Orkut puts me on the spot: of my first five Friends, I know two only slightly, but I can’t avoid rating them all on scales of Sexy, Cool and Trustworthy. This strikes me as a design flaw.
the effects team got a new toy
Continuing to catch up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I noticed in season 3 several morphing shots (transformation between vampire and human face) much smoother than I’ve seen before. Such changes, I think, never happened in close-up in previous seasons.
Russell has seen fit to write about me on Orkut:
Anton is one of the most thoughtful, careful thinkers I know. One of the things I appreciate about him is the enormous depth of his knowledge.
Who me?! I have to keep reminding myself that my standards for “careful thought” and “deep knowledge” are higher than average.
I’m a little bit surprised that Russell didn’t add: “And he shoots straight.”
I got a big new disc for my Linux box, and copied over my home files from the corrupt old disc, apparently without problems.
I also upgraded from Red Hat 7.1 to RH 9 – and adjusting is a bitch!
Jonathan David Morris: Immigration and the Myth of Unwanted Jobs
So what are we talking about when we talk about “jobs that Americans aren’t willing to do?” Landscaping. Housekeeping. Things of that sort. Why aren’t Americans willing to do them? Because they’ve been taught to sit back, relax, and collect unemployment rather than take inglorious jobs.
Employers don’t deserve to be punished for this. They ought to be free from social engineering tactics like quotas and affirmative action, and they ought to be free to hire anyone willing to do the job — and that goes for people willing to answer customer service calls over in India, as well as people willing to transplant their families to come to America.
As always, however, the politicians won’t have it. Dick Gephardt, for one, says he’d work towards an international minimum wage if elected president. This would represent a greater victory in the worldwide workers’ revolution than any of the Soviet Union’s Cold War accomplishments.
Between this proposal and our [sic] efforts to shut down sweatshops, it seems America’s bent on inducing unemployment all over the globe.
Brad Edmonds: I Still Owe the Military Nothing
Truman bombed Japan because the Japanese demanded as their only condition of surrender that the emperor remain emperor. They continued to demand this after both bombings, so Truman just gave in. The bombings were for nothing. And with no retaliation for Truman or the US to fear, Truman still stopped, and gave the Japanese what they wanted. They didn’t even have rifles.
2025: The link is dead, but here is another. And that piece seems to be a sequel to this one.