Category - commentary

commentary, personal, travel

And people wonder why I am leery of winter travel:

It might not be “hell,” but you can sure see it from here…

A columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes her 18 hour! journey from office to home:

The third gas station does have gas, but there’s no getting near it. Cars jam the driveways and side roads from every direction, inches away from hitting each other. I watch from afar as desperate motorists carry empty water jugs and two-liter Coke bottles to the pumps and fill them with fuel. I never knew gas had a yellow tint.

I turn into Publix, which is serving as another makeshift shelter, and buy water jugs. There, even more people are asleep in the aisles. One man opts to sleep on a shelf. He just moves those Duralogs right out of the way and stretches out like he’s in a bunk bed on a tour bus. Some people huddle around a small TV at a check-out line and watch a movie with Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum.

When I was a sailor in Hawaii back in the 1980s, I came to the conclusion that “the most important thing a sailor ever learns is when not to.”

I think the same could be said for leaving the house in the winter.

Labor Saving Devices

January 29, 2014

commentary, Digest, gizmos

Or: Why Our Modern Lives Are Crazy
(well, mine, anyway)

The Babbage Difference Engine – a mechanical precursor to today’s electronic computers

I set aside an hour Monday morning
to address various “desk chores”
that have gone neglected
for the past week or so.

I know now
why I put these things off.
Bear with me here.
And tell me:
Does this sound like anything
that has ever happened to you?

The first thing I needed to do
was submit documentation
to my “Health Savings Account.”
They wanted me to account
for the $800
that I put on the account
for some dental work
I had done a couple of weeks ago. Read More

Omnivore’s Delight?

January 27, 2014

Really? Chicken-flavoured vegetarian ham??

It’s fine with me if vegetarians don’t want to eat meat.

But why do they insist on naming their food after it?

Why don’t they just call it “Processed Plants” or “Packaged Edible Flowers” ?

Photo source unknown; found it on the Facebook. And the guy whose page it showed up on, he doesn’t know where it came from either. That’s why I try to put a © watermark on all the stuff I post there, for whatever good it does.

Mayhem At The Movies and The Unsuspension of Disbelief

January 23, 2014

This story about the guy who wound up dead after texting in a movie theater made the rounds of the social media networks last week. I let it go by the first couple of times I saw it. It seemed implausible at first, but now that I have digested the heart-wrenching details, it seems all too familiar.

I don’t know how you feel about people who light up their cell phones in a darkened theater, but my first thought was: “that coulda been me…”

Not the guy getting shot. The guy doing the shooting.

Because I’m the one who has too frequently had to ask the asshole sitting near me to put their cell phone away during a movie. Read More

Is Net Neutrality Dead?

January 21, 2014

LIstening to this excellent discussion of the issues around “Net Neutrality. It’s amusing to hear the guy from VerizonCast going through verbal gymnastics to make the case that more corporate control of the web is in the end-user’s interest. His organization is called “Free State Foundation.” A loving nod to Orwell…
http://ift.tt/1heemUM

It Was Nice While It Lasted ?

January 20, 2014

commentary

The “level playing field” of the Internet, that is.

If you’ve been befuddled by the recent Appeals Court decision on the subject of “Net Neutrality,” Michael Wolff does a pretty good job of explaining what it could mean.

Power begets power and enables you to hold onto power. Owners of the pipes can charge what the market will bear. …Though Netflix will have to pay much more for distribution, it is large enough to be able to afford that bill. Its nascent and would-be competitors cannot. And without access to low-cost distribution

It’s not entirely clear that this loss of “neutrality” is a final ruling. It could yet go to the Supreme Court – though given that august body’s preferential treatment of corporate interests, it’s hard to fathom how the Appeals Court ruling could be reversed; Or the FCC could revisit its own mandate, and recast their original ruling under a different mandate.

The genesis of the recent ruling appears to be the jurisdiction under which the FCC originally ruled that ISPs like Comcast, AT&T an Verizon could not charge for access to their networks:

The court just invalidated the way the FCC tried to make Net Neutrality rules in a 2010 order. The judges rejected the legal framework used by the FCC and said the agency currently lacks the authority to implement and to enforce these rules…The silver lining is that there’s nothing in the court’s decision that prevents the FCC from reversing its earlier misguided decisions and treating broadband under the law as the “telecommunications service” it so obviously is.

So the fact of the matter is that nothing has been decided. We’re in limbo. The FCC could go back to the drawing board, in which case the whole thing would be up in the air again for years.

I can’t count the number of times over the past two decades I’ve heard the phrase “level playing field.” I always did think it was a bit of a mirage. If the FCC can’t find away to enforce the idea of the pipes as common carrier, even the mirage will probably vanish.

(New) Word of The Day

January 20, 2014

commentary

I just taught my word processor(s) to spell the word “eclecticist.”

That was just after adding the expression “exploring the adjacent possible” to my weekly vocabulary.

Things We Take For Granted

January 20, 2014

commentary, Digest, gizmos

You really can’t appreciate how much you rely on the very tip of your primary-hand index finger until you nick it with the super-sharp blade of a brand-new food* processor, and can’t use it for a couple of days to swipe or type…

*the original version of this post had the word typed as “foot-processor.” See what I mean?

This Just In (from Kindle Highlights):

January 20, 2014

commentary

Shared from Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series)

When you give yourself frequent permission to explore the “adjacent possible” with no restrictions on where it leads, you increase the likelihood of a creative breakthrough in all areas of your life and work.

http://ift.tt/1e74d91

TechHive: Google is creepy, but you shouldn’t automatically fear it invading your Nest

January 20, 2014