This is really quite remarkable: Pure Komachi knives by Kai. Knife nerds will immediately recognize Kai as being the genuises behind Shun and Kershaw, probably some of the best knives in production today. Lovely Wife and I stumbled on these in KTA up in Waimea this afternoon and upon learning they were a whole whopping $17 bought a hollow-ground santoku (in purple-pink) and a yellow vegetable knife, figuring "well, at least we have something for the condo, if nothing else." (I had been contemplating ordering Fibrox to replace the lousy Sabatier knock-offs we have here right now.) A Kai knife for less than $20? Yeah, ok.

I am shocked, shocked, shocked by the performance. Blown away is more like it. I'd never, in a million years, think I would have found a knife that performed as well as my Kyocera ceramic knives for, like, a tenth of the cost -- but there it is, in purple-pink. I'm seriously rethinking my knife acquisition strategy as a result of this.

Plus, they're colorful! Kitchens need more color. It's just amazing.

(See also Kuhn Rikon for colorful, ridiculously good knives that are suspiciously cheap.)

Current Mood: impressed

William Langewiesche, The Devil at 37,000 Feet:

The site smelled of jet fuel, which had soaked into the soil and spilled into two small streams that flowed through the forest there. It also smelled of death, or more accurately of organic decomposition, which in the heat was well advanced. Perhaps a hundred soldiers were at work, expanding a helicopter landing zone, and collecting and bagging the victims. They had built a camp out beyond a cluster of wreckage from the Boeing’s wings, where the landing gear could be seen still desperately extended. The main wreckage lay just to the north in a dispersed chaos of torn and twisted metal, shattered machinery, bent hydraulic lines, tubes, wiring harnesses, cockpit displays, cabin seats, and all the transported contents of the airplane—a sad spillage of luggage, purses, briefcases, clothes, medicines, cosmetics, photographs, trophy fish that sportfishermen had been hauling home from Manaus, and thousands of computer parts that the Boeing had been carrying in its cargo hold and that now littered the forest and slumped into a stream. The debris had dug into the earth on impact, and had drawn trees and branches into the tangle. The condition of the dead should be left unsaid, except to note the mercilessness of the slaughter, and the fact that after Gol Flight 1907 hit the ground hardly any corpse remained intact. Carnivorous tigerfish had braved the poisoned streams and were feeding on flesh that had fallen into the water. This is what happens when a wing is severed in flight. The Caiapós are warriors, perhaps, but they were deeply disturbed by the scene.

Langewiesche has always had a distinct flair for clear, powerful writing, but this piece, on the mid-air collision between N600XL and GLO1907, reminds me of nothing so much as Raymond Carver's fiction -- sparse, precise, commonplace language that ultimately endows its subject with startling power. I understand the technical details of what happened over the Amazon that day -- I understand the technical details of most aviation incidents better than most -- but I've never read an accident report quite like this before, one that sent shivers down my spine.

If living on the prairies taught me anything, it's that it's far better to shovel 2" of snow twice rather than 4" of snow once. So in that spirit, I attacked the driveway here at 2100, clearing the roughly 3" that had accumulated since Snowpocalypse, Round III began at ~1700. I then went and did other things for 4 hours, only to come back to five more inches -- thank you, increasingly heavy snowfall! That took an hour to clear. There's now enough snow around that I've run out of places to put it; my neatly-constructed piles are avalanching themselves, and I can't seem to keep anything in place. I have given up trying to keep the sidewalk clear -- I can't even find the sidewalk anymore. Unshoveled areas feature suicidally high cliffs of snow, and I am dreading daybreak.

So last month, Sirius-XM went ahead with their channel merger, blowing up basically every channel I actually listened to. Lucy, the alternative hits channel -- gone. The System, a WorldSpace trance channel -- gone. POTUS, kind of like talk radio without the morons -- gone on XMSR Canada. XM Chill -- horribly disfigured. Bluesville is OK, for now, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope for it. Thanks, Sirius-XM! I'll be waiting to see if the Mariners suck before deciding whether I'm going to cancel my subscription.

What amazes me is that the only thing I actually wanted on Sirius -- CBC on satellite -- didn't get merged over. Blows my mind. Buncha apes. I fail to see the point of paying for subscription radio services that don't sound all that different from the crap that's on commercial radio for free.

The only bright spot in the channel realignment is that I now get BBC Radio 1 -- not a subset, not a stupid branding with a bunch of poncy accents -- no, we're talking about the real, live, actual Radio 1 feed from the UK. Of course, I'm too old to fit in Radio 1's demographic, and I'm listening to it eight hours out of sync (hooray for 0300 programming in Britain!), but man, this is what satellite radio is supposed to be! I'd kill to be able to get radio feeds from other English-language radio networks. That'd be awesome.

But that's not the point of this entry. I've been diving back into my music collection, and trying to find new and interesting stuff to listen to. Pop music these days mostly makes my teeth hurt, or makes me miserable; the last truly great new pop song I heard was (and I'm almost ashamed to admit this) Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love." Everything sounds the same. So I'm back exploring what, for lack of a better term, could be described as "sonic landscapes" -- instrumental, electronica, trance. Start with Sigur Ros and E.S. Posthumus and get stranger from there.

But I stumbled on this thing tonight, and it was so striking, so startling that I had to share. It's Max Richter's "24 Postcards in Full Color" (available on iTunes for the damned, but in a DRM-free format). This is 24 tracks, none of them longer than about 2:30, using a string quintet, a guitar, and a piano, with a bunch of other, stranger found sounds. The goal was, apparently, to explore -- get this -- the ringtone as a musical form.

Yeah, right was my initial reaction. But here's the truly weird part: it actually works as music. They're like, I dunno, musical amuse-bouches. It's some of the strangest, most interesting music I've heard in a long, long time.

The defining moment of Campaign 2008, for me: standing in the lobby of the Rio in Las Vegas, having just gotten out from Penn and Teller, watching mobs of people surge through the hallways, some of them crying, some of them laughing, some of them hugging, all of them chanting, in one voice, with the force and joy and certainty of the vindicated: "Yes we did."

20-odd hours later, it still rings in my ears. "Yes we did."

I could be cynical about this. I'm cynical by nature. But I can't be cynical about this.

Dorothy Gambrell gets it exactly right.

A collection of things I've been reading:

• Fascinating thread on cryptography (which hilariously few people read) on the street price of illicitly obtained digital goods, by analogy with the price of heroin as a measure of the success of the war on drugs. I had no idea this stuff even existed, never mind was tracked (though in hindsight I guess I shouldn't be so stupid).
• Also from cryptography, is privacy possible in public places? Answer: Probably not.
• Chantal Hebert has a blogue.

Dear Edie Carey,

Last night was simply spectacular. But I have a complaint: Where the hell have you been all my life?

( Read more... )

N823AL, a Boeing 737-200 belonging to Aloha Airlines, at Keahole Airport (PHKO)
30 January, 2008

News of Aloha's suspension of passenger service has spread throughout the air travel world, and we're now 24 hours into a post-Aloha passenger universe. Aloha is one of the first airlines that I remember clearly, and one that played a pivotal role in forming some of my most treasured memories as a kid. Going to Hawaii was always a great thing; going through Honolulu, over to the inter-island terminal, with the bus station atmosphere, the dark floors, the generalized mayhem, to end up on one of these psychedelically painted planes and whisked off to the Big Island -- it was heady stuff for me. So much so that, when I went back to Hawaii for the first time in way too long last year, and climbed aboard the Aloha flight to Hilo in Honolulu, settled into my seat and got a small plastic container of guava juice once we hit cruise... it was a lot like nothing had changed, and I was 8 again.

Seeing N823AL on the ramp in January I thought I was looking backwards into my past. No other plane looked so ridiculous and yet so sublime. I'm a lot older now and way more jaded, and yet I felt a little weak taking this picture from the departure area while I waited to leave.

We didn't fly on AAH earlier this year and it had more to do with availability, timing, and fares than anything else -- we were leaving PHKO and heading back home and trying to find an available seat on an AAH flight was difficult. So instead we few Hawaiian, and I had one of the most pleasant short-haul flight experiences I've had in a very long time. Now I feel bad, because I thought I'd come back to AAH the next time around, and there won't be a next time, now.

It's strange how we invest emotional energy in things like airlines. I remember watching CP turn into Canadian, loving every minute I spent in the air with Canadian, smirking at anyone dumb enough to fly Air Canada by choice. And then it all fell apart; my last flight on Canadian, to Boston in May of 2000, was bittersweet because the return was on Air Canada metal, and the contrast was stark, obvious; I didn't like it at all. Now I put up with Air Canada and I tolerate WestJet, and am shocked when I have an ACA flight that doesn't come with a side order of extreme annoyance, or a WJA flight that doesn't make me grit my teeth over some issue or another. Air travel doesn't seem like much fun anymore, and yet it continues to hold some kind of silly appeal for me.

The world changes, you heard it here first. There are all kinds of things you can no longer do on airplanes; some, like the decline and fall of catering standards and service, are a function of the business climate. Some, like riding in the pointiest part of a 767-200 all the way to Toronto, are a function of our time. (This remains the coolest thing I have ever done in an airplane I wasn't being paid to ride in to date.) That's lost and gone forever. You'd think, though, that the joy of travel, the experience of getting somewhere, would still hold some fun; now, it's drudgery at the airport, ritualistic humiliation at the screening point, cattle-class service on board, and baggage roulette at the final destination. No wonder people are down on the airlines -- it's not fun anymore.

Aloha had its share of problems. I didn't really enjoy flying with them last year, but that experience hasn't changed my memories or my love of the airline any. I have decades of warm, happy thoughts for AAH, and I'm really going to miss them. They, more than any airline I spent time on as a kid, were the providers of the last of the "fun" trips, from start to finish.

I was cleaning out a directory tonight (this is what I do these days when I'm tense or angry, I go and clean out my hard drive) and I came across the original version of Russ Allbery's magnificent rant about... I'm not sure what it's about, actually.

Superficially it's about Usenet, my first true love on the net, but if you dig a bit deeper, read a bit between the lines, it gets at some of the core issues around the Internet and inter-networking generally -- how the network itself, while interesting and fun to play with, is entirely secondary to the goal of allowing people to connect with each other; the value of the relationships forged on the network; the exclusivity of some of those relationships; the ability of this phenomenal tool to bring people together, and what happens when it is under threat from people who don't understand that.

The post is ten years old this month. It feels, in its broad images, like it could have been written yesterday. It dates only because the technology and the specific source of the problem has changed; the essence, its core, is as true as it ever was.

Now nearing the end of my second decade on the Internet (and its predecessors), I see this more clearly now than I ever did. Spam, trolls, denials-of-service, flooding -- all of this is, in some way, an attack on the infrastructure itself. Yet although no one cries when a router screams because its table is overloaded, a great many people cry when jerks invade their bboard or flood their favorite blog. We don't care about the physical reality of the Internet -- most of us probably never did, and wouldn't know a router from a switch if it bit us in the face. We care about the space in our heads, the collective space we all made, the space that was special to us and meaningful, the space that got chewed up when some vandal came roaring through.

I used to argue about spam as though it were some kind of stolen resource. It is, in the purest sense of the term, but I didn't get sad because my mail client had to spend a few more seconds processing mail. What saddens me about the e-mail spam problem is that I've had to implement filters, wall off entire countries, and disable even the most basic diagnostic messages because I can't deal with the volume of junk flowing back to me. The platonic ideal of e-mail, to my mind, no longer works -- and while there's a technical side to this, I'm not really upset that no one with an e-mail address that ends in .hk or .tw can send me mail. I'm upset that no person with an e-mail address ending in .hk or .tw can reach me anymore. It's sad that we've reached this point, yet I don't know how a reasonable person can do anything else. This was, ultimately, one of Russ's points. "The difference, to me, between those things that Usenet is for and those things that Usenet is not for, is one of manner and quantity. Not one of content. I do not want to see any person excluded from Usenet, even if they believe that Usenet should be used for machine-generated spew. I just want to stop the spew, because if it goes unchecked it will drown out and destroy the beauty of what Usenet is."

Perhaps I am not explaining this well; perhaps I am rambling. It's late and I'm up past my bedtime. But I am thinking about the things that I love, and have loved, and how they make me feel, and I think back to the arguments we used to have about the nature of the network, and I keep thinking that we were all missing the point -- that maybe we're all still missing the point. The point is the contact. The point is the connection -- the ability to reach out and find someone to make you feel less lonely. I think we sometimes forget how precious and special that is, and how sad we are when other people ruin it for us.

Talking about the problem in that sense -- in terms of the effect it has on people trying to reach each other -- somehow feels more honest than worrying about computational cycles and mail server load. Russ's rant was shocking because he put into words what many of us felt but could not explain; we couldn't defend the emotional damage we felt when a part of Usenet (or the network generally) broke because of someone else's malfeasance. But he could, and he could focus that hurt and anger like a laser beam on a very specific example, which gave his rant a shocking degree of power. It's not the anger that amazes me, ten years later -- I remember being plenty angry on Usenet. What amazes me is the passion.

I wish I could write such an empassioned defence of the Internet.

Hold on a second, clamhead! You think you can just roll in here and tell us it's not on when it very clearly is on?! You're just trying to make us not practice, aren't you? Because you know your kids are goin' down when my kids give them this! Give me some moves out, Girl T! Check this out! Yeah! You like that?!"

Much to my sorrow, embedding on this magnificent YouTube video is disabled, but that will in no way prevent me from using it as a teaching aid, or just as some filler material the next time I have to give a talk even tangentially related to cardiac electrophysiology.

It is absolutely brilliant beyond words. Better, I think, than a cheap knockoff of a Justin Timberlake song (which is, in and of itself, pretty damn good).

Green sea turtle, Anaeho'omalu Bay, Waikoloa, Hawaii
18 January, 2008

It's nice to be back.

With Mike Huckabee's win in the Iowa caucuses tonight, I thought it might be nice to congratulate the former Arkansas governor with a trip down memory lane...

Way to go, Mike! Yeah!

Dear Botnet Owners,

On behalf of the entire Internet, I would like to say "thank you!" for finally putting that "mailer-daemon" character in his place, and making sure that I will have to forever automatically delete any piece of e-mail that comes from him. I am so grateful that you've managed to make bounce messages so thoroughly useless I now have to start ignoring them, thus ensuring that I'll never really know whether my mail got through or not.

Thanks again. I love my new broken Internet.

Fuck you very much,
Dr. Hazmat

Current Mood: pissed off

Dear Kayak:

Earlier this morning, I asked you for some help finding flights between Kailua-Kona and Honolulu at the end of January. Now, I'll admit -- I wasn't trying to use you to buy the tickets, merely to get an idea of what was out there and what the price ranges were. And, to be fair, you showed me about 240 options, most of them in the same price brackets. But I got kind of curious about the flight that was listed for $1,400, and so I was floored to discover that your route-finding engine's idea of a reasonable way to get from Kailua-Kona to Honolulu is to connect through... Los Angeles.

Okay. I'll concede that somewhere, a user might think, "hey, that might be a good choice," but I'm hard-pressed to think of a situation where that would occur on a regular basis. And, in the grand scheme of things, it's not quite as bad as stupid as the time the RAC told a woman driving from Nottingham to Bideford to go through Ireland and France (which has been fixed; I just tried it). But really, would it be so hard to insert a sanity check in the engine that said, basically, "if the proposed route is longer than the average length/time of these other routes, maybe we should hide it from the user unless specifically asked"?

It finally happened: An Apple commercial made me laugh. It may have something to do with the fact that it's in another language, and that Mac doesn't come off like quite the annoying prick he does elsewhere. But I give them credit -- this is a funny ad.

The whole Japanese campaign works better for me than the obnoxious North American/UKnian one. Mac isn't held out to be some ultra-hip asshole, and PC isn't such a shocking loser. The problem is that you can't brag about your accomplishments and your strengths in Japan, so you have to be more subtle about it; basically, what the campaign is saying is that Mac is a much calmer, more relaxed, more enjoyable person, while PC is a bit like your excitable younger brother. Mac isn't the condescending jackass he is in North America; PC isn't portrayed as such a fucking loser. (I could also talk about the different ways the two refer to themselves (the Japanese language has a lot of different ways to say "I," most of which come into play through the various ads), but that's a bit out of my depth -- I don't speak Japanese that well.) The subtleties of the interaction will be lost on a lot of non-Japanese speakers, but it's very clear that the spirit behind this series of ads is one of harmony rather than superiority.

I still think the ads themselves are bogus. The premise is essentially flawed -- it's a technology choice, not a moral question. But this is a much less irritating way of making the case. I like it.

(As if that opinion carried any weight whatsoever...)

I'm going to come right out and say it: Best. Ending. Ever.

Jack Hitt wrote a fabulous article in Rolling Stone last month about missile defense, made all the more fabulous because it contained information relating to a defense or aerospace project that was new to me. As they say, read the whole thing. If you're like me, though, and have spent a significant portion of your life around computers and the open source movement, the most striking this about this article is the horror you'll feel when you realize that the United States Department of Defense has adopted the CADT model of weapons system development.

I'm not joking. Hitt might as well have been writing about any large scale OSS project:

This kind of thinking does wonders for the speed with which you can deploy weapons. Take the shield's interceptor missiles. In the old way of building things, a few missiles would have been built and tested repeatedly until it was clear they could reliably launch, sync up with central command, interact with radar, intercept a test missile that shrouded itself in decoys, make the necessary discriminations and blow the proper target from the sky. But under the new way of building things, all you have to do is have the whole thing worked out on paper, in simulated computer run-throughs and a few limited real-world tests. That's why fields of interceptor missiles are already up and, in a capability-based way, running in both Alaska and California.

Of course, the "deploy now, test later" approach has its drawbacks. During a 2005 run, the interceptor couldn't get out of the silo because the retraction arm -- which hadn't been tested properly in real-world conditions -- didn't fully retract, causing the entire system to shut down. In the old knowledge-based world, that probably would have been worked out before deployment. But in the capability-based world, each interceptor had to be removed, a new retractor system designed and installed, and the interceptors put back into the silos. ...

If the old question was whether or not the technology worked -- and it still has not been satisfactorily answered -- there now appears to be a new question: Even if the technology is found to work, given the current schedule, will missile defense be fully operational anytime in the next half-century? ...

Last year, three weeks of heavy rain did what no invading army could pull off: It penetrated Fort Greely's defenses and took out a quarter of the missiles. The silos and the electronics vaults adjacent to them were flooded -- one silo was filled with sixty-three feet of water. Boeing blames the military, the military blames Boeing. According to the Missile Defense Agency, it is not cost-effective to repair the damage. Moreover, it is now considered too dangerous to work near missiles in the undamaged silos. The latest budget has a line in it to start from scratch: The government plans to build a completely new field of twenty missiles.

Tell me there's a difference between this mentality and:

This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

Let's see. Obsession with new and shiny stuff? Check! Belief that technology will conquer all? Check! More interested in releasing product than actually having a product that works? Check! Complaints from other developers about fundamental flaws in methodology unsound ignored? Check! Poorly articulated design goals with no clear roadmap to achieve those goals? Check! Wow, that's really disturbing -- the new and improved Department of Defense really does look like a CADT software project.

I weep, but I don't know why.

(We will, for the sake of politeness, ignore the geopolitical implications of missile defense. Gwynne Dyer had it right almost a generation ago: "Star Wars won't help people survive, only missiles." The issue isn't -- and has never been -- one of defending friendly lives, but ensuring that American weapons can be delivered without fear of retaliation; back in the cold war this was more about preventing a counterforce first-strike, today it probably has more to do with having the ability to blow the shit out of Tehran or Pyongyang without worrying a hidden launch site might get overlooked.

On a totally unrelated note, Jack Hitt is a fantastic writer who desperately needs a frickin' Web site or something so he can point to his latest articles and say, "hey, go read!")

The Internet is officially out of money. All you new-media punks and johnny-come-latelies (and by that I mean, "anyone who got on-line sometime after about 1995") can go home right goddamn now.

I've been thinking this for a while. 15+ years into the mass-popularization of the Internet, we continually see the re-emergence of trends in on-line communities that we saw before. The problems and the dynamics are the same; the only thing that changes is the interface. We've always had trolls and agents provocateur; now, instead of infesting newsgroups, they infest blog comment sections and Web bboard fora. People are continually trying to solve the same problems we solved back in the Dark Ages, usually with less grace and less skill than we did. I won't belabor the point, but the problem essentially boils down to a failure to correctly disseminate information, and a tendency to disregard prior art and experience as a guide to developing contemporary solutions. It isn't uncommon to run into Internet software developers who are wholly ignorant of the history of their chosen medium, so it probably isn't surprising that we see the same solutions to the same problems re-invented over and over (and frequently less elegantly than in the past).

It's bad enough that the Web as a whole goes through these phases where we seem to be trying to solve the same problems we solved on Usenet in the 1980s, but we've now reached a point where the Web is dealing with the same phenomena we dealt with eight years ago. By which, of course, I mean the goddamn blahgs.

The current meme in the circles of blogs that I read is the New Media Mob: A collection of young writers who've managed to parlay their blogs into paying gigs at formerly respectable publications. Roy and Sadly, No -- particularly directed at this post by Cool Kid Garance Franke-Ruta -- sum it up quite nicely. It comes down to this: A group of people have, for reasons that are not fully explained by their literary or cognitive skills, been elevated to the status of superstars within a particular community, and everyone else wonders why that happened.

We've been here before in the blog world. Oh, my, how we've been here before.

If you flash back to 1999 or 2000, back when blogging was beginning to take the world by storm, you remember the A-List. You may even remember the prescient article by Joe Clark that described the phenomenon. At the time the blog was primarily personal and anecdotal, driven by technology, and its superstars were technology "pioneers" and developers; now, seven years later, the blog is primarily political, driven by people who seem to complain about the current crop of pundits while at the same time lusting after those gigs themselves.

I mean, Clark basically nails it (to use an old hoary blogging cliche):

The A-List: “Jason Kottke... is widely admired among bloggers as a thoughtful critic of Web culture.... Getting blogged by Kottke, or by Meg Hourihan or one of her colleagues at Pyra, is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on Oprah.”

• Finally, independent confirmation of an obvious fact that is self-servingly denied by the Weblog aristocracy itself: Despite no appreciable difference in the “thoughtfulness” of their respective Web criticism, some Webloggers are superstars.
• The myth, of course, holds that all bloggers are equal, because we all can set out our wares on the great egalitarian Internet, where the best ideas bubble to the surface. This free-market theory of information has superficial appeal, but reality is rather different.
• Jason’s commentary is quite good (Meg’s less so), but so is the commentary written by literally a dozen other bloggers I read, none of whom can create a miniature Slashdot effect by mentioning you. (I’m not citing any other bloggers here, by the way, whatever their fame or acumen. I’m limiting the name-dropping to the bloggers Rebecca Mead introduced into the discourse.)
• Jason’s fame cannot be attributed solely to his cuteness (mentioned explicitly by Mead). I can think of two other A-list bloggers who are better-looking, not to mention having a bit more meat on the bones, and I am aware that there are a lot of attractive bloggeuses. Moreover, one A-list blogger is spectacularly ugly, but that has not impeded his star status.
• Web-design skills cannot account for everything, either. Jason’s site, in its various forms, offers a middling level of programming complexity. Yet I can name three other A-list bloggers, and a far greater number digging for coal with their bare hands in the caverns of the net, whose sites are more complex and better-looking.
• A small number of A-list bloggers run Weblogs that are effectively undesigned, a positioning statement that aims to showcase their ideas more prominently, but their ideas aren’t markedly superior to other bloggers’ in the first place.
• Any way you cut it, there is no rational or even pseudo-rational explanation for the distribution of fame in the blog biz. Fame is like that.

It's exactly the same thing, seven years later, and we're all acting like it's a brand-new phenomenon. Replace "Jason Kottke" and "Meg Hourihan" with "Matt Yglesias" and "Megan McArdle", and "web design" with "commentary," and Joe Clark has managed to preemptively capture the annoyance of a number of bloggers. That no one that I've found so far has managed to notice this is, frankly, shocking -- and we should all be ashamed at how fast we collectively forget the history of our own medium.

This does not, however, detract from the fundamental irritation that most of us feel when we read this stuff. There isn't a whole heap of difference between this:

Rio just came out with a new MP3 player shaped like a walnut – and about the same size. They say it’ll sync with my Palm, which is too damn new for me to have synced it with my old Palm, let alone the Cube or the PowerBook. Anyway, something to pick up on Saturday morning.

And this:

Brian is/was Ezra’s roommate. Sommer is Matt’s friend. Ezra is staying with Matt here in NYC while we are all up here for the Clinton Global Initiative. Alex and I are friends, as are Alex and Megan. Matt and Ezra and Megan went shooting together on Yom Kippur (bad Jews!), along with Dave, who is throwing a joint birthday party with Brian later this week. Also, Megan and Matt work together. And I used to work with Matt and still work with Ezra. And I think we are all Facebook friends.

Well, that's not entirely true. We'll come back to this idea in a second.

Once again, we see the development of an us/them dichotomy between the blog superstars and the common masses toiling away in relative obscurity, and, once again, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to differentiate the two groups in terms of quality of output -- there is no clear reason why, for instance, Matt Yglesias should be given a prominent place at The Atlantic and someone like Amanda Marcotte or Jim Henley or Radley Balko isn't, at least not on the basis of the quality of their commentary -- just as there was no clear reason why Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan were elevated to the status of blogstars in their day. (I suspect that the real reason has to do with comfort levels: Radley and Jim and Amanda all suffer from fairly advanced cases of Stickittothemaniosis.) The qualifications Brian/Ezra/Sommer/Matt/Alex/Garance/Megan bring to the table -- an Ivy League degree, connections, and an Establishment Media gig -- seem to be more fungible and even less impressive than the qualifications the Original A-List possessed; at least Hourihan could, by working at Pyra, claim to have played some role in the development of the medium she would ultimately represent in the pages of the New Yorker. I'm not sure you could make the same argument for McArdle and her merry band.

Clark again, with his own emphasis:

I would be less inclined to complain if I were able to share in the Internet bounty in even the most trivial way. None of us Webloggers is particularly wealthy; few of us became dot-com millionaires. It’s just that everyone but me gets to make a living. It bugs me that the A-list kids are not really any smarter, or any better at Web design, or have anything particularly better to say than so many of the plebes. Their fame is inexplicable, but famous they are – and able to keep their heads above water. It’s the combination I resent.

Elizabeth Taylor was at least beautiful and could act, when not knocking back the sauce and buying diamonds by the barrel. What causes an anointed cadre of objectively undifferentiable Webloggers to be viewed as demigods escapes me. And it does in fact chafe against my egalitarian instincts. Many of us are as good as they are.

What's worse this time around -- and the big difference between this A-List and the last A-List -- is the degree of incestuousness. It's truly shocking. These kids all come from the same part of the world, have roughly the same educational background, have the same upbringing, have worked at the same places, and essentially think the same way on every given topic. Again, we've seen this before -- Jason would link to Meg who would link to Robert who would link to Dave, and round and round we went, and it was rare to find one who disagreed with the others. Which was creepy enough, but ultimately harmless when the topic of discussion was blogging itself, or Web standards, or whatever. Now, however, we're turning to blogs as an alternative to traditional media, to discuss issues of vital importance, and we're still seeing mass agreement and bland traditionalism. Because the New Media Mob hang out together and work together -- because, as Garance says, it's a cocktail party with the same 50 people over and over again. This isn't good. It suppresses minority and radical viewpoints, the same viewpoints that desperately need to be heard -- the same ones that, paradoxically, the Internet and the blog revolution was supposed to promote. That bland conformity was bad enough when it was on the editorial pages of the major daily newspapers, but the blogosphere was supposed to be the antidote to that. Instead of competing with Maureen Dowd, we have a group of writers working hard to be the next Maureen Dowd. And they're not even interesting Maureen Dowds.

How is this helping, again?

Current Mood: contemplative

I bought a Lexmark E210 printer a few years ago, before it became readily apparent what a bunch of bozos they are. It doesn't really matter to me whether they won the case or not; the fact that they'd go to those lengths to stop consumers from using third-party products in their printers was pathetic in and of itself. Regardless of the dickheadedness of their behavior, I was still stuck with this printer which takes insanely expensive toner cartridges.

The E210 is basically a re-badged Samsung ML 1210 laser printer. It's logical to assume that the ML 1210 toner cartridges would fit in the E210, right? Wrong! They don't! Buying an approved Lexmark toner cartridge costs $128.95 at my local Staples; the Samsung cartridge is $78.95. Did I mention the Samsung cartridges are good for another 500 pages? Yeah, they are.

It turns out the reason they don't fit is about a half-inch of plastic on the toner cartridge itself, and that fixing this problem is ridiculously simple. It took ten minutes, five of which were spent looking for a screwdriver. (I did a major cleaning around here recently, and as a result, I cannot find anything.) The instructions actually overstate things a bit; you don't really need to remove the rear cover, though if you do the front cover probably goes on a bit more easily.

I mention all of this merely to wonder idly at the logic of some companies. Lexmark re-badged and re-branded a Samsung product, mostly by slapping a different plastic case over the insides, but in order to justify having a Lexmark label on the printer, they added about $0.03 of material (I figure $0.02 for the aluminum bracket and $0.01 for the screw), jacked the cost of the toner cartridge up by almost $50, and made it so it doesn't last as long. Their entire revenue strategy seems to involve fleecing the consumer on the back end, though to be fair this isn't something that's restricted to Lexmark since most printer manufacturers do exactly the same thing. There seems to be something slightly awry here, something vaguely unethical or immoral, yet I can't quite put my finger on it. I don't know why companies have to behave like this -- is fucking over your customers ever a good idea?

When I discovered this, I was all set to go on a self-righteous rant about it, but then I realized that by removing this tab and converting my printer to use the cheap cartridges, I've done something better than ranting: I've cost Lexmark money. Granted, it's not very much money, and I doubt they really care that some people who bought E210s are opening them up and getting around their very crude technology, but as a method for sticking it to the man this is hard to beat, and it's a lot more satisfying than merely complaining on the Internet -- it puts money back in my pocket, and it's an act of defiance. Yay!