Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Updates

Sean at White Peril wrote another gay marriage post. In this one he mentioned mine and pointed to my About page (which I’m not linking to myself because I’ve been meaning to spiff it up). Both Doug and I are flattered that he called us “adorable” and liked my smile. Thank you Sean.

So I went to his site thinking I’d leave a comment but I found that he and Michael from Gay Orbit ("discover your inner homo” - must add him to my blogroll right away) were going back and forth in the comments. Preferring not to engage, I will send Sean an email instead.

I followed the comments over to Gay Orbit in search of a promised post. There I was happy to serendipitously find that gay is back in the federally funded suicide workshop I alluded to the other day. Finally, I read Michael’s post, It’s not gay marriage. I suggest you do too.

Good night.

I read it for the articles…

Much as we’d like to see them survive, our concerns about the shaky condition of USAir led us to order a bunch of magazines to use up some frequent flyer miles. One of them, Doug’s choice not mine, was Men’s Health. Today the first issue came arrived. The cover ("New Year, New Body, New Life") made me wonder, did our mailman blush? It looks to me like a gay version of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue only instead of just one a year, they’re all like that. Now really, what did I expect?

Media players

Via Dean’s World, Brian Tiemann has an exhaustive look at Mainstream Media Players and concludes:

The bottom line appears to be that Windows Media Player is a basic player with some baffling shortcomings masquerading as a full-featured media organizer; RealPlayer is a charlatan trying to be all things to all people, but failing to be anything to anybody; and QuickTime Player is a refined and velvet-smooth minimalist entrant with some jaw-droppingly awful defects of user-experience design preventing anyone from appreciating it on the basis of its strengths.

The defect he hates most is the “QuickTime Pro nag screen.” It’s the nag screen choices that bug me; I’m happy to hit “No” every time as the cost of my free player but “No” is not an option. Even after years of clicking I will still sometimes hit “Why Go Pro.” Now that makes me crazy.

Lessig: Why your broadband sucks

I do very much enjoy Larry Lessig. In Wired, after noting that the US ranks 13th in broadband deployment, he asks what almost $1 billion spent on lobbying state lawmakers gets you:

Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the Reds in local government from offering free Wi-Fi throughout their municipalities. The action came after Philadelphia, where more than 50 percent of neighborhoods don’t have access to broadband, embarked on a $10 million wireless Internet project. City leaders had stepped in where the free market had failed. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from free Internet access to Karl Marx. So Rendell, the telecom industry’s latest toady, even while exempting the City of Brotherly Love, acted to spare Pennsylvania from this grave threat to its economic freedom.

Let’s hope this is just the first step. For if you look closely, you’ll see the communist menace has infiltrated governments everywhere. Ever notice those free photons as you walk the city at night? Ever think about the poor streetlamp companies, run out of business because municipalities deigned to do completely what private industry would do only incompletely? Or think about the scandal of public roads: How many tollbooth workers have lost their jobs because we no longer (since about the 18th century) fund all roads through private enterprise? Municipal buses compete with private taxis. City police departments hamper the growth at Pinkerton’s (now Securitas). It’s a national scandal.

The column is now available, read by Lessig, via podcast.