May 2005 Archives

Growing up watching the X-Files resulted in me viewing FBI agents' attempts to thwart government conspiracies as commonplace. Hence my disappointment today when we learned that Mark Felt, then #2 at the FBI, was Deep Throat--Woordward's anonymous source in the Watergate scandal. The captivating, decades-long build-up did not end in some startling revelation of Republican back-stabbing, but with a government employee ostensibly doing his job. Perhaps the FBI was different in the 60s and 70s, with the agency beholden to the Commander-in-Chief, but when I became introduced to politics, Louis Freeh was recommending a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton Administration. Thus, it seems natural to me that an agent with knowledge of a vast cover-up that harms the American public would do his or her best to fight it. And that appears to be just what happened. Yawn: what's next?

(A potentially more interesting aspect of this story is why the Washington Post has taken so long to comment on this revelation and if they are disappointed that they could not break the story of the final chapter in the Watergate saga.)

Featured on the front page of ESPN is a fellow Camp Wigwam alum, Andrew Goldstein. The story is about being an openly gay athlete at the upper level of sports. Congrats to Andrew for being an All-American, this amazing goal against 'Cuse, and overcoming his obstacles.

Went to Theatre J with Taren and Rain last night, where we watched Hannah and Martin, a play about the philosopher Martin Heidegger and his student/paramour, Hannah Arendt. The play raised several moral conundrums, the primary of which was what limits (if any) that should be imposed on the marketplace of ideas.

For instance, as Heidegger began to sympathize with the Nazis, he dismissed the ideas of the Communists (and to some extent, the Jews) out of hand because of their background or politics. Arendt, the protagonist in the play, and her husband vehemently argued that all ideas should put in the open for discussion. But, the play goes on to ask, what about ideas that brainwash and ideas that lead to Holocaust? And while it's clear that those dangerous ideas should be rejected (if not censored), what about Heidegger's work after the war? Should he be barred from teaching? Should his books not be published? And how much did his politics have to do with his philosophy? Interesting questions and ones I don't have complete answers for.

On a lighter note, LOTD: Store Wars (really funny)

On Wednesday night, some co-workers, Rain, and I went to the midnight showing of Episode III at Gallery Place. The theatre sold so many tickets, it had to increase the number of theatres showing the movie from three to six. Most of the people in our party had theatre 10 and three had theatre 12. So three of us, Rain, co-worker Taren, and I set off to get everyone T10 (theatre 10) tickets by bartering with others. Taren found a young woman wanting two T12 tickets and willing to trade for theatre 10 tickets. Perfect. So I get set to trade our tickets, when I realize I have two theatre 12 tix and a credit card stub (which I thought I threw out). Whoops! I had accidentally tossed away Dave's theatre 12 ticket. Well, no matter at that moment, we still had two tickets to trade. After that trade we needed a ticket for Dave and a ticket for co-worker Allison who hadn't bought a ticket yet. It turned out that the same young woman we traded with had two extra tickets, so we bought back our original theatre 12 tickets. Then I made my second dumb move for the evening: in trying to trade for two theatre 10 tickets, I traded for one theatre 10 ticket and one theatre 13 ticket. I thought that Settlers of Catan-like trade was progress...survey says: X. Now we were stuck with one theatre 13 ticket, and even though theatre 13 moviegoers didn't have to wait in line (they were already being seated), trading a single ticket is difficult (to say the least). Taren gets the idea that we should try to trade the ticket in at the counter, but the cinema will only give out theatre 9 tix, since they are still selling theatre 9 seats. Taren also thinks we may be able to sell several of our T10 tix for T13 tix and then split into two groups. But I wasn't willing to give up the chance to all sit together just yet. Yet another option was to buy an extra ticket to pair with our current T13 (which we would have traded for a T9) and eat the $10. We then both (1) found a couple with T10 tix willing to trade and (2) thought of the fact that we could cinema-trade one T13 and one T10 for two T9's and then barter them off. Hence: success! Everyone got to watch Star Wars in the same theatre. (Thoughts on the actual movie a bit later.)

A great article in the New York Times about Katie Brownell, who pitched a perfect game (all strikeouts) in little league.

I believe the antiquated 1952 ban on women MLB players is still in effect, which is why Ila Borders had to play in an independent league. Hopefully, young women like Katie will change this ridiculous policy.

This creative blog should help tide you over until Episode III is launched. (Start with the first entry and work your way forward.)

Have a look at British MP Galloway's testimony to Sen Coleman's committee.

For the movie-watching tonight:

In other news, Chu and I had a great time camping with part of the West Wing crew in the Shenandoah valley last weekend. Highlights included: buying a local paper, finding out about the mountain(side) cafe from the paper, having my decade-old tent keep us dry from the rain, using the local paper to start a fire to toast our bagels on Sunday morning, and then locating and eating at the mountain(side) cafe on the way back. Oh, and discovering the joys of apple doughnuts :)

First off: Star Wars: Episode II party, my place on Tuesday. If you're reading this, you're invited. It'll be low-key: just some cheesecake-eating and Attack Of The Clones watching to refresh everyone's memory before Revenge of the Sith opens.

Now, to vent: Linux sucks. Okay, it doesn't suck, but it can be darn frustrating sometimes. As Chu and I have been building the TiVo, we've run into a multitude of problems, some have been my fault, some have been Linux's fault. In general, I'm surprised at how much Linux still relies on the command prompt. Not that I'm uncomfortable with text commands (I've been on UNIX-like systems since high school), but I thought the Linux bazaar was trying to spread the OS to the masses. Until things "just work" and use a GUI, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Right now, neither of those is true.

To the specific gripes. My main complaint has to do with installation. We've had a lot of problems with other parts of TiVo, but in the end they mostly seem to be things I screwed up. But, on installation, we did things correctly and they just didn't work. First, I tried installing Fedora. I thought this would be easy, since I'd already installed machines with the Red Hat package they used to sell in stores. But a bit into the install process the screen went haywire. Complete fuzz. I went into options (ie, outside the gui and into the command prompt) and it told me to try using the "noprobe" option. I tried that to no avail.

So then I thought "there are several Linux distros, let's try SuSe." As I mentioned before, I had trouble finding a torrent for the DVD, so I downloaded the CD installation. This required an FTP install, and the GUI here was completely unhelpful. You had to find and type in the ftp servers yourself...how hard would it be for SuSe to maintain an active list which the install program could query? The first ftp site we tried, Oregon, was dead, but it took us a while to realize that. Next we tried Colorado, which bugged out 90% in (twice). Lastly, we connected to Tennessee, which downloaded the entire install, but then gave an error. Three times is enough for me: I'm done with SuSe.

Before I try to find a torrent for Debian, I try Fedora one more time. Digging through the myriad of options, I found "nofb" (whatever that means!) and the monitor problem disappeared. And this epitomizes why Linux is not populace-ready. Here's a known problem, with a documented solution, but no one has tried to autodetect and autofix the problem. How hard could it be to check the video out and make sure it doesn't go all fuzzy? (Well, to be honest it might be difficult, I truly have no idea.)

Second major gripe: Fedora has frozen four times since we started using it a week ago. They seem like hardware freezes, but I'm still not entirely clear why computers can't avoid, or skip over, such errors. Clearly the hardware still works, as when I reboot, everything operates normally. So why can't my OS detect which hardware is having trouble and reset it? (If my memory twitches, it'd have to try to copy the current memory contents onto the disk...but what's wrong with "mini-restarting" the processor or the hard drive if either of those is the problem.)

We've also had to install Fedora three times. We did the second fresh install because we partitioned poorly the first time (our mistake). But then Fedora froze when updating the RPMs, pretty much irrevocably corrupting the RPM database. A web search yielded a manual method of fixing the problem that would have taken about three hours; instead we decided to start over.

Problems on my side of the fence have been: mis-jumpering the DVD-drive (the manual might have been wrong, it's still unclear), buying the slightly wrong version of the TV Tuner (it still might work though), and not reading this wonderful step-through all the way through before we started playing and messing things up.

That said, our goal is to finish by May 25th and TiVo the Champions League final match (go AC Milan!) and I think that's still doable. We received a signal from the tuner card last night--whether it's the right signal has yet to be determined.

In good news: I'm up to 85 points on the Hitchhiker's Guide Adventure Game. (I'm at the part where I have to show a "sign of my intelligence.")

LOTD: How to piss off enjanerd.

Friday evening I headed over to Sean and Nick's for a guys-only game night. Got there in the middle of a tournament-style (ie, winner-take-all) poker game, plopped down my three bucks, and proceeded to take everyone's chips :) I got lucky since the one person there that really knew had to play poker had to leave early (on account of his fiance) and therefore started betting way too aggressively. Whatever combination of being lucky and good I was that evening, the felicitous result was the same.

Then we played four-way Settlers, in which I was completely shut-off during the beginning of the game. I clawed my way back, and came within one turn of victory, but had to settle for second place behind Ben.

Saturday I had my first soccer game with the "Left Wing Freak Shows:" a team that consists of former members of the Dean campaign. I played in goal and had a clean sheet going into midway through the second half before their one good player rifled a shot toward the upper-right corner of the net. I got three fingertips on it, but the ball still fell just under the crossbar. Thankfully, the offense did its job and we won 2-1.

I went straight from my soccer game to DC United's. Freddy Adu started in his first MLS game of the 2005 season and did not disapoint. I had always said that one game I would show up and Freddy would finally learn how to pass the ball: Saturday was that game. He had two assists in the first half; on the second goal, my favorite player, Josh Gross, finished off a cross with a flying header into the top of the net! Then, in the second half, Freddy showed off his dribbling skills by maneuvering through the Columbus defense and pocketing a goal off the inside left post. That game was truly Adu's coming out party.

Sunday and yesterday I worked on my TiVo with much frustration, which is a rant for a later post (when I'm finally finished with it).

The NY Times covers the event as does NPR (thanks, enjanerd) and the AP.

And to think, the most publicity East Campus ever got while I was there was fourth west trying to reverse burn their carpet.

UPDATE: The Hotline picked it up as well:

"If it happens it will be one of the biggest events in human history" -- MIT student Amal Dorai, on if someone actually shows their face at his time-travel conference (AP).

How many events get Slashdotted and Hotlined?! Impressive.

In the spirit of "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy," here's a link to Douglas Adams' text adventure game (thanks to dog_new_tricks for the link). I had heard this mentioned in passing over the years (especially the Babel Fish puzzle), but had never played it until today. The game has been augmented with some graphics to bring it out of the 1980s. Warning: addiction is possible. So far I've only been able to get 25 points (out of 400) before perishing in various ways.

Wait...I'm supposed to be doing work. I'll have to restrain myself until this evening.

How is Al Gore like Josh Lyman? They both own Treos!

From the Wall Street Journal's Corrections: "Al Gore has used a Treo hand-held device with the GoodLink wireless email system since switching from a BlackBerry almost three years ago. Mr. Gore is an investor in Good Technology Inc., the closely held Santa Clara, Calif. concern that sells GoodLink. A page-one article last Monday said Mr. Gore has a BlackBerry" (The Hotline, 5/3).

Also, Gmail started intrdocing "Web Clips" for select users. Basically, you select new sources (including blogs) to be displayed on a single row above your mail. So now I can see when janeite, enjanerd, chicklet,and PreLifeCrisis (among others) update their blogs as I check my mail. If you've got web clips on your gmail, then you can add Middless Philosopher by using this link: http://www.mindlessphilosopher.net/blog/index.rdf. Enjoy!

And Adam Nagouney takes a look at the work our friend Karen Hicks is doing acroos the pond!

Thursday I flew to NYC on business, but stopped by to see jonk at Google and Chicklet for dinner. The business was with AJWS, where I met AJWS's President, Ruth Messinger, for the second time in as many weeks. The first occasion was at Adat Shalom (a reconstructionist synagogue in MD) a couple weeks ago, where Messinger spoke about Jewish values and world service. She spoke five times over the course of the shabbat, and I only happened to catch the first talk, but apparently an interesting exchange happened at the last event:

Adat Shalom was discussing whether to repeal a bylaw that said that the temple should remain neutral on political members. One woman wanted Messinger's opinion, stood up, and said: "I deal with politics in much of my life. I want my synagogue to be a place of relaxation and meditation, where I can reflect on my life without the distraction of the world around me. I was wondering your opinion on that?"

To which, Messinger responded: "That's great and reasonable. That's just not Judaism."

Link of the day: MIT's time traveler convention and corresponding Slashdot article.