…or so President Ahmadinejad claims. How could it not be when the government shoots and kills people in the street? This is not acceptable.
Iranian woman shot and killed
Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Iran is the most stable country in the world
Saturday, June 20th, 2009Fowler MS makes the front page of The Oregonian today
Monday, June 1st, 2009Following up on the protest at Fowler last week, The Oregonian has a front page article today describing one of the teachers being laid off from Fowler. Both Mr. Rice and his wife are educators and represent a large part of Oregon’s population, being transplants from California coming for the livability of Oregon. They’ve both been laid off and are trying to figure out what to do…
Fowler Middle School students protest teacher cuts
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009School’s out for the day and I’ve just heard that today a bunch of students at our local middle school staged a walk-out over education funding cuts. Good for them! These kids need to do more…organize demonstrations, contact their state and federal political representation, regularly go to the school board meetings and city councils and teachers union meetings (assuming those even have any sort of public transparency), and even try to scrutinize some of the relevant/public budget numbers to find bad funding prioritization choices. And get on their parents to do the same. Given the economy it is no huge surprised that education is being cut this year to the point that teaching staff are being laid off, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Choices are made by the grown-ups to prioritize certain things over others and this is a prioritization choice. Choices can be influenced. Choices can be analyzed and called out when they’re unreasonable.
It’s just a sad state of affairs that there’s a tonne of economic stimulus money going around to create jobs that invest in the future of our country and fund shovel ready work, but at the same time we’re laying off people who invest deeply in the future of the country. We’ve got wall street banks that are too big to fail but those holding the governmental purse strings are seemingly willing to let our schools fail.
Coffee drinking while scootering
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
I’ve been thinking for some time of rigging myself something to nestle a coffee holding vessel somewhere on my scooter. Corazzo seems to make good products (though I bought a larger fancier Italian lap blanket instead of theirs) and this seems like an obviously handy one to have.
But patent pending, self-levelling, auto-gimbal? Either they’re trying to patent basic physics (inertia, gravity) or that is supposed to be internet humor…
William Gibson on Marketplace
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008…or mention of his Pattern Recognition anyway, today in the form of a recommended summer/beach reading. Especially after going to OSCON last week and seeing that practically everybody is using MacBook’s these days and also at the same time hearing a lot of wailing about vendor lock-in and the need for openness, I’m surprised there aren’t more Cayce’s walking the streets. For the record there were a few Apple laptops with their glowing clam-shell logo covered with some non-corporate-brand logo.
Book humor / art
Saturday, June 7th, 2008My mom’s been working at libraries on and off for a really long time now. Not too surprisingly she somehow stumbled onto this cool artist, Jim Rosenau. He makes a variety of arty things from books.
Guerrilla gardening
Monday, June 2nd, 2008Boingboing’s linked an LATimes article on the subject of Guerrilla Gardening. Individual property rights are always bumping up against the good of the collective society. There usually aren’t many people standing up for the latter and those that do aren’t usually empowered to make a change. There’s something very libertarianly socialist about this guerrilla gardening concept though and it seems like it’s generally a positive thing, besides maybe police hassles.
There are definitely some areas in my metro region (Portland), city (Tigard), neighborhood (Bull Mountain) and my neighbor’s yard (I’ll leave him be) which could use guerrilla gardening. I might just have to try to tackle one occasionally!
Verizon may have some intelligence after all
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008Last I knew Verizon was still a fan of a tiered-internet. On the other hand they’re now saying at least when it comes to blocking copyrighted materials they wont tier things.
Their VP of PR specifically has said, “We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content.”
I’m not sure how they can say that and at the same time be for a tiered internet. Unless they envision that as discriminating against traffic by source and destination only and not content? But some of the other quotes in the NYT article make it seem like Verizon may be moving more towards accepting that they’re in the business of selling pipes and the more and fatter pipes customers want because of a thriving internet means more business for them.
Portishead third album: brought to you by your friends at Google Analytics
Monday, February 4th, 2008I decided to glance at my blog’s google analytics reports and noticed a lot of recent hits on an old post about a third Portishead album. Made me think a bunch of people must be searching for info on a third Portishead album. And lo…they were. And there is one.
Can’t wait to hear it in April. And this might be the year to trek to Coachella if they’re truly to be one of the headliners. Maybe they’ll come to Portland, Oregon…We have some nice cozy music halls.
Los Alamos Tech Surplus
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007This link came across my feed reader. It’s not quite clear where it’s going as only the first two of five parts have been released as of today. But the Black Hole looks like a really cool store to tool around in for a while. Their eBay store doesn’t appear to work, but it would be so much more fun to see the place first hand anyway.
