What’s That Smell?
Summer is the worst time to be around garbage. Even if it’s in a train. When the garbage train is heading south, it’s typically taking garbage from up north to some dump down south and that’s the worst time to be train watching. When it’s heading north, it still stinks. But not nearly as bad!
CSX
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Ask most people what they want in a dream car and you’ll hear something like Ferrari or Lamborghini or Rolls Royce. Some kids may mention monster trucks. Here’s what I want. I want this:
Mounted something like this:
With a joystick mounted close so I can aim and fire it. No more traffic jams for me… And for my redneck buddies out there who think this gun might not be big enough, take a look at the page where I found it: http://www.orsm.net/text/a10-thunderbolt.php. Scroll to the bottom for an idea of how big it is.
E.W.
Oh and I think I need eye and ear protection.
Earlier this year, AC360°, with the help of a seasoned team of researchers, conducted a pilot study based on the 1940’s doll test. In this pilot study, more than 130 kids were asked a series of questions about five cartoon dolls with varying skin tones. Half of the children were African-American and half were white, half were in the north and half in the south. [More @ AC360]
I was concerned when I asked my 7 year old son the same question and gave the same answer as the children in the AC360 test. The darkest child is the bad child. This perception isn’t something he gets from us at home. So where did he get it from? When I asked him why, he first said he didn’t know. It wasn’t until he looked at the picture and associated the “color” with a “person” that he said “Because he’s African-American”. It was that delay in his searching for a reason that caused me to realize it’s the test that implies racism and not anything he’s gotten from home, school or even the media. It was the test itself.
The method of these tests are flawed for a number of reasons. Continue reading
I HATE FLASH.
I could live with Flash if people just used it for video. I still don’t like it, cause most of the time I’m connected to the Internet via a phone line. That means it’s impossible to watch a Flash video even if I want to, because you can ONLY stream it. And via a phone line you ain’t streaming anything. Sure, I suppose there are tools out there for ripping the stream, but so far there hasn’t been any video online that I want to see that bad. You are NOT the Martin Scorsese of the Internet.
However, that’s not all that Flash does. For some reason out there, particularly larger companies with too much money to spend for web “designers”, Flash is used for things like download links. Several years ago I sold a customer a valve. It’s a complicated bugger and now that customer wants me to do some maintenance on it. So I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual for that.
I did a search using their site’s search page (always amazed when that actually works…) and found the files I wanted, in pdf form, as I expected. Then I click the little “download” link. Nothing. No shocker there, I don’t like javascript either.
Here’s a clue for you web “designers” out there. I don’t want to run your software for you. Your stuff is running on a huge machine, mine’s a little machine. Plus, there are just too many guys out there with nothing but time on their hands working to run things on my machine so they can get things like my bank account numbers, access to my email and other generally bad things. Those people like it when the average guy lets anyone run stuff on their computer, like ActiveX. For me, I don’t need cutesy animations, I like text. Pictures when I need them. And I’ll take my video on the TV. That goes for cookies too. If you are just dying to track me, use your own hard drives like Google.
Ok so the link is javascript. Great, fine, I turned it on for you. Now when I click the “download” link I am greeted with a black page with a little text on it in the corner “Get Flash player.” Well, I suppose I got my text anyway. Now I’m irritated. I look at the source of the page, which I noticed was a redirect from the page I actually wanted. Yeah I saw that page pop up just before the black page. The source of the page was about three lines.
Now I can feel that my blood pressure meds weren’t prepared for this afternoon. So I do some deep searching with Google, since I can see the filenames of the actual files I want, none of which are flash.exe. So I got what I needed, without calling the phone number listed on the site under “Having trouble with downloading?” I’m pretty sure a chat with Bob (pronounced Boob) somewhere in India or Pakistan wouldn’t be at all good for my personal health right now.
So what have we learned? I hate Flash. Ok maybe you learned it, I already knew that. What I learned is that the next time I sell a preaction valve to someone it will be made by Tyco. Their website just works. In fact I may just allow their cookies next time I visit.
E. W.
I know none of this matters. I don’t have any illusions that I’m the William Shakespeare of the Internet.
As I sit here a long way from home and the communication equipment between me and my family fails, threatening to take my sanity with it, I’ve been getting a small taste of what it is like for our military. I’m not anywhere like Afghanistan and no one is shooting at me (though there are probably some who want to hit me) and I can still talk to my wife and kid most any time of the day. But I wonder how those other families manage. If you know one of them and you can, take some time to help them. It is harder than most can imagine. It’s still harder than I can imagine.