No, Don't Leak That!

R.E.M. R.I.P.

"To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening." R.E.M.

This isn't really surprising; thirty years is a long time. But, it does turn them into band that only exists in memory. Which is kindof sad. Though, as far as records go, they've been primarily a historical band for me since "Out Of Time", I have always wanted to see them play live again.

I suppose there's an inevitable reunion tour to look forward to, in five or ten years.

The Works of Frank Nimrod

Happy Birthday, Peaches

Turns out the Oracle Client has this neat feature where, apparently, you have to uninstall Oracle in order to boot your PC. Awesome way to kill an hour.

I'm sure that's described in an Oracle manual somewhere, but I'd have to go through three layers of management to get the fucking manual, which I couldn't do anyway because I couldn't boot my fucking computer.

Every other year I do a Favorite Album list. And, so I'll start working on my new list in just three short months. Yipe.

But, I was thinking it might be fun to do a group Favorite Album list, too. We could each submit our top 25 (or 20, or 10, whatever) and then use a simple "A vs B" ratings app to compare submitted records against one another. The app would pick records out of the submitted list, two at a time, at random; you pick the best one from the pair; the win/lost gets recorded; rankings are updated; repeat. And, the back end could use some kind of Elo ranking system (like they use for chess, Scrabble, etc.) to calculate a final ranking. Leave voting open for a month or so, then, see what we picked. We could limit voting to people who submitted albums, or open it up to anyone, etc.. details can be hashed out later.

It would be a pretty simple web app to write, but I won't do it if there's no interest.

So, let me know if you're interested!

The Tea Party's Million

Everybody in the office is coughing again.

Man stakes claim to tube steak statue

Could somebody tell me when “no tax decreases, ever!” became lefty dogma ?

It’s such a weird position to take. On one hand, the idea that we need to increase revenues (now!) completely synchronizes with the right’s insistence that the deficit is going to murder us all in our sleep. And it completely synchronizes with the right’s insistence that the left is nothing but a bunch of tax-and-spenders.

But sometimes, tax breaks help people - especially tax breaks on low earners during times of economic hardship^* !

This is just baffling. If possible, I’d like to file a formal complaint with the Lefty Dogma Committee about this. When are they meeting next?

* [insert long discussion about the Laffer curve here]