the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I have wanted some way to make posting Amazon affiliate-coded items easier. Now, with ecto‘s handy tagging shortcuts, it’s a snap. Simply look up the item’s ASIN number, copy it to the clipboard, and the %@ token will be replaced when you use the shortcut. (There’s probably a more clever way to get the ASIN number.)
The next logical step is to plug the Amazon web services API into the iTunes “now playing” component so that the “now playing” link pops users over to Amazon rather than Google.
Thinking over the employment situation and reviewing all I’ve read and heard about globalism and outsourcing, I wonder what trades/professions are unlikely to be outsourced? What work doesn’t travel?
Food/agriculture is globalized already, for better or worse. Farmed fish (catfish outranks cotton as a cash crop in Mississippi), apples (grown everywhere, from Australia to China), grapes (exported as fruit and wine on both sides of the equator), etc. Cars, electronics, clothes, all of these are imported now. (Next time, you hear some grumbling about the need to “buy American” ask them if they can be sure everything *they* buy is American-made?)
Continue reading “Thoughts on outsourcing, globalism”
BIOMETRICS WON’T CATCH DISPOSABLE TERRORISTS – George Jonas – Benador Associates:
There may well be terrorist moles flying or servicing passenger and cargo jets in Western countries, waiting to be activated for a suicide mission. Some may be pilots or flight attendants; others may gain access to restricted places as mechanics, ground crew, baggage handlers, caterers, or cleaners. The papers of such infiltrators are in perfect health; the sickness is in their heads.
As Bruce Schneier points out, the phrase “disposable terrorists” has a disturbing ring to it. How do you defend against someone who has opted out of life?
from CryptoGram
James Joyce’s descendants are copyright jerks
James Joyce’s terrible descendants have decided to use the newly extended Euro copyright to bully anyone who publicly reads his work, in Ireland, on Bloomsday, into silence. Link (via Lessig) [Boing Boing Blog]
June 16, 2004, would mark the the 100th anniversary of the fictionalized events chronicled in Ulysses. I was planning to take the family until the realities of the expense sunk in. But now I don’t have to feel like I’m missing anything. I was there in 1988 and couldn’t look in any direction without seeing something Joycean . . . . The day started with a reading in the Martello tower where the day’s events begin: I took the DART down there and walked a lot of the way back. A great city to linger in . . . . I wonder how the Tourist Board feels about this? I’d love to be part of a civil disobedience campaign where the readings go as planned but everyone identifies himself as a character in the novel: let the Joyce family find themselves in court against Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus, and the rest of the people in Joyce’s work.
When you do something that’s not for yourself, for whom do you do it?
A couple of local[1] weblogs[2] have kicked this idea into my head.
Continue reading “who do you love?”
*Results*
* Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.30.
* Your Interference Factor is: 0.20.
* Your Universalising Factor is: 0.00.*Are you thinking straight about morality?*
There was no inconsistency in the way that you responded to the questions in this activity. You did not evaluate the actions depicted in these scenarios to be across the board wrong. And anyway you indicated that an action can be wrong even if it is entirely private and no one, not even the person doing the act, is harmed by it. So, in fact, had you thought that the acts described here were entirely wrong there would still be no inconsistency in your moral outlook.
Like the Political Compass, I’m in the bottom left quadrant.
Continue reading “what’s taboo for you?”
I’m just not a fan of IIS 6.0 (Internet Information Services- Microsoft’s web server) because administration is overly complex. Gimme Apache and PHP any day. But this is a huge company so open source won’t cut it.
I thought those days were behind us? The only big company around here that I can see insisting on IIS and SQL Server is the one that makes them both.
If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!
Ma Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
I had reason to look this up for a comment just now, and was surprised to see it attributed to a variety of people (some just referred to as “Senator” or “Governor”), with British MPs lumped in there as well.
Who else but a governor of Texas could say that?
I installed the Plugin Manager last night while trying to make some more sense of the challenge that is generating XHTML valid pages.
I can’t remember enough of what I have tried to recount the steps: I do know that cleaning up the templates (as previously documented) is essential. A nice addition to your toolchain is “Brad Choate’s latest Textile plugin . . . “:http://www.bradchoate.com/weblog/2004/02/05/textile-tips.
But one benefit is that local wiseguy “JimFl”:http://jimfl.tensegrity.net/eb has packaged up his nifty Zeitgeist module for inclusion in the master plugin directory. the “output it creates”:/movabletype/zeitgeist.html has been one of the top 5 most requested pages on my site since I implemented it.
How does it work? Take a look . . .
Continue reading “MovableType plugin manager, zeitgeist plugin”
I have decided to aggregate all the postings about my ‘learning experience’ in a category with that name.