Category: Uncategorized

Business Week finally groks what us Macintosh IT guys have been saying for years…

“Corporate information-technology managers favor PCs because these machines are so befuddling. The rising complexity of workplace computing makes big companies ever more dependent on tech support, so what self-respecting chief information officer is going to recommend a computer — such as the Mac — that might shrink rather than expand his department’s influence? Macs generally require less support than PCs and are thus cheaper and easier to run and maintain. So perhaps the PC’s dominance of the workplace is about power — not money.”

Why contacting Brian Eno may not be a good idea.

Kent Southard at BushWatch nicely follows up last week’s nuke story and outs Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as this decade’s Dr. Strangelove.

The nexus of the Bush war party seems to be Rumsfeld’s Deputy Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Pat Buchanan in his book ‘A Republic, Not an Empire’ finds Wolfowitz, and a 46 page memorandum he wrote while in the Pentagon under the first Bush, at the center of Republican foreign policy. As his book’s title suggests, Buchanan’s apprehensions are based on the agenda explicitly laid out by Wolfowitz – that America should dominate the world, in every sense, that the planet shall serve as our empire; that we should militarily prevent any country or consortium of countries from controlling the resources that would allow them to escape their dependence and subservience: which is how we now find ourselves building a string of military bases in Central Asia, to control Caspian Sea oil reserves not for America’s use, but to control China and India who will.

And so we also find ourselves with ‘contingency plans’ for nuclear weapons, with apparent abandonment of our historic ‘no first strike’ policy – in case somebody didn’t get the message and needs to be slapped down. When Pat Buchanan says a conservative is too extreme for him, it should tell you something.

The International Dada Archive (damn, how cool is that?) has a big archive of early Dada pamphlets and zines. [via Bruce Sterling]

One of my fave things in San Francisco is the Musee Mecanique – a collection of early 1900’s coin-operated arcade machines, fortune tellers, and mechanical uncertainties.

Anyway, the Musee is located underneath the Cliff House tourist trap (itself a part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area) – which has decided to expand downstairs and toss out the Musee. There’s an online petition up to save the Musee. I have my doubts that it’ll do any good, but grass roots support helped save the Giant Camera Obscura so who knows…

I’m a big fan of the letter grading system that the Los Angeles County Department of Health uses for grading the cleanliness of LA-area restaurants (as usual, Orange County is too chicken to institute a similar system). Anyhow, the LA DoH publishes their closure list up on the web.

The Unfathomed Spider

“When you see a cloud formation, it means that the squid meditates. A table beams with wisely ancestral power, or a frightening blackness bartered the servant from the ring in exchange for a mortician over some township. An ooze completely pierced the black, beating heart of the insanity… A cyclopian polygon draws itself up, because the wisely smelly particle placed the sacred mark of Cthulhu upon the false stone.”

Courtesy of the Random H.P. Lovecraft Story Generator

Tim O’Reilly on Dune. Tim “World’s Greatest Technical Books” O’Reilly’s first publishing venture was a bio of Frank “Dune” Herbert (which text is now available for free under an open content license). In this week’s “Ask Tim” feature, Tim handles sticky questions about Herbert’s intention with Dune. [via bOing bOing]

Workplace is a journal about labor and workplace issues in academia.

Last night I had an anxiety dream about having to send in my PowerBook to Apple for some undisclosed reason. Dream time was spent dutifully waiting on the phone for a RMA number while obsessively making sure I had at least several backups (over and above the usual one) on hand in case I needed to get at the files I haven’t touched in over two years.

Perhaps the most interesting part is that in my dream, cell phone connections still suck. This leads me to believe that like the weather, lousy cell phone connections are as iron-clad a fact of nature as say… gravity.

This also leads me to believe that the most impossible item in the Star Trek universe isn’t the transporter or warp drive, but the lowly communicator.