Two brand spanking new Dell laptops show up for some friends/clients and I'm updating them before I deliver the little buggers. A series of snags rear their collective ugly heads. It's called XP Service Pack 3. XP Service Pack 3, and it's implementation on the Microsoft Update website are still a bit unable to deal with fresh PCs with mere XP SP2, or your average not quite up to date PCs.
Yesterday I blogged that I'm considering an ortho surgeon. I don't know if I need one or not, but my internist has suggested I probably do. So, I'm off to see a surgeon to determine whether or not I need surgery.
That's not the story here.
A friend of mine receives updates from my blog, and emailed me immediately suggesting a surgeon he knows of in my home state.
I just post a blog considering a surgeon and the power of friends and personal networks goes to work for me. I didn't email him personally, ask for advice from him or anyone in his local network, and poof -- I get his input anyway. That's extremely cool.
I don't commute, I quit traveling as much, and I drive as if gasoline were dear and limited (like it is).
Don't do as the Europeans and protest without real action. Will angry screams and threats make one more drop of oil come from the ground? Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and the other oil countries can't hear your cries for the clamoring of buyers after their product. You could weaken the US companies by increasing their tax. You could nationalize the European companies. But, you'll do nothing but limit the built-in efficiencies of business seeking profit. They are delivering the oil as close to the price you're governments can squeeze out of them. Protests accomplish nothing but create hysteria, and there's nothing good that comes of that.
Math Illuminated "is a thirteen-part series for adult learners and high school teachers."
I'm going to try to get my kids on this, and read it myself (my math skills could use some improvement). And, then I'll report here regarding our progress. However, it's a good thing to check out. The Annenburg project is a great source of learning material (hint hint, school systems).
Turkey is a free country. The people are free to worship as they wish, travel, vote, conduct business, and all the other things that western liberal democracies allow their citizens. Recently, Turkey's government has become more Islamic in nature due to its free elections. However, the courts made an impressive move to stand firm on constitutional law banning religious elements in public spaces. It's a very interesting take on separation of church and state.
The Constitutional Court said in a brief statement that the change, proposed by Mr. Erdogan’s party and passed by Parliament in February, violated principles of secularism set in Turkey’s Constitution.
-- NY Times
I'm finding more open minded models out there lately. Specifically, I see a lot of people giving away high quality media through social networks, etc. and creatively finding ways to monetize their work (sometimes just rehashing very old models, like live performance and advertising). It seems they "get it," in a way that big Hollywood and old-school Music Industry types are reluctant to accept.
I should be embarrassed about this, and I am. I religiously complain about magic quotes, but code keeps coming back to me from developers who insist on ripping out good controls on illegal or dangerous characters (see SQL injection for example) and relying on magic quotes.
This is an old problem. And, fortunately PHP6 deprecates this feature. But, it won't stop the thousands of lines of code that rely on them from causing you headaches. Beware of PHP6 sorta compliant code when this goes away. It should go away, and I'm happy, and I spend more time dealing with the badly written code using magic quotes or the badly configured server environments that enable it than I do code that requires magic quotes breaking. One is really annoying, the other is quite dangerous.
