The new Master Race

Steven Berven:

The Global War on Terror is not about revenge for 9/11. It’s not about an eye for an eye. It’s not even about eradicating the Taliban. It’s about fighting against the same sort of Master Race mentality that made the Imperial Japanese and Nazi Germany a threat to our people and our way of life. We are the infidels. We are the subhumans to the Islamic sense of racial elitism.
I confess, though I always picked up the superiority aspect of radical Islam, I hadn’t thought of it in the terms of Muslims being a “master race”.

links for 2007-01-21

Twittering just got easier with Tweet

Scott McNulty noted Tweet in his Twitter feed as well as on TUAW. I downloaded Ted Leung’s Growl-modified version of Coda Hale’s script. Coda has good installation and usage instructions in the original Tweet script, which you can use if you don’t care about Growl support.
Tweet combines the power of AppleScript with that of Quicksilver (you are using Quicksilver, aren’t you?) to make posting to your Twitter account easier and faster than ever. Sorry, Windows users, but all of this, except the Twitter service itself, is Mac-only.

My sister’s responsible for a big ball of learning?

The McWane Science Center in Birmingham, Alabama, is getting a cool new invention, courtesy of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. My little sister wrote the grant application that landed McWane the exhibit. Way to go, sis!

Once again, we learn why they’re called analysts

So let me get this straight:
Apple sets new company records for revenue and profit, beats the Street’s estimates, and ships 28 percent more Macs and 50 percent more iPods than they did this time a year ago, but because a bunch of analysts don’t like future estimates, the stock price takes a dive?
No wonder monkeys do just as good a job at the stock market as analysts.

Tell me again why I should upgrade

Walt Mossberg reviews Windows Vista for the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple’s operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

There are some big downsides to this new version of Windows. To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won’t be able to use all of Vista’s features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly.

In fact, in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers.
Something tells me that the only Vista-running PC we’ll see in our home will either be my wife’s company-provided laptop, when their IT department decides the latest version of Windows is “safe” enough with which to conduct business, or if I decide to throw Vista on my Intel-powered iMac. The latter would, at most, be for web site testing, and pure kicks.
I’m pretty much done with Windows PCs at this point. The Mac does everything I want, does it better, does it more intuitively and elegantly, and the Mac is safer. Sure, you can argue this locks me in to a single company, Apple, but then Windows users are pretty much locked in to a single company, too, aren’t they? Oh, you can buy your PC from Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, or build it yourself, but you still have to go to Microsoft for the operating system.
(Linux zealots are not invited to this discussion, so pipe down already. Besides, most of you are fawning over Ubuntu nowadays, which still locks you in to a single distribution/company for that particular flavor of the OS. Or you like SUSE, or Debian, or Red Hat, for whatever your reasons may be. And most people don’t feel like hunting down drivers for their Sony notebook just so it can properly display all available resolutions or connect wirelessly to the Internet, things you still have to do with Linux variants.)
For the record, in his review, Mossberg does acknowledge that as far as Windows itself goes, Vista is the best version yet. Which isn’t surprising, since each version since the original has been successively better, with the exception of Windows ME (what a disaster that beast was).
When the desktop PC I built my wife two years ago outlives its usefulness, it will get replaced with either a hand-me-down iMac, or a Mac mini. It’s one thing to do Windows tech support for a living, but when it comes to home computing, that’s something I’d rather not have to worry about.

Night at the Museum

I was going to blog about this yesterday, until I got slammed with the norovirus, aka, the stomach flu.
My beautiful bride had Monday off (if the stock market’s closed, her office is closed), so we did some shopping, sans little phisch, and decided to take in a movie. I wasn’t in the mood for anything too serious, and the movie I really did want to see, Eragon (great book), has all but disappeared from most theaters. So we decided on the Ben Stiller vehicle, Night at the Museum.
We at the phischbowl heartily recommend Night at the Museum. It’s wholesome fun for the entire family, and you may even learn a thing or two. (Regarding the “entire family” bit: I wouldn’t take my three year-old, mostly because he’d probably be bored, but I can see my friend’s second-grader thoroughly enjoying the film.)
Ben Stiller is, well, Ben Stiller, though not in a goofy Zoolander sort of way, more like in an Along Came Polly or Meet the Parents sort of way. Robin Williams is great as Teddy Roosevelt, though not in the usual obnoxious Robin Williams sort of way. I thought Steve Coogan was very amusing as Octavius, and a great foil for the uncredited Owen Wilson’s Jedediah. Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, and Bill Cobbs are great as the three retiring security guards Stiller’s Larry Daley is taking over for.
One hint: don’t leave immediately when the credits roll; there will be two more scenes within the credits you don’t want to miss.

Today’s rowing

Thirty minutes, 4,995 meters.
A lousy five meters away from five thousand. Two strokes. Two strokes were all I needed before the machine cut off.
At least I got my pace up from last time.

It’s Twitterrific!

I confess I’ve been sucked in to the world of Twitter. It’s kind of addictive, watching what folks like John Gruber, the Iconfactory boys, Maury McCown, and even Darth Vader, are up to.
I’d love to know if my friends have accounts, so I can add you as a friend to mine, and please feel free to add me as a friend to yours. Ping me via IM, drop me an e-mail, or leave a comment.
One cool thing Twitter did last week was they created a Macworld account. By adding this account as a friend, you could follow the postings of those at Macworld Expo as Steve announced the latest and greatest tech from our favorite fruit company. There were so many messages coming in to Twitter through AOL Instant Messenger that Twitter exceeded its allowable AIM traffic, and that service was unavailable for about a day. (To clarify, you couldn’t post to Twitter via AIM; Twitter and AIM were each unaffected.)
You can post to Twitter via your Twitter page, by instant message (Jabber or AIM), or by text message from your mobile phone. (Text message charges from your mobile provider apply, but there’s no charge from Twitter.) If you’re a Mac user, you can also use Maury McCown’s TwitterPost, or the just-released-today Twitterrific from those aforementioned boys at the Iconfactory. Both apps are freeware.
So the question remains, what are you doing?

links for 2007-01-13