Schiavo parents to sell donor data to direct-marketing firm: "Xeni Jardin: The parents of rececently-deceased Terri Schiavo will sell their list of supporting donors to a direct-mailing firm.
The company, 'Response Unlimited' pays about $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 6,000 e-mail addresses. A spokesperson for the Schindlers confirmed that they had agreed to sell the information, but won't say for how much.Link (Thanks, Steve)"
Day 1:
Good news: I finally got hold of a Mac to use at work.
Bad news: After adding myself as a user and applying a system update, the computer wouldn't boot.
Day 2:
Good news: That gives me an excuse to go to the Apple Store to get a disk utility.
Bad news: While at the store the car will get booted, costing $50.
Day 3:
Good news: The disk utility is able to diagnose problems the system software couldn't.
Bad news: After running for 36 hours, the utility can't fix the problem.
Day 4:
Good news: There's a second hard drive I can install the system software on.
Bad news: That drive seems to have problems, too.
Day 5:
Good news: I can still try wiping the main drive and reinstalling.
Bad news: Now the CD drive appears to be broken.
Day 6:
Good news: The root of the problem seems to have been a loose RAM stick.
Bad news: The root of the problem seems to have been a loose RAM stick, and I've wasted untold hours screwing with other symptoms without checking what I should have checked first.
Sigh.
The Moose (look Chandra! A moose!) nails it.
I try not to obsess over blog readership, but the latest phenomenon has been fascinating. There are only a small handful of people who read this on a regular basis, and anyone else who comes here is typically either following a trackback link or has done a Google search and ended up here. When the whole "I'm sorry" thing popped up re: electing Dubya I got a spike from people looking for that, and a few weeks ago I got a brief spike from a Daily Kos link (not the main blog, but a comment in a discussion thread).
Over the last few weeks, however, there's been a steady stream of people hitting this site looking for one picture in particular...wigger. Lately this one picture has been responsible for 75% or more of the total hits to this site. I find this very, very strange.
Just finished tweaking the design on a Jewish Genealogy web site for a friend of mine. I was raised Lutheran, he's Catholic. As far as I know neither of us has any Jewish heritage, and yet here we are...shalom y'all, don'cha know.
INT. DAY, DINING ROOM
CHANDRA
I talked with Jon & Lisa last night and was a non-family witness that they don't want to be kept alive with a feeding tube.
JASON
Did you sign something?
CHANDRA
No.
JASON
Ok-- that probably won't count then. You need to get something on paper.
CHANDRA
Oh.
(pauses)
Just for the record, I don't want to be kept alive, either.
JASON
Ok.
(pauses)
I want to be kept alive, though.
CHANDRA
Really?
JASON
Yes. Only under certain conditions, though. I want to be kept alive and propped up in Congress as a public testament to the value of life. I also want to wear seasonally appropriate hats.
CHANDRA
Like for Dr. Seuss' birthday?
JASON
Sure, and a yarmulke for Hannukkah and Yom Kippur, a Santa hat for Christmas, a green hat for St. Patrick's Day. And a sombrero for Cinco de Maya.
CHANDRA
How about beads for Mardi Gras?
JASON
Sure-- and if the women in Congress flash me, they can take a set of beads.
CHANDRA
You really want Hillary Clinton to flash you?
JASON
Hey, if she really valued life, she would.
As always, Juan Cole provides some excellent perspective. This time regarding the recent meeting of the Iraqi Parliament. So far they've proven to be able to meet for a couple hours (in the Green Zone, of course), but they haven't gotten anything else done.
In the past I've posted my video work here (see "Failing the Dover Test" and "The Speech"), but I've decided to host my latest effort over on the transparent media site, since that gives it a more permanent home, less prone to scrolling off screen. At any rate, it's now available, and hopefully you'll find it reasonably entertaining.
What do you call this?
If you called it "a spade," then congratulations. You're part of the reality-based community. On the other hand, if you referred to it as "a black upside-down heart with a tail" then you must work at the New York Times.
Here's a tip. When the government puts together reports that place itself in a positive light and then has those reports aired on the evening news, that's not "prepackaged news." That's "propaganda."
You can almost set your watch by these articles in the business section of the Athens paper that discuss the New Media Institute/Synergy Center and the businesses that operate there. Nearly all of them feature EO Studios and talk about the difficulties they're having in moving beyond the incubator, while at the same time indicating that the business(es) want to stay in the downtown area, but that rents are too high and they can't find a suitable space. This is where they lose me. Granted, downtown is close to UGA and there's a cool vibe there, but Athens isn't that big and if they really wanted to move out I can't believe that there's not suitable space somewhere in town. None of these articles ever come out and say what's so magical about downtown that EO (and others, I assume) just can't bear to leave. I tend to think that this is an excuse they're using to stay in the incubator where it's nice and cozy. At some point (EO has been in the incubator now for something like 5-6 years) they need to just cut the cord and set out on their own like a real business.
Some great rants about the state of the video gaming industry. Mostly deals with consoles, which are the worst of the bunch. At least on a PC there's the opportunity to distribute something as a shareware app, which opens things up a bit. On the consoles we're really just seeing the same half-dozen games released over and over again with prettier pictures.
And it's not even one of ours.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: another side of Gus.
Yes, he was sitting on the scanner.
Yes, I am a cruel man.
(Via Letters to Myself.)
I've been amazed at the number of writers who, in the wake of recent events in Lebanon, think that Bush's Middle East policies may have been right all along. I'll admit that I haven't read deeply into what's been happening in Lebanon, but from what I'm reading it strikes me as more coincidence than good policy that Syria is now pulling out. In Iraq, things are certainly getting no better. If we're hearing less about it, then that's because of the twin spectres of Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson, plus the fact that reporters in Iraq are holed up in bunkers too afraid of getting shot or blown up to tell us what's really going on.
Now, don't get me wrong. I would love for what's been happening over the last week to be some sort of turning point for the better in the Middle East, but I'm highly skeptical that it is. Mostly I just wish that people were a little less prone to being jerked one way or another by the slightest change in the news...
I've been slow in doing this, but if you scroll down a bit you'll notice a whole batch of links on the left hand side of the page. These are all (except for Boondocks and Tom Tole, which are special cases) the links in my newsreader. Peruse as you see fit.
Just started another batch of renders for "A Civil Discussion." The first set took around 16 hours, but the current set is a little more expensive to calculate, so it's going to take closer to 50 even though there are fewer frames to render. I suppose I could have worked on optimizing the scene a little more, but at a certain point you just have to go with what you've got. It's not like I'm having to work for 50 hours on the thing. Still-- I think when it comes time to do the final batch of renders for this I'm going to split them up among a couple different machines. At any rate, by the end of the week I should have all the material I need to put together the final edit of this, barring any adjustments I think need to be made.
The Flash movie itself isn't all that, but the site's reaction to getting Slashdotted (technically "BoingBoinged", I suppose) is a hoot. Those inconsiderate linkers!
Ok, this is one of those memes that I honestly don't get, but since Chandra seems to enjoy doing it and she's doing a fair amount of hand-editing I thought I'd play along and try to offer a quicker method. Here's the list from my laptop:
My Powerbook isn't my main music computer, so the list is not really representative of my collection as a whole. It tends to be populated with stuff I find online more than anything.
Anyway, on to the technique for doing less typing. Copy your song list from iTunes and paste it into a text editor that knows grep. I use BBEdit, but TextWrangler would work as well. Then, do a find & replace with the following strings:
Search string:
(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)\t(.*?)$
Replace string:
<li>"\1" by \3, from <i>\4</i></li>
If you have a different number or order of columns showing in iTunes the pattern may be slightly different, but the adjustments should be pretty easy to figure out. You'll need to add the ordered list tags at the start and end, but the bulk of the work should be done for you.
The new job is going reasonably well. It's a job, at any rate. I haven't had the time for blogging, which is as I predicted. I don't have access to a wireless network in my current office, which puts a damper on how much time I can spend checking news feeds and posting items of interest. There's a spot in the building where I can usually get access at lunch, but the connection is often spotty, so I very often spend most of my time trying to coax web pages to display and can't actually digest them. Such is life.