Practicalmadness

The quote of the day from 37signals’s Matt Linderman on SvN (via Projectionist):

“Do not use Getting Real if it means you’ll wind up killing people.”

In the spirit of the Olympic Games just ended, I shall for the first time be awarding three Fabulous Prizes to the winners of the 2006 Practicalmadness Oscars Game :

Gold Medal:

• A 512 MB Apple iPod shuffle music player (value: $69)
• A one-of-a-kind Oscars Game t-shirt from Chicago’s own T-Shirt Deli (value: about $25)
• The people’s ovation and fame forever

Silver Medal:

• $15 gift certificate to the U.S. iTunes Music Store¹
• The people’s respect and general approval

Bronze Medal:

• One item of your choice from the U.S. iTunes Music Store¹ valued at up to $5.00 USD.
• The people’s grudging acceptance and eventual affection

I’ll be adding some new form fields to the Profile screen tonight or tomorrow: Mailing Address and T-Shirt Size. Players, please log into the Oscars Game sometime between now and Oscar Night to update your information (and also to finalize your picks in advance of the big night). Anyone registering this week, please make sure you head over to the Profile screen and update your information. (We promise not to release your personal information to any third party.)

¹ If the winner of these prizes is not a U.S. resident, I can arrange for an alternate prize of equal value.

And welcome to the February Redesign.

(Crickets chirp. The seconds tick by. A sense of comprehension so longed for, so craved in this vacuum of utter chaos we call human existence remains elusive. You cry to the heavens: why? Why? Why, Lord, why?)

Sigh…you’re wondering why the home page looks the same, aren’t you? Well, you are looking at the new site, on the new server, and while it was originally my intention to wait until I had all five main sections (home page, monthly archives, tag archives, individual entry pages and the new tags browser) in place before I unveiled anything, last night I impulsively decided that a big roll-out like that benefited nobody except my ego.

So here’s what’s new right now:

• The new Tags Browser: I’ve been transitioning from assigning posts to individual categories (such as Web Arcana) to assigning one or more tags to the posts. The Tags Browser is displayed as a tag cloud (one of those things where tags with more items are displayed in darker, larger type than those with fewer items), and I’ve included some JavaScript trickery so you can filter the tags list based on how many entries are connected to that tag. (The list gets really, really short if the number is any higher than 3 or 4, but I still need to go into the archives and tag older posts.)

• Ajax-powered Commenting: I finally figured it out. Not that Ajaxed comments are really a necessity, but they’re cool and they just make using the site a little nicer. This could still use a little bit of work — specifically I’d like to add some kind of “thinking…” state so you know that the server’s working on processing your comment, but this is good enough for government work.

• New Tags layout on the individual pages: On the home page right now, tags alwayus link to a page on Technorati. Well, that’s dumb — Technorati’s cool, but I’d rather you read my stuff first. So on individual pages you’ve got the option. To look at the Practicalmadness tag, click on the tag name. To look at Technorati, click on the Technorati icon. To look at neither, just click on something else. Like your butt.

• The Plaid: Gotta love the plaid.

Coming up next, I’ve got to apply the new layout to the other pages and work on making the archive pages a little cleaner and more useful. I’m not going to set a timetable for that, since I know I’ve got more important stuff to work on this week (ahem ahem Oscars Game ahem) and I won’t stick to whatever timetable I set. I’m thinking next week until the realign is complete, which is totally fine with me.

And while we’re on the subject of changes, I wanted to announce one more: provided I don’t wimp out again, this will be the final “what’s new” post to this site. I plan to establish a separate “change-blog” to announce design changes, new features and other stuff that would go into a post such as this one, because I’d like to keep the body of the site content focused on things not related to the site itself. It’s like going to a party: if you spend the whole time talking about yourself, you’re liable to end up talking to yourself.

I feel like sometimes this is a blog with an audience of one, talking about itself to itself, when talking about other things is much more fun for everyone involved. So this new “Meta-blog” will be up shortly, and I’m going through to remove old meta-posts as part of the process of reading through and tagging the archives.

Finally, here’s a blast from the past: the original Practicalmadness home page design from 2000-01, side by side with the February 2006 Redesign (click for a slightly larger version in PNG format, ~240 KiB):

So however I may have improved the site in the last five years in terms of design skill, attractiveness, web standards compliance and Ajax gimmickry, and no matter how important or unimportant those things may in fact be, at least I can say the site is definitely more coherent now than it was then. And whether or not that is an improvement, Dear Reader, I leave to you.

I’ve been talking about how much I love Campfire, but now it’s time to find out how much you love me. (Well, and Campfire.) I’ve opened one of my chat rooms to guests, and we’ve got room for about 10-15 people.

So do you have a sec? Step into my office, will you?

Update: The Practicalmadness chat is now closed to non-members. Thanks to everyone who stopped by.

A couple of quick announcements, at the end of which you will be rewarded with a photograph of an insanely large bunny rabbit.

• Friendly, my simple framework for fast, easy PHP web devlopment, is officially on the loose. I’ve been developing and using Friendly since last June, and the only thing more exciting for me than how it’s shaped up into quite a useful little tool in the last eight months is how much cooler it’s going to become in the next eight. If you program websites in PHP you owe it to yourself to give Friendly a look. (And you can start with this concise Getting Started guide I wrote.)

• Campfire, 37signals’ new web chat application (that I raved about earlier this week), is finally open to the public. And in case I failed to mention it earlier, no, Campfire is not free. You can get a limited 30-day trial (for which you don’t even have to enter a credit card number), and monthly subscriptions start at $12.

  Pricing is based on file storage and simultaneous users; for example, that $12 plan gives you 10 users and 100 MB for real-time file sharing (in my opinion, Campfire’s #1 coolest feature). I went ahead and signed up for the Plus membership, which gives you up to 20 users, 250 MB of storage and SSL security for $24/month.

  Congrats to the whole team over there for the launch, and for accomplishing the truly impossible: getting a beautifully-designed, cutting-edge web application to work seamlessly with Internet Explorer.

Finally, since you made it this far, here is your giant bunny:

My word that is a large bunny.

• “BE MINE. Wait. That has six letters. Six letters is so unlucky. It’s like YOU DIE. That’s exactly what it’s like. Now you’re going to die and it’s all my fault.” Obsessive-Compulsive Valentines from McSweeney’s.

• The first MacBook Pro laptops are shipping with faster Intel Core Duo processors than previously announced. Now if only we could get Adobe to ship a Universal binary version of Photoshop sooner than next year, this would really rock.

• There are rumors on the internets that John Lasseter might bring Disney’s 2-D animation tradition back from the dead.

• How flame wars begin: a joint study by researchers at NYU and the University of Chicago shows that people think they correctly interpret the tone of a e-mail message 90% of the time, but are actually only right 50% of the time.

• For people with discerning taste in single-serving friends: for five dollars you can arrange to have a matchmaking service find you someone to sit next to on your next flight.

• Camino (a rockin’ open-source Mac web browser based on the same Mozilla technology as Firefox) has made it to version 1.0. Camino (née Chimera) was the first browser I used upon switching to the Mac four years ago, and I still use it from time to time whenever I need to use something that’s not supported in Safari, like Gmail’s new chat feature. Highly recommended.

• Make a video for Pretty Girls Make Graves’ new song, win the people’s ovation and fame forever. Also: a thousand bucks.

• Finally, there’s something on the iTunes music store for guys who think South Park is way too highbrow: Sports Illustrated swimsuit videos. And speaking of iTunes video, I’ve got three words for ya: School. House. Rock..

My birthday was also the day of the Snakes and Rubies discussion/event at DePaul, and later that evening at my birthday party as I was getting drunk enough to try dropping a discussion of web development frameworks into my otherwise innocuous cocktail chatter, I framed the event as “kinda like a web frameworks DJ battle.” Sam noted that the point of the event wasn’t an us-versus-them, Ruby-vs-Python grudge match, and yet the crowd in attendence at S&R clearly wanted a battle to pit Ruby’s extreme dynamism against Python’s extreme pragmatism, to put things in terms of us versus them. Sometimes in the testosterone- and caffeine-fueled world of the web geek, it’s not enough to have found something you consider to be a superior solution — you’ve got to have the validation of seeing the other side crumble under the power of your awesomeness. If it cannot rock, it must therefore suck.

Which brings me to the latest tempest in a teapot: browser-based chat. 37signals is due to release their new “joint,” Campfire, any day now. But last Monday Google added a web-based interface to Google Talk to Gmail, and so by the end of the business day that Monday there were asshats commenting at Signal vs. Noise about how Google had (a) beaten Campfire to market and that (b) this had something to do with anything.

Some things I hope to be posting about today/tomorrow:

• Google and 37signals are in the process of launching web-based chat applications, and of course, people are framing it as a battle when Google Talk and Campfire are in fact very different products for very different purposes. It’s Kinda Like A Web Chat DJ Battle.

• Speaking of new apps: Joyent just (finally) launched the hosted version of their Connector e-mail/calendar/groupware application. Can it steal my heart from Gmail, which I’ve heretofore considered to be quite possibly the most perfect e-mail software ever conceived? We shall see.

• Awesome movie: Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. (And typing that reminds me that I forgot to return Kicking and Screaming, an earlier Baumbach movie, to the video store last night. D’oh!)

• Awesome new music: KT Tunstall and Beth Orton, and also the Decemberists’ contribution to the new Elliott Smith tribute album staffed entirely by artists from Portland.

• And as predicted in the Onion: Gillette’s six-bladed razor. Of course I bought one.

“Spaceball One…they’ve gone to plaid!” — Barf

I’m very, very close to a finished mock-up for the much-hyped February Redesign, and I can tell you two things about it:

• It’s as big a leap forward in terms of usability over the site you’re looking at as this design was over the one that preceded it. (And if you can trace all the pronouns in that sentence you get a gold star.)

• Plaid. It’s all about the plaid.

The primary color of the new theme has changed from “Practical green” to a lovely deep red, and the new design makes ample use of our identity font, the lovely and versatile Neutraface. And no, your monitors are not broken: the background pattern in the screenshot at right, yes, is plaid. I can’t say I know of any other blog, website or online magazine that willingly uses an ugly-ass tartan as its background pattern, and I can’t think of a better ugly-ass pattern to use as our background tartan.

More importantly, the new design makes good use of a sidebar column — the new home page will include — for the first time, frankly — text explaining what the hell this site is and who the fuck I am. The individual post sidebars (pictured) will contain a paragraph placing the entry in context, with links back to the blog main page and the monthly archives. They’ll also contain a list of the entry’s categories/tags, with links to the category archive page on this site and to that tag’s page on Technorati.

Speaking of category/tag archive pages, those will link to the relevant tags on Technorati and Del.icio.us — I may even write a little something that pulls in my own Del.icio.us bookmarks for a given tag, for a little linkblog action.

A few things I’m toying with eliminating/omitting in the February relaunch:

• Comments: Yes, I know, I go back and forth on this. But since comments returned, I’ve gotten exactly five of them, three of which could just as easily have been personal e-mails, and one that was just weird. I’d love to develop a community around this site, but at the same time I won’t deny that Practicalmadness is a more or less one-way conduit of information. Of course, if there’s a demand for me to keep comments alive, well, please leave a comment and say so.

• Non-RSS XML Feeds: Geeks and nerds know that just as there’s more than one kind of “MP3” music file, there’s more than one kind of “RSS” feed. Most bloggers use a dialect of XML called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for their feeds, but some people prefer a newer, more open format called Atom.

  Right now I think there’s still an Atom feed being generated for the blog, but don’t expect that to continue. Not that I have anything against Atom, but I’ve chosen my horse. His name is RSS 2.0. Actually, that’s his breed. His name is Mittens.

I’ve got some other little things planned, but you’ll have to wait until next week to see this plaid goodness for yourself. I’m hoping to have the new design up for Valentine’s Day (because I love you) but it may be more like later next week until it’s all done. Watch this space for details.

The new Belle and Sebastian album, The Life Pursuit, is out today in record stores, shipping now from Amazon.com and available for download via Emusic. However, it is conspicuously absent from the iTunes Music Store. What the crap is this? I can get something on fucking Emusic before I can get it on iTunes?

Emusic is a competing service that gives you copious downloading for a low monthly fee — in my case, 40 songs for $10/month — but only offers music from indie labels. Which is great for when you’re looking for Sufjan Stevens or anything from Matador Records, but less useful after many of the indie bands one likes get signed by the majors.

It’s also historically been my impression that while iTunes is the shiny new cineplex downtown, Emusic is the ancient $3 theatre up in my girlfriend’s neighborhood — that they don’t get new releases until they’ve had a week or two in brick-and-mortar stores and on iTunes. Cause, like, why would one pay $10 or more for an album when they can download it for $2.50, unless they actually want the physical CD for their collection? Granted, I’ve never bothered to check them for new releases, so that may have been a bad assumption all along.

Anyway, the album: it’s all right so far. I liked the single (“Another Sunny Day”) when I downloaded it from Matador’s website last month, and I still like it. Other than that the album isn’t sticking with me yet, but that may change.

Let’s see: marshmallows, tents, intra-office communications frustratingly stuck using IM…what’s missing from this picture?

Following on my post about Campfire and how 37signals’s apps are about how they’re about it, this magically appeared on that company’s blog this morning.

Feeling warm yet?

I’m starting a new PHP project yesterday/today, and thus taking the opportunity to begin readying Friendly — my simple “short stack” MVC programming framework — for its close-up. We had originally planned on Monday for the initial public release, but it’s looking like it’s going to be later next week or the following week. The reason for the delay is that, well, I’m changing some shit at the last minute.

The reason I bring it up is that any new web development frameworks being developed or released right now live in the shadow of Ruby on Rails. Rails is being hailed as the great white hope for web development, with people yammering on about massive productivity gains (translation: getting to bill twice as much for work that takes half as long to do), easy Ajax support and all the bells and whistles that make building a web 2.0 site as easy as not building one. And yes, web-heads, that last bit was meant ironically.

With all this noise about Rails, it’s important to remember that it was not created to raise your hourly rate for coding (or mine) or to make it easier to develop the next Google Maps-del.icio.us-Sapphic Erotica mashup with a fake word for a name. It was developed because D.H.H. wanted to write more beautiful code. (warning: PDF link).

Everything else that Rails is can be traced back to a desire to make coding more like language: more fluid, more dynamic, more humane and more fun. And a big part of that — which was crazy shocking when Rails came out but seems to be taken for granted now — is its Inflections feature.

When you create a Rails “model” called User (i.e., a programming object meant to represent the database record for one user), it knows that the database table from which it’s meant to draw information will be called “users.” When you create a model called HappyChild, it knows that its table will be called “happy_children.” You don’t have to set this up — Rails just does it, and you never even have to think about whether your models and tables will match up unless there’s a major exception to the rules.

I was thinking about this because I have started to take this aspect of Rails for granted, until I started trying to implement this in PHP this morning. And lemme just say that working in a framework where someone has already sat down and made a list of every common singular/plural inflection so that I never have to explicitly tell my WildAfricanGoose model that its table is called “wildafricangeese” now feels like a total freaking luxury.

• Submitted for awesome: this exchange between a reporter and Chicago’s own Sen. Barack Obama:

  REPORTER: I was wondering if you could react to…

  OBAMA: What, did Harry Belafonte say something?

  And we all have Tim Russert to thank for this particular in-joke.

• Speaking of politics, Rep. John Boehner has been elected to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. But not before the Republican House Caucus had to take a second ballot because the first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

• Starbucks has just started selling a line of insanely expensive cocoa drinks based on the Chantico Drinking Chocolate (aka “the chocolate thing”) they introduced 13 months ago.

  Chantico was pretty much a failure, and apparently Sbux thinks they’ve figured out the problem: it wasn’t caffeinated or expensive enough. So enter the Cocoa Espresso, which combines a slightly less rich version of Chantico with a shot of espresso, in the same 8 oz. cup for $3.25 including tax. I call it “chocolate-flavored crack,” although I don’t know that it’s so different from a mocha as to be worth paying 50% more per ounce.

• “Attention Fleet Managers and other interested parties. It is recommended that you update the vehicle indentification symbol system on your current inventory of automobiles.” (From Coudal.)

• Apparently Yahoo, at least, has decided that Symbian smart phones like my Nokia 7610 are worth writing software for. I’ve been playing with Yahoo! Go, which synchronizes your phone’s mail, calendar and address book with your Yahoo account, and it’s pretty nice. I think I’d be more enthusiastic if I actually used Yahoo for anything.

Despite all the talk of America’s unfortunate oil addiction and this idea that we’re going to solve our domestic problems by hiring more Advanced Placement math teachers, the most significant (and, of course, most overlooked) aspect of last night’s State of the Union address is the arrest of war protester Cindy Sheehan.

I defy anyone to provide a good explanation for why she had to be arrested. She could have been respectfully asked to leave the House gallery, she could have been prevented from entering in the first place, but to have guards remove her by force is over the line.

Her side of the story was posted to Common Dreams tonight:

I was never told that I couldn’t wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things…I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately, and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for “unlawful conduct.”

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, “2245, huh? I just got back from there.”

I told him that my son died there. That’s when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm’s way for still? For this? I can’t even wear a shrit that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.

When levees start breaking all around the world, who’s going to buy these people some rubber pants?

Condoleeza Rice is surprised that Hamas won the election. Who could have foreseen that a relatively honest, fanatical Palestinian movement could beat a corrupt, ineffective, old school organization that has failed to deliver either freedom or prosperity. I mean, when was the last time that happened?

Those lucky stiffs at the 37signals Getting Real workshop last weekend got to play around with their new product, Campfire.

I had assumed that Campfire would be an Ajax-powered chat room of sorts (and it is), just as I inferred just from its name that Writeboard would be some kinda collaborative text editor.

Of course, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, a 37signals app (and any user interface, really) is never about what it’s about but how it is about it. By that, I mean that the point of a well-considered user interface design isn’t in piling on features, but in providing maximum usefulness. A well-designed interface may in fact do less than a competing product — that’s fine, because the features it does have are the ones you’re most likely to need.

My Backpack account doesn’t do anything I can’t already do with iCal or a paper planner — to-do lists, notes, et al., are not revolutionary in themselves. The same is true for other technology I love, like Apple’s Mac OS X and iPod interfaces or my TiVo: there are many ways to do those particular jobs, and what sets these products apart is their thoughtful solution to the problem at hand.

And sometimes such a thoughtful solution can be pretty jarring, like how I thought my previous Mac — the G4 iMac with swivel arm-mounted LCD — was strange and alienating until I got to use it and see how much it could improve on every computer I had ever used before.

If Campfire has easy file sharing, then it already solves one major problem I have: AIM file transfers do not work on the AT&T Yahoo DSL I’m stuck with at work, so those of us in the office (or me and my friends) can pile into a Campfire chat and collaborate.

The Oscars Game has been on for 27 hours now, and things are looking fierce. I’ll be making the final prizes announcement later this week, and meanwhile I have decided on the final scoring structure for 2006 and launched a new feature: Tip Sheets. A Tip Sheet is, well, a page full of tips — that is, bits of trivia that may prove useful in making your Oscar predictions.

Tip Sheets also include a table showing what percentage of Oscars Game players have picked a given nominee — for example, right now Brokeback Mountain has 70.8% of all picks in the Best Picture category right now. The key to Oscars Game success is breaking away from the peloton: it’s not about getting them all right, but getting more categories right than your opponents. In my experience, that means being better-informed and more willing to go out on a limb with a gut prediction.

The Tip Sheet will show you how close a particular race is — for example, the Tip Sheet for Best Actress is currently showing Reese Witherspoon (Walk The Line) and Felicity Huffman (Transamerica) in a virtual dead heat. So that may be a category where you want to apply some strategy: maybe create three Pick Sets, pick Felicity on two of them and Reese on the third. Not that I’m suggesting necessarily that you should do that or that I have done that — I’m just saying you could do that.

By the end of the week I plan to start using the Tip Sheets to collate tips, including the nominations and winners from other awards shows, and I’ll be adding a comments feature so people can post their own suggestions (or misdirections) and, like, talk to each other and shit. In the meantime, you’ve got live statistics on each category. Enjoy.

If you’re reading this on the home page today, you’ll notice that I’ve changed some things around. This is not the much-talked-about February redesign — that’s still in the works. The February relaunch is getting somewhat more ambitious (as in, switching to a new blogging system sort of ambitious) and there are some design problems I’d like to fix now. So I’ve decided to give the homepage a makeover to both give you readers a preview of what’s coming and to make the site homepage a little easier to deal with.

The biggest changes are:

• Typography: The main blog font is now a bit smaller, but with extra spacing. The result is (I hope) a more readable blog that looks good on both Mac and Windows.

  The Windows thing is important, as it turns out 45% of my traffic comes from Windows IE users. That’s a really low number relative to the internets as a whole, but still a significant enough number for me to want to really, really focus on making my site IE-friendly.

• Navigation: The drop-down menus and recent entries list from the footer has been bumped over to the right-hand column, and the affiliate links and ads are currently banished from the homepage. I’m a greedy sumbitch, so there will intermittently be ads or referral links somewhere on the home page. But for right now I’m focusing on making sure the site is easy to use.

  I’ve also adopted the “industry standard” feed icon used by Firefox and the just-released Internet Explorer 7 beta, although I’ll probably cut my own version that’s somewhat less standard but still recognizable and more in line with the aesthetic of the site.

• Tags (sort of): At the bottom of every post there is now a tags bar, with links to Technorati.

Like so much in life, this design is not final, and I will probably make some major changes/additions to it very soon. But until then, enjoy the navigation improvements and send me your questions and comments.

The President’s State of the Union Address last night was, like, 7,000 words long. That is way too long to be easily digested by an American body politic desperate for shorter, easier, more vacuous statements from its public leaders.

And so as a public service, Practicalmadness has gone through the text of the SOTU and — in the tradition of the great Jean-Luc Godard — cut out the boring bits.

We give you the abridged State of the Union.

The President’s State of the Union Address (Abridged)

America is addicted to oil, and some of that oil comes from the Persian Gulf region, where there is some vague unrest caused by evildoers and ruffians who (a) pose a constant threat to all American citizens and indeed the entire American way of life, and (b) are in their last throes of insurgency in Iraq. As such, American industry may want to kinda sorta start looking at alternative energy sources.

Regarding Iraq, there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second guessing is not a strategy.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter what assumptions we were operating under when we went to Iraq, whether they were false or not, intentionally or not — now that we’re there, we’ve got to let our boys in uniform see this thing through to the bitter end. Oh, right, and the Iraqis too. A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison, would put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country and show that a pledge from America means little. Lemme give you an example: we all know Americans have no intention of giving up their SUVs and monster trucks, which is why my administration has stonewalled the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — because America keeps its promises to its allies, and only makes the promises it can keep.

Abroad, our nation is committed to a historic long-term goal. We seek the end of tyranny in our world. Which is why we must continue the program of indefinite detention without charges, secret prisons and secret, warrantless surveillance, to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected Al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America. Appropriate members of Congress have been kept informed, and it’s their fault if the government doing something illegal and they didn’t say anything about it when they got the memo.

Speaking of which, America respects the people of Iran, and we respect your right to choose your own future and win your own freedom. And our nation hopes one day to be the closest of friends with a free and democratic Iran. So, like, get to it, Iranian people — you know what to do. Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Wink wink, kill your leaders, nudge nudge?

Finally, it has been brought to my attention that some Americans are finding it difficult to prosper in the current economic circumstances. The American economy is as robust as it’s ever been — why, ExxonMobil just posted the largest annual profit in U.S. history — so clearly the problem is that the skills of American workers just aren’t competitive enough in today’s job market. So we need more money spent on scientific research, and more money spent on our schools. Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers to lead Advanced Placement courses in math and science, so that kids in privileged white communities will all have the best possible shot at success in life.

Fellow citizens, we’ve been called to leadership in a period of consequence. We’ve entered a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite, and I’m sorry but I have never heard that word ‘exacerbate’ in my life.

Sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore. Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing. Lincoln could have accepted peace at the cost of disunity and continued slavery. Martin Luther King could have stopped at Birmingham or at Selma and achieved only half a victory over segregation. My administration could have focused on alleviating the pain of racial discrimination in America’s cities, or at least fixed some fucking levees. But that’s history, and this is today. Today, having come far in our own historical journey, we must decide: will we turn back or finish well?

Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage. Therefore books are irrelevant, as are facts, figures, evidence and needless criticism. We will lead freedom’s advance. We will compete and excel in the global economy. We will renew the defining moral commitments of this land. And so we move forward — optimistic about our country, faithful to its cause and confident of victories to come.

Except against hurricanes. Cause, like, damn.