Bill Gates on the Daily Show

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I have to add my two cents.

Although I haven’t seen a single word from the blogosphere yet this morning, I know what everyone’s probably typing (or has typed): Bill Gates is a dork.

I’m not writing this to make fun of Bill Gates. I’m just writing this as a statement of opinion based on observations during last night’s Daily Show interview.

Okay, so he’s not really a dork. After all, he’s the richest man in the world. How can the richest man be a dork?

But he certainly comes off as a dork on television. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t do many television appearances. He certainly did not look comfortable sitting in the chair opposite Jon Stewart.

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit for System Builders - 3 pack [DVD]Stewart was kind to him. He joked around with him and did a little gentle teasing about Microsoft and Windows, but he certainly didn’t stick the knife in or zero in on the man’s dorkiness. And Bill Gates joked back — at least a little. There’s definitely a good brain lurking inside that dorky exterior. But I laughed out loud when he pushed his glasses up on his nose. (I’ve been using a Mac long enough to remember the Bill Gates screen saver, which showed a cartoon character of Gates on a window-washing scaffold cleaning the screen. One of the configuration options was to set the “neurotic” level; the more neurotic, the more he’d push up his glasses.)

The interview took up two of the show’s three segments. There was more comedy than actual information — which is what you’d expect from The Daily Show. I still don’t quite understand why Gates appeared on that show and not something more mainstream. It certainly increases my respect for him. Anyone who appears on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report has guts. Stewart and (especially) Colbert can make a guest’s head spin when they want to. (Colbert is famous for making politicians look incredibly stupid in an interview.)

Anyway, I’m sure there’s much better analysis of the interview out on the blogosphere. I’ll probably find a bunch of good links later on today and add them to a links list entry.

I do want to add one note. As Bill Gates walked on stage during The Daily Show last night, he reminded me of someone. (Mind you, I haven’t seen any live-action footage of Gates in years and my brain isn’t wired well to recognize faces.) My mind started searching for the identity of the person he reminded me of. Kind of chunky, short hair, glasses. And dorky, of course. Who?

John Hodgman. The PC.

Why You Shouldn't CYA

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A story with a moral.

My friend Tom sent me this one, which was accompanied by an image of the donkey from Shrek (not included so I don’t get my butt sued off by Disney or whoever owns Shrek). As usual, if anyone knows the author of this, please send me the info so I can give proper credit. – ML

One day a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do.

Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey.

He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone’s amazement he quieted down.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up.

As the farmer’s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up.

Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

Remember the five simple rules to be happy:

  • Free your heart from hatred – Forgive.
  • Free your mind from worries – Most never happen.
  • Live simply and appreciate what you have.
  • Give more.
  • Expect less.

Now enough of that crap.

The donkey later came back, and bit the farmer who had tried to bury him. The gash from the bite got infected and the farmer eventually died in agony from septic shock.

MORAL FROM TODAY’S LESSON:

When you do something wrong, and try to cover your ass, it always comes back to bite you.

The Planets

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A history of the planets.

book coverMiraz was kind enough to get me two items from my Amazon.com wish list. One of them was The Planets by Dava Sobel. It’s a kind of history of the planets — when they were discovered, how they were named, what’s important about them from a historic point of view, and more.

The book is full of fascinating details. For example, did you know that Charles Darwin traveled onboard the H.M.S. Beagle at the age of 22 to be a “gentleman’s companion” for the captain? And that the Beagle’s 1831 mission was to map the coastline of the New World?

Or that Uranus, which was discovered by Sir. William Herschel in 1781, was at first thought to be a comet?

Or that the four largest moons of Jupiter, which were discovered by Galileo in 1610, were named for Florentine Prince Cosimo de’ Medici — a ploy Galileo hoped would get him a position in the Tuscan court? (Surely you must know that Galileo was jailed by the church for his theory that the earth revolved around the sun.)

The book offers plenty of science, too. In reading it, you can learn about the composition of the Sun, planets, and important moons of the solar system (including ours). You can learn about how long it takes for each planet to rotate around its access and revolve around the sun. You can learn about exploratory fly-bys and landings and what the planets look like.

About the only thing the book doesn’t provide are photos. The author goes into great detail about how the planets look to the exploratory vehicles that have photographed them, but doesn’t include a single photograph. Yes, there’s original artwork for each body’s chapter and it’s certainly quite attractive and interesting, but there aren’t any photos to accompany the author’s descriptions. To me, that’s a major shortcoming in this book.

book coverbook coverA side note here. I’ve read two other books by Dava Sobel: Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter. The edition of Longitude I read was hardcover and richly illustrated with photos, drawings, and more. (I regret giving it away; I would like to read it again.) An excellent history of the importance of longitude for navigation and the work of a man to create a perfect timepiece for shipboard use. Galileo’s Daughter was interesting but not quite as enjoyable for me. It consisted primarily of letters from his daughter, a nun, that helped tell part of his life story.

What’s clear to me from reading three of Sobel’s books is that she has a talent for making history interesting and readable. I highly recommend her work. But whenever possible, go with illustrated editions. I really think they make the books come alive.

The Importance of XHTML Validation

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When will I ever learn?

Miraz has told me again and again — validate your pages after making changes to your WordPress theme templates. She even advised readers in our book, WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide. And every time I validate, I find errors, proving that it’s a step I really do need to take.

Yet I continue to skip this step when I tweak my theme’s template files on every single blog I run.

This morning, I got an e-mail message from someone named Tine who wrote:

I’m completely new to WordPress but found your site because of the book you have made and was curious.

Are you aware that your blog don’t look good in Explorer 6? Some of the text to the left is cut off.

I use Explorer 6 on XP Pro and 1024×768.

Uh-oh.

I fired up my PC and loaded up my home page in Explorer 6. The situation was worse than Tine reported. What appeared did not look much like my site at all. And in the status bar, Explorer was politely telling me that page had errors but didn’t offer any way to find out what they were.

My first instinct was to panic. But then I remembered the XHTML validator at http://validator.w3.org/. I ran the page’s URL through the validator and settled down to find and fix the 110 errors it found.

Sheesh.

The main culprit in this case was some code I’d inserted into my post.php file to display RSS links beside category names in each post’s header. This rather slick piece of coding, which I was pretty proud of, contained the dreaded unencoded ampersand error. That means I’d included & in the code when I should have included & in the code. That error was all over the place, but Explorer seemed to be choking on it in the new code. When I fixed its first occurrence and reloaded the page in Explorer, the page appeared fine, although the status bar smugly reported that there were still errors in the document.

Other problems included

    and tags without

  • and tags. Oops. And

    tags without tags. (It appears that ecto was causing that problem in the way it codes Technorati tags. Good thing I’m not using tags in my posts anymore.) Of course, all my Amazon.com book cover links were missing alt attributes. And some of my rotating ads used IMG instead of img for coding. The list goes on and on.

    Of course, if I’d been validating the XHTML after each template change as Miraz recommends, I would have caught these errors as I introduced them. I wouldn’t have spent my Sunday morning debugging code.

    Have I learned my lesson? I think so. At least for a few days.

    The Lost Painting

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    History that reads like a novel.

    Book CoverI saw The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr in a copy of Bookmarks, a magazine full of book reviews. I added it to my Amazon.com wish list.

    The Taking of ChristThe book is an account of the finding of a painting by Caravaggio, a 17th century Italian artist. The painting, called The Taking of Christ, was found in the 1990s by a restorer.

    Evidently, many paintings from that time were lost — they’d be sold by the artist or a dealer to a wealthy patron or art collector to be hung in a home. Over the years, the paintings would be moved around, handed down to descendants, sold, and resold. The records regarding these paintings were not always complete, so paintings would disappear from the records and thus “disappear” from the art world. In some cases, a painting’s value would be understated and the painting, aged, dirty, and possibly damaged would simply be discarded by an owner. Many masterpieces were lost this way.

    The book tells the story of how two art history students stumbled upon some evidence that the painting had been sold to a Scotsman in 1802, who believed the painting was done by a different artist. The painting was then traced to an auction house where the trail went cold. Had it been sold? No one knew. And no one knew what had become of it.

    The book is written like a novel, complete with dialog and some characterization. But all the characters are real people, many of whom were interviewed by the author during his research. This keeps the book from being a dry history tome. Instead, it has life and is quite interesting to the average reader.

    The book was listed on the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year for 2006. The edition I read included an epilogue by the author which covers the discovery of another version of the same painting.

    I recommend the book to anyone interested in art, history, art history, or the process of searching for lost artwork.