I wrote up a short article on Wikinews: Thousands in San Francisco protest US wars.
It isn’t a great article, and it is pretty short, but it is kind of neat to write your own news. Also, the nice thing is that other people can go in there and edit it – add more information and such.
A lot of people are pissed off at the current administration. Surely, George Bush is one of the worst presidents that this country has seen. And so we will go ahead and blame, blame, blame the Bush administration. OK, sure, the administration should take a lot of blame. But we are only in the situation we are in because we have allowed it to happen.
You might say that George Bush was never actually elected in 2000. And you’d be right. But actually elected or not, it was damn close. So we still should take a lot of the blame because, stolen election or not, the election had to be very close for it to be stolen. But then he was elected to office again in 2004. So we have failed in electing someone else to office.
OK, well let’s suppose that we have all “learned” from our mistakes and elect a nice Democrat to office in 2008. Who are we kidding? All a Democrat will do is be less of a corporate whore. A Democrat will whine and complain that we never should have been in Iraq to begin with, but of course according to almost all of them, we can’t leave now.
So our country will still have a lot of bass ackwards inequalities and still be fighting a war of agression in Iraq. But of course it won’t be our fault, because we will have voted for a nice friendly Democrat. What else were we to do?
Well, what exactly is holding us back from not voting for one of the two major parties? In the end, nothing. Sure, our election laws are pretty screwed up. I mean a third party can’t even get into the debates. They can’t even get on some ballots. Well, this needs to be fixed. But we all have a responsibility to analyze our current situation and then analyze what options we have to remedy the current situation. Not voting or voting for one of the two major parties is not a remedy to our current situation. It is time for each citizen in the United States to take responsibility for their part in the current state of the country.
I like how Noam Chomsky puts it — He says that he couldn’t look himself in the mirror each morning if he didn’t do what he does.
I am eating some “Golden Honey Granola” right now. Wow, it sure is delicious. But a couple of things irk me here.
First of all, it is put out by the “Peace Cereal” brand. Sure, peace sounds like a great idea. But how about you just give me the god damned cereal, and let’s keep politics separate from it. You sure as hell don’t see “War Monger O’s” promoting the neocon viewpoint.
Secondly, the box says that “10% of Profits Donated to Creating Peace”. Here’s an idea: how about you charge less money for your cereal to make the same profit, and let me decide what to do with the difference?
I am not sure who these people are trying to fool. OK, so donate whatever percentage of your profits to some good cause. Great. But by putting it on the box, it is obvious that you are just trying to profit off of the peace movement.
Another cereal I have seen is “Heritage O’s”. Ooh, I want to buy those so that I can support cultural diversity! I can taste the moral correctness in every bite!
I’ve got a better name for these cereals. Let’s call them “Help, I’m Being Eaten by a Crazy Liberal!”
So you want to be a liberal company still? Well let’s do it in a way that makes sense. Get rid of the normal corporate structure and make the company worker owned. Be environmentally responsible. Be honest to the consumer and put out a good product. Now those are things that I can get behind. That is being a good liberal company within the confines of being a company.
I guess this is the punishment I get for shopping at San Francisco Real Food. This is a store which obviously just panders to the rich liberal crowd. I shop there because it is yummy, convenient, and the only full grocery store within a decent walk from my apartment. All of the food there is organic, and all of it is very much over priced. It is quite obvious that they are simply looking to profit as much as possible off of the organic/liberal/yuppie/anti-capitalist/anti-war “market”.
And when I googled “San Francisco Real Food” to try to find their website, I find this gem of an article. So this company quite obviously cares little about the liberal movement. They’re just another union-busting company looking to line their pockets.
Someone in Tennessee was busted for a large marijuana-growing operation.
This just seems so neat to me. I love projects of a large scale, and of good organization.
I guess that is why I just upgraded my storage capacity to over 1TB 😀
Some of you may have heard about the mudslide on Leyte island in the Phillipines with an estimated death toll of 1,350 people. Many of you haven’t. It happened on Friday, February 17, 2006.
Today, the Washington Post online front page does not have a single link to the story. Neither does its “World News” section. Neither does its “Asia/Pacific” section.
The New York Times online does an pretty job with the story; you can see it on the first screen full of text on the front page. There is a featured picture for it on the International section and it is the top story in the Asia section.
BBC News online has a link to the side about the mudslide and it is the top story in the Asia section.
The San Francisco Chronicle online has a larger link to the side, which is nice. One thing I did notice, however, was that there is no “World”, “International”, or “Asia” section. In fact, their main sections are listed as sports, business, entertainment, food & dining, and travel. This just goes to show you how much this newspaper is actually a newspaper, and how much it is a pop culture magazine.
The actual print San Francisco Chronicle newspaper from Saturday had as its two main stories (top half of the front page) something about the weather on some local mountain, and a story about how crime is falling on a certain street in Oakland.
I applaud Google News for having the mudslide as the top story. I know that Google News is automated, but whatever algorithm they are using managed to pick out a good top story today.
So depending on your news source, you might get a good sense of the importance of this story. Or you might think it is just a minor occurrence, perhaps judging by a small link to the side with relation to a story that seems much less important. Or you might not even hear about it at all, even if you happen to read the all the links posted on all of the relevant sections on the Washington Post website.
The above analysis was not done with small-town newspapers. The Washington Post and New York Times are two of the most important newspapers in the country. The San Francisco Chronicle is the largest newspaper in the fourteenth largest city (and twelfth largest metropolitan area) in the country.
If the media makes a story sensational, many of us will perk up and pay attention for at least a few minutes. After this, we will have formed our own opinion on how important the story is. But the story’s initial placement is very important. Some stories will just never be heard unless they are made to be important by the media. The media has a huge responsibility here.
And who can blame the average citizen for not knowing the real most important story of the day? Most of us have busy lives; who has time to do analysis of the media and world events every single day? You really have to watch the news carefully to catch what is important. If you happen to go off the radar for two days, you are probably going to miss something huge.
I am just putting these facts out there, and you can take them how you want. I have my own ideas on why things like this happen, but I can’t say that my ideas are fully formed enough for me to attempt to state them as fact or even as a well-thought-out theory. The bottom line is – it is a damn shame that stories like this are not heard like they should be.
It is almost 6:30am, and I am still the only one in the office. I am sitting here wondering if we are even supposed to be open today. I double-checked our official days off in two places, and didn’t see President’s Day listed as a day off.
Well, I would still welcome going home at 8am or so if no one arrives. Not that I am expecting that to happen…just being hopeful. Kind of like when I would wake up in the morning for school and sit there glued to the TV seeing if we had off for snow. That is definitely a unique experience for some people…some places get so much snow that there is no way they are going to get off for it. Some places get no snow at all and have the same effect.
But Maryland…if a little snow was sticking to the road, we got off school. And man, that was great.
Update (8:09am): There is indeed work today. One guy (at least) had off, and a lot of people are working from our other office because of limited transit today.
Mistakes don’t bother me in general. What does bother me is when people don’t bother to really think about what they are doing or saying to make sure it makes sense. It also really bothers me when people know they are doing something incorrectly but don’t bother making an effort to change it.
One example of this that really bothers me is the use of “login” instead of “log in”. “Login” is a noun, not a verb. “Log in” is what should be used as a verb. For example: “Please log in using your login and password.”
I see this error made all across the Internet. I wonder if I am just really strange, or if this kind of stuff really irks other people too?
Of course…my website even says “login” and “logout”, but I didn’t write the web software, so it would take a while for me to find where to change that.
In an attempt to reduce some of my monthly costs, I am going to be getting rid of my hosted servers. Step one of this is to move all of my websites that I host to one of my servers at home.
So, fourmajor.com is now running out of my closet. You might notice that speeds are a bit slower, but it should still go fast enough.
At work, our internal network uses a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0. That allows for 65,534 host addresses. Talk about not knowing how to plan a network.
And here I can’t pass the CCNA…
