Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

This is something I wrote after hearing Donna Marcus, the mother of a woman who died in the 9/11 attacks, on the radio. If you disagree with what I write, perhaps you at least will understand why a person like me, with so many unanswered questions, cannot support 4 more years of our country's current President.

Why?

Why did our president ignore Osama Bin Laden, whom his predecessor had been pursuing?
Why did he ignore the briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"?
Why did he go into a classroom to read "My Pet Goat" after he had been told the first tower had been hit?
Why didn't they bring down the other planes after the first one hit?
Why did he just sit there for seven more minutes after he was told of the second plane?
Why didn't any staffers prod him to get up and act?
Why do they say that we are safer when they clearly let this tragedy happen?
Why do people believe him?

Why were they planning on invading Iraq long before 9/11?
Why did they switch their focus from Afghanistan to Iraq?
Why did they outsource the job of finding Bin Laden to Afghani Warlords instead of doing it ourselves?
Why did they use evidence they knew to be false to justify invading Iraq?
Why did they allow torture to occur in prisons?
Why did they allow 377 tons of munitions to be carted away by the terrorists under our noses?
Why do they say the world is safer, when there are more terrorists now than ever before?
Why do people believe him?

Why has the economy gone downhill for four years in a row?
Why have no new jobs been created?
Why is his job record the worst since Herbert Hoover?
Why do they insist things are looking up when so many of us are out of work?
Why do people believe him?

Why did he fill up his cabinet with lobbyists titans of big industr?
Why did they call it "Healthy Forests Initiative" when it should be called "Leave No Tree Behind?"
Why do they call it "Clear Skies Initiative" when it allows more pollution?
Why do people believe him?

Why were thousands of Florida voters illegally removed from the rolls in 2000?
Why is the same thing happening again?
Why are programs being established to intimidate voters at the polls?
Why are new voter registration cards and absentee ballots being lost or destroyed?
Why do people believe him?

Why do the families of soldiers have to send body armor, rather than the military equipping soldiers properly?
Why are Haliburton contractors getting rich while our soldiers' pay is cut?
Why have over a thousand soldiers died and many more maimed, yet he cuts veterans' benefits?
Why is he attacking his opponent's patriotism when nobody in his administration ever served their country?
Why do people believe him?

Why does he hand out puny 'tax cuts' to Americans while giving huge breaks to his billionaire buddies?
Why did he just pass another corporate giveaway of billions of dollars this week?
Why is he putting us so deep into debt that our children are each inheriting a "baby tax" of $100,000, plus interest?
Why does he talk about freedom when our deficit means that we are now indebted over our heads to the Chinese and the Saudis?
Why do people believe him?

Why is he 'conservative' when conservatives are supposed to be cautious and preserve the way things are?
Why is he a 'Republican' when Republicans of the past like Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln were nothing like him?
Why is he creating the biggest deficit ever and biggest government ever when real Republicans favor fiscal discipline and small government?
Why do so many Christians identify with him when his actions are do not follow the teachings of Christ?
Why do people believe him?

And
Why do I believe that this nation no longer the pinnacle of strength and freedom that I grew up in?

"How to Run Your Own Software Business", a panel at the Mac OS X Conference with Oliver Breidenbach, Steve Dekorte, Steve Gehrman, Will Shipley, Brent Simmons, and myself.

Mike Matas (the guy who designed Watson's icons) and Wil Shipley (who founded OmniGroup) have teamed up to create a software company called Delicious Monster and a program called Delicious Library. You may not have thought you needed a program to catalog your books, videos, games, and so forth — but as soon as you try it out, you will need this program.

Delicious Library is exquisite. It won first place (U.S.) in O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Contest, and it deserves it. I watched people's jaws drop when they saw it demonstrated at the conference this week.

The attention to detail in the application — OK, also the innovative use of the iSight as a barcode reader — is what makes this program shine. Within seconds of putting your item's UPC code up to your iSight (or zapped it with your barcode scanner or typed in the code), it has grabbed all sorts of information about the product from Amazon.com's web site. Including the picture, which the program adjusts cleverly to appear as if it's actually a plastic-encased DVD (or whatever media) sitting on your shelf. (It makes the thumbnail picture that you see on Amazon's web site look as sophisticated as a PC running DOS!)

But wait, there's more. You can import people from your address book, and via drag and drop, check out anything in your library to your friends. Set the due date, from the program or via iCal with two-way integration. It's really cool.

I'm sure there are more features I haven't mentioned, and I know of some other cool features that are on the way after version 1 is released. Go to their site and sign up for notification of the program's release (due less than two weeks from now) so you can be the first on your block to have your entire media library scanned into your computer. This application will be big.

Next Tuesday's election is an important one, and it is important that U.S. citizens exercise their right to vote. But everywhere you turn, problems have been cropping up: voter registration forms destroyed in Nevada and disallowed in Ohio, the web site for helping US citizens abroad being inaccessible, programs for intimidating and delaying voters in Florida and Ohio, easily hackable electronic voting equipment (running on MS-Windows of course!) with no paper trail, and so forth. Whatever candidates you support, I'm sure most of you find this kind of behavior inexcusable.

Fortunately, a number of groups are taking action to attempt to counteract such atrocities. Election Protection and Votewatch are two such (nonpartisan, in this case) groups. There are a number of other national and local organizations devoted to "get out the vote" (GOTV) to make sure that people who are registered to vote actually go to the polls and vote successfully.

Besides just voting, I think it's terribly important that as many people as possible take the day off of work on Election Day and volunteer to help make sure the election process works by helping get people to the polls and/or monitoring the polls for irregularities. So I highly encourage those reading this to do just that.

After it's all over, if you did end up spending the day helping out, send me an email here and tell me how it went. And let me know if you'd like a chance to get onto the super-secret pre-beta mailing list (with product discount) for the new Mac application I'm working on [subject, of course, to the company's customary beta signup and license agreements]; I'm sure the boss here won't mind putting you on that list if you've been helping to preserve Democracy for America.....

Rock the Vote!
— Dan

P.S. Even if you aren't taking the day off to vote, but you notice something fishy at the polls, please call Election Protection at 1-866-OUR-VOTE to report it. A similar hotline is at 1-866-MY-VOTE-1. Bring these phone numbers with you to the polling place.

This year's Mac OS X Conference, put on by O'Reilly Media, is shaping up to be another winner.

Yesterday, I attended Scott Anguish's tutorial on Cocoa Bindings... a subject that I'm still not particularly familiar with since it came on the scene after Watson had been written. This is great stuff, and it makes it really easy to build a lot of an application's bread-and-butter functionality.

Today, six of us got onstage to do a panel discussion on "How to Start Your Own Software Business." We talked for 1-1/2 hours on our experiences with starting and running a small company. I think it was well received.

Tomorrow, Stewart Copeland, famed drummer of The Police (whom I recently had to describe to somebody a bit younger than me as "Sting's old backup band") will be giving a talk. Maybe he'll do a drum solo for us!

This is cool. The Unity Campaign (formerly RalphDontRun.net) recently convinced most of Ralph Nader's original 2000 "Citizens Committee" to unite behind an endorsement of John Kerry. We're talking Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jim Hightower, Bonnie Raitt, etc.

Does Ralph have any friends left?

BTW if you're interested in helping get out the message that Ralph's former supporters are abandoning his egostistical crusade, you can donate to their ad campaign which is going to target 1.6 million readers of alternative weekly newspapers. They are trying to raise $18,000 in the next 48 hours.

I made a contribution and now I have that "donation high"....

Somebody wrote me and asked if I could post some suggested alternatives to Watson, so that even after tools 'break' in Watson, while we patiently wait for Sun to release Watson's successor, users can still access the information. So that is what this post is about.

First off, take a look at the Web sites that Watson tools are connecting to. You can find this under the 'Tool' menu when a given tool is selected. This is a good starting point. Bookmark the sites that you find useful. And, dare I say it, you can always break out Sherlock and give that a spin. It's slow, but at least it works for the most part.

• Amazon, PriceGrabber, VersionTracker, Meerkat, Google — these aren't expected to go out of service in the forseeable future.
• Epicurious and RecipeSource — these directly correspond to surfing Epicurious and RecipeSource.
• Movies — Try MovieFone or Fandango. Or marvel at Sherlock's movies channel.
• Weather — Try Weather.gov (and bookmark your location) or The Weather Channel.
• Reference — Use the king of reference sites, Bartleby.com.
• TV Listings — Watson uses TVGuide.com, but you may have better luck using Zap2It, or TitanTV — especially the latter if you have EyeTV.
• Packages — Rather than going to the individual sites, try a web-based aggregator such as PackTrack, or the Mac application PackageTracker.
• Phone Listings — Sites with phone listings abound; there are many used by the Watson tool, too many to list here. Just use the Tool menu to see what's appropriate for your country. Or use Google.
• Translation — Unfortunatly I haven't seen an alternative way to access multiple language translation sites like Babelfish, FreeTranslation, Intertran, Lycos, in one easy package. So just use the Web sites listed here.
• Image Search — To be honest, I just use Google's image search these days. They have a good enough selection for me!
• Stocks — There are many web sites that will look up stocks for you; some provide real-time quotes but most are delayed. A simple suggestion would be to use Yahoo and set up a portfolio.
• eBay — I don't have any specific suggestions, but VersionTracker lists a number of eBay clients. Any recommendations from our readers?
• Zip Codes — USPS's site.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve this list, please leave them in the comments!

Today I sent out a fix to the TV tool to restore iCal/EyeTV operation (albeit in a limited way, alas) via the Search tab. There is no duration information in the search results, so the default value is an hour. You will need to adjust the time manually if the actual program length is any different.

Today is, I regret to say, the last day of Watson support.

The Epicurious tool got an update today to fix some problems dealing with multiple result sets.

The Packages tool got an update in version number only ... apparently there were a significant number of earlier versions floating around there with an incorrect version number (1.7.6), so to deal with this problem, I've created an update which will leap-frog that incorrect version number, to 1.7.6.1.

I'm glad President Bush wore a blue tie. It complemented his red face.

Update: I hate to have to explain a joke, it lessens the impact. But I assumed that everybody saw what I saw — which was an unchanging split screen, showing both candidates all the time. So what many people might not have seen was that almost every time Kerry spoke, Bush's face turned a deep, deep red out of anger or embarrassment.