September 2010 – Page 4 – elaine nelson, aka epersonae

9/17/2010

Today’s Links 9/17/2010

Diaspora Developer Release
interesting, looks like it’s actually going somewhere. (is it RoR?)
You Can Stop the Social Media Hype Â«
"As long as we continue to buy into the hype of new technologies and look to communications tools and platforms to save us, weâ€™re doomed." dooooomed! 😉 also, the internet is made of people. seriously, though? this article is a good reminder to chill out.
WSOD with PHP versions 4.x, 5.0, & 5.1 when the Date_PHP4 module is enabled. | drupal.org
grumble grumble grumble.
GoDaddy SSL Certificates and Cannot Verify Identity on Mac/Safari Â« Boxed Ice Blog
not my specific issue, but pretty sure something in that neck of the woods.
Safari can’t verify the identity of the website | Hello System Admin | Where system admins share technical article and tips | Create free Blog | Updates on domains, web hosting, servers and more
the answer kinda makes my head asplode. not sure what to do from here.

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9/16/2010

Twitter Digest for 2010-09-16

@kegill oh, the Atom/RSS wars! (for your communities page: I gather there's a big chunk of LiveJournal that's gone to Dreamwidth.) in reply to kegill #
@mooshymama @TurtleNorthwest listened to Pop basically continuously for a month. #
@mooshymama @TurtleNorthwest I always associate Tones on Tail w/site redesign I did in 2000 for United Way Pierce County (then-employer) #
@kegill livejournal, moveable type/six apart, atom. in reply to kegill #
@bhenick 🙂 funny thing is I didn't start playing until after college. (w/coworkers at children's museum! including @olybuzz) in reply to bhenick #
@bhenick I'm feeling rather like the old lady in our new D&D group. (at 36! WTF?) playing til 10, then trying to settle down wipes me out. in reply to bhenick #
@morrischris well, *sorta* easy – I got held up for an annoyingly long time because it rejects business names w/ "branch" included. :\ in reply to morrischris #
why yes, updates run better if you actually upload the new files to the site you want to run the updates on. who knew?! #
@denisejacobs no, I only just found out about it the last time it upgraded, and just tried it out this morning. 🙂 in reply to denisejacobs #
@hjames happy birthday! (my 18 yr old self would look confused, I think.) #turned36lastweek in reply to hjames #
@denisejacobs did u know that colorzilla can extract a color palette from a webpage? (DOM color analysis) http://bit.ly/a1est0 in reply to denisejacobs #
@wsdot earworm! (that was the first music video I ever saw, btw. 9 or 10 yrs old, mom away for the weekend, babysitter turned on mtv.) in reply to wsdot #

9/15/2010

Today’s Links 9/15/2010

Feeling the Pain of Rejection? Try Taking a Tylenol: Scientific American
how bizarre. admittedly, early research, but fascinating idea.
25 Popular Color Scheme and Palette Generators | cssJuice
CSS Drive: Image to Colors Palette Generator

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9/15/2010

author: Guy Gavriel Kay
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2010/09/06
date added: 2010/09/15
shelves: fantasy, fiction, favorites
review:
Awesome, as always. Kay remains pretty much my favorite fantasy author ever, or at least in the top 5. Fascinating story with lots of twists & turns, vivid setting (a fantasy China/Mongolia), and complex compelling characters. Plus: ghosts! assassins! warrior monks! palace intrigue! spooky stuff! Devoured the whole book in about a day, which is probably a little crazy; in my defense, it was a sick day. Sometimes his endings are painful, this one splits the difference with both happiness & melancholy.

C just finished it yesterday, and as he notes, it’s also great fuel for my still-developing Central Asia-based game world, up to and including the inside-cover map. 🙂

9/15/2010

Under Heaven

author: Guy Gavriel Kay
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2010/09/06
date added: 2010/09/15
shelves: fantasy, fiction
review:
Awesome, as always. Kay remains pretty much my favorite fantasy author ever, or at least in the top 5. Fascinating story with lots of twists & turns, vivid setting (a fantasy China/Mongolia), and complex compelling characters. Plus: ghosts! assassins! warrior monks! palace intrigue! spooky stuff! Devoured the whole book in about a day, which is probably a little crazy; in my defense, it was a sick day. Sometimes his endings are painful, this one splits the difference with both happiness & melancholy.

C just finished it yesterday, and as he notes, it’s also great fuel for my still-developing Central Asia-based game world, up to and including the inside-cover map. 🙂

9/14/2010

Today’s Links 9/14/2010

The net effect of the â€œhigh cost of higher edâ€ argument : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present
"Strangely enough, none of these books suggest that the federal and state governments should once again subsidize higher education at the rate it did during the Cold War, nor do they advocate ripping out computer labs and IT departments, which are the two biggest reasons college costs more than it used to."
Two Cities Two Wheels: Middle Ground
"Anyway, I found it interesting to look up some actual facts regarding autos and bikes."

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9/14/2010

Twitter Digest for 2010-09-14

@sarahnopp sounds excellent. it's been a while since I last watched that. in reply to sarahnopp #
@godlessgirl I have a soft spot for the whales of IV. 🙂 (it's the only star trek that my mom likes, btw) in reply to godlessgirl #
@jamesscottbrown happy to help. 🙂 in reply to jamesscottbrown #
@rolandovich there's a very good Frontline episode (on insta-netflix) about for-profit colleges. boggling. in reply to rolandovich #
@emmettoconnell well, that explains it; I was a bit of a proto-Emo. see also: Jane Eyre, Rebecca. in reply to emmettoconnell #
@ScrivenerApp I am a cheap bastard, but I'll be plunking down $25 to upgrade to Scrivener 2.0. in reply to ScrivenerApp #
fun stuff! (plus secret 3-day "sale" at the end) RT @ScrivenerApp: Tip of the Day: http://bit.ly/9YkwQj. Scrivener 2.0 feature-set! 😉 #
@vantan thank you for sharing your lovely memories, he sounds like a fantastic grandpa. in reply to vantan #
@einmaleins cool! someplace to fill the void left by place on Harrison. (name escapes me, they were there FOREVER, closed last yr IIRC.) in reply to einmaleins #
@sarahnopp sleep & fluids! (also: bad tv!) hope you feel better soon. in reply to sarahnopp #
now I'm missing Dori & Don. ::sigh:: #
true story: bday card from asst included markup. I said some other markup might've been more semantic. she said: I knew you'd say that. #
. @brucel on the plus side, the 2 former students who were (not concurrently) my assistants were hella smart and picked it up quickly. #
. @brucel I used to work at a community college (2000-2006) and student employees were generally clueless about web standards. #
pointless coincidence of the day: Zuckerberg's dad is a dentist with the nickname "Dr. Z." So was a friend's ex-father-in-law. (no relation) #
& the only voicemail: reminder that my bday was logo shirt day. (glad to have missed that, honestly.) yay for vacation on a holiday week. #
@einmaleins awake (allegedly) and working! Inbox 0 FTW! in reply to einmaleins #
::cries:: RT @morrischris: This Dilbert comic is illustrative of what happens w/social media at so many orgs! http://ow.ly/2DsUX #
back to work. a gloomy ride, but surprisingly warm. 108 emails in my inbox, down to 7 already. #
🙁 RT @jbertrand: The agency lost an employee this weekend in a car crash. She wasn't wearing her seat belt #reasonstomourn #

9/13/2010

Today’s Links 9/13/2010

Web Album Generator: Free Photo Album Software
I used to have a cute little windows script by pb of mefi fame, but this seems to work just as well. (needed to make something static.)
A Tasty Recipe: Pecan Pie Muffins â€“ Tasty Kitchen Blog
Jon Carroll – SFGate
"Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day." think I’ve read this before. still awesome.
The Facebook Reckoning – Anil Dash
In which he expands on the quote in the New Yorker article: "here’s even more nuance to my feelings about Facebook than merely remarking on the privilege of its CEO"
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg opens up : The New Yorker
interesting personal story from the author at the end.
Retiring Later Is Hard Road for Laborers – NYTimes.com
"In all, the researchers found that 45 percent of older workers, or 8.5 million, held such difficult jobs. For janitors, nursesâ€™ aides, plumbers, cashiers, waiters, cooks, carpenters, maintenance workers and others, raising the retirement age may mean squeezing more out of a declining body." (musing: should retirement age be based on years in the workforce?)
The death of â€˜right brain thinkingâ€™ Â« Mind Hacks
"creative thinking does not appear to critically depend on any single mental process or brain region, and it is not especially associated with right brains [or a bunch of other stuff]" – meta-analysis of 70+ experiments.
Revenge of the Introvert | Psychology Today
HTML5 structureâ€”div, section & article â§ Oli.jp (@boblet)

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9/13/2010

screwing around with html5

I’m trying an HTML5 version of my current site theme, and ended up making some other fiddly changes to the theme files, so things may look … quirky … for a little bit.

9/13/2010

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education

author: Diane Ravitch
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2010/09/06
date added: 2010/09/13
shelves: history, non-fiction, politics, sociology
review:
She closely reviews the literature around accountability testing and school choice, after describing how she came to be an advocate for those things. Curiously enough, she wrote the history curriculum for CA in the late 80s that I went to high school under. And the data doesn’t follow what she had hoped for, in fact in many cases it’s entirely counter-productive. If you’ve followed this stuff at all, then there’s nothing massively surprising, but lots of interesting food for thought. (A friend of mine is a high school English teacher in Texas; I’ve listened to a few rants.) A good reminder that there are no simple options for improving education, altho there are lots of simple obvious ones…that happen to be wrong.

What I find curious, personally, is that she was an advocate of these ideas at all. Her background is in looking at the simplistic education fads of the past, so choice and testing ought to have sounded warning bells. A testimony to the power of peer pressure, I suppose.