Weather widgets are fun.
At home, it’s just below freezing. Here in the SouthEast, it’s not much warmer—but the world shows signs of impending spring.
My former housemate, Dr. Ed, is currently in Bangkok. It is 32 degrees Celcius at around 6PM (his time). If you can’t do the math’s, that’s around 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
It’s a big world, made small by weather widgets.
I think I want a dedicated printer for generating 3×5 cards and A5 inserts. And, while I’m at it, I might as well get one that does rudimentary scanning as well.
We’ll see. 40GBP isn’t cheap, but it isn’t killer. I’ll think about it, anyway. The Canon Pixma MP160 (Amazon UK, review) looks reasonable for what I want to do with it. Maybe.
Update: And, as long as I’m keeping track of things…
I think I’ll need to order some index cards and boxes. Perhaps. I do have a whoop-ass index card file on my desk right now, which might serve just fine. I think it could take a hit from a 10MT nuclear warhead and keep my 3x5s safe…
I flew from London to Cleveland in December.
I flew from Cleveland to London in January.
I flew from London to Houston in February.
I flew from Houston to London in March.
I flew from London to Los Angles in April.
I flew round trip LA to Cleveland in May.
I flew from LA to London in May.
I flew round-trip London to Faro in June.
I flew from London to Cleveland in July.
I fly, Cleveland to London, before the end of the month.
I have never watched ZeFrank’s video podcast before; very succinctly, he makes clear the way I feel about the US response to terrorism.
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Even with the risk of airplane bombings, it is still more dangerous to drive your car—or smoke cigarettes.
As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself. London’s police deputy commissioner Paul Stevenson’s report said that the plot was “intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”
No. It is imaginable. Between three and ten flights out of thousands would have resulted in the terrible loss of human life.
Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don’t think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen.
The entire spot is 2 minutes, 21 seconds. It’s rational, and straight-forward.
If a terrorist makes you live in fear, shame on them.
If your government makes you live in fear, shame on you.
I’m reposting this Guardian article in full. Someone will yell at me, if necessary, to pull it.
American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.
Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.
Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4′s Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.
The troops told Dr Fadhil that they were looking for an Iraqi insurgent and seized video tapes he had shot for the programme. These have not yet been returned.
The director of the film, Callum Macrae, said yesterday: “The timing and nature of this raid is extremely disturbing. It is only a few days since we first approached the US authorities and told them Ali was doing this investigation, and asked them then to grant him an interview about our findings.
“We need a convincing assurance from the American authorities that this terrifying experience was not harassment and a crude attempt to discourage Ali’s investigation.”
Dr Fadhil was asleep with his wife, their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, and seven-month-old son, Adam, when the troops forced their way in.
“They fired into the bedroom where we were sleeping, then three soldiers came in. They rolled me on to the floor and tied my hands. When I tried to ask them what they were looking for they just told me to shut up,” he said.
When the rest of the world starts waging a war on terror, we’ll call them terrorists… because they will be attacking us, instead of us attacking them.
I can’t make a phone call out of my office. Actually, that’s a lie: I can call other phones on campus. As a third-year PhD student, I can’t call down the hill to order take-away. I can’t even dial a toll-free number; to do that requires me to call the switchboard, request an 0800 number, and then get connected. This means that I cannot use a calling card to call off-campus after, say, 4:30 (or whenever the switchboard operators decide to go home).
Other than being incredibly backward, the University of Kent is unlikely to make changes to their telephone infrastructure anytime soon. This kind of “lack of access” for their students, undergrad and graduate alike, is endemic, and part of an institutional inability to see that you can only enable great things and good work by enabling communication and collaboration. Blocking toll-free numbers is ridiculous. Generally speaking, this means I cannot call California, during PMT business hours, from my office, as it is physically impossible to use the phone to make the call.
Enter Skype Groups. My department could, in theory, provide Skype credit for every member of faculty, staff, and postgrad in the department. Granted, I have routinely had Skype crash or otherwise die in the middle of a SkypeOut call (once to the Home Office, trying to work through student visa issues), but at the least it would be a start. As it stands, I pay for this myself, and pay for all my own phone calls to colleagues elsewhere in England or abroad. This, at least, would provide a cheap, and convenient, framework for us to make calls locally and internationally.
Via my father, my mother made mention of the fact that Dale Chihuly’s work is being exhibited in the Kew gardes up in London. I think that I need to head up to London some Saturday or Sunday where the weather is supposed to be good.
While I’m at it, I should probably go up in the Eye, and revisit he V&A. I also like the look of the Open Systems exhibition in the Tate Modern come June to Sept.
If you lived in the UK right now, the new Honda Element would cost you around £9000 to purchase (assuming you could get the US price for it). Of course, you would actually have to purchase it from an importer, so it would be marked up by a factor of 2, meaning the vehicle would cost £18,000, or $33,100.
The 15.9 (US) gallon tank in the Honda Element is around 13 imperial gallons, or approximately 60 litres. Since one US gallon is 3.785 litres, and it gets roughly 25 miles to the gallon, it must get around 25 miles to 3.785 litres, or 6.6 miles to the litre.
A litre of petrol (gas) in the UK right now costs around 89p, or £0.89. One British pound is converting to 1.83985 dollars at the moment (wholesale, not with transaction and conversion fees). So, one litre of fuel costs $1.64. Put another way, you can travel six miles in Britain for $1.64 in a Honda Element.
A full tank on the Honda Element costs $98, in the UK.
If you think the USA won’t reach these kinds of prices, just wait. Current US prices are around $2/US Gallon, or $.52/litre, or 28p/litre. But, I’m confident that the USA will get there—petrol prices will eventually stabilize with the rest of the world, and if the war and systematic gutting of social security don’t work wonders on the US economy, then realistic fuel prices will. That 20 mile commute to work will suddenly cost $5.50, each way.
And then the US will wish the government had invested in public transport instead of fuel subsidies.
Note: You can simulate this cost, right now, in the USA, by driving a Hummer H2. It has a 32 gallon tank ($198 to fill in the UK), and gets 9.6 miles to the gallon, or 2.5 miles to the litre. For $1.64, you can drive 2.5 miles in the UK in a Hummer H2.
I can walk 2.5 miles in around 30 minutes.
It’s always fun when someone you know starts a new weblog. Stuart Kent, formerly at the University of Kent (no relation), now at Microsoft, has started a weblog regarding his work on tools infrastructure.
Reading Microsoft weblogs regarding software design and development practices is a very educational experience. I must admit, I don’t read many of them, but I would imagine that there is a lot of ephemeral knowledge to be gained by tracking a handful of key weblogs. I suspect Stuart’s weblog will be more on the design side rather than implementation, focusing on larger issues regarding DSLs and how to express those ideas in tools. We’ll see.
I borrowed my housemate’s ICBM homing device… erhm, GPS, and discovered that the ICBM coordinates I had for this blog were wrong! The little 
button on the left-hand side of the page links to a nifty server that lets me find out what websites are close to me, physically.
The biggest problem was that I had put myself -1 degrees into the Western hemisphere. That’s… well, fortunately still in England, because 0 degrees isn’t actually all that far away. But, at the same time, I was declaring myself to be somewhere I really wasn’t.
So now when I push the little green button, I find out that I’m near Jibble, UKC Quotes, the Canterbury takeaway menus, Adam Sampson, and the fivegeeks. Which makes sense, because I actually know some of those people.
(For those who wonder, they’re called ICBM coordinates because they’re the numbers you should give to the nice man on the phone when he calls to say that they’re going to launch big nuclear missiles at you.)
This is a pure-rant post for me, and not much of a rant at that.
| “[Our kids deserve] the very best teachers that money can buy.”
This statement just made me cringe. First, it brought to mind the old joke where the punchline is, “Madam, I belive we’ve established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over price.” But more importantly, are the best teachers really those that come at the highest price? Can you, in fact, “buy” teachers? And further, doesn’t this statement lay any perceived failures squarely at the feet of teachers, and teachers alone, yet again? It always sounds good when candidates for office say that education is important to them. Education is important to me, too. But in my opinion, it’s just a “feel-good” soundbite. While no one has a magic formula to ensure that students learn, the people making these statements rarely have ANY knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in education. |
Holly is responding to political ads, and how education (like every other substantive issue) becomes vacuous in the game of political football that takes place this time of year. While it may be a feel good sound-bite, it does hit a few issues for me:
But the rant gets better! (Or, it links in more of the websites that I regularly read…) Chief WatchPuppy Matt Lavine points me to this tasty tidbit!
| Education Secretary Rod Paige called the nation’s largest teachers union a “terrorist organization” Monday, taking on the 2.7-million-member National Education Association early in the presidential election year.
… He said he had made clear to the governors that he was referring to the Washington-based union organization, not the teachers it represents. Weaver dismissed Paige’s distinction between the union and its members. “We are the teachers, there is no distinction,” he said. |
(via The Billings Gazette, running an AP newswire story)
Ah. Well. Good. Excellent. Talk about incentive. Even if I interviewed for a teaching position in the US, the fact that I’ve lived abroad might make them think I was attempting to join an Educational Terrorist Cell.
In related news, I received my absentee ballot for local elections back home… today. I need to get my ballot back for the Primary elections by… Tuesday, March 2, 2004. They mailed it 3rd class three full weeks ago.
Bastards.