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Like a lot of other people, I’ve been pretty stressed out recently. Nothing too terrible is going on for me personally, but I’m concerned about the U.S. financial situation, I’m concerned about how that will affect me and my company (if at all) and I’m concerned about the current political happenings in part since I think that they will have the biggest affect on the first two issues. I’ve been obsessing over politics and polls for the past few months when I would probably be better off “drink[ing] herb tea and play[ing] with [my] screensavers.” At this point, I’m fairly confident that Obama will win (yay!), but watching the McCain campaign’s negative attacks is annoying - in particular since the negative ads are aimed at Obama personally and not his policies (as opposed to Obama’s negative ads which appear to be aimed at McCain’s policies). ...

Okay, this is probably the last of the foreseeable posts on the Wallstreet bailout – and probably the most serious. I spend the last week extremely pissed off about the bailout. Here were a bunch of idiots absurdly inflating the price of housing, with other idiots actually loaning them money to do so, more idiots treating the bad loans as assets and still more idiots insuring them against loss under ridiculous assumptions. It’s not really a surprise that the whole thing blew up. The only surprise is that it took as long as it did. Hell – 5 years ago in late 2003 when K and I bought our current place, we were worried that there was a housing bubble inflating prices beyond what the properties were really worth. And this was in North Carolina which didn’t have the hottest housing market. ...

As a public service announcement, I am hereby warning the people I know that in light of the bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and the entire freaking banking system, all of which will cost tax payers about $1 trillion, the next person that tells me that deregulating markets will provide a solution to anything will be asked to STFU. thank you and good night

I hope everyone’s having a great 4th of July (at least those of us in the States, folks from other countries can be forgiven for not thinking too much of it). July 4th, along with Thanksgiving, is one of my favourite holidays. That may surprise some folks. It’s not like the house is decorated in red, white and blue. I’m not wearing a flag pin, the Pledge of Allegiance makes me uncomfortable and I’m not that into fireworks. But external trappings aside, I consider myself to be a very patriotic person. I just don’t define patriotism as being synonymous with “flag waving. ...

It’s things like this that embarrass me when I tell someone I’m from Louisiana. The Louisiana House has voted overwhelmingly to pass the Louisiana Science Education Act which allows science teachers to use supplemental materials when teaching controversial subjects. For those who haven’t been there, in Louisiana, controversial subjects include: evolution, global warming, Keplerian astronomy and the round earth theory. Okay, I made the last one up – at least 85% of Louisiana households do believe that the earth is round. ...

Oh, and an ironic follow-up to the republican filibuster of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: apparently, the senate unanimously voted for a bill barring genetic discrimination in hiring and insurance. I wonder if anyone’s told them that your gender is based on your genes. Not that I would accuse senate republicans of being misogynistic in their concern over discrimination. Well, okay, yes I would.

Yesterday, the U.S. Senate took up the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which the House had already passed. The act was pretty reasonable. It essentially clarified the 1964 civil rights act to say that if you are being discriminated in terms of salary equity, you have 180 days from the date of each paycheck to file a claim. So, essentially it defines the act of discrimination as occurring with each short changed paycheck and not just with the initial salary setting. ...

The CTO Project makes an interesting observation that faculty are a bit like some corporations. They feel obligated to use Web 2.0 technologies in order to engage student interest and actually make some token effort to be up to date. But that they only want these technologies if they can exert complete control. Trust me, I can relate. We’re currently contracting with a part of the government that wants to do something similar. They want to make use of the knowledge of a number of experts to produce an encyclopedia of a given technology. Of course, this has been dubbed the FOOpedia (where FOO is the technology). ...

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting in subtle ways. Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical. In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both are interesting – but it can make it a little hard to know what I’m really thinking. So take it with a grain of salt that I just read an interesting article in the February 2008 issue of IEEE Computer on how to turn music lovers (particularly teenagers) into music distributors. ...