I sure didn’t. Actually, my AP Government class mostly spent its time listening to the teacher rhapsodize about Teddy Roosevelt and watching tapes of Bill Press and Bob Novak facing off on an early incarnation of Crossfire.

I don’t think my experience was unique. In fact, judging by the coverage of the current filibuster/non-filibuster/filibuster-forcing-pre-filibuster, it seems pretty clear that even those who should be among the best-informed observers of the political process have very little idea how parliamentary procedure works. Despite the fact that it’s completely essential to understanding how things get done in the legislature, reporters tend to just fake their way through coverage of it. I’m beginning to wonder whether anyone outside of a tiny set of professional staffers actually understands how our government works.

It’s all very, very strange. It might be time to update those Schoolhouse Rock cartoons into longer, more boring versions of the originals. And hey, as an added bonus, doing so will also provide additional material for a new wave of ironic t-shirt iron-ons two decades from now! It’s win-win.

Oh christ. Charles has just pointed me to “The Space“, a members-only club that seems to be sinking its roots into the neighborhood. Be sure to check out their services and application, which asks for a credit card number and signed agreement to abide by the club rules without actually listing what the fees or rules (or even address) are.

Then, head over to the entrepreneurs’ bios on this page and laugh at my impending doom:

Five years as a rugby player triggered my interest in world travel.
That’s how I met my wife, Karen. When we settled down in Washington, our mutual passion for real estate investment kept us exploring. Adams Morgan, Arlington, Georgetown—we got to know all of the area’s fascinating and unique neighborhoods.

So cosmopolitan! Edgy, too — I hear Adams Morgan is kind of a rough neighborhood.

With the Warehouse in trouble, this neighborhood actually does need some general-purpose space for art, music and events. But “International Lifestyles” aren’t going to attract their allegedly-desired artistic class by setting up a guest list and throwing on a Thievery Corporation mix CD. Here’s hoping this carriage house quickly reverts to something half as useful as the car repair shop it used to be.

Not to be a scold, but after yesterday I think I should emphasize: you might want to try to avoid getting migraines. I knew something strange was happening when the screen started swimming and I couldn’t properly string together words for an IM conversation with Cyrus. This was mostly just confusing and interesting — I’ve been fascinated by aphasias, agnosias and other functional deficits ever since since I learned the blind spot trick. But from there things quickly descended into a dull ache exacerbated by attempts to read. I finally gave up and went home, where a nap more or less set things right. But the back left side of my brain still felt worn out for the rest of the night, like the strip of grass in the middle of a soccer field.

Fortunately, this was unusual — I can only feel sorry for the folks afflicted with migraines on a chronic basis. In my case I can only conclude it was caused by — what else? — suspicious, out-of-the-ordinary coffee. I know, I know; even I’m having a hard time believing that explanation at this point. But I’m really at a loss for what else it could be.

Bunnie Huang is the man who cracked the Xbox — not once but twice, as he recently revealed himself to be involved with the hypervisor escalation exploit, too. He’s an electronics god.

Recently he’s been working on Chumby, a fun alarm clockish gadget that promises to bring widget-like capabilities to your bedside table. Part of his duties involve arranging and overseeing the production of the units in China.

He’s just begun putting up a series of blog posts about his trip, and they’re really fascinating. At the very least, be sure to check out the first one, which has video showcasing the incredible skill and speed of the workers.

• Made In China: Getting Started
• Made In China: Skill
• Made In China: Dedication
• Made In China: Feeding the Factory
• Made In China: Scale

UPDATE: I see that BoingBoing linked to these posts, too, and Bunnie’s put up a notice saying his site may be inaccessible as a result. Whoops.

UPDATE 2: Aaaand after further RSS catching-up, I see that son1 beat me to this by a mile. Sorry for the redundancy! But hey, everyone agrees: these posts are worth reading.

• Some notes on developing Google Mapplets. Mostly just a rehash of the documentation, but some might find it useful.
• The Unfoggedbot is doing pretty well, but just choked on the RSS feed again. I think that may have been because Becks was adding a feature I’d requested. Maybe not, though. I need to add some better error handling to that script, which is unexpectedly shaping up to be the weak spot in the system. I’ll also need to schedule some downtime during which I add code to clear out the database every week or so — as things stand right now the comment DB will just keep growing and growing.

Tech project the second! I aspire to participate in the comment threads over at Unfogged. There’s really no better place on the internet for listening to people with PhDs talk about such weighty topics as fat celebrity paramours and bizarre Japanese pornography.

But it’s tough. The comments come in quick bursts. The only real way to participate in a thread is to keep it open in a browser window, manually refreshing every few seconds. Unless I’m stuck on a bus, I get bored when a slow spell hits. I move to a different web page or task. I come back and thirty messages have gone by, and the conversation has moved past a point where I would’ve liked to participate. Crap. There’s comment RSS, but the interval at which RSS readers update is much too slow for it to be very useful.

What I need is push technology — something that does the checking for me, only bothers me when there’s new content, and does so fast. So hey, I built something. It’s a pretty simple IM bot hooked up to a script that checks the comment RSS a few times a minute (hopefully this is okay by the Unfoggitburo — I figure one script that resyndicates content could ultimately serve to reduce load).

Based on my not-very-rigorous testing, it seems to work fairly well. If you’re interested, give it a shot and let me know what you think, and any improvements that you’d like to see.

1. Add “Unfogged” to your AIM buddy list. Having the bot as a buddy loosens some of the rate limits that might otherwise prevent it from sending messages.
2. Send the bot a message containing the URL for a particular Unfogged thread. You can use either the entry’s permalink or the comment thread’s link. You should get back an IM saying you’re subscribed to the thread.
3. From this point on you’ll get an IM whenever someone posts to the thread. To toggle your subscription off, send the URL again. You should get another message confirming that you’ve been unsubscribed.

Disclaimers! The script is pretty rough:

• it doesn’t daemonize
• the Net::OSCAR package apparently can’t deal with rate limits, so if it hits one who knows what’ll happen
• if it crashes it won’t relaunch, and it’s running off a somewhat flaky server in my living room
• it won’t send IMs faster than once every three seconds in order to avoid rate limits, so it may get backed up during peak periods
• and of course, it could always go crazy and start sending you floods of IMs (if that happens, I suggest just blocking the AIM user — send me an email or comment, while you’re at it)

But at the moment it seems okay! If folks find it useful I’ll polish it up, post the code and find it a better home.

UPDATE: Already found a bug! If the RSS parser finds an empty feed (which can occur if it queries it at the same moment as the feed’s being rebuilt by MT), it craps out. I think I fixed the script, but I could be wrong. I’ll have to have a closer look in the morning. I can confidently say I restarted it, which should let it work for a while, at least.

Honestly, I don’t understand what they’re so upset about. I enjoyed the article, but the revelations it contains are merely a fraction as offensive as the stuff from LNS that Wonkette has published. And I’m having a hard time seeing who’s going to get fired on the basis of the piece, as the commenters are claiming. “Not friends with a bunch of jerks” isn’t usually included as a requirement in job listings.

Tech project the first!: I’ve revisited my venerable DCist Map project and ported it over to Google Mapplets — a just-launched feature that lets you add user-contributed mashups to your Google Map display in a wholly integrated way. This lets you do all kinds of neat stuff. For example, you can turn on a crime overlay by checking the “crime overlay” box. Then you could compare area muggings to gas prices by clicking the “gas price” checkbox. You’ll be revolutionizing sociology in no time!

I’ve dusted off my code and ported it to the Mapplet version of the GMaps API, which actually entailed porting it to the GMaps v2 API first. It’s nice of them to have finally un-switched latitude and longitude, but it made things kind of a pain in the ass for me. Still, it’s nice to have it done and the tool up-to-date. Oh, and while I was at it I finally extended the yellow line up to Ft. Totten, as I should’ve long ago.

I’ve submitted the mapplet to Google’s directory, but who knows when or if they’ll add it. For now, if you want to add it to your “My Maps” toolbox, you can do so in the following way. You’ll only have to do this once, then it should sit happily in your sidebar, waiting for you to toggle it on whenever you need it.

1. Launch the mapplet-enabled version of Google Maps (it’s still in beta).
2. Click on “Add content” in the upper left of the “My Maps” section.
3. To the right of the search bar at the top of this page is a tiny little link that says “Add by URL”. Click it.
4. Enter “http://dcist.com/map/mapplet.xml”. Note the lack of www! The Gothamist folks have set up the hostname to redirect to the www-less version, but Google isn’t smart enough to handle that. Enter it like this and you’ll be fine. Click “Add”.
5. Say “OK” to the security warning that’ll pop up. Trust me, I’m a nice guy.
6. Follow the “Back to Google Maps” link in the upper left of the screen.
7. That’s it! You should have a new item in the “My Maps” section. Check the box next to it and the metro overlay will be activated.

I’ll write up a post for DCist about this tomorrow (or maybe I’ll wait to see if it’s accepted into the directory). But I thought I’d put it up here first, so that you guys can give it a try and let me know if you run into any horrible problems.

UPDATE: One other interesting side-effect: this makes it easy to see where Google and I disagree about a Metro station’s location. In most cases this is because the station has multiple entrances; I usually went with whichever one was most visible. In others its because of different standards: I generally used the satellite view to find the platform and geocoded that (yeah, I did them all manually). Google appears to use street entrances. I’d consider redoing them, but it’d mostly be for pride — having both on there is (arguably) the best solution.

Alright, it was a little crowded and hot, at least one channel could be counted on to be clipping until 2/3 of the way through each song, and somebody standing near me seemed to have had a big meal of chili and corn nuts immediately before coming to DC9 (my personal recommendation: grasshopper tacos — the taste is just okay, but the horrifying-your-girlfriend potential is pretty solid).

Still, that was a fine, fine rock show. Congratulations to Amanda, Kyle and Sommer for another wildly successful Unbuckled.

But I think we need a new term for whatever genre of music Le Loup belongs to, or aspires to belong to. Along with Arcade Fire, the Polyphonic Spree, Broken Social Scene and who knows who else, this is a band that clearly has a ridiculous number of members, but somehow manages to use them to productive ends. And there are jammy elements, but I’d hate to call any of them jam bands. And there’s a lot of melodrama, but — well, okay, there’s just a lot of melodrama, I just don’t care. I belong to a generation that shed tears when Optimus Prime died — I’m always ready to be emotionally manipulated.

I’ve been a bad blogger recently, but I’ve got a few semi-nifty technical projects in the works. Hopefully I’ll be able to wrap one or two of em up tonight; stay tuned.

Also, the tag links aren’t working anymore, if anyone cares — looks like Google crawling them was slowing down my webhost’s machine so much that they disabled it. I’ll probably just ditch the tags completely.

I suppose this writeup is making Friday’s show still relevant, so I may as well put up the post that the demands of wedding-attendance preempted.

First, it was great, and you should check out Kyle’s amazing photos of the show.

Second, the two bands I saw — Middle Distance Runner and Georgie James — both struck me as having a similar quirk: dueling songwriters. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon, certainly, but it seemed particularly obvious in these two cases.

I don’t know much about MDR, having had to leave their Unbuckled appearance early, but it was pretty easy to see that their songs come in two flavors. First, catchy pop that occasionally aspires to Bends-era Radioheadishness, and which is strangely lacking in bridges (seriously guys, key changes: they’re good for what ails ya). Second, garage/stomp/Kings of Leon-style rock, the kind of stuff played by shirtless dudes in jeans and mesh caps who spend a lot of time trying to shop for belt buckles without anyone noticing them doing it. I’m not a huge fan of the latter and so couldn’t tell you whether MDR’s take on it is particularly good or not. But I really liked the songs of type A.

Georgie James has this sort of split personality, too. John writes angular pop songs (angular — what a fantastically cliched music critic word), while Laura’s melodies seem to be more about mellow, bouncy notes tumbling over one another. I like John’s hooks better, but although he has a very nice voice, Laura’s clearly the one with the distinctive vocals and charisma (also: she’s purty). It was nice to hear them making larger (though still tentative) forays into one another’s songs on their older material, but I was surprised to see how divided their styles remained.

Of course, I haven’t seen the songwriting credits on their demo EP or their unreleased album, so perhaps I’m just imagining a division where none actually exists. But in my mind, at least, the band’s got two distinct styles. Each one has a lot to recommend it, but I’m looking forward to hearing more stuff that capitalizes on both.

UPDATE: While you’re at it, why not go check out the first song from Bullets, the newest band in the great Q & Not U diaspora. Pretty catchy, although I’ve gotta say that the Purple Rain screengrab may be overkill.