Google talk

Google Talk is live now and people are playing (for the last couple of weeks the website was a mostly empty page that said "OK").

Configuring Adium is pretty straight forward.

Make sure to turn on TLS.

My contact list did not appear automatically but it was pretty easy to add a few gmail folks I knew to make sure the connection was up.

The circus in Philly

Yeah, I'm talking about Owens (the other T.O.) and the series of events there last week. Owens said a lot of things to piss off teammates and coaches last week but he appears pretty oblivious to any negative issues.

"During practice and work-related situations he has been and will be attentive and responsive," the statement said. "Terrell only asks what every other worker in America asks for, respect and dignity."

I suppose it's never occurred to him that most (not all) workers are told that they need to talk to fellow workers and supervisors. And if they don't comply, they're fired. I can see why he wants more money now though, he'll be incapable of ever holding a job when his NFL days are behind him.

I predict things are going to get even crazier when T.O. comes back on Wednesday for three reasons.

First, there's the Eagle brain trust, which is sticking with the assertion that he will not get a raise this year, period. When two nearly immovable objects collide many interesting things happen (out here we call them earthquakes).

Second, the press are not going to be able to leave alone the offer by Limbaugh to help Owens and McNabb. In the middle of the Philly dust up, Rush offers to help set up another oil refinery (he's bringing the matches). If you can appreciate the absurdity of sports media, this isn't just icing, it's a three flavor banana split on top.

Finally, the big media guy who had been defending Terrell all along was Stephen A. Smith. Smith has now pulled a Snidely Whiplash with this column. Smith's closes with this:

The situation has surpassed ridiculous purely because Owens appears to have no clue about how ridiculous he looks.

"I'm a good teammate," he said. "Just because I don't speak to a couple of guys doesn't mean anything. I have no desire to speak to [McNabb]."

Well, that's smart - a receiver has no desire to develop chemistry with the guy assigned to throw him the ball.

Brilliant! Now let's see if it gets him a new contract.

Sadly, we know it won't happen. At least not to Owens' liking.

It's time to dismiss this case.

While I'm here, this is for Mark Kiszla (Denver Post). You make some good points about Owens, but you left something out. The whole reason he got a deal beneath his abilities coming into Philly (not much more than a year ago) was because he'd acted like an insufferable prick during his last year in San Francisco and during the process that brought him to Philly. Don Banks covered some of this when he wrote T.O. and Eagles are stuck with each other. Maybe Denver is a place for T.O. to G.O. (as the signs at the preseason game suggested). Rice might be able to talk some sense into him but what happens in three months (weeks) when he's making noises about Jake?

Owens is who he is and he's not changing.

Kill the signs please

It seems that CalTrans is thinking about inflicting their new program to make our freeway system as ineffective as possible here in Ventura County. Toss my hat into the ring with our mayor:

Thousand Oaks Mayor Claudia Bill-de la Pena echoed the view of others who say that drivers often slow down to read the freeway signs, so she would like to know how well the program works before it is introduced to the Ventura County area.

The Daily News has a couple letters from people grumbling. The Times has a story on the grand plan. I believe (with a lot of experience) that these signs cause more problems than they alleviate and the people making decisions haven't a clue how the system works as a whole. Consider this quote:

"In general, the research shows very clearly that the better information about arrival time significantly reduces the burden people perceive," said Brian Taylor, director of UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies. He pointed to a study showing people felt less stressed on the Metro's Rapid bus line when they were able to see how many minutes until the next bus arrived.

So we're going extrapolate from a study on the perceptions of people standing around at stationary bus stations and somehow apply that to people flying down a freeway at 75 miles per hour. Sounds like a winning concept! Not to be left out, USC had to chime in:

"Improving people's states of information will in general make them less frustrated," said James Moore, chairman of USC's Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

I can't argue with that general idea. Heck, that's why I check the various traffic sites before leaving home. The problem isn't the information, it's the delivery system and the way people react to it. Had either of these traffic experts ever driven around near our wonderful freeway signs they might have learned something. Oops, wait, that's field research. My bad.

I'll go out on a limb here but I'd bet the reason the traffic backs up is because a lot of people slow down (and some even brake; and when one lane breaks the others do so in sympathy or something) to read the damned sign. I've seen this so often. Traffic comes to a halt, I flip around the dial looking for a cause and find nothing, get to the sign and realize that was the accident. Yes, I've seen real accidents (a few of them at the signs) and road breaks for crap on the roads cause the same problems, but it's far from a coincidence when it always ends in the same place (and that place is lit up with some useless message).

The sad reality is that as soon as the signs go on, traffics slows down in a very non linear way that I can only surmise based on far too much personal experimentation (I don't have the raw data and no one seems to be looking at it). In general, the pattern is much like what you'd see shortly after a major collision was finally cleared. At the scene (the signs), the traffic is moving somewhat slowly (mid 30's to 40's) and then opens up completely. A mile back it's stop and go, somewhere between 0 and 40. The further it backs up, the more sluggish the traffic reacts (because they have no idea what the hell is wrong). When the South (East) 101 sign at White Oak is on for any length of time, the traffic will typically come to a dead stop at Topanga and sometimes even further back. That's about a four mile traffic backup just so we can pass along a message.

Besides, we do have radio (if you're from these parts you know about KFWB and KNX, and if you're not, too bad) and we're got a bunch of new technologies coming that will make the sensing data available on the web today mobile. The signs feel like a feeble experiment gone horribly wrong and now CalTrans needs to justify their cost somehow. Can't we just say 'oops'?

I'm going to give this idiotic notion some time (and entirely avoid the 101 going east for a while), but I'm not hopeful.

Man shoots car

Oh, I certainly feel for Mr. Rye who decided (after a reported thirty minutes of nearly continuous alarm noise) that he'd had enough and took matters into his own hands.

I remember a parody commercial (I'm pretty sure it was on SNL) from the early eighties that I found pretty funny at the time. The 'product' featured a tripod mounted laser combined with a car alarm detector and guidance system. The pitch was that city people could finally sleep soundly as the system would vaporize any car making unwarranted sounds at night.

This crazy story brought that all back and made me laugh when I read it yesterday.

I guess we live in a pretty tranquil part of the world when that's the above the fold story for the Metro section of our local paper.

Firefly season

This is definitely the season for Firefly the short lived Fox series that has seen a ground swell of buzz this year, leading up to Serenity due in theaters next month. As a small token of evidence, I offer this from H&R: A discussion mostly about how much people like Firefly with links to some discussions about the general politics of the series.

I'll call out two posts. First Daniel Drezner makes it one of his Books of the Month for August (and includes some interesting tidbits about the way they've marketed the film while building anticipation). I also got quite a kick out of this Firefly Photo Essay. There's a lot more if you are interested in clicking through it all.

I got my start because of some small favor I performed for Meng early this year for which he sent me the Firefly DVD as a gift. It took forever to get around to watching it, but I really enjoyed it when I did. Then I got busy and it was only after getting back from Jersey that I finally watched the rest of the episodes. Now I'm working my way through it again.

So what is it all about?

It's a romantic (and somewhat twisted) view of 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century culture reborn somewhere in space some 500+ years from now. It's been called a space western, a melodrama and a morality play. All of those elements are there. This review mentions that "It could be the only science-fiction show ever with a Chinese/bluegrass soundtrack" which may just sum up how unique it is.

There are quite a number of core characters, yet the series seems to revolve around a former sergeant from a failed civil war who has moved to the outer regions (the west?) and leads a band of (mostly) non-conformist nomads on a series of money raising adventures based mostly on crime (pretty easy to do, as even minor salvage operations are consider criminal acts). This leader is aloof and calculating, yet enigmatically human.

If you haven't seen it and like smart stories, I'd highly recommended it.