Category: Uncategorized

My John Ashcroft Conspiracy Theory

In 1992, John Ashcroft’s nephew was caught growing 60 cannabis plants. Normally, growing this many plants would be tried in federal court and Ashcroft’s nephew would most likely have served a prison term, especially in light of then-governor Ashcroft’s “tough on drugs” stance. However, Ashcroft’s nephew was tried in a state court and got put on probation.

Today, Ashcroft is now the U.S. attorney general and it has recently been discovered that he has a great brownie recipe. That’s right, brownies. The recipe is so slacker-simple because the main ingredient is brownie mix. So simple that you could follow it could follow it even while high.

Coincidence? I think not.

KPMG again

The KPMG linking controversy continues in Wired News’ story, Big Stink Over a Simple Link. They have an interview with one of the KPMG spokedroids who has this to say:

George Ledwith, a KPMG spokesman, insisted the company wasn’t trying to harass anyone, and was just “protecting its brand.”

Asked if he was aware of the weblog backlash, he answered: “What we are aware of is that individuals and others link to our site without an agreement, and we have a Web policy clearly outlined.”

The policy he refers to — posted on the company’s website — states, “KPMG is obligated to protect its reputation and trademarks and KPMG reserves the right to request removal of any link to our website.”

He said that this was not a new policy, nor was it unusual. “We easily sent hundreds of these letters over the past year,” he said. Indeed, he wondered why this was considered newsworthy at all, as “many organizations do this.”

Our Vision of Global Strategy

Oh, dear sweet Baal, this is the worst easy-listening dreck I have heard in a very long time.

I’m referring to the KPMG corporate anthem, Our Vision of Global Strategy. The lyrics are standard PR boilerplate…

KPMG

We’re strong as can be

A dream of power and energy

We go for the goal

Together we hold

On to our vision of global strategy

…and the music is has 80’s easy listening ballad-with-a-cause written all over it, right down to the cliched electric piano. My guess is that it was meant to be used with a corporate video (“I can see a helicopter shot with rolling green vistas,” said Mike Skeet, my co-worker, tech writer supreme, author, movie reviewer for the CBC and all-around Renaissance Man).

If your curiosity’s been piqued, you can listen to the MP3 and experience the evil for yourself.

That does it — I have to do an accordion version.

Unfortunately, a lot of programmers I know seem to disagree. “Everyone knows how to use a browser,” they say.

I thought I’d bring up a couple of counter-points in the hopes of enlightening my otherwise-often-right friends.

Alan Cooper: Lose the Browser!

Here’s what Alan Cooper (a.k.a. “The Father of Visual Basic”) had to say about browsers in InfoWorld:

“My advice to Microsoft is to abandon the browser. The browser is a red herring; it’s a dead end. The idea of having batched processing inside a very stupid program that’s controlled remotely is a software architecture that was invented about 25 years ago by IBM, and was abandoned about 20 years ago because it’s a bad architecture. We’ve gone tremendously retrograde by bringing in Web browsers… We have stepped backward in terms of user interface, capability, and the breadth of our thinking about what we could do as a civilization. The browser is a very weak and stupid program because it was written as essentially a master’s thesis inside a university and as an experiment….”

He’s right, you know…

Recommended Reading

Beyond the Browser A piece by Bruce Tognazzini on how the browser has been crippling the software industry as far as human-computer interaction goes.

First Principles by Bruce Tognazzini. If you’re designing user interfaces, make sure you know all about the terms and ideas listed in this piece.

That’s what P.R. companies tell you to do when being interviewed by the press. That’s probably what the writer of this letter should’ve done too. She had him dead to rights until the last line of her note.

Thinking of You
Or: A Virus Warning

There’s a new worm, Goner, that’s been making the rounds. If you get e-mail that looks like this:

When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you. I am in a harry, I promise you will love it!

…don’t run the enclosed program. Delete the message immiediately. It’s not a screen saver, but a program (written in Visual Basic, no less) that uses Outlook, ICQ and mIRC to propagate itself. You’d think that people would have learned after the Love, Anna Kournikova, SirCam and “To have your advice” attacks, but noooooo…

KPMG! KPMG! KPMG! KPMG!

KPMG seem to be under the opinion that people need their permission to link to them. For the record: Wrong!

For the background story, check out Chris Raettig’s weblog. Raettig has a website featuring corporate anthems — yup, just like national anthems, except for corporations. Perhaps KPMG is a little miffed that he not only made an MP3 recording of their anthem but also gave it a less-than-stellar review:

— it’s that team of power and energy at kpmg with their spectacular straight-to-the-top now finally slightly back down aspirational anthem our vision of global strategy. i sense a conspiracy; have you ever seen peat marwick and geoffrey, the giraffe from toys’r’us in the same room together? either way this is destined to become a modern classic. an audiable warning of what companies can do when they take themselves too seriously.

this from a kpmg insider… “In summary: it is awful, awful, awful and we are very (very) embarassed to be associated with it. keep up the good work.”

I encourage everyone to link to KPMG. It’s not really sticking it to The Man, but it’s still fun!

Recommended Reading

Oops…I Did It Again. A good article about social engineering and its relationship to malicious programs propagated by e-mail by those security-minded people at SANS.

Some of the culprits responsible for this meance to society we call linking: Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreesen. Also to blame are those evil people behind the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books.

Proof the hyperlinking is evil and should be outlawed and made punishable by death: Brad, The Game. A choose-your-own-adventure Web game where all the characters will end up on the Maury Povich Show someday. In one ending, I scored 69 times in an elevator with a woman who tunred out to be a man. Evil!

The fine print for the KPMG site. We really should’ve listened to Shakespeare when he advised us to kill all the lawyers. We ought to take a few suits down while we’re at it.

In case you were curious, here are guidelines for links for a couple of other companies: 3Com and Gateway.

Opinions about the legal issues of linking.

A Nice Beat, But Can You Dance to It? A Fast Company story on corporate anthems.

For my friend George’s birthday, I flew down to New York and took him and his wife Leesh out for dinner at Babbo. This was one of those damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead nights where I decided that we should try the traditional tasting menu, complete with the wines to match each dish. Birthdays are sacred after all, and George is a man who enjoys the finer things in life (for example, he eats only fromt he $1.29 menu at Taco Bell and buys only premium pork rinds).

The courses, in order, were:

• Braised beef tongue

• Very fresh tagliatelle in a very nice herb sauce

• Pork shoulder in creamy polenta

• Guinea hen in an amazing pepper sauce (this was George’s and my favourite)

• Goat cheese in a fig compote

• Turrone

• Cakes — Leesh had a pumpkin pastry, George had the apple crumble and I had a flourless chocolate cake. Each one was covered in a matching sauce.

George and Leesh

Me and my guinea hen

Recommended Reading

Some profiles of Babbo’s chef, Mario Batali. The man is a freakin’ genius.

Some reviews of Babbo. You must go sometime.

Susur’s. Not in New York, not Italian, but it’s an amazing Toronto restaurant with a world-renowned chef, Susur Lee. Another must-go place.

What I’m having for dinner tonight. Can’t eat at expensive restaurants all the time. At least not on my salary.

“Good old rock. It always wins”. A sex parlour in Fukuoka, Japan will give you a major discount — from about 5,000 yen to a mere 100 yen — if you can win three consecutive games of jan-ken-pon (rock-paper-scissors). The article is interesting for the bits about how to improve your chances of winning, rather than the sex shop aspect. Really. I swear.

Dissed by a five-year-old. One more reason to not have kids.

From 1983 to 1987, there was a band of very nice if somewhat tempermental lads from Manchester known as The Smiths. Although their lineup was conventional — a front man, a guitarist, a drummer and a bass guitar, they were unconventional in most other ways, with their odd chord patterns (the closest thing to a standard rock song being Bigmouth Strikes Again, whose chords are reminiscent of All Along the Watchtower), odder lyrics and even odder front man and throat, one Steven Patrick Morrissey. Morrissey (on the album credits, he went by only his surname), also affectioantely known as Moz, was your classic tortured soul: angsty, lonely, depressed and mopey. Exactly the kind of personality that many a teenager — especially pasty, gloomy Brit kids writing poetry in a tiny bedsit in something-on-another, UK, could really appreciate.

Prior to his stint with The Smiths, Moz had a pen pal named Robert Mackie. Mackie collected this correspondence and made them available to anyone who would cover the cost of the photocopying them. Someone’s taken some of these letters and put their text on a Web page — complete with Moz’s spelling and punctuation — here.

A long time ago, Spin magazine ran an interview with Morrissey, after which someone wrote a letter to the editor saying that Morrissey should get over himself, and that what the perpetually glum vegetarian needed was “a cheeseburger and a fuck.” After reading these bits of correspondence, I’m inclined to agree.

Some choice excerpts:

Dear person,

So nice to know there’s another soul out there, even if it is in Glasgow. Does being Scottish bother you? Manchester is a lovely place, if you happen to be a bedridden deaf mute. I’m unhappy, hope you’re unhappy too.

In poverty,

Steven

Do you really like Kate Bush? I’m not surprised. The nicest thing I could say about her is that she’s unbearable. That voice! Such trash!

…thank you for your photo. It came in handy until the plumber arrived. Did you know you had a dead caterpillar on your lip? Real deco, man. You could have smiled but it’s dreadfully unfashionable, isn’t it? Observe the enclosed piccy of your author, disguised as an artiste. This photograph is suitable for framing. Incidentally your real name IS Robert, isn’t it? Everyone in Scotland is either Robert or Billy or Jimmae. Have you got a real Scottish accent? How novel! Why don’t you join a traveling circus?

I’m sure there are worse groups than Duran Duran, but I’ll be damned if I can think of any.

I’m glad your body is still untouched by human hands, at least it gives you something to look forward to, besides Christmas.

He hated Duran Duran? Blasphemy!

Recommended Reading

The Reflex. Lyrics to the greatest song about self-gratification ever written. Even better than the Divinyls’ I Touch Myself.

Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? Is he obsessed with “Lunix”? Every parent should know about this.

Lawrence Lessig’s new book, The Future of Ideas. I may have to get a copy of this.

One cartoonist’s take on Segway, a.k.a. Ginger, a.k.a. It, a.k.a. Dean Kamen’s new invention.