Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

I had been using Bloglines as my feed aggregator for a while, but over time I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with it. Their interface for adding and managing feeds is quite nice, and they even rolled out some nifty updates last weekend…but to my dismay they continue to focus on the feeds and not the posts. I’ve long wanted the river-of-news style for posts; this style tends to group posts from different feeds that cover the same topic, and thus reduces the time taken in skimming over the duplicates. But the worst offense has to be the way read-vs.-unread posts are handled in Bloglines; c’mon, guys, opening a feed does not mean that I’ve read every single post, and there’s a third important state: read-but-I-wanna-do-something-with-it-later.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, whine whine whine. I’m sure if I shelled out some bucks there are probably some nice fancy aggregators that do all that and more. But…really, the things I mentioned are fairly straightforward. Are they truly that hard to implement?)

Last night I discovered Google Reader, and I’ve switched because the don’t-be-evil fellahs look to have nailed my three wishes above. The interface needs some work–it’s mildly klunky, looks like the GUI team was dominated by Trekkies, and knows of no other weblog tool but blogger.com–but it looks to me like they’ve focused on the right things. Time will tell if this will become The One or if it will just a bridge to when Flock is ready.

• Satire in the legislative ranks
  Good to see that some of our politicians at least still have not only a sense of humor but the sense to realize that the public interest demands legislation based on something more than ‘I just don’t like X’.
  (tags: USA politics satire)
• turning down big bucks
  Wait, turning down a potential windfall from Hummer because they don’t want to be associated with gas-guzzling aboniations? I thought all those lefty types were relativists with no values to guide their lives!
  (tags: USA society values)
• NSA searches for advanced data mining tech
  Actually, I hope the NSA has some success here. Striking the proper balance between civil liberties and police powers would be much easier if we had confidence that government agencies could actually get something useful from all the info they claim to need.
  (tags: USA government civil liberties technology)
• An avalanche of goodwill
  Nice to see Joey Cheek get some well-deserved recognition. After watching Bode Miller act like he didn’t care while Shani Davis and Chad Hendrick act like petulant children, at least its good to know that some people still appreciate the privileges and honors we often afford our athletes.
  (tags: USA sports society)
• Court gives meth addicts way out
  So, is this an example of good values or going soft on lawbreakers?
  (tags: USA law society)
• Saddam ‘calls off hunger strike’
  Calling off a hunger strike for health reasons?!? WTF? I thought the whole point was to cause health problems that would lead to sympathy.
  (tags: international law)
• Pension reckoning,
  A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
  The Feds have the deficit, we’ve got our pension problems. Either way it’s gonna be a mess. How long until our legislators can no longer play with the appropriations numbers to ensure that the reckoning happens after they’re safely retired from office?
  (tags: Illinois politics)

I find the continued dustup over the Danish editorial cartoons attacking Muhammad to be distressing on two very separate counts

• To take offense when someone takes potshots at your culture and religion is certainly understandable. Yet the proper responses would seem to be denunciation, responses in kind, shunning, or simply ignoring the things altogether (especially when they are a juvenile and ham-fisted as these particular cartoons seemed to be). To honestly believe that the appropriate response is to riot, to threaten violence and death–in short, to proclaim that that your beliefs are so inviolate that no one should be able to even think about considering doing or saying something that offends your particular sensibilities–is pathetic. That others will take the oppoutunity to to manipulate events to advance their own agendas is despicable. Funny (in the gallows-humor sort of way) how a number of the protestors decided to add ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ into the mix despite that neither country had anything to do with the cartoons’ publication.
• Yet the direction the debate has gone on this side of the Atlantic has been even more inexplicable to me. When I saw that the Daily Illini decided to publish the cartoons, I had to shake my head, and while I don’t think that the suspension of the editors was the required response, I can’t say I was surprised.

  Regarding the publication decision, my question is: Why? What will be accomplished? The usual, knee-jerk answer has been along the lines of ‘To prove a point’ or ‘To support free speech’. However, to my mind these are extremely unsatisfactory…

• Freedom of the press is not seriously under attack in the U.S. The current administration is playing dangerous games in the arenas of separation of powers and civil liberties (particularly privacy and probable cause), and PC zealots continue to cause problems on various college campuses, yet I can’t see that First Amendment rights are really threatened. For an editor in Tunis or Baghdad or Islamabad to order publication would have been a bold stand for principle, but it’s not as dramatic for someone safely ensconced in the halls of an elite American university.
• The contribution to debate and understanding is minimal. In an environment well-qualified to promote sociopolitical discussion and turn it into usable action, the publication of these cartoons may have been useful to find ways to bridge the gaps; however, as someone who spent many years on the Urbana campus, and even read the DI occasionally, the UofI and the DI fail to measure up. Moreover, these cartoons in particular aren’t very enlightening about any new insight on Western views of Islam, so their publication–especially now, given recent events–is merely provocative. The small Muslim communities here are most likely to see the publications as not only offensive but gratuitous attempts by already-privileged people to play at being the Principled Reporter, while the more dangerous throngs overseas are unlikely to know or care.
• The virtue of press freedom is being misconstrued.Freedom of the press is a limitation on the state, designed to prevent criminal sanctions against a person for the mere fact of saying or publishing something. I’ve noticed segments of the punditry trying to extend this to mean that it allows–nay, demands–that any idea be put out there, unfettered and without consquences. Perhapps canning the DI editor was an overreaction, a pandering to interests who can’t handle public controversy…but he’ll be able to move on with his life, and the incident may actually make his services more attractive to some publications. Yet I find the hand-wringing that such events will pressure people into ’self-censorship’ to be disingenuous. Indeed, in some ways such pressure was the rationale behind removing the government from the editorial process: let any idea be available, and in so doing let the public decide which ones should thrive and which ones should be pushed to the margins as being undesirable or offensive or just plain wrong.

Faced with such incalcitrance in the thinking of so many people on all sides of debates like these, it’s sometimes a wonder that any sort of detente is possible, no matter how uneasy. The only hope is that those who not only hold more extreme views but who are willing to take provocative actions appear to represent a small minority.

For the masses who probably don’t check my del.icio.us links with regularity…

• Giant Telescope Will Peek at Past
  I happen to know from seeing things in grad school that DARPA and individual military branches fund research all the time with essentially no strings attached. I suppose some trepidation over the source of funding isn’t completely unjustified, but might it come from a more general public misunderstanding of the value of pure research–investigations that aren’t targeted at any particular goal other than knowledge? Yes, I firmly believe that even the DoD sometimes acts without ulterior motives.
• How to fold a fitted sheet
  This has been an issue in Bartonia for years. And people say the Web is useless!
• ‘Sleeping on it’ best for complex decisions
• Little-known feline ailments
  Surprising that these are considered ‘little-known’, since any cat owner will have seen several of them after only a short while.
• Chicago Restaurants, Chicago Menus, Ratings, Reviews, IL Restaurants Guide
• Restaurant Place: The Restaurant Menu Directory (Chicago)
  Really, unless your restaurant (1) doesn’t a website (nowadays??) and/or (2) is always changing the menu, I think there’s no excuse for not having the menu available in a format like this. Ooh, how about RSS feeds for those spots with frequently changing menus? Knowing that restaurant X just got a fresh shipment of Y for tonight’s specials would help drive business from people like us who often find themselves indecisive on a Saturday night.
• The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005
• Illinoize
  Especially being an election year, this site provides some interesting reading for Illinoisans who are either political junkies or who just want a view of what’s going on that’s less parochial than the local news outlets. Posts come from all corners of the political-cultural map, which can be a bit jarring or head-scratching but is probably a good thing overall.

The presence of a play-by-play commentator for a televised sporting event has long seemed a silly affectation, but some of the better color commentators do, from time to time, actually improve the experience through explanations of some nuance that may not have been immediately apparent in real time. Still, as a long-time viewer I’ve learned to tune out most of the yakkery and selectively listen only to thost bits that might prove interesting.

I don’t have such well-developed mental filters for the winter Olympics, so I’ve paid more attention to the announcers’ commentary…and it’s really struck me how inane much of it is. Three items stand out from the past week:

• The lingo and delivery of the snowboarding commentators conveys a sort of ‘Duuude’ cachet. Perhaps it’s just unfamilarity with these relatively new events, or maybe pure elitist disdain for a sport still enveloped in a slacker-surfer-ganja-free-spirit mentality, but hearing what sound like Bill & Ted talking about the righteous moves so-and-so did at last week’s Winter X-Games simply doesn’t project the grandiosity the IOC tries to weave around the Games.
• Is Scott Hamilton a commentator or a cheerleader? His cries of ‘whoa!’ evoke Hawk Harrelson and are likewise distracting. Is it really adding anything to mention that skaters are required to do a number of mandatory elements? Or that a triple axel/double toe loop combo is difficult, requiring talent, skill, and practice?
• I didn’t catch the name of the Canadian commentator during the ice-dancing short program, but I did notice that she repeated, essentially verbatim, the same description of how the focus is different for each member of the pair three times in a span of about five or six minutes.

It occurs to me that the structure of Olympic competitions tends to enhance the superfluousness of commentary. Perhaps the vast majority of what Pat & Ron say during Cubs games changes very little from game to game, but it helps that there’s typically a day that passes between the times they say it. In contrast most Olmypic events only take a couple of minutes to complete, so the commentators say the same thing again and again (and again!) in the space of just 15 or 20 minutes. Moreover, a downhill race or short skating program simply doesn’t have the complexity of a three-hour ballgame that takes place in the context of a long season and thus doesn’t require the same kind of insight and explanation. This isn’t to say that the Olympic events don’t require nuance of ability and technique that can mean the difference between the podium and the gallery; rather, whereas the subtlety of a pitch sequence may have import on tactical decisions in the remainder of a game (or strategic decisions for the season) that might not be initially obvious, the consequences of missing a gate or two-footing a landing will be readily apparent within moments.

Ugh, when’s the paperless society gonna be here again? I know they need to be thorough given the amounts of money involved, but the size of the stack of paper that makes up a loan application is astounding–especially since most of the pages boil down to “make sure you pay” and “if something goes wrong, we’re not responsible for anything”. I suppose I shouldn’t gripe too much: a generation ago (or maybe even just a decade?) the whole thing would have required actually spending a couple hours in someone’s office, while we’re able to do it all via telephone and fax and courier.

And yet we’ll probably have to sign and initial nearly as many pages come closing day.

Oh, well, at least the end result should be worth all the effort.

It almost doesn’t seem possible, but the house hunt appears to be over. As if my day hadn’t already started busily enough, what with people from Singapore to London to Sydney pleading for answers on important topics, in the late morning Liz called to tell me that something happened with the bidders who trumped our offer from last Sunday and the owners came back to us with a counteroffer. And so it began again…

• Call to mom to look up some extra property info. All tax and deed issues seem to be clean, which good. Boy did the place appreciate since it’s last deed transfer in 1997. It’s up for reassessment this year, so the property taxes will go up, oh well.
• Call Liz back, let’s decide whether to counteroffer after lunch. Can’t delay too long, another showing is scheduled this afternoon. A couple people point out that we’ve got nothing to lose by counteroffering, so we choose the midpoint between our original and the counter.
• They say they won’t go below X, but we figure we have to stay put. Their floor is at the top of our comfort range, and if we hit that we want a little more–just something else that makes us think we can’t lose this house. Okay, looks like we’re moving on.
• 30 minutes pass, then the amazing happens: if we go up by just $2k and close in early March, they’ll say yes. Stunning
• Agony…should we do this? Is it too much? It comes down to this: if we pass on this, then what are we looking for? Was our original offer itself too much? Do we need to reevaluate the whole thing: our priorities, budget, etc.? My spreadsheets say we can afford it and still have a cushion for planning future life changes. Interest rates and prices will probably be going up in the next few months, so combined with possible fees for month-to-month our our apartment, holding out for something less expensive may end up being a wash anyway. If we wait for everything to be perfect without any uncertainty, we’ll never do anything. (As some of this back-and-forth occurred while Eric and I were wandering the floors trying to scrounge up a KVM, props to him for the insightful comment that figuring out our process and priorities for making the decision was more important here than the numbers.)
• Our agent calls at this point: gotta know, what do you want to do? Yes, go for it. Fear and excitement now churn anxious stomachs in the Loop and Lakeview.
• Five minutes pass, Angela calls back: OK! Let’s arrange to update the contract. I’m so glad that I work with a team who essentially kick me out the door to take care of this rather than finishing what remains of the workday.

We met at the house to initial the paperwork changes, and within two minutes of being inside again we realized that it was the Right Thing. Maybe it was a little more than we expected to pay, maybe it’s a bit farther from the El and shops and restaurants than we had hoped, but it’s a fantastic place–which is the point, isn’t it? I didn’t particularly enjoy the frantic pace and pressure to make life-altering decisions on short notice (especially without my carefully crafted budgeting spreadsheets in front of me). Nor did I enjoy the negotiation process, although I did find it ironic that the contracted sale price was between the ‘final’ offers from both sides.

The sellers have officially signed off, so now it’s time for papework. Lawyers. Bankers. Government clerks. Movers. And of course the new adventure of actually owning a house…