I tend to border on obsessive-compulsive. I wax the wheels on my car. I’m still not happy with the enormous performance gains I’ve gotten by tuning my WordPress setup to move from 4 to 400 (dynamic) pages per second.
So it stands to reason that how I clean my desk is… unique. The problem is that the desk is synthetic wood, so there exist a total of zero cleaning products that work on it. Using something like Windex cleans it but leaves it looking even more dull. And don’t even think about using a wood cleaner. I used Pledge once. It looked great, but it remained slippery for about a week. The Pledge is apparently supposed to sink into the wood. This is somewhat difficult when the desk isn’t made of wood, so you instead get an incredibly slick, oily desk.
I think I finally found the key, though: car wax. You clean with one of the many cleaners just to get junk off of it–I used Simple Green, but Windex would work just as well. And then you pour liquid car wax on and apply it with a cloth as if you were applying it to your car. Wait a while for it to dry, and wipe the white hazy stuff off. The result is a high sheen. It didn’t do as well as I’d like with filling in the scratches, but it looks much better overall.
I admit it: I’m a total dork. I just waxed my desk. But… It works.
I decided the other day that I ought to try to start my own TeamFortress 2 server. (Actually, I tried long ago, but hoped the problem had been fixed. But it hasn’t.) I want to share the cause of the problem in the hopes of helping others, since Google usually picks these things up.
You spend forever downloading the Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS), and excitedly fire it up. It runs through some stuff and seems to be working, but then you get a whole bunch of bizarre errors scrolling by:
Bad data found in model "dispenser_toolbox.dmx" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib1.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib2.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib3.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib4.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib5.smd" (bad bone weights)
What’s been surmised is that it’s because your processor doesn’t support SSE2. Bah! There’s no fix, either, other than pleading with Steam to write a version that doesn’t require SSE2, or upgrading your CPU.
It’s clearly time to build a new server and colocate it. 😉
For whatever reason, we’ve been getting a lot of calls asking us to donate money to various causes all of a sudden. My mom did some research and unearthed some interesting information. Most of the calls come from “paid fundraising” companies. They take a percentage of what you donate–usually around 40%, it seems. We had the same person call us today on behalf of two separate charities. Both from the same company.
Should you find yourself in the same position, don’t fall for the irritating, “Can the {starving children, disabled veterans, cute kittens, abused children} count on you for support?” line. Respond by asking where they’re calling from, if it’s a paid fundraiser, and how much they get. If you’re feeling charitable when they call, thank them, and tell them you’ll make a donation directly to the charity.
You could make an argument that it’s simple economics, and that there’s even “good” being done–most charities don’t cold-call people, so they may be bringing in incremental donations. But, in my mind, it’s extremely sleazy to not fully disclose your own fiduciary interests when taking donations.
No matter what I do, I keep finding myself thinking about webhosting.
Netcraft does a monthly survey of hosts with the top uptime, and mentioned that DataPipe is usually on top. I’ve found that, at least for what I do, any “real” data center has just about 100% uptime. I have never not been able to reach my server. You’re either with a notoriously bad host (for example, when Web Host “Plus” bought out Dinix, they took the servers offline for a few days with no notice… that’s noticeable downtime), or you’re with a reputable host where downtime just doesn’t really happen.
So 0.00% downtime, as opposed to 0.01%, isn’t a huge deal for me. (That doesn’t mean it’s not impressive.) But what impressed me about DataPipe is that I clicked their link and their webpage just appeared. No loading in the slightest. I browsed their site, and there was never any waiting. I might as well have had the page cached on my computer, except I know it’s not cached anywhere.
Their data center is in New Jersey, but they clearly have excellent peering. I’m getting 20ms pings. They don’t (directly, at least) offer dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, or shared hosting.
One of my big concerns is that I wonder about long-term viability. The market’s full of hosts. A lot of them are “kiddie hosts,” inexperienced people just reselling space often with poor quality. That’s room for competition. But the problem is that there are hosts selling the moon: 200 GB of disk space and 3 terabytes of bandwidth for $5 a month? That’s ludicrous: that’s more than I get with my dedicated server! They can get away with it because no one uses that much, but it concerns more “honest” hosts–you’d have to charge ten times as much if everyone actually used it! But for hosts that offer, say, 1GB of space and 10 GB of transfer–a ‘realistic’ amount–they’re left vulnerable to people thinking they’re getting a better deal.
I realized the other day that, while a lot of people offer VPS (virtual private server: several people share a server, but software ‘partitions’ give each of them their own server software-wise, with root access and separation from other users), I’m really not aware of any good ones. It’s also hard to find any that offer significant amounts of disk space, or any that are particularly cheap.
The work you do as a volunteer for a campaign, quite frankly, sucks. You call hundreds of people, most of whom hang up as soon as they learn why you’re calling. You hear the same stuff over and over. Those that are more involved than I am rarely sleep. It’s just horrible work. I treasure every minute of it.
We’ve been working out of the basement of a wonderful local family, as the official regional campaign headquarters got too crowded and too hectic. All the national people have apparently come in (for obvious reasons), leaving little room for volunteers. With heaps of papers strewn across the table in someone’s basement, one of the organizers asked me, “Is this grassroots or what?” as I walked in.
You meet a lot of people. I mean that in multiple ways. Today I met Deval Patrick (MA governor) in person and he talked to my mom and I for a moment, seeming to genuinely care. I’ve met so many volunteers for the Obama campaign, and they’re all over the place. At dinner last night we sat with a guy and his two young children, and with several adults. Several of the volunteers I work with are younger than I am, many still in high school. And today we worked side-by-side with a woman in her 60s. This is exciting.
And you somehow get access to The Grapevine. We were talking today about how Romney pays his volunteers. This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me: I’m doing my work for Obama because I feel so strongly that he’s the right man for the job. My point isn’t that he saves costs by having volunteers who are, well, volunteers. My point is that since I’m not being paid a dime for my work, there’s no incentive to do it but for the obvious one: to elect him. Some of my new partners have apparently come across a few Romney “employees” who don’t even support him. They do their work, but at the end of the day on Tuesday, their vote won’t be cast for Romney.
Not many people pick up when I call. I’m either calling from a phone whose caller ID shows a candidate’s name, or I’m calling from my own phone, in which case I block caller ID data out of paranoia. (I don’t need some nut who’s had one too many calls coming after me.) And I really don’t blame them–I don’t pick up the phone unless I know who’s calling, either. But the one thing that excites me is that the people who pick up aren’t stupid by any means. You can’t just read some stats to them and swing their vote. They’ve either made up their mind and can articulate exactly why, or they’re undecided and ask tough questions.
This is what politics needs to be about. In New Hampshire, politicians can’t get away with reading us a prepared speech about what they want to talk about. We control the conversation, and we talk about the things that affect us. And the candidates who won’t do that don’t make it out of our state with ratings intact.
What’s remarkable about this election is that it seems that a lot of people are booing attack ads. It seems like I’m far from the only one that much prefers candidates to talk on how they can work together, not to take perpetual jabs at each other. Not only does it not move us forward, but it’s frankly irritating.
In tonight’s debate, Hillary seemed to be in attack overdrive mode. After one particularly pointed remark, John Edwards made a comment about how, before she finished third in Iowa, she didn’t seem to be so focused on the negative politics. Bravo, John.
Anyone who read my (admittedly lengthy and sometimes meandering) commentary on the 100 Club dinner last night–or anyone who went there–remembers one thing that seemed odd: Hillary fans were assigned to tables right by the stage, and right in front of the cameras. The Obama tables were cast into a corner, perpendicular to all the cameras, at a distance. I was somewhat peeved by this, but didn’t think too much of it.
I can’t believe I’m linking to Fox, but it turns out that a Fox reporter picked up on this, with surprisingly good insight. (For brevity, feel free to scroll about a third of the way down and start with the sentence beginning, “Never was that on display more clearly than at the 100 Club Dinner here Friday night.”)
I think I speak for almost everyone, not just fellow Obama supporters, when I say that this type of sneaky campaigning isn’t welcome here. When the Republicans tried phone-jamming our get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts years ago, we sent them to jail. We don’t like people who play dirty in New Hampshire, and any politician who thinks they can come into our state and pull the wool over our eyes is in for a surprise. Except it’s really no surprise, but rather, common sense: we like an honest, clean fight in which the best candidate wins, and the voters will speak on Tuesday.
My mind works in strange ways sometimes. Read and think about each of the following statements:
I was cooking a pizza in the oven at 250 degrees, but I was in a big hurry, so I doubled the temperature to 500 degrees.
I miss the summer days when it was 80 degrees, and, over night, the temperature would be halved to 40 degrees.
It was ten degrees the other morning, and tripled to thirty by noon.
It was 0.1 the morning before that, and had risen three-hundred times to 30 degrees by noon.
It was -1 before I woke up that morning, so it was -30 times as warm by noon.
To me, it makes progressively less and less sense. But I’m trying to think of why. It’s clearly asymptotic at 0 degrees: if it’s exactly 0 degrees and grows to 0.1 degrees, it’s “infinitely warmer.” Of course, most people wouldn’t notice the tenth of a degree increase, and my concept of “infinitely warmer” is something significantly warmer than 0.1. And it doesn’t make any sense when you go into negatives. I think another part of the problem is that “zero” degrees doesn’t mean “zero warmth,” since it doesn’t make sense to have a negative amount of warmth. (Assuming that “no warmth” isn’t neutral, but is absolute zero.) Of course, Fahrenheit and Celsius don’t even grow at the same rate, compounding things further.
Through my newfound connections, I got myself invited to a dinner with the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Me and 2,999 other New Hampshire residents. It was amazing. Although let me start with one disclaimer: it used to really get under my skin when people would take jabs at Democrats for being disorganized. But between a Youth Democrats of America conference I went to with some college colleagues and tonight, I’ve come to the following conclusion: Democrats are great in government, but terrible at organizing conferences. It took us a good 20 minutes to find a parking spot. It wasn’t that it was crowded (it was), but it was that the people telling us where to go were utterly inept! They’d tell us where to go park, and we’d arrive and have someone else tell us that they had no idea why they sent us there, since we couldn’t park there, and send us somewhere else. So we zig-zagged across the Hampshire Hills complex for quite some time.
In typical style with these posts, I’ll probably mix political and event commentary with some comments about photographic conditions. All photos link through to the Flickr gallery, where I’ve uploaded 21 highlights from tonight.
Let’s begin with the trivial. It was held in a huge dome, newly built at the posh Hampshire Hills dome. Since I’d been there last (a couple years), they apparently built an enormous stadium capable of seating 3,000:
We were all there to see the Democrats running for President, but they made us sit through an awful lot of other stuff. For example, who–or what–is this?
Carol Shea-Porter spoke briefly. While I think everyone in the room was to credit, I was secretly proud for having voted for her. Not only is she spot-on when it comes to the issues, but she’s an outstanding speaker.
A few photography notes… For one, if you ever find yourself in charge of lighting at an event such as this, please consider bringing a photographer in to give you some guidance. The flag had really strange lighting on it. The goal with the black backdrop and intense lighting on the podium may have been to ensure that the background was non-distracting. It’s surely better than the glossy poster behind Bill Clinton. But it threw my camera’s metering through a loop, and I ended up shooting in full-manual mode most of the night. It was so dark that I was using ISO1600 at f/3.5 (as fast as my wide lens goes) and getting exposures of 1/15 second. Terribly dark. But then I was using ISO800 and getting 1/500-second shutter speeds shooting candidates. This is good, except that the light was really harsh, and all the lights were of different color temperatures. So our beloved flag was maroon, white, beige with a hint of blue, and black, while the whitest of speakers had intensely red skin. If the speaker was properly exposed, the podium was underexposed, and the sign in front was overexposed.
John Lynch, New Hampshire’s (Democratic) governor spoke a bit, too. Here you can see another problem: my 200mm lens (effectively 320mm with the digital camera’s crop) was far too short… They need to make a 100-600mm f/1.4 lens for situations like these. (Such a lens would probably weight at least 100 pounds and cost as much as a house, but it would take great pictures!) I honestly don’t know a lot about what Lynch has been up to, but it’s the same way I felt like when Clinton was president: things seem to run smoothly. National politics is a crisis week after week. With both Deval Patrick (MA Governor) and John Lynch, I think no news is good news. (I forget whether it was Lynch or Shea-Porter that mentioned it, but 2008 marked the beginning of civil unions in New Hampshire. So it’s not all no news. I’m frankly kind of proud that what much of the country probably sees as a quaint old farming state is at the forefront of…. rights?)
John Edwards was a no-show. I’m not sure what happened. I’d imagine that he was doing something else, somewhere else, but I’m really not sure why, especially after the surprise of beating Hillary in Iowa, he’d chose to avoid a forum with 3,000 New Hampshire Democrats and cameras from every news network in the country.
So Kucinich went first. While the Caucus results show him having received 0.0% of the votes, he didn’t seem phased by trivial polls.
If you think this is an unflattering photo… You should have been there. I agreed with a lot of what he said, but it was how he said it that I think resigns him to getting 0.0% in important polls. He spoke about how it’s wrong to spy on our citizens (a reference to Bush’s wiretapping), and how we should end the war, etc. But he seemed almost as angry as on Hardball.
It seemed a lot like a fire-and-brimstone speech, except, instead of shouting about Jesus, he was shouting about the Constitution, and, instead of waving the Bible, he was frantically waving his pocket copy of the US Constitution:
What pictures can’t convey is that he was furiously pounding on the podium and began jumping around a bit. Hopefully one of the news stations that was there will broadcast that.
He was actually a great speaker, and has a quality I love in politicians: the ability to poke fun at himself a little bit. He started talking about the need for a strong showing not just in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then began to list a few more states with early primaries. “But they tell me I’m not supposed to do lists anymore,” he said, an obtuse reference to his infamous yell. And then he made the reference much clearer by pumping his fist and acting as if he were about to reenact it, drawing laughter and applause.
I’ve liked him for a long time, and he’s a very close second to Obama on my list of preferred candidates. (An Obama-Richardson ticket would be incredible! Hint hint, Obama!) While he doesn’t always photograph well (or maybe I just have bad timing), he sure knows how to give a speech. But perhaps most powerful was what he said about the need to pull out of Iraq. He talked, with evident sadness in his voice, about how he looks forward to the day when he can stop taking down the New Mexico flag to honor yet another of his residents killed in action. It was a really powerful way to put it, and the way he did it was flawless: it seemed like he opposed the war not just for political reasons, or as a soundbite, but because it truly pained him as governor to see his citizens being killed. Wow. Just wow. I really can’t do his speech justice here, but suffice it to say that I think his was the best.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton was there. I didn’t get (m)any pictures of her, because her supporters were standing and completely blocking the podium. (More on this later.) Bill and the much-forgotten Chelsea were there, too. But she began something that left me feeling uneasy: throughout the whole thing, there’d been an awesome sense of compatriotism. Some of us were there for Obama, some were there for Hillary, and some for other candidates. We were all in it together, not for our candidate, but for our future.
Hillary let loose a verbal barb clearly aimed at Obama, saying that we need strong leadership to end the war, not just hope that it will happen. This really rubbed me the wrong way–this type of bickering is exactly what has so many people fed up with politics. I also started to pick up on a sense of animosity between the Hillary fans and the Obama fans. I mentioned earlier that the Hillary fans crowded the stage and remained standing. None of us could see the stage, but with two enormous screens projecting a live feed, it wasn’t a big deal.
The Hillary camp somehow also wound up with all their tables right in front of the podium, while the Obama fans were assigned to tables in the corner. It turns out I was far from the only one to find this a little strange, as the Obama organizers decided to have us all stand and walk up to the stage when Obama came out. This ended up being an utter disaster, though.
Since our seats weren’t anywhere close, we ended up blocking an aisle. This didn’t sit well with the fire marshall, who (emphatically) cleared the aisles. We were still standing, just with a big fire-safety aisle between us, but an announcer demanded that we sit down before the event would proceed. A number of Hillary supporters were also getting testy with us. While really just a minor thing, it seems to me to show a lot of deeper problems: Obama supporters ended up coming off as brash and obnoxious, and I think Hillary fans and Obama fans came to dislike each other a little bit more. This is what we can’t have happening.
Of course, not everyone sat down as requested, leaving those of us who can follow instructions to get some pretty lousy pictures.
Obama, as usual, gave a great speech. He talked a lot about hope (which sums him up well). But he indirectly had a great comeback to Hillary’s jab, saying that, while he acknowledges that he’s a “hopemonger,” it’s time for a President with a can-do attitude, as opposed to focusing on the stale ways of Washington that we’re all so fed up with. Unlike some of the other candidates, he really didn’t use the opportunity to give a basic “You should vote for me” speech, as much as a, “The time is now” speech.
We’ve got a few more days to go. I’m attending a house party tomorrow (Deval Patrick’s coming), and it looks like there’s a Nashua Obama rally. Sunday’s more phonebanking, and Monday’s a Manchester rally for Obama. And then Tuesday is the day. And then it’s all over for us, with the candidates and the news getting a few days rest before scuttling on to the next primary. And an incredibly awkward period of waiting will emerge, leaving us in suspense for months before candidates are finally chosen.
One of the many things I try to shy away from is making generalizations. They’re often harmful and downright inaccurate.
But one generalization I do feel comfortable making is that the comments on YouTube are among the worst I’ve ever seen. Even the few that are coherent tend to contain egregious grammar problems. I’m not talking about a missing comma. im talkin about like riteing like this i mean its so dummm why do they do this its like their never lurnd 2 right
Those are the good ones. The bad ones are offensive, pointless (“i like this video so much1!111”), or just downright bizarre. (In the video to one of my favorite songs, you barely see The Killers at all, yet someone left a comment that they love videos like this one where you can see the band playing the whole time.)
I want to know why this is the case. There are some sites (Digg, Slashdot) where there are some dumb comments. But YouTube is notoriously bad. Hilariously so. Except it’s gone way past hilarious, to the point of being irritating and kind of depressing. Is it a demographic thing? Is it swamped by 13-year-olds? (With apologies to 13-year-olds, who probably far exceed the average commenter on YouTube.) Is it a broken windows type thing, where people leave stupid comments because everyone else does?
YouTube recently implemented a rating system, where you can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to comments. Good idea. Except it really doesn’t work! For one, they made my classic mistake, but in reverse: they clearly never tested in Firefox (well, Flock or Firefox 3, but Flock is basically Firefox with some more addons and a fancy theme). But that’s not my point. A comment might voted up or down a couple points, but that’s all. There’s no suppression of comments, and the comments remain in chronological order, so comment moderation is pretty pointless.
While I don’t believe Rudy is going to make it far in the campaign, and while I really don’t like the attack ad element of politics, I’m frankly pretty appalled with Rudy Giuliani. I think it’s immoral to try to use 9/11 to your advantage. But Rudy’s use seems particularly insidious. He keeps suggesting that we need to vote for him if we want to be safe from terrorists. Besides the fact that his is creepy fear-mongering, what bothers me most is that there’s an unspoken (in this ad) implication that his leadership on 9/11 is what qualifies him.
It was a really crass comment, but a political commentator someone said something to the effect of, “Giuliani is an expert on terrorism just like the mayor of New Orleans is an expert on flood prevention.” While it maybe goes a bit too far, the point remains the same: what, precisely, about 9/11 makes him a qualified leader?
The IAFF (firefighter’s union) asking the same question. And if there’s anyone people respect because of 9/11, it’s FDNY. The IAFF essentially blasts Rudy for mis-handling things. One big problem I’d forgotten all about was the radio failures. They knew since the 90’s that their radios didn’t work inside the WTC, but repeated attempts to get it fixed never occurred. (They mention an “upgrade” that was actually so bad that they went back to their old radios, which is what they used on 9/11.) Tragically, more than 100 firefighters, because of these communication failures, never got the signal to evacuate WTC and ended up losing their lives because of it.
Some have also criticized Rudy for his decision to locate much of the city’s emergency communications infrastructure in the World Trade Center. Even if his common sense / expertise on terrorism didn’t tell him that this was an intuitively bad idea, previous attempts by al Queda to blow it up might have.
And if you’re not offended enough, give this a watch. I keep wanting to believe that this is a farce, with a look-alike mocking him. Except that all indications are that this is real. A Parkinson’s victim calls into a program Rudy’s doing on the radio to ask him why he took his food stamps and Medicaid away. Rudy cracks up laughing, mocks him, and offers to send him psychiatric help “because [he] clearly need it.” While Rudy surely didn’t know he was mocking a Parkinson’s victim, why would he treat anyone that way?!
Moral of the story: if you’re going to try to exploit 9/11 to win an election, you’d better make sure your botched leadership didn’t kill our firefighters. And you might want to refrain from going on public radio and cracking up laughing, and subsequently mocking, people who call in to say they have Parkinson’s and can’t afford their medication. But that’s just my opinion. I’m no political consultant or anything.
Update: For those that don’t read the comments, you should at least check out the link in this one for more of Rudy’s radio program.
