tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

Princeton Protests Proposition 8

2008-11-21T11:02:00.001-08:00

"Traditional sidewalk values". Priceless.

Still struggling to understand the whole protest-after-you-lose-the-vote thing, but I guess those are details.

Rebuilding the Republican Party

2008-11-19T05:37:00.000-08:00

It may strike some as odd that my first post-election political post would be about the GOP, but there you go: I’m a maverick. (Is it OK to use that word again? Or will it forever conjure up images of Tina Fey hawking “Palin 2012” t-shirts on QVC?) I’ve been heartened in conversations with friends and family who are proud Republicans over the last two weeks to hear their resolve at taking a long, hard look at what went wrong. (And equally encouraged by their genuine eagerness to support Barack.)

I’ve made no secret of my Democratic party leanings – I’ve voted Democratic for every Presidential candidate I’ve been eligible to vote. Yet I grew up in a Republican household, spent many chilly fall days in Connecticut canvassing for Republican candidates (local and national). My Dad volunteered on George HW Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign. Gerald Ford once commented to my Dad at a state party meeting that my Mom was cute. (She is, by the way.) So I have mostly positive feelings about the GOP – the old GOP. And I know precisely - the actual day - when those feelings started eroding:

That’s Pat Buchanan delivering his address to the 1992 Republican Convention. He referred to the Democratic Convention as a “masquerade ball”, mocked its attendees as “radicals and liberals” – even blew the “cross-dresssing” dog whistle (get it? THEY’RE ALL GAY!). And then this:

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him.

Much of the slash-and-burn tactics the GOP has deployed over the last 20 years trace, for me, to that speech. It’s possible they existed before – that religion was used as a wedge to scare voters into voting for the GOP – but I certainly didn’t see it. In President George HW Bush I saw a committed government servant, a modest man with a fearsome intellect who lost touch with his country. I voted for Bill Clinton, not against George Bush.

In 2000, I considered crossing party lines and supporting John McCain over George Bush in the California primary. I liked McCain, I didn’t like George W Bush, and I had originally supported Bill Bradley. (Family trivia: my first son was born on Super Tuesday that year. The political junkie thing runs strong in our family.)

And as President Bush betrayed his party’s ideals – on civil liberties, on government spending, on the separation of church and state, on scientific research, on diplomacy – I began to get angry. George W Bush did not represent the GOP I knew and grew up with: he led a religious coalition of social conservatives who sought to codify their beliefs through government intervention. When Howard Dean said “I want my country back!”, it resonated for me in a way that summed up much of what I felt was wrong. And when he followed it up by exclaiming that he was “tired of listening to the fundamentalist preachers!”, I remembered Pat Buchanan and his exhortations of a religious war.

Today’s GOP is coping with significant defeats across the board. I contend that this was a natural extension of Buchanan’s religious war: as Karl Rove (and Ashcroft, and Bush, and Palin, and countless others) played it to its logical conclusion, inevitably someone would show up and get us past it. But in those defeats, I’m encouraged – out of this will rise new thinking about what the party can (and should) do, most importantly from people whose voices must be heard in the party. Check out Rebuild the Party, or David Frum's announcement of the New Majority. Read Reihan Salam's posts over at The American Scene. Listen to former Congressman (and founding member of The Heritage Foundation) Mickey Edwards talk about the future of the conservative movement. They're not all in agreement - but they don't need to be. The key is that they're working hard to identify ways to reclaim the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

Many of my Democratic friends will no doubt scratch their heads, wondering why I would care: we won! But that's just it: I didn't support Barack Obama because I wanted to win. I supported Barack Obama because I believe in what Barack often spoke about: "disagreeing without being disagreeable". Politics for me is finding good solutions to hard problems, not demonizing the other guys because they don't agree with me.

Encouragingly, each of the links above demonstrate a positive, principled approach to defining what the Republican Party should be about. In none of those efforts do they spend any time figuring out clever ways to question my patriotism, my eagerness to destroy the family or my desire to wage war on people of faith. And that's a start. A very good one. Here's hoping they stay at it, and make progress.

Old WordPress posts are (mostly) redirecting

2008-11-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

In moving 3,000 posts over from WordPress to Blogger, errors when users visit old links are inevitable. My implementation of WordPress published posts to URLs that looked like this:

http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2008/11/04/yes-we-did.php

I've converted to Blogger, and Blogger's permalinks are a tad different:

http://tins.rklau.com/2008/11/yes-we-did.html

Specific differences: no /archives sub-directory, no /day in the path (just /year and /month), and the file extension is .html instead of .php. Ideally, I wanted a way to ensure that people visiting the first URL end up at the second.

For the most part, that's now happening. Using the WordPress Redirection plugin (I'll eventually move this out of WP itself and handle this in .htaccess), I'm using the following regex query:

/tins/archives/(\d*)/(\d*)/(\d*)/(.*).php

And I'm redirecting those URLs to this string:

http://tins.rklau.com/$1/$2/$4.html

A few edge cases where this breaks: Blogger caps its permalinks at 5 words. So posts-with-lots-of-words-in-the-title.php become posts-with-lots-of-words.html, and my redirection won't work. Also, Blogger doesn't include the word "the" in permalinks, so the-day-is-here.php won't properly resolve to day-is-here.html.

Nevertheless, this is about a 98% effective solution, which I'm quite happy with. I'd love to have a custom 404 page so confused visitors could figure out what was going on - but on the balance, I've accomplished what I set out to do.

And so concludes this period of meta-blogging, in which I blog about the blogging engine that lets me blog. Even I'm a tad tired of it, so look for obsessive political blogging and the random nerd post to reappear any day now.

Feed readers, I'm sorry (but it's over now)

2008-11-18T11:27:00.001-08:00

Yeah, I know I just basically spammed you through Google Reader (or whatever your favorite feed reader happens to be these days). But the worst is over: I've imported my entire blog and all posts are now live on the Blogger-managed blog here.

Last step in this migration is to use htaccess to rewrite incoming traffic from the WordPress URLs over to Blogger. May get to that in the next couple days, otherwise it'll be the weekend.

Thanks to Aaron Brazell

2008-11-15T16:17:00.000-08:00

Aaron Brazell, the mastermind behind Technosailor, is, as they say, Good People. I pinged him the other night after banging my head against a wall trying to get my WordPress blog exported properly. The issue was my reliance on Textile when drafting posts (this started in Movable Type, and I continued doing it once I converted to WordPress. And the default export script in WordPress doesn't trigger any plugins when it exports the text, so my 2800+ posts were mostly useless for a Blogger import.

Aaron whipped up a plugin that did exactly what I needed, and I now have my entire WordPress archive in a usable export format. A "thank you" seems hardly sufficient, but I'll start there: Aaron, thank you. :)

Some other lessons learned: my first few attempts at exporting from WordPress failed and it took a few tries to learn what was up: the default timeout setting for PHP is 30 seconds. My WordPress install lives on a shared server, and exporting 2800 posts and 9000 comments was taking longer than 30 seconds. This page was what I needed: editing the export.php file (in wp-admin/includes/) and adding set_time_limit(120); to the script did the trick: that gave the script plenty of time to execute and ensure I got the entire blog exported.

The conversion will continue - next step is to import the posts into Blogger, then figure out the most efficient way of rewriting inbound links so that links to the old site (in the form http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/yyyy/mm/dd/post_title.php) are rewritten to the new site (which will be in the form http://tins.rklau.com/yyyy/mm/post_title.html). That should be relatively straightforward.

In the meantime, FeedBurner subscribers should be seeing these posts now as I've updated the source feed to point to the Blogger-maintained feed.

The Matrix Runs on Windows

2008-11-12T12:44:00.001-08:00

We may as well close YouTube - we have found the Best. Video. Ever.

WordPress to Blogger conversion

2008-11-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

Wow, is this painful. Starting with my transition to Movable Type, I started using Textile, a Movable Type plugin that let you use text-based shortcuts for doing HTML markup. In the days before a rich text editor, this was a great time-saver.

A couple years later I switched to WordPress, but found a WordPress plugin that allowed me to continue to use these shortcuts. Not only did that mean that my past entries with the shortcuts included would still work, but it meant I could continue to use the same shortcuts - which I continued to do, even though WordPress had a decent rich-text editor.

(Can you guess where this is headed?)

Now that I'm converting to Blogger, I have around 4 years of posts that are largely useless when it comes to hyperlinks: insead of this, I have "this":http://www.google.com. With plugins installed in WordPress, it converts the short-hand to the proper HTML... but Blogger doesn't have any corresponding plugin.

So I've spent the last 2 days meticulously finding each hyperlink and updating it to the proper format. Not fun. Necessary, but not fun. I'll be done soon enough...

Moving to Blogger

2008-11-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

Seven years after my entree to blogging (courtesy of a pre-Google Blogger), I'm coming back to where it all began. Stay tuned - migration of the blog from here (WordPress) to here (Blogger) will wrap up by early next week.

YES. WE. DID.

2008-11-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Bradley Effect

2008-10-30T04:28:00.000-07:00

That is all.

Sonos upgrade is shockingly good

2008-10-28T02:44:00.000-07:00

Sonos pushed out version 2.7 of its controller software last night, and I had a few minutes to play around with it before heading into work this morning. It’s awe-inspiringly good.

What is Sonos? I wrote about my purchase of the Sonos last summer, here’s my summary:

For those that don’t know what it is, the Sonos is a multi-room music system. They are tiny-ish boxes that are either powered (so that you can plug speakers directly into them) or unpowered (so you plug them into a stereo), and they communicate with each other and the wireless controller via ethernet and/or wifi. In addition to sharing your entire MP3 collection throughout the house, Sonos integrates with Rhapsody and Pandora, in addition to a slew of Internet radio stations (browsable by region as well as by genre). In short, more music than you could ever listen to is available at the touch of a button. The sound quality is spectacular, and the setup was surprisingly easy. (Like Fred, I highly recommend the Sonos/Rhapsody combo: the ability to access a library of 3m songs instantaneously and send it to any room in your house is breathtaking the first time you do it.)

We’ve now enjoyed our Sonos for almost 18 months, and it now sits right alongside our TiVo as the family’s most loved pieces of technology. Here’s what’s new in this upgrade:

iPhone/iTouch controller: the additional remotes for the Sonos are pricey ($399 if memory serves); now an iPhone app gives you a free additional remote to control the Sonos from anywhere in the house. That’s pretty astounding – Sonos just made their system more usable and cannibalized one of their (presumably high-margin) accessories. Talk about being customer-focused!

Radio directory: The Sonos directory of radio stations worldwide was already pretty great… our favorite radio station, hands down, is MVY Radio out of Martha’s Vineyard. (Friends will recognize the blue lobster, which is one of my laptop stickers.) But the enhanced support for streaming radio stations is incredible: tell it your location and they instantly aggregate all available stations. Prefer those stations from the town where you grew up? Change your location, and there they are. More than 15,000 radio stations are indexed and easily searchable. Unlike over-the-air brodcast radio which often has pops, static or interference, radio streams are crystal-clear. (My only complaint with most commercial radio streamed online: the annoying rights issues with commercial actors whose unions didn’t grant streaming broadcast rights, resulting in pockets of dead air or muzak playing while the commercial airs but cannot stream.)

Pandora, Last.fm are both free: looking for new music? Get started with either last.fm or Pandora (or log into your existing accounts) and you’re on your way.

Rhapsody: Streams are upgraded from 128k WMA to 192k MP3. We continue to subscribe to Rhapsody for on-demand access to millions of songs, though I have a feeling we’ll be playing with last.fm more now that it’s integrated.

Sonos upgraded its hardware a few months ago, and while still priced right under $1000, for anyone who listens to hours of audio at home I think you’ll find this a gadget that will thoroughly enhance your audio experience.

One final note re: Sonos. I’ve had a few interactions with their team by e-mail, and I’m really impressed at how dedicated they are to not only improving the product, but at how committed they are to ensuring customers genuinely love the product. Dave is right – Sonos (the company and the product) is universally loved – and for good reason.

Greatness and pettiness

2008-10-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

Been thinking about this speech a lot in the last couple days. Jeff Bridges from The Contender:

Yes, I’m a sap. And a hopeless optimist. But I’d like to think that as a country we can avoid falling into the abyss of demonization and hate, and instead find greatness in our leaders.

2008 ELCA Communicators Conference keynote

2008-09-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

You may recall that last month I gave a speech in Chicago at the 2008 ELCA Communicators Conference. This particular conference is important to me, for a couple reasons. First off, my 2006 speech to this group was the most impactful speech I’ve ever given. It was wild to see so many blogs pop up, and to receive e-mails months, even a year or more after the fact. I can count dozens of friends on Facebook and regular e-mail correspondents from people who were either in the audience that day or who heard the audio online after the conference. It lead directly to being asked to serve on the board of directors for Augsburg Fortress, an innovative publisher who’s making incredible strides as it adjusts to a changing marketplace – a professional development that has been valuable in its own right.

Needless to say, I was excited to be asked back – and thoroughly enjoyed the follow-up presentation that I gave. This year the ELCA video taped the presentation, and were gracious enough to share the video with me. For those who are interested, this year’s speech is included below.

Thanks again to the ELCA for sharing the recording. Those of us who make technology our living tend to spend gallons of digital ink complaining about the hordes who don’t get it. It’s to the ELCA’s credit that they are trying very hard to learn these new media, experiment, figure out what doesn’t work, and iterate. I never expected to sit in a position of leadership within the church – not least of all because it’s my “adopted” church (I was raised Catholic), but also because, well, church leaders were them, definitely not me. It’s humbling to be in a position to influence how those decisions are getting made.

I’m incredibly proud of what those in the audience have accomplished. Whether it’s Ning-based social networks focused on the liturgy, countless Facebook groups whose members number in the thousands, or the fact that more than one out of every 100 books available on the Kindle at launch came from Augsburg Fortress – the church is working hard to apply these modern technologies to fundamental challenges.

I’m looking forward to hearing from those who watch the speech… what did I miss?

Got Google Questions? We got answers.

2008-09-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

Very excited to announce a project that I’ve been working on for the past several months (in addition to a few others…) – the Content Central blog and the updated Submit Your Content page. Both are intended to bring a bit more transparency to how we distribute content for content partners at Google, and help partners find the tool(s) they need to get better results from working with us.

Congrats to Don, who was instrumental in seeing this through. And major thanks to Steffanie, JL and April (none of whom have a blog I can link to, as far as I know – hint, hint) who brought much-needed focus to the project. Keep an eye on the blog, lots of good stuff is in the hopper over there.

John McCain's dishonorable campaign

2008-09-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

Another day, another breath-taking ad from the McCain campaign:

Go read the supporting evidence at McCain’s site; here’s the relevant portion:

The Full Text Of S.B. 99 Included Changes That Would Offer Sex Education To Children Beginning In Kindergarten. “Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.” (S.B. 99: Illinois Senate Health And Human Services Committee, Passed, 7-4-0, 3/6/03, Obama Voted Yea)

Now I realize it’s been a while since I graduated from law school, so perhaps my ability to parse legislation is a tad rusty. But a clear reading of that sentence — really the only way to read that sentence — indicates that the legislation simply added the requirement insofar as they were already taking in a class. In other words: if (and only if) there was a Kindergarten class teaching sex ed (can anyone point out any curriculum where this was on the agenda? I’ll be stunned to see any link to any Illinois school where that’s the case; it sure wasn’t in Naperville), then that class simply needed to add language regarding HIV.

Put more simply: no class in Kindergarten? No HIV talk. The bill just toughened up existing sex ed to make sure it was more effective. You know, so that kids might not, um, get pregnant and stuff.

But that’s an entirely separate discussion.

Why was Kindergarten even mentioned? As Hilzoy points out, it was because Barack felt that age-appropriate education might help protect children from pedophiles. Hardly the “comprehensive sex education to kindergarteners” claimed by McCain.

Let’s not forget:

The truthiness of Sarah Palin's maverick credentials

2008-09-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the McCain campaign launched this new ad, titled “Original Mavericks”:

“She opposed the Bridge to Nowhere”, the ad’s voice-over declares. Which is pretty great. Except, well, she didn’t.

She lobbied in favor of the bridge, going so far as to campaign in the city where the bridge would have terminated, and proudly displaying her support by sporting a “Nowhere, Alaska” t-shirt:

[caption id=”“ align=“alignnone” width=“278” caption=“Sarah Palin Nowhere, Alaska T-shirt”][/caption]

Caught in the lie, the McCain campaign now points out that, well, she didn’t really oppose it from the beginning, but she’s totally the one who killed it. Only that’s not true either.

Even richer? After having earmarked $200m+ from federal taxpayer money to pay for the bridge to nowhere, she petitioned Congress to keep the money even though they were not going to build the bridge.

And guess what? She got to keep it. More than $300 for every man, woman and child in Alaska. For a bridge that never got built.

Lest you think this is an aberration, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she took a town with no debt and left it with nearly $20m in debt – or over $3,000 per resident. Best of all, however, is her pride in obtaining several federal earmarks:

[caption id=”“ align=“alignnone” width=“391” caption=“Palin brags of earmark success”][/caption]

Last note on those earmarks: they were opposed by none other than the Original Maverick Himself, John McCain:

In 2001, McCain’s list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town — one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.

McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin’s tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002.

What else is there to say?

Update: TalkingPointsMemo has a nice video response to this, with even more details:

Google at the conventions

2008-08-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

Sarah Lai Stirland has a nice piece has a good piece over at Wired about what we’re going to be doing in Denver and in St. Paul at the Democratic and Republican conventions. I’ve been working on plans for the Democratic convention for months, and it’s hard to believe we’re just a few days away. One of the things we’re working hard on is making it possible for those who can’t be at the conventions to follow along online; I’ll post later in the week some links to gadgets and URLs that’ll get you started.

McCain and the Cross

2008-08-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

Keep an eye on this: Andrew (and others) are poking around McCain’s cross anecdote, and so far can find no reference to it (not in a prior retelling of McCain’s Christmases in captivity, not anywhere before 1999 when it appeared in Faith of My Fathers).

If this has legs — that is to say, if McCain lied about an apparently transformative experience in captivity and exploited others’ faith in an attempt to curry favor with the Evangelical community — it would be a profoundly stupid move. Hillary’s comments about sniper fire in Bosnia were dumb, but ultimately harmless — they just showed her trying to maximize political gain by showing how tough she was under fire (literally, in that case).

My first reaction when I heard the story retold on Saturday night was that it was a great story, and I was puzzled about never having heard it before. Seems like the kind of thing that should have been indelibly connected to his public life as a candidate — and perhaps I’d just missed it (admittedly, I don’t follow him as closely as I follow Barack). But something here doesn’t add up. (As I’m writing this, Andrew finds further evidence it’s not McCain’s story — he first told it as if it happened to someone else.)

If he’s lying about this, it makes it extremely hard for him to use his captivity as a proxy for his character, faith and duty to country. Which is why it would be so dumb to embellish… but he’d hardly be the first politician to fall victim to that trap.

Time will tell…

Update: Andrew’s most recent post on this more or less puts this story to bed:

Day said “the only friendly thing the [guards] ever did was hit me on the leg instead of on the head.” But, according to Day, McCain wouldn’t condemn them all, telling the other men of the occasional act of decency he’d witnessed from his captors. Day says McCain told him how one of those guards had “made a cross with his foot and wiped it out.”

Could it be... Hillary?

2008-08-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else, I’ve wasted a ton of cycles wondering who Barack’s VP choice would be. For a long time, I’ve thought Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer — governor in a red state, fluent in Arabic, farmer, lived in Saudi Arabia for years — was a great off-the-radar pick. But picking him — or Tim Kaine, Kathryn Sebelius, or Tom Vilsack — would likely result in a loud, nation-wide “Who?”

And that’s not what Barack needs. Other front-runners bring as many negatives (Biden’s loose lips, Gephardt’s boring, Richardson’s got some Clinton problems of his own, etc.) as they do support, and what support they do bring is lukewarm among your average voter. (Is there really a Biden groundswell coming? I doubt it.)

What’s the most dramatic, news-worthy, guaranteed-to-bring-votes VP nominee Barack could name?

Much as it pains me to say, I think there’s just one name who fills the bill.

Hillary.

Not really sure how I feel about that — but the more I’ve thought about it over the weekend, the more it feels possible. And just a week ago I told a friend I’d be stunned if she were the pick… now I’m not so sure.

Blog? What blog?

2008-08-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

Even I will acknowledge the irony of being the guy who has proclaimed — for years — that anyone who says they don’t have time to blog is lying, lazy, or both. So what’s my excuse? My last post was over a month ago. I don’t think I’ve ever gone that long between blog posts since starting this blog nearly seven years ago.

Let’s see. For starters, I’m still making a fair number of comments in two places: my Google Reader shared items (the Notes feature is the killer feature I’d been waiting for) and Twitter. And for the smattering of other content I create (Flickr, in particular) you can always get the aggregated, auto-updated list of stuff over at FriendFeed.

But the lack of blog posts is a combination of factors: the ease with which I can dash off a quick comment on Twitter or in Google Reader means that I have less need to compose more fully-formed thoughts on the blog. I tend not to write too much about Google-specific matters, and I’m not all that interested in breathlessly covering the latest tech news. On the politics front, my strong support of Barack doesn’t translate into a need to pontificate on why I support him – I think anyone who’s read more than a few posts here has a pretty good sense of why I support him and would have a hard time supporting Sen. McCain.

And, of course, there’s the easy cop-out: I’ve been busy.

Quick update on what I’ve been up to, for any who care: I recently took over as the content lead for Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle). We are a lean team within the content partnerships group responsible for ensuring that PS has all of the merchants and product listings included, and that the product team has all the info they need to continue to innovate. It’s a great challenge, I love the team, and I’m really enjoying ramping up on something entirely different.

In addition, I’ve been working for months on our partnership with the Democratic Convention. (We’re an “official provider” to both the Democratic Convention and the Republican Convention.) That means I’ll be in Denver (working, I promise!) ensuring that a variety of Google products are used to help make the convention more interactive and inclusive. I’m stunned that I get to indulge my habit (politics) while “working” — to say I’m lucky would be an understatement.

I’ll be sure to have a number of updates once I get to Denver, and will be posting photos to Flickr and Picasa. Stay tuned!

How Twitter and Google Earth Saved the 4th of July

2008-07-10T01:31:00.000-07:00

When I say “saved 4th of July”, I really mean, “saved me from disappointing my children.” Which, as any parent would readily understand, means exactly the same thing.

We live in a new development in San Ramon (Windemere), and we didn’t move in until late July last year. Since my daughter needs to be in bed by 7 or so, having the whole family out to see the fireworks around 9:30 wasn’t really an option. I knew San Ramon had a pretty big fireworks show, but I had no idea whether we’d be able to see the fireworks from our house. As the bird flies, they’d be just 4 miles away or so… but between us and the launch site were at least two ridges.

It occurred to me that Google Earth might be able to solve this dilemma. I got the location of the fireworks (Bollinger and Alcosta), and navigated there in Google Earth. Just one problem: how tall do fireworks detonate?

I tried a couple Google searches, but the obvious attempts resulted in lots of fireworks regulations for home use, ads for fireworks, etc… not what I was looking for. So I asked my Twitter followers. Within a few minutes, I had replies from Sean, Julio and John. (John’s clearly a better Google searcher than I am. Please don’t tell anyone at work.) I love Twitter.

So, back to Google Earth. I added a polygon with an elevation of 300m at that location:

End result was a nice tall rectangle right at that spot:

For the last step, I needed to go to my house in Google Earth, enable terrain mode, and then look in the direction of the fireworks to see if I could see the polygon:

Sure enough, it looked like I’d be able to see the fireworks! (For those wondering: the satellite images of our new development are a couple years old.) Sure, they were a couple miles away, and maybe one out of four blasts happened behind the ridgeline… but the bottom line was that the boys got to see their fireworks, and Becca got to sleep (saving us all from 5th of July “fireworks” during the day).

Yep, I’m a nerd.

McCainonomics - I'm going to be RICH

2008-07-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

I know candidates tend to say the darndest things on the campaign trail (can you say cling? I knew you could!), but John “doesn’t really understand economics“ McCain’s latest foray into fiscal conservatism is a doozie. Kicking off his Last Economist Standing week, he explained how he’d balance the budget in his first term:

The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

More on this incredible policy announcement here and here.

Let me try and figure this out: after the Bush administration maxed out the country’s credit cards, President McCain would win the war (w00t!) quickly, and use the debt we’re not incurring (in McCainonomics, this is called “savings”) to balance the budget.

Now, I went to law school because there was no math involved. But is that really how it works? Because, if so, I’d like to make an announcement: effective tomorrow, Wednesday, July 9, I am leaving Google and will be purchasing Yahoo. Not shares of Yahoo, but Yahoo. How could I possibly afford to to buy Yahoo when Microsoft couldn’t? Glad you asked: the savings from not buying Google will more than cover my purchase price.

Next up? Microsoft. (Which I’ll pay for by not buying IBM, of course.)

See how easy this is? McCain’s a genius.

You need to read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

2008-07-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks back, my friend Mike Marusin from Naperville updated Twitter that Cory Doctorow would be appearing at Andersen’s Bookstore in my old hometown, Naperville, IL, for a book signing. He’d just published Little Brother, and I was jealous that Mike got to meet Cory. I’ve long been an admirer of Cory’s, and a few days later I stopped by Cory’s site to check it out.

Imagine my shock to find that I could download all of Cory’s books and short stories for free, pre-formatted for ebook readers. That meant I was able to grab a copy and throw it on my Kindle… which I did, but was in the middle of reading White House Ghosts (yes, I’m a junkie) so I forgot about it. I had some time on Sunday afternoon, so I pulled out the Kindle and started Little Brother. I finished it last night, and it was spectacular.

I’ve seen other reviews peg it as a young adult novel, which I think is a load of crap. It’s a good story, pure and simple. That its protagonist happens to be a 17 year-old is immaterial, I think, to the target audience. Anyone who wants to know more about the technology shaping our society should read the book – and Cory does a great job of explaining complex issues (cryptography, hacking, open source software, tunneling, to name a few) in ways that non-techies will be able to appreciate. (I’ve seen a couple reviews knock him for these explications, suggesting it drags the narrative down… I disagree. If you’ve ever hung out with an obsessive, talented geek who is spectacularly good at this stuff, you’ll know they can spend hours explaining what they’re working on. The only difference with Cory is that his explanations often make sense to the uninitiated.)

The book is a fast read, and it’s a great ride. Cory nails the technology, the politics are spot on, and the implications about our growing surveillance society are laid out in an uncomfortable progression that you’ll want to give thought to. I told Robin last night that if I’d read this book as a teenager, it would have changed my life: Marcus (the main character) is a remarkable kid, and I have no doubt that I would have aspired to his blend of political commitment and technical mastery.

If you spend any time thinking about politics and technology (and if you don’t, what in God’s name are you doing hanging out at this blog?!), you’ll want to get yourself a copy of Little Brother.

A postscript: as I noted, Cory gives his books away for free. He’s also a full-time author, leading some to wonder why the hell he encourages people to download his books for free. From his intro:

For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies — in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you’ve got to figure that most of the people who “like science fiction” (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don’t really buy books. I’m more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who’s in the tent bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it’s in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they’re intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That’s the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.

Now here’s a particularly cool twist: Cory points out that many readers, after enjoying the free ebook, ask him if they can send him some money. He doesn’t want that – to do would be to encourage people to bypass his publisher, which he doesn’t want. Instead, he keeps a list running of librarians who need copies, and he invites readers to contribute copies to those schools/libraries.

I just bought four and had Amazon send them on their way… now 3 schools and 1 public library will have a copy of a book I think is critical for younger kids to read, and hopefully be inspired by. How cool is that?

I’ll repeat what I said four years ago: Cory Doctorow is a genius.

Helping my 6 year-old learn to read

2008-06-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers of this blog may remember the less-than-smooth toddler years my son Robby enjoyed. There were the febrile seizures (now outgrown, thankfully), the strabismus in his left eye requiring eye surgery in both eyes, and the speech and developmental delays that were thankfully diagnosed early (and for which he received regular speech and physical therapy). Compared to the more extreme situations many parents have faced, we considered ourselves quite lucky – and having recently completed kindergarten here in San Ramon, we’re quite proud of his progress. (Particularly on the speech: he was briefly in speech therapy here, only to be told after a month or so that he was sufficiently progressed that he no longer needed ongoing therapy.)

Every child is different, and the fact that his older brother was reading fluently by the middle of kindergarten was not in and of itself troubling. But we knew that entering first grade without reading comfortably would make first grade more stressful for him – so this morning I set out to see if I could find a good computer-based aide to help him read. (Tutoring was going to be tricky – we have a lengthy trip back east next month that’ll have the kids out of town for almost a month – so that seemed to be a non-starter.)

I quickly found two web-based solutions – ClickN KIDS and Starfall. The former was a sponsored link at Google in my early queries; the latter showed up in a couple blog posts I found from teachers talking about various in-class tools they used.

ClickN KIDS is $60 for one student, but it gave us a couple sample lessons, which I let Robby try. The interface was quite straightforward – it’s a Flash-based app, which means that we can do the lessons from anywhere we have a browser. (Given next month’s trip, this was a huge plus over installed software, which I’d have to install on multiple computers.) It acts as more of a self-guided program – which I like not because I don’t want to help Robby, but because I want him to learn to use the computer without me (or his oh-so-helpful brother!) guiding him along. We read to Robby quite a bit, and I wanted this to be something he could do on his own and feel a sense of accomplishment with.

Starfall, it turns out, was what Ricky used in his kindergarten. It’s free, but seems to work best in a teacher-led (or parent-led) environment. Early interactions were good – Robby enjoyed the stories and did well at the tests. We may refer to it occasionally as additional material, but ultimately I chose to sign up for ClickN KIDS instead.

What sold me on ClickN KIDS were a couple things: the lesson-based interface gives Robby discrete tasks to accomplish, and each one focuses on progressively more advanced phonics, sight words and letter combinations (the program goes from K-3rd grade levels). And it gives me a comprehensive report to show how he’s doing individually and compared against all users on the system, along with indications for each lesson of particular words or sounds that he struggled with.

He’s already done 3 lessons today – and he loves it. I’ll report back after we’ve been at it for a couple weeks to see how much progress he’s made – but I’m pretty optimistic so far.

BTW – if you’re interested, you can get $10 off the sign-up (and they’ll give me $5 too, for what that’s worth) if you use my e-mail address (rick@rklau.com) as your promotion code.

Anyone else have recommendations for computer-based reading programs? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.