January 11, 2008
Al Sharpton's an ass
I should probably leave this alone, but it really bugs me when public figures, notably the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, co-opt someone else's problem or tragedy as a soap-box for their race and equality issues. It's very dangerous of me to question their motives, but every ounce of my being thinks their actions are motivated first by power, greed, and fame, and second for their desire to be a voice for the oppressed and marginalized. I'm not saying that they're entirely disingenuous, but because their motives are inverted they do more to escalate racial tensions than soothe them.
I was reminded of this opinion when I read this morning on CNN about Golf Channel host, Kelly Tilghman's, recent gaffe:
Excerpt from the CNN article:
-----------
"Tilghman uttered the remark during coverage of Hawaii's Mercedes-Benz Championship on Friday, while she and and co-host Nick Faldo were bantering about how young golfers might challenge ever-dominant Woods.
Faldo said, "To take Tiger on, well yeah, they should just gang up for a while until ..."
"Lynch him in a back alley," Tilghman interrupted with a chuckle."
-----------
It doesn't appear to me that this was intended to be racist. It doesn't point to inner racism coming out in a moment of weakness. She was just trying to be funny and made an honest mistake. I am constantly opening my mouth up to say something that I think will be funny or insightful, and realizing the second it's out of my mouth that it might be inappropriate or hurtful. Just this morning, my wife wanted to sit on the couch, and my daughter wouldn't move her legs, and even after Courtney told her to, Emma said, "I want you to sit on them." In a flash, I said to Emma, "Trust me, you don't want her to sit on them. Doh! You can bet I got a glare from Courtney. With humor, timing is everything. The faster your can respond, the greater the potential for humor. We don't always take the time to filter those statements. Like it or not, my brain has associated certain things, positive and negative, with every race on the planet. At some point in the future my brain may impulse my mouth to say something racially inappropriate before I consider the ramifications. That doesn't make me a racist, stupid perhaps, but not a racist. Tilghman has since issued a genuine apology to Tiger Woods,
Exerpt from the CNN article:
-----------
who through his agent issued a statement saying he was friends with Tilghman and respected her, said, "We know unequivocally that there was no ill intent in her comments."
-----------
Apology given, apology accepted, done. If Al Sharpton really cared about social justice and people he would see that the initial public outcry at Tilghman's comment, her subsequent and genuine apology, and Tiger Woods' forgiveness were information enough that the world doesn't condone statements like hers, and takes racial inequality very seriously. She's been suspended, and had her hand slapped, but he wants her fired. What!?
To me, the drunk rantings of Michael Richards and Mel Gibson likely point to repressed feelings and racial hate, but this was a simple mistake -- plain and simple. I know she's white and all, but demanding she be fired for that mistake seems way overblown. Tilghman is known for professionalism and speaks millions of words per year and six of them are unintentionally hurtful. Give me a break, 80% of the words out of Don Imus' mouth, trying to be funny, could easily be misconstrued and hurtful to someone, but I don't even think he's a racist.
It's not what you say, but how you say it.
Like I said, I should have left this one alone!
[Update: There's some great continued discussion of this post on a friends blog. Thanks Peter.]
[Update: My brother in law read this post while I was with him, his first comment, even before finishing, was that I may have undermined my position by starting the whole post off by calling the antagonist an ass. While I assumed a certain amount of license in rant mode, he may have a point. Thanks Dan.]
Posted by mark at 10:22 AM | Comments (6)
December 3, 2007
How the other third lives
We're in the midst of a kitchen remodel. On Saturday, our drywall guy asked me what I did for a living. I gave him my standard short answer, "I build websites ..." That didn't get much of a reaction, so I followed that up with "for Amazon.com ..." I could tell that the name didn't register either, so I just said "I'm a computer programmer; I write software." His response, "I haven't really gotten into the whole computer thing."
Wow, he's not online, and he doesn't even own or use a computer. Here is a successful sub-contractor with a friendly, professional crew who doesn't use a computer and hadn't heard of Amazon.
In this Information Week article, found via a quick Google search, in February 2006, only 64% of US households are online. Of the 36% who aren't online, only 2% have a desire to get online. I don't really have time to find more recent data, but one can assume that things probably haven't changed too much.
I'm curious to know how much that demographic has been inadvertently marginalized by the assumption that, "everyone's online these days." This was refreshing and a good reminder that we could in fact live healthy and productive lives without computers and the internet. Unless of course you build websites for a living.
Posted by mark at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)
October 8, 2007
Amazon Mp3 store
If you're not living under a rock, you'll know that a couple weeks ago Amazon launched an mp3 store that portends to compete with Apple in the digital music sales arena. I was initially skeptical because the Apple store is easy to use and tightly integrated with iTunes. You buy a song or TV show, and voila, it's in iTunes. The major difference between Apple and Amazon is that all songs purchased from Amazon are DRM free. Apple only sells some of their music without DRM, and I'm not sure it's possible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't -- I have no idea. For many, DRM is completely transparent. If you purchase from the Apple store (into iTunes) and only ever listen on your laptop or sync to an Apple device, then you'll never care about DRM. For me, I use a 3rd-party device that allows me to wirelessly stream music from my computer to my stereo. This works great unless you have DRM protected music. The device I use doesn't support DRM. Whenever I purchased a new, DRM protected album from iTunes, I had to first rip it to a CD and then re-import it into iTunes as mp3 files in order to remove the DRM. I then felt compelled to keep around two copies of the album, the purchased DRM version and and the non-DRM version. Needless to say, it was a pain.
As for my concern about ease of use and integration with iTunes, Amazon's service works great. You have to download and install an Amazon MP3 Downloader to help manage the download process. I'm not entirely sure why this is necessary, but I'm guessing it's to help ensure that your downloads were successfully downloaded, how many times they've been downloaded, allow you to pause and restart, etc. Since the Apple store is browsed only from within iTunes (read proprietary web browser), this sort of thing wasn't necessary. Since iTunes is such a good music player, none of us are mad that we have to use iTunes to browse their store. We weren't so happy when Microsoft did something similar with Internet Explorer, but I digress. Once the music is downloaded it's immediately available in iTunes, so integration with iTunes is seamless.
There were a few small hiccups with the store, but they weren't that big of a deal. After purchasing my first album, I tried to use the back button to browse for more albums and ended up downloading the album twice. When this happened, the first time download of the album was still processing so I had plenty of time to cancel the accidental re-download. Surprisingly, there wasn't a way to delete queued downloads in the Amazon Mp3 Downloader, so I had to let it download and then manually delete the second copy of the songs. Also, the installer didn't register the amz extension with the currently open Firefox window; perhaps that isn't possible. On restart Firefox recognizes the new extension fine and correctly launches the downloader.
From this point forward, if Amazon has the album, I'm going to purchase it there, I would suggest you do the same. If not, I'll still use iTunes. Oh yeah, just so Amazon gets the in the last word, many songs and albums are cheaper on Amazon. $0.89 cents a song versus $0.99 and $8.99 an album versus $9.99. The Crane Wife by The Decemberists was a full $2.00 cheaper.
[Update: If you enable iTunes Plus in the Apple store, you will always see the DRM free versions of songs/albums if available. The DRM free iTunes songs are more expensive individually at $1.29 a song, but it appears that you can still get the DRM free version of The Crane Wife through Apple for $9.99.]
Posted by mark at 12:30 PM | Comments (7)
September 5, 2007
Bye Bye MySpace
I finally decided to cancel my MySpace account. Call me a prude, but I got sick of being tempted to look at really stupid things just because they were titillating or offered some form of half-wit, low-brow humor. Here's the message I left for MySpace when they asked me why I was canceling my account:
"I'm switching to Facebook. Everywhere I look on MySpace there's trashy content. I expect a certain level of that sort of thing, but there's certainly more on MySpace. It's quickly becoming a 'red light district' on the web. If you don't allow a way for wholesome people to participate in the community without being exposed to so much crap, then you're eventually going to lose those people. For example, one of your advertisements that YOU got paid for had a semi-naked woman laying on her stomach pulling on her g-string with her stiletto heel. It's definitely sexy, but I don't NEED to see that, and I certainly don't want that content on the screen when I'm editing my profile with my family in close proximity."
I can handle a fair amount of bawdiness, and I understand that there are people out there who have lower standards. I was trying to use MySpace to manage a network of my friends to foster communication and to have some fun. It's now apparent that my network was in their space. They should rename the site to OurSpace.
I remember entering a couple houses in high-school and college for some random party or get together and knowing the instant I walked in that I needed to leave. The coffee table was the perfect litmus test. On these occasions, the table was covered with overflowing ash trays, a pipe, a bong, a bag of weed, numerous empty bottles or cans of beer, an empty pizza box, and possibly some porn (yes I threw that in to help the analogy). I'm not talking about some crazy party, but the sort of squalor that some people choose to live in on a daily basis. You know it when you see it. For me, MySpace has become that coffee table.
I choose to leave MySpace, and I'll choose to leave Facebook if the same conditions occur there. Let's be honest, the internet is cool and social sites have a certain appeal and usefulness, but at the end of the day we can live without them.
Posted by mark at 10:11 AM | Comments (6)
June 18, 2007
Typekey authentication
I was getting blasted by comment spam, so I enabled Typekey, an authentication service that claims to eliminate spam. It certainly eliminated spam, but it also eliminated comments. A friend informed me that, "your typekey login thing fails horribly for me." So, it's disabled for the time being while I try to figure out a better approach. Any other ideas out there?
Posted by mark at 8:26 AM | Comments (1)
January 8, 2007
Bubble boy
A couple months ago, I and a couple dad friends took our children to a really cool log cabin for a two night adventure. Or at least what was intended to be a two-night adventure. I had what can only be described as an allergic meltdown. I was sneezing like crazy, wheezing badly, my eyes were watering, and I was getting mild hives. I take a prescription antihistamine (Allegra) that was "in my system," but it wasn't doing much. In an attempt to curb the symptoms, I was taking liberal (read too many) doses of my Albuterol inhaler and popping the OTC pink Benedryl like candy just to maintain mediocre breathing, and try to stop the sneezing and watery eyes. It was about as uncomfortable as you can get before you decide that it's life threatening. I had been talking up this trip to James and Emma for months, so I was reluctant to leave. Also, It was about 15 degrees outside, so sleeping in the car or in a tent wasn't an option, I was basically stuck, in a cabin, that was slowly killing me for one night. With the aid of too much Benedryl and Albuterol I managed to get through the night and intelligently opted out of a second night. Ever since that night, my normally under-control allergies have been haywire.
This morning, I got allergy tested and the results were pretty startling. Of the 54 things that they tested via skin prick, I was allergic to 33 of them. Nurses are pretty hard to read sometimes, but I'm pretty sure that I was not the common case patient. ;-)
Here are the results. I included all of the items they tested because I thought it was interesting. I've put an x next to what I was allergic. Most reactions are similar to a mosquito bite. My dust mite reaction was about the size of dime, and I still have redness and itching the size of a quarter 6 hours later. I'm starting allergy shots on Wednesday.
| Trees | |
| x | Alder |
| x | Ash, white |
| x | Beech, American |
| x | Birch |
| Box elder | |
| x | Cedar, red |
| x | Cottonwood, eastern |
| x | Elm |
| x | Hackberry |
| x | Hazelnut |
| x | Hickory |
| x | Locust |
| x | Maple, mix |
| x | Mulberry |
| x | Oak, mix |
| Pine, Virginia | |
| Pine, white | |
| x | Sweet Gum |
| Sycamore, American/Eastern | |
| x | Walnut, black |
| x | Willow |
| Grasses | |
| x | Bermuda |
| x | Bluegrass |
| Fescue | |
| Johnson | |
| Orchard | |
| Redtop | |
| Ryegrass | |
| Timothy | |
| Weeds | |
| Cocklebur | |
| x | Dock |
| x | Kochia |
| Lamb's Quarter | |
| x | Mugwort |
| Pigweed | |
| Plantain | |
| x | Ragweed, giant |
| x | Ragweed, short |
| x | Sheep, sorrel |
| Molds | |
| x | Alternaria |
| x | Aspergilus, fumigatus |
| x | Cladosporium |
| Curvularia | |
| Epicoccum | |
| Helminthosporium | |
| Mucor | |
| Penicillium | |
| Environmentals | |
| x | Cockroach, mix |
| x | Dust mite, mix (CRAZY allergic) |
| x | Cat |
| x | Dog |
| x | Feathers |
| Controls | |
| x | Histamine |
| Saline | |
Posted by mark at 3:44 PM | Comments (3)
December 9, 2006
Christmas Music
I love Christmas Music.
My friend Jason Harrod is a fantastic singer/songwriter from North Carolina. He just posted a couple of his renditions of two popular Christmas songs for download on his website:
http://jasonharrod.com/news.html
I'm also providing them here since they're free:
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
They were on a multi-artist Christmas album released a few years ago called Gift, A Weathervane Christmas Collection, I don't think it's still available. Anyway, on that cd were Jason's two songs and two songs by the Vigilantes of Love (VOL). Those two songs by VOL have become my two favorite songs on my playlist every Christmas. I think Bill Mallonee of VOL is an unbelieveable songwriter and given the obvious glut of writing on the theme of Christmas, it's pretty cool to see new compelling lyrics.
Those of you that know me, may know that I'm a stickler about digital rights and think that copying music without paying for it is illegal and wrong. However, in the spirit of Christmas, I'm going to post these two songs for you to listen to. If you like them, Bill Mallonee has a Christmas album that includes both and a few more (I don't have it so I can't vouch for it). In fact I don't know if it's even still available, so ... enjoy!
Sing Angel Choirs
On to Bethlehem
Merry Christmas!
Posted by mark at 8:47 PM | Comments (6)
UnSpun
11 days ago, on November 28th, we launched UnSpun by Amazon. This is the project that I've been working on for some time now. It's been a lot of work, and I've been VERY busy. There are a ton of new features that we already have planned, but I think the initial results are great.
It's a site of lists. Lists of movies, places to get Thai food, songs, pastimes, celebrities, quotes, etc. Anything that can be ranked is on UnSpun or *should* be on UnSpun. You can create your own lists, and then fill them with your opinions. The community will add their opinion as well. Check it out, add some lists, vote some items up or down, and have fun. It's really addicting.
Be warned, there are some lists that are of a sensitive nature and you should just ignore those. We're still trying to figure out how to handle potentially offensive lists like Euphemisms for Sex, Quotes from Sex and the City, Top women you'd leave your partner for, etc. However, there's a ton of *useful* lists that need your opinion.
You can see lists that I've created and ranked here:
http://unspun.amazon.com/user/mveerman
Please let me know if you have any suggestions. It's obviously a beta release, so it's in constant evolution and any feedback (picks and pains) are welcome.
Posted by mark at 6:18 PM
April 28, 2006
Prayer needed for Andrew Sandberg (Seneff family)
Many of you probably know the Seneff's. They have been family friends of both Courtney and my families for years. Rebecca Seneff (married name Sandberg) and her family are living in Kenya, Africa as missionaries. Their two-year old son, Andrew, had a bad accident a couple days ago and injured his eye. The Seneffs have been a huge support for us through the past two weeks, so naturally I offered to use the network that I've built up to pray for Courtney to help spread the word about Andrew. It's been a tremendous blessing for me to see how many people have prayed for Courtney and I'm sure the Seneff family would take comfort in knowing that you were also praying for little Andrew. Here's the info from Rebecca (I knew her as Becca):
-- from Rebecca --
Hello to all of you…
Well, we leave for the airport in abut 3 hours. We are flying to London and then on to Maryland to Johns Hopkins where Andrew will be seen on Friday afternoon. Most of you already know the happenings of the past 48 hours. But in short, Andrew and Jake were playing with a small metal airplane and somehow Andrew pulled it with enough force that the wing of the airplane cut into his eye. He had emergency surgery and now has 10 stitches stretching from one side of his cornea to the other. The doctor had to cut the iris as it and the pupil had already begun to protrude through the cornea. The wing of the plane went through his cornea, iris and then his pupil. We are not sure if it hit the lens or if there is damage to the retina. We have exhausted our resources here in Kenya thus the trip to the States. The doctor here is unable to assess whether or not there is permanent damage to his sight. We will know more after this weekend. Please pray that there will be no infection in his eye. Please pray that Andrew does not touch his bandage/patch on his eye. Please pray that God would do a miracle and that his eye would be completely healed. We believe that the Almighty is good and that He is gracious. Andrew is His child and Andrew’s sweet blue eyes were formed in the strength and wholeness of God’s hands. We trust that God will indeed watch over Andrew and be with us.
Andrew’s spirit is so beautiful. When we went to the doctors for our initial visit we were really unsure about how bad his eye was. Jake was with me at the time. When the doctor said that he needed surgery and that it was a serious injury, Jake and I started crying. Jake immediately hugged Andrew and told him that he would be ok.
The next day after the surgery the nurse from that office came to our hospital room and told us that when we had left the office they prayed for Andrew.
Andrew has comforting eyes. He draws people in with his eyes. It was astonishing to me to watch Andrew minister with his quiet spirit to all of the people at the hospital. Without any words, he brought a smile to people and somehow made them feel at peace.
Thank you for your prayers and for your love.
Roger, Rebecca, Jake and Andrew
-- end from Rebecca --
Thanks again for all of your prayers for Courtney!
Posted by mark at 7:26 PM | Comments (1)
March 21, 2006
South Beach Diet - day 1
At the risk of boring the 5 or so readers of my blog. Today marks the first day of my foray into the world of fad dieting. My wife and dad have both had great success with the South Beach Diet (SBD), and I really need to lose about 15-20 lbs. I'm currently 205, and I'd like to reach 185-190 within 2 months. I tried the eat sensibly approach, and didn't lose a pound. Of course, I still consumed a similar amount of beer...
The first two weeks of the SBD are kinda weird. You cut out ALL carbs, including fruit. About the only thing you can eat is meat and some low carb vegetables (no corn or carrots). The goal of this stage is to: 1. Teach you about carbs, so that you're more aware of them in stage two, and 2. break your body's "addiction" to sugar (ie. metabolized carbohydrates.) If stage one works as intended, the craving for carbs should be reduced dramatically. The diet's founder, Arthur Agatston, calls this insulin resistance syndrome. I don't think anyone would say that stage one is "healthy," but it is necessary. Kinda like quitting cold turkey; ironically something I CAN eat during stage one.
Anyway, after stage one, you can add a bunch of things back into your diet. Whole grain breads, wine (I'll probably diverge from the path and allow beer -- beer is considered a major taboo with SBD.) All of this is to be consumed in moderation, and hopefully in much smaller quantities than before the diet. We'll see how it goes.
Here's what I've eaten today so far (a bunch of violations are pointed out).
1. 3 fried eggs (not the best egg choice since it's fried, but I didn't use butter)
2. 2 slices of cheddar cheese (these weren't low fat as required)
3. handful of pistachios (I think I had 25 -- which is too many)
4. chicken sandwich from Chick-Fil-A without the bun, 2 pickle slices (fried, grilled would have been better)
5. Coffee (I'm not cutting this out, but I think decaf is recommended.)
I'm desperate for some fruit, but I really want to see if this whole carb-switch/reduced craving thing works, so I'm going to try my best to avoid carbs entirely during this phase.
Posted by mark at 12:02 PM | Comments (6)