Shouzer

Joystiq linked to and gave a bit of commentary on this piece by George Will.  The whole editorial is a weak, elitist tirade against denim, of all things.  Honestly, I feel a bit bad about potentially wasting anybody’s time by contributing to his readership.  Perhaps that’s all he’s going for; I hear newspapers around the country are failing, but based on drivel like this, I’m starting to think it has more to do with “Pulitzer Prize-winning” authorship like this than anything else.

The crux of his argument seems to be that denim was created for poor, dirty laborers, and our uncivilized society has idiotically adopted it as our primary fabric.  He attributes it to a “thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly” mentality, simultaneously revealing that he believes denim-wearers are unclean and–of course–that he’s superior (who didn’t see that coming?).

He goes on to bemoan this “misuse of freedom” (oh yeah, denim is far more damaging to society than the KKK), all the while revealing his jealousy of people more successful (“Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products”), who have more fun (“Seventy-five percent of American ‘gamers’ . . . are allowed to vote”), and of apparent inferior intelligence (“children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies”).  Boohoo.

Personally, I wear jeans because they’re comfortable, not as some fashion statement.  It seems that Will puts more thought into what I wear than I do, which he might argue is the root of his discontent.  In reality, I do like wearing suits, but there’s at least two problems with wearing one all the time:  1) I don’t feel like sweating in my office all day, and 2) frankly it devalues the few times in my life that I do dress up.

It reminds me of an early episode of House (yeah, George, I watch TV.  Fuck you.) in which House doesn’t hire a female doctor, because it’s apparent she’s more concerned with her looks than with being comfortable.  Assumedly, Will would prefer the opposite:  that we all dress uncomfortably to create false facades of importance and self worth.   He calls wearing denim “the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances”.  I call his editorial a carefully calculated attack on lower castes.

After all, his argument isn’t that, as a society, we’ve outgrown denim.  No, it’s that denim is meant for laborers and bums, and everybody else should have better taste–everybody else should dress their stature.  I suspect he would have loved to live in the middle ages.  Back then, everybody knew their place.  You had royalty, and you had peasants.  And they most certainly didn’t dress alike.

xkcd has a good point about all the hooplah that’s been made over the AIG bonuses.  I understand the public’s anger, and honestly I do think it’s a pretty stupid thing to do.  But the fact of the matter is the bonuses are inconsequential when put in the proper context.

This makes me feel a little better as well: story. It’s nice to see that money actually being put the use for which is was intended. My bank called me a few days ago and offered a line of credit to me, trying to sell me on the idea of taking out a loan. I’ve never had that happen before. It seemed like a good sign that the credit market is starting to thaw.

[Update:] Maybe that wasn’t such good news: story

I really do not understand this bailout business, but it feels to me like the same sort of fear-mongering we had pre-Iraq. We have this government “expert” telling us that disaster is imminent, and if we don’t knee-jerk react to agree with him, we will all rue the day.

On the other hand, I have read many articles by independent experts agreeing that we do, in fact, need to do something to fix this crisis. So I guess I would reluctantly agree that this investment needs to be made.

What really angers me though, is that the administration is fighting Congress about garnishing executives’ salaries. I don’t have a problem with these guys making multimillion dollar salaries under normal circumstances. They are managing billions of dollars, and high salaries come with high risks. Plus, these companies should want the best of the best for their chiefs, and they must pay for that kind of talent. However, when these executives run those companies into the ground, we the tax payers should not have to pay their huge salaries. Really, they should pay us for screwing us all by causing our investments to drop.

Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary, opposes theses wage limits because he feels it will cause many companies to hesitate to take assistance from the government. My question is, how is that a bad thing? I think companies should be hesitant to seek assistance from the government. It’s a last resort, not some sort of incentive program or grant to build small businesses.

You’ve got to admit, it would be kind of cool to be able to tell people that you were in one of these planes.  They weren’t really that close to colliding, but they were close enough that they had to take evasive actions.  Then again, I don’t know how soon after that I’d feel like flying over the open ocean…

It’s pretty strange to see things like this, knowing that Scott was there just a few months ago. I honestly haven’t kept up on world news like I probably should have recently, so I don’t know too much about what’s going on.  It sounds to me like there’s people who feel that the current government is really just a proxy for the previous government, which was ousted a few years ago.  Yeah, that would seem to defeat the purpose.

Next up is Google Chrome.  Apparently Google doesn’t think that we have enough browsers between Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, and whatever else is out there.  They’d rather have their own.  Honestly, I think that’s pretty silly.  Who knows, maybe it’ll be the greatest thing ever, but I doubt it.  Wouldn’t their time be better spent investing in Firefox, which is itself an open source browser?  Hell, they already employ Ben Goodger, who used to be the lead dev on Firefox.

Lastly, I thought this story about the credit card companies and Mythbusters was pretty weak.  Basically, the Mythbusters were going to do a show about RFID hacking, and Visa/Mastercard/AMEX shut them down.  How about instead of trying to hide security flaws, you just fix them?

I check up on Shouzer several times a day, and there has been no activity for almost 2 weeks. That makes me bored, and I suspect that the same holds true for whatever readers we do have. For me personally, I’ve been trying to come up with stories to write about, but I’m drawing a blank. Not much has happened over the last 2 weeks either. Life is settling into a groove, which is nice, but it is not conducive to story-telling.

There are some news articles that have come out recently that I feel are worth mentioning. The first is GM’s quarterly earning release, which is important to me. They lost $15.5 billion last quarter. Ouch. From what I’ve heard, my department won’t be going through any forced layoffs, despite a 20% company-wide reduction in salaried “expenses”. There will be a few people leaving my area through early retirement. I could go for some of that. I’d probably take it if I got the offer.

In much, much better news, the death toll in Iraq in July was at its lowest since 2003. It’s nice to hear some good news coming from that region after years of bad news. Honestly, I have become a bit numb to it. I am at the point where the news of a suicide bombing in Baghdad does little to pull my heartstrings. That is honestly a sad reflection on both me and the situation as a whole, I think.

The other big question I hear a lot is, What exactly do you do at GM? (I think it’s mostly my parents that ask me this.) Well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I am starting to get a grasp of it. I am a controls integration engineer on the 6 speed transmission platform. My group manages the releases of software for these transmissions, and troubleshoots any problems that come up. We are the go-between for the core software people, those who write the code, and the calibrators, those who test and tweak the code in the vehicles. I am mostly on the troubleshooting end of that spectrum.

For example, I am at a plant right now helping with a problem with the transmission output speed. We are getting some noise on the signal related to the sensor that is used to measure said speed. Lots of people from many different groups are involved in the troubleshooting process, but my group is spearheading the effort. It’s what we do. I have a few other responsibilities, including tracking CPU utilization on all of the software releases and handling serial data communication mismatches. Often, a test car will be put together with a hodgepodge of components. Sometimes, the controllers for these components are using different versions of the serial data protocol, and I have to sort that out. I haven’t done too much of this yet as I am not fully trained in this area, but it will become a big part of my job.

So it turns out that it only took 7.5 years, but I finally agree with Bush about something.  Basically, Congress voted to stop filling the strategic petroleum reserve in an effort to lower gas prices.  Bush is opposed, because he doesn’t believe it would affect oil prices, and he thinks national security is more important.

Now, granted, Bush has taken ‘national security’ to the extreme in his tenure as president, but I think he’s right about this one.  Yes, gas is expensive, and it pisses me off.  I just don’t think this is the right move.  Overzealous military man or not, he’s right that we shouldn’t put ourselves at risk (however small) over this.  I also don’t personally believe that this will affect oil prices in the least.

Just about thirteen months ago I shared here that I had been mentioned by name on a story done by an espn.com writer. Today, I have similar news to share. A question that I sent to Jaguars.com senior editor Vic Ketchman was answered in his latest column. I am “Kyle from Carbondale, IL” because I was at work while typing. Great success!

I know I’ve been absent from the blogging world lately (*cough* Juvers *cough*) I’ve been studying hard for finals, but this deserved a post. I know Steph and Megan will appreciate the irony of this. Turns out that our chorus teacher that lasted one year was a contestant on ABC’s The Bachelor: London Calling. If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is. This woman was always complaining about having to leave “upstate New York” and move to southern Illinois. I had to check out the shows web site since I obviously did not catch the episode when it aired. Here’s a screen shot of her. I can only assume by the look on her face this is when she met “The Bachelor.”

Obviously since she is on this show her marriage to the classical saxophone player did not work out. Honestly, I’m glad. He was a real ass. Though, she must be happy out in LA now. Not in the simple, small town, rural southern Illinois. She always seemed to complain about that every day.

Anyways, gotta get back to studying. Last final is in two hours.

I happened to catch this article on Engadget about Sony adding it’s music catalog to Amazon mp3. It’s amazing to me how quickly all the major studios have come around on drm-free downloads after EMI showed that it was perfectly sane.

EMI couldn’t have put drm-free mp3s on iTunes anymore than a year ago. I don’t actually remember when it was, but seriously… After such a long-fought “battle” against college students, you’d think one of these companies would have jumped to this conclusion a little earlier.

As far as I’m concerned, DRM of all forms is anti-consumer. It’s not pro-copyright or anything like that, it’s just plain old anti-consumer. Bought the first couple seasons of The Office on iTunes? Too fucking bad, you’re going to have to get the next couple on Amazon Unbox, and you’ll have to watch them on different devices. Fuck that shit. You know what that’s going to do? That’s going to make me more likely to pirate it. That’s the only way I have any guarantee that it won’t quit working at some point.

I’m posting this because I haven’t seen this story on Google News or Shortnews, which are the two news outlets I see most. I’m curious to know how many of you have actually heard about this before as it doesn’t seem to be getting much media coverage. I haven’t even seen CNN International covering it, though to be fair, I rarely watch that channel. I originally saw the story a few days ago in the Bangkok Post, but this one from Yahoo is much better written and informative. Anyway, here’s the link:

Link

Just found this out today, but apparently four patients received organ transplants from an Hepatitis C and HIV positive donor. See this link for an article that ran in the Chicago Sun-Times. One transplant occurred at each of the three university medical centers. I can’t remember where the fourth transplant occurred.

According to the article, the questionnare the donor filled out said that there was engagement in high-risk behavior. However, the screening tests for HIV and Hepatitis were negative, so the institutions proceeded with the transplants.

Talk about shitty.

This post is actually directed at Jared. Normally, people do these sorts of things over email, but Jared and I just don’t communicate much through email. The rest of you are just going to have to deal with it.

Jared,

What are the chances of you sending me one of these T-shirts? Come on, you know you want to. Plus, we all know you’re making fat bank over there in the US. Forget that it costs a fortune to live in Seattle.

Oh, and you’d better go ride that SLUT when she opens for business.

Scott

Just a quick link to this story.  Megan and I stumbled upon it the other day, and I hadn’t posted it yet.  “Good boy” would be an understatement, I’d say.  The thing that’s funny to me is that not only did the dog dial 911, but he knew that he needed to dial.  Hell, he probably reacted better than most people would have.

I liked this article: Link

This guy is obviously quite full of himself, but he presents an interesting argument. I’m not sure how valid it all is. For instance, he claims that his method of measuring climate change is the most accurate in the world. Hmm…I’m not so sure I buy that. Maybe if someone else was writing about him, but it sounds more like an egotistical scientist trying to gain some acclaim.

The idea that the sun is the driving force behind climate change makes a lot of sense though. I wouldn’t think that minor changes in the atmosphere would have nearly as much of an effect as minor changes in the energy of the sun as the minor change in the sun would result in a massive change in the amount of energy the planet receives. Changing the filter isn’t as effective as changing the source.