http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701860_pf.html
Where are out databases?
The Ds and Rs target voters; what about us Ls?
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
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Posted by reinkefj
Do you have backups … lessons learned … personally!
Wednesday, March 8, 2006I have manged to “brick” my lovable luggable laptop. It’s limping along no thanks to a corrupted McAfee execuatble “protecting” me from the inet. Arggghhh! But, with every “challenge”, there come opportunity. In my anal dedication to backups, (having paid tuituion at that particular school TWICE in my long long career), I am pleased to find that everything is preserved. Not as elegently as I would like, but I do “have” everything. My prolific “kid on the soceer field” whirling dervish do it all outpouring has been staunched by the lack of my favoirte tool performing as it should. But, I am still bloging, working, paying bills, nagging, and browsing pretty much as usual. Recovery is awaiting Senor Dell sending me the recovery disks that they no longer ship with each product because as their tech says “no one ever needs them any more”. Wrong, “No one” is me, now! So as soon as the pony express delivers them, I’ll do resusitation on this big heavy pig and be back in business. The luggable being down has given me a platform to play with the latest release of UBUNTO, which I call I BUNT TWO, which is sweet. Right out of the sleeve their live cd brings up a workign platform. Sweet. The last version had trouble with a hardwire connect to the work lan requiring configuration, and wireless for home never worked. This version BOTH situatuins work on boot up. Sweet. No touch useablility.
Why do you care?
If you’re employed and your workstation fails, what personally will you lose in both personal content (very bad) and business content (worse). In one of my tuition experience, I “lost” 6 months of intellectual productivity. I was depending upon my employer’s recovery scheme as I was told to do. Bad idea. The guy who was responsible said “oops” and kept on chugging. I was left scrambling and took a hit in my bonus for certain things that I knew I had done but couldn’t demonstrate and / or recreate. The second lesson, different employer, same scenario, I lost a week’s work. At that time, I backed up every Friday before I left for the week end. No I backup at the end of every day!
If you are unemployed and your workstation fails, what will you lose? Besides the ability to do work, what data will you lose? What is your plan for doing email or cover letters or a targeted resume, when your computer is doing its best imiatation of a brick?
Remember “lessons are repeated until the student learns”!
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Posted by reinkefj
In my never-ending search for my fellow alums … …
Monday, March 6, 2006RSSBANDIT tumbled out the following item from PUBSUB. It was a photo from MSN that mentioned MC. Fascinating pictures of a beautiful young women. It’s a snap peak into her life over several years. Entrancing.
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Posted by reinkefj
What part of the Second Ammendment do these bozos not understand?
Sunday, March 5, 2006http://www.anjrpc.org/fopalawsuit.htm
/begin quote/
February 27, 2006 – The Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. (ANJRPC) announced that it has commenced a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and one of its police officers for wrongfully arresting and imprisoning for nearly five days a 57-year old Utah man delayed at Newark Airport by a baggage error while traveling from Utah to Pennsylvania.
/end quote/
It is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable. I plan to write the various critters that respresent me. To do the correct thing!
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Posted by reinkefj
Something went wrong
Sunday, March 5, 2006Sent a reinkerambling to distributejasperjottings. I must be getting senile!
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Posted by reinkefj
add five pigs to protect football in valey
Sunday, March 5, 2006
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Posted by reinkefj
Splitting MP3 file … …
Sunday, March 5, 2006… … when my favorite podcast went from 1 hour files to 3 hour files, I had t do something. My pos mp3 player doesn’t pick up from where it left off but from the beginning of the file. Argh!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3splt-gtk
http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/home.php
It’s not a perfect solution. You have to do stuff! And, compensate for the user interface deficiency. But it works.
Like most Open SOurce Software, it works. It’s free. And, it is “good enough”.
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Posted by reinkefj
Report from a Saint Patrick’s Day dance
Sunday, March 5, 2006Ahh sure an begora the Fifties are alive and well in Flushing Queens. We went, health problems aside, with our old firends to their local parish st pats dance. It was a hoot. They had some young Irish step dancers preform, who were very good and colorful. But, to my eye, only one of them “look” irish. If you lined them up and said pick out the irish girls, then you’d have been hard pressed to do it. One girl looked definitely Italian. But, if they think they are, then they are. I like Riverdance; so you can imagine that I liked them. There was a pipe band. And some speeches. And a politician. (Amazing how they can always find a camera and local voters!)
Out of the evening, I came away more convinced of the sad fact that activities such as this are a dying breed. Just in the last decade, events at this parish have gone from overflowing, (my friend would call several months in advance and say I have to buy tickets now), to smaller and smaller venues. I see this as everyone converting to the state religion of secular humanism with it’s apathetic sacrament of tv. Catholic education can not compete with the “free” edcuation provide by the taxpayer. And the total loss of stature of all Churches in the paradigm. In the France, symbolized by the Three Musketeers, the King was balanced by the Cardinal. We are losing that balance. In New York, the Irish fraternal societies were overflowing. The parishes were vibrant with activity. It’s a losing battle. But, I can’t see what replaces it? People sitting in their homes, cacooned, watching tv? Maybe the Matrix story is right.
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Posted by reinkefj
Libertarian: One who believes in the right of the people to be free from government interference.
Friday, March 3, 2006In his blog (January 6), Australian author Joel Shepherd quotes young Frenchwoman Sabine Herold, who is affiliated with the French libertarian group, Liberté Chérie. Herold told Shepherd: “To be a libertarian is not to be either right-wing or left-wing. To be a libertarian means that you’re for the rights of people to live their lives without the government interfering.”
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Posted by reinkefj
Schools wasting money on computing is a symptom of the problem of “gummamint”
Friday, March 3, 2006http://stevehargadon.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-on-ed-tech-in-rebuilding-gulf.html
/begin quote/
OK, so as a liberal arts major who is also a geek, it is hard for me to watch how much we spend on computers, and then how quickly we discover we have to spend it again to keep current… There are no simple answers, but I would imagine that many schools and districts have already looked back and wondered if they could have used some of that money for other things.
/end quote/
If I can interject a little Austrian-economic Libertarian (I.e., classical liberalism) thinking, then I’d say that State Skooling suffers from the fatal flaw of all gummamint thinking.
They are, or have, THE solution. Only THEY can have the right ideas. THEY are the intelligentsia looking out for the befuddled masses.
Austrian economic thinking points out that only economic man struggling to satisfy his fellow man has the benefit of the marketplace to learn what people do and do not want. They don’t have that competitive marketplace to serve as a check on their ideas.
From my view, they have no competition to:
(1) assess if the money they are spending makes sense.
Envision that there were two competing schools. They are identical in all respects except one. One comes with all the latest and greatest computing. One come with the “old” LTSP model with old surplus hardware networked to one powerful server. Now clearly the “new” school would have to charge more for all that new hardware. Would the parents pay the difference to have their children go to the “new” school or would they e satisfied with the “old” school. There is no place to test if the extra money is well spent.
(2) in the “public school” funding model, the taxpayers don’t get a choice.
I am saddened by the implicit assumption that the school gets to use money for alternatives. It’s never given back to the poor taxpayer. Just keep using it and using it. Like a duck being fatten for pattefoigras. Just keep stuffing as much money as posible into the “education factory”. Without the discipline of the marketplace to tell a school administrator that they have reach the end of the marginal utility curve, how does a school administrator knwo when they have spent to much? When they have spent 200% of their budget and then whine in the press that there is never enough money. For the children.
When the taxpayers wake up and say we don’t want, or Intelligent Designer forbid, we can’t, to pay anymore, they will get the cold ice water bath of a “pair of dimes” (paradigm) shift.
The principles of the new paradigm will be: (1) Publik skools fail because there is no marketplace to discipline them. Marketplaces satisfy our needs by the greedy self-interest of providers. The ineffective or inefficient fail. We need failure so that we can fine tune how much resource is applied to the various human needs. (2) People want their children educated to suceed. He who has the gold makes the rules. The marketplace empowers the buyer to satisfy their various needs. Education is just one of those needs. (3) Government (gummamint) is the worst way to provide any social service. It really has only one role to protect us from violence and fraud. Citizens need to restrain it to only those functions. Gummamint running education is a conflict of interest; educated citizens are needed to restrict it to its proper role.
Can’t happen fast enough if we are as a nation to survive.
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Posted by reinkefj
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