What reading Tufte won’t teach you: Interface design guidelines - Simply stated rules for designing UIs.

User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel - If you haven’t read this, and you claim to be a UI programmer, who the heck are you kidding?

more to come.. Suggestions welcome.

Enough is enough folks! Proposition 8 was a f*cking slap in the face. Its time we, queer folks and straight allies alike, stood up and said something about it. Please take some time tomorrow and join a local protest in your town. Don’t just stand by and let this go unopposed.

To find out about a rally in your town, see http://jointheimpact.com/. Or if you’re as much of a Facebook junkie as I am, check out http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=33598248873#/event.php?eid=45356108205. There are events in literally every state in the nation. You won’t have to go far to find one.

I want to recommend a blog post that I ran across on Facebook today. The author is a little bit inflammatory, but also makes a lot of really good points if you can get past the flames.

p.s. Don’t give up in the first couple of paragraphs. The good stuff is latter.

Open letter to white activists.

Think about how you use civil rights imagery. There are parallels there, and they should be drawn, but to compare the passing of Prop 8 with lynching and Jim Crow disrespects Black history. … To my mind, this helped trivialize their desire to marry, particularly among older blacks who remember when being able to marry white people was the least of their worries.

But to speak of African-American religiosity as if it’s the same thing as your white neighbor’s homophobic Bible-thumpin’ Leviticus-quoting Rapture-believing denim-jumper-wearing young-earth anti-science women-get-back-in-the-kitchen 700 Club brand of Christianity is to shit on the people who brought you school desegregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Black churches are potential allies, and indeed many religious leaders have already come out in favor of LGBT rights, but those alliances aren’t going to get very far if white Leftists keep talking about them as if they are forces of institutionalized oppression when in reality their role in American history has been precisely the opposite.

I know when I hear someone say they won’t go into certain parts of the city, even someone else’s city, I feel like a wall just went up between us — even if I’d previously seen this person as a friend or ally — because that’s the kind of neighborhood I live in. And I’m white. So think about how that comes across.

Everyone, I have a birthday coming up at the end of November and I’d like to ask a favor of you. If you were otherwise considering giving me a gift, please don’t. Instead, I ask you to do two things: 1) Vote against Proposition 8 if you’re a California resident, and 2) make a donation to the No on 8 Campaign whether you are a Californian or not. The upcoming vote is likely to be a very close one and your support is much more valuable to me than any physical gift could be.

Here’s a few (of the many) reasons you should oppose Proposition 8:
- You believe in separation of church and state. Proposition 8 is a direct effort to introduce religious morality into the state constitution. Even if you don’t personally support gay marriage, the thought of having one particular religion’s idea of morality inscribed in the state constitution should scare you.
- You don’t believe a minority should be at the whim of the majority. Proposition 8 takes rights away from a minority group. If it passes, the majority of the population will be voting to directly strip rights from a minority. Given that everyone is a minority in some way (race, sex, age, occupation, etc..), do you really want to be setting that precedent?
- You believe in equal rights under the law for all. However you look at it, the CA Supreme Court has very clearly stated that denying gay people the right to marry is discrimination. Proposition 8 wouldn’t change that fact; it would simply inscribe discrimination into the state constitution.
- Finally, and most importantly, because I’m asking you to. This is an issue that is important to me personally, and I am asking for your support.

For the record, the above is not a generic form letter or anything like that. I wrote it (from scratch) because this is a cause I personally believe strongly in. I would greatly appreciate your support in opposing Proposition 8.

Yours,
Philip

I am sending an email with the text above to many of my friends and family in California and around the country. This is a cause I believe in, and I’m asking my friends and family to stand with me.

If you’re reading this, I encourage you to do the same. From what I’ve heard, this is going to come down to a very close vote. Every single person you talk to, and every single dollar you raise will make a potentially critical difference.

Love Makes a Family

CT Supreme Court

UPDATE (10:40 am): The case has been released and is a pro-equality decision! Connecticut is the 3rd state to have gay marriage!

Check out the actual decision!

I absolutely loved this quote from the Illinois Bankers Association:

“The reality is that by ignoring the law and his legal responsibilities, he is carrying out ‘vigilantism’ at the highest level of an elected official,” it said. “The Illinois banking industry is working hard to help troubled homeowners in many ways, but Sheriff Dart’s declaration of ‘martial law’ should not be tolerated.”

Bullshit. The sheriff is doing his job and saying that the banks must do theirs. If they haven’t met the legal requirements for eviction, he shouldn’t be evicting anyone. Period. End of story. He is in the right here; not them.

Illinois sheriff scolds banks for evictions of ‘innocent’ renters
CNN, 10-9-08

For the record, I love this moderator. She’s cutting them off and forcing them to actually answer the questions!

<--- Missing sections first 1/2 hour --->

Update (9:32pm): Climate Change
Palin - “we’re allowing them to …pollute more than America would ever stand for.” - Any body else concerned by that wording
Biden - faced man-made impact face on, support for clean coal & safe nuclear, export clean coal technology

Update (9:34pm) - Carbon Caps
Palin - Seemingly ignored carbon caps question. Two word answer. (”I do.”) Support for large scale domestic drilling and energy production
Biden - Yes, strict caps.

Update (9:38pm) - Same Sex Rights
Biden - Support for equal constitution rights. Do not support same-sex marriage.
Palin - Can’t support “redefine marriage”. Emphasizing tolerance. No civil rights discussion. Dodged the equal civil rights part of questions.

Update (9:43pm) - Iraq
Palin - Plan for withdrawal, but no early withdrawal. Emphasis on surge and NATO allies (what allies?). Attack with “white flag of surrender”. Slander about voting not to fund the troops.
Biden - Shift responsibility to Iraqis and draw troops over 18 months. Defense of Obama.

Update (9:50pm) - Pakistan vs Iran
Biden - Solid comparison. Redirect issue towards Afghanistan. Build schools to compete for hearts and minds. Point about control of Iran not in the hands of nut job (whose name I can’t remember.)
Palin - Mention nut job leader of Iran and says should not have nuclear power or weapons. Attack on “meet without preconditions”.

Update (9:53pm) - Israel solution
Palin - Two state solution is the solution. Israel is our strongest ally and we will not allow a second holocausts. Enough is enough looking backwards. (After everything she’s said so far? Hah!) Divert to domestic issues.
Bidin - Both friends on Israel. Attack on elections in Gaza strip, not putting NATO troops in Lebanon. “I haven’t heard how his policy on [] will be different from George Bush’s”

Update (10:10pm) - Usage of Nuclear Weapons
Palin - Dodged main question. Went in direction of proliferation. Then went to Afghanistan. Disputed claim of general in Iraq.
Bidin - “Facts matter”. General said, surge will not work. 3 weeks in Iraq is more than 6.5 years in Afghanistan. Caught own over extension about McCain’s record, stepped back.

Update (10:05pm) - Interventionism
Biden - Dafur (no fly zone, “rally the world to act”). genocide -> does not have right to national sovereignty
Palin - Attack on Biden for reversed stance war vote. Agreement on Dafur. Also “all options are on the table” statement. (Does that worry anyone else? Isn’t that a Bushism we can avoid?)

Update (10:07) - “A heat beat away”
Bidin - Carry out Obama’s policies. Rinse repeat.
Palin - Acknowledge differences in positions. Continue policies. Rinse repeat.

<--- Questions are less straight forward and descrete. As such, I'm breaking out by issue, not question now. -->

Education (from a couple of different questions)
Palin - More focus on education, need flexibility in NCLB, profession of teaching, working with special needs
Bidin - NCLB not funded properly

VP Power
Palin - Flexibility of VP office in congress etc. (Very dangerous expansion of past policy in my opinion.)
Bidin - Cheney violated article 1 of constitution. Very dangerous. (I agree entirely.)

Own weaknesses
Palin - Did not answer at all. (Amusingly she drew attention to her own record, but refuses to let Bidin use McCian.)
Bidin - Faced question straight on.

Unfortunately, I have to stop now. My laptop battery is about to die. I may add some extra comments latter.

The $55 trillion question
The financial crisis has put a spotlight on the obscure world of credit default swaps - which trade in a vast, unregulated market that most people haven’t heard of and even fewer understand. Will this be the next disaster?
By Nicholas Varchaver, senior editor and Katie Benner, writer-reporter, CNN Money
Last Updated: September 30, 2008: 12:28 PM ET

Let’s consider the reason for the economic problems we’re now facing. The price of real estate has gotten completely out of sync with its actual value and people’s ability to pay. About 10 years ago, prices started going up exponentially versus the fairly linear increases they’d followed for the last hundreds of years. Given this, it was really only a matter of time before a reset had to happen. Well, now is that time. The price of real estate has fallen dramatically and probably will keep falling for a while yet. Even the current prices are still too high. They haven’t fallen enough to get back to where they should be yet.

Before you start panicking too much folks, remember this is a good thing for most of us! Now, if you bought a home in the last ten years or so, you’re screwed. Sorry. For the rest of us though, I’m frankly looking forward to the day when I can actually afford to buy a home in Fairfield County.

However, the problem our economy is facing is a little broader than that. The brilliant folks on Wall Street decided that since real estate and mortgages were risky they were going to spread the risk around (diversify) as much as possible. (Note: By itself, that isn’t actually a bad idea.) The problem came when everyone decided that since *they* weren’t exposed to any risk, why should they be careful about who the loaned money to or how much they loaned? After all, *they* would still get their money back right? Well, once everyone started doing this, the quality of the average mortgage went *way* down and the average amount went up - which of course just helped the price explosion described above. End result, we have a lot of low quality debt (mortgages, CDOs, etc..) spread all over the US and world financial system.

Well, people finally realized that no one has any idea how much this crappy debt is actually worth. (Answer: Probably not much.) As such, no one is willing to buy it. Since a lot of businesses depended on being able to buy and sell assets to keep cash flow up, they found themselves in a bad situation. With a lot of assets they can’t sell, even if those assets were actually worth something, they can’t stay in business. This is what happened to a lot of the major investment banks which were (in)famous for their high leveraged business models.

Frankly, I wish we could just let them all hang. They got themselves into this; they should suffer the consequences. The problem with that is that they drug the rest of us in too.

On the lending side of things, since what were perfectly stable businesses are failing left and right, no one wants to loan anyone else money since there is a chance they might not get it back. End result, no one can borrow money and even more businesses go “boom”. The big worry at this point is that the bad debt is so widely held and that there is so much of it, that we could see a cascade effect well outside of the financial industry. When banks are in trouble - like now - they tend not to want to loan anyone money. End result, recession or possibly even a depression.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves, what I’ve described above could be bad. *Really bad.* As in, a lot of people loose jobs bad. (For the record, I work in the finance industry. As such, I’m definitely not ignoring this aspect.) However, in all honesty I think the $700 BILLION - nearly as much as Iraq & Afghanistan combined* - bailout of Wall Street would be worse in the long run. Bailing them out once does nothing to address the fundamental problems and frankly just encourages them to do it again. If we’re going to fix this, we need to fix the root causes.

If we absolutely must bail them out, let’s give them a loan instead. One with 10% interest a year, and first right of repayment. (In other words, let’s make a profit and minimize our – the taxpayers’ – risk.) After that though, let’s go after the fundamental causes of the crisis so this doesn’t happen again.

* This used to read “more than Iraq & Afghanistan combined”. I got this statement from someone else - don’t remember who unfortunately - and it turns out to be not quite accurate anymore. According to the Government Accountability Office, we’d spent $635.9 billion on the “War on Terror” as of December 2007. However, if you include the spending this year to Sept 15, the total jumps to $807 billion. Updated: 9-26-08

While it might not have been the best of papers - honestly I usually got my news elsewhere - it was a good central source for things happening in the GLBT community in downstate. The Flame was somewhat of an area institution; one that I at least will miss.

Putting out the flame
After 11 years of publishing a newspaper for the gay community, Buff Carmichael calls it quits
SEPTEMBER 11, 2008
BY DUSTY RHODES, Illinois Times