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Day: July 28, 2008

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-28

Published by NiteMayr on July 28, 2008
  • Looking at my future options. Still looking for a perm. Job with Benefits. MMMmmmm Health Care. #
  • Arsenic and Old Lace starring John Hurt and Ian McKellen as the aunts; doesn’t that sound like CAMP AWESOME?!?! #
  • With Ryan Reynolds in the Cary Grant Role and Steve Buscemi in the Peter Lorre role. Can you say Oscar Winning Comedy? #
  • I was going to go looking for Writeroom for Linux; but then I realized that I have Vim there. I’m just going to sit back down now. #
  • Stephen Fry as Cousin Teddy!!!!! #
  • OH; I forgot. I played Mass Effect. It’s good. I turned off Bloom, Depth of Field and Blur effects. I played with them on, but, No. #
  • I’m listening to Marc Maron “Tickets Still Available”. You should too. #
  • Acomedian doing jokes about how “Ironic” by Alanis isn’t about Irony. How funny is that? If you said “not funny at all” you get check-plus #
  • MF: Couldn’t find work, was on food stamps but about to lose them….and hates libruls.

    Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Irony. #

  • If you read my last blog post in Stephen Fry’s voice, it sounds great. #
  • MF: There is an awful lot of inarticulate and misguided rage out there, and sometimes it’s armed or behind the wheel of a car #
  • @warrenellis Perhaps you are not familiar with the works of Michael Bay, it’s essentially the same thing. #

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I need more paperwork!

Published by NiteMayr on July 28, 2008

I’m fibbing a bit here; I hate paperwork.  I despise it, in fact.  However, I love feedback from people (and while I prefer email) I really enjoyed getting weekly updates from my daughter’s teacher on her progress at school.

I came accross this story linked from “The Times Online”

Times have changed so much since many parents were at school, that teaching methods are often now completely different. This report says that parents feel that schools “expect” them to support their children’s learning, and assume they know how to do so.

I sometimes had to scratch my head over some of the more baroque teaching methods employed by my Daugther’s instructors; they had warned us to expect the unexpected, but how does one prepare for the utterly alien?  I wish I had kept some of the pages on hand to demonstrate the malefic wonder of it all; the square diagrams of numbers that seemed utterly foreign to me.  Not to mention my wife; who would often look at the homework sheet, sniff a bit then pass it off to me in hopes that I could make heads or tales of it.

This situation improved slightly when we were presented with an actual copy of the source materials that gave examples of the expected product of our daemonic equations.  Sometimes we could even check over her work to ensure that it was correct.  As the days progressed and the teaching methods solidified, so did our Daughter’s understanding of the work and therefore it fell to us to simply ensure that it was correct and complete.  My codex Malefectorum being of the old-school; sometimes I wondered if I was not getting the answers right myself; or at least; not “new school” right.

Food for thought.

You and your Flying Purple Pony can get stuffed

Published by NiteMayr on July 28, 2008

Did Muslims react so strongly because they did not understand or believe in freedom of speech? Gallup’s data, which demonstrate Muslim admiration for Western liberty and freedom of speech, indicate otherwise. The core issues of this apparent clash, or “culture war,” are not democracy and freedom of expression, but faith, identity, respect (or lack of it), and public humiliation. As France’s Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk observed in The Associated Press in the midst of the cartoon controversy: “We gain nothing by lowering religions, humiliating them and making caricatures of them. It’s a lack of honesty and respect.” He further noted that freedom of expression “is not a right without limits.”

Islam and the West: Clash or Coexistence?

I’m focusing on this last quote; from Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk; it’s fairly naive to ask a religious authority about how people should talk about religion in the public square.  What do you imagine the Grand Rabbi will say about religion;  that satire is satire and we should accept the clowns with the accolades?  No.  Simply no.  Like the Pope or the GRand Vizier, the religious authority is going to fall on the side of the religious without fail.  Therefore there opinion; however florid, is moot and accepted as supporting religion without inquiry.

The “Cartoon Debacle”  highlighted something that I hold dear; the ability (and lack thereof) to laugh at oneself.  It’s a hard pill to swallow when someone makes fun of your hero; it’s even harder when that hero is your personal savior.  This I get; but when someone lampoons my heroes (even the ones that I adore) I don’t feel compelled to violence (any more).  If it is funny; I laugh.  If not, I fume and maybe even give back an indignant remark; but that’s about it.  It seems that people can get very huffy about their heroes, personalizing anything about said heroes as an individual slight.  Not only does this show a shocking lack of character, but it demonstrates a lack of  development on par with serious emotional developmental issues.

Notice that (any more) I dropped in there?  That’s because it USED to be that one could goad me into a tear-stained fury just by making fun of the music I liked.  I hadn’t developed the emotional coping mechanisms that would allow me to separate myself from my interests.  This is probably the kind of lack of development that leads to violent reactions to parody.  I don’t know; I’m not a psychiatrist.  I’m just a Blogger.

That being said; it sucks that people (as a group) can be so easily led to outrage. We all have to just lighten up and tackle real issues and outrages when they come up.  Right?

Cuil: Totally useless

Published by NiteMayr on July 28, 2008

I read about cuil this morning while looking through the posts on my iGoogle page.  Interested in new things and not willing to simply discount it out of hand, I fired up the ethernets and typed my name and interests into it’s waiting inputs.

And didn’t find the website you are reading this on.

Not at all.

Not even if I searched for things I knew were on this page.

So, yeah. Cuil sucks.

Sorry guys, you have a long way to go if someone can’t ego surf their own website from your engine.

More Boring Canadian Politics

Published by NiteMayr on July 28, 2008

“An election will come between now and October 2009,” he said on CTV’s Question Period on Sunday.

“(Calling an election) is a decision that belongs to me, that’s true … I will choose a good moment.”

—Celine Dion on Calling an Election

Stephane Dion continues to play coy rather than stating the facts.  Things aren’t bad enough to call an election, when things are good people vote for incumbents.  In this case “The Tories”.  If Stephane would just drop the act and state that he knows there is no point in calling an election; as his team would just lose.  The general populace is nothing if not forgetful, the years of peace and prosperity under the Liberals are too easy forgotten it seems; lost in the dust of minor controversy.