Goth will never die. Of course for fun we could take it out, bury it, and then dig it up later to see what it looks like.
— kcwise1, in the WWDN Soapbox thread Calling all goths
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Yikes
I think I just heard gunshots. Eight, very quick, all together, no pauses. Creepy.
[2:30] Called the police, they’re going to check out the immediate area.
[2:33] Nice response time — there’s two police cars looking around now.
[2:55] Haven’t heard anything else, nor have the police felt the need to get back in touch with me for any reason. I’m going to assume that all’s well — or at least well enough that I don’t need to actively keep an ear cocked.
Hooray for living downtown! ;)
Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers
Interesting timing on this one. My friend Prairie is working on getting her teachers degree, and teaches English classes at her college. She stopped by for a few hours last weekend on her way through Seattle, and we ended up chatting for a bit on just how often students seem to have, at best, a very questionable grasp of the English language.
One of the things that drove this home for me within the past few years was corresponding with a friend of mine who I know is quite intelligent, knows how to express herself quite well, and generally is quite handy at doing so. However, all these strengths are almost entirely verbal — when it comes to the written word, reading e-mail from her was like corresponding with a different person. Little use of capitalization or punctuation (and what there was was often used incorrectly), poorly constructed sentences…the works. Eventually I had to break down and ask her about it, and she attributed it in large part to how she was taught in school. Apparently, teaching basic things like grammar, punctuation, spelling, and all the building blocks of the English language had fallen by the wayside, usually being replaced with an admonition from the teacher to be sure to use the grammar check and spell check on the computer.
Quite frankly, I was pretty floored by this. Admittedly, much of my command of the language (which, though it may be somewhat egotistical, I like to think is fairly decent [though I do tend to over-use parenthetical remarks {like this} too much]) was greatly influenced by having two parents with a love of the language, but even without their assistance, I know that proper writing was still being taught when I was in school. Is this just not deemed worth paying attention to anymore? Or are teachers just getting lazy? Either way, it’s a fairly disturbing development.
What started all this rambling, though was an article in the New York Times about how today’s teachers are coping with students using online abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons in their writing.
Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. “They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end,” said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. “If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown.”
As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today’s students are “Generation Text.”
On the one hand, suddenly typing — and writing in general — is ‘in vogue’ again among kids, due to the explosion of the ‘net and its associate technologies, such as IM programs like Yahoo! Messenger, chatrooms, and weblogs. However, if teachers aren’t able to help train these kids in the differences between the online slang and the correct usage, today’s students may very well be in for a world of hurt later in life, when they’re asked to write something more formal than a quick IM note to set up a date or pass gossip along. The teachers in this story sound like they’re all at least making some effort to make sure they’re actually instructing their students well — it’s the other teachers, those who ‘teach’ their classes to rely on all-too-inaccurate grammar- and spell-check software, that really worry me.
“Kids should know the difference,” said Ms. Harding, who decided to address this issue head-on this year. “They should know where to draw the line between formal writing and conversational writing.”
Found via MeFi
Faster! Faster! Fas…aw, crap.
I was playing with what I’d hoped would be a new feature for the site last night. Things were looking really promising for a while, too — but it looks like it’s not going to happen, or at the very least, not anytime soon. Bleah.
A while ago, Kirsten recommended I take a look at Andromeda, an application for streaming audio across the ‘net. At the time, I didn’t figure it was something to look into — primarily because all of my .mp3 files were on one computer, and my webserver was a seperate machine. Howerver, since the old webserver died and I’m now serving djwudi.com off of the same machine that has all my music, I thought I’d take a look at it.
Downloaded and installed it last night, and after a quick e-mail with the developers to figure out one small glitch, things were up and running. It works really nicely, too. From my PC, I could hit my website, browse through my music folders, set up playlists, and listen to any .mp3 file stored on my webserver. Nifty! I had all sorts of ideas for how I wanted to play with it, too — everything from linking to a band’s directory if I mentioned them in a post, to seeing if there was a way I could integrate it with my ‘Music of the Moment’ display to add a ‘play’ button for whatever track was being displayed at the moment.
Unfortunately, there’s one key roadblock — my connection to the ‘net. My incoming connection is nice and fast (1.5 Mbps, about the speed of a T-1 line), but my outgoing connection is pretty pokey (128 kbps, about twice the speed of a 56k modem). So, I figured it was worth taking a look at what other options I might have through my ISP, Speakeasy.
Turns out that according to their pricing grid, I’ve got two options for adjusting my speed, and staying close to my current price range. For $10/month more I could drop my incoming speed in half to 750 kbps, but triple my outgoing speed to 384 kbps. Or, for $20/month more, I could keep my incoming speed as-is, and triple my outgoing speed. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to go for the first option — while I really like having the T-1 speed incoming, it’s rare that I really use it all, so I figured I could go ahead and live with half of that, and take the smallest possible increase to my bill.
So, off to the phone to call Speakeasy. At which point, the bad news hits. It turns out that there are two different companies that Speakeasy parners with to provide their DSL service locally, Covad and WorldCom (though it might not be WorldCom, I’m hoping I remembered that correctly). The connection I currently have goes through Covad, and apparently it’s the top of the line Covad connection. Upgrading to a faster speed would require switching me over onto WorldCom’s network — which would require me cancelling my current line, and re-ordering a new line at the different rate. Sounds easy enough…except that it would create about a month where I’d be without DSL access.
Dial-up access only, and no website. Ugh.
The only other option would be if I had a second phone line. Then I could order the new DSL line, hook that into the second phone line, and kill the current DSL line when the new one kicks in. Unfortunately, that would require me paying for two phone lines for that month, two DSL lines for that month (plus all the setup costs for the new line), and then the hassle of changing my phone number at the end of the switch.
None of those options are particularly appealing.
End result, then, unfortunately, is that my site stays it’s current pokey (but, thankfully, usually okay since I keep most of my pages pure text) speed, and no Andromeda integration.
Ah, well. It was worth looking into, at least.
Stoopid. With two ‘O’s.
In working on the job submission tool I’m involved with at my job, it keeps amazing me just how many complaints and/or comments we’re getting from customers that they wouldn’t have if they would read the information on the page. But they don’t, and they whine, which forces us to attempt to dumb it down even further. I’m convinced that the lowest common denominator is sinking minute by minute.
Then I realize that I’m working in a place where there are signs posted on all the soda machines — which are free, and marked as such — explaining in four steps how to get your free soda from the machine.
- Select and push button of desired soda.
- Allow soda to drop.
- Remove soda from cooler.
- Please remove only one soda at a time.
As my dad once told me, “you will never lose betting on human stupidity.”
My most humble apologies!
Erk…as horrid as a thing this is to admit, I goofed up.
Yesterday (the 15th) was my dad’s birthday, and in the midst of my usual weekend duties, I completely forgot to call. Or write an e-mail. Or post a note here.
Or anything. Sigh. I generally try to be better about this.
I’ll be calling tomorrow morning — if I’m lucky, before he gets up and checks this website…but if not…happy (late) birthday, dad! You’ll be hearing from me soon!
Dance, Spider-Man, dance!
I think this has been going around on the ‘net for a while, but I just stumbled across it again. I don’t know who made it or where it’s from…but it amuses me.
If only we could…
I’ve often said that if I had my youth to do over I would waste more of it.
— Xopher
I don’t ‘forward’!
I get a lot of things sent to me by the people I know, and that have my e-mail address. Some (many) annoy me, but at times I get sent stuff that I actually like, or find amusing, or some such.
Going through and cleaning up my hard drive after upgrading my system, I figured that a blog would be good way to keep all these things around in a central place…so, that’s what I’ve done! There’s only a couple things up there now (and they’re both pretty long), but more will appear as I keep digging through all the stuff I’ve got scattered around my drives.
So without further ado — I don’t ‘forward’!
Even cops get to play sometimes
Every morning on my way to work, I walk out my door and head about five blocks down 8th avenue to my usual bus stop. Once a week, when I need to pick up my paycheck, I cut through the Freeway Park next to the Convention Center and head into downtown to the Today’s offices.
Since I had a paycheck waiting for me today, that was my route. Once I turned into the park entrance, though, I was a little concerned, as there was a small group of five police officers, all on their patrol bikes, grouped around the top of the staircase I normally head down. It didn’t look like anything was really happening, though, so I just kept going on my merry little way. Just before I got to the top of the stairs, one of the officers turned his bike around, carefully took aim — and started to attempt to ride his bike down the staircase, egged on by the other four officers he’d just been talking with, and another officer already at the bottom of the staircase.
He paused at the first landing long enough for me to walk by, then started working his way down again, only to take a tumble off his bike about halfway down. Fortunately, the next officer, already starting to ride down the stairs on his bike, managed to both avoid the one who’d just fallen off his bike and was laughing and trying to disentangle himself from the spokes, and keep going down without taking a spill. “It’s not as easy as it looks!” said the officer waiting at the bottom of the stairs, as we watched a couple more start to bump their way down.
Must’ve been a slow morning.
Man I wish I’d had my camera with me.