spirit is moving in the world today, and all people should, quite simply, oppose it. It is evil, it is wrong, and it does not become okay just because it's us instead of them.
So, how about some diversity? Some freedom? I'd vote for that.
Okay, I admit to being a little biased towards Kinesis Ergonomic keyboards... But it's hard not to be sorta tempted by the DataHand keyboard, which is honestly one of the coolest-looking keyboards I've ever seen.
Who am I kidding? I want one. I don't know whether or not I'd get much mileage out
of it, but with the amount of writing I'm doing these days, any little bit helps. It's just that, uhm, $650 is a lot for a keyboard.
Anyway, if you're a keyboard junkie, and you were put off by the $2,100 price listed in the Typing Injury FAQ... These can be had for $500-650, maybe $900 with a lot of options. Pretty reasonable, as heavy-duty specialized ergonomic hardware goes.
The underlying issue here is that writing twelve hours a day is putting stresses on my hands that even the Kinesis Ergonomic keyboard cannot entirely alleviate, and I'm starting to think about switching around input devices more often. I'll be giving them a call when the day-star is up again, maybe they can cut me a deal.
America has historically been a great country, a bastion of freedom, and I think it's clear that we need to take action to regain our rightful place in the world. America is under attack; the enemies of the state are a clear and present danger to us. We need to do something about terrorists. We need to reclaim what is historically ours.
What, then, shall we do to deal with the terrorist problem? The first thing we need is more unity. I think it's time we got behind our President. I mean, he may not be perfect, but he's our president. We had an election, we voted, we elected him. Shouldn't we give him our allegiance now? One country, one people, one President. It's that simple. George W. Bush is a man of the people. He's our President... But that's really standing too much on ceremony. Dubya is a man of the people. We need to get behind our Dubya.
It is important that we try to correct occasional glitches or problems, but we must not let them distract us from our commitment to our great nation. We need to stand up and say "I will serve my country, right or wrong", because if our great nation falls, there will be no one to care for right and wrong. The Republican party has a role to fill here. We are the example of faith, of bravery, of unchanging conviction. We are the old guard of the party that never wavers. Our Dubya has set a firm public example of conviction in the face of naysayers and doubters.
Freedom is not an easy goal to attain. Too long, we have lazily assumed that if we just trade with people, they will become free. No. Work makes freedom possible; we must be ready to do that work. There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are obedience, hard work, honesty, order, moral purity, family values, truthfulness, sacrifice, and love of our nation. Each of these has a crucial role to play in our goal of eventually providing the world with a real solution to the terrorist problem it faces today.
Terrorism threatens to undermine our vision of a free and peaceful future. Terrorism shows a vision of hatred for freedom. The world is divided by love and hate; to be on firm ground, one must know whom to love and whom to hate. Quite simply, we cannot be safe until we have defeated the terrorists completely, eradicated their vile poison from the earth. Some people argue for ever-increasing license and liberty, calling it "progress", but this will not give us the final solution to the terrorist problem. Old-fashioned methods and morals will suit us just fine.
We don't need to make alliances with everyone in the world, trying to find "common ground" among their disparate purposes. Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions. Our Dubya has the vision, the leadership, the plan to make this happen.
Who's with me?
Edit, 2/25/05: In fact, even I'm not with me. For those who didn't get it, the above speech is rife with direct quotes from Hitler and Goebbels, and if you found yourself agreeing with it, you should seek professional help.
A while back, I wrote about switching to Moneydance. Moneydance is a shareware home finance program.
It's been over a year and a half. I'm still using Moneydance. I still love it. My upgrades are still free or cheap. I just got the update to "Moneydance 2005", which appears to have been free with the last upgrade I paid for; I don't even remember when that was. It's been a while. Meanwhile, Quicken found an utterly dishonest loophole, and sent me spam. They said "we know you said you never wanted marketing email, but we have to tell you that we're discontinuing the online services for Quicken 2002".
Do they have to tell me, when they know damn well I've never used those services? No. They just want more of my money. They want me to upgrade to Quicken 2005. I've got news for you, guys. Quicken 98 crashed. Quicken 2002 crashed. Quicken 2002 eventually got its reconcile database so fucked up it took me two days just to find out I would never be able to reconcile an account in Quicken again.
Moneydance, by contrast, imported Quicken's data -- the same data that Quicken couldn't reconcile, I might add! -- and just worked.
I've been using Moneydance for a year and a half. I copy my Moneydance data file around freely. I mostly run it on my Mac, but it works fine on NetBSD; it's a Java program, and very portable. I'll bundle a copy of the database and the current version of Moneydance up on my laptop before going on a trip. No problem.
I'm not Intuit's customer, and thanks to their hostile attitude, I never will be again. They know I'm not using their "online services"; it's dishonest of them to use that as an excuse to send me promotional email, a promotional letter, and whatever else they may have sent that got caught by filters.
So... Anyone out there thinking about upgrading to Quicken 2005, consider Moneydance. It's cheaper than Quicken, it does everything I've ever wanted from a home finance program... Oh, I should be harsher. Maybe it could use more graphing features. But it does well enough.
In the year and a half I've been using it, it's never crashed when I was working. It used to be, if I left it up overnight for a few days, the Mac Java machine would eventually crash, but that's Apple's problem.
In short... This is a program which does the stuff for which people get, say, Quicken, or Microsoft Money. Only, it's better-maintained, cheaper, and portable. You don't have to buy two copies to share data between a PC and a Mac. Tech support is incredibly responsive, and you can just send in an email if you want; you don't have to fill out an elaborate web form just to get ignored. (None of my tech support requests to Intuit got answered in any meaningful way.)
And, since it's shareware... You can download it, play around a bit, and see what you make of it. No risk. Just export your old data, import it into Moneydance... And see how you like it. Not sure about something? Send in a request, and watch the speedy, helpful, response.
Then pay the money. Shareware is the best chance you have at a vendor actually caring what you think, or whether the program sucks too much to ever be used again. And this is a great example of Shareware working out really well.
This isn't, technically, theft. No, I'm sure it's all very carefully considered, and legal.
Come to think of it, it's probably not art. I don't think something which is carefully constructed with focus groups to try to perfectly imitate a successful work of art can be considered "art" in its own right.
But I ask you to consider the strange similarity between Harry Potter (boy wizard attending school for wizards) and Charlie Bone (boy wizard attending school for wizards).
Note that they even sort of approximate the artistic style of the covers:
http://www.scholastic.com/titles/features/fantasy/charliebone_rrr.asp
Or get a better look here:
http://www.bookfinder.us/review3/0439474299.html
Very familiar, that art style. And the lettering. The details are different, and some reviewers apparently feel that the book is similar in style. But... It's hard not to think of this as an effort at capturing the success of the Harry Potter books. Come on, guys. Do your own stuff.
I stumbled across this livejournal entry recently:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lukadia/165947.html
I think the thing that tipped me off was gales of laughter coming from Fireball's room.
This is funny. It's sort of pathetic, but it's funny, and the great thing is, even a casual bit of Google searching will turn up so many hits on "banrai art theft" that... Well, if you like watching sort of teenager drama, and you miss high school, this is the thing for you. Lots of classic funny lines.
Imagine, if you will, someone with the pathological lying behavior of Bill Clinton, but the classic articulation and clear reasoning we've come to expect from George Bush. This is a girl who has the character and mind it would take to be a serious candidate for the modern Presidency.
... Oh, wait. This just in:
http://aido.furvect.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=300
I forgot to mention impersonating a lawyer.
This caught my eye, while I was at McDonalds' today. These numbers were found originally printed on the back of a placemat. The same numbers were provided by a little brochure called "A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts", and match the information I found on the McDonald's web page, at http://www.mcdonalds.com/app_controller.nutrition.index1.html.
Let's look at these numbers. I omitted some of the columns which were all 0s, such as the Protein count.
| Nutrition Facts | Serving Size | Calories | Sodium (mg) | % Daily Value | Carbohydrates (g) | % Daily Value | Dietary Fiber (g) | % Daily Value | Sugars (g) |
| Coca-ColaŽ Classic (Child) | 12 fl oz cup | 110 | 5 | 0 | 29 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 29 |
| Coca-ColaŽ Classic (Small) | 16 fl oz cup | 150 | 10 | 0 | 40 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 40 |
| Coca-ColaŽ Classic (Medium) | 21 fl oz cup | 210 | 15 | 1 | 58 | 19 | 0 | 0 | 58 |
| Coca-ColaŽ Classic (Large) | 32 fl oz cup | 310 | 20 | 1 | 86 | 29 | 0 | 0 | 86 |
Now, the calorie numbers are a little curious; for three sizes of drink, they estimate 10 calories less than "10 calories per fluid ounce". Maybe the 21-ounce drink doesn't have ice.
But look at the sodium numbers. Isn't that an oddly regular progression? Let's just do a little spreadsheet of this.
| Ounces | Sodium (mg) | mg/oz |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | 5 | 0.4167 |
| 16 | 10 | 0.6250 |
| 21 | 15 | 0.7143 |
| 32 | 20 | 0.6250 |
Does anything strike you as a little odd about these numbers? For comparison, I went to the Coca-Cola (UK) web page, which gives nutrition facts:
http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/nutrition/coca-cola.asp says that Coca-Cola has 0g of sodium per 100ml. A fluid ounce is 29.57353 ml. So, maybe Coca-Cola UK is rounding down.
According to Coca-Cola in Australia, there's actually 10mg of sodium per 100ml of soda. That would get us 35.4 mg of sodium in a 12-ounce cup, assuming no ice. But hey, if your glass was 85% full of ice, you could get down to 5mg.
But what's most disturbing is that these numbers are obviously self-contradictory. The number of milligrams of sodium per ounce can hardly be varying this much when it's all coming from the same vending machine!
In short, it looks very much as though these numbers were simply made up from whole cloth. If we trust the Coca-Cola Australia page, we get 94.6mg of sodium in a 32-ounce cup... But honestly, I don't trust any of these numbers.
This leaves me wondering how many of the other numbers on the menu are made up. What disturbs me is how obviously shoddy these numbers are. It is obvious that a 16-ounce glass of a given substance should not contain twice as much sodium as a 12-ounce glass of the same substance. The straight linear progression makes no sense.
Other drinks listed on their site (diet coke, sprite) tend to give plausible numbers; at least, for instance, the sodium content of the child and small is in a 3:4 ratio.
I notice also that "Hi-C Orange Lavaburst" has patently stupid numbers. The content, in mg of sodium, follows the progression "0 5 10 10". So, a 12-ounce glass has no sodium at all, but a 21-ounce glass has twice as much as a 16-ounce glass...
The Hi-C error could be attributed to careless rounding. However, the Coca-Cola error can't be rounding, and frankly, makes no sense at all.
Real publishers put a lot of money into editing and printing a book in the hopes that it will sell well. They gamble. They have a lot of interest in checking work for quality.
Vanity publishers pay minimal to no advance (one famous publisher offers a $1 advance so they can say they pay an advance!), and their goal is to get some sucker to front some costs so they can make money on even unsaleable works.
How to tell which is which? The SFWA decided to run a sting operation; they produced the worst book they could, and submitted it to a famous vanity publisher, PublishAmerica, who had previously claimed at length to be very picky about quality. Needless to say, it was accepted.
How bad? More bad than you can imagine. We're talking material that would be flunked out of freshmen writing classes at a real college.
In short... PublishAmerica is not a real publisher. They're a vanity press, but unlike, say, iUniverse, they don't have a real business model for working with people who aren't marketable in the big markets. (iUniverse is a real company. They don't pretend to be something they're not; they're a vanity press doing print-on-demand and targeting people whose books have a small market or unusual requirements. Their service isn't for everyone, but so far as I can tell, they're honest.)
But the book. Oh, the book. It is far too funny. You can read more about it.
I think it can be best summarized by this:
--Andrew Burt (author of chapter 11 and the software used to machine generate chapter 34 :-)
I mean, come on. But to those of you who enjoy reading, writing, or even editing... This is a brilliant, brilliant, "book".