I tend to be pretty obsessive-compulsive, and OxiClean is quite effective at cleaning, so it’s little surprise that I use it religiously.

But what is OxiClean, anyway? Oxygen, of course. I never really thought it through enough to realize that my image of it as powdered oxygen made no sense at all. (And if oxygen had such powerful cleaning effects, wouldn’t allowing your clothes to be in contact with air clean them?)

Wikipedia to the rescue: OxiClean is primarily sodium percarbonate, a “water-soluble adduct of sodium carbonate and hydrogen peroxide.” Notably, when mixed with water, you end up with soda ash and hydrogen peroxide. Soda ash, also known as sodium carbonate, is a strong base (as opposed to acid) helpful in softening water, neutralizing pH in acidic solutions, removing flesh from dead animals, inducing vomiting in dogs, and cleaning silver. Hydrogen peroxide, of course, is a bleaching agent. It’s also acidic and apparently useful in rocketry as a propellant. (According to Wikipedia, it is also used to whiten bones for display, which suggests that soaking a dead animal in OxiClean may simultaneously remove its skin from the bones and whiten the bones!)

This whole “birther” movement is really taking off. (Somewhat like “tweets,” I really hate the word “birther.” For those who don’t follow lunatic conspiracy theories, “birthers” are the people who content that Obama is not a US citizen.)

I used to try to reason with these people, but I’ve given up on even listening to them talk. The head of Hawaii’s Board of Health has certified that he’s inspected the birth certificate. So has the Republican governor. So has an independent council. His “abstract of birth” has been released more than a year ago. The state just doesn’t give out copies of someone’s actual birth certificate. Additionally, Obama’s birth was listed in the newspaper when he was born. It wouldn’t have made any sense to try to do that fraudulently if you were a Kenyan. It’s not like his parents thought he was going to come to run for President some day.

There’s an audio clip of Obama’s step-grandmother saying he was born in Kenya. Ignoring the fact that an audio clip on the Internet of one’s step-grandmother isn’t necessarily a reliable source, it’s really misleading. Speaking through an interpreter “on the phone in a crowded hut during a celebration, over a speaker phone that dropped the call three times,” she realized that what she had said was misunderstood, and clarified that Barack was born in Hawaii, not in Kenya. That bit was conveniently omitted from the “birther” claims.

None of the people that have sued have had standing to do so, so none of the cases have moved forwards, but “birthers” tend to assume all of the facts in them are true.

The McCain campaign, which I thought was playing really dirty tricks and trying anything to discredit Obama, looked into his citizenship and found that the claims that he was here illegally were bogus.

All in all, those involved tend to either not understand the facts, or they completely disregard them. The Huffington Post has a copy of an MSNBC interview in which Chris Matthews lays out the preponderance of evidence in favor of Obama’s citizenship, while Gordon Liddy, who served several years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in, and who “once made plans… to kill journalist Jack Anderson, based on a literal interpretation of a Nixon White House statement ‘we need to get rid of this Anderson guy,'” argues that Obama is engaged in a conspiracy.

It’s to the point where it’s not possible to try to use logic in this argument. The President is a citizen of the United States, despite what the far-right would like to believe.

I had pondered aloud about Radiant CMS in the past about Radiant CMS, a small and slick CMS.

After tooling around for about 45 minutes, here’s a mini-review:

• It’s easy to set up, and is, indeed, small and slick.
• Generally, it works well.
• It’s seemingly not meant for non-technical users. To get a basic templated page set up, I had to figure out layouts and pages. Easy enough for me, and pretty powerful, but not something a non-technical user would grasp at all.
• More advanced features aren’t that intuitive. For example, I’d like to have a “Snippet” that is a dynamically-generated list of the pages on my site. I can probably do this somehow, but I have no clue how, and the documentation doesn’t make it that apparent.
• The extensions provide lots of added functionality. Unfortunately, three of the five I attempted to install failed with cryptic errors. One of the five worked great (“settings”). The fifth, paperclipped, installs fine, but fails to generate thumbnails and doesn’t show any errors. There are several rake commands that need to be run for most extensions that I haven’t seen documented in any clear place.

Overall, it’s slicker than a lot of things, but it still feels like a rough-around-the-edges tool meant for developers and geeks, not ready for the sort of people that want a webpage but don’t understand this H-T-M-L concept.

Quantcast eventually collected enough data on visitors to the blogs to generate some statistics on visitors. I know from Google Analytics that 64% of visits come from search engines, and that “returning” visitors only make up 25% of visits, so “we” that post here are in the minority. Still, the results surprised me a bit.

According to Quantcast, the average visitor is an Asian male, aged 35-49, having no (minor) kids, having a graduate degree, and earning under $30,000 a year. That seems statistically improbable. (This actually isn’t entirely accurate: college-educated, but not graduate-level, is the highest demographic, and Caucasians still make up the largest demographic here. But the numbers I went by were compared to the average: the site is considerably more popular with Asians than other sites on the Internet, and somewhat more popular among well-educated, low-income people. Which is perhaps accurate if you consider that many of us have just finished college within the past year or so.

More interestingly, the site is considerably less popular than average with Hispanics, parents with kids under 17, and especially with children 0-17 themselves. Nearly half of all visits were from outside the US, but in terms of DMAs, Boston/Manchester ranks very highly, followed by New York. Waltham is the most popular city, though, followed by Boston.

Another one for stats geeks: just shy of 58% of users are using Firefox, 22% IE, 9% Safari, and almost 4% Chrome. For what it’s worth, other sites seem to have Firefox and IE roughly flipped. Windows accounts for just over 2/3 of all visits; Macs come in at 15.99%, and Linux at a bit over 14%. Fourth place goes to the iPhone, with 2.36%. Nearly 17% of visitors do not have Java support.

If anyone is interested, I’m gearing up to list my old camera, a Fuji FinePix S5100. It’s “only” 4 megapixels, but still takes good shots. It has excellent zoom, macro mode, and can do short videos at 640×480. It includes a 1GB xD card and an xD card reader; the manual and software are available from Fuji online. There’s a minor defect in that the flash doesn’t always stay down, but I’ve never had it pop up when I was using it. (I’ve ranted before about resolution: I have a 10-megapixel camera and have it set to shoot at 5 megapixels, because the 10-megapixel images are just too big. I have a 20×30 print from a 6-megapixel camera.) I plan to put it up on eBay soon, but if anyone wants to grab it for $100 now, let me know.

I’m toying with selling my current digital SLR, too. It’s a Canon Rebel XTi. I’ve always babied this camera, so it’s absolutely like new. It would include a Sigma 18-50mm lens (f/3.5-5.6, selling for about $100 these days), two CF cards (1GB and 2GB), and a CF card reader, plus the battery and charger, original packaging, etc. I’m looking in the $400-450 range. I’m not positive I want to do this yet, but if anyone is interested, it would certainly make up my mind for me. 😉

If you’re interested in either, let me know. I’m hoping to get more than I mention here for both cameras on eBay, but cameras have a high rate of fraud on eBay, so I’m eager to skip the whole thing.

I’ve come across several articles talking about the marijuana trade in California. The state has permitted medicinal marijuana for a while now, but a growing number of Californians are calling for full legalization, regulated much like the alcohol industry. The reason is simple: no one knows the hard numbers, but most estimates are that it’s a multi-billion dollar industry in California alone, and some estimates for taxes indicate that it could bring in close to a billion dollars in tax revenue.

Another interesting reason is something I saw proposed by, of all people, someone on the far-right, who complained about the far-reaching grip of Mexican cartels. What would happen, they pondered, if the sale and consumption of domestic-grown marijuana were permitted? Wouldn’t the marijuana drug trade with Mexico cease to exist overnight?

Another interesting argument I heard compared current marijuana laws to the Prohibition, a time when gang violence ran rampant to collect illicit alcohol profits, and when alcohol use was rampant and quality was poor. (Moonshine!) John Rockefeller, who had supported the Prohibition, noted that it had actually served to increase alcohol consumption.

There’s a risk that the Mexican cartels would up the pressure on more dangerous drugs, I suppose, or that an unreasonably high tax could keep the black market going. But for a plant that’s supposed to grow like a weed, it seems that legalization would deal a crushing blow to the lucrative, illegal trade, and now, more than ever, the country needs the tax revenues. Regulate it just like alcohol: driving a car while high should be illegal (and surely already is), consuming it in public needn’t be permitted, delivering it to minors shouldn’t be permitted, and selling it without a license to do so can be prohibited. Oh, and you can tax the heck out of it. When the government is making hand-over-fist the money that’s currently going to drug cartels, and when the police stop imprisoning people possessing minor amounts of the plant, I think it will become clear that it was the right decision. Possession of small amounts* of marijuana has been legal in Massachusetts for a while, and the state hasn’t imploded. In fact, I don’t know a soul who has even exercised their newfound right to possess it.

(* I think an ounce of marijuana is actually a pretty considerable amount?)

Since government loves regulating things and taxing them, let’s start treating marijuana like tobacco and alcohol, both of which are dangerous and addictive vices.

I was at Costco today and noticed that they were selling the Canon T1i, a new digital SLR produced by Canon. It’s an ogle-worthy camera, with two especially notable features: ISO3200 sensitivity (expandable to include ISO6400 and ISO12,800) to help get shots in darker settings, and video, both at 720p (30 fps) and full HD at 1920×1080, but only 20fps.

I briefly toyed with the one in the store. It had no lens or storage media, which made it hard to use, but I was pretty impressed. It feels like it’s built a bit sturdier than the XTi and its siblings, though I don’t know whether or not it actually was. The LCD is vastly improved, and makes the LCDs on older cameras like my 10D seem laughable. It’s a full 3″, and much higher-resolution. The graphics on the menus were also improved, no longer looking like they were from the 1980s. There’s a dedicated ISO button for rapid changes, and it has the “Custom Functions” that the XTi series lacks. The resolution was needlessly increased to 15 megapixels. Somewhat unconventional for higher-end DSLRs, it uses SD and SDHC, as opposed to the CompactFlash cards Canon has used for years and years. Oh, and there’s HDMI out.

I’d previously sworn this camera off. It was too expensive, and if I was going to spend close to a grand on a camera, I might as well spend a bit more and get the 5D Mark II. But after handling it in the store, I’m now obsessed. B&H has the best prices I’ve seen so far: $815 with the 18-55mm IS lens, and $770 without. (Incidentally, the lens appears to go for $75-125 on eBay.) It’s really tempting to sell my current camera and trade up.

Edit: NewEgg has the kit for less. Shop around because prices vary a lot. The kit is currently only $40 more at some places.

A lot of people in the tech industry have long compared DRM to an Orwellian, big-brother setup. That’s precisely what makes this story so ironic. To be fair, it’s practically an industry-wide practice: although Apple recently started offering its music DRM-free, the iPhone is still a platform that Apple keeps strict control over; Microsoft’s music store is DRM-laden and has even stranded customers. Oh, and Apple’s latest iTunes version supposedly did nothing but prevent functionality with the Palm Pre.

I like it when things like this happen, though, because it gets DRM purchasers riled up, and I like to think that there’s going to be a point at which people stop buying music and videos that won’t play until they can phone home and make sure you have permission to view them. Sure, piracy is a problem, but it’s not my problem. Now that I’m able to buy DRM-free music, I have no problem spending $1 on a good song. Now that TV stations have gotten with the program and begun to offer their content online, it would be pointless for me to try to download torrents of them. I like to think that people are starting to wise up: give us DRM-free content, or give us nothing.

I went with some friends to see Bruno (err, Brüno) today. Borat ranked among the most hilarious movies I’ve ever seen, so I had high expectations for Bruno, a movie about a flamboyant fashion reporter from Austria.

A coworker, in describing the movie a few days ago, compared it to a trainwreck: there were parts that were really, really bad, and yet you couldn’t walk away. Borat had some parts that were so offensive and so utterly over the top that it hurt to laugh, yet at the same time, you felt a little offended. I thought Bruno often flipped that: it was a little funny and quite offensive.

Most sexual scenes are blurred out, but there is a bit of, err, graphic male nudity, that was, regretably, not blurred in any way. Much like the other over-the-top scenes, it reached the point of hilarity, but then kept going until it became disturbing, offensive, and not funny.

The movie definitely had parts that were laugh-out-loud funny, and that left me in pain from laughing so hard. But many other parts seem to have horribly offended gay rights groups, while thoroughly disgusting heterosexuals. There were several points in the movie in which I truly thought that Bruno was in danger of being killed, including one in which he travels to the Middle East and dresses in traditional Orthodox Jew attire, except he adds his flamboyant flair, and is chased by many outraged people. He meets with a terrorist while in the Middle East and does nothing but offend him. He goes hunting with conservative hunters and starts hitting on them, at one point stripping nude in the middle of the night and trying to enter someone else’s tent.

The movie somewhat followed the formulaic plot of Borat, which left the movie a bit predictable, and which I didn’t think really made much sense to duplicate. Overall, I’d say that the movie had moments of sheer hilarity, but could have been condensed to about 20 minutes, with the removed 60 minutes being comprised of about 10 minutes of filler between the funny parts, and 50 minutes of stuff that went too far and became offensive, or which was really much more graphic than was needed. Everyone who saw the movie with me seems to have drawn the same conclusion: funny at times, but I really wouldn’t recommend it.

And, dear God, to the mother who brought her early-teens son to the movie and sat in front of us: what in God’s name were you thinking?

A while back, Internet advertising was incredibly obnoxious. Sites would draw you in, and then they seemed to care more about ad impressions than their content, so you would be barraged with advertisements. Popups, popunders, flashing ads, ads covering content, ads playing sound, ads trying to install software, ads resizing windows…

Switching to Firefox prevented the egregious stuff that should never be allowed (like popup ads resizing windows and installing software), but it was still a nuisance. One day I discovered AdBlock Plus, and I basically never saw any ads again. For a really long time, life was great.

Over time, my conscience got to me. (The fact that my paycheck comes from an ad-supported site might help, too.) Whilst certainly not legally-binding, I came to see a lot of Internet sites as having a tacit agreement in place: you can access our content for free, as long as you view our ads. It’s kind of like commercials: there’s no expectation that I’ll sit glued to the television and watch every second of them, nor is it expected that I’ll do business solely with companies that advertise on TV. But commercials are the only reason I can watch TV for free, just as ads are the only reason many of the sites I enjoy are free.

So I turned off AdBlock Plus, and started viewing the web the way a lot of other people saw it. And I felt good about myself. Even if it’s only a few pennies at a time, I was helping to support the sites I frequent. Every now and then I’d find an ad that was actually interesting or relevant, and I’d click on it.

But then I had another revelation. A lot of Internet ads aren’t at all like commercials. It’s like a gang of mobsters leaping out of my televisions at commercial breaks, holding me on the couch and performing annoying charades while showing me graphic photographs of how well their male enhancement products work, all the while making an awful racket and getting in my way. And it’s like commercials that pop up in the middle of a suspense-packed action screen, completely obscuring whatever is going on. In the few years when I didn’t  view advertisements online, it seems that advertisers have had to become even more obnoxious to cope.

And for that reason, I have reenabled AdBlock Plus. I sometimes think I should allow it to display advertisements on some sites that I frequent that display only tasteful ads, but other times, noticing just how obnoxious ads are, I think it’s not worth my time.

What I feel worst about isn’t a sort of “soft theft of service,” but the fact that I may unknowingly link friends, coworkers, or blog readers to sites with popups and obnoxious ads, because I don’t ever see them. It’s a cruel world out there.