...your mom starts using the nickname on everything.
My legal first name is five letters and frequently (as in "always" outside my family) mispronounced. Searching it straight also brings up a website I don't want my employer or my parents to see. So I went with a three letter nickname. Easy to pronounce, works great, a romance author has the same name. My elderly mother likes it so much she now uses it on everything. The point was to keep work and non-work life separate--and she's blurring the lines. Oh well, it could be worse.
My sister's nephew (her brother-in-law's son) is a rookie driver in NASCAR. Every track has a computerized simulation and he drives the sim every week for practice, even if he's not scheduled to drive in the race. All the drivers do these sims. I have no idea how much these sims cost to produce, or how often they're revised.
Back in the early 1980s, when I was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin, I took a class in *something* which had a lot of stuff about "sign", "symbol", "signified" and "signifier" in it. (God help me, but I don't remember what it was about.) Anyway, the only thing I did get out of this class was a visiting lecture by a linguist who had been contracted by the Department of Energy to come up with signs to put on a proposed storage place (which became Yucca Mountain).
Anyway, the upshot of this guy's work was that there was no sign that could be devised that would carry the symbol of "danger" for 10,000 years. Instead, he proposed to the DOE that they come up with a "nuclear priesthood", a caste of people who would pass down from generation to generation why it was so important not to go near the storage place.
I've forgotten everything else I learned in that class, but I did remember that lecture. Wish I could remember the name of the guy who proposed this solution. Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth here for a 19MB download.
I also noticed that it's only the msn.com homepage that is blocked. I have pulled up internal site pages and they load just fine (example: search.msn.com). However, if I try to go to the msn.com homepage from that page, I get the message.
What amazes me is that Bill Gates and Co. don't get that some of us are not willing to use a free piece of junk and would rather pay for a better browser.
I find it funny to read these comments about the Alvin Maker series, where the readers consider the books to only be American alternative history. In point of fact, they are something more.
The Alvin Maker series is in fact Card's mythological retelling and extended riff on the life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church--with a twist. The "Alvin" in Alvin Maker comes from an (unproven) historical assertion that Joseph Smith's older brother Alvin (who died just as Joseph Smith was getting caught up with gold plates, etc.) was actually supposed to be called as a prophet, and Joseph was a mere backup.
If you read Card's oevure, you can see the Mormon influence shot all the way through. It's most obvious in the "Homecoming" series (which is a liberal borrowing of the Book of Mormon), but you can see it in other of Card's books.
Last spring, Salt Lake City's mayor, Rocky Anderson, reviewed the D.A.R.E. program as part of a larger review of the budget. Anderson came to the conclusion that D.A.R.E. was not effective and not worth the salaries of the four police officers who taught the program in local schools. So he pulled the officers off D.A.R.E. duty and put them back on the street, and eliminated the D.A.R.E. program. The schools are now using a free program (I don't know the name of it, so sue me).
D.A.R.E. supporters continue to write to our local newspaper complaining about Anderson discontinuing the program in the schools. Oddly enough, these appeals to the public are couched in very emotional terms, and don't present any statistics as to the efficacy of the program. As has been pointed out, critics of D.A.R.E. have been all over the program for years because it doesn't seem effective.
Slashdot Mirror
...your mom starts using the nickname on everything.
My legal first name is five letters and frequently (as in "always" outside my family) mispronounced. Searching it straight also brings up a website I don't want my employer or my parents to see. So I went with a three letter nickname. Easy to pronounce, works great, a romance author has the same name. My elderly mother likes it so much she now uses it on everything. The point was to keep work and non-work life separate--and she's blurring the lines. Oh well, it could be worse.
My sister's nephew (her brother-in-law's son) is a rookie driver in NASCAR. Every track has a computerized simulation and he drives the sim every week for practice, even if he's not scheduled to drive in the race. All the drivers do these sims. I have no idea how much these sims cost to produce, or how often they're revised.
Yay, Dave!
Of course, the content is enough to make one's lips pucker...
Back in the early 1980s, when I was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin, I took a class in *something* which had a lot of stuff about "sign", "symbol", "signified" and "signifier" in it. (God help me, but I don't remember what it was about.) Anyway, the only thing I did get out of this class was a visiting lecture by a linguist who had been contracted by the Department of Energy to come up with signs to put on a proposed storage place (which became Yucca Mountain).
Anyway, the upshot of this guy's work was that there was no sign that could be devised that would carry the symbol of "danger" for 10,000 years. Instead, he proposed to the DOE that they come up with a "nuclear priesthood", a caste of people who would pass down from generation to generation why it was so important not to go near the storage place.
I've forgotten everything else I learned in that class, but I did remember that lecture. Wish I could remember the name of the guy who proposed this solution. Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth here for a 19MB download.
Just checked...still blocked in Opera 5.12.
I also noticed that it's only the msn.com homepage that is blocked. I have pulled up internal site pages and they load just fine (example: search.msn.com). However, if I try to go to the msn.com homepage from that page, I get the message.
What amazes me is that Bill Gates and Co. don't get that some of us are not willing to use a free piece of junk and would rather pay for a better browser.
The Alvin Maker series is in fact Card's mythological retelling and extended riff on the life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church--with a twist. The "Alvin" in Alvin Maker comes from an (unproven) historical assertion that Joseph Smith's older brother Alvin (who died just as Joseph Smith was getting caught up with gold plates, etc.) was actually supposed to be called as a prophet, and Joseph was a mere backup.
If you read Card's oevure, you can see the Mormon influence shot all the way through. It's most obvious in the "Homecoming" series (which is a liberal borrowing of the Book of Mormon), but you can see it in other of Card's books.
Mirele
A Grateful Salt Lake City Taxpayer
D.A.R.E. supporters continue to write to our local newspaper complaining about Anderson discontinuing the program in the schools. Oddly enough, these appeals to the public are couched in very emotional terms, and don't present any statistics as to the efficacy of the program. As has been pointed out, critics of D.A.R.E. have been all over the program for years because it doesn't seem effective.