Extremely annoyed with NPR's reporting recently.

I've been exceptionally annoyed with NPR's quality control recently. In several incidents recently, I've noticed reporters using unsuitable language, acting inappropriately toward interviewees, and skewing copy in a highly partisan manner.

The first incident happened two weeks ago during an article on education policy. The conversation toward the end of one interview became highly technical, and the reporter referred to people who "get into that kind of debate" as "edunerds."

Now, I like wonks and admire their technical expertise, especially when they use it to create policy solutions that are as efficient as possible, highly nuanced and sensitive to the needs of all parties with an actual stake in a given debate. Al Gore and Barack Obama are in this mold. But to refer to these people as "edunerds" dismisses them out of hand. There has been a lot of criticism recently about an anti-intellectual thread in the press, and this just shows that NPR is part of that weave. NPR is telling its listeners: This issue is really too complicated for you to bother your pretty little head over.

The second came in an article Barbara Bradley-Haggerty did on a summer camp for secularists and atheists. I received the idea of the camp with a mixed reaction, but I accept that some atheists would rather their kids go to a camp with other kids of atheists parents, one where the likelihood of proselytising is low. The article was just kinda going along when Mrs. Bradley-Haggerty suddenly asked the kids, "Do you ever think about what happens to you when you die?"

I'm sorry, but that was an unacceptable line of questioning. Especially from NPR's "religion" reporter, who ought to have half a clue about the nuances of her job. I cannot imagine her going into, say, Jesus Camp, or Allah Camp, or whatever, and asking the kids, "What if you're wrong? What if there's an evil god waiting for you on the other side, and you've made him mad by being a Christian or a Muslim?" But that's exactly what she did to these kids: she decided to end her lighthearted look at Atheist Camp by challenging twelve-year-olds with existential horror and Pascal's wager.

And last but not least, this weekend during the three-minute "And here's the news" update at the top of each hour, the reporter, Greg Windham, was reporting on Joseph Biden's speech after his nomination as vice president. Windham quoted Biden's riff of "You can't change America when you've voted with George Bush 95% of the time"-- without telling the listener that that was a quote. He reported the statistic as fact.

Also unacceptable. It makes it sound as if NPR's editorial board agrees with the statement. It may be true. John McCain may agree with it. But without additional context explaining where the statistic comes from, and without additional indication that the quote was in fact a quote, Windham exceeded his mandate to report and instead acted in a partisan manner.

(By Horus, I think XMMS is psychic today. On the Air by Peter Gabriel? How perfect was that?)

Oh, please, girlfriend!

From the RNC this morning: "Barack Obama's decision to "pass over" Hillary Clinton for his vice-presidential selection without even a vetting or a phone call has served to only exacerbate tensions with the Democrat Party."

Let's make something very clear: Hillary Clinton had not withdrawn from the race; she had only stopped the financial bleeding of her campaign. She was still a candidate. That, by itself, is a clear indicator that she did not want to be considered for the vice presidency. For Obama to even ask would have been an insult to her candidacy: it would have said, once and for all, that he does not believe she was a viable candidate.

The PUMAs and their RNC masters really can't have it both ways: they can't say that it was an insult for Obama to pass over Hillary, and at the same time say it would have been a terrible insult if he had asked.

The State of the Dinah

I took Dinah to the vet this morning. I swear, those people have not gotten around to maintaining a proper schedule like the rest of the world. These days, when I go to a doctor's office, if I'm on time usually so are they. But every time I go to the veterinarian's office, it takes forever for them to get around to seeing me. (Hmm, an interesting point for the Yowlerverse.)

Anyway, the vet said that Dinah's doing exceptionally well for a cat her age. Her arthritis has gotten to the point where she's no longer even trying to climb up on the bed and she still pees possessively on every article of clothing Omaha or I leave on the floor. Never hits the kids clothes, though. She's eating well, but is having even more trouble grooming herself properly, so Omaha and I have to spend more time combing and raking her fur. She's doing well with her nightly meds and fluids. We discussed arthritis medicines, but it meant my having to give Dinah a shot every night. I said one needle was enough, and he agreed. We haven't seen any more "neurological incidents" with her since that one seziure Omaha reported about a year ago.

He said that we've done a remarkable job of keeping her weight up, but when I described what we have to do to keep her eating-- rotate her diet every day, different brand every other day-- he shook his head and said, "Well, if that's what it takes. I still wish you could keep her on a kidney-safe diet." Yeah, so do we. I've gotten to the point where I stack the food packets in separate stacks in the shopping basket, so the folks at the store can just shoot the barcodes rapid-fire and be done. They're grateful for that.

She's in today for her annual teeth-cleaning. She doesn't even try to eat hard food anymore, so this has become an expensive necessity. Other than this, she needs only another visit next year in April for a vaccination update, and another one a year after that. I wonder if we can hold off the vaccination six months and schedule it at the same time as her dental appointment.

She's whiny and needy but healthy and holding together, and I expect her to be around next year for that expensive cleaning, too.

Gentoo: Speedbump!

Well, I woke up this morning to discover that my desktop rebuild had not actually finished. Almost, but not quite.

There are two primary desktops for Linux: KDE and Gnome. These are the toolkits that provide much of the functionality of the windowing environment: the toolbars, widgets, and window management. Both use a PDF management library called "poppler." Apparently, my first major build-through had build Poppler with a KDE-optimized API, but not the Gnome-optimized API, so when I tried to install Gimp, it halted the build with this message: "Please add GTK to the Poppler USE flags and try again."

I mean, crap, couldn't they just do that themselves? Anyway, I added 'app-text/poppler gtk' to the USE database and restarted.

At least 500 packages have gone in; it was only the last nine or so that had to be restarted. But those nine were all the final products, things like Inkscape (vector art program), Wine (Windows API layer), Gimp (Photoshop replacement), Scribus (Desktop publishing) and Thunderbird.

Still, this has been a hell of a lot more smooth than the 2006 install. I'm told that the 2007 was completely borked, so maybe it's good that I just skipped it and went with a fresh install anyway.

Strangely unreflective media...

When you read a magazine from another culture, if it's a culture you have at least heard of in some respect, you bring to your reading certain expectations. Those expectations may be far from valid, they may even be offensive to those putting out the magazine, but they're your expectations. Having them met would be validation of your prejudice; not having them met would be an eye-opening experience.

It doesn't even have to be a culture far from home. I'm not talking about reading the cherry-picked articles that appear in MEMRI, for example. Just Country Weekly, a magazine about country music and the artists who make it.

I was stuck in a doctor's office for an hour with only this magazine. It's a slim and easy thing to read, and I went through it from front to back. There were mentions of various country singers and performers and even an interview with Jeff Foxworthy, the country comedian.

There was even a report about Country Thunder, a four-day music festival with all the greats of the genre, dozens of performers, and (according to the article, if not the website), extra percussion from the National Guard in the form of a (small) howitzer.

And yet, for supposedly all this "Music from the Heartland of America!" stuff, for all the flagwaving, for all the pictures of men in unform firing off a canon, for pictures of country music stars in camo jackets and helmets holding their ears while the cannon was fired, for all of that, two words appear precisely zero times in this magazine. Can you guess what those words are?

"Iraq" and "Afghanistan." For that matter, "supporting our troops" is also strangely absent.

Okay, I don't expect every magazine to be thinking about the war all the time. But you'd think that there'd be mention, somewhere, in all this banal jingoism, all these routine pictures of stars dealing with their kids or talking about their marriages, of the real prices of freedom. Maybe some middle-tier star doing a USO tour somewhere. Fundraisers. Awareness raisers. Something.

Huh.

"♫ Anything you can do, I can do better ♪ I can do anything better than you. ♫"

Until circumstances change, this will just be the most horrible geek tease you can imagine.

At the office, we have exactly three approved programming languanges: C for performance, Python for everything else, and a begrudging tolerance for ECMA-262 for the WebUI team and site design. (Although the docs deployment people get away with PHP, which annoys me to absolutely no end.)

The problem has been that unit testing the WebUI has been more or less impossible in a systematic way in a language that QA has been required to learn. The most useful of all WebUI unit testing frameworks is FireWatir, Firefox Web Application Testing In Ruby. It's a nifty framework; it talks to a Firefox (or Mozilla) instance over a telnet socket opened up in firefox's backside (oh, baby, talk dirty to me!).

But it's written in Ruby, dammit. I don't want to have to teach my QA team another programming language.

Therefore, the solution was completely obvious: rewrite FireWatir in Python.

I'm not saying I've done this. I won't even talk about what I have done. But for programmers fluent in Python, Ruby, and Javascript, who are comfortable with network programming and can successfully build Mozilla by hand, it won't take more than 24 straight hours (not "a day," mind you but a 24-hour work cycle) to port the entire project to Python.

If someone did such a thing, though, what would they call it?