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One less lecture - 12 April 2007
Apr. 13th, 2007 12:06 amI had another class come to a close today. Only one more lecture before it’s all done, and there’s only one more assignment to turn in. Most of what I’m doing is cleaning and prettifying and making CSS do my bidding, rather than trying to implement new functionality. I did pick up a few tricks, though, some of which reduced my database access, others which made my code less weighty yet still able to pull off what I want. What I really need is for someone to proofread my code and make suggestions on where it can be improved. Twice now I’ve gotten back suggestions to make my code tighter, but no specific suggestions. I may pester the extra lab sessions, then. If there aren’t any that conflict with other things, that is. Instruction time here is a good, good thing. And every time I go to lab, something not covered in lecture is shown that makes me wonder just how far the Rails rabbit hole goes.
Anna Weggel sums up pretty well what graduation and the time afterward will likely be like. Not Following the Money is as much about coming to terms that just out of college... you learn to live on nothing and go up from there. I feel like that’s a distinct possibility for me, too. At least until the loans are paid off. And by then, I’ll be used to it, so I can put the extra money away for retirement.
The lead article for today is not a joke, although one could probably preface it with something like “So a Rabbi and an Imam walk into a bar...” A Muslim and a Jew, and their friendship as they grew up, a friendship that continues. It can be done - people can be religious and devout and still get along with other and see each other as people. It’s not a foregone conclusion that both will be spending their time trying to destroy each other. Even people who adamantly maintain that Islam's radicals are getting out of control aren’t saying that everyone’s a radical. And that it’s a relatively small percentage, too. So somehow we need to get the radicals on all sides away from the explosives. The friendship between the two is also a much better outcome than the reported incident of an Illinois police officer beating and saying obscenities to an Arab man after the police officer told him to park his nonfunctioning van on the driveway in his garage. The source is obviously inclined to bias, though, so some corroboration from an independent news source would be nice.
Politics, politics. This should make a lot of blood boil over. Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts have been mishandled, resulting in the loss of data, according to the White House. The accounts may have been used to conduct skullduggery and avoid mandatory archiving, and now some amount of those e-mails has been lost. As noted, this sounds a lot like “the dog ate my homework”.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nebris links to a summary object from AfterDowningStreet.org that says the subpoenas may start getting teeth very, very soon, and that several top officials are slated to testify before Congress. How much spine, fang, and bite the Congress shows will probably determine the quality of the answers they receive.
The continuing saga of the President and his minions makes Gregory Cochran in The American Conservative wonder whether Mr. Bush and his part are from a universe slightly off our own dimensional vibrations.
A Townhall contributor finds out something that liberals have complained about for some time - there are people who would rather shut you up than discuss issues with you. This may be a matter of liberals making the same “mandate” mistake that conservatives did on the last two elections. In any case, now that it’s been experienced, maybe this contributor could help his ideologically-similar people to avoid doing the same thing. (He could probably find fertile ground for his new message in the far-right religious types.) At least all he’s getting is hate mail. It could be worse. He could have had a Legislature demand his blog be changed to bear Jeb Bush's name after he denied Jeb the chance to be a guest blogger. You know, that analogy doesn’t extend quite as well as I thought it would. Still, the Legislature changing the name of the university’s college of education because they wouldn’t give Jeb an honorary degree is reprehensible. (Also, a little funny, that an education college should bear such a name.)
A bomb exploded in the Iraqi Parliament building's cafeteria, killing at least two. The perpetrator had to clear several levels of security to enter the area, and heads are being scratched as to how something like this wasn’t picked up. Not related to this incident, the military tours in Iraq for the army are now possibly 15 months long, with the trade off being a full 12 months back home after the tour. The surge continues to demand much of our troops. I wonder what they would be doing now if Iraq hadn’t been invaded. Would we be stepping up to counteract Afghanistan surges?
This is a nice human-interest story, but I’m not sure whether people would be happy that the kid is born, angry that resources were diverted to rescue the embryos, or some other thing about the birth of a child that was rescued from a fertility clinic when hurricane Katrina hit. The child is yet unknown, either in gender or name.
A different story, involving a child - a kindergartner was arrested for a violent tantrum and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors. Six year old child, charged with crimes. Lots of things all going wrong, looks like. All the kids in the class most likely learned a lesson today. Whether it was a good lesson or a poor one, I don’t know.
Last child-related material - Project Linus, giving security blankets to those who need them. A short snippet in Psychology Today talks about a study that suggests a security blanket can help overcome separation anxiety, in case of an insecure attachment to a parent.
My arteries! My veins! My heart! Fried Butter Balls! Ye gods! That recipe could give someone a heart attack just by looking at it.
Case closed on the Duke lacrosse players - all charges dropped. Apologies being made to the players because of the persistence, apparently in the face of reality and evidence, of the prosecutor in trying to put the crime on the players.
Peeking in at technology bits, Many Eyes, a website designed around having people put together their own visualizations, is launched. You can get visual representation of a concordance of names in the New Testament, for example, or visually see the differences between fast food sandwiches in terms of nutritional (or lack thereof) content. This might do well for the primarily visually-oriented culture we have. Of course, that means they could be subjected to biases in the presentation. Additionally, MySpace is blocking Photobucket from its pages now, which has Ars Technica speculating that it might decide to shell up and not allow any outside content on its servers.
A Flickr pool takes the old and makes it new. There’s more than 12,000 plus pictures, the feed says. So have a look at Wardrobe Remix, and see just what kind of inspiration may strike.
A Charles Dickens theme park. Definitely not Disneyland. Maybe if the characters are influential enough and play their parts well, people will go read the source material. Of course, this could produce the opposite effect, of people believing they’ve read Dickens by going to the theme park. Will the people who have read the source material, though, head to the theme park.
bradhicks gives the world a perfectly good, non God-invoking reason for people to do good in the world: Other people are watching. By showing that people aren’t always looking out for themselves, more people might not look out solely for themselves.
The next-to-last part - Now that Don Imus has been sacked, Media Matters asks us to do the sensible thing and fire all the other bastards on the airwaves - people like Glenn Beck, Neal Boorts, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson. Many of us would like to see this happen, but it’s not likely, because these commentators don’t talk about sports. And probably because they have enough listeners that agree with them that a large outcry to sack them wouldn’t happen.
Last for tonight is this - how work and play should be one. I’m hoping that my work will feel like play all the time. Oh, and also easily mispronounced domain names, current and expired. Because lowbrow humor accompanies highbrow thinking. It’s a rule. No, really.
I’m going to bed now. I don’t have anywhere to go in the morning, but that never really stopped me before. Maybe I’ll get up and do some work on my project. Or something. In a good way.
Anna Weggel sums up pretty well what graduation and the time afterward will likely be like. Not Following the Money is as much about coming to terms that just out of college... you learn to live on nothing and go up from there. I feel like that’s a distinct possibility for me, too. At least until the loans are paid off. And by then, I’ll be used to it, so I can put the extra money away for retirement.
The lead article for today is not a joke, although one could probably preface it with something like “So a Rabbi and an Imam walk into a bar...” A Muslim and a Jew, and their friendship as they grew up, a friendship that continues. It can be done - people can be religious and devout and still get along with other and see each other as people. It’s not a foregone conclusion that both will be spending their time trying to destroy each other. Even people who adamantly maintain that Islam's radicals are getting out of control aren’t saying that everyone’s a radical. And that it’s a relatively small percentage, too. So somehow we need to get the radicals on all sides away from the explosives. The friendship between the two is also a much better outcome than the reported incident of an Illinois police officer beating and saying obscenities to an Arab man after the police officer told him to park his nonfunctioning van on the driveway in his garage. The source is obviously inclined to bias, though, so some corroboration from an independent news source would be nice.
Politics, politics. This should make a lot of blood boil over. Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts have been mishandled, resulting in the loss of data, according to the White House. The accounts may have been used to conduct skullduggery and avoid mandatory archiving, and now some amount of those e-mails has been lost. As noted, this sounds a lot like “the dog ate my homework”.
nebris links to a summary object from AfterDowningStreet.org that says the subpoenas may start getting teeth very, very soon, and that several top officials are slated to testify before Congress. How much spine, fang, and bite the Congress shows will probably determine the quality of the answers they receive.The continuing saga of the President and his minions makes Gregory Cochran in The American Conservative wonder whether Mr. Bush and his part are from a universe slightly off our own dimensional vibrations.
A Townhall contributor finds out something that liberals have complained about for some time - there are people who would rather shut you up than discuss issues with you. This may be a matter of liberals making the same “mandate” mistake that conservatives did on the last two elections. In any case, now that it’s been experienced, maybe this contributor could help his ideologically-similar people to avoid doing the same thing. (He could probably find fertile ground for his new message in the far-right religious types.) At least all he’s getting is hate mail. It could be worse. He could have had a Legislature demand his blog be changed to bear Jeb Bush's name after he denied Jeb the chance to be a guest blogger. You know, that analogy doesn’t extend quite as well as I thought it would. Still, the Legislature changing the name of the university’s college of education because they wouldn’t give Jeb an honorary degree is reprehensible. (Also, a little funny, that an education college should bear such a name.)
A bomb exploded in the Iraqi Parliament building's cafeteria, killing at least two. The perpetrator had to clear several levels of security to enter the area, and heads are being scratched as to how something like this wasn’t picked up. Not related to this incident, the military tours in Iraq for the army are now possibly 15 months long, with the trade off being a full 12 months back home after the tour. The surge continues to demand much of our troops. I wonder what they would be doing now if Iraq hadn’t been invaded. Would we be stepping up to counteract Afghanistan surges?
This is a nice human-interest story, but I’m not sure whether people would be happy that the kid is born, angry that resources were diverted to rescue the embryos, or some other thing about the birth of a child that was rescued from a fertility clinic when hurricane Katrina hit. The child is yet unknown, either in gender or name.
A different story, involving a child - a kindergartner was arrested for a violent tantrum and charged with a felony and two misdemeanors. Six year old child, charged with crimes. Lots of things all going wrong, looks like. All the kids in the class most likely learned a lesson today. Whether it was a good lesson or a poor one, I don’t know.
Last child-related material - Project Linus, giving security blankets to those who need them. A short snippet in Psychology Today talks about a study that suggests a security blanket can help overcome separation anxiety, in case of an insecure attachment to a parent.
My arteries! My veins! My heart! Fried Butter Balls! Ye gods! That recipe could give someone a heart attack just by looking at it.
Case closed on the Duke lacrosse players - all charges dropped. Apologies being made to the players because of the persistence, apparently in the face of reality and evidence, of the prosecutor in trying to put the crime on the players.
Peeking in at technology bits, Many Eyes, a website designed around having people put together their own visualizations, is launched. You can get visual representation of a concordance of names in the New Testament, for example, or visually see the differences between fast food sandwiches in terms of nutritional (or lack thereof) content. This might do well for the primarily visually-oriented culture we have. Of course, that means they could be subjected to biases in the presentation. Additionally, MySpace is blocking Photobucket from its pages now, which has Ars Technica speculating that it might decide to shell up and not allow any outside content on its servers.
A Flickr pool takes the old and makes it new. There’s more than 12,000 plus pictures, the feed says. So have a look at Wardrobe Remix, and see just what kind of inspiration may strike.
A Charles Dickens theme park. Definitely not Disneyland. Maybe if the characters are influential enough and play their parts well, people will go read the source material. Of course, this could produce the opposite effect, of people believing they’ve read Dickens by going to the theme park. Will the people who have read the source material, though, head to the theme park.
bradhicks gives the world a perfectly good, non God-invoking reason for people to do good in the world: Other people are watching. By showing that people aren’t always looking out for themselves, more people might not look out solely for themselves. The next-to-last part - Now that Don Imus has been sacked, Media Matters asks us to do the sensible thing and fire all the other bastards on the airwaves - people like Glenn Beck, Neal Boorts, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson. Many of us would like to see this happen, but it’s not likely, because these commentators don’t talk about sports. And probably because they have enough listeners that agree with them that a large outcry to sack them wouldn’t happen.
Last for tonight is this - how work and play should be one. I’m hoping that my work will feel like play all the time. Oh, and also easily mispronounced domain names, current and expired. Because lowbrow humor accompanies highbrow thinking. It’s a rule. No, really.
I’m going to bed now. I don’t have anywhere to go in the morning, but that never really stopped me before. Maybe I’ll get up and do some work on my project. Or something. In a good way.
