this for doodling on Photoshop:
Check out the Central Virginia Ruby Enthusiasts Group website and consider attending our October 7 CodeJam if you're in the area.
Thanks to all the CVREGers who got the website up - looks great!
I've been meaning for some time to write a post about the Cory Maye case. I've engaged in more than one online discussion of the case in varying contexts (racism, the drug war, forced entry by law enforcement) and have always promised a treatment in this blog. However, the tireless and diligent blogging of Radley Balko on the case - and his role in uncovering and publicizing critical details - has kind of dwarfed any sense that I could contribute something more valuable. So instead I'm going to link you to the writing of Balko and other sources so you can familiarize yourself with the case.
The paragraph summary: an informant's tip resulted in a late night forced entry by rural Mississippi police into the home of one Cory Maye, who had no prior criminal record and was not even named in the warrant (though his duplex unit neighbored a known dealers'). Sleeping in a room with his baby daughter, Maye claims he never heard the police announce themselves and feared a break-in by criminals. When police entered the room he fired a shot that killed the son of the police chief. He was tried and convicted as a result of incompetent counsel and sentenced to death. All for defending his home as any of us would have done.
There's a LOT more to the case, and I urge you to familiarize yourself with it. Here's some materials:
Last night I got a package from the Adam Smith Institute. I opened it up and found one of these:
I don't remember ordering one, but it's funny (not sure if the ASI thinks it's a joke, though). Thanks if somebody arranged for this to be sent to me.
Heh, shit, I just remembered who this could be. Is this your work, Mr. Van Fleet?!?!
I've installed Tracks, a Ruby on Rails web application that implements the Get Things Done time management methodology, on one of my web servers. If you're interested in checking it out, leave a comment here and I'll give you a URL. No support guarantees* but it appears pretty stable. I like the app and I'm already using it to keep track of personal projects and things I'm always forgetting to do.
Congratulations to Matt for getting promoted to Web Development Manager!
As the guy who encouraged him to take the risk of leaving a secure job for one fraught with challenges, I assume full credit for his accomplishment.
Seriously, you deserve it, man. We'll drink to this - TONIGHT!
I just found Jim's finance, Megan, has a blog and I had to quote this. She teaches at a rural Virginia high school. She complains about the same stuff that I always found... wierd back when I was in school. From her post about her first week back at school:
We got a new style of spirit shirt this year: a light denim button-up shirt, with the school logo on it. I can't even begin to tell you how hideous this shirt is. Now I have one of the more attractive figures at the school (how sad is that??), and it looks terrible on me! They come in "women's sizes" which everyone was excited about, except that they really don't. It's a man's shirt that runs ever so slightly smaller. And the worst part, everyone will wear this denim shirt with jeans this year. It doesn't go with jeans. Do they know that? Of course not because these are the people that wear holiday sweaters with bells and apples and rulers on them.
Priceless!
She also makes a serious point about the lack of technological sophistication in schools. It's something Tasha and I were talking about this morning since it's the topic of an essay she's writing for school. In very few other white collar professions would you be able to get away with the ignorance that Megan has to endure in her co-workers.
If you subscribe to any of my RSS feeds, please update your feeds to reflect the new Feedburner URLs:
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Well, you will if you look, smartass.
This is pretty interesting. I'm reading John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education and one part is just far too amazing to not blog. Apparently, the core inspiration for American public education int the 19th century was the Hindu system. Gatto explains how a clergyman, Andrew Bell, saw some real potential in their use of free schooling as a reinforcement of the caste system:
Bell noticed that in some places Hinduism had created a mass schooling institution for children of the ordinary, one inculcating a curriculum of self-abnegation and willing servility. In these places hundreds of children were gathered in a single gigantic room, divided into phalanxes of ten under the direction of student leaders with the whole ensemble directed by a Brahmin. In the Roman manner, paid pedagogues drilled underlings in the memorization and imitation of desired attitudes and these underlings drilled the rest. Here was a social technology made in heaven for the factories and mines of Britain, still uncomfortably saturated in older yeoman legends of liberty and dignity, one not yet possessing the perfect proletarian attitudes mass production must have for maximum efficiency. Nobody in the early years of British rule had made a connection between this Hindu practice and the pressing requirements of an industrial future. Nobody, that is, until a thirty-four-year-old Scotsman arrived in India as military chaplain.
Bell brought this system back to Britain and eventually it found its way to America.
The book is fascinating; I highly recommend it, and you can read it for free!
From Wil's blog, My So Called Penis (still the best blog name ever):
You know what would be a great virus to spread to cell phones? A virus that goes into the phone and replaces people's ringtones with some guy yelling stuff like, "Hey fuckhead! I'm fucking ringing!" or "Hey douchebag, you gonna tell everyone you fucked your cat last night? That was pretty sick, fucko." Preferably in a New Jersey accent.
There were some frustrations in the beginning, but I suppose they were to be expected. Somehow things just worked out... I had a problem with screen resolution for which I was able to find a quick hack. Then I couldn't get Xubuntu to recognize the NIC, so I popped it out to check the manufacturer and model (according to nongeek's instructions, thanks man!). While I couldn't locate the correct driver in the lib directory (no Dell drivers I could find), I found out that just by reseating my NIC it was recognized! Finally, it wasn't too painful to get Internet Connection Sharing working with my windows machine to give internet access to the Xubuntu box... and now I'm online!
All in all for a brand new OS, not bad... not bad at all.
My recent post on conspiracies did not really solve anything for me, nor did it crystalize a complete thesis like I expected. Complexity is an important element to deal with, but there's more to be said. It did, however, give me a starting point from which to express further opinions on the concept of conspiracy and the theories surrounding it. I think there's much more to be said above and beyond merely reacting to the wave of Hallmark 9/11 nostalgia that yesterday's blogosphere offered up.
As I stated in my previous post, I'm interested in conspiracy as a function of collective social dynamics. The Time article I quoted made a point about the psychological need to explain complexity through conspiracy. Unlike the popular thinking on the matter, however, I don't think the existence of theories makes conspiracy any more or less likely. There are theories about every imaginable dynamic we've been able to identify in the universe, from theology to physics to sociology and politics. All of them represent best guesses, some more or less supported by fact, regardless of their level of acceptance.
The problem is not theoretical speculation nor the uncertainty that such theories aim to alleviate (unless, I suppose, you're a politician). It is the capacity for society itself to establish the legitimacy and transparency of the political order in which it exists. Now, the basic dynamics of this should not be difficult to understand, though I'm not suggesting that running the world is a simple task. Some dimensions of life are naturally opaque - the human soul, quantum physics, etc. I'm not entirely certain that politics is one of those areas. People deal with interpersonal politics on a more or less daily basis - in the workplace, in the family, in their social circles.
featured seller on Etsy, a Web2.0-style site for artists and crafts people to share and sell their work! Lately she's been expanding her online presence with two blogs, her Etsy page, and a new site for her work (which she did herself to dazzling effect). I'm very proud of her - she works a hell of a lot harder than most people I know. She's intensely creative, yet has kept her business afloat through thick and thin. I admire and love her very much (which she already knows, but like most girls she wants to hear me say it).
So my wife got a new computer courtesy of Matt, and I took her old one to have my dirty way with it. I've been wanting to try out Linux for a while, so I grabbed a copy of Ubuntu since it's supposed to be so super easy to install. However, the computer is so old that it was sagging running off the Live CD (keep in mind this is a P2 400 Mhz with maybe 128 megs of RAM and a 4X CD-ROM drive). Waiting 15 minutes - literally - for a response to a mouse click just wasn't cutting it.
So I grabbed a copy of Xubuntu and went to install that. It's supposed to run better on older computers. Apparently there are very few display drivers on the Live CD and so I was stuck in 640x400 or something like that. Which would be fine if the installation windows shrunk to conform, but they don't. So most of the controls I need to click on to go through the installation are completely off screen. Additionally, there wasn't a consistent tabbing scheme on one of the screens (the time zone selection one needs you to Ctrl+tab or Alt+tab or something, not tab through).
But I'm finally installing. I'll let you know if I run into any more problems, but I had to bitch about that.
UPDATE: Got it installed no problem, but continued to be plagued by low resolution. Eventually hacked my way into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and had success when I amended my monitor settings to define HorizSync and VertRefresh values (hint: look up your monitor's specs online). I can't find the discussion that tipped me off there, but I bet if you search hard enough you can find it. Read more here.
Now to get my network card working!
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