Category: it could be called work

This may just corroborate some of what you already know, but for me it quantified some things and made me aware of some things I hadn’t considered.

“Born to Buy : The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” (Juliet B. Schor)

What I found most disturbing was the amount of money and effort going into exploiting kids and making them into passive — and later — aggressive consumers. The central idea of the book is that kids are exposed to too many messages and exhortations to buy as a result of unsupervised or unregulated advertising. The amount of time kids watch TV is up but the amount of advertising — especially for non-nutritional foods, violent games, and adult products like alcohol, is way up. Schor presents some frightening details on the link between exposure to Hollywood films and the increased use of alcohol and tobacco through the use of paid product placements in the films.

And she discovered, contrary to her own assumptions, a link between troubled kids — poor self-esteem, poor decision-making skills, and unhealthy attitudes toward family and society — and TV watching/ad exposure. The initial assumption was that troubled kids watched TV, ate poorly, and scratched their materialistic itch to soothe their feelings about themselves, but a study demonstrated that the media messages were causing the other problems.

The last part of the book has a call to action for legislation and policy initiatives we’re unlikely to see, but along with that are some simple steps that every household can take without waiting for government ‘help.’

• Turn off the TV and put it somewhere that makes it inconvenient for everyone to watch it
• Model good behavior — don’t tell the kid he can’t have expensive things while you shop at Tiffany & Co.
• Go outside: it will go you both good
• If you have to be inside, play boardgames, paint, draw, read, write, tell stories: live

One of my favorite arguments — the need for Slow Food, among other things — makes an appearance, as well, as we see a generation of kids who have never tasted anything but sugary/salty snacks and who rather eat a blue snack than a green fruit or vegetable.

Right book, wrong time: as the author notes, this is not a great climate for arguments against the power of big business in favor of the individual, even if the individual is 6. But don’t that stop you.

MS vs. Apple in the stock market:

Extrapolating from Apple’s form in the last quarter they are on a pace to do a gross of about $16 billion this year. Microsoft, which own 96% of the desktop market or so, made $36.8 billion last year.

So Apple is grossing almost 1/2 as much as Microsoft with a much smaller percentage of the desktop market. Is that perhaps due to selling hardware rather than software? There are associated costs to this of course which make selling software much more desirable but it seems that Apple has been growing dramatically in the last couple of years in total sales volume.

And of course, software products were also on the MacWorld agenda: iLife 05 and Pages, the second piece of the office software puzzle. I have to wonder why they’re not working with OpenOffice, but at the same time, it opens a second front. Open Source OS users and Windows users alike can use OpenOffice or KOffice or even individual apps (AbiWord and gnumeric) while Mac users are offered Pages and Keynote (where is the Excel replacement?). I doubt it will make much of a dent in MSFT’s revenue stream, but it may be more than a mere distraction.

Now playing: She Said by Brie Larson from the album “iTunes New Music Sampler (Universal Motown Edition)”

Interesting look at Seattle after the party:

Seattle bruised but wiser five years after the tech boom

This image sums it up nicely.

Since I would replacing a G3 iMac with this — no screen I can reuse — this gets pretty spendy. I can get a decent flat panel display for a few hundred dollars but at that point, I’m pretty close to a G5 iMac. So I get a faster machine (1.8 GHz G5 vs 1.42 GHz G4), with otherwise similar options, for a coupla C-Notes more.

[click to enlarge]

Why not go the whole way?

I ordered the wrong kind of cable for my digital image system, and the seller is shipping the right one to me — without even waiting for the other to be returned.

eBay’s feedback system needs to go to 11 for moments like this.

Now playing: You Can’t Hide by Maktub from the album “Khronos”

Let Them Eat Prose (Harpers.org):

Wanted, a reading public. This is what the publishers say is needed—that is, serious readers, those who care enough about books to buy them, own them, and really possess themselves of their contents. This is what the writers say is needed—the writers who are becoming almost more numerous than the readers. Nearly everybody writes for publication; it is impossible to provide vehicles enough for their contributions, and the reading public to sustain periodicals does not increase in proportion. Everybody agrees that this is the most intelligent, active-minded age that ever was, and in its way the most prolific and productive age. Is there a glut and overproduction in the literary world as well as in other departments? Isn’t it an odd outcome of diffused education and of cheap publications, the decline in the habit of continuous serious reading?

In my quest to build out the capacity to digitize a lot of old slides and negatives, I’m finding it to be a piecemeal affair.

A scanner I have, finally: I scored a Nikon Super Coolpix LS-2000, but at that price (US$89), it lacked cabling of any kind. So I am waiting for an UltraSCSI cable to show up before I even know if it works. I have a CD/DVD burner but the OS doesn’t believe in it: it’s so generic I have to use Toast (which freeware version shipped with the drive). But I have no DVD media so I can’t be sure how well it works (it will burn CDs and it was new, factory-sealed, so I’m optimistic).

I also got an 80Gb drive, since the old B&W this is all going into has a mere 12 Gb drive: too small to be really useful. And as luck would have it, it’s a Rev 1 Blue and White, so it can only take a single ATA drive: later releases — the Rev 2 models — could handle an additional drive.

As a result, I can either scrap the 12 Gb drive and replace it with the 80 or score an ATA card and add the 80 with room for more if I need it. A Mac-compatible one runs between US$40 and US$100. I’ll get one of those once I see some coin from my contract work (which won’t be til after the new year and school starts up). And there’s always that Google AdSense revenue rolling in . . . . (I don’t expect to see anything from there until June: if you’re familiar with AdSense’s pay schedule, you know why that is).

Judging by this, the additional controller card is the way to go: the data corruption risk and the fact that the on-board controller might not see anything with a DMA speed in excess of 33(!) don’t thrill me.
I really don’t want to sink a lot of cash into a machine this old (ca 1997) and I suppose this isn’t all that much. But let’s hope this is as bad as it gets.

A local hero is parting out some old Mac hardware (disks, RAM, etc.) and perhaps that will help stanch the flow.

Drop these lines into your index.php:

[/www/wordpress]# head index.php
0) {
exit;
};
if (strpos($REQUEST_URI, 'visualcoders.net')> 0) {
exit;
};
?>


I found that Cafepress doesn’t support any kind of webservices or other APIs to display products. So I decided to hack something together myself.

I grabbed a copy of my storefront page and pulled out the information I needed, stuffed the resulting lines into an array, and pulled out a random line.

Now to automate this and see how it goes.

So the album art that iTunes generates is pretty easy to work with if you want to make simple paper CD sleeves.
Here’s an overview of the printout and the finished sleeves.

The first step is to cut off the top and bottom, using the crop marks as your guide (don’t rely on the fold lines: if your printer doesn’t grab the paper just so, your cover will be a little off-center). Cut off everything outside the crop marks.

Next, use the crop marks to trim the sides: you can cut off everything outside them when you do the sides. Then cut a small (1/4 inch) slot from top and bottom along the center, where the cover or sleeve will fold. Fold the sleeve in half along the lines marked. Then fold the resulting parts down along the top and bottom. Apply a glue stick (or Elmer’s if you prefer: you really don’t need much) and press the seam flat.

Now you’re going to have to work with me here: I would take another picture to illustrate this but my digital camera didn’t make it home from a Christmas party last night. Anyway, glue down the thin tabs on the back side (where the track information appears) and press it down, then glue the other tabs and fold the sleeve together, wrapping the tabs from the front around the whole sleeve so they close around the back.

Press out the seams (the handle of a utility knife works well for this) and you should be done. You should have a CD sleeve that looks like the one in the picture. The trick is using the crop marks to ensure it’s the right size to hold the media. The crop marks work just fine for that, though I sure didn’t realize that the first time I tried this.