Posts

Wes Clark has dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination. I think he’d make a darn good cabinet secretary in a Democratic White House.

Alpine is coming out with a car stereo that enables you to listen to and control your iPod from your dashboard.

Most of the complaints about the Tim Russert interview with President Bush yesterday seem to center on the lack of followup questions when Bush gave vague, irrelevant, or outright dishonest answers to questions he was asked. Is there any chance that the list of questions had to be vetted in advance by the White House? Why else would Russert roll over and play dead? The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus fact checks Bush on some of his assertions today. The nice thing about the interview is it gives the media a lot more fodder for for comparing things Bush says to things as they actually are, which should yield conditions favorable to those who oppose his reelection. ...

Kevin Drum, of Calpundit, is doing real journalism these days. Specifically, he’s digging through the paper trail associated with George W Bush’s service in the National guard. This is essential work, and it’s actually probably best handled by a devoted weblogger (or an ad hoc team of them). Newspapers are never going to publish scans of the relevant documents and explain what they mean, and they’re certainly not going to publish their ongoing research every day so that people can criticize it and add to it. Kevin’s work could very well find itself being ripped off and incorporated into big media news stories very soon. ...

Mozilla Firefox 0.8 has been released. You’ve probably been calling it Firebird, but the Mozillians decided to change the name to avoid perpetuating the namespace collision with the Firebird relational database. I just hope they don’t change the name of the email client to Thunderfox. One big new feature is the integration of an installer for Windows into the standard build. There had been an installer available for Windows for several releases, but it was built and distributed outside the core project. Now, Windows downloads are packaged as an installable file. If nothing else, that says it’s getting pretty close to being ready for prime time. Update: I can’t seem to download the update from the Mozilla site due to there being too much traffic. Is it just me, or should there be a way to download the Mozilla products via BitTorrent? (Less than 60 seconds after posting that, a reader sent me a BitTorrent link, which you can access here.) Update: Thunderbird 0.5 is also out today. ...

William Saletan has a concise summary of President Bush’s disturbing appearance on Meet the Press this morning. (Saletan’s opinion is similar to the one offered by Josh Marshall in the Washington Monthly article The Post-Modern President.)

Brad DeLong has been running an ongoing series of items on his Web site requesting that economists who signed onto a letter supporting the Bush economic program last year contact him if they are still on board. So far only one of them has contacted him to indicate that they still believed in the President’s economic program. Here’s the original item.

From the “it’s about time” category, news that Tivo has signed a deal with Nielsen (the television ratings people). Last year, we were a “Nielsen family,” and we actually had to write down which shows by hand in a little diary that they sent us. I would have thought that by now you would at least be able to go online and indicate which shows you had watched, but Nielsen hasn’t even come that far. The whole thing was particularly insulting when you consider that we have a Tivo, a digital cable box, and a DVR provided by Time-Warner Cable. Surely we should have been able to just give our consent to someone to let Nielsen know what we were watching. I believe Tivo when they say that all data collected from customers is anonymized and aggregated, and if my viewing habits can actually influence broadcasters to show more of the kinds of shows that I like (instead of regularly cancelling them before sweeps), I’m all for it. ...

Awhile back, I recommended the Michael Lewis book Moneyball, which described the approach taken by the Oakland A’s to invision a new system for running a major league baseball team. The book is about baseball, but it’s also about surpassing conventional wisdom. Paul DePodesta, the assistant general manager of the A’s, gave a speech to a business audience that describes their approach more succinctly.

I got an invitation to Orkut the other day and finally signed up today, after having lunch with a couple of former coworkers who are members. All things considered, I think Linked In is more my speed.