That nuclear glow in Sweden

I was under the impression that Swedes didn’t have to worry about much more than the high price of alcohol & the high suicide rate (which may or may not be connected); but it seems like another potential concern has popped up on the worry radar: whether or not your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his kitchen.

Richard Handl, a resident of Angelholm, a town in the west of the country, attracted police attention last month when he contacted the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority to inquire if it’s legal for an individual to construct a reactor at home. Well, you can imagine how that might perk up official ears, can’t you? It turns out that you’re not allowed to have radioactive materials without a permit in Sweden.

Handl was arrested and released after a hearing. But the cops took all his radioactive stuff away.

Now, here’s the thing: look at the photo of his “melt-down” that Handl posted on his blog. From the number of cigarette butts in that ashtray, I’d say he’s in greater danger of lung cancer, or of setting his building on fire, than of achieving fission.

Following Newt: no human involvement

This should come as no surprise to any human with three synapses firing in sequence:  it’s been reported that 92% of Newt Gingrich’s followers on Twitter are not human.

No, we’re not talking Tea Partiers here; a search company has determined that only 8% of little Newtie’s followers are verifiably humanoid. The rest are spambots.

The report goes on to say that an unnamed Gingrich staffer has admitted that he’s paid for followers. I suppose that’s less slimy than paying for sex; but just as sad.

Mashable has produced a chart tracking the human-vs.-bot Twitter-follower ratio for a number of Republican presidential hopefuls. What I am finding hard to believe is that Michele Bachman’s is as high as 28%.

Navigating the galaxy

So, if you don’t like the voice of that cow, Jill, who directs you on your Garmin sat-nav device, you can now let The Force or The Dark Side guide you. According to a report in the LA Times, for a mere $12.99 each you can download the voice—and speech patterns—of Yoda & Darth Vader.

I suppose if you require entertainment with everything, including GPS, it’s value for money. Me, I think either of them would get on my nerves after a while. Jill certainly has, & I got her for free with the device.

I wonder how either Jedi handles the dreaded “reCALculating” that I hear much more often than I’d like?

Tax dollars actually at work

I went trawling the Web to try to find any politician who doesn’t behave like our Congressmorons in D.C. And--imagine this, there is one.

I give you the mayor of Redondo Beach, Calif., a gay, Asian Republican who works with his constituents to maintain both a satisfactory level of services and a balanced budget.

I understand this is a solution that is not, as we say in the tech business, scalable. Mike Gin’s election didn’t come at a campaign cost of millions, so he didn’t have to sell his soul to multi-national corporations. Therefore he’s able to focus on, you know, the work and the outcomes to people who don’t pay his bills.

But, given what we’ve had to put up with for the past few weeks, months and years on a state and national level, I want to focus on the concept that elected officials can actually do right by the people who put them in office, even if it’s just in Surf City USA.

More of our tax dollars not at work, part 2

As of this writing, we’re still waiting to hear what nuts our Congressmorons are going to pull out of the conflagration they’ve been setting around our economy.

These are the words I have for them all:

Contempt

Disgust

Revulsion
Scorn

Loathing

Disrespect

I believe that, whatever they do in the next few days to justify their toying with the nation’s present and future economy to score points with their corporate masters, the American people should recall their worthless asses—every one of them—by special election.

Having no Congress is better than the one we have.

Oh—a couple more words about Congressmorons:

Tar

Feathers

Walmartian chronicles

A friend of mine sent me an email with photos of Wal-Mart shoppers, which got me started on a quest for the tasteless and the tacky. Because right now I’m in need of a laugh at someone else’s expense, for a change.

This is what I found. And also this.

I feel a little bit better.

A question of beauty

We live in a strange, strange world, when such icons of drop-dead beauty as Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington aren’t “pretty enough” for the cosmetics company they represent in advertising. No, the photos for L’Oréal’s campaigns for Lancôme (Roberts) and Mabelline (Turlington) apparently required air-brushing and Photoshopping to “perfect” the women’s faces.

I know this because Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency (and isn’t that a concept all on its lonesome?) has banned the adverts in question at the behest of an MP for precisely that reason.

Now, here’s the thing: the products being advertised were foundations—you know, the stuff women are supposed to glop onto their faces to even out skin tone and provide the backdrop for the rest of the crap they’re supposed to apply, like blush, eye shadow and whatnot. (Look, I had a traumatic experience with greasepaint as a child; I’ve never liked gunk on my face since.) 

I.e., the agency geniuses not only thought that Roberts’ and Turlington’s mugs needed a boost; but also that Roberts and Turlington wearing L’Oréal’s products needed work.

Think about that.

If the Pretty Woman herself and a supermodel aren’t “beautiful” enough to be presented without digital alteration, what the hell kind of standards of beauty are we supposed to be held to?

And what the hell hope do ordinary women have of getting within the same time zone as those standards?

Oh, and BTW—who the hell is setting those standards?

More of our tax dollars not at work

Here’s an interesting chart, out of the NY Times by way of The Atlantic, regarding the fine mess we’re currently in.

Not that anyone in Congress cares, because they’re too busy posturing, spouting rhetoric and playing chicken with the nation’s future.

Actually, I don’t believe any Congressmoron has a clue about the concept of “future”, since for them long-term means “the next election”.

Scroll down to the bottom of the story for a chart depicting the effects of Shrub’s tax cuts on the fine mess we’re in.

It's enough to make a donkey weep.

All aboard for Milwaukee

The product management group I’m part of had its weekly “team” meeting yesterday morning. (And why are corporations so keen to use the word “team” when what they actually mean is “a bunch of people working for their own advancement, at cross purposes and without communicating with each other”?)

And one of the group, a part-time PM who’s evidently also part of the engineering group in Bangalore, informed the rest of us—including our manager—that a portion of the software operates in a particular fashion entirely unanticipated by us. Meaning, the developers decided to build the interfaces in this precise way, even though this is not how it was specified in the product requirements document. Meaning also that yesterday, three weeks before the entire highly-complex software-hardware-services product solution is supposed to be ready for what they call “first customer ship”, product management discovered this functionality for the first time.

For those of you unfamiliar with the world of product development (especially software products), this is like the Pullman porters deciding to steer a moving train to Milwaukee instead of Chicago, and bugger the whole concept following the actual rails.

But, as if that’s not whacked enough, our manager did not go ballistic. That’s like the train’s engineer just sitting back and filing his fingernails; maybe thinking about bratwurst, instead of throwing on the brakes and opening up a can of whup-ass on those porters.

The thing that worries me a lot is this: I’m responsible for collecting and prioritizing the feature requests, as well as writing the PRD, for the next couple of versions of this product. & not only do I feel as though I’m still going to be chasing a runaway train that’s already pulling out of the station—even though these people will have gone through two releases by mid-August and; should thus know better—I have no confidence at all in my manager’s capacity or will to grab the damned controls and be a bloody product manager.

Aside from which, we all look like groupers, flapping our mouths open and shut at meetings, discovering that the product we were supposed to have conceived, specified and driven is actually going to Milwaukee.

Old Spice & old Nazis

Interesting news day.

If you’re big on 80s retro & romance novel covers, your pulse may go up to learn that Fabio is back. He’s the new face (& chest) of Old Spice.

I suppose it’s a lateral move for a man who last made bread by starring in commercials for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Meanwhile, the earthly remains of Rudolf Hess have been exhumed & his gravestone removed to stop neo-Nazis from using it as a focal point for rallies. He was cremated & his ashes scattered at sea.

It’s a strange old world we live in.