Me Blog

Many if not most of the people who oppose evolution have little or no real understanding of how it actually works. One of the greatest misconceptions is that evolution is random. Often they will argue that evolution is like expecting a fully operational 747 to assemble itself out of a pile of scrap. This argument is only impressive to those who misunderstand how evolution works. If they understood a bit about how evolution really works they would be embarrassed to utter such nonsense.

Evolution isn’t random; it is guided by natural selection, a process that doesn’t need any intervention. As its name implies natural selection is just that, natural. Animals survive or not depending on how well they are adapted to their environment. If you have two hares and one has a white winter coat and another one doesn’t, the one without will be much easier to catch by predators. It is unlikely that such a hare would leave many baby hares that share the dark winter coat. The result is that over many generations the frequency of hares with dark winter coats is reduced significantly. As you can see intuitively there is no need for human or divine intervention for this kind of selection to happen.

The random part comes in genetic mutations. Mutations are errors in our genetic code. When copies of our genes are made during cell division errors occur, these errors are mutations. If these mutations occur in the cells that generate the sexual gametes, (eggs and sperm), the mutation can be passed down to our children. As you can imagine, most mutations are harmful, even lethal. Changing things at random hardly ever results in an improvement, the key is that sometimes it does. The mutations that are lethal or maladaptive get selected out, again without the need for intervention from man or god. The mutations that are apparently harmless or helpful have a better chance to get passed on to future generations. If these mutations help the bearer survive or better adapt to it’s habitat, the chances are higher that the helpful mutation will spread through the population.

Another reason that people misunderstand evolution is that it takes place over very long periods of time, thousands and millions of years. You can’t sit there and watch evolution happen before your eyes. Evolution is a process of small changes over time in a population. Unless you are playing close attention to an animal or plant population for extended periods of time and looking at the variation of the distribution of genes, you are not going to notice evolution happening. In a sense humans have been tinkering with evolution for thousands of years. We have been breeding animals or plants since we first domesticated wolves and started planting crops. That we can breed animals is testament to the fact that natural selection works. If it wasn’t possible for a species to change over time, we would not have been able to breed so many varieties of dogs, cats or crops.

Another reason for misunderstanding about evolution is that some people think of the human body as the pinnacle of creation. They seem to think that it is perfect. To put it as simply as possible, it is far from perfect. There are many imperfections in to be found in the human body that would have been obvious to any intelligent designer. To begin with, our eyes are badly designed. You might have heard that our eyes are the only places in our bodies where blood vessels are directly and plainly visible, this is true but it means that the blood vessels as well as the nerves leading from the rod and cones sit on top of the cornea, in the direct path of the light. Not even the cheapest digital camera has a sensor in which the wiring blocks the light. To make matters worse the nerves and vessels have to exit the eye and in order to do so they have to go through the cornea, which leaves us with a blind spot in each eye. Any engineer that designed a digital sensor so poorly would be fired immediately. The funny part is that squid and octopus have better eyes than us “superior” humans. The blood vessels and nerves in the eyes of squids sit behind the retina and thus don’t block the light impinging on the retina. God must really like squid.

As many other people I suffer from back pain. In fact most people experience some sort of back problem in their life. The reason for so much back trouble is that our spine evolved on animals that had a horizontal posture. The mass of most animals hangs from a horizontal spine. Since our ancestors started walking erect our spines have been subjected to an amount of stress that they didn’t evolve to support. Instead of our weight being distributed over the length of our spine as it hangs between our shoulders and hips, the weigh of most of our body is borne by the vertebra of our lower back. This stress leads to all sorts of problems like herniated disks. As you can see this looks more like the result of random mutation and evolution than of though out design.

I could go on to talk about nipples on men, the appendix, aging, auto immune diseases, birth defects and other obsolete structures and maladies that cause humans trouble, pain and early death, but that would be piling on. Evolution is not a mere theory that is up for argument. Evolution is accepted scientific fact and it is no more in doubt than the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity. There is no controversy about evolution among real, serious scientists. A few people with an agenda manufacture false controversies hoping to change public policy for their own personal greedy motives. It reminds me of the cigarette companies who for so long claimed that cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. They would trot out these “scientists” who quoted numerous “studies” proving that there was no link between cancer and smoking. These so-called scientists who claim that there are doubts about evolution or global warming, etc., are no more credible than the liars and thieves parading as real scientists who allowed the cigarette companies to continue to sell their cancer sticks. These “scientists” are no more than shills who will say anything to anyone as long as there is money in it for them.

The lesson of this post is simple, if your personal religious beliefs make it hard for you to accept reality, don’t blame reality. Maybe you should instead take a closer look at the superstitions and legends that you are holding on to. Maybe these irrational beliefs are the problem and not science.

The rise in oil prices has given rise to many valid complaints about gas prices. The exorbitant cost of gasoline is putting a squeeze on the budget of most Americans. People find that they are not just paying a lot more money to fill their tanks, the cost of food and anything that is made with oil derivatives or is shipped from distant places is rising as well. Given that situation and the upcoming presidential election, it was inevitable that some unethical politician would start pandering. What is sad is that McCain, who once was a principled maverick who stood for straight talking is now instead speaking with a forked tongue.

There is no doubt about it we have an energy problem, made worse by a government administration that did nothing but line the pockets of bil oil for 8 long years. We need to do something to fix this problem and we need to act quickly but drilling offshore is not the answer. We need to look for alternate energy sources and we need to conserve oil. We also need to invest in developing new technologies. In the near future the alternative energy industry is going to be developing quickly. The US can either work to be a leader of that industry or let it be developed elsewhere and lose the opportunity to get high paying tech jobs and give birth to a highly profitable industry sector.

There are many reasons why drilling offshore is a bad idea. Let me count the ways.

1. The US has less than 2% of the world’s oil reserves: Even if the US extracted all that oil, it would hardly affect the price of oil. The US uses over 20% of the world’s oil supply. A mere increase of 2% in supply will not lower prices significantly.
   
2. Extracting the oil will take a long time: Even if we started drilling now, it would take decades to get that oil into gas tanks. Analysts say it may take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to get the oil out. What will the price of a gallon of gas be in 2018?
   
3. The oil companies are not using the leases they have now: There are many oil leases going fallow. Why aren’t the oil companies drilling there? Why do the oil companies want more oil leases? This is just a land grab.
   
4. Extracting hard to reach oil is only profitable when prices are high: If the price of oil drops, the oil companies will not be able to make a profit extracting this oil. No high prices, no oil. That guarantees consumers won’t see lower oil prices.
   
5. The free market: If the oil companies do extract this oil why would they sell it at a lower price in the US market, if they could make a higher profit in Europe, India or China?

There are probably many other reasons. What should make us all suspicious is that no one outside of the fossil energy industry is saying that offshore drilling is a solution for high gasoline prices. Only the people who are likely to make big profits are advocating offshore drilling. The experts on the other hand tell us that the way out of this mess is to conserve.

The real and long lasting solution to this problem lies in conservation and in alternative fuels. In the past 30 years, the fuel efficiency of car engines has not increased significantly. This is not because automotive engineers are sitting back drinking beer in front of their TV’s. Modern car engines are very efficient; they produce more horsepower per gallon of gas than engines from the 1970s. The trick is that it is difficult to raise both gas mileage and horsepower. Car companies have opted for giving us cars that accelerate faster rather than cars that drive further.

The government has also failed to prod the car companies in the right direction. Car companies have resisted many of the things we now take for granted. They opposed safety belts and air bags; they oppose higher gas mileage standards. The government needs to stop listening to car companies and raise mileage standards for all vehicles. Car mileage standards rose after the oil crisis of the 1970’s but the government excluded small trucks from the regulation. This loophole was exploited by car manufacturers and resulted in the introduction of SUVs.

The gas mileage standard might have been too low but they at least applied to all cars. This loophole allowed vehicles with ridiculously low mileage to be sold to the public. This was not much of a problem while gas prices were low, but with gas prices spiking to never before seen heights, the millions of SUVs wasting untold gallons of gas are hurting the pocketbook of all Americans. We have been using gas as if there was an infinite supply. There are no hidden, mysterious solutions. We can all do something real to lower prices. We can conserve energy. Conservation and alternative sources of energy are the answer; anything else is election year pandering. Any politician who advocates offshore drilling as a solution to high oil prices is lying in order to get elected. Take that into consideration when you cast your ballot in November.

I have been feeling great lately, since I returned from CIT Week. I have more energy and I feel stronger. I just had a physical and my doctor told me my cholesterol numbers are great, not merely good mind you, but great. I am happy and grateful that I feel so good.

At CIT I met people who have various physical challenges. There were at least three people with Parkinson’s disease and one person who had partial paralysis of half his body. Yet all were working as hard as, or even harder than I was and usually with a smile on their face. It is difficult to feel sorry for yourself when you see something like that. It made me realize yet again how lucky I am that I have all my parts and that they are working well. Not that I don’t have some aches and pains, but I really have nothing to complain about. I am not trying to say I am in perfect shape; I have much to work on. I would like to lose some weight and I’d like to get stronger, but I can and will do it. I am not limited by a disease or accident and that is truly something to be grateful for.

For as long as I can remember I have been a glass half empty kind of guy. I can’t remember when this pattern started, but even in my daydreams I’ll often think about why what I am thinking of can’t happen or what will go wrong if it does. Up until recently I have accepted my negativity as realism but recently I have realized that most of my negativity is merely a bad mental habit.

This change in point of view started after my return from a tai chi workshop in Canada. My return flight was delayed because of high winds in Chicago. My flight was supposed to leave Toronto around 4:30 p.m. but I didn’t leave till two hours later. Part of the reason for the delay was that the plane had to return to the gate to refuel. We had been waiting to take off for about an hour when the pilot was informed of a route change to avoid the storm that was causing the delay. The new route required more fuel and the plane had just enough fuel for the shorter route. Returning to the gate, refueling and waiting to take off took another hour.

That two hour delay meant I missed my connecting flight in Chicago. The next flight wouldn’t leave until 10:00 p.m. CST and Arrive in Miami past 2:00 a.m. EST. Thankfully this flight was on time. Unfortunately for me I was sitting behind one of the rudest group of people I have ever encountered inside an airplane. It seemed that two families and their children where travelling together with their children and they were sitting right next to me. I have kids and I know how difficult it is to travel with children. Kids get bored, tired and cranky and the vagaries of modern air travel only make things worse. These people however seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious. When their children weren’t making noise, they would find some way to make their presence known, like talking loudly or joking. I thought I was ready for most eventualities, I had several pairs of earplugs with me and my iPod and a wrap around set of headphones. At one point, I was wearing both earplugs and my headphones playing loud music and yet I still was able to hear the screams of the kid sitting right in front of me. For the majority of the flight this child would react with loud, high pitched yelps of joy for every thing that he observed outside of his window. Every last cloud, star or distant light seemed to require some loud exclamation. Not once during the long three hour plus flight did the parents make even a tiny attempt to quite their children. By the time I got to Miami I was exhausted, frazzled and angry. I had not been able to relax or sleep for more than five minutes the entire flight. This was easily and by a long margin my worst flight experience ever. Needless to say I took my anger out on my wife when I finally got home.

After enduring such a nightmarish flight, I felt entitled to be angry and I looked for reasons to be pissed. It didn’t help that I was truly exhausted and traumatized. When I calmed down I realized what an ass I had been and apologized to my wife.

Later that same day, I dragged myself out of bed and once again apologized to my wife. She was understandably tired and her shoulder was hurting. I endeavored to make up for my dramatic arrival and spent the next two days paying more attention to her and massaging her back. This small effort on my part made my wife feel a lot better and went a long way towards making up for my behavior and had the side effect of making me feel closer to her.

 As a result of my stay in Canada, I was interested in reading the Tao Te Ching so I picked it up from Audible and bought a printed copy. In my absence Netflix had delivered a movie that had been recommended by a friend, The Secret. Over the next couple of days I watched the movie and I listened to a great recording of the Tao Te Ching By Stephen Mitchell. Strangely enough these two different works were resonating and reinforcing each other. Now, I am admittedly a skeptic, I don’t have much use for religion and metaphysics. I prefer facts and reality, so I approached much of what I heard in The Secret with a degree of doubt. But I could not disagree with one of the main point of the movie, that our thoughts affect our reality. There is no doubt that my return flight was a disaster but my attitude and thoughts made it much worse. Even before the flight I was anxious and kept fretting about missing my flight and arriving late. I was missing my family and wished to get back as soon as possible.  I was obsessed with getting back and I was concentrating on every thing that went wrong and thinking of other ways things could get worse.

I am not yet entirely sold on the idea that my mere thoughts can manifest wonders right out of the blue but I can’t deny my own experience. By thinking negatively, by looking at the empty glass I made things worse. I sat there stewing, getting angrier and angrier, looking for problems and ended up blowing up on my wife. If I had instead been more positive, I may not have arrived any earlier, but my state of mind would have been much different. I could have made the whole experience of flying back home a lot better instead of the long torture it became. By looking for problems, I found them and in spades. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

The result is that I am trying to change the way I look at things. It isn’t easy; I have many years of negative mental habits to overcome. I catch myself returning to old habits and thinking negatively but I am catching myself and that is a start. I don’t know that I’ll become a positivity guru overnight, but I know that looking for the bright side of life makes me feel better.

I have been in an introspective mood as of late and I have realized that I tend to look for the negative things in life. I have decided to be a little more optimistic so I am starting a series of posts about things I am happy about. These posts are not in any particular order.

The other day I was listening to the book "The Secret" in my car when they mentioned wishing for the car you want. I said to myself, "I am driving it". I drive a VW Beetle. It is a W3 or triple white model. I saw it at the dealer and I fell in love with it. Normally I prefer much more colorful colors for cars but the white and black was so striking and elegant that it won me over. Soon after that we were trading in our old VW and driving out in the new.

I am very happy with my VW, its not large or flashy but it is mine and it makes me happy.

I hope to make regular posts about TTBGF (things to be grateful for). I could sit here and pump out a hundred or so TTBGF in an afternoon but that would be a chore and I want to keep this light and fun. I also want to keep myself in a grateful mindset and stringing along a series of TTBGF over time better accomplishes that goal.

I spent last week in Canada at a tai chi workshop in Orangeville, Ontario. I have been practicing Tai Chi for nearly eight years and have been a beginner instructor for five of those years. I attended the workshop in order to move up to the next level of instruction and to bring my tai chi up to a higher level. I was somewhat anxious about attending the workshop, I worried (needlessly it turns out) that my tai chi wasn’t up to par and whether I was in good enough shape to do the work. It was a tough week, but I am glad I attended and I am all the better for it.

I have wanted to learn Tai Chi for quite some time but whether it was because of the cost or the inconvenience of the location I didn’t get around to taking a class until 2000. In the fall of that year tai chi came to me. My wife pointed out an article in our local newspaper that mentioned a new class that would be starting at the local recreation center. I took that class and many more since. I also started attending local intensives and small workshops. Soon I was attending workshops in Tallahassee home of the national headquarters for Taoist Tai Chi. Three years into my tai chi journey; my instructor asked me if I would like to become an instructor. I wasn’t sure that I would be a good teacher but I trusted his judgment and applied to become a beginner instructor. In 2003 I became a beginner instructor and have been teaching a tai chi class ever since. It isn’t easy, I worry often that I am not being clear enough, that I talk too much, that I am not funny enough to distract my students and keep them from becoming frustrated. But it also has been very rewarding; my students tell me that I am very patient, which would surprise no one more than my wife. She can surely think of many words that describe me, and patient is not among the top ten, or top twenty. Therefore becoming an instructor has helped me become more patient as well as improving my tai chi that I may become a better instructor.

The Taoist Tai Chi Society is a non profit organization and all it’s instructors are unpaid volunteers. Taoist Tai Chi was founded by a Chinese Taoist monk who immigrated into Canada in 1970. He was motivated to help other people improve their health by the practice of Taoist Tai Chi. As an instructor I would help continue Master Moy’s mission to make Taoist Tai Chi available to all. Master Moy Lin-Shin, passed away on June 6th 1998. He was very ill as a child and his parents took him to a Taoist monastery in hopes that they may help him, they did and Master Moy became a Taoist monk. He attributed his survival to the Taoist arts that he was taught and promised to bring the gift of tai chi to all who would be willing to learn it. He left behind a group of like minded people who have continued his mission and have made true many of his wishes.

The first CIT Week was held soon after Master Moy’s death and has been held every year since. Instructors from all over the world, from as far away as New Zealand and Malasya attend and work together. My instructor again asked me to attend the workshop to see if I would qualify as a continuing instructor. So I made arrangements to take off work and made travel arrangements. The first three days were very hard. I had volunteered to help with breakfast and I had to be in the kitchen by 6:30 a.m. awake and ready. I am not a morning person, my brain is hardy awake by 9:00 a.m. so this was a bit of a sacrifice, but every attendee is asked to volunteer with many of the tasks that make the workshop possible and getting it done and out of the way in the morning turned out to be a good decision.

The kitchen in Orangeville is quite large as you may imagine. Every day three meals were prepared for nearly 500 people. That kitchen was in use from early in the morning to late at night, either preparing a meal or getting ready to prepare the next meal. I ended up making scrambled eggs with two other people. It takes a lot of eggs to feed over 450 people so every day we cracked anywhere from 600 to 700 eggs. We had to use the woks to cook the eggs as the grill was busy cooking up bacon, sausages and either pancakes or French toast. Cooking in a wok is quite different, especially in a professional kitchen. After a couple of days the regular cooks would give us tips on cleaning the woks and on how best to cook the eggs. It was quite an experience, although I don’t think I’ll be craving eggs for a while.

The workshop usually started at 10:00 a.m. and went till lunch around 12:30. After lunch we met at 2:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. for an afternoon session. After dinner we would have a final session from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. by which time I was ready for bed. It wasn’t constant exercise; there was enough down time and explanations for you to catch your breath before another work out. There was no pressure to overexert yourself. We were constantly reminded to take breaks if we got tired and stopped regularly for snacks and liquid replenishment. Breaks notwithstanding, by Tuesday I was exhausted; all my muscles ached and complained loudly with every move. I skipped lunch and took a two hour nap. As tired as I was, there was little room for self pity, doing tai chi with me there were people who had greater challenges and they didn’t skip a beat. I met several people with Parkinson’s disease and one who was partially paralyzed among others. All talked about how tai chi had improved their health and some talked about how they had regained mobility. 
 

By Wednesday the clouds of exhaustion had parted and even though my muscles were still somewhat sore, I had much more energy. Later that day two instructors pulled me aside and informed me that I had been given an assignment as a CIT. After that news I hardly felt tired anymore I was walking on clouds. Of course the CIT assignment only means more work. I’ll have a new class and I’ll have to work harder on my personal tai chi so that I may have more to offer my students. I am also expected to return every year to CIT Week to continue my training and update my skills and to meet again all the great people for whom I helped prepare scrambled eggs. As much as I worried about this CIT Week, I am looking forward to next year’s workshop.

 

I new it couldn’t last, the Democrats would find a way to screw up a free lunch. This election year all they needed to do to win the White House is to show up. The country is so tired of this disastrous administration that a worn out cardboard cutout of Walter Mondale could win the election. So the Democrats did what they do best, find a way to piss off and alienate voters in two key states, Michigan and Florida.

These two states committed the cardinal sin of moving up their primaries. Actually it wasn’t the entire state that made this blasphemous decision, at least in the case of Florida it was the state legislature that made the change, The Republican led state legislature. So the Democratic National Committee (DNC), in its dubious wisdom decided to punish the Republican led state legislature by taking away all the state’s delegates for the Democratic convention. They figured that the best way to punish the Republican led state legislature was to disenfranchise all the Democratic voters of Florida. If this isn’t the definition of “cutting you nose to spite your face,” I don’t know what is.

That decision was a bad idea in 2007 when it was first conceived, but now after Super-Duper-Tsunami Tuesday is over and the two remaining candidates are virtually tied in the race to be the Democratic nominee, this decision has been revealed to be one of the dumbest moves for a party accustomed to colossally moronic moves. Because of this move, the party now faces the real possibility of a brokered convention. While the Republican Party has practically all but nominated John McCain as the Republican candidate, the Democrats face weeks of struggle and indecision leading to a convention where party bigwigs instead of the voters and their delegates could select the candidate. Way to go DNC!

Now the party is scrambling for a way to restore the delegates to Michigan and Florida and save face. The DNC floated the idea of setting up caucuses or even new elections. Here in Florida the state election officials laughed in the DNC’s face. To paraphrase their response: We had our election, count the damn votes! But even counting the votes already cast in Florida may not solve the problem.

The DNC prohibited candidates from campaigning in the two states in question. Barak Obama demands a new election because he didn’t campaign in either state. He conveniently omits that he ran ads in Florida as part of a “national TV buy.” Hillary Clinton on the other hand, points out that she won the primary despite not having campaigned and without any TV ads. The DNC is now faced with a dilemma; it finds itself caught between a rock, a hard place and with its back to the cliffs of insanity.

The Rock
The DNC doesn’t back down and ignores the votes cast in Michigan and Florida, disenfranchising the voters in those states, making it likely that the eventual candidate will be Barack Obama. These disenfranchised voters may not feel very charitable towards the Obama come November. They may stay home and give McCain a win in both states.

The Hard Place
The DNC counts the votes in Michigan and Florida, practically guaranteeing a win by Clinton. Obama voters feel cheated and stay home. McCain wins Michigan and Florida.

The Cliffs of Insanity
Obama and Clinton get to the convention in a virtual tie leaving the selection of the party’s candidate to the super delegates. Whoever they pick the voters for the loser are likely to feel disenfranchised, never mind that this isn’t a very “democratic” way to choose the candidate for the Democratic Party. The democratic vote is depressed nationwide and McCain wins the presidency.

Knowing the track record of the Democratic Party, the same folks who brought us “winners” like Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis and John Kerry, what do you think the DNC will choose to do? Will they go with the lesser evil or will they find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? I am afraid I know the DNC only too well. We might as well get ready to inaugurate John McCain as president in January 2009.

 

I want to like Amazon’s Kindle, I really do. I love the concept of the e-book. There is little doubt in my mind that a good e-book reader would be a great product. My kids have to drag tens of pounds of paper books to and from school every day. A Kindle would be a perfect solution for this problem. I am sure that I am not the only one that longs for a way to take my books with me on trips. I would love to be able to put the pdf manuals of the various devices I own in a single e-book reader that I could take anywhere. There is a ready market of people who get the idea of e-books and are waiting for the ideal product to deliver.

The Kindle does many things right. It is small and light. It has a long battery life and it downloads books wirelessly. You can get newspapers and certain blogs delivered to your Kindle. It can even play MP3 files. The Kindle even passes the bathroom test, like a magazine or book you can easily read it in the john. There is a lot to like about the Kindle. Unfortunately there is also a lot to dislike. The form factor is not attractive. It looks like it was designed by engineers. Maybe great engineers, but engineers nonetheless. In the age of the iPod and the iPhone customers have become accustomed to great design. The Kindle’s design is merely adequate. It may be simple enough to disappear once you start reading, but its shortcomings won’t be so easily overlooked.

More than mere aesthetics my problems with the Kindle are with Amazon’s policies regarding e-books, DRM and its end user license. To begin with, the cost of e-books even, at $9.99, is much too high. With a hardcover or even a paperback, you have manufacturing, storage, handling and delivery costs. These are eliminated altogether or greatly reduced with e-books and yet we have to pay a minimum of $9.99 per file. That cost may have been acceptable if it shared some of the attributes of a regular book that we take for granted. Barring some accident, books last decades even centuries. What are the chances that the books purchased for a Kindle will be usable five, ten or twenty years from now? When I buy a book I can keep it as long as I want or I can share it with my family or friends. I could sell the book as used or donate it to a library. For that matter, I can go to the library and read all their books free of charge. The Kindle’s e-books cannot be shared. You don’t own the e-books as you do a book. You don’t have the right to resell or share it. A library cannot lend you an e-book. I am not willing to give up all the benefits of physical books for the convenience of e-books, especially not at $10 per book. If Amazon and the book publishers want to charge so much for e-books they should allow me to share or resell the file. It is unacceptable to take away many of the advantages of books while keeping the price relatively high. Amazon should either charge much less and limit sharing or reselling or allow the buyer the same rights as a regular book. Charging so much money for e-books while loading them with DRM and limiting user’s rights is way too greedy.

I read a lot of blogs and being able to do so in the Kindle is a really attractive idea, but why should I pay to do so? Besides only a few blogs are available anyway. Not only would I not be able to read all the blogs I follow on a Kindle, I would have to pay $1.00 per month to read the few blogs that are available. I am not going to pay Amazon for each blog I read. I wonder how much of that charge would be paid to the bloggers. Why should Amazon get a cut from the efforts of bloggers anyway? Amazon is giving you “free wireless access” but that isn’t because of altruism, the costs are hidden. You pay for your wireless access in other ways. Amazon relies on making the purchasing of products as easy as possible. They realize that people will buy more if they can purchase books at a whim. Amazon doesn’t want me to use the wireless features of the Kindle unless I pay each time I use it. I would rather pay a monthly fee to access the internet and get whatever content I want, when I want it, than having to pay Amazon for every bit of data that comes into the Kindle.

That brings up another issue. Users cannot just load their files into the Kindle. You cannot put a pdf file or a Word document in your Kindle directly; you have to email it to your Kindle. Amazon receives your file, converts it for a nominal fee, and sends it to your Kindle. Why on earth can’t I put my own files on my device directly? I have hundreds, if not thousands of files that I may want to read on a Kindle. There is no reason why the Kindle cannot display a pdf file, Word document or text file natively. These are not exotic file formats that need special handling; these formats are ubiquitous and should be usable by a $400 device that claims to be an e-book reader. There is a way for PC users to convert their own files but that is only available on PCs. There is no conversion utility for Macs.

Unfortunately, these flaws are too large to be overlooked. For the right device I could do without color and a variety of fonts. I am not ready to give up the rights I have with my books for $10. I will not pay for the privilege to read blogs on a Kindle. I am not paying $400 for a device that will not read pdfs, Word docs or text files directly. The Kindle’s problems arise from the core idea it was designed around, how to make more money selling books. It wasn’t designed to solve the user’s problems; it was designed to make money for Amazon and book publishers. If Amazon decides to change the raison d’être of the Kindle and turn it into a customer centered device, the Kindle 2.0 may be a product worth buying. The current Kindle is best used for kindling.

The 4x6 paper cartridge for my trusty old Canon printer broke the other day. Being an amateur photographer, I print a lot of photos and the majority of those prints are 4x6. Since my Canon I900D is a few years old, and not realizing (duh!) that I could get a replacement 4x6 cartridge until too late, I went into printer shopping mode. I figured I would go for a higher end photo printer, with archival inks and better color and resolution. After doing a significant amount of research I decided upon the Epson Stylus Photo R2400. One of the things I made sure to check was whether the R2400 could print 4x6 photos, it does. Once I confirmed this capability I started looking for a good deal. When I found a refurbished printer on Epson’s site for two thirds of the retail price, I went for it. I realized that I couldn’t return it and that it may be missing the bundled software and paper samples but it seemed like a good deal. Boy was I wrong!

The printer came after a few days in a massive box. I made room for the printer in my office and proceeded to install it. Right away I started having trouble. Since it was a new printer, I figured I just needed to become familiar with it and I began to play with it. I soon found out that it was very finicky. The printer and page setup settings had to be just right. I would print something, the job would be queued and sit there until the driver would give up and stop all jobs. If the right paper wasn’t in the right tray no amount of coaxing would make the printer budge.

I became acquainted with the various trays for the printer and their requirements. It turns out that the thicker papers have to be fed through the manual/roll tray in the back of the printer. I then tried to print some large panoramas. I took some Epson 8.3x23.4 paper that I purchased some time back and put  it in the manual tray. I had to create a custom size for the paper in page setup. Apparently Epson has dropped this panorama paper and the size isn’t available in the printer driver anymore. I cropped and resized a nice panorama to fit the special paper and I printed it, or I thought I did. Again the printer sat there looking dumb. The paper was in the right tray and by then I had managed to print on regular letter paper so I knew I could print. So what was happening? I tried again and again with the same results the job would start and then sit in the queue until the queue was stopped. Frustrated I figured I would try printing some 4x6 prints instead. I kept having the same problem.

I tried troubleshooting the problem online. Epson has a troubleshooting guide on their support page that is supposed to walk you trough most problems. I have very bad luck with these guides. Since I have many years of experience using my computer and printing photos, I know the obvious things to try, making sure the printer is on and hooked up, making sure the software is installed, restart the computer and printer, check that the ink is installed properly, etcetera, etcetera, you get the idea. I try the obvious things before I try to get help. I didn’t even get to try their guide; all I got was a blank page. I tried accessing the website with two other browsers, nada, no dice. I gave up trying the guide and sent tech support an email.

While waiting for a response, I started searching online for problems with the printer. It was there that I found out that there was a newer version of the printer driver. The one shipped with the printer was for PowerPC Macs, not Intel Macs. I downloaded the driver and read the installation instructions. I would not be able to install the new driver over the old one. The instructions said to remove the old drivers first, restart the computer and install the new one. Why the new drivers are not included on the software CD is beyond me. One simple test could tell the installer what kind of Mac I own and it could choose the appropriate one saving the customer a lot of hassle. I didn’t realize it then, but saving the customer from hassle isn’t a big priority at Epson.

I figured that the new driver would solve my problems, I was wrong. The large paper still refused to load and I could not produce any 4x6 prints from iPhoto. I then tried to print from Photoshop. Perhaps I’d have better luck there. I did manage to print 20 or 30 truly wonderful letter prints and some borderless 4x6 prints, but the larger paper sizes eluded me.

The next day I tried the online tool again as I had not received a response from tech support. This time the troubleshooting guide was available. Most of the help was useless suggestions but I did come up with one solution. You can’t just put paper in the manual tray, that would be too easy; you have to push the paper forcefully enough past where it rests naturally. Then you have to put pressure on the paper in the manual tray until the printer grips the paper, otherwise the printer, not finding any paper in the tray, gives up. To print on large paper you have to click on all the dialogs and then turn to the printer and push the paper. This sounds easier than it is. The printer is very large, over two feet wide and weighing 34 pounds. Unless you have a sizeable desk, this baby is not sitting next to your computer. You have to move to the printer and hold the paper before the printer gives up trying to find it. Luckily I have a wireless mouse and I could click on the print button while I was near the printer. It was thus that I finally managed to print on 13x19 watercolor paper.

I now tried the panorama paper again. I managed to load it, hurray! But my joy was short lived; the printer left a 3 inch gap at the beginning of the paper and petered out slowly at the end leaving large uneven borders on what was to have been a borderless panorama. At least 20% of the paper was wasted, there was no joy in Mudville, I had struck out again.

It was now when I started having another problem. Printouts started showing ink stains. Somehow ink had leaked on the printing path and was staining the paper as it made its way through the printer. I contacted tech support again. They responded a day later with the helpful suggestion of cleaning my print head. Since the stains were produced by ink left on the print path, cleaning the print heads would be useless. I pointed this out this to tech support in my reply. They responded by suggesting I run thick paper through the printer until the excess ink was wiped off. I grabbed some paper towels and cleaned as much of the paper path as I could. That seems to have fixed the stains.

I gave up on the panoramas; I could live without that if need be. I have to be able to print 4x6 photos from iPhoto, that isn’t an option. Although I could print borderless 4x6 prints from Photoshop, they have to be sent individually which is a big pain. iPhoto is very limited, but it is very useful for printing large batches of 4x6 photos, I wasn’t going to give that up without a fight. I sent tech support an email asking for help in printing from iPhoto. A day later they replied with detailed instructions about cropping photos to the right size, selecting the right paper size in page setup and how to print photos from iPhoto. After taking a few deep breaths to calm down, I replied that I have extensive experience with iPhoto, and printing 4x6 prints that the problems wasn’t my lack of familiarity with printing photos. A day later I received their reply telling me to reinstall the printer and resetting the printing system. I did as requested even though I had already reinstalled the printer driver with the Intel version appropriate for my Mac. I also reset the printing system, which erased all the print settings for all my printers, Epson or not. I lost settings that I use to make postscript files to distill into PDFs among other things, all of which have to be recreated from scratch. The fix allowed iPhoto to print on the Epson printer, but alas there was one more problem. The supposedly borderless prints had a 1/8th inch border on the top and left side. I sent tech support an email asking for help with this, days later I am still waiting for a response.

To make matters worse, if that was conceivable, the printer driver is extremely difficult to navigate. Epson suggests using Epson branded paper in order to get the best quality prints. The specific names of the current Epson papers show up in the print dialog. What makes this incredibly infuriating is that the page setup determines what paper options available to you within the print dialog. This makes some sense and is well intentioned but very poorly executed. I bought some Epson Ultra 4x6 Premium Glossy Photo Paper to print my photos. Even though I tried every possible page setup setting for 4x6 paper there is no way to select Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper in the print dialog. No matter what 4x6 option I select in page setup the Premium Glossy Photo Paper option is always grayed out. Only matte paper choices are available.

I regret ever having bought this printer; it has been nothing short of a nightmare getting it to work. I have produced some great prints, but the amount of hassle I have to deal with to produce a print is extremely aggravating for a printer that retails for about $800. I made the mistake of buying a refurbished printer from Epson, that means I cannot return it and get my money back. I am stuck with this large, expensive paper weight. I am going to attempt to get it fixed or replaced. I was given the number for customer relations. I am reticent to call them because of the hassle involved. I am tired of dealing with this printer and most of all of dealing with Epson. Lemons appear even in the best manufacturing facilities. I can understand that there may be occasional problems with a product but aside from the defects of this printer, Epson isn’t set up to deal with customer's problems effectively. The tech support personnel have a limited script to follow and know little about the products they support, If that wasn’t bad enough, they are also slow to respond. Their lack of troubleshooting skills and the long response times make it extremely frustrating to deal with Epson tech support. After this nightmare I am reticent to buy another Epson product again. I may be stuck with this boat anchor of a printer, this albatross, and I may have to absorb the loss of $500 plus the cost of extra ink cartridges but Epson has lost a customer for life.

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Update Oct 12th: After much crying and gnashing of teeth I finally got a hold of an actual person at Epson. I spent three hours with two different tech support reps. We solved most of my remaining problems. The R2400 communicates with the computer and tells the printer driver what kind of ink is installed. If you have matte black (MK) ink, the driver will not allow you to select glossy paper. If you install the photo black (PK) ink, the driver then allows you to select glossy paper as well as matte paper. The problem is that this communication only happens when you launch the Epson Printer Utility, select your printer, click on status monitor and select the slot for matte/photo black ink. Until you force the driver to notice the change, it will not realize that the ink has changed and will not make the proper paper finishes available. You can switch ink cartridges back and forth as many times as you like, but until you manually check the ink levels for the MK/PK ink, the driver will not update the paper choices available to you in the print dialog.

The problem with the borders was harder to solve and am not 100% happy with the solution. During the three hours we tested many different settings. I was not able to reproduce the 1/8th inch border on the top and left sides of the photo that was happening previously when I printed from iPhoto. When printing on matte paper from iPhoto and Photoshop, we got perfect borderless prints. Printing on glossy paper was a different story, in both apps I keep getting a very thin, tapering white border at the bottom of the paper. Why it should happen in glossy paper and not on matte wasn't answered. The only way to remove the border was in Photoshop. In the Photoshop print dialog you have to select scale to fit media. You may need to change the percentage of scaling until the point where the image is enlarged enough to cover that border, maybe, if you get lucky. So far my experimentation has given me unpredictable results. Sometimes I get a thin sliver of a border on one side of the paper, sometimes I don't. It seems to me that borderless 4x6 prints are much easier on my Canon I900D. I guess I am going to have to keep it around for 4x6 duties and use Moby Dick, a.k.a. Epson Stylus Photo R2400 for larger photos.

From Daily Kos

by kos
Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 12:40:26 PM PDT

While all of this was talked about last week and through the weekend, here's another reminder of those Democrats too cowardly to stand up to the unitary executive.

In the House:

Say What?

• Jason Altmire (4th Pennsylvania)
• John Barrow (12th Georgia)
• Melissa Bean  (8th Illinois)
• Dan Boren  (2nd Oklahoma)
• Leonard Boswell (3rd Iowa)
• Allen Boyd  (2nd Florida)
• Christopher Carney  (10th Pennsylvania)
• Ben Chandler  (6th Kentucky)
• Rep. Jim Cooper (5th Tennessee)
• Jim Costa (20th California)
• Bud Cramer (5th Alabama)
• Henry Cuellar (28th Texas)
• Artur Davis (7th Alabama
• Lincoln Davis  (4th Tennessee)
• Joe Donnelly (2nd Indiana)
• Chet Edwards (17th Texas)
• Brad Ellsworth (8th Indiana)
• Bob Etheridge (North Carolina)
• Bart Gordon (6th Tennessee)
• Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (South Dakota)
• Brian Higgins (27th New York)
• Baron Hill (9th Indiana)
• Nick Lampson (23rd Texas)
• Daniel Lipinski (3rd Illinois)
• Jim Marshall (8th Georgia)
• Jim Matheson (2nd Utah)
• Mike McIntyre (7th North Carolina)
• Charlie Melancon (3rd Louisiana)
• Harry Mitchell (5th Arizona)
• Colin Peterson (7th Minnesota)
• Earl Pomeroy (North Dakota)
• Ciro Rodriguez (23rd Texas)
• Mike Ross (4th Arkansas)
• John Salazar (3rd Colorado)
• Heath Shuler (11th North Carolina)
• Vic Snyder (2nd Arkansas)
• Zachary Space (18th Ohio)
• John Tanner (8th Tennessee)
• Gene Taylor (4th Mississippi)
• Timothy Walz (1st Minnesota)
• Charles A. Wilson (6th Ohio)

In the Senate:

Guess Who Congress Granted The Power Of Warrantless Wiretapping…

• Evan Bayh (Indiana)
• Tom Carper (Delaware)
• Bob Casey (Pennsylvania)
• Kent Conrad (North Dakota)
• Dianne Feinstein (California)
• Daniel Inouye (Hawai'i)
• Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota)
• Mary Landrieu (Louisiana)
• Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas)
• Claire McCaskill (Missouri)
• Barbara Mikulski (Maryland)
• Bill Nelson (Florida)
• Ben Nelson (Nebraska)
• Mark Pryor (Arkansas)
• Ken Salazar (Colorado)
• Jim Webb (Virginia)

For a bunch of people who want to strut around acting "tough", this crowd sure ran around like a whipped puppy once Big Bad Mr. 25% said "boo!" Scary!

Of course this is shameful and ridiculous, but it's also a helpful reminder that our efforts to transform our Democratic Party continue to be a long-term project.

Don't let 2006 fool you. We made progress, but we didn't win the war. That'll take far more time. Decades, perhaps. But we'll eventually teach this crowd that capitulation isn't strength, that caving in to fear-mongering to eliminate our civil liberties isn't strength, that giving more powers to executive branches run amok isn't strength, that effectively endorsing the notion of a unitary executive isn't strength.

They just proved, without a doubt, that for all the talk of a "strong" Democratic Party, we've still got a long ways to go.

(Of course, only two Republicans in all of Congress opposed this new administration power grab, but then again, we don't expect better out of them…)

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I don't have much to add to Kos' comments, only that I am ashamed that these traitors dare call themselves Democrats. They should be kicked out of the party. How could they fail to protect our rights? Didn't they understand what the 2006 elections were about? They grant greater surveillance powers to this president and to this attorney general? The same people who have been tearing up our constitution piece by piece for the last six and a half years? They granted these powers to the most secretive administration in the last fifty years, to the most dishonest administration in recent history. I don't care to hear their excuses, their rationalizations or their lies, I have had enough. They have failed us in a way that cannot be forgotten or forgiven. They are the problem as much as George W. Bush and his minions. We need people in Washington who have the testicular fortitude to stand up for our rights when it counts. I want Democrats who will come out ready to fight, taking no prisoners and giving no mercy. Our constitution requires the most vigorous defense by people with the courage to do what is right. I have run out of patience, I want the Democrats to act now. If they fail to act, we will have to look for leaders who will. Leaders that won't betray us.