The Clever Shark

Here’s an aspect of the whole Newsweek Qu’ran controversy you’re not likely to hear from the sheepish American press. Once you get past the bullshit White House spin, then you can find the truth.

Trump: Freedom Tower ‘disgusting’, ‘unacceptable’. I don’t know about “disgusting”, but the idea of replacing the WTC with a structure which seems all show and no substance — about half the bulding will be an empty spire-structure to artificially raise the Tower’s height to a jingoistic 1776 feet — does strike me as fairly insulting to the people who died there on 9/11.

The difference between Europe and America. Sadly, it’s all too true…

Alberta family treated for hantavirus infection. Perhaps the greater crisis in Canada is not a political one…

Just as the blog was migrated to MySQL 5 last week, this week it has now been migrated to PHP 5. It meant a surprising bit of work, but now that’s all behind me. This was a prerequisite for major changes coming soon.

Bush and Blair were going to invade Irak, but they first had to come up with a reason. This disgusting mess reminds me of what Nietzsche said about philosophers — “they pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic: while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an ‘inspiration,’ generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event”. (Beyond Good and Evil)

‘Steve Ballmer, I believe, is a liar.’ You know you’re having a bad day when you manage to piss off both gay-rights groups AND right-wing preachers at the same time. This is related to the previous posted link.

Microsoft is paying off Ralph Reed to the tune of $240k a year for ‘consulting’. What Mr. Reed, who is not a technologist, has to offer Microsoft is really uncertain. Mr. Reed is known as the leading bigoted and homophobic political organizer in the USA, and his being on Microsoft’s payroll is rumored to be a means for Microsoft to gain direct access to the White House (Mr. Reed was an organizer for George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004). It’s also rumored to be a big payoff to the religious right, who seem to also have made Microsoft “change its mind” about a Washington state bill to give additional protection to gays and lesbians. This is a revolting development. Remember now that when you buy Microsoft products you fund the extreme right wing movement in the USA today.

I’ve just switched the database engine on the backend to MySQL 5… what can I say, I’m just a “bleeding edge” kind of guy. The good news is that it seems to work pretty well so far, what with it being a beta and all. The best part of the operation was to find that with a little configuration work the conversion can be done in a pretty seamless manner.

Adobe’s Macromedia acquisition FAQ, translated from PR into English. It’s a useful guide to cutting through the marketingSpeak(tm).