entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

I had a jones for new music, but i want to avoid giving Amazon my business until they stop doing shit like dodging taxes, opposing union organization, and trying to kill warehouse workers.  So, hey, buy local.  The two local music stores are Streetlight Records and Rasputin Music.  I found Streetlight's site suboptimal for finding stuff i wanted, so i went with Rasputin, paying my sales tax like a good citizen and my shipping fee like a good "buy local" pinko liberal (i could have driven there, but ZOMG FOSSIL FUELS and anyway, i figured that there was no way that the store would have in stock some of what i wanted).  The shipment ended up split because one disc was on backorder, yet it arrived ahead of the rest of my order.  And then i got one completely wrong item, which i'll have to return.  So thanks, Rasputin and Streetlight, for sending me back grumbling to Amazon for my next music purchase.

Paul Graham has written some interesting and enjoyable essays over the last few years.  Peter da Silva pointed me at his latest, where he starts off by pointing out the ways that Yahoo! failed to grab a commanding lead in the Internet game and takes a tangent into companies where hacker culture is key.  At first i was engaged with what he was saying, probably in no small part because of confirmation bias, but then it became more of a matter of him saying, "Companies with hacker culture are awesome because good hackers write good software," without actually supporting his case; the longer i examine the essay, the more it reads like selection bias and circular reasoning: "Yahoo! had no hacker culture and sucks; Google has hacker culture and rules.  Ergo, hacker culture leads to success."

What also really got me going was a paragraph that Tom Fawcett pointed out.

Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.

This is quite frankly the stupidest thing i've read in quite some time and falls right in line with Zuckerberg's hubris.  That's not a commitment to hacker culture; that's falling prey to your blind spots.  Having hackers work with HR and Marketing is a good idea; having them work in those departments is delusional.

There's no doubt that, when your company's product depends on the work of programmers, the vast majority of which fall culturally under the hacker umbrella, it behooves management to foster that culture in order to maximize their return from their employees.  But to go from that to implying that companies that let the inmates run the asylum reap the most benefits is at best wishful thinking and at worst foolish.

There's a second half to my response to Graham's essay which i'll write once i wake up from my nap.

... but i hear the train coming anyway.

My career is stuck in a bad spot, where i can't afford to work for a place whose output isn't objectionable (like a university or a non-profit organization), so i have to take a job with companies that produce abhorrent things, like social networks or online ad frameworks, and are either megacorporations ridden with politics and bureaucracy, or are minuscule startups run by delusional megalomaniacs who overwork everyone, or they're midsized companies run by decent, smart people and therefore are a target ripe for acquisition and reëducation.  And i'm still too far off my winemaking certificate to seriously enact a career change (and we're back to the "can't afford" part, anyway).  The small business is already a vanishing thing, but it's practically mythic in this industry.  I wonder whether there's anything that can be done about it.

Florida Marlins 2006 Opening Day players payroll: $14.9 million
Bud Selig's 2006 compensation as Major League Baseball commissioner: $14.5 million

CNBC's Darren Rovell talks about it.

schwa242 brings us this bit of Flash-based deranged work that, he claims, is someone's school project.

One of Lynne Cheney's publishers has decided to not reissue her book Sisters after all, because she doesn't consider it "her best work". I'm sure that the whoring and the hot girl-on-girl action have nothing to do with her opinion of her work (which plot she claimed to have forgotten in 2001... do writers forget what their own books are about?).

This is the first year, since i started playing in `98, that i'll not be playing fantasy baseball. It feels weird, but i'm glad that i'll have the extra time to do anything else. I wasn't planning on playing last year, but i was given a free team by ESPN.com (which is normally given to league winners, except that i didn't win in `02, but who am i to turn down a free team?).

Wal-Mart has decided to circumvent Inglewood's city council by sponsoring a ballot initiative that will let them set up shop in a huge stretch of concrete by effectively declaring it its own fief, separate in almost every way from the city in which it exists. Can this be the first step to corporate sovereignty?

UPDATE: The initiative was voted down by almost 2-to-1.

Kim and i spent the last few days in Vegas, visiting her father after he'd just had pacemaker/defibrillator battery replacement surgery. Kim's dad spoiled us at mealtime, and i returned the favor by doing serious tech support on his computer (the damned thing has been trying to run Win2K on 64MB since it was purchased 2.5 years ago), which involved a few trips to Fry's, trying to find RAM that worked with his Dell POS. The Las Vegas Fry's is huge even by Fry's standards, and it has a slot machine theme; it contains a café, and i found they had a gold panning kit for sale.

I also managed to catch the MLS opener while there; the `Quakes lost and looked lost on the field half the time, but, hey, Freddy Adu came in in the second half and flashed a bit of his skill (i hope he makes it to the Germany `06 USA team... he'll be about as young as Pelé was when he debuted in Sweden `58). It rained (REALLY rained) while we were there, but we did manage to get out and take a short hike in Red Rock Canyon. We missed out on the Valley of Fire, but we'll try to get to it next time.

As far as the more obvious Vegas pasttimes, we went to see Penn & Teller, who'd just come back from vacation; their show was good fun, although i felt the show could've been a little tighter. Also, i blew $50 at blackjack; there is no scientific evidence that shows that a new dealer will bust your ass out, but in my experience, every damn time (and i am not exaggerating) the dealer has changed, my money goes south at an alarming rate. This particular dealer was turning difficult hands into money by beating me by one (i'd have an 18 to his 14, and he'd draw a 5... stuff like that). It's one thing to lose, and it's another to get your ass beat like a dog.

Global Insight, a private consulting firm hired by the Information Technology Association of America, an industry lobbying firm, said that, while outsourcing does result in some short-term U.S. unemployment, its long-term benefits outweigh its costs.

While the outsourcing problem has been taken to FUD extremes, i just can't help feeling skeptical about this particular study.

Microsoft forges alliance with MLB.com

"Say, where do we get one of them anti-trust exemptions?"

The Republican Nat'l Committee asked 250 TV stations to pull a MoveOn.org ad on "soft money" grounds. Irony... it's FAN-tastic.

Also: Standard & Poor's demotes Sun's credit rating to "deliquescent turd".

A friend had his credit card number stolen after a site he used was cracked. His bank rep told him that two of the charges had gone through because, even though they'd received "Confiscate card: stolen" notifications, they nonetheless ran the charges through. One of them was dell.com. The rep went on to say that Dell is the king of credit card fraud — they do no address checking or any sort of verification. He also said that nearly every card he dealt with in November had Dell charges.

Hit Song Science can determine the likelihood of a song becoming a hit (registration: klortho/klortho). I can't decide whether this is ultra-cool and will lead to major labels dropping crap like a stone and looking for quality stuff amongst the unsigned and indie... or whether it is abominable and will lead major labels to perform unspeakable surgery on their existing music in order to make it "mathematically viable".