Tuesday, April 05, 2005
You Have Been Warned: Next Carnival of the Capitalists Will Be Selective
As you may recall, hosts for Carnival of the Capitalists have always had the option of excluding any posts they wanted, though we have always encouraged inclusiveness so long as a post fit the criteria. Which is to say, substantively original writing on the huge range of topics covered by “business” and “economics,” with an odd tendency that spontaneously grew toward allowing some posts about blogging that might not really be business-related.
Usually there is a firestorm of protest when too many posts are excluded, especially if the reasoning seems odd to people. I personally prefer inclusiveness, and am not sure cutting the number way down, even if it results in amazing quality in what’s left, is a good idea.
This is why I asked Torsten Jacobi, an excellent previous host, to make sure he announced his intentions to winnow the included entries down to twenty out of those submitted.
I also suggested he reply to entrants from the CotC mail account, letting them know the plan, and then to let those included know they were selected as he puts together the post. Experimenting, or varying from the norm even if it’s within the rules, is best done with warning, to the degree possible. It’s not like everyone who enters CotC reads this blog, and I am not sure I feel compelled to put this notice onto the CotC info page. However, it’s not a bad practice to check the host blog during the week leading up to that edition of CotC.
I’d like to see hosts start enforcing the 3:00 PM eastern Sunday deadline, too. Get your entries in early.
Anyway, an effort has been made to warn you about the selectivity that will be applied by this week’s host. At least you know ahead of time, even if it is not what you would prefer.
Yes, I *am* reverence impaired, thanksforasking.
Am I the only one who finds the constant news pictures of the Pope’s body a little creepy? I’m not so much on bodies. I don’t even like the fake dead on CSI and such.
I assume, though, that this is some sort of cultural thing. We’re accustomed to wrapping our dead in handsome caskets, as though we could ward off our own eventual death by prettifying the deaths of others. It occurs to me that the Vatican’s way is much more honest.
It still creeps me out, though.
Maybe I’ll finally be able to break the habit now.
Lawren has reported that Noah Wyle has finally given up on ER. Maybe now I can let go that last shred of hope that they might manage not to suck so mightily again someday.
Your Daily Sadie
Monday, April 04, 2005
Blast from the past!
Originally published on The Accidental Jedi:
TITLE: Another one flees the host-that-must-not-be-named…
STATUS: Publish
CATEGORY: The ‘SphereDATE: 06/19/2003 10:17:23 PM
Jay Solo has a new home. Go congratulate him, and visit often. He’ll be able to relax once that hit counter gets over 10,000.
Congratulations and Welcome!
Mike has a picture of his adorable new nephew, Jared, born March 31 to Tony and his wife.
Looks like more pictures will follow, probably at their family web site.
Carnival of the Capitalists
The April 4 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists is up, hosted in style by the excellent Law & Entrepreneurship Blog.
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is brought to you by Mantra Brand Consulting. Our “Brand Humanity” series of web seminars will look at high-level strategies to tactical “how-to’sâ€? of opening dialogues with employees and customers using new technologies like blogs, wikis and forums. The series will also help business managers navigate the blogosphere and better manage their brands in a highly networked marketplace. You can enroll here.
Next week’s host will be TJ’s Weblog.
Submit your entries, by 3:00 PM eastern time Sunday, to cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com, or use the Gongol.com submission form or the universal carnival submission form.
So Helpful
I love Hosting Matters.
However, sometimes I could do with less aggressive scanning of my e-mails. Mail that passes through their servers gets scanned for viruses, potentially dangerous attachments, and even phishing.
It’s the middle one that gets me. I routinely e-mail myself files from work to home or vice-versa, from my e-mail account to my very same e-mail account. Wasn’t I surprised when I sent myself an MDB file (Access database) and had it stripped and replaced with a warning on the other end. Documents, spreadsheets… no problem. So an MDB or an EXE has to be renamed, even if it is inside a ZIP file.
Sunday I e-mailed myself a bunch of stuff from the office. Most of it I also had in a position to be burned onto a CD. That all came through fine. I also zipped the source directory for a program I wrote for my timekeeping. It caters to my big client’s desire to have the time broken down by category. That’s a pain, but then it beats making a several page, itemized invoice that lists a description of everything I did.
That didn’t come through. I renamed the obvious MDB and EXE files, zipped the whole directory, mailed the ZIP file, and had it nuked by the mail scanner. Probably there was a zip within the zip that contained something eeeeevil, or perhaps now VB source files are considered a danger to society. Sigh…
At least it wasn’t urgent. Starting with everything from April 1 onward, Deb is going to enter my time for me, if not do the bills too. I need to tweak the program, install it for her, arrange for the database to get backed up from her machine to mine regularly, and away we go. My problem lies in not recording what I do and potentially losing revenue. The way I had things setup, there were two computers from which I could record time at the office. I’d get busy and not bother a lot of the time, then catch up later. It was also easy to miss forever anything not leaving an e-mail trail or not inherently memorable.
What brought this to a head is the client who calls me on my cell phone regularly. I never get that time recorded, because I can be anywhere. He called when we were in the recovery room for the first couple hours after Sadie got evicted. I started sometimes remembering to e-mail myself a note to record the time. If I could do that consistently, then record it regularly, I’d be golden. Since I can e-mail from the cell, or from a client via the web interface, I am well covered.
So everything I do will now e-mail to an account setup for the purpose, which creates a nice archive because we’ll leave the mail on the server for an extended time. Deb will check it every day or two or three, enter what’s there, and at the end of a month I won’t be trying to figure out and enter what I did. If I could have her do the actual billing, it would save me basically a day each month, and a task I dislike enough to procrastinate at dangerously.
But I digress.
It’s cool and makes the net safer for HM to do those scans, but boy is it annoying when I lose something legitimate.
On another note, I may be quiet the rest of the day as there is waaaay too much to do, starting with looking into the aforementioned client’s internet connection being down.
Your Daily Sadie
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Carnival of the Capitalists - Some Clarification
The intended window in which a CotC is to be published on the host blog is late Sunday afternoon to Monday morning, as late as noon if necessary. If Monday is a holiday, the host may choose to treat it as a one day extension, in otherwise the same timeframe, but should give notice of that intention. The intended format is a single post, at the same time.
Part of the reason for Monday as the edition date, and Sunday afternoon to Monday morning as the publication window, was to allow plenty of time for the host to read the submitted posts and create the CotC over the weekend, if not starting prior to the weekend. As CotC has grown, the number of posts have created a task of several hours reading, organizing and writing. This is why we ask that entries be in before the last minute, and not later than 3:00 PM eastern time each Sunday.
It is simply not viable to wait until Monday morning to begin even to review the e-mails containing the submissions. If your schedule and commitments are such that you will not be able to start work on CotC until the publication date, please request that arrangements be made to have another host cover the week, perhaps as a trade of hosting slots if a different week works better for you. Alternatively, arrange for assistance in preparing the post for you to publish. Let’s keep things functioning smoothly and within the publication window everyone has come to expect over the past eighteen months.
Happy Birthday and Stuff
Today Sadie got to see her grandmother, great-grandmother, a couple of uncles, an aunt, and a couple of teenage cousins, which doesn’t happen all that often. Deb got my cold so decisively that this almost didn’t happen. Even Sadie has started showing symptoms.
We had cake and ice cream for my mother, who turned 70 today, and me. I was born on her 26th birthday, four sunspot cycles ago. Sadie was an angel! Much better than she’s been before over there. She prefers drinking from a real glass to her sippy cup, and just loved drinking water from my grandmother’s glass with ice in it, or mainly just sucking on the rim and enjoying the cold. We’ve never given her water with ice before.
Anyway, it was fun to see everyone. Then we stopped at the office, where I needed to get some work to bring home. Finally, we stopped at Roche Brothers supermarket, mainly for Sadie food. We were almost out. Got a couple dozen jars. Her latest new thing has been pears and pineapple. I’d only gotten two jars, and we like to give three days of a new food with nothing else new introduced during that time. It’s one of her favorites, so we got a couple of those, and some other new things, mainly combos of ingredients she has already had. We’re planning to give her mangos, but Shaw’s carries those so it requires another stop. I do most of the shopping, so it’s fun for Deb to get to look at and pick out stuff. Plus Sadie was fascinated. Last time we took her in there, for a lightning run for necessities, she was still very little and cried through part of it because we’d pushed her too far. She’s easier to entertain and distract now.
Anyway, enough boring all the non-relatives with Sadie details. I need to actually get into the work I brought home, despite feeling like going to sleep without further delay.
Sorry We Missed It
The first Jersey blogmeet pictures are available, courtesy of Gigglechick here. I think Kate and Jim are still recovering.
Update:
There’s a review of the blogmeet here.
Me No Likey Either
Thanks to Jen for the advice on blogging time settings.
In a previous post, I assumed the server side of things was responsible for the hour behindness of the timestamps on the posts. Nope. You, too, may have to check your blogging software settings. As Jen notes, in Expression Engine it’s in the “Localization Settings” part of “My Account” in the control panel.
In WordPress it’s under Options in the control panel, at least in the version I am looking at. The times are based on GMT. For Eastern it’s normally -5. Changing to -4 sets it right.
Sleep Is Good
Speaking of Sadie, she decided to wake up crying and not fall back to sleep, at what would have been before 7:00 until the time change. Looks like my posts are still on the old time.
Deb got my cold, probably worse than I did, and she’s limited on what she can take. Between what passes into the milk supply, and what dries up the milk supply, it’s grim even if you’re nursing and not merely pregnant. This was not the morning for that, and bad enough we should get up and moving before we otherwise would have to, so we can go to my grandmother’s and have cakes with bonfires of candles on top for me and my mother. I was her best birthday present ever.
I changed her and rocked her, but I think her problem was hunger. Just as I was debating the merits of breaking out a jar of food to see if that helped, Deb came and got her. As I suspected, a few minutes of nursing and she was out again. She simply didn’t get as much to eat late in the day as normal, so there was no chance she’d sleep 9 - 10 hours as she has been recent nights.
Looks like it’s my chance to nap a little longer… I shouldn’t have done the insomniac thing, getting up “for a while” before 6:00 7:00 and coming in here.
Poor Deb. I’m tempted to take a well nursed Sadie and a couple jars of food to my grandmother’s house, and leave Deb home to rest.
Your Daily Sadie
Sadie’s First Power Outage
At somewhere approaching 7:00 last night, we were sitting at the computers, Sadie was playing on the floor, when… click. Bounce. Bounce.
The power slammed off, then on, then off and on again a couple more times in rapid succession, each of which left my poor computer attempting to reboot. I finally managed to hit the switch on the back to cut off the power supply at the source, lest it keep bouncing off and on and kill the machine.
Deb’s UPS screamed until she shut down and I killed the UPS power switch. We have that on the newer, better computer as it would be harder to bear having it die. Mine merely has an expensive surge protector.
It’s not especially common for the power even to blink off here, let alone go out like it means business. It did this time. It was an interesting exercise in our reactions and locating stuff. I can practically see in the dark, and have an almost uncanny ability to remember where things were so I don’t trip over them. I headed for the living room to get Deb’s Mag Light. Which I had just traded the batteries out of recently for the near dead ones that were in Sadie’s swing.
For her part, Sadie was babbling away and, as I recall, just starting to whine at us about nothing in particular. She was shocked into complete silence for the duration, though later she was fascinated by the candles, which she wanted to touch, naturally, and how things looked in candlelight. Luckily she was off to one side and we knew exactly where she was on the floor, because it was Just That Dark.
Deb found the candles, which weren’t where I thought they were, and a lighter, while I took the flashlight into the kitchen, turned on a couple gas burners on the stove, found a quarter, pried open the battery pack on the swing, and swapped the good batteries into the flashlight. Then we got five candles lit and distributed between kitchen and living room. I brought out one of those dome shaped closet lights you can press to turn on (it also has a pull string), and left that in the bathroom.
Then we got bored.
No TV. No computer. Not enough light for reading.
We had been talking supper anyway, so we discussed our “no microwave to thaw the chicken” and “minimize opening of the fridge” options. After much head scratching, I thought of and volunteered to make pancakes. It was easy to do in minimal (3 candles) light, and involved just two quick openings of the refrigerator.
We all ended up in the kitchen. Sadie was in the high chair, which she likes to sit in even just to play, because she can see everything well. She hates to miss things. The swing was starting to bother her because it was too low to the ground. Deb sat keeping her occupied and watching me make pancakes.
When those were most of the way done, it went on again. Best guess a bit over an hour, total. Yay! Talk about different perceptions, though. To me it was an unusually long outage. To Deb it was impressively short. Different experiences in different parts of the country.
It was also the first one here, apart from maybe a few flicks off for a minute or less. We definitely need to improve or readiness, although it could have been much worse. I used to have cheap flashlights all over the house. As they died or were lost, or I left them with my stepsister when I moved, figuring she’d need them more than me, I haven’t replaced them. There are one or two, with dead or near dead batteries, in car trunk or toolbox. In the Sentra I have a better flashlight, with near dead batteries, to make up for the lack of a dome light. We only have one handy in the house because Deb supplied a Mag Light, and a Mini Mag that didn’t turn up immediately.
Ironically, I had forgotten that I left the candles right out in a convenient place. Deb knew where they were. I was convinced I had more, but if I do, they are seriously buried in a drawer.
I used to have a rechargable flourescent lantern for camping. My brother borrowed it. When his ex stole his house, it was in the cellar. As far as I know, he never was able to get it back. That was enough for hours of reading. Traditionally I would read until I was falling asleep, and that allowed me to do so even when camping.
So we need more candles, in places we can find them easily, more flashlights, and spare D cells. We have big packs of AA and C cells, but I ran out of D size. A lantern would be a bonus.
Good as Sadie was through the whole thing, it seemed to throw her whole schedule off, and may have made her afraid of the dark. She fell asleep early, but then didn’t want to sleep for real. She’s having separation anxiety as it is. That plus being in the crib in the dark seemed to bother her. Or maybe it was just gas.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
More On The Pope
I have fairly vivid memories of watching the selection process for Pope previously. I believe the one I saw parts of on TV, watching with my grandfather, who was quite interested in the whole affair, was the selection of John Paul I.
Then either God or the ubiquitous, mysterious, usually nefarious “they” decided that was the wrong choice in short order, paving the way for John Paul II, an intriguing selection from the start, at least from a geopolitical standpoint. You gotta watch out for “they,” you know, as they’re always up to no good. My grandfather told me he stopped voting after “they” killed Kennedy. Under protective cover of the Warren Commission, of course.
Anyway, I am not Catholic. In fact, I have been known to make fun of Catholics. My stepfamily is Catholic, though, including a stepcousin who seems to have found peace in becoming a priest. I am not even particularly religious, for all I have respect for folks who are, in any reasonable way, and defend their right to believe as they will and practice freely, in any reasonable way. Take “reasonable” to mean the standard libertarian “don’t initiate force against others” clause. Hey, sounds a lot like the golden rule.
Nor do I believe that the fact that a particular, generally secular nation or society is heavily imbued with or influenced by a particular religious influence, as we are by Judeo-Christian tradition, in any way means folks not of that religion are being “oppressed.” Give me a break. Any more than I believe people of any particular religion have any place trying to remake the government in their non-secular image.
At any rate, disagree on many things or not, I have always admired Pope John Paul II. If only I had half the energy he did in his heyday. I grant you the problems with child molesting priests have been handled poorly, and could have used attention from on high that appeared to be absent. But, when he took on the role of Pope…
Communism.
I grew up with the omnipresent fear of nuclear fire, or worse, imposition of tyranny from without. Today there is at least as much reason to fear imposition of tyranny, or greater tyranny, if you will, from within, than there ever was to fear it or destruction from without. Not that we couldn’t yet be nuked; the probability in general and in scope did decrease.
There was no Reagan. No Thatcher. No John Paul II. We were weak and dead ending because we thought weak, voted weak, waxed in doubt.
Into that clouded future came a giant of a man; charismatic, overflowing with belief, religious and otherwise, bold and certain, from within the evil empire’s dominion no less. If everything else about his reign was wrong, if he spread no other hope, did no other good, shone no other inspiration, his role in challenging communism and shredding the iron curtain marked him with greatness. This is true even if you take the Bible to be collected traditional stories and wisdom written down by men, changed or reinvented in retelling and translation, and nothing more. This is true even if you believe God to be a supreme act of self-delusion rather than a supreme being.
And so a giant strode among us, then was gone. Whether merely from our plane or for all time, a giant in his day, to be missed, admired, and well remembered.
Culcherralife
Being gratuitously political in an otherwise gracious speech marking one of the least political events lately is disturbingly unbecoming.
A Great Man Leaves Us
MSNBC and Yahoo News report that the Pope has died.
Does Anyone Else…
Become amused on seeing the Pope’s, or any probably dying person’s, condition described as “grave”?
I can’t help thinking “grave? but he’s not dead yet!”
A Whole New Level of State Placement
Remember the addictive state placement game? I thought it would be cool to have a version that went one state at a time and cleared between each, making it a huge challenge.
Well, here it is!
I went looking at the domain the other one was one, found their entire set of online state games, and that is the advanced variant of the intermediate “place the state” game I linked before.
So far, every time I have played it I got 76%, except just now when I got 78%, average error of 18 miles, done in 373 seconds. Which basically means I got all the easy ones plus some of the “out in the middle” ones.” Those are the challenge. How many can you get?
Your Daily Sadie
Friday, April 01, 2005
Weighing heavy on my mind.
Nothing seems to get a rise out of me lately like the continuing “obesity wars.” This has been at the top of my mind for a couple of reasons, the foremost being that I’m dieting at the moment in a rather desperate attempt to drop my blood pressure and avoid additional medication and the problems that can cause. I’m probably doomed either way, since diets and blood pressure pills both make you fat, but I’ve decided to go down fighting. The other reason is simply that things have gotten more and more absurd, and there has been another burst of stories on the topic, so I’ve been seeing more and more about it lately, which neatly feeds my own obsession.
This sort of thing--Lawmaker Wants Teachers Weighed For Obesity--is completely unacceptable. It shouldn’t even be on the table in a civilized society. I’m not the fan of slippery slope arguments, but I don’t think that Kasey is making one here:
Because you know where this will go ... give them a foot, and they’ll take a mile, then five, then fifty ...
...given that if it were not a metaphor, it would be a statement of fact. Smoking and obesity are not, in fact, exactly the same problem, but the success of the anti-smoking movement has emboldened the folks who, for whatever reason, care so deeply about what you put in your body. I was wondering how in the world they’d come up with the obesity equivalent to second-hand smoke, and thought the trend would be slowed somewhat by the relative weakness of the “you have no right to be fat because it might (and this is by no means clear) cost us all money” argument. But now that we can assume that exposure to fat people is harmful to kids’ health, well, that opens it right up, doesn’t it?
Because I’m sure that your average nine year old thinks to himself, well, I’m not sure if I should eat this twinkie, but it must be ok because Mrs. Smith is fat and she’s my teacher. Uh-huh.
Sadly enough, I’m not particularly surprised to see this, considering that just yesterday I was reminded again that we do live in a post-reductio world. Over at Asymmetrical Information, Jane made quite a nice argument about the absurdity of pouring money and energy into ineffective anti-obesity campaigns, which was, in part, an examination of how the anti-smoking model breaks down when we’re talking about weight. For some reason, that seems to have induced many commenters to propose strategies of their own, many of which illustrate her point rather well. I would find this funny in a different mood, I suspect, but for the moment, it just strikes me as sad.
One of the things that seems to come up again and again in these conversations is the absolute conviction that many people seem to have that all one has to do is eat “right” and exercise a bit and that extra weight will just fall right off. The problem with this is that human metabolism is a rather complicated thing, as Jane discusses in a follow-up post:
I’d also point out, to all those superior skinnies, that it’s a lot easier to stay skinny than to get that way. For one thing, to stay skinny, you have to eat 1800-2000 calories a day; to get that way, you have to eat, like, 1200 calories a day, which would certainly make me grumpy. For another, fat has weird effects on the endocrine system, pumping out hormones that tell your body to produce more fat. Also, your body has what’s called a “set point” that tells it how much it wants to weigh; this controls appetite and so forth. It only takes 6 months of being overweight for most people to reset their set point upward; it takes more than three years of weighing less to reset it downwards again. And of course, the more you diet, the more aggressively your body, which thinks you’re in the middle of a famine, tries to hold onto calories. So lecturing someone on how they’d be just fine if they’d just eat less and excercise more is a little bit rich.
Why people can’t accept that it is at least this complicated is beyond me. I rather suspect that a good portion of the problem is that we’ve turned weight into a moral issue. Being fat is regarded as prima facie proof that one is somehow morally deficient. I suspect that this arises in part out of a weird sort of superstition: if we are just thin enough, nothing bad can happen to us. We’ve confused the association between some disease states and weight with proof that heaviness is the single cause of these illnesses, then inverted that assumption and hold being thin tightly in our fists as a talisman against the evils of high blood pressure and diabetes. The cult of health is no doubt based in a fear of death; having given up religion, we count carbohydrates instead. Illness has become an obsession, and it seems that the only thing we like better than obsessing over our own health is obsessing over the health of others. Obesity is our current outlet for the all-too-human compulsion to stick our noses into other people’s business, and all the better if we can feel morally superior while we’re at it.
Of course, our short-sightedness in these matters is potentially dangerous, as we are so focused on fat as the cause of disease that we forget that it can be the result of such as well. Any number of hormone imbalances can make it next to impossible to lose weight. In my case part of my struggle is due to an old injury that limits my ability to exercise. Though rare, there are also more exotic causes for overweight, as demonstrated on this week’s episode of House, where they very nearly allowed a young girl to die because they couldn’t see that her obesity was the result of a disease rather than the cause of it (more here). Tumors are not a frequent cause of obesity, of course, but the interaction between disease, treatment for it, and one’s weight is more complicated than “if you got off your fat ass your high blood pressure would disappear.” In fact, I would venture to say that it is more complicated than that pretty close to 100 percent of the time.
I worry sometimes that this “moralization” of fat will keep us from being able to take advantage of the inevitable technological advances that should make it easier for us to control our weight in the future. After all, as additced as we are to taking pills to solve our lives, we are equally addicted to the notion that other people should do things the hard way. Luckily, greed is a factor here, and work toward pharmacuetical solutions continues apace. As Randall Parker points out:
...in the medium run we will have drugs to control appetite and prevent obesity. In the longer run we will have gene therapies that will reprogram our bodies to adapt us to the unnatural environments that we have created for ourselves.
And that is as it should be. Maybe we can even dream of a time where one’s health is not presumed to be everyone’s business, but I’m certain that a cure for busybody disease is much further off.
Best of the Malkin Today
”Michelle Malkin“ is quite interesting today. See especially her vigilante American pictures at the bottom of the page for someone most of you know and like. How dare they paint him in such a bad light!
She also seems to have fixed her BlogAds-induced page load failure that usually keeps me from reading.
Rest In Peace Frank Perdue
My mother once wrote to Frank Perdue, complaining his chicken was too fatty and the yellow color that came from “marigold petals” was really yellow fat. That got her a letter back, some free chicken and greater respect for the company and product.
I always enjoyed his commercials, even if it gave me no brand preference, and I am saddened by the news that Frank Perdue has died at the age of 84. He was a brilliant marketer and businessman for whom I had great respect.
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
TexasBestGrok has this weeks extensive Carnival of the Recipes, which includes the crockpot recipe I posted recently for barbecue shredded beef.
Your Daily Sadie
