This made me feel better

Over the last couple of years I have been grappling with this feeling that our civilization is in decline as evidenced by the prevalence and popularity of reality TV shows that focus on pain and humiliation. People watch car races for the crashes, "The Batchelor" for the tears, and Springer for the fights and humiliation. Audiences are not satisfied with acting. They need the real thing.

This post on the Long Tail blog made me feel a little better. It references a David Foster Wallace essay which says:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

So it looks like mass media just amplifies the negative side of our culture. The positive, aspirational side is still there. There just isn't a market for it.

See you at the Flavian.

Yankees spending more on luxury tax than Tampa is on payroll

I just saw a Yahoo News article that says that for 2005, the Yankees will pay more in luxury tax than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays will spend on their whole payroll. The Yankee$ will probably spend over $190 million (leading to a tax bill of $60 million) while the Devil Rays are around $25 million. I can't believe the disparity between payrolls and I don't know how MLB will stay competitive. It's getting to the point that the rest of the league just has to hope that the Evil Empire makes mistakes or implodes under their own pressure.

Speaking of the Bronx pressure cooker. I heard an NPR interview with Buster Olney who wrote the book The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness. The book sounds great. The basic premise is that Steinbrenner has created such a high pressure environment that it has become very difficult to perform. The teams of the 90's were so good because they had a strong core of players that came up through the minors together (Williams, Jeter, O'Neill) and supported each other against the wrath of George and the attention of the fans. Now the team is a bunch of greedy individualists who, although great athletes, regularly perform beneath their potential. I hope he is right.

Slackware Rave's

It seems all anyone has to do is write an article about Slackware and everyone comes out of the woodwork. So, I figure I would add to the din.

Slackware is the oldest and largest community based Linux distribution around. It is usually on the top 10 on DistroWatch.
The latest version (v. 10) was released in June 2004.

I have been using Slackware 10 (on a Sager lap destroyer) since September and am pretty happy with it. Slackware is pretty stable (except for that phase that for some reason KDE decided to crash all the time - I don't use KDE anymore) and easy to use (although I frequently envy people who can just "YUM" or "Emerge" while I must trudge along with ./configure; make; make install). I guess the best part of Slackware is that it forces you to kind of know what is going on with your software. In the words of an anonymous colleague: "I don't know, I think that Gentoo is making me stupid." I also find the Slackware forums to be very helpful and can occasionally find what I need on Linux Packages.

So if you are interested in taking the Linux desktop/laptop plunge and want to learn something on the way, Slackware is not a bad choice.

Funny page on replying to obnoxious emails

Just saw this post on Boing Boing. It describes how to politely reply to an obnoxious email without bottling up your anger or having to write two emails. Hilarious.

Content management posts moved

I have moved posts about content management to Content Here. Stay here for other insight and musings.