Electric Josh

Time management for anarchists.
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Pictures coming. Patience.
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All regimes are founded on opinion.
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More Get Your War On. Good Dr. Rees assures us that everything is just fine.
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Rick Santorum (of all people) wants to make the NOAA's weather data available only by paying a private company. This is much like what the Mass Turnpike Authority has done with traffic data, and it's beyond stupid. I've already paid for that data! Let me have it, dammit! Story here. Here's an AccuWeather spokesman demonstrating that he's a moron:

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, PA. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'"

So perhaps best not to forecast anything unless the forecasts you aren't producing tell you that the weather won't be warm and sunny. Cute. (What is it with Pennsylvania and bad government these days?)
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Everyone's favorite hacker who got rich and now has tons of time on his hands to write little essays now has The Submarine, in which he describes how PR firms plant about half of the news stories that aren't about natural disasters or other obvious news.

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

He makes no mention of how presidential campaigns and the like get covered, but you get the general idea. This sort of thing does make reading the news way more interesting, parsing the backstory out of the stilted words that eventually see print.
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Brutal insomnia arrives almost precisely at the end of Conan O'Brien, which would have made knowing that tomorrow is going to be an exhausted slog seem somewhat better. Alas.
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Wireless ethernet and beautiful weather are a combination that makes it extremely hard to complain about being a programmer.
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NYU law student asks Antonin Scalia, "Do you sodomize your wife?" Excellent, although the letter is, perhaps predictably, a bit overwrought.
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Marathon day. Go #5205! Update: 3:44:33!
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The iPod played me When Not Being Stupid Is Not Enough by Built to Spill. I had forgotten how good that song is. Yay technology!
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Here's what's replacing the candy factory.
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This space was delighted to learn that the entire block outside its office window that used to be a candy factory is slated for demolition. This will be great fun to watch. Note also that this space is all done eating candy after seeing a few dozen cubic yards of dirt and dust—actual dirt, not just debris from the demolition—get pushed out of a fourth story (!) window Friday afternoon.
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The crawler excavator was at it again today, methodically knocking down most of the rest of the building across the street. At one point, the operator triggered an avalanche of the enormous pile of scrap metal atop the one corner of the building being wrecked. The noise of it alerted us that something super cool was happening, and since the avalanche lasted almost ten seconds we missed very little. The two-story pile slowly fell three stories, kicking up a big cloud of gray dust (which I'm sure was perfectly safe), and the excavator's operator backed his vehicle up several feet in order not to be crushed by the debris. Immediately realizing he had an audience including not only most of his coworkers but also everyone near a window office in my building, he flexed his arms for us like Hulk Hogan. We all laughed and applauded, and the demolition continued. It was fantastic.
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Across the street from my window at work, a large steam shovel type thing with a pincer mounted on the end is taking apart the shell of an old Necco factory. Post and beam with two layers of brick on the outside. As chunks of wall fall 20 or 30 feet to the earth, the building I'm in, 40 feet away, shakes. And me with no camera. Ain't gettin crap done at work today.
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I decided, all on my own, that The Poo Units would be a good name for a band. The lovely wife doesn't bother pretending to be impressed.
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Headed here this afternoon. We'll let you know how it turns out. Update: Too cranky, so we didn't make it. Alas.
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Deeeeath!! Frank Rich is completely brutal, and dead on, about the pope and the television and such:

Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

Took the kid to see the otter and birds of prey at the Trailside Museum today, which is great except that she can't pronounce the soft t sound in the middle of otter nor the r at the end, making it almost impossible to tell what she's saying when she starts talking about it.
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Google Sightseeing: "Why bother seeing the world for real?" Excellent catalog of satellite photos of tourist-y places.
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Uh oh. This space is starting to run out of stuff to say. We'll see how long this lasts. In the meantime, visit the fine sidebar, at left.
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