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First class day done.
Jan. 5th, 2007 01:54 amOne class looks like it’ll be tough but bearable, the other class looks like it’s going to try and drown me in paper and then sneak assignments in while I wasn’t looking. I think I’m going to need a good three-ring binder for that one. Ordered my books, though, so those should arrive with sufficient time to read. And then next week begins, and I’m at the class thing for real. Also going to try my best at picking up pocket change/possible BC funds/ACen funds doing what I may be least suited to doing - referee work. (chuckle)
Oh, look. Gigantic ice scultupres. We could have some of our own. that is, assuming we got snow instead of the rain we’ve been getting for a while now. It’ll be March when the blizzards arrive, I guess, late from getting held up in Colorado. It’s getting to the point where all the snowmen are made of concrete.
Reaching out to the new Congress, either in earnest or in a calculated political move, Mr Bush outlines what he wants to do with the incoming Congress. In other Congressional matters, The House of Representatives will now be working a five-day week, according to the new Speaker’s schedule. How interesting - legislators staying at work to, y’know, legislate. Maybe they’ll start earning the money they make. I’d like to see Congresspersons and Presidents making minimum wage and having to work as long and as many days as the average American, too, and see if that won’t instill in them an appreciation for getting good wage and time off.
The Book of Lists, a book that holds facts that you may or may not have ever wanted to know, in a list-like format. So when those odd trivia questions appear, you can rattle off things like 14 Nations With More Sheep Than People with a grin. The Book of Lists might be a very useful thing for my collection. Maybe I’ll have to see about getting one at some point. Speaking of lists, here’s Wired's list of coder resolutions for the new year. I might have to follow some of them, with this web page design class.
Taking things perhaps a little too far, iPod is inspiration for a 24-story tall iPad. Yep. A building modeled after the design of an MP3 player. Now tell me, do all the people who walk in turn immediately into white earbud-sporting shadows of themselves?
A 14-year old British boy sails into the record books by piloting Cheeky Monkey across the Atlantic solo. Skipped school to do so, but his father was not too far behind, so he couldn’t skip out on anything else.
Popular Mechanics talks about what librarians and archivists already are trying to solve - how do you keep old data readable? Migration forward is a good idea. Emulation backward has some advantages, sure. Truth be told, though, we’re already losing data at a rapid rate. We have to make decisions on what we think is going to be important to our descendants. I wonder how wrong our guesses are going to be.
The next generation of robots up from Aibo and Furby will be more expensive - but as Wired reports, it's probably going to be a lot more lifelike. Pleo is the next step in developing companions. Although I’d really appreciate that robotic chair that gets discussed at the end of the article.
A missionary walks in the places that most people avoid, bringing Zen to the populace. I’m not entirely sure that “missionary” is the right word to use, but I am going for the dissonance that happens between “missionary” and “Zen” for most people.
If you’ve ever wanted to call a company and get a human, but keep getting lost in menu after menu after menu of automated messages, then Gethuman.com may be your salvation, as it demonstrates the fine arts of confusing or engaging the machine sufficiently that you receive a human to help you with your problems or queries. (Link is to United States corporations and numbers. There may be other sequences for other countries.)
I’m not sure how to caption this. But it appears that if a senior accept Medicaid help for senior citizen care, then the state you are in is obligated to try and recover the costs of caring for them from their estate. This has, understandably, caused significant alarm. What’s even worse, is that all of these assets seized, on average, amounts to about 1% of the total cost paid out in support care. The government seizes assets for 1% of the costs. At that point, I think it would be safe to say that it’s not worth the hassle. Even more so, though, the cost of care is bankrupting the children. (NYTimes) Some are delaying their own retirements, borrowing against their own assets, and potentially running themselves into the ground because they want to take care of their parents, and there’s really no help forthcoming from anywhere - not insurance, nor government programs.
Health care is, as always, expensive. David J. Bordeaux suggests, however, that if we stop thinking of medical care as a human right, it will get significantly cheaper. His reasoning suggests that people will use medicine more sparingly, knowing that they won’t have such things as insurance from either employers or government sources and all of their costs will be out-of-pocket. In that way, he reasons, waste goes down, the market takes over, and prices drop of their own accord because of competition. While I can see the wisdom of prices going down, simply because there won’t be insurance to make inflated bills to, I don’t think I can go along with the premise that prices will go down due to market forces. Even simple medical procedures are expensive, as I found out, shelling out $100 to be given a scrip and see a doc or two because my insurance didn’t have me covered when the bill came due. We’re paying for the debts of med school, among other things, when we get those costs. Is there a logical fault somewhere, either in his argument or in mine? Cheaper medicine would be a benefit to everybody, especially if we could get it to be cheaper worldwide.
I’m more convinced that LiveJournal has some sort of embedded Trackback or similar feature, as I got an IM from one of the people I recently linked to thanking me for citing him. Which always brings up the question “Just how did you manage to find that?” Either that, or I’m good enough that I’m starting to make impacts on server logs from people who follow my links. Which is a really scary thought - wielding actual Intarwebs power, even unconsciously, would only make me more nervous in front of the readership.
Last appearing is something that probably deserves more thought on wider subjects than what it was posted to. It’s a definition of "fluffiness" in paganism, but I think several of the precepts there could be applied to other places. I wonder if in other places there are similar definitions and attitudes towards those starting out, or those who persist in being “fluffy” for whatever reason. In some places, though, the attitude tends to take a harder eye at people who want to be “EXTREME HARDCORE X” and try to motivate the fluffies into becoming more like them. This seems to be a pretty good case of two factions pulling in their opposed directions. Is this the norm for social/religious/etc groups, or so I just have a knack at being able to pay attention to groups that do have that tug-of-war going on?
So tell me about your experiences with fluffs, or the hardcore, or whatever. I’m curious.
Oh, look. Gigantic ice scultupres. We could have some of our own. that is, assuming we got snow instead of the rain we’ve been getting for a while now. It’ll be March when the blizzards arrive, I guess, late from getting held up in Colorado. It’s getting to the point where all the snowmen are made of concrete.
Reaching out to the new Congress, either in earnest or in a calculated political move, Mr Bush outlines what he wants to do with the incoming Congress. In other Congressional matters, The House of Representatives will now be working a five-day week, according to the new Speaker’s schedule. How interesting - legislators staying at work to, y’know, legislate. Maybe they’ll start earning the money they make. I’d like to see Congresspersons and Presidents making minimum wage and having to work as long and as many days as the average American, too, and see if that won’t instill in them an appreciation for getting good wage and time off.
The Book of Lists, a book that holds facts that you may or may not have ever wanted to know, in a list-like format. So when those odd trivia questions appear, you can rattle off things like 14 Nations With More Sheep Than People with a grin. The Book of Lists might be a very useful thing for my collection. Maybe I’ll have to see about getting one at some point. Speaking of lists, here’s Wired's list of coder resolutions for the new year. I might have to follow some of them, with this web page design class.
Taking things perhaps a little too far, iPod is inspiration for a 24-story tall iPad. Yep. A building modeled after the design of an MP3 player. Now tell me, do all the people who walk in turn immediately into white earbud-sporting shadows of themselves?
A 14-year old British boy sails into the record books by piloting Cheeky Monkey across the Atlantic solo. Skipped school to do so, but his father was not too far behind, so he couldn’t skip out on anything else.
Popular Mechanics talks about what librarians and archivists already are trying to solve - how do you keep old data readable? Migration forward is a good idea. Emulation backward has some advantages, sure. Truth be told, though, we’re already losing data at a rapid rate. We have to make decisions on what we think is going to be important to our descendants. I wonder how wrong our guesses are going to be.
The next generation of robots up from Aibo and Furby will be more expensive - but as Wired reports, it's probably going to be a lot more lifelike. Pleo is the next step in developing companions. Although I’d really appreciate that robotic chair that gets discussed at the end of the article.
A missionary walks in the places that most people avoid, bringing Zen to the populace. I’m not entirely sure that “missionary” is the right word to use, but I am going for the dissonance that happens between “missionary” and “Zen” for most people.
If you’ve ever wanted to call a company and get a human, but keep getting lost in menu after menu after menu of automated messages, then Gethuman.com may be your salvation, as it demonstrates the fine arts of confusing or engaging the machine sufficiently that you receive a human to help you with your problems or queries. (Link is to United States corporations and numbers. There may be other sequences for other countries.)
I’m not sure how to caption this. But it appears that if a senior accept Medicaid help for senior citizen care, then the state you are in is obligated to try and recover the costs of caring for them from their estate. This has, understandably, caused significant alarm. What’s even worse, is that all of these assets seized, on average, amounts to about 1% of the total cost paid out in support care. The government seizes assets for 1% of the costs. At that point, I think it would be safe to say that it’s not worth the hassle. Even more so, though, the cost of care is bankrupting the children. (NYTimes) Some are delaying their own retirements, borrowing against their own assets, and potentially running themselves into the ground because they want to take care of their parents, and there’s really no help forthcoming from anywhere - not insurance, nor government programs.
Health care is, as always, expensive. David J. Bordeaux suggests, however, that if we stop thinking of medical care as a human right, it will get significantly cheaper. His reasoning suggests that people will use medicine more sparingly, knowing that they won’t have such things as insurance from either employers or government sources and all of their costs will be out-of-pocket. In that way, he reasons, waste goes down, the market takes over, and prices drop of their own accord because of competition. While I can see the wisdom of prices going down, simply because there won’t be insurance to make inflated bills to, I don’t think I can go along with the premise that prices will go down due to market forces. Even simple medical procedures are expensive, as I found out, shelling out $100 to be given a scrip and see a doc or two because my insurance didn’t have me covered when the bill came due. We’re paying for the debts of med school, among other things, when we get those costs. Is there a logical fault somewhere, either in his argument or in mine? Cheaper medicine would be a benefit to everybody, especially if we could get it to be cheaper worldwide.
I’m more convinced that LiveJournal has some sort of embedded Trackback or similar feature, as I got an IM from one of the people I recently linked to thanking me for citing him. Which always brings up the question “Just how did you manage to find that?” Either that, or I’m good enough that I’m starting to make impacts on server logs from people who follow my links. Which is a really scary thought - wielding actual Intarwebs power, even unconsciously, would only make me more nervous in front of the readership.
Last appearing is something that probably deserves more thought on wider subjects than what it was posted to. It’s a definition of "fluffiness" in paganism, but I think several of the precepts there could be applied to other places. I wonder if in other places there are similar definitions and attitudes towards those starting out, or those who persist in being “fluffy” for whatever reason. In some places, though, the attitude tends to take a harder eye at people who want to be “EXTREME HARDCORE X” and try to motivate the fluffies into becoming more like them. This seems to be a pretty good case of two factions pulling in their opposed directions. Is this the norm for social/religious/etc groups, or so I just have a knack at being able to pay attention to groups that do have that tug-of-war going on?
So tell me about your experiences with fluffs, or the hardcore, or whatever. I’m curious.
