Same here. I've never understood this whole "toilet reading" phenomenon. When I have to take a shit, I sit down, dump, wipe, get up, and wash. Unless I'm sick or something, it never takes me long enough to sit and read or ponder anything; if not for the clean-up, it'd take about as much time as a typical piss. After all, it's not like it's an especially comfortable place to sit. Are people in general that more constipated than I am, do they have that much more difficulty finding "alone" time, or what?
And the youngsters in the audience might be interested to know that RPM used to stand for "rotations per minute". See, back in the 20th century, when music was encoded in analog form on pressed vinyl, the signal was engineered to be played back at one of three standard speeds: 78rpm, 45rpm, and 33+1/3rpm. Using the slowest speed, it was possible to fit over 20 minutes of music on one side of a 12-inch disk! (And you had to turn the disk over to access the data on the other side.)
This challenge is similar to the 24 Hour Comic. This was a challenge issued many years ago by cartoonist Scott McCloud to one of his friends, who had a tendency to take days (at least) to finish a single page of art. The goal was to write and illustrate a 24-page comic book in just 24 hours, starting with 24 blank sheets of paper and ending with a finished story. (By comparsion, a typical issue of a DC or Marvel superhero comic takes 4 or 5 creators a whole month to produce.)
It's a great exercise. (I've tried twice and succeeded once.) It forces you to set aside whatever's preventing you from getting things done, and create. Forget "I don't have time"; it's only one day. Forget the need to get everything "just right"; the deadline for each page is only an hour away. Just do it. The results are usually far from perfect; no one produces their "best" work like this, and that's not the point. It's an eye-opening exercise, showing the cartoonist what he can accomplish - and how efficiently - if he tries.
In many ways it's like the punk rock ethos vs. the studio rock of the 70s, favoring raw energy, enthusiasm, and creative inspiration instead of the over-processing, second-guessing, and sterility of baking something for 12 months in a studio. And I know that I get more of a kick from the Ramones' End of the Century than from ELO's DiscoVery.
I use last year's return as a template for this year's. Except in cases where my income situation changes drastically (e.g. the year I spent mostly on unemployment, when I started/stopped college) all that changes are the specific numbers to fill in. I have a spreadsheet that I enter the source numbers into, which does all the calculations for the spots on the form that require you to show your work. I'm not exactly an EZ filer (I do consulting on the side, so Schedules C and SE come into play), but it's all about 30 minutes of work, including printing the IRS PDFs. I'd spend the same amount of time just talking to an accountant, or installing and entering my personal info for a desktop app. I recently tried one of the free online filing services, and found the whole mess of pages they wanted me to wade through more trouble than it was worth. I already know what the bottom line will be, based on my last pay stub, so I'll just ink and mail the forms as soon as I get my W2, and wait for my smallish refund check in the mail.
It isn't just cell phone calls; that's just the latest front-page-grabbing 911 failure around here. Some of the others are still being investigated, but they all seem to come down to confusion and miscommunication.
The lack of visuals is not the problem. (For that matter, camera phones have always struck me as a technology "solution" (or "feature") in search of a problem (or market).
That wouldn't help. We're talking about a system in which a cell phone tower in one county might pick up a 911 call from another, for which the closest first-responders are in a third jurisdiction. That was the scenario in a recent debacle, and part of the problem seemed to be a question of "Who do I send this call to?" Callers can't provide that info, even if they could send the dispatcher movies of the man bleeding to death.
The 911 system in my area is having a hard enough time simply getting the right emergency responders on the line and to the scene. There's no way they're ready to deal with pictures and video.
I suspect the main reason they choose 30 is to ban violent videogames without actually banning violent videogames...
When I saw the headline of this article, I thought it was talking about creating a section in stores featuring games that over-30s might want to play: not the adolescent splatterfests. The games they want to make over-30-only are precisely the games that appeal mostly to under-30s. Which is, of course, the point: to restrict these games from reaching their market.
In theory, the reason we have an age limit of 21 for booze is because the brain is still developing up until age 21, so alcohol might stunt that growth.
Incorrect. I was alive (albeit only a kid) when the drinking age was raised to 21 here in Michigan, so I know the public argument for it first hand. The stated goal was to get alcohol out of high schools, because high school students weren't responsible enough to handle alcohol. When many 18-year-old high school seniors were old enough to buy alcohol, it was readily accessible to their 17-year-old classmates, to any juniors who hung out with them, etc. To say nothing of 16- and 17-year-olds who looked "old enough". There was no real obstacle to a high-schooler party with a keg, and any well-connected 14-year-old freshman could get access to it. Never mind brain development; no one wants to put up with a drunk 14-year-old (they're bad enough sober). Bumping the drinking age up to 19 would still leave high schools with seniors who'd flunked a grade, or just older friends who'd graduated but still hung out with high-schoolers. Going all the way up to 21 meant that not only could no high school student buy, they weren't likely to have any personal friends who could, either. It pushed the threshhold just far enough to cut the high school kids out of the party.
Personally, I think the whole age-based-prohibition approach to alcohol is a bad idea; teenagers should learn to drink in moderation with their parents at the dinner table at home or in the relatively controlled environment of a commercial drinking establishment, rather than in clandestine, peer-run parties. But given the fact that we do it this way, raising it to 21 was the most effective way to cut down on alcohol abuse by high school students who simply aren't ready to handle alcohol without adult supervision.
When I was a teenager and had not yet acquired a taste for coffee, my father wisely observed that when I got to college, I'd learn to like it. Which was just the push I needed to dig in my heels and resist. Of course he was right about my collegiate need for caffeine, but the cafeteria's soft drink dispensers were functional at every meal, so I started waking up with diet cola. A pattern was set.
My last year of college I spent a semester in Scotland, and was introduced to an alternative: tea. Although my flatmates snickered at me for not knowing how to brew a kettle, by then I was mature enough to welcome the opportunity to expand my horizons (plus, none of them were my dad). A hot cup (or large mug) of tea became my cold-weather starter. (To this day I've had a cup of coffee only once... and didn't finish it.)
Of course both are lacking in energy (a conscious choice to keep me from puffing up), so I need to get my actual fuel from somewhere. Oatmeal (especially off-brand) is one of the cheapest and healthiest, and with a fairly liberal splash of honey or a dollop of jam (nicely compensated by my lo-cal beverages), it's darn tasty.
Why not look at what actually got done during the year rather than make unreasonable expectations?
Because unless you set goals for yourself, you might get all the way to 2007 and find yourself still using Windows, and unmarried. Has that happened to anyone you know?:)
"Comic" still has "funny" as a primary meaning, and there are still countless people who think that "comics" are all funny (or at least silly). If I were to say "I'm making a comic book", most people would think it involves jokes or men wearing tights, and they'd be wrong. That's poor communication. The "error" is clinging to an archaic term that will be easily misunderstood, when there's a better one available.
Because neither the literal meaning ("funny book"), nor the commonly understood meaning ("simplistic fantasy adventure"), nor the publishing industry meaning ("a short monthly periodical") is applicable to a serious 200-page memoir.
And in the mean time he should do what... not have internet access?
He has other computers; he should use one of them. Or reinstall Windows XP. That's what you do when an upgrade doesn't work out: you un-do it. Especially with pre-release software (which only an idiot installs on his only usable machine). If A doesn't work, use B which does.
OK, if your only computer is a hot new piece of hardware that you bought/built with no operating system in anticipation of getting Windows Vista, and you have no way of accessing the internet until you can get a working installation of Vista on it, you have my sympathy... for your remarkably poor planning.
A decent grandfather-father-son backup system needs 25 devices!!!
Which most lay people will hear as "It's way too expensive and too much trouble; don't even bother". A less-than-ideal backup system that gets used is much better than an according-to-Hoyle setup that's too complicated for the users.
There was the time back in the late 1980s when the multiplexed underground cable that my college was using to provide terminal connectivity for their new-fangled computerized class registration stopped working, and they ran dozens of hastily-created RS-232 cables from the data center to the hall where the action was, half a block away... secured to the sidewalk by duct tape, of course. Which at least didn't remain in place as long as the 10base2 cable that connected two dorms, strung between their 2nd floors (until it was taken out by a lightning strike).
More recent ugly hacks that I can claim personal credit/blame for are mostly of the sort that involve pulling a rabbit out of my ass because a solution needs to be found By Tomorrow Morning... like for deploying 200 installations of Windows 95 in a week (in the days before Ghost, or even backup software that preserved Long FileNames) using DOS boot diskettes, Netware, a utility called lfnbk, and ncopy... or building an e-mail server out of RedHat Linux 6 and spare parts (no, I didn't even have a complete working computer at my disposal) when the company's glorified BBS mail software found itself unable to exchange mail with the standards-compliant system used by a major new business partner.
I don't know about the market-share percentage, but I predict that students at Kendall College of Art and Design will buy about 1,000 MacBooks in 2007, as the school is going to require laptops starting in the Fall semester... and even the AutoCAD-and-Windows-using majors (e.g. Industrial Design and Interior Design) are being spec'ed to use MacBooks.
No, not really. You've done a swell job of giving him the benefit of the doubt, but by taking that sentence out of context, you changed its whole meaning. Following the first statement like that, it serves an extension to it, simply rephrasing his thesis for emphasis: that all "favors" should be quid pro quo. In that context, "someone" refers to any person who asks him to do an unpaid favor, and "others" refers to the people being asked: such as himself.
And even if we go with your interpretation that he's merely saying that he doesn't expect people to do things for him, that's just cooly self-reliant, not in any way warm. And it doesn't negate his downright cold attitude toward helping others.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod Parent Up. Ask A Labor-Law Specialist.
And the youngsters in the audience might be interested to know that RPM used to stand for "rotations per minute". See, back in the 20th century, when music was encoded in analog form on pressed vinyl, the signal was engineered to be played back at one of three standard speeds: 78rpm, 45rpm, and 33+1/3rpm. Using the slowest speed, it was possible to fit over 20 minutes of music on one side of a 12-inch disk! (And you had to turn the disk over to access the data on the other side.)
:)
This challenge is similar to the 24 Hour Comic. This was a challenge issued many years ago by cartoonist Scott McCloud to one of his friends, who had a tendency to take days (at least) to finish a single page of art. The goal was to write and illustrate a 24-page comic book in just 24 hours, starting with 24 blank sheets of paper and ending with a finished story. (By comparsion, a typical issue of a DC or Marvel superhero comic takes 4 or 5 creators a whole month to produce.)
It's a great exercise. (I've tried twice and succeeded once.) It forces you to set aside whatever's preventing you from getting things done, and create. Forget "I don't have time"; it's only one day. Forget the need to get everything "just right"; the deadline for each page is only an hour away. Just do it. The results are usually far from perfect; no one produces their "best" work like this, and that's not the point. It's an eye-opening exercise, showing the cartoonist what he can accomplish - and how efficiently - if he tries.
In many ways it's like the punk rock ethos vs. the studio rock of the 70s, favoring raw energy, enthusiasm, and creative inspiration instead of the over-processing, second-guessing, and sterility of baking something for 12 months in a studio. And I know that I get more of a kick from the Ramones' End of the Century than from ELO's DiscoVery.
I wouldn't be surprised if every user whose "validation" fails tries at least a couple more times after that, inflating the failure rate.
I use last year's return as a template for this year's. Except in cases where my income situation changes drastically (e.g. the year I spent mostly on unemployment, when I started/stopped college) all that changes are the specific numbers to fill in. I have a spreadsheet that I enter the source numbers into, which does all the calculations for the spots on the form that require you to show your work. I'm not exactly an EZ filer (I do consulting on the side, so Schedules C and SE come into play), but it's all about 30 minutes of work, including printing the IRS PDFs. I'd spend the same amount of time just talking to an accountant, or installing and entering my personal info for a desktop app. I recently tried one of the free online filing services, and found the whole mess of pages they wanted me to wade through more trouble than it was worth. I already know what the bottom line will be, based on my last pay stub, so I'll just ink and mail the forms as soon as I get my W2, and wait for my smallish refund check in the mail.
It isn't just cell phone calls; that's just the latest front-page-grabbing 911 failure around here. Some of the others are still being investigated, but they all seem to come down to confusion and miscommunication. The lack of visuals is not the problem. (For that matter, camera phones have always struck me as a technology "solution" (or "feature") in search of a problem (or market).
That wouldn't help. We're talking about a system in which a cell phone tower in one county might pick up a 911 call from another, for which the closest first-responders are in a third jurisdiction. That was the scenario in a recent debacle, and part of the problem seemed to be a question of "Who do I send this call to?" Callers can't provide that info, even if they could send the dispatcher movies of the man bleeding to death.
The 911 system in my area is having a hard enough time simply getting the right emergency responders on the line and to the scene. There's no way they're ready to deal with pictures and video.
Personally, I think the whole age-based-prohibition approach to alcohol is a bad idea; teenagers should learn to drink in moderation with their parents at the dinner table at home or in the relatively controlled environment of a commercial drinking establishment, rather than in clandestine, peer-run parties. But given the fact that we do it this way, raising it to 21 was the most effective way to cut down on alcohol abuse by high school students who simply aren't ready to handle alcohol without adult supervision.
When I was a teenager and had not yet acquired a taste for coffee, my father wisely observed that when I got to college, I'd learn to like it. Which was just the push I needed to dig in my heels and resist. Of course he was right about my collegiate need for caffeine, but the cafeteria's soft drink dispensers were functional at every meal, so I started waking up with diet cola. A pattern was set.
My last year of college I spent a semester in Scotland, and was introduced to an alternative: tea. Although my flatmates snickered at me for not knowing how to brew a kettle, by then I was mature enough to welcome the opportunity to expand my horizons (plus, none of them were my dad). A hot cup (or large mug) of tea became my cold-weather starter. (To this day I've had a cup of coffee only once... and didn't finish it.)
Of course both are lacking in energy (a conscious choice to keep me from puffing up), so I need to get my actual fuel from somewhere. Oatmeal (especially off-brand) is one of the cheapest and healthiest, and with a fairly liberal splash of honey or a dollop of jam (nicely compensated by my lo-cal beverages), it's darn tasty.
Imagine typing in page after page of DATA statements for it, copied out of the back of Fabricate! magazine. Ah, those were the days....
"Comic" still has "funny" as a primary meaning, and there are still countless people who think that "comics" are all funny (or at least silly). If I were to say "I'm making a comic book", most people would think it involves jokes or men wearing tights, and they'd be wrong. That's poor communication. The "error" is clinging to an archaic term that will be easily misunderstood, when there's a better one available.
Because neither the literal meaning ("funny book"), nor the commonly understood meaning ("simplistic fantasy adventure"), nor the publishing industry meaning ("a short monthly periodical") is applicable to a serious 200-page memoir.
Spend less time refreshing /. and more time working on my graphic novel.
Gotta go!
OK, if your only computer is a hot new piece of hardware that you bought/built with no operating system in anticipation of getting Windows Vista, and you have no way of accessing the internet until you can get a working installation of Vista on it, you have my sympathy... for your remarkably poor planning.
There was the time back in the late 1980s when the multiplexed underground cable that my college was using to provide terminal connectivity for their new-fangled computerized class registration stopped working, and they ran dozens of hastily-created RS-232 cables from the data center to the hall where the action was, half a block away... secured to the sidewalk by duct tape, of course. Which at least didn't remain in place as long as the 10base2 cable that connected two dorms, strung between their 2nd floors (until it was taken out by a lightning strike).
More recent ugly hacks that I can claim personal credit/blame for are mostly of the sort that involve pulling a rabbit out of my ass because a solution needs to be found By Tomorrow Morning... like for deploying 200 installations of Windows 95 in a week (in the days before Ghost, or even backup software that preserved Long FileNames) using DOS boot diskettes, Netware, a utility called lfnbk, and ncopy... or building an e-mail server out of RedHat Linux 6 and spare parts (no, I didn't even have a complete working computer at my disposal) when the company's glorified BBS mail software found itself unable to exchange mail with the standards-compliant system used by a major new business partner.
Of course that thread got retconned away by Infinite Crisis....
I don't know about the market-share percentage, but I predict that students at Kendall College of Art and Design will buy about 1,000 MacBooks in 2007, as the school is going to require laptops starting in the Fall semester... and even the AutoCAD-and-Windows-using majors (e.g. Industrial Design and Interior Design) are being spec'ed to use MacBooks.
No, not really. You've done a swell job of giving him the benefit of the doubt, but by taking that sentence out of context, you changed its whole meaning. Following the first statement like that, it serves an extension to it, simply rephrasing his thesis for emphasis: that all "favors" should be quid pro quo. In that context, "someone" refers to any person who asks him to do an unpaid favor, and "others" refers to the people being asked: such as himself.
And even if we go with your interpretation that he's merely saying that he doesn't expect people to do things for him, that's just cooly self-reliant, not in any way warm. And it doesn't negate his downright cold attitude toward helping others.