Funny. I was just reading Fake Steve Jobs go on about how Windows Live is a pile of doo-doo, with his central theme being:

Trust me on this. Nothing in Windows Live will work the way they say it will.

The thing is, I teach a computer class, and though I try to switch as many as I can over to GMail, I know a lot will be using Hotmail. Also, I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot about Windows Live. Like it or not, it’s used by a lot of people, and in the position I’m in, I’d beeter at least know what it all is and have experience with it.

So I go to the sign-up page to start an account. I fill everything out.

And I get the form back, partially blanked out, with this:

I try it again. And again. Three Five Seven times over ten minutes one hour two hours. Each time, I have to retype the double-password, secret question’s answer, and Captcha field because they blank out. Each time, no luck. Sorry, the server is down.

How right can Fake Steve Jobs be?

Here’s an interesting interview between wingnut Neil Cavuto and wingnut Ben Stein on the topic of Republican Senator Larry Craig, via Crooks & Liars. I mention this not because it is unique, but because it is not unique. I have heard similar sentiments voiced recently by the right wing. Here are a few things that are seriously wrong with such arguments.

1. What happened to Craig at the airport was “pure police harassment and thuggery… a policeman drags him off… starts browbeating him, essentially threatens he’s going to ruin his career if the guy doesn’t plead guilty right away. This is Gestapo tactics…. Gestapo, Gestapo, Gestapo, it’s not America.”

Okay, this is the first big problem. The way Craig was treated was not thuggery, according to conservatives describing police interrogations of people who are not Republican politicians. If anything, it was likely more gentle and easy than most criminal suspects are treated. But Stein’s reaction to what happened, like so many conservatives, sounds so naive as to make you think that these guys are either disingenuous or that they’re idiots.

One common fact about police interrogations is that they are designed to bring about a confession. The policemen involved will wheedle, they’ll coax, they’ll challenge, they’ll threaten, they’ll lie… they’ll tell you that you’ll look guilty if you don’t talk to them, knowing that the more you talk, the more guilty you’ll look. They are specially trained to elicit responses, to keep a dialog going, to make you feel like you’ve got to talk, and to ensure you that it’ll help you, when they know it’ll hang you, even if you’re in fact innocent. Which is why lawyers always tell you to shut up, and why police always tell you that asking for a lawyer will make you look more guilty. What do right-wingers like to derisively call it? “Lawyering up”? So do the police; they believe you’re guilty, so anything to make you sound that way to a jury is what they want. If you’re innocent, then the smartest thing you can do is not talk, instead get a lawyer to navigate the system for you. But the police want you to gab away, and will do everything in their power to make you look guilty, including lying and browbeating.

And all of that is perfectly legal because conservatives have fought to make it so. And when it’s not a Republican who they favor who is being grilled, conservatives will be incredibly happy to see it happen, and will nod approvingly when such tactics can get a confession out of someone. But when it happens to one of them, suddenly it’s “entrapment” and “thuggery” and it’s unforgivable.

Please.

2. “The police have real work to do at the airport… hey, it’s an airport, hello? There are security problems at airports, al Qaeda, are you listening?”

Hmm, security people at airports trying to stop gay men from having sex in public restrooms. What kind of idiots could possibly have been responsible for setting policemen on that kind of task? Oh, wait–I know–conservatives just like you, you dumb fool! Who do you think it was, Ted Kennedy? He’s they guy you scream at if police are kept from trolling men’s rooms trying to catch gay sex solicitation.

Now, I don’t think that there are too many men who are not seeking gay sex who want to have that kind of thing happening in public bathrooms, whatever they may feel about homosexuality. But the reason that it’s in the restrooms in the first place is because conservatives made that one of the only places such solicitation is likely. And the reason why foot-tapping and hand-sliding is used to signal an encounter is because the police will arrest you more easily of you straight out and ask for sex.

Talk about creating a problem and then complaining about it.

3. “Our security people are entrapping perfectly honest U.S. senators.”

Yes, that’s right–policemen are going and staking out bathroom stalls in airports for the specific reason of catching perfectly honest U.S. senators. That’s the mission, as I understand it.

4. “This guy went in there, as far as we know all he did was tap his foot, or else listen to someone else tap his foot. He didn’t do an illegal act, he didn’t do an indecent act.”

That’s right! After all, all that he did was repeatedly stare into the policeman’s stall through the door crack from the outside over several minutes’ time, then go into the next stall, tap his foot, move his foot so that it touched the foot of the guy in the next stall, and then repeatedly ran his hand along the bottom of the partition between the stalls. That’s all! How many of us haven’t done that once or twice a week!

But what about the “wide stance” excuse? Well, think about it; imagine that you’re in a bathroom stall, sitting on the toilet. How far over do you have to move your foot so that it’s touching the foot of the guy in the next stall? I’m not suggesting you try it, but next time you’re in a stall, look at the foot of the next guy and just measure the reach in your mind. I’ll bet that you don’t find it to be an easy reach, that it takes a pretty deliberate act to do that. Which is why it’s used as a signal. I mean, think of all the times you’ve used a bathroom stall; how many times has someone else’s foot touched yours?

Of course, Stein and others will cling to the senator’s story, not the policeman’s, as if those nasty Gestapo innocent-senator-entrappers can’t be trusted. You can’t trust the police!

Now, imagine it wasn’t a Republican senator who was nabbed, but an out-of-the-closet non-Republican-politician gay man. You think that Stein or other conservatives would say the policeman was lying then? Of course not. This is the party of law and order, after all! They would fully believe whatever the policeman said, and the congratulate him for doing his job, which is to keep dirty, dangerous, immoral perverts like those from making public bathrooms into the new Sodom and Gomorra.

5. “What did he do wrong? Just tell me what he did wrong? And even suppose he was soliciting for gay sex? Gay sex is not illegal in the United States, the Supreme Court has said that. If it were illegal, it’d be a different story. It’s not illegal, he didn’t do anything illegal.”

Craig pled guilty to “disorderly conduct” charges. Again, I would point out: the only reason why this kind of stuff is illegal, the only reason laws have been made against this, or that laws meant for other crimes are used in these cases, the only reason why policemen are assigned to find it and arrest people for it, is because of people like Ben Stein, and other conservatives, who have campaigned for decades about how gay sex is wrong, immoral, should be illegal, etc. etc.

Don’t you just love how conservatives change into gay rights advocates when one of their own senators is charged with soliciting gay sex?

In short, the arguments made by conservatives like Stein are blatantly and unforgivably hypocritical, the eternal right-wing double standard.

As you might already know, “public television” in Japan is expressed as NHK (“Nippon Hosou Kyokai,” or “Japan Broadcasting Corporation”). NHK has two basic channels, general and educational, as well as satellite versions. It is controlled by the state.

One of the big controversies around NHK is how to fund it. It is funded by viewer fees, collected by agents of NHK who come to your door (though many give via automatic bank payments). However, a lot of people don’t pay those fees, for whatever reason. The law as currently written requires payment, but does not allow for any punishment for non-payment. Because a lot of people don’t pay, it’s causing a stir in government; some are suggesting that penalties for non-payment be assigned, and that fees be cut by 20% to make it more palatable.

All of this comes across to me as exceedingly stupid. If you’re going to make it mandatory, then why not simply add the money to the national budget and collect via taxes? A lot cheaper, a lot simpler, and far easier to enforce.

Does anyone out there know anything about .htaccess? Because I am getting extraordinarily frustrated here. For months, maybe years, I have tried to run hotlink and referral spam prevention using a .htaccess file, and never got it to work. About a week ago, it seemed like I got it to work… then it wasn’t working. Again. Every time I try a new way, it either lets everybody see my images, or it blocks everybody including my own site.

Please somebody contact me in the comments and help me out. We’ll talk by email. Thank you!

I’m starting to get hotlinking from a new angle. Over time, I have taken pictures of cats and posted them here. The problem: there now seems to be a surge in the number of people and web sites where a cat-themed role-playing game, with feline “Warriors,” and everyone seems to be linking to my images of cats.

I swear, people like this ruin the web for everyone. Now I can’t post images of cats unless I want to be used by these people. There are way too many different sites on different domains to block effectively.

Anyone know what this whole feline role-playing thing is all about?

There’s an American who lives on my floor that I met for the first time several weeks ago. Very friendly, very outgoing; seems like a really gregarious, sociable guy. I’ve seen him around on a few more occasions; once walking into the building with another guy, and a few other times I’ve seen foreign men leaving his apartment. I didn’t know if it was the same guy or if each one was a different person. I assumed that he did business out of his apartment.

Well, it turns out I was right, sort of. I met him on the elevator again today. Again, just as friendly as ever. On the way down, I asked him about his work. He said that he ran several businesses. “One of them is a male escort business,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m on my way to Starbucks right now to meet a guy about that. If I find him acceptable, I take him back to the apartment,” where, I assumed, they would work out the details of the work. I did not ask further.

Interesting who you meet in the hallways.

Fred Thompson is now officially running for president. A few months ago, this was a troubling worry. Now, not so much. Not that he was ever really a heavyweight, but he had a Reaganesque feel to him: no substance, but Hollywood glamour and a voice that could win votes. (For all that conservatives bash liberals about loving Hollywood, the truth is that right-wingers swoon far more easily to Hollywood stars, ecstatic at the chance of having a Hollywood star run for office as a Republican.) Why Thompson decided to run now is a bit of a mystery, as his campaign has kind of fizzled out, and few take him seriously now.

Josh Marshall reports on what he calls “The Muck Gap.” Media outlets like CNN strive to be “bipartisan” in reporting on scandals–only, it seems, when there are more conservative scandals than liberal ones, and not the other way around. Marshall points out quite rightly that even eight months after Democrats took control of Congress, the overwhelming majority of scandals continue to be Republican.

Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia is retiring, meaning that popular former Virginia Governor Mark Warner, a Democrat, may run and has a good chance of gaining a seat for the Dems next year. More bad news for Republicans, who are already facing probable, almost certain losses in the Senate next year already, as Republicans will be defending almost twice as many seats as Democrats (21 as opposed to 12).

Bush’s PR shock troops in action in Iraq: Democratic politicians now are finding that their visits to Baghdad are preceded by some unknown agency handing out “bios” of them to the troops which are edited to make them look bad.

At the recommendation of a friend, I watched the BBC’s 2005 3-part documentary, “The Power of Nightmares.” It is available online for viewing or download. It details the origins and evolution of neoconservatism and islamofascism, how they both have very similar core concepts related to neo-fascism, and how they have been the answer to each others’ problems, using each other to gain power and influence. There is a lot in this documentary to make you stop, think, and reconsider what you believe and what you have been told about the “war on terror.” Well worth watching.

Warning: this is another post where I moan and whine about something minor that ticked me off. Feel free to skip over it.

For quite some time, my PHS cell phone had trouble charging, mostly because the contacts on the bottom where you rest it on the charger got worn through. I blogged on it before. I finally got it repaired… but didn’t know the hassle it would produce. First it was one of those runaround things, where the shop I bought it from said it was the service provider’s (“Willcom”s) responsibility; Willcom said it was the phone maker’s responsibility; and then the maker said it was Willcom’s responsibility.

The big trouble for me was the hassle of having to go to the Willcom shop. The closest one is located on the West side of Ikebukuro. If you know Ikebukuro, then you know that it’s not easy at all to get from one side to the other. Add to that the fact that the parking enforcement mercenaries seem to be out in full force in West Ikebukuro; I nearly got ticketed a few weeks ago when I went by scooter. Which means going by bicycle is necessary–but going by bike involves getting on and off the bike repeatedly to walk it up and down stairs and crap like that. So it’s no fun making the trip.

I had already made the trip once (I had to wait in line for ten minutes to get served) to find the shop and be told that it was the maker’s responsibility. Now, with the maker telling me to go back to Willcom, I fully expected them to deny responsibility again. What happened instead (after another wait in line) was almost worse: they accepted the responsibility to have it repaired. Which means I wasted a trip and time calling the maker; they essentially lied to me the first time. They accepted the phone for repair and gave me a loaner… but told me it would take an hour to have it fixed. So I had to waste an hour sitting there waiting for them to get around to doing a switch (which later they admitted could be done in 10 minutes). I couldn’t go back home, despite how close it was, because by the time I got back, I would have to turn around and leave again immediately.

After a week’s time, they called me back to say the phone was ready. So I went back… and was told to wait for another hour for the number to be switched back (this after waiting in line for fifteen minutes). Why didn’t they do that before I acme in preparation? Maybe they couldn’t have two phones like that at the same time, I don’t know. But I needed to get back home faster than that, so in frustration, I told them I’d pick it up later; they said, no problem, come and pick it up anytime.

So I just went back to pick it up. Guess what?

That’s right. It wasn’t ready. The server was down, they claimed. But they offered me the loaner back until they could get it cleared up. Why hadn’t they called me up when they discovered this, so as not to make me waste another trip? No answer, they just bowed very deeply in apology. Which was more frustrating–I didn’t feel like accepting any apologies, I just wanted not to be forced to waste more time and effort.

I stressed to them that the next time I came back, I just wanted to show up, be handed the phone, and then get out. They offered me the loaner back, but I was having none of that–I knew that they would again make me wait for as much as an hour while they tried to switch yet again. At which point they said they could do it in ten minutes. The hell with promises from these clowns, I thought. I said no, keep the loaner, make sure that my phone is reset and ready to be picked up without the hassle, before you call me and tell me to come over yet again.

Frankly, I can’t wait to get an iPhone and be rid of PHS. The one good thing it has going for it is that it’s cheap–I get a 2000-yen-a-month contract and 10-yen-per-minute calls. But PHS has weak signal strength, not as comprehensive coverage, and (now I have discovered) crappy service.

Rant over. What else is happening in the world today?

Akihabara is not what it used to be. It used to be the Mecca of electronics, the place where you could bargain and haggle. Well, you might be able to haggle in some places, but not like before.

I remember, years back, wanting to buy a Japanese word processor–back before PCs were commonplace in Japan, when everyone used these electronic type-writer like machines just for typing and printing. A “Wapuro.” I went to several stores in Akihabara, and asked prices. These prices were always listed for an item, but were almost always marked out in red–you had to ask for the price, and could usually talk it down somewhat. Each time I got the price for a store, I wrote down the store’s name and the price in a notepad, so I could remember who had what for how much. After going to four or five places, I noticed something: the prices I was given were lower for each successive store I visited–the first shop had the highest price, the last had the lowest.

I finally figured it out: each time I visited a new store, the salesman was getting a peek at the notepad I was carrying, checking out the lowest price, and then beating it by a little. I had been haggling down the price without ever realizing it. But that’s what Akihabara used to be–not just the little stores, but the big chain stores as well.

That no longer holds true. Akihabara is different today. Maybe you could haggle, but I don’t think you’d get nearly as far as you could have twenty years ago. Instead, you usually don’t even have to go to Akihabara; you can get good and sometimes even better prices by visiting the electronics chains like Yodobashi, Bic, or others like them in Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, or elsewhere. There’s even a new chain, Labi, which just opened up a big store in Ikebukuro. For a straight-out electronics purchase, I would usually go to places like these.

Akihabara has also transformed from an electronics heaven to mostly an anime and gaming heaven. On the main drag, at least, most of the stores seem dedicated to video gaming or some form of anime-related electronics/media. A shop bearing the name “DVD” in big letters likely won’t be selling any DVD players, but instead game DVDs.

But if you want to buy something unusual, Akihabara is the best place for it. For example, I wanted a region-free DVD player, one that could handle Divx files. For that combo, Akihabara was probably the best place; I found a good machine for it. That could be found in the bigger shops, ones that had duty-free sales for non-Japanese.

Similarly, I needed to get a USB keyboard–with an English, not Japanese, layout. I found a shop in Akihabara that specialized in keyboards, and had a few dozen English ones. For that, you have to go to the back streets.

Instead of shopping on the main drag, take a cross street to the streets behind the main drag, on the other side from the Yamanote Line. Here, you’ll find the real electronics heaven. Lots of little stores selling all manner of stuff in all manner of ways. A lot of shops will have these dirty plastic or cardboard bins chock full of cheap stuff, from knock-off products to cheap imports. I bought a 4-button mouse that was identical to a nice one I bought made by Logitech; everything was the exact same, except for the maker’s logo. The Logitech I had bought on sale at Yodobashi for ¥2000; this knock-off was for about ¥600.

It seems that almost anything can be found in those bins, from cables to removable drives to gadgets and toys to, well, whatever.

There was a ¥1000 3-megapixel digital camera with USB port that I was sorely tempted to try out, just for fun. A ¥650 set of wireless headphones. Any number of mice from ¥500 yen up, but the most expensive ones were still cheaper than the cheapest ones at the major retail outlets.

A lot of the shops get way too techy for the ordinary buyer, though–for example, there are lots of shops which sell stuff for people to make their own PCs.

But if you really want elemental electronics, try visiting the place I refer to as The Maze. Very close to JR Akihabara station, it’s a building on a fair-sized plot of land that long ago was converted to stalls in narrow aisles open to the outside.

In here, you can buy loads of just about anything and everything electronic–not computer-related, necessarily, but electronics-related. There are shops which sell nothing but wiring, or nothing but LED lamps and other lighting bits and pieces. One shop sells nothing but old but functioning radio tubes, some priced in the hundreds of dollars. For the home electronics-engineer hobbyist, this place is a treasure trove. You can also find larger components and systems, especially surveillance cameras/closed-circuit TVs, GPS systems for cars, and stuff like that.

These places are the main reason to go to Akihabara these days… unless some big new anime-based video game is going to be released. But I like the back streets better.

This in the news today:

[A] 38-year-old woman, who was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, was being driven to a hospital near the western city of Osaka after she suffered from stomach cramps and bleeding, according to Kyodo News agency and other local media.

Nine hospitals closer to her home in Nara prefecture (state), over 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, had earlier refused to admit her, saying they were full, the reports said.

Her water broke two hours into the journey. Ten minutes later, the ambulance collided with a minivan.

There is just so much wrong with this story, but it reinforces my apprehension about ever needing an ambulance in Japan. Honestly, unless I feel it’s necessary, I will seriously consider hailing a taxi instead, especially if there is nothing that can be fixed before getting to the hospital in any case. At least taxis drive aggressively. Ambulances here tend to be rather slow and over-cautious.

So, why did the ambulance in question get into the accident? It’s possible that the driver was panicked by the patient being in such dire straits, with so many hospitals refusing service and the only accepting one so far away. But there’s even money on the bet that it wasn’t the ambulance driver’s fault.

Here in Japan, I have noticed an alarming disregard for emergency vehicles by drivers. Every time I see a fire truck or ambulance approach an intersection with sirens blaring and lights blazing, I stop immediately–and am always shocked by how many people don’t stop. Just a few weeks ago, I was at an intersection near Tokyo Dome, and an ambulance was clearly, audibly and visibly, approaching from the cross street. I had stopped early, but most traffic continued until the ambulance came to a stop at the intersection, shouting pleas over their loudspeaker for traffic to clear. Despite this, a car simply ran through the intersection, making the ambulance wait… and then, to my shock, a city bus drove through after the car as if nothing unusual was going on. No way the bus driver did not see the ambulance. This was egregious, even for Tokyo. And yet, I shouldn’t be shocked, as I see this kind of thing all too often.

That’s why I have the feeling that the minivan driver was at least partly at fault: I can so easily imagine the driver simply deciding that where he was going at 5:10 am was more important than some ambulance.

So what happened to the poor woman then?

After the accident occurred, the hospital in Takatsuki refused to admit the woman, with one official telling ambulance workers, “Treatment is difficult as the woman has already had a miscarriage. We also have an emergency operation.”

Another two hospitals refused admission and after another request the initial hospital in Takatsuki decided to admit her.

When Bush effectively made the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution null and void, the media barely blinked. When Alberto Gonzales claimed that the right to Habeas Corpus did not exist, the press wasn’t all that stirred up. Just the administration shredding the Constitution here, folks, nothing to get excited about.

But, boy, do they love a sex scandal! Even such that when a Republican senator is caught soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, it becomes a week-long media frenzy like no other–even though the actual impact on the country is about zero. Idaho has a Republican governor, so if Craig resigns or is otherwise forced out, he’ll just be replaced by another Republican, not that Idahoans are really going to elect a Democratic senator anyway. And this scandal takes place far enough away from any election that it won’t make a difference in terms of sullying the party in general and hurting its chances. So really, this story has “back page” written all over it… but it remains top news in the media and will stay there for a few days.

Interestingly, Republicans are pretty much turning on Craig, wishing privately and sometimes publicly that he’d just have the decency to resign, to leave town. This in contrast to their attitude concerning Louisiana Senator David Vitter, who was also caught soliciting sex illegally; with Vitter, they defended him strongly and pooh-poohed calls for his resignation. And it’s not just because Craig solicited man-on-man sex and Vitter solicited hetero sex. Rather, it’s because Craig’s governor is a Republican, so the seat is safe, while Vitter’s was a Democrat, and they would lose a seat. That’s the overriding principle here, and not one of perceived “morality.”

Now, Craig–aside from being a knee-jerk Republican and therefore blaming everyone in sight, including, of course, the media–is practically pleading with the public to believe that he’s not gay. Almost as if that’s more important than anything else here, that nobody thinks he’s queer.

Now, I may get into trouble for this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s telling the truth there–as may be several other conservative figures in power who have been similarly caught standing behind another man with their pants down. What we’re talking about here is not something that is automatically homosexual in nature, at least as far as orientation is concerned. Remember, sex, for many people, is almost inextricably intertwined with power and control, especially anal sex. For heterosexual men in particular, receiving anal sex is the ultimate signal of submission.

And that may be what a lot of this is about: thirst for power and control intermixed with a twisted sense of sex as perverse, sinful, and shameful–you know, core conservative values.

(Yes, yes, I am fully aware that I am tremendously oversimplifying and perhaps mischaracterizing an incredibly complex and involved psychological landscape. Hell, I have no idea if it was anal or oral sex he intended to solicit, or if anal, whether he was to be the pitcher or the catcher. Still.)

Well, this is interesting. Hadn’t heard of this before. Apparently, there is a growing number of people who are homeless, but still making just enough money to get by–but not enough to get an apartment, apparently, or at least they prefer not to have one. So instead, they spend their nights at Internet cafes, which provide shower facilities and even sell clean underwear. Honest–unless this is a huge hoax that someone put over on the news services. Supposedly, the Japanese government has found 5,400 people who do this, regularly.

The story I found claims that the “refugees” spend ¥3000 for a 5-hour stay (with a meal provided) and get a shower for ¥200 extra. However, I find that pricing to be suspect; 30 days in a month, ¥3000 yen/day, that’s ¥90,000 per month. While an Internet cafe might be nice, one can rent an apartment for much cheaper than that, if you’re willing to settle for less-than-luxurious conditions.

Either the prices most of these people pay are much cheaper (and I’m guessing that you can find much better than ¥3000 for 5 hours if you look hard enough–I found a cafe that was ¥400/hour for a two-person booth, and I am sure that many drop their prices for the late night customers), or the people in question simply prefer things to be taken care of for them, not to mention having a nice space provided–some of the Internet cafes offer good surroundings.

It is also a good alternative to a hotel. I remember staying in a capsule hotel once, and it was horrible; it was essentially a watering hole for drunk businessmen who were either snoring loudly, watching TV loudly, or were congregating in the corridors and chatting all night. Nor was it really that cheap; an Internet cafe would be cheaper, and likely a lot less noisy.

I’m getting better at cooking, I think. Or at least in presentation. As I am at home most of the day during my August vacation, and Sachi has to work most days, I am cooking most of the dinners. My repertoire is still limited, but I’m getting more of a feel for things. Tonight’s dinner, shown in the image below: stir-fry chicken with onions and green peppers, with garlic, onion, and pimenton spices, served on a bed of lettuce, shaved onions and carrots, with sliced spring onions (“negi”) on top. The side dish is fried potatoes: dice the potatoes and boil for 6-10 minutes, then fry in a pan with a little extra virgin olive oil and apply spices to taste. With beer and toasted bread rolls, delicious. And a relatively simple meal.

As we sat down to eat, we were treated to constant lightning flashes. Though a thunderstorm seemed to rage nearby, we heard little thunder; instead, there were repeated flashes every five or ten seconds, many bright, but none with an accompanying boom. Reminiscent of my mother commenting that when they heard thunderstorms when she was a kid, they said “God’s bowling tonight,” Sachi tonight commented, “God is taking a lot of pictures now.”

How much do you want to bet that as Gonzales retires, the White House will try to dismis all investigations in regards to the Justice department, effectively saying, “Hey, Gonzales is gone now, the matter is closed”?

I’ve had enough of the post-resignation testimonials about Gonzales to make me seriously ill, particularly from the president himself. A lot of right-wingers seem to be sighing with relief, glad to see him gone, but at the same time chiming in on the whole he-was-an-honest-guy-smeared-by-the-Democrats meme. As if illegally, brazenly corrupting the Justice Department with partisan politics was not bad enough. As if the USA firings and the subsequent, multiple lies under oath weren’t a problem (do I even need to mention the Clinton impeachment here?). As if Gonzales’ shameless advocacy for torture wasn’t enough of a brand of illegitimacy.

Gonzales fought to hide Dick Cheney’s allowing energy industry leaders to write government energy policy. He has been a force behind the more abusive elements of the “PATRIOT” Act and other violations of Constitution rights since 9/11, including warrantless wiretapping–which in order to push through, Gonzales went to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft to pressure him to sign his approval for it. Yeah, a real saint. And let’s not forget that this is the guy who tried to argue that Americans don’t have the right to Habeas Corpus.

It is ironic that right-wingers are all teary-eyed about how badly those goddamned vicious liberals are mistreating this great man, when Gonzales himself claimed that the Geneva Convention’s use of the words “outrages upon personal dignity” and “inhuman treatment” were so vague that we should be allowed to torture people.

And how did this great legal mind get his start? By doing dirty work for his boss, Texas Governor George W. Bush. Bush, you see, had been arrested for drunk driving years before, and wanted to cover it up. But he ran into trouble when he pulled a PR stunt. Bush had received a call to jury duty, and decided to make PR hay out of it. Saying that it was “a feeble excuse” to claim he was too busy or too important for the task, he went to court. He failed to fill out the legally required part of the juror’s form that required a listing of his criminal record, but that wasn’t the scandal. No, it was when Dubya, by chance, was assigned to a drunk-driving case, and realized that he would be asked, under oath, if the had ever been arrested for drunk driving.

Alberto Gonzales to the rescue!

…before the case began, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge’s chambers. Gonzales then asked Crain to “consider” striking Bush from the jury, making the novel “conflict of interest” argument that the Texas governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant (who worked at an Austin nightclub called Sugar’s), the judge said. “He [Gonzales] raised the issue,” Crain said. Crain said he found Gonzales’ argument surprising, since it was “extremely unlikely” that a drunken-driving conviction would ever lead to a pardon petition to Bush. But “out of deference” to the governor, Crain said, the other lawyers went along. Wahlberg said he agreed to make the motion striking Bush because he didn’t want the hard-line governor on his jury anyway. But there was little doubt among the participants as to what was going on. “In public, they were making a big show of how he was prepared to serve,” said Crain. “In the back room, they were trying to get him off.”

Gonzales lied about this episode when he was being reviewed by the Senate for confirmation. An auspicious start to his stint as AG, just as was his start in politics in Texas.

While working for Bush in Texas, Gonzales was also hip-deep in another Bush scandal, again involving perjury. In this case, Gonzales helped Bush get excused from testifying in a corruption case. Bush was heavily involved in Texas political corruption. In 1996, Eliza May was appointed as director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission, and started doing her job all too well. She started investigating a funeral home business that had given sizable donations to Bush and his father. The business’ representative went to Bush’s chief of staff, and May was soon fired from her job. She filed a whistleblower lawsuit, and Bush was subpoenaed in it; Gonzales help get Bush out of having to testify, in a way that Bush literally perjured himself (but, like so many other times Bush broke the law, was never prosecuted for). In that case, Gonzales also received a memo which noted that two Texas funeral commissioners had ties to the funeral home–illegal, but Gonzales did nothing. His defense? Even back then, Gonzales was using the “I forgot” excuse, and claimed he didn’t recall such a memo.

This is the great man that the president is memorializing tonight. A criminal, a liar, a corrupt political crony.

In other words, his kind of guy.

The new iPods are coming! The new iPods are coming! Maybe! Probably!

Well, almost certainly, now. Finally, after so long waiting for the whole iPhone wave to subside, Apple is, it seems, ready to release the next generation of iPods. Already spy images (possibly faked) of the new iPod Nano design (wide-bodied with muted colors) have been flying over the Internet. The images, which could easily have fallen into the “that’s so fake” trash pile, were given a stamp of approval by Apple Legal, which demanded their removal from the originating site (which, of course, prompted far greater coverage on so many other sites).

Rumors have been going around about a new iPod release for some time; almost every month this summer has been the rumored release date. A few days ago, it became known that Apple was holding a special event on September 5th, and the rumors started to fly that this was the iPod announcement. And now there seems to be hard evidence that this is true, beyond what Apple Legal does: iPod supply is drying up at retailers. This is about as close to a sure-fire indicator that you can hope for that a new model is coming out.

At least some of the models, probably the full-sized ones, will run on OS X. The widely-held belief is that the full-size models will also be full-screen and touch-screen; if they’re not, expect a lot of anger from expectant fans. Essentially, everybody expects the big iPods to be just like iPhones, but without the phone part. Expect WiFi to be absent; if Apple provided WiFi and the ability to use Safari, the product would probably bee too much like an iPhone. It would be cool if they had it, but unrealistic. Not to mention that with WiFi, you might even be able to get a Skype hack and turn it into a virtual iPhone.

Then there are the Nanos, apparently getting a bigger screen, and maybe running OS X themselves–though that’s lower on the probability scale, unless each machine will have a lot more flash memory than in the past.

Some even expect the iPhone Nano to be released–a cheaper, smaller, less-featured iPhone. I doubt that, as Apple seems to want to keep the two lines distinct from each other.

We’ll see in a week’s time. Until then, expect the rumors to fly wild.

In other Mac News: If you saw this story from Symantec, then you can safely disregard it.

“Apple has been demonstrated to suffer a number of vulnerabilities over the years,” he said. “Suffice to say that Symantec and other software security vendors do produce anti-virus software for the Mac because we believe there is the potential of a problem.”

And the fact that they sell software to “protect” your computer has nothing at all to do with the fact that they constantly release reports telling people how open to attack the Mac OS is. Of course, because there has never been an actual functioning piece of malware for OS X in the wild, they have to keep talking about those “vulnerabilities,” which are nothing but potential weak spots where hackers could attack… but somehow never do. A lot of these vulnerabilities require rather intricately unlikely environments and sets of circumstances, like two Bluetooth-active Macs which have not had their software updated for a year, in the same room, where one is infected and the other has a user who blindly accepts and approves of a mysterious, unknown Bluetooth device that does not exist.

So let’s lay it out once again: Macs are not invulnerable. They can be attacked. However, they never have been, and it is likely that they will not be for some time. And when they do start falling prey to viral attacks, they will still be far less susceptible to attack than Windows PCs. You don’t need anti-viral software today, but you might at some time in the future. So don’t pay attention to the companies making the software trying to scare you into buying what you don’t need.

Elsewhere, a company claims that it has developed a way to unlock the iPhone so that it can be used with any service provider. Apparently, they’re for real, because AT&T is taking legal action to stop them. From the best I can understand of what people have been saying, it is not illegal (or at least not something anyone will sue you personally for) to unlock your iPhone, but it is probably illegal to unlock iPhones as a paid service.

Under the law as it stands, you are allowed to unlock your cell phone, at least under the criteria listed here (pdf):

Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

That means that it is probably legal to unlock your iPhone in order to subscribe to a different provider–but it is not legal to unlock other people’s iPhones for a fee. However, if I read the exception correctly, then it would not be illegal to sell software to the consumer which allows them to unlock their iPhones–so long as they are the ones doing the unlocking. However, there’s a lot in there which goes over my head, so I could be reading it wrong. Check out the pdf linked to above, and see pages 48-52 for relevant material.

The process itself is apparently software-based, takes only a few minutes, and is simple to use. The only feature which is fully disabled is Visual Voicemail, because that’s an AT&T service; however, if other carriers start using it, it should work on an iPhone. The unlocking company claims that the unlock is “restore and upgrade resistant,” which suggests that Apple can’t “switch you off” or otherwise disable the unlock via a software upgrade.

What is more interesting: the unlock seems to be able to free up the iPhone for users outside the U.S. Hmm… I think I’ll wait on that for a little while myself. First, it’ll probably cut you off from upgrades and stuff from Apple (not to mention most likely voiding the warranty), and second, by the time it comes out officially in Japan, it’ll probably be 3G, and with more flash memory. I’m guessing.

At least one consumer is fighting back against the locking in general, filing a class-action lawsuit (pdf) demanding that iPhones be unlocked for use with any carrier. I can sympathize, and I believe that locking a product like that, while it may be necessary in business sense, is unfair to the consumer. Nevertheless, this guy’s case is, to put it bluntly, stupid. The basis of the suit is that Apple did not adequately inform buyers that they were locked into using AT&T with the iPhone. Sorry, but to not have been aware of the AT&T lock-in is a lame excuse at best. Maybe, in its direct ads, Apple didn’t add a huge you’ve-got-to-use-AT&T disclaimer or anything, but the knowledge of this fact was so widespread, and the practice of locking phones so common, that you’d have to be an idiot not to realize it. Kind of like suing Toyota to make them install an ethanol engine in your car for free because, when they sold it to you, they did not go out of their way to inform you that it required gasoline.

And finally, I spent a few hours in Akihabara yesterday, trying to find a monitor solution for the new Mac Mini my school has bought. I wanted to be able to use both a monitor and a TV output for the machine, so I could face the class, see a monitor, and have the same image put on a TV behind me. Alas, it seems that this is unlikely, at least without a few hundred dollars’ worth of equipment and add-ons. I can display on a monitor, or I can display on a TV… but not both.

The trip also brought forth a few things I don’t particularly like about Macs, the biggest being the lack of microphone support. This seems so obvious, especially in the age of Skype, but Apple continues to flub this one. The “sound in” port on the Mac cannot support 99% (not a hard statistic) of the mics out there. If you want a headphone-mic setup for the Mac, you have to go with a USB solution. Not very smart. Apple has also been non-standard in the types of monitor ports it uses, as if a standard port would kill them. VGA ports don’t exist on Macs, despite being the dominant type. Even S-Video ports on the Mac differ from standard ones, or at least the ones used on PCs. And from what I can tell, there are different types of DVI ports, and the ones used on Macs are, again, dissimilar from a lot of ones used elsewhere.

Apple has been ahead of the game in several ways, like wisely dropping the floppy disk before anyone else, and having a high-speed hot-swappable cable interface (Firewire) long before USB caught up, but in terms of ports and interfaces in general, and A/V interfaces in particular, their history has been spotty. Not as bad as their history with making a decent mouse, of course.

Man, I have been spending way too much time primping the WordPress stuff on this blog. I am probably going to have to take a break from this for a few weeks while I get other business out of the way. In this post, I just wanted to make a few notes about how a few problems were fixed.

First of all, Japanese in the posts. Apparently, if you install WordPress version 2.2 using “Fantastico” (web hosting CPanel software) or in some other fashions as well, there is a bug in the wp-config.php file, specifically two lines:

define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

By deleting these two lines (or putting two slashes at the start of each line to “turn them off”), Japanese will appear fine. I thought I had a deal-breaker when pre-existing smart quotes in other posts suddenly turned to gibberish, only to discover that this new bug only happened in blog posts made after the switch. I simply re-uploaded the stories, and now everything is kosher.

As you might also have noticed, I was finally able to center the calendar. In the stylesheet, under the #wp-calendar heading, I added these two lines:

margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;

Apparently, they cause free-sized margins to be created to the left and right of the table, effectively centering it. Frankly, a command like “align: center;” would be a lot easier to figure out….

I have also added a new plug-in, called “On This Day.” It shows blog posts from the same day over past years. It’s smart enough to match the day on individual entry pages as well. One problem I had initially was that the widget showed the day’s posts from the current year as well, something which bugged me to the point of distraction, and I tool it down. But I mentioned this to the widget’s developer… and a few days later he posted a new version with the requested feature of excluding this year’s posts. How’s that for customer service?

I added a “robots.txt” file to ask Google Image to stop scanning my images folder, but that doesn’t erase the thousands of files they’ve cached already, and probably will have there for years to come. Still, you gotta start somewhere.

So far, spam has not been that big a problem. Only one spam has gotten past Askimet, not counting a few that needed Askimet moderation (but did not get to the main moderation area). But the spammers have not yet quite figured out where my main site went yet.

For a long time I have had trouble blocking sites using the .htaccess file. Turns out that I was (for the Nth time) the victim of bad documentation. The best I had been able to get was one site blocked (I used that to block MySpace), but after that, none of the blocks would work. Just today I stumbled upon a web page that actually went to the trouble to explain that if you want to block more than one site, you have to add “,OR” tot he deny rule. I had been writing:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace\.com [NC]

…but what I should have been writing was:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace\.com [NC,OR]

The “NC” being a command to ignore case, and the “OR” being a note to add another text string to block. Without the “,OR” added, only the first block in the list works. Would it have really killed the authors of the hundred other pages I had depended on previously to make such an obvious and vital note? Sheesh. I also finally figured out that to block access to an image, you had to place the .htaccess file in the directory which has the images to be blocked.

Now I just have to figure out the specific syntax to block any site that has the word “forum” in the URL, and my life will be ten times easier….

Sometimes, living with Sachi, I pick up a good expression in Japanese, here and there. One that I got a while back was when we were watching the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith. As they went through that long battle scene through their house, Sachi kept saying, “arienai!” (“有り得ない!”)* Sachi asked me how to say that in English; at the time, the best I could come up with was “That’s impossible!”

Tonight, we watched The Princess Bride, a very nice movie, one of Rob Reiner’s earlier directing jobs (Reiner is a very dependably good director). As we were watching it, I was explaining a lot of the vocabulary to Sachi (the DVD I have didn’t have subtitles, neither Japanese nor English). And one of the oft-repeated words in the film appealed to me as the perfect translation for “arienai”: “inconceivable!”

*I tried to write the Japanese for this, but have just discovered that Japanese won’t print here… bug #17 that I have to try to fix…. Fixed it. Configuration file problem.

Well, I’ve just found a major flaw in WordPress: the lack of a halfway-decent search engine. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the stupid theme that I based my design on, but as far as I can see, the “Search” function in the sidebar is limited to presenting the results of a search in full, unabridged form, printing whole posts in groups of ten instead of giving a succinct, easy-to-read list of titles with short excerpts. I have found and tried a dozen or so widgets, and not a single one works. Either they break with the most recent version of WordPress, or their documentation is so bad that it’s impossible to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to do.

Does anyone out there with WordPress savvy have a suggestion? I would rather avoid Google searching; I would like to control the appearance and not have the search leave my domain. I know that I am essentially asking for what Movable Type had, but it’s more out of functionality than simple dedication to what I am used to.

Thanks to everyone who helps out, in advance.

About a month and a half ago, I wrote an entry about the garbage handling in the new building we live in, and noted that the recycled garbage room’s door was strangely locked. Not only do you have to wave your room key over a sensor to get into the room, you have to wave a key over another sensor to get out of the room. This struck me as strange, but I accepted it as okay because before you could get into the room, you had to have a key anyway; I also figured that you could get out of the room via the garage entrance. I figured the double-lock system was to keep people from getting into the building from the garage area via the recycled garbage room.

Well, it turns out that this system is pretty dumb. First of all, the building’s security is kind of a joke. People are constantly entering the building without a key, simply by following in people who open the doors legitimately. When Sachi and I held a housewarming party last month, more than half the guests got past the “locked” front entrance. If someone wants to get in, all they have to do is stand outside pretending to fiddle with their cell phone; when they see someone approach the entrance (from the inside or out), they just pretend to finish text messaging or whatever and then walk to the front door as the other person is passing through. No one questions this. So really, there is no reason to have extra protection elsewhere. The whole “autolock” security thing is weak as tissue paper. Not that I am worried about security; there are cameras and stuff that help prevent crime, each apartment’s door is securely locked, and it’s not like crime is rampant in Japan, anyway.

But the garbage room double-lock is dumb for another reason as well: people can and do get locked into the garbage room. Last week, as I was taking out the trash, I heard a banging on the door to the recycled garbage room. I opened it up, and there was a poor cleaning lady. Somehow she had gotten in, probably as a tenant entered with their key–but when she was finished, she realized that she didn’t have her key! She said that she had been locked in there for fully twenty minutes! Apparently, I was the first person to come along. Sure enough, when I checked, the doors to the garage were locked from the inside, in addition to the door leading to the interior hallway. All the doors were locked from the inside, and there is no intercom in the room.

Recently, I posted about the Iraq War and noted that right wingers have touted a “drop” in Coalition troop fatalities as evidence that the Surge™ is working and things are getting better in Iraq. I pointed out that a July dip in casualty numbers has been a pattern that has held true over three years and so it does not have anything to do at all with the “Surge.”

A frequent visitor who gamely carries water for the Bush administration pointed me to an article in USA Today which seemed to support the idea that the “Surge” is working: that “major attacks” have declined since the “Surge” began. That, plus a claim that tips from local Iraqis about insurgents have quadrupled, were the only “hard” evidence that things were getting better in Iraq. My visitor challenged me to read that and answer to it.

My reply: it was cherry-picking data, choosing just two figures from two dates each, out of a virtual galaxy of statistics, and claiming that they represented the whole of the image:

If your source showed *all* the data, I would take it more seriously. Instead, it is an example of the administration releasing a story through indirect agents (in this case, military officials including a retired general friendly to Petraeus) who uses cherry-picked numbers to make his case. For all we know, the trend could be increasing–and the reporter, like so many these days, simply reports what he’s fed. Did he investigate the whole dataset, get all the numbers and facts and figures, so as to confirm or deny the numbers he was given as accurately portraying a trend? Apparently not–he most likely just accepted what was set before him and wrote it up like a good little puppy.

Show me the level of said violence each month over the past one or two years. Add the number of people killed as opposed to simply the number of attacks–were the 130 in March killing just a dozen on average and the 70 in July killing 50 on average? Then add the *total* number of attacks of all types, and the total number of Iraqis killed–also month-by-month over the last year or two.

Well, ask and ye shall receive. Kevin Drum just happened, a few days after those comments, to post an entry that had far better data–not all that I asked for, but a lot further along those lines than the USA Today article provided. Here is the data as provided by Drum (from The Brooking Institute [pdf file]):

Violence Metrics

¹Methodology changed dramatically between 2006 and 2007, so numbers are highly suspect.
²Number is for March 2007.
³Numbers are for June only. No July numbers are available.

Infrastructure Metrics

4No numbers available for June/July. Figure is extrapolated from May and August numbers.

As you can see, the numbers support the USA Today claim that there has been a decline in the number of multiple-killing attacks… but confirms my suspicions that the number of people killed in those attacks has increased. And almost every other figure presented shows things getting worse, not better.

Is this absolute proof? No, of course not. There’s a lot more data in the Brookings report, not all of it bad–but only if you ignore general trends and believe that all immediate downward ticks (just one or two months’ turn as opposed to four+ years of numbers) will continue that way, when they never have in the past. As I have pointed out, there has always been a July dip in those numbers, and the real picture cannot be well-understood until perhaps the end of the year or further beyond. Looking at the whole of the situation in terms of long-term trends, it seems impossible that laying a few tens of thousands of troops on the problem for a few months is really going to turn the war around and put us in a position where we could “win,” where it would be at all worthwhile to stick it out for another three or ten years. As I said yesterday:

The theory is that if we can just apply enough pressure to dampen violence in Iraq for a while, then Iraq can heal itself, pull itself together, become a unified whole, pick itself up and banish the insurgents. That’s all, not much.

And that, my friends, is the extent of the pipe dream. The Iraqi government cannot pick its nose without falling apart at the seams; the insurgents, even if suppressed, are still there and are not going anywhere; the Iraqi militia, when they are not giving their weapons to insurgents or actively participating in the insurgency, are incapable of policing Iraq on their own; there is no solution in sight for solving the problems of sectarian division; and so many, many other problems.

I stand by that. If the data says anything, it says that there is a short-term dip in bad news that coincides with July patterns over time, and that the long-term prospects are dim at best, with violence up significantly over last year even after the short-term dip.

But that’s not what we’ll hear in the report about the “Surge.” The White House, always claiming that “the generals” tell them what to do and they just follow those brilliant men in uniform, is actually writing the script for General “Sock Puppet” Petraeus, and the USA Today article is almost certainly just a pre-report softening-up PR campaign to try to get the impression out there that, het, maybe the “Surge” is working.

If only it were true. If only there was hope in this situation. If only there were something we could do at this point. I wish it too, folks–but wishing don’t make it so, and I for one am not willing to sacrifice another thousand of our young soldiers on a self-serving, Bush-perpetrated pipe dream.