Archives

Putting the Dubya in AWOL

AWOLI watched Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes II piece on the renewed questionability of George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard this evening with great interest. Two quick things occurred to me: first, that it’s highly unlikely that the network would have allowed Dan Rather — who is synonymous with the credibility of their news organization, for better or worse — to lend his imprimatur to this report without being pretty confident that they were right on the facts. This is an important point, because CBS is notoriously weak-willed, having caved into Republican pressure on everything from a harmless Reagan made-for-TV movie to commercials from MoveOn.org. It means something when a lapdog like the Eye bites back.

The second thing I considered was that, hey, maybe the reason George W. Bush didn’t show up for duty is that he came across one of these discs in his mailbox back in 1969. Could be.

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Building the New This

Subtraction LogoOkay, so fifteen months later, I’ve begun a major redesign for Subtraction.com. I’m pretty satisfied with the progress, though I admit it’s going slow enough that I’ll be surprised if it’s all done by Halloween. The new overhaul will maintain essentially the same information architecture that you see here from a site and page perspective, but I’ve made some usability improvements so that it will be easier to read, which has become increasingly important to me as I get older — I’ve started that inevitable old codger’s shift away from a young designer’s fascination with teeny, tiny text.

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The Hit Parade

John KerryOkay, the Kerry campaign had a terrible August, but let’s be clear: the recent Time and Newsweek polls were inaccurate in declaring a double-digit lead for President Bush. Doing a little bit of the kind of vetting that, disturbingly, few news outlets are willing to engage in, Rasmussen finds that the President’s bounce was a nontrivial but still manageable 4 to 5 percent. There’s still 57 days left, enough time to turn this around.

The consensus is that the Kerry-Edwards campaign has let Bush-Cheney define the debate over the past few weeks, and allowed Kerry’s fitness to lead to become the question. They hit first, which sucks, but it gives Kerry an opening to fight back and with great ferocity. I say, call Bush’s own competence into question by saying what everyone already knows loud and clear — Bush is an intellectual lightweight, who can barely grasp the enormity of what’s going on around him, and it’s this unsuitability for handling the weighty issues at hand that have led us so far astray.

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Little Bit of Little Saigon

I would’t discourage anyone from trying any of the Vietnamese restaurants in New York, but even the most well-regarded of them pale next to what can be had in Westminster, California’s Little Saigon area. Being Vietnamese, I’m more critical of these establishments — and of how closely their cooking methods resemble my mother’s — than the average customer. But it’s not just a cultural thing, it’s a matter of dollar value, too. What you can get in Manhattan, in finer restaurants like Cyclo and Blue Velvet 1929 isn’t bad; it’s just disproportionately expensive given the inaccurate and uninspired dishes they bring to your table.

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’Bye-Oh to My VAIO

Sony VAIO PCG-SR7KJust a moment to say goodbye to my Sony VAIO PCG-SR7K, which I once called “the best computer I’ve ever owned” Ha! Was I really ever that young?

Seriously, I’ve had this ultra-compact notebook since the fall of 2000 (since the Clinton administration!) and it just passed away this past week when I put it in my bag and took it home from the office. I have no idea why it decided to leave for another plane, because I was gentle with it on the way home. But those VAIOs, as I discovered in my second year of ownership, are exceedingly fragile. In fact, they’re junk, and while 3.5+ years is a decent lifespan for a Windows machine, I find it not a little shameful that the machine, for the past two years, has been pretty much unusable.

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Grant Me the Serenity

Two things, which are completely out of my control, have me in a foul mood this evening, and I wonder half-jokingly if they’re somehow linked. If you were the sort to gloat, you might say that they’re exactly the kind of things that an East Coast liberal should be rightly suffering over. There’s lots of things I could say in response to that, but I’ll just say that that’s what makes this country great, right?

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Where’d the Ambition Go?

iMacMy initial thought on Apple’s new iMac, which was announced today at Apple Expo in Paris, is that it’s a nice bit of engineering, but unfortunately it amounts to little more. That the product team seems to have jumped through some nontrivial technical hoops in fitting a G5-based CPU on the back of an LCD screen seems insufficiently impressive to me — I wanted something more groundbreaking. The form factor of the iMac line has, since its inception in 1998, always represented the vanguard of Apple’s consumer thinking; both the net appliance cutesiness of the original and the elegant, sunflower-like articulation of its 2002 successor were new ways of thinking about consumer computing.

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Third Party Candidate

Mister President for PresidentUsing a fifteen dollar pack of Avery Ink Jet Transfers and some ten dollar Old Navy tees, my girlfriend and I turned out a couple of these “Mister President for President” shirts tonight. It was super-simple; we just ran the transfers through our cheap ink jet printer and then ironed the designs right to the tees, and we were done in fifteen minutes. Now we have something to wear to this Sunday’s march up to Madison Square Garden.

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Bluetooth Still Just Over the Verizon

Motorola V710Like at least a few geeks, I’ve been waiting a long time for a Verizon Wireless mobile phone that features a built-in Bluetooth chip. That’s because, first, Verizon’s coverage in the New York metropolitan area is the best by far of any of the mobile carriers — at least in my experience — and second, I’m still enamored of the promise of wireless synchronization and data exchange via Bluetooth (in spite of the imperfect performance of the Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson T608 that I bought last month). And really, it’s just one phone that I’m asking for Verizon to release.

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