Sunday Story Hour

I’m still sitting in bed, reading through the news—or what passes for it for me—and decided to share some of my favorite stories from the day.

Flush with Energy by Thomas Friedman - Friedman usually bugs the shit out of me, but he won me over this time around with an interesting op-ed column about Denmark’s energy independence, and with one line in particular:

[Denmark] responded to [the 1973 Arab oil embargo] crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

All Clocks Run on Phelps Standard Time - I’m not a huge fan of sports in general, but I’ll usually make an exception for the Olympics. Watching Michael Phelps annihilate his opponents in the 400m Medley last night reminded me why: the best Olympic athletes are simply a treat to watch.

Obama Camp: McCain’s Latest Celeb Ad “is a Lie” by Greg Sargent - It’s refreshing to see the Obama people not pussyfooting around the truth: that the McCain campaign is lying through its teeth. Using words like “lie” has a tendency to cut through to the heart of the matter in a way that seems alien in our soundbite-focused ‘shades of gray,’ ‘differences of opinion,’ ‘all opinions are equally valid’ pundit-driven, asinine media. 

"This ad is a lie, and it's part of the old, tired politics of a party in Washington that has run out of ideas and run out of steam."

The Road Ahead for Gallery by Bharat Mediratta - Gallery is a PHP-based web photo gallery application I used to use until I discovered that Flickr took all of the pain and suffering out of my photo management (and had nifty social features). Bharat talks about how Gallery grew into an unusable monster, and how overall participation in the project is lower than it should be due to the terrible complexity of the application. 

My theory for why we don't have enough developers is that Gallery 2 is far too complex a product...Gallery 2 was designed to solve all problems well, but in its ambition it really only solves most problems poorly.

iPhone Coders Muzzled, Miffed by Apple’s NDA by Scott Loganbill - An article on the newly reborn Webmonkey (which I remember being the source of my early knowledge of HTML…at the age of 12) talks about the chilling effects Apple is having on the nascent iPhone application development community with their Fucking NDA. I can attest to this. It drives me insane that I can’t legally discuss the iPhone SDK with anyone else.

They feel as if they’re coding with their hands tied, and the frustration is enough to make iPhone programmers want to curse loudly in the direction of Cupertino.

Why McCain would be a mediocre president by Rex Nutting, Washington Bureau Chief for CBS Marketwatch - I’ll just quote some of my favorites passages from this article:

Like the current occupant of the White House, McCain got his first career breaks from the connections and money of his family, not from hard work. The son and grandson of Navy admirals, he attended Annapolis where he did poorly. Nevertheless, he was commissioned as a pilot, where he performed poorly, crashing three planes before he failed to evade a North Vietnamese missile that destroyed his plane. [B]etween the beginning of 2005 and mid-2007, no senator missed more roll-call votes than McCain did, except Tim Johnson, who was recovering from a near-fatal brain aneurysm. McCain is fighting an imaginary Vietnam War, where a sure victory could have been achieved with just a little more bombing, just a little more "pacification," just a little more will to win at home. This fantasy clouds McCain's judgment on foreign policy...Most of the other high-profile politicians who fought in Vietnam...don't view the Iraq War as a chance to get Vietnam right.