December 31, 2012
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 77,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
August 13, 2010
The other night I needed to get some work done. Work that required access to my employer’s network. Access that required me to install the VPN software on my new laptop. And that’s when things started to go wrong.
You have to register with the VPN provider before can dowmload their VPN client. And it’s not just any registration process — it is a highly secure one that looks like some command and control freak setup the process. First you have to give them everything from your phone number to your job title. Then you have to come up with a password that has not only letters and numbers — get this — but mixed case. Because I’m sure crackers are getting into the provider’s web site to download this free software via exhaustive password guessing instead of just registering for free on the site. Happens all the time.
But just in case I forgot the password to download free software I got to pick not one, but two security questions. And oh — my login name has to have between 9 and 50 characters, with no spaces, at least one letter, and may contain numbers. I couldn’t make something up this silly.
So, I registered. Eventually. After going through maybe 200 “errors” presented by the regristration page screen was…. another page that said “Your session is no longer active.”
The second sign that something was wrong was… it didn’t actually work. Yep, every time I entered in a new user id it was … simply forgotten at the login screen. And the password reset screen.
One more point of joy — clicking on the “Log in” link at the web site’s home page gives you “The page you have requested is not available.” I’ll bet.
So I try copying over the MacOS application directory from my old laptop. And this is when I realized that the VPN provider folks are fools. It looks like the installation sprays its contents over a wide variety of directories, like some kind of … Windows install. If you just copy over the Application directory you find out that the crapware expects to find a library installed in /Library/Frameworks/.
Around the time I realize that this resembles a Windows install, I realize that most Mac OS users would never put up with this — Steve Jobs would have someone executed before putting up with this. The distinguishing difference between Windows users and Mac OS users is that one wants to use a computer and that the other wants to get work done — so there must be a Mac OS solution to this.
It turns out that Mac OS has the VPN built in. But wait… it requires a shared secret, which it is very careful to not let you see. However, it is stored in an encrypted form. Thinking once again that most people wouldn’t put up with this I start googling for a solution — and find a web site that will decrypt it for you. And possibly harvest it as well.
So, as a result of wanting to get work done, and school boy security engineering, I’m sending the shared secret over the Internet to a site I’ve never heard of to decrypt it.
Awesome!
May 16, 2010
Hola muchachos! It’s your hombre-in-chief, Angry New Mexican here. I stumbled upon this article the other day, which explains why requests for Obama’s birth certificate is starting to have a non-trivial cost on the government of Hawaii. I shared it with my fellow angry men and they had some better ideas than just making it illegal — charging the birthers to for their requests. Angry Overeducated Catholic, explains it all using his usual wit.
Angry Overeducated Catholic
I agree with the proposal to turn birthers into a profit center; this seems to be a no-brainer. It’s not even an ideological or political issue—agencies regularly charge reasonable recovery fees for FOIA requests, and rightly so.
Processing documents is expensive…even if, as I’m sure is the case, the birth certificate is in a special file near the main desk since it’s requested constantly…
The thing that gets me is, why the heck do people keep requesting the documents? If you weren’t satisfied with Hawaii’s documentary standards the first 100 times, what do you expect to learn from the 101st? If Hawaii was snowed by a crafty foreign devil and his bewitched American sugar momma and gave a birth certificate to a shift foreign-born baby, what can you possibly learn from the birth certificate that will substantiate that? There’s clearly no smoking gun, or the first 1000 folks would have found it.
(It would be like constantly pestering the USAF to re-release the Project Blue Book documents. Not the real, super-secret ones proving alien life, you understand, but the same ones they’ve already released that you didn’t like. Again, and again, and again.)
Hey, birthers, move along! There really is nothing to see here! The princess is in a different castle!
But, as others have pointed out, they have every right to request it, and Hawaii has every right to charge them each a $25 processing fee. Heck, waive the fee for Hawaiian residents who have made less than 10 requests in a year. And waive the first 10 fees for any given document, if you are really generous. But by all means if thousands of dumbasses keep requesting the document they’ve already viewed on the Internet a million times, make those idiots pay!
March 17, 2010
The Economix blog over at the NYT turned me on to how the Midwest is the “Beer Belly” of America, where bars outnumber grocery stores. You see, the folks at floatingsheep.org have done all sorts of exciting things, such as the awesome “pizza map” which shows whether your region prefers pizza, guns, or strippers. I was very surprised by the small number of Southerners who liked strippers. But Angry Overeducated Catholic put me straight…
Angry Overeducated Catholic
Well, remember that this doesn’t really show that Southerners don’t like strippers…only that they like guns (or pizza) more.
Also, we should always remember that one stripper can “service” a goodly number of customers, and strip club customers may not mind driving for 20-30 minutes to the club, since they plan to spend hours there….thus we should expect pizza places to be more numerous, because nobody wants to wait an extra half hour for pizza (except Chicagoans)…
The real apples to apples are strip clubs to gun shops, as:
March 8, 2010
After reading Bang Bank you’re safe I thought it would be interesting to produce a graph of the Brady Gun score against the gun homicide rate per 100,000.
2009 Brady Score vs. Gun homicide rate
No real surprise: the gun score doesn’t seem to have much to do with your chance of being killed with a gun.
There are a lot of problems with this graph; correlation is not causation, the scale is a bit off, and California tends to dominate the eye, being all the way on the right.
But the biggest problem is that the underlying Brady score is measuring inputs instead of outputs. It is like trying to figure out if a school is any good by looking at how much money it spends instead of how well the students learn.
January 20, 2010
[I have been gone for some time, and perhaps the loss of lackluster McCain and subsequent abandonment of “moderate” Barack Obama to the machinations of Pelosi, Reid, et. al., affected me more than I knew. But if so, Brown’s victory has revitalized me! Or, equally likely, I was just a lazy ass who got distracted and wandered off for no good reason and am now back, again for no good reason. Your choice, I guess. — AOC ]
Back in the summer of 2009, while celebrating a notable birthday of a good friend, I was chatting with two of the birthday boy’s very liberal, very activist friends. They were naturally overjoyed by Obama’s election (and, in fact, by Biden’s selection—being that rarest of things: Biden groupies), and were certain it was just the start of a sweeping demographic and electoral shift to a permanent progressive majority. Not unlike our own Angry New Mexican (well, except for ANM’s odd infatuation with Her Thighness and low opinion of our President).
Having had some of the same experience a certain number of years before (remember that coming permanent Republican majority?) I expressed skepticism. I told them that the Democrats had arrogantly assumed that the electorate’s mandate for reform and fiscal responsibility was a mandate for sweeping progressive changes, despite the massive evidence to the contrary. And the public was, I told them, becoming angry at this apparent disconnect and the apparent arrogant disregard for Main Street’s traditional center-right views.
They were scornful, and in the fullness of time we made a little bet. In our conversation, we had each agreed that the GOP would gain some seats in the House during 2010, but not enough to pick up a majority. But we disagreed on what would happen in the Senate in 2010. So I bet that the GOP would pick up enough seats to end the super-majority (but not retake the Senate) and my counterpart bet that the Democrats would pick up at least one additional net seat, increasing their super-majority. We agreed to a push if things remained 60-40.
I’m not going to assume victory just now, as there’s plenty of time for the GOP to screw up or for the Democrats to get their act together, but I have to say that my fine dinner at an excellent restaurant on my liberal acquaintance’s dime is looking pretty solid. And, even more gratifying, for the reason I mentioned: the sheer arrogance and incompetence of the Democratic leadership. (The mirror image, to be fair, of the Republican arrogance and incompetence that lost the GOP the whole shebang in 2008.)
Witness Brown, a moderate, country-club style republican in the mode of a McCain or Olympia Snow, become a rallying point for libertarian and Tea Party money. And doing it not by concealing who he is, but by emphasizing who he’s not. He is a moderate, center-right guy, he is not a progressive lackey of Pelosi and Reid. That was enough, even running for Ted Kennedy’s hereditary seat in Massachusetts, and it will be enough for lots of other folks in the elections to come. Unless the Democrats change course—which they won’t (as a party, at least—many of the reform-minded Dems who ran in 2008 may take action to remind folks why they got elected, and that’s a good thing).
Oddly, this could all actually end up working out well for Obama in 2012, if he sees the writing on the wall and, like Clinton before him, reinvents himself to be what folks like Angry Midwesterner assumed he was in 2008: a fiscally responsible reform minded candidate who wants to change a broken corrupt system. As I said at the time, he really did have an historic opportunity to accomplish great things, if indeed he was the moderate reformer he claimed to be.
Conspiratorial folks might even whisper he was always that and this was all a grand scheme to depose Witch Queen Pelosi and Crown Price Harry from their thrones…but I think that misses the true tragedy. Obama was always both a reform minded candidate and a progressive true believer. He was seduced into believing that the 2008 election had given him the historical opportunity to move beyond simple reform and enact the Second Bill of Rights of his hero, FDR. He thought he could follow through on Saul Alinsky’s goal to radically transform society without all the blood and revolution and slaughter of the enemies of the people. So he allowed himself to be used by Pelsoi (another true believer) and Reid (a corrupt bastard) in a shameless attempt to grab power over most of the American economy (by effectively nationalizing the financial, heavy industrial, and medical industries). For our own good, of course.
And now, the people have reminded him that that’s not really what America is all about. Perhaps now he can refocus on doing the things that really do need to be done and that he said should be done: bringing transparency and fiscal responsibility back to the Federal process, finding a way to keep health care affordable for the average American without breaking the economy, restoring America’s image around the world, and working with our international partners to help spread prosperity and rule of law wherever we can. Those are truly great goals, and worthy of real bipartisan effort.
Which we may now, finally, actually get.
January 11, 2010
Let’s be honest – regardless of what label one applies to him, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) manages to make that entire group look bad. In case anyone wanted a list of his potential rules violations, the NYT has cordially provided it. My favorite highlights are included below
These include:
–Approval of the purchase of four first- and business-class commercial airline tickets for a June 2008 trip during which he met with his mistress in Argentina.
— Personal use of state-owned aircraft for trips such as the birthday party of a campaign contributor in Aiken, and flying from Myrtle Beach to Columbia for a ”personal event,” including a haircut.
— Reimbursing himself nearly $3,000 using campaign contributions, including about $900 for expenses to attend a Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami and a hunting trip in Dublin, Ireland, several days later.
As Angry Diesel Engineer astutely noted: “What an idiot! You can’t take the gubernatorial helicopter to Supercuts, because your new do will get all messed up when you get back in the thing!”
The bigger news is that my good friend Angry Overeducated Catholic has begun his descent to madness. Rather than condemning Sanford’s inability to follow the laws of the state he governs, AOC has been reduced to shouting “ZOMG Democrats are teh sux0r!” Witness gems like:
AOC on Sanford’s purchace offirst/business class tickets to meet his mistress:
Note that this would apparently have been legal if he’d flown coach. (Or used his own money, naturally.) Well, or, let’s be honest, if he’d been a Democrat, although possibly only if he’d also chartered a private jet instead.
AOC on Sanford’s personal use of aircraft:
Of course, again, all of this is legal and standard for Democratic Congressmen. Remember the giant Midwestern funeral which was also a giant Dem campaign rally! Sadly, poor Sanford had the bad sense to join the wrong party for those without ethics.
AOC on Sanford going to Miami, and Dublin on campaign funds:
That is odd, since you’d think that attending the Governors Association would generally be covered by good old taxpayer funds, as it is in states where Democrats are governors. But he might also have used monies or goods provided by a “good friend”, another SOP across the aisle. And a decent Democrat would certainly have successfully argued that a trip to Ireland was for “economic development” for his state (hey it works for Daley).
So, as I suspected, Sanford’s real crimes: being a Republican and an asshat. Fool that he was, Sanford forgot to switch parties before defrauding folks and sleeping around. Bad for him, but good for us, since he got exposed, deposed, and now indicted…none of which would have happened to Gov. Sanford (D).*
*Well, he might have resigned. I should be carefl here, as some Democrats actually do resign when their shady deals are exposed. I’m just presuming that since this guy was such an asshat, he wouldn’t have done the right thing even when outed. Instead he would just emulate Kennedy, Jefferson, Clinton, Frank, Reid, etc. and bulled on through.
Though Republicans are chomping at the bit to eviscerate each other for being insufficiently conservative, evidently flagrant ethics violations only get a “But Democrats are worse!” It’s just one of those reasons why the Republicans are headed into permanent minority status. Well, that, and assclowns like Tom Tancredo who make hating mis amigos an article of faith. You know, just like the Anglo Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself; unless, of course, he is a filthy Mexican.”
January 9, 2010
The folks over at Slate have written up a history of holding your gun sideways. As you might have expected, the Angry Men added some interesting commentary.
Angry Military Man
Unprofessional jackasses. This is one cultural trend that seriously pisses me off, I had a devil of a time trying to teach people how to properly hold a fucking pistol. They were always trying to be gangsta.
Angry Overeducated Catholic
But AMM why does this annoy you? I mean, I understand that this idiocy by your students annoyed you, sure. But how is this outcome anything but welcome:
As police chased Raymond “Ready” Martinez through Times Square on Thursday, the street hustler and aspiring rapper fired two shots, holding the gun sideways “like a character out of a rap video.” According to the New York Post, Martinez’s side grip caused the gun to jam, enabling police to shoot and kill the suspect.
By all means, let’s do whatever we can to encourage this sort of poor gun control by our criminal classes. If they’re going to abuse their rights, at least let them abuse them in a way that minimizes their danger to others and maximizes their danger to themselves.
I want a lack of professionalism in my would-be professional criminals!
Angry Immigrant
In that case…
I would like to propose a new gangsta style grip that involves holding the pistol upside down next to the head, barrel pointing forward. This would allow the spent casing to bounce “awesomely” off of the temple of the shooter, signifying toughness and promote true “def” style hearing loss.
Sighting the barrel directly next to the eyes should maximize the shooter’s conception of aiming accuracy, as it brings a point-and-shoot cyborg mentality for the shooter.
This new all-def method makes no claims of actual accuracy improvement. In case of a gun jamming, this may cause grievous explosive injury to the shooter, but that’s the risk of being tru-4-life.
Angry Libertarian
We can do better and have.
A suspect in the rape and armed robbery of several woman in River Forest accidentally shot himself in the head during a police chase Monday night in Oak Park. The suspect died several hours later.
Angry Overeducated Catholic
Well, yes, but of course in this case do we have any certain knowledge that he was in fact holding his gun when he shot himself in the head? There may have been a little officer-assisted suicide going on…this is River Forest we’re talking about.
On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that this guy was one of the dullest knives in the drawer. Of course there’s the inevitable tagline in modern America:
Patillo had convictions for aggravated unlawful use of a fire arm and drugs. He was paroled April 25 from the Sheridan Correctional Center.
Gosh, a parolee is released and within a year escalates to even more dangerous and violent offenses? What a shocker!*
Be interesting to find out whether this guy was off as part of Governor Quinn’s early release programs to save money…apparently they’re quietly releasing increasingly dangerous types because of funding issues.
Yippee!
*Note that this crap also makes the lives of actual reformed ex-cons even harder. Now that everyone knows that parole is a “get out of jail to rape and murder for free” card, there’s even less chance given to actual honest parolees who earned their parole through actual reform. When you make an earned privilege a natural right, you cheapen it 9 times out of 10.
December 5, 2009
Hola muchachos! Angry New Mexican here again with some original work for a change. So it turns out that for conservatives, hatred of the New York Times is an article of faith, much like Bill Clinton’s assassination of Vince Foster or the fact that President Obama is actually a Muslim and for that matter wasn’t born in America. Hmm. Perhaps I should have added those to the Conservative’s Declaration of Faith. But I digress.
Evidently The Grey Lady is viewed as the personification of all that is wrong with the “liberal media.” Now, if they wielded that label on MSNBC, I would find it hard to complain, but this is the same party who’s current 10 Commandments are so exclusive that Ronald Regan qualifies as a RINO (and if the WSJ says so, can a Republican really argue). To expect Republicans to have any connection with reality is like expecting Paris Hilton to develop a set of morals. I mean, it’s technically possible, but it’s about as likely as winning the Triple Crown with a lame horse. Regardless, the relative decline of print media, especially the New York Times, had Angry Overeducated Catholic salivating at the thought of a conservative media ascendancy. I had to respond. You see, the truth does that sort of thing.
Anyway, as bad as things are for the Grey Lady, the NYT is still doing pretty damned well compared to the vast majority of major papers. It’s still America’s #3 newspaper, after all. WSJ and every hotel’s favorite USA Today (#2 and #1, respectively) are also holding up pretty well.
WaPo is fucked as a national paper, which is why they’ve closed all their domestic news offices outside of the Washington metro area. They’re not even trying for “national paper” status any more. The Chicago Tribune and LA Times fighting valiantly on their way down, but they’re doomed unless they can (a) off the NYT or WSJ or (b) take the WaPo route and surrender. They’ll either refocus themselves as local papers (WaPo’s plan), or die.
This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with “media bias.” Just because the conservative media fantasy-cum-conspiracy-theory happens to offer an explanation for an event doesn’t mean that it’s the correct explanation (witness the circulation slide of the Moonie-owned uber-conservative Washington Times).
The bitter truth is that that through the power of the internet, the paradox of choice is wielding it’s winnowing fan. The papers with a truly local (or truly niche) audience will survive. But they’ll be small because a niche, by definition, doesn’t have many people willing to pay for it. The big guys will survive too, because when people have too many options they pick what is popular. If for no other reason, they allow you to have a discussion with other people who have seen the same material. This is also why Twilight movies are guaranteed to be made in Hollywood. No matter how badly they suck, they will pack theaters because they are popular. And tons of people see popular movies, even very, very bad ones. This is what will save the WSJ and NYT. They’re the most popular. People will read them because plenty of other people do. Everyone else gets fucked. (See also the article, “A world of hits” in this week’s Economist).
I’m sure it warms Angry Overeducated Catholic’s heart to realize that the future of print national/international level news in America is WSJ vs. NYT (let’s be honest, if it weren’t for hotels, nobody would read USA Today). The polarization brought by Conservative Savior Rupert Murdoch via Fox News to television will now make it’s inexorable way to print news. Rupert versus the world. I’m sure he’s always looked at it this way. But it wasn’t until recently that a sane man would actually think he might be right.
I sure wish the Bancrofts’ had a pair of balls somewhere in the entire family and stood up to Murdoch. I’d rather see the future of news fought between then Bancrofts and the Sulzbergers than see the world’s second most offensive Australian (after Mel Gibson, the raging alcoholic anti-Semite, naturally). But sadly, the fallen state of the world is such that douchebags do sometimes get ahead.
The 12 Angry Men Blog 