Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2007-05-16 11:40 pm
silveradept) wrote2007-05-16 11:40 pm
The grind continues - 16 May 2007
It’s sort of evolved into a waiting game, now, where I look for something, send in something, then wait to see if they even acknowledge my presence or not. This is probably how the job market works for everyone, and now I get to see it firsthand. I suppose it’s the first major “setback” I’ve had so far, in the sense of “would like this, am actively trying hard to get it, and have had no luck”. Hope springs eternal, because there’s a telephone interview tomorrow for me in the morning. I hope this one turns out to be worth something.
The daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Yolanda King, died yesterday . Which sort of says something. Upon Falwell’s death, I knew about it almost immediately - there was some delay on Yolanda King’s death. Priorities in this country, maybe? Or just what’s news and what’s going to be next in line to be news.
Jesus’ General had a special guest contributor to mark the occasion of Jerry Falwell’s death - a eulogy written by Tinky-Winky, which, if you read it well, says a lot about other figures and their orientations. Some of them may still be unrepentant. In a more serious note, Ameicans United for Separation of church and State had a few words to say about the occasion, mostly formal. It’s a fairly sober statement. With as much as Falwell’s type of Christianity is vilified, I would have thought stronger words would have been said.
The Pope certainly wasn’t mincing any words when he said that natives in South America were “silently longing” for Christianity and the conquerors from Europe. The reaction to such remarks has been to wonder what Ratzinger was smoking when he said such a thing, not just from the natives but from Catholic priests as well. Sounds like Catholicism’s getting a good dose of fundamentalism, too.
Perhaps because of people like Falwell, there are members of other religious groups that still keep their faith a secret, because they fear consequences. Those described for the most part are social consequences, but it’s not too far of a flight of fancy to see how social consequences could translate into physical consequences, with teasing of children or job threats or perhaps a “performance-related” dismissal of some sort. The current climate is not very conducive to anyone other than Christians being open about their religion. Which is sad.
The BBC also reports that gender discrimination is still a significant problem for girls and women worldwide, starting at conception (for son-heavy cultures) all the way through their lives. Educating girls and holding to the conventions, treaties, and agreements already in place are big steps needed to help stop gender discrimination.
Politically speaking, the Republican Party candidates continued to unveil their plans for the Presidency in their second debate. Mitt Romney wants a bigger Guantanamo, several candidates are accusing each other of not being conservative enough, and Rudy Guliani says that the party needs to get united around a candidate that can beat Hillary, namely him, rather than focus on issues. There was even a candidate, Representative Ron Paul, who blamed the 11 September attacks on the United States’s involvement in Iraq in 1991. Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the Republican party, these are the people who want to be the next President.
The Airport security procedures are supposed to help us feel safe and stop terrorists, right? Well, A news crew crafted some fake IDs and manages to get through security checkpoints using them. Many of which, if you stopped and looked at them, would probably not actually look like any ID at all. This probably proves one of the maxims of pulling off a good con - if you look like you know what you’re doing, and don’t show that you’re trying to pull one over on someone, it probably works. The props just have to look close to the real thing. Speaking of terrorism, a trapped cache of weapons and explosives were found, thought to be used for an attack, were found... in Alabama. Six men were arrested for the matter, and the country is reminded that not all threats and violence come from an outer source, and many of them may not have anything to do with Islam.
The police in Australia are having similar troubles that the police in America have when it comes to the mentally ill - much of their training is to shoot threats first, rather than negotiate with them. The examples cited in the article, however, are ones where there was likely a justifiable cause for it, namely “has a weapon and intends to do harm to the officer”. I guess that this additional training is supposed to be for those situations before there are active threats to the officers. Good luck. It would just be nice if every country had a mental health system that could handle both the people who can be cured and the people who can’t and not leave them out on the streets to suffer.
Programming is getting easier to learn. The Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails framework made it somewhat easy for me to build an application that did what I wanted it to, and I learned this in the course of 14 weeks or so. MIT is aiming for a younger crowd by introducing Scratch, a programming language intended for grade-schoolers that uses jigsaw-shaped pieces to represent programming concepts. By putting the pieces together in the right order, the code can be executed.
A different kind of art, one that might trigger some memories for people who have had to wear them, or been in places where they would have been useful - a gas mask becomes a shower head. I don’t think I really would want to bathe from that. Something a little more plebian, perhaps.
Next to last is something that is probably making too much of a silly thing - but then again, serious analysis of silly things often results in new knowledge. Silly analysis of serious things often results in new ways of thinking, so they work with each other. Anyway, it’s basically a longwinded and circular introduction to the link between slang, l33t, image macros, and lolcats, relating all of them together in a geeky and possibly linguistic sort of way. I like it, and I think that maybe this serious analysis of the silly is worth something. Who knows? Maybe we’ll start being able to predict what the next subculture language will be.
The last thing for tonight is both cute and scary - namely a character that looks like a very young girl performing wrestling chokeslams. Since I can’t read the language in question, I have no idea whether the girl is young or just looks it.
Anyway, got to go to bed - early interview tomorrow. What I’ll do afterward, I don’t know. But it’ll probably be entertaining.
The daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Yolanda King, died yesterday . Which sort of says something. Upon Falwell’s death, I knew about it almost immediately - there was some delay on Yolanda King’s death. Priorities in this country, maybe? Or just what’s news and what’s going to be next in line to be news.
Jesus’ General had a special guest contributor to mark the occasion of Jerry Falwell’s death - a eulogy written by Tinky-Winky, which, if you read it well, says a lot about other figures and their orientations. Some of them may still be unrepentant. In a more serious note, Ameicans United for Separation of church and State had a few words to say about the occasion, mostly formal. It’s a fairly sober statement. With as much as Falwell’s type of Christianity is vilified, I would have thought stronger words would have been said.
The Pope certainly wasn’t mincing any words when he said that natives in South America were “silently longing” for Christianity and the conquerors from Europe. The reaction to such remarks has been to wonder what Ratzinger was smoking when he said such a thing, not just from the natives but from Catholic priests as well. Sounds like Catholicism’s getting a good dose of fundamentalism, too.
Perhaps because of people like Falwell, there are members of other religious groups that still keep their faith a secret, because they fear consequences. Those described for the most part are social consequences, but it’s not too far of a flight of fancy to see how social consequences could translate into physical consequences, with teasing of children or job threats or perhaps a “performance-related” dismissal of some sort. The current climate is not very conducive to anyone other than Christians being open about their religion. Which is sad.
The BBC also reports that gender discrimination is still a significant problem for girls and women worldwide, starting at conception (for son-heavy cultures) all the way through their lives. Educating girls and holding to the conventions, treaties, and agreements already in place are big steps needed to help stop gender discrimination.
Politically speaking, the Republican Party candidates continued to unveil their plans for the Presidency in their second debate. Mitt Romney wants a bigger Guantanamo, several candidates are accusing each other of not being conservative enough, and Rudy Guliani says that the party needs to get united around a candidate that can beat Hillary, namely him, rather than focus on issues. There was even a candidate, Representative Ron Paul, who blamed the 11 September attacks on the United States’s involvement in Iraq in 1991. Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the Republican party, these are the people who want to be the next President.
The Airport security procedures are supposed to help us feel safe and stop terrorists, right? Well, A news crew crafted some fake IDs and manages to get through security checkpoints using them. Many of which, if you stopped and looked at them, would probably not actually look like any ID at all. This probably proves one of the maxims of pulling off a good con - if you look like you know what you’re doing, and don’t show that you’re trying to pull one over on someone, it probably works. The props just have to look close to the real thing. Speaking of terrorism, a trapped cache of weapons and explosives were found, thought to be used for an attack, were found... in Alabama. Six men were arrested for the matter, and the country is reminded that not all threats and violence come from an outer source, and many of them may not have anything to do with Islam.
The police in Australia are having similar troubles that the police in America have when it comes to the mentally ill - much of their training is to shoot threats first, rather than negotiate with them. The examples cited in the article, however, are ones where there was likely a justifiable cause for it, namely “has a weapon and intends to do harm to the officer”. I guess that this additional training is supposed to be for those situations before there are active threats to the officers. Good luck. It would just be nice if every country had a mental health system that could handle both the people who can be cured and the people who can’t and not leave them out on the streets to suffer.
Programming is getting easier to learn. The Ruby language and the Ruby on Rails framework made it somewhat easy for me to build an application that did what I wanted it to, and I learned this in the course of 14 weeks or so. MIT is aiming for a younger crowd by introducing Scratch, a programming language intended for grade-schoolers that uses jigsaw-shaped pieces to represent programming concepts. By putting the pieces together in the right order, the code can be executed.
A different kind of art, one that might trigger some memories for people who have had to wear them, or been in places where they would have been useful - a gas mask becomes a shower head. I don’t think I really would want to bathe from that. Something a little more plebian, perhaps.
Next to last is something that is probably making too much of a silly thing - but then again, serious analysis of silly things often results in new knowledge. Silly analysis of serious things often results in new ways of thinking, so they work with each other. Anyway, it’s basically a longwinded and circular introduction to the link between slang, l33t, image macros, and lolcats, relating all of them together in a geeky and possibly linguistic sort of way. I like it, and I think that maybe this serious analysis of the silly is worth something. Who knows? Maybe we’ll start being able to predict what the next subculture language will be.
The last thing for tonight is both cute and scary - namely a character that looks like a very young girl performing wrestling chokeslams. Since I can’t read the language in question, I have no idea whether the girl is young or just looks it.
Anyway, got to go to bed - early interview tomorrow. What I’ll do afterward, I don’t know. But it’ll probably be entertaining.
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Have teh best
-=TK
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It bothers me that women get discriminated against. I'm sure every single woman I know, regardless of their race, could probably tell a story about being discriminated. And what for? If there are no girls, then who do the boys marry and who has the children? And don't get me started on how if someone is really that upset over having agirl, they ought to go blame the man since it's his sperm that makes the gender! Everything used to be by the "Mother right" and women were in charge, women picked their mates, women were the ones who had several lovers...and then the Christians showed up and battled and told them it was wrong....but that's a rant for another time.
....and that sure is one interesting showerhead. A little on the creepy side, and I hope they cleaned that sucker thoroughly before using it, but, uhm, yay for being resourceful?
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And then you wonder why I think everything ought to be equal. If everyone truly believed and lived that old "do unto others as you would have done to you" phrase, I think things would be a lot better off.
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