All posts by djones

events, heat, time

The Event That Was

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The volunteer appreciation and recruitment event for the humane society (and new facility construction update) was this evening. I was more than happy that it was held in a nice air conditioned gallery as the outside temperatures today soared into the high nineties. Made it a lot of fun lugging stuff into the gallery. {*grin*}

Tomorrow is the BBQ for Relay for Life, so I’ll have to mosey over and eat and throw a few balls at the dunk tank victims. Of course it probably won’t be as hot just to make it less enjoyable for the dunkees. It always amazed me that I made it through three terms as mayor without being railroaded into being a dunk tank victim for the event. There is a lot to be said for glaring and looking unpleasant. {*grin*}

Am I the only one who finds that the year is getting away from them? It seems that time is flying by and always catching me unawares. The older I get, the faster time seems to move. I just know that one of these days I am going to look around and it will already be next year. Do you ever feel that way?

Uncategorized

Once There Was A …

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A short fairy tale of woe and doom. Once upon a time there was a company named Google who also happened to own another company called Blogger. One fine day, one product of Google ceased to work with the only product of Blogger. True to form, Google acknowledged there was a problem for some users and proclaimed that they were working on the issue. After weeks of problems logging in to Blogger using Google’s Chrome browser, today it seems to work mostly work correctly again. You might think that such idiocy wouldn’t happen with products all under one owner like that, but … So the moral of the story? Not even all the ducks in one family swim together is a straight line all the time.

In any case, today was Memorial Day and it was a nice and slightly cool day until about 4pm when the forecast 50 mile an hour winds and hail hit. It all cleared out in time for me to fire up the BBQ to cook for the small celebratory crew of L, her mother, my mother, and me. So we had a great repast and sat around the table talking for a bit over desert. All in all a very pleasant evening.

One of the topics of conversation was the question: Do you count relatives by marriage as “relations” or not? The original train of thought came about from L and my attendance at a high school graduation party for the daughter of a golfing buddy. At said party we ran into a person who is related via marriage to me through the fact that he is the cousin of my uncle’s wife. We also ran into the brother of another aunt’s late husband. I would consider those all relatives (even if a bit distant). On the other hand some people do not consider any marriage tag-a-logs other than spouses to be relatives. So what do you think?

(Those of you who share my devotion to science fiction will find the names more meaningful. {*grin*})
blogger, garden, weather

I’m Back …

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Or at least trying to be.

Blogger has made it darn hard to get back. Somehow they broke their interface when using Chrome and LastPass. The little light bulb above my pointy head finally turned on and I fired up another browser to login and do this post. It doesn’t seem to have been a good month for Blogger. This has been the worst period for outages and odd errors since I started writing this blog. I sure hope it is not a harbinger of the future!

So just to get everyone up to date, this has been a month of getting some gardening stuff done (and the onions all planted) and the arrival of spring weather. Out here in the semi-desert the coming of spring means thunderstorms and sometimes even rain. This month has been a wet one compared to most years – one of the continuing changes due to climate change. The winters have been geting dryer and the springs wetter and more stormy. So now we are waiting for it to dry out enought to get the rest of the garden planted. And of course once it is planted, that will be the last moisture we will see for the rest of the growing season. {*grin*}

Time to get back to work preparing for an upcoming Humane Society event. Now that I have a way around the Blogger idiosyncrasies, I hope to post regularly again.

I’ll leave you with one of the better editorial comments on the recent Blogger shenanigans from The Odd Blog:

Caption: Ann Althouse, relaxing at an undisclosed location following the attempt on her life by Blogger.

abuse, ads

Abuse?

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Every so often something new and annoying happens in the business of the internet. The most recent trend to annoy me is the appearance of streaming video ad-lets that have no escape, mute, or user control embedded in various pages. Many of them have no way to prevent the contents from being streamed at the person viewing the page they are on. One clicks on to a page and there, off to the side, is a streaming video with no accessible controls and sound blaring, making it nearly impossible to read the article you originally intended to read.

Why are these ad-lets annoying and a dirty trick? There are several reasons:

  • No volume control to mute the obnoxious ad audio.
  • No pause control to stop wasting bandwidth for the video.
  • Capricious consumption of my bandwidth without asking permission.

Given that more and more ISPs are installing bandwidth consumption caps on consumer accounts, do you really want to see your bandwidth used without your permission to display an obnoxious streaming ad? I sure don’t, and I don’t even have a bandwidth cap on my service.

What can be done about the problem? Short of some technical slight of hand to prevent the domains serving the bogus video from connecting, there is very little the average user can do. But one thing we can all do as consumers is to refuse to do business with any company that uses such ads. Maybe they will get the hint that abusing their potential customers is not a way to increase sales.

What do you think?

dumbness, opinion

Near and Dear

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Near and dear to my heart is the dumbing down of the populace I see each day. Little things like simple math skills gone missing. A complete lack of knowledge of the world around us and how it works. Attention spans approximating that of a gnat.

All of these problems I believe are symptomatic of a change of attitude in society as a whole. A few generations ago, education was regarded as the way to a better life. Parents emphasized education as a way to a better life to their offspring. Somewhere along the way the whole process has been ditched in favor of  the many faces of the cult of idol-ism. So now we have a growing group of semi-literate and scientifically uneducated people who follow the dictates of the talking head of the moment without critically examining anything. It scares me for the future.

One of the oft overlooked consequences of the dumbing down of America is the increasingly strident opinions of the populace. One of my favorite quotes puts it succinctly:

People are getting dumber but more opinionated. — Philip Roth

Can’t be much clearer than that. Check out your favorite letters to the editor page for classic examples. (Or listen to a call in radio or TV program since many are no longer capable of writing a coherent letter.)

On the other hand, my rationalist mind demands that I also ponder if the dumbing down is real or just a a figment of my imagination. After all:

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. — George Orwell

So what do you think. Is the increasing stridency of modern opinion due to the dumbing down of the populace or ….?