Tag: author

Why I Might Change Browsers

This is a very geeky entry. I apologize in advance. Feel free to pass it by.

When I go on the Internet, like right now, I use the Firefox browser. Firefox comes from Mozilla. I suppose this is unimportant to all but those of us who wear propeller hats.

Most people use Internet Explorer. That’s the browser that comes standard with Windows.

IE, as it’s called, is fine… except it is often the equivalent of living in a home in a bad neighborhood with no locks on the doors. Truthfully, if everyone were trustworthy, IE would be perfect. They aren’t. It isn’t.

There are some improvements Firefox brings, including some in security. A whole community has sprung up, writing ‘extensions’ to give it extra capabilities. I take advantage of many of those (including one that eliminates all pop-ups and most other ads).

Unfortunately, Firefox isn’t without its downside. It was totally incompatible with the software Mississippi State used to administer my courses. It falls on its face on MSNBC.com video files(big surprise there), asking me to install software I already have.

This weekend I attempted to install MyWebexPC.com. That too wouldn’t play well with Firefox.

I am not alone. There have been a number of articles citing the inability of FEMA’s website to work with anything but Internet Explorer.

From CNET: Unfortunately, more and more U.S. government agency Web sites are becoming Internet Explorer-only sites. For example, if you want to fill out a Katrina claim form online with FEMA, you have no other choice but to use the only 66 percent secure Internet Explorer 6.x.

The problem is, Firefox follows the standards that have been established for the web. Anything that won’t work with Firefox won’t work because the author has decided to write to Internet Explorer’s peculiarities. Websites should be browser agnostic.

Since IE controls nearly 90% of the browser market, it makes sense to keep things compatible with it. What doesn’t make sense is excluding Microsoft’s competitor.

If these sites were more forgiving toward agreed upon standards, Firefox might get a better foothold and Microsoft would have to respond by improving IE. Competition is good.

As it stands right now, I am seriously thinking of abandoning Firefox. That’s not because it isn’t good. It’s because I’m sick and tired of hitting dead ends.

Firefox doesn’t have to be ‘fixed’ for it to work. Quite the contrary. The only thing wrong with Firefox is, it isn’t broken.

Who Is Andrew Breitbart And Why Is Matt Drudge Throwing Him All Those Links?

I’m a habitue of Drudge. Though Matt Drudge has a political and sometimes social agenda, the site links to news I find interesting and does it on a fast and constant basis. Drudge is mostly a collector of news rather than a reporter. Just about all his headlines point to stories on other sites.

Until recently, most of Drudge’s stories came from traditional sources. If a story was actually from the Associated Press, he’d find a website carrying it and link there. You’d be directed to a newspaper, TV station, magazine or Yahoo, which carries wire service reports.

Now, he’s started linking to lots of stories on breitbart.com. Breitbart.com looks like an automated aggregator of AP and Reuters wire stories.

Quite honestly, I’d never heard of it or of Andrew Breitbart, the person whose telephone number is listed as the contact for the web address.

I’m not in Los Angeles, but I used Google’s mapping facility to look at breitbart.com’s physical address. It looks like a residential area just off the San Diego Freeway and near UCLA.

Then I started checking his name. Here’s a quote from Andrew Breitbart on author Roger Simon’s site.

The New York Times got it right — I am amicably leaving the Drudge Report after a long and close working relationship with Matt Drudge, a man who will rightfully take his place in the history books as an Internet news pioneer. I am also excited to be a partner in an inspired new endeavor, the Huffington Post. The last time I worked with Arianna she got a guy who didn’t deserve to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery disinterred. That was cool. I admit: I like to go where the action is.

And, if you go to the Internet Archives and look at some older breitbart.com pages, they actually show Drudge’s site. Well, they all do except this one. Oops.

So, it looks like Breitbart is now somehow connected with Arianna Huffington – liberal and, once again, Matt Drudge – conservative.

Is Drudge is sending all this traffic Breitbart’s way out of the goodness of his heart?

There’s nothing nefarious here (well nothing I can see). If there’s a financial relationship between Breitbart and Drudge, traditional journalists might question the ethical connotations of linking for profit. There’s nothing I’ve looked at that says that’s what’s happening and far be it from me to judge ethics. I just don’t know.

I’m writing what I found because I saw unusual online behavior and put 2+2 together. It’s all out in the open.

For me, it was interesting to see this new website spring up and get much of Drudge’s business. That’s where my curiosity kicked in. If you can aggregate tens or hundreds of thousands of hits… or more, Google ads (or similar ads, sold by others and placed on your site) alone could make a small, automated website very profitable with little investment or ongoing effort.

Blogger’s note: While looking through more websites, trying to read up on Andrew Breitbart, I stumbled on the fact that his father-in-law is Orson Bean. If the name means nothing to you, don’t worry. If you’re my age, Orson Bean was a very witty New Englander who worked the TV game show circuit in the 60s and 70s. I was a big fan. I wondered where he went.

Two Interesting Controversies… Well, To Me They Are

I thought I’d write about some interesting things I’ve read over the past few days.

The first seems to be a simmering controversy. It has not yet reached critical mass, but it should as soon as someone in the mainstream press catches on.

Is someone else fudging when it comes to global warming? Last week there were questions about a pro-industry push. This is just the opposite.

It starts with some comments on global warming from a respected scientist representing a respected organization

Kevin Trenberth from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) claims that warmer oceans and increased moisture could intensify showers and thunderstorms that fuel hurricanes.

“Trends in human-influenced environmental changes are now evident in hurricane regions,” Trenberth said. “These changes are expected to affect hurricane intensity and rainfall, but the effect on hurricane numbers remains unclear. The key scientific question is how hurricanes are changing.”

All well and good, except this is a conclusion and a report steeped in controversy.

Dr. Chris Landsea is from the National Hurricane Center. He’s the guy who wrote the Hurricane Center’s FAQ. He is not a happy camper.

Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4’s Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity” along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe.

Landsea goes on to say global warming will have minimal impact (if any) on tropical systems down the road. In fact, Landsea has resigned from this board in protest of the books being cooked.

Earlier today Matt Drudge was linking to an article which quoted Dr. Trenberth with no opposing viewpoints or perspective I was upset, so I wrote the author of the story.

Hello,

I appreciate you pointing this out. Unfortunately, the article was

published before I was finished with it. It was pulled off our site (but

not before it was picked up in other places), and I have now added some

context.

http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050616_hurricane_warm.html

I apologize for this mixup.

Michael Schirber

LiveScience

How much damage has been done? Who can tell. Even bad or retracted research sometimes takes on a life of its own. I’ll wait and see what’s quoted later.

On to the second bit of reading which concerns the space program. It’s not often I see something in the National Review I agree with (in fact it’s not often I see the National Review). Today was the day.

This time it’s an article by John Derbyshire about the space program and its dubious current value. This is something I’ve written about before here in the blog. It’s not a popular thing to say the space program is a total waste… but it is.

I wrote John (whom I’d never heard of before this evening) and he wrote back.

Thank you, Geoff. Excellent comments. I just did a radio spot with Jerry

Doyle — he’s a big shuttle fan & has swallowed all the NASA guff about

microgravity manufacturing & the rest.

I think of the Shuttle program as a sort of Brasilia of the skies — pure

1950s thinking. Who else, today, is riding a vehicle designed by slide

rule?

Best,

John Derbyshire

A Brasilia analogy – wow!

It’s My Job

Every once in a while someone will tell me some outlandish weather story. They believe it, but it’s untrue. I hate to burst their bubble, but it’s my job… weather, not bubble bursting.

Here’s today’s installment from the L.A. Times. It’s a story about heat problems suffered by soldiers in Iraq.

With temperatures approaching 130 degrees, medics fear that casualties will increase. “This could become a significant problem,” said Brian Humble, senior medical officer with a Marine emergency facility at a camp just outside Najaf.

The headline that lead me to this was on Drudge in red type: TEMPS NEAR 130 DEGREES IN IRAQ…

Here’s what I wrote to the author of the article, Edmund Sanders:

I know it’s a minor point, and I’m not denying it was hot, but it is doubtful Najaf has gotten above 120 any time in the past decade and 115 in the past few weeks.

In order for statements like: “With temperatures approaching 130 degrees, medics fear that casualties will increase” to be meaningful, we all have to agree on how we calculate the temperature. Normally, temperature is taken out of the sunshine in a louvered enclosure. It is an air temperature, not a surface temperature – so the thermometer needs to be protected in that way.

The historical high for Asia is 129f in Israel. Worldwide the highest was 136 in what is now Libya.

I live in Connecticut. Often, in the summer, my viewers will tell me it was 115-120 in their backyard – because of direct sunshine on the thermometer.

All the best,

Geoff Fox

I’ll let you know if he responds.

Here’s the bottom line – You can’t get the big things right unless you get the little things right.

Powerless

I was sound asleep when Steffie walked into the bedroom. She leaned down to wake me. I sprung up – as if I had been launched.

“The alarm is beeping,” she said.

I was groggy – after all, it wasn’t 10:00 AM yet. I walked down the hall to the panel for our alarm system. The LED readout and another light were flashing. From inside the box came, “beep.”

I turned to Steffie and asked if the power was out? I guess I wasn’t very lucid if I had to ask. It was off.

Back in high school I had a teacher, Mr. Temes, who complained that his Brooklyn neighborhood of Manhattan Beach was connected to the power grid by a piece of zip cord. It sometimes seems the same here.

We had been hit by moderately powerful thunderstorms overnight, with torrential downpours. But the power worked then. We didn’t lose the juice until it was sunny, dry and warm.

I reset the alarm system and went back to the bedroom. As I put my head on the pillow I stopped to listen to the silence.

We live in a world with so many little noises generated electrically that it’s easy to miss them. But you really do hear the difference when the power’s off.

Every electrical appliance with a transformer is vibrating a little when it’s plugged in. Refrigerators cycle their compressor on and off. The pump to pressurize our well water kicks in. There was nothing.

Well, actually, that’s not so. There was mostly nothing, punctuated by yet another beep every few seconds. Years ago we had bought a cordless phone with a great feature. So you don’t take it too far from its base, it beeps when it loses contact with the mother ship.

Every time the power fails, it beeps incessantly.

I was first made aware of the little noises we always hear when I read “The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium : An Englishman’s World.” Robert Lacey, the author, talked about the things we’d notice that were different back then, and noise was high on the list.

Before I fell asleep I picked up my cellphone (which now works at home) and called Helaine. She was out shopping. We are so totally dependent on electricity that until recently neither of us carried a key to the house – depending on the garage door opener and then security system protected interior doors.

Luckily, before she returned the power problem was fixed. I knew it when I heard a small motor kick in and the sound of a little extra water streaming into our toilet’s tank.

My Mom Says Don’t Be a Gambler

I speak with my mom nearly every night. I call her from the car on my way home from work. Though my dad is sleeping – he’s sleeping without his hearing aids, so it’s not really a disturbance.

She says she’s awake, and most of the time she probably is, but I know there are nights I must wake her up. She likes the calls and I do too, so she doesn’t complain.

Every once in a while we’ll talk about poker. She doesn’t know the game at all. She does, however, have poker advice for me.

“Geoffrey,” she will say, “don’t be a gambler.”

I think she means don’t bet a lot. Don’t bet money which is important to your life or lifestyle. Don’t risk your family’s well being. She is right.

The kind of gambling I do is penny ante stuff. And, at least for the last nine months, I’m winning – which makes it a little less threatening. Still, she has a point and I will heed her.

I have tried to explain to my mom that poker is a game of skill, with a fair amount of luck involved. You can be good enough to win over the long run – to beat the players and overcome the rake. There are pros who make their living at the tables. But, for short spurts, anything can happen.

Recently I have been getting the impression that, even if only by dumb luck, I stumbled into the best way to learn – concentrated online play. I read a blog entry yesterday that confirmed and enhanced what I had been thinking. I have no idea who the author is.

The results of the 2004 WSOP Main Event has made it dramatically clear that learning to play no-limit online has become the quickest way to become proficient. This realization is currently slamming the faces of a lot of poker pros at this very moment. Poker pros who are still experiencing shell shock at how well the “dead money amateurs” have been able to read them like open books, and in the process were able to neutralize their bluffs with calls based on very good reads of their “betting patterns”. Some of these pros will go into denial by blaming luck and ignorance on the part of the “dead money amateurs”. If you are one of these pros, you can continue to do this at your own risk.

He’s talking about the World Series of Poker, now nearing its conclusion in Las Vegas. His World Series of Poker read is similar to my recent impressions at Foxwoods.

Almost immediately I found an inner peace I had never experienced at a poker table before. Everything was crystal clear. I was totally confident. I watched as players went in and out, betting, checking, folding. I knew what they had… or was pretty sure.

I’m playing online tonight, honing my skills, as I type this.

I’ve made a promise to myself to tighten up my game another notch. Since Sunday’s tournament win, I have played too many hands – to my own detriment. I can’t be scared to fold. In the little sit and go, single table tournaments, I play (in fact in any tournament), the goal is not to win. The goal is to outlast and survive.

In my first tournament, it didn’t help.

Nor in the second…

Nor the third.

Car washing 101

On my way home from work, I stopped to wash the car. I’ve never had to wait to use the carwash at midnight, until tonight. Pictured, the car ahead of me.

I took my “Natural Disasters” quiz. I would have been faster, but I had to stop and write a note to the author of my textbook, questioning his ideas about flood control. Fifty two years old and I’m still a putz!