Category: it could be called work

Enough. It makes me crazy. I just took a look at some more styles from the contest and picked a couple that worked reasonably well.

I also whacked a couple that were too distracting to look at. Sorry if I blew away one of your faves.

Now playing:Blockheads by Ian Dury & The Blockheads from the album “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – Best Of” | Buy it

Project Censored 2005 – Story #11:

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.

Back in December of 1996, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, were hired by FOX as a part of the Fox “Investigators” team at WTVT in Tampa Bay, Florida. In 1997 the team began work on a story about bovine growth hormone (BGH), a controversial substance manufactured by Monsanto Corporation. The couple produced a four-part series revealing that there were many health risks related to BGH and that Florida supermarket chains did little to avoid selling milk from cows treated with the hormone, despite assuring customers otherwise.

According to Akre and Wilson, the station was initially very excited about the series. But within a week, Fox executives and their attorneys wanted the reporters to use statements from Monsanto representatives that the reporters knew were false and to make other revisions to the story that were in direct conflict with the facts. Fox editors then tried to force Akre and Wilson to continue to produce the distorted story. When they refused and threatened to report Fox’s actions to the FCC, they were both fired.(Project Censored #12 1997)

I suppose the extension of this would be if someone were to rely on the news to make decisions about the efficacy or safety of a product and suffered some harm as a result: would the organization that willfully omitted the facts from its reporting be liable?

Now playing: Magazine: Believe That I Understand from the album “Secondhand Daylight” | Buy it

John Kerry: The Most Liberal Senator? An Analysis

I wondered why we needed to spend money on a submarine detection system, given that terrorists — supposedly the biggest threat — don’t have submarines.

Boeing Wins Contract for Tracker Planes (washingtonpost.com):

The Navy chose Boeing Co. over Lockheed Martin Corp. yesterday for a $3.9 billion contract to provide the military service with aircraft to hunt submarines and track surface ships.

Well, it turns out, one of the Axis of Evil states does have subs and they can be made into launch platforms for nuclear missiles.

Where in Washington, D.C. is Sun Myung Moon?: Rev. Moon’s submarines, sold to Kim Jong-Il, empower a nuke threat to the West Coast:

The submarines were purchased from the Russian Pacific Fleet as scrap, though largely intact, by a trading company funded by Rev Moon of the Washington Times, recently crowned as Messiah in the presence of a group of US legislators. MeFi reminds that Moon is also the guy who writes the paychecks of Bill Gertz, Tony Blankley, Wes Pruden, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg.

And North Korea has the missiles already, unlike other notable tyrants.

Top News Article | Reuters.com:

North Korea is deploying new land- and sea-based ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads and may have sufficient range to hit the United States, according to the authoritative Jane’s Defense Weekly.

In an article due to appear Wednesday, Jane’s said the two new systems appeared to be based on a decommissioned Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27.

It said communist North Korea had acquired the know-how during the 1990s from Russian missile specialists and by buying 12 former Soviet submarines which had been sold for scrap metal but retained key elements of their missile launch systems.

Jane’s, which did not specify its sources, said the sea-based missile was potentially the more threatening of the two new weapons systems.

The MeFites seems skeptical of how seaworthy those old subs are, but they need only as reliable as the CSS Hunley to do the job.

So I have spent some more time on the freecycling exercise.

It works amazingly well. I have unloaded an old point and shoot camera (noted earlier), two printers, an old laptop battery charger, and a pair of underbed storage drawers. I have acquired a working cordless trimmer (charger still being sought by the donor) and a Yamaha digital piano/MIDI controller (yet to pick up, but my name is on it). This kind of invisible commerce may be the despair of economists but it works.

If you haven’t tried it and want to either divest yourself of some useful but no longer needed stuff, give it a try. Likewise, if you need stuff that may be hard to find in stores or that you suspect might be available for the asking, it doesn’t hurt to try.

Notable items I have seen freecycled:
* a bread machine (new with recipe books)
* electric piano
* many futons and mattresses
* lots of storage-related stuff (shelves, containers, filing cabinets)

My next project may to pull together enough old kids bike parts (or whole bikes) to let my school’s health and fitness teacher run a bike safety class and bike rodeo without using a lot of district (ie, taxpayer) funds.

I got some photos attached to an email this evening that were HUGE — 1.7 – 2 Mb — and in the course of their being bundled up for transit, being sent, and unbundled, two of them were damaged. Apple’s Preview.app wouldn’t open them. They could be viewed in a browser, so all was not lost: they were recognizable as JPEGs, at any rate.

So I quickly fired up the GIMP in X11, opened them up, resaved as something smaller that 2072 * 1200 or whatever they were, and all is well.

Well, if I like OS X so much, what do I say to the fact that Preview.app — an OS X application — failed to open the files? True enough it did, but OS X, being UNIX and extensible through DarwinPorts, allowed me to run a different set of tools and get me what I wanted.

Not every OS is as easily extended.

Pitchfork: Top 100 Albums of the 1970s

Today, we’re offering the last of three installments of our Top 100 Albums of the 1970s, showcasing our top 20 favorites.

I have so few of these LPs (sadly, I hadn’t heard of some of the artists, which is a strange feeling). The reviews of the ones I am familiar with seems pretty accurate, so this might be a useful guide for backfilling one’s collection.

This from a fellow (and soon to be ex-) MovableType user: he just upgraded to 3.0 but still found this note from his hosting service in his inbox:

Michael’s Mind » WTF?

You need to find an alternative to your MT as its running very high in the process list. MT has a lot of flaws in process management and security and causes a lot of problems on the server.

This week looks like I’ll take a poke at migrating to WordPress . . . . performance was always a problem with MT 2.x and if they’ve not fixed that in 3, why bother?

Whiskey Bar: At a Loss for Words:

Now the idea that the 43rd president of the United States may have a severe, probably undiagnosed, learning disability isn’t a very original thought. (In his book, Dr. Levine also mentions that such disabilities sometimes seem inherited. Anyone who remembers 41’s own ferocious, but losing, battles with the English language might suspect the same.)

Billmon mentions this documentary as a helpful guide to understanding learning disabilities, some of which seem to be diagnosed as personality traits rather than problems.

He goes on to cite more of Dr Levine’s work, especially with the incarcerated, documenting the link between poor linguistic ability and impulse control:

In other words, those who can’t articulate their own thoughts may be literally incapable of talking themselves out of doing dangerous and/or illegal things – like, say, trading arms for hostages, or secretly subsidizing a Central American guerrilla army, or invading a large Middle Eastern country. As Levine says: “If you can’t talk out your temptations, you capitulate.”

Bill Clinton had his own issues with self-control but I don’t recall anyone dying as a result of any of it . . .