The MacDeskBlog

My prediction for the Electoral College

This is my prediction for the outcome of tomorrow’s election. My basic assumption is that Obama will sweep every state where the polls show him within 4%. A week and a half ago, I thought he’d take West Virginia, but that seems to have returned to and solidified for McCain. On the other hand, a week and a half ago, I wouldn’t have guessed that Georgia, North Dakota, Montana and Arizona would be in play.

McCain supporters certainly have the ability to prove the folly of my assumption by getting out there and voting. Similarly, Obama supporters also have that ability by staying home.

So, do you civic duty. Go Vote. And, perhaps more importantly, Stay The Frack In Line even it takes all day and the official closing time passes you by. If you get into line before the polls close, you WILL be allowed to vote.

What’s your prediction?

I’m not accustomed to just posting links, but this article speaks for itself and I hope a couple hundred million Americans read it before November.

The Politics of Lying

One of the unavoidable downsides of working as a political speechwriter is meeting some smart aleck who says, “so you write all those lies that politicians say.” Between clenched teeth, my usual response is: “I’ve never written a lie in my life.” It’s true: not only for reasons of personal morality, but because no politician I’ve ever met wants to be caught telling a lie.

Sure politicians occasionally stretch the truth or exaggerate, but willful and conscious lying is something else, which makes the stream of fabrications from the [ed.: read the article] campaign over the last week that much more shocking.

It boggles my mind that anyone actually believes a word that comes out of McCain or Palin’s mouth at this point. McCain was for the environment before he was against it. He was opposed to Jerry Falwell before he prostrated himself at Falwell’s Liberty University. He was one of the troops before he was against them. He was against the Bush tax cuts before he was for them. He was for ‘experience’ before he picked Palin. He was for the wrong war before he was for the wrong war. Oh wait, he didn’t flip-flop on that one, he was just plain wrong.

He doesn’t know how many houses he owns. He doesn’t know anything about economics let alone the economy. He was against government earmarks before he picked the earmark happy governor of the most earmark dependent state to be his VP candidate.

And lo and behold, his flip-floppery is contagious. Now Palin says that she is a crusader against the very earmarks that she championed, such as the Bridge to Nowhere. There are so many negative things to point out about Palin, but really, there’s only one that matters: McCain showed the judgement he would use in the Oval Office. He picked someone who eliminates the one argument he actually made traction with: experience. He picked someone to cynically appeal to conservative Hillary backers and/or to pander to the religious right (who, for some reason, forgive both her inability to make abstinence-only education work with her own children and her willingness to let her pregnant teenage daughter make her own decision about continuing her pregnancy). McCain’s experience led him to pick the governor for the past 21 months of the 47th largest state and former mayor of a town of 7000 to be first in line behind McCain who is three years older than the oldest President of the United States.

I just don’t get it. How can anybody support McCain? Sure, he was a “Maverick” before the Rove smear campaign beat him to a bloody pulp in 2000 (btw, I liked him pre-2001). But McCain has remade himself into a pro-Oil, pro-rich, pro-life, pro-war, anti-environment, anti-choice, anti-middle class W-clone in the eight years since then.

I just don’t get it.

Netflix: Requests and Suggestions

Hey,

My wife and I share a queue and we frequently have problems where we’ll get three of my movies at home and none of hers. It can really gum up our queue. Sometimes, I have to send one or more of the movies back and put it BACK INTO OUR QUEUE for another chance to watch it. Other times, when we’re trying to catch up on TV series, we’ll end up receiving the discs out of order (blame the USPS) when we’d really rather have our next movie arrive in lieu of having two discs from the TV show at the same time.

It would be really great if you provided a way for us to have separate queues. That way, we’d always be assured of having something to watch when one of us is out of town, and we’d never get frustrated by looking at Disc 4 when Disc 3 is still en route.

Oh, and related to this, when you combine my love of serious anime like Akira and Princess Mononoke with my wife’s love of Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell comedies, you end up making horrible movie recommendations which neither of us like, such as Pokemon and Paddington Bear. I really think you’d give us better recommendations if you tracked us separately.

I’m really hope that you implement this. It would eliminate all of the frustrations which we currently have with Netflix and keep us from switching to Amazon Unbox, Comcast PPV, or iTunes movie store.

Thanks for your consideration,

Ryan

One of my high school friends just highlighted this article over at CSO online. Yeah, I’ve never heard of them either. But the article is really good. Really long, but really good. It’s about putting risk into perspective because the media makes every little risk seem huge. Like one of my favorite whipping boys, Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. Are you more scared of being attacked by a shark or of developing skin cancer? C’mon, sharks? Really? Sorry, stop worrying about it.

Read the article, and stop worrying.

Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us?

Senator Feinstein:

It is time for you to retire. Your continued support of the expansion of Executive powers at the expense of our Civil Liberties is a clear indication that you no longer have the best interests of your constituents at heart. I have supported you despite concerns about your propagation of the culture of fear since 9/11. However, my support has just come to an end.

Please announce that this will be your last term in the Senate and move aside for a more progressive respresentative to take your place.

Formerly yours,

Ryan Walker

This was the last straw. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about this bill until after the Senate voted on it. I fired off messages to both of my Senators and Representatives (I included Pelosi though I’m not actually in her district) over the weekend. Alas, the House caved too, though at least my Representatives voted against, unlike Ms. Milquetoast Feinstein.

The New York Times captured my feelings on the bill pretty well:

While serving little purpose, the new law has real dangers. It would allow the government to intercept, without a warrant, every communication into or out of any country, including the United States. Instead of explaining all this to American voters — the minimal benefits and the enormous risks — the Democrats have allowed Mr. Bush and his fear-mongering to dominate all discussions on terrorism and national security.

Mr. Bush claims that he has kept America safe since 9/11. But that claim ignores the country’s very real and present vulnerabilities. Six years after the 9/11 attacks the administration has still failed to secure American ports, railroads and airports from terrorist attack, and has put the profits of the chemical and nuclear-power industries ahead of safeguarding their plants.

It is hard to break up after so long. But, to be honest, this has been several years in the making. Feinstein has pretty consistently supported The Administration on the War on Terror Civil Liberties. Her tepid opposition to the war, when she has managed any at all, is typically quick to crumble. Over the past few years, she has staked out ground barely half a step to the left of Joe Lieberman. She has become a DINO and it’s time for her to retire.

I’m sitting at Willie Mays Field (two days after he turned 75 and who knows how long until the field actually gets named that) with an hour to go before first pitch. My usual pre-game ballpark dining haunt, Primo Patio Cafe, is closed due to a gas leak, so I just had garlic fries and called it dinner.

I’m not of the habit to bring my PowerBook to the ballpark, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. And tonight, it turned out to be a good thing. I realized as I waited for the train to bring me up here that I needed to queue a few more pictures for this week. So, I whipped it out, hopped onto the free wireless network here, and took care of it.

I’m waiting for my friend John from college to join me. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years since he moved to L.A. for a writing job. He just moved back to San Francisco last month. Tonight, we get to catch up.

Batting practice is finishing up now. The Giants just finished up a horrid road trip. And Barry is not expected to play tonight. Lowry is off of the DL and starting tonight. The sky is clear and blue, and the temperature is nice.

Life is good.

I’ve been struggling with trying to figure out what to say about network neutrality. The truth is that I didn’t think this is really a big deal. Not because I thought that it isn’t important, but rather because preserving network neutrality is so blatantly obviously the right thing to do that I could not conceive of Congress failing to preserve it.

I was wrong. The Senate has already voted to abandon network neutrality. That’s right, the (comparatively) rational, conscientious, thoughtful, sane half of Congress has already acted stupidly. This means that we have the much harder job of getting the irrational, easily corruptible, money grubbing House of Representatives to act intelligently.

You might be wondering still what is network neutrality?
Well, it’s what lets me deliver a free service to you with enough bandwidth to keep you happy. It is legislation which currently prohibits internet service providers from restricting access to competitors, or to sites they don’t like, or to sites which don’t pay them.

What would an Internet without network neutrality look like?
If AT&T, Comcast and the other big TelCos have their way, they will each be like China, able to block access to sites they don’t like. More likely, though, they’ll just meter down performance to those sites with whom they compete. So, Comcast will probably try to encourage people to use their music store instead of access the iTunes Music Store not by making the Comcast store more compelling but by making access to iTMS unacceptably slow. AT&T will do the same to iTMS and to the Comcast store while routing their customers to the Yahoo! music store.

What would MacDesktops look like without network neutrality?
These mega-corporations will each be able to bill me for the files which their customers download from MacDesktops. Or, they’ll be able to extort me in order to let traffic from my site through to you. If Comcast or AT&T or another TelCo decides that there’s money to be made in desktop pictures like there is in ringtones and cell phone pictures, they’ll be able to pinch off MacDesktops while promoting their own fee for picture site. The most likely outcome is that downloading pictures from MacDesktops will just slow way down.

What you can do:
1. SIGN a Net Neutrality petition to Congress.
2. CALL Congress now.
3. BLOG about this issue, or put our “Save the Internet” logo on your Web site.
4. MYSPACE: Add “Save the Internet” as a friend.
5. WRITE A LETTER to Congress.
6. VISIT our coalition Web site for more information, SavetheInternet.com.

GoDaddy hit me with a $900 charge for data transfer overage last month. No warning. They charge $29 for 500GB of transfer per month, and then jack it up to $6/GB for overage transfer. With no warning. They were willing to charge me only $450 for the overage, but not willing to go lower because I could have seen the overage through their exceedingly cumbersome administration console. I was supposed to notice that bandwidth usage had double for the last week of my month for that, and remember that my month ends on the 18th.

I can see that the server went over the bandwidth limit. I can accept that I should pay more for the month. The problems I have with this situation are:
A. $6/GB is an unreasonable rate for overage which $0.058 is the base pre-paid rate;
B. GoDaddy does not make it clear to customers that the overage rate is more than one hundred times the base rate;
C. GoDaddy does not warn of overage before the fact, they expect users to constantly check through GoDaddy’s administration console (which is junk) to make sure everything is fine (which is junk);
D. GoDaddy does not pre-authorization the overage;
E. GoDaddy does not provide any way to make the prepaid bandwidth a cap for the month, they just start charging the overage rate.

So, I cancelled my servers.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Please feel free to contact GoDaddy.com and tell them how screwed up their business is and that their handling of MacDesktops is preventing you from using their services. The billing manager’s name is Mark Danzan. If you talk to him and he tries to tell you that their billing model is like a cell phone plan, please make sure you sympathize mention that you too have a cell phone plan which charges $30/month for 500 minutes and charges $6/min thereafter! Or feel free to contact me and tell me how ridiculous I’m being.

I am working on another hosting arrangement for the future. In the meantime, I am very close to having the site up and running on my home servers, with images spread across two DSL lines.