September, 2011 archive
Back from the Shadows Again 0
The cable from the modem to the router was ill and had to be put out of my misery. I had it fixed yesterday, but decided to punt the internet for an evening.
The tech support person at my ISP, who helped me rule out the modem as the cause of the problem, was excellent. The phone call lasted fewer than 15 minutes, including name-rank-account number and crawling around messing with cables.
A snippet of our conversation, from when I jacked my laptop directly into the ethernet port on the modem.
- “Okay,” said I, “I’m going to reboot this puppy so it starts clean.”
“Good idea,” said she.
“It’s only going to take about a minute and a half.”
“Oh,” she said, “You must be using Linux.”
QOTD 0
Daniel Webster, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and heerfulness.
Corporate jets, bonuses, and stock options, on the other hand, seem to breed the opposite.
Down at the Farm 0
My Internet connection is making dial-up took good.
I’ll be back when it is.
There is a new venue for tomorrow’s DL in Norfolk. Follow the Meetup link in the sidebar for details. My cellphone is not suited to editing HTML.
Theft of Services 0
As a follow-up to my previous post, Wisconsin:
As the Madison Capital Times reports, “Besides losing their right to negotiate over the percentage of their paycheck that will go toward health care and retirement, unions also lost the ability to claim work as a ‘union-only’ job, opening the door for private workers and evidently even inmates to step in and take their place.” Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.
Why pay for labor when you can steal it?
And some persons may have thought that Dennis G’s practice of referring to the Republican Party as “the Confederate Party” was hyperbole.
Via Paying Attention.
Follow the Money 0
Underneath all the guff, the reality that apologists for the Confederacy refuse to face (or wish to conceal–depending on the apologist) is that slavery was ultimately about trading persons as in the markets and then using them, like draft animals:
Words of Wrongdom 0
My old boss on September 11, 2001:
It’s a good thing there’s a Texan in the White House.
Er, yeah.
He was a good boss, but a lousy prophet.
Living the Myth 0
The cowboy myth:
Gun Nuts won’t be happy until every town is Deadwood and every hour is high noon.
When Does Respectful Remembrance Cross into Hollow Pandering? 1
Papers, radios, and even blogs have overflowed with stories recounting the events in New York of September 11, 2001.
Not here. There is nothing for me to add, no perspective unexplored. I don’t need help to remember what happened on September 11, 2001.
Indeed, I have done my best to avoid the issue–not to avoid my memories, distant as they are from the memories of those who were there, for my memories came at a distance: from watching the live television coverage in my company’s cafeteria along with a goodly number of my co-workers; from later stepping into the smoking area at the back door of the building and hearing no airplanes, though the building was about two miles from Philadelphia International Airport; from my mail carrier’s worries about his sister, whose fate he did not learn for five days; from other events large and small.
I contemn the efforts of both “old” and “new” media over the past two weeks to thrust those events upon me from all directions in macabre and tasteless ways, like someone describing the procedure for a post mortem to mourners at a funeral.
Lynne Steuerle Schofield put it quite nicely in the Denver Post earlier this week:
(snip)
Here’s the other side, though, for me anyway: Sometimes I feel I am asked to attend my mother’s funeral again and again, year after year.
And, throughout, the maudlin repetitious media mewling has missed the most important part of the story.
My contempt ripened and matured last week, when I saw this on the screen of my friendly local silicon-hearted ATM machine:
The creation of that, and of all the other similar empty gestures of the past two weeks, that’s when remembrance crossed into hollow pandering.
Them What Has, Keeps 0
After pointing out that “speedup” refers to practices designed to wring more work for less money from employees (think Lucy in the candy factory), Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery point out that calling it “productivity increases” doesn’t make it any less insidious. Employees give the productivity and employers keep the increases.
A snippet:
Sure, but we all have to do more with less — employers struggling to survive the downturn are just tightening their belts, right? That’s true for some. But in the big picture, the data show a more insidious pattern. After a sharp dip in 2008 and ’09, U.S. economic output quickly recovered to near pre-recession levels. The United States did better than most of its fellow G-7 economies. But U.S. workers didn’t see the benefit: During the recession, far more people here lost their jobs than anywhere else, and far fewer were hired back once the recovery began. And who knows what will happen now that the economy has made another downward turn?
RIP Michael Hart 0
Creator of Project Gutenberg and inventer of the e-book.
I have about a dozen Project Gutenberg publications in my Android as I type this and am actively reading four of them, hopping back and forth depending on my mood.
There are more scattered about on various computers.
Mr. Hart has left quite a legacy.
Update from the Foreclosure-Based Economy 0
Everything is just fine, thank you.
Nearly 1 of every 3 homes sold in August – 29 percent – were in foreclosure or sold for less than what the homeowner owed last month, reported Real Estate Information Network Inc. That’s up from 25 percent a year ago.
Also I missed one dustbiting bank that got blanked last night:
No doubt it didn’t diversify its portfolio with enough foreclosures.
Light Bloggery 0
I’ve volunteered for a little computer project for a candidate I support, though I’m not in her district. It will occupy me for most of the weekend.
I expect to get off a few drive-by posts along the way, if only for break-time.
For Your Listening Pleasure 0
I am currently listening to a reading of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.
I credit KPO for introducing me to the site.
