Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Note: Despite the date, this is not an April Fool’s post. Can’t believe I have to say that.
“Don’t walk away in silence,” someone spray spraypainted on the wall of a girls school on the lower east side, New York. The school painted over it, of course, and left this note in its place:
The school turned the episode into a teachable moment. “It really gave us a chance to engage in a dialogue with our students.”
via GammaBlog
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes westberkeleyfoundation.com
The West Berkeley Foundation has given over $1.3 million in grants since 1993 to non-profit organizations that serve Berkeley’s most underserved children, elders and families. It is only possible because of the caring action of individuals and companies that believe philanthropy begins in our own backyard.
This week at Stuck Between Stations: Roger Moore on the lasting influence of Cuban bassist Israel Lopeze – Cachao’s Legacy: Two Nations Under a Groove:
Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao†Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940.
60 Minutes, The Science of Sleep — We’re sleeping less than ever:
In 1960, a survey by the American Cancer Society asked one million Americans how much sleep they were getting a night. The median answer was eight hours. Today that number has fallen to 6.7 hours – that’s a decrease of more than 15 percent in less than a lifetime. And from what the scientists 60 Minutes met are finding, we may be putting ourselves in a perilous situation.
.. and we’re paying dearly for it. Test subjects allowed to sleep only four hours per night are able to metabolize sugars at about the same rate as pre-diabetics, and have a voracious appetite. In other words, there may be a connection between cultural sleep deprivation and the obesity epidemic. And of course, memory and mental acuity in general suffer dramatically as well. Not to mention nice-ness (tired people are cranky people).
But what refrain is more commonly heard in the workplace than “I’m exhausted?” We’re compensating for the insane pace of everything by staying up later, perhaps fooling ourselves that we’ll be more productive if we just trim off a few of those hours “wasted” on sleep. But it ain’t natch’l, what we do.
“But you know I find it amazing to see how many people are asleep within five minutes of boarding an airplane at 11 o’clock in the morning. You know, sit down and boom. It shouldn’t happen. A normal adult shouldn’t be falling asleep at 11 o’clock in the morning, minutes after sitting in a small, uncomfortable airplane seat. It just shows that, you know, people are exhausted.”
Ever since Miles was born, I’ve been deep in this pattern, getting by on 5-6 hours/night (7 on a mellow day), day after day, week after week. I used to try and get one full 8-hour night per week, but now even that doesn’t happen regularly. You just get so used to being a zombie, it starts to feel normal. Every now and then you get a full night or something close to it, and the mental clarity is astonishing, this feeling of alertness like you remember from a long-ago life. I swear I’m going to reform, get back on the 8-hour track permanently… but I never do. They say we’d be more productive sleeping more than less – that the increase in sharpness more than compensates for hours lost in sleep. But it’s hard to convince myself of that.
Anyway, it’s well worth the watch (or read).
Free speech is one thing, but come within a mile of religion and people are going to get tweaked. In Orange County, FL, a week before Easter, a billboard suddenly appeared, reading simply: “All religions are fairy tales.” Almost overnight, a nearby restaurant watched business drop by 2/3. People started calling the media. I’m imagining the reports went something like this: “Hello, media? Someone is expressing an opinion and I have to be exposed to it when I drive by!”
I think the business angle is especially interesting – it provides an instant concrete measurement of public opinion. What is it about religion that strikes so deeply? I can hardly imagine another opinion being expressed on a billboard – no matter how controversial – that could impact local businesses on such a broad scale. It’s just weird.
The billboard company claims the signage was not paid for, but put up in the middle of the night by anonymous pranksters.
Update: The article has been removed from WFTV’s site without explanation. Google for coverage elsewhere.
via Sean Graham
Secret: This weblog has been running off the as-yet unreleased WordPress 2.5 for a few weeks now, via subversion checkout. For those not following along at home, WP 2.5 features a radically redesigned back-end that seems almost intentionally designed to piss off people who are resistant to change (but to delight the purists). Funny how we get with our tools – once usage patterns become entrenched, even huge improvements in usability start to seem like blasphemy (cf: people raging about Microsoft’s new “ribbon” interface in recent versions of Office, even though they’re an obvious improvement).
Have to admit, my first experience with 2.5 was disorienting and not altogether favorable. But after a couple of weeks of regular use, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom of the focus groups; separating out commonly used functions from uncommon in the UI was long overdue. And while the new colors still felt washed out and pallid, a recent Profile page option to re-enable the old colors on top of the new UI compensated.
Birdhouse Hosting keeps all WP installations up to date automatically when new versions are released with a simple script. The system has been fantastic from a maintenance and security perspective, but puts me in an interesting position – when I run the next automated update, I’ll be changing the UI out from under a whole lot of users. Fortunately, my early experience has users reacting positively and not being confused at all – a few minutes of exploration and they’re off to the races. The good news is that there have been almost no API changes in this version that break plugins or themes. In fact, the upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 broke a lot more stuff than this version will. There’s a plugin compatibility list in the codex if you’re interested; out of the 70+ WP-based publications I manage, only two will be affected by anything on that list (we’ll hold those back for a while).
Loving the new media manager – upload multiple files at once, handle image alignment at insert time, insert multiple images into a post simultaneously as a gallery (with automatic thumbnails, intermediate size, and full size versions – and independently commentable sub-posts for intermediate versions). Full-screen editor. Brand new tag manager. Much improved comment management. The visual editor no longer breaks embedded media like YouTube videos. A ton of subtle improvements that make life easier all around.
There are bound to be bumps, but progress is good.
Update 3/29/07: WordPress 2.5 has been released – go get it! Need a WordPress host with lots of experience/expertise? Contact me through Birdhouse Hosting.
The Knight Digital Media Center has been running workshops providing multimedia skills training to journalists for a while now, but this week marks the start of a program expansion, as we offer our first Tech Training for Editors workshop. Rather than Photoshop, Sound Track Pro, and Flash, we’ll be teaching RSS, podcasting, map mashups, and other essential internet technologies to editors looking to expand the web savvy of struggling newspapers.
I’ve been busy setting up WPMU as a mock CMS for the editors to work on, relying heavily on the PodPress, Twitter Tools, and WP-Flickr plugins. I’ve also got the new Prologue theme installed, to demonstrate how publications can provide Twitter-like services of their own (I’ll be demonstrating it in a mini-session on microblogging).
The mid-day and evening sessions will be webcast as usual, but this time we’re adding a new element to the mix — rather than panning the camera to a screen displaying output from the presenter’s laptop, we’ll be using Vara Software’s Desktop Presenter to mix output from the speaker’s laptop with camera output, directly into our webcast software (knock wood). Tune in!
This week at Stuck Between Stations: Rickrolling Yngwie (me) on StSanders’ sublime video overdubs of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.
Already we’re seeing spin-offs. It’s one thing to watch Eric Clapton’s face and fingers scrambling after bad college-level jazz, but what do you do with real jazz? Check the great Oscar Peterson quartet ripped to shreds by an equally talented pianist calling himself Tibenham:
Gizmodo: “Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon.” Video:
Something about the way the bot moves elicits sympathy in the viewer – its motions are so animal-like they throw you. When the researcher kicks BigDog to demonstrate how it can regain its balance, my first reaction was one of sympathy for “the animal” – internally, I had already started to identify it as a living creature (and thus as sentient). But the whine of the two-stroke Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine keeps you reminded. Wonder why it isn’t electric?
More here.
Santa Clara Valley Water District’s fact page on bottled water:
In addition to the misconception about health benefits, there are other, more serious, problems associated with the production and consumption of bottled water. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption required more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation. Bottling the water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. It took 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.
More at the site.
See also: Bottled Water: The Hoax