Whatever You Like - Weird Al

The king of parodies, Weird Al Yankovic, has released his latest single. "Whatever You Like" is a parody of T.I's song of the same title. Weird Al's version reflects on the current problems in the economy. Instead of rapping about buying his girlfriend diamonds or whatever T.I gets his girls, Al offers to buy his girlfriend whatever she would like at McDonalds or WalMart. Certainly no "White and Nerdy", but it isn't half bad.
The great thing about the song is that it went from conception to release in just 2 weeks. Weird Al's recent interview in Wired magazine touched on the problem that anybody with a macbook can record a parody and get it out in less than an hour. I guess if you can't beat them, join 'em.
So here is the latest Weird Al single, "Whatever You Like"

Sarah Palin is an Idiot

I'm not the smartest man in the world, but I get by. Watching video though, I cannot figure out what the heck Sarah Palin is trying to say. Seriously, how was this woman elected to any office? She can barely string a sentence together.
As Keith Olbermann pointed out, Hannity has said she was a great speaker and very smart at the convention and when she accepted the nomination, but those were not her words, and they were off a teleprompter. Besides, the majority of those speeches had already been written before Palin was even chosen. That was her reading off somebody else's words like a trained parrot. And then, because the republicans know full well that she can't be relied upon to come up with her own viewpoints (such as her view on creationism or her gaff of supporting Obama's plans for Pakistan), they feed her talking points, but she can't even get those right.
Fareed Zakaria is almost too gracious. He suggests that Palin drop out of the race. As scared as I am of her actually getting a national office, I'd almost rather she stay in the race just to destroy John McCain. At least, she needs to stay in for the vice presidential debate, where Biden will no doubt wipe the floor with her.
What's worrisome though, is that she actually is appealing to some people. These poll numbers make me glad I live in London. Sure, slightly less than 50% of young evangelical women approve of her, but 46% is still far too much for a country that used to pride itself on education and the intelligence of its youth.
This woman isn't a pig in lipstick, she's a 2nd grader on stilts.

Done With Iraq By June

I am calling it right now. If Obama is elected, by the end of June, 2009, combat troops will have left Iraq. Not because we will have won the war, not because Obama wants to ditch the country, but because of budgetary constraints. Eventually, we're going to bail out these banks, and that isn't cheap. The next president will need to cut the budget somehow, and Iraq would be the most popular way to do it.

The Cloud and The Future of Google Docs

Ask most anybody working in the world of computers and they’ll tell you that the future lies in The Cloud (or a series of many Clouds). I agree, and I think I may know how Google is going to launch the world forward into this next phase of data storage.

For those that don’t know, The Cloud refers to servers where personal data is stored. Apple’s product Mobile Me is a good example of using The Cloud. A user’s calendar and phone contacts are kept on their phone, their computer, and on a server that Apple maintains. When a change is made on one device, it immediately shows up on all the user’s devices. For example, a user adds an event “Joe’s Birthday” on their iPhone’s calendar. Later that night when they log onto their computer, they will see that event already added to iCal because the iPhone has communicated that changed to the central server, and iCal as checked with that same server for any changes.

Using The Cloud for emails and calendar events is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is capable in the next few years. Already, entire computers are run in The Cloud and displayed on dummy terminals. In this way, a laptop with just a monitor, keyboard, trackpad, and Internet connection can be more powerful than a desktop computer. Eventually, it could be that nobody stores any data on their personal computers, and could just log on to their personal desktop from any computer with an Internet connection, like a VPN account, but 1000x better and for everybody in the world. In the mean time, The Cloud still has immense potential for extending data portability.

Of course, Google is known for search, but they do so much more. One popular product is Google Docs. Google Docs is an online word processor and works like a simplified version of Microsoft Word. All the files are stored in The Cloud and are accessible from any computer with an internet connection. Although files are private by default, users on Google Docs can share files with other users to allow them to read or revise the documents online. In addition to Google Docs, Google also has similar products to mimic Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint.

My school newspaper uses Google Docs for storing all of our work so that editors can quickly access and revise articles, and we love it, but Google Docs has three glaring flaws that top it from replacing Microsoft Word.

First, it is not a fully featured word processor. There are plenty of things it can do, but it still cannot match the thousands of features in Word, and with current Internet connection speeds, it never will have all of those features.

Second, files on Google Docs are only saved in the Cloud, not on a user’s computer. This can lead to problems when there is not an Internet connection or edits are made to a file on a user’s computer but not on the version of that file in Google Docs.

Thirdly, as I alluded to the my last point, Google Docs cannot be used offline (by default), and when it is used offline, it still isn’t a fully featured word processor. Google does let users turn on an offline version of Google Docs so that they can access files and edit them when they do not have an internet connection, but it requires messing around with settings and installing extra software, something that the typical user does not want to do (or may not know how to do).

Thankfully, all of these problems can be solved within the next year, if Google gets its act together that is. What they need is a fully featured word processor for offline use that can use The Cloud to sync files across Google Docs and files saved directly onto computers. This may sound like a large undertaking, but it really isn’t.

Google is a well-known supporter of open source software like Firefox, and they distribute Firefox along with Google software like Google Earth in their recommended software package “Google Pack.” Another piece of open source software that Google has supported in the past and has put in “Google Pack” is OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a suite of software with programs equivalent to the software included in Microsoft Office. Like Firefox, it is completely free. Before I switched to my current MacBook, I had a Sony laptop, and I used OpenOffice for years. It is compatible with Microsoft Office and works great. Today though, I use Microsoft Office because OpenOffice is not properly available for Macs (NeoOffice and the X11 version do not count). Slowly, developers are making a version of OpenOffice to use on Macs, but the process seems to be going very slowly.

In the past, Google has sent OpenOffice programmers to help develop the software. Now, they need to do the same thing and send over some people to get OpenOffice on Macs. Once OpenOffice can be used on Macs, Google would just need to create a piece of software that syncs files from computers to The Cloud (much like Dropbox). With all of this in place, everyday users would happily migrate away from Microsoft Office to Google Docs much like they have done with Firefox.

Given what Google has accomplished in the past, this should not be a challenge. In fact, if they wanted to speed up the process, they could just purchase ThinkFree Office and rebrand it. It does essentially what I am suggesting, but isn’t as stable as it could be and doesn’t have a big name like Google behind it right now. Besides, Google Docs is really just a rebranded Writely.com.

E-Moment of Silence

Crossposted at thinkyouth.org
At lunch today, a good friend of mine asked our table what we all thought about having a moment of silence during school for the victims of 9/11. Everybody agreed that it was a good idea, but I didn’t say anything. Not because I didn’t agree with everybody else, I just thought the question had a pretty obvious answer. Then he turned to me specifically and said “And I’m guessing that you have something wrong with that…”
I’m not that cynical that I don’t believe in moments of silence, and my friend isn’t stupid, he’s just been sucked in by the Fox News style propaganda that anybody who is liberal or doesn’t support the George Bush 90% of the time is a bad person whose dissent supports terrorism. Of course, that’s crazy talk.
Just in case, let me make this perfectly clear: I support moments of silence on September 11th. In fact, right here I’ll have an emoment of silence. Please take some time to reflect on all the tragedies throughout the world: Iraq, Darfur, Israel, Palestine, and all the rest, but more importantly, let’s remember September 11th, 2001. And not for trying to pin the blame on somebody, but to make sure we don’t forget what that was like to be attacked, and to remember the victims who’s lives were cut short so unjustly.
…
…
…
…
…
…
I was helping a friend the other day write a story which mentioned September 11th, and we couldn’t think of the right verb for the attacks. Finally, we settled on describing it like a cancer invading the towers that day. And it was certainly settling. I’m not sure that anybody is ever going to find the right words.
America did learn one thing from 9/11 though, and it is something that we need to remember in the coming months as the election approaches and our words get ever more vicious. We can unite as one people, and we are more the same than different.

NoFX and My Sub Prime Mortgages Rant

Cross-posted at thinkyouth.org:
I was just listening to one of my favorite songs by the punk band NoFX, “The Irrationality Of Rationality”, and apparently I haven’t listened to it in a year because I’m only just now realizing how perfectly it fits with the subprime mortgage crisis. It could be that NoFX traveled into the future, but I’d say it is more likely that history just repeats itself much quicker than we like to admit.
Here’s the song. Have a listen, but be warned, the lyrics could be considered explicit.
The first verse, about Frank and the shareholders, explains very succinctly how these sub prime mortgage problems started. To simplify it a bit, the financial institutions that created the subprime mortgages were told by their shareholders “We want more money! Get us more profits!” Then, the financial institutions say, “How do we make more money?” and they realize that they need to innovate. Innovation takes risk, but they were big companies, so taking risk is part of what they do.
So now, all these “innovators” are sitting in their 2nd or 3rd homes saying, “We didn’t do anything wrong. We just innovated. Businesses innovate, and innovation takes risk, so we took risks. You can’t blame us for taking risks or following orders or industry trends. I mean hey, everyone was doing it. We needed to make as much a profit as the other banks. And it isn’t our fault that the government needs to help us out. Our innovations helped the economy while they lasted. If the government doesn’t help us out, we won’t be making any more profits and we’ll go out of business.” And trust me, they are saying it. They've said it to me. Of course, this fits in well with the second verse of the song and the line, “The guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to.”
And now then the media goes on saying nothing important and just rambling on about stupid suggestions like, “Hey middle class! Have you thought about a staycation?” Instead, they should be talking about how these people, and the fed, screwed us over big time. Now the idiots who caused this problem are begging for, and getting, government bail outs which you and me are going to have to pay for down the line even though all these bail outs do is postpone the inevitable collapse of our economy to levels where prices aren’t so inflated by speculation.
Of course, I don’t advocate people who have lost their homes go out and shoot people who still have homes, but the third verse of the song is important too. We all know that there are people who have lost their homes, and more people are going to lose homes. Even the middle class is becoming homeless. Maybe, for just one day, the media could focus on these issues that will actually affect our everyday lives in terms of do people have shelter instead of Obama v. McCain, which is important, but doesn’t deal so directly with questions about such basic needs.

Welcome / First Post

Hi readers.
Thanks for visiting We’re Quite Hostile. The blog is written by two teenagers in London, and just starting up, but we should be posting once or twice a week, so subscribe to the RSS feed for updates. Here's our about us thing:

We’re quite hostile. Although we don’t agree on everything, the two of us are committed to questioning the status quo. We write about music, politics, and whatever else strikes our fancy, and we will always try to say something unique in our posts.
We both have very eclectic tastes in music, from Philip Glass to Converge.
Sometimes, these tastes overlap with the blogosphere hype, but usually we just find something we like regardless of what other people are saying. Our favorite record store is Rough Trade, and we both like Jeffrey Lewis’ music too much.
Politically, we’re left of center and about as south of authoritarian as you can get while still recognizing an inherent need for government. We fight against popular misconceptions and cut through the bs of the media and politicians. We believe in the inherent worth of every human being and their right to live in a just society. We aim to be one more thorn in the side of authority and the establishment. Some of our favorite news sources are The Raw Story, The Real News and Al Jazeera English.
The name We’re Quite Hostile comes from the Public Enemy song “Prophets of Rage.”

Mike Rushmore
- I’m an ex-patriot originally from Chicago, now a senior in high school in London. My first cd was either by Alvin and The Chipmunks or The Beach Boys, and I was introduced to rock music through Weird Al’s parody of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Both of my parents are conservatives, but I am proud to say that I have not been a conservative since middle school (when I actually started to educate myself about politics). Now, I am a left-wing libertarian, much in line with the UK’s Liberal Democrats. I believe that the government should exist primarily to maximize personal liberty, and to support those unable to support themselves. I also blog at thinkyouth.org (politics) and vandalog.com (street art) and occasionally post videos on YouTube as xakaxunknownx (music and politics) or vandalog (street art).

Kasra Sarikhani
- Born and raised in London, England with foreign parents and an American education. I strongly believe that I have beliefs similar to the vast majority of people. I believe that everyone has basic rights and needs such as the right to education, the right to affordable housing, the right to vote and the right to live a comfortable life. Unfortunately somewhere along the line something goes wrong and our views get distorted and diluted until they’re no longer recognizable in our governments’ policies. Politics aside, I’m a pretty normal kid. I probably like music more than most but other than that I’m your typical 17-year-old high schooler. I’m in a band, go to boring parties, watch crap movies and go to a bunch of shows. Favorite bands range from Neutral Milk Hotel to Sonic Youth to Bob Dylan etc…