The Colbert Factor New York Times profiles Senior Correspondent Stephen Colbert. He's a very funny man. I can't believe that he actually tried to work on Good Morning America. What a sell out.

Republicans for the legalization of Marijuana OK, so I made that title up, but they really should consider it. Pandagon talks about how the RNC is trying to avoid violent protests in NYC by offer[ing] "peaceful political activists" discounts at select hotels, museums, stores and restaurants around town during convention week, which begins Aug. 29.

Are the Republicans really this out of touch with reality? Their attempt to placate protesters with double talk won't work this time.

Right now would have been a great time for marijuana to be legal. The RNC could then sell the marijuana at a considerable discount during the convention to the protesters. Do you think that a bunch of high protesters are going to cause any problems? I think not. I bet you the pizza parlors around NY would get a huge spike in business.

Buy a Politician This just in from the New Yauk Times: Politicians for sale in Texas.

Running as a Republican in a heavily Democratic district in Texas against a five-term incumbent, Ms. Klein, 39, has received more in donations and fund-raising help from the telecommunications and power industries than any other rookie candidate in the nation.

What? Why the hell do they care about some lowly district race?

Because administration officials have said that in the event of a second Bush administration she would be considered by the president, whom she served as a senior policy adviser when he was governor of Texas, as a candidate to be the next head of the Federal Communications Commission.

So what exactly does campaign finance reform do for us? Hold on, it gets better:

"The reason they've told me that they support me is that they appreciated that I had integrity," Ms. Klein said. "Even though we disagreed, it was harmonious."

What a crock of shit (Pardon my Texan). I think they "disagreed" on her kickbacks, but the outcome is "harmonious" for both parties.

Messaging & Collaboration IM Interoperability: It's the Business Model, Stupid. Stowe Boyd makes the argument that companies don't care about the fact that XMPP is an open protocol. Companies should care, but they're stupid, and so they don't.

The same is true for Linux. Companies aren't using Linux because its open source. Companies are using it because Oracle, IBM, etc are putting their applications on Linux, it's cheaper than Microsoft's alternative, and they don't like Microsoft. If you think they're doing it for any other reason you've got to be kidding yourself.

However, XMPP's openess does give it an edge over it's competitors. It's easy to build services on top of XMPP. XMPP enabled applications will be the reason for XMPP winning over proprietary protocols. XMPP being an open protocol isn't good enough for companies to use XMPP, but rather building applications on top of an open protocol will be cheaper. That's the kind of logic any MBA hotshot can understand.

The trick is to make building XMPP enabled applications as sexy as using Linux or building web-based applications. There are things on the horizon so just give it time.

You think the carpet pissers did this? You're Entering a World of Lebowski is a well written New York Times article by David Edelstein who "gets it" because he obviously listened to the Dude's story. The article gets bonus points for the following paragraph:

The Coens turned down requests to be interviewed about the cult of "The Big Lebowski," which is frankly infuriating: I did not watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to be blown off by too-cool, insular, press-shunning elitists.

(via Andy)

American Dad Seth McFarlane, the creator of The Family Guy, has a new show called American Dad that looks promising. Check out the six minute pilot.

Build your own Feedbruner Leslie Orchard over at 0xDECAFBAD is busy building an Atom/RSS client/server aggregator on top of Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser. From the system diagram, it looks like the scanned feeds are dumped into your choice of relational database. From there you can construct queries for feed items, and then the query result set is automatically turned into an Atom feed. It goes one step further by providing an XSLT processor to transform the resulting Atom feed into XHTML for viewing inside of the browser. This is hardly revolutionary, but if done right it could become very useful. With some slight modifications, you could pretty much duplicate a lot of the functionality offered by .

Conversation one-two punches Are you the kind of person who likes hitting below the belt? Need some pointers about walking away from a conversation victorious at all costs? Then look no further than Conversation Terrorism. The site is there as a reminder of what not to do during a conversation, but really let's just hope that the sap that you're going to take on sticks to those rules. [ via Stupid Evil Bastard ]

Fedora Jon Udell's excerpt from Michael Tiemann's speech on Fedora is really interesting. The reasoning behind the Fedora development model used to be big mystery to me, but this really cleared things up. To me RedHat's approach to developing Fedora makes a lot of sense. They obviously want to have a version of Linux that is free and up to date, but since they also want to be able to sell it to corporate types, they need to make it stable. Those two objectives are usually competing. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Doom3 vs. blogging Our blog posting has been pretty slow this week. Honestly, we have a good excuse. We've been playing Doom3 in our spare time since Tuesday morning when we were able to get our grubby hands on the game. This is definitely one of the perks of working for yourself. Unfortunately, the game runs pretty slow on our dated machines, which is another side effect of being self employed.

Out with the managers, in with the wranglers. Ned explains his new class naming convention where he uses Wrangler instead of Manager. I never really thought about it, but I like it. I've got a lot of "manager" classes, but that's going to change -- it's time for some corporate down sizing. Yeeha!

RSSCalendar I saw a new service called RSSCalendar off of HotLinks today. It's a really cool idea. You administer your calendar via a web interface, and then you can send people links to the RSS feeds for either daily, weekly, and monthly events. So all updates made to the calendar will propagate to people subscribed to your feeds.

RI Serial Killer Aces Full of Links points to Boston.com article about the Woonsocket Serial Murder. This is a tad too close to home. Again, I really should start watching the local news, but these days I get all my news from the web or from The Daily Show.

Photoblog So the executive decision was made to move our photos to a separate photo blog: I've seen better. There was a lot of going back and forth whether or not to continue posting the pictures here or not.

The advantages of moving to a dedicated photo blog is that we could present the images in a larger format. Most of the images on I've Seen Better will have a maximum dimension of 600 pixels, but on GN they were limited to 450 which seem just low enough to lose a lot of the detail captured in the full image (this may have worked in my advantage on more than one occasion).

In the spirit of great compromises, we'll post more photos to the photo blog, but once in a while post pictures to good-old Going Nowhere. This of course means that we'll have to start posting more regularly to GN since we can't really use the images as filler anymore.

Sync It Baby!

I wonder what time this commercial airs. If you're actually interested in getting one of these, check out syncitbaby.com

Lodi, CA and Stanford Andy returned from California just the other day, and wasted no time getting the pictures from Lodi and Stanford up on his web page. Take a look at the awesome California pictures. Andy said that the weather was gorgeous while over there, and I think that's pretty evident from the beautiful blue sky in most of the pictures.