Many of you may recall that I subscribe to Sirius (and have since before Howard Stern was signed). My #1 preset is BuzzSaw. Following is an analysis of BuzzSaw's playlist between midnight ET on Dec. 23 and approximately 2:00 pm ET on Dec. 24. The data is courtesy of The SIRIUS Stream Explorer; a condensed form of the data follows the analysis.
In the 38 hours studied, 469 songs were played (counting examples like "Heartbreaker" straight into "Living Loving Maid" as one song), for a mean of 12.3 songs/hour. 384 distinct songs were played. No song was played more than 3 times in the period, implying that the odds are against hearing a song twice within 12 hours.
All in all, I would say that this is a pretty good balance of repetition versus variety, in my opinion. In listening for 24 hours straight, one could expect to hear at most c. 50 repeats.
It's been a while since I last posted. A rundown of what has happened in the interim is well beyond the scope of this JE.
I. Have. Fallen. Hard. For. This. Girl.
She's a coworker of mine (at least for now...). There's been one encounter outside of work which sorta-kinda evolved into a date (with me, the "first date" has always been somewhat nebulous... each of my previous relationships grew out of a friendship; thus by the time it progresses to a stage where it's undeniably a date, it seems kind of ludicrous to declare that landmark in time as a first date... in short, in matters of the heart, I'm an evolutionist, not a creationist [though with more than a little bit of intelligent design thrown in for good measure
She's a vegan. My diet is, um, highly carnivorous. We're talking about there being no greater delicacy than a giant cheesesteak (be it Philly or New England style).
She's a member of PETA. She supports, at least at some level, at least one group branded by the powers that be as a terrorist group. In short, she's likely vegan for moral reasons above all else (a ubiquitous "Meat is murder" button on her jacket is possibly also evidence of this).
The conflict should be apparent.
It can't possibly work out, can it? Could you carry on a relationship with someone you view as at least an accessory after the fact to murder? Could you carry on a relationship with someone who would be delusional if they didn't view you as a murderer?
Now, I'm horrid at reading women (or people in general, for that matter), but she seems to be genuinely interested in me. I have no choice but to take her statement-in-passing that I'm the first non-vegan she's socially dined with in some time as some kind of honor: out of the 99-plus percent of the male population that's not vegan, she's at least considering me.
(For the record, I studiously ordered pasta primavera... while not vegan [yummy alfredo sauce], it's a rare meat-free meal for me.)
Given the shyness that breeds the friendship-first phenomenon (see above), I thus tend to evaluate LTR potential (note that this is not an expectation thereof but simply a contemplation there of) before jumping in. This fundamental issue is about the one unresolved one in my mind.
I'm never going to feel comfortable (nor, I suspect, will she) consuming meat in her presence (ovo-lacto type product could very well be acceptable; she herself consumed chocolate cake with whipped cream for dessert; I won't tell any of her vegan friends) nor in any way asking her to be a party thereof.
Can I be an ovo-lacto-vegetarian? A vegetarian/dietary vegan? A dietary vegan who shuns leather (but accepts, say, wool)? A full-on vegan?
Tried to amend my carnivorous habit
Made it nearly a pair of days...
Cheeseburger at City Jake's
-- With apologies to Jimmy Buffett
From Saturday afternoon (I have forgotten when exactly I ate that stromboli) until noon today, I consumed no meat, sort of to see whether I could. There really wasn't anything planned about this... I have no doubt that my crash veg diet was horrible for me and that with enough research and so forth (or simply a knowledgeable vegan to cook for me...
I gotta run, so I'll post this rambling missive as is... post comments below.
As a preface, I'm a fan of all genres, but my current album of the month is Bishop Allen - Charm School.
Just read Jacob Sullum's column about CrossBalls , on Comedy Central. I had not heard of this show, but I must watch it at some point.
Reason contributing editor, escapee from Communist oppression, Xena fan-fic author, and Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young comments. Too much good stuff to pick out a quote, so I will abstain.
Jesse Walker pretty much sums up my view... [apologies to HuSi readers who have already seen this...]
The Democrats have nominated a senator who--just sticking to the points listed above--voted for the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, McCain-Feingold, and the TSA; who endorses the assault on "indecency"; who thinks the government should be spending even more than it is now. I didn't have room in my top ten for the terrible No Child Left Behind Act, which further centralized control of the country's public schools--but for the record, Kerry voted for that one too. It's far from clear that he'd be any less protectionist than Bush is, and he's also got problems that Bush doesn't have, like his support for stricter gun controls. True, Kerry doesn't owe anything to the religious right, and you can't blame him for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Other than that, he's not much of an improvement.
Yet I find myself hoping the guy wins. Not because I'm sure he'll be better than the current executive, but because the incumbent so richly deserves to be punished at the polls. Making me root for a... blowhard like Kerry isn't the worst thing Bush has done to the country. But it's the offense that I take most personally.
If you're from one of the following states, odds are that you're an overall contributor to the Greatest Country in the History of Earth (in descending order of chance of being a contributor)
Congratulations to all of you!
Indianans aren't contributors, but you aren't leeches on those of us who contribute. Just keep this in mind.
And now it comes to the less fun part of this exercise. Who are the leeches? Who's on welfare? Odds are, if you're from one of the states below, you're a despicable person who's dependent on the largesse of the states above (ranked ascending order of leeching):
John Edwards' Bursting Media Bubble
Charles Paul Freund
News stories that describe a candidate's apparent weaknesses can allow that candidate to address such issues in public. It's not as if only reporters could see, for example, that Edwards didn't know what he was talking about during some of the candidates' debates. Many voters could see it, too. With no sustained public dialogue about it, Edwards really had no obvious way to resolve voter doubts, leaving voters to take those doubts with them into the polling booth.
[SNIP]
A stark fact that is sometimes obscured by Edwards' positive coverage is that his best claim is to have exceeded early expectations without being able to build on his early success. Indeed, he won no more primaries than did Howard Dean or Wesley Clark: one. Aside from his native South Carolina, Edwards didn't even do well in the South, running behind in such states as Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. Despite his efforts to cherry-pick primaries (another relatively unexplored subject of campaign coverage), he couldn't beat Clark in Oklahoma, couldn't sell protectionism in the Rust Belt, and couldn't make any headway at all against Kerry when they were last two serious candidates standing. True, he had outlasted other Democrats with far more experience, but Edwards' candidacy in its closing days was very like his early candidacy, when few people had heard of him. It had failed to develop depth.
A story I submitted got posted to YRO: Yay! Just posting this for the benefit [???] of any fans who ignore YRO.
Note that it was timothy and not michael who posted it...
An interesting piece by Jesse Walker regarding Reagan's willingness to betray the major constituencies that helped to get him elected:
And if Reagan didn't live up to the expectations of his libertarian supporters, the flipside is that he did the same thing to his backers on the Christian right, and among that species of anti-Communist that seemed unconcerned with the specter of nuclear war.
Due to volume of comments (IINM, my most heavily commented JE yet... 'tis always amazing how popular meta-wankery can be from time to time), I suppose I'd address some of the issues brought up in a second JE...
"Emigrate" may have been a poor choice of word, or it's quite clear that clarity is a good thing . I'm not suggesting that we abandon Slashdot, or even the JE's. I think that SolemnDragon got the gist of what I was thinking about: a sort of complement to the JE's. Cross-posting wouldn't/shouldn't be "against the rules".
History. There is a history of sites that broke off from Slashdot and succeeded (at least for a significant period of time). Kuro5hin is, of course, the dominant example. HuSi, which basically was where a significant portion of the "Kool Kid5" of K5 went when things started going downhill is perhaps even more directly applicable to this idea.
On Scoop. Scoop has a counterpart to messaging called the Hotlist. As implemented at HuSi (which started life as little more than a testbed for Hulver's patches to Scoop), every story (including diaries) that you post is added to your hotlist. Every time a reply to one of your comments is posted, an entry is added to your hotlist. Additionally (and this was the extent of the K5 hotlist for non-subscribers), you can hotlist a story that's particularly interesting and thus be alerted when new comments are posted. K5 subscribers (and all HuSi users) also got the ability to hotlist users, so that whenever they posted, a hotlist entry would be displayed. UI conventions on Scoop sites are to place the hotlist on every page. I know of no limits on hotlist sizes, though I haven't really looked at Scoop's code in a loooong time.
A rough vision. This would not really be a competition to Slashdot. It wouldn't be stories that got rejected by Slashdot (not that there's anything wrong with that or such should be verboten). Would there be a general topic? Not really, though I suppose "the most intelligent user community on the web" might be apt (if possibly a bit conceited). K5's "Technology and Culture" may well be the best summation of what I'd like. We're all reasonably cultured and all reasonably knowledgeable on technology and such; we've got the expertise.
Political commentary: yeah
Game reviews: yeah
Music/Movie/TV/Book reviews: yeah
Interesting news: yeah
Interesting sites: yeah
Random shit from our daily lives: yeah
Humor: yeah
Fiction: why the hell not?
Community structure. I think HuSi has the right idea: if you want to join, fine. If you crap all over the lawn, we'll clean it up and ban you. Knock yourself out.
AC posting. One idea I've had brewing for a while is that AC posting should be preserved, but not immediately visible (as it is open to abuse). Logged-in users get the ability to promote/make visible AC posts. If one logged-in user promotes a post (and thereby essentially certifies, under risk of dire consequences that it's not crap), it's visible for all to see and treated just like any other post from a logged-in user. If three vote "It's crap", the post is no longer eligible for promotion.
Marotti.com. Yes, thoughts of Marotti.com have gone through my head. IMHO, Marotti "failed" because it didn't really differentiate itself from Slashdot (by which I mean the front page). As much as we bitch about the editors here, the story selection, the dupes, and so forth, the fact is that it's difficult to imagine a successful competitor to Slashdot in the "News for Nerds" market. Accordingly, Slashdot's FP should not be the model.
Has the time come for the "FK Circle" (to use a possibly somewhat inaccurate term) to emigrate from Slashdot and move to our own territory, where rather than earn ad money for OSDN, we could have control over how the ad money is distributed?
Maybe something along the lines of Scoop... I realize that K5 is junk nowadays, but I don't think there's a community CMS that matches Scoop in the medium-sized community area (cf. HuSi).
There's enough interesting people who post in this circle to assure no end of content. If things get slow, we could always line up another Guy vs. Dayton no-holds-barred cage match
If you have a comment, please post in this follow-up JE
My prescription:
At least then some good might come out of this whole affair.
"Luke, I'm yer father, eh. Come over to the dark side, you hoser." -- Dave Thomas, "Strange Brew"