Are you sure we've met before?

If I meet someone at a party and we chat a while, I will always make sure to say to them, if you see me a week from now and I don't recognize you, don't be offended. I'm not snubbing you, I just can't remember faces of people until I've talked to them on several occasions.

I've heard of people much worse, people who can't recognize their own wife if she changes her hairstyle, and there's an
article in the New York Times on the subject. Which lead me to faceblind.org, which lead to two tests to see if you're "face blind," a condition known as prosopagnosia.

On the tests where you have to identify celebrities I do just fine. In fact, once I've seen someone enough times I'm almost as good at recognizing them as most people. Usually if I meet someone and talk to them on three separate occasions within a couple of months that will be enough. And I am able to recognize people generally for perhaps a day after I meet them (people I see rarely are another matter; there's one guy I've given the "don't be offended if I don't recognize you" speech to several times, because he's a friend of a friend I see about twice a year. It's like that guy in Memento who keeps having to explain his situation).

I did poorly on the second test, scoring 74%, which is one percentage into the "possibly face blind" category. My girlfriend scored an average 85% while Francis, the disgustingly brilliant guy who sent me the link to the Times article, scored 100%.

I'm glad to find a test that suggests this is a real problem, because I've been accused of just being anti-social and someone who just doesn't really try to remember people. Which isn't at all true. I have at times studied faces intently during conversation, only to find two weeks later they don't even have the same hair color I thought they had. It doesn't matter if it's a passing waiter or a girl I'm hot for; all memory of the face will fade within a few days. I do remember they exist, my impression of them and what we talked about, I just don't remember their face. (A general impression can sometimes be enough in the right context: I didn't recognize my girlfriend's face the next time I saw her, but I remembered swing dancing with a tall skinny girl so when I was at a swing dance club and saw a tall skinny girl I kept walking past her in hopes it was her and she would recognize me, which she finally did).

The problem with this one is people don't believe it. It's true in general for invisible imperfections. No one accuses a guy with a cast on his leg of not trying to jump the high hurdle, but people with an anxiety disorder are told they are just letting their fears get the best of them. But the fact is, we are all limited both physically and mentally. Not everyone can run a five-minute mile and not everyone can memorize a book just by reading it, nor could any amount of training make it possible for them, but some people can do these things easily. But while no one will look down on you for not being able to memorize a book, because it's a rare talent, people will judge someone who can't remember faces, because it's so rare that they just don't believe it. People are far more accepting of people who can't remember names (which I also can't do). I've had people get very mad at me for forgetting their face.

All you people who can recognize faces are so lucky and don't even realize it.

the lack of basic competence in television

Perhaps it's a small thing, but on the talent show America's Got Talent, while performers were dancing or doing acrobatics a big banner would be flashed over them telling you what number you could call at the end of the show to vote for them, thus preventing the viewer from actually seeing what they were doing. This, even more than the frequent cutaways to David Hasselhoff watching them perform, just suggests that the people making the show don't actually understand that people watch a talent show to see the performances, not to stare at banners and judges.

The thing is, this isn't remotely uncommon. It's like when you watch a movie with subtitles and a big station logo or one of those awful animated advertisements that crawl across the bottom half of the screen, sometimes including sound effects, block out the subtitles. It's hard to decide whether these things are simply a display of open contempt of the viewers or pure incompetence. My guess is it's a little of both.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing gets worse every year because there's not really much you can do about it short of not watching shows you otherwise enjoy. And if you did stop, would the networks even understand that was the reason? Once I stopped watching a cool anime series on MTV2 because they had this huge flashing logo that was like one of those awful flash ads on web pages. What could be more inappropriate than a distracting animated logo on an animated series? I probably wasn't the only one who was annoyed, but I'm sure if the ratings for the show were low MTV2 would just assume people didn't like the show. It would never occur to a network that people didn't like garish logos and advertisements and banners.

You can't even email networks to complain, in most cases. All you can do is complain in network forums, which may allow you to vent steam but which doesn't get the word out to the networks.

Yes, there are bigger problems in the world, and at least on America's Got Talent that little yodeling girl made the finales, but still, big banners cutting off the bottom half of the screen while a clog dancing troupe is performing just pisses me off.

Opinionade: The Series

For a while last fall I was doing capsule TV series reviews, but then new shows started coming so far apart that I couldn’t do a few at once, and devoting an entire blog entry to one show just seemed excessive.  And shows come and go so fast; I would have given a favorable nod to Emily’s Reasons Why Not if it hadn’t been cancelled after one episode.

But I’ve realized that there are now a few shows I’ve started watching recently that seem interesting, so I’ll write a few words on them.

Psych (10 pm on USA)
Premise: Guy with Sherlock Holmes-style skills pretends to be a psychic

Review:  There was a brilliant, short-lived comedy-detective show years ago called Tenspeed and Brownshoe with Jeff Goldblum as a nervous dork and Ben Vereen as a cool, con man type.  About a year later there was some other show I remember nothing about that had four characters, and the one black character was a cool, con man type.  And I thought at the time, why can’t the white guy ever be the con man and the black guy be the nerd?  I knew black nerds and white slicksters, and it just bugged me when TV runs to the obvious stereotypes.

Well look how far we’ve come in a measly 26 years.  In the very fun new detective show Psych, the white guy is faking it ever step of the way, dragging along his nervous Nelly black partner every step of the way.  (And yeah, I know there have been black dorks on TV shows, most famously Urkel, but this just happens to be exactly what I felt was missing in the 80s, so it caught my attention)

The show is a lot of fun.  Shawn, whose father trained him to be hyper-observant, has been phoning in tips to the cops based on what he notices on TV shows, but his advice is so good they decide he must be a criminal himself (this part is not convincing, but now that it’s out of the way we probably won’t have to hear about it again).  To get out of hot water he tells them he’s a psychic, and uses his observational skills to convince them, doing such a good job that they hire him to investigate a case, which he solves.

This comes on right after Monk, and it’s very much in the same mold (of the early Monk, not the present hit-or-miss Monk).  It’s funny and reasonably clever, and it’s neat the way the camera zeroes in on the telling clues Shawn notices.  It’s not, perhaps, as good as I remember Tenspeed and Brownshoe being, but hopefully it will last longer.  

Conclusion: Well, I’ve only seen one episode so I may be getting ahead of myself, but this looks like a winner.

Kyle XY
Premise: mysterious kid with strange abilities and no belly button joins a wholesome American family

Review: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  Guy wakes up naked in the middle of nowhere with no idea of how he got there or who he is.  Fortunately he turns out to be preternaturally brilliant, and … oh, you have heard this before?  Of course, that was the short-lived  series John Doe.  Kyle XY has pretty much the same opening, although according to the producers they had the idea for that scene years before John Doe came out.

Anyway, John Doe started out great and went downhill, but I’m hoping that Kyle XY, which also started out great, keeps its momentum a little better.

The first two episodes were great.  Kyle is reminiscent of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, an observer of humans trying to puzzle out why they do what they do.  The show is often funny and it’s playing out the central mystery quite well.

The third episode worries me a bit.  This is on the ABC Family Channel, and the third episode was like something you’d see on a “family channel,” with lessons learned about lying and too much sweetness with too little story.  But I’m still hoping this won’t go the way of John Doe, getting bad and then getting lost.

Conclusion: I’m hoping Kyle can avoid both family sappiness and the loss of focus, sense and interesting stories that plagued John Doe.  If it does, this could be really great.

Dog Bites Man
Premise: inept news team goes around pestering people

Review: Comedy Central has only had a few series that more-or-less fall into the classic sitcom form.  There’s Reno 911, a series that has been running for years that I think is horrible, Stella, a brilliant and original comedy that was cancelled after one season, and now Man Bites Dog, which falls somewhere in between comedically.  The show details a news team’s adventures as they investigate important stories like spring break.  The central conceit is that while the news team is made up of improve actors, everyone else on the show is a real person who isn’t told they’re on a comedy show, and presumably believe these people are who they’re pretending to be.  

I haven’t really decided on this one. It’s amusing but not hilarious, and the real-people angle hasn’t really resulted in anything that funny.  The Daily Show’s interviews with people who don’t see to be aware they’re talking to someone from the Daily Show are funnier.  Still, I always have admiration for comedians who have the guts to act like total jackasses in front of people who don’t realize it’s a put on.

Conclusion: I could go either way on this one, but for now I’ll keep watching.

Blade: The Series
Premise: a couple of good vampires try to kill a lot of bad ones.

Review: First off, I think adding “the series” to the end of a title is incredibly lame.  But then, Blade likes the obvious.  The show is mean and macho and generic, with the only interesting personality a peripheral cop-gone-very-bad character.

I don’t need to write a review of this now, because When I saw the movie Blade II I posted a review on imdb.com, and the series is so like the movie that I can just use most of that review:

Blade II Blade: The Series is basically decent. It's got a few cool and/or effective moments, it keeps moving, and everything about it says "basically adequate though uninspired action flick." Snipes The series' star makes an acceptable b-movie sort of action figure, with less presence than Vin Diesel but more talent than Chuck Norris.

I watched it to the end and didn't feel overly restless, so if you just kind of like action pictures and it's on TV it's worth at least looking at. But that's about the best I can say for it.

Conclusion: This is just keeping me slightly interested enough to stick with it, but it’s really a week-by-week decision.  I could very easily give up on this one, but it’s pretty watchable all the same.

okay, born again bush haters, make nice!

It took me a few listens before I realized the Dixie Chick's
Not Ready to Make Nice was about their controversial statement a few years back that they were embarrassed that our jackass president was from the same state as them. I just thought it was about not being willing to make peace with an ex until I heard "And how in the world can the words that I said/Send somebody so over the edge/that they'd write me a letter sayin'’/that I better shut up and sing or my life will be over"

So I'm thinking, don't all those people who voted for Bush and now say he's doing a shit job owe the Dixie Chicks some sort of apology? I'm just wondering, are people writing them now saying, "I'm sorry I was such a complete and utter moron, and I shouldn't have burned your records, and you were right and I was wrong and I clearly should never try to think for myself because I don't have the intelligence of a half-wit."?

I hope so, but I doubt it. Even though it has become so obvious to everyone except the blindly faithful that Bush has lied, misled and screwed up every step of the way, I don't think too many people are saying, hey, this is my fault. But they should, and the Dixie Chicks should get a reward for being brave and right when so many people wergoingig along with war fever. I think they should be given the right at least to just go on stage and say, "I am so ashamed that there are so many utter and complete morons from Texas and every other state in the U.S" without receiving a single angry letter.

We are all doomed

If there's one lesson to be learned by reading about United States anti-terrorism measures, it's that the government doesn't know what the fuck it's doing and we are all doomed. Latest case in point, a report from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general criticizing the inclusion in the department's National Asset Database of petting zoos and popcorn factories as terrorist targets.

The database actually winds up with more "terrorist targets" in Wisconsin and Indiana than in New York, which would explain why anti-terrorist funding has been slashed for us and increased in the mid west.

There are a few problems here. One, the government is more concerned with playing politics than protecting us from a terrorist attack. They'd rather funnel the money to states that like Republicans.

But it's also another example of the utter lack of common sense the administration exhibits at every turn. After Hurricane Katrina when the government was doing nothing they later explained that they had no information through official channels that things were going badly and emergency help was needed, even though it was on the news. When something makes no sense - the news is reporting people starving while reports are coming in saying everything's going fine - Indiana looks like a bigger terrorism target than New York - the sensible thing to do is say, wait, that isn't right. It's as though the government is a weatherman reporting a sunny day, refusing to just turn his head and look out the window at the rain.

There will be a terrorist attack, it won't be in Indiana, and we are all doomed. Have a nice day.

cyclists want to run me down

You never know what's going to piss people off, at least I don't. Otherwise I would have expected all the angry e-mails in response to my comment in my review of MotoGP 06 (along with World Tour Soccer 06) that motorcycles are, to quote myself "insanely dangerous."

I soon learned from outraged readers that riding a motorcyle is no more dangerous than having a pillow fight in a marshmallow factory, even if a 2001 report by the National Highway Safety Administration reports that in 2000 "motorcyclists were about 21 times as likely as passenger car occupants to die in a motor vehicle crash and 4 times as likely to be injured."

Well, po-tay-to, po-tah-to. I think the world would be a safer place without motorcycles, but then, in the words of Three Dog Night, "if I were the king of the world ... I'd throw away the cars and the bars and the wars," so really, I'm ready to take everyone's fun away.

The emails that annoyed me the most were the ones that said something along the lines of, "keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself and just tell me if the game is any good." Those seeking impersonal, dryly written game reviews can find them in myriad game publications that will speak at length about frame rates and bonus extras and supported resolutions and controller options and all sorts of useful, uninteresting stuff.

But that's not what I do. My idea of a great critic was Dorothy Parker, whose best work was a series of theater reviews for The New Yorker. She would go on about herself, talk about her day, go off on tangents, and be very witty and insightful. Was she the most informative, detail-oriented critic at the time? I suspect not. But her reviews are worth reading as prose,even though without access to a time machine I have no way to go back and see the plays she recommends. In fact, who I read is not tethered to who is most useful. Years ago I used to love reading Andrew Sarris's film reviews in tea Village Voice. He wrote intelligently about film, about what it should be, about what it was, about what makes a film great. I also disagreed with almost every opinion he gave on specific films. For game reviews I tend to go to Gamespot, even though I often disagree with their reviewers, because they have better writers than most of the gaming sites. (Although I may have to start paying more attention to Eurogamer after reading this hysterical panning of Gene Troopers.)

What I aspire to is reviews that people would read simply because they are interesting to read. And I believe to do that you have to bring yourself into the article; interesting writing does not come from dry analysis, it comes from finding an interesting take on a subject allows people to understand where you're coming from and how your perceive what you are writing about. I may not always succeed in my goal of entertaining, but if someone's going to complain, I would rather they complain that I wasn't witty than that I didn't discuss frame rate flutters.

White is coming

In an attempt to win a "most peculiar ad of the year" award, Sonny created the "white is coming" billboard in the Netherlands, advertising the upcoming release of a white PSP. The billboard, which shows a white woman holding a black woman's face in a rather domineering way with the text "Playstation Portable White is coming," was pulled by Sony after generating cries of racism.

In terms of racism, well, if no one were conscious of race then this really wouldn't mean anything to anyone. If the billboard were a woman with white hair holding the face of a woman in black hair, it would just be an odd picture. The question is, is anyone really not conscious of race? Were the people who designed this ad really so color blind that it didn't occur to them that there was societal context that would make this offensive to some people?

But while my initial reaction to the billboard was, that could be seen as racist, my second reaction was, what the fuck are they trying to say in this ad? White is going to kick black's but? I mean, Sony put out a black PSP: are they now saying the white one will be superior and all those people who bought the black one are losers stuck with the inferior gadget?

Yes, the people who designed this ad seem to have not thought through its racial ramifications (unless they did it on purpose to stir up controversy), but really, it appears the designers didn't think through anything about this ad at all.

An internet was sent by my staff ...

The Daily Show showed a clip of Alaskan senator Ted Stevens' explanation of the Internet, so I went searching to see what else he said. Boing Boing has the
best bits, but if you want to read the whole thing it's here. In context it's not quite as horrendous as out of context, but it's still clearly the speech of someone who doesn't know a thing about the internet and is sort of parroting back some information some staffer gave him.

Stevens, a sleazy, right-wing, pork-barrel politician who has never shown a bit of restraint or common sense, is proof that most voters are idiots.

Go here, trust me

DON'T PUSH THE RED BUTTON

Those latecomers the pilgrims

The Times has an interesting
take on the immigration debate. While the point they're making seems like a stretch from time to time, what caught my interest was that the describe yet another case in which history as taught in school has almost nothing to do with what actually happened. There were apparently lots of Europeans in America by the time the Pilgrims got here, mainly Spanish. And that's what interests me. It's something Robert Wuhl spoke about in a fascinating comedy-lecture he did on HBO called Assume the Position. I can't remember anything from that special, except that in it he shows that a ton of stuff we learned in history classes is just plain wrong. There's a little trivia quiz on the website, and some questions, like was Benedict Arnold hung as a traitor and was George Washington the first president of the U.S., have surprising answers.

It's really kind of freaky how much stuff I've been told in my life is just plain wrong, or incredibly skewed (I recall Wuhl said that Paul Revere's ride was much shorter than another American on the same night, but a poem was written about Revere because he had a catchier name). It leaves me with the knowledge that my brain is probably filled with disinformation. And even worse, all the lies I was told growing up are still being told.

Depressing, isn't it?

Sharper girls besting slacker boys

With long New York Times articles, I usually read the first page or two and give up, but this one is worth reading through, at least if you find discussions of gender differences interesting.

Basically, women have scooted ahead of men in academic studies, not because men are doing worse but because women are doing better. Guys are more likely to slack off, women have their eyes on the prize.

An interesting result of this is that the difference is getting more notice than some feel it deserves. There are larger gaps between races in college than sexes, but apparently the men-women gap is a hot topic.

Of course, the question is how will this play out after college. Will employers snatch up these honor-laden women while guys get the lesser jobs (except in the hard sciences, where men still rule). Or will men still win out simply because that's how it's always been. I'm expecting a change, more girl bosses and CEOs, but only time will tell.

velvet or polyester?

On the first episode of America’s Got Talent, a modern version of the gong show in which the least talented performers are kicked off stage, an act called Blue Velvet came on.  They harmonized in a rather tacky way in an intro but were kicked off before they could actually start their song.

It struck me as mean, but it also struck me as odd.  While they were cheesy, they were on key, and at times the same judges would let some other act go on for a minute or more before stopping them, as was the case with a terrible impressionist.

Anyway, I wondered what Blue Velvet’s song was actually going to be like, so I tried googling for them.  But I couldn’t find them.  I found lots of clips of their gonged performance and a lot of references to the movie and the song, but not to the singing trio.  

This could mean they simply don’t know how to get a site on the internet, but it does increase my suspicions that they were just a set up, perhaps day actors brought in so the judges could cruelly gong someone without giving them a chance.

The cruelty in talent shows does not appeal to me.  It’s interesting to see the people who think they are great and aren’t (some are so delusional in the estimations of their own talent that one does wonder if they also are set-ups, but I have actually known tremendously untalented people who though they were geniuses, so it’s hard to say), and it’s fun to see genuinely talented, original performers.  But I would rather not see people flatly insulted and mocked to their faces.  The mean guy on American Idol (which I don’t watch) has said he is mean because people need to know not to waste their time if they suck, but a lot of people who suck manage to get pleasure out of performing (you don’t have to be very good to get a gig) and some people who can’t sing turn out to be quite appealing (i.e. Bob Dylan).

As for Blue Velvet, well, if they are a real group, I think it was awful the judges didn’t give them a chance, and I also think they really need to learn how to use the internet.  

My great significance

Recently I made a list of my pick of the most necessary PC software.  One of the things I mentioned was Weather Watcher, a nifty little freeware program that puts the current temperature on your task bar.  I said I far preferred it to WeatherBug, a similar program.

Someone from WeatherBug actually emailed me to argue for their software, claiming their network of weather stations gives them the most reliable and up-to-the-minute forecasts and that their network is used by many important agencies.

Maybe so.  Weather Watcher just pulls the data from weather.com, and I have no idea if they’re as accurate or not, nor do I much care.  I recall WeatherBug having a clunky, obtrusive interface and it’s ad-supported if you want it for free, so I’ll stick with Weather Watcher; I still remember how thrilled I was when I discovered it and could get rid of the useful but always rather annoying WeatherBug (to be fair, I haven’t used it for years, so maybe it’s better now).

What interests me is not weather WeatherBug is worthwhile but that a PR person bothered to try and convince me it was.  I told her I only got 5 hits the day I posted my software list, but she still insisted on sending me a little map of WeatherBug’s weather network.

This isn’t the only time someone has been interested in the dubious power of my blog.  A while ago Stardock sent me KeepSafe, real-time backup software, not because I occasionally cover technology for the New York Times but because I have a blog.  It’s a kind of odd program, in that you can’t just back up stuff already on your PC, it only backs up new stuff as it’s created and it backs up stuff everywhere, so when I installed a program it, having been set to back up documents, backed up the readme file.  I much prefer Iomega’s software, once called Quicksync and now called Automatic Backup Pro, which will backup your data to wherever you like as you create it.

All of this makes me wonder, how do I get better stuff from my blog.  If I start reviewing movies here instead of on The Internet Movie Database will studios start sending me movie tickets?  What if I review DVDs?  

Probably wouldn’t get me anything.  I have occasionally tossed in reviews of TV shows, but that hasn’t got me any notice at all.  But hey, any PR people who want to get a little extra space on the blogosphere, I’m here for you.

skillfull incompetence

Watching the PBS documentary
FRONTLINE: The Dark Side, made me understand the Bush white house; it is run by people who are brilliant at getting what they want and incompetent at handling what they get. The documentary details the ways in which Cheny and Rumsfeld played skillful office politics to push the country into war with Iraq. Along the way the bungled the possibility of capturing Bin Laden and lead us into a disastrous war. This is in keeping with the president, who plays the political game brilliantly but simply is incapable of running the country. And I suspect it has a lot to do with the quality of the world in general. People get ahead not because they are good at their job but because they are good at manipulation and kissing up. And under Bush's remarkably incompetent leadership the entire country is now in the hands of such people.

Can righteous indignation prevent smoking?

I like the series of anti-smoking campaigns put out by TheTruth.com. They're the people who did that series of sitcom parodies in which tobacco executives would pitch utterly insane ideas to market tobacco which turned out to all be culled from actually tobacco industry documents. They just started a new commercial in which someone asks a doctor if he has Zephyr, which is revealed to be the code word for cancer used in Tobacco industry documents.


These ads are intriguing, but I always think it's a rather odd approach to getting people to stop smoking. Because many of the ads don't actually tell you cigarettes are bad for you, and when they do it's often in a somewhat indirect way. In the case of the Zephyr ad, the fact that smoking causes cancer is sort of mentioned in passing, but the real goal of the ad, as with many truth.com ads, is to point out that Tobacco companies are sleazy.

I keep wondering what the rational is behind such ads. Would teens stop smoking cigarettes because tobacco companies are sleazy? I mean, if I learned chocolate chip cookie manufacturers had internal documents talking about campaigns to present cookies as healthful and non-fattening it wouldn't actually stop me from eating cookies.

Maybe this approach does work. I hear the tobacco industry, which was forced by a legal ruling to fund these ads, is claiming the American Legacy Foundation, which is behind theTruth.com, is in breach of that agreement which stipulates that the ads cannot "vilify" tobacco companies. Since the ads do almost nothing but that it's amazing TheTruth.com wasn't shut down long ago.

Personally, I think what's going to kill smoking is just the difficulty of finding a place to smoke. I love the fact that people can't smoke in restaurants in New York (it's one reason I kind of like Mayor Bloomberg), and I can't wait until the city stops people from smoking in parks as has apparently happened in a lot of towns in California. Of course, once no one can smoke in public I won't care if people smoke or not (in the same way I don't care if people shoot heroin), except for my friends, who I would prefer not smoke so they don't die.

UPDATE: Years later, I read an article in the Times that says this: 'But educating people about the tobacco industry’s marketing efforts can have a big impact. “We now have empirical evidence that people who don’t like the tobacco industry are about five times as likely to quit, and a third to a fifth as likely to start.”'

So it turns out that yes, righteous indignation can stop people from smoking. Go figure.

My list of essential Windows add-ons and utilities

Recently I got a new computer. So I began a list of all the essential programs I needed to install on it. Not big things, like Microsoft Office and Firefox, but all the little utilities and shell extensions that make my life easier. It’s such a good list that I thought I’d share it with the world. Most of these are freeware. If I don’t provide a link (through laziness) search for it at downloads.comand if that doesn’t work just google for it.



Shell extensions (shell extensions are generally programs that when installed add an item to the right click context menu. If you don’t know what the right click context menu is you haven’t experienced half of the Windows experience. Right clicking your mouse button on most things – files, documents, whatever – brings up a handy menu)
cmndline: This is for programs that allow command line switches. For example, when I was having problems with my reminders always popping up in Outlook I used the switch cleanreminders. With comndline you simply right click on the executable, choose comndline, put in your switch and run it, saving you the trouble of running the program from the DOS command line.
clipname: Right click on a file and you can use clipname to copy the file name, the path or the DOS path, the latter of which is very important when dealing with programs that don’t understand the Windows naming convention (like some Java programs)
Windows power tools (link is same as TWeakUI link below, and is for Windows XP, although there are power tools for older versions on microsoft’s site):. Microsoft created a number of handy add-ons for Windows. One lets you open a DOS window in the folder you have open, another lets you resize your images. Many others, take your pick.
Startcop (or startupRun ): This is a utility created by PC Magazine that shows you all the programs that Windows loads up at Startup and lets you delete ones you don’t want. Great for getting rid of crap that slows down your system. Run it and you’ll be amazed to find software you never even use is loading itself every time you run your PC. It might be hard to find the free version of Startcop, since they later created a paid version, but NirSoft's StartupRun is just as good. Free.
Infotag magic: This causes a tooltip to pop up when you hover your mouse over a file that shows a lot more info than the standard tool tip. Gives tons of detail on media files, basic information on shortcuts and previews of text files. Free.
OpenTarget: Quick way to open the folder containing the file a shortcut is pointing to. (Microsoft used to have something similar as one of their power tools, but for some reason they don’t have on their website any more.) Free.
Everything: This desktop search application is far faster and simpler than Google Desktop Search. Results are almost instant and the simple interface uses Windows Explorer (although you can set it to use another file manager) so it works just like it's a part of Windows. It lists all file types without plug-ins. Everything only searches file names and folders, so it's no good if you want to find text inside a file, but if you're looking for a filename, which is usually my case, nothing could be better. It will also only search NTFS drives, but if like me all your drives are formatted in NTFS that's no problem and I don't think it searches files internally. One note: it wouldn't check my external USB drive until I went into the options and checked some check boxes. Free.
roboform: Browser add-on that lets you fill in forms with the click of a button. Free, no ads.
DiskKeeper: Nice program that constantly keeps your hard drives defragmented, speeding disk access. Put it on “set it and forget it” mode and never think aboug defragmenting again (if you’ve never thought about it before you especially need this). Costs something, don’t know how much.
QuickZip: This is to uncompress zip files (and other compressed formats). Since I have Windows XP, which will open a compressed file as a folder and has its own way to uncompress them, I don’t need this a lot, but it does let you use the context menu to extract data from one file or even extract from multiple files into one folder. Free.
Launchy: There wasn't much I liked when I installed Windows Vista, but there was a cool feature that allowed you to run any program by typing the first few letters of its name, and when I went back to XP I hunted down something that did the same thing. The answer is Launcy, a nifty little program that can be called up with a key combination. Free.


Utilities
easycleaner :Fantastically useful free collection of tools. It’s got something to find unnecessary files to make more room on your PC, something to clean out dead entries in your registry, something to find duplicate files, an Add/Remove program utility that loads faster than Windows’, and some other good stuff. Better than many commercial products. Free.
TweakUI: A Microsoft product that lets you customize pretty much everything in windows. For example, you can create a shortcut that doesn’t have “shortcut to” appended on the front and choose which sorts of files can be created with the “create new” folder command. Free.
Treesize: Really handy when you are out of room on your hard drive and need to find out what’s sucking up the space, this shows how much space each folder on your PC is using. If you’ve got one folder using up a gigabyte and it’s not even anything useful (like the uninstall info for Windows XP SP2 that Microsoft stupidly leaves behind even though once you’ve got it working you’re never going to uninstall SP2) then Treesize can tell you where it is. I have the paid version, but there’s also a free version. Easycleaner has a similar tool but it’s not as good and unlike Treesize doesn’t let you run it on any folder from the context menu.
Tidy Start Menu: This lets you organize your Start Menu, good for people who install tons of stuff. Free limited version, haven’t tried the paid version.
pop3 preview: Sometimes my mail browser just won’t download something, usually because it’s too big. So I use Pop3 preview, which lets you see what’s on your mail server and read and delete it. I don’t need it often, but it’s worth having. Free if you only want to check one account, I think there’s a pro version for multiple accounts.
Everest or Aida32: Tells you everything in your PC, what kind of motherboard, what kind of memory, what kind of BIOS. Very handy if you need to know that stuff. Free. Everest was designed by the guy who did Aida32 and it looks the same to me, but it's more recent so in theory it would be better.
Gspot codec identifier: Tells you what codec is needed to play a video file. Good if you download a file and your media player doesn’t know what to do with it. Once you know the codec you need you can go to http://www.free-codecs.com and download it. Free.
Virtual Folder: This will allow you to create one virtual folder pointing to multiple folders. For me the main advantage to this was I could create a virtual folder that pointed to various folders with related items and then search all these folders as though they were in the same place. Free, although you apparently get more features if you pay.
Virtual Clone Drive: If you have DVD images (like a file with an "iso" extension) this will allow you to use that file as though it was an actual DVD disk. Free.
Nfodiz: text file reader. Unlike notepad, this can translate ascii art, which is often used in the hacker/cracker community. Free.
FolderGuard: Allows you to password protect certain folders. Useful if you want to hide stuff on your PC from family or co-workers. Not hard-core security – you can bypass it by booting in safe mode – but useful for those in need of light security. $


Programs
GOM Media Player: Straight ahead media player, without all the elaborate, bulky crap of WIndows Media Player. For a long time I used Media Player Classic, which is patterned after the lean media player Windows had before they created WMP, but I always kept an eye out for something better and that something is GOM. Simple, fast and has shortcut keys to skip forward and other stuff that Windows had in their old player but didn’t bother with for their new one.) Free.
uTorrent: I used to do all my peer 2 peer downloading through programs like Shareaza and Limewire, but then I started realizing that, if you know of a good, reliable torrent site like Mininova you get much better results.
A different sort of peer to peer program that is a great way to find things like television shows. If I miss an episode of Gilmore Girls I can usually find it as a torrent file and download and watch it on my PC. I used to use Bittorrent, but it kept resetting all my preferences. uTorrent works better and also allows you to select individual files from a torrent with multiple files. You can also add search engines for sites like Mininova; it's still not quite as integrated as LimeWire, but you get much fewer duds and fake files.
Foxit: This is a PDF file reader. Of course, most people use Adobe's reader, but it's terrible. It's big, slow, and the last version I used insisted on taking several seconds to load something I didn't need without any way to turn off the option. Then I discovered Foxit, a small, fast PDF reader that blows Adobe away.
DOSBox and D-Fend: This is for people who like to play old DOS games that won’t run on a Windows PC. DOSBox is a DOS emulator, D-Fend is a front-end that makes DOSBox much easier to use.
Easy Duplicate Finder: This is the best program I've found for searching your computer to see if you have two of the same file.
Weather Watcher: This puts the current temperature on your taskbar; click on it and you can see a daily or hourly forecast. Much more streamlined and friendlier than the similar weatherbug. Free.
Memento: Puts post-it notes on your desktop. There are a number of programs like this, this is the best of the ones I’ve tried. When I was originally making my list of essential Windows utilities and add-ons I made the list in a Memento postit Free.
Media Monkey: The best media player I've found, although it's taskbar controller needs work. Still, it organizes files well and has the ability to find duplicate songs and other good features. Also, while the freeware version is good, if you want it to automatically scan your music folders for new songs you have to pay something, whereas Windows Media Player will do that for free.
VuePro: Of the image viewers I’ve tried I like this one the best. It’s simple and lets you quickly crop images. It costs something, so if you want a good free image viewer try the Farstone Image Viewer. Be warned though that even though it lets you crop images and has a save file command, you can’t actually crop an image and saved the crop image, as far as I can tell.
Thumbsplus: I don't use this anymore, but I recall it was a very good image cataloger. Costs something.
ACDSee: Also an image viewer, I only use this for one thing, to rename related files into a consistent naming scheme. There are other freeware programs that do this, and someday I'm going to sit down and find the best one, but for now this will do. I think this costs something, but I’m not sure, I’m using an old version I’ve had for years.

Free online backups:
IDrive and MozyHome: This are two services that will back up files on your computer and give you some free storage space (and the option to buy more space. Of the two IDrive seems easier to configure and work with, but I actually use both under the theory that the more backups of my important documents, the better. Both are free.


Microsoft Outlook add-ins (I don't use Outlook anymore - I've moved to Thunderbird, so I can't say if these are still current)
AttachmentOptions: Outlook will not let people send you certain types of files. It’s fine that it won’t let you receive executables, since they’re dangerous, but for some reason it also won’t let you receive links to websites (although you can cut and paste a link into the message text). AttachmentOptions lets you choose which files Outlook will and will not accept. Free.
spambayes: Excellent Bayesian spam filter (Bayesian means it looks at what you consider spam and tries to filter out similar emails).

Pink's emotional middle ground

On Pink's new single Who Knew, she has a line that strikes me as a perfect summation of her public persona. Who Knew is a melancholy song about the discovery that when someone says forever, it doesn't mean it's going to be forever. It's a thoughtful song with no anger and even some fondness for her ex.

The line that struck me is:

If someone said three years from now
You'd be long gone
I'd stand up and punch them out
'Cause they're all wrong

It's an interesting comment, because in a song about loss and heartache she talks about beating someone up (although not my favorite Pink line, which is actually "What happened to the dreams of a girl president
She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent"). That is Pink's persona, an introspective tough girl.

This for me puts her neatly in between two of my favorite singers, Carly Simon and Janis Joplin, who for me have always represented the two poles of personal songs.

I've always felt an affinity for Carly Simon as a songwriter, because I feel her somewhat distanced approach to describing her emotions is similar to mine, even though I wrote comedy songs that no one ever hear and she wrote serious songs that were on the radio. Still, like me, Carly can stand outside and describe her feelings. No Secrets is the complaint of an intelligent, self aware woman thinking about the ramifications of honesty. That's the Way I Always Heard it Should Be is sad but keenly observed. Many of her early songs were sad, but there was always that sense of observation. It's interesting that he saddest, purest emotion she ever expressed in song was a description of her state of mind years earlier.

Janis Joplin, on the other hand, was always engulfed by her emotions. When she was in pain she was like an animal in a trap gnawing on its own foot. She was pure emotion, happy or sad or angry, and that was it. That rawness was what made her so emotionally powerful.

Pink, as I say, is somewhere in between. Like Carly Simon, she can get enough distance from her emotions to see what's going on, but while Carly seemed able to cooly step outside herself and observe, with Pink it is more like she is making a mad dash from her emotions while they nip at her heels, ready to swallow her up again. She runs looking backward, describing her fresh wounds, unable to glance forward to see the emotional disaster waiting up ahead.

Scalia follows a typically illogical train of thought

A Times Article on a Supreme Court ruling that refused to throw out evidence the police obtained when the didn't knock before entering with a search warrantincludes this paragraph:

But Justice Scalia expressed confidence that there was an 'increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline' that minimizes the need to deter misconduct by excluding evidence.

A typically moronic remark from Scalia. First off, I've heard the argument that we don't laws because people are better before; I knew a guy who said labor laws are no longer necessary because corporations are more moral than they were back in the days of child labor and 15 hour work days. If you believe that you are surrounded by a wall of stupidity that nothing can pass through.

Are police trying to keep their excesses in check? Yes. Why? Because if they don't, courts will throw out cases. If they can do what they like and their cases don't get dismissed, they will do what they like.

Expect a lot less knocking.

This isn't the most upsetting thing in the world to me. I mean, if they break down the door rather than knocking I think they should replace the door, but if they've got a warrant they're going to come in and a pause just gives you time to hide evidence, which isn't what anyone wants. But Scalia's comment is just so laughable that it makes me a lot madder about this ruling than I would be otherwise.

It's just one of those white things

It’s not that I haven’t noticed that rap and hip hop have become a part of white culture, but I never quite realized how thoroughly white America had adopted these as their own until yesterday in Washington Square Park.  There a group of 30 or 40 Christian Teens from Dallas who billed themselves as Broken Ground gave a free performance to sell New York on Jesus.  The show was actually pretty good, they had a lot of spirit and did some fun dance numbers in the style of the musical Stomp, using trash cans and folding chairs as rhythm instruments and the like.

The music was a mix of rap, soul and gospel, the dancing was pretty much all hip hop or the Stomp-like numbers.  And even though the group was 95% white, seemingly composed primarily of slightly chunky blonde teenage girls (who ran up to audience members after the show eager to chat), the entire entertainment was drawn directly from black culture.  And when it gets to that point, it means you’ve got a generation who no longer thinks of rap and hip hop as a product of black culture, they are just THE culture.

I realize this is what people who witnessed the beginnings of rock and roll eventually saw.  First it was black music.  Then a few white singers chimed in.  Then it became so much a part of white mainstream culture that it was hard to remember a time when rock was considered truly edgy and dangerous.

I’ve started wondering when black people are going to ditch rap.  I mean, rock went from being 100% black to perhaps 95% white in maybe 20 years or less.  Perhaps it’s time for black people to invent something new for white people to appropriate.  Maybe it’s already happening; I’m not that hip, so I won’t know about the big new musical style until years after it hits the streets.

Of course, black musicians never deserted jazz, and white people never totally appropriated soul, so nothing can be said for certain.  But it is fascinating to watch this happen, to see that in one form or another this always happens and to realize that Africa, without intending it, has had such an incalculable effect on the world’s culture that it is more influential on how the world was shaped than all those Christians flooding the planet in a determined effort to remake the whole world in their image.

These kids are going to get so depressed in a few years

Interesting story in the Times about a cellphone ringtone only
audible to youngsters. As we age we lose the ability to hear certain tones. Some company in England created a product to make an annoying high-pitched sound that adults couldn't hear as a way to drive teenagers away who were hanging out in front of their stores. But someone realized if you used it as a ring tone then kids could keep their cellphones on in class and teachers wouldn't know it.

So kids are all really happy about this right? But they'll start not being able to hear their ring tone around age 18, on average. So really, this is just another invention to drive home to people that they are getting old, and all those kids feeling they've put something over on their teachers are going to have to face the hard, cold reality of the decline in their physical abilities earlier than ever. Poor kids.

how to get people to read your blog: write something that's actually useful

Wow, I got two comments on my comparison of Thunderbird with Outlook 2002 and another blogger posted a link to it. Might not sound like a lot, but that's got to make this my most notable post. If I just compared two major software packages everyday I might actually get a bunch of followers. Don't think it's going to happen though.

good idea stuck at the half way point

Yahoo has a nifty feature that will recommend movies to you based on how your ratings of movies compare to other user's rating. It's not perfect, recommending some movies I would never want to see and ignoring movies I would love, but it's interesting. I am less interesting in the theatrical recommendations than the movies on TV recommendations. I don't see that many movies, and since when I do go I go with Debbie it's not just about what I would like.

Unfortunately, Yahoo's TV recommendations system is a mess, and it doesn't look like they have any intention of fixing it, since early on I sent them a lot of feedback (they have a link for feedback in a prominent position, so apparently they want it) and nothing has changed. First off, while it recommends movies I would like, it always is 3 hours off on the time the movie starts, even though it has in its records that my zip code is 10009 and I use Time Warner cable.

Reasons to like Tori Spelling

It has always been chic to look down on Tori Spelling, and even before I had ever seen her I had a negative impression. But the first time I saw her it was in a small part in the Parker Posey movie House of Yes and she was actually pretty good. So I've been pretty open to the possibility that she's actually a decent actress, rather than just a talentless creation of her father.

I was also prepared to like her personally after watching the brilliant, short-lived TV series Grosse Point, a parody of Beverly Hills 90..whatever-the-other-numbers-are in which the character of Marcy was presumably patterned after Tori. Marcy was sweet and insecure, so I thought, maybe Tori is the same.

Now Tori has gone the way of Kirstie Alley in Fat Actress, playing herself in So NoTorious on VH1. On the show, Tori is sweet and insecure, and even her best friends think she's talentless and owes her career to her rich daddy, who speaks to her through an intercom in his mansion, greeting her with "Hello angel" (he produced Charlie's Angels).

So far, So NoTorious is very funny. I say so far, because the first few episodes of Fat Actress were also very funny, and the last few were pretty horrible. But the three I've seen were all very good. And Tori is very good playing herself.

It's hard to know how she feels about the merciless fun her own show makes about her. There's a difference between letting writers make fun of you and actually having a sense of humor about yourself; Michael Jackson made a video that made fun of all his eccentricities but I don't think he thinks he's weird. It's brave to play yourself as an idiot or a weirdo, as proved by Jon Lovitz and David Duchovny on The Larry Sanders show, but it's also good business; William Shatner revived his career by acknowledging his own pompousness.

All of this has me pondering why Tori has always been such an object of ridicule. I never saw the Beverly Hills show, so perhaps she wasn't very good on it, but she probably wasn't worse than any of the others on that show; bad acting is often a feature of Aaron Spelling productions.

The hostility seems to come from the fact that she has a daddy who can give her a career (in So NoTorious she is seen giving a wretched ten-second audition at the end of which her dad shouts out, "you're hired!"). People feel it's not fair. And of course, it's not fair, but it's interesting that people seem far less hostile to a talentless actress whose career is entirely due to her looks. Raquel Welch is one of the worst actresses to ever star in a movie, and owes much of her looks to plastic surgery, but I don't think she was ever despised as much as Tori is. Now, getting a career because you had a good plastic surgeon, or just because you are born good looking, isn't any fairer than getting a job because your daddy owns the company, but it seems to rankle people more. Sure, Tori was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and got chances most people don't get, but then, Christina Aguilera was born with an amazing voice (they blocked her from high school talent shows because it was so incredible), Liza Minelli got breaks because her mom was famous (Judy Garland) and most people in Hollywood wouldn't have their jobs if they weren't born better looking than the rest of us.

So while I certainly envy Tori's good fortune, at the moment I do basically like her, and I hope her show continues to be funny and she winds up besting the naysayers and getting herself a respectable career.

Always get a second opinion

Recently my retina tore. No reason, it just tore. My vision went blurry and I saw what I thought was a large floater but turned out to be blood. Yeah, ick. This was four days before my health insurance kicked in, so I was pretty much fucked up the ass by the hand of God on that one.

I wound up going to the emergency room at Manhattan Eye [plus a couple of other organs] where a doctor told me he would try and surround the tear with laser rivets. The idea was this would keep the tear from getting bigger and keep my retina from falling off. He had trouble seeing through all the blood (this was not blood you could see in my eye without fancy equipment, and the tear itself is also invisible to the naked eye, but it apparently looks really grim to an opthamologist), so he lasered some that night, some the next day and some after that. But he couldn't laser one part of the tear, where he thought fluids are formed, and said I would need surgery, a truly horrible sounding thing that had a 15 to 20 percent chance of going wrong.

I was pretty freaked out but was going along with it all. While you always hear you should get a second opinion, when you're scared your going blind in one eye you start just wanting someone to tell you what to do. Fortunately, my friend Jessica insisted I call my regular opthomologist and ask him to recommend a retina specialist. After the first three all couldn't see me before my scheduled surgery and my regular opthamologist hadn't gotten back to me with more names (he's terrible at returning phone calls) Jessica even called my opthamologist and talked to his office manager and pleaded my case so well that he called almost immediately after. He gave me one more name, a doctor who works two blocks from my house and agreed to squeeze me in for a looksee before his vacation started.

He looked at my eye, said he didn't think it looked all that bad, lasered the rest of the tear in about three minutes and said that barring something crazy happening I wouldn't need surgery.

I'm not out of the woods yet. His associate, who is seeing me while the other one is on vacation, wants me to get surgery, because he feels even though the tear is lasered there is still a risk it could tear through. He's young, and younger doctors tend to be very end to preventative surgery, so I'm hoping when the other one comes back he will stand by his diagnosis and say I still don't need surgery.

So I can't yet say getting a second opinion saved me from surgery, but it did give me a chance, and it's important to note that the second doctor easily lasered a tear the first doctor couldn't manage, which leads me to agree with Jessica that you should never make the guy on call for emergencies your main doctor. She actually had many stories of people she knew who were incorrectly diagnosed or treated in emergency rooms.

So always, always, always, no matter how freaked out you are, go see another doctor.

In a supporting example, my friend Sharon owns a house upstate she rents out, and there is a problem with the septic tank. The first company she contacted her said she would need a huge amount of work to get it working which would cost $25,000, a lot for a house worth maybe $60,000. The second contractor, a family business that's been around from the 50s, said they could fix it for about $2000.

Always get a second opinion.

Cheney is given the bird

It's interesting to discover when Cheney shot a lawyer he mistook for a bird that he is as incompetent in his personal life as he is in his job. After I heard about this on the Daily Show (I hadn't checked the news for a couple of days) I searched around for the inevitable Cheney bird jokes. Here's an article with a bunch of them.

King spins into her grave

Normally one expects a little rest between the time you day and the time something happens so terrible that you find yourself spinning in your grave. Such is not the case for Coretta Scott King, who died just hours before Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court, hereafter to be known as The Court of Shame and Infamy, marked the end of any progress in human rights in this country for the foreseable future. And thus King started spinning before she even made it to the coffin.

the good, the bad and the icy

While I don't care for macho sports like football or boxing, I have developed a fondness for the more elegant sports, notably figure skating. In the same week I saw the best and worst figure skating television broadcasts I have ever seen.

The worst was on ABC. It was just listed in the TV guide as "figure skating," and listed as a sports show, so one would expect your basic skating competition. But instead there was some bizarre artsy pseudo documentary whatsit. Rather than just showing the event, they tried to make it into some sort of story. They would show chopped up routines, sometimes most of a routine, sometimes just a few seconds, and often the skater would be shot in a closeup that prevented you from seeing what she was doing, or they would use some weird filter or make the screen glisten. This was intercut with backstage moments in which skaters and their coaches and families were talking (at one point you only see a routine on the TV another skater is watching), and then there's a narrator filling in the gaps and trying to make it dramatic (apparently ABC doesn't see a skating competition as inherently dramatic).

It was the sort of special someone would create in a sitcom. You know, some kooky character - Diane from Cheers, Kramer from Seinfeld, Jack from Will and Grace - in some fluke lands a job directing sports, and says, "people don't want to see the same old thing, they want it jazzed up and made into art." And then they make some crazy bit of nonsense and get fired.

A day later, I saw Hilton Skating And Gymnastics Spectacular. I missed the first half hour (I just tuned into it accidentally), but I see Bravo is reshowing it (it was originally broadcast on NBC).

A combination of the two best Olympic sports, this was an all-star lineup of Olympic medalists getting together for a flashy exhibition. For the most part gymnastics and figure skating alternated, but in some cases they would perform synchronized routines. The gymnastics was not so much Olympic routines as Ed Sullivan show routines, with all sorts of crazy leaps and spins and gymnasts tossing other gymnasts in the air. The most memorable figure skating routine involved a giant cube as a prop, and must be seen.

The only weird thing was the final number, sung by some American Idol loser (excuse me, runner-up). Even though it was an international collection of skaters, the final song was America the Beautiful, as though the Hilton's wanted to say; you foreigners are great, but we're still going to whip your ass in the next Olympics. But all in all this was everything I want in skating and gymnastics. And there wasn't a single weird filter or artsy edit in the whole thing.

Roberts - the new Scalia?

It is disturbing that in the Supreme Court's ruling that the federal government can't prevent states from permitting assisted suicide that the court's two most conservative members were joined in the dissent by new Chief Justice Roberts. The hope was Roberts would not just be another Scalia, especially since likely current nominee for the court Alito almost certainly is, but hope is fading. If Roberts is, as it now looks, a third Scalia (following longtime Scalia wannabe Clarence Thomas), then we will have four Scalias on the court, which is four more than should be on any court. Be afraid, be very afraid. And for god's sake call your congressmen and tell him to block Alito.

Justice Alito: say goodbye to your freedoms and rights

The New York Times has a good editorial on supreme court nominee Alito, pointing out that his testimony, often referred to in the press as cautious and non-controversial, is actually pretty worrisome. I'm really pretty scared of this guy. I feel the US. is on a precipice, ready to plunge into something between a 1950s-style America of repression, blacklists and a clamping down on free expression and liberties,and the version of this country portrayed in The Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately the Republicans are so powerful that they can really rewrite this country now, twisting it to their will. I think the only chance we have to retain any true semblance of American freedom and Democracy is to get the Republicans out in the next election, but I have no confidence in spite of all the Republican corruption scandals that the Democrats are prepared to make a strong enough case to the American people to convince them there is a viable alternative to Republican sleaze. With Alito on the court and Republians probably still in charge for the next decade I think you can expect this country to be completely trashed, a resort island for the rich in a sea of poverty, misery and oppression. And I hope I'm wrong, but that's the way we're heading.

New TV series, final verdicts on 2005

This fall has been notable for all the pretty good but not great series that I felt borderline about. The Night Stalker started well but jumped the shark in the forth episode. I kept giving it a chance for a few more episodes based on its early promise, but finally decided to give up when episode 7 seemed, while not as bad as the last couple, just dull. But it turned out to be the first of a two-parter, so I thought, well, I'll watch one more and then stop. Then ABC canceled it. That's right, they showed part 1 and then canceled it before airing part 2. Pretty obnoxious, huh?

Last I heard, the networks had only canceled two shows, Night Stalker and Threshold. I'm a little sad about Threshold, because it had good characters, but I'm not brokenhearted by any means. Threshold wasn't a must-see show, but I did like it, and it was certainly better than the non-cancelled Supernatural, which I remain borderline about. For me, character is important in a show, and Supernatural's generic pretty boys just don't do it for me; the show feels like it was designed in committee. It's watchable, but I'm just not excited about it.

Of the dramas, the one that turned out best was Bones, which gets by on its interesting characters, most notably Dr. Temperance Brennan. My first take on Temperance was she was a hot chick version of Dr. House, but as I continued to watch I thought that with her amusing confusion regarding popular culture and her distanced yet sincere approach to people she's really more like a hot chick version of Data from Star Trek: Next Generations. She's funny, she's likable and she has good chemistry with the FBI guy. And the stories are getting a little more interesting. Still a little contrived and obvious, but at this point the drama I would most miss.

I also took a quick look at Ghost Whisperer. It was critically panned but is a big hit so I thought I'd take a look. It's blank, soft-headed and soft-hearted and quite tedious, at least from the half of an episode I saw; more Touched by an Angel than Medium.

The most notable shows this year are both comedies, My Name is Earl, which I think is the funniest show of the season, and Everybody Hates Chris, which runs a close second. It took me a while to see Chris, because there were shows I liked opposite it, but now I can finally write my mini-review of it, along with a couple of the new replacement shows.

Everybody Hates Chris

Premise: Everybody hates Chris, obviously.

Review: It's tempting to compare this show with Wonder Years, since they're both about young boys who grew up in previous decades and both narrated by the adult versions of those boys, but Chris is a much less sentimental, nostalgic show with more edge to it. I would say they're probably equally good, although I might like Wonder Years better simply because I grew up at the same time in the same sort of suburbs. But Chris is very funny. I've never cared much for its overrated creator Chris Rock - I don't think he's that funny and he strikes me as awfully misogynistic - but the young Chris hasn't acquired that disturbing anger that defines the older Chris, making him much easier to relate to. Perhaps as the show goes on we'll see him become a bitter, successful comic.

InJustice

Premise: Sometimes innocent people actually go to jail. Someone should try and get them out!

Review: This has potential. While every other crime show is about a brilliant investigator bringing down a criminal, this is about a brilliant lawyer freeing the unjustly incarcerated. An organization lead by a flamboyant corporate lawyer (with perfect flamboyant, successful lawyer hair) played with gusto by Kyle MacLachlan investigates cases where the wrong person may be behind bars. I've only seen one episode, but it was pretty interesting. It's a very television view of law, in which you prove someone is innocent by finding the real culprit, and the first episode gets a little too fancy in the reason the injustice happens (apparently over-eagre DAs aren't enough), but it's got a lot of the fun investigation quality of the Law and Order shows. I also like it's rather progressive nature and suspicion of power and authority, so I hope they keep doing a good job and have some success. Anyway, I always like Kyle so it's nice to have something to watch him in.

The Book of Daniel

Premise: Jesus thinks you should stop taking tranquilizers.

Review: I was so looking forward to this based on the commercials. It looked like a sort of Desperate Housewives soapy comedy about a priest who deals with a bunch of crazies and has face to face talks with a witty, irreverent Jesus Christ. It's a shame the person who put together the ads didn't put together the actual show, which is one of these sincere, Everwoodish dramas. Even Jesus isn't really that witty; the ads edited his dialog for more punch, but the conversations themselves are genial and sometimes light-hearted but not especially funny. I got bored and stopped watching about a third of the way through the two-hour premiere.

Four Kings

Premise: Four guys hang out and hope their show doesn't get canceled?

Review: I only watched about five or ten minutes of this, it struck me as another of the bland, generic, unfunny comedies that are flooding our airwaves. I couldn't be bothered.

Outlook 2002 vs. Thunderbird 1.5

I have just tried my most complete dalliance with Thunderbird, the free open source mail reader by the same organization that brought you my favorite browser,

I had looked at Thunderbird before, but had decided not to use it because it has no calender. This was especially important in therms of my PDA, which I would sync up with Outlook. There is a calendar extension for Thunderbird that is quite popular, although at the moment on the Thunderbird site it has a low user rating because so many people are angry that it hasn't been upgraded to be compatible with the latest versions of Thunderbird. But it wasn't a complete solution ayway.

I decided to give Thunderbird a try after my PC died and I went to a backup. While I was using a different hard drive and thus didn't have all my saved mail, and since I have taken to carrying a Nintendo DS instead of a PDA, I figured what the hell. When I got my old hard drive (in my backup PC) I started using Outlook again, but at some point when checking memory usage with the task manager it looked as though Thunderbird used less memory, and since I only have 256 MB in my backup PC memory is at a premium. So I actually imported all my mail from Outlook into Thunderbird and used it for several days.

This comparison is between Outlook 2002, because I don't have 2003, versus Thunderbird 1.5, which is actually not quite released. If you go to the website you will see they only have an earlier version. I can't recall where I found 1.5, they don't make it that easy to find but I found it somewhere, probably through google. There's actually a 1.6 Alpha version floating around now that I haven't tried.

Memory Usage

First off, I was wrong about the memory. Both programs are constantly taking memory and giving it back. When I first had them running I saw Thunderbird at about 20,000 KB and Outlook at 40,000, plus I had a program called K9 running to deal with spam in Outlook, and that was another 9,000. But as I kept testing I found that both programs would, depending on what they were doing, go up to around 40,000, and while Thunderbird would drop down to 15,000 from time to time, Outlook would, when minimized and not doing anything, drop down below 10,000. The memory issue became even less significant when I decided to see what other people thought of Outlook versus Thunderbird and found a very good rundown that mentioned an anti-spam add-in for Outlook called SpamBayes that can be installed into Outlook. This meant I no longer had to run K9.

Spam Filtering

Thunderbird has good internal spam filtering, which now also includes support for SpamAssasin, which helps evaluate spam somehow. Outlook 2002 has some simple junk filtering but it's not good for much, but with the discovery of the free add-on SpamBayes I now have integrated spam filtering in Outlook. I just started using SpamBayes, so I can't say how good it is, but it seems promising so far. Unfortunately it lacks support for anything like SpamAssasin and also lacks DNS blackhole list support (these are lists of known spamming domains). (Thunderbird also doesn't support the DNS lists.)

Stability

In terms of stability, Thunderbird wins hands down. Outlook has always tended to freeze and crash on me. To make matters worse, any time it crashes, the next time you start it there's a diagnostic process that, with all the mail I have, takes several minutes, during which time I can't use Outlook. This is typical of Microsoft products, which always approach any system crash by doing something annoying that takes a long time. It often does this recover thing even though it was closed normally; sometimes Outlook just gets into a state where it always feels it crashed and starts up with the recovery thing every damn time. Thunderbird is less prone to crashes and freezes and if it does crash it doesn't take extra time to restart.

Filtering
Outlook by a mile. Outlook supports very elaborate filters. For example, I belong to a Freecyle New York Yahoo group from which people can offer stuff they're throwing out. I have a filter in Outlook which looks for freecyle emails with offer in the subect (you can also post "wanted" requests, which I filter out and which also has one of a number of items I'm specifically looking for (a receiver, a disk of Outlook 2003, etc.). This can't be done in Firefox, which has a much less sophisticated filtering system. The best I could do was create a folder for all freecyle mail (with wanted filtered out) and then create a search folder that searched for items I want. A search folder is a neat thing where you can create a virtual folder that looks for specific things, for example, a search folder that shows all your unread mail. Back when I used to use Entourage, Microsoft's vastly superior mail reader for the Macintosh (for some reason Microsoft's Mac division makes better software than their PC division, at least in terms of Microsoft Office), I could see all my unread mail or flagged mail at a glance, but in Outlook 2002 there's no way to do that. On the other hand, I just learned that Outlook 2003 has their own search folders, which is why I'm hoping someone will give away an unwanted disk of it on freecycle. Thunderbird's search folders are imperfectly implemented so I'd be curious to see how Outlook does it.

Datebook integration

Outlook has really good datebook integration. You can actually drag an email into the calendar folder and it will pop up with an appointment with the email in the body, which I thought was incredibly neat when I stumbled across it. The Calendar is really good, you can easily drag appointments to different dates and other good things. For Thunderbird 1.5 all there is now is ReminderFox, a very basic extension that keeps track of appointments. It's an admirable attempt but rather clunky.

Address book
I like the way you can create and manage multiple address books in Thunderbird. I could make a friends address book, a business address book, etc. and populate them from my main address book. This was useful because I could then have a friends mail folder and just say, any mail from this address book should go to that folder. You can create multiple address books in Outlook 2002 too, but it's a pain and you can't work with multiple address books at once, so there's no way to divvy my existing addresses into new address books. So while if I had a populate friends address book I could indeed use it to send friends emails to a specific folder, it would be hard to set up (right now I just filter for individual senders). On the other hand, Outlook has categories, which is handy. If I could filter for email from people in specific categories I'd be all set, but I can't.

Thunderbird also doesn't have a built-in way to add addresses to an address book. There is an extension that does it, but it doesn't seem to be good at recognizing when you're putting in a duplicate, although I only tested it a little so perhaps it's better than it seemed. It's also not been upgraded for 1.5, but another extension called MR Tech allows you to force install extensions, and doing that I found the add contacts extension works well except for the duplicate thing. But Outlook does a better job of adding contacts.

Security

People claim Thunderbird is more secure, and I have no idea but I thought I'd just mention that. I have Outlook set to be careful about attachments and not run anything when I open an email, so I haven't had any security problems, and I suspect the people concerned about security are as careful as me and aren't really having problems with Outlook either.

Conclusion

As much as I would like the free, open source Thunderbird to be better, it is trounced by the corporate giant. I don't know how it compares with Microsoft's free Outlook Express though, so perhaps for those who don't want to pay extra for a mail reader it's a good bet.

I suspect someday Thunderbird will surpass Outlook, but it will take a while. Firefox is so good because so many people are coding for it, taking on additions and creating extensions to allow you to do an incredible number of things. Extensions are a main selling point, something Microsoft has never really understood. Even when I tried looking around for an integrated anti-spam filter for Outlook I couldn't find one until yesterday, because Microsoft doesn't offer a central location for that sort of information. This is very stupid of them; if they embraced the amateur coder community they could have much more useful and powerful products, but Microsoft is a control freak and seems to hate encouraging outside code. Anytime Windows Media Player 10 crashes, perhaps just because the PC crashed, when you restart the player it turns off all your plugins. Microsoft's disdain for add-ons is, IMO, a major failing that will become more and more of a hindrance if they don't rethink things.

Right now there aren't nearly as many extensions for Thunderbird, and I think that's simply because not as many people are interested in using it, so there are less people working on improving and modifying it. But as Thunderbird improves, more people will use it, and more stuff will be created for it. Once there's an integrated calendar that syncs with the popular PDAs, which is being worked on, a lot of people will make the jump. Eventually there will be a tipping point in which Thunderbird is so close to Outlook that open source fans will start jumping over in droves and there will be a huge increase in extensions and improvements, and then Thunderbird will start pulling away from Outlook. But from what I see I don't expect for that to happen for at least another year. But someday, I suspect, I will come back to Thunderbird.

The U.S. Military: sneaky or just plain dumb?

The question raised by the military's new set of classified interrogation techniques is, did the army know what they were doing and think they could get away with it or were they just being dumb. At a time when congress has passed John McCain's anti-torture legislation that the white house seems unable to stop, the army created a ten-page classified addendum to the Army Field Manual that is used to determine what is cruel and inhumane treatment. This looks like an attempt to make an end run about the proposed law. It's hard to say if that's true, because it's hard to believe the military would be dumb enough to think that wouldn't piss off congress. On the other hand, since they weren't aware that adding a secret addendum right now was going to create some controversy it seems that whoever was in charge of this project wasn't thinking straight, so perhaps they really were hoping to screw with the intent of McCain's law. It's one of those things we'll probably never know for sure, but in the white hot glare of publicity I think the field Manual isn't going to be claiming that cattle prods aren't really inhumane.

LOL

A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man replies "150" and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituallity, biomimicry, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nano-technology, and sexual proclivities.

The customer is very impressed and thinks, "This is really cool." He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectlty prepared drink and asks him, "What's your IQ?"

The man responds, "about a 100."

Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, supermodels, favorite fast foods, guns, and women's breasts.

Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks, "What'syour IQ?" The man replies, "Er, 50, I think."

And the robot says... real slowly,

"So.... ya gonna vote for Bush again?

answer the damn question!

I appreciate the reasons the Democrats are playing the Replican game of hammering on talking points while ignoring substantive debate or real discussion, but it disgusts me regardless of which side is doing it. Last night I watched congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, on the Daily Show slip and slide through Jon Stewart's softball questions. Her big point was to mention John Murtha in every sentence. (Murtha, if you don't know, is the hawk turned dove congressman who recently came out in favor of getting out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Murtha was Pelosi's answer to everything. The question of why the Democrats choose the ever drab John Kerry to rebut Bush's latest delusional Iraq speech was answered by noting what a great thing Murtha did. Pretty much every question had a similar answer.

Pelosi is always pretty slippery. Perhaps she's afraid of getting caught with her foot in her mouth Howard Dean style, but I don't see how Democrats can insist that they are the answer when they won't answer any questions.

Eating the decorations

I find it interesting that, outside of myself, no one I know seems to have
ever thought to eat the colorful ears of corn used in Thanksgiving
decorations. They're really very good. I much prefer them to yellow corn,
which I have never especially liked. The colored kind is nutty and chew and
a very different thing altogether. It also takes forever to cook; I'm not
exactly sure how long, as I just put it in boiling water and check it
occasionally until it's edible, but I'd say at least 1/2 an hour.