don't ever, ever talk to the police. ever.

I just watched a great set of videos about why you should never talk to the police for any reason.

Here's the first one, by Professor James Duane, giving a background on the law and a bunch of different scenarios where even if you're innocent, anything you say just makes your life worse. Then, there's a second video, by a cop, about exactly why the law professor is correct. It's a nice set.

(Don't let the fact that Professor Duane talks way too fast annoy you, you just have to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, he makes some really great points.)

I find this particularly interesting because I've been interrogated by cops and various security professionals several times in my life, and I've found myself doing exactly what he describes here, talking way too much to try to convince them that I'm innocent, or embellishing the truth if I'm trying to get out of something. You always, always end up saying the wrong things, or going a bit too far in your earnest desire to help prove your innocence. I've always regretted it in retrospect.

The primary point that he makes is that the 5th amendment is NOT just for criminals to protect themselves, it's also for innocent people to protect themselves from the system. Anything you say that is false, even unrelated to the case at hand, is ammunition against you. And even the fact that you talked to them at all, even if everything you said was 100% fact, can be used against you if the cop misremembers what you said.

At the end of the day, absolutely nothing you say to the police helps you, it can only hurt you, and that's a very interesting thing to keep in mind. Innocent or not, your words are ammunition against you. The only way to win, is not to play, as I learned from WarGames. Don't ever talk to the police.

what is Hillary Clinton waiting for?

This race has gotten more bizarre by the day. Generally speaking, Hillary Clinton only has two possible paths to the nomination:

1) Get Michigan and Florida seated with the completely ridiculous and unfair assumption that she should be allowed to take delegates from an illegal vote, where candidates had agreed to not campaign, and Obama wasn't even on the ballot. Every time she argues for this option, it blows my mind. She might as well say "I'd really like to be allowed to cheat, if that's okay with you guys." The result of this would be the division the party and alienation of many Democratic voters.

2) Get to the convention and convince superdelegates that she's the better candidate, despite losing the popular vote and the delegate count. She's already started saying that she has the support of "white Americans", which is a surreally racist tact for someone who talks about how hard it is to be a woman running for president. Yeah, it's hard to be a woman, but it's cool to say that white people don't want to vote for a black guy. Nice. The result of this would of course be the division of the party and alienation of many Democratic voters.

So seriously, what the fuck is she doing? You hear these news reports of people saying that she's fought such a hard battle that she deserves to run it to the end, despite the impossible odds. Why? Because she's a woman, she should stay in because we PITY her? When every day, her campaign divides the party, and lets McCain sit back fat and happy and watch the disaster unfold? What kind of argument is that?

The only realistic tactical reason I can see for her campaign continuing right now is that she thinks that she can force her way into the VP position by being just popular enough that Obama feels he has to take her in.

I really hope that doesn't happen, they're completely different candidates, and she stands for all the stupid bull-headed politics as usual nonsense that he's supposed to oppose. Her position on that absurd and short sighted gas tax cut perfectly showed this to be the case, that she would pander for votes against the advice of every economist and rational human who understands supply and demand curves. You might as well put a band-aid on a slit throat.

Drop the fuck out already, and let us get on with the process of trying to dethrone the politics of fear that have crippled this country for almost 8 years.

our cognitive heat sinks

This is a fantastic video about how society deals with change by creating cognitive "heat sinks", which I'd never really thought of in those terms before, but makes perfect sense.

Clay Shirky goes over how we reach periods of societal change, and lose ourselves in mindless excess of things like alcohol, or sitcoms, and then start to tap that stored wealth of cognition and slowly bring ourselves to the next societal level.

I highly recommend checking it out, it really helped me solidify my thinking about how we create "relief valves" in our minds where we passively consume in order to spin unused brain cycles, it's not just sitcoms, it's professional sports, it's religion... we've got these heat sinks built up all around us, just waiting to be tapped. Otherwise, we would completely combust as a society.

The trick is to recognize your own heat sinks, and start to tap them to do something, instead of nothing.

His bit about someone asking him "Where do they find the time?" about Wikipedia really hit home for me, I've always been a firm believer that we have huge, HUGE amounts of free time that we fritter away. It confuses me when people ask me where I find time to play games to review on Noobtoob every week, and take Japanese classes, and do any number of other things - what's interesting is I still waste probably 40 hours a week on cognative heat sinks. Maybe more. I certainly don't feel like I'm making the most of my time.

We have to give ourselves permission to have these escape valves, of course, you can't be creating and contributing all the time, but whenever I force myself to take a couple percent of my spare brain cycles and actually DO something, I always feel better for it. And I think the direction we're going is really exciting, a whole new generation of kids are coming up who don't think of entertainment as a passive medium. I just need to learn to think like them and ditch my baggage.

another dose of politics for you

Lawrence Lessig, most well known for founding Creative Commons, and writing about free culture, has endorsed Obama, with a very well made and convincing video, here.

Also rocking my socks this week is a music video taken from the original source material of Obama speaking in New Hampshire on the night of the primaries.

If you haven't watched that speech, I highly recommend it, if it doesn't quicken your heartbeat a bit, I think you're probably dead inside.

I'm going to quote a bit of it here, that really stuck with me:

"We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we've been told we're not ready or that we shouldn't try or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier... Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can."

That's been a rallying call of mine, throughout my life, and to hear it repeated in such a positive and powerful way by a politician, it really gives me hope. As long as people have told me I can't do things, I've always responded that "Yes, I can." And it turns out that quite often, just believing that makes it possible. It's a truly American credo, one of belligerence and hope combined, one of confidence and exuberance and forward thinking. That was a damn fine speech.

we're a democracy, dammit

One major reason I can think of for not supporting Hillary Clinton for the nomination (well, one of very, very many), is that I don't like the idea of our country being run by dynasties.

I mean, jesus, this country has been run by the Bush/Clinton dynasty for 20 goddamn years now. I don't want to make it an even quarter of a century.

There's a danger here, in that we need to cycle in new people, with new ideas, and not get used to a certain name being the person you have to go to for leaders. We don't need American Royal Families. It's time to break the chain and get some new blood in there, and shake this country up a bit, because I don't like where we've been going.

20 years! I still can't believe that. An entire generation of Americans has never known a leader who wasn't a Bush or Clinton.

moon landing conspiracy theories

You know, in all the discussions I've seen of conspiracy in the moon landing, I'd never heard of the mirror that we left there. It pretty much destroys all the conspiracies, yet it's not talked about much. Neil and Buzz left a mirror there, pointed back at earth, in 1969.

I've been watching a documentary about gravity here, and it turns out that astronomers are able to bounce a laser off the mirror that we left there, and use it to measure quite accurately the distance between the earth and the moon.

Now, if you hit the surface with a laser, the photons don't make it back. It takes an incredibly accurate telescope and a lot of patience to hit that little mirror. If there wasn't a mirror there, the experiment wouldn't work.

What's awesome about this is that it's repeatable! You can go to an observatory with a telescope mounted laser, just like this documenter did, and test the theory. Boom, there's the mirror, we landed on the moon. Shut the hell up, wackos.

customer service is dead

You used to be able to walk into a store and talk to the owner.

Next, you called a help line, and talked to some kid reading a 3 ring binder.

That was too expensive, so we hired Indians who don't understand your problems to help you with your problems.

Following that, we got lots of websites where you can only fill out a web form, and someone will help you, eventually.

Google has taken the next step, and told people to fuck off completely.

I've got a problem with Noobtoob's streaming feed on Youtube. It's all documented right here in a forum post.

Why is it in a forum post, where I'm begging for help, and no one is listening? Because Google has decided that they won't help you at all with anything that breaks. They set up a forum, so you can beg for help from other people who are there to beg for help. Needless to say, it doesn't work very well.

If you go to their help pages, you can click through FAQs, but there's NO contact information anywhere. There is literally no way to get help from anyone. You can't even fill out a form begging someone to help. Once, I found a page where there was a text field, and I begged that they would help me with my Youtube/Adsense problem.

I got no response, so I went back to use the text box again... and they had REMOVED it, I shit you not. There was one place on the entire site where you could try to contact a person, and it was a mistake that they fixed.

So, this is the future. Web 2.0, community-generated help forums, with thousands of people screaming into the night and no one listening. I guess if enough people complain on forums or blogs, they'll read about the problem in a website, and then decide it's big enough to fix. I never thought I'd miss Indian call centers.

It's mind bogglingly unfriendly and stupid, but I guess it's cheaper than helping people. Because, you know, Google is short on money.

seriously, folks

I want to propose a Constitutional amendment saying that we can't have a president who doesn't believe in evolution.

None of this wishy washy "It's just a theory!" nonsense that shows that you don't have two fucking brain cells in your head. Read any five pages of a Richard Dawkins book, and if you still don't understand that the mountains and mountains of scientific evidence show exactly what is happening, you are INELIGIBLE.

It's fucking 2008, people. I don't mind if you're religious, a lot of people are, and that's cool. None of us know what caused the big bang. But we sure as shit know what happened after it. Get on board.

this is what the world looks like to a libertarian

All of my friends have been posting this thing, and I did it myself out of curiousity, because everyone else that posts it has either all blue on the top or all red on the top (mostly blue, of course).

However, being a libertarian, my beliefs are a mixed bag from both parties. A couple strange things to note is that I don't agree with anyone on more than 68% of issues, and also, none of my top matches has a chance in hell of even making it through the primaries.

I figured that Ron Paul would be my top hit, actually. I was surprised he was farther down, but that's probably because of my stance on things like abortion and gay marriage. I don't know a damn thing about Bill Richardson, but apparently he's the most libertarian of the bunch. For the number of things that I answered that I'd do, like cut budgets, and privatize social security, I can't fathom why a Democrat ended up at the top. I guess the truth is that neo-cons have zero in common with me, and Democrats have a little bit.

No matter which way it goes, I'm gonna be sad with whoever wins the election this year. Notice that ALL of the major front runners are within 4% of each other on my chart. Looks like it won't matter much to me which side wins.

68% Bill Richardson
63% Mike Gravel
63% Ron Paul
63% Chris Dodd
61% Rudy Giuliani
59% John McCain
59% Barack Obama
58% Dennis Kucinich
57% Hillary Clinton
56% Mike Huckabee
56% John Edwards
55% Mitt Romney
48% Joe Biden
46% Tom Tancredo
46% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

I think this election is over

I think that 2008 is locked down?

Why is that, you ask? I have photographic evidence:



Mike Huckabee's victory speech in Iowa... who's that behind him?

CHUCK FUCKING NORRIS.

If Chuck Norris says that Huckabee is the next president, who can argue? This is the man that doesn't do pushups, he pushes the earth down.

Jesus that's a weird picture. Click on it to see a bigger version. I captured this out at a pub in Maryland, and I started screaming so loud that the bartender changed the channel to sports. Seriously.

people are crazy

I've been reading passiveaggressivenotes.com for the last 30 minutes, and it's gotta be the most fascinating thing I've seen all week. People are absolutely nuts. And reading the notes that they leave for each other is a window right into the craziest illiterate parts of their souls. From screaming at people who have sex on creaky beds to labeling someone the "Mad Bomber" for crapping all over the stalls at work, this is a peek into some weird shit.

The most passive aggressive thing I've seen in a personal situation is a roommate who was unable to clean up other people's stuff going out and buying his own knife and labeling it, so no one could yell at him for not cleaning it, but that was NOTHING compared to this madness. Check it out.

on vacation

Rusty and I headed off with all his belongings to Maryland:





It got cold very fast:



But we made it.

The stop in through Illinois was awesome, it's always great to hang out with the clan.



Adrienne's Redskins hat was a big hit:







So was Guitar Hero:



For New Year's Eve, I drove up to Harrisburg to hang out with Kevin, and we met Matt Pinfield from MTV fame:



And then we drank a lot and watched his friends set a dresser on fire, and toss it off a roof.



Like I said, we drank a lot.

Today I swung by to see Alison and Lee and their baby, and their kickass house.



That's it so far ,tomorrow Rusty and I are gonna go check out DC.

RIP Chairman

As any of you know who have come over to our house in the last year, we've got a couple neighborhood cats that have adopted us, including a cute little old lady named Chairman Meow, who has been part of our house for about a year, and could be found every night on either my lap or Adrienne's, completely content.

She also absolutely loved heat, she'd go and sit and watch the fire for hours, or sit on the heating grate. Between heat and people, her world was pure joy. She was pretty much the friendliest cat I've ever seen. She loved to come up and give people a little nudge with her head until they petted her. Unlike every other cat in the world, she loved to be picked up, never ran away, never got angry, never scratched. She was pure affection.

Last night, she showed up with a huge lump on her back, which turned out to be a herniated bladder - the vet says she either got hit by a car or fell from something too high. Since she was 15 years old, the surgery would have been too much for her, so our neighbors (who she belonged to), put her down.

What stuns me is how upset I am. Chairman quietly became part of my family, and she was so happy and innocent, and to have her gone forever from a freak accident, when I didn't even get to say goodbye, is heartbreaking. It's almost harder for me to see animals hurt than people because they don't know why they're being put down, or why they're in pain.

I think my own fear and hatred of mortality makes me less able to deal with this sort of stuff than the rest of you normal people, I don't think it's okay that anyone has to go. I can't wrap my head around how it's okay that we never get to see someone again when they're gone, forever. Whether it's a cat or a person, it's just as permanent, and just as wrong.

Sorry to see you go, Chairman. I find myself missing you every time I sit on the couch. Life is really unfair sometimes.


















Bye, kiddo.

podcasts for a road trip

Does anyone have any good suggestions for podcasts? I'm going to drive from Santa Clara to Tucson, and then from Tucson to Maryland. So we're talking about five straight days in a car. Good podcasts would be nice.

I've been listening to The Future and You, Hardcore History, the Singularity Podcast, and Astronomy Cast... I've downloaded JapanesePod101, and some others. But what do you guys listen to? Better yet, what are some good serialized podcasts of books or old radio shows? Any suggestions?

girls are weird

You ever notice how at big parties, you frequently get conversation migration such that the women and men separate like oil and water? Sure, there's some mixing, but for the most part, you get little clumps, organized by sex.

I've been in several situations in the last few weeks where it was me and a gaggle of women, and it's made me realize that the conversational style of the sexes is vastly different.

Sure, guys talk about cars and farting and robots, and women get bored with us. Everyone knows that.

What's bizarre is how women talk. (Well, bizarre to me and my penis).

Often in groups of women, there's this completely unordered stream of consciousness type conversational flow, where anything that any girl says can remind another girl of something, and they just start talking about it. Often in mid sentence. While the other girl is talking.

And they don't seem to mind, or think this is rude at all!

I can't really wrap my head around this. I'm used to conversations where a topic is raised, and people give their opinions about it, or raise points, and then once everyone has said their piece, or it's clear that no one is going to change their mind, another topic is raised. If someone else has something to say, they mentally file it into a queue, and they use this as the next conversational topic when a lull arises.

Let me give you an example of how the conversation appeared to me recently:

Girl: "What do you think about X?"
Me: "Well, I think that..."
Girl1: "OH MY GOD I LOVE THAT RESTAURANT!"
Girl2: "Yeah, it's great, but I don't like their curry"
Girl1: "You know who has great curry? This other place"
Me: "Uh, anyway, like you just asked me, I think..."
Girl2: "Jesus, what is that guy doing!" (regarding another driver)
Girl1: "Look at that beautiful dog!"
Girl3: "HELLO DOGGY!"

and so on, and so on...

I'm not really able to let go of the linear nature of my mind, and just let conversations flow from moment to moment, whatever stray impulse hits the brain of people around me. It's not ordered, and it doesn't allow for very much depth.

Not only that, but sometimes I get the impression that they're not actually listening to each other. They all feel the need to talk and have other people listen, but they are somehow able to all do it at the same time, and feel satisfied. Or maybe they've mastered the art of listening while talking.

It's very strange mental wiring. And it never seems to happen one-on-one, it's a phenomenon of multiple women, like a specialized protocol. I'd love to see the RFC for that one.

If you'll excuse me now, I've got to go find some dudes, I just saw a video of a farting robot that I need to show them.

coming out to DC/MD/VA

Hey East Coast peeps-

I'm heading out to the East Coast with Rusty, to help him move to Maryland for good. We're leaving Tucson right after Christmas, and we'll be arriving in Silver Spring around the 30th.

I'm thinking about hanging around town for a few days, maybe till the 4th or so, going down to DC, seeing the sights, riding the metro, eating east coast food, seeing old friends, that sort of thing.

If you're in that area, and you want to get dinner or lunch, or show me something cool, or get a beer, drop me an email or comment on this post. I'd love to see people, it feels like I hardly ever come out east anymore. I'll have a rental car, so I don't need to be hauled around, either.

Let me know!

open letter to UI designers

Dear Every UI designer in the English speaking world:

Use a fucking QWERTY keyboard.

Just use it. Please.

In the last week, I've been subjected to keyboards where the keys are in order from A-Z on the following: my Tivo, my Wii (Mario and Sonic Olympic Games), the jukebox at Fibbar's, and my GPS.

Serious, I don't understand. Everyone knows where the keys are on QWERTY. We're 100x faster. It's really hard to type on a weird keyboard where they keys are alphabetical, our brains don't know where to look for them.

Please. Always use a QWERTY keyboard. Or I will hunt you down and gut you like an animal.

guess it's good news/bad news

So, for no apparent reason, Youtube decided to kill its "Gadgets and Games" section of videos, even though it was always full of really great reviews, demos of gadgets, and a pretty thriving culture of geeks. You know, geeks, who make lots of videos and money, and are a really valuable core demographic.

Yeah. Gone. Of course, that's where Noobtoob lived, up until this week. Now we're in Entertainment, a much scarier wasteland of pirated asian TV shows, gay dudes watching gross movies and narrating them, people gossiping about celebrities and crying about Britney Spears.. Not really a place that we would stand out.

But the loyal fans are rating us highly, and we're up at #11 top rated for the day. Considering that means we're the #11 top rated in all of Entertainment instead of back in Gadgets and Games (where we were hitting #1 on the days we posted), it's not too bad. I love the Noobtoob army!

Maybe we'll even get more people who surf the top rated page and decide to try a couple dudes talking, instead of the screenshots of naked women that usually pepper the central frame of attention grabbing Youtube vids. Or maybe not. Hell, this is the internet. Boobies win every time.

I feel the earth move, under my feet

We had quite a shake tonight.

5.8, centered just about damn near on my house. I've never seen a quake right under my feet before.

Adrienne and I were hanging out, I was playing Guitar Hero 3, and it felt like someone started tugging the rug out from under me. You could see the walls shaking, toilet lids falling, the TV swaying. Nothing broke, though.

Adrienne ran for the doorway, and eventually I put down the guitar and went over there as well. It certainly wasn't a quick one, the shaking continued for 20-30 seconds.

I'm not sure Adrienne really believed me when I claimed that if the ceiling had fallen in, I would have deflected it with the power of my rock.

coolest hack ever

I can't believe how awesome this is.

If you load up jailbreakme.com on your iPhone or iTouch, you can hack it, without a PC, over the air. It hacks the phone, and drops on installer.App, which allows you to download literally anything else you want on your phone.

Keep in mind that people didn't think we'd be able to hack 1.1.1 at all, or as of just a week ago, the steps to do so involved a full page of painful instructions. These guys did a hell of a hacking job, so much so that I immediately gave them a Paypal donation, and up to this point, I'd never done a micropayment donation before.

Think about what this means to the hacking movement. Someone expresses interest in your hacked iPhone, but they don't want to do it to their own, because they're scared of "bricking" it, or they think it's too hard.

You just send them to that website, and boom, it's unlocked and ready to go. No pairing to the right machine with iTunes, no bricking, nothing. It's the kind of hack that gives me goosebumps as an engineer.

I'm sure Apple will close this TIFF flaw in the next firmware update, but then the hackers will figure out something else. And so on. And what's really funny is that they're nice enough to fix the TIFF loophole when they hack your phone, so it actually ends up MORE secure than when you started. That's hilarious.

Anyway, enjoy. I certainly have.

you don't seem very scary, somehow

I'll be damned, it's been years since I've seen Die Hard 2, and I'm watching it tonight, and the bad guy is freaking Haywood from Shawshank Redemption (the greatest movie in the history of all time) He's the stuttering, illiterate, numbnuts that talks the fat guy into crying that first night.

"Uh, it's the Count of Monte Crisco.. by Alexandree Dumb-ass".

Course, he starts this movie buck naked doing karate in a hotel room, and he looks a little tougher, but still. Freakin Haywood.



EDIT: Jeez, the guy who runs the airport tower is Senator Fred Thompson. You know, the guy who is running for president in 2008. That Fred Thompson.

This is quite the all star film.

EDIT2: Last edit, I promise. We've also got Chief O'Brien from Star Trek as the pilot of a plane that I don't think is long for this world, and the evil Terminator from Terminator 2 as a bad guy. Oh wait no, John McClane just fucking killed him using a ventilation grate. John. Goddamn. McClane. For president.

God I love Die Hard movies.

portal noobtoob skit

We've got a pretty great skit this week centering around Portal, the new game by Valve.

BTW, if you haven't played Portal, you need to. Right freaking now.

All you need to understand for the skit is that you've got a gun that shoots portals that let you move from one place to another in zero time, like stepping through a door. Enjoy!

oktoberfest

Oktoberfest was freaking sweet. 1 liter beers, lots of kraut and brat and debauchery.

The crew lifts their enormous beers in toast:

 

Bruce and myself getting saucy.

 

Bates REALLY liked the desserts.

 

Lord almighty that's a lot of people.

 

I've learned that next year I'm bringing my own enormous mug. All the cool people were doing it.

The whole album is here, plenty more fun pics.

I highly recommend attending next year. I'll be there. I might even get a hotel in the city, catching a cab out of the marina was a bitch.

cats on adrienne

 

I think I need a separate blog called "cats on Adrienne" because it happens more often than you might think.

Apparently her sleeping body is the perfect mattress if you're a feline.

wall art

This is an amazing stop motion video someone did with drawing on wall with charcoal. What's really cool is that he incorporated existing features like papers stuck on the walls, or pieces of wood, right into the movie.

It reminds me of Tool videos, which were some of the more amazing stop motion to come out of the 90's.