There’s this concept I keep running into that seems to have no word to describe it, but that happens all the time. The concept is opposing a fix to something because it’s not perfect. Let’s say that a whole city block was on fire, and the fire chief, having limited resources, commands his crew to start putting out the house closest to them.

“But chief,” a firefighter complains, “that won’t put out the other fires on the block. I think it’s a bad idea.”

“Well, then, what do you propose we should do?”

“I don’t know.”

I see this happen all the time in groups, and it invariably drives me out of my mind. It’s one thing when you have a better fix (“but chief, what about the other 7 firetrucks parked at the station and their crews that we forgot to dispatch to the fire? Let’s call them in!”), but all the time I see people shoot down an okay-enough fix to something, and propose no alternative, because the fix only improves the situation without fixing it entirely.

This isn’t to say that there are no bad ideas at all; if the chief’s recommendation was to spit on the house engulfed in flames, it would be a bad idea, because the improvement won’t be noticed at all. But if the fix is start by putting out one house, why not start there? Fire may be a bad example, since putting out the fire in a house if it’s surrounded by other burning homes will probably lead to the house catching on fire as soon as you move on. But take Ralph Nader’s opposition to seatbelt laws on the grounds that they didn’t go far enough. His opposition worked, but a better solution was never proposed, so he ended up undermining the cause he was fighting for. Or look at California’s budget crisis, in which two parties arguing over how much to cut the budget by end up deadlocked and the state ends up with no budget at all. If something is slow and someone finds a way to speed it up, but only a little, it’s an improvement. If you need a lot of money and someone gives you a little bit of money, it’s an improvement. Don’t say no unless you have a better plan.

This is a fairly ethereal concept, but it pops up everywhere. Watch for it and you’ll see it happen in short order, I promise.

This article makes me sick. If I try to distill the story down to a few sentences, I end up with a summary like this: some Republicans are trying to seize the opportunity to stick it to the Democrats by opposing Sotomayor, but other Republicans haven’t seen a good reason to oppose her. Still others think that they should give her carte blanche because she’s Hispanic and they don’t want to seem racist, or because the GOP needs stronger Hispanic backing. Some have blatantly confessed that they’re trying to figure out what would resonate most with voters.

Conspicuously absent in Congress, at least as told by this article, is any discussion about whether or not Sotomayor is a good candidate for the Supreme Court. Isn’t that all that matters? Stop discussing partisan loyalty, organized tactics to make your point, or race. If she’s qualified, approve her. If not, oppose her nomination and explain why you’re doing so. Is it really that hard?

(This isn’t at all meant to suggest that Republicans are alone in doing these things. They’re just the ones in the news at this particular moment.)

A friend once told me a story about her troublemaker of a brother. One day, as a young kid, the dog came running into the house whimpering, and my friend’s brother immediately exclaimed, “I didn’t stab him!” Since no one had accused him of doing such, and since no one had yet realized that the dog had, indeed, been stabbed, his attempt at proclaiming his innocence ended up being a guilty plea.

It’s easy to dismiss as something little kids do, but I think the same sort of thing is happening in world politics. Every time North Korea releases a story about how great Kim Jong-il is doing, the fact that he’s most likely terminally ill becomes even more apparent. (And, by launching a ton of rockets into the ocean, they’re drawing still more attention to their leadership.) And you could say the same sort of thing about Iran: everything they say about being stable and thriving seems to be a pathetic attempt at denying the reality. Or like when the police investigating Rihanna’s beating had the police photos leaked to the press, and came out saying that they wouldn’t confirm whether they were real or a hoax, but that they would fire whoever leaked them to the press.

I’m a bad liar. The uneasiness in my voice and my panicked, paranoid look gives me away almost every time. But it sometimes seems that I can do better than the propaganda departments of some countries.

Radiant CMS is a small CMS written in Rails that looks full-featured without being bloated. If I were to design a new semi-static site, I think I’d probably give it a whirl. It’s got quite a few extensions, too.

There’s also a Twitter gem that Rails (or just plain Ruby) developers can take advantage of. Without actually trying any, it seems that Fleakr may be the best available gem for Flickr. There’s also flickr-fu. Most irritatingly, the top gem, called “flickr,” seems like it hasn’t been worked on in a long time and never left alpha.

I sometimes see people post on Twitter to the #followfriday category. Today I decided to go for #unfollowfriday.

It was a tough decision, honestly. I like the variety of what the people I follow on Twitter bring. Some are of a professional interest, others were of more personal interest to me, and still others were friends. But I have so much crap flying by on Twitter that I rarely even fire up a Twitter client because I just don’t care.

So I went for broke and removed most of the high-volume Twitterers I follow, along with a few that I never should have followed like snoopdogg. I hope I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings, but I just couldn’t keep up with all of the tweets. Now I’ve got a pared-down offering so I can savor each tweet.

Russian gas giant Gazprom formed a joint venture with Nigeria’s state-gas company, and chose to name their new venture Nigaz. Most people reading the news respond with, “Are you serious?!,” or just burst out laughing.

The BBC has an article about the poor choice, explaining that it’s not pronounced the way you might be tempted to pronounce it (but not in mixed company), and interviews a branding consultant who states, “People will soon forget that the name sounds bad.”

Really? People will soon forget that naming your African joint-venture “Nigaz” sounds offensive?

What do the gurus think of this (barebones motherboard + Dual-core Atom 330), this case, and a pair of these? Oh, and go whole hog on the memory.

$335.45 for a PC-based fileserver with 2TB of disk, 2GB RAM, and minimal power usage. Put Linux on it and make it an iSCSI target, or use NFS. And Samba gives Windows clients support, too. Maybe you want something like Openfiler?

In an ideal world, I’d spend a bit more and have a machine with a “good” NIC (a high-end Gigabit card), hardware RAID (just basic support is fine), and three or more disks. But this is small and simple. I want to set it in a corner and forget it, and just mirror the drives via software RAID. Thoughts, anyone?

Could I just go on record as stating that raining nonstop for a month is not natural? Something is wrong.

I just checked the 10-day forecast. Guess what? Eight days of rain! Saturday, July 11 will be warm and partly cloudy. Although, frankly, I don’t believe that.

Anyone want to help me build an ark?

How does one go about shipping a 65-pound box? Does FedEx have offices like the Post Office where I can mail it? Is it cool with them if I wheel the box in on a dolly?

I’m looking into trying to ship it from work, since UPS and FedEx will come to our offices to pick things up, whereas they probably will not come to my home. I tried to get an estimate, and accidentally discovered a useless bit of information: shipping a 1x1x1″ square box weighing 65 pounds, with a declared value of $1, from Boston to Chicago costs $26.27 via ground, and up to $267.60 to overnight it.

What I want to know is why FedEx thinks a 1x1x1″ box weighing 65 pounds—clearly a revolutionary scientific breakthrough—would be worth $1? Failing that, I’m curious about why they would assume a box weighing 65 pounds would measure 1x1x1″, and never ask me what its actual size is? Furthermore, I wonder if it’s even possible to ship a 1x1x1″ box? Could you fit all the information on it? Does anyone else really want to try?