Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs

Pledge III

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Much discussion about the Pledge of Allegiance ruling. Many people believe the issue is much ado about nothing, while others are mildly or strongly supportive of the ruling. Of those who dislike the ruling, it seems that there is a strong belief that without religion, we will flounder about, without moral guidance and support.

A friend sent me a quote in an email that I find apropos in regards to the necessity of religion to provide a foundation for morality:

“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.”

The author? Adolf Hitler from a speech he made during negotiations for the Nazi-Vatican Concordant in 1993.

Categories
Weblogging

MT and Trackback

This is the first posting with Movable Type’s Trackback incorporated.

Ah, I love the smell of new technology in the morning.

Categories
Weblogging

The lost art of courtesy

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Along with our respect for freedom and our sense of humor and perspective, seems we’ve lost something else in this modern age of connectivity – our courtesy. And in its void, we’ve replaced it with various guises of non-courtesy masquerading as courtesy.

For instance, there’s the lost courtesy of the client who filled up so much of my time just before I moved that I had to hire help to finish.

Or the phantom courtesy of those who request help or information and who chat away, chat away, only to fall silent when their needs are met.

One of my favorites is the A-list courtesy demonstrated by the person who doesn’t respond to a personal email, not because they don’t have time, but because they don’t deem the email to be important enough.

Token courtesy is asking someone how they are and not really wanting to hear the answer; or expressing sympathy or compassion or caring, not because they’re genuine emotions but because there’s little cost to saying the words over the Internet.

How about the anonymous courtesy of the anonymous commenter. Weblog graffiti. At least the street artists have skill.

Artificial courtesy: the weblog posting, comment, or little note that gleefully points out flaw after flaw, ignoring the possibility that amidst the mud and the dirt and the garbage is a tiny perfect gem – a lovely phrase, a clean sentence, and genuine sincerity.

Finally, in this list of non-courtesies, there’s the null space courtesy:

I’m one of the luckier webloggers who has decent readers who usually stop, and take a moment to drop a comment or two. And I love them to pieces when they do. However, I go to weblog after weblog, and see the infamous zip, zero, nada comment count because those who read, appreciate, and run don’t have the courtesy to take a moment and drop a line. And yes, that’s me in this bunch because I’m just as discourteous as the rest.

Categories
Just Shelley

Nebraska’s On My List

Driving across Nebraska was a series of slows and gos due to the road construction. Unfortunately, it was also the location of my first car scratches.

After leaving a construction zone at one point, a work truck next to me that was hauling away dirt and rocks and mud hit a rut and a pile of mud with rocks splashed across my windshield and the front of the car. Considering that the day was sunny and clear I was more than a bit surprised by the mud appearing from nowhere, especially when traveling at around 70MPH. Luckily I have nerves of steel.

(Well, in honesty, luckily no one was around me when I swerved from surprise and hit the brake.)

Today I had the car thoroughly cleaned and sure enough, the little Nebraska legacy left scratches in the door and across the hood.

Golden Girl’s no longer a pristine scratch-free virgin. Sigh.

I knew I should have gone back to the location and beat the crap out of the crew.

Categories
RDF

Threadneedle test RDF

I’ve posted examples of the RDF used for ThreadNeedle to the ThreadNeedle Discussion Group. One file represents the type of RDF embedded within a posting for a threading disucssion start, one file represents the type of RDF embedded for a reply.

I’ve also registered the domain threadneedle.org, and will move my work there as soon as the DNS change propagates through the system.

I won’t be moving ThreadNeedle source code to Source Forge until I have minimum functionality – Source Forge projects proceed more effectively if given a code base. Regardless, the Source Forge project will point back to ThreadNeedle as home base.

Still working through whether to implement the first draft of the tool in Perl or Java. Most likely I’ll implement both to start (and possibly Python – hmmm). And the data store will be MySQL.