Shouzer

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.

Am I really the only one who thinks the first Android phone, the HTC Dream, is ugly?  Honestly, after some of the great things HTC is doing with its Touch lineup (the Diamond and the HD are both beautiful), how can anybody be happy with the Dream.

Little late this week….Please forgive me.

First off, I have to apologize to CBS. Last week, I was upset at them for blacking out one of their two games, forcing me to watch the abysmal Lions. Turns out, it wasn’t CBS’s fault:

no games can air at the same time as a local team’s home game on another network

That’s from my source for NFL TV distribution.

The Rams are making a pretty strong case for the number 1 draft choice next season. I keep reading this week that they are lacking intensity and the attitude to win. To quote from Remember the Titans, “attitude reflects leadership.”

I was watching some Sportcenter coverage of the Michigan St. game over the weekend, and the pundit said the team is starting to reflect the coach. Even though the game was boring, they won in an intense defensive battle. Their coach, apparently, was something of a defensive star. (I’m too lazy to find a link to support that.)

I couldn’t help but draw a comparison to the Rams. They seem to be reflecting their coach’s attitude now, and they are sinking as a result. When Linehan showed up, he wanted to stop the rampant turnovers that plagued the offense. His philosophy was that any drive that ended in a kick was a victory, whether it be a punt, a field goal, or an extra point. That sounded pretty good at the time. Mike Martz hardly instilled a sense of control on the team. His high-flying offense scored a lot of points for both teams on the field.

My theory is that the offense started feeling OK about settling for field goals when their drives stalled. Gradually, that regressed to accepting punts as OK so long as they didn’t turn over the ball. Now, they are dead in the water because mediocrity has been allowed to flourish.

Contrast this with the fictional characters in Remember the Titans. The coach in this movie demanded perfection. Anything less was a failure. Perhaps St. Louis needs and infusion of perfectionism.

As for the defense, I’ve got nothing. They have been horrendous for as long as I can remember. There were points in the recent past where they could force turnovers, but they have always been a sieve. You can hardly expect an ex-offensive coordinator like Linehan to turn that around either. Anyone expecting the defense to turn around under him was kidding themselves.

NYTimes. Aaaron Sorkin. Obama meets Bartlet. Truly refreshing stuff.

OBAMA I’m not. They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m — wait for it — the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

Read: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21dowd-sorkin.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1222228800&en=007cf9e8faaaf52a&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin

I ran across this story about Ed Hochuli this morning, and I thought it was worth sharing.

Ed Hochuli, the NFL ref who botched a call at the end of the San Diego-Denver game that allowed the Broncos to keep possession and go on to score the winning points, has been receiving hundreds of e-mails from irate fans.

Even crazier? He’s responding to them.

“I’m getting hundreds of emails — hate mail — but I’m responding to it all,” Hochuli said in a posting on the San Diego Union-Tribune Web site. “People deserve a response.

“You can rest assured that nothing anyone can say can make me feel worse than I already feel about my mistake on the fumble play. You have no idea. … Affecting the outcome of a game is a devastating feeling. Officials strive for perfection — I failed miserably. Although it does no good to say it, I am very, very sorry.”

I really appreciate that Hochuli is being a man and admitting his mistake in this situation. I’m so tired of people (read: public figures) pretending they are flawless. Hochuli is human. He screwed up, and his actions should and will have consequences. The NFL has said he will be graded down, and that will probably cost him a spot in the playoffs. I think those consequences are appropriate, and I’m glad Hochuli is accepting them.

It rained all weekend here in Northville, MI. My apartment has a small stream next to it, which I really enjoy. This weekend, not so much….

Sorry for the crappy quality. My phone doesn’t take the best pictures.

1. The local CBS affiliate decided to waive their right to show an early game. Do you know what that means? It means I’m stuck watching Green Bay vs. Detroit. Well, at least Detroit’s lack of defense will make this game exciting to watch. There should be lots of big plays. Thanks CBS.

2. The Rams decided to sign Eddie Kennison this week to replace injured Drew Bennett. To do so, they had to drop one of their 7th round draft picks, a LB. They claimed that they wanted Kennison to bring a veteran presence to the team. That’s probably the biggest load of BS I’ve ever heard. As if they don’t have enough veterans on this team. The geriatric squad is teaming with veteran leadership. They should consider adding some youth and vigor to the lineup.

Is it me, or is the Rams’ ownership trying to pull a Major League to get the team moved back to LA? They are stacking the team with old, washed-up players and asking the city for a new stadium. It’s as if they are trying to anger the city of St. Louis. Sadly, this might actually be true….

One final note on the Rams. The guys on the ESPN pregame show debated whether the Rams would allow more sacks or score more points this week against the Giants. It sounds laughable, but it’s actually a pretty valid debate. Last week, they allowed for sacks to match up with their three points.

Who doesn’t love puppies?  Right?!  Nobody, that’s who.  To that end, here’re some pics of our new puppy, Athena. 

I had the great hardship of “working” on the 2010 Camaro this afternoon. It’s a real pain to have to drive prototype vehicles on a closed test track for a living. Sometimes, I wish I had never been born.

Here’s a picture (not the one I drove):

In all seriousness, work can be a drag sometimes, and it is really nice to have little perks like these. Plus, it is pretty cool to say that I worked on that car.

Oh how I’ve missed the great gridiron. Football is probably the thing I miss most about American culture when I am living overseas, and it’s great to have it back in my life again. Unfortunately, the Rams appear to be the worst team in the NFL, and the team of my new city, the Lions, made a rookie quarterback look like a star in his first game. (And they gave up a ridiculous amount of rushing yards.)

The biggest complaint about the Lions has always been that their front office is full of morons, and I think the Rams are suffering from the same condition. When Dick Vermeil was at the helm, things seemed to go very well, but there has been a great decline since he left. My evidence of this is in their draft choices. Let’s look at their 1st round picks for the last five years:

2006: Tye Hill. When he’s not getting called for pass interference he’s getting burned deep.
2005: Alex Barron. I think this quote from Wikipedia says it all:

Some seasons, he has had more false start penalties than other teams’ entire offensive lines. One particularly memorable play happened in the 2005 season on a screen play (at home vs. Jacksonville.) Barron apparently forgot what the play was and stepped in front of Steven Jackson, the intended receiver, to catch the ball for an illegal touching penalty. Some fans have simply dubbed this as “The Play.”

2004: Steven Jackson. His durability is a question mark, but he’s the best player on the team right now.
2003: Jimmy Kennedy….is no longer on the team. He was traded for a 6th round pick. Talk about a good return on your investment.
2002: Robert Thomas. (who?) I had to look him up. He was traded 3 years after being drafted for a Chris Johnson, a former 7th round pick.

Some of their more notable player acquisitions over the last few years:
Dante Hall. He has has-been written all over him.
Will Witherspoon. I’m fairly happy with this one. He’s been decent.
Corey Chavous. Ditto.
Drew Bennett. You could call him a has-been, but that would imply that he was good at some point. He was brought in to help the Rams punch the ball into end zone, but you can only do that when you can make it past the 50.
Randy McMichael. He didn’t do much last season, but he was good on Sunday. Actually, he might have been the only player on the team who played well in week one.

The Rams did have some impressive young talent set to replace their aging skill players. Kevin Curtis, Shaun McDonald, and Mike Furrey added explosiveness and speed at WR. Furrey even showed some aptitude at safety. All three were let go because they didn’t fit with the team’s new mindset. Apparently, they only want old guys who are going to get hurt and run slow.

It was amazing to watch football again though. I even saw quite a bit of college action, which is something I’ve never gotten into before. I was very impressed with East Carolina as I love watching an underdog crush people. It just feels good.

Delhomme’s last second TD pass against San Diego was pretty sweet as well. I don’t know why San Diego struggles to win so much. They have such talent. They seem to be lackadaisical for some reason.

Monday Night Football was great last night as well. What a match-up to start the season with. Green Bay vs. Minnesota. Aaron Rodgers was downright impressive. As was Peterson. Jackson, not so much. I couldn’t stay up for the late game, but it was a blowout anyway.

I was knocked out of my eliminator pool on week 1 for the second year in a row. I picked the Colts, and they failed me. I guess I have yet another reason to hate them.

Eight years ago, I distinctly remember making an argument that, while his qualifications were meager in comparison to Al Gore, George W. Bush would make a good presidential choice. After all, his father was a former president, he had Colin Powell on his side, and he ran with a well-publicized inner-circle of strategists, experts, political leaders. Surely, this team would not fail.

I was wrong.

And I won’t be fooled again. Sarah Palin has given an opinion, spoken, writen or otherwise, about the war in Iraq, how to fix the economy, or international relations. She is going to need a gigantic team of advisers feeding her every line in every speech and in every town hall and in every debate. She is not ready to lead, and I highly doubt she will ever be ready to lead. The candidates themselves must be ready to govern the country and represent it in world affairs, not a committee of party insiders. It doesn’t work. The past eight years have proven is doesn’t work.

And a word of advice, if you happen to be a community organizer, I guess you should just quit your job and go the unemployment line. What a laughable role in this country you have! You deserve no respect.

I want to warn everybody that this post is a sort of random, stream of thought rant…  With that out of the way, here goes.

I’m sitting here watching Rudy Giuliani talk at the RNC as I type.  What it makes me realize is that I can’t stand the Republican party whatsoever these days.  Scott mentioned below that we’re raised to hate the opposing party, and I think that’s true to an extent.  But it’s the Republican’s hypocritical divisiveness that makes me dislike them.  Most of his speech has been bashing Obama and his “lack of experience”, yet he’s going to be followed by Sarah Palin who has about 20 months experience as the governor of Alaska.

He’s talking about how Obama wants to expand the government, but forgets to mention that his party created the Department of Homeland Security, his party created the national ID, his party is for warrantless wiretaps.  More government, more government, more government.

Giuliani talked a bit about how McCain wants to lower taxes to stimulate the economy.  He’s somehow forgotten how well that went when Bush did it.  The economy is doing pitifully, and the national debt is the worst it’s ever been.

Oh, now he’s talking about the “executive experience” that Sarah Palin has; she’s got more than the democratic ticket combined.  Yeah, because the mayor of a town of 5000 really has to make some tough decisions.  Fuck, the president of most universities deals with more people.  Oh yeah, then there was her 20 months as governor of Alaska.  The entire state has a population of like 600,000.  Woohoo!  Yeah!  Sorry, that’s not very impressive when I live 15 miles from Seattle, which has a larger urban population all by itself.  I don’t consider the mayor of Seattle as a viable candidate for president.  I doubt he does, either.  Yet McCain’s focus thusfar has been how “unqualified” Obama is.

There’s always the fact that Obama is a “flip-flopper”.  What’s an example?  He said he’d accept public financing, then he changed his mind.  Right.  My guess is that when McCain got married, he made a promise to be faithful to his wife.  Then he cheated on her.  Talk about “flip-flopping”.  Talk about family values…

Now we get to listen to Sarah Palin.  She points out that Obama can give a whole speech about the war, but not mention the word victory.  Oh, I’m sorry you naive moron..  We haven’t achieved victory there.  Would you rather him lie to you, like Bush did?  You remember the “Mission Accomplished” sign?  That was a few years ago.  Then, only a year ago, we sent 30,000 new troops there.  Oh yeah, mission accomplished indeed.  It doesn’t sound like a victory to me.

I could go on and on, but it just depresses me that people can actually stand this shit.

Last weekend, I went on my biggest meetup yet. I went to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with the camping and outdoors group. I have to be honest, I was pretty scared about going on a trip of that magnitude with a bunch of people I didn’t know, but I figured it was pretty similar to going diving or on a day tour or something.

I left after work Friday, carpooling with two people I met that afternoon. We stopped off in this cool little restaurant on the way up called Iva’s Chicken Dinners in Sterling Michigan. It was hillbilly classy, and I liked it a lot. It was nice to take in some culture on the trip.

We got to the cabin around 1am after getting lost a few times. One of the guys in the group had opened up his family cabin for us to stay it. It was a pretty nice place, though it didn’t have electricity and the toilet didn’t flush. I met all of the people I would spending the weekend with at that time, and I was way too tired to make much conversation. I was also pretty nervous too.

Saturday we went to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. We hiked for a bit and went to the beach. Then, we took a boat ride to see the pictured rocks. Afterward, we went to this local restaurant called the Bear Trap to sample the local specialty, the pasty. Unfortunately, they were sold out. I ate one on Monday morning, though, so it’s ok.

Sunday was pretty much a lazy day. We chilled around the cabin and the river it was on, and took a brief trip to a fresh water spring which had crystal clear water. Then, we had a nice campfire in the evening.

Monday was just driving back home. Michigan opens the bridge between the UP and the lower part of the state on Labor day for people to walk across it. My car decided to go on home, but a few people from the group did the walk. I never did understand the novelty of walking across a bridge, but whatever.

The highlight of the weekend was easily the people I was with. They were an incredibly interesting and diverse bunch. I really enjoy meeting people outside the usual circle of engineers at GM.

When I moved here, I knew that making friends would be tough so I tried to look at the problem as an adventure. I would honestly say that it is a bigger challenge for me than learning to live in a foreign country. I have come to appreciate other people a lot more in this journey, though. I have found that almost everyone I meet has something interesting to say, and it is fun “exploring” them in conversation to learn more about their lives. I think I have also become much more sociable as well, but much of that change happened in Prague and Bangkok.

I still haven’t made a lot of friends here, but I am enjoying the process of finding them a lot more now.

I am writing this in response to Jared’s News Bits post. As you can imagine, I have a lot to say about this topic as I have lots of friends in that city. Normally, I’d put this in a comment, but it’s probably going to be pretty long. I thought it deserved its own post.

Jared already linked you to a news article about the situation so I’m not going to repeat that, but I think it’s worth giving my take on the situation. The group in control of the government right now, the People Power Party (PPP), is accused of coruption by the opposing political parties which have come together under a common banner under the name People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). About two years ago, the military ousted the Thai Rak Thai (Thai Love Thai) party, and then ruled the country under a military junta for about a year. The coup was supported by street demonstrations by the then newly-formed PAD group. The military and the PAD strongly believed that the Thai Rak Thai government was corrupt and had come to power by buying rural votes. Now, the PAD is making the same accusation against the PPP as well as claiming that the PPP is merely a puppet of the dismantled Thai Rak Thai and its leader, Thaksin Shinawatra. This time, however, the military is refusing to intervene in the conflict, stating that another coup would be bad for the country. The PAD is refusing to back down until the PPP is removed from power, and they have mobilized many unions, particularly in the transportation sector, around the country to cripple its infrastructure.

Judging from what I saw in Bangkok, I would say it is extremely believable that the PPP is corrupt. There were physical signs of corruption all around Bangkok such as decades-old half-completed highways that were never completed because someone stole the money that was budgeted to build them. However, it is hard to see what the PAD truly hopes to accomplish. The PPP maintains strong popularity in rural Thailand, and they would probably win again if another election was held today. Presumably, then, the PAD is advocating for some sort of non-democratic government; ironic considering their name.

I find shocking similarity to our own government situation. We, too, have a party in power that is largely supported by rural voters and hated by the urban citizens. We, too, have large protests that turned violent (at the Republican National Convention). I think the biggest difference is toppling the government is seen as a viable option in Thailand because it is how they have historical dealt with political problems as a country. In the US, we had the good fortune of having forefathers who fought for revolution and then turned around and created a strong central government. That is an amazing feat when you compare the US to other democratic upstarts around the globe.

I look at the PAD with a certain amount of admiration. I question their end goal, but at least they care enough to fight for their country and do something. My personal apathy is truly appalling. I’m not suggesting when should start a sit-in at the White House demanding the impeachment of Bush, but maybe a little revolution would be healthy in our country. Our human nature as Americans is not better than that of the Thais. The only thing separating us is a historic precedent.

I was chatting with a certain friend of mine in Bangkok following the government declaration of the state of emergency yesterday, and she brought a fresh perspective that amazed me. I asked her which side she supported, and she answered “I am Thai. Everyone is Thai.” I realized today that this viewpoint has been completely eliminated from the American discourse. We are programmed to divide along party lines. One either supports the left or the right. The only other option is to support neither and hate both, a category I find myself in. The never-ending criticism constantly fueling the fires of negativity, insisting that we hate the opposing party. I hear so much of it that it makes me hate them both.

Somewhere that fourth choice of sorrowful disagreement has been lost in the haze. When two brothers fight, a strong family grieves for the lost love and urges reconciliation. They do not stoop to the level of the combatants and join the fray. Obviously, criticism is both necessary and healthy, but perhaps we take it too far and inadvertently add division and destruction to the American political arena. Perhaps instead, our refrain should be, “I am American. Everyone is American.”

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?