My first comment spam!

If it weren't 7 AM I'd break out the champagne. Omnimatic has arrived! Finally, after nearly a year of sweat and toil, I received my very first comment spam. It's a lovely piece about why we should all invest in timber. I'm going to delete it now.

Romney cuddles up to Bush

I've never liked Mitt Romney. When he first ran for governor of Massachusetts he struck me as a disingenuous opportunist in the way he portrayed his residency. I know that's nothing new when a New England Brahmin like George HW Bush kept a P.O. box in Texas so he could vote there, and a Cubs fan by birth like Hillary Clinton moved to New York because she liked her chances in the Senate race.

If that were the only thing it would be no big deal, but ever since he decided to run for president (bored with his day job, I guess) he has begun singing from the Bush 43 hymnal like a choirboy eager to be chosen for a solo. Stem cell research? Against that evil witchery now; I HAD to pretend I was for it because, well, you know, I was in enemy territory up there in Massachusetts. Abortion rights? Against that one too, now that I'm looking for conservative votes.

Now Romney is praising the war in Iraq, just as other Republicans have begun to show some guts and call it what it is. "The enemy is emboldened by anything other than the strength of America," he said yesterday. I don't know that this is a flip flop, but it sure sounds like a big wet smooch on Bush's behind.

I can't imagine that this guy truly has presidential ambitions; surely he realizes that his international experience is limited to running the Olympics and that the Massachusetts governorship has never been much of a launching off point for national politics. More likely, he's angling for a cabinet post.

You have to wonder if he realizes that Bush is a lame duc when he says stuff like this: "And it's an extraordinary obligation and burden that the president faces. Every American life -- every life -- is precious, and it's an extraordinary burden, which the president carries very well and with dignity." Blech.

Stuff I like: Listgarden

I've been looking for a tool to fill a hole in creating RSS feeds. The problem: blogging tools all create RSS feeds, but I wanted to have feeds for pages on the site that aren't blogs (my employer's site, not this one). Eventually this will be automated with a new system, but I wanted something for the short term--meaning cheap to free, with a very gentle learning curve, that can fit into the existing work process. I don't want people creating content once in HTML and all over again in RSS. And it had to be cross-platform and Mac friendly.

I found what I wanted in Listgarden from Dan Bricklin's Software Garden. He's the guy who jump-started the PC revolution by creating VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet. This tool--unlike a lot of open source stuff--is made for non-programmers. Some tech ability helps if you want to customize the output, but you really don't have to know anything other than how to follow well written directions.

In Listgarden, you add item headlines and descriptions, and the program generates both an HTML page and and RSS file. One well thought-out feature breaks the HTML template into 3 parts, so you can just use the middle (no head tags, etc) to create a server-side include. Then tweak the CSS a little and you can feed content to your existing HTML page while creating the feed. Another setup I'm considering is to use Listgarden to create email newsletters in HTML, with an RSS feed as an alternative.

The only drawback is that it's a pain to set up on a Mac because it requires the X-code Developer Tools to be installed (a gigantic download if you don't have it) so you can run Perl. The steps are easy to follow and work like a charm, but it will be a barrier for some people. The Windows version is nicely compiled into an executable. I emailed tech support about this and got a nice note back from Dan Bricklin himself (how's that for service?) explaining that he had a nice packager for Windows but not Mac, and if I find a good one let him know.

Free software with better customer support than anything I've paid for. Gotta love it.

They're probably Democrats too

From today's Boston Globe

Boston's beloved pair of swans -- feted by city leaders, residents, and tourists alike as one of the Hub's most celebrated summer attractions -- are a same-sex couple. Yes, scientific tests have shown that the pair, named Romeo and Juliet, are really Juliet and Juliet.

See? Those damn activist judges go around messing with nature, and look what happens! This undermines the institution of mating. And it will lead to cygnetphilia and ultimately, bestiality.

I suppose we should expect a visit from Fred Phelps (who I will not dignify with a link, Google him if you must).

This has now triggered my Fred Phelps memory, which I'll share briefly. When we lived in Chicago we were a member of a wonderful church led by an inspiring minister. (I've been a de facto atheist all my life except for those two years.) This minister, Greg Dell, preached that "God don't make no junk" and that homosexuality was not a deviation, but part of God's creation, and that our diversity is something to be celebrated. Others in the United Methodist Church strongly disagreed and they put him on trial for performing marriage ceremonies for same sex couples.

When all this was going on, Mr. Phelps decided to pay us a visit. Fewer than a dozen Phelps people, mainly his family as far as I could tell, stood across from the church waving their sick signs and chanting unchristian things. On our side of the street, a good hundred or more church members and friends formed a human chain around the church and dwarfed the hateful presence. The "protesters" just looked pathetic.

I felt proud to be part of that church.

New language for evolution

From Cathy Young's op-ed in today's Boston Globe:

In some ways, evolutionary theory is more compatible with conservative ideas than with leftist ones. Indeed, proponents of applying evolutionary theory to human social structures tend to be viewed by the left with suspicion, particularly on biological explanations for sex roles. As several commentators have pointed out, it's conservatives who reject the notion that complex organization requires deliberate central planning -- in economics. Why should biology be different?

This last point is a vulnerability in the Bushie worldview just begging to be exploited. If conservatives (read: Karl Rove) can use language to change the popular "estate tax" to the unpopular "death tax", why can't we talk about evolution with more potent words? We should start talking about the "market-driven biological freedom" theory versus the "centrally planned biological welfare" theory.

Kids need to eat!

The average lunch period in US elementary schools has decreased by 6 minutes in the last two years, according to an article in The Boston Globe. Kids have an average of 24 minutes to get their food and eat it. I've learned not to send anything hard to open or slow to eat in my son's lunch. You'd better peel the orange in the morning or it won't get eaten. Even so, there are no guarantees. Often he brings his lunch bag home with not a single thing eaten. Not enough time, he says.

This short break in the day has a lot of functions to fill. It's a social occasion, when kids have a little less structure and a chance to see their friends from other classes. It breaks the day in two, providing an orientation point and a defense against the monotony of arithmetic and handwriting. Most importantly, it's about eating--refueling for the afternoon and for growth.

At least we're not dealing with the absurdities of lunch periods starting before 11 AM. With luck we won't have to face that until high school.

Manny and Millar

I'm glad the Sox didn't dump Manny Ramirez. I'm equally glad they didn't dump Kevin Millar, because then I wouldn't get to read stuff like, "'I never say that,' said Ramirez, while Millar pretended to translate his remarks into Spanish." I wish I'd heard it.