I understand the sentiment but with some major library closures now hitting the UK, citizens deciding to check out all 16 000 items in their local library’s collection might just make it easier for the powers-that-be to close the library’s doors permanently rather than have an impact as a protest gesture! (Putting a smiley face here doesn’t seem appropriate – is there’s a gallows humour emoticon?)
(via MetaFilter)
My mom was cleaning out some papers at home and found the original spec sheet/packing slip for the first computer our family ever bought in 1988 which is when I was in grade nine.
It doesn’t have the actual price mom and dad paid but I think it was somewhere around $2500.
A couple other things of note – 256kb of RAM memory is hard for me to even think about how to put into modern terms – maybe the size of a couple page PDF with a graphic in it?
I looked up the hard drive (kudos to Seagate for having all legacy drives on their site) and saw it was 32MB which is about the size of 20-30 photos, 10 MP3’s or maybe one really graphic heavy Powerpoint presentation?
I also love how one of their “System Packing” check-boxes was “Shareware” – a close cousin of the open source software that has such influence today.
(I should look up that salesman to see if he’s on Facebook or referenced on Google!)
A great summary of every single type of free online service you (or your library) might be interested in…
(via LibrarianInBlack)
Guility. Yep. Definitely. Learned it in Typing10 a million years ago. Hard to break a habit like that.
(H/T to CP on FB for the link)
[Edit: I’ve gone back and added a few links to this post and re-worded a few points for clarification in the subsequent days and weeks after this was originally posted.]
Just to be clear, even to write that post title made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
In fact, I still strongly believe that Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama – where he is intellectual, she is ignorant. Where he is civil, she is confrontational. Where he is cool, she is crass. But they have this strange polarity where each is an enormously charismatic presence with a hugely populist appeal. (The thread on MF where Sarah Palin was announced as McCain’s running mate still holds the record for most comments with 5555 on a site where the average thread might get 50-100 comments and a really really hot one will get 500 to 1000! In fact, that thread has twice as many comments as the next highest commented thread. Palin is also connected directly to four and indirectly to six of the top ten MF threads of all-time – most of which are related to the 2008 Presidential election although some have more of a focus on Obama and/or McCain.)
But after nearly a week where I’ve spent a lot of time reading various online forums and magazine articles about the Gaby Giffords shooting in Arizona, I’ve gone away from my initial reaction that Sarah Palin and the elevated violent rhetoric she revels in were somehow responsible.
In my mind, Palin is no more responsible for Giffords’ shooting than Robert DeNiro is responsible for the shooting of Ronald Reagan or Marilyn Manson is responsible for Columbine. (Video games on the other hand? Nah, just kidding.)
Ultimately, as a librarian (and long before I chose this career), I have had a strong belief in the importance of people being able to say what they want (as long as it contravenes no existing laws.) I would rather have dangerous ideas (or stupid ones) out in the open so they can be analyzed, dissected, occasionally ridiculed and ultimately accepted or rejected.
There has been a lot of talk about the rise in violent rhetoric in the US over the past generation but it’s something that’s always been there since the first days of the country. And I am reminded of what a former chair of the Calgary Freedom to Read Week committee told me: “Just because you have the right to say something, doesn’t mean that you should.” He was speaking about the Dutch Mohammed cartoon situation but that sentiment can equally apply to the politicians in the US who use cross-hairs er, surveyor marks on maps to show which districts they’re targeting.
But again, as pathetic as it is, violence is Palin’s “brand”. She’s the “mama grizzly”, she shoots wolves while hanging out of the side of a helicopter, she can cook up a mean moose stew – after field dressing it herself of course!
There is little yet to directly link the shooter to the Tea Party movement and his actions seem to be the result of a mentally unstable mind that blended all manner of philosophies from the right, left and elsewhere (I admit to gasping a bit when someone pointed out a couple clues indicating the gunman was an atheist.)
There are much deeper problems here than the inflammatory speech that happens in American politics. The speech is just the end result of a variety of other factors – a culture of guns that is ubiquitous, a culture of violence (again, not a direct contributor but there are some studies that indicate links between the excessive amount of violence absorbed from popular culture and changing behaviour patterns), a woeful lack of mental health services (made worse in a country without universal healthcare). There is the impact of the rise of “me first”-style churches that are increasingly politicized in a country which theoretically has division of church and state.
There is the distrust of the “Other” and the internalized stress that an increasing majority of US citizens feel as their country’s millionaire and billionaires pull the American dream even farther from their reach – even as the increase in reality TV makes people think it’s closer.
And underlying it all is a crumbling education system which does not give people even the basic tools to be critical-thinking citizens but instead churns our barely literate drones who will need pictographs to work the register at McDonald’s.
No, Sarah Palin isn’t responsible for the shooting in Arizona. But she is currently the single best embodiment of the various deeper cultural factors that allow disruptive shootings like this to occur.
(Much of my take on this issue was influenced by reading the back and forth in this mega-MetaFilter thread. Here are a few links I couldn’t work into this post…
And the single freakiest thing I came across in a story with all kinds of unreal elements (everything from the fact that a woman shot in the brain at point blank range is still alive to the child who was shot having been born on September 11 to the congresswoman being married to an astronaut who is scheduled to command the last Space Shuttle mission!) – a MetaFilter post about the rise of Christian right-wing extermism in the United States from *last* August said:
The current cycle will likely peak next spring. The usual pattern is for the Patriots to ride on the energy of electoral cycles and then the more violent ones will have a temper tantrum (usually in the form of mass killings) in the spring after the federal elections. You may recall the last cycle turned violent in 1995, six months after the right-wing frenzy gained the Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Depression. The crazies like Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph don’t have any investment in electoral politics, but they are activated by political agitation and take the hot air coming from the far right as encouragement and approval for their own extremism.
Eerily prescient.
One last thought…
It’s a small light in the midst of tragedy but some are claiming that Obama’s memorial speech in Tucson could be a defining moment of his Presidency and in fact, restore some of its initial promise of bringing the nation together.
Hey Ryan,
Long time, no talk! I hope doctoring is going well, married life is treating you swimmingly and your decision to leave politics behind continues to be the right decision.
I suspect I know your answers to those questions which makes this next statement a hard one to make. But with the announcement of Pat Atkinson’s resignation today, I think you need to strongly re-consider your decision to leave politics. In fact, I think you need to throw your hat in the ring for the Saskatoon-Nutana NDP nomination.
There are numerous reasons why I think this makes sense:
I don’t have any knowledge of the current situation in Saskatoon-Nutana – whether they have potential candidates campaigning already or any other internal factors that could influence your decision.
And I know that choosing to throw your hat back in the ring would be a difficult decision for all number of reasons – personally as well as the hit you’d take for changing your mind and going back on your declaration that you didn’t want to be part of the nasty and divisive world of politics. But even one of our greatest premiers had a similar set-back in 1982 and went on to a great political career.
You said many times during your bid for the NDP leadership that politics is nothing more than medicine practiced on a larger scale. You still have an amazing opportunity to help change our society on that grand scale.
Cheers,
Jason
Okay, my Atheist Xmas series of posts is done but I just had to share this song which has one of the best lines ever (see post title)!
Pace and I were dancing around listening to music the other day and this song from my England semester abroad came on. I immediately thought of the reference to Batman in the lyrics and how impressed Pace would be. But upon further reflection, I realised that Pace, who’s starting to have a habit of saying some pretty wild things to get a reaction, maybe shouldn’t be dancing around his daycare singing this song!
(In terms of saying inappropriate things, there are more and more stories of Pace doing this with every day that goes by including two examples from today alone. When Shea picked him up from daycare, Pace apparently asked if we were having “pees and poops” for supper – before laughing hysterically at his wit. Then, after supper, he said a strange quasi-profanity involving Jesus, bums and carrots that left Shea and I killing ourselves with laughter – even as we were trying to point out that comments like that might just be considered offensive by some – in a way that wouldn’t encourage him to do it more!)
As opposed to a “sausage party“, a bacon party would be something I would be very excited to attend! 😉
In fact, if queried, I would likely say that bacon is one of my favourite foods – definitely top five anyhow. (Shea and I have been known to cook up four pounds of bacon at a time then sub-parcel it for freezing and easy future use. I will die young but I will die happy!)
So reading about a Redditor (they love the bacon on Reddit – there’s even a sub-Reddit dedicated to “the other, other red meat”) who had a Bacon Party with prizes for the best dishes and accompanying photos, well, let’s just say you may have heard of “food porn” but those photos are like “artery porn”! 😉
Hipstamatic Tinker Toy Frame, originally uploaded by headtale.
Technically, not done with the popular Hipstamatic iPhone app but another camera app that’s just added a bunch of filters.
Still cool to know what Pace would look like if he’d had his photo taken in the 70’s! (Er, I think Polaroids still exist so maybe that’s not a question that needs answered come to think of it.)
The nature of the Internet is changing and developing constantly and one of the most significant evolutions is the nature of commerce online.
Now, there’s always been commerce online and most definitely since the web entered the popular consciousness in the mid to late 1990’s. I remember buying a book from Amazon somewhere around 1997 just to try out what was then, a pretty radical new service. So the development of e-commerce, in all its forms, from Amazon to Ebay to Paypal is one aspect of what I’m thinking about.
But there’s also the changing nature of how people relate to the Internet. I think we’ve reached a point where a lot of the earliest Internet users, steeped in a mentality of “free” have begun to acknowledge that maybe not every single thing online is going to be free (well, unless it’s something offered by Google!)
Those are a couple of the thoughts that popped into my head when I came across an AskMetaFilter thread asking it’s very tech-savvy community “What web services are worth paying for?” To me, some of these answers are sort of like someone who believes in free music and “information wants to be free” still choosing to buy the albums of their favourite independent artists rather than downloading them for free.
Here are the sites and online services I support financially…
