Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Flower/Crater

Sarah Palin Interviews for a Job

Sarah Palin, answering a question on whether she thinks she’s qualified to be president:

And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership.

I’m not sure what question she was answering there, actually, or whether this really qualifies as an answer — or a sentence, for that matter. But it’s marvelous. It made me wonder what it would look like if she interviewed for a job as a software developer.

Interviewer: Can you describe the pros and cons of the Spring framework?

Palin: Yes, of course. Now, some people would say that the “Spring framework” is not a framework at all but perhaps rather an attempt by software bureaucrats to tell hardworking American programmers how they should write their software for example. And you know me I’m just a backwoods Alaska girl and honestly I don’t spend much time listening to the “experts” and the “elites” because sometimes you just have to go with your gut.

Interviewer: [pauses] So you don’t like it?

Palin: It’s not a question of liking or to not liking, Charlie, it’s a question of standing up for what’s right. Can I call you Charlie?

Interviewer: My name’s Phil.

Palin: Great! Imagine, Charlie, that you were getting ready to sit down in your own home or perhaps in your own yard in your own neighborhood wearing your own pajamas and you wanted to make code with your computer. The kind of thing that average moms and dads who love their kids and America do every day. Right?

Interviewer: I’m not sure.

Palin: Now imagine that you’re typing away at your codes and then suddenly some government bureaucrat swoops in and says stop Charlie! Stop, darn it! Because you’re not perhaps typing it the way that the “hive mind” wants you to type it. You’re typing it in a way that’s individual to yourself and that just doesn’t sit well with the socialists and the communists and the media elites. How would that make you feel?

Interviewer: I’m in the yard? In my pajamas?

Palin: In your own pajamas that you bought with the labors of your hard earning. And now this guy who never probably even shot anything with his own hands perhaps wants you to write it his way. The “spring” way, whatever the heck that is. [laughs]

Interviewer: So you’ve never used it before?

Palin: Chad, whenever I hear the work “framework”, you know what I see? I see a crowd of hardworking American men and women slaving away their whole lives stuck like dead butterflies on a communist scaffolding working for the State. I see welfare mothers with fifteen babies snorting coke that they bought with our money, Chad. I see the whole nation bent under the burden of socialized healthcare while Mexicans pour over the border and take jobs away from good American workers. And for what?

Interviewer: I’m not sure.

Palin: For the Spring framework, Chuck. When I had my son, Spork, me and my husband Todd looked each other in the eyes and we said to each other: “Never again. Never will we let the tyranny of French monarchy scar the shores of this great land.” Our men and women are overseas fighting for our freedom against the forces of Hitler or perhaps some Hitler-like entities while in our own country ACORN workers are free to go into our schools and hand out pamphlets about how to do abortions and Nancy Pelosi wants to nationalize Christianity and illegal immigration and what are we going to do about it? I’ll tell you what, Chris. We need to stand up and be the Americans that our founding forefathers and foremothers and little founding forebabies wanted us to be. By turning our back on the Sling framework, Chuck! But standing up for what we believe in and for what’s good and right and then for example traditional values which.

Interviewer: [pauses] It’s the Spring framework.

Palin: Exactly. Now, you can do whatever you want. You can use the Sling framework or the Euro framework or the Lenin framework or whatever you want! This is America. But if you do then the will of the people will rise up and crush you like a bug and that’s what makes America great.

Interviewer: Well, Ms Palin. It’s been very nice talking to you.

The Pious Tree

(from the Hawaii trip)

Cthulhu Fortune Cookies

I used to eat at the Cthulhu takeout joint down the street. The food was ok, but, honestly, I found the messages in their fortune cookies a little offputting. Some examples:

A secret admirer will soon send you a sign of affection, in the seething form of the worm god Rlim Shaikorth, who will eat your soul.

Love conquers all — if by “love” you mean Othuyeg, the Doom-Walker, whose great tentacled eye will carve a bloody path through the ranks of the weak and leave in its wake the mangled remains of the damned.

The voices you hear in your head are real. Their owners will soon be coming for you.

In the end there are four things that last: faith, hope love, and the Dark Silent One Zushakon, who will eviscerate the first three things and consign their steaming viscera to the infinite void.

The one you love is closer than you think. You have just eaten him.

When I complained, the owner suggested I try adding in bed to the end of them. That didn’t help at all. I finally stopped going when the eyeballs in the hot and sour eyeball soup started looking at me.

Evil Is a Turn-Off

From Paul Graham’s fantastic piece on the iPhone App Store:

The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.

How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak

I popped the SIM card out of my iPhone last week and put it in back in its old home, an aging (but loyal) Motorola Pebl. A pointless gesture, yes — Apple doesn’t give a shit if I use their phone, especially since I haven’t shackled myself to their reprehensible partner in crime — but, then again, it’s not really a gesture. Apple’s App Store policies have been making my skin crawl lately, and using their phone has become genuinely unpleasant. It’s no fun any more.

And the bad feelings are leaking over into the rest of the Applescape. I got rid of an AppleTV recently, and for the first time in a long time feel no real desire to own any of their increasingly lovely computers. Evil is a turn-off. Graham again:

But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced “Don’t be evil” so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.

It would be one thing if Apple was just screwing over its own ecosystem — but what if this horrible software distribution model leaks out into the wider world, and we have to start buying all our stuff through dictatorial, single-channel gatekeepers? It would stunt the industry, hurt software, throttle innovation.

Anyway. It’s weird rooting for Apple to fail, but I sincerely hope they do, and fail hard. The iPhone’s a more or less perfect device, but perfect is no substitute for good.

Word Nerdery

From a BoingBoing post about über-crank Ignatius L. Donnelly, who Charlie Pierce profiles in his book Idiot America:

“Cranks are noble,” Pierce says, “because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.” It’s like the difference between kitsch and dreck–people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better–they’re in it for the money and the power and the fame.

I really really love this kind of semantic hair-splitting. This is where vocabulary really gets interesting: at the shifting hairs-width border between not-quite-synonyms. Our relentlessly Darwinian culture tends to pound the crap out of this kind of “extraneous” nuance — the difference between “less” and “fewer”, for example, is quickly disappearing, and the farther/further distinction is just an annoyance these days. Lots of dictionary definitions seem more like quaint archaeological artifacts that pertinent, present-day concerns.

Still. English is a borderless country on an infinite plane of possibility, and it will gladly absorb anything you dump into it. So there are always new gems to find, if you’re willing to dig.

Soldiers Coming Home to Their Kids

I defy you to watch this dry-eyed.

LED Football: Now with Extra Nostalgia Power!

My favorite iPhone game, LED Football, just got better. And by better, I don’t mean that the characters on the screen have begun to resemble actual football players, or anything. No: they still look like red line segments, as God intended.

But note the up and down buttons:

See those wear patterns? They actually get worse the longer you play, just like they did on the original handheld, back in 1977. Which is great for those of us who don’t much appreciate it when that special trapped-in-a-hopelessly-idealized-past feeling is undermined by the present.

Radiohead in a Nutshell

Twitter without Merlin Mann would be a sadder place.

Real Men Use 18-Button Mice

The new OpenOfficeMouse has been generating a lot of buzz lately, mostly because of its proud array of buttons — 18 in all — and its built-in joystick:

Now, what can you do with 18 buttons, 52 commands, and a joystick? The answer is anything you like. The ability to assign application functions to both clicks and double-clicks, combined with the ability to use the joystick as an analog joystick or as the equivalent of 4,8, or 16 additional mouse buttons, significantly expands your options beyond the mere addition of more buttons.

The thing that all the haters aren’t considering is that an 18-button mouse gives you 262144 potential click combinations — enough to assign a click for pretty much any action, or series of actions, imaginable.

Say you wanted to launch a browser, navigate to your third favorite celebrity gossip site, compose a pre-emptive tweet about the indiscretions of Starlet X, and start a little game of solitaire. With the OpenOfficeMouse, it’s simple! Just click buttons 1 and 3 and 5 and 9 and 10 and 13 and 17 while rotating your joystick -36 degrees off its central axis. Just be careful not to click button 12 as well, because that would shut down your computer. Or possibly alphabetize the icons on your desktop. It’s unclear.

My understanding is that the manufacturers of this device will soon announce a bevy of new products, including:

1. The OpenOfficeKeyboard, which does away with the tedium of shift- and control-key combinations by providing a dedicated key for every possible OpenOffice function. This doesn’t just mean separate keys for big O and little o and umlaut ö, but a separate key for things like Copy and Paste and Insert Date and Select Font as well. The keyboard goes into production as soon as a large enough blimp hanger can be located to build a prototype in.
2. The OpenOfficeUSBKey, 432 terabytes of storage convenience, right at your fingertips! As long as your fingertips are manipulating a crane powerful enough to lift it, of course. Comes with its own trailer, which you can conveniently hitch to the back of your car in the event that you wish to transport it to a different location¹.
3. The OpenOfficeMonitor, which is actually a series of connected monitors, each dedicated to a single window! No more tedious opening and dragging and minimizing². With the OOMonitor, all your windows are there, all the time. And, in the unlikely event that you actually want to close one, you can simply snap off the associated monitor/window module and put it under your desk. The default configuration comes with 6 separate monitor/window modules, and it’s super-easy to snap on additional ones, as your multi-tasking needs dictate.

I’ve found the recent, Apple-inspired trends toward smallness and simplicity deeply disturbing. It’s wonderful to see a company doing something about it.