LookIt

It's not just me

I thought I was being a bit lame when I updated one of my XP boxes with the patch to eliminate the GDI trojan problem and couldn't figure out what the patch was telling me. I guess I'm not alone. When I did Windows Update on two other XP boxes side-by-side, both of which I brought up to SP 2 from the same CD-ROM, they gave different results. I truly don't know whether or not the systems are safe from the attack, which has now been seen in the wild.

I am now regretting letting my parents still use Windows instead of forcing them to the Mac during their last hardware upgrade cycles. This is just amazing.

Google and China

A bunch of people are up in arms about Google News in China not running headlines from newspapers that are banned in China. Tim Bray even calls this pathetic. Sorry, I don't buy it, for two reasons:

- If I'm using Google News to look at news, I don't just want the headlines, I want the news. Google listing headlines from web sites I can't get to is about as useful to me as Google listing headlines from print-only sources.

- People are acting like China is the only place that bans certain news agencies. Many countries large and small throughout the world do this, often more effectively (that is, brutally) than China.

It would be great if people here didn't think that Chinese internet users were stupid (well, any more stupid than western internet users). They know that there are news sources that are banned; they hear about them the same way we hear about repressed news sources. Google doesn't need to say "hey, we smart westerners know better than your government what headlines you should see".

I don't hear many statements that Google is bad for not showing the web headlines from some of the less-moderate Arabic web sites talking about the US's actions. Funny, that.

Not competing with iTunes Music Store

Big news this week: Apple's iTunes Music Store (iMS) has another competitor, eMusic.com. The breathless announcements make it sound like Apple should start to get worried; after all, eMusic.com has lots of "alternative labels" and lower prices.

No.

eMusic.com has a bunch of unknown labels with little-known bands (and the occasional well-known band but only a single album that they did while waiting for better labels to sign them). Worse yet, the subscription plan is just plain dumb for most music buyers. You pay a fixed fee, starting at $10/month for 40 downloads. Yes, that 1/4 the price of iMS, but it also completely limits you to that many songs. If you find a band you really, really like, and they have five albums out, you have to pick and choose the ones you want now and then buy the rest next month.

Sillier yet, if you don't use all you 40 downloads in a month, you pay anyway. So, if you get bored of eMusic.com (which is not difficult) and forget to cancel, you'll get nailed next month. Gee, that'll cause happy subscribers and make them want to stay. You can almost hear the membership sales people say "let's punish our users for not downloading exactly the right number of songs per month."

I was hopeful about their re-launch because they also were going to start selling soundboard-quality recordings of live shows, which they got when they bought the Digital Club Network. But the selection is so limited that you'd have a hard time finding many shows from any particular genre that you would want. And, in the same "let's try to trick our customers into wasting money", they sell filler talk as separate songs. Clicking "download entire show" is almost a sure way of throwing away a buck.

They probably have some happy customers who will want to stay more than a few moths, but so few that no one will notice.

The 50th picture

Inspired by Tim Bray's noticing that Google does a bad job of indexing pictures, I wanted to see how people do with their new digital cameras after taking, say, 50 pictures. Searching for the pictures that Google has indexed whose filename is IMG_1050 shows that people have mostly figured out how to use the flash well, but cropping and composition are still works in progress. I suspect that the 50th photo on people's first film cameras were similar, but more expensive to process.

And the next silly Google craze will be to do such a search and make up a story linking the photos on the first page.

Followup:Tim points out that many/most cameras start at 0100, so IMG_1050 is actually the 1050th picture taken. That makes the results a little more depressing.

Perversion of what?

I'm hearing more people talk about the violence and humiliation being inflicted against civilians in the name of Islam is a perversion of Islam or is an aberration of Islam or is not true Islam. All of that may be true. But I get the creepy feeling that many of the same folks saying this are forgetting that the violence and humiliation that the US is inflicting against Muslim civilians is a perversion of Christianity, is an aberration of Christianity, and is not Christianity as taught by the words and deeds of Christ. Each side may feel justified in escalating the violence and humiliation because the other side is not acting as they should; if so, there will never be an end to the escalation.

Afternoon joy

For those of us who didn't grow up in agricultural areas, farmer's markets can be really special. Santa Cruz has a great one that runs about nine months of the year, every Wednesday afternoon. There are dozens of farmers, about half of them organic, and many other vendors of freshly-made foods. It's also a great place to run into local friends; I saw five folks from different parts of my life today.

And I can't say enough about freshly-picked local organic figs; it's taking great willpower not to down the whole basket.

Life in lefty Santa Cruz, part 384

Senior citizen driving a spiffy, fairly recent Cadillac with a bumpersticker that says "I'm anti-Bush and I vote".

Chinese names

My buddy James Seng (sometimes known as Ching Hong Seng) gave into my repeated requests and wrote up a fairly detailed explanation of how Chinese people get non-Chinese names. The short answer is: there are many ways. The essay is the first I have found that explains (in English) Chinese naming, much less how folks like James get non-Chinese names.

One quibble I have with James' essay is that he calls these names "Christian" and "English". Many of them could be considered Christian names, but I am now in fairly frequent contact with Chinese people whose names are "Merlin" and "Linus". OK, maybe those are "English" and "Christian", respectively, but I think it is easier to classify them as "dweeby" in the positive sense of the word. ☺

Still here

Maybe the best way to honor the dead is to honor their effect on those of us living. In the three years since someone thought it was right and holy to kill thousands of civilians with airplanes, one song has touched me more than any other: Land of the Living by Lucy Kaplansky (MP3, 4.5 meg). She's a solid New Yorker, and her latest album, The Red Thread, covers a wide range of serious topics, from what the survivors in New York have to deal with, to adopting a child, to religious demagoguery. Even if you don't normally like singer-songwriter music, you might want to give it a try.

Land of the Living, by Lucy Kaplansky

Late afternoon back in New York town
Waking up as the wheels touch down
Pick up my guitar and walk away
Wish I was going home to stay

Line of taxis, I wait my turn
Tar and asphalt, exhaust and fumes
Beside the road on a patch of ground
Taxi drivers are kneeling down

Beneath the concrete sky I watch them pray
While the people of the world hurry on their way
I think they're praying for us all today
And the stories that fell from the sky that day

CHORUS
This is the land of the living
This is the land that's mine
She still watches over Manhattan
She's still holding onto that torch for life

Back home fire's still burning, I can see it in the air
Pictures of faces posted everywhere
They say "hazel eyes, chestnut hair
Mother of two missing down there"

I pass the firemen on duty tonight
Carpets of flowers in candlelight
And thank you in a child's scrawl
Taped to the Third Street firehouse wall

There's shadows of the lost on the faces I see
Brothers and strangers on this island of grief
There's death in the air but there's life on this street
There's life on this street

CHORUS
This is the land of the living
This is the land that's mine
She still watches over Manhattan
She's still holding onto that torch for life

Then I got in a taxi, said "Hudson Street please"
He started the meter and he looked at me
I glanced at his name on the back of his seat
And I looked out the window at the ghost filled streets

I noticed cuts on his hand and his face
And I said "You're bleeding, are you okay?"
He said "I'm not so good, got beat up today
And I'm not one of them no matter what they say

I'm just worried about my family
My wife's in the house and she's scared to leave"
And I didn't know what to say
I didn't know what to say, but I said a prayer for him anyway

CHORUS
This is the land of the living
This is the land that's mine
She still watches over Manhattan
She's still holding onto that torch for life