Observations Over The Last Week

Couple of random thoughts I had while living my life this past week:

• Last Thursday night I went out to Borders looking for The Orphanage on Blu-ray (which they did not have by the way). While wandering around, I noticed that they still have an HD-DVD "section". It consists of exactly 8 titles, none of which were on clearance or even on sale. I submit to you that if you happen to be out looking for a particular HD-DVD and when you get to Borders the one you are looking for just happens to be one of the 8 they have you should proceed immediately to the nearest convenience store and buy a lottery ticket because you are obviously the luckiest person on Earth at that moment.

• Anyone who has purchased tickets through ticketmaster.com in the last 5 years knows that as part of their protection against server attacks they require you to type in a random security word which changes everytime you select a ticket. The other day, the security word that came up for me was "bitch". I certainly wasn't offended, but it led to the following thoughts: 1) do they have a filter on the list of possible words; 2) if so, did they intentionally decide to leave this word in or was it an oversight; and 3) I wonder what other kinds of interesting words are possible.

• I am officially sick of the presidential race and it's not even May yet. At the beginning of the race (which seems like about 6 years ago now) I tried to be fair and listen to everyone, including the candidates that I didn't like in an honest attempt to see if they could change my mind. About a month ago I arrived at the point where I physically can't listen to Hillary speak anymore; I have to change the channel. Now, in the last week I have gotten to the point where I can't even listen to the two candidate I DO like. I would like to make an earnest plea to Indiana to please, please, please give Obama a decisive victory next Tuesday and end this thing. Because if it doesn't end there it is going all the way to the convention, and I just can't take another 3 months of this. So come on, Indiana, be a pal. Remember how we started Rex Grossman in the Super Bowl against your Colts? Time to return the favor.

• I am in CPA limbo and it's a very weird feeling. With every passing day I can feel a little more of the knowledge that I crammed into my head over the last 6 weeks seeping out, and I don't know yet if it's a problem or not. This is going to be a very long 2-3 weeks till I find out. At least I have the Cubs now. But dear god, if I have to wait till mid-June to find out . . .

I Might Be a CPA . . .

. . .or maybe 3/4 done; or maybe still just halfway done. Just finished the 4th test literally less than an hour ago. I'm currently sitting in the beautiful Chicago Public Library writing this. Nothing like going straight from a CPA test to the library. Damn, do I know how to party or what!? Actually, because I'm such a nerd I have been fantasizing the last month about how nice it will be to be able to read again during the morning el ride instead of studying. I think people are used to guys staring at hot chicks on the el, but it's something different altogether to be leering seductively at someone's paperback. No one quite knows how to respond.

Anyway, now it's just a matter of waiting. The first round of scores are supposed to be released the week of May 16th, so I've got at least 3 more weeks ahead of me. But they are estimating that they will only have 70% of the scores from the two tests I'm waiting on so it's possible I won't find out one or even both of them till halfway through June. I suppose if I was motivated I would keep myself up to speed and keep studying so I don't forget everything, but frankly at this point if I even look at my review books again for a while I think I'm going to vomit.

Took tomorrow off to catch up on sleep and let my brain cool down and I'm looking forward to eating some horrible food (still debating between italian beef and chili-cheese fries or Taco Bell) and relaxing while watching the Cubs.

My Fellow Moronic, Ignorant Cubs Fans

In following with the spirit of stupid slogans from yesterday's post, I woke up to find an article in the Sun-Times about the new #1 selling shirt at non-Cub affiliated merchandise stands outside Wrigley. They feature this image:

Last weekend, my bro and I were discussing and wondering how Fukodome feels about all the headband wearing and bowing in the bleachers. Well, he doesn't need to worry about pondering the more subtle aspects of racism because he has a large shining beacon of ignorance to concentrate on now! I said before the season started that I knew the play on words with Fukodome's name was inevitable, but congratulations Cubs fans, you have once again managed to surprise me by sinking to an all-new lowest common denominator!

Look, I am no prude and I'm not a radical leftist who's worried about offending everyone. In fact, I think that racial humor can be absolutely hilarious when done correctly (great examples are Chris Rock on blacks, Jon Stewart and Lewis Black on Jews, Stephen Colbert on Catholics, Dave Allen on the Irish) and I don't even necessarily subscribe to the belief that you have to be a member of a particular group in order to make fun of it. But it is really all about context. Most of the time, racist humor is derived from taking a stereotype of an existing group and either applying it to something unexpected or grossly exagerrating it for effect. But to be truly funny rather than offensive it relies on the understanding that the intended audience knows that you don't really believe that stereotype applies to every member of that group. And there is also the tacit approval granted from going to see a particular comedian live or choosing to watch them on TV. You can always walk out or you can always change the channel if it offends you. But when you decide to break away from that and make something public, you aren't giving the rest of us that choice and can put us in an uncomfortable position. I am going to Wrigley tomorrow, and I'm sure I'll see people wearing this shirt. Let's say that I'm next to someone who is and on the other side there is an asian. I now am in the position where I either have to get confrontational and tell this guy his shirt is offensive, or I say nothing and appear to approve of it by my silence.

Now I want to be crystal clear here that I am an absolutely adamant supporter of free speech and I don't believe that the shirt should be pulled off the market or even banned from Wrigley. However, that doesn't preclude me from thinking less of someone who chooses to wear it in public.

But why am I worked up about it? After all, I'm not asian. I am, however, a Cubs fan and I think that the jist of the problem is summarized nicely in the Sun-Times article: "The image feeds not only ugly, arrogant, and ignorant Japanese stereotypes, but also the stereotype of the obnoxious, profane, drunken, booing, garbage-throwing Cubs fan. How much truth is there in either image? How funny is either one?"

Fukodome, to his credit, is taking the high road so far. ''I knew I was coming to a different country, so I expected something like this. Maybe not necessarily racial, but that anybody could take any context of my words and degrade me if they wanted to. But if I make a big deal out of it, it's not going to benefit me, so I'm not going to make a big deal of it.''

I'm glad that Fukodome was prepared for this and seems relatively unfazed, but I'm just disappointed that we couldn't surprise him.

And by the way, the name of my fantasy baseball team is "My Fuk'n Sori Team" and I still think that's hilarious.

If You Don't Read This Post Your Life May Be in Danger!

Not really, but that probably got your attention , right?

So I'm out for a run on Tuesday and I suddenly start seeing all these lawn signs opposing the proposed construction of a new condo tower in downtown Evanston. Apparently it's going to be 150 feet taller than the current tallest building in Evanston, will displace some 140 office professionals since the new building won't have any office space, and also use about $3 million in public funds for its construction. OK, fair enough. So how do they choose to get this point across on a lawn sign? "Save Evanston. Stop the Tower." To put it lightly, this seems like just a bit of an exaggeration. Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe once the tower gets built I will walk out my front door and see the Four Horsemen riding across the sky, or there will just be a giant crater where Evanston used to be, or suddenly the entire city will be populated by drug dealers and gang members. If that happens, I'll apologize for not taking this dire emergency more seriously.

This is a perfect illustration of the kind of muckraking that I can't stand. It is most prevalent in politics, although it certainly is not limited to that arena. From one side we get to hear that "John McCain admitted he knows nothing about the economy" (he actually said "I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues") and that he "speaks of a 100 years war in Iraq" (he actually said that he would be fine having a troop presence there for 100 years "As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."). Then from the other side we get to hear that "al-Qaida would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11" if Obama gets elected, and that he is a Muslim who attended a Madrassa (a radical muslim school) as a young boy (he lived in Indonesia and briefly attended a Muslim school that was not a Madrassa and he has always been a Christian). Most people chalk up this kind of behavior to a necessary evil of politics, but it's only necessary because people don't reject it. I think Jon Stewart said it best when I saw him live about a year ago (and I'm paraphrasing here): the people that march and go to protests and get on the news are always the extremists, because normal people are too busy with their own lives to go around holding up signs that say "Be Reasonable". I think there's a lot of truth to that. Every issue seems to get radicalized and set up as a "you're either with us or against us" choice rather than the far more productive "you're over there and I'm over here so let's come up with something we can both live with." I mean, why sacrifice a good misleading sound bite just for the sake of reasonable debate?

So, I say to my fellow citizens of Evanston "can't we do a little better than this?" I'm not asking for much. How about just "Save the Evanston Skyline" or "Say No to Taxpayer Funds for Private Construction"? Must we over exaggerate to the point of ridiculousness just to get people on our side? Can't we lead by example?

Oh well, it was worth a try . . .

Sources:
McCain quote on the economy: http://tinyurl.com/7pfca
McCain quote on the 100 years war: http://tinyurl.com/5qfkka
Accusation that al-Qaida wants Obama to win: http://tinyurl.com/2l4qmc
Article that Obama is a Muslim: http://tinyurl.com/yqat77
Debunking of the above article: http://tinyurl.com/2ktpjh

Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check

If you are confused by the title you now have an idea of how I felt when my computer has repeatedly spit up this exact phrase to me over the course of the last several months. Honestly, how could an error message like this make it through the quality control process? At this point, I would much prefer the computer to simply shout "No!" at me or print a big red X across the screen rather than try to present the illusion that it's giving me helpful information that I can use to solve the problem.

A little background is perhaps in order here. Sometime last fall I came home from work one day to discover that i-Tunes had crashed and wouldn't reopen. After trying various quick fixes I came to the conclusion that I would have to uninstall and then reinstall i-Tunes. Seems easy enough right? Well, when I went to run the uninstall program about 2/3 of the way through I had my first experience with the above error. I eventually traced it to a problem with Quicktime (which is required to run i-Tunes) and I thought that my problems were over but they were really just beginning. The uninstall for Quicktime wouldn't work, nor could I manually delete the Quicktime files, nor could I install a new version of it. All three activities resulted in my friend the cryptically unhelpful error message. The upshot of it all has been that over the last 6 months or so I have been stuck without i-Tunes and thus have been forced to listen to the same songs on my iPod. And although I have often stated that if music had stopped being made in 1996 my music collection would be largely unaffected, I still do enjoy having the ability to add and remove songs (otherwise, all I really have is one really big MP3 CD). So it's been kind of an ongoing project of mine for about the past 6 months. Once a month or so my frustration meter fills up enough to the point that I resolve to fix the problem and then after a solid 3-4 hours of fruitless effort my frustration is eclipsed by my discouragement and I give up until the next month. Rinse and repeat.

For all intents and purposes, computers have come a long way in terms of ease of use and self-monitoring. However, all it takes is one little miscue for you to feel like you're back in the days of MSDOS, staring at a black screen with the computer saying "Invalid command" or just simply "Error" after pretty much everything you type and the only diagnosis available to you was "this doesn't work". It also led me to think more about the evolution of computer use over the last 50 years. Originally, computers were used to perform manual operations that took far longer to do by hand. The key being that here when the computers broke (which they frequently did), we were able to perform the same tasks in the coventional way; it was just a lot slower. Eventually though, once they got sophisticated enough we started using them for things and calculations that we were unable to do without them. We also started forgetting how to do things the manual way since it was no longer pertinent information. Finally, we've started replacing the existence of physical items for the sake of their digital representations (i.e. we get rid of the CD or DVD once we've ripped it onto our hard drive). Up until 3 or 4 years ago, if my MP3 player didn't work I could always just pop on my CD and hear whatever I wanted. Now, though, I got rid of all my CDs and thus if my computer crashes I am just SOL.

Obviously this kind of thing has been happening for quite some time and I am not trying to spout a "2001" type or warning that we shouldn't leave everything to computers, but I do find it interesting, particularly because this is a trend that is just going to keep growing. I mean, have you seen the CD section at Best Buy lately? Up until about 3 years ago, CDs took up about half the store; now it's 3 aisles in a corner. I don't even remember the last time I bought one. Is there really any reason to think that as the speed of information increases that we won't be doing exactly the same thing with all our movies and video games too? I don't know yet for sure if Blu-Ray will replace DVDs as the standard format, but I do know for sure that it will be the last physical media format we have. Similarly, I think the X-Box 360, PS3, and Wii will be the last of the next-gen systems where you will have to purchase physical video game discs to play.

By and large this is a good thing, if for no other reason than the fact that it should cut down on the amount of raw materials needed to produce these items as well as cutting down on the refuse when they get disposed of (obviously that's offset somewhat by more hard drives). But it just makes for some interesting potential problems. Right now when you lose something like music on your computer it's just gone from your machine. There are still physical copies somewhere in the world. But what if that is not always the case? We could be looking at the possibility sometime in the future that when something gets erased it is just expunged from the Earth permanently as if it never existed. Obviously, that is an extremely remote and far fetched scenario, but it conjures up thoughts of some super-coded virus that learns how to break security on its own and corrupts every computer it touches. And it is my firm belief that should that ever happen, when an alien civilization comes to visit us in some distant time and tries to figure out what went wrong with life on this planet, they will eventually dig deep enough to be greeted by this message:

"Error: Cyclic Redundancy Check"

P.S. I did FINALLY manage to fix my computer this past weekend through a combination of "chkdsk" commands that eventually quarantined the corrupt file and allowed me to delete it. So you will all be happy to know that I can replace all the bad 80s music on my iPod with entirely different bad 80s music.

You're More Right Than You Realize

Busy prepping for the CPA exam tomorrow, but just saw something I felt compelled to comment on. In a speech yesterday, Hillary Clinton compared herself to "Rocky", indicating that she never gives up. In talking about ending her presidential campaign, she alluded to the famous training scene in the original film and said it would be as if "Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum steps and said, 'Well, I guess that's about far enough.'" Well, I imagine it's been a while since she's seen the film so I guess it escaped her attention that Rocky in fact LOSES to Apollo Creed at the end. He does come back to beat Apollo in the sequel, so maybe she's just trying to set up her 2012 campaign.