Horrific News

This story may be especially troubling for those of you who accompanied Heidi and me to England back in 1999. You'll probably remember Geoff frequently asking, "do you want me to tell you something?"

Of course we did, and in general he delivered some quite interesting stories and information.
One of the tastiest bits was the story of the cheese rolling in the village of Brockworth.

You remember, don't you? The locals would race a half-stone-plus wheel of double Gloucester cheese down a stunningly steep hill to thrill and astonish the onlooking thousands.

Well, the safety first types have had their way with this time-honoured tradition, and it won't happen this year ...
sad times when traditions give way to fear....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/12/cheese_rolling/

grr.

Hands Up For Detroit

I don't think I've ever simply re-posted somebody else's blog post, but I really appreciate this one, and I want as many people as possible to see it.

Check it out:
http://www.readymade.com/blogs/readymade/hands-up-for-detroit/

Is Ballmer Balmy?

The Guardian reports that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claims that Google's culture isn't responsible for its success, but rather that it's based on their incumbency in the search arena.

Faced with Google's rampant success and dominance of the online world, legions of experts have tried over the years to dissect what makes it such a unique and powerful company.

Is it because its engineers famously get 20% of their time to develop their own projects? Is it the influence of the 'triumvirate' of top executives? Or is it that Google simply understands the future better than the rest of the world?

Ask Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer why he thinks Google is the internet's most powerful company, however, and he'll offer a straightforward alternative: it got there first.
Speaking at the SMX West conference in California on Tuesday, the man in charge of rival search engine Bing said that Google's success today was not tangibly linked to the company's culture, but simply spun out of the fact that it became successful in web search before its rivals.

"The number one thing that Google benefits from in search is that they did it right, first," he said. "There's a value to incumbency." "You can ascribe these things to things like culture, but it's never clear which came first - incumbency or culture," he added. [emphasis added]

Playing up Microsoft's own culture and staff, Ballmer admitted that the software giant was late to produce a mature, usable search engine technology - despite launching the first MSN Search website as long ago as 1998. But with Bing slowly growing market share in the United States, he said that his eventual goal was to become the dominant engine.

"We've got great long-term optimism," he said. "Tomorrow's goal is to gain a few points, a tenth here, a tenth there - just keep working and working."

His comments about culture will be seen as a sideswipe at Google, which has built a reputation based in part on its attempt to build a culture diametrically opposed to Microsoft's.

Let's take Mr. Ballmer's statements at face value. Google's being first with a good product in the search category is the reason that other search engines have been unable to wrest that top spot from them.
I get it. That explains why Lotus and WordPerfect are the dominant entries in their segments, I suppose. Oh. Wait. Reverse that, as Willy Wonka might say.

More likely, this is Steve's attempt to explain away Bing's lack of a knockout punch. It seems that this doesn't happen to Microsoft very often - Quicken, anyone? - so they're not terribly adept at explaining it away.

Carnage du Jour - 23 February 10

Wow. Perhaps the best lamb chops I've ever made.

This was very simple, and was made to go with some oven-roasted sliced potatoes and onions that Heidi had made.
I simply heated a skillet nice and hot with some canola oil, then I rubbed the chops with kosher salt, Herbes de Provence (the good stuff with plenty of lavender), and a bit of chipotle pepper.
Once the first side was down, I did the same thing on the other side - but I added a bit of dry mustard (Colman's prepared, of course) to the mix. After getting a bit of a nice crust on each side, I added a handful of grape tomatoes and a splash of beef stock (since I had some sitting in the fridge) and popped it in a 400F oven for 5 minutes. At the 5-minute mark, I put a little bit of shredded mozzarella on top of each and let it melt briefly before hitting it with the broiler to add a touch of brown.

As I said before, Wow. Perhaps the best lamb chops I've ever made.

Lake Louise Poem - 2010

It hardly seems fair to keep this off the interwebs, so here is the offering from this year's SRB (Substitute Retreat Bard). Please enjoy responsibly.

The Clock
The Clock
Time is out of Joint.
Yes: at Lake Louise,
Time flies
Time flies like an arrow
[but fruit flies like a banana].

Yes, time flies at Lake Louise,
it flies and creates memories here
where Twenty Ten means Twenty-One,
and those memories are filled with
faces and stories and names.

Books and Naps,
Fire and Snow,
Music and Games.

Baubie, Beckius, Blunden,
Cobau, Caldare, DeWitt
Dixon, Driscoll, Dietz.

Tables of puzzles,
Tables of snacks,
Tables of logarithms.

Leach, Martin, Makos,
Morency, Norris, Pullen,
Richardson, Rossbach.

Ping-Pong and Foosball,
Retreaters Lost and Found,
Tether Ball and the Liberty Bell.

Sancya, Sicklesteel, Stelma
Stowell, Sullivan, Thomas,
van Becelaere, Van de Putte.

Time is out of Joint
Time flies at Lake Louise
The Clock
The Clock
The Calendar
Time is out of Joint.

I'm a Special Interest,

and you can too! (to paraphrase Mr. Colbert)

How droll it is to hear our Democratic leaders bleating about those nasty "special interests" and what they'll do to our nation if not headed off by their tireless work and vigilance on our behalf.

Well, this got me to thinking about special interests, and I've decided that since our current president refused public funding of his campaign (the first to do so), then he must have raised only special interest money.

Think about it: there are very few things that a government can do for all of its citizens. Not surprisingly, they line up nicely with the enumerated powers of the federal government in our Constitution. National defense, enforcement of contracts, police power, and limited ability to raise revenue to fund those kinds of activities - that's really about it.

Anything that entails taking something (e.g. taxes) from one group of citizens to benefit another group of citizens is nothing less than dealing with special interests.

So, if there's something I want you to pay for the government to do for me, I'm a special interest! This is a very liberating thought, don't you agree?

The way I'm thinking of this is, I don't want the State to force me to pay for what another citizen wants for himself. At the same time I don't want the State to force someone else to pay for what I want for myself. It's really pretty simple. Let the State enforce contracts among citizens, protect our borders and sovereignty, and maintain the agreed-upon rule of law.

That's something only a special interest could hate.

Lite's on, nobody's home

Well, I managed to get back into facebook despite their attempts to keep me out. It looks as though the problem actually originated in the DNS which I couldn't flush in my work PC (thanks a lot, IT folks - grr). Once I tried to log in from my home, I could get in and change the default to regular facebook and leave the option of switching to lite once I'm logged in.

It's a cleaner, faster interface, but I'm sure it will be changed some before it becomes the normal version - there are no ads!

At any rate, the problem is fixed (though no thanks to facebook who remain singularly silent on the customer support front).