Bob Loblaw Law Blog
Not every great comic is published every day. Copper is a once-a-month*, but so delightfully drawn…
I really don’t know anything else about it, except that Ryan North likes it. So that’s enough to warrant taking a look.
* and apparently, so is this site. I don’t know what to tell you about that.
Filed under: Friday, webcomic
This one goes out to Cruel Dave who, as a rocker, totally rocks out. One of several things I like about Diesel Sweeties is the Red Robot cross pollination with Exploding Dog (”crush all hu-mans!”), and the 8-bit design. It was retro at the time.
And for those of you who are saying “DS is sew 2002″, note that rstevens keeps other funny things up at http://www.lolbots.com/
Happy Friday & Happy 3 day weekend, Americans.
Filed under: Friday, webcomicSo the US Congress is on the verge of passing some legislation that would reform the rules about how credit card companies do business. That’s great. I mean, I’m all for open markets and Lassiez-Faire but I think we’ve seen how the human tendency toward greed can be cancerious in an under-regulated environment (note that it is this same characteristic which is supposed to be the problem in very regulated environments like socialism and communism, but I digress (and oversimplify)).
But as an individual consumer who has on occasion been slapped with ridiculous charges and policies and fees applied without any discussion, I would like to see the House offer a version of the bill that applies all of the proposed changes immediately, retroactively, and without notice. This idea is not practical and probably not entirely legal and certainly not fair, but it would be cathartic, I think, for consumers to see credit card companies get attacked with a taste of their own medicine. Of their own unfairness.  And I mean fair in the human-to-human, playground sense, not the fine print, legalese, retroactively updated without notice sense.
And for your further entertainment:
Filed under: Politics, rantA decade into a career working with computer stuff, I still don’t get why anyone would write a broswer-specific website. Ever.
It isn’t a rule of thumb, it is simpler logic than that:Â Don’t limit your audience.
One of the things Iam not saying here is don’t reach forward to embrace new features and capabilities. Although that may happen, I garuntee you can still get your message across and your application built without it. All that has been done since the days of HTML 1.0 is to increase whiz-bang features and client-side processing. It may not be as easy and your cheap, wet-behind-the-ears programmers may not like that you’re not using their new favorite language, befuddle 4.0, but you can get your message across and your application built without ostracizing any chunk of your audience because they don’t use your favorite browser. Even Opera, even Safari, even the blackberry browser if you need to.
But for fuck’s sake don’t restrict your audience to only using Internet Explorer.
And yes, I’m looking at you, Research In Motion. Your BlackBerry upgrade site has a link that suggests Mac users should follow, which takes me to a page that informs me the information can only be seen using IE. WTF?
I’m ranting here, fine. If the frustration persists or the discussion warrants I may flesh this out more later.
I encounter this predominantly in intranet situations. I suppose it is the lingering assumption of corporate IT departments that they control the desktop (ha!) and therefore limiting access to their supported client(s) is okay or even smart.  I’m here from the present and I’m here to tell you that you don’t control the access client (or if you do, you spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to maintain that control), and I just got a postcard from the future informing me that all clients will be user-owned by lunchtime.
Veering off onto a well worn yet tangential path, let me remind you that the pendulum swing between centralized and decentralized computing resources is regular and predictable, and the move back toward centralization is picking up steam.  The users are still forming two orderly groups: powerless and power users. The powerless want to be provided with the tools to do their tasks, the power users want to use their tools to do work.  For the powerless you’ll soon be providing something like a remote desktop or thin client that runs from a single application on their corporate-run endpoint, for the power users you’ll soon be providing an option for a remote desktop that runs from a single application on their user-run endpoint or a suite of applications served over defined protocols (SSL, HTTP, IMAP, SSH, etc.). And this is really where the rub is. Not because I’m a power user and it ties my hands, but also because it ties the hands of those who would make use of their best tools.  For example (and to bring this back around), if you don’t like IE for some reason, you should be able to use Firefox, Safari, or Opera because they all do the task of communicating via HTTPS. The P in that acronym stands for protocol, which means a “standard procedure for regulating data transmission between computers.”  If Safari doesn’t do it properly, Safari is broken and needs to be fixed (not blocked based on the user-agent string).
And I don’t feel one bit better after this rant, so this has been a colossal waste of time. Ah me.
Filed under: Computers, rant, WorkstationBecause after having this presented to me 4 times and being awed each time, I know I’m going to want to watch it again so … noted here for future reference. That is to say, “yeah, I know you’ve seen this before, but it is still awesome.”
(Not yet filed.)
Note that this has been going on for over ten years. I haven’t made it through the whole thing, but it does get better.
Filed under: Friday, webcomicIt is Girl Scout cookie season once again and if you have the need (not just the want) for their cookies, you can find a place where they are being sold using the Cookie Locator. Isn’t the Internet wonderful?
Anyone who has had a conversation with me in the last five years where Girl Scout cookies has come up has heard me say this, but I will record it here for posterity: I will not buy Girl Scout cookies except directly from a Girl Scout. Understand that in the neighborhood I grew up in it was an occasional event that kids would circulate through the neighborhood selling various wares. Boys sold chocolate bars for the Boys Club, girls sold Girl Scout cookies. Parents were almost always good for one per kid, other neighbors were usually good for one total.  Boys were given a box of chocolate bars and told to come back with the money, Girls were given a sign-up sheet and customers paid when the cookies were delivered a couple weeks later. All of this took some energy and effort, it taught us accountability and responsibility, and it kept us out of trouble and out of the house.  It was good stuff.  The kids who did the best by selling the most were rewarded with accolades and sometimes prizes. I was never seriously in the running for any of those honors. I just expected that the winners worked harder, knocked on more doors, walked through more neighborhoods, or had more relatives than I.
Then some years later when I had entered the workforce I was sitting in my cubicle when a woman interrupted me to ask if I was interested in buying, or rather signing up to buy, any Girl Scout cookies. Delivery and payment would be in a couple of weeks as usual. Having been out of the reach of the Girl Scouts for a few years while gone to college and living in small apartment buildings, I was excited to have access to these cookies again. She passed me a completely full sign-up sheet with a few sheets of office paper stapled to the front and I filled in my order on what must have been the fifth page of handwritten orders. A box of do-si-dos and two boxes of peanut butter patties. Yes, please! What I didn’t calculate was that my temporary contract for that job would be expiring before the cookies were delivered and my order and wish would never be fulfilled.
What I did calculate, however, was that the girl who was getting the credit for selling all of those cookies was nowhere to be found. Sure, she was probably in school as she should be, but she wasn’t doing the work of selling the cookies her mother was. Where was the accountability lesson?  What of the girls whose mothers did not do the selling for them? Was I helping some young girl grow up to learn that whatever needs to be done mommy will do it for her (and she will get the award)? Had I just been duped? And what about the mother? Was she on the clock? Was she using company resources of not just time but paper and staples to carry out this work? Had she given any thought whatsoever to the statement her actions were making?
And since that day, I have always asked before buying or signing up to buy Girl Scout cookies,”Are you a Girl Scout?” And if they say that they are, I buy a box (or five) of cookies and thank them.
And when Jeffy reminds me that Girl Scout cookies contain palm oil, and Orangutans have been sometimes brutalized in the harvesting of palm oil, I don’t really have a good response.  But I also know that palm oil is in soap.  Did you know that, mister two showers a day?
Filed under: about me, Aminals, enviro, food, The Internet
