You May Be Able to Get There From Here

An interesting story from James Galloway’s obituary of Robert McNamara:

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.

This tattoo doesn’t seem to bad, until you realize where it came from:

From Art Brodsky in the Huff Post:

Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves. There could, of course, be a larger discussion about the meaning of “conservative” and Republican, and whether the two are synonymous.

It’s nice to see comprehensive coverage of this issue on the front page of the Huff Post this week.

I think that I’m in favor of more (Ted Stevens) conservatives making ludicrous claims about the net and net neutrality, because such comments and positions give more publicity to the importance of protecting the rights of all internet users. In other words, democratic candidates will have a reason to fight on these issues because they’ve been aired publicly.

I suppose this post is a confession.

My discontent as a city biker bubbled into an act of violence today.

On my bike ride home this evening, a man nearly hit me on a calm two-lane street while yelling “Fuck you, Faggot.”

This sort of thing often happens. On occasions like this, I’ll often catch an irate driver at an upcoming stop light. This was not the case this evening: I almost caught the man at the next light, but he was a little too fast.

(Not that I would do anything to him at the stop, except give him a look of indignation or maybe an explicit gesture. One time I did scare the shit out of an old lady who had wronged me by knocking on her drivers-side window. At that time, I really like the idea that she had honked and almost run me over with the notion that I was just a biker, an unreal fragment on the road. I’d like to believe that my act of startling her made her think about the real world.)

This evening I did not catch the abuser, but I did see the bar/restaurant that he turned into. (The bar, by the way, is a faux Japanese restaurant, which gives me umbrage apart from the situation.

In a large, tight parking lot at dusk, I knew it would be hard for me to be seen. I waited, parked my bike at an establishment across the street, and then walked over to the guy’s car and slit one of his tires. I also left a note, “please be nice to bikers.” The tone of my note is influenced by my habitually reading of passiveaggresivenotes.com.

I’m normally not one for violence, but I do like exacting karma-tic justice. I hope, though, that I can suppress the joy that I receive from performing this act, because it a joy reaped by violence.

To The Point, from KCRW, has an informative discussion on drug policy this week, specifically the past racial inequities of of crack vs. cocaine prosecution:

Congress has relaxed overly harsh and discriminatory penalties for crack, as opposed to powder cocaine. But federal prisons are still full of blacks and whites serving different sentences for the same crimes. Should sentencing guidelines be made retroactive? Would that lead to the sudden release of 20,000 prisoners, crowding the courts and increasing crime? Also, a transit strike in France, and some big decisions for Michael Mukasey, the new Attorney General. Were Blackwater guards unjustified in killing Iraqi civilians? Can they be prosecuted?

You can listen to the program at KCRW.com

As a non-programmer whose learning techniques for application development in both a web and traditional environment, however ungracefully, I’ve decided to survey some of the Rich Internet Application (RIA) tools that have been developed in the past couple of years. My primary focus is to consider Adobe’s Flex framework, but I’ll also be reading and responding to Microsoft’s Silverlight tool, and other, small tools that can be implement as part of existing solutions.

I’ve been reading Getting Real, a book (organized collection of essays) by the team at 37Signals.

The company is a design firm that branched their design business to straight-forward productivity software.

It’s good reading because the writers offer sound advice for small companies, particularly those looking for success with web services.

This said, much of the books reads like an autobiography of 37signals due to an almost doctrinal, unabashed modeling of the company’s history and strategy. But this is often the case with business-oriented books by business people.

So perhaps 37signals should not be critiqued to much for their pride. Plus, the book is freely available on their website.