Movable Type 3.0 beta testing starts this Monday, April 19th. You can apply to be a beta tester now.
Author: Bryant
From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast:
“Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.
I really haven’t had a lot to say about the Iraqi insurgency. Or, if you prefer, rebellion. Or terrorism. Or uprising. Me, I’ve been thinking of it as “the Iraqi disaster,” but I must admit that’s a somewhat loaded term.
I think in retrospect I’m a little wary. There’s this great debating tactic: when someone posts about problems in Iraq, and says “this is the sort of thing I was worried about; this is the sort of thing that proves my point” you go over and say, at the top of your lungs, “Look! She’s happy that American soldiers are dying!” It’s not a great tactic because it convinces people. It’s a great tactic because it reinforces the convictions of the people who use it, and allows them to feel all morally superior.
Still. This is the sort of thing I was worried about, and it’s the sort of thing that proves my point. I wish I’d been wrong.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has a fairly firm hold on Najaf. Najaf is a holy city, and if American troops attack it, the Mahdi Army will swell with recruits. The United States cannot afford to allow rebels to control a major Iraqi city. The wicket is more than a little sticky.
It wouldn’t matter if it was UN troops. The only armed force that could do anything about the problem without making the problem worse is an Iraqi armed force. Unfortunately, we don’t have the kind of credibility and authority in Iraq which would make it possible for us to convince a sizable Iraqi military effort in Najaf. Not that there was going to be any way to establish that kind of credibility.
The only likely path out of this is negotiations, and those are going to be difficult for entirely different reasons — mostly issues of face. Muqtada al-Sadr doesn’t have to back down, and Bush won’t.
The current casualty levels are high in relation to what we’ve seen over the course of the last year, but low in absolute terms. This is cold, but it is also true. It also doesn’t entirely matter, because the question is how longer we’ll be willing to watch a hundred Americans die every month with no exit strategy in sight.
Juan Cole is still the best place to go for analysis of the Iraqi situation. The Command Post has a conservative bias but that doesn’t keep them from posting both good and bad news.
Poppy Z. Brite’s new book, Liquor, is a pretty huge change of direction from her early work. It’s not horror, it’s not gory, and it’s not the work of a writer fascinated by young gay men in New Orleans…
Strike that last; maybe it’s not such a huge change. Still, no vampires or other creepy-crawlies. It’s a foodie novel set in New Orleans, and it’s well-written, so it’s pretty much perfect for people who love cooking. I wouldn’t call it terribly deep but I enjoyed it. Her husband is a cook, and she’s got the feel of the restaurant world down pat as far as I can tell based on the summers I spent running dishwashers on Nantucket.
As a novel, it’s got a fairly loose plot and a paucity of tension. As a slice of life piece, it’s a lot of fun.
Sadly, Kwame lost, but it won’t hurt his career. Which is good — I think he’d have been a better hire than Bill, although I’m sure Bill will do a good job for The Donald. On the other hand, Bill certainly did a better job on the final task than Kwame. Kwame was stuck with Omarosa no matter what, but he should have at least tried to sideline her.
Even given that he’d kept Omarosa, he might have had a chance to win if he’d defended himself in the boardroom. I’d have used the situation as an excuse to trot out the “I always hire people who are smarter than me” line, which has the advantage of being true. I’m pretty sure Kwame’s management style works better when he’s had the chance to build and/or mold his own team rather than inheriting a bunch of subpar workers.
I’m already looking forward to Apprentice 2, in large part because competitors can think about strategy now. This season, since nobody knew how the final few shows would work, strategic planning was a shot in the dark. Now, I think it’s clear that you want to ally with another strong competitor; the goal is to get to the final four and then out-interview your ally. That way you get him or her back on your team for the last task; it’s immensely important to have a strong employee there.
Mind you, that’s not exactly what Bill did (unless Bill and Amy had a stronger alliance than we saw) and it’s more or less what Kwame did. So it’s not a guaranteed win. Still, I think that if Kwame had dealt with Omarosa better he’d have won because of Troy’s strong support, and it’s certainly the strategy that got Kwame and Troy into the final five.
WISH #92 asks:
Have you ever gotten burned out as a gamer? What did you do to combat burnout? Which things you tried helped, and which ones didn’t? Which ones would you recommend to a gamer with burnout?
I actually feel a little burned out right now — not a lot, but a bit — so good timing. Hm.
I think that burnout is a life phenomenon for me, not a gaming-specific phenomenon. My work is keeping me too busy to think about gaming as much as I’d like, and there’re a bunch of other things swirling around, and I have trouble working up the enthusiasm to generate characters or think about GMing or anything. Which saddens me. (Yes, this is a typical symptom of depression; yes, I know.)
Mostly I just nudge myself to press on regardless. I don’t skip gaming even if I want to. I grind out character descriptions no matter how I feel about them, because I know they’re better than I give myself credit for. I read gaming material that’s given me joy in the past. I spent a while this week transcribing NPCs from Classic Organizations into Hero Designer, just to get myself back in the groove of thinking about HERO. And all that works pretty well.
A few days ago I was listening to Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball) on the morning sports show on WEEI. He didn’t say anything deeply surprising, but he did mention that he’d run into Bill Belichick at his agent’s office in New York the other week. Apparently, Coach Belichick is writing a Moneyball-style book about football — no surprise, since he takes the same value for money approach as Billy Beane. I’m looking forward to it, assuming he successfully navigates the publishing rapids.
N is another evil Flash game. It’s sort of an action platformer physics simulation. I like it a whole lot.
From last night’s press conference:
“The report itself, I’ve characterized it as mainly history. And I think when you look at it you’ll see that it was talking about a ‘97 and ‘98 and ‘99. It was also an indication as you mentioned that that bin Laden might want to hijack an airplane, but as you said, not to fly into a building but perhaps to release a person in jail. In other words, serving as a blackmail. And of course that concerns me. All those reports concern me.”
I gotta wonder. What steps do you take to prevent a hijacking carried out in order to fly a plane into a building, and what steps do you take to prevent a hijacking carried out in order to free someone from jail? And how are they different? I can’t help thinking that the purpose of a hijacking doesn’t have so very much to do with how you prevent it.
I’m booked for GenCon Indianapolis 2004, in the Omni Severin. I’ll see some of you there, I’m sure.