Chasing My Own Tale
This is really quite cool: {{link http://www.neen.org/demo/clinger.swf Liquid Man}}
It’s a variation on the old mouse tracks effect that’s been way over done in both Flash and JavaScript, but the twist is the cool part. Whatch how the figure twists, front to back when the mouse is moved from the left to the center to the right.
These are not quotes, but summaries of the situations that are depicted:
A. Marriage shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)
B. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)
C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)
D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)
E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)
F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)
I hope this shows how today’s definition of marriage is different from the Bible’s “definition” of marriage.
The argument that says “marriage is based on how the bible defines it and that will never change” when used against Same-Sex Marriage fails. Would someone please find an arguement that can stand on *some* merit, or at least something greater than opinion? I’m really struggling to find a valid reason to argue against SSM.
PS, that last Deuteronomy passage gets followed up with a great one:
“If [two] men fight together, and the wife of one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of the one attacking him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall not pity [her.]” (Deut 25:11-12, NKJV)
Sam Ruby has a great slide that categorizes project contributors. It matches pretty well with my experience, though I need to figure out if there are more clumps of participants out there.
{{link http://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/etcon/63.html Sam Ruby on Contributors }}
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If you have come to Dwelling (this journal) because of a search engine result, that result may be off by a about 400. When I imported some of my old journal entries, I had to renumber them all so that the newer entries increased their values by quite a bit.
Look at the URL for this entry (this assumes that you’re looking at a page that only has this entry on it.) and you’ll see a really long number with a lot of zeros in front of it. That URL needs to have 400 added to the numbers in order to find the new number for it.
For those of you playing along at home: if the entry you’re looking at has the number “000000245.shtml” then you simply need to change the 2 to a 6 and hit return. You’ll end up looking at entry number “000000645.shtml” which will have the content you’re searching for.
Since some of my entries are more highly linked than others I will manually put forwarding links on the entries themselves in order to save people the trouble.
The search engine indexes should be up-to-date in about 6 months. The other links to these entries from other people’s archives and sites may take a lot longer, if not forever. Oi.
From {{link http://www.stratnews.com Strategic News Service}}:
What is the latest news? Not good. Let’s look at the jobs figures for a moment. The latest figures showed a 21K pickup in jobs, about 10% of what would be required to simply maintain employment levels at past GDP growth rates. But at least companies are hiring again, right? Wrong. If you dig a bit, you find out that all of these hires were done by the government, not by corporations. Very bad news. That means, from a business perspective, no new jobs were created last month. Zero.
Of course, it gets worse. If you look more closely at unemployment, two aspects leap out at you. Here they are, in numbers: in 2003, one half of all black males from 16 to 64 were unemployed. That’s right, 50%. What’s all this talk about 5-6%, Whitey?
And here’s the other: while the current administration trumpets the fall in employment from June last year (6.3%) to now (5.6%), this figure appears to be measuring the disappearance of the young from those seeking jobs. The labor-force participation rate of 16-24 year-olds hit a 32-year low in December, according to BusinessWeek, at 60.5% – thereby accounting for ALL of the fall in the employment rate. What if those kids were still looking for jobs? The current unemployment rate would be 6.6%.
The next time someone cites productivity increases or lower benefits costs for these great low unemployment figures, just laugh at them. Better yet, tell them the truth.
No I’m not talking politics! I’ve added entries from my old Journaling system. Let’s see… I stopped using it in 2000, so now, 4 years later I’ve finally imported them into this system.
Neither my script nor this system (GreyMatter) have import or export tools, so it was mostly manual. The biggest stumbling block was the lack of documentation of the GreyMatter files (though they’re all very easy to access Perl scripts). However when I got pointed to foshdawg.net/gm/dev/ via the ongoing greymatterforums.com it started to be something that I could accomplish.
GM has a weird background. It was created by a guy who wanted it for a photoblog, but then he dropped it after some nasty personal stuff. It was already in pretty wide use, so instead of migrating away from the abandoned ware, a bunch of people picked it up and continued working on it.
This week I moved the latest ‘official’ release, which mostly added security features. It was released last October, so it seemed to have been pretty well accepted by the users without any big issues.
So after making that updgrade (which consisted of uploading 5 .pl files.) I decided to dive into getting the old journal entries in the system. First I had to figure out how many old entries I had, so that I could renumber the ‘new’ entries. Tuned out I had 389 old entries and it was easer to simply add 11 blank entries and then add 400 to the serial numbers.
Finally I combined all of my old entries into a single master archive (only about 500k) and then I used BBEdit to strip out the extra HTML and BBEdit’s RegEx search and replace to get all of my data in order.
My saving grace was that I had added a time/date stamp that was at the start of each entry and I never varied it the three years that I was using the system. That allowed me to keep the all of the entries in order and organized.
The last step was splitting the master archive into each individual entry file. I used an old Classic app called TextSplitter 2.2.1 that Dejal Systems released for free now that it’s ‘old tech’. It had a few hang ups and I had to split the Master Archive in half in order to get it all the way through.
End result? My archive page is now twice as long and the entries from 1998 to 2000 need to be edited to look somewhat decent. Over time I guess.
Okay, I’m taking the plunge.
Yes, I’m starting to use three column layouts. It’ll start off small, but I’ll bring it around to most of my layouts. As long as the center channel still reads easily for most people in the 640 to 800 pixel range, I’ll be okay with it.
Over on OrderSomewhereChaos, I’ve upgraded the layout navigation and I’m slowly working up an additional layout, though it will take some time. This time it’ll be something more intense, with some heavier layout elements than usual. That’ll be a good thing.
Now that users can choose which layout they want to work with, I feel more comfortable putting some more agressive and heavier layouts together.
Thought taxes, class syllabi, some research and an article are in front of the new design.
“These results are supportive of research by Jensen (2001), which states that participants listening to classical music are more likely to disclose personal information than those listening to no music.” – Usability News, 6.1 2004
It would be interesting to have music playing in the background of a job interview, or some other highly structured interaction and contrast classical with other music forms.
Um. Colin Mockery, a singing airplane, Mr Bean and Harry Potter… together again for the first time.
Great interview on Wired with one Dr. Michael Bull. He talks about how the iPod and other portable music devices are used to control one’s environment. Below is an excerpt, read the full interview with Dr. Bull at Wired.
For example, a lot of people use it to go to work, for commuting. I found that they use the same music on a regular basis. They will often play the same half-dozen tunes for three months, and each part of the journey has its own tune…
It gives them control of the journey, the timing of the journey and the space they are moving through. It’s a generalization, but the main use (of the iPod) is control. People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction … and they’re having a good time. That can’t be understated — it gives them a lot of pleasure.
So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.