General

I had noticed recently that all of my blog entries were getting spurts of voting that was negative, and so I took a look at the access log to see what was up.  To my great surprise, 90% of the votes were from MSN's web scraper, even though it requires javascript to access the actual URL.  Taking a closer look at the non-bot votes using cat and grep, I could see that most were multiple votes from the same IP address, clrealy designed to skew the karma results.

When I originally enabled the karma plugin, I had hoped it would allow me some insight into what the silent public thought about my blog posts, which ones were useful, which ones not at all, and use this to gauge what might be best to focus my limited time on, since I am interested in way too many things for 24 hours in a day .  It looks like the karma plugin just doesn't cut it, unfortunately so I decided to disable it.

If you have any good ideas on better ways to rank the popularity of articles I've written for the list on the right sidebar, please let me know, I am also interested in the feedback on what people find useful on this blog, so that I can write more articles that don't suck .

Thanks in advance.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think that Bush might have had an idea that would benefit the poor. Specifically, I'm referring to his soon-to-be-announced health insurance plan. Basically, it would tax folks who pay more than approximately $625/month in health insurance (per individual, so $1250/family) on the amount above that threshhold, to help cover those who are not insured through their employer, or who are not insured whatsoever. If I understand it, this would mean, in effect, if your individual plan is $700/month, you would pay taxes on $75/month = $900 of "income." In other words, assuming a tax rate of 20%, you could pay an additional $180 of taxes in that year. If your individual plan is $1000/month, you would pay taxes on $4500 of "income", or $900. This might seem like a lot of money, but let's take a realistic look at things. $900 is $75/month, which is the cost of having cable television in most areas. So, even if you're getting ripped off BIG time (NOBODY should be paying more than $700/month per person for health insurance coverage, even in New York City), you'll only have to pay the cost of cable television. If you're making $30000/year, this is 3% of your income, so even relatively poor W-2 people would not see a big tax hit.

This could be huge. Just a few years ago, I was among those who were paying for health insurance out of pocket. As a resident of Manhattan, I was spending more than 50% of my income on rent (very typical in New York), and spending approximately $300/month on health insurance. At the same time, with a yearly income of just above the poverty line, because of an inability to deduct the rent, and an inability to deduct the cost of medical insurance, I was paying double the national average in taxes for my tax bracket, because of W-2 employees in other parts of the country who were able to buy houses and had employers paying for health care. Now, I'm on the other side, as an employee of the University of Nebraska, the health insurance is significantly cheaper, has more coverage options, and is tax deductible.  The benefits to a W-2er are undeniable, and providing these benefits to the poor is a tremendously powerful idea.  "But wait," you might be thinking, "why the hell should I pay taxes on my hard-earned money to help some loser who can't hold down a real job to pay for their doctor? I'm not rich, I have enough trouble supporting my own family, this poses an unfair burden and will cause me to have to cut back on important things like my charitable giving!"

OK whoa, let's step back and take a look at the most important part of the article: "...tax breaks to help low-income people buy health insurance and tax increases for some workers whose health plans cost significantly more than the national average." The highlighting is my own. Basically, The plan would take some money from those with exorbitant medical insurance and use it to subsidize the poor.  It's not really a tax on the middle class, it's a tax on the rich, and on the stupid (those who don't understand how to shop around for affordable health insurance).

The primary criticism in the article from Charles Rangel is that "We are trying to bring tax relief to the middle class. The president is trying to increase their tax liability. This proposal is inconsistent with what the majority is seeking in the House and the Senate." Now wait a minute here! Since when do the Democrats use distortion of the discussion to justify killing something that would benefit the poor? This is something that makes me very uncomfortable. We, as a society, have a responsibility not just to maintaining the wealth and stability of the middle class, but also to providing for the comfort of those who cannot fend for themselves. In many other societies where this is not a priority, terrible inequalities often lead to the rise of revolutions (think France, 1780's) or even, in some cases, to modern-day terrorism. This is not to say that we should protect the poor so they won't kill the rich or middle class, quite the opposite. Instead, we have a moral obligation to protect the poor and it would be stupid not to do so for the health of society at large.

Actually, to be honest, the most similar distortion that I have heard was the Republican push to call the Estate tax a "Death tax" and wrongly represent it as something that could affect average Americans, when it really only affects 2% of the population.  What does this tell us about the Democratic party, champions of the underclass?

Having said all of this "yay" talk, it is important to note that when I was a super poor starving artist, the majority of my tax liability was not income tax, but was in fact social security and medicare tax. This is also true of almost all truly poor Americans. I didn't actually pay a cent in income taxes for 4 straight years, and yet still have tax bills of $1000-$2000 dollars each year - about 10-15% of my yearly income, or to put it closer to the point, food and transportation for 3 months. This proposal will only truly benefit the poor if the deductions come out of pre-tax income, before social security and all of that jazz is even calculated. So, I will remain skeptical until I see the actual plan.

In addition, we often forget that taxes and deductions are percentages.  It is not like people will suddenly have $7500 more income.  This plan means an actual maximum potential income increase of more like $1125-$2250.  This might not sound like much if you're middle class or rich, but when you realize that we're talking about a poor person, this could mean an actual post-expense/post-tax doubling or tripling of available cash.  For a very small price to those with luxurious medical coverage, we could see a real improvement in the life of the ultra-poor.

I can't help but wonder what the catch is, Bush has proposed mediocre to outright terrible things for the poor for 6 straight years, why would he suddenly go all socialist over a lost election?  Time will tell.

Today, I was trying to approve a few comments, and discovered about 15 comments on blog entries that somehow had never been marked as approved.  For many, I never received notification emails, so please accept my apologies - some of them were over a year old.

I'll try not to let that happen again!

Today, I booted up my relatively new Gateway desktop machine, which I have been running gentoo linux on for a while, and was warned by the BIOS that the hard drive was corrupt.

This is the last straw for me. I bought this computer in June of 2002 when my old computer spectacularly died in a blaze of glory. I happened to be in the middle of a freelance job working on a website for someone at the time, and so flew downtown to the Gateway store in New York City, picked out the top of the line they had in the store, and took it back in a taxi. At first, it was great, but the problems began to mount.

First, after only a year, the internet stopped working. At this point, I contacted Gateway using my laptop, because I had been smart enough (I thought) to purchase the 3 year extended warranty. After an hour in their online live support (basically IMing), the guy's best idea was to "re-install windows." I pointed out that the restore disks didn't have MS Word on them, even though it came pre-installed. His suggestion? Buy another copy. At this point, I became fed up, and after copying needed docs to my laptop, decided to install gentoo linux. This worked great for about 7 months until suddenly, BOTH of the 2 hard drives I had cannibalized from the old computer failed. I figured this was due to happen, since they were older, but I was shocked when the original SATA drive also failed 3 months later, with an audible grinding noise followed by a blue screen of death. In addition, the built-in ethernet on the motherboard failed, so I bought another card.

Incidentally, the laptop failed 1 year after I bought it, about 10 days after the warranty expired. eMachines was the manufacturer, who was incidentally bought by Gateway. Very odd coincidence.

Last year, I purchased a brand new WD hard drive, and installed it in the Gateway, put gentoo on the computer exclusively, and have happily used it until today's corruption. At this point, I'm out of options. I can't afford the time to reconstruct my entire gentoo setup from scratch on ANOTHER new drive, and can't afford the money to buy a new computer. At this point, I'm stuck with my windows machine. I was running VMware with gentoo, but today, when I tried to start it, the gentoo.vmx file was deleted, with no trace.  I have no idea what happened to it, so now I have no linux whatsoever.

In any case, the point is, if you're considering buying from Gateway, don't. You're not going to get your money's worth even if you spend top dollar.

For years, the Bushes (father and son) administration and American auto makers have strenuously argued that we have to do a balancing act between preserving the environment and creating a thriving economy. As usual with the Bush politicians, the argument has been flawed from the beginning, but the evidence hasn't really proven this claim.

Until now. This article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/business/16auto.html) shows that the auto making industry in the United States may be completely and permanently doomed to subservience to energy-efficient Japanese automakers for the first time ever. This is due to the insistence upon creating gas-guzzling humongous trucks, vans and SUVs, ignoring smaller cars, and ignoring the need to be flexible in assembly line plants, something Toyota planned for ages ago.

This blatantly stupid decision by U.S. automakers will do much more than endanger the jobs of U.S. autoworkers, it will transfer the money currently funneling into domestic automakers profits into foreign automakers profits, subtly shifting the wealth of the United States overseas.

In short, it forces the U.S. to reconsider its dominant financial position in the long term, and as a result, its dominant military position. The aggressive posturing of the Bush administration combined with the stupid economic decisions could in fact make the U.S. a more dangerous place to live than it has been for 200 years, since the British shot up Washington D.C. in 1812.

In case it isn't obvious, if you thought your vote doesn't really matter, it does. Every political opponent of the Bush family has a better environmental record. Forcing higher fuel economy 6 years ago would have potentially saved Detroit now. Even if fuel economy were not forced to be higher, a different president would have never invaded Iraq, which is a primary source of increased fuel prices thanks to the thriving civil war and insurgency, both of which prevent oil pumps in Iraq from operating at near capacity. Your vote in November for the Senate and the House of Representatives is critical in this regard. If you vote for those who support the current economic and military policies, you are casting a direct vote for the eventual insecurity of the United States.

This is not a Republican/Democrat issue per se, there are several Democratic incumbents who have been guilty of prolonging the problem. However, if you have a choice between a conservative Democrat and a much more conservative Republican on the environment and on the military, this is always a difficult choice. Seek advice of external groups that monitor the voting records of candidates, and that document fundraising sources. For instance, a quick look at the backers will often reveal a candidate who is supported by oil companies, Wal-mart, etc., and give you a better picture of their real policies than what they say are their real policies.

Be smart this fall - help reinvigorate the U.S.'s lost moral and economic imperative and improve the world order as a result.

If you are a U.S. Citizen, it is time to call your Representatives and Senators. They're trying to gut Net Neutrality, a crucial component of the internet's success and its freedom. Net Neutrality guarantees that all online speech is treated equally and prevents Internet providers like AT&T from deciding which websites work best on your computer. Without it, these companies can decide what you see and do online. In other words, without Net Neutrality AT&T could conceivably decide to limit the bandwidth for iTunes because Microsoft pays them to increase the bandwidth for MSN Music.

You can read more about the effort to fight this terrifying idea at http://www.savetheinternet.com/.

This weekend, while I was away playing a concert, someone hacked into an insecure application on the same host that runs chiaraquartet.net and used it to initiate a denial of service attack.? As a result, the entire site was shut down and everything was moved to a new server.? Things are working again, but it took a while.? I had to re-install the stupid blog from scratch, so let me know if you find problems.

This past September, my soon-to-be wife and I picked up a cat from Lincoln Nebraska's Cat House, a no-kill shelter. From the start, we knew he was a brilliant addition to our lives because of his extraordinary personality, but only later did we discover the true depth of his oddness. His name is "Dirty" because he had a little poo problem until we switched his food to another brand.

Every April Fool's day, PHP displays a different logo on its phpinfo() page. In the past, this has included a rabbit, Zeev's dog, and others. Perhaps it is Dirty's time to be enshrined in PHP forever

Click here to see Dirty in action. Here are some previews:

As of now, trackbacks are disallowed for this blog. I haven't had anything but spam through the trackbacks, and it is just not worth deleting the stupid entries. If you wish to comment, by all means do so using the comment form for an entry - I read each of these individually and approve anything that is not spam.

So today, Lindsay Jacobellis, snowboarder from the USA made a mistake and fell down right before the finish line, losing the gold medal in the new snowboard cross event. Worse, it was while doing a "showboat" grab at the board that she fell down.

So, she screwed up. Most people would simply leave it at that. Celebrate the successes, and maybe even lament the mistakes of failures. NBC instead chose to make a little featurette that showed the mistake in slow motion over and over, while talking about how "we all say its not about winning medals, but about competing at the olympics, but on some days, it's about not losing medals." Clever. They continued to say that Lindsay Jacobellis (20 years old) said she wasn't "showboating" but "you don't need a degree to see that she wasn't simply snowboarding. She learned the most important lesson: don't count your chickens before they hatch." Then, the commentators proceeded to comment on how if she had just stayed on the straight and narrow, she would have won.

Of course, we all know that this is how competitions are won, by never taking risks. Nope, safety first! Better to practice just 30 minutes a day, and not too hard, just in case you injure yourself. In fact, better not to do any physical activity. We can just sit in suspended animation and live off of glucose drips. Glad we cleared that one up. Thanks, NBC!

Hello all, I have grown tired of the brown/orange theme I have been using, so I am trying a new one. Any preference for the new or the old one

The New York Times reports today that expanding standardized testing to public universities is being investigated by the Bush administration. Charles Miller, a business executive appointed to run the commission, is quoted as saying:

He said he would like the commission to agree on the skills college students ought to be learning ? like writing, critical thinking and problem solving ? and to express that view forcefully. "What happens with reform," he said, "is that it rarely happens overnight, and it rarely happens with a mandate."

As a member of the faculty of a public university (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) in the music department, this immediately strikes me as yet another preposterously misguided idea of what higher education is. American public high school has transformed from a militaristic academy designed to turn out slightly-skilled labor for factories (early 20th century) to a mill for conformist anti-Commie scientists (mid-20th century) into a militaristic academy for churning out incredibly skilled test takers who have absolutely no creative ability to function in the real world.

A standardized test has no ability to measure what makes a person successful in the workforce. The personal connections we make and ability to absorb new ideas and communicate them are what make someone successful. Universities provide a unique opportunity to learn these unusual skills precisely because they don't focus on standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests. I remember one final examination from a music history class I had to take at Rice University as a music major consisted of one question:

Trace the history of opera from its inception to the end of the classical era.

This class, mind you, was not about opera, it was about the Baroque and Classical periods of music history, and so could have been about any of the subjects we studied. The point is, we did not know before the test was given what the question(s) could be.

Aside from the knowledge of opera, this test is the kind of thing that demonstrates:

1. the ability to put together a coherent sentence without any outside help
2. ability to assimilate historical information and organize it into structured paragraphs
3. ability to actually understand and provide insights about the material presented

You just can't do that kind of thing on a standardized test! In addition, how do you determine what a student should be learning Most college courses assume you've learned basic reading and writing skills in high school where you should be learning these things. If a college has to provide this, it is generally considered remedial or for foreign students, ESL (English as a Second Language) is provided to bridge the gap.

A college/university is not the place to be learning basic arithmetic, reading, and writing. These are skills best learned in high school, a community college, or through a GED program, all of which do a fine job of providing these services. Colleges/Universities require these basic skills in order to process advanced concepts.

In addition, unlike high school, universities have this thing called a "major field of study" that allows you to focus your studies on a particular specialty, so that you get a degree in that specialty. Should we expect all music performance majors to learn the same skills as organic chemistry majors I hope not, because I doubt any of the orgo majors would be comfortable playing a 70 minute solo program using the musical instrument of their choice demonstrating a wide range of the repertoire (and no, bunsen burners don't count as musical instruments).

Finally, there are already plenty of indicators out there for parents and prospective students to choose between different institutions of higher learning. Magazines, ratings guides, SAT scores on entrance, graduation rates, famous alumni/faculty, and so on. In the worst case, transferring to another institution is also an available option.

Standardized testing for colleges/universities is the stupidest idea I've heard in a long time. No, sorry, since last week's budget.

What the hell is up with these people Can't they come up with any useful ideas

"Oh I know, let's invade an oil-rich^M^M^M^M^M terrorist dictatorship"
"Let's take out those dangerous nukes with star wars^M^M^M^Mterrorists with warrantless wiretaps^M^M^Msocial security problems in 40 years by eliminating it now^M^M^M^Mweak-kneed Democrats by making everyone afraid of blowing up"
"Let's focus on international relations, particularly with arab countries and Europeans, so that we can gain support for the occupation of Iraq and remove the funding base for Al Qaeda. Then, let's balance the budget by repealing the tax burden against the poor and lower middle class passed in the first Bush term, and provide incentives for people to conserve energy so that they have more money to spend on consumer goods, hence increasing tax receipts and take-home pay in one fell swoop. Then, let's raise fuel economy standards, examine steps to nationalizing catastrophic health insurance, and see if we can't turn around the country in 10 years^M^M^M^M^M^MLet's attack Republicans for being mean and corrupt"

Hmm, I guess neither side has anything really useful to offer

Photo taken near the Queens Midtown Tunnel

Today, the New York Times (and others) reported that Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Wow. I wish I could say that I didn't see this coming.

Assuming a jury finds Libby guilty (which is likely), let's examine this from another angle: what motivation did one of the most powerful people in the nation have to lie to a grand jury Surely, a man that smart knows the meaning of perjury and obstruction of justice, so he was clearly afraid of something far worse than these charges.

Now, I am speculating, but since he perjured himself in relation to a national security breach, this could be either fear of the utter destruction of the Bush presidency, or of revealing something worse than perjury, say treason. Either way, the truths that his lies are covering pose an even more unsettling question:

Why does 50% of the country think Bush is an honest man and his administration will do good for the world

The people I know who have voted for Bush generally voted against his opponent for various reasons (abortion rights, fiscally conservative). However, it still confounds me to this day that the man was elected.

1. I predicted on the eve of his election that we would be at war unnecessarily within 4 years. My guess was China because of trade difficulties back in 2000. I was wrong, and should have seen it coming - of course he would set his sights on Iraq. He surrounded himself with his Dad's and Reagan's chief advisors.
2. He has been lying from the beginning, and I mean back when he was running for governor of Texas. Back then, he was claiming to be environmentally sound, when his record showed otherwise. During his tenure as governor, Houston went from a relatively clean city to being more polluted than Los Angeles. As a student at Rice University, I could physically perceive the difference when jogging. Compassionate conservative Why is his chief advisor (Karl Rove) the man his father hired because of a newspaper article describing the dirty tricks Rove performed for Nixon while still in college What was the deal with those phone calls sullying John McCain's name in the 2000 North Carolina primary
3. He has never demonstrated the key qualities of a Christian that he exploited to get elected - I am speaking of forgiveness, compassion for the poor, and humility. Instead, the primary values he has displayed in his actions have been vengeance ("wanted, dead or alive"), exploitation or plain ignorance of the poor (special contracts to Halliburton during 2003, cutting taxes for the rich and proposing cutting back Social Security, tax breaks for oil companies after Katrina), and extreme hubris (refusing to release documents on John Roberts or Harriet Miers).

Even my grandmother, who has voted Republican since Eisenhower, voted against the man in the last election.

What is wrong with this country Is it going to take an impeachable offense for people to wake up and recognize that the Republican party simply doesn't represent the interests of the majority of their voting base

Actually, I know the answer to this. It will take the re-organization of the biased media outlets like Fox News and others who confuse editorial with fact. Until people start receiving the actual news, there is no hope whatsoever.

At the moment, I am in the passenger seat of a rental car, about 40 miles outside of Los Angeles, travelling at erm, approximately the speed limit. The quartet just played a concert at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which was very well received. However, that's not the point. The point is that in order to connect to the internet, I am plugged into my Cingular Treo 650 cellphone, using it as a wireless modem. This is all possible because of a program called Pdanet that tweaks things with networking to make it work.

I've been using the phone itself to check email, but because my server has secure access, Versamail (at least the version I have installed) doesn't work. This option is great, I can do all of the normal things that I do through the laptop and the speed is quite good.

I was even able to use this in North Dakota, although the best internet speeds have been in Southern California, even compared to New York.

Technology fun.