Month: March 2005

Getting organized

I was going to comment earlier but I was too busy merging my “to do” lists. When that was complete, I had to reorder and generally revise the master copy, which to be honest ended up a total rewrite. First item, as always, “organize”.

Then I had to spend some time rethinking how I categorize my password list. (For the curious, my current scheme goes by service; for example, email portals, financial accounts, shopping websites, utility accounts, etc. Within service, it gets tricky. For shopping, it’s further broken down into book stores, travel sites, auction sites, so forth. Yes, it bothers me that “travel sites” doesn’t have a better fit than with “shopping”, but I just can’t nail down a universal solution. Alphabetical is so 1993.)

Of course, I’m joking about all this. Ha ha.

Jason, first posted as a comment

Organizing those photos

Walter Mossberg reviews photo-organizing programs:

These programs differ from traditional photo-editing software like Adobe’s Photoshop. They place less emphasis on tweaking and perfecting each picture, focusing instead on organizing your hundreds or thousands of photos and helping you share them with others. They do have basic editing tools, but they are mainly designed to help you manage your digital-photo collection.

Two of the best photo organizers have just been updated, and I have been testing them on my collection of more than 10,000 digital photos. One is Picasa 2, which runs only on Windows and is now a free offering from Google, which purchased Picasa last year. The other is Apple Computer’s iPhoto 5, which runs only on the Macintosh. It comes free on every new Mac.

Talking the talk

• John Salley, co-host of FSN’s “Best Damn Sports Show Period,” on reports of steroid use by NFL players in the 1970s: “Who cares? Their job is to entertain us and go back to their cages.”

• Comedian Argus Hamilton, on the Yankees’ Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui — not Jason Giambi or Gary Sheffield — being chosen for random drug tests this week: “By this logic, the Nuremburg trials would have indicted General Eisenhower and Bob Hope.”

Sideline Chatter

Things Stressed Women Say At Work

  • Okay, okay! I take it back. Unf**k you.
  • You say I’m a bitch like it’s a bad thing.
  • Well this day was a total waste of make-up.
  • Well, aren’t we a damn ray of sunshine?
  • Don’t bother me, I’m living happily ever after.
  • Do I look like a people person?
  • This isn’t an office. It’s hell with fluorescent lighting.
  • I started out with nothing and I still have most of it left.
  • Therapy is expensive. Popping bubble wrap is cheap. You choose.
  • Why don’t you try practicing random acts of intelligence and senseless acts of self-control?
  • I’m not crazy. I’ve just been in a very bad mood for 30 years.
  • Sarcasm is just one more service I offer.
  • Do they ever shut up on your planet?
  • I’m not your type. I’m not inflatable.
  • Stress is when you wake up screaming and you realize you haven’t gone to sleep yet!
  • Back off!! You’re standing in my aura.
  • Don’t worry. I forgot your name too.
  • I work 60 hours a week to be this poor.
  • Not all men are annoying. Some are dead.
  • Wait…I’m trying to imagine you with a personality.
  • Chaos, panic and disorder … my work here is done.
  • Ambivalent? Well, yes and no.
  • You look like shit. Is that the style now?
  • Earth is full. Go home.
  • Aw, did I step on your poor little itty bitty ego?
  • I’m not tense, just terribly, terribly alert.
  • A hard-on doesn’t count as personal growth.
  • You are depriving some village of an idiot.
  • If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport.

Yeah, but can they impersonate Elvis?

From The New York Times:

In Kenya, a 10-year-old elephant named Mlaika seems to think she’s a truck. At least she has been heard imitating the low rumble that trucks make on a nearby highway.

Mlaika’s mimicry is described in the journal Nature, along with a report of an African elephant that lived in a Swiss zoo with Asian elephants and learned to imitate the chirping that only the Asian species makes.

The two findings show for the first time that elephants – like primates, birds, bats and some marine mammals – are capable of vocal learning. The discovery has important implications for understanding how elephants communicate.

Audio clip of elephant sounding like truck (sort of).

Weather Watcher

The weather this morning in Albuquerque is best described as yucky. Snow, rain, sleet wind and hail. About 40°F.

Which brings me to Weather Watcher, a nice little program self-described as:

Freeware, adware-free, spyware-free, hassle-free, desktop weather. View the weather information for over 77,000 cities world-wide!

Recommended by Ed Bott who just updated his favorite software list.

Niagara didn’t fall

An enormous ice dam formed at the source of the Niagara River on the eastern shore of Lake Erie on March 29, 1848. Just after midnight, the thunderous sound of water surging over the great falls at Niagara came to a halt. The eery silence persisted throughout the day and into the next evening until the waters of Lake Erie broke through the blockage and resumed their course down the river and over the falls.

Today in History from the Library of Congress

Obsessive compulsive

At last count, 11 comments on the obsessiveness of NewMexiKen and some of his children and grandchildren. My god, we’re even having former colleagues chiming in.

Yes, it’s true at CYO camp as a 10-year-old, while others were winning awards for swimming, or softball, or even beadwork, I got the neatest camper in my tent award — and true to form I still have the felt insignia they gave me nearly 50 years ago.

Did I inherit this, or was it the doing of years of Catholic nuns?

When I was a kid the nuns had little clickers. When we went to church before class they would click so that we all could genuflect in unison, or stand in unison. Even in high school, I remember we were lined up by height to kiss the bishop’s ring and receive our diploma.

Interestingly enough though, I come out a strong “P” on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type. [A Perceiving (P) style takes the outside world as it comes and is adopting and adapting, flexible, open-ended and receptive to new opportunities and changing game plans.] I test so strongly as a “P” that I was once singled out with a couple others during an experiment.

So, “How come,” I asked the instructor after, “if I am such a strong P, I alphabetize my CDs (within each genre) and have most of my books shelved according to Library of Congress call number?”

“Were my parents opposites?” he asked. [The opposite of P is J (Judging), one who approaches the outside world with a plan and is oriented towards organizing one’s surroundings, being prepared, making decisions and reaching closure and completion.]

“No, I think they were P too,” I replied.

“Did I go to Catholic school?”

His point was that the stong P of my parents (especially my mother) conflicted with the strong J of most nuns. Hence, I was confused.

Coincidentally the person who told me that is mentioned in Sunday’s New York Times in an article about early risers:

“I’m an early riser, I’m achievement driven, and oh, my, has it served me well in the business world,” said Otto Kroeger, a motivational speaker and business consultant in Fairfax, Va. Mr. Kroeger, who says he routinely rises at 4 a.m., preaches about the advantage of getting up before dawn to audiences and clients. “For 13 years,” Mr. Kroeger said, “I never allowed myself more than 4 hours in any 24-hour period. It was all ego driven. My psyche was saying, ‘I can do it, I can outlast.’ It’s a version of the old Broadway song from ‘Annie Get Your Gun’: ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.'”

Which type do you think he is?

I know, I know

NewMexiKen will get off the basketball kick here soon. Nothing else much caught my imagination today — and the item below confirmed my own thinking about the last play of the Arizona season — but I will move along here shortly.

If you want, you can read about The Biggest F***ing Bastard on the Face of the Earth at The American Street.

That would be Tom DeLay, of course, but you knew that.

Oh, Dianne Wiest is 57 and Reba McEntire is 50.

Let Jimmy Chitwood shoot it!

Fantastic Four – Best basketball weekend ever: Comebacks! Overtimes! Bad coaching! By Robert Weintraub. An excerpt:

Still, these questionable moves are small beer next to the plays “drawn up” in the endgame by Kentucky’s Tubby Smith and Arizona’s Lute Olson. Two coaches who have won national championships. Two graduates of the Andy Reid School of Clock Management and Game-Ending Infamy.

Don’t rail against Olson because the Wildcats blew a 15-point lead in the span of a single TV timeout. Perhaps owing to a home-court edge the tournament supposedly eradicated years ago, Illinois won late-game favor from whistle-swallowing referees who allowed the final minutes to turn into an episode of The Shield. Even with the historic comeback, Arizona still had the game in its hands with seconds left. So, what does Lute draw up? A clear-out for Salim Stoudamire, who was off during the game but hit game-winners in the regular-season finale and 48 hours previous against Oklahoma State? Perhaps a simple two-man game with Stoudamire and big man Channing Frye, who dominated inside all night? Nope, he put the ball in the hands of Hassan Adams, a brilliant offensive rebounder who can’t pass or sink outside shots. Adams should’ve been crashing the boards to tip in a potential Stoudamire miss. Instead, he heaved an off-balance chuck—and this crazy shot didn’t come close to going in.

Monkey wrench gang

Even The Arizona Republic, not exactly the bastion of so-called liberal media, thinks the Republicans are out of control.

Duck. Hide. Or run for cover if you’re anywhere near the Legislature.

Some of our Republican lawmakers are throwing monkey wrenches right and left.

Well, to the right, anyway.

Now that conservative Republicans have an edge at the Legislature, they can’t resist trying to gum up projects and agencies that are humming along just fine, thanks.

…

Every legislative session sees its share of misguided proposals. But this year they have gone so far that you have to wonder, what’s next?

Take the asphalt away from the Department of Transportation?

Make the Highway Patrol go on foot?

Save overhead by merging Game and Fish with the Department of Gaming?

Libertarians vs. Theocrats

Functional Ambivalent has an exceptionally insightful post on the coming war between Libertarian Republicans who believe that business should be allowed to do pretty much whatever it wants, and Theocratic Republicans, who want to use government to enforce a single interpretation of the Bible. An excerpt:

So now we have something called a “pharmacists’ rights movement.” This movement seeks to protect the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions they don’t approve of. Laws proposed in several states make it difficult or impossible for pharmacy operators to fire pharmacists who won’t do thier jobs, so long as theyr’e not doing their jobs out of a deeply held, conservative Christianity.

You can’t protect just one religious group, under the law, so any success at protecting Theocratic pharmacists will inevitably broaden to protect lots of other deeply-held beliefs. Vegitarians working at grocery stores, for example, could refuse to let people buy meat. Sporting goods store clerks could refuse to sell bullets to hunters and car salesmen could, with impunity, refuse to sell gas-guzzlers when what everyone really should be buying is gas-electric hybrids. Let’s let everyone anywhere enforce their own morality in any business environment, and take away the businesses ability to cope with these rogue moralists!

Exactly!

How dumb are the people who run Division I-A football not to decide their championship on the field of play the way college basketball does, with teenagers and barely twenty-somethings doing unpredictable, inexplicable, sometimes wonderful but also very human things one night after another in March.

Michael Wilbon

They’re very dumb; world class dumb.

The not-so-great seer

NewMexiKen promised to link back to Thinking ahead to the Final Four, but was so discouraged by Arizona’s loss I forgot.

I said that in Chicago, the winner of the Arizona-Oklahoma State game would go to St. Louis. I was wrong, it’s Illinois.

In Albuquerque, I said it would be the winner of the Louisville-Washington game, and it’s Louisville.

In Syracuse, I thought North Carolina would win, and that was correct.

For Austin, I predicted the winner of the Utah-Kentucky game would emerge, but Michigan State defeated Kentucky.

Two for four.

Louisville and Michigan State showed great desire, winning in overtime and double overtime respectively, but my choice to win it all is Illinois, which showed they would not be denied. If not, may Roy Williams of North Carolina finally win a championship.