I like Moby, and enjoy reading his blog except for when he’s being political, as he has been for the last, oh, nine months or so–he’s extremely liberal, to the extent of (and, in some ways, beyond) “OH EM GEE APOKYLIPS” if McCain wins. (Which is the great thing about believing in God–He’s in control either way!) I just had to laugh at today’s post, though. I know he’s just being facetious when he suggests giving right-wing fundamentalists Oklahoma to found their own sovereign nation, but, really? Are you going to push the Cherokees out again in order to do so? Because your idea totally isn’t a return to Manifest Destiny and Indian Removal in the first place!

Honestly, I think I’m more surprised he didn’t suggest giving away Alaska instead.

From the Lansing State Journal: Man, 24, Shot Dead in South Lansing

What gets me isn’t that there was yet another murder in Lansing, though of course that’s horrible, or even that, as always, the victim was “such a nice boy.” (This is a commentary for another day, but dead people are always portrayed as saints. I’m sure this guy was nice, but c’mon, are drug dealers never killed like this? “Man, it sucks that Bob got shot, but I’m so not surprised. Dude was always totally wasted and picking fights.” Makes me wish we were operating under the Speaker for the Dead model.)

No–the thing that got me was this quote:

“These kids,” she added, with sadness coming into her voice, “they can’t just settle things with their fists. When you shoot somebody, they don’t come back. It affects the family. It affects the neighborhood.”

What about settling things with words? If you’ve got violent tendencies, take them out on video games or at the gym, people. I like to chop veggies when I’m angry or stressed–it turns the energy into something productive (and tasty). Fistfights are still acts of violence, and even if there’s a legitimate reason for the violence, there are better ways to pursue justice.

A friend of mine from grad school works at a company that promotes magazines.  Apparently the P.R. director got approached by the editor of this magazine:

It’s called Cats in Space, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It even beats out SparkleWorld. Seriously. I hope it’s real.

Actually, one of the even better things about CiS is its parent site. This high-quality publication is hosted by the similarly high-quality awesomecats.com. Content-wise, awesomecats performs its function of being a site about, well, cats. If cats are your thing, it has a decent collection of resources–if you can get past the horrible page design, at least. And the sad thing is, people have obviously very specifically spent a fair bit of time on the design of the site. The header, for instance, is beyond my Flash capabilities. Not that I’m some flash guru by any means, but somebody had some good quality bonding moments with Flash over that header. And they obviously try to offer a reasonable range of services. Why, I could register wasabijane@awesomecats.com if I so chose, or even have an awesomecats.com website of my very own!

Actually, this is what I find the most telling. Look at their site features: 5K free web space is but one example. For you non-techy people, this randomly selected image is 4K. A single-spaced, one-page Word doc is likely to be at least 25K. This blog post is probably more than awesomecats can handle. And, even more telling, the first line of their site features reads as such: “No knowledge of web design or HTML is required to create websites.” No kidding. But then, I think the only ones who would take them up on such an offer are people like the creators of Cats in Space.

…and anyway, I was always more of a dog person.

Facebook has a feature that allows you to give virtual gifts to your friends. Most of these cost $1 and are pretty generic and benign–a guitar, a birthday cake, or, once, a piece of paper.

On occasion, a company will sponsor a gift, which will be free but probably pretty obviously branded. For the release of Indy 4, for example, there was a free fedora with the Indiana Jones logo attached. I support that sort of thing–actually, being a poor, broke grad assistant, those are the gifts I’m most likely to give.

Today’s free gift is a bottlecap with a mountain sketched on it. I don’t think I would have known or cared what it actually was had it not been for the attached sponsorship: Coors Light.

Here’s the thing: Facebook’s original audience was college students, and I suspect that the majority of users are of age. But an increasing number of high schoolers are using it. I realize I’m in the minority in that I’m not particularly fond of alcohol… but does it really mean that such companies should start to *sponsor* free gifts? I mean, one of the only banned types of clothing in my school district growing up was t-shirts advertising drug and alcohol use. Is it unfair to ask Facebook to have similar standards–to attach some sort of age confirmation software to certain gifts?

Again, I realize I’m in the minority on this, and really, it’s a very small issue. I just figure that teens get enough of these messages elsewhere. Do we really need this on Facebook too?

Minor point of irritation: corporately sponsored recipes. You know, the kind that comes in those recipe books you can order with 5 proofs of purchase, or the ones on the packaging for your preprocessed food.

Today, I think I lost a few brain cells by looking at one.

(more…)

If I ever go back to school after I finish my Master’s, it will be for programming. I’m getting sick of taking hours trying to figure out what any trained programmer could do in minutes. Case in point: I now have a favicon. It took me minutes to make and probably about a dozen attempts to actually get functioning–and since it only worked after clearing my cache and I have it uploaded in two places with several lines of code copy-pasted in, I’m not even sure what’s actually making it function. But this site’s starting to look like something now; and, in the end, there’s nothing like that feeling of “Problem: Solved!”

Attempting to upload entries from blogger… actual blog coming soon…ish.