Found water

Cats love "found water," especially running water. Instinct, apparently, tells them to prefer it over standing water. Some clever entrepreneurs, understanding this principle, have come up with constantly recirculating water fountains intended for pets to drink from.

But Mister Gato doesn't need a Drinkwell... he's got us trained to turn on his own private water fountain every time we pass the bathroom sink:

Mister Gato's water fountain

Mister Gato, of course, doesn't just like "found water" in the sink. He also likes "found water" in your glass, especially if you've got some ice in it, and he's never turned up his nose at "found milk" either.

(Earlier Mister Gato posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. See The Modulator and The Carnival of the Cats for more bloggers' cats from around the world.)

This one hits a little close to home.

Hypomanic? Absolutely. But Oh So Productive! (New York Times, March 22, 2005)

At some point, almost everyone encounters them - restless, eager people, consumed with confident curiosity. Researchers suspect that their mental fever shares some genetic basis with that of bipolar disorder, known colloquially as manic depression, a psychiatric disorder characterized by effusive emotional highs and bouts of paralyzing despair.

In recent decades, scientists have found that bipolar disorder is widely variable, and that its milder forms are marked by hypomanias, currents of mental energy and concentration that are less reckless than full-blown manic frenzies, and unspoiled, in many cases, by subsequent gloom.

New research helps explain how people with manic or hypomanic tendencies navigate the small triumphs and humiliations of daily life, and provides clues to how some of them quickly shake off the emotional troughs that their ambitious natures should make inevitable.

Won't you be my NeighborNode?

Another great Wi-Fi idea: NeighborNodes.

In cities around the world, community spirited techno-geeks have been setting up free Wi-Fi hotspots as part of the freenet movement. All it takes is a Wi-Fi router placed near a window or connected to a rooftop antenna, a cable or DSL modem and some firewall software. Users will always find free hotpsots.

Here in New York, in addition to the cluster of nodes run by NeighborNode.net, we've got NYCWireless.net, too!

Hoops fever

It's Sweet Sixteen Time!

Last night's basketball games were but an appetizer for the main course today:

Three teams from the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) region of North Carolina--UNC, Duke, N.C. State-- are playing their regional semifinal games tonight. (And but for a very tightly contested second-round loss in double overtime, a fourth North Carolina team, Wake Forest, would be right there with them.)

As Mike Wise observes, reviewing last week's games in the Washington Post:

Meantime, what a weekend for Carolina hoops. For the first time since 1989, three teams from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle advanced to the round of 16. The Tar Heels, the Wolfpack and the Blue Devils, 2-0, just like that. The state of Indiana did not even have a team in the tournament this year. Down here, they serve sweet tea and humble pie with their hoops.

North Carolina was awesome. The Tar Heels did not wear down Iowa State as much they punished and buried the Cyclones, 92-65, to advance at Charlotte Coliseum. They won their first- and second-round NCAA tournament games by a combined 55 points. The Tar Heels scored 188 points in two games. With respect to Illinois, Roy Williams's team is the best in the country.

As a man who grew up in Raleigh (as a State fan, actually), graduated from the University of North Carolina, and has had the good sense to hate Duke (unless no other ACC team is in contention, in which case I will offer my grudging support) since I was a small child, I must say, it's an embarrassment of riches.

I am thawing out a pound of Don Murray's excellent barbecue (stashed in my freezer since my last trip home), making some cole slaw and (sadly, given current blood-sugar issues) unsweetened iced tea, and settling in tonight with gleeful anticipation.

In the Austin regional semifinals, Duke plays Michigan State at 7:10 PM.

In Syracuse, we've got N.C. State playing Wisconsin at 7:27, followed by UNC vs. Villanova at an estimated start time of 9:57. I'll definitely be taking a disco nap this afternoon to stay strong for that one.

And if it goes like I think it might, UNC will play NC State on Sunday and then go on to face Duke in the Final Four... what my friend BobLee refers to as the "Apocalypse Sunday" scenario of N.C. State beating Carolina is just too grim a prospect to be considered.

While I was out...

The must-read blog Belmont Club moved to a new location. You definitely don't want to miss Wretchard's continuing commentary, so update your bookmarks.

And the best (IMNSHO) Windows news aggregator client, RSS Bandit, issued a major upgrade, with a pile of cool new features. Nifty stuff! Thanks to the RSS Bandit development team.

Get a Living Will. Now.

So much ink, and so many pixels, have already been spilled over the Terri Schiavo case. I really have nothing useful to add in the way of commentary to the depressing, disgusting political circus that this lingering fifteen-year nightmare has turned into.

I will say this, however: if you are of legal age, and you do not have legal documents setting out your wishes for medical care in the event that you become unable to speak for yourself, fix that situation immediately.

Here are some good resources:

The American Bar Association's site on Advance Directives.

The invaluable Nolo.com's area on medical powers of attorney and living wills.

Courtesy of Commerce Clearing House, here's a site where you can download legally valid power of attorney and medical treatment forms for any state in the U.S.

The U.S. Living Will Registry has all kinds of information resources, and also allows you to register and store your living will with them (free of charge) once you create it.

Finally, a very affordable commercial solution: for less than $50, Quicken WillMaker Plus 2005 will create legally valid healthcare directives and powers of attorney (as well as just about every other kind of estate planning document you can think of); the program will ask you all the relevant questions, saving you from having to do the research yourself.

P.S. And if you care at all about your wishes being actually followed, you'll probably want to stay out of Catholic hospitals if you're seriously ill:

The free and informed judgment made by a competent adult patient concerning the use or withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures should always be respected and normally complied with, unless it is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.

At least the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is up front about letting you know that their values trump yours.

Now, where were we?

Been a while since I posted to the blog.

Very busy couple of days at the office on Monday and Tuesday of last week.

Wednesday I woke up feeling bad, called in sick. It felt like sort of a mild stomach flu or something. Fever, headache. Crampy, achy - a bad pain in my lower left side. Ick. Slept approximately eighteen hours.

Thursday: Lather, rinse, repeat.

By Friday I realized that things were getting worse, not better. Had been having trouble getting an appointment with my overbooked-and-popular regular MD, so I got myself to the local doc-in-the-box.

The doctor ran a couple of quick tests and, to use a technical term, freaked out. In particular, my blood sugar was through the roof (blood sugar? Dude, I'm not a diabetic... um, I don't *think* I'm a diabetic...)

He sent me straight to the emergency room (which, in New York City, is quite an experience... like being trapped for eight hours in an overpacked passenger car on an unusually incompetent third-world railroad, say.) I was admitted to the hospital directly from there.

After four days of blood tests, x-rays, CT scans, etc. etc., they delivered the final diagnosis:

• Pneumonia, lower lobe of left lung (say that five times fast.)
• Inflamed pancreas, verging on pancreatitis
• The elevated blood sugar (probably due to the pancreatic inflammation) is being treated for now as new-onset Type II diabetes (oh joy!) until treatment is completed and we can sort things out.

I am home now, with computer access, etc. I still have many days of tests to get through, which will involve a fair bit of running around lower Manhattan, and it will be a while before I am cleared to return to work. But I got the best night's sleep I've had in a long time last night, my fever is gone, and so is (most of) the pain. Those are all good signs, I think/hope.

If I owe you an e-mail, apologies. I'm working on it!

Bullshit Bingo!

I know what I'm gonna be doing on my next long conference call.

Dear Symantec: You suck.

From: Barry Campbell
To: [Symantec CEO, COO, CIO]
cc: [Clueless Indian Outsourcing Company]
Subject: Technical Support Woes

On Saturday, March 5, 2005, I opened up a case with Symantec's web/e-mail based tech support, regarding my sudden inability to use Live Update with Norton Internet Security 2005. The case was assigned as number [redacted].

I was contacted by a representative of Iseva, where Symantec has apparently outsourced its technical support. The entire e-mail trail is reproduced below my signature [blog readers: I have spared you this - bc], but in essence, what happened was this:

-- I used the web form on the Symantec site to describe my difficulties using Live Update in Internet Security 2005. In the web form submission, I indicated that I had already tried all the relevant troubleshooting procedures in the Knowledgebase, with no success.

-- The Iseva rep wanted to walk me through a troubleshooting procedure I had already performed, based on a document in the Knowledgebase that I had already found.

-- When I informed the Iseva rep that I had already tried everything he was asking me to do, I heard nothing further from him. My last communication from the Iseva rep was on Sunday, March 6, almost one week ago; I wrote on March 8th to ask what was happening with my case, and there was no reply.

I have several questions.

-- Does Symantec feel that this is an adequate level of technical support for a paying customer? (I don't.)

-- Does Iseva feel that they are doing a good job for Symantec? (I don't.)

-- Is abandoning the customer once the first-level support script is exhausted an official Symantec and/or Iseva policy? (It appears to be.)

Frankly, I think that this has been an absolutely disgraceful performance on Iseva's part, and by extension, Symantec's.

I am stuck with disabled software on my desktop machine, and am at the point of removing it, demanding a refund from Symantec, and installing AVG Anti-Virus and ZoneAlarm.

Please give me a reason--any reason--to reconsider.

Shagadelic, baby!

"The Americans are identical to the British in all respects except, of course, language." -- Oscar Wilde

Which brings us to today's text, courtesy of WRAL-TV (Raleigh, NC) news:

Bill Would Establish Shaggin' License Plate

RALEIGH -- The Daughters of the American Revolution have one. Recipients of the Purple Heart and the Silver Star have one, too. You can even get one to show your support for sea turtles.

State Sens. David Hoyle and Tony Rand are co-sponsoring a bill that would establish a license plate paying homage to shag dancing.The proposed license plate would bear the phrase "I'd Rather Be Shaggin'" and would also have a picture illustrating two shaggers.

For such a license to be printed and issued, the Division of Motor Vehicles must get 300 or more applications.

Okay. When Southerners talk about "shagging," they mean to reference a rather stylized dance that one performs to "beach music."

In much of the rest of the English-speaking world, especially the UK and environs, people will think you're talking about this.

Personally, I will always treasure the memory of asking (in all freshman innocence and earnestness) a beautiful English exchange student, at a college party where beach music was being played, whether she'd like to shag.

(Hat tip: Ruby Sinreich)

Browser wars: Firefox vs. Internet Explorer

The "browser battle" between emerging upstart Mozilla Firefox and monopolist Internet Explorer has been getting a lot of play in the technical press for quite some time now.

The mainstream press has also weighed in on the story, including heavy hitters like the Wall Street Journal's technology columnist Walt Mossberg, who gave Firefox high marks in his December 30, 2004 column (WSJ subscription required), praising it for its tabbed-browsing features and integrated RSS support.

But until recently, analysis of the business case for choosing between Firefox and IE has been curiously lacking, as has a solid market analysis of current conditions.

Enter Knowledge@Wharton, a newsletter from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, with their article, "Browser Wars: Will Firefox Burn Explorer?" They offer interviews with Wharton School faculty and experts on the topic. For example:

As far as browsers go, customers are disgruntled with Microsoft. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation, formed in July 2003 with funding from America Online's Netscape unit to promote open source web software, cites 25 million downloads of its Firefox browser in the last 100 days. Web measurement company WebSideStory reports that Firefox had a U.S. market share of 5.69% as of Feb. 18 compared to Internet Explorer's 89.85%. While it's far too early to call Microsoft's browser an also-ran, Internet Explorer had a market share of 95.48% in June 2004, says WebSideStory. Globally, the trend toward Firefox is the same. On Feb. 28, Amsterdam-based web analytics company Onestat.com put Firefox's market share at 8.45% globally, up 1% from November 2004.

"The Internet Explorer is a terrible browser and it has security problems," says Wharton legal studies professor Dan Hunter. "Firefox is just a better browser, but I would argue that its market share gains have come because spyware and other hacks plague Explorer."

[...]

According to [Wharton marketing professor Peter] Fader, increased marketing of Firefox is unlikely. After all, Mozilla doesn't have the marketing budget to do a sustained campaign. Meanwhile, Microsoft has one asset that is almost unbeatable: Inertia. Microsoft's browser is packaged when you buy a PC. Other software such as Outlook and Office is included. Are people going to go out of their way to download a Firefox browser or some open source alternative to Microsoft products? "Sure you could argue that some of Microsoft's products are bloated and suboptimal, but they do get the job done reasonably well," says Fader.

Okay, so it's not exactly rocket science. But the Wharton business geeks make some solid points and demonstrate a reasonable understanding of both technical and market issues with respect to the Browser Wars, 2005 edition. It's worth a read if you're interested in the subject.

(Disclaimer: I've been on record for a long time as a Firefox supporter, and have not only blogged about in the past, I've urged people to switch. Just so you know where I'm coming from.)

Also posted on enrevanche.

March Madness, ACC version

The ACC Tournament is in full swing. Oh man, I'm like a kid at Christmas!

We North Carolinians take our basketball seriously... and basketball takes us seriously, too; three of the top five teams in the nation right now (Duke, UNC, Wake Forest) are based in NC.

Just watched UNC almost lose a game to bottom-ranked Clemson. (The Heels woke up late in the second half and pulled it out, 88-81.)

Was IMing with a friend this morning, and he observed that his favorite thing about college basketball was that in any given game, any team can get hot and beat their highly-ranked opponent.

He's absolutely right. We saw it happen last week when three nationally-ranked teams succumbed to underdog opponents, and we almost saw it again this afternoon in the UNC game.

Of all places to find wisdom about college basketball, here's an interesting article from Reuters (dateline: Raleigh, NC.)

U.S. interest in college basketball, especially in areas where professional sports do not dominate, can be nearly as rabid in March as is the following for soccer in Europe.

"I don't think anything can compare (to the NCAA tournament) for a three-week span," said sales representative Chester Brown as he waited for lunch at a sandwich shop in Raleigh this week.

"For four days a week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for a three-week span, everybody in every office building in the country is talking about basketball," Brown said.

The analogy to World Cup soccer is right on.

Once again, I point you to the ACC Hoops blog and to Yoni Cohen's excellent College Basketball blog. Terrific blog coverage at this time of year.

Cats and guns... a potentially lethal combination

Down in Raleigh, visiting with the parents, and getting ready to watch the ACC Tournament on the telly.

Then I saw this story come burbling over the AP wire:

BATES TOWNSHIP, Mich. - A man cooking in his kitchen was shot after one of his cats knocked his 9mm handgun onto the floor, discharging the weapon, Michigan State Police said.

The wound was apparently not fatal; otherwise, I think we would've just been introduced to the latest candidate for the 2005 Darwin Award.

Please, gun-and-cat owners: if you are going to disregard the fundamental rules of firearms safety (hint: *never ever* leave your semiautomatic pistol lying around with one in the chamber!), please practice good Cat Awareness.

Cat Awareness 101: If your personal property is sitting in a location where your cat might like to lie down, it's toast. Mister Gato, in his unending quest for lebensraum, has knocked everything from the day's mail to expensive electronic equipment onto the floor.

(There is, of course, ample literary precedent for the pistol-packing kittycat. Come to think of it, Behemoth carried a nine, too.)

Mister Gato, running slightly to fat-o

Mister Gato is bulking up and turning into quite a bruiser, after a year-long diet of Iams and all the mice he can catch and eat and his conversion to indoor-cathood:

You weren't really interested in those acrostics, were you?

Unlike Jason Giambi and Jose Canseco, he did it without the benefit of steroids.

(Earlier Mister Gato posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. See The Modulator and The Carnival of the Cats for more bloggers' cats from around the world.)

Catching up

Whew, y'all. Haven't been at the Blog Console for a week now -- incredibly busy times at the office, and something had to give. Last week it was the blog, unfortunately. Apologies to my regular readers (both of you) and I'll try to do better this week.

Checking in quickly at halftime of the Duke-UNC basketball game... speaking of which, Yoni Cohen has moved his excellent College Basketball blog to spiffy new quarters. As March Madness approaches it's a must-read every day.

Much news to share with you, which I'll try to do tonight and tomorrow.

Shut up and fork over the fifty bucks already

Over at SwaggerSays, enrevanche buddy BobLee posts about the furor du jour at our mutual alma mater: an attempt to raise athletic fees by (gasp) $50. (See, for instance, this editorial in the Daily Tar Heel.)

As BobLee hisownself rightly points out:

A $50 increase put into perspective is 3.5 large pizzas OR two tanks of gas in a PT Cruiser OR a 10 oz jar of face cream from Sephora.

I would like to break it down for you just a little further, however. Stay with me, now, 'cause I'm going to run the numbers.

Total tuition and fees for the 2004-2005 Academic year, for UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduates taking a full load of courses (12+ credit hours per semester) is as follows:

NC Residents: $2225.26 per semester, or $4450.52 per year
Out of state: $8774.26 per semester, or $17,548.52 per year

(Source: UNC Cashier's Office.)

According to the College Board the average costs at four-year undergraduate institutions in the US are as follows:

Four-year private $20,082 (up 6 percent from last year)
Four-year public $5,132 (up 10.5 percent from last year)

Now, remember, these costs are the averages for all colleges and universities in the country, and for many of these, to paraphrase Paul Fussell, the resemblance to an actual institution of higher learning is purely architectural.

The UNC Board of Trustees wants to kick tuition up by $200 a year and student fees by $50 (for in-state students.) For those of you doing the math at home, that's a 5.6% increase (about half the national average for public institutions, I cannot help adding.)

Still with me? Okay. Now factor in:

UNC is on everybody's short list of the best public universities in the nation. Even when compared with private universities it always shows up in the "most selective" ranks and near the top of the overall heap.

For example, the US News 2005 colleges survey, just out this week, ranks UNC at #29 nationally overall, ahead of such august institutions as New York University and the University of Wisconsin and in the same range with Georgetown and UCLA.

(Okay, my wife, the Harvard grad, is entitled to look down her nose at me a little, but I ask you - when's the last time Harvard had an NCAA Men's Basketball team in serious contention in the post-season? That's right: Never.)

In sum:

The (heavily taxpayer-subsidized) tuition and fees at UNC are an incredible bargain, maybe one of the Best Buys available today in higher education, particularly for in-state residents.

(Try taking your $4450 and change up the road to Duke University and see how far it gets you.)

Update: On Bullshit

Catching up on old posts, part II (and, my goodness, there's certainly a lot of bovine excrement around the blog this weekend, more so than usual!):

Reader and pal Chap points us to this very thoughtful Times (of London) treatment of the refreshing and important philosophical treatise, On Bullshit.

We all think we can identify bullshit. We know when we are talking bullshit ourselves, and we have all been guilty of it at times, in the pub or the pulpit, though some of us produce more than others... But what is bullshit? The concept is universally recognised, yet as Professor Frankfurt writes, "the most basic and preliminary questions about bullshit remain, after all, not only unanswered but unasked."

He begins, like all good philosophers, by defining what bullshit is not. Bullshit is dishonest, yet it is not necessarily mendacious. The bullshit artist may not tell you the truth (though he may do so inadvertently), but he is not deliberately lying. This is because bullshit cares nothing for truth or falsehood, accuracy or error, and that is its force and danger.

Both the liar and the honest man must have regard for truth, the former to subvert it and the latter to propagate it. Bullshit, by contrast, is fundamentally unconcerned with truth or falsehood, but only with appearance, effect and persuasion, however transitory... The essence of bullshit is getting away with it, with persuading listeners or readers of a sincerity that is, by definition, phoney. The bullshit artist simply does not care about truth: “He pays no attention to it at all,” writes Professor Frankfurt. “By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

Update: GeoURL.org back in business

An update to an earlier post:

The GeoURL.org server is back on line (with nearly 150,000 existing database entries still intact.) GeoURL is a geographic database for weblogs; it allows you to enter a site's URL and see all of its "neighbors."

Like so: Who's near enrevanche?

To register your site, you need to embed your latitude/longitude information, and your site's name, in your header metatags, then ping GeoURL.

Here's what that looks like for this site (using "ICBM" as the tag name for your lat/long is a bit of black humor going back to Usenet days):

<meta name="ICBM" content="40.737, -74.003" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="enrevanche" />

Added to the enrevanche button collection:

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter - missile defense expert

You never know what you're going to learn when you check in with Metafilter for the day.

Here's a little gem that surfaced in a thread on Danica McKellar (she played Winnie on "The Wonder Years" and has a math degree, endearing her to geeks-of-a-certain-age):

As a member of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, and as a session guitarist for Carly Simon, Bryan Adams, Ringo Starr and many others, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter has been a clandestine rock and roll hero since the '70s. Now, as a specialist in terrorism, missile defense and chemical and biological warfare, he's also a covert hero for the U.S. military.

He's currently working for the Department of Defense as an adviser to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and has also served as a top military adviser for numerous congressmen and senators.

(Source: VH1.)

In other brainy-celeb news on that thread, Dolph Lundgren is a degreed engineer who won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at MIT.

Dateline: Milford, Nebraska -- Flaming shitpile extinguished

You know, everybody's got problems, and every place has problems, too. There are big-city problems, and there are rural problems.

Here in New York City, we worry about things like subway relay room fires taking out huge chunks of our infrastructure at random, or encounters with unmedicated schizophrenics on the street.

Out in Milford, Nebraska, local officials are relieved to announce that they have managed to extinguish a 2,000 ton mountain of smoldering cowshit that has been burning for four months. (See also: local coverage from the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal Star.)

Now, if you're like me, and you start free-associating on "2,000 ton pile of smoldering cowshit," you're gonna think about these guys (or, to be fair, these guys.) Spontaneous combustion in a feedlot compost heap isn't the first thing that springs to mind.

One thing's for sure: the residents of Milford, Nebraska are breathing easier tonight.