Don't forget to vote!

Politics is my Olympics. It’s like a Super Bowl in which we can all participate. I don’t follow sports very well, but I look forward to the circus that happens in this country once every couple years. This year’s final act has been a roller coaster ride.

Today is a special day. It’s a day when those of us who follow politics finally get to read the last page of the chapter we’ve been reading nearly exclusively for more than the last two years. Today, each state selects from among a subset of a large number of candidates for President of the United States in this election year of 2008.

How does this information relate to auctions or technology? The next president will have the ability, if not a perceived mandate, to make what could be drastic changes from our economy to foreign relations to the environment to national defense to our military involvement around the world. All of these issues are important, but they’re outside the scope of this blog. Our presence on the world stage is tightly integrated with the technology industry. That industry is directly tied to science.

How many times has public perception changed during the course of the last few thousand years? How many empires have risen? How many forms of government have been devised? How many fluctuations have we seen in mores? How many republics have failed?

All of the answers to the above questions are influenced, at least in part, to the sum of the knowledge of the human race. As time moves forward, we know more about the world. This accumulated knowledge, with a few exceptions, certainly molds new political ideas. Knowledge pulled us, perhaps kicking and screaming, out of the dark ages when, as the general public became more well-informed, they threw off the fetters of abstract, dogmatic teachings in favor of an empirical reality that better matched what they observed. When the church said one thing, and people observed another, the domain of the church - the unexplained - grew smaller. As we learn more, our knowledge becomes the basis of new beliefs as these new beliefs replace the outdated, older beliefs. Note the difference between knowledge and beliefs.

While science can be wrong, it is self-correcting. Any time science is found to be incorrect, the hypothesis is modified and retested. Once a hypothesis has been tested and found by many different, unrelated scientists to hold true under all conditions, it becomes a theory.

Some politicians don’t understand what a theory is. A theory is the closest science can come to fact. A theory is really a collection of facts that describe a phenomenon. Many politicians preface the term evolution with theory of in an effort to discredit it. They don’t understand that they’re validating it in they eyes of anyone who understands the scientific method. It’s like talking about the theory of gravity or the theory of relativity as if they haven’t been found to hold true in our tests.

There are a host of concepts that modern day con artists are trying to propagate on us as a culture. Alternative medicines like homeopathy, reflexology, acupuncture and chiropracty are fine if their placebo effect cures your headache, but can be the most immediate and dangerous of the pseudosciences to us if we try to use them to cure real diseases. Creationists, and their cousins the intelligent design crowd, fall into the same lack-of-any-credible-scientific-evidence-whatsoever group as those who propagate The Secret, the concept that wishing really hard for something happy to happen can actually make it occur. The fun party tricks of the likes of Sylvia Brown and John Edward can actually become harmful to those who believe in them and, in my opinion, demand legislation to protect the gullible, first amendment be damned.

It’s important that we recognize and pay attention to the stances held by our politicians. From Kansan Sam Brownback’s fear of stem cells and evolution to Alaskan Governor Sara Palin’s doubt that global warming is man-made to Senator Barack Obama’s remark that the science is inconclusive regarding the alleged link between autism and vaccinations - all of which are destructive to the public well being - those who make up our government are many who have questionable if not deplorable stances on scientific issues.

We must hold our politicians to the highest standard, a standard above belief and pseudoscience, above mores and norms, above religion and superstition. We must hold our politicians to acknowledge and respect the domain of science and that of the peer-reviewed scientific community.

The most brilliant political mind who never ran for office was a guy named Aaron Sorkin. He said, “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Show up tomorrow. When you vote tomorrow, make sure that you think about science as you pull the lever.

Today he was ranting about how the liberals (said, of course, with audible disdain) were trying to make political hay with Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. He said the ‘rest of America’ had already moved on.

First, let’s ignore how thie ‘rest of America’ is actually the liberals he dispises and focus on this simple concept: liberals care about Palin’s daughter in the same way they care about a lost puppy. They want to help it, feed it and give it a good home, unlike the Republicans who want simply to eat it.

Liberals don’t factor Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy into the political equation. It’s something that happens and, like the sex lives of political candidates, it won’t effect how Palin would govern. We liberals have plenty of hay to make over the issues and what kind of governor (used generically) she would be were she to hold a higher office than Governor. The political group with the most desire to make a big deal out of her daughter’s predicament is exclusively the right-wingers, who see it as an affront to their monotonous abstinence-only drone that continues to fail to produce real results. Perhaps she’s not as conservative as she was made out to be. Or, perhaps, and I think this more likely, she’s not as good at leading and demonstrating those conservative values as she was made out to be.

I spent a fair amount of time today immersing myself in Google’s Chrome. I watched the live announcement today and downloaded it within a few minutes of it being released to the public. Unlike the server shortages that plagued Apple with it’s last big product launch, Google’s offering was easily conveyed to the multiple computers on which I installed it.

Chrome has a new Javascript engine so it’s fast. Balls fast. Melt your face fast. It’s running on Webkit so it’s pretty. Kate Bosworth pretty. Kate Bosworth in 21 pretty. I tried to get it to run on Linux using WINE and, while I got it to load, it didn’t work well enough to render any pages without crashing. It puts Firefox to shame in the coolness category, and while it has a ways to catch up when it comes to community and available plugins, it’s still faster and sexier and what I’ll be using until Microsoft puts IE8 on the ground.

Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy and Chris Goering

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of Wordpress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past - all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.

Properly designed websites keep usability in mind for 100% of possible users. They’re made with semantically valid XHTML and CSS. They don’t start animation or sound without the user clicking somewhere to request it. They don’t require the user to download something special like Flash or Java. They load faster because of the lighter page weight caused by separating the markup (XHTML) from the layout (CSS). They have a good navigational structure that doesn’t rely on drop-down or fly-out menus. They can be browsed effectively with a text-based browser or screen reader. They are very well-indexed on search engines because they’re so accessible.

Flash does have one redeeming quality. It is the current, defacto standard for video distribution. Until Silverlight gets out of diapers, it appears we’re stuck with Adobe’s pile of steam for now.

Techcrunch was quick to point out that it was important not to misspell it and type www.culi.com.

While ‘traffas’ consistently returns aarontraffas.com on Google, this site returns nothing but Sweedish results, a function at the very least of not accounting for geography. When I tried “aaron traffas”, the first result was a “page not found”.

Purple Wave returned a bunch of deep links, but not one link to our home page.

It looks like it has a ways to go. Perhaps it’s currently more useful to misspell it after all.

Vista has Windows Mail, which is a new name for XP’s Outlook Express. It’s the Microsoft equivalent of Thunderbird, and I can find no substantive feature differences between Windows Mail and Thunderbird in the limited investigation I’ve done. Out of the two, I’d use Thunderbird because it has an open-source community behind it.

Thunderbird is awesome, but it is email only. There are other functions of Outlook, like contacts and calendar, that Thunderbird lacks in its basic installation. If you use an Exchange server or a hosted Exchange service, which is a practice that unfortunately is still hard for me to not recommend, Outlook is about the only way to go. The closest product to Outlook as far as features go is a product called Evolution, but it only works on Linux.

My recommendation is to become one with the Google Apps suite. Their calendar is superior to that in Outlook, their email is the best anywhere, and they’re Docs and Spreadsheets package is getting more robust all the time. I wish we had taken that route instead of going with our hosted Exchange solution. Google Apps is the only realistic and free calendar-sharing system, and it also happens to be the best. Google’s Gmail product can be used by your domain, so you keep your email address, use Gmail’s absurd nearly 7 GB email limit, use Thunderbird to check your mail, and everything is in one place. It costs nothing and is a viable solution for everyone in your office to be better connected and better informed with schedules, contacts, etc.

Aaron is a proud member of the National Auctioneers Association

I was playing around on the NAA forum, a great member benefit for auctioneers, and I realized that what I was writing was applicable to just about anyone, not just auctioneers. Here you are, for whatever it may be worth to you.

I’ve been using Linux on the desktop for the last two years. It’s fantastic and provides many programs and packages available by simply selecting which ones you want to install. You don’t have to download and run an installer, for the most part, you simply select the programs from the list.

I can’t stand Microsoft Office or, worse, anything from Adobe, so not having these programs isn’t a problem. There are many other open-source alternatives that allow you to sleep better at night and get more work done easier.

For anyone looking for video editing on Linux, have you tried Cinelerra? I looked at it and was very impressed with the features and power offered.

For any of you who use Firefox on more than one computer, you should look at Mozilla Weave. It provides the ability to synchronize bookmarks, tabs, passwords and add-ons across different installations of Firefox. They have yet to support 64 bit Linux, which makes me sad, but it works great between my Vista notebook and my XP aux-box.

Are you still using OpenOffice or have you tried the Google Office version?  I can’t remember if I asked you in Nashville…

I’m still using OpenOffice. It’s not equivalent to Google Docs in that Google Docs is a web-based product that has a fraction of the features of a complete office suite like OpenOffice, StarOffice or Microsoft Office. Google is working continuously to add features, and rumor has it that they will allow for offline Docs use via their Gears package within the next six months, but as of now they the analogy is like comparing apples to band saws.

if I decide to move to this Linux system, do I dump MS WIndows completely and migrate to that desktop?…I have a computer that I need to erase a hard drive on and was thinking of using it as a trial computer.

The beauty of most Linux distributions is the live CD. My preference and recommendation is Ubuntu Linux. Download the ISO and burn it to a CD from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu. Put it in your computer and start it up. It will load the Linux desktop without touching your hard drive or installing anything. You can browse the Internet, work on documents and browse your network without ever installing the operating system. Note that because your CD isn’t nearly as fast as your hard drive this practice isn’t a good idea for anything other than trying it out, but its a good way to get your feet wet and make sure it will run on your hardware without dumping a computer.

You know, you should really try it on your Macbook. I always wanted to get a Macbook and put Linux on it. I bet it runs like a sewing machine.

The auction panel was a blast. I love talking about auctions and the tools we use to conduct them.

What other program/software etc creates/edits etc. a .pdf?  I was under the impression (wrong?) that Adobe owned that file tag…

Thanks in advance.

Adobe submitted its format for ISO certification and received it. PDF is an international standard. Many programs do a better job than those by Adobe for creating and modifying PDF files.

If you’re on XP, get PDFCreator.
If you’re on Vista, get CutePDF.

Both of these free programs will let you print to PDF anything that you could print to a computer.

Regardless of your Windows distribution, get Foxit PDF reader and ditch Adobe Acrobat for viewing PDF files. Foxit loads many times faster and takes up much less space on your hard drive.

Of course, if you’re running Linux, PDF support is built into the distribution.

If you want to do things other than view or create PDF files, check out the great solutions from Lifehacker, where you can find many posts about cool tools to create, modify and tweak PDF files without paying hundreds of dollars for Adobe products that will just bloat your system and infect it like a root-kit virus.

So what do you do when a page is set up for IE only? Typically, I find this on GIS websites. Is there an add-on to emulate IE?

Use IE. IE isn’t evil. An up-to-date version of IE is just as good as Firefox, in my opinion. I prefer IE to Firefox, in fact, but I can only get IE 6 to work on Linux. When Mozilla released Weave, I started using Firefox 3 on my Windows machines, but because Weave doesn’t support 64 bit Linux, I may be moving back to IE on Windows.

Firefox 3 has a speed improvement that arguably puts it slightly ahead of IE 7, but when IE 8 comes out I’ll probably be recommending it as it will be the first Microsoft browser that will default to standards mode instead of quirks mode. I can’t wait for everyone who designed a site without using web standards finds that his or her site is completely hosed when viewed in IE 8 for the first time.

I did notice that Dell offers ubuntu as an OS on some of the newer laptops and desktops it sells.

Yeah, but they’re all Intel-based systems and I’m an AMD guy! I just can’t do it!

Seriously, they’re still not a good deal in that they’re about the same price as a similar Windows-based system. The advantage to Linux is that it should cut down on manufacturer cost, but because of all the deals OEMs make with Windows crapware companies, the systems still cost about the same.

The best thing to do is to buy the system with the specs you want with Windows, then call the manufacturer and get your Windows refund. It takes a while on the phone because most phone-grunts don’t know what you’re talking about, but there are widespread reports that many people are getting as much as $50 back by not using the Windows that comes pre-loaded on a laptop.

For more information on hippie-propagated bullshit, see Douchethirsty.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fire_the_starting_gun_the_darw.php

Newsweek ran an article comparing Lincoln to Darwin recently, claiming that because both men were born on the same day, it was fair to ask who was more important to history. I disagree with their conclusion. Lincoln was a politician who, while arguably a very good one, is limited to the field of social constructs. At the end of the day, all we have as a population is what we know. Laws and perceptions change over time, while we can only figure something out once. Darwin figured out what is unquestionably the most important, most fundamental principle for biology and history and taxonomy.

How many times has public perception changed during the course of the last few thousand years? How many empires have risen? How many forms of government have been devised? How many fluctuations have we seen in mores? How many republics have failed?

All of the answers to the above questions are influenced, at least in part, to the sum of the knowledge of the human race. As time moves forward, we know more about the world. This accumulated knowledge, with a few exceptions, certainly molds new political ideas. Knowledge pulled us, perhaps kicking and screaming, out of the dark ages when, as the general public became more well-informed, they threw off the fetters of abstract, dogmatic teachings in favor of an empirical reality that better matched what they observed. When the church said one thing, and people observed another, the domain of the church - the unexplained - grew smaller.

Lincoln’s presidency was most definately influenced by accumulated knowledge. Had he ruled fifty years prior, things would have been very different. The field of politics, while perhaps more glamorous and favorable to a participant’s reputation and ego, is inherently limiting when referencing the question of leaving a mark on history. In a thousand years, there may not be a country - or a planet, if we keep electing Republicans - but there will still be science. We will still know about Natural Selection, undoubtedly in a more complete way than we do now, just as we will still understand and indeed know more about string theory, nuclear theory and other fundamental concepts in the world of science.

Who was more important to history? In the short term, the arguement can be made for Lincoln, though I don’t know who answers the question of history in the short term. Indeed, the correct answer for the long term is Darwin, as the theory he championed will continue to live and be refined and perfected long after the issues surrounding the presidency of Lincoln have been marginalized to the history books.