Anti books

I was just down at Sam’s Club where they had a couple of books; Obama Nation and The Case Against Barak Obama–attack books. The title leaves no doubt about what the book’s trying to do. What use is a book like that? One knows from the outset that the book is biased and tells only one side of the story.

If one wants to be informed and to make up ones mind, then one needs to hear both sides of the story. I suppose someone could read TWO books, one for and one against. But even here each of those books will likely distort the facts in favor of the one side. So the reader doesn’t get both sides of the truth but two distorted views.

I had hoped that Jerome Corsi would fade into the woodwork after his shamefully deceptive smear book about John Kerry last go-round. He’s back. I give the Obama camp full marks for the title of their rebuttal to his book, which they call “Unfit for Publication”.

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What happened?

I’ve just finished reading Scott McClellan’s kiss-and-tell book: “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.”

McClellan doesn’t come across as a very sympathetic character to me. “I did bad things, but I’m not a bad person; my mother loves me” is the central thesis of the book–along with “I was only following orders” and “It Washington’s Culture of Deception, not me, the White House Press Secretary to blame.” [these are not quotes from the book].

OK, enough catty name calling. Now to the reason I got riled up enough to write a blog entry. Among all the big issues about vanishing WMD and the outing of Valerie Plame sat an improvised explosive device that McClellan seemed not to find out of place in the Oval Office, and here I quote him from page 175, describing a plan to justify the Iraq war, WMD or no:

“For the next ten weeks, every significant opportunity on the president’s schedule would be used for pushing this message. Republicans in Congress and allies in the media, such as conservative columnists and talk radio personalities, would be enlisted in the effort and given communications packets with comprehensive talking points aimed at helping them pivot to the message whenever they could. … It was a determined campaign to seize the media offensive and shape or manipulate the narrative to our advantage.”

I suppose it would be too much to hope for that McClellan would name exactly which conservative columnists and talk radio personalities were coordinating their message to the Bush narrative manipulation offensive. By the way, is “pivot” the same thing as “spin”?

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Frequent Flier Games

I went on the US Airways web site to use some of my frequent flier miles on a trip to Albuquerque 3 months from now. Although their brochure says you can get round trip flights for 25,000, the web site (without explanation) asked for double that. I read the fine print about blackout dates. I wasn’t asking for blacked out dates. It said things about restrictions on partner airlines. I changed cities and avoided partner airlines. Still, they wanted double miles. The fine print said something about the number of seats being limited and that they sold out early. Three months is pretty early, and I looked at dozens of flights. I even said I was flexible about dates. No dice.

So I wrote them. They said much of the same fine print stuff I mentioned above, but added a curious bit–that there might be more seats available closer to flight time. That is, I was invited to gamble. If I win, I get to use frequent flier miles for the trip; if I lose it will be so close to the flight date that the fares will have tripled.

I asked them for a list of available dates. They declined.

I hope they enjoyed making their customer stumble around like a blindfolded child playing pin the tail on the donkey. The customer did not enjoy it one bit.

I’ve never had problems like this with other airlines.

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Domain not for sale

I’ve had a couple of inquiries about selling BlogOrDie.com. I like the domain name (even though I’m not such a passionate blogger as the name would imply). I’d like to keep it. Of course there is some amount of money that would make me rethink things, but I never expect that to happen.

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American Music

I was on hold with the IRS yesterday. How come they have to play Russian music? Isn’t there any American music they could have come up with?

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Wish You Well

It’s hard to believe that the same David Baldacci who wrote Absolute Power and Stone Cold also wrote this tender story of a family living in the Appalachian mountains, struggling to survive against disability, weather, and greedy corporate interests.

My wife and I read it together, and I must say that the writing is evocative, the plot engrossing , the characters compelling and the results heartwarming. Read this one!

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UML 2 for Dummies

This is not a book I would recommend.

I assume that a book titled “UML 2 for Dummies” would be about UML 2, and a chapter entitled “Best Practices” would be about best practices for UML 2. Only that chapter appears before anything about UML 2 is presented. It’s really a collection of definitions and comments that the reader isn’t prepared for. For example, this gem says “Whenever you need to hide the internal parts of an object, use UML aggregation notation.” This might be a good tip in a section about UML aggregation notation, only by page 25, no UML notation has been presented at all.

The book seems to be largely focused on topics for software developers, but the examples used to explain some very important concepts are not software examples. I found the explanations fuzzy and not very enlightening.

When finally in Chapter 3 we actually get to see some UML 2, the the thing shown in Figure 3-4 is something generally not used and that the author recommends you not use. So here’s a an obscure detail presented in the middle of the most basic introductory section, and gets it’s wrong (or the text describing the diagram is wrong). The text says the arrow points to a “class”, but in the diagram the arrow points to an anonymous object. I guess I’ll have to consult some other book to see whether the diagram is wrong or the text is wrong.

This is just a shoddy piece of work, and I’m sorry I bought it.

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