The Underground Man

King Lance

Moving house is a bitch (at least if you do it yourself). I've had little time to do anything (except interview for a job).

That said, I got some time to watch the morning procession of Le Tour as they pulled into Paris. Lance won this Tour going away (some six minutes to the good)--giving the lie to the suggestion that he was weakening or past his prime.

It seems like last year's performance was just a glitch and he is back "en forme". Possibly the best time trialer in the world and the best climber in the world. A very hard combination to beat in the Tour de France.

I see no reason that he shouldn't try for a seventh in a row next year. Sure, it'll be tough--possibly tougher than this year if Ivan Basso performs and Tyler Hamilton can finish. But with the Discovery channels helping out by sponsoring the team I'm sure that Lance would like to give them a victory.

I hope to take a summer vacation next year in the Dordogne and visit the route of the Tour nearby.

'Til next year, then.

Lance in yellow (again)..

Well, in a stage where the commentators expected everyone to take it easy because of tomorrow's grueling time trial up L'Alpe d'Huez instead the peloton split apart as the best riders had to chase a breakaway group that included pre-race favorite Jan Ullrich. Of course, Ullrich had little hope being ten minutes down to Lance but it looked like maybe he thought he could cut a couple of minutes off that lead before tomorrow's mountain time trial.

Not to be the case as a chase group of Postal riders along with CSC's Ivan Basso brought him to heel before the last climb. And yet again Basso and Lance finished in the first two places with Lance taking the stage win again. So he got a twenty-second bonus and Basso a twelve-second bonus for second place.

So barring accident Lance looks in good shape for tomorrow's time trial up the Alps. I rather doubt that Basso will gain much time on him as it looks like they are very evenly matched (which in itself is a surprise to most of the commentators). We may well be watching a race between Le Patron and the heir apparent here.

Oh, yes. Iban Mayo and Tyler Hamilton are both out of the race. Kloden looks a distant third so unless Ullrich rides the race of his life every day until the finish it will most likely be Lance and Ivon in first and second on the podium. It's still not certain that will be the order--it's a compelling last few days.

Today's Party Shuffle

Courtesy of iTunes, my last five tunes listened to:

Wake Me Up on Judgement Day, Steve Winwood
Caravan, Van Morrison
A Little Less Conversation, Elvis vs. Jxl
Old Folk's Boogie, Little Feat
Coming Back In, Toby Lightman

Posts will be scarce this week

For two reasons, posts will be a bit scarce this week. I'm moving house and I'm interviewing for two different jobs. With any luck, all will go smoothly (with the house move). I'm fairly confident about the job interviews as they are both for positions I've held before.

I think the high-tech market is stabilizing enough that a full-time position seems like a better prospect than continued consulting. I cannot really attribute it to the Republican tax initiatives though. I think its probably the same cycle of boom and bust that we've had in high-tech since the early 1980s. Firms have "leaned down" to the minimum staff necessary to function efficiently and as they take on new clients now need new staff.

It's nice to see firms adding program and project managers though. I've always thought that they should be some of the first team members chosen as a firm upsizes.

Apple vs. Windows running costs

I was just reading this comment in the Tech Knowledge forum (scroll down to the entry by Kel, Feb 13th) and was reflecting on my experiences with XP Pro on an HP laptop yesterday (see my previous post on the subject of satellite modems).

My friend paid something like $2500 for his used HP zd7000 laptop with XP Pro (which interface surprisingly doesn't suck) and a ton of useful software. The thing is, he had previously visited with me and seen my 15" TiBook. I had sat and explained to him how with Virtual PC you could run anything that you could run on a "real" PC. I explained how the Mac hadn't crashed in two months (except for averaging a weekly Safari crash) and how much easier life seemed with it. I explained how both my digital camera (Kodak DC290) and my fathers (Canon Powershot A80) synced up immediately and flawlessly. How easily I could burn CDs and download and play music. And how much better the text display was (courtesy of anti-aliasing text).

All to no avail. Since buying it three weeks ago he has laid out hundreds in tech support money, getting it to work with his satellite system and fixing configuration issues. Is it just that people have become accustomed to their computers "sort" of working? Of expecting the interface to be confusing and cryptic? (This is not to say that Linux doesn't suffer from the confusing and cryptic interface as well. It does. It's just nowhere as mature and there are very few interface "experts" working on its design).

Why couldn't I convince him? Must have been that damn gold kryptonite.

Maybe Apple needs to start a loaner or rental program. Take one home and try it for a week sort of thing?

Lance in Second..

It was a great race today. A very long, fast start followed by two Category 1 climbs that split the peloton into the contenders and everyone else. Lance pulled away from just about everyone (with the help of his teammates) and dropped all the other GC (general classification) riders in the first third of the last climb.

Only Ivan Basso of CSC was able to stay with him at the end and pipped him to the finish. Since Basso's best finish in the Tour is eleventh he hadn't generally been considered a threat on the general classification to Lance's bid for a sixth Tour. I think he might be considered differently after today.

Lance put something like 2:30 on Jan Ullrich (who looked in pain) and even more on other contenders like former teammates Heras and Hamilton. He even gained on Iban Mayo who, as a Basque riding near his home territory was supposed to make a better showing.

Lance may not be as strong as he was two years ago--though time will tell over the next couple of days--but he looks a lot stronger than the usual suspects who contend for the overall crown.

Fascinating race. I remain very annoyed by those who suggest that he is using drugs. I imagine that he probably did in his early days in the Tour (this is his tenth) and he is very careful not to say that he has "never" used them. But I honestly believe that he has been winning these Tours because of his struggle with cancer. After overcoming that, the Tour has to seem a relative breeze.

There seems to be little or no appreciation of that in the commentary. They (especially the French press) seem to be looking for other reasons for his success/dominance.

I put it down to strength of will and preparation.

Of enology and Riedel

I've collected wines (red wines, port) since the mid-80s. That was when I moved down to the SF Bay area. My father lived in Novato at the time, a stone's throw from both Sears Point Raceway and the Napa and Sonoma valleys.

So weekend became visits from my job in Silicon Valley up to get to know him better and to go on pilgrimages to vineyards and winemakers. We explored quite a few of the lesser known vineyards like Mark West, and Heitz, Clos Pegas, Caymus and of course, the well-known Franciscan and Beaulieu wineries.

I joined a couple of "wine clubs" in the last ten years and have accumulated a fair number of quality red wines. I finally sat down and catalogued them last night, so that I can put them into a spreadsheet and put "drink by" dates on them. I have for years subscribed to the theory that one should let them age a bit in the bottle before drinking.

Unfortunately this has occasionally led to letting some sit too long and get past their prime. My rule of thumb is 4-5 years for a Merlot, 6-10 years for Cabernet Franc (hard to find), Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon. I was reading Robert Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide last night in an effort to refine these rules of thumb when I stumbled across some interesting ideas and some recommended wine glasses.

Parker's belief is that with most red wines produced in California today one need not lay them up for years. They can be drunk at any time after purchase with some few worthy of keeping for a couple of years.

He does urge the purchase of some good wine glasses, notably the Riedel brand Vinum Bordeaux line (for red wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot).

Supposedly, the structure of the glass places the wine on the optimal point on the tongue to yield the best (truest) taste. I was somewhat sceptical of this claim until I bought a pair of these for my father for Father's Day.

We did an A-B test with a fine Merlot and damned if the taste difference wasn't quite significant. All three of us agreed. They are a tad expensive ($40) unless you are a wine enthusiast. If you are I would definitely recommend them.

Extreme programming aka pair programming

I just caught a reference to "extreme programming" in a Wired online article. I was thinking that I first entered this field back in about 1996. Of course, I don't think I had a name for it.

It came about because we (my company) were under a very tight deadline for writing code to demo the first version of IE4.0 (the first really decent browser Microsoft put out). Over the course of five or six weeks we built several whole Web sites that used just about every element of the DOM/Javascript/VBScript/SG. But coding about twenty hours a day we could (and did) get stupidly tired and make obvious mistakes.

So I instituted a program where we did buddy programming. Two people, one monitor and keyboard. One set of eyes to watch and suggest while the other typed. It worked amazingly well.

Now this was panic programming. A hard and fast deadline, young Web coders, lots of Jolt cola. But I thought it was an elegant solution to the immediate problem.

Nobody really seemed to have a problem with it. Perhaps 'cause nobody (except me) had huge egos. And after you had stared at a problem for an hour or two and your neighbor solved it in ten minutes you could really see the value.

Now it's a coding philosophy. And people are writing books about it. I prefer the term "pair programming"--which I just saw for the first time in the Wired article.

personality tests..

Ah.. personality tests. Love to take them. Got a pointer to this from Gary's site. Here are my results:

20 Questions to a Better Personality

Wackiness: 8/100
Rationality: 56/100
Constructiveness: 64/100
Leadership: 64/100

You are an SRCL--Sober Rational Constructive Leader. This makes you an Ayn Rand ideal. Taggart? Roark? Galt? You are all of these. You were born to lead. You may not be particularly exciting, but you have a strange charisma--born of intellect and personal drive--that people begin to notice when they have been around you a while. You don't like to compromise, but you recognize when you have to.

You care absolutely nothing what other people think, and this somehow attracts people to you. Treat them well, use them wisely, and ascend to your rightful rank.

I think this is totally true. Not only that, I've been attracted to (and have read) the writings of Ayn Rand since I was a young teenager. Turns out she is one of my mother's favorite writers as well. We've both read "Atlas Shrugged" a couple of times. The first time, I read the whole book in about 14 hours straight.

No comment

Paul at A Crank's Progress turned me on to this artist a while back. He takes WWII propaganda posters and lends them new life as social commentary. I'm too lazy to look him up..

Why I've given up Linux

At least temporarily.

I stayed with Linux since early 1994 when I first used Slackware to drive my company's Web site. I've used a lot of different variants by now (Slackware, Red Hat, and lately Knoppix).

Until I got my TiBook. OS X is like a variant of Linux that just works. No more screwing around looking for apps and having to build them. No more klugy interface. Yet with the power of Linux, a command line, compilers and libraries and a whole ton of apps being developed seemingly daily.

Toss in a really good interface design and I'm pretty darn satisfied. I still support Linux intellectually but I've found my muse. And it supports suspend and resumes instantaneously--even in the middle of a DVD movie. Incroyable!

I wonder how many others are going to defect from the Linux fold to OS X?

Pulp Fiction (again)

I'm watching Pulp Fiction (1993) yet again. It's on IFC (the Independent Film Channel) and it appears un-cut (stunningly).

I see more in it every time I watch it (I think this is like the fourth time). It has resonances with Kill Bill and Reservoir Dogs and Bande a Parte (1964)--the French new wave film of Jean-Luc Godard. I'm watching the Twist contest at this moment and it is evocative of the moment in Bande a Parte when the three main characters dance the Madison in the French cafe--in itself a seminal moment in French film history.

Classes are being taught on this film (at least here in America) and I've found scholarly treatises on it and even a game theory breakdown of the final showdown between the characters of Pulp Fiction and a similar triangle in Reservoir Dogs (1992). Just brilliant.

LP angst..

I'm trying to decide how much to spend on a turntable.

Yes, that never-used audio component that is all but extinct. I'm torn between buying something merely competent and something that was outstanding and may now be bought for a reasonable price (<$200).

I am going to digitize my album collection (which I haven't heard in a good ten years). But I'm struggling between my audiophile urges (long thought dead) and common sense. Common sense, on the one hand, tells me to what the cheapest turntable that will do an adequate job. But it also tells me that I shouldn't buy crap as one always regrets that. I suppose it comes down to how I define adequate. I don't really know that I could tell the difference between the Thorens turntables I'm looking at and a Technics.

How can I be suffering buyer's remorse before I've even bought the bloody thing?

Typing differently

I was just thinking as I was typing this morning that it would be nice to have an AI algorithm that could interpret what I was typing and put the spaces in between the words. After all, I probably use a limited vocabulary of about 1200-1500 words (do you know the average American only has a vocabulary of 500 words?) and so it could do a reasonable job of guessing when I needed a break between words. After all, it should be much faster than I am.

Would this make a difference in typing speed? I would think so. I type somewhere between 80-120 words/minute most days (the higher end when I'm ticked off and adrenalized). Some decently large percentage of the time my hands stay on the keyboard is dedicated to the movement of my right hand off the keys surface to strike the space bar (I only do it with my right hand for some reason--is that a flaw). Between lifting, striking and replacing I could see that my right hand must leave the keyboard for at least 10% of my TTT (total typing time).

Maybe I should just retrain myself on one of those split Dvorak keyboards. I'm assuming here that y'all know that the reason the "standard" keyboard is laid out the way it is is to slow typists on the old manual typewriters.

Yes, Virginia, I used one. For a few years. Pain in the ass. Anyway, type too quickly and the keys hit one another on the downstroke and bind. So some bright bulb figured out the layout that would slow down typing (English) to a rate that would reduce the interference.

Did s/he do a proper study I wonder?

Anyway, the Dvorak keyboard re-lays out the keyboard to optimize typing speed and one can apparently get split keyboards that cant the two haves up at something like a 30 degree angle. This way one doesn't pronate one's wrists and carpal tunnel syndrome becomes a thing of the past.

There are also "chording" keyboards that let you type at accelerated speeds because two or three keys pressed simultaneously will generate a whole word. I believe that one can even type everything with one hand using one of these. Very cool.

Rummy-o-meter

So maybe Cheney is now the new Teflon Don? I suspect with Republicans controlling House and Senate we will never see him up on charges. He's one of the few people I would dislike more than Bush in power (aside from some televangelist like Pat Buchanan).

It's the economy, stupid!

How is it that I've heard very little commentary on the effects of the war on the economy? Both the general economy (GNP growth rate) and jobs have to have had a big boost as a result of the war. Certainly, job growth due to the military isn't broken out.

I would be quite curious to know how our national economy would look if the "war benefits" were dropped out of the figures. My gut level feeling is that it would look terrible still.

I feel like I'm seeing a slow recovery in the high-tech job market but there are still so many of us unemployed (and having dropped off the rolls) that it is going to be another year or two before unemployment in this sector drops back to reasonable levels.

Assassins!

"You're assassins! All of you!

It took something like fourteen hours for Lapize to complete this stage (the last rider took some eighteen hours and crossed in the dead of night).

I don't know if the Col du Tourmalet is in this year's TDF. I do know that the L'Alpe d'Huez is. It is a vicious climb and, this year, the scene of an individual time trial (which may well decide the winner amongst the contenders). In fact, that whole last week of the Tour is filled with climbing stages, some with several Category 1 climbs and a couple with Hors Category (the most difficult classification--literally "beyond classification" climbs).

It should prove to be a fascinating week to watch and one where the teams (and their strength climbing) will become a major factor.

Lance in yellow..

Ah, me and my sport enthusiasms. Lance Armstrong took the yellow jersey (that of overall leader) today.

The US Postal Team of Lance Armstrong cruised to a pretty comfortable victory in the team time trial today. How this works is that each time is given a starting time five minutes apart and sent out in reverse order of their standing. So the team last in the standings (on aggregate time) is sent out first, and the best team last. As a consequence of their performance yesterday the US Postal team (the "Posties") went out last today.

The rules have been changed so that the Tour has minimized the impact of the team time trial on the overall standings. Heretofore, whatever you did (in terms of time) was added to your total time. So if you were in the lead group and finished ten minutes ahead of the next closest group, you gained ten minutes in the general classification (time).

Not any more. The maximum gap is ten seconds between positions (twenty for the second place team). So if you are fifth in the standings, and the gap between each team is ten seconds or more all you will lose is fifty seconds.

Unfortunate for the Posties because yet again (they won going away last year) they finished a good minute ahead of the second-place team (of Postal team defector Tyler Hamilton) and seventy-nine seconds ahead of Jan Ullrich's T-Mobile team (of the pink uniforms). So where in the past Lance would have gained sixty-seven seconds on Tyler and seventy-nine on Ullrich he gained only twenty and thirty seconds respectively.

It's a pity but it will lend itself to a tighter race in the end. Though I dare say that it looks like Lance is strong this year and barring injury or misfortune he will dominate yet again.

He looks happier too. Having a supportive and delectable girlfriend has to help.

Free stuff from Apple

You can win a bunch of free stuff from Apple for downloading the 100 millionth song.

Or you can do it for free.

Credit for the pointer goes to Airbag.

Kerry-Edwards 2004

Well, I've decided to take the plunge and volunteer to work on the Kerry-Edwards campaign. I don't have a full-time position at the moment and it doesn't look like I can become a citizen in time to vote.

But I'm compelled to act because I cannot stand the direction this country has gone in the last four years. So I'll do my bit to encourage local voters to vote Kerry and see what labor I can contribute.

Question Time

I tell you.

The British parliamentary system is far superior to the American system. Just take the time to tune into C-Span when they are televising Question Time in the British House of Commons.

Every Wednesday the Prime Minister has to take questions from any member of the House of Commons about ANY TOPIC. And he has to answer off the cuff. (At least to the questions from opposition parties.) I don't even like the guy but I have to admire him.

Stunning. One sees Tony Blair's intelligence, education and poise quite evidently. One just cannot see George Bush II being able to function like this.

It points out how far short our system falls.

TigerLaunch

Yet another cool app for OS X. A really basic one now that I think about how much time I spend searching through folders for apps I have just added.

It puts a drop down in the menubar that lists all your apps. You can configure as you choose. So a lot of that lesser-used stuff that was crowding my dock can now go away. Leaving room/attention for the important stuff.

I'm trying to clean up space on my 40Gb drive (before moving to a 7200rpm 60Gb) and I'm find all kinds of stuff I've downloaded but haven't had the time to play with yet.

This will undoubtedly help me with those frequently lost apps.

Top ten sci-fi movies

I saw Chronicles of Riddick last night and I was talking to my brother-in-law before the film and saying that I might place it in my top ten sci-fi movies. Then I thought, what are my top ten sci-fi movies??

So here's a stab at it in no particular order:

Dark City
Terminator
The Matrix
Chronicles of Riddick
Le Cinquieme Element
Alien
12 Monkeys
Existenz
Blade Runner
Brazil
Mad Max

I think they all had in common excellent writing. There are certainly many others that might fit in this list but I think many of these set trends or broke new ground. I'm not sure that I would agree on CoR in five years but right now I think the screenwriting is damn good and the casting inspired.

I'm open to suggestions for additions to the list. I think there are probably a couple of recent Japanese films that deserve consideration. I'm going to watch one tonight, Versus (2000). Then, of course, there was Avalon (2001) and Casshern(2004), which I just missed seeing in London. Who knows, it may reach our shores.

I tell you, the Japanese are a growing force in sci-fi film.

Konfabulator widgets in action

The two objects I seem to be using the most (at least, initially) from the 650-odd Konfabulators available are the mini-iTunes remote and the clock. Of course, I already have a clock but there is a gorgeous representation of the Sterling wrist watch that I had to have on my desktop. Note the little row of stars just underneath the name of the artist. That lets you set the rating of the tune so that it either gets skipped (when you rate it one or two) or played more frequently--depending on the settings of your Party Shuffle. Damn nice integration.

I should probably figure out how to do some of my own watches. Though I could see in Javascript the animation of the hands could prove a bit problematic. Worth looking into.

It's interesting that I'm finally hitting the limits of my laptops speed (it's an 867Mhz, 15" TiBook with 512Mb). Actually, I may be hitting the memory limitation (I have very little free) now that I'm doing some real work, doing a little graphics layout (so running Photoshop), browsing the Web, listening to iTunes, downloading music with LimeWire, and running Konfabulator widgets simultaneously.

I think I need to up the RAM to the maximum of 1Gb. Anyone for a couple of fast 256Mb chips for a Powerbook??

Bush and his church

I suppose we have to call it his church. He and Karl Rove have made a point of courting the evangelical vote for a very long time now. There was a show on PBS I recorded a couple of months ago that gave a long history on Bush's involvement with evangelical Christianity.

Well, I'm here in the home of the "mega-church"--Dallas. I drive by them every day here. You know the type (or maybe you don't if you're lucky). They see, oh, five or six thousand per sitting. They are small malls, offering all kinds of services including entire schools that will occupy your kids while you pray and socialize.

The Guardian (them agin!) has a good article on how the Republican machinery is gearing up to use their parishoners as the front-line troops in the election.

Scary to think that 25% of the electorate is "evangelical" and that 80% of them will vote Bush blindly. Very scary.

Le Tour de France 2004

I've been a real Tour de France fan for a couple of years. Living in France, I got to watch it live in my local cafe. Even struggling to grasp the commentator's French it was entrancing. The coverage in L'Equipe was first-rate (why don't we have a great daily sports paper in this country?) and proved a great accompaniment to the drama unfolding on the TV.

Last year, I watched I got up at 6am every morning (West Coast time) to watch it live on OLN. This month, it's the Lance Armstrong Network. To prepare, I bought and read Lance's book, "It's Not About the Bike".

This year will be his attempt to win a sixth Tour de France. An unparallalled feat if he achieves it (and I sure hope he does). Last year had so much drama between Josepi Beloki's awful spill and Lance's resulting x-country excursion to his being knocked down by an asinine spectator to the final win by only a minute (after three weeks of racing). Couldn't have been closer. Of course, he was distracted, breaking up with his wife and getting over an illness just before the race began.

This year though, he is 32, nearly 33. None of the other five-win riders ever won one at this "advanced" age. I think we may see the first one--if Mother Chance allows. All the progress in athletics lately has shown that up until 40, injuries permitting, one can compete at the highest level.

The problem here is that one doesn't recover as quickly at 32 as at 22. And three weeks is a hell of a long time to be on a bike at an average speed of over 20mph.

Oh, yeah. Lance is in second place after the first day's prologue (the time trial over a relatively flat course). Two seconds back. His chief competitors are expected to be racers Jan Ullrich and Bradley McGee. Look out for Tyler Hamilton, who left the US Postal team (Lance's team) last year in search of his own success. He finished fourth with a broken collarbone!

If you're going to watch only one day, watch the climb the day of 21 July. It's a very famous grind up to the top of L'Alpe d'Huez (some 1850 metres above sea-level). Lance has become a famous climber since his return from cancer (he lost a lot of weight and re-built his musculature after his return) and so he frequently leaves competitors in the dust on these climbs. They are tests of will as much as conditioning and that mini-drama where he breaks his nearest competitors will is captivating.

I could go on and on..

The lion isn't sleeping anymore

With a headline like that I would have hoped to be writing about the coming Euro 2004 final including England. No such luck.

Actually, I caught a great article in the Guardian this evening (or early morning really) about the descendants of the Zulu tribesman who wrote the melody for "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (famously recorded by the Tokens).

If you've seen the Lion King (and I had the pleasure to a couple of weeks ago in London's West End) you know that Disney uses the song in their show (the only non Elton John song apparently).

Well, the copyright has reverted after his death and now they want royalty payments.

A lot of royalty payments.

Delicious...

Marlon Brando, 1924-2004

Sadly, Marlon Brando has died.

A good innings by any account, I remember him for many roles. Of course, for my generation his performance in Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" was the signature piece of a long and distinguished career.

Some might say that it was his best role but one would also have to consider his ground-breaking work in "On the Waterfront (1954)" and "The Wild Bunch (1953)". Both of the films he did that year of 1953, "The Wild Bunch" and "Julius Caesar", remain among my favorites.

Along with James Dean, he will remain an icon of American film of that era.

Konfabulator and WWDC 2004

I just downloaded and installed Konfabulator. It is a neat app that allows you to put "widgets" on your OS X desktop (and to manage them). The widgets are written in Javascript and Konfabulator has been around long enough that there are quite a few nifty little ones to choose from.

First impressions are that they are gorgeous.

I caught a reference in an O'Reilly article that one of Apple's new features in Tiger was a rip-off of Konfabulator. So I thought I might as well and go try the original (not being a developer and so not having early access to Tiger).

There are differing opinions as to whether it is truly a rip-off. Graphically, there is little doubt. But conceptually? That's a more complicated argument. I'm of two minds. I think the only real argument for compensating the developers of Konfabulator is that they (1) have contributed something of value to the OS X community, and (2) combatting the perception that Apple is ripping off its developer community (which may or may not be true).

In public relations terms, I don't think it can be argued that Apple has made a mistake. At 3% market share, that's probably not the wisest course to take. You need all the positive press and enthusiasm amongst your community that you can get.

Notable with regard to the Apple product is that they too are written using Javascript but also HTML and CSS. Toss in the access to the CoreImage technology underlying OS X and you have just enfranchised tens of thousands of Web geeks with the power to develop their own widgets. (Yes, Apple calls their applets widgets as well.)

Note for Gary: they have a special widget just for Gmail users. (You lucky dog.)

Safari vs. Firefox 0.9

Well, I'm using the latest versions of both browsers and while I like the look and feel of Safari more (and the drop down bookmarks) I am beginning to believe that Firefox puts less of a burden on my CPU.

Quite a bit actually (which is a pity). I expected more from Apple. Maybe I'm misreading the activity monitor but I'm seeing transient CPU loads as high as 60-65% with Safari and no more than 35-40% with Firefox. Safari seems to put just as high a load on virtual memory as Firefox if not higher.

All in all, the difference appears to be dramatic and I'm going to use Firefox more consistently for the next week and see if I see a difference in my system performance.

(Here's a postscript: Firefox 0.9 seems to have a real problem with plug-ins. It took me quite a while to get Flash working and I still haven't gotten Shockwave working. On the plus side, the scroll bar on the right-hand side finally draws properly. Ah.. the joys of using software still under development).

iTunes (just for kicks)

The last five tracks I've played on iTunes (with my Party Shuffle):

Desafinado (Off Key) -- Stan Getz
Don't Want You No More -- Allman Brothers Band
Ne Vois Tu Pas -- Autour de Lucie Chanson
Slow Walk -- Sonny Boy Williamson
Take My Hand -- Dido

A pretty cool mix that I would have never put together left to my own devices.

Fact-free approach to Middle East policy making

It's quite interesting in that in confirms what many of us have thought for the last year or so: that the Bush administration developed their views of the Middle East to support their prejudices (probably what we all do to some extent).

More of a problem when one has the power to crush entire countries though.

Paul Krugman on Iraq

Found a gem of a little article by columnist Paul Krugman of the NY Times.

I was reading up on William F. Buckley's stepping down from his position at the National Review (still haven't found his resignation posting, surprise since he apparently denigrates the Bushies crushing of Iraq) when I found another columnist ranting about Paul Krugman.

So off I go to read the original article (which I find on the "Free Republic" blog). Boy, he torched off a rocket there.. saying what a lot of us think (if the opinion polls are correct the majority of Americans now agree with me).

Nice being in the majority again after 4 very long years.