Birds of a Feather

A logical career progression for a FOX News anchor:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sources close to the White House said Monday that Fox anchor Tony Snow is likely to accept the job as White House press secretary, succeeding Scott McClellan.

The sources said they expect him to announce his decision within the next few days.

A source familiar with the discussions said Monday that newly appointed Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asked Snow to make a decision by early this week.

Two sources familiar with the discussions said Bolten wanted to fill the post this week, as early as Tuesday.

The Gods Inside You

People under the age of 20 have this massive hole in their soul. And they have built their personalities around cynicism. Cynicism means, simply, aping or putting into an ironic form, mocking, existing institutions, instead of building institutions of your own. What I’ve discovered is that because these people have such a deep need for something to believe in that if someone like you, who has a powerful set of beliefs, or someone like I, who has a powerful set of beliefs—I’ve been searching the Gods all my life and now I know them, the Gods inside of us. Or I feel I do. Someone like me or you who can come along and show these people that there is a meaning to life, that there are things worth believing in, that there are things worth being passionate about, they respond immediately. Now, we’re either going to have the new Adolf Hitler’s coming along, who know how to manipulate this need, and do it with the new nationalisms and the new tribalism’s, and the new hate groups, or we’re going to have a you or a me, who will come along and pour a positive message—a positive sense of something to believe in, a positive crusade for emotionality.

The only messiahs who exist are as human beings. We human beings are all basically cockroaches at heart. That is to say, we’re insecure when we’re alone by ourselves, we have all kinds of self-doubts, we have our depressions, and we have all kinds of reasons to believe that we’re nobody at all. But it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Isaiahs of the world, it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Einstein’s of the world, it’s the “nobodys-at-all” who become the Jesus Christ’s of the world. And it’s incumbent on us, having learnt the lesson—we’ve been able to learn a lesson from the history of Christianity. Jesus put together a movement that was based on respect for the humble and the poor, on seeing their possibilities, on seeing that they had to be treated as human beings too.

But what happened to his message? When it was taken over 322 years later by Constantine, Constantine had the cross painted on the shields of his men. And suddenly, Christianity became an excuse for mass murder. Christ would never have allowed that. OK, we know that now. And we know that Christ was just as human as anybody else. Why did he cry out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” when he was on the cross? Because he was insecure about everything he had believed in up until then. He was as human as we are.

It’s up to human beings to be the messiahs. We’re the only ones who are there to do it. And we have to do it. We have to do it. Because if we don’t do it, someone with an equal belief and passion to ours, who believes that the way to achieve things is through the old animal way (…) built into our limbic system, built into the lower parts of our brain, who knows that the best way to unite people is by uniting them in hatred against an outside group; and uniting them in mass murder.

We have to come along before that person comes along. We have to fill that void, and we have to fill it with positivity. It’s about digging into the elemental passions (…) All of this plays a part in trying to give to the new generation a movement that’s based on something extraordinarily passionate. That you can powerfully believe in. That you can use to advance humanity tremendously, absolutely tremendously—but that excises, deliberately, the God of War.

When you find the Gods inside yourself, you’ll find the God of War. You’ll find the God of bloodlust. You’ll find the God of genocide. And he will be one of the most powerful passions in you. And you have to knife him out of existence. You have to freeze him in his own private Hell, and make your positive Gods the Gods that take you over.
And by “the Gods that take you over” I mean you have to find those passions that are so much more powerful than you, than anything you’ve been allowed to express in your life, and making those things the things you work on. In other words, not putting off until you’re 40 or 50 the things you feel passionate about at the age of 15 and 16 - but going directly to those things, and trying to implement them when you’re 20.
Pass ‘Go’. Forget the 200 dollars. Go directly to Park Place. And put your life there, on the line, with all the emotion and power and passion and insight in you.

And fuck the God of War.

- Howard Bloom

Office 2004 under Rosetta

If you are like me and have yet to plunge into the world of Intel Mac (my MacBook Pro arrives next week), you may be wondering how key productivity apps function under Rosetta (Apple’s trick for running PowerPC code on Intel Macs).

Here’s a pretty clear indication of how Office 2004 runs:

We won’t keep you in suspense. In general, Office 2004 under Rosetta works “well enough” to “very well,” and in some cases, it’s even faster than on the PowerPC machine.

To determine this, MacTech ran over a thousand tests across three models of Macs, and the four major Office applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. And, since graphics code is shared between Office applications, we ran a suite of graphics tests as well. These are each covered in more detail below.

In one of the most critical set of tests, we specifically looked at whether the user could type or interact faster than Office could keep up, and even in the slowest of scenarios, we never found the user waiting for typing, or other interactions like selecting menus. Even when typing at over 100 wpm, Word was able to stay ahead of the user.

Of the four applications, PowerPoint, is the one that struggled the most. It appears this is due to Office graphics engine shared by all of the Office applications.

At the other end of the spectrum, Entourage was not only on par, it was faster in many cases than our PowerPC baseline. In fact, with the exception of launching the application, Entourage was faster across the board on the Intel iMac, while the MacBook Pro was about on par with the PowerBook G4 (slightly faster in some cases, slightly slower in others).

Whew!

Of course, universal binaries are highly desireable and hopefully will come sooner than later.

Want to make music?

Have you thought about making music with your computer, but haven’t tried it yet. Intimidated? Too daunting? No software or hardware?

Try this: The world’s tinest synth, made in flash. I guess there could be smaller ones out there, but I haven’t seen them.

BTW, eye4u is a legendary vector graphic pioneer. Their original home page and demos blew my mind, and are still pretty cool seven years later. Check this out. Be sure to go to the showroom. The page and music haven’t changed since I first came across it way back when the dotcom boom was riding high. Imagine how choppy it was on a Duo 280.

When will we be tired of lying?

Lying is the core value of our society. The brightest, most creative minds in our society are liars. Paid liars. I’m talking about advertising people (not all of them). Political writers (not all of them). Sales executives (not all of them). In fact, at the heart of all transactions is a core of lying. The more margin, the bigger the lie somewhere back along the transaction chain. What we can get away with without getting called on it. Pushing the limit of the truth to maximise advantage or profit.

Since when is pushing the limit of the truth not lying? A little lie is not as bad as a big lie, I guess. But the big lie is more readily accepted. And more profitable. Everyday hundreds of millions of people buy into big lies. They do so because some smart person had the guts to tell a really big lie and get paid a lot of money for doing it.

I’m tired of it. And if you need me to provide you with examples, you are not paying attention.

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