Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for August, 2008

Charter Communications is Giving Away Free Laptops

Tired of that same old slow dial-up Internet connection? Have you been thinking about upgrading to a hi-speed connection, but think you can’t afford it?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have hi-speed Internet at a decent price? Wouldn’t it be even better to have hi-speed Internet with a free laptop thrown-in? That’s not enough of a deal? How about free gas too?

Now you can get your wish because between August 22 and September 22, Charter Communications is accepting entries into its sweepstakes to give away 30 HP Compaq notebook computers. Every new customer who opens an account for one of their three hi-speed Internet packages will be given a $100 Shell gas card and be entered into a drawing to win one of these laptops in the Charter Laptop-a-Day Giveaway.

The PC is an HP Comaq Presario C770US Notebook. It has an Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor with 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive, DVD Burner. It also includes built-in WiFi and Ethernet and comes with a NEOtec Backpack. This prize, valued at over $600, is perfect for back-to-school. For sweepstakes rules go here: http://connect.charter.com/landing/disclaimers/laptop.html

You Spin Me Right Round Like a Record Baby

I suppose it’s a given that any writer would be interested in language and how it’s used. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I was on the edge of me seat last night watch Barack Obama take it to McBush in his acceptance speech. My favorite line has to be: “You know, John McCain likes to tell people he’d follow Bin Laden to the Gates of Hell . . . but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives.”

Yes, there was a lot of red meat in that speech (mostly McCain’s) and it’s hard to argue against the speech’s rhetorical power. Admittedly, Obama is my candidate so I’m more inclined to praise the speech, but listening to the commentary afterward only reinforces that Obama scored a home run with just the right language and the right cadence — that the speech was fucking poetry!

On MSNBC, I thought Keith Oberman and Chris Matthews were getting sexually excited. Even that right-wing sourpuss, Pat Buchannan seemed impressed. CNN gave Obama a slight less exuberant thumbs-up. But the most interesting response came from Fox News and McCain’s surrogates. Brit Hume kept calling the speech and the stage craft a “spectacle” — a decidedly negative connotation. Juan Williams (who always looks like he’s in need of some acne products) basically said that the speech was dull. Only Bill Kristol gave the speech relatively high marks which surprised me. McCain’s campaign surrogates looked like they were going to cry. They had almost nothing to say: “stammerstammer . . . no experience . . . blahblahblah . . . stammerstammer . . . blahblah . . . McCain POW . . . blahblahblah . . . stammer . . .” In fact, they sounded a lot like Kerry’s surrogates during the last presidential election, when the Bushies were sticking it to Kerry.

I’ll admit, until last night, I had my doubts about Obama — not about his intelligence and his character, but about whether he had the stuff to take on the Repugnican attack machine and still maintain his dignity. I think McCain and the idiots at Fox finally figured out what they are up against last night. Obama is a fucking ninja and I can’t wait for the debates!

Google Hate Me

I was reading an interesting post over at the blog, Consistently Inconsistent this morning. According to the post, there’s a new search engine out there geared specifically towards the African-American community. Apparently, there is a need for it because, according to the search engine’s founder, John C. Taylor, Google’s search algorithm is biased against black web-surfers:

“I was having great difficulty finding things that matter to us,” Taylor said. “You’d like to think things like cancer are race neutral, but cancer is black or white. How we get it, the things that impact how black people deal with the treatment regimen – all that is different. I looked for it, but there is really nothing that spoke to how black men deal with [it]. So I said, ‘Gosh, it would be great if we could merge all the stuff from the National Cancer Society, the National Institute of Health, all the right places, the authorities, but also get that information that is specifically relevant to black people . . . .”

That’s an interesting theory — especially if you’re trying to sell African-Americans on using your search engine. But, is it true? I went to Rushmore Drive and input the search terms “cancer african-americans.” In another window, I input the exact same terms into Google. Guess what? The results returned were more or less the same — certainly not so different as to support the argument that Google’s algorithm is biased against black people. I input several other search terms that might be relevant to the black community and I got similar results. In fact, the only thing my own research was able to conclude is that Mr. Taylor doesn’t know how to use a search engine.