If I made a band’s Web site, I would have, at a minimum:

1. Lyrics to the songs. This is so unbelievably important, and it’s so unfuckinglybelieveably frustrating that more bands don’t do it. Let me give you a hint, bands: hiding your lyrics from the Web will just have some fanboy put them out there for the world to see, and the people who will get the traffic [and the ad revenue] are the shady jerks with the “Congratulations, you have won a free Nintendo Wii!” ad that screams at you the moment the page loads. You want that traffic. Why? You want them to know who you are.
2. Tour date listings. Essential. It’s a pain to update them, I know. There’s many apps out there for that, but I would choose Yahoo!’s Upcoming if I were you. Upcoming is searchable, scriptable, extensible, and also pretty darn easy to update. Then there are folks like me who use All Crazy Style to mash up Upcoming data with Last.FM plays to find out when bands I like are playing near me. Real simple: you load the data in Upcoming, and you can spit it out on your site. You can update Upcoming from anywhere.
3. Links to listen to your stuff. Don’t fire music at me when I load your site. I know you’re a musician, but the Web is largely about text. Let me choose to listen, and give me that option, but that auto-load bullshit is for MySpace. [And don't get me wrong, MySpace has value.]
4. Links to buy your stuff. These need to be everywhere: main site, discography pages, album pages, individual song pages. If you create a page per song, that individual song page should have a link of a place to buy that song—iTunes, eMusic, what have you. You want to cater to the fan coming in to Google some obscure lyric they heard on a commercial or in a Zach Braff vehicle—they’re gonna buy that shit if you give them half a chance.

The way to think about it is this: most people aren’t going to load up your main Web site and have that be their entry point. They just aren’t. Google is going to send them to you. So, think about a song you really love, Mr. Band Guy, and Google that. So, if you love Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, you get Last.FM’s page for the song … which has … BINGO … iTunes link. Last has done the heavy lifting for you here. But they’re gonna do that for Page and Plant … chances are they won’t for your garage band.

Some thoughts: if you get a song picked up for Grey’s Anatomy or Kyle XY or whatever, you want to 1) have that fact listed on a page about that song, and not just in a news feed/blog 2) lyrics of the song on that page, so the Googlers who are bad with names but good with ears for mumbled lyrics can find it and 3) a quick, fast way for them to buy that song and 4) relevant links on that page to find out more about you. The scenario is this: “I heard this killer song on Scrubs last night. Let me find it on Google … ooooh, there it is. 99 cents? Sure, I love that song. Hmm … who is this guy? Let me read more about him …”

It’s hell getting found in the music business. It’s hell getting found in the blogging world, too—which is why this entry is named like it is. Chances are that, if you’re not one of my regular readers, you got here from the Goog, too … so you should be nodding your head.

Okay, okay, okay, examples.

Bad: M. Ward: LOUD MUSIC, can’t find shit. Damn shame, because I love M. Ward.

Poor: Shearwater, which has a lyrics page for their stuff, but … in PDF. I know, you want art. I want to cut and paste the lyrics into iTunes. Don’t make me work, dammit.

Okay: The Mountain Goats, who have lyrics for The Sunset Tree available, but that page does not get you anywhere on that site. There isn’t a link to be found—not to the rest of the site, not to a place to buy the song you Googled, nothing. Kudos for posting the links, though.

Good: Andy Osenga, and not just because he uses some of my photos on the site. But he’s still not to great, because lyrics … Andy Osenga lyrics on Google don’t get you anywhere near him. [Or, for that matter, near andrewosenga.net, which is a problem Chris Hubbs and I should fix...]

Great: well, hell, no one really comes to mind. Leave suggestions for good band sites in the comments.

Folks, I know … this shit is hard. But it makes you money, so you better work at it.

Dave Letterman is right: “This is not how a tested hero behaves.” And that’s the problem—the John McCain we’re getting to vote for in five-ish weeks is not the guy who ran in 2000 or even the guy from 2007. Of course, neither has Obama kept to his lofty ideals; this has just denigrated to your normal level campaign.

So Chris tweeted: “So McCain will go ahead and debate tonight. Snarky comments from @gfmorris in 3… 2… 1… ” I responded thusly:

1. “John saw Sarah’s “performance” with Katie Couric and didn’t want to send her in his stead.”
2. “It all depends on what your definition of ’suspending the campaign’ is.”
3. “It’s amazing that, in 2008, we’re excited about an *old white guy* going to Ole Miss. James Meredith must be proud.”

Let’s look at this dispassionately: If you came in from another planet and were shown the actions of the two candidates and were told, “One of these guys has been at the national seat of government for more than two decades, was a prisoner of war for over five years, and used to command a military organization; the other guy is a first-term member of the higher house of the national seat of government, has far less experience than his opponent, and is a quarter-century younger,” and then told that same observer the actions of McCain and Obama in the last week … wouldn’t you think that this observer would figure the panicky, impassioned responses for Obama and not McCain?

I mean, if you’d told me that, less than six weeks before the election, the economy was going to crater and either Obama or McCain would be losing their shit, I would’ve bet on Obama—and I’m an Obama supporter.

Coming into the conventions, Republicans who considered themselves likely voters indicated in most polls that, on average, 87% of them were ready to vote for McCain as President. Contrast this with Obama, who had only 83% of likely Democratic voters in his pocket. The reason for Obama’s poorer showing, heading into Denver, was singular: the Hillary hangover.

Let’s consider who those likely voters that weren’t with their party’s presumptive nominees were. For the Democrats, it wasn’t the liberal base: those folks have been with Obama over Hillary for quite some time, given their varied stances on the Iraq War. [Regardless of the effect that Obama's moderation of his stance might have on those voters, Obama voters don't seem inclined to flee him even though he's moved to the center a bit.] No, it was three groups in Hillary’s core that Obama wasn’t reaching: working-class folks, women voters who still wanted Hillary as President [which I get, I really do; in the reverse situation, you'd probably have some black voters who were reluctant to be behind Hillary with the taste of the promise of a President Obama still on their tongues], and older voters. Joe Biden, with his age, roots, and experience, ameliorates two of those three things. And Billary probably did their dead-level best to unite the party behind Obama in Denver; sure, there are going to be some defectors, but those folks were most likely already leaning that way before Barack ever set foot in Colorado.

For the GOP, it’s mostly voters from the base, the kind of folks who think McCain is too much a maverick and worry if he’s conservative enough. Palin might have the sheen of a moderate, corruption-fighting maverick from Alaska, but the first quotes I saw about her were from Ralph Reed and James Dobson—the very folks that were wary of McCain. Palin’s history—mainly her narrative about choosing to carry a Down’s syndrome child to term—solidly puts her in the conservative end of things. I see video clips of her shooting a gun and know that my dad is sitting in Tennessee, smiling that a pro-gun governor from the west kicks ass.

But here’s the difference in the calculus: if you make the argument that the bases aren’t going to defect to a third-party candidate [in this case, Bob Barr for the GOP], why not go to the center? Obama’s pick of Biden moves him towards the center, as Biden picks up the few hawkish Democrats and those in the center that were for the war but who’ve not liked how it’s been prosecuted [hello, right here] as well as helping Obama with the working-class gruffs who love that he rides the train home to Delaware every night, rather than living in Washington. [And I love that, too.] Palin, on the other hand, seems to be designed to do two things: 1) shore up the GOP base and 2) pick off Hillary supporters purely by being a female. Ummm … that seems like a grand miscalculation of the likelihood of centrists moving to McCain.

As I was writing this, Kari and I were trading emails about the Palin pick [amongst other things; our friendship is mostly based on these emails we trade when we need to talk things out, hehehe], and she pointed me to Andrew Sullivan’s piece on how Palin is not, in early polling, pulling the undecideds:

But among the critical undecideds, the Palin pick made only 6 percent more likely to vote for McCain; and it made 31 percent less likely to vote for him. 49 percent said it would have no impact, and 15 percent remained unsure. More to the point: among undecideds, 59 percent said Palin was unready to be president. Only 6 percent said she was. If the first criterion for any job is whether you’re ready for it, this is a pretty major indictment of the first act of McCain’s presidential leadership.

One other striking finding. If McCain thought he could present Palin as a moderate, he was wrong. A whopping 69 percent view her as conservative (37 percent as very conservative), and only 13 percent see her as moderate.

From this first snap-shot (and unsettled) impression, Palin has helped McCain among Republicans, left Democrats unfazed, but moved the undecideds against him quite sharply. I totally understand why.

So, who would I have picked, were I McCain? I would have taken Joe Lieberman in a heartbeat, concerns about the conservative wing of the GOP defecting and/or staying home notwithstanding. Here’s the thing: the folks on the right-wing of the GOP are scared of Obama. They don’t like his politics, but they realize that he resonates with Americans in many of the same ways that Reagan did thirty years ago. Remember, the GOP loves Reagan [and with, I would say, fairly good reason, the failures of trickle-down economics notwithstanding; all in all, I think Reagan did a very good job]; they see Obama as someone who will do the same thing for the Democrats. Also, conservative voters know that one main reason W won in 2000 was the Nader Effect. Conservatives like holding the White House, and I think that, in the end, they would’ve held their noses and voted for McCain-Lieberman.

Why do I care? Really, it’s simple: I want the best two candidates possible. I voted for McCain in the Alabama primary because I thought he was the best of the GOP field; I’m planning on voting for Obama because I think he’s the better candidate. But just because I now find myself in the Obama camp—a weird place for me, as I’ve voted Dole, Bush, and Bush since I turned 18—doesn’t mean that I want to see the GOP roll over and play dead. I want the best thing for this country, and I think the best thing for America would be a spirited, principled discussion between the two sides. And, in the case that Obama lost, I would want McCain to have the best partner in governance on his side—and I think that’s Joe Lieberman, not Sarah Palin.

If you follow my delicious bookmarks, you’ll see that I’ve bookmarked a lot about Palin already. I’m this fired up about it because I think it’s the wrong decision. I wanted the right one, because I want the best thing for this country.

With this in mind, there are many proposals afoot to enable drilling for crude oil in areas currently under legal protection from doing so: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, continental shelf areas in the Gulf of Mexico, etc. Is drilling for oil at these times most like:

1. Printing your own money during a currency crunch.
2. Teaching an alcoholic how to build a still when alcohol taxes go through the roof.
3. Hammering your thumb to take your mind off of your leg being cut off.
4. Fiddling while Rome burns.

Answer and discuss.

Fellow MSMS alumni, I urge you to consider doing something similar. You may not be able to afford to throw $55 at the Foundation every paycheck—but figure out what you can. We were given a great gift, and we need to propagate that gift through the generations.

Low-wage workers in rural areas are taking the biggest hit, but those who work in cities aren’t faring much better. It used to be that the very poor inhabited central cities and the working class lived in the inner suburbs, but now that the rich are moving back into town, the poor are being pushed outward. Retail, restaurant, hospital and hotel employees who work in upscale cities often must look 30 to 50 miles from their jobs for affordable housing. Their longer commutes mean they need to spend more on gas.

To quote myself from 2005:

But the next SUV driver I see in Madison complaining about gas prices on the local news … well, pardon me if I feel like punching ‘em in the face.

It helps to know that Madison, Alabama is the yuppie suburb of Huntsville, itself an economically prosperous part of an otherwise economically downtrodden state. People around here drive SUVs not for sports utility but for status uplift.

[And if I could go back ten years and read my Weblog now, I'd be stunned that I was agreeing with Reich, too.]

Lets see we can go to mars. We can build a space station. You kind of get the idea.

Sure do. I work in manned spaceflight. None of this means anything, not even considering that the International Space Station is managed out of Houston, a notable oil city. Your point?

MB comes out with a car that is the size of my shoe and it only gets 35miles per gal. So why can’t we make a car that get 60 to 70 miles per gallon??? I have a 2 seater sports car that has a supper charger on it and I get 29MPG on the highway.

None of that is internally consistent. I drive a Subaru Impreza WRX wagon, and not only does it drink 93 octane, but being turbo-charged and all-wheel drive means that it’s lucky to get 27mpg on the interstate. Does it suck to fill that up at $45 a tankful? Yeah, it does. I would love it if 93 octane were still $1.45 a gallon. That would rule. But it’s not.

You can kind of fill in the blanks. I have this feeling the good old American public is getting the screw job. I don’t hear anyone talking about this on the campaign trail. But we know big oil is a big backer of our dear legislators.

Still lost as to what the point is here. And frankly, I do hear folks talk about the economy on the campaign trail—and I saw campaign footage of Hillary Clinton at a gas station. So it’s being discussed. And sure, oil companies donate lots of money to politicians—same as every large corporate strata in this country. I don’t like any of that, but I don’t see it getting fixed anytime soon.

And yeah, this is a painful cost increase to working folks. But here’s the perfect storm that’s happened, as I see it:

• Relative economic prosperity and low gas prices in the 1990s finished the drive away from the fuel-efficient cars we saw in the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s. Why were those cars built then fuel-efficient? Gas crises in the 1970s the last time oil prices were up this high [indexed to inflation, that is]. When oil was below $20 a barrel, the American dream of driving a bad-ass vehicle came back in vogue—you could fill up that Ford Explorer for less than the cost of steak dinner.
• American fiscal policy has radically weakened the dollar. Even if oil was no more expensive to get out of the ground or no more sought on the market, the very fact that oil commodities are sold in dollars means that, as the dollar weakens, the price of oil is commensurately going to rise. [In fact, it would be interesting to convert 2008 oil prices into 2006 dollars for shits and giggles.]
• American foreign policy in stirring shit up in the Middle East has everyone worried that oil production in this country or that country could be cut off, which always drives scarcity.
• More of the world is developing, and let’s be honest, powering with oil is damn easy—light it on fire, turn the heat energy into steam, and use the steam to drive a turbine.

I figure that the rise of hybrids and generally smaller and more fuel efficient cars—here comes my friend Stephen to talk about his Honda Fit, which is about the size of my WRX and probably has half the operating costs—will continue as long as oil prices are high. I’d love to see CAFE—Corporate Average Fuel Economy—standards pushed ever higher, because let’s be honest—we’ve not spurred automakers to be more efficient with market means. When we’re given the ability to be cheap and lazy about our energy use, we’ll become profligate. Only when it’s expensive do we worry about it.

We’re fighting human nature here, and fundamentally, I think that’s what government does. Some certainly disagree with me, but I think that’s what it is.

[Now let's see if linking to that old entry gets more comments with email addresses of "fuck@you.com", eh?]

I know that it’s totally cliché to write open letters to you on Weblogs. I mean, I was probably doing it back when I ran TOTK. You know, before I had to shave. [Or before I grew the beard and quit shaving.] Anyway: my beloved Cincinnati Reds have won six straight and eight of ten. They’ve somehow dug out of last place and now are sniffing the division “chase”, which in the NL Central is best defined as “the team least averse to finishing over .500″. Sure, the Reds are 60-70 and maybe only have a 1% chance of winning the division title at this point, but … do you think that you could have found a minute or two to air highlights of their sweep of the Marlins in the one-hour Sunday night Baseball Tonight?

No? Okay. Screw you.

Love,
GFM

Q: Why is this entry exactly five sentences?
A: http://geof.is.a.sarcastic.asshole.gfmorris.net/

Let’s just list the problems here:

1. The GOP doesn’t have a majority with 50 Senators; it has control because Dick Cheney is VP. There is no majority in a 50-50 Senate; control is run through the VP to break ties, but that only provides vote-by-vote majorities.
2. There aren’t 49 Senators and Senators-elect who are announced Democrats; there are 47.
3. The worst of all: there are two Independent Senators: Bernie Sanders from Vermont and Joe Lieberman from Connecticut. Listing them as Democrats is wrong, because they aren’t. [Despite Joe's proclamations.] They’re both officially Independents, even though they’ll both caucus with the Democrats.

How should this be fixed?

1. 47 Democrats.
2. 2 Independents.
3. “Needed for Control: 49 Dem, 50 GOP” replaces the “Needed for Majority” text. If you want to add more info, you note that both Independents will side with the Democrats.

It’s just plain horrible work by CNN [and I'm picking on them while there are undoubtedly many other news outlets doing the same thing]; your audience is smart enough to know about Sanders and Lieberman and Cheney, so write the graphics correctly and let the folks do some thinking. The folks that won’t get it probably don’t care about this stuff anyway, so … report the facts and don’t do the analysis in the graphic when it distorts the facts even as it represents some level of truth.

Okay, gripe over.

Buzzwords aren’t all bad, 37 Signals. The examples cited typically seem to indicate a desire to be anti-elitist and inclusionary. Well, not all communication is meant for outsiders! A great example is all the communication we do at work: we have a lot of shorthand for a lot of the work we do. The only time that we really have to break out of that shorthand is when we have to communicate with people outside of our group—and doing so then is quite, quite vital. A lot of buzzwords come from insider shorthand—it’s only bad when it escapes the insiders!

As an example: I’m quite sure that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had his fair amount of shorthand. If nothing else, he was a seminarian, and those folks are prone to the development of lots of conceptualizations that are best expressed in theological terms—on the inside.

But this “buzzwords are always bullshit” stance is, in and of itself, bullshit. If you closely watched the 37Signals Campfire room, I’m more than willing to bet that you’d find a lot of internal shorthand that could, at some point, be buzzworded. [Ruby on Rails, for instance. Rails is their framework, their name for their system. Rails is short, quick, and to the point. But now it's a buzzword. My point exactly.]

When making sweeping statements, be care to note context. This writer failed to adequately do so, which brings about this response.

Now, I know that most menial jobs start above the minimum wage these days because of the demand for labor. I get that, and I get all the economic arguments to not raise the minimum wage. Heck, it’s important to remember that the last time the minimum wage was increased, Clinton was President, and it stayed where it was for the rest of his second term. The economy certainly zoomed on to good jobs and low unemployment without the raises staying in effect.

In short: I don’t buy the “living wage” arguments, but even the biggest haters of the minimum wage can look at what’s been done here and curl their upper lip in disgust.

I got DSL through BellSouth back in January; twice in that time, their billing department has screwed the pooch and disconnected me for no good reason. Seriously: none. This second time, despite multilple calls and assurances, I was never able to see my billing information online, and I was only getting electronic bills, so … no way to get any warnings from them at all.

Once was fine: I was willing to deal with it. I hadn’t gotten around to canceling the cable modem [because I was using it for BitTorrent ], and around that time, my roommate moved in, and it was just easier to segregate our Internet connections [him: cable; me: DSL] because of what we were doing with them. But now … ugh. I can’t even call in to figure out WTF is wrong, because their billing department shut down 10 minutes before I even got home. Yes, it’ll be open tomorrow, but the only call I’m making to them is to tell them to kiss my lily white ass.

Interestingly enough, Knology has concurrently rolled out a higher level of cable modem service in my area—better even than the DSL performance. Yeah, I think I’ll upgrade…

The NHL TV deal—taking the guaranteed money from OLN over the partnership with ESPN—has been a debacle from my end of things. I love hockey, and I watched less than five regular season games before dumping my digital cable [and my only access to OLN with my cable provider]; I’ve only seen one postseason game, and that was only because I was in Carolina for Game One, where the venue that hosted the concert I was attending happened to have the game on in their bar. I could just see the screen from where I sat, so my head was definitely on a swivel. Compare this to past years, when I have pretty much spent any idle TV time in the summer with whatever playoff game has been on ESPN—after all, it might be a Steve Levy game, which means it’ll go to eleven [overtimes].

My fear was that Game Seven—the very win-or-die, mano y mano kind of contest that drew me into hockey in the first place—would be stuck on a crappy cable channel that almost no one watches. [The aforementioned Game One was outdrawn by women's college softball playoffs on ESPN, after all.] Instead, the game will be broadcast in all its glory for almost all the country to see. Sure, maybe they don’t give a damn about hockey, or maybe they don’t understand the sport … but the opportunity to see this brutally beautiful game is all I can ask for as a fan of hockey.

GO CANES!

[This is not to say that I am never guilty of this, because I am. However, you now have an club to beat me over the head with when I try to argue that the subjective is objective.]

This promises to be an ugly night.

Unfortunately for this individual, whom I’ll call J, I was in Detroit. I was clearly in no position to do anything about it right then, because, well, I was in Michigan and my bootleg client was in Alabama. I explained the situation to J and urged him to persist and see if he could get an account on DIME. He replied back the next day that he’d been unable to do so. [In all fairness, I should have started to get suspicious here---others have told me that persistence pays off here.] Fair enough, I told him—I’d work on it when I got back.

Well, I think you just have to see from the dearth of posting here this week that, well, I’ve been busy and/or tired since I got back. It just hasn’t happened. Turns out that J was on a bit of a deadline—he had to get these bootlegs to a friend coming back [or maybe leaving?] for Spring Break on Friday. Fine. Tonight, I offered to upload the bootlegs via FTP to my server here, where he could grab them via FTP and do the transcoding on his own. Honestly, there was no way my bootlegs, even if I made them tonight or before I left for work in the morning, were going to get to Chicago by tomorrow, right?

J’s reply: “i don’t know what u r suggesting”

Mental reply: “I’m suggesting that I hand you the work and let you do the heavy lifting yourself. I’d just be sacrificing the bandwidth, but … fuck it, I pay for it.” Instead, I told him that it just wasn’t going to happen, and that I was sorry that I hadn’t been able to come through for him. No harm, right? Dude asked a random Internet person for help.

J’s reply: “r u kidding me u dont have time to burn 2 cds?”

My reply, verbatim, which I handed to Misty before I sent it:

Look. I am not a college student with a ton of time. I’m a professional engineer working 40+ hours a week. I just got off travel Monday where I was gone from my job for three days. I was travel-lagged. I have lots of hobbies that, honestly, came ahead of your request.

You asked me to do this while I was gone. Had I been home, I could have done this easily, no problem. But given that it’s already Thursday night and you needed these, well, tomorrow, the chances of me getting a CD-R burned and to you tomorrow are, well, nil.

When you’re the one asking me for a favor, you have no right to dictate how I spend my time.

Please do not waste your time sending further emails to me; your attitude has earned you a place in my server’s killfile. Any incoming email from you will be deleted immediately.

Thanks, and have a nice day somewhere else.

Dickweed.

Oh, and J, if you come on to here under the guise of defending yourself:

1. I will confirm to everyone that it’s you.
2. You won’t find sympathetic ears here.

Fuck you, and good night. [Why yes, my week has sucked eggs. And yours?]

[Oh, at least my crown is finally done. Yay for that.]

[Cell phone rings.]

“This is Geof.”

“Hi, is this Goffrey Morris?”

“It’s Geoffrey, but … yes. With whom am I speaking?”

“This is [mindless CSR] from Knology. You had an install scheduled today, and the technician is at your house, but you’re not home.”

“I had no such thing scheduled.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, ma’am, I assure you that I did not. I recently downgraded my digital cable service back to extended basic. I’ve already taken the receivers into the office.”

“Well, Mr. Morris, the technician needs to install a high-pass filter on your connection. Is there anyone at home who can authorize the technician to enter, or can you go to your home to let him in?”

“No.”

[pause]

“Ma’am, this is horrible customer service.”

“Did you say, ‘horrible customer service’?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did. Now, it’s not your fault that your people can’t communicate, but I was told nothing about this, either when I made the original phone call to downgrade service or when I took the units back in to the local office. You’d think that if this was so all-fired important, someone would have told me in one of those two interactions—especially when I ended both of them asking if there was anything else to do.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Morris. Can I reschedule sometime later this week?”

“No, ma’am. My week is absolutely full, and honestly, you’re wasting my time right now.”

“Will next Monday morning work? We’ll have the technician out first thing.”

“That will be fine.”

I started writing this at 0900 with the intention of leaving as soon as I’d finished and dealing with the inevitable phone call later. Clearly, having the technician come out first thing didn’t really happen. In fact, I saw a Knology truck go by my house at 0812 and got a false hope. Ended up that this wasn’t my technician; the guy I had was competent, quick, and pleasant.

But here’s what really pisses me off: there was no need for the technician to even enter my house. The guy hadn’t even so much as rung my doorbell when I noticed that his truck was blocking my driveway; I went outside, and he was already swapping out the filters. What did they have me stay home for almost two hours of my workday this morning [it'll be close to 1000 by the time I get to the office]? To sign my name to the work order.

That’s it.

Suffice it to say that I’m done putting off installing the DSL modem [I've already paid for this month's service on the cable modem, and I've got a discount coming on the return of the cable boxes for that service, so I could keep the cable modem for over another month without charges]. It goes up tonight.

Fuck Knology.

Now I will STFU and try not to break out my LART.

Do I like paying more for gas? No, not really. I’d like to spend my money on other things. But my demand for gasoline is pretty inelastic—I drive to get to work, and I drive to stay sane. It’s pretty inelastic for other folks, too, I’m sure. But, at the end of the day, the market generally finds a solution.

Now, do really poor folks have a beef here? Sure. Folks trying to hack it on minimum wage—don’t derail into a discussion of whether a minimum wage is a good idea; it’s the law of the land, so for now, let’s limit the scope of this discussion to the magnitude and not the existence—do get screwed out of this, because the artificial floor of the market hasn’t been indexed to inflation. [Mind you, there aren't a plethora of jobs around here right at that minimum wage, but they exist.] But Jesus was right … you’ll always have the poor with you.

But the next SUV driver I see in Madison complaining about gas prices on the local news … well, pardon me if I feel like punching ‘em in the face.

Now, Mozilla will version like WordPress. Why not just generate version numbers with a random number generator, and only accept the random result if it’s higher than the last number you had? John Wilson could code up such a script in 35 seconds, and Gareth Watts could have a version outputting for all SourceForge projects in a half-day, tops.

Le sigh.

“For A Friend” wasn’t about anyone you know. Stop speculating. Now, dammit.

Yeesh. Y’all act like you have a right to my business, rampantly running through to people you think I might be talking about before they’ve even had a chance to read what I’ve had to say. I’d like the cluefucked among you to write this on your hand and then slap yourself in the forehead: I have friends outside of our little group.

For the record, no, I don’t know who among you went off half-cocked. I don’t want to know, either. But you need to get out of my business. Thanks.

Blah.

I might be an engineer by trade, but you just missed a huge opportunity to sell me on your stuff. Do I really need CAD drawings [via PDF ... ?] of your stuff if I’m just a mildly interested consumer? Why does your residential products page make me guess as to what I might want? Dude. I just saw something cool in a magazine, and thirty seconds later, I felt like I was back at work. I don’t care if you have a La-Z-Boy integrated with a touchscreen that will do everything from control my TiVo and stereo to make coffee and wipe my ass … you just lost any interest I had in you by having a craptastic site design.

Suckers.

There’s a strong discussion going on over at PVRBlog on what’s wrong with TiVo. Such discussions go on all the time, but this one is better than most because several of the commentators get right down to specifics.

That quote is exact as of the time of this writing, down to the fact that the link encompasses the spaces surrounding “PVRBlog”.

Here’s my two big beefs:

1. The text to give the permalink to the discussion shouldn’t be PVRBlog but “strong discussion”. Why? I look at it this way: I want the link to be self-descriptive. Notice in my first paragraph in this entry that the phrase “example of bad linking practices” is pointed at the permalink of the entry I’m bitching about. That points the bitchiness directly at the entry that sucks, and doesn’t point it at the B2blog itself. Now, mind you, my Christian ethos of “Hate the sin, love the sinner,” may have some overlap here, but I look at it like this: maybe the B2blog will get better at this kind of stuff. I don’t want to point “example of bad linking practices” at B2blog’s home page if, three months from now, they’re using good linking practices.
2. I like to link the title of sites. Again, if you’ll look back to my first paragraph, I use a secondary link in there to point to the B2blog. Why? That link is self-descriptive: it’s a link to the B2blog, pointing at their homepage.

Now, mind you, you can probably find examples of bad linking practices back in my history. I’ve only improved because I’ve had this kind of things shown to me as a problem in the past.

And I rail about this stuff because bitching about it relaxes me. I heart Business 2.0; I was a charter subscriber and held a subscription for the first few years of the publication. Nowadays, I’m not wanting to do entrepreneurship, so I dropped it. But their Weblog still points me to good stuff, so I read it.

[On the chance that Damon Darlin, the guy who wrote this entry, reads this ... it's intended as constructive criticism, chief. Much love.]

The rush to declare stuff “the best!” or “the most $x” or whatever has completely made our language devoid of non-superlative comparisons. If I tell you that you’re a good student, or a good person, society has trained you to ask yourself, “Why did Geof use good and not great? Why am I not great?! My mom thinks I’m great!” Anytime that we limit ourselves to acey-deucey, onesie-twosie comparisons, we make binary choices in what is quite clearly a greater-than-binary decision set.

GAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

[This is what I get for running a Web forum. Every other discussion seems to be, "What's the best $X?" "What's the coolest $y?" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!]