The Blogg

February 8, 2010

Who Dat Has A Dumb Catchphrase?

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 10:47 am

Yesterday’s Super Bowl was not a great game like several recent ones, but a good game. I do not think many people picked the Saints to win by 14. (My prediction was Colts by 7 or less.) Although the second quarter looked one-sided, both teams were in this to the very end. The call to open the second half with an onside kick was bold — I am not sure I could have done that myself. It was a strange game in several ways. No turnovers in the first 55 minutes, and the Saints won even though their defense has been build around turnovers. Very few penalties, and only one instances of a player not getting right up after a play. What is wrong with the announcers? On the 2 point conversion try, as soon as they showed a replay all of the males in the room where I was watching were yelling “Challenge! He crossed the plane,” while Simms was spouting off about needing to maintain control while going to the ground. Is it that difficult to find a crew that at least knows the rules as well as the average fan? At least when Madden was making inane comments it was humorous. They should have Ron “Jaws” Jaworski work every game.

I am a big fan of the The Who, and thought they still sounded great 9 years ago at the Concert for New York City, but the last decade has not been kind to them at all. Losing Entwistle was a major blow, obviously, but Daltrey is the real problem. Maybe he has just decided to change up his timing a bit in recent years, but it sounded to me like he was actually missing cues, most noticably at the beginning of “Baba O’Riley”. The guy they had playing drums was like an anti-Keith Moon: calm and efficient. Townshend can clearly still play his old riffs, but I think it is time to hang up The Who and go on solo tours.

Continuing the trend of last year, I think more than a third of the advertising was for the host network and its shows, implying that they could find no buyers willing to pay the steep price tag. There were a few memorable advertisements, and a few disappointing reruns of ones that have been in use for a while. I particularly liked the Doritos spot with the no-bark collar, the Volkswagen one (although everyone knows it is only the Beetle that earns punching rights), the Dodge Charger ad, the HomeAway.com spoof of the National Lampoon’s Vacation series, and the three Denny’s clips (especially the third).

February 1, 2010

Disaster Insurance

Filed under: Uncategorized — chadhogg @ 8:34 pm

Scott Adams today touched on a topic that I first thought about in the context of flood insurance circa Hurricane Katrina. The supposed purpose of insurance (though this has been perverted in the case of health and life insurance) is to spread risk over the population. With a large number of participants and an event that affects individuals randomly and at a fairly predictable rate, it makes sense for all participants to pay into a pool from which those affected by an event are compensated with the overhead going to profit for a broker. But when we are talking about an event that, if it occurs, will affect a large percentage of the participants, this breaks down.

If everyone in Louisiana (or Californian earthquake survivors) files a claim for the value of their home in the same year, there is no way the insurer will have the assets to be able to pay them. One option for the company would be to borrow enough cash to pay those claims and pay down the debt with premiums from future years, but they could also simply declare bankruptcy and leave all of their customers with nothing. Seeing the financial meltdown over the last two years, I suppose they would actually buy insurance against having to make a large payout from a larger company, who would in turn try to offset their risk. In theory this might allow the whole system to work, but it seems just as likely that all of these companies would fail together.

If you were an evil genius, as we have seen a great number of Wall Street executives are, why not create a flood / earthquake / etc insurance company, sell lots of policies, and have no intention of ever paying on them? The worst that happens is that you dissolve the company, take the boatloads of money you have earned in salary over the years, and start a new one. I am sure there are all sorts of regulations on insurers requiring them to hold a certain percentage of their total potential liability in semi-liquid assets, but doing so to the extent that would be necessary to cover these kinds of widespread disasters would make the entire enterprise untenable.

I suppose the same problem exists with any transaction in which you pay a fee now for the promise of a service in the future, but insurance against natural disasters seems like an especially easy way to throw a lot of money into what could be essentially a legal scam.

January 27, 2010

State Of The Union Remarks

Filed under: Politics — chadhogg @ 11:04 pm

The first third of the President’s State of the Union address was a bit disappointing and I began to lose interest during the last third, but the middle was encouraging. A few more specific responses below:

  • I really hate the way President Obama likes to mention the names of random locations. Anecdotes about specific persons or businesses that illustrate his points are bad enough, but name-dropping cities serves no purpose at all.
  • He proposed many new tax credits, such as one for small businesses that raise wages. Unfortunately, this is just another case of taking from some and giving to others. Why should the entire population go further in debt so that some people will be paid better? If they simply decreased taxes a moderate amount on everyone, the economy and eventually the labor market would see similar gains. There were all sorts of other tax credits proposed for various other special classes of people.
  • I agree with the president that the economy will not reach full employment without some fundamental changes, but I am not sure that he goes far enough in proposing them. It is good that he wants to reform financial institutions to prevent the kind of illusory wealth building and risks that led to the current meltdown, but I do not know whether or not his proposals will do this. It is good that he wants to reform the healthcare industry, although I do not think the bills circulating through Congress are the best way to do so. But there are far more deep issues than these.
  • President Obama is unwilling to “accept second place for the United States of America”. While we should certainly strive to be the best, perhaps it is time to tone down the nationalist rhetoric. He later made a claim that American rescue workers in Haiti are chanting “U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!” every time they pull a body from the rubble. That is absurd, and I hope not true. The relief effort should be a prime example of international solidarity in which people realize that their country of origin does not matter at all.
  • Good for him, promoting nuclear power. It is a shame it will take a decade to get new reactors online.
  • A spending freeze is an excellent start, and going through the budget “line by line to eliminate programs that we can’t afford and don’t work” is certainly necessary. But that kind of talk sound hollow when you have just proposed creating a new bureaucracy to oversee exports. This spending freeze will not take place until next year “when the economy is stronger”. But what if it is not stronger then? Is it really necessary for spending to increase during the current year.
  • One of the reasons I voted for the president was the hope of greater government transparency and nonpartisanship, and while there is much to be done there, I appreciate the strides that have been made. More so, I appreciate that this is still a priority for him. This was the high point of the speech for me.
  • You want Congress to do more to eliminate earmarks? Good. But let’s talk about the existing health care bill, which has all sorts of special sections for individual Congresspersons. If you were serious about this, you would have made it clear that you refuse to sign a bill, even an important one, if it includes this sort of nonsense.
  • If all of our troops really do leave Iraq in August and leave behind a stable state that does not need them, it will be a major accomplishment. But I am not holding my breath. What I have read about the situation and future in Afghanistan is rather less rosy than the perspective in this speech as well.

January 23, 2010

I’m With Coco

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 4:28 pm

Like many people, I am upset that last night was the last episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, but not because I am outraged over the unfairness of it. It is difficult to feel too sorry for someone who had a dream job, was just handed $35 million, and could have kept his job if he were willing to be flexible about the timeslot. My reasons are much more selfish: for a decade Conan’s show has been a pleasant end to my weekdays. Whether I watch while working, listen while drifting off to sleep, or take a break from whatever I am doing to at least catch the monologue, I have not missed many of his shows. No other late-night show is half as funny.

I was always a bit skeptical of Conan’s move to the Tonight Show from the beginning. So much of his Late Night shtick revolved around the show being run on a shoestring budget and having few viewers. How could that work on the largest comedy stage in daily broadcast? Besides, I knew that the older, more refined audiences at 11:35 would not appreciate his zany antics and surreal humor. Indeed, my mother hates him. Surprisingly he maintained these elements more or less as they had been on Late Night, and unsurprisingly his ratings were bad.

I hope that in September he will be able to get another gig with most of the cast and crew intact. He is the star, but it would not be the same show without Max Weinberg, Mark Pender, Richie “LaBamba” Rosenberg, and the rest of the once-and-future Max Weinberg 7. I am sure the writers and production staff are also more important to the show than I would guess. But no one else is going to give them the kind of budget that NBC did. We will see at that time what kind of man O’Brien is; whether he really loves his craft enough to do it anyway or will be unwilling to work for less than what he perceives as his value.

In the meantime, it would be fantastic if he and his crew took advantage of the fact that their severance pay means they will not need to work for sometime and created free web content for the fans. After watching O’Brien and the band perform Freebird with Billy Gibbons, Beck Hansen, Ben Harper, and Will Ferrell last night and remembering the rockabilly songs that he would perform with the Max Weinberg 7 during the writer’s strike, I would love to see host and band go on tour as a musical act with comedy thrown in for a few months.

Also, it is surprising to me that NBC is and has been for some time the 4th rated television network. Of the weekly shows that I currently make a point of watching when they have new episodes (Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, The Office, Parks And Recreation, Community, House, The Simpons, Family Guy, and American Dad), more than half are NBC shows. In all three places where I have lived I thought the local NBC affiliate had the best evening news program. Even without Conan, they have the best weekday late night programming (Leno is good, just not as good as Conan, and while Jimmy Fallon was awful he is getting better). It cannot live up to its earlier incarnations, but I would still rather watch Saturday Night Live than anything else on Saturday nights. I do not watch much in the way of early morning talk or news magazines, but when I do it is the Today Show and Dateline. The only thing I tune into CBS for is sports events, and I don’t even know what channel our local ABC affiliate is on. Apparently the families surveyed by Neilsen have very different tastes than I do.

January 21, 2010

Welcome Our New Corporate Overlords …

Filed under: Politics — chadhogg @ 11:01 pm

Today’s Supreme Court ruling may be correct; I am not a legal scholar. But if it is, we need to amend the Constitution to take away the personhood of corporations. Employees, executives, and shareholders of corporations, as well as union members and bosses should be allowed to spend as much money as they would like promoting political candidates, but corporate executives and union bosses should not be allowed to spend the money of the groups they oversee in the same way. Corporations and labor unions already have far too much power over the political process through lobbying and the kind of donations that they have been allowed to make. An abstract legal entity with no soul and virtually no consequences for its actions does not need a right to free speech. This is only one of a very long series of steps degrading what was a flawed but reasonable democratic republic into oligarchy, but it makes me sad.

January 10, 2010

Book Review: The 42nd Parallel

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 11:33 pm

I want to appreciate stream of consciousness writing, but I cannot find any artistic merit in it. Thankfully, John Dos Passos restricts that style to certain short sections of The 42nd Parallel, 27 mini-chapters intended to give a broader perspective than those of the expository characters. Perhaps for other readers it serves that purpose. The narrative is also interspersed with 19 “newsreels”, in which he cuts short phrases from the headlines of various contemporary news stories. Unfortunately, for a reader far removed from the time in which these events took place there is rarely enough detail to have more than guess at what is actually happening. I do enjoy the stories of Mac, Janey, J.Ward, Eleanor, and Charley, but even here Dos Passos manages to annoy by being cute with language, inventing his own compound words with no discernible rhyme or reason for their selection. Each of the narratives are interesting in their own right, but while a few of the main characters do have chance encounters there is no overarching plot holding them together. This is almost more like a collection of short stories written to together paint a picture of American life at the beginning of the 20th century than a traditional novel. I cannot say that this is among my favorite reads, but it has shown enough to convince me to give 1919 a try.

Moving On With The Eagles

Filed under: Sports — chadhogg @ 4:11 pm

I told my father-in-law that I would be satisfied even if the Eagles did not win last night, but played a competitive game. I was not satisfied. I think this game was actually worse than the week before. Now the Eagles front office (without Tom Heckert, if rumors are true) has the unenviable task of adjusting an average or good team in ways that will make it into a great team instead of a poor team. If they make too many changes too hastily, they could end up with a much, much worse team, but something clearly has to be done. A lot of the sportswriters I have read today seem to blame the defense most of all for yesterday’s loss. While giving up 34 points is unacceptable and there are certainly changes that need to be made on that side of the ball, I thought the offense had much more significant problems. When you keep having to defend a short field on no rest because the offense turns the ball over, chances of success are very low. Following are the positions in order from most in need of action to least, in my opinion

Quarterback: While the rest of the team did not do him any favors, McNabb was flat-out awful yesterday. The problem is, as terrible as McNabb plays sometimes, he is still one of the top 16 quarterbacks in the league. When he is playing well, he is among the very best. If you can get somebody who consistently plays at 75% of the “good” McNabb and never has those terrible days it would be a good move, but there is a real danger of making a major downgrade if you switch to someone else. Vick does not match the pass-happy philosophy and personnel here, so hopefully another team is willing to trade a draft pick for him. I think the best option here is to draft a quarterback this year to get him acclimated to the system, have an open competition between McNabb and Kolb in the following year, and ship out whomever loses that competition with the second-year guy as the backup.

Offensive Line: For a group that has been a priority in drafts and trades ever since Reid arrived here, there sure are a lot of issues here. The Eagles have a lot of money tied up in players that have demonstrated an ability to play at a high level but whom cannot be counted on. I think they have to keep the Andrews brothers here, but also have to have starting-quality backups in the likelihood that neither of them come back from injuries to play well again. Winston Justice is a free agent that they have to sign or replace with a player of similar quality. Max Jean-Gilles they can probably afford to let go of, assuming that Nick Cole moves back to his usual guard position. Drafting a good center to fill in until Jackson is healthy and possibly to replace him would be a very good idea.

Safety: None of the players they brought in to replace Dawkins has been acceptable. Mikell should remain the strong safety, but they have to upgrade the free safety position. Signing Darren Sharper would be nice, but most likely this will have to be a rookie with Demps or Harris as a backup plan.

Linebackers: Trotter is nothing more than a stopgap at this point, and many of the players that rotated through the starting lineup this year are free agents this year. You cannot afford to let Gocong, Gaither, and Jordan all go in the same year. I have never been sold on Gocong, but I would keep the other two. Hopefully Bradley comes back from his injury with all the ability he showed two years ago, but again you have to be prepared for the very real possibility that he does not. At the end of the previous season this position looked like one of the Eagles great strengths, but they were one of the biggest problems this year, and the front office is going to have to do something creative to fix it for the future.

Fullback: Leonard Weaver has been an absolute pleasure to watch this season. The Eagles need to do whatever is necessary to resign him to a long-term contract. They need to stop using him so much as a single back, though. His touches should come as misdirections when he is the upback.

Tight End: Celek is the best player we have had here since Chad Lewis at least, but there is currently no depth at all behind him. If Cornelius Ingram is not going to be the guy, we need to find another capable #2.

Cornerback: It sure would be nice if he made a serious attempt at tackling, but you are not going to be able to improve significantly on Samuel and Brown as the starters. Hanson is not a good nickelback, and there is no one behind him that I trust. If they can resign Hobbs to be the third guy that would work, or it might be time to look at a younger player.

Kick Returner: If Hobbs is resigned and healthy, this becomes a non-issue. None of the other players who filled in here during the season showed much to be excited about, but if they get an entire offseason to work on those skills they might be acceptable.

Halfback: McCoy has shown himself to be a good runner, and with another year he should be better in protection and as a route runner. Westbrook can still be very useful to this team if he chooses to play another year, but I think he needs to be used more sporadically. If he wants to continue to be an every-down back, we should try to send him elsewhere. Buckley has not had many opportunities, but looked good in the preseason. As long as they keep McCoy, I think they will be ok regardless of what other moves they make.

Defensive Line: Trent Cole and the tackles are fine. The rotation at the other end spot has worked, but it would definitely be an upgrade to find another great player at that position. How many players have we brought in thinking they would be that guy?

Wide Receiver: Jackson and Maclin could very well be the Fitzgerald and Boldin of the next decade if they keep playing at the same level and get consistent quarterback play. Avant is a free agent who they should keep as an excellent third receiver. After that it trails off a bit, but Curtis and Brown are capable backups.

Punter: Rocca has been inconsistent but not awful since they brought him here. I will not care much one way or the other whether they resign him or pick up someone else.

Placekicker: There was a time when I was concerned about Akers, but he looked fine this season.

Punt Returner: I don’t know who the backup is or how well he would play, but Jackson is excellent.

Of course, none of this may matter if the league and players’ union cannot agree on a new contract.

January 4, 2010

iPod Adventures

Filed under: Computing, Personal — chadhogg @ 2:41 pm

Yes, I have become an owner of an Apple product thanks to a Christmas gift from my wife. When I replaced my old car I pulled the aftermarket head unit out of it that reads data CDs full of MP3 files, but had decided not to install it in my current vehicle. I was in the process of burning audio CDs to play in it when she decided to buy me an iPod and FM transmitter to be used in my vehicle. What follows is a tale of questionable shopping tactics by my wife, poor decisions by Apple, unexplainable pricing by Target, evil decisions by Apple, and unsatisfactory results from a Belkin product.

My mother-in-law [redacted], so Rachel asked her to pick up a black iPod Classic 160GB. When it became clear that we would not see them before Christmas, my wife went to our local Target and purchased her own black iPod Classic 160GB, with the intent that when we got the one from her mother she would return it using the receipt from the one she purchased. This plan became somewhat murkier when we discovered that not all black iPod Classic 160GB instances are created equal. Specifically, there was a version manufactured from 2007 through 2008 (“sixth generation”) and another manufactured starting in 2009 (“sixth generation, 2nd revision”). The primary difference is that the newer version is slightly slimmer. Although Apple chose to use the same name and model number for two different products, they have different UPC codes and stock numbers. Of course, I had already opened and began using the older model.

Target also charged wildly different prices for the two revisions. Strangely, the older version was sold to Rachel for $350, while the newer one was sold to her mother for $230. Since we could not possibly return the newer version with a receipt from the older version, I reset the older model to factory condition and returned it, the documentation, and accessories to the box, hoping I would be able to explain the situation to a customer service representative. Unexpectedly, Rachel attempted to re-shrink wrap the box using plastic cut from a Ziploc bag and some sort of heat sealing device. It did not look perfect, but close. A Target employee accepted it without question, but I felt terribly dishonest even though it was in as-new condition.

The iPod is designed to work with Apple’s iTunes software, which is fair enough. Since iTunes is not available for my operating system of choice, however, I needed to look into alternative ways to transfer music to it. I would prefer that I be able to simply treat the device as an external hard drive, drop a directory of music onto it, and go, but I understand that having a database of metadata is useful. The gtkpod application looked like a reasonable choice for being as close to what I would want while satisfying the iPod interaction model. Getting it to work, however, was no easy task. You see, starting with the 5th generation of iPods, Apple started attempting to lock them down so that only their software would be able to access the device. Enterprising hackers eventually found a way to fake the application signature by hashing the serial number, but this is a poorly documented, manual process. Eventually I did manage to thwart Apple’s attempts at preventing me from using the device I own in the way I would like.

After having loaded some music onto the iPod, I took it and the Belkin Tunebase FM transmitter on a trip out to Bethlehem. Getting the transmitter to fit into the cigarette lighter in my car was quite a chore; they design it to have a tight fit so that it will not freely rotate while driving, but I had to supply a ridiculous amount of force just to jam it into the socket. The transmitter itself is simply not of high enough power to consistently reach the antenna at the back of my car. If tuned to a frequency on which there is a competing station, you hear a mix of the two sources. If tuned to an unused portion of the spectrum, you hear a mix of your music and static. The device includes what they call ClearScan technology, which is supposed to automatically find a frequency with least interference. In actuality, it seems to do almost exactly the opposite. I live in a somewhat remote area with plenty of unused frequencies, but it always seems to select one of the few on which there is a commercial broadcast. Not that this matters, since I have no particular preference for mixing with static over mixing with other music. It also has settings to apply compression to the sound before transmitting it to help boost the signal, but with modern recordings already super-compressed I found that this had no noticeable effect. There is one way that I could significantly improve the sound, however — holding my hand just above the end of the antenna. With a part of my body in that vicinity the sound comes through relatively clearly. I have not been able to figure out whether my body is being used as a large antenna, or if the radio waves are reflecting off of my hand back towards the car’s antenna, or what. Perhaps someone experienced with RF signals can make a conjecture.

January 3, 2010

A Poem

Filed under: Personal — chadhogg @ 9:43 am

If you like hackneyed forms (ballad meter, according to Wikipedia), forced rhymes, embarrassing metaphors, and half-finished work, then you will love this poem that I wrote while unable to sleep last night:

Cursed be the day the beast was born,
In rotting and decay.
Quickly it spread across the land,
Grew stronger ev’ryday.

No climate was too much for it,
Not desert, hill, or glen.
The beast could feed on wheat or rye,
Or roots or fruits or men.

For ten men came to taste the beast,
And nine it filled with glee.
The other thought he ate the beast,
But it consumeth he.

We tried to fight the beast one day,
And drove it from the land.
We could not live without the beast,
And gave in to demand.

The beast was now a part of us,
As heart and skin and bone.
For that orig’nal sin of old,
We all must now atone.

Cursed be the day that old Pandora,
Raised it to her lip.
We cannot kill the beast, my friend,
So come and take a sip.

December 19, 2009

Book Review: Appointment In Samarra

Filed under: Books — chadhogg @ 6:37 pm

It is surprisingly enjoyable to read a novel about places you have been (Reading, Harrisburg, Allentown, Philadelphia), events you have attended (the annual Lehigh-Lafayette football game), and in general the culture in which you have lived. Appointment in Samarra is a bit like The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter in that the characters and relationships matter much more than the plot, even though three major events within 48 hours propel the book. If this were solely a book about Julian’s self destruction, there would be no need for chapters told from the perspective of Al Grecco, Lute Fliegler, and so forth. Yet these are important to the narrative, for the insights they give us into the variety of lives lived in Gibbsville and the collective societal climate. O’Hara seems to have a gift for the way people think and talk about each other in private. This was not one of the best novels that I have read recently, but it was one of the most enjoyable. I must admit that I care for the Maugham quote from which the novel takes its name more than the book itself.

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