Perhaps a productive day? - 17 May 2007
May. 18th, 2007 02:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptI say perhaps because I don’t know if any actual work was done. I did a telephone interview, I got another rejection without an interview, I got a reimbursement for the Pizza Hut I ate on the way down to Barrington. The memory I ordered arrived, and I stuck that in my computer, so now it’s running a nice 2GB of system memory, and the difference is obvious. Should have done this earlier. It’s very nice to switch between programs without having to wait a minute for things to load. Oh, and I re/tagged my MP3 collection, for the most part. I had the time on my hands. I watched the hockey game, too. So in that sense it could have been a productive day... but I didn’t do anything that would earn a paycheck. But, I kept myself busy, and so I suppose it was a productive day in that sense.
Someone took their drawing skills to Bill Watterson’s source material and produced a Calvin and Hobbes animated short. The animation and drawing is true to the Watterson style. The voicing, could use some work, but for two and a half minutes or so, it’s not a bad job. I don’t think Watterson would ever go the animation route, though...
Wonder why some books take off and some don’t? So does the publishing industry, relying on their intuition and not really going and doing any research on what kinds of books people would like. So I guess it really is a crapshoot as to whether or not anyone gets published these days.
Google now has a combination search that will get videoes, images, and maps along with text pages. So Google’s gone meta on itself. If the new search style turns out to be more helpful, maybe we’ll see it introduced as the default Google search?
Even before it's been released, the new HD-DVD encryption key/scheme has been decoded. It can’t have been brute-forced, so I wonder how they got it this time - but this probably means another round of cat-and-mouse as the AACS try to find a way of getting a key that won’t be cracked immediately. Good luck on that.
Having worked in the library, as well as knowing that libraries are committed to free speech, the account of a veteran being arrested for writing his protests to military recruitment is a very difficult situation. The right to conduct one’s business in a public space contrasted with the right to voice one’s protests to that business. It’s very difficult. The library most likely has a policy of some sort with regard to this, but unless the vet was creating a serious disturbance, I don’t fully understand why the arrest was made. Inside the military, specifically in the hospitals, A Navy veteran complained that an Iowa City facility almost continuously proselytized Christianity to him. As a Jewish patient, he was not interested, and claims that he wasn’t able to eat some times because nobody at the hospital would provide or prepare kosher food. We’re lucky that someone didn’t refuse him treatment because of his religion. In other religiously-related news, it’s kind of apparent by now, but there are organizations, like Capitol Ministries here, that would love nothing more than to see all elected and appointed government officials spouting their brand of Christianity, several of which are actively trying to recruit more into their fold. Although, either I’m not looking in the right places, or having a religiously fanatical president isn’t actually working all that well for pushing the agenda.
A good idea gets put to a worse use - an anonymous infant-drop service, hoping to curb abandonment of babies in parks and supermarkets, had a preschool-age boy dropped off on its first day of service . Apparently, his father brought him to the place and then left him there. Poor kid. The Japanese authorities are worried that others might decide to do the same. Really, though, to do something like that, the birth parents should go through adoption procedures, rather than just leaving the kid there.
A bad idea being put to use at all is the way that the National Organization of Women describes "Parental Alienation Syndrome", a pseudoscience that takes as its causes the presence of “programming” by a parent to get their children to hate and say anything so that the programming parent can get control of the children. “Programming” apparently includes allegations of abuse, physical or sexual, and the more that a child has those thoughts or the more the legal system works to get the father away from the children, the more that PAS is present, apparently. The more likely it is that the abusive parent is abusive, the more that someone sees PAS. At no point is the psychiatric condition of the non-programming parent examined or any inquiries made into incidents of abuse that may have occurred at the hands of the non-“programming” parent. I don’t understand how this even survives, since it makes no sense.
The Village Voice gives us a peek at how Rudy Guliani treated and was treated by the Yankees while he was mayor as an insight into what kind of President he would be, and the results are not good, involving lots of gifts and seats and amendments to the Yankees’ lease agreements. Certainly... interesting. The Hill offers something up from the other side of the aisle, with the chair of the Rules Committee possibly having not recused herself from conflicts of interest while on one of the subcommittees, which would certainly be a twist.The deeper you looke, the more the politicians start showing off skeletons and secrets.
What we leave with, however, is a village building a podium so that people can use mobile phones - the spot with signal is two feet above their heads in a specific locale in the village. So climb up and speak up! I’m going to bed.
Someone took their drawing skills to Bill Watterson’s source material and produced a Calvin and Hobbes animated short. The animation and drawing is true to the Watterson style. The voicing, could use some work, but for two and a half minutes or so, it’s not a bad job. I don’t think Watterson would ever go the animation route, though...
Wonder why some books take off and some don’t? So does the publishing industry, relying on their intuition and not really going and doing any research on what kinds of books people would like. So I guess it really is a crapshoot as to whether or not anyone gets published these days.
Google now has a combination search that will get videoes, images, and maps along with text pages. So Google’s gone meta on itself. If the new search style turns out to be more helpful, maybe we’ll see it introduced as the default Google search?
Even before it's been released, the new HD-DVD encryption key/scheme has been decoded. It can’t have been brute-forced, so I wonder how they got it this time - but this probably means another round of cat-and-mouse as the AACS try to find a way of getting a key that won’t be cracked immediately. Good luck on that.
Having worked in the library, as well as knowing that libraries are committed to free speech, the account of a veteran being arrested for writing his protests to military recruitment is a very difficult situation. The right to conduct one’s business in a public space contrasted with the right to voice one’s protests to that business. It’s very difficult. The library most likely has a policy of some sort with regard to this, but unless the vet was creating a serious disturbance, I don’t fully understand why the arrest was made. Inside the military, specifically in the hospitals, A Navy veteran complained that an Iowa City facility almost continuously proselytized Christianity to him. As a Jewish patient, he was not interested, and claims that he wasn’t able to eat some times because nobody at the hospital would provide or prepare kosher food. We’re lucky that someone didn’t refuse him treatment because of his religion. In other religiously-related news, it’s kind of apparent by now, but there are organizations, like Capitol Ministries here, that would love nothing more than to see all elected and appointed government officials spouting their brand of Christianity, several of which are actively trying to recruit more into their fold. Although, either I’m not looking in the right places, or having a religiously fanatical president isn’t actually working all that well for pushing the agenda.
A good idea gets put to a worse use - an anonymous infant-drop service, hoping to curb abandonment of babies in parks and supermarkets, had a preschool-age boy dropped off on its first day of service . Apparently, his father brought him to the place and then left him there. Poor kid. The Japanese authorities are worried that others might decide to do the same. Really, though, to do something like that, the birth parents should go through adoption procedures, rather than just leaving the kid there.
A bad idea being put to use at all is the way that the National Organization of Women describes "Parental Alienation Syndrome", a pseudoscience that takes as its causes the presence of “programming” by a parent to get their children to hate and say anything so that the programming parent can get control of the children. “Programming” apparently includes allegations of abuse, physical or sexual, and the more that a child has those thoughts or the more the legal system works to get the father away from the children, the more that PAS is present, apparently. The more likely it is that the abusive parent is abusive, the more that someone sees PAS. At no point is the psychiatric condition of the non-programming parent examined or any inquiries made into incidents of abuse that may have occurred at the hands of the non-“programming” parent. I don’t understand how this even survives, since it makes no sense.
The Village Voice gives us a peek at how Rudy Guliani treated and was treated by the Yankees while he was mayor as an insight into what kind of President he would be, and the results are not good, involving lots of gifts and seats and amendments to the Yankees’ lease agreements. Certainly... interesting. The Hill offers something up from the other side of the aisle, with the chair of the Rules Committee possibly having not recused herself from conflicts of interest while on one of the subcommittees, which would certainly be a twist.The deeper you looke, the more the politicians start showing off skeletons and secrets.
What we leave with, however, is a village building a podium so that people can use mobile phones - the spot with signal is two feet above their heads in a specific locale in the village. So climb up and speak up! I’m going to bed.
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a crapshoot
Date: 2007-05-18 10:20 am (UTC)"Adventures in the Screen Trade": Perhaps the most famous quotation from the book is “Nobody Knows Anything”. It is one of his two “Roman numeral 'I's” and is repeated throughout the book. Now widely-quoted, it is often inaccurately used to suggest that Hollywood executives are stupid, but in fact refers to William Goldman's strong belief that, prior to a movie's release, Hollywood has no real idea how well a film will do.
~M~
no subject
Date: 2007-05-18 06:39 pm (UTC)