Tuesday August 03, 2004

Parameterizable Web Components What do Struts w/tiles and HTML::Mason have in common? One is part of a Java MVC framework, the other a Perl component system. But they both provide parameterizable components. People I've spoke to who have never used a component system that use named parameters in component calls often just don't get it. But it's really very simple. So lets see if we can shed some light on this.

Let's say you have a page called "query_results.html" that internally calls a table widget "query_results_table.html". And let's say the table widget takes a parameter for which column to sort the rendered table on and a title for the table caption. So the calling component might invoke the widget like this (assuming .html are handled as JSP):

<!-- could also spec a symbolic name in the tiles definition xml -->
<tiles:insert page="query_results_table.html">             
  <tiles:put name="title" value="Widget Query Results"/>   <!-- some literal text -->
  <tiles:put name="sort_order" beanName="sortOrder" />     <!-- a java.lang.String -->
</tiles:insert>

The called component (query_results_table.html) then has this

<tiles:importAttribute name="title" ignore="true"/>          <!-- an optional parameter -->
<tiles:importAttribute name="sort_order" />                  <!-- a mandatory parameter -->

HTML::Mason provides a similar facility.

<& query_results_table.html, title=>'Widget QueryResults',sort_order=>$so &>

or equivalently, call out to Perl-land

% $m->comp('query_results_table.html',title=>'Widget QueryResults',sort_order=>$so);

The called component would have something like this

<%args>
$title => 'Default Title'
$sort_order                     # mandatory parameter
</%args>

So what does it look like without parameterizable components? Well, for instance every PHP project I've seen is rife with stuffing things into globals and then using an include like

$title = 'fubar';
$sort_order = 'cereal';
include('query_results_table.html');        

The component has magical variables in scope and it hopes that the caller set them (yech).

<?
echo "$title";
?>

This is unacceptably lame speghetti-bait. There very well may be some better ways to do it in PHP, too bad they're not prevalent. All of the PHP code I've seen has semi-random groupings of functions stuffed into include files like that. If you're lucky, there might actually be class definitions in there. But the UI components can't take a distinct set of parameters; you're either hoping that the caller stuffed the right variables into the current scope or you're going to write a lot validation code.

I didn't want to get into naming conventions for components or any of the other real life deltas you'd want to see in production code; I just to want keep it illustrative. Hopefully this example isn't too simple and contrived that it fails to illuminate the importance. OK, maybe not... so why is this important? Relying on the presence (or absence) of variables set externally is a problem plagued, buggy development practice. A component's instrumentation should be unambiguous. The Java and Perl examples illustrate clear, explicit parameterization. Which params are mandatory and which are optional is obvious from the the way they are declared in the component. Using named parameters leads to cleaner, less buggy code that's easy to reuse and change. Rapid development and agility, that's what I want.

• Struts + tiles
• Mason

Now I know there are perfectly reasonable people who are happy with PHP in every respect and will take umbrage at my dis. Well, it's nothing personal folks. Rapid prototyping is cool but structuring a language so it's easier to make a mess than to keep it clean is not.

( Aug 03 2004, 12:53:29 AM PDT ) Permalink
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Sunday August 01, 2004

Technorati in WSJ The Wall Street Journal doesn't want you to know what they're talking about or link to them without a bunch of rigamarole and commitment. Yet they "get it" well enough to cover the blogging story at the Democratic National Convention. Clueless and clueful, an enigma and a riddle. And so it goes.

I thought it was really cool that Technorati was in WSJ last week for the Blogwatch joint endeavor with CNN. But the irony is not lost on me that while most of the media makes it a point to provide access to what they're talking about, WSJ has an iron curtain drawn around their content.

So here it is, in all of its glory (it's so glorious, you can't link to it):

Bloggers Enter Big-Media Tent

Boston's Political Circus Lends
New Legitimacy to Web Scribes

By CHRISTOPHER CONKEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 27, 2004; Page A6

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

Bloggers have written their way into the mainstream, and the media may never be the same.

This week Democrats have granted official media credentials for their convention to more than 35 political Web loggers, or bloggers.

They range from 16-year-old Stephen Yellin of New Jersey, who writes for the widely read dailykos.com, to David Weinberger, a 53-year-old fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Their attendance signals a new legitimacy for Web commentators and has spurred intense debate about their place under the media tent.

At the same time, the mainstream media have rushed to join the blogger party. MSNBC rolled out a site this week called "Hardblogger," featuring postings from Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell and Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Web-savvy candidate Howard Dean. CNN is partnering with the Web-tracking site Technorati to produce Blogwatch, a feature that is tracking the musings of the credentialed bloggers. And the Associated Press launched its first blog, featuring the insights of veteran newsman Walter Mears.

At least one established media outlet plucked a popular blogger to report from Boston. MTV News hired Ana Marie Cox, who writes the risque, inside-the-Beltway gossip blog Wonkette.com, to report live from the floor of the Fleet Center arena where the convention is being held. She seems to find the whole experience amusing. "So what does MTV want with you?" Ms. Cox asked herself in a pre-Boston departure post, as blog reports are called. "We have no idea. They just put a pile of money on the doorstep, handed us a plane ticket, said something about 'sink or swim' and ran away."

In his first entry from Boston, Josh Marshall, author of the popular talkingpointsmemo.com, wrote, "The whole thing is mystifying to me. Blogs make up a small, specialized niche within the interdependent media ecosystem...not producers but primary or usually secondary consumers -- like small field mice, ferrets, or bats."

Whatever type of political animal they may be, bloggers are very much a part of the circus. Inside the Fleet Center, one of the windows at the Democratic News Service is reserved for bloggers so they can arrange interviews with politicians and delegates. "Bloggers Boulevard," as the seating area inside the arena for bloggers is called, is outfitted with wireless technology so the bloggers can post from mobile devices while watching the festivities.

Yesterday morning, the Democratic National Committee even hosted a fancy breakfast attended by about 30 bloggers at the Hilton Back Bay Hotel. For every blogger, there seemed to be a reporter from a traditional news organization ready to conduct an interview. As a further show of the bloggers' growing clout, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama of Illinois, who will deliver the convention's keynote speech tonight, stopped by to speak and answer questions.

Among those absent is Andrew Sullivan, the former New Republic editor who writes Daily Dish, one of the most popular and continually updated conservative blogs. "I think the conventions are a waste of time," says Mr. Sullivan, who didn't bother to apply for credentials. "They're a TV show, so I'll watch them on TV. I'm not a big fan of schmoozing with other journalists just for the hell of it."

Several bloggers were disinvited because too many people had been accepted, says Mike Liddell, the convention's online communications director. One of them, Adele Stan, decided to come to Boston anyway. "The great thing about blogging is you don't need no stinking badges," she writes. "Whatever happens to you, wherever you wind up, whoever you meet, that's what you write about."

Mr. Liddell expects bloggers to give readers an unvarnished look at what goes on at the convention. But the topic on many minds inside the media pavilion is the creeping impact that blogs are having on the mainstream press. In a recent dispatch on his site thetruthlaidbear.com, N.Z. Bear wrote: "They may not know it yet, but the bloggers aren't there to cover the convention. They're there to cover the journalists."

Bloggers already have been doing that. In December 2002, Mr. Marshall jumped on Sen. Trent Lott's comments praising the late Sen. Strom Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat party. Eventually, the mainstream press seized on the remarks and they became a major scandal, forcing Mr. Lott to step down as Senate majority leader.

This sort of back-and-forth with the mainstream press -- whom bloggers depend on for material but relentlessly skewer for what they call overplaying or underplaying stories, bias and other perceived errors -- is an oft-stated goal of bloggers.

Campaigndesk.org, a site that continually critiques professional journalism in a blog format, is having an impact, too. "Editors like us and reporters don't," says Steve Lovelady, the site's managing editor. "Some scream bloody murder...nobody's as thin-skinned as reporters."

Eventually, the distinctions between blogs and other media will blur, predicts blogger Daniel Drezner, who was recently hired to write an online foreign policy column for The New Republic.

Write to Christopher Conkey at christopher.conkey@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

The Web address of N.Z. Bear's blog, The Truth Laid Bear, is truthlaidbear.com. This article incorrectly listed the Internet address as thetruthlaidbear.com.

So that's it in its entirity. I'm not normally into violating terms of services, copyright infringement or voiding my warranty. I'm posting this as a statement to WSJ: join the rest of the planet and figure out how to be read and linked to without all of the high ceremony and obligations. You might hope that by the time the repelican convention hits, they'll have caught the cluetrain, but don't count on it. ( Aug 01 2004, 03:16:19 PM PDT ) Permalink

Thursday July 29, 2004

Obama Llama, Co Comma Comma, Fee Fi Fo Fama: Obama! The demands of provisioning infrastructure and developing software has been a necessary distraction from the Democratic National Convention. I'd caught Bill Clinton's speech the other night; obviously one of the most thoughtful and dynamic, uh, orators of our times. But everyone's buzzing about Obama-this and Obama-that. Who?

Yep, it's been a pretty busy week for me, but I've tried to at least tap into the sizzle of political posturing that's been going down in Beantown a bit. I took a look at the text of Obama's speech and was impressed with its love of the country, the importance of having high standards for initiating combat, the plight of so many Americans who are suffering under Bushonomics.... good stuff but what's the BFD? . Perhaps it's a you-had-to-be-there kinda thing. I'll have to look around for a video or audio archive of the speech. ( Jul 29 2004, 09:49:53 PM PDT ) Permalink


Tracking the rattle and hum of politics Blog junkies have no doubt taken notice of the Democratic National Convention coverage by bloggers, credentialed or not.

The last few weeks have been a wild and crazy time as I and the rest of the Technorati team erected politics.technorati.com. It's an effort I'm very proud as we've identified a selection of blogs that are liberal or conservative leaning as well as those that are at the convention and we're tracking their postings in a very-close-to-real-time fashion. While there is still much to be done to make the Technorati service as robust as we want it to be, I take a great deal of pride in the political blog gathering and in general our efforts to keep up with the growth rate of the blogosphere's expanding universe. ( Jul 29 2004, 09:50:13 AM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday July 20, 2004

Johnson/Schmidt has nice ring to it It wasn't that long ago that the Arizona Diamondbacks were a force to be reckoned with. The pitching duo of Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling was something to fear.

But then there were injuries and other team problems, Arizona shuffled up the team, trading Schilling away and gutting their position players to acquire Richie Sexson (who sustained a season-ending injury early in the year). They've been generously giving away the wins ever since. Now with Johnson ready to move on to pitch with a team that can win some games and Giants in sore need of some more zing on the mound, it's time for the Giant's ownership to pony up and bring Johnson to San Francisco. He won't be far from home; he was born in Walnut Creek and went to school in Livermore. Johnson has said he doesn't want to be far from his Arizona home; he's settled down there with his family. Well, it's about a 1.5 hour flight from SFO to Tucson, IIRC. So here's the rotation:

• Johnson
• Schmidt
• Woody
• Williams
• Tomko

Perhaps with Hermanson as a reliever, Herges can get an occasional break and Rodriguez should be put out to pasture. Having Johnson in the line up and pitching into late innings, there'd be less milling through the bullpen, their performance would likely improve. Having a five time Cy Young winner aboard will likely give the whole team a lift.

It could happen. It should happen. Perhaps Barry Bonds will wear a world series ring after all. ( Jul 20 2004, 01:29:46 AM PDT ) Permalink
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Tuesday July 13, 2004

I've made the switch I've been using unix laptops as my main work environment for about 7 years. It started with a Dell Pentium 90 in 1997 that ran FreeBSD. In recent years, it's been Mandrake, SuSe and RedHat Linux. But for a number of years, I've admired from afar Mac OS X.

The last few months using a Dell laptop running Windows XP and the funkiness that comes along with it (unpredictable wireless compatibility, viruses, random crashes, having to run cygwin to get some basic shell and utility functionality) has been madness. Now I'm posting this from my new 15" Powerbook. As I've suspected, this is Apple getting an OS right and "Bravo," I say!

The lore as I recollect is this:
One of the designers of BSD, Kirk McKusick, taught (still teaches?) a course at Berkeley on BSD internals (they were in the Extended Education catalog for years, haven't looked lately). His Spring 1998 term class was filled with Apple engineers -- the word I'd heard is that a whole cadre of FreeBSD and NetBSD enthusiasts left that course to work on the networking, filesystem and other core capabilities of Mac OS X. Some years later, after all of the shenanigans with Walnut Creek CDROM and Wind River, Jordan Hubbard, alpha-geek of the FreeBSD project, was hired away by Apple.

So here I am, having come full circle, running a BSD laptop! Brilliant!

( Jul 13 2004, 10:34:26 AM PDT ) Permalink

Saturday July 10, 2004

Vote For Somebody Else You don't have to love John Kerry to be happy voting for him but you really have to hate yourself if you vote for George Bush.

Today I saw Fahrenheit 9/11. It didn't change my mind about anything, I've felt for a long time that George Bush is devious and he's devious about grave matters (not dalliances, as the prior president was). Michael Moore's film probably won't change the mind of anybody who's backing Bush -- if you still back him now you must be in serious denial of reality -- but it may sway someone who hasn't otherwise been paying attention to how weak the original case for war was. Even people like Mr. Voice of Reason have come around to fessing up to the errors of their ways as far as following along to beat of the war drums: if The President says that there is sufficient evidence of a threat, he should be given the benefit of the doubt? Well, you gotta give us something, Mr. President and you've come up with zilch. While I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein the bottom line is that there are lots of brutal little dictatorships around the world, is it our business to go around steamrolling them? Apparently, only if it compliments another agenda.

George Bush and his crew have had a long festering antagonism towards Hussein for lots of reasons:

• Tactical remorse from Dick Cheney who wishes he'd pressed into Baghdad in Desert Storm
• The failed assassination plot against The Elder President Bush
• Iraq was doing its oil transactions in Euros instead of Dollars, as is customary in the petroleum industry
• Baathism had too much of Soviet flavor to its brand of dictatorship

So Michael Moore didn't get into all of these aspects but he layed out pretty clearly that the Bush adminstration has had a pathological fixation on Iraq that has distracted from neutralizing the Al Queda network.

• There were no Weapons Of Mass Destruction
  There was plenty of intelligence to bear this out but it was dismissed
• There was no connection to Al Queda
  They're ideologically opposed: Baathism is pan-Arabic socialist dictatorship, Al Queda espouses extreme Islamic Fundamentalism -- these are incompatible

Finally, Bush is spending enormous amounts of money that the government doesn't have to support this. We're going to pay the price for this in the form of high interest rates and economic inflation for years to come. Yea, so much for being a fiscally conservative compassionate conservative. George Bush is a devious shill and should be rendered unemployed as soon as possible.

So if you're not mad, get mad. And vote for somebody else. ( Jul 10 2004, 10:24:36 PM PDT ) Permalink

Friday July 09, 2004

A CMM For Operations The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) provides a framework for evaluating the how well equipped a software development organization is deliver high quality software on-time and on-budget. There are five CMM levels, each with distinctive Key Process Areas (KPA). Is there an equivalent for website or service provider operations? I'd sure like to see it as formally explored as the CMM.

CMM level one is adhoc and chaotic, project success is pretty much built on a lot of good luck and heroics from competent individuals. Level five is a self-improving managed development lifecycle. In between there are a bunch of KPAs. Here's the spectrum:

Level	Focus	Key Process Area
1 - Initial	Competent people and heroics
2 - Repeatable	Project management processes	Requirements Management Software Project Planning Software Project Tracking & Oversight Software Subcontract Management Software Quality Assurance Software Configuration Management
3 - Defined	Engineering  processes and organizational support	Organization Process Focus Organization Process Definition Training Program Integrated Software Management Software Product Engineering Intergroup Coordination Peer Reviews
4 - Managed	Product and process quality	Quantitative Process Management Software Quality Management
5 - Optimizing	Continual process improvement	Defect Prevention Technology Change Management Process Change Management

One interesting aspect to the CMM is that it's typically not possible leapfrog to new levels. You can't really jump from level one to level three, getting the level two stuff right first is part of getting to level three.

Web site and service provider operations seem to have a similar spectrum. I don't have the KPAs clarified yet and there are some fundamental differences between operations and development: where software development is a collaborative process of invention, operations is predominantly about production and maintenance. Let's give it a try, we'll call this an Operational Maturity Model:

1. Ad hoc
   Relies on competent people and heroics for success but maintenance is reactive and interupt-driven. Production is manual and loosely planned. Capacity planning? Hah!
2. Repeatable
   Maintenance is still reactive but production is scripted. Future capacity requirements are reactively assessed.
3. Defined
   Maintenance is proactive, standard operating procedures (SOP) are codified and production is automated. Capacity planning is based on qualitative projections.
4. Managed
   Maintenance and production is highly automated and metric driven. Trends are studied and capacity planning is based on quantitative projectons. Provisioning has been made for high availability and failover (HA/FO) requirements.
5. Optimizing
   Systems are self healing and deployed redundantly with HA/FO provisioned. Production is automated, proactive and metric drivem. SOPs are metric driven so the time to resolution of system faults are measured and refined.

OK, so this might be a stretch. I don't have a big list of KPAs delineated for ops, I'm kinduva software guy. Further, it may be possible to leap frog to different OMM levels (unlike CMM). I don't know, until the KPAs are understood, it's tough to say. Big Managed Service Provider (MSP) endeavors like Loudcloud, SiteSmith and Logictier have come and gone (or at least re-invented into something else) and you'd think that there'd be more of an established science to these things by now. It's 2004.

Anyway, here are some things I've checked out or amused myself with here and there on the matter:

• Hyperic (this looks familiar....)
• Opsware Inc.
• Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective
• The Software Engineering Institute's CMM Maturity Assessments: What You Need To Know (in case you don't know what you need to know, you can pay Forrester to tell you)
• Organic IT 2004: Cut IT Costs, Speed Up Business
  The Architecture Behind Grid, Utility, On Demand, And Adaptive Technologies
  (this looks really interesting, too bad it's not in my budget)
• The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CIMM)

Why is this important to me? If ops is always descending into madness because things aren't functioning on a more mature level, guess who has to jump into the fray? Yea.

Looking for more on this...
( Jul 09 2004, 10:58:30 PM PDT ) Permalink

Thursday July 08, 2004

Roller: blog-ware implemented with Spring, Hibernate and all of that jazz I noted that Rafe has taken an interest in Spring, Hibernate, etc as the foundation for blog software. I've been using Roller for a while, it's got all of that jazz!

In his post, Rafe even mentions hosting it as a project on Sourceforge. Consider this a tap on the shoulder: if you want to give MT the heave-ho and aren't on a Wordpress trajectory, Roller's architecture ain't bad. ( Jul 08 2004, 06:27:52 PM PDT ) Permalink
Comments [2]

Attack Of The Old-school Uber-Guitar Gods The rumors are persisting and even some dates heard for the US tour by Ulrich Roth and Michael Schenker this fall.

If you're into old UFO and Scorpions, you'll recognize the importance of this event. Amongst guitar geeks, Ulrich Roth is a legend (and to everyone else he's just an old hippie) -- one such friend saw Roth perform in Dusseldorf a earlier this year where he played Scorpions songs from the pre-Lovedrive era ("Sails of Charon", "Hellcat", etc). I love that stuff! And seeing Michael Schenker will be a great blast form the past (like, it was over 20 years ago when I was a youngster and saw MSG in Oakland... 1980? 1981?) but seeing Roth pull those old tunes will just kick ass!

These are some of the tour dates heard of so far

• Aug. 27 - Ventura, CA, @ Ventura Theatre
• Sep. 10 - Chicago, IL, @ House of Blues
• Sep. 17 - Springfield, VA @ Jaxx

( Jul 08 2004, 08:45:15 AM PDT ) Permalink

Wednesday July 07, 2004

The Scalability Holy Grail PHP versus J2EE versus mod_perl... I've used 'em all and each will give you plenty of opportunity to tie thirteen knots around your neck. But to say that any of them can't provide a foundation for a scalable web infrastructure is just insipid.

I might be concerned with how easy a particular scaling solution is to integrate with the application language and framework, but they all can be made to scale. I prefer to look at how much the prevailing practices with the technology make change easy. Just 'cause you can prototype it quickly doesn't necessarily mean you can collaborate well with it and evolve it easily. And I've certainly seen my share of funky reinventions of the materialized view, half baked cache management systems and database pounders wind their ways into prototypes that become hacked architecture. So all of the hubbub about troutgirl's Friendster goes PHP post (and Rasmus' feeble attempt to indict J2EE) strikes me as trite (and perhaps I'm not the only one puzzled by it). troutgirl's remark that, "We had not one but TWO guys here who had written bestselling JSP books. Not that this necessarily means they're great Java devs, but I actually think our guys were as good as any team." Begs the question: what does that have to do with it? Were the performance problems really in the presentation tier? Or was the presentation so closely coupled to the backend that they couldn't be distinguished? And I need to know what reading not to recommend, what were the names of those books? Gimme a break.

Poor web application performance is often simply attributable to at least one of a handful of Common Stupid Mistakes:

1. Development shortcuts that are quick-n-dirty that also happen to introduce slow-n-dirty runtime characteristics (let's just call those "crappy hacks")
2. Insufficient use of caching or pre-generation of components that are static or have a low change rate (let's just call those "gratuitous dynamicism")
3. Inappropriate use of caching... does that logic need to be cached or is its invocation infrequent enough that maybe a plain old CGI is exactly how it should be implemented? (that'd be "gratuitous caching")
4. Excessive round-tripping to the database (well, that's just "excessive round-tripping")
5. Tight coupling of architectural pieces that have independent scaling and/or stability requirements... (score that: "tight coupling")
6. Nailing up resources i.e. does each child thread/process require its own database connection? (another potential effect of "tight coupling")

Lay on top of these the absence of foresight on how the architecture will smoothly scale with four or ten or a hundred times the use and sure enough, someone will blame the language or a framework... they may be contributing factors but Common Stupid Mistakes are technology agnostic.

You can make those mistakes in any programming language and framework. The key for me is how easy is to avoid these traps given the practices that are widely used by adherents to a given application environment. How good are the tools? The test frameworks? Is clean object design and architectural layering widely appreciated by the development community around that technology?

There are lots of ways to make mod_perl and PHP or MySQL scale (Slashdot and Wikipedia will be happy to testify), there are lots of huge J2EE applications that have enjoyed terrific scaling, you might employ caching that is native to your technology (i.e. in Java, PHP or Perl) or agnostic caching. But regardless, if the architecture suffers from too many crappy hacks, gratuitous dynamicism, gratuitous caching, excessive round-tripping and tight coupling -- it's gonna suck. Period.

So concern yourself with how easy will it be to employ best practices, to evolve and extend the functionality over time and integrate with other applications. The scalability concerns can be handled with various means. ( Jul 07 2004, 11:04:57 PM PDT ) Permalink
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Monday July 05, 2004

The Google Labs HR Pitch Hiring the best and the brightest isn't easy. But is it really useful to use pattern recognition riddles that likely have little to do with the work that will be fulfilled?

Does this parking lot puzzle really attract the best candidates? In my experience, having a group of smart people is important but so is having a group of people who are good collaborators, can communicate well, are courageous with ideas, critical thinkers in evaluation of ideas while being non-judgemental of people. Collaborative creation requires a lot more than merely being a smarty pants. Maybe all of that squishy stuff is too much to put in an ad.

BTW, Technorati is hiring... we want smarty pants people who are good collaborators!

( Jul 05 2004, 11:26:09 AM PDT ) Permalink


Fourth of July From the Berkeley Hills The city and bay were covered in a thick blanket of fog. High above the vastness, we watched a unique show.

From high atop Grizzly Peak Blvd (Berkeley, CA) we watched the fog light up with different hues, sparks occasionally breaching the surface as though we were looking upon a wispy sea with incadescent mammals coming up for air.

( Jul 05 2004, 11:22:27 AM PDT ) Permalink

Sunday July 04, 2004

War, lies, burgers, baseball and the American Way I'll be observing this 4th of July doing a few very American activities: criticizing our government and bar-b-queing.

So let's get the serious stuff out of the way. Why does George Bush enjoy half the popularity he does? He's by far the worst president of modern times. In the build up to the Iraq war I was skeptical of the Weapons of Mass Destruction pretext and puzzled by the lack of Democratic Party outrage at how weak Colin Powell's "not Adlai Stevenson caliber" presentation to the UN was. As the US ultimately occupied Iraq and came up empty, the shallowness of the outrage in the US was further an outrage. Now as it has been widely corroborated that the Bush administration was determined to find pretext for war on Iraq from its inception, I would expect impeachment proceedings. I mean, damn, the American public would impeach the other guy for lying about a blow job but give this one a pass for sending several hundred American boys off to die on predicated on lies? Gimme a laugh about a cum stained dress anyday, thank you. George Bush has pulled a fast one on us, running up deficit spending and saluting the homecoming of body bags. He deserves criminal indictment, not re-election. He has not defended my freedom, he's sullied it with shameful lies. Soldiers and their families should be Mad As Hell and Not Take It Anymore. Impeach Bush.

So I'm spending the day with my loved ones. And since the burner and other components of my old bar-b-que were terribly corroded, I did my patriotic duty and went to Sears to get a new one.

This is pretty high quality device that assembled pretty easily. I think accompanying today's interleague play between the Giants and the A's with some burgers and hotdogs and hanging out with the family will be my way of flag waving.

See ya at the next Anti-War rally!

( Jul 04 2004, 10:45:25 AM PDT ) Permalink
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Wednesday June 09, 2004

Better to burn out than fade away? Metallica's Lars Ulrich apparently had an inexplicable spell.

There were recent reports of medical emergencies on New Music Express' website. But it doesn't sound like an organic problem. Lars explains, "I had to chill out... I had an episode on the airplane going to Donington the other day... The last 6 months caught up with me..." (from a video posted on the Metallica website). Wow! The foibles of the rich and decadent can really catch up with ya, aye buddy?

Indeed, what a drag it is getting old; I hope the dork feels better. Thanks to Umlaut for the heads up.

( Jun 09 2004, 11:35:33 AM PDT ) Permalink