Tag: connections

Categories
politics

Candidate Announcements

This 2008 election is already shaping up to be a different animal from previous presidential elections as far as how campaigns are run and how the media is involved. Over at Oval Office 2008 comes the suggestion that a candidate could make “an announcement previewing his pre-announcement of his intent to announce that he will announce.” I’d say that pretty well covers our news coverage of presidential candidates. That caused me to chuckle because those who follow politics pretty well know who is (or will be) running and those who don’t follow politics almost certainly don’t care this far in advance. The only reason I care about the announcements is that I use that (or rather, the formal FEC filing that goes with it) as the line of demarcation between those I study for endorsement and those I don’t.

Categories
culture

Interesting Idea

So, this idea of a Redesigned alphabet is apparently not new. I was intrigued by the alphabet shown on Northtemple but I but I was less impressed by the font I found from the comments under the original post. The idea is interesting, and there could certainly be some interesting alphabets generated which have identical upper and lower case, but as proven by my links, smallcaps can simulate the effect with any font available so it’s not that hard to do. I’m almost tempted to make this post in small caps to prove the point.

Categories
life meta technology

Functionally Complete

As of now I consider my site to be functionally complete. I do not currently anticipate substantial changes to the style or structure of the site. At some point I will post my style in case anyone is interested in using or modifying it for their own site. I would like to acknowledge the people who have provided some of the resources which I have found very useful in this design.

I learned how to do the rounded corner effects with CSS from: Arve Bersvendsen @ virtuelvis.com. Once I understood his code I was able to create the scalloped tab effect for my menu options. Who would have thought that my left-brained self could wax creative like that.

My header image is: “Ripples” by Jeremy Stanley @ www.flickr.com/photos/jpstanley. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. I was thus able to crop it to fit my header. When I share my theme I will include the cropped version and the original version of the image under that same license. All other parts of my theme will be shared under a simple Creative Commons – Attribution license.

I wanted a cohesive color scheme for my site and I found the Color Palette Generator by Steve DeGraeve @ DeGraeve.com. I used my header image to generate the original palette and then used the color picker to generate further colors from that palette. Steve has many other useful programs available on his site as well.

Categories
life

New Running Shoes

My birthday present netted me a free consultation with a famous triathlete of my acquaintance, the host of Tri-Talk, who gave me tips on equipment and preparation for my marathon. One of the suggestions he made was that I should visit Runners Corner to get myself some new shoes.

I knew it was time to get new shoes since the shoes I have been running in are older than my marriage. The fact that I have four children is proof that such shoes would not last through marathon training. The fact that I have glued the soles back on both shoes suggests that they might not last the week.

Tonight I took his advice and visited Runners Corner. They were great! I got a personal evaluation of my running prior to choosing which shoes to buy. I also got to go run in 6 different pairs of shoes before I settled on the two I liked the best I learned a lot about shoes, and running from the visit, and I also learned (from someone who has actually run the race) that I might want to choose a different marathon than Park City for my first marathon. My shoe guide ran Park City for his first marathon and he said it’s one of the toughest courses in Utah.

So I may be changing races, but I am definitely going to enjoy training more. I had forgotten what running shoes actually felt like.

Categories
culture

Theoretics

Thanks to J. Max Wilson for helping me discover this commentary on academia by Orson Scott Card.

I have personally encountered theoretics in my education, especially my graduate education, and was sadly able to understand the entire course description he posted. I enjoyed Card’s illumination of the cause and effects of theoretics in academia (I also enjoyed the words of Lee Smolin which Card quoted extensively). One thing that was not discussed was the facet of theoretics which makes it so hard to detect and dislodge in a timely manner – it is as hard to prove any theoretics-cloaked groupthink right or wrong as it is to prove that String Theory is right or wrong. Like String Theory, we tend to assume that the groupthink is right in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary (this is the benefit of doubt).

In my studies the groupthink was about concepts such as constructivism, learning objects, and simulations. Like String Theory, all of them have proven to be ethereal, and like String Theory none have managed to be the grand unifying theory that their original proponents seemed to hope.

Categories
culture technology

Can I Join Too?

I have to whole-heartedly agree with the thoughts of Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman about the way reality TV is showing our decline from civilization.I think it is ironic that D’Arcy is offering to help buy an island to get away from reality TV with royalties from a reality TV show. Despite the irony I volunteer to pitch in my pennies and be among those refugees on CDB Island.

Categories
Education

Good Fit

I rarely just link to things like this, but I have been very excited to discover Mathemagenic where Lilia is interested in exactly what I have begun to pursue in my PhD studies. The difference is that she is way beyond me as far as the work she has done. Her list from November 17, 2004 looks like a very good list of things that will need to be studied in our quest to understand blogs academically. I just don’t want to forget it.

Categories
politics technology

Time for a Poll

In our country, which is run by polls anyway, I think that it is time to take a poll to find out Is Cheap Broadband Un-American? According to the article “cities . . . recognized broadband access as a basic public utility—no different from water, gas or electricity—that they could provide.” So the question is, what defines a public utility. Telephone and cable have been considered quasi-utilities and they have been regulated accordingly. We should take a poll to see if internet access has penetrated the population more deeply than telephone or cable access. I think it’s pretty close. Not only that, but cities can provide internet access much more easily than they could provide other communications options.

I have written about this topic multiple times so my position should be clear that internet access and broadband should either be regulated or provided by the government because the industry refuses to play nice with customers.

Categories
politics

When Will We See the Light

It is about time that we acknowledged the truth of what happens when Lobbyists have so much sway in our system of government. I don’t think there is anything else to say after what Mr. Lessig wrote. This is more than simply the access to broadband that I have written about previously. In both the specific case and the general trend we must take back democracy so that it is not subsumed by capitalism.

Categories
technology

Nice Idea

I am sure that Lazyweb will come in handy for me because I do sometimes have ideas that I think others are more qualified to solve than I am. Thanks to Marco for pointing it out for people like me to find it.