I know that this law would be difficult to enforce, and that we'd all like to be able to post our political views, ask difficult questions, and engage in other harmless and even noble behaviors anonymously, but cyberbullying is real and it can happen to any one.
Ironically, I was online under a pseudonym at time. This was the fall of 2003. I did not know the word "cyberbullying," but something about this group felt very funny, so I thought my avatar would be happier there than I was. I'd had some bitter experiences with smaller ladies' groups. http://tacheiru.us/unfettered/defunct.html
Here is the group my "personna" joined's URL. I'm not sure they are even active.
Haldis, my alter-ego (She's a bit more than a pseudonym. I've been online as her http://hopefulviper.us/haldis for seven years so she has a separate history and if I do something under her name, I say she did it. This helps me keep track of who I was when I did what.) soon had an inbox of overflowing mail and in among the letters from the Yahoogroup that was so overloading the servers at the time, it took three days to clear. In among these gems, came some very ugly poison pen letters from a throwaway email address. The emails accuesd my personna of having "an immoral relationship" with her boyfriend and said she'd better watch herself or something vaguely bad would happen. This sounds a lot milder as a description than it did in real life. There were also ugly messages left on the remotely loaded web board, my avatar had on her web site. She deleted some of them. I think there may be one or two left up.
My avatar and I were both frightened. The avatar went to the list owner to complain. The list owner told her to be careful and watch it. We both interpreted this as the fact that the listowner did not want any bullies on her list and that she would do what she could to keep up her list's good name.
Call it a miscalculation. The bullying continued. Haldis (my avatar) and I searched for ISP's and other clues and we managed to find the bully's identity. Meanwhile, Haldis got sick of the list and the way that they had gone after another member. Haldis ripped up a glurge just to see the reaction. She got thrown off the list but the email took three days to stop. She got to see the grand pile-up and pile-on that followed her ouster. Haldis also learned that the list owner had been in cahoots with the bully.
Haldis had no choice but to email two cease and desist letters signed by her and witnessed by her fictional suite mates (Haldis is much younger than I and was a freshwoman in college at the time this all occured). The threat sounded real enough and the cyberbullies were history.
I can still find letters I wrote about this at the time...
Letter 1 -- Psycho by the Pound 11/4/03
I took a nap and then Haldis had to score Web Leagues. Suffice it to say the scoring set up at ZOID is much better. I counted 70 ballots by hand. I had reason to dread doing it.
I also did some thinking about the attack on Haldis. I tried to figure out what is provoking it. Haldis' political page is a possibility. Thadea's remarks about the crassness of competing a memorial page and site fighter demographics could be another. A third possibility is that the attacker "Squeakychair" is just crazy.
I mean you don't like someone for some reason that you meet on a fairly open and unmoderated mailing list that brings in women from all over, you either have it out with them in public or you write them a confronting letter that you sign with your real name or you let it go. This crap with threats and taunts which almost feels like blackmail, feels crazy and crazy making.
Also sign Bravenet and Lycos guestbooks. You can start with this site
http://www.4chloe.com or http://www.godhearsyou.com
When you get done, visit a web site of someone who has signed the book and sign their book and then chain through that book to a third site etc... You should start seeing spam shortly.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna ehkuhall7@tacheiru.every1.net
PS I use a white list because you know what kind of troubles my inbox has.
My first memory is from when I was about 14 months old. I was in the baby carriage. I remember my father telling me it was the fourth of July (would have been 1963). I got a blue gum ball from a gum ball machine. I just played with it. It wasn't food and I did not have the teeth to chew it. What I probably did not have were any molars. I could talk because I had some front teeth. I had been talking since I was nine months old.
I cut teeth very late. I preferred soft foods for a long time as a little kid because I became self-aware before I had all my teeth.
The other thing I was very aware of was that everything was just way too big for me. I could not get beyond the first bar on the monkey bars (I can still feel how this hurts today). I fell in the toilet at the world's fair (1964) when I was two.
Most of my early memories are about language. I remember lacking words for a lot of things and naming everything I could name. B&M baked beans were "little brown beans." My mother's patchwork woolen cap was the "ef-fou-fa-tah" (It looked like an ef-fou-fa-tah). The stuffed polygonal ball with polka dots was called the "rag-a-buff ball." I still have my rag-a-buff ball.
I can remember a great argument with my father about the old Mobile gas signs. They were of a red pegasus. I called Mobile gas "flying red dragon." My father said the animal in question was not a horse. I said that it had to be a dragon because horses did not fly.
I think I was at a loss for words until I was about eight years old. No matter how many of them I learned, it was always hard to describe things that were important.
The name of the game is do they have it? A $40 basket of groceries is a big basket so I'm on a pseudo shopping spree at Fresh Direct. Your results may vary since I don't eat like the typical American....
I started out in groceries looking for some herbal tea flavors I can't buy in Columbus, Georgia at my friendly Publix which is our "high class" supermarket. I wanted Strawberry Kiwi and Tangerine Zinger. Fresh Direct came across. Publix does not stock these flavors.
Score: Fresh Direct 2 Publix 0 Money spent at FreshDirect $4.00 I'm 10% of the way to making my minimum.
OK, next I wanted at least one can of Bumblebee canned smoked salmon in oil. FreshDirect does not carry this product.
Score Fresh Direct 2 Publix 1 Money spent at FreshDirect so far still $4.00
OK, I want some sardines if I can't get my smoked salmon in a can. I like Reese hot and spicey or golden smoked or Vigo with lemon. FreshDirect carries neither of these brands and these are hoity toity sardines.
Score Fresh Direct 2 Publix 2 Money spent at FreshDirect still $4.00
OK, canned fish is not FreshDirect's long suit. They are supposed to be a gourmet store. Well do they carry the nutbutters I walk six miles to get from the one decent natural food store here in Columbus? No soynut butter. No almond butter. No cashew butter.
Score: Fresh Direct 2 Publix 2 Country Life 2 Money spent at FreshDirect still $4.00
Now FreshDirect is supposed to have wonderful cheese. I would like some of that nice port wine cheese spread or some cheddar flavored with port wine. This is one I get from Atlanta at the DeKalb Farmer's market. I also used to be able to buy it in the local large supermarket when I lived in Upstate New York. You can guess the score...and what's worse there is no smokey cheddar either. Publix has smoked cheddar though the current piece in my freezer is from the DeKalb Farmer's Market. Fresh Direct has absolutely no flavored cheddar cheeses. Publix usually has several flavors.
Score Fresh Direct 2 Publix 3 DeKalb Farmer's Market 3 Country Life 1 Money spent, still $40.00
Now in all fairness Fresh Direct has gouda cheese and havarti with caraway seeds. Let me buy half a pound of each of these so I spend at least a little money. These are second and third choice items.
Score: Fresh Direct 3 Publix 3 DeKalb Farer's Market 3 and Country Life 1 Money spent at FreshDirect $8.00 (The cheese cost me $4.00 for two half pound blocks.)
OK, on to the holy of holies. The produce department. Fresh Direct is supposed to be good at this and buying produce in a Southern supermarkets is a disappointment for a Yankee like me. Here we go.... I want a winter squash, a white onion, a 1lb bag of carrots, a cabbage, some fresh dill, and some scallions, and an anise, and a daikon radish. What can you do for me Fresh Direct? For the winter squash, a nice hubbard is my first choice and a kobacha is my second choice. OK, how does the produce stand up?
Publix has a kobacha squash, carrots, onions. It sometimes doesn't have scallions or dill but only sometimes. It almost never has anise or daikon that is worth taking home. The daikon is made of rubber.
Fresh Direct has kobacha squash (second choice and small too!), carrots, anise, daikon, dill, cabbage, white onion, scallions. I'd really like savoy cabbage instead of the plain stuff so let's see how they do on this. They have it and at a very reasonable.49 a pound.
OK, the scores is now FreshDirect 11 Publix 7 DeKalb Farmer's Market 10 and country Life NA. Money spent $17.00 Well I'm nearly half way to my quota and I'm exhausted.
I'll need some bread to eat with the cheese. The canned fish and nut butter have to come from elsewhere. I would like a pound of dried beans, preferably Goya pink beans, a loaf of Arnold 100% whole wheat bread, and a 2lb bag of brown rice. Let's see how Fresh Direct does.
Looks like they don't carry Arnold, but they carry Wonder's 100% whole wheat which is more or less as good. There are no dried pink or lima beans or split peas. There are dried pinto beans. There is also brown rice. Total spent for these three items $4.00 and the beans invovled a second choice.
Fresh Direct 12 Publix 8 Amount of money spent so far $21.00
OK life is not complete without some fruit. I'd love a bag of ida red apples, having not seen them in Georgia this year. Note: the apple harvest in the northeast was a disaster. Publix bats a zero on this. No Ida-Reds at FreshDirect either but they do have Cortlands. I'll buy three pounds. Let's see in this part of the world a 3lb bag of apples holds a dozen pieces of fruit. Whoah $10.00 for a dozen Corland apples! What happened. Clearly the apples in the three pound bag don't exist at FreshDirect.
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 8 Amount of money spent so far... $31.00 (I got ripped off!)
Now here is one I bet fresh direct does not have, a nice cheap brand of mayo, yes the real industrial strength stuff. I buy this stuff and like it. Helman's is tasteless. Yup no El Cheapo Mayo. Another strike out.
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 9 Amount of money spent so far still $31.00
OK, I want some string figs. That royally priced bag of monstrous apples won't last the week. Let's see if Fresh Direct can come thorugh. Now Publix has these in stock so they get a point. Dried fruit in the south is not always easy to get. FreshDirect being a New York store has its own dried fruit department. I wonder if the kalmyra figs will be astronomically priced. The figs are about twice what I pay in Columbus. There is no less expensive choice. Well that was a fast way to blow $6.00 Rip me off like that and you don't get your point!
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 10 Amount of money spent $37.00 I got ripped off again!
OK, I want some Birdseye frozen pepper stir fry mix. I also wouldn't mind a bag of frozen soy beans or edamamme. I can get both of these in Columbus for $1.50/bag and $3.00/bag respectively, though the edamamme come from Country Life. Let's go! Edamamme that are not shucked don't count. The pods are stringy. Strike one! And the multi colored frozen peppers from Birdseye are also missing. Ding!
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 11 Amount of money spent is holding at $37.00. I was sure I would make my quota.
OK, fish at Fresh Direct is supposed to be great. Of course it is all fresh. This is not always so great given that fish has a very short shelf life. Now I have a hunch I'm going to bomb out here because I am a bit on the budget minded side. I'd like some hoki or hake filets, nice white fish that is not outrageously priced. Well they have some tilapia at $5.39 a pound. I'm going to buy a whole pound of this stuff. I bought three portions for $8.00 and I'm over quota. I can obtain tilapia fresh at Publix when it goes on sale for about this price and they have frozen fish in sealed packages as well.
Fresh Direct 12 and Publix 12....It's a tie???
It's no tie. Fresh Direct loses here's why.....
Yes, they have a decent vegetable selection. Many items I can't get at Publix are at Fresh Direct.
Outside of that though, troubles begin. Items I like are either missing as in canned fish or nut butter or only the most expensive versions of an item are available. The apples are some fantastic fancy grade that weigh almost a pound a piece. The figs came in at a whopping $6.00 a pound instead of the $2.59 I pay for a 14oz string. Then there are the missing flavored cheddars. These are not the most expensive cheese and I had to look hard to find the red wax gouda.
I was also real generous to FreshDirect. I did not go hunting for chili sauce (I want thousand island on my cole slaw and I make my own) and they'd bomb out on that. I would guess they don't carry kasha either.
I think FreshDirect needs to cater to a clientele of more modest means. It would not be so hard to fill a $40 grocery basket if I had a second person in my household, but I don't always want or need top shelf items. I was not happy with Fresh Direct's selection except for produce. I had to work very hard to make that $40 quota and I made it only because I got ripped off twice. I have a hunch if I lived in New York City or Atlanta I could get the cheeses and canned fish I wanted without much problem. As it is, I still do better at Publix.
I know this was a long post but you should try a shopping trip of your own and see what it feels like.
I don't live in New York. I live in Columbus, GA. I don't drive and the supermarket (and a good one) is two miles away. I have my backpack and a pull cart which slides open to hold about a bag and a half of groceries. The backpack holds frozen items and items that can't ride on the pull cart such as apples. The hardest part of using a pull cart is knowing what can't go in it and seeing that the groceries are packed properly. I live alone and my grocery bill comes to under $40/week. Something like FreshDirect would be a 33% increase in price.
I'm trying their web site out now and seeing how they compare to Publix.
Both of our computers work well. Of course my mother who got her computer from the Chasids down on Central Avenue has a sweet machine. I 233mhz pentium (1 or 2). Mine is a 200mhz Pentium I ordered from Gateway.
She is a way more conservative user than I am, no heavy duty web surfing, fewer greeting cards, much less pop up infested crap, fewer spam pits to dodge though she did fall into Send4Fun. I keep a three ring circus going on this machine. Still Adaware run several weeks ago revealed only a handful of cookies. I'll be running it three or four times a year. I also use web based email (I avoid Outlook like the plague) that does NOT open attachments, and I see a ton of infected mail. I run virus protection software on this machine as well. I have yet to see it detect a virus. Crap avoidance takes a pair of sharp eyes. I think my mother has those.
My mother seems even better at repelling crap than I am. Arthritis in her shoulder is partly to blame. She cacn't do heavy duty online time. She had a color printer but decided that since the black ink that was all in one cartridge with the colors used up first, to switch it only to black. Arghhhhh..... She loves doing her taxes on her machine and online banking.
I told her my machine was for fun and not for ugly money things like this. We are so philosophically apart on how to use our machines that I would make one heck of a poor support person.
My mother's computer support came through colleagues at work when she was working and more recently through her boyfriend and through people she meets when she volunteers to do taxes. My mother loves machines and all things practical so her computer works and is well cared for. I'm a social butterfly whose been around the block a few times so my machine is also well cared for.
I just wish my mother would learn that sometimes it's better to pay market price and get good service. She has a time limited ISP and is thinking she's getting a bargain. For a few dollars more, I told her she can get all she can eat internet and on very good backbone. In the Northeast my provider rents some of the finest lines I've ever used.
Of course my mother got all those cheap phone deals and now has four bankrupt phone companies. I am glad I didn't install anything for my mother. All we'd do is fight over support issues. Let her boyfriend handle it, and we all love our PC's. They love us back.
Now if any one can tell me how to teach a mother to learn html. My mother would be superb at it, so would my dad for that matter.
They are web based. Just tell it you want to print the card rather than send it via email (You have to put in email addresses first but they can be fakes). There are thousands of images to choose from and you do have to write your own message. The image quality is superb and the printed cards fit nicely in standard business size envelopes. They don't look like storebought greeting cards but they cover only one side of an 8" x 11" piece of paper so there's not tricky folding and they don't require card stock.
My mother tried the Adkins diet when it came out and lasted three days. She complained it made her nauseous. She was very scaird at how sick it made her. My father did the Stillman all meat diet. He lost the weight and eventually gained it back. He also ended up with gout.
I know I wouldn't last three days on a low carb diet. I'd start looking for the fruit bowl and be in misery at the missing bread (I like whole wheat bread), rice, and pasta. You can't stay on a diet if it makes you utterly miserable.
I've lost weight successfully three in my life, and each time I did it with portion control and I still enjoyed my starch and fruit. The first time was on my college meal plan. I drank water instead of soda, avoided all the pastries and ate only two hard boiled eggs or a slice of bread and peanut butter for breakfast.
The other two times I lived mainly on whole grain cereal (Wheaties, wheat chex or Grape nuts flakes) with skim milk and fruit for breakfast, and peanut butter (and sometimes fruit preserve) sandwiches on whole wheat bread, plus fruit for dessert for the other meals.
I was satiated, and I don't think it was the fat in the peanut butter. During one of these dieting bouts, I kept a measuring cup by the cereal box. Cereal was expensive and I was poor and I only wanted the recommended portion.
I ate raisins with my cereal some of the time, and I still lost weight. I think this worked for a couple of reasons. I don't think satiety comes from protien or fat. I think it's in the mind. If you eat a full and complete portion of something, you've had your portion and that's it. A piece of fruit is also a portion. One is all you are supposed to get. To take more is gluttony. I think this is geting into the area of habits and ritual taboos.
Also cereal, fruit, bread, and peanut butter taste good. I think they taste better than fresh meat which needs a ton of salt to taste good. The cereals I was eating were flavored with sugar, salt, and malt syrup. Fruit of course is just terrific. The blond raisins were the best, though apples are a universal flavor.
Since I had meals I liked, I felt good about what I ate and was satisfied enough to stay on the diet which came out to about 1500-1800 calories a day. I was on it for several months and was working for a plump shrink at the time. I had spent all winter bundled in sweats that were fairly shapeless.
The shrink made her living helping obsese patients lose weight among other things. I remember arguing with her that raisins were helpful for losing weight because they tasted so good, you would not be tempted to eat other foods if you got a daily ration of them.
Come spring, off came the sweat shirt, and boy was that shrink surprised. I am right now addicted to soda and weigh a bit too much. I wonder if a variation of the old peanut butter sandwich and wheaties diet would work again. I love sweet drinks, even though I know that calories you chew on provide more satisfaction. I think it's the chewing and the swallowing not the chemistry that do it.
In short, I think satiety is a series of complex cognitive tricks. It's not just chemistry. That's why tripping those tricks helped me lose weight. I think the fast food epidemic also catches those same cognitive tricks and trips them the wrong way.
My mother has been able to finally lose and keep off weight with a low fat high complex carbohydrate diet. She's given up meat but eats fish when she goes out. I think losing weight is just a question of knowing yourself really well and then working with what makes you happy so you stay happy while cutting back on food. Not only does the weight come off but since you know what you really like to eat, and have some ideas about right amounts, you are going to hopefully use that knowledge to keep the weight off when you go to a less restrictive regime. I think the belly just follows where the head leads, it's getting the head to lead that's the hard part.
This crap with invasive software, opt-in by deception, and just plain garbage is going to go on forever until and unless users get more savvy or those in the know take the time to train them.
I tried some of this last summer with awful results. I was in a group that is now defunct called the Secret Garden. I think it is now called http://rainbowofhope.tripod.com
I was head of the Support committee which meant we not only made web pages with graphic gifts but we also sent tons of cards.
I got up a good discussion on ecards and I showed my committee a spam trap and explained why it was bad. It was a card an actual member had sent.
The fireworks exploded. The woman who sent the card knew I meant what I said when I said it wasn't her fault.
Another member who had the ear of our Fearless Leader, Jules, did not. She feared she would be at the wrong end of the tirade I was directing at the spam pit, Flowgo.
I explained over and over to Jules the need to make spam traps a public issue and that providing good support means no spam. Jules worried about hurt feelings. I worried about screw ups.
I got through though when I said that the last thing any of us needed was to send a Flowgo/Funstun card to a sick or bereaved member and stick someone who has more than enough stress with the stress of spam.
We began to test card providers by sending cards amongst ourselves. Again, this does not take much skill. I think we would have gone much further if Jules hadn't pulled her cop de tat.
I think people can learn. Sometimes I wish they wouldn't. I'm currently head of RAOK's guestbook committee and lately there has been a huge drop off in the number of guestbook signings. The reason is that Bravenet is no longer as stable as it was precrash. I didn't pick RAOK's guestbook provider. It also throws two to three popups a signing. Signing a Bravenet guestbook just isn't much fun any more.
By the way, I feel about Bravenet the way a lot of you feel about Flowgo/Funstun/Send4Fun. At least the guestbook signers are avoiding garbage.
This comes from a joke, where you talk about what you do with your finger (poke), and when you sit in a nice hot bath you soak. In England a fellow is called a bloke. Now what is the white of an egg?
Flowgo/Funstun/Send4Fun use a very similar technique to get users to opt in to their spam lists. When you recieve a typical e-card (and not all of them but enough) there is a link in the first paragraph of the letter for ordinary pick up and a second link for AOL. You get a card from a friend and don't examine the links too closely. Besides the pattern is all the same.
Flowgo/Funstun/Send4Fun make their first link say something like "to see this card and recieve our great newsletter click here." The second link says "to see this card and recieve nothing," click here. Users who read carefully get no newsletter, but how many do?
Of course those who click the first link technically had a choice and are opting in. Opting in to receive a newsletter is not spam.
It's slimey and deceitful but since users technically opt in, I believe it's legal. I've gotten myself off Funstun/Flowgo's spam list twice. It's very easy to forget that the white of an egg is not a yolk.
For card education please visit Solla Sollew http://nakedmolerat.org.uk/sollasollew It was my attempt at starting my own ladies' group.
Alright none of you gentlemen send e-cards but opt in by deceit is alive and well at http://www.funstun.com and http://www.flowgo.com
Here is how it works. You send an e-card or someone sends you one from this place. For some reason many of the ladies in my groups can't resist animated cards and they just click on the send this to someone else link.
What arrives in your mailbox (or the recipients mail box) is an innocent enough looking pick up letter. Commonly with e-card pickup letters you hit the top link (Unless you are an AOL subscriber). The second link is for AOL.
These cards however have a top link that says "to view this card and subscribe to our list click here...." My mother fell into this trap. I fell into it twice. There are now variations with three and four links and the link for viewing the card only either in the middle or at the bottom.
We are all creatures of habbit. It is VERY EASY to click the wrong thing accidentally. I just don't send cards from those two companies and I urge all my friends to avoid them.
I also dutifully zap any pop ups for anything that invade my screen. I do a lot of surfing personal web sites so I see a lot of pop ups. My 28.8 connection at the house helps in this regard because the pop ups are slow enough in coming that I can kill them before they open.
I don't say yes or no to the Gator. I say "goodbye."
The best interfaces I used were WordStar 2 in the mid 1980's and Displaywrite 3 in the early 1990's. I am a fast and accurate touch typist. The two fingered commands in Wordstar basicly linked brain to keyboard to screen for me. I have a visual impairment so it meant my eyemuscles could stay on the screen and not have to move and refocus. I also had no mouse to mess with.
I love doing graphics which for me mainly means scraping the backgrounds off of photographs. I also draw with a mouse. I have pulled my right trapezius muscle four or five times. The first time was in 1996 and my boyfriend and I left for vacation as I ached. Passive motion in a car or bus is agony though standing and walking feel good. I did not sleep and through most of the second day of my trip from Utica to El Paso I stood in the aisle of the Greyhound with my arm upstretched.
My boyfriend had trouble walking in the Texas heat so when we rode the Via buses I stood again because to sit with my arm in my lap would have been unbearable. I remember touring the military post they hae in El Paso and laying down periodically to rest that sore shoulder.
I think the bad muscle has gotten stronger with time. I still would like to be able to word process without a mouse and with all keyboard commands. I realize for a lot of people this is not practical but for those of us who are GOOD TYPISTS this would be a more comfortable alternative.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
http://zc2zc3.st
I don't get why those Third World representatives and their sympathizers are complaining about ICANN creating a digital divide. Those countries are sitting on a goldmine of barely used two letter domains. Subsaharann Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South America there's a whole world of domains out there and if a country is savvy enough to open registration up to the rest of us, I would suspect there's money to be made.
Most of the Polynesian domains ws, vu, nu, to, tv, sell for at least $35/year, making them more expensive than Internic registrations and certainly more than what it costs to register a.com,.org, or.net with discount registry.
http://zc2zc3.org was already taken when I went to get a domain for ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition. Being avowedly uncommercial and DIFFERENT from other web site competition communities, I did not want a.com or a.net
I went shopping and found.st which is Saotome and Principe. It was not cheap but I have the name for three years at $75.
I think it was worth the shopping and worth the price. Sure everybody thinks.com but that makes.com common as dirt. An.st raises eyebrows. Having a short name to start with I figure http://zc2zc3.st is not hard to remember. Of course the eyebrow raising effect will die back as more people get these exotic country codes but for now it is nice to be the "first one on my block..."
I think there would be lots of other folks like me if other third world counntries made it easy to register their domain names.
Eileen H. Kramer/ZOIDRubashov/Roanna
http://zc2zc3.st
Cats that are spayed/neutered and returned to their old hunting grounds perform two valuable functions: They kill vermin and their presence prevents other ferals from entering the territory.
Usually organizations that trap "strays" place the cats that are socialized and which have been dumped for adoption. Feral cats are either released into a supervised colony or in the north they are sent to businesses to be working cats.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
http://zc2zc3.st
I think Solomon's stats are misleading. Sure people spend a lot of time at MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, but what are they doing there. In a lot of quarters Yahoomail and Hotmail are synonymous with email. Yahoo may be providing the banner and the venue but the content is letters from Aunt Milly. The same is true or messageboards in MSN Communities and Geocities home pages.
Reading a letter from Aunt Milly or looking at The Angels and Unicorn Fantasy Heaven is not the same thing as visiting the Official Barbie Page or the airlinen tickets for sale page or other stores.
Furthermore, the moneyed interests can not drive the little person with something to say out of business. You can rent web space for less than $150 a year. If you care about what you say, you can put together a site for your soapbox and even include your own CGI and exclude ads. The problem with this arrangement is people have to know you are there. This is the problem I run into with
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition http://zc2zc3.st This is a problem that I think a lot of us smaller webmasters have.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
Nakedmolerat.org.uk (It's better in the burrow!)
http://nakedmolerat.org.uk
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition
htp://zc2zc3.st
OK, I skipped all the demos. I enjoyed chemistry but hated the labs. On the bottom of the page is a link to one of the web's most gorgeous periodic tables. Each group of elements is a different rainbow color.
If you click on each element you see an image of it in nature and get its history. If you click on the chemical information you see its image in pure form.
There are quicktime movies and Shockwave demos too. This is not the visual periodic table for nthing.
I don't think I'd want anything like that passing through my digestive tract. I always heard that feces were undigested fiber and dead bacteria. The "turd" in that experiment is just a piece of incinerated sugar. By the way, where is the professor's protective goggles and lab coat, and what about ventilation equipment? You can see the fumes rising from that black gunk.
Just a footnote but it is amazing some of the
pages built by K-12 teachers in math and science. These people have far fewer resources than college faculty who end up using WebCT, SmartCourse, or BlackBoard or something else that lets them drag and drop or having department secretaries convert Word documents to pages.
Here is an example. Here is another one. My webliographies are full of sites like these. The science ones are mine and I coded the html from scratch.
The web is a very powerful tool. Please don't sell those of us in nontechnical professions short.
Anonymous Coward I hope to metamoderate that post of yours some day because it deserves better than the score it got.
Your solution that we as consumers should walk away from corporate culture and use the net to create and support our own is probably the best response to all of this.
I don't know CGI and the last thing I "hacked" was a CD from which I copied MSCDEX 2.0 more thann ten years ago. Most users will never be able to implement the fancy patches and protocols necessary to route around damage.
When it comes to privacy I'm more concerned about an employer reading outgoing email or sampling downloaded files that go to my hard drive, than I am about FBI Carnivore.
But buiding one's own culture through creative writing, web graphics, midi (yes midi. They're smaller and easier to upload and play) etc... might be possible.
I say "might" because as I see it there are two barriers. The first is technical. There is a caricature of the typical web users as a stupid yutz living in the web's trailer parks.
There's a grain of truth here. In one of my ladies' groups I found out I was the only one who knew html. Being able to code your own static web page on your hard drive is empowering, so is making your graphics with PSP. I haven't tried making my own midi or arranging them yet. I don't have the equipment.
Not only can't the typical user not code her own page. She forgets to back it up. Candi the founder of RAOK lost her entire web site due to Geocities' ban on remote loading. She was serving images off her site and yes the images were displayed gallery style so the site was not storage. Remote loading is important for leaving graphics in guestbooks.
What make this technical barrier worse is that Corporate internet tells typical users they don't have to learn to code. This is to the point where I know professors and librarians who have refused to learn html fearing it was too hard. At its worst typical users become attached to drag and drop editors which make their sites nonportable.
That's the technical barrier. There are also social barriers. When it comes to web graphics FREEDOM IS NOT PRIVATE PROPERTY. If your stuff is really good and it gets stolen and put on someone else's web page, you are doing a good job. If someone uses your graphics to make more graphics, than there is more stuff out there. This does not seem to sink in in the world of "no right click" and "don't steal my graphics without linking back." What makes you think your graphics are good enough that I'd want them on my page?
A typical internet user also feels NO PAIN NO GAIN. This means graphics that only a few experts can do and only some graphics are "nice enough." It is more than possible to work smarter rather than harder and turn out something presentable. I bet nearly everyone has this in them. The result may not be representational art but it will with some tweaks and practice suit your needs.
A typical user thinks he or she is not good enough. Look at the pained posed portraits on most personal pages and then look at the human forms of dreamy, spiritual, and Victorian ladies. Why shouldn't a candid shot be good enough? Why not try writing your own prose or poetry? If your poetry doesn't work, then try prose.
The last barrier is "us." I'm not sure if I'm part of "us." I'm currently a member of RAOK and LOTH. That gives me a foot in both camps. We need to start treating them as equals. We don't have to like all their art, but I have learned a lot about web page graphics from them. I build lusher more interesting pages because of this. Also making pressies or quilt squares is about the best graphic training there is. Then take those pressies on the road and sign a few guestbooks or do support. You will be amazed what you learn about yourself. You will have more in common with these people than you think. A quilt square is a 130*130 pixel grpahic that is displayed as part of a "quilt" of such squares.
If you want to talk about a noncorporate culture, this is where some of it is being made and while LOTH is all female, RAOK takes guys.
If, and it is big IF, the typical internet user can get past all the technical and psychological/social barriers to building a culture outside corporate control, it just might happen.
Heck, I guess I am an old fogey. I'm thirty-nine, but I do have to laugh when any one complains about working in a cubicle. I currently don't have a cubicle though I did on my last job. My current office which is windowless measures 12" by about 8". My cubicle was about the size of my present office.
On my old job, we got the cubicles in 1996 and were very very happy to get them. There was a whole committee set up to get them and interviews with suppliers etc... This was the first time we had private work space.
On my present job there have been offices such as they are for the last five or six years. When I came in they were there. Unlike most of you, I don't stay in my office all day. I have "desk duty" when I go out to man the reference desk in two to four hour slots.
I look upon my office (cubicle or dungeon. I think the cubicle was nicer)as a refuge from office politics, and like most librarians I refuse to keep it neat, though I do leave a spot on my desk to do work and I attempt not to dump my stuff on the chairs. Since I am supposed to do mediated searching, I have lots of chairs. I also have some of the previous librarian's junk though I got rid of a lot of it about a year ago when I cleaned the place up by hauling the dumpster to the office doorway and giving everything I hadn't touched in a year the old heave-ho.
My immediate supervisor whose office has a window is very uncomfortable in her office. Remember until about five years ago librarians did not have private work space. She oftenn takes her work to the work room or the paraprofessionals' glassed in area behind reference. She still has not gotten used to having an office. I'm grateful for mine.
Power is mastery of an adult skill.
This is something that happened long before there
ever was an internet or one that was accessible
to a twelve year old.
Back when I was a kid (I was born in 1962) as soon as we could string the sentences together, the teachers taught us how to write letters. There were friendly letters, and there were business letters. With the business letter, the teacher had tossed each of us the key to power.
By writing a business letter, I could communicate just like a grownup, and command grownups attention. I routinely wrote away for free stuff.
Well I love cats and cat fancy though all my furr babies are mixed breed shelter kitties or rescues. I attend cat shows, and when I was a kid I had a subscription to Cats Magazine. I read every article I could understand.
That was how I decided to write to breeders and catteries to get free information on the different breeds. I of course knew no one would waste their time with a twelve year old girl so I crafted business letters in the proper form and said I was interested in breeding that particular breed of cat. I was particularly interested in various breeds of Oriental shorthairs.
The literature poured in and then came the phone call. My parents were away and the sitter looked very perplexed as she handed me the phone. It was a man with a high voice and he was calling in answer to my letter about Chartreux cats. I sweated bullets as I talked cat fancy over the long distance line. We said our goodbyes and then...
I was consumed with guilt. This gentleman had actually believed I was an adult! Not only that he was in California which meant a day time long distance call for nothing. No wonder I felt guilty. I promptly got out my writing tablet and pen and wrote him a letter of apology telling him I was truely a kid.
Now my cynical adult self laughs at my pangs of conscience. A few questions and the breeder of Chartreux in California could have found out I was a fake. He could have asked how many cats I had or for my CFA registration membership number etc... Of course it takes a cynical mind not to believe information that comes well presented. Presenting information well is power.
I think after the cloned baby is born it will be a baby. Just because she is the sibling (most likely it will be a she in the US since there is a preference for daughters among mothers) of one of her relatives, doesn't change things. She will have all the other rights that a much younger baby sister would have.
I think it is interesting reading the way you males discuss cloning. When I think of human cloning I think of it as a fertility treatment. If a woman can't produce her own eggs, the treatments available to her are rather messy. To harvest eggs from a donor requires pumping the poor woman up with hormones. To take cells to be cloned requires a quick biopsy. Producing a child via cloning does not put an egg donor's health at risk.
I am all for human cloning. This is a therapy that when it becomes safe enough will be one more choice for couples that can't reproduce. Clones will be wanted children. What's not to like?
Do you think men and women, including do-it-yourselfers and recreational designers create different kinds of web design, and if so, what can be done to take advantage of the best of both worlds?
Also, what do you think of triple bordered backgrounds?
Slashdot Mirror
I know that this law would be difficult to enforce, and that we'd all like to be able to post our political views, ask difficult questions, and engage in other harmless and even noble behaviors anonymously, but cyberbullying is real and it can happen to any one.
Ironically, I was online under a pseudonym at time. This was the fall of 2003. I did not know the word "cyberbullying," but something about this group felt very funny, so I thought my avatar would be happier there than I was. I'd had some bitter experiences with smaller ladies' groups. http://tacheiru.us/unfettered/defunct.html
Here is the group my "personna" joined's URL. I'm not sure they are even active.
http://www.geocities.com/trueheartsofgold/
Haldis, my alter-ego (She's a bit more than a pseudonym. I've been online as her http://hopefulviper.us/haldis for seven years so she has a separate history and if I do something under her name, I say she did it. This helps me keep track of who I was when I did what.) soon had an inbox of overflowing mail and in among the letters from the Yahoogroup that was so overloading the servers at the time, it took three days to clear. In among these gems, came some very ugly poison pen letters from a throwaway email address. The emails accuesd my personna of having "an immoral relationship" with her boyfriend and said she'd better watch herself or something vaguely bad would happen. This sounds a lot milder as a description than it did in real life. There were also ugly messages left on the remotely loaded web board, my avatar had on her web site. She deleted some of them. I think there may be one or two left up.
My avatar and I were both frightened. The avatar went to the list owner to complain. The list owner told her to be careful and watch it. We both interpreted this as the fact that the listowner did not want any bullies on her list and that she would do what she could to keep up her list's good name.
Call it a miscalculation. The bullying continued. Haldis (my avatar) and I searched for ISP's and other clues and we managed to find the bully's identity. Meanwhile, Haldis got sick of the list and the way that they had gone after another member. Haldis ripped up a glurge just to see the reaction. She got thrown off the list but the email took three days to stop. She got to see the grand pile-up and pile-on that followed her ouster. Haldis also learned that the list owner had been in cahoots with the bully.
Haldis had no choice but to email two cease and desist letters signed by her and witnessed by her fictional suite mates (Haldis is much younger than I and was a freshwoman in college at the time this all occured). The threat sounded real enough and the cyberbullies were history.
I can still find letters I wrote about this at the time...
Letter 1 -- Psycho by the Pound 11/4/03
I took a nap and then Haldis had to score Web Leagues. Suffice it to say the scoring set up at ZOID is much better. I counted 70 ballots by hand. I had reason to dread doing it.
I also did some thinking about the attack on Haldis. I tried to figure out what is provoking it. Haldis' political page is a possibility. Thadea's remarks about the crassness of competing a memorial page and site fighter demographics could be another. A third possibility is that the attacker "Squeakychair" is just crazy.
I mean you don't like someone for some reason that you meet on a fairly open and unmoderated mailing list that brings in women from all over, you either have it out with them in public or you write them a confronting letter that you sign with your real name or you let it go. This crap with threats and taunts which almost feels like blackmail, feels crazy and crazy making.
So the question is w
E-cards are technically opt-in by deceit.
Try http://www.luckysurf.com
Also sign Bravenet and Lycos guestbooks. You
can start with this site
http://www.4chloe.com or
http://www.godhearsyou.com
When you get done, visit a web site of someone who has signed the book and sign their book and then chain through that book to a third site etc... You should start seeing spam shortly.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna
ehkuhall7@tacheiru.every1.net
PS I use a white list because you know what kind of troubles my inbox has.
My first memory is from when I was about 14 months old. I was in the baby carriage. I remember my father telling me it was the fourth of July (would have been 1963). I got a blue gum ball from a gum ball machine. I just played with it. It wasn't food and I did not have the teeth to chew it. What I probably did not have were any molars. I could talk because I had some front teeth. I had been talking since I was nine months old.
I cut teeth very late. I preferred soft foods for a long time as a little kid because I became self-aware before I had all my teeth.
The other thing I was very aware of was that everything was just way too big for me. I could not get beyond the first bar on the monkey bars (I can still feel how this hurts today). I fell in the toilet at the world's fair (1964) when I was two.
Most of my early memories are about language. I remember lacking words for a lot of things and naming everything I could name. B&M baked beans were "little brown beans." My mother's patchwork woolen cap was the "ef-fou-fa-tah" (It looked like an ef-fou-fa-tah). The stuffed polygonal ball with polka dots was called the "rag-a-buff ball." I still have my rag-a-buff ball.
I can remember a great argument with my father about the old Mobile gas signs. They were of a red pegasus. I called Mobile gas "flying red dragon." My father said the animal in question was not a horse. I said that it had to be a dragon because horses did not fly.
I think I was at a loss for words until I was about eight years old. No matter how many of them I learned, it was always hard to describe things that were important.
The name of the game is do they have it? A $40 basket of groceries is a big basket so I'm on a pseudo shopping spree at Fresh Direct. Your results may vary since I don't eat like the typical American....
.49 a pound.
I started out in groceries looking for some herbal tea flavors I can't buy in Columbus, Georgia at my friendly Publix which is our "high class" supermarket. I wanted Strawberry Kiwi and Tangerine Zinger. Fresh Direct came across. Publix does not stock these flavors.
Score: Fresh Direct 2 Publix 0 Money spent at FreshDirect $4.00 I'm 10% of the way to making my minimum.
OK, next I wanted at least one can of Bumblebee canned smoked salmon in oil. FreshDirect does not carry this product.
Score Fresh Direct 2 Publix 1 Money spent at FreshDirect so far still $4.00
OK, I want some sardines if I can't get my smoked salmon in a can. I like Reese hot and spicey or golden smoked or Vigo with lemon. FreshDirect carries neither of these brands and these are hoity toity sardines.
Score Fresh Direct 2 Publix 2 Money spent at FreshDirect still $4.00
OK, canned fish is not FreshDirect's long suit. They are supposed to be a gourmet store. Well do they carry the nutbutters I walk six miles to get from the one decent natural food store here in Columbus? No soynut butter. No almond butter. No cashew butter.
Score: Fresh Direct 2 Publix 2 Country Life 2
Money spent at FreshDirect still $4.00
Now FreshDirect is supposed to have wonderful cheese. I would like some of that nice port wine cheese spread or some cheddar flavored with port wine. This is one I get from Atlanta at the DeKalb Farmer's market. I also used to be able to buy it in the local large supermarket when I lived in Upstate New York. You can guess the score...and what's worse there is no smokey cheddar either. Publix has smoked cheddar though the current piece in my freezer is from the DeKalb Farmer's Market. Fresh Direct has absolutely no flavored cheddar cheeses. Publix usually has several flavors.
Score Fresh Direct 2 Publix 3 DeKalb Farmer's Market 3 Country Life 1 Money spent, still $40.00
Now in all fairness Fresh Direct has gouda cheese and havarti with caraway seeds. Let me buy half a pound of each of these so I spend at least a little money. These are second and third choice items.
Score: Fresh Direct 3 Publix 3 DeKalb Farer's Market 3 and Country Life 1 Money spent at FreshDirect $8.00 (The cheese cost me $4.00 for two half pound blocks.)
OK, on to the holy of holies. The produce department. Fresh Direct is supposed to be good at this and buying produce in a Southern supermarkets is a disappointment for a Yankee like me. Here we go.... I want a winter squash, a white onion, a 1lb bag of carrots, a cabbage, some fresh dill, and some scallions, and an anise, and a daikon radish. What can you do for me Fresh Direct? For the winter squash, a nice hubbard is my first choice and a kobacha is my second choice. OK, how does the produce stand up?
Publix has a kobacha squash, carrots, onions. It sometimes doesn't have scallions or dill but only sometimes. It almost never has anise or daikon that is worth taking home. The daikon is made of rubber.
Fresh Direct has kobacha squash (second choice and small too!), carrots, anise, daikon, dill, cabbage, white onion, scallions. I'd really like savoy cabbage instead of the plain stuff so let's see how they do on this. They have it and at a very reasonable
OK, the scores is now FreshDirect 11 Publix 7 DeKalb Farmer's Market 10 and country Life NA. Money spent $17.00 Well I'm nearly half way to my quota and I'm exhausted.
I'll need some bread to eat with the cheese. The canned fish and nut butter have to come from elsewhere. I would like a pound of dried beans, preferably Goya pink beans, a loaf of Arnold 100% whole wheat bread, and a 2lb bag of brown rice. Let's see how Fresh Direct does.
Looks like they don't carry Arnold, but they carry Wonder's 100% whole wheat which is more or less as good. There are no dried pink or lima beans or split peas. There are dried pinto beans. There is also brown rice. Total spent for these three items $4.00 and the beans invovled a second choice.
Fresh Direct 12 Publix 8 Amount of money spent so far $21.00
OK life is not complete without some fruit. I'd love a bag of ida red apples, having not seen them in Georgia this year. Note: the apple harvest in the northeast was a disaster. Publix bats a zero on this. No Ida-Reds at FreshDirect either but they do have Cortlands. I'll buy three pounds. Let's see in this part of the world a 3lb bag of apples holds a dozen pieces of fruit. Whoah $10.00 for a dozen Corland apples! What happened. Clearly the apples in the three pound bag don't exist at FreshDirect.
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 8 Amount of money spent so far... $31.00 (I got ripped off!)
Now here is one I bet fresh direct does not have, a nice cheap brand of mayo, yes the real industrial strength stuff. I buy this stuff and like it. Helman's is tasteless. Yup no El Cheapo Mayo. Another strike out.
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 9 Amount of money spent so far still $31.00
OK, I want some string figs. That royally priced bag of monstrous apples won't last the week. Let's see if Fresh Direct can come thorugh. Now Publix has these in stock so they get a point. Dried fruit in the south is not always easy to get. FreshDirect being a New York store has its own dried fruit department. I wonder if the kalmyra figs will be astronomically priced. The figs are about twice what I pay in Columbus. There is no less expensive choice. Well that was a fast way to blow $6.00 Rip me off like that and you don't get your point!
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 10 Amount of money spent $37.00 I got ripped off again!
OK, I want some Birdseye frozen pepper stir fry mix. I also wouldn't mind a bag of frozen soy beans or edamamme. I can get both of these in Columbus for $1.50/bag and $3.00/bag respectively, though the edamamme come from Country Life. Let's go! Edamamme that are not shucked don't count. The pods are stringy. Strike one! And the multi colored frozen peppers from Birdseye are also missing. Ding!
Fresh Direct 11 Publix 11 Amount of money spent is holding at $37.00. I was sure I would make my quota.
OK, fish at Fresh Direct is supposed to be great. Of course it is all fresh. This is not always so great given that fish has a very short shelf life. Now I have a hunch I'm going to bomb out here because I am a bit on the budget minded side. I'd like some hoki or hake filets, nice white fish that is not outrageously priced. Well they have some tilapia at $5.39 a pound. I'm going to buy a whole pound of this stuff. I bought three portions for $8.00 and I'm over quota. I can obtain tilapia fresh at Publix when it goes on sale for about this price and they have frozen fish in sealed packages as well.
Fresh Direct 12 and Publix 12....It's a tie???
It's no tie. Fresh Direct loses here's why.....
Yes, they have a decent vegetable selection. Many items I can't get at Publix are at Fresh Direct.
Outside of that though, troubles begin. Items I like are either missing as in canned fish or nut butter or only the most expensive versions of an item are available. The apples are some fantastic fancy grade that weigh almost a pound a piece. The figs came in at a whopping $6.00 a pound instead of the $2.59 I pay for a 14oz string. Then there are the missing flavored cheddars. These are not the most expensive cheese and I had to look hard to find the red wax gouda.
I was also real generous to FreshDirect. I did not go hunting for chili sauce (I want thousand island on my cole slaw and I make my own) and they'd bomb out on that. I would guess they don't carry kasha either.
I think FreshDirect needs to cater to a clientele of more modest means. It would not be so hard to fill a $40 grocery basket if I had a second person in my household, but I don't always want or need top shelf items. I was not happy with Fresh Direct's selection except for produce. I had to work very hard to make that $40 quota and I made it only because I got ripped off twice. I have a hunch if I lived in New York City or Atlanta I could get the cheeses and canned fish I wanted without much problem. As it is, I still do better at Publix.
I know this was a long post but you should try a shopping trip of your own and see what it feels like.
I don't live in New York. I live in Columbus, GA. I don't drive and the supermarket (and a good one) is two miles away. I have my backpack and a pull cart which slides open to hold about a bag and a half of groceries. The backpack holds frozen items and items that can't ride on the pull cart such as apples. The hardest part of using a pull cart is knowing what can't go in it and seeing that the groceries are packed properly. I live alone and my grocery bill comes to under $40/week. Something like FreshDirect would be a 33% increase in price.
I'm trying their web site out now and seeing how they compare to Publix.
Both of our computers work well. Of course my mother who got her computer from the Chasids down on Central Avenue has a sweet machine. I 233mhz pentium (1 or 2). Mine is a 200mhz Pentium I ordered from Gateway.
She is a way more conservative user than I am, no heavy duty web surfing, fewer greeting cards, much less pop up infested crap, fewer spam pits to dodge though she did fall into Send4Fun. I keep a three ring circus going on this machine. Still Adaware run several weeks ago revealed only a handful of cookies. I'll be running it three or four times a year. I also use web based email (I avoid Outlook like the plague) that does NOT open attachments, and I see a ton of infected mail. I run virus protection software on this machine as well. I have yet to see it detect a virus. Crap avoidance takes a pair of sharp eyes. I think my mother has those.
My mother seems even better at repelling crap than I am. Arthritis in her shoulder is partly to blame. She cacn't do heavy duty online time. She had a color printer but decided that since the black ink that was all in one cartridge with the colors used up first, to switch it only to black. Arghhhhh..... She loves doing her taxes on her machine and online banking.
I told her my machine was for fun and not for
ugly money things like this. We are so philosophically apart on how to use our machines that I would make one heck of a poor support person.
My mother's computer support came through colleagues at work when she was working and more
recently through her boyfriend and through people she meets when she volunteers to do taxes. My mother loves machines and all things practical so her computer works and is well cared for. I'm a social butterfly whose been around the block a few times so my machine is also well cared for.
I just wish my mother would learn that sometimes it's better to pay market price and get good service. She has a time limited ISP and is thinking she's getting a bargain. For a few dollars more, I told her she can get all she can eat internet and on very good backbone. In the Northeast my provider rents some of the finest lines I've ever used.
Of course my mother got all those cheap phone deals and now has four bankrupt phone companies. I am glad I didn't install anything for my mother. All we'd do is fight over support issues. Let her boyfriend handle it, and we all love our PC's. They love us back.
Now if any one can tell me how to teach a mother to learn html. My mother would be superb at it, so would my dad for that matter.
http://shopping.corbis.com
They are web based. Just tell it you want to print the card rather than send it via email (You have to put in email addresses first but they
can be fakes). There are thousands of images to choose from and you do have to write your own message. The image quality is superb and the printed cards fit nicely in standard business size envelopes. They don't look like storebought greeting cards but they cover only one side of an 8" x 11" piece of paper so there's not tricky folding and they don't require card stock.
My mother tried the Adkins diet when it
came out and lasted three days. She complained
it made her nauseous. She was very scaird at how sick it made her. My father did the Stillman all meat diet. He lost the weight and eventually gained it back. He also ended up with gout.
I know I wouldn't last three days on a low carb diet. I'd start looking for the fruit bowl
and be in misery at the missing bread (I like
whole wheat bread), rice, and pasta. You can't stay on a diet if it makes you utterly miserable.
I've lost weight successfully three in my life, and each time I did it with portion control and I still enjoyed my starch and fruit.
The first time was on my college meal plan. I drank water instead of soda, avoided all the pastries and ate only two hard boiled eggs or a slice of bread and peanut butter for breakfast.
The other two times I lived mainly on whole grain cereal (Wheaties, wheat chex or Grape nuts flakes) with skim milk and fruit for breakfast, and peanut butter (and sometimes fruit preserve) sandwiches on whole wheat bread, plus fruit for dessert for the other meals.
I was satiated, and I don't think it was the fat in the peanut butter. During one of these dieting bouts, I kept a measuring cup by the cereal box. Cereal was expensive and I was poor and I only wanted the recommended portion.
I ate raisins with my cereal some of the time, and I still lost weight. I think this worked for a couple of reasons. I don't think satiety comes from protien or fat. I think it's in the mind. If you eat a full and complete portion of something, you've had your portion and that's it. A piece of fruit is also a portion. One is all you are supposed to get. To take more is gluttony. I think this is geting into the area of habits and ritual taboos.
Also cereal, fruit, bread, and peanut butter taste good. I think they taste better than fresh meat which needs a ton of salt to taste good. The cereals I was eating were flavored with sugar, salt, and malt syrup. Fruit of course is just terrific. The blond raisins were the best, though apples are a universal flavor.
Since I had meals I liked, I felt good about what I ate and was satisfied enough to stay on the diet which came out to about 1500-1800 calories a day. I was on it for several months and was working for a plump shrink at the time. I had spent all winter bundled in sweats that were fairly shapeless.
The shrink made her living helping obsese patients lose weight among other things. I remember arguing with her that raisins were helpful for losing weight because they tasted so good, you would not be tempted to eat other foods if you got a daily ration of them.
Come spring, off came the sweat shirt, and
boy was that shrink surprised. I am right now addicted to soda and weigh a bit too much. I wonder if a variation of the old peanut butter sandwich and wheaties diet would work again. I love sweet drinks, even though I know that calories you chew on provide more satisfaction. I think it's the chewing and the swallowing not the chemistry that do it.
In short, I think satiety is a series of complex cognitive tricks. It's not just chemistry. That's why tripping those tricks helped me lose weight. I think the fast food epidemic also catches those same cognitive tricks and trips them the wrong way.
My mother has been able to finally
lose and keep off weight with a low fat high complex carbohydrate diet. She's given up meat but eats fish when she goes out. I think losing weight is just a question of knowing yourself really well and then working with what makes you happy so you stay happy while cutting back on food. Not only does the weight come off but since you know what you really like to eat, and have some ideas about right amounts, you are going to hopefully use that knowledge to keep the weight off when you go to a less restrictive regime. I think the belly just follows where the head leads, it's getting the head to lead that's the hard part.
Eileen H. Kramer/ZOIDRubashov/Roanna
This crap with invasive software, opt-in by deception, and just plain garbage is going to go on forever until and unless users get more savvy or those in the know take the time to train them.
I tried some of this last summer with awful
results. I was in a group that is now defunct called the Secret Garden. I think it is now called http://rainbowofhope.tripod.com
I was head of the Support committee which meant we not only made web pages with graphic gifts but we also sent tons of cards.
I got up a good discussion on ecards and I showed my committee a spam trap and explained why it was bad. It was a card an actual member had sent.
The fireworks exploded. The woman who sent the card knew I meant what I said when I said it wasn't her fault.
Another member who had the ear of our Fearless Leader, Jules, did not. She feared she would be at the wrong end of the tirade I was directing at the spam pit, Flowgo.
I explained over and over to Jules the need to make spam traps a public issue and that providing good support means no spam. Jules worried about hurt feelings. I worried about screw ups.
I got through though when I said that the last thing any of us needed was to send a Flowgo/Funstun card to a sick or bereaved member and stick someone who has more than enough stress with the stress of spam.
We began to test card providers by sending cards amongst ourselves. Again, this does not take much skill. I think we would have gone much further if Jules hadn't pulled her cop de tat.
I think people can learn. Sometimes I wish they wouldn't. I'm currently head of RAOK's guestbook committee and lately there has been a huge drop off in the number of guestbook signings. The reason is that Bravenet is no longer as stable as it was precrash. I didn't pick RAOK's guestbook provider. It also throws two to three popups a signing. Signing a Bravenet guestbook just isn't much fun any more.
By the way, I feel about Bravenet the way a lot of you feel about Flowgo/Funstun/Send4Fun. At least the guestbook signers are avoiding garbage.
This comes from a joke, where you talk about
what you do with your finger (poke), and when
you sit in a nice hot bath you soak. In England a fellow is called a bloke. Now what is the white of an egg?
Flowgo/Funstun/Send4Fun use a very similar technique to get users to opt in to their spam lists. When you recieve a typical e-card (and not all of them but enough) there is a link in the first paragraph of the letter for ordinary pick up and a second link for AOL. You get a card from a friend and don't examine the links too closely. Besides the pattern is all the same.
Flowgo/Funstun/Send4Fun make their first link say something like "to see this card and recieve our great newsletter click here." The second link says "to see this card and recieve nothing," click here. Users who read carefully get no newsletter, but how many do?
Of course those who click the first link technically had a choice and are opting in. Opting in to receive a newsletter is not spam.
It's slimey and deceitful but since users technically opt in, I believe it's legal. I've gotten myself off Funstun/Flowgo's spam list twice. It's very easy to forget that the white of an egg is not a yolk.
For card education please visit Solla Sollew
http://nakedmolerat.org.uk/sollasollew It was my attempt at starting my own ladies' group.
It's any of us.....
Alright none of you gentlemen send e-cards but
opt in by deceit is alive and well at
http://www.funstun.com and http://www.flowgo.com
Here is how it works. You send an e-card or someone sends you one from this place. For some reason many of the ladies in my groups can't resist animated cards and they just click on the send this to someone else link.
What arrives in your mailbox (or the recipients mail box) is an innocent enough looking pick up letter. Commonly with e-card pickup letters you hit the top link (Unless you are an AOL subscriber). The second link is for AOL.
These cards however have a top link that says "to view this card and subscribe to our list click here...." My mother fell into this trap. I fell into it twice. There are now variations with three and four links and the link for viewing the card only either in the middle or at the bottom.
We are all creatures of habbit. It is VERY EASY to click the wrong thing accidentally. I just don't send cards from those two companies and I urge all my friends to avoid them.
I also dutifully zap any pop ups for anything that invade my screen. I do a lot of surfing personal web sites so I see a lot of pop ups. My 28.8 connection at the house helps in this regard because the pop ups are slow enough in coming that I can kill them before they open.
I don't say yes or no to the Gator. I say "goodbye."
The best interfaces I used were WordStar 2 in the mid 1980's and Displaywrite 3 in the early 1990's. I am a fast and accurate touch typist. The two fingered commands in Wordstar basicly linked brain to keyboard to screen for me. I have a visual impairment so it meant my eyemuscles could stay on the screen and not have to move and refocus. I also had no mouse to mess with.
I love doing graphics which for me mainly means scraping the backgrounds off of photographs. I also draw with a mouse. I have pulled my right trapezius muscle four or five times. The first time was in 1996 and my boyfriend and I left for vacation as I ached. Passive motion in a car or bus is agony though standing and walking feel good. I did not sleep and through most of the second day of my trip from Utica to El Paso I stood in the aisle of the Greyhound with my arm upstretched.
My boyfriend had trouble walking in the Texas heat so when we rode the Via buses I stood again because to sit with my arm in my lap would have been unbearable. I remember touring the military post they hae in El Paso and laying down periodically to rest that sore shoulder.
I think the bad muscle has gotten stronger with time. I still would like to be able to word process without a mouse and with all keyboard commands. I realize for a lot of people this is not practical but for those of us who are GOOD TYPISTS this would be a more comfortable alternative.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
http://zc2zc3.st
I don't get why those Third World representatives and their sympathizers are complaining about ICANN creating a digital divide. Those countries are sitting on a goldmine of barely used two letter domains. Subsaharann Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South America there's a whole world of domains out there and if a country is savvy enough to open registration up to the rest of us, I would suspect there's money to be made.
.com, .org, or .net with discount registry.
.com or a .net
.st which is Saotome and Principe. It was not cheap but I have the name for three years at $75.
.com but that makes .com common as dirt. An .st raises eyebrows. Having a short name to start with I figure http://zc2zc3.st is not hard to remember. Of course the eyebrow raising effect will die back as more people get these exotic country codes but for now it is nice to be the "first one on my block..."
Most of the Polynesian domains ws, vu, nu, to, tv, sell for at least $35/year, making them more expensive than Internic registrations and certainly more than what it costs to register a
http://zc2zc3.org was already taken when I went to get a domain for ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition. Being avowedly uncommercial and DIFFERENT from other web site competition communities, I did not want a
I went shopping and found
I think it was worth the shopping and worth the price. Sure everybody thinks
I think there would be lots of other folks like me if other third world counntries made it easy to register their domain names.
Eileen H. Kramer/ZOIDRubashov/Roanna
http://zc2zc3.st
Cats that are spayed/neutered and returned to their old hunting grounds perform two valuable functions: They kill vermin and their presence prevents other ferals from entering the territory.
Usually organizations that trap "strays" place the cats that are socialized and which have been dumped for adoption. Feral cats are either released into a supervised colony or in the north they are sent to businesses to be working cats.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
http://zc2zc3.st
Long ago I dated a chemistry grad student and he told me: "There are old chemists. There are organic chemists. There are no old organic chemists."
Roanna
I think Solomon's stats are misleading. Sure people spend a lot of time at MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, but what are they doing there. In a lot of quarters Yahoomail and Hotmail are synonymous with email. Yahoo may be providing the banner and the venue but the content is letters from Aunt Milly. The same is true or messageboards in MSN Communities and Geocities home pages.
Reading a letter from Aunt Milly or looking at The Angels and Unicorn Fantasy Heaven is not the same thing as visiting the Official Barbie Page or the airlinen tickets for sale page or other stores.
Furthermore, the moneyed interests can not drive the little person with something to say out of business. You can rent web space for less than $150 a year. If you care about what you say, you can put together a site for your soapbox and even include your own CGI and exclude ads. The problem with this arrangement is people have to know you are there. This is the problem I run into with
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition http://zc2zc3.st This is a problem that I think a lot of us smaller webmasters have.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
Nakedmolerat.org.uk (It's better in the burrow!)
http://nakedmolerat.org.uk
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition
htp://zc2zc3.st
OK, I skipped all the demos. I enjoyed chemistry but hated the labs. On the bottom of the page is a link to one of the web's most gorgeous periodic tables. Each group of elements is a different rainbow color.
If you click on each element you see an image of it in nature and get its history. If you click on the chemical information you see its image in pure form.
There are quicktime movies and Shockwave demos too. This is not the visual periodic table for nthing.
Roanna
I don't think I'd want anything like that passing through my digestive tract. I always heard that feces were undigested fiber and dead bacteria. The "turd" in that experiment is just a piece of incinerated sugar. By the way, where is the professor's protective goggles and lab coat, and what about ventilation equipment? You can see the fumes rising from that black gunk.
Roanna
Just a footnote but it is amazing some of the
pages built by K-12 teachers in math and science. These people have far fewer resources than college faculty who end up using WebCT, SmartCourse, or BlackBoard or something else that lets them drag and drop or having department secretaries convert Word documents to pages.
Here is an example. Here is another one. My webliographies are full of sites like these. The science ones are mine and I coded the html from scratch.
The web is a very powerful tool. Please don't sell those of us in nontechnical professions short.
Roanna
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition
Anonymous Coward I hope to metamoderate that post of yours some day because it deserves better than the score it got.
Your solution that we as consumers should walk away from corporate culture and use the net to create and support our own is probably the best response to all of this.
I don't know CGI and the last thing I "hacked" was a CD from which I copied MSCDEX 2.0 more thann ten years ago. Most users will never be able to implement the fancy patches and protocols necessary to route around damage.
When it comes to privacy I'm more concerned about an employer reading outgoing email or sampling downloaded files that go to my hard drive, than I am about FBI Carnivore.
But buiding one's own culture through creative writing, web graphics, midi (yes midi. They're smaller and easier to upload and play) etc... might be possible.
I say "might" because as I see it there are two barriers. The first is technical. There is a caricature of the typical web users as a stupid yutz living in the web's trailer parks.
There's a grain of truth here. In one of my ladies' groups I found out I was the only one who knew html. Being able to code your own static web page on your hard drive is empowering, so is making your graphics with PSP. I haven't tried making my own midi or arranging them yet. I don't have the equipment.
Not only can't the typical user not code her own page. She forgets to back it up. Candi the founder of RAOK lost her entire web site due to Geocities' ban on remote loading. She was serving images off her site and yes the images were displayed gallery style so the site was not storage. Remote loading is important for leaving graphics in guestbooks.
What make this technical barrier worse is that Corporate internet tells typical users they don't have to learn to code. This is to the point where I know professors and librarians who have refused to learn html fearing it was too hard. At its worst typical users become attached to drag and drop editors which make their sites nonportable.
That's the technical barrier. There are also social barriers. When it comes to web graphics FREEDOM IS NOT PRIVATE PROPERTY. If your stuff is really good and it gets stolen and put on someone else's web page, you are doing a good job. If someone uses your graphics to make more graphics, than there is more stuff out there. This does not seem to sink in in the world of "no right click" and "don't steal my graphics without linking back." What makes you think your graphics are good enough that I'd want them on my page?
A typical internet user also feels NO PAIN NO GAIN. This means graphics that only a few experts can do and only some graphics are "nice enough." It is more than possible to work smarter rather than harder and turn out something presentable. I bet nearly everyone has this in them. The result may not be representational art but it will with some tweaks and practice suit your needs.
A typical user thinks he or she is not good enough. Look at the pained posed portraits on most personal pages and then look at the human forms of dreamy, spiritual, and Victorian ladies. Why shouldn't a candid shot be good enough? Why not try writing your own prose or poetry? If your poetry doesn't work, then try prose.
The last barrier is "us." I'm not sure if I'm part of "us." I'm currently a member of RAOK and LOTH. That gives me a foot in both camps. We need to start treating them as equals. We don't have to like all their art, but I have learned a lot about web page graphics from them. I build lusher more interesting pages because of this. Also making pressies or quilt squares is about the best graphic training there is. Then take those pressies on the road and sign a few guestbooks or do support. You will be amazed what you learn about yourself. You will have more in common with these people than you think. A quilt square is a 130*130 pixel grpahic that is displayed as part of a "quilt" of such squares.
If you want to talk about a noncorporate culture, this is where some of it is being made and while LOTH is all female, RAOK takes guys.
If, and it is big IF, the typical internet user can get past all the technical and psychological/social barriers to building a culture outside corporate control, it just might happen.
Eileen H. Krmer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition
Heck, I guess I am an old fogey. I'm thirty-nine, but I do have to laugh when any one complains about working in a cubicle. I currently don't have a cubicle though I did on my last job. My current office which is windowless measures 12" by about 8". My cubicle was about the size of my present office.
On my old job, we got the cubicles in 1996 and were very very happy to get them. There was a whole committee set up to get them and interviews with suppliers etc... This was the first time we had private work space.
On my present job there have been offices such as they are for the last five or six years. When I came in they were there. Unlike most of you, I don't stay in my office all day. I have "desk duty" when I go out to man the reference desk in two to four hour slots.
I look upon my office (cubicle or dungeon. I think the cubicle was nicer)as a refuge from office politics, and like most librarians I refuse to keep it neat, though I do leave a spot on my desk to do work and I attempt not to dump my stuff on the chairs. Since I am supposed to do mediated searching, I have lots of chairs. I also have some of the previous librarian's junk though I got rid of a lot of it about a year ago when I cleaned the place up by hauling the dumpster to the office doorway and giving everything I hadn't touched in a year the old heave-ho.
My immediate supervisor whose office has a window is very uncomfortable in her office. Remember until about five years ago librarians did not have private work space. She oftenn takes her work to the work room or the paraprofessionals' glassed in area behind reference. She still has not gotten used to having an office. I'm grateful for mine.
Eileen H. Kramer/Roanna/ZOIDRubashov
ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition
OK, get set for a long post.
Power is mastery of an adult skill. This is something that happened long before there ever was an internet or one that was accessible to a twelve year old.
Back when I was a kid (I was born in 1962) as soon as we could string the sentences together, the teachers taught us how to write letters. There were friendly letters, and there were business letters. With the business letter, the teacher had tossed each of us the key to power. By writing a business letter, I could communicate just like a grownup, and command grownups attention. I routinely wrote away for free stuff.
Well I love cats and cat fancy though all my furr babies are mixed breed shelter kitties or rescues. I attend cat shows, and when I was a kid I had a subscription to Cats Magazine. I read every article I could understand.
That was how I decided to write to breeders and catteries to get free information on the different breeds. I of course knew no one would waste their time with a twelve year old girl so I crafted business letters in the proper form and said I was interested in breeding that particular breed of cat. I was particularly interested in various breeds of Oriental shorthairs.
The literature poured in and then came the phone call. My parents were away and the sitter looked very perplexed as she handed me the phone. It was a man with a high voice and he was calling in answer to my letter about Chartreux cats. I sweated bullets as I talked cat fancy over the long distance line. We said our goodbyes and then...
I was consumed with guilt. This gentleman had actually believed I was an adult! Not only that he was in California which meant a day time long distance call for nothing. No wonder I felt guilty. I promptly got out my writing tablet and pen and wrote him a letter of apology telling him I was truely a kid.
Now my cynical adult self laughs at my pangs of conscience. A few questions and the breeder of Chartreux in California could have found out I was a fake. He could have asked how many cats I had or for my CFA registration membership number etc... Of course it takes a cynical mind not to believe information that comes well presented. Presenting information well is power.
Roanna
I think after the cloned baby is born it will be a baby. Just because she is the sibling (most likely it will be a she in the US since there is a preference for daughters among mothers) of one of her relatives, doesn't change things. She will have all the other rights that a much younger baby sister would have.
I think it is interesting reading the way you males discuss cloning. When I think of human cloning I think of it as a fertility treatment. If a woman can't produce her own eggs, the treatments available to her are rather messy. To harvest eggs from a donor requires pumping the poor woman up with hormones. To take cells to be cloned requires a quick biopsy. Producing a child via cloning does not put an egg donor's health at risk.
I am all for human cloning. This is a therapy that when it becomes safe enough will be one more choice for couples that can't reproduce. Clones will be wanted children. What's not to like?
Do you think men and women, including do-it-yourselfers and recreational designers create different kinds of web design, and if so, what can be done to take advantage of the best of both worlds?
Also, what do you think of triple bordered backgrounds?
Roanna Vessels of Clay -- Graphics Portal