The next time one of my managers is dumb enough to put us through a bout of writing “mission statements” and “vision statements”, I’m going to print this off:
Mission, vision and statement of principle, all on one handy para-maroon wall hanging, perfect for any meeting room!
Courtesy of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment (UK) via Michael Yon.
…and I want it for free.
Dear Starbucks,
Screw you.
Caribou, Bruegger’s, Dunn Brothers and a host of ma/pa coffee shops and restaurants give me WIFI access to the Matrix for free. I got it this morning while waiting for my oil change at Walser.
If I buy an Americano for three dollars plus, I expect you to throw in a few Megabits.
I’ll not access your Web, if it’s not for free.
No! – No, Thank You to thee
I need this great wonder invented by Gore
But make me pay, and I’m out the door
I do enjoy your extra burnt Espresso,
But when I am surfing, you’ll not get my American Expresso.
Regards,
JRoosh
PS Say “Hi” to Howard
Today is the “Day of Armor” in Ukraine – a military holiday celebrating Ukraine’s tank crewmen.
So if you see a Ukrainian tanker today, say “Поздравляю Вас, матрос taнkoвй” .
Or something like that.
I’m asking purely hypothetically, here. It’s an intellectual exercise. No hint of “legal advice” is being solicited, and I acknowledge that you, a member of the Bar, will not be providing any.
1. Under what circumstances may police enter a home? I mean, short of hot pursuit? I’m aware that if someone invites the police into their home of their own free will, it’s “consent”.
2. Who may give “consent” to enter a home? Specifically, may a minor with no responsible adult present in the house give consent?
3. Hypothetically, if a minor (with no parent present in the home) specifically tells the police to wait at the door, may the police enter the house?
Again – I am asking purely as an intellectual exercise, on behalf of someone else.
Thanks.
Ever since I started biking, I’ve wondered at some of my fellow riders – the guys who you’ll see pedaling down the street in dockers, dress shirts and loafers, ties cinched around their necks, laptops bungeed to their panniers, heading to (usually) some state or non-profit office. I asked – how do they manage that and not reek like a bear in the office?
Yesterday’s PiPress has the answer: not always very well:
“There’s a significant number of people who will not bike to work” without a place to keep their bike, store their clothes and clean up, said Billy Binder, a member of bicycle advisory committees for the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County. “If you’re sweaty, who’s going to sit there in business clothes?”
Yet a growing number of two-wheeled road warriors insist they are doing it without offending their co-workers.
“So far, nobody’s ever said, ‘Eeeewie, go find a shower,’ ” Chuck Laszewski said.
For years, Laszewski has ridden six miles from his home in Falcon Heights to work in downtown St. Paul, previously as a reporter with the Pioneer Press and now as communications director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy.
Laszewski changes his clothes at work, but like many bike commuters, he says most summer days it’s cool enough in the morning that a cyclist who isn’t trying to break a time-trial record won’t get too hot and need a shower.
“Most summer days, it’s about 70 degrees when I get to work, so you’re not going to get into a huge sweat,” he said.
On the few days when it’s really steamy, he brings a towel to dry off before he gets to his desk. “God bless Madison Avenue. They do know how to make a good deodorant in this country,”
One hopes so.
And what’s this “if you’re not trying to break a time trial” BS? Of course I am.
If you’re pushing it all the way, it’s testing your limits (however feeble your limits may be); you’re pushing yourself. You’re getting a much better workout. You’re getting to work or home faster. You’re giving yourself something to live for; that adrenaline rush that comes from passing someone 15 years younger than you wearing lycra and riding a bike that costs more than my car. It’s the thrill of “Victory”, or at least of blowing other peoples’ cranks off.
Otherwise, you’re just commuting. And you can do that in a car or on the bus, for crying out loud.
There was a shower at work when Jay Walljasper was editor of the Utne Reader, but Walljasper said he rarely used it after biking to work.”I never had any complaints from my colleagues about my slovenliness or unpleasant odors coming from my direction,” he said.
But then, you were the editor.
I wrote about location-centric devices in the car a few months back and how you may some day be driving along and up pops a banner ad of sorts on your navigation screen. Or who knows, maybe the ads on your radio will be customized based on the businesses you are currently driving by.
The technology already exists. The Matrix will soon know where you are. And maybe whether you like it or not.
Customized advertising may be the least intrusive application of location technology.
There are already black boxes in passenger vehicles that gather data on throttle position, speed, steering angle, brake application and other data that can and have been subpoenad by insurance companies and in court.
Its not a stretch to think that these boxes will soon gather, store and maybe even report location data without your knowledge.
In the mean time, Yahoo would like to make use of it now, and at least for now, will ask for your permission.
On Tuesday at Yahoo’s San Francisco-based skunk works – known as the Brickhouse – the embattled Internet company unveiled a new location services platform dubbed Fire Eagle.
Location is one of those things that has huge potential for adding a layer of context to all kinds of services on the Web. Geo-tagging – the practice of adding geographic information to Web sites, photos and videos – is gathering steam across all sorts of Internet-based properties, from restaurant review sites to social networks and house hunting services. What has been missing, however, is an easy way to insert yourself into that growing stream of geographic information.
In essence, that is what Fire Eagle does. You either tell Fire Eagle where you are, or give permission for some device to do it on your behalf – say your mobile phone – and Fire Eagle broadcasts your location information to the services that you have approved.
Which all sounds cool, and there may be some constructive, relevant use of this technology for consumers – as long as they retain the right to turn it on and off. I have Google Maps on my Treo, but at least for now, you have to tell it where you are. Equipping it to automatically know where you are would be useful.
“Where’s the nearest Caribou?”
So imagine that all your friends on Facebook now get feeds on your location, by city, neighborhood or even street address. If you are driving through a neighborhood house hunting, you could get updates on homes on the market, past sale prices and upcoming open houses. Hungry for Italian? The closest places for a decent plate of pasta come streaming to your phone. Note that you can do much of this today with individual services, but you have to tell each of them where you are. With Fire Eagle, you give your location once, and all kinds of services can access it (again, only with your permission).
If advertisers know where you are, they can entice you with deals/coupons/menus on the spot.
Apple is in on it as well. No surpise there.
Yahoo will face competition from the likes of Apple (AAPL), which has made scores of location-based services available as downloads for the iPhone, and Google (GOOG), whose Android mobile phone platform is expected to do the same for a range of mobile devices.
“No Elizabeth, I’m not at Rielle’s place again. I promise.”
In every case, whether it’s a social network or an advertiser, a person’s location will only be made available to those services that individuals approve. And if you don’t want anyone to know where you are – illicit affair, job interview – you have the option of hiding your location for a period of time you determine, or even lying.
“We think it’s a good idea that users can lie about where they are,” says Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo’s Brickhouse. “Like I don’t always tell my mother where I am.”
Repeat after me:
You can’t get away from the Matrix. The Matrix always knows where you are. You need the Matrix.
The Core of The Matrix is the wireless smart phone. A device as reviled as it is praised. It has brought freedom to our lifestyles while at the same time been the subject of “Hang Up and Drive” bumper stickers.
I installed Facebook on mine today. I’ve never been more connected with more people in more places, from Cedar Rapids to San Francisco; South Minneapolis; Switzerland to Italy.
Save the distraction these devices surely cause to drivers (and apparently walkers alike), the health risk these devices pose whilst pressed to one’s cranium for sometimes hours at a time is not yet clear.
Numerous studies have been conducted, the lion’s share by the wireless industry itself, lending the “all clear” declaration dubious merit at best.
Why Cell-Phone Health Concerns Persist
If putting Garfield in the microwave causes the critter mortal harm (anecdotally speaking of course), it stands to reason, even allowing for the difference in frequency and power, that a cellular telephone likely has some effect on the brain – certainly the side of your head.
Whether that effect is a slight rise in temperature akin to the hysteria-inducing magnitude cited in the Man-Made Global Warming/Cooling/Change movement or tumors the size of golf balls has yet to be conclusively determined. Cell phones have enjoyed societal saturation for about ten years. Brain tumors reportedly have a gestation period that is more often than not at least that.
As for me my approach is as my approach to God and Nutritional Supplements.
I believe in God and Vitamins because I’d rather be wrong and have had faith all the while than the other way around when I’ve written my last blog post.
So I use a headset and forward my cell phone to my desk phone as much as possible. I don’t give my kids cell phones. I use the Bluetooth system in my car and I don’t care if you can’t hear me as well.
I moderate the pressing of the flesh with my Treo 755p.
What say you?
1972: Nixon wins in a landslide. Pauline Kael: “How could we win? Nobody I know voted for him!”
2008: Hypothetically, John McCain wins. Macintosh/Twitter/MyFace/AppleCrack users: “But he doesn’t even use Safari!”
Y’see, he’s older than a lot of candidates. He’s not a real computer guy. At an age when most of Obama’s latte-guzzling Mac-toting Twitter-tweeting audaciously-hoping e-advisors were learning how to put video on SpaceBook, he was learning how to fly an A4 Skyhawk and lead men into harm’s way. About the age most of the too-cool-for-Starbucks crowd was getting burned out on Match.com, Mac was getting his hands hammered flat by NVA goons which, lemme tell you, is hell on your texting speed.
Oh, he’s making tentative moves toward the online crowd – but to some of that particular pack of hamsters…:
His efforts have won him brutal derision from the online left.
“McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet,” Obama-backing satirist Andy Borowitz headlined one imagined dispatch.
“Sen. McCain said that he had embarked on his visit to the Internet to allay any fears that he is too out-of-touch to be president, adding that he plans to take additional steps to demonstrate that he is comfortable with today’s technology: ‘In the days and weeks ahead, you will be seeing me rock out with my new Walkman,’” Borowitz wrote.
Show of hands; anyone who gives a crap?
I mean, anyone who actually pays taxes and doesn’t think Che Guevara was sexy and heroic?
I thought so.
Others have been less gentle.
After a spokesperson told The Associated Press that McCain is “fully capable of browsing the Internet and checking Web sites,” a front-page diarist on DailyKos sneered: “I hope someone gave him a cookie.”
And if we were looking for someone who could out-twitter Ahmadinejad, that’d mean a whole lot to me.
But we’re not, and it doesn’t, and as a side note to anyone who docks a candidate any points for being ten years behind the online fashion curve, I’m going to refer you to www.whogivesacrapyoutriteslapnuts.com.
Consider yourself s3rv3d, pwn3d and, what the hell, v@nqui$h3d.
LO friggin’ L.
Is e-mail ruining your life? Delete … now
According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research company Basex, unnecessary interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28 percent of the average knowledge worker’s day.
So if I spend another 28 percent of my day in the bathroom and another 40 percent blogging…wow! That’s like 106% of my day spent…(I’ll resist finishing that sentence).
Behind the e-mail backlash is a growing perception that — despite its convenience and everything positive it has brought to work and social situations — it is a monster that’s threatening to ruin our lives.
“It chases you,” said Natalie Firstenberg, a Los Angeles therapist who said the subject of e-mail is a frequent subject with her clients. “There are no business hours.”
Methinks her clients needed therapy before they got a smart phone (a misnomer if ever there was one). My friend Smithers has a more colorful moniker for these devices.
As legions of “knowledge workers” vacation this summer, the question of whether to take along the BlackBerry is more complicated than ever. Do, and the vacation might not be such a vacation after all. Don’t, and you’re likely to return to an in-box that takes hours to clear or, worse, the dreaded “your mailbox has exceeded its limits” message.
We covered this here and here.
The Matrix can be our friend. Or our enemy. It’s only as smart or as menacing as we allow it to be.
Well…unless your boss hands you a crackberry on the company account and says “Don’t leave home without it.”
Then you’re pretty much screwed.
And some people (or their parents) are just plain stoopid unfortunate.
The nation’s youngsters will soon be headed back to school and making new friends in new classes, as well as catching up with old buddies – activities that these days typically spark a flurry of text-messaging, especially among teens and young adults. But the nation’s emergency physicians say they are seeing a dangerous trend that can go hand-in-hand with texting: a rise in injuries and deaths related to sending text messages at inappropriate times, such as while walking, driving, biking or rollerblading.
“In March, [we] were driving and saw a woman in her twenties step off the curb and get struck square by a pickup truck,” said Dr. Matthew Lewin, MD, PhD, an emergency physician at University of California San Francisco Hospital in San Francisco. “She was unconscious and it appeared she’d suffered a massive brain injury. You could tell she saw the truck at the last moment because her cell phone was dropped right where she was struck just off the curb, and she was thrown about 20 or 30 feet.. It was horrifying. The truck stopped. The driver was devastated. I was amazed to hear she survived all the way to trauma center but died [in] the ER.”
So unless your boss superglues a Blackberry to your wrist, it behooves the wireless warrior to keep your wits about you and condition your fellow thumbinistas. Yesterday on a bike ride I received two phone calls from a client who didn’t leave a message then proceeded to text me:
“JR call me back ASAP. I have to talk to you.”
So I stopped what I was doing, which was biking (Yes, I pulled over), thinking maybe he had had a death in the family or something (I do insurance planning too) and called him only to find out he wanted me to confirm some rumor about one of my colleagues.
Sigh.
I told him that since he had texted me I thought his call was urgent and if it’s okay with him, could we please carry on this conversation later (or not at all).
I used to tell my clients that I return all phone calls within twenty four hours but if you email me “it’s like you sent me a letter – give me a couple days.”
That doesn’t really work any more. In fact, many of my clients see email as more urgent than a phone call, probably because they really don’t use the phone any more. The upside of this is that I in turn can get a lot more done and can communicate a lot more efficiently using email.
Expectations do have to be managed and in a service business such as mine, that must be done in a cordial but firm manner.
It cuts both ways. There’s no such thing as “email tag”, which is a good thing.
So for now, as long as I am able (though I rarely do) to disconnect, I am Master of My Domain on The Matrix; not the other way around.
Via Pianomomsicle:
- Of television programs that aired before you were born, what’s your favorite? “Victory at Sea”, the NBC miniseries on World War Two.
- What person of historical significance was from your neighborhood or city? Colonel William Dupuy was on General MacArthur’s staff, and was with him on the deck of the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered. MacArthur gave the colonel the ceremonial flag that the Japanese emissary handed over. I found it in my city’s museum when I volunteered there, back when I was 12 or 13. All the old ladies and my family said “oh, that’s nice, Mitch. Take out the garbage, please”. Then, about ten years ago, it was on the front page of the Jamestown Sun; a HUGE DISCOVERY! The VERY FLAG that the Japanese had handed over on the Missouri! Anyway; other than Louis LaMoure, Peggy Lee, Shadoe Stevens and Darin Erstad, that’s about it.
- What’s a story that’s often been told about someone in your family in the years before you came along? My family wasn’t big on stories. I have very little idea about my parents before I was born. Maybe this story here counts.
- Which of previous generations’ dumb mistakes (in deed or thought) baffles you the most? Slavery?
- What aspect of life in the good old days would you love to see a return to? I think schools should be able, in cases of gross misbehavior, to paddle the crap out of kids.
That’s a start.
I got into the world of business (and out of the world of media and/or bars) about fifteen years ago.
After I’d been in the racket about eight or nine years, I remember sitting in a meeting, to meet a new director for an IT department I was with.
“I’m a process person”, he said, confidently.
“Polish up your resume”, I whispered to the co-worker next to me.
I was right, of course. When a person has to advertise himself as a “process person”, it’s generally because they’ve found a) it’s easier than focusing on delivering things, and b) has found a ready-enough market of companies whose intrinsic processes are so dysfunctional that he’s been able to string sort of a career together. Organizations that are dysfunctional enough to need “process people” are generally too hopeless to be fixed by tweaking “process”; they need to be gutted and started over. In the meantime, if you’re stuck with a “process person” for a manager – well, see the beginning of the post.
And it goes double for people who pronounce the word processes like “pro-ses-SEES”.
All by way of saying I’ve lived this video way too many times.
Back in 2000, I was teaching a “writing for the web” class at a local college. Since I was (and am) a Usability guy, I took a week or two to teach the basics of usability analysis.
Fortunately we had a prime case study in the news.
The “Butterfly Ballot”, viewed through the non-political, pretty-objective standards usability people use, was a complete disaster. My class and I came up with a solid page of feedback just by going over it; I would have added that “observing people using the ballot, with an aim toward improving the design, would have been interesting” – but of course, we got that all over the news for the next two months.
Before the election? That might have been helpful.
The Times, eight years later, gets the message:
The butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, Fla., was one of the great debacles in election history. It was so confusing that it was hard to tell which hole to punch to cast a vote for a particular candidate. Many people intending to vote for Al Gore accidentally punched the hole for Patrick Buchanan or punched holes for both Mr. Gore and Mr. Buchanan, which disqualified their votes.
The design, by the way, was equally likely to draw votes away from Bush. But we’ll leave the Times alone for the moment.
The controversy should have led to sweeping reforms, but it didn’t. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law lists 13 ballot problems that show up around the country in election after election. One is creating a layout in which it is unclear what hole voters need to punch — or where they need to place a mark — to cast a vote for a particular candidate. Another is placing more than one contest on the same screen of a computer voting machine, which often leads voters not to vote in one of the races. Making matters worse, the instructions that accompany ballots are often confusing.
The response from some commentators – “anyone who’s too stupid to use a ballot is too stupid to vote” – is the kind of thing most interaction designers have heard from programmers, if we’ve been in the business long enough.
It’s wrong, of course; ballots should no more actively confuse, obfuscate or muddle people than should the software you use to do your job or balance your checkbook. In the private sector, the company with the more usable product usually wins. It’s a major reason “Quicken” has beaten “Microsoft Money” for the past decade and a half. It’s why Best Buy and Target and Amazon spend millions designing their real and online stores, and millions more observing how real people do interacting with them under real-world conditions.
Is the integrity of elections as important?
Congress should require that ballots used in federal elections meet minimum design standards. It should also mandate pre-election usability testing and make funds available for it. States and localities need to draw up better guidelines for how ballots are designed and clearer instructions to voters.
Every once in a while, the Times gets one right.
They should also publicly report after each election how many votes are lost because of miscast ballots.
There are, on the other hand, easier and cheaper ways to accomplish this.
Honda’s version of Toyota’s Prius (Obama Bumper Sticker also Standard?)
Various cities around the Twin Cities are debating raising the standard for garage door strength, noting that in many suburban tornadoes, the real damage begins when the garage door blows out.
When high winds, especially tornado winds, hit a typical suburban house, the failure of many garage doors to withstand the force can become the first link in a disastrous chain reaction. Minnesota has moved in recent years to require somewhat stronger construction standards for doors, but communities elsewhere have gone further.
The theory is that the failure of the garage door makes the rest of the garage a wind scoop. causing greater damage to the house and sending huge parts of the garage sailing into neighboring houses.
Some communities are answering by requiring the doors be able to withstand a 90mph gust, up from the current standard of 80mph.
Some question whether stronger garage doors are worth the additional cost, since no door can stand up to the full fury of nature.
Er…I’m no engineer, but why not just build a panel into the back of the garage that blows off (hinged downward, so as not to fly across the impeccably-maintained lawn and smash things) at 95mph, relieving the pressure inside the garage?
Would it not be cheaper than building armor-plated garage doors?
Back in college, we had a scene with a pistol. We used a starter pistol; the chamber held only caps, and the barrel didn’t even have a hole for a bullet in it. And still, the professor/director insisted that, on stage, we never point it directly at anyone. “They’re always loaded”.
Which is a familiar notion to anyone that’s taken a gun safety close.
And – you’d think – to a French marine. But apparently not.
French sergeant accidentally shoots 17 at a hostage-rescue demonstration:
The sergeant opened up with an assault rifle, firing live rounds instead of blanks into a crowd of hundreds of visitors watching a hostage-taking exercise Sunday at the base near the southwestern city of Carcassonne.
A man who witnessed the shooting told AFP that “suddenly, people were falling, we thought it was part of the exercise, and then we saw blood.”
The sergeant was playing a terrorist in a show being put on for a crowd.
A senior army officer insisted that the incident was almost certainly the result of an “unintentional” error.Fifteen civilians were among those injured, including the three-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl who were both operated on overnight and were described Monday as being in a stable condition.
…The use of the live rounds was “99.9 percent” likely to be “an unintentional fault,” said Colonel Benoit Royal, the head of the French army’s information service.
Hope everyone recovers.
Wonder if Nancy Pelosi will try to blame this on Heller?
…Sunday morning, I had that odd feeling.
Something wasn’t right.
Something was missing.
As usual, that little bird in the back of my head was right:
Can’t slip a thing past me.
Later in the day on Sunday, I did something I hadn’t done in eleven months; I rode up to the 35W River Bridge. I rode out onto the 19th Street Bridge (a span I didn’t even know existed until I saw it on the coverage of 35W – which shows you the tunnel vision you can get driving on an interstate bridge), and saw the two spans dangling in mid-air, extending toward each other, maybe forty feet apart, even closer than in this Daily Digital photo from last week:
They’re at least another row of segments closer than they were in this picture.
These blogthings just keep nailing it.
This test: “Are you a PC or a Mac?”
| You Are a NeXT Black Slab |
 |
Wow. Didn’t see that coming!
Lileks and I were talking last Saturday on the NARNII show about the real “Two Americas” in this country. There’s a pessimistic America that believes the nation is spinning into a vortex of decay, global warming, and rich-vs.-poor civil war on the one hand – an American that thinks the rest of America needs its soul “saved” (not to name any names here). And there’s an America that is optimistic – that retains the spirit of its immigrant forefathers who came to this land to find a new, better life.
One America thinks our best days are behind us, and gets a secret tingle up their leg watching The Day After Tomorrow (“That’ll teach you to drive SUVs and ignore Mother Earth!”), and believes that we’d better quit nattering about freedom and the market and liberty and just hush up and listen to our older, wiser betters in China and India. One America sings “America: F*** Yeah!” with simultaneous comic irony and pit-of-the-gut sincerity.
One America voted for Jimmy “Malaise” Carter, Walter “Sure, I’ll Raise Your Taxes” Mondale, Michael “Look At Me In My Tank” Dukakis, Algore, John Kerry and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, and quietly waits for the inferno to overtake them; many of them even avoid having children, either because their thoughts of the future are so dismal or, in extreme cases, because they believe the human race should voluntarily extinct itself. The other America elected Ronald Reagan, flocked to see Rambo, waved the flag at times that made that other America blanche with embarassment, bought Smith and Wesson Model 29s and dared you to pry them from their cold, dead hands, and quietly contributed to the downfall of a genuinely evil empire, leaving the world a much better place than it’d been ten years earlier.
Now, I believe a couple of things:
Let’s go back to optimism for a bit.
James and I were talking about how crushing pessimism was one of the dominant leitmotifs of American pop culture over the past fifty years. We also noted that next week’s Minnesota Street Rod Association convention at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds (at which the NARN will be broadcasting!) harkens back to an era when America was profoundly optimistic – where the sky, and beyond, was the limit. Cars were big, brawny, cheery and optimistic.
I noted, in contrast, that this is the face of the current American car-buying public (or at least the stereotype of it):
Now, the Prius is a perfectly fine car – Toyota builds a good vehicle, yadda yadda.
But I noted that other car makers had tried their hands at building hybrids – Honda, Volvo et al – and gotten dicier results in the hybrid market; they’d made the “mistake” of merely building hybridized versions of their regular cars. In other words, their “normal”-looking hybrids failed in the market, while Toyota dealers can’t keep the dorky-looking Prius in stock.
The reason, of course, is that the people who are concerned about “global warming” today want to be seen doing the vehicular equivalent of wearing a hair shirt. They want to drive a car that looks like a rolling cockroach, thus to feel closer to the nature into which they feel we are all about to decay anyway.
My statement; America – at least, the part of America that flies the flag and hears “God Bless the USA” with a certain tingle of pride even as they cringe at the mawkishness, the America that flies the flag on June 14, right-side up, no flame involved – will take the notion of alternative transportation into their hearts only when electric vehicles look like this…:
…only when hybrids look like this…:
Only when a ride on a light rail train looks like this:
…rather than some exercise in self-abnegation and penitence to Mother Earth (like Michelle Obama envisions for us…):
Then – when the idea of “alternatives” are seen not as expressions of shame, of crabbling about after the crumbs of our betters, of finding comfort in societal doom, but rather of progress rather than decay, of skill and prowess rather than doom – then, America will embrace these ideas.
So sign me up for the first electric Porsche 914.
Er…maybe the first one in the third year of production, anyway.
The first were built in 1907. The last were manufactured in the late thirties. They were among the British Commonwealth’s standard rifles until the late fifties,
In the hands of the “Old Contemptibles” – Britain’s tiny force of regulars in 1914 – they held off massed waves of Germans during the original blitz through Belgium. They fought at The Somme, Passchendaele, Second Marne, Dunkirk, Narvik, El Alamein, the Bramaputra and Cassino, Sword and Gold and Juno beaches, all the way across France and Belgium and Holland and Korea and the Suez.
A refinement of an 1888 design that had been tried and found wanting during the Boer War, Irish and Indian and South African reservists carried them well into the seventies and early eighties. After the AK47, they were the most common weapon in the hands of the mujahedin in Afghanistan early in their jihad against the Soviets. It’s still seen in the hands of reservists and policemen throughout south asia.
The SMLE reminded me of Winston Churchill; pug-nosed, but a smooth operator. I fired one at a range in 1988 (and a few more times thereafter). It was the rifle equivalent of an aged single-malt on a mahogany table; old-school in that way that all the great antiques are. The short-throw bolt action, worn down after goodness-knows how many people cranked it over the years (its receiver was stamped sometime in the late twenties, as I recall) was the fastest, smoothest turnbolt I personally have ever fired.
(Note: No, this is not the one I shot. I just pulled it off the net).
There were 14 million of them made (possibly including the “modernized” versions, the Mark IV and Mark V, from the forties and fifties). Back in ’88, they were running for under $100. Yet another deep lifelong regret.
I work in the software business. I end up having to stay current on a lot of trends in software.
So, it seems, to people in the news business, according to the folks at MPR’s “In The Loop”, who are apparently all atwitter about…er, Twitter:
Now, given my very limited experience with Twitter, I’d count myself in that latter category. But from what I do know, the program is no savior. What really impresses me though, has nothing to do with “tweeting” at all . . . it’s that in a newsroom, where for a long time people have played it safe, measured all the risks before making a move . . . these folks were now congratulating us for trying a chaotic experiment with uncertain results. That’s a big deal.
In the media business right now, no one really knows what web application or social networking trend will be the one to bring us into the digital future. But one thing’s for sure, without the right attitude about taking chances, you’ll quickly be left behind.
I gotta confess; I have not the faintest idea what Twitter is for. Oh, I know it lets you post one-liner entries pretty much constantly through the day – as if any of us needed more on-line time-suckage. Robin Marty at Minnesoros Monitor “Independent” used it, rather innovatively I thought, to report from the DFL convention (most DFL ideas fit into one line, so it was a natural).
I’ve heard “Twitter” called “Microblogging” – which strikes this macroblogger as really, really pointless.
Worse – I tried to check out the website. Perhaps I was having a bad day, but I hadn’t the faintest clue what I was supposed to do, or what the purpose of the whole exercise was, or how it was that I was supposed to get the little microblogged pellets of wisdom out into the ether.
So perhaps this is one trend that will, as the Loopers say, “leave me behind”, more or less like VRML, Webvan.com, Pets.com, PowerAgent, Flooz.com, Go.com and Gather.com, for better or worse, did.
Happy to say that of all the dumb corporate concepts I’ve worked for, I’ve never latched on with any on this list, from which I’ll excerpt a couple:
1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com
Oh, there’s more.
In the world of gear, there are toys – things that’ll give you that little burst of pleasure instantly – and then there’s machinery, the things you have to work to get what you want with.
A fuzz box? It’s a toy.
I don’t mean, by the way, to disparage toys. Toys have their place, and it can be an important one. They give adults, like kids, something they need; a learning experience, something to enjoy, something that ties learning to fun, or just that little jolt of fun you need.
The Fender Deluxe? It’s machinery.
I bought my Fender in 1978, for $100 worth of paper route money. It was 50 watts of power through a 10 inch speaker, the bare-bones two-knob tone controls, a simple spring reverb tank and a tremolo unit.
That’s it. No overdrive circuit. No power soaker. No EQ.
The basic tone, after you got done cranking on the tone controls, was basically…clean. You had to crank it to get overdrive distortion – and 50 watts cranked was very, very loud.
But this was the fun part; after a while of noodling around with it, you found (or I found, anyway) a combination of things that made it, with all its faults, mine. My sound. In my case, sometime after I moved to the Cities and after maybe seven years of playing the thing, I cracked the code: My guitars (a Fender Jazz and an Ibanez SG), into a cheapo preamp stompbox, thence into a DOD rackmount delay line (that I left sitting on my amp, since, sheesh, who’s gonna buy a rack?), and then into a switch pedal (to jump between the Fender and my Peavey Bandit, when I wanted a wash of cheap, overdriven fuzz. The preamp gave the Fender a little film of crunchy distorition, while the DOD could be tweaked to give just the right amount of slapback to fill things out, making the Fender sound…
…damn good.
It, and the DOD, got stolen probably in 1989. That thief, unfortunately, I don’t know. Hope you enjoy it, douchebag, whoever you are.
Anyway – one of these next tax refunds…
Question for all your bikers/excursionmongers who know the Bloomington area.
Old Cedar Avenue runs south of Old Shakopee Road, southwest of the Mall of America. It’s west of the current Cedar (Hwy 77). On the map, and on Google, it crosses the Minnesota River on that old box-trestle bridge that is just west of the new Cedar bridge.
Now, an Hennepin County bike map says the old trestle bridge is closed – but a look at the Google Streetview looks like it’s open.
From the looks of it, Old Cedar links up to the foot/bike path on the new Cedar bridge, which would be a VERY handy shortcut for me.
Does anyone out there know if that old bridge is actually open to bikes?
Leave a comment. Thanks!
UPDATE: Oops. Asked and answered.
So after a couple of years of seeing the commercials, I had to find out – who is the girl in those “you have to put Mercury on your list” commercials?
Well, the ‘net knows all – it’s Jill Wagner.
OK – but, better yet…:
I’ve always been around guns. I was raised by my father and he has always had a gun collection and he shoots skeet. When I was like 13 years old I’d go with him to shoot skeet. I actually have a gun collection of my own. I got a gun for Christmas, a Kimber Raptor .45. Also I have a Colt .45 and I have a Ladysmith. Last night my Dad just informed me that he’s going to give me one of his shotguns but he didn’t tell me which one yet. He’s going to surprise me. I’ve only got four guns so far which is a very small collection but I’ve always liked shooting.
OK, I’ll put a Merc on my list after all.
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