RaffyJohn.com Rocks In My Head

I’ve been struggling with some work lately, trying to makes things perfect, but this usually ends up making things worse. Or I end up not pursuing it simply because I envision all the imperfections down the line. That’s when I have to revisit Paul Buchheit’s…

“Perfect” is the enemy of “good enough”

Forget about your lack of talent, skills, knowledge, time, resources, or whatever else you need to be “good enough”. Start an inane blog, take bad photographs, upload boring videos to YouTube, write bad software, create useless products, play bad music, and make ugly art. Forget “good enough”, and then simply indulge in the joy of creation.

There is no such thing as “senseless creation”.

Happy Counterterrorism Day

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent
To blow up the King and Parliament.

“George Washington banned the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day in America because he saw it as a way for the state to use a terrorist act as an excuse to hoard power and torture.” via Reddit.com

Ron Paul’s Realtime Donation Graphs and Statistics for Q4

Poll Finds Americans Pessimistic, Want Change

Overwhelmingly, Democrats want a new direction, but so do three-quarters of independents and even half of Republicans. Sixty percent of all Americans said they feel strongly that such a change is needed after two terms of the Bush presidency.

Wobbled by Wealth?

The agonizing truth about CIA renditions

The fate of prisoners secreted away under the Bush administration is in some ways worse than even Hollywood has portrayed.

The Imperial Presidency

On Jan. 31, 2001, soon after taking office, Bush held a cabinet meeting. When he entered the room, one chair was empty: the secretary of state’s. “Lock the door,” Bush said. A few minutes later Colin Powell could be heard trying the doorknob. The room “erupted with laughter.” Then Bush ordered the door unlocked. He “had made his point,” Draper says; Powell was “not the big dog any longer.” That the president of the United States would want to show how important he was by humiliating Colin Powell speaks volumes.

The Boy With The Incredible Brain is a fantastic documentary of Daniel Tammet, a British savant who has the ability to learn a new language in a week and can do calculations to 100 decimal places.

It is amazing what the brain is capable of.

“Happiness is a warm gun.”

The web is a buzz over Rudy Giulianis new radio ad campaign in New Hampshire this week. Here is the quote that is the target of discussion:

“I had prostate cancer five, six years ago. My chance of surviving cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States: 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England: only 44 percent under socialized medicine.” via WashingtonPost.com

The issue people have with the quote are not only with the numerical fallacies, but that Giuliani was covered by a government healthcare plan at the time of his treatment.

Giuliani’s fear mongering is despicable to me. Do people actually believe these lies? Or is that they just want to?

Paul Krugman sums it up nicely:

“Mr. Giuliani’s claim is wrong on multiple levels — bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear.” via Prostates and Prejudices, NYTimes.com

Healthcare is simple to me. What reasoning could there be to deny anyone the care they deserve?

I had always been puzzled by the new found joined-at-the-hip friendship between Apple and AT&T when the iPhone was released, until recently.

It turns out that AT&T is paying Apple $18 each month for every iPhone user on the AT&T network for the exclusive relationship. This estimate, from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, sheds some light on the strict attitude Apple has taken with people un-locking their iPhones to work on carriers other than AT&T.

Projectionist.com has one of the best archive page layouts I have seen in a long time.

I have one post on my tumblelog, maybe I’ll find a use for it down the road.

For those of you interested, you can easily “follow” me at friendfeed.com/rjb.

For those who do not know what FriendFeed.com is, it aggregates your online identities and notification systems like Twitter, del.icio.us, Google Reader and Netflix. If puts all your activities into a life-stream effectively so your friends can track what you are up to.

Hooked on nytimesriver.com, the New York Times organized as a river of news, as my primary source for news. Also check out nytimesriver.com/outline, the NY Times organized by keywords.