Thursday, November 30, 2006
SAEF
let’s give this a try
what a boring post ... which is pretty much what anybody expects from my blog anyway .... hmmm i don’t think the smiley got added to the main body ... oh, well
Click to read more...
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
just upgraded the site…
...to a new version. Time spent: Five minutes—i.e. including the download time, reading the docs, and actually doing it. Upgrading all sites, including SIMU and the EE Core stuff: another ten minutes.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
the scenic route
They say that necessity is the mother of invention.
Well, it took a bit of chilly weather to find out that it’s actually faster to take the ‘scenic’ route to work.
After walking for 7 blocks then waiting for a bus for 25 minutes in the cold yesterday (the buses usually come about every 5 or 10 minutes, but sometimes traffic gets a bit snarled when the weather isn’t very good), I tried something a bit different today.
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Friday, November 24, 2006
the cable guy
Once more the cable modem is crapping out intermittently.
So, I spent a half hour on the phone the other night with a tech guy. He had me try a bunch of things, but we couldn’t get a connection. So I had a couple of options.
I could drive half way across the city in the cold and snow and pick up a new modem to see if that helps.
Click to read more...
Thursday, November 23, 2006
reflections on friendship
SEB’s recent Lost and Found thread got me thinking…
When talking about friendship, something is always lost in translation. In Germany, there’s a profound difference between ‘friend’ and ‘acquaintance’ - much more pronounced than colloquial usage or dictionary definitions in English suggest. An old friend of mine visited recenty, a visit that was sadly far too short. However, although this was only the second time in about ten years that we met in person, the intervening years simply dropped away. You could say that we live apart, but haven’t grown apart.
This isn’t necessary true for all the people one crosses paths with in life. Some people we’re not close with in the first place and given time and distance, they simply fade from memory. Others are never far from our minds. Some we can very easily get back in touch with. And then there are those that may have been close once, but now seem like space aliens. Given enough mutual changes, there’s simply no basis to pick up where one left off, or even to establish a new relationship.
The Internet is a powerful tool to find those we’ve lost. Finding them, however, is not always a positive experience. I myself lost touch with somebody about 20 years ago and quite deliberately so. Plenty of water has passed under that bridge and I was made aware that the other person would appreciate hearing from me. I’ve done my part, but haven’t heard back. It’s possible, of course, that the missive ran afoul of a spam filter. It’s also possible that it’ll simply take time to answer. Regardless, it was only a short step from the email address to a website and I’m left dubious by what I found. It would be nice to exchange a few civil words, but that may well be the end of it.
Oh, well. Such is life.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Looking at the calendar…
pardon the turkey
Don’t know who wrote this:
Traditionally, this is the time of year when the President
ceremonially pardons a turkey.
However, this year, the turkey is being held at Guantanamo after
being water-boarded by Dick Cheney. No pardon is forthcoming, and
the Butterball hotline is being tapped by the NSA.
Take-out from McDonalds is the patriotic alternative.
Have a great holiday!
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Interesting thoughts on marriage
Intuitively, this makes sense. Now it seems that family researchers are just starting to pick up on it.
There is something fundamentally different about low-income single mothers and their educated married sisters. But a key part of that difference is that educated women still believe in marriage as an institution for raising children. What is missing in all the ocean of research related to the Marriage Gap is any recognition that this assumption is itself an invaluable piece of cultural and psychological capital—and not just because it makes it more likely that children will grow up with a dad in the house. As society’s bulwark social institution, traditional marriage—that is, childbearing within marriage—orders social life in ways that we only dimly understand.
Want equality? Be an advocate for the nuclear family. The whole article is worth a read. http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_marriage_gap.html
another school shooting and video games
The second bad school shooting in Germany in the last year or so has prompted calls to ban violent video games.
Expatica: Calls for video game ban in Germany after shooting
This has a familiar ring to it. Quoting out of order:
Pathologists in Germany said Tuesday a teenaged youth who shot and wounded five people at his old school the previous day killed himself with a gunshot in the mouth.
Sad. And the predictable knee-jerk responses:
The attack revived debate in Germany on banning first-person shooter video games. Edmund Stoiber, premier of the state of Bavaria, said he would introduce legislation against them in federal parliament, adding, “Killer games should be prohibited in Germany.”
...
However the German Interactive Software Association dismissed the calls, saying this would breach constitutional free-speech rights. Olaf Wolters, a spokesman, said a ban would be ineffective, because the games could be downloaded from abroad via the internet.
However:
Sebastian Bosse, 18, an enthusiast for both live-action and virtual shooting games, was armed with reproductions of old-fashioned muzzle-loaders which can be freely bought on the internet, police said.
...
The attack, presaged by home-made warfare videos on Bosse’s internet site, had chilling parallels to other school shootings including that by Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, who killed 16 people and then himself at his school in Erfurt, Germany in April 2002.
Both youths were loners at school, enraged that they were ignored by fellow teenagers and had failed scholastically. Steinhaeuser had been expelled and Bosse had repeated classes three times, graduating last year among children three years his junior.
“None of us had any contact with him,” said Linda Blaenkner, a former classmate at the Geschwister Scholl high school attended by Boss in Emsdetten near the Dutch border.
Bosse was a keen player of Counter-Strike, a computer game in which the player holds a virtual gun and kills opponents, but he also acted out his gunman fantasies with like-minded youths in the woods.
...
Two of the three old-style firearms he carried Monday were on free sale in Germany to persons 18 and over.
The third, a small-bore rifle, would have required a gun licence. Bosse only had a junior gun licence that allowed him to carry a compressed-gas weapon for self-defence, the police commander on the case, Hans Volkmann, said.
In other words, there was a troubled youth and the warning signs were clearly visible. Calling for a ban of violent video games, whether they are your cup of tea or not, seems to be a case of shooting the messenger. Rather than pointing the finger at all the people who failed to spot a prototypical loner bound to go on a rampage or those who noticed and took no action, the easy way out is to blame the video game industry. Doing the latter is incoherent anyway, because then you have to blacklist any and all portrayal of violence. Watching the news, reading the wrong books, and so may just give the wrong guy the wrong idea…
There are more reasoned voices, though:
The attack also brought calls Tuesday for German schools to move faster to provide counselling for disgruntled students.
Josef Kraus, president of one of Germany’s teachers’ unions, the Lehrerverband, charged that German politicians, schools, the media and entertainment industry were too busy blaming one another to take any effective action to re-integrate loner youths like Bosse.
“We have a fundamental culture here of looking away if there is a problem,” he told N-TV.
That much I can agree with. The last part I’m not so sure about:
In remarks to the newspaper Bild, he said, “Brutal computer games and videos con youths into the idea that the strong win. They don’t show the losers any way out. Drugs, consumerism and fun are the sole values that today’s pop and TV stars propagate.”
I have played this games of genre and have grown up in the rare German household that bristled with guns and ammo. Can’t say that I’ve ever misunderstood the difference between a game and real life.
Blaming consumerism is a lame excuse. You could rather blame a lack of parental investment and role models and the absence or failure of any societal failsafes. It’s that looking away bit again. Yes, we should all mind our own business. Unless there is a clear and present danger that somebody else’s will become ours.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
testing
i may be jumping the gun ... but i saw a new button ... and i pressed it!
Will this really show up in my blog? I guess I’ll find out in a few seconds.
Lookes like it’s really easy to edit this, too. 
And the old version with the spelling mistake can be retrieved by selecting Revision Number 2 .....
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