Saturday night special

• Inequality and the Sergei Brin effect - self selection on a grand scale
  
• What Paulson might get out of the bailouts
• Cobb Country gets a tank - for real. I grew up there, and in general, the place makes Mayberry look like Escape from New York. Perhaps it's to quell the riots should (really, when) McCain lose.
• Tom puts it quite well with

  the penchant for blaming the problems on “greed” is the Great Chicago Fire on oxygen.

• My neighborhood makes the news. Apparently it's "rich in tolerance and diversity". I was not interviewed for it, though I still like it a lot.
  
• Rocksploitation now has a real music video - sort of.
  

Least surprising headline ever

Report: Crack users with HIV engage in unprotected sex

Only in Atlanta

I went to the all night convenience store last night on a beer run after we ran out at the recording studio. Ahead of me in line was an obvious heroin addict (lots of track marks) wearing pajamas. Behind and to the side of me was was an attractive debutante type having a loud conversation on her cell phone. The heroin addict is having a loud conversation with the clerk about her kids (apparently it's a lot of work but they're worth it); the debutante is having a loud conversation on her cell phone that ended with "Some people have NO MANNERS!".

I savored the irony for an hour or so.

Sunday reading

• Cities and Ambition -

  "A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping."

  I've always judged cities by the quality of the homeless and convenience stores, but there's all sorts of different metrics I suppose.
• What if politicians pandered to economists?
• The AJC now has foreclosure listings

I play with video

From my new tiny video camera. The sound quality is impressive, the degree to which YouTube Crunches it is not welcome.

The rare wise move from the APD

Finally the Atlanta Police department cracks down on the idiotic critical mass rides.

After years of looking the other way, Atlanta police recently cracked down on a monthly bicycle ride through the city streets that includes blocking cars and flouting traffic laws.

At least 10 officers, eight on motorcycles and two in patrol cars, followed more than 300 bicyclists through downtown Atlanta, Little Five Points and Virginia-Highland on June 27 from about 6:30 to 8 p.m. Most of the bicyclists stopped for red lights they normally would have ignored. At least two bicyclists were ticketed for disobeying traffic laws.
...
Highsmith, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, said Critical Mass would not be the same if the bicyclists followed the rules.

"The little bit of disruptiveness and the civil disobedience is a part of raising awareness [about bicycles] in a more conspicuous way," he said.

The group wants both better infrastructure for bicycles, including bike racks and lanes, and to show drivers that they, too, can hop out of the car and onto a bike.

Now honestly, if the cyclists are lobbying for better infrastructure, how does NOT using the infrastructure that's already there help matters? Why should anyone pay for more bike lanes when the existing lanes aren't being used and the people agitating for them are as boorish as possible?

Not that many people will care about this, but it's been a pet peeve of mine for years...

Tom Waits

Last night I saw Tom Waits playing the Fox Theater. The show was wonderful; he did about half the songs I was hoping he would do. The only fly in the ointment was the massive array of hoops that TicketMaster made everyone jump though; only two tickets per household, original credit card required to enter, ticket checks every 20 feet, etc. It was a bit like the old Soviet Union. Security was much tighter at the show than at my visit to the capital last year actually.

And an addendum - I was talking to a long time Waits fan after the show and she said that the security concerns probably were Waits' idea; apparently he's willing to go a long way in his vendetta against scalpers.

Update on the two murders across the street

A news update here. It seems that there were two killers, and also that they planned to torch the house when they were done. Scary business.

Meeting the trouble halfway

So now it seems that the "incident", which is to say, two murders, that happened 100 feet away from my house was a drug deal gone sour, and not a home invasion. That does make me feel a bit better. The shooter(s) being caught would seal the day nicely.

More info on the blue lights

Here is the article. Scary business. The article does describe the neighborhood as "Upscale".

The night the blue lights kept the neighbors up

The street is taped off in front of my house, there are three police cars to the left and right of my house, and the church parking lot across the street is cordoned off with yellow police tape. A news van was here too (they left after about an hour). I've heard something of what happened, but I'll link to the news story when it comes out in the morning.

At the zoo

I'll be doing a more formal gallery soon, but here are some samples of my visit to the zoo with Mike and Erin.

I venture out in the middle of the day with camera

To the studios of Griffin Mastering, conveniently located six doors down the street.







The quote of the afternoon was by the new harmony singer: "My armpit smells like hamburger."

Rockspoloitation on Saint Patrick's Day

They needed some photos for their site, and I took quite a few. I finally got a chance to shoot in daylight which made quite a difference.

Tornado parties and the kindness of strangers

So, last night I venture out into one of the more interesting parts of downtown to go to a party at the offices of my good friends at Lucky Fish. I carefully check the weather beforehand so as I can be home before any thunderstorms so my dog won't have his usual psychotic break that happens when a storm comes and I'm not there. The storms were supposed to come around midnight and I planned to leave around 11:00 PM. All was good.

It was a great party, with casino games and cool people. I'm near the door around 9:30 when I notice the wrath of God happening outside. Someone checks news on a ubiquitous I-Phone and says that CNN Center and the Georgia Dome have just been hit by a tornado. The first tornado to hit downtown in living memory. The history is made more notable by the fact that the party is a quarter mile away. Crap I think. I'm not worried about my personal safety as we were in a converted 100 year old well built factory . Nonetheless leaving is out of the question. I've driven through one tornado and I'm not driving through another one.

We all head down to the basement, and the party continues. The power goes out too, which makes for a very fun party by candlelight. The second tornado warning passed around midnight and I made my way back home through downtown Atlanta.

Not surprisingly the city looked like a tornado had just passed through (photos from the AJC here and here. My house is about four miles from the first link and two miles from the second.). I resign myself to the thought that the dog had destroyed the remaining blinds in my office (his favorite target) and hope for the best in terms of structural damage.

I return home to find the house untouched, the blinds shredded, the back door open, and the dog gone. Fresh teethmarks on the knob tell me that he had opened the door to come look for me when the thunder hit. I also make the unpleasant discovery that the back door no longer latches (hence his ability to open it).

I first look in the jungle/backyard area beyond the fence where has sometimes jumped, to no avail. I sneak through all my neighbors backyards and can't find him. I drive around the neighborhood looking for him, and he's nowhere in sight. It was quite dark and foggy and the odds of finding him were close to zero, so after several hours I decide to wake up at dawn and look then.

I get a call at 3:50 AM from someone asking me if I was missing a dog! I thank them profusely and congratulate myself on the custom tag I'd gotten him with my name and phone number. I then rushed over to where they were.

Somehow he'd make it all the way to the East Atlanta village, a distance of two miles. All the power was out in that neighborhood, even emergency power. I find the very nice people on the sidewalk standing over an exhausted but unharmed pooch. Apparently he had stopped to rest and they came over to him thinking he was hurt, and found my number. Why and how he made it all the way over there I have no idea. I thanked the good Samaritans profusely and went home. Drex was almost asleep by the time we got back and he's been sleeping for most of the day.

And that was my Friday adventure.

Quick Link Roundup

• ASP.net best practices
• The Georgia Encyclopedia
• A quick start guide to SilverLight
• A periodic table of visualization methods
• Patrick Lang on Obama - featuring the notable line that Obama is the "Trophy Messiah"
• The first look at SilverLight 2.0
  

When irony meets the homeless

One of the more annoying things about my fun new area is the increased encounters with the urban outdoorsmen of our community. I was making a late night caffeine run for one my increasingly frequent all-nighters and I came across some guy bumming for money outside the grocery store. He did the usual story, then closed with "I need money for food."

Naturally he was eating a bag of Cheeto's at the time, which actually dovetails nicely with my more famous moment involving orange snacks and grocery stores, which you can hear if you see me play at any music venue...

Life in the age of table saws

Current finger count: 10

After much delay, my vaunted "Secret society" style bookshelves begin today.

And on yet another note, it's snowing in Atlanta again - if this keeps up, everyone should expect some cool photography as the city panics and wrecks their cars.

Snow!

It's snowing in Atlanta, for the first time in three years. This is so cool. It's very light, but I predict the Atlanta snow panic will start in about fifteen minutes...

I play a different venue

In this case, Blind Willies in the Highlands on Sunday night. Judging the reaction of the small but appreciative crowd, it sounded good.

Random Photo

From my visit to the Commuter Art Gallery

The sounds of silence

While I've been thrilled with the new place so far, one thing that's been amiss the the fact that the State Patrol (headquartered behind my back yard, about 200 yards away) has run a generator every minute of every day since I moved in. The generator was not running when I looked at the house.

For the first time it has stopped. The silence and the other noises are kind of eerie.

For a historical trivia, the Georgia State Patrol building used to be the local Confederate widows home for Atlanta. The Atlanta Time Machine has a photo.

Me and MasterChief

My visit to MicroSoft was interesting.

Van Halen

Van Halen (featuring David Lee Roth but not Michael Anthony) is coming to Atlanta next year. Surprising.

Top of the world

Or the roof anyway. Somehow I managed to buy a house withe 2 fireplaces and 0 ways to close the flue. Another task for the pile I suppose. For those keeping score at home, I still have not climbed the tree that overhangs the house (it's the one in the shot)

A weird thing in my neighborhood

So, I take a different route home from running a quick errand in the new neighborhood, and I discover that there is a numbered, named, and unpaved road in the heart of downtown Atlanta. Really strange...

Friday link round up

• Intown Coyotes - They're in Oakhurst, which while wooded, is certainly not a suburban area in the traditional sense. I wonder if they make fun of the country coyotes and get weird tattoos...
• A profile of the last remaining WW I veteran, here is one who passed away last year at the age of 113. To quote from the article

  "Census records show that Mr. Hardy’s father was born in the 1830s and that both his parents were slaves, Mr. Young said."

  It's amazing that the past is that close in the human chain.
• Michael Yon reviews the combat cameras
  

Weird things on Craig's List

While I was uploading some large files I came across these two items on the "Women Seeking Men" section

Item One:

Hi. I am staying with friends outside Buckhead, BUt I have to move..I am 25 former Bad girl (was in trouble, not now)single. Looking to move in and COOK CLEAN DO LAUNDRY AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR NEEDS in xchange for rent and....I am very good looking..5'6" 111 lt brown hair green eyes. and for real...Race doesnt matter

Item Two:

I am seeking a professional man that owns his own business and calls all the shots. To describe my self a little, I am multi-ethnic, 5'5, 130lbs, carmel skin, white teeth, nice curly medium length hair, very intelligent, discrete and sweet.

I'm seeking employment, something 40 hours a weeks( I have a resume)
The beneifits are office sex with me, or a side relationship.
If you are serious respond with a place where we can interview(not a hotel or a house)and a job details.

I'm not sure which combination of sued/murdered/robbed/conned would result, but at least two of them seem certain. Does people post these things because they work, or is it just a cry of desperation?

The market has spoken

This editorial from the AJC is an annoying example of the current hysteria about subprime loans

Describing the wreckage of the subprime mortgage collapse as part of the normal business cycle is akin to characterizing the devastation of New Orleans as the aftermath of a seasonal downpour.

In both disasters, human blunders and government inattention played pivotal roles. And the market can no more be counted on to fix the subprime mess than Mother Nature could be trusted to fix up the mess after Hurricane Katrina.

Government must intervene quickly and firmly in the subprime fiasco, in helping desperate borrowers keep their homes if possible and, more important, in ending abusive lending practices that contributed to the national leap in mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

New federal and state laws must couple strong prohibitions against abusive lending with equally strong enforcement and consequences. The pain must be felt by the duplicitous mortgage brokers who talked the homeowners on Elm Street into loans with hidden brokerage fees and unnecessarily high interest rates all the way up to the investors on Wall Street who profited from the bundling and selling of these subprime loans.

The article then goes on to describe several cases of fraud that happened in the Atlanta area, fraud as everyone knows is already illegal. Foreclosure and the denial of credit IS the marketing working, mainly in stopping people from buying homes they can't afford. Absent fraud, no one is forced into a mortgage, and everyone knows how much they'll be paying.

I suppose I'm more sensitive to this now (having just bought a house) than most times, but it's quite maddening.

Random Atlanta insights

I got sick of working and went for a drive for about 40 minutes tonight. I wound up near Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and I do have to say, that place looks like a prison, it's like the dark side of Gotham City from the Batman Comics. Most of the places around it (I took an odd route home and got lost) are quite photogenic in a burned out, industrial way.

On an unrelated note, Man charged with vandalism of Tupac Shakur statue. Atlanta is home (oddly, since there's not much of a connection) to the Tupac Shakur Arts Center for some reason.

Tuesday night rapid fire

• Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
• John Robb on private military contractors - one thing he doesn't mention (and I don't think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It's unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
  
• Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
• For some reason validator callout extenders won't work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
• Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
• Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
• DNI on leaving Iraq
• A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
• Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
• Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
  

The criminal side of over coming handicaps

From the AJC

Armless Gwinnett man involved in deadly fight jailed
A disabled artist known for painting with his feet was jailed this week on charges related to a deadly brawl with another man earlier this month.

William "Rusty" Redfern was booked into the Gwinnett County Detention Center Wednesday on a misdemeanor charge of affray, a legal term for fighting in public, and later released on $1,200 bond.
...
Witnesses said the men yelled at each other from across the street. Redfern, who was born with no right arm and only a stump for a left arm, then ran into Teer's driveway and head-butted him.

Teer, 49, died minutes later. Police initially suspected Teer died from the head-butt. However, a subsequent autopsy determined that he died of a heart attack. Teer had been suffering from coronary artery disease, according to the Gwinnett County Medical Examiner's Office.

If you put your mind to it, I suppose you can accomplish anything.

An interesting series on the death penalty

The AJC is having a series on the death penalty in Georgia. Two interesting tidbits

Tidbit 1

White killers are more likely to face capital prosecution and land on death row, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. The reason: White killers are more likely to kill white people.

A statistical analysis shows Georgia prosecutors were more than twice as likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white.

Tidbit 2

Though most crime involves a victim and a perpetrator of the same race, there is no tradition of outrage on behalf of black victims who are attacked by black assailants. Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, who is black, has noticed the difference.

"Everyday my office ... handles horrible cases involving the sexual assault and/or death of black children, black women and black senior citizens. It is difficult for me to recall an occasion wherein my office has received a note, card, letter or phone call from any black advocacy group or political leader in support of these victims. We receive many communications in support of black defendants in some of those same cases," he wrote in an e-mail.

"I am very disturbed about what's happened to Genarlow Wilson and the 'Jena Six,' but I am equally disturbed by the plight of the endless number of black victims who don't have the benefit of community support or outrage," he said.

Public Choice theory strikes again I suppose.

Now I find out...

After complaining for years about how I have nothing in common with my neighbors, today I find out that one of my neighbor's loves to talk politics and is a fellow Ron Paul supporter. Pesky lopsided timing...

To hunt the house you have to think like a house

I went out with Jim (the Realtor) for the first time today and found a couple good prospects, one of which I really liked. We also discovered that there is a ton of crap in East Atlanta, including what seemed like an operational crackhouse for sale. The term "No disclosure" is a big one on property listings.

Scary quote of the day

From the AJC article Clayton may seek records on all renters

"This is not to say Big Brother is watching," he insisted. "It says Big Brother is helping."

It's not the most intrusive thing that could happen, but bear in mind that in the past 10 years we (the Atlanta Metro Area) have had

• 1 Mayor in jailed on corruption charges
  
• 1 political assassination of a sheriff
  
• 1 ex-sheriff convicted of said assassination, along with several deputies
• 1 police shooting of an 87 year old woman based on a perjured warrant
• The creation of a "Tupac Shakur Arts Center" funded by the taxpayers
• Cynthia McKinney's entire political career

And we should give the government more power?

A handy link for househunters

It seems that one can search country property records online, Dekalb County (Georgia) is here.

Your tax dollars at work

In the form of a brazen retirement scam at the Fulton County Clerks office. Basically the old clerk retires and her successor hires her back at $55 an hour.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution learned through open-records requests and interviews that Hicks is working without a contract, that her new job has no written goals or deadlines and has delivered no tangible work product in six months of employment.

All this and the roads aren't fixed.

Tuesday link clearing festival

• Noir is a new club/restaurant in Atlanta that just opened up, decorated entirely in a film noir motif. They have movie nights too. Sounds perfect for me. The AJC review is here.
  
• WikiBroker and Zillow seem quite handy as well. The Zillow link is set to where I am thinking about moving.
• Robert Patterson (a blogger new to me) posts this excellent link to the Battle of Algiers.
• The Chinese ARE building the first affordable electric cars! Which is one of my predictions from a while back.
• Curiously underreported story about Global Warming.

  These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data. . . .
  
  NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

• PurpleSlog responds to my 8 Random Facts Question. His blog tagline is now "Accepting the World As It Is Until Robots Get Better"
  

Jury Duty Again!

And only two years after the last time.

And question #4 on the questionnaire (along with name, address, etc) is "Are you Hispanic?"

Weird.

Saturday link roundup

• A nice how-to on HDR photography
• Survivorman is blogging again!
• The greatest living American you've never heard of.
• The world's stupidest Fatwas, my favorite -

  Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.

  The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
• It seems that tires will outlive us all
• More on the Kathryn Johnson case
• A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
  

Quick Thursday links

• The linguistic capabilities of the candidates
• A story about the old Pullman yards I explored a few months ago. Photo gallery here.
• ASP.net and Validation Groups - I can't believe I didn't know about this earlier.
• The NYT breathlessly points to a supposed new trend in econ departments. Intelligent Design is a new trend in biology in the same way I suppose.
• E-Prime is the way to go
• Austin Bay has seven possibilities for Iraq. Number one is the most likely I think.
  

A good time was had by all

My first ever gig at Limerick Junction was a success. Everyone seemed to have a good time. The songs "I Miss Ronald Reagan" (written by Tommy Womack) and my song "Heroin and Cheetos" seemed to go over particularly well. My would-be guitar showcase of Bonaparte's retreat fell a bit flat. The room sounds noticeably different when full than when half full and that threw me off a bit as the set progressed.

On the whole a good night. The A-Sides rocked as usual. The photo was taken by my brother, who also recorded the show.

Come see me play tonight

If you're in Atlanta come out and see me play in my first ever scheduled gig this Sunday at Limerick Junction Pub. I'll be going on at 8:00. Atlanta legends the A-Sides are the headliner.

Local drug war update

Today's newspaper brought mixed results. The Atlanta Police Department does seem to be cleaning itself up, indeed, much more than I expected. However, I haven't read anything about any sort of judicial accountability; they're the ones who approve the warrants, seemingly without even looking at them.

Rant Starts
Meanwhile, people like this guy send exactly the wrong message with his "How not to get busted" DVD series. The point of drug legalization is not to evade the law or get high, it's to live in a free society where people can make their own mistakes and take responsibility for them. Instead we revive the notion of demonic possession in the form of "addiction" which is a "disease", which is at the same time pitiful and criminal and a reason to treat us all like children in the hands of an all-knowing state.

The end result of protecting people from the consequences of their actions is to fill the world with fools, and that seems to be what we've done.
Rant Ends

Starting somewhere

I came across an interesting article on AJC.com about a couple in Grant Park trying to erect a windmill on their own property. For those who don't know, Grant Park is a tony neighborhood near the center of Atlanta that prides itself on diversity. Like most areas that pride themselves on diversity, it's composed largely of childless college-educated types who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic party.

Needless to say the neighbors are contesting the windmill. While they're organized enough to put together a website, they don't seem to be organized enough to utilize the Coase Theorem. Needless to say, I'm for them erecting the windmill on their own property.

Before anyone asks, wind power is usually much more efficient (per dollar) than solar energy, and also has a much lower starting price. Also, modern windmills are geared to prevent fast rotation which protects birds.

Signs of progress

In policing Atlanta anyway

Atlanta police have virtually stopped seeking search warrants for drugs following the November shooting of an elderly woman and dropped — at least temporarily — the forced-entry tactics that led to her death, court records show.

In the six months since Kathryn Johnston died in a botched police raid, Atlanta narcotics officers have not sought a single "no-knock" search warrant, court records show. They served at least 25 no-knock warrants during a comparable six-month period a year earlier.

Reason has prevailed, at least temporarily.

Two for Monday

• Sandy Berger gives up his law license, which makes me thing that there is some serious hiding going on.
• More on the rogue Atlanta narcotics squad. Unmentioned is any mention of the judges and magistrates who rubber stamp all this crap. Ideally they would be help liable for any fraudulent warrants they sign, but that will never happen.
  

Performance anxiety

So, at long last, I have my first gig as a solo performer in one month, opening for the A-Sides. And I need a full hour of material.

It's good to have goals. And deadlines and stress I suppose.

Sunday link round up

• A creepy collection of suicide notes
• Google used this camera to create their new "Street View" feature (which is not in Atlanta, yet).
• Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin explains why the lessening of racial majorities is a bad thing for diversity. Really.
• There's a new, free version of Refactor! specifically for ASP.net. It's pretty cool. When I installed it it deleted all of my toolbox snippets in Visual Studio, so be careful about that.
  

Local music legends mentioned in the mainstream media

Atlanta based garage rock duo The A-Sides are briefly mentioned in today's Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Sunday photography

I wound up taking some shots for a friend of mine's site and wound up with a lot of good shots. My brother took the one of me (the first one) and I took the one of Steve Coffey (of the band the Rockin' Pontoons) (the second one). Galleries on the way soon.

Taken at my brother's house

Taken off of North Highland

Scenic views wanted

Does anyone know of any great views of the city? I'll soon be doing another installment of the fiddler photo series and I'm looking for some good places to shoot. All suggestions welcome.

Quck roundup

• An interesting look at the military aspects of social networking.
• Underwater windmills
• How we would fight China
• The metaweb/FreeBase
• Evidently February was cold
  
• Blurb has dropped their prices.
• Strangest suicide attempt, ever

  Two Georgia men survived a gruesome suicide attempt Friday after cutting their own arms off with a saw, reported Atlanta's Journal Constitution.
  
  The 40 and 41-year-old men managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting them about six inches above their wrists, Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin told the Journal.

• Baby steps to a better editorial, it's easier to see why this one is so wrong.
• The 20 best comic book weapons.
• It's odd seeing this already existing - I stumbled across this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' which is the general gist my future novel The Comedian.