[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin
- Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle, hardware and opaque, restrictive software. Why?
I provide computer support all day every day to “users”. I am not one of these snotty IT guys who looks with scorn and derision on people who don’t know what an IRQ is. I recognize that users don’t care about computers. The computer is a means to an end for them: a presentation to solicit more grant money, or a program to investigate a new computational method, or just simply sending a nice note to their family. They don’t want to “use the computer” so much as do something that the computer itself facilitates. I’m the same with with cars: I don’t want to know how an internal combustion engine works or know how to change my oil or in any other way become an automotive expert — I just want to drive to the grocery store!
But the damned computers get in the way of all the things the computers help us do. There’s this whole artificial paradigm about administrator accounts, and security, and permissions, and all other manner of things that people don’t care about….
I pick on Microsoft a lot, because I think they do a lot of things fundamentally wrong. But plenty of other companies are just as guilty of bad design, bad implementation, and bad communication with their users. Google’s Chrome browser is cute when it says “Aw snap!”, but that leans the other way in terms of uselessness: it doesn’t give the user any better idea of what might be wrong, and users are left to feel helpless, powerless, and stupid.
…The pace of change in the computer industry works against users. The whole color-coded ports initiative was a great step toward end user convenience, but that’s not enough when users now need to know the difference between VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort. A lot of the computers that are coming into my office have all three video ports, and the monitors support multiple inputs, leaving users to wonder which one(s) they should use when setting up their PC. I’ve had multiple calls from really smart graduate students who couldn’t figure out how to connect the computer to the monitor. Sure, it’s an easy joke to make fun of these situations, but it’s a damning indictment of the computer industry as a whole, if you ask me.
- Confirmed, Facebook Automatically Bans Users: This Week in Online Tyranny (ReadWriteWeb)
- Facebook has a “crowd-sourced” way of handling complaints. If a certain number of users register complaints against another user, that user is automatically banned and his or her profile is locked down.
…A group of Islamists have been targeting persons they find offensive and using this method to silence them.
- Feminine Performance and Thinking Of The Children – The Sexist – Washington City Paper
- When young women engage in overt feminine performance, we think of the children, but deep down, we’re thinking about women, too. As these girls enter into adulthood, how do we deal with our discomfort at the version of womanhood they’re taking on? We tell them to keep performing femininity, but by God, to just keep it to themselves. Makeup is to be worn “naturally,” never garishly; sex is something to perform for men behind closed doors, never to be spoken aloud; plastic surgery is tacky, unless it’s good plastic surgery, which is still better than looking old; extreme diets are to be kept private, in favor of of “I just keep in shape by running after my kids”; and feminine performance is in all cases an entirely personal choice, never a culturally-informed one. When we Think of the Children, we’re not disturbed that girls are beginning to adopt feminine performance—we want them to do that. We’re disturbed because they’ve forced us to to notice how ridiculous it is.
- Help for Cats Needed
- A father’s death is always a difficult time, but for one daughter, a father left behind an especially difficult legacy. In a central-Pennsylvania county with no animal shelters or rescue groups, when word got out that Kay’s father was too soft-hearted to refuse to care for any cat, his property became a dumping ground for any unwanted feline. After his recent unexpected death, Kay, who now lives out-of-state, returned to her family home to find that nearly 100 cats had set up residence in the house, garage, and property.
Now she is trying to do what her father would have wanted, to find homes for each and every kitty. It is easy to feel sympathy for Kay and her difficult situation, but what she needs is not our sympathy but our help.
- Jo Walton on Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu
- Jo Walton: A woman on Gont: Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu:
Le Guin is speaking with a double tongue in [Tehanu]. On the one hand she’s saying very clearly that women’s domestic lives are central and important, and on the other the force of story is bending everything to have an actual plot, which needs an evil wizard and men and the world of action…
- Heavy Sludge Oozes into Marshes of Louisiana – CBS News
- [DEAR INTERNETS, PLEASE STOP CONFUSING THESE WORDS:
cite - to quote or to reference as an authority.
sight - a vista or view
site - a place
http://www.ehow.com/how_2081945_use-cite-sight-site-correctly.html
How to Use Cite, Sight and Site Correctly-L]
- Sen. Whitehouse Drills Salazar on BP’s Exemption from Impact Study (Firedoglake)
- At yesterday’s Environment and Public Works hearing on the BP disaster, Sheldon Whitehouse asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Council on Environmental Quality Chair Helen Sutley why BP had been exempted from doing an Environmental Impact Study on the Macondo drilling site. He listed a number of things that should categorically exclude a project from receiving such an exemption. Two of those almost certainly applied to this well. [...]
Sure, we know a lot about the environment. We just have some crazy belief that the walruses have decided to vacation on the Gulf of Mexico.
- No matter what, the media always return to village fundamentalism — all election results prove that Real Americans are conservatives. (Hullabaloo – Digby)
- Evidently, Obama can no longer appeal to “centrists.” Which means he’s a “liberal.” [...]
The village doesn’t know how to interpret what’s going on in the electorate, so they keep coming back to the same thing, even when they think they aren’t: the electorate is freaking out because the Democrats are too liberal. What else could it possibly be?
I don’t have “the answer” to what motivates voters. If I had to guess, free floating anxiety about this overwhelming number of problems, from the economy to the environment to terrorism to social upheaval is a big part of what’s got people going, along with the sense that Washington seems incapable of dealing with it. (I also think the feeling that Obama hasn’t delivered on “change,” which he allowed everyone to define in their own way, is a big part of it on the left.) But it’s clear that whatever is going on isn’t that voters in general are desperate to return to conservative policies. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Politico to figure that out, but hopefully the Democrats, at least, will do so.
- Why I Am Not a Libertarian (Feminists With Disabilities)
- There are some things about libertarianism that I like and agree with. I’m against state interference in romantic and/or sexual relationships between consenting individuals with full capacity. I’m in favor of strong civil liberties and freedom from search or surveillance by the state.
But I do not trust the free market to take care of civil rights issues, primarily because I’ve seen the free market fail to take care of civil rights issues for hundreds and really thousands of years. And I believe that getting the government out of the business of defining and enforcing civil rights would have disastrous results for all but the most privileged among us. And Rand Paul’s espoused views bear that out. Here’s what he’s got to say about LGBTAI rights and women’s health…
The Link(s): Wed, May 19th, 4pm by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.