Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Just heard in a commentary on NPR (no idea who, I turned in partway through):
If those bible-thumpers really want a conundrum, how about this? If you take the word ‘presbyterians’ and rearrange the letters…it spells ‘Britney Spears’.
— Jim Hightower, at the October 2005 Annual West Colorado Congregation in Grand Junction, Colorado
After having some recurring problems with the Gallery software that we’d been using for the Hanscom Family Gallery, I decided to throw in the towel and talked dad into putting his Flickr account to use.
I’m so glad I did.
He’s been going through and scanning in a lot of old pictures that he and mom brought back from Florida after her parents died last year, and putting them up. Such great stuff in here!
Mom’s parents, my grandparents, Harold and Arline Ward.
My grandpa teaching swimming — probably at the YMCA, if I’m remembering correctly.
Mom in about 5th grade, dressed up as a clown for Halloween.
“La Vie Boheme B” by Original Broadway Cast from the album Rent (1996, 1:53).
One of the (few) downsides to my little Powershot A95 is that as a point-and-shoot style camera, it’s a touch limited as to what it can do — a standard 3x optical zoom, a fixed lens so no other lenses can be attached, no threads for filters…little things like that. Very normal for a point-and-shoot, of course, but at times, a wee bit limiting.
However, one of the nice things about the A95 is that it is possible to attach some accessories to it. Canon’s Powershot cameras include a detachable ring around the lens assembly that, when removed, reveals a mount point. Canon also supplies a few accessories that can attach to the mount: an adaptor tube, which can then have either a wide-angle or a telephoto lens attached to it. However, as the A95 is a couple years old, these items aren’t incredibly easy to come by anymore.
Last week sometime I stumbled across LensMate, a local company that makes aftermarket adapters for the A95’s mount in both 52mm and 37mm sizes. I went ahead and ordered the 37mm adapter (since I knew my work carried some 37mm filters and accessories), and it arrived in the mail yesterday.
I took the camera in to work so that I could make sure the adapter worked with the filters I wanted to pick up. It did (no surprise, but nice to have it confirmed), so I got three Quantaray filters: a UV Haze, a Neutral Density, and a Circular Polarizer.
Since 37mm is a standard size for camcorder lenses, our store carries a few accessory lenses originally designed for camcorders. Since they’re the same thread size as my new adaptor, I started experimenting with those, and as it turns out, we’ve got a set of a .5x Wide Angle Lens and a 2x Telephoto Lens that fit perfectly, so I started playing with those to see how well they worked. Verdict: not bad, and I may want to pick the set up after my next paycheck.
Then things started getting silly.
Y’know, I don’t care about football. Never have.
But even I can’t be a complete curmudgeon about the Seahawks’ win today. First time in thirty years…I guess it was about time.
So…yay. Go Seahawks.
I might just have to pay some small amount of attention to the Superbowl this year. Weird.
Heh — I can hear fireworks going off somewhere outside. Seattle’s going to be a pretty happy city tonight.
…as summarized by Cor Tenebrarum on the SeaGoth message board:
“Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).
The headmaster of a technical school in Lozere, France, has been dismissed after discovery of his anonymously-written weblog, which was deemed obscene and pornographic (link to Babelfish translation). Apparently he was discovered when he posted his photo in a recent entry.
Can remarks published on a blog perso justify a dismissal? Yes according to the national Education which judged that this civil servant held a blog “obscene and pornographic”. It there posted its homosexuality and criticized its administration.
The fact is without precedent in France. Located on Internet via its blog Garfieldd.com, the headmaster of the technical school of Mende, in Lozere (48), at the beginning of January by national Education was revoked. The institution reproaches him for having published contents in “pornographic” matter on its blog, however held under pseudo (Garfieldd). But of the notes on its professional life frays with others intimate and on its states of hearts its function and identifiable place of work returned.
Besides in his last version(filedpartly), the chief of establishment posted his face in banner page. What could convince the professors of another college of the area to alert their hierarchy. “To denounce” others will say.
In an interview on line on the site of RTL, the headmaster reacts highly: “I challenge the pornographic term, that was never the case on my blog (…) in which I spoke about my life (and thus also) of my professional life. Objectively my blog was anonymous.” Like any civil servant, this headmaster was held with the duty of reserve, of which the blogs are not free.
I, unsurprisingly, discovered this when I noticed traffic getting a bit of a boost thanks to a link midway through the article.
This business rests the question of the freedom of the blogs compared to professional space. Abroad precedents exist: a Web designer American laid off in 2002, to have scoffed the life at its company (without quoting of names) on its blog Dooce.com; an employee of Microsoft in 2003, for an impertinent post published on its blog perso; an employee of bookshop in Edinburgh (Scotland) to have disparaged its employers; an air-hostess of Delta Air Lines to have photographed itself in uniform on an aircraft of its company in a sexy installation.
Heh. “Impertinent.” I like that.
I’m also starting to get hits from the ZDNet France article that the Yahoo! page was syndicated from. Two and a quarter years after ‘the incident’, and while things are slower, my 15 minutes of fame is still making itself known from time to time. Yikes.
Three items caught my eye today:
Finally, after an extravagant introduction by Mr. Abernathy, who referred to Dr. King as “conceived by God” (“This personality cult is getting out of hand,” said a college student, and, to judge by the apathetic reception of Mr. Abernathy’s words, the crowd agreed), Dr. King himself spoke. There were some enthusiastic yells of “Speak! Speak!” and “Yessir! Yessir!” from the older members of the audience when Dr. King’s speech began, but at first the younger members were subdued. Gradually, the whole crowd began to be stirred. By the time he reached his refrains—“Let us march on the ballot boxes. . . . We’re on the move now. . . . How long? Not long”—and the final, ringing “Glory, glory, hallelujah!,” the crowd was with him all the way.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
On 4/4/67, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. We were appalled. Anyone familiar with this period knows there were many assasinations before and after this, from political leaders to civil rights workers. We had had enough.
That weekend, there was a protest rally in Kokomo IN, hardly a bastion of liberal thought. Kokomo was then, and may be now, primarily a factory town. Berta, my mother, and I marched in the rally.
There were not many white faces in the Kokomo rally, but we were among them. It is only an accident of history we made it to the church where the rally ended without incident, as the streets of Kokomo were lined with jeering people, mostly white.
…here it is: The Best. Blonde Joke. Ever.
“Mysterious Ways (Apollo 440 Magic Hour)” by U2 from the album Mysterious Ways (1991, 4:26).
26 days of rain, and a state of emergency has been declared.
Can’t say I’m surprised, really. I think it was my next-door neighbor starting to build an ark that tipped me off.
“Drip, Drip, Drip” by Chumbawamba from the album Tubthumper (1997, 5:08).
At least, according to the Original Geek Test, that’s my final score.
(via a crank’s progress)
Update: Heh — I’ve done this one before…and scored higher that time. I wonder what I answered differently this time around?