Sick band. Latino metal with serious force behind it.

I’ve created a new Yahoo! Pipe for programming news. It pulls from:

• dzone.com
• programming.reddit.com
• digg.com/programming

Enjoy.

[ Programming Pipe Feed ]

The UF Tasing incident reminded me of something that happened to me in high school.

When I was in 9th grade I was almost killed by 10 police officers. I was in the local newspaper, and barely escaped some serious court time.

It was Saturday night at around 11pm or midnight. We were at the local Motel 6 where one of my buddies was staying, and some friends and I were playing laser tag in the parking lot.

All I remember hearing is, “Freeze! Newark Police Department!” I remember looking around me and seeing lots of guns pointed at me as I inched backwards on my knees with my fingers laced behind my head.

Someone had called in saying there were people outside with guns. As we were cuffed and detained they of course found out that the guns we were carrying were laser tag toys. Giant, space-weapon-looking laser tag toys. Of course it was dark, so there was no way for the people who reported us to know they were fake.

As we were being brought into custody a cop looked down to find that his pants were torn while he was jumping a nearby fence in order to box us in. He jokingly made a comment about how they were $50 pants that he would have to replace.

There were three sets of parents involved — mine and two others. When the other parents heard about our unfair treatment, i.e. being treated like criminals and put to our knees and such, they went apeshit. Deadly force…they’re just kids with toys…blah blah. You know the battle cry.

Then it became even more serious to the other parents (and became a true incident) because of the officer’s reference to ruined trousers during a serious situation where, “we could have been killed”. It turned into a minor fiasco.

So the paper had interviewed all the parents and were about to get an apology from the police department regarding the insensitive comments made combined with the “unnecessary show of deadly force” when the papers made it to our house.

When they asked my parents about the incident they got a different answer. My parents told them that the police thought there were guns there, so it was a justified response to act the way they did. They further added that if it had been one of them that had ruined a pair of $50 pants over some stupid kid playing with fake guns in the middle of the night, they’d be pissed too.

That was the end of it. Their injection of logic ended the attack against the police, as the parents were not united on the issue. The other parents were angry at mine, but they of course didn’t care. They had no stomach for groupthink stupidity, especially when it had the smell of victim-based opportunism.

I learned a lot from that.

Hopefully the University of Florida kid will learn a similar lesson, i.e. that when you go to a public event with a U.S. Senator present and get belligerent ON PURPOSE in order to make a scene (after telling multiple people to record what’s about to happen) — you may just get the attention you were seeking.:

flickr.com

I’m torn. The guy was clearly out of line, but did it really need to come to this?

This is a major incident right now; it’s all over the place. What do you guys think? Did the kid deserve to get roughed up, or were the police totally overreacting?

I predict that the U.S. government will apply pressure to Iraq in order to keep Blackwater there.

Question: would any of you guys participate if I were to put up a forum? I’m considering it under the assumption that many of you would enjoy some middle ground between commenting on someone else’s site (too limited) and having your own site (too much work). A forum provides a nice sweet spot.

Would you guys participate? And if so, what kind of functionality you want from it?

Here are my initial thoughts:

1. Relatively few categories, if not just one
2. Focus on your content, not mine
3. Wide-open discussion (I’ve never censored a post on my site)
4. Leverage the blog to fuel participation

…that’s about it so far.

Thoughts?

I’m thinking of an REM song…

[ 10:05 PST ]

My favorite philosopher is Betrand Russell. As my views on morality continue to evolve I find that Russell’s thoughts on the topic are closest to my own. He also wrote a good deal about mathematics, logic, and physics, which secures his place at the top of my list.

I really wish people like him, Doug Adams, and Einstein were still alive.  That’s far too short a list, of course, but you get the idea.

15all.files

I have a new design philosophy. It’s called 100% Easy to Read. Here are the highlights:

• Don’t tell us to adjust the font size
• Don’t tell us busy pages look better
• Don’t tell us scrolling is bad
• Don’t tell us text isn’t important (95% of “web design” is typography)
• Don’t tell us to get glasses (use a font-size that’s large enough)

Here are the 5 basic rules:

1.  Standard font size for long texts
2. Active white space
3. Reader-friendly line height
4. Clear color contrast
5. No text in images

There are two other concepts that jumped out at me: using text as an interface, and the understanding that typography is not the art of selecting typefaces. Typography is so much more.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the presentation of my text lately. Until now it’s been about the formatting of the text within the post itself, but now I’m thinking more about the look of the entire page and site.

I’m going to be doing a lot with this in coming weeks and months. I at least have an idea of what I want; now I just need to get there. I thank the heavens for CSS.: