About this site -- This site is a place to keep and share
the somewhat random musings, rants, and observations which otherwise clutter my brain. I hate clutter.
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The local school district informed me this morning that a new district policy had been put in place. Further, if I was to volunteer to chaperon my son's upcoming field trip to Darien Lake, I would first be required to take a one-hour mandatory volunteer training course.
I was shocked. After all, I have been volunteering in this district for 9 years. I've organized and judged science fairs, chaperoned a previous trip to Albany, conducted classroom demos and workshops, etc. Hell, I'm scheduled to spend tomorrow afternoon teaching 6th Graders to program Lego Mindstorm robots. But I never stopped to think that I was completely untrained for this. I thoughtlessly never considered the risk that I was taking with the well being of the little lives and minds in my temporary charge. After all, there's no way that 13 years of parenting, and 4-plus decades on the planet punctuated with stints of coaching kids and teaching adults has in any way prepared me for the task of supervising 6th Graders on a trip to a local amusement park. Hell, I took 4 kids to Orlando in February. What was I thinking? I wasn't trained for that!! They might be scarred for life!
I can hardly wait for this engaging and informative seminar that will finally qualify me to be in charge of children. I expect we'll learn things like:
Bus Safety - "never use children for wheel chocks"
Zero Tolerance - "never share your beer with kids while on school property"
Classroom Control - "sometimes a stern word can be as effective as a nuclear dope slap"
Respect for Authority - "don't let the kids cajole you into spit-balling the teachers"
Tort Law - "if the district is ever sued for your behavior, swear they trained you not to do that"
No time for a pet? You haven't the patience to train one anyway? Well no worries... check out the virtual dog. It responds to your commands and never poops on the rug. What more could you want?
You may have noticed that your Windows clock is drifting a bit since you installed the new Daylight Savings Time patch. Or perhaps you've noticed that it's now generating an error when trying to synchronize your clock with the standard time servers. Apparently the new patch isn't compatible with either of the standard time servers installed with Windows. But the fix is very simple. The NIST time server is compatible. You just need to add it.
- Double click your clock to open the Date and Time Properties - Go to the Internet Time tab - Click in the Server: field and paste the following server name - time-nw.nist.gov - Click the Update Now button - You should get a message saying the time has been successfully synchronized
And now you don't have an excuse for being late (or early)...
Don't get me wrong... I've shed as many tears as anyone while watching the news of the shootings at VT. And, I'm horrified about it. But I had the news on most all day today and there was not ONE word about the fact that the Supreme Court upheld the partial birth abortion law that Bush put in place. We are one step closer to them feeling that they can overturn Roe v. Wade and women will loose their right to control their own bodies. This is just what every Christian and right wing republican has been waiting for. They will feel they are one step closer... and I'm sure they are. However, it wasn't even news today. I have to ask myself why that was the case. I'm disgusted at both of these incidents, but both are very news worthy. Maybe the republicans are happy to just quietly let it have happened and hope that everyone is so wrapped up in the shooting stories, that they won't notice how much closer we are to losing all our reproductive rights. Crazy...
In no way do I wish to downplay the horror that occurred on the Virginia Tech campus two days ago where a gunman killed 33 people and injured 15 more. This is was the worst mass shooting in US history, and has rightfully shocked and outraged the whole nation. As individuals, most all of us can empathize with the inexplicable loss experienced by the families of the slain. And many of us now fear for the safety of our own children, brothers, sisters, parents, and friends who go to school or work each day in what should be a safe environment. The emotional healing required to move on from an event like this is only begun.
But here's a sobering thought. While this one event on a campus far from where most of us live has rocked our entire nation. Events like this, racking up similar body counts of innocents, are occurring in the city of Baghdad several times a week - and have been doing so for years now. Can you even remotely imagine what it would be like to live there? To watch your loved ones leave the house in the morning and rationally wonder if you'll ever see them again?
Here in the US, Virgina Tech was an historic tragedy. In Iraq, it was just Monday...
"What I found in discussions with current and former members of this administration is that there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region. In my view, there are essentially three strategies in play simultaneously."
This is kinda long, but you have to watch it. John Bolton is interviewed by a BBC reporter who actually had facts in front of him and was willing to use them to expose his "guest" as being more than a little callous and hypocritical. It's a shame we can't get the US media to behave like this. Then maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.
Ironically, one interpretation of Bolton's position would be that he actually supports troop withdrawal as proposed by the Democrats. That wasn't addressed in the interview, but I'm pretty sure he's too much of a party-line man to agree with it.
Lots of interesting (if not troubling) stats in this Pew Research Center survey on what Americans know (or don't know) about their government and world affairs. But I find the most comical to be that regular viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report scored 54% higher than regular viewers of Fox News. Hold on a minute while I try to come up with an astonished expression...
I'm not sure which aspect of this AP news story is more disturbing. That there are are $2000 toilets available with "pulsating massage spray" or that they have a tendency to burst into flames beneath your nether regions.
I know all you readers out there look to this blog for your fashion tips, so you need to know what all the babes will be wearing this summer at the beach. The trendy girls will be sporting solar powered bikinis. The power can be used to charge your cell phone or even keep your drink cool. Ain't technology grand??
Which is not the sort of factoid which gets you attention at parties. Eye-rolls, yes, but it's not the way to spark a conversation. Instead, maybe lead with this non-intuitive bit of research: Sexual Photographs: Surprise! Men Look At Faces, Women Focus On Sexual Acts
Science Daily — A study funded by the Atlanta-based Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) analyzed the viewing patterns of men and women looking at sexual photographs, and the result was not what one typically might expect.
Researchers hypothesized women would look at faces and men at genitals, but, surprisingly, they found men are more likely than women to first look at a woman's face before other parts of the body, and women focused longer on photographs of men performing sexual acts with women than did the males. These types of results could play a key role in helping researchers to understand human sexual desires and its ultimate effect on public health.
The finding, reported in Hormones and Behavior, confirmed the hypothesis of a previous study (Stephen Hamann and Kim Wallen, et al., 2004) that reported men and women showed different patterns of brain activity when viewing sexual stimuli. The present study examined sex differences in attention by employing eye-tracking technology that pinpoints individual attention to different elements of each picture such as the face or body parts.
"Men looked at the female face much more than women, and both looked at the genitals comparably," said lead author Heather Rupp, Ph.D., a fellow at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, who conducted the study in partnership with Kim Wallen, Ph.D., a Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroendocrinology at Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
"The eye-tracking data suggested what women paid most attention to was dependent upon their hormonal state. Women using hormonal contraceptives looked more at the genitals, while women who were not using hormonal contraceptives paid more attention to contextual elements of the photographs," Rupp said. Although it is commonly assumed males have more interest in visual sexual stimuli, researchers are working to figure out what characteristics are important to men and women in their evaluations of sexual stimuli.
The answer may lie within a small section of the brain called the amygdala, which is important in the processing of emotional information. In Dr. Hamann and Wallen's previous fMRI study, men showed more activation in the amygdala in response to sexual vs. neutral stimuli than did women. From the fMRI study alone, the cause of the increased activity was unclear, but Rupp and Wallen's study suggests the possibility that higher amygdala activation in men may be related to their increased attention to faces in sexual photographs.
Here's the setup: I had ordered a new motherboard for a computer I was building. The board worked fine except for the onboard sound. I was dreading the pain-in-the-butt RMA process which would be required to fix this. Not only would I need to rip the PC all back apart, but then ship it back, wait a few weeks and wait for the repaired board to return. Ugh. I need a Plan B.
So with a quick web search I found a $25 USB fob that would replace the sound function on the motherboard. This was a small price to pay compared to the aggravation of repairing the board. I checked, and the local Best Buy store had them in stock. Great. I was hoping to deliver the computer that night, Best Buy was on my way, and the device should only take a few minutes to install onsite. I finished the last couple steps of the build, packed the PC up and headed out.
I'm thinking that the Best Buy stop should be a quick in-and-out. And it should have been...
Walking in the door I head straight back to the computer department. Uncharacteristically, I don't even search the isles, I walk straight up to an employee and tell him what I'm looking for. The guy promptly takes me to a shelf and hands me a PCI sound card. I explain that this isn't what I'm looking for. I want the USB device. The next 15 minutes went like this:
"We don't carry that." "Really?, your website says you carry them and that this store has them in stock." "Well sometimes the website is wrong." "Maybe you could look?" "Oh alright..."
He then grumbles over to the service desk where he starts looking the device up on the computer. I wander over and peer over his shoulder.
"Look, you have 5 of them in stock!" "Well, I don't know where they would be, I've never seen them." "Maybe you could look?"
So Captain Happy then fumbles about on his computer some more and it shows him the shelf where the stealthy devices are kept. It turns out they are located right across from the computer station he's working at. The guy stares at this shelf all day. We walk over and he hands me on.
"Is that what you're looking for?" "Yeah, thanks. Now I have one question, is the plug on the back a 3.5mm or 2.5mm plug? I can't see it through the packaging and neither the website nor the package specify that." "I dunno." "How do we find out? If I need an adapter, I want to know now." "We don't carry those adapters."
I desperately wanted to ask how the hell he would know that given his stellar knowledge of the inventory, but I managed to keep my urges in check.
"Well, can we open the package so I know for sure what size the plug is?" "I can't open the package." "Then how do I know what I'm buying?" "You can take it home and if it's not what you want then you can bring it back." "You're maybe missing the point, I don't really want to make multiple trips here." "Well, I can't open the package." "Well, then I'll open it." "You can't do that unless you buy it." "Okay, so if I buy this, I can open it here and if it's not what I want then you'll give me a full refund all while I stand here?" "Yeah, that would be okay." "And this makes sense to you?" "Do you want to buy it?" "Sure, let's generate as much paperwork as we can."
So I put it on my credit card, whip out my knife, and dive into the blisterpack. To my increasing amusement, the plug is sufficiently recessed in the fob that I cannot tell visually what size the plug is.
"Do you have a cable with either size plug on it so I can see what fits, or do I need to buy a cable too?"
After much grumbling and rummaging around under the counter the bluebird of happiness produces a cable with a 3.5mm plug. Lo and behold, it fits. I return the cable to him and gather up the parts of my new sound fob scattered on the counter.
"Thanks! Always a pleasure doing business here."
It should be noted that he didn't tell me to "come again."
Monroe County officials are developing a plan with High Falls Brewery Co. to turn beer waste into ethanol and produce enough of it to power much of the county's fleet of vehicles. If all goes well, the county hopes to have extra available to offer ethanol-based fuel to the public.
"But Honey, Al Gore wants me to have another beer!!"
Now that I've convinced my closest family members to move to Vonage, I can expect that should Vonage lose its court appeal on patent infringement charges and be forced to shut down, that that they will rightfully kill me. Moreover, I will understandably be expected to move all of them to another provider with similar features at a similar price. The problem is, there is no such animal. Which brings us to today's rant: patent law.
Patents were originally envisioned to provide some protection for inventors to recover the costs of their research and trials. After all, without a patent, someone who spent lots of time and money inventing something new could be quickly tossed from the market by someone coming along and copying the technology and selling it cheaper. After all, the copier has no research costs to recover, so he can afford to sell cheaper. The result would be a loss of innovation for the country. There would be no incentive to invent.
This is most typified by the pharmaceutical industry where it may take 10 years of research and clinical trials to bring a new drug to market. Without the rights to make an inflated profit on that drug for some period of time, companies would shut down their research labs.
However, in recent years patent strategies have changed, especially for high-tech companies. Many companies are becoming patent mills. They are cranking out patents on ideas and concepts more than actual research. There is little to no investment in the invention, beyond the cost of writing and filing the patent. And often no desire to ever market the "invention". But rather they are using patents to prevent other companies from entering related or leveraged market spaces or developing competing technologies. Patents are being used to stifle innovation rather than promote it. Once another company introduces a product which steps on the patent, the patent holder waits until the company achieves some modicum of success. Then they go after the company to extort license fees from them or to shut them down.
Further, there are companies out there who exist just as teams of lawyers who have bought up patent rights from companies which the originator no longer found valuable. Then they roam the marketplace looking for companies they can sue for possible patent violation. This is what happened to Blackberry and Palm. The companies were attacked by freelance lawyers with patent rights the lawyers had purchased expressly for the purpose of extorting money out of PDA providers.
In the case of Verizon vs. Vonage, Vonage was the company who brought VoIP phone service mainstream in the US. Verizon is a relative latecomer to the game. And honestly would never have entered the market had companies like Vonage, Comcast, and Time Warner not made VoIP a commercial success. Verizon was much happier with traditional phone service as it was able to command much larger margins. But now that their core business is threatened, they are trying to sue the competition out of business. If they are successful with Vonage, expect other companies to be targeted next.
It's not remotely clear how this is good for industry or innovation as a whole. It's clear to me that patent law needs major reform in this country. Perhaps some sort of use it or lose it clause that prevents a company from just amassing "preventative patents". If the company cannot show an ongoing effort to commercialize a patent, then they cannot assert patent violation. I'm sure there are more creative solutions than this, but something has to be done to get the country back on the path to innovation. We can't just sue each other into success.
Let's be clear... if the war in Iraq ends badly, it will not be Bush's fault. On this much we can all agree. But I wonder now, given the political posturing over the pending war appropriations bill, whether or not there is a larger plan involving a Republican strategy to take back ground lost in the 2006 election.
First, it's time to face it. The war in Iraq will end badly. Whether we pull out in 5 months or 5 years, the puppet regime we installed as a government there will crash and burn. We can quibble about how much blood will be spilled in the process; about whether the result will be 3 independent countries; whether Iraq will be divvied up by it's neighbors; or whether it will emerge as a whole nation. Whether it will proffer some sort of pseudo-democracy ala Egypt, the faux-democracy cum theocracy of Iran, the tribal structure of Afghanistan, or, however unlikely, a true western style democracy. Who knows? It's ultimately not our choice, as it's more than a little clear that we lack the stomach (political will) or the resources to control the situation. It will be what it will be. Better sooner than later to my mind, but I doubt the outcome will be substantially different. And I'm guessing that to varying degrees, the administration is aware of this "rock and a hard place" dilemma.
This leaves the administration to basically choose on whose watch this debacle occurs. Does Bush end it now and suffer the political embarrassment of the collapse of his defining move as President? Or does he leave it for the '08 guy and still suffer the abuse that will be heaped on him, just posthumously? It's not clear that Bush matters in this anymore. The question is, what benefits the Republicans more?
Should the war drag on into the '08 election, its increasing unpopularity will doubtless cause a repeat of the spanking the Republicans received in '06. This will put them in a severe minority position hole which will take them 4-6 years minimum to dig out of. I don't think this is a tenable position for them.
The other option? End the war before the '08 election, and blame it convincingly on the Democrats. I think the Republicans are aware that the public at large is still pretty naive about what will happen when we pull out. I doubt that people are prepared for the ensuing economic turmoil the resultant Mideast instability will cause. Oil prices will spike, driving up consumer goods costs and hurting every American in his own wallet. I don't think people (as a whole) are expecting that.
So here's the plan (so I speculate). Bush will tow the line on the spending bill vetoing anything with a timetable. Congress will pass a few interim measures to prop up the effort through the summer. But in a few months Bush will announce that he is being forced to reduce troop levels because of the Democrat's unwillingness to pass an acceptable spending bill. Note, this will be heavily pitched as the Democrat's failure, not his unwillingness to sign. Iraq will collapse and the economy will be impacted as described above. All just in time for the heat of the '08 election season. Republicans will make lots of noise about how things were just economically dandy until the Democrats took power and then everything went to hell. This will be the cornerstone of the Republican '08 election message.
The White House is now in full smear mode against former campaign strategist Matthew Dowd's assertion that he's seen the truth. Bush is still behind Gonzales, against Pelosi, threatening Harry Reid, and ignoring the populist demands on Iraq. It has to be so difficult to be so completely wrong so very often.
My ex once said that she didn't really know the wrong answer until she heard me express my opinion. I think I finally know what she means. I'm beginning to feel that way about Bush.
