According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.

I was perusing my usual dailies just now, and noticed that Zonker, brave man that he is, has taken on the subject of censorship. He's noted a few Internet pages that the elites at a particular coffee shop* have chosen to keep people from reading, along with screenshots of the error messages.

Now, anyone who reads Sandy's page knows that Zonker is a pretty sensitive guy, and can get pretty worked up about things. It's why we love him so much. One thing you may not know about Zonker, though, is that also tends to censor himself. Every now and then, I guess he has a little too much to drink, and comes home and really opens up. Sometimes, maybe a little too much. Usually, he just deletes it off his blog the next morning, or bowdlerizes it after-the-fact, so he won't lose his tough-guy image. For example, a week or so ago, he wrote a weepy post about the injustice of Aaron and Marcy not winning the Pairs Figure Skating Gold in Turin, despite running a "fabulous" (his word) routine. The next morning, however, it was nowhere to be found.

I guess the same thing happened with Zonker's post about the firewalled blogs. Although his post is still there, for the most part, a lot of the screenshots he posted last night at 3:30 AM have disappeared! Luckily, I'm in a timezone that's 6 hours ahead, so I was able to save a few of the screenshots that Zonker made in the coffee shop, but aren't on his page anymore for some reason. Let's take a look:

Ouch, that must sting. Er...sorry to hear about that Zonk-man.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds like a nature site. What could be the problem there?

OK, but that could've been any of the other computers in the place, too.

Now, that's just unfair. It's all about context.

Information is crucial to a democracy. I don't think a few people should decide what pages are 'suitable' to be viewed by whom, or how many times in a 30 minute period. That's just wrong.

UPDATE:
* - Note to selff: Don't forget to write funny footnote

I just noticed that Sam started posting again at sammoore.org; he only came up for air long enough to tag me, and then, like Keyser Sose, poof, he'll probably disappear again, to whatever musty dungeon he haunts to hatch his plans for world domination and rope-play.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

So, I'm still on my first pot of coffee, and abstraction is not one of my strengths at this unlikely hour. Luckily, I have iTunes tracking my every move, compiling ungodly amounts of data for Apple's Syndicate-like marketing department. I'll just post the screenshot of my Top 7 played songs in iTunes and my iPod.

I've been using iTunes for almost three years now, and I have to assume it's been tracking my music usage for all that time. I didn't realize I listened to that much NIN.

I'm not gonna tag anybody. Well, anybody except A-Heldin, E-Heldin, The Other Sam, John C. Dvorak, and John K., the creator of Ren & Stimpy.

(click to play)

The little lady and I were in the Cologne-Düsseldorf-Neuss metroplex this week, where the annual pilgrimage Karneval was in full swing. It's a solemn time for Christians in Northern Germany, as they contemplate the coming Ash Wednesday, and the 40 days of Lent, costuming themselves in the symbols of their faith: The Angel, The Devil, and the Slutty Fishnet-Wearing Nurse.

In Cologne, one of Chrisitanity's holiest cities, the final resting place of the three wise men, the people are so drunk and rowdy during Karneval, that the police just sort of mill around, watching the show in groups of five or more. It's the epicenter of stupidity in the world until Tuesday, when it moves to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.

I was perusing my usual dailies just now, and noticed that Zonker, brave man that he is, has taken on the subject of censorship. He's noted a few Internet pages that the elites at a particular coffee shop* have chosen to keep people from reading, along with screenshots of the error messages.

Now, anyone who reads Sandy's page knows that Zonker is a pretty sensitive guy, and can get pretty worked up about things. It's why we love him so much. One thing you may not know about Zonker, though, is that also tends to censor himself. Every now and then, I guess he has a little too much to drink, and comes home and really opens up. Sometimes, maybe a little too much. Usually, he just deletes it off his blog the next morning, or bowdlerizes it after-the-fact, so he won't lose his tough-guy image. For example, a week or so ago, he wrote a weepy post about the injustice of Aaron and Marcy not winning the Pairs Figure Skating Gold in Turin, despite running a "fabulous" (his word) routine. The next morning, however, it was nowhere to be found.

I guess the same thing happened with Zonker's post about the firewalled blogs. Although his post is still there, for the most part, a lot of the screenshots he posted last night at 3:30 AM have disappeared! Luckily, I'm in a timezone that's 6 hours ahead, so I was able to save a few of the screenshots that Zonker made in the coffee shop, but aren't on his page anymore for some reason. Let's take a look:

Ouch, that must sting. Er...sorry to hear about that Zonk-man.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds like a nature site. What could be the problem there?

OK, but that could've been any of the other computers in the place, too.

Now, that's just unfair. It's all about context.

Information is crucial to a democracy. I don't think a few people should decide what pages are 'suitable' to be viewed by whom, or how many times in a 30 minute period. That's just wrong.

UPDATE:
* - Note to selff: Don't forget to write funny footnote

I just noticed that Sam started posting again at sammoore.org; he only came up for air long enough to tag me, and then, like Keyser Sose, poof, he'll probably disappear again, to whatever musty dungeon he haunts to hatch his plans for world domination and rope-play.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

So, I'm still on my first pot of coffee, and abstraction is not one of my strengths at this unlikely hour. Luckily, I have iTunes tracking my every move, compiling ungodly amounts of data for Apple's Syndicate-like marketing department. I'll just post the screenshot of my Top 7 played songs in iTunes and my iPod.

I've been using iTunes for almost three years now, and I have to assume it's been tracking my music usage for all that time. I didn't realize I listened to that much NIN.

I'm not gonna tag anybody. Well, anybody except A-Heldin, E-Heldin, The Other Sam, John C. Dvorak, and John K., the creator of Ren & Stimpy.

(click to play)

The little lady and I were in the Cologne-Düsseldorf-Neuss metroplex this week, where the annual pilgrimage Karneval was in full swing. It's a solemn time for Christians in Northern Germany, as they contemplate the coming Ash Wednesday, and the 40 days of Lent, costuming themselves in the symbols of their faith: The Angel, The Devil, and the Slutty Fishnet-Wearing Nurse.

In Cologne, one of Chrisitanity's holiest cities, the final resting place of the three wise men, the people are so drunk and rowdy during Karneval, that the police just sort of mill around, watching the show in groups of five or more. It's the epicenter of stupidity in the world until Tuesday, when it moves to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.

I was perusing my usual dailies just now, and noticed that Zonker, brave man that he is, has taken on the subject of censorship. He's noted a few Internet pages that the elites at a particular coffee shop* have chosen to keep people from reading, along with screenshots of the error messages.

Now, anyone who reads Sandy's page knows that Zonker is a pretty sensitive guy, and can get pretty worked up about things. It's why we love him so much. One thing you may not know about Zonker, though, is that also tends to censor himself. Every now and then, I guess he has a little too much to drink, and comes home and really opens up. Sometimes, maybe a little too much. Usually, he just deletes it off his blog the next morning, or bowdlerizes it after-the-fact, so he won't lose his tough-guy image. For example, a week or so ago, he wrote a weepy post about the injustice of Aaron and Marcy not winning the Pairs Figure Skating Gold in Turin, despite running a "fabulous" (his word) routine. The next morning, however, it was nowhere to be found.

I guess the same thing happened with Zonker's post about the firewalled blogs. Although his post is still there, for the most part, a lot of the screenshots he posted last night at 3:30 AM have disappeared! Luckily, I'm in a timezone that's 6 hours ahead, so I was able to save a few of the screenshots that Zonker made in the coffee shop, but aren't on his page anymore for some reason. Let's take a look:

Ouch, that must sting. Er...sorry to hear about that Zonk-man.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds like a nature site. What could be the problem there?

OK, but that could've been any of the other computers in the place, too.

Now, that's just unfair. It's all about context.

Information is crucial to a democracy. I don't think a few people should decide what pages are 'suitable' to be viewed by whom, or how many times in a 30 minute period. That's just wrong.

UPDATE:
* - Note to selff: Don't forget to write funny footnote

I just noticed that Sam started posting again at sammoore.org; he only came up for air long enough to tag me, and then, like Keyser Sose, poof, he'll probably disappear again, to whatever musty dungeon he haunts to hatch his plans for world domination and rope-play.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

So, I'm still on my first pot of coffee, and abstraction is not one of my strengths at this unlikely hour. Luckily, I have iTunes tracking my every move, compiling ungodly amounts of data for Apple's Syndicate-like marketing department. I'll just post the screenshot of my Top 7 played songs in iTunes and my iPod.

I've been using iTunes for almost three years now, and I have to assume it's been tracking my music usage for all that time. I didn't realize I listened to that much NIN.

I'm not gonna tag anybody. Well, anybody except A-Heldin, E-Heldin, The Other Sam, John C. Dvorak, and John K., the creator of Ren & Stimpy.

(click to play)

The little lady and I were in the Cologne-Düsseldorf-Neuss metroplex this week, where the annual pilgrimage Karneval was in full swing. It's a solemn time for Christians in Northern Germany, as they contemplate the coming Ash Wednesday, and the 40 days of Lent, costuming themselves in the symbols of their faith: The Angel, The Devil, and the Slutty Fishnet-Wearing Nurse.

In Cologne, one of Chrisitanity's holiest cities, the final resting place of the three wise men, the people are so drunk and rowdy during Karneval, that the police just sort of mill around, watching the show in groups of five or more. It's the epicenter of stupidity in the world until Tuesday, when it moves to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.

I was perusing my usual dailies just now, and noticed that Zonker, brave man that he is, has taken on the subject of censorship. He's noted a few Internet pages that the elites at a particular coffee shop* have chosen to keep people from reading, along with screenshots of the error messages.

Now, anyone who reads Sandy's page knows that Zonker is a pretty sensitive guy, and can get pretty worked up about things. It's why we love him so much. One thing you may not know about Zonker, though, is that also tends to censor himself. Every now and then, I guess he has a little too much to drink, and comes home and really opens up. Sometimes, maybe a little too much. Usually, he just deletes it off his blog the next morning, or bowdlerizes it after-the-fact, so he won't lose his tough-guy image. For example, a week or so ago, he wrote a weepy post about the injustice of Aaron and Marcy not winning the Pairs Figure Skating Gold in Turin, despite running a "fabulous" (his word) routine. The next morning, however, it was nowhere to be found.

I guess the same thing happened with Zonker's post about the firewalled blogs. Although his post is still there, for the most part, a lot of the screenshots he posted last night at 3:30 AM have disappeared! Luckily, I'm in a timezone that's 6 hours ahead, so I was able to save a few of the screenshots that Zonker made in the coffee shop, but aren't on his page anymore for some reason. Let's take a look:

Ouch, that must sting. Er...sorry to hear about that Zonk-man.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds like a nature site. What could be the problem there?

OK, but that could've been any of the other computers in the place, too.

Now, that's just unfair. It's all about context.

Information is crucial to a democracy. I don't think a few people should decide what pages are 'suitable' to be viewed by whom, or how many times in a 30 minute period. That's just wrong.

UPDATE:
* - Note to selff: Don't forget to write funny footnote

I just noticed that Sam started posting again at sammoore.org; he only came up for air long enough to tag me, and then, like Keyser Sose, poof, he'll probably disappear again, to whatever musty dungeon he haunts to hatch his plans for world domination and rope-play.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

So, I'm still on my first pot of coffee, and abstraction is not one of my strengths at this unlikely hour. Luckily, I have iTunes tracking my every move, compiling ungodly amounts of data for Apple's Syndicate-like marketing department. I'll just post the screenshot of my Top 7 played songs in iTunes and my iPod.

I've been using iTunes for almost three years now, and I have to assume it's been tracking my music usage for all that time. I didn't realize I listened to that much NIN.

I'm not gonna tag anybody. Well, anybody except A-Heldin, E-Heldin, The Other Sam, John C. Dvorak, and John K., the creator of Ren & Stimpy.

(click to play)

The little lady and I were in the Cologne-Düsseldorf-Neuss metroplex this week, where the annual pilgrimage Karneval was in full swing. It's a solemn time for Christians in Northern Germany, as they contemplate the coming Ash Wednesday, and the 40 days of Lent, costuming themselves in the symbols of their faith: The Angel, The Devil, and the Slutty Fishnet-Wearing Nurse.

In Cologne, one of Chrisitanity's holiest cities, the final resting place of the three wise men, the people are so drunk and rowdy during Karneval, that the police just sort of mill around, watching the show in groups of five or more. It's the epicenter of stupidity in the world until Tuesday, when it moves to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.

I was perusing my usual dailies just now, and noticed that Zonker, brave man that he is, has taken on the subject of censorship. He's noted a few Internet pages that the elites at a particular coffee shop* have chosen to keep people from reading, along with screenshots of the error messages.

Now, anyone who reads Sandy's page knows that Zonker is a pretty sensitive guy, and can get pretty worked up about things. It's why we love him so much. One thing you may not know about Zonker, though, is that also tends to censor himself. Every now and then, I guess he has a little too much to drink, and comes home and really opens up. Sometimes, maybe a little too much. Usually, he just deletes it off his blog the next morning, or bowdlerizes it after-the-fact, so he won't lose his tough-guy image. For example, a week or so ago, he wrote a weepy post about the injustice of Aaron and Marcy not winning the Pairs Figure Skating Gold in Turin, despite running a "fabulous" (his word) routine. The next morning, however, it was nowhere to be found.

I guess the same thing happened with Zonker's post about the firewalled blogs. Although his post is still there, for the most part, a lot of the screenshots he posted last night at 3:30 AM have disappeared! Luckily, I'm in a timezone that's 6 hours ahead, so I was able to save a few of the screenshots that Zonker made in the coffee shop, but aren't on his page anymore for some reason. Let's take a look:

Ouch, that must sting. Er...sorry to hear about that Zonk-man.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds like a nature site. What could be the problem there?

OK, but that could've been any of the other computers in the place, too.

Now, that's just unfair. It's all about context.

Information is crucial to a democracy. I don't think a few people should decide what pages are 'suitable' to be viewed by whom, or how many times in a 30 minute period. That's just wrong.

UPDATE:
* - Note to selff: Don't forget to write funny footnote

I just noticed that Sam started posting again at sammoore.org; he only came up for air long enough to tag me, and then, like Keyser Sose, poof, he'll probably disappear again, to whatever musty dungeon he haunts to hatch his plans for world domination and rope-play.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

So, I'm still on my first pot of coffee, and abstraction is not one of my strengths at this unlikely hour. Luckily, I have iTunes tracking my every move, compiling ungodly amounts of data for Apple's Syndicate-like marketing department. I'll just post the screenshot of my Top 7 played songs in iTunes and my iPod.

I've been using iTunes for almost three years now, and I have to assume it's been tracking my music usage for all that time. I didn't realize I listened to that much NIN.

I'm not gonna tag anybody. Well, anybody except A-Heldin, E-Heldin, The Other Sam, John C. Dvorak, and John K., the creator of Ren & Stimpy.

(click to play)

The little lady and I were in the Cologne-Düsseldorf-Neuss metroplex this week, where the annual pilgrimage Karneval was in full swing. It's a solemn time for Christians in Northern Germany, as they contemplate the coming Ash Wednesday, and the 40 days of Lent, costuming themselves in the symbols of their faith: The Angel, The Devil, and the Slutty Fishnet-Wearing Nurse.

In Cologne, one of Chrisitanity's holiest cities, the final resting place of the three wise men, the people are so drunk and rowdy during Karneval, that the police just sort of mill around, watching the show in groups of five or more. It's the epicenter of stupidity in the world until Tuesday, when it moves to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.

I was perusing my usual dailies just now, and noticed that Zonker, brave man that he is, has taken on the subject of censorship. He's noted a few Internet pages that the elites at a particular coffee shop* have chosen to keep people from reading, along with screenshots of the error messages.

Now, anyone who reads Sandy's page knows that Zonker is a pretty sensitive guy, and can get pretty worked up about things. It's why we love him so much. One thing you may not know about Zonker, though, is that also tends to censor himself. Every now and then, I guess he has a little too much to drink, and comes home and really opens up. Sometimes, maybe a little too much. Usually, he just deletes it off his blog the next morning, or bowdlerizes it after-the-fact, so he won't lose his tough-guy image. For example, a week or so ago, he wrote a weepy post about the injustice of Aaron and Marcy not winning the Pairs Figure Skating Gold in Turin, despite running a "fabulous" (his word) routine. The next morning, however, it was nowhere to be found.

I guess the same thing happened with Zonker's post about the firewalled blogs. Although his post is still there, for the most part, a lot of the screenshots he posted last night at 3:30 AM have disappeared! Luckily, I'm in a timezone that's 6 hours ahead, so I was able to save a few of the screenshots that Zonker made in the coffee shop, but aren't on his page anymore for some reason. Let's take a look:

Ouch, that must sting. Er...sorry to hear about that Zonk-man.

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds like a nature site. What could be the problem there?

OK, but that could've been any of the other computers in the place, too.

Now, that's just unfair. It's all about context.

Information is crucial to a democracy. I don't think a few people should decide what pages are 'suitable' to be viewed by whom, or how many times in a 30 minute period. That's just wrong.

UPDATE:
* - Note to selff: Don't forget to write funny footnote

I just noticed that Sam started posting again at sammoore.org; he only came up for air long enough to tag me, and then, like Keyser Sose, poof, he'll probably disappear again, to whatever musty dungeon he haunts to hatch his plans for world domination and rope-play.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

So, I'm still on my first pot of coffee, and abstraction is not one of my strengths at this unlikely hour. Luckily, I have iTunes tracking my every move, compiling ungodly amounts of data for Apple's Syndicate-like marketing department. I'll just post the screenshot of my Top 7 played songs in iTunes and my iPod.

I've been using iTunes for almost three years now, and I have to assume it's been tracking my music usage for all that time. I didn't realize I listened to that much NIN.

I'm not gonna tag anybody. Well, anybody except A-Heldin, E-Heldin, The Other Sam, John C. Dvorak, and John K., the creator of Ren & Stimpy.

(click to play)

The little lady and I were in the Cologne-Düsseldorf-Neuss metroplex this week, where the annual pilgrimage Karneval was in full swing. It's a solemn time for Christians in Northern Germany, as they contemplate the coming Ash Wednesday, and the 40 days of Lent, costuming themselves in the symbols of their faith: The Angel, The Devil, and the Slutty Fishnet-Wearing Nurse.

In Cologne, one of Chrisitanity's holiest cities, the final resting place of the three wise men, the people are so drunk and rowdy during Karneval, that the police just sort of mill around, watching the show in groups of five or more. It's the epicenter of stupidity in the world until Tuesday, when it moves to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.

Microsoft has been busy the past few months. They've obviously spent thousands of man-hours working on the next version of Windows, Vista, in order to make it the gaudiest user experience possible.

(click for full-size)

Ugh, just look at that thing. I always thought the Playskool-inspired appearance of Windows XP was a horrible idea, but Microsoft's focus groups apparently think otherwise. And they're still shipping that ugly-ass, over-saturated landscape background, albeit from a different vantage point. It always reminds me of a close-up of Shrek's scrotum, for some reason. Luckily, I'm not Microsoft's target customer, seeing as I spend more time tossing Steve Jobs' salad than thinking about upgrading Windows. Which is probably why I still use Windows 2000*.

For incorrigible updaters, there's also a new version of Office coming out early next year, with a re-"thought" user interface. Windows applications in general, and Microsoft products in particular, have suffered interface creep since Windows 3.0 came out. That's the first version of the environment that included the toolbar widgets, unless I'm not mistaken. I remember opening up Samna's Ami, the first truly graphical word processor for Windows, and gasping with delight at the little buttons that bolded or underlined text with the click of a mouse. Such decadence, especially when coming off of WordStar.

Slowly, though, those little icons became the baffling swarm of obscure symbology we're all confronted with every day. The Office 2007 toolbar in this screenshot, for example, takes up one sixth of the overall screen real estate. That's a pretty big waste of pixels, but it's nothing new for Microsoft. The default install of Microsoft Word 2000, for example, has at least 40 toolbar buttons on it, and came out at a time when SVGA (800x600 in Windows-speak) was still mostly for power users. There's a button for Print Preview, which really should be exclusively a menu item, and there's one for Spell Check, even though it spell-checks on the fly. There are also icons for Cut, Copy & Paste, even though I've never actually seen anybody use them; who the hell does that with a mouse? There are also some baffling buttons, including a globe with a chain on it, which I have to assume is the "Enslave World" function that was so popular in Microsoft's internal builds.

I never installed Office 2003 on my own computers: I refused. I still use Office 2000, because it's the only legal copy that I have, for one. The other reason I still use it is that Office 97, which was the last good version, doesn't include the Euro symbol. I got stuck using Excel 97 on a customer's computer a few months ago, and it amazes me how good it really was. It loaded in a snap, it didn't pepper you with suggestions or constructive criticism while you were trying to work, and the shortcut keys are right where I remembered them. Excel, up through the Office 2000 version and most definitely excluding Office XP and 2003, is the only Microsoft product that is worth a damn at doing what it is designed to do**. Being a smug Mac fanboy, I usually justify this by saying that Excel was originally designed for the Macintosh platform.

The main area where Office has really hurt the consumer is where it matters most: Overall productivity. In the end, the reason you buy an office suite is to help you run your office. That means document creation, management, and retrieval, as well as functional uses such as spreadsheets and databases. The first thing most users do when they sit down to create a document is not the creation of a document, per se. They muck around with the fonts, or try to figure out why certain words get underlined and turn blue, and where they can turn off that setting, or why they're suddenly getting the third degree from some stupid little paper clip. What they most definitely do not do, is start typing. If you're old enough, you'll remember the Cadillac of word processors, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. When you started the program, there wasn't anything you could do but start typing. I can't get WordPerfect for DOS to run on my Mac, so here's my WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS Simulator™, based on God's Own Text Editor, Joe.

Clean as a whistle, visually, and lousy with vicious, finger-breaking keyboard shortcuts.

I've been supporting users since 1989, and to this day I have never seen a customer actually use Access to keep track of stuff. I would also estimate that the Office users I've supported who are actually proficient in Excel to be around 5%. Word is probably at the bottom of the heap, as far as used functionality goes. Very few of the documents I've seen are actually created with good word processing principles, such as structured style use, proper tabs and such. 90% of all word users could do everything they need to do with Wordpad, and save themselves a wad of cash in the process.

Probably the biggest omission in the evolution of the Office package is in document management. Users are still creating their own folder structures, naming conventions, and so forth, and nobody has any clue what they're doing. Using the Windows filesystem to organize information is a recipe for pain and suffering. What users really need is iTunes for Documents. With iTunes, you don't have to come up with some goofy folder hierarchy to organize your MP3s; you never actually touch your files, you just search or browse their descriptions, genres, or what not. You also synchronize that with your iPod, and you always have it with you, without even really trying. Imagine if it were like that with all your documents, spreadsheets, emails, and presentations!

Somebody needs to get on this.
--
* - Actually, I upgraded to XP last week, seeing as EA decided that Battle for Middle-Earth II doesn't run under Windows 2000. Dicks.
** - Well, I do have to admit that I'm impressed what people do with Microsoft Outlook when they use it properly.

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft is going to tear Google a new one with their innovative new Windows Live service. The revolutionary new service, which opened up its Beta program today, actually allows users to search the web by keywords! Amazing. I think I've got a new startpage!

UPDATE:

Sucks. Back to Google.

For about 4 weeks now, the garbage collectors in Stuttgart have been on strike. They're protesting the lengthening of the work week, which, they argue, will cost jobs. It might, I guess, if garbage collection were a zero-sum game. But they completely ignore Zonker's beloved Parkinson's Law:

work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, since the strike began, the garbage piled up in Stuttgart, a city of 590,000 people. Last week, the municipal authorities lost patience and hired private sanitation firms to swoop in and clean up the place. According to a report I watched on German news channel N24, the private workers get paid about 25% less than their civil servant counterparts, and work longer hours. But they were happy to get the work, as was obvious from the good-natured interviews they gave to the N24 crew.

Of course, the garbage has to go somewhere once it's picked up. The striking workers physically blocked the private drivers from reaching the city's landfills and trash incinerators, which is dangerous, not to mention illegal. It amounts to thuggery, though I expected nothing less of union workers. Germany has a 12.5% unemployment rate, and if there's any justice, that number will get a sizable bump by the firing of the entire municipal garbage-collection work force of Stuttgart, and the dismantling of the ecology of union bosses, financial supporters, and strike organizers that could let such idiocy thrive.

An interesting development to keep an eye on is the proposal of the FDP, which passes for a conservative party in Germany, to tax the supplemental payments that unions pay their workers during strikes as normal income. Why this isn't already done is beyond me, but I guess that's life in the Worker's Paradise. This would definitely take a bit of the piss out of the risible organzisation ver.di, that profits by blackmailing some of Germany's largest employers, local city governments, with threats of strike.

And they wonder why German industry is slowly draining away to Eastern Europe.

As I was scanning the dailies this morning, I came across this paragraph in the Washington Post:

"North Country," as well as "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Syriana," were financed by Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian and the billionaire co-founder of eBay...

Now, aside from the fact that all three of these movies are shameless Oscar-bait, and that at least two of them are seen as being not-so-subtly anti-American, they were all financed by the same Canuck?

At least when the Jews controlled Hollywood, they made movies like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. I guess once those scheming Canadians took over, they figured it was time to turn every single movie into to a sort of wild-eyed Clooneyed-up version of Being John Malkovich. Damn snow-backs.

Just in case anyone was wondering, we got 20 inches of snow today.

The birds are singing, and the buds are just popping out, aren't they?

Well, the Steve killed another of my predictions last night. I was expecting the next Intel-based Mac to be the iBook. It looked like this: Who the hell is going to buy one of the Power Macs, which will stick with the IBM G5 probably until late fall, when a desktop computer with more ass is available for about a third of the price? So, you stick with the mobile branch, starting with the Powerbooks, then the iBooks. The you upgrade the desktop offerings, starting with Power Macs, then the iMacs, and, last but not least, the Mini. I was exactly wrong about pretty much everything.

This upgrade is a bit puzzling, marketing-wise. Power Macs have expandability, but the Intel-based Mac Mini is breathing down their necks, processor-wise. And they're adorable, quiet little boxes. I mean, just look at it:

link

It's a fine desktop computer, as long as you're not planning on running Quake 4 on it.

I'd love to replace my aging Windows desktop. About the only things holding me back at this point are abject poverty and the lack of a German version of Quickbooks for the Macintosh.

For some reason, they call the first of March the first day of 'Meteorological Spring'. I'm not sure why meteorologists need their own calendar, unless it's because they need to justify why they're always wrong. 'Why, yes I did say it would be sunny and warm on Wednesday. On meteorological Wednesday, you cretin!'

Well, fuck meteorologists, and they can take their meteorological spring and shove it up their meteorological cornholes. I'm tired of seeing this:

That would be my smoking balcony about 5 minutes ago. Meh. Looks like another six weeks of 30-second cigarettes. I could use a thawing.

I realize this is supposed to start me seething and looking for a Chinaman to bash, but this is one of the awesomest videos I've ever seen.

Via Tian.