Archive for March, 2008

Here’s Hoping This Election Comes Through

Optimism isn’t in great supply for this Zimbabwean election, because even though the opposition party has apparently defeated the 28-year incumbent Mugabe, I don’t see him giving in to any concept of fairness when he could simply rig the vote on a massive scale. Already the vote results are being delayed, so there’s that. And as for democratic leverage, what is the West going to do, devalue the currency?

Still, I’m a sliver hopeful that the Zimbabwean Howard Beale vote will prove powerful enough to triumph this time, giving such a strong “F this” vote that it’s too embarrassing even for Mugabe to rig things. The country has a deep pit to climb out of, but dropping the shovel is a good start.

I’m New to the Job Thing and Into Web Media. What Systems Should I Learn?

I feel like I’ve run into iterations of this question a few times lately, so here go some words of whizzzdum.

If I were some 21-year-old dude again, but my 21-year-old self was transported to 2008 and I was looking for a job in media websites, I’d pick up some books on the following languages at SBX. I could stop in during my next trip to EV-1 for a Busch Light 30-cube. ($10.99, readers. But that was in 2001 prices. I imagine with the surge in grain prices, it’s gone all the way up to 46 cents per beer or so.)

The geek glasses know

First, I’d learn Flash. Front-end developers can do really well with this, even though I think it’s a really bad idea to use Flash for basic page templating. Instead, Flash is awesome for news graphics, such as the popular delegate calculator we rocked at Slate. It’s really portable for things like embedded video players and widgets (see the Bushisms widget), it can do great visual effects that DHTML still can’t do with ease (or at all), and it’s a lot less dangerous than Javascript for site stability. If your swf file is f’d, it’ll take down your movie but likely not your site performance. (Unless it’s way huge and you’re seeing too many downloads, but file size is a problem for anything.)

Second, I’d get really good at CSS. It’s the best way to control page display, so clearly it’s mad useful. The HTML part is fairly simple; you’re just wrapping things in divs of different class and ID. Then the CSS comes into play and keeps your site looking tight.

Third, I’d learn object-oriented programming. It’s the basis of Javascript behaviors and used in back-end programming as well, and that’s across all platforms. ASP.NET, Java or PHP, you’ll want to know the underlying structures. And that’s once you know basic programming stuff like loops, conditionals and database connectivity; if not, learn that first.

Assuming you already have the media knowledge down — journalism and such — you’d be representin’ for an entry-level producer or front-end developer job. Other useful technologies include Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress (for the occasional print thing), IIS or Apache server admin, and database structure. That last one is obviously useful in general web development, but I’m assuming you’re looking for a job with a media company big enough to have its own DBAs.

As far as the PHP / open-source question, I definitely advise people to learn it, but I say that with the knowledge that you probably won’t be using it working for a media company in the next few years. PHP is great and I love all the innovation around it, but most companies are still running legacy systems in ASP.NET, Java or other technologies and will bust out some criticism about scalability and support issues if you suggest moving to PHP / MySQL. (Facebook apparently not being large-scale and uptime-critical enough.) So, while PHP is great if you want to set up a site from scratch and will be useful when it becomes more supported with big sites, you probably won’t need it on a day-to-day job basis.

Apologies to any non-code people who were bored stiff on this one.

Saved

Ignore my previous dour economic analysis. I just got this in the mail:

Dear Taxpayer,

We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which provides for economic stimulus payments to be made to over 130 million American households. Under this law, you may be entitled to a payment of up to $600 ($1,200 if filing a joint return), plus additional amounts for each qualifying child.

Our national woes are over, thanks to this $600. ($1,200 if filing a joint return — that’s me now! Even better!)

Our $1,200 will go right into my Citibank money-market account, so at least I’m doing my part to prop up the personal-banking arm of one of America’s crucial investment banks. Holla!

Going A Bit Too Far With Web Advertising

I’m all for innovative Internet advertising — it puts enchiladas on my table — but Phorm’s plan for tracking users’ comprehensive Internet behavior via their ISP seems a bit overboard. The privacy concerns are obvious, so I’ll come at this from a business perspective.

Phorm on its face is obviously bad for individual media outlets, whose perspective I’m admittedly favoring: this all-sites-visited method of advertising prompts advertisers to buy based on users’ web behavior as one singular package, not separate entities grouped by the aforementioned individual outlets. The ability for each individual outlet to tailor its advertising message to its particular clients is thus diminished: this is ultra-individualistic without taking into account what visitors to, say, the New York Times have in common with other visitors to the Times‘ site. But I think this all-the-web approach is inconvenient for advertisers: Instead of buying up space on NYTimes.com based on the common interests of the Times’ audience, advertisers are going to have to do their own aggregating work to design a broad base of characteristics that somehow coincide with each other. The NY Times can provide demographic info on its audience and advertisers can reach that audience by buying on the NY Times, but how is a company wanting to reach a targeted group going to isolate that group based on their visiting tons of different sites? Phorm could probably aggregate packages of user characteristics and sell those, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

There’s also the much bigger problem of having every potential site that the user visits opt into this advertising network — it’s either that or put some sort of ISP-based spyware onto the user’s machine to serve up desktop ads. Serving advertising over top of other sites’ own advertising is a recipe for being sued, and desktop ads always drove me nuts with various file-sharing services. And that was back in the day of 2000, so I doubt users have grown an appetite in the time since.

I’ll leave the very legitimate privacy concerns to other peeps — like the New York state legislature — but I think that Phorm as an ad strategy doesn’t really address the all-important point of finding appropriate inventory for your ads.

On a related note, I think the quadrantONE network is a great idea for newspapers, but what I really want to see the network do is get into local-market ad production and sales. Once newspapers provide effective venues for small businesses to advertise online as they do now in print — the production issues in creating web ads obviously have a different set of challenges from those of print ads — then that’s a big breakthrough for newspapers.

The Men Running America (In the Wrong Direction)

Two great moments in quotations today, both from men with the power to influence and shape America’s economic and political situation. The first comes courtesy of Aron Wilder, the CEO of HTFC, a small firm that takes loan applications and sells residential mortgages to larger lenders like GMAC. They’re one of many direct players involved in the subprime mess engulfing the economy. Here’s Mr. Wilder in response to a question from the lawyer representing GMAC, in GMAC’s lawsuit against HTFC for selling improperly underwritten loans [link]:

Q: This is your loan file. What do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A: I don’t know. Open it up and find it.
Q: Look at your loan file and tell me.
A: Open it up and find it. I’m not your fucking bitch.
Q: Take a look at your loan application.
A: Do it yourself. Do it yourself. You want to do this in front of a judge. Would you prefer to [do] this in front of a judge? Then, shut the fuck up.
Q: Sir, take a look—
A: I’m taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Better get used to it. You’ll retire when I’m done.

That’s usually not the sort of guy whose ilk you want as a huge force in your national economy.

Second, we have Vice President Dick Cheney, the No. 2 member of the United States executive branch. He is thus responsible for executing the will of the people, as written by the people’s representatives in the legislative branch. Here he is being interviewed by ABC News’ Martha Radditz about the Iraq war [link]:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That’s a huge accomplishment.

That is an awful lot about the Vice President summed up in the one-syllable clause “So?” The man is concise!

Great Afghanistan Piece

I think this has floated around the web a bit, but if you haven’t read it, check out this NY Times magazine piece:

Battle Company Is Out There

It’s very heavy, but gripping. I’ve read a few people complaining that it’s biased or gives an incomplete picture of the war, but that’s not what it’s about; it’s a piece about one particular piece of the Army in one particular part of Afghanistan, and does a great job of painting that with a sympathetic eye toward the soldiers. Endorsed by my friend Jeff, recently of the Army himself.

Quick Hits

• Barack Obama’s speech today was a good one, but I don’t quite know why it’s being presented as a game-changer. He had some really intelligent things to say, but he said them over half an hour. Now he’s dependent on a soundbite media to convey that message to voters who won’t otherwise seek him out, those being the ones he’s trying to win over in PA and in the general election. Rev. Wright, meanwhile, offers plenty of soundbites.

But maybe I’m still wrong and voters this election cycle want broader information from their candidates. This dude’s grasp of things is certainly encouraging. (The best part is how the interviewer gets completely owned after expecting some sort of dumb-ass answer.)

• On that note, why does the man-on-the-street interviewer in that clip come at his subjects with such a chip on his shoulder? I always followed the “catch more flies with honey” principle when doing man-on-the-streets. Considering you’re going up to a complete stranger and asking them to give you honest opinions, that seems like the only way to do it.

• There are some things that Rev. Wright says amidst the vitriol that make sense and are legitimate criticisms. Certainly the United States has serious issues with how it’s treated its minorities. But how much positive change are you really going to affect by turning all of your listeners off of the very system that needs to be fixed? This is my problem with many leftists: conservatives jump in and take control of societal institutions, but so often liberals prefer to sit on the sidelines and wait for some perfectly fair system to magically evolve — while they leave control of that system to the aforementioned conservatives, mind you. I’m a liberal and I’m heading off to get my MBA in part because I believe you can only change things by engaging them. And yes, I know that the media exists to spotlight things for scrutiny, but it’s a powerful societal institution that can’t be ignored.

Criticism is always more fun, but so often ineffective.

P.S. - did you know Wright was in the USMC?

• Should the U.S. boycott the Olympics this summer because of China’s brutaltreatment of Tibet? I really don’t know. I do know that it would be the greatest thing in years to see the entire U.S. Olympic contingent walk in to the stadium in “FREE TIBET” T shirts.

I’m a White Person, and I Like Stuff

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com

Granted, the title “stuff liberal white yuppies like” is a lot more accurate, but this is still quality satire. Here is a good example; I had a design prof in college who loved AdBusters. (Ironically she was not white.)

Advanced white people will supplement No Logo with a subscription to AdBusters, where they will learn how to subvert corporate culture and return it to the masses. Specifically, this means taking ads and redoing them to give a negative message about a product. Apparently the belief is that when other people see this ad, they will be hit with an epiphany that their entire existence has been a Matrix-style manufactured universe.

For more satirical stereotype fun, check out Stuff Asian People Like and Stuff Educated Black People Like.

(via The Root’s blogroll)

I Come to Praise the Irish-Food Quarter-Aisle

Erin Go Bragh, dudes.

It being St. Patrick’s Day — at least in one hour — I’d like all of you still living in NYC to take a moment at your local grocery establishment and appreciate the 1/4 of an aisle devoted to feeding the Irish immigrant masses, those still moving to New York after all these centuries. It’s one of the things you don’t really get here in D.C. — the last one I saw was when I went to visit Boston a few weeks back — and it’s much missed by your correspondent. Having lived in Queens, where there’s an immigrant community for every nationality known to man, I’ve gotten to know and love the Irish-food section while perusing the aisles of Sunnyside, Astoria and Woodside.

You’ll know you’ve found the aisle when you see Barry’s Tea, in the familiar red box at the top of the section. It’s meant to be drunk in the Irish style, meaning strong enough that you mistake it for coffee. Also known as “the bomb”. Next to that they’ll keep the breakfast theme going with some McCann’s Irish Oatmeal. They should probably change the name from “steel cut” to “oat gravel”. For real, it’s stony. For those who like their biscuits named for what happens after you eat them, we have my grandma’s favorite Digestives tea cookies from Burton’s. It all finishes off with some Chivers jam and Fruitfield Orange Marmalade. We in America eat normal fruit preserves like grapes, peaches or strawberries, but in Ireland they like to invent weird fruits like “gooseberry”, “bramble” and “lemon curd” (?), pack them in sugar and sell them to toast fans who don’t know better. Watch out for these, they’re strange.

Under your breakfast stuff comes the Knorr and Erin soup. I’m down with Irish potato, but a little wary of the brown tomato. You can top your soup off with some HP Curry Sauce or maybe some Bisto White-Sauce Granules — what discerning eater doesn’t love granules? Also a winner is Chef brown sauce, which comes in a handy 2.5 liter (or “litre”) container for those times when you need to dip 200 dozen french fries (or “chips”) at once.

Below the Cadbury chocolates, the beauty of which I have already described, you have the junk food — a personal favorite. We all enjoy Tayto cheese ‘n onion crisps, but the real pleasure is washing it down with a cool, sugary glass of Club orange. This stuff is definitely the best-tasting orange pop in the universe, but I will concur with my friend John who said it probably shouldn’t be drunk out of the bottle, lest the world’s most well-fed bacteria colony grow in its incredibly high-fructose medium. Club lemon and Club rock shandy (again, ?) are a little disappointing, but you won’t go wrong with pop made from real orange juice. Fizzy orange: favorite of both me and my bro.

On another Irish food note, the one thing missing from the Irish food aisle is the best Irish food of all, the breakfast bangers. You have to special order them in the U.S., but they make a great gift for your family porkosseur this March.

To end on another Queens food note, the poultry market in Flushing, across the street from the U-Haul, is the proud home of the worst smell in the world. That is all.

Bear Sterns: A Lose-Lose for the U.S.

Bear Sterns, the biggest player in the subprime mortgage crisis, agreed today to sell itself to JPMorgan for an astounding $2 per share. The deal was set up by the Federal Reserve, which feared that Bear Sterns’ failing to find a buyer would have flooded the market with mortgage-backed securities and ruined more banks holding similar assets. In layman’s terms, it would have hella sucked, so they had to do some stuff to stop it.

Reading this article, there really is a lot to be said for having Bear Sterns die a mean death. It’s fitting as a consequence of their rough-and-tumble business dealings that went against everything my rural-Ohio landlord grandpa knew to be true about real estate: giving cheap money to people who can’t pay is generally a bad idea, and that’s extra true when it’s done on a nationwide scale.

The problem is that our national economy’s financing has become highly centralized, such that letting any one of the several big-time Wall Street banks — Citi, JPMorgan, HBS, Merrill Lynch and all those others where Northwestern MMSS kids go to become analysts — is a recipe for a major economic hurtin’ on people who don’t necessarily deserve it. We’d all love to see Bear Sterns’ disaster-makers get what they deserve, but the U.S. has given them such power in the first place that we can’t afford to let that happen.

That’s why I grudgingly support this bailout for the sake of those on the far end of Wall Street who would be hurt the most, with the caveat that the market needs greater regulation on the front end: the government can’t afford — literally — to keep waiting until things fail before it jumps in with lots of tax-provided cash to save the day. It’s odd that this happens in the same week that Eliot Spitzer, chaser of investor irregularity, took such a public dive. More action in the spirit of what he was trying to do could have prevented things like this, but if anything the momentum in that sphere has gone the other way in the wake of Spitzer’s hooker-induced political demise.

I just hope that Bear Sterns is a wakeup call to the public, but because it’s so complicated and industry-specific, I doubt that will happen. The funny thing is that it’s really not that complicated: people who think they know better probably don’t, and giving them too much leeway is asking for trouble.

Update 3/17: This Paul Krugman column says it better than I did.

300: The Incredibly Late-to-the-Party Review

Writing that last post about political messages in movies reminded me to note the really odd political points that 300 made last year. Before someone chimes in with, “But you’re supposed to abandon that and enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations,” I will note that I acknowledge the movie as a groundbreaking action / cinematography movie, and I truly did enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations and giant killer rhinos. Still, I think it’s notable that the movie conveys the following viewpoints:

• Those who aren’t white, physically attractive and within sexual norms are the enemy and must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
• Those with physical disabilities must be terminated with extreme prejudice, as they grow up to become traitors.
• Nine-foot-tall gay men with robotically deep voices are nothing but trouble. They are dangerous and tend to lead armies of non-whites (see above). Terminate with extreme prejudice, assuming you aren’t first terminated by arrows.
• City-states that appreciate culture and science, even if they still terminate fools with extreme prejudice, are pedophiles. And that’s true even when their navy does more to win the war.
• “This! Is! Spahta!”

Still, those CGI battle scenes were pretty sweet. Four phats for those. The moral of the movie only gets half a phat, which I will award for its doctrine of standing up as a nation.

CGI battles:
Moral message:

There Will Be Blood: The Late-to-the-Party Review

This Saturday my amigo Andre and I decided to see Be Kind Rewind at the Landmark E Street Theater in fabulous Washington, D.C. We got there and they were down to one ticket. Thus ends my tale.

In a quick backup idea, we opted for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn-of-the-century capitalist epic loosely based on muckraker icon Upton Sinclair’s Oil! In a word: hmm.

My Slate D.C. coworker Tim Noah hit the nail on the head when he noted that the film divides into two halves: a first half that sets up the nerve-jangling expectation that this film will have some sort of awesome, morally complex message about business and religion in America, and a “WTF” second half that abandons that conceit and decides to concentrate on making Daniel Plainview into an unredeemable psycho. Andre and I both left the final scene — it’s really thrown in there out of left field — wondering what the hell just happened, and I think this was a common reaction among the other theatergoers present.

There was so much about this movie that was great: the Oscar committee should cancel the Best Actor award each year that Daniel Day-Lewis does a movie and just hand him the statue. (He has done a great deal to associate mustaches with bad-assedness in his past two roles.) The musical score annoyed the hell out of me with its loudness and horror-movie tone, but after I left I thought back on it and realized that the music really worked. PTA also did a phat job of making this a period piece, and the sweeping shots of the empty California landscape — though the movie was actually filmed in Texas — really established the sense of isolation and hardscrabble individualism reflected in Plainview’s life. Lots of reviewers have praised the dialogue-free first 20 minutes, and that’s warranted because it was amazing.

The supporting cast was decent — guy who played Plainview’s brother, good; kid who played H.W. Plainview, quite good; vow-of-silence dude from Little Miss Sunshine who played the crazy preacher, not convincing at all in conveying religious fervor. But I just can’t get past the letdown that was the movie’s lack of message. Boogie Nights and Magnolia both had a lot to say about the importance of being genuinely connected to others, and while TWBB touched on that a little bit, it just didn’t deliver enough.

Sorry, PTA: I love your stuff, but not as much this time. Three phats out of five:

Guinness’ St. Patrick’s Day Thing

I just saw one of the commercials in which Guinness promoted its effort to make St. Patrick’s Day an “official holiday” through the U.S. Congress. Leaving aside the fact that, pragmatically, March 18 should be the national holiday — people get hangovers, after all, and we get Jan. 1 instead of Dec. 31 off — I’ll give them credit for a clever idea-planting deal.

Clearly Guinness — and Diageo, its parent — know that this official-holiday thing, from a political perspective, really isn’t much. If Congress does recognize it, it would likely be just a symbolic recognition and not a federal holiday like Thanksgiving; if they don’t, well, whatever. The idea they’ve planted is to reinforce the predominant idea that St. Patrick’s is a time to take the entire day — particularly nice if it’s a day off anyway — and drink until you’re lying on the floor, which just might involve such Ireland-iconic (and delicious!) Diageo brands as Guinness, Harp or Smithwick’s. Either way, the drinking idea stays sticky in your brain-piece.

But back to the campaign, I would like to point out that St. Patrick’s Day is already a national holiday in — shocker — Ireland, where it is celebrated by taking the day off, going to Mass, and then hanging out at home. Parts of Ireland have imported the Americanized St. Patrick’s, but it’s by and large a day where people just rest up to honor my patron saint.

While I love a good party as much as the next guy, the wilding-out of St. Patrick’s is a trend I don’t much like — call it old-school, but St. Patrick’s Day to me is a day to watch bagpipers in parades and look back at just how far the Irish have come in the past 200+ years of America’s existence. Yes, pub-going is a big part of Ireland, but the whole get-blasted-in-green-hats thing is way more about consumerism than it is about any sort of ethnic pride. (Check out the number of Bud and Miller promos next time you’re out on St. Patrick’s.)

To acknowledge the counterargument, woo! Alcohol! But yeah, take it easy.

Turn of Phrase of the Day

One has to wonder at this stage whether Senator Obama and his children’s crusade completely appreciated that this is the way it would play out, but then their own actual delegate count is not immediately affected by last night’s events. What may be affected is their blissful sense that it would all be one long peace-and-love cakewalk to the nomination. (And this same uneasy feeling may communicate itself to the voters of the great blue-collar state of Pennsylvania, where there are a number of hardened adult political types who are wedded to an old-fashioned and unsentimental version of the Democratic Party.)

Agreed on the Pennsylvania problems for Obama. Hitchens is too harsh on the candidate in this piece, but I do love “children’s crusade”. Touché, old dude.