I regularly watch “The Lab With Leo” on the How To Channel. He has just done a segment on a new site called MyToons. It’s a you tube for animations. I would generally rather watch a good animation than some of the rubbish served up these days in the name of entertainment so I was excited to find this excellent site. Here is an example of the work that you can see there. Go on watch it and tell me that you have never felt like this guy.
A gay hotel (I don’t know how a hotel can be gay but that is how it has been reported) in Melbourne, Victoria has won an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act under a ruling by the Victoria State Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). Therefore, management has won the right to refuse entry to heterosexuals.
I am not making any value judgments here but this sort of hypocrisy infuriates me. It is either wrong to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference or it isn’t - you can’t have it both ways (pun intended).
I am of course simplifying what is a complex issue but sometimes this is the best practice. One of the arguments for the decision is that there are many places where heterosexuals can go but very few places where homosexuals can go and not be harassed or vilified. Very few places they can go? This is bulls#%@t - they can go anywhere they damn please - that is the point of anti-discrimination laws. The issue of whether they feel safe is an entirely different matter and I would support any and all steps taken to ensure this is the case. Personal safety is an issue that must be managed for all regardless of any labels we chose to apply to particular groups.
Raising money for education and schools is something I can get behind no matter where in the world it takes place.
BlogCatalog has challenged bloggers to help raise awareness for DonorsChoose and hopefully raise $25,000 for worthwhile projects. A little about DonorsChoose:
At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.
There is a link on the about page if you want to donate or you can blog about this yourself to help spread the word.
It was reported on our local television news last night that a man suffering from prostate cancer had benefited from the drug docetaxel. This drug has benefits in the treatment of several forms of cancer including prostate, breast and ovarian cancer. This is great news as the drug has the potential to extend the lives of those with later stage prostate cancer.
Here in Australia the news is not all good however. This drug is covered on our Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule for breast and ovarian cancer but not for prostrate cancer. The cost of the drug without the PBS subsidy is up to $1,289.30 according to the PBS website. After the subsidy the cost to the patient is $30.70. The patient referred to in the news story last night had spent $20,000 on treatment.
If this situation were reversed and the treatment was subsidised for prostate cancer and not for breast cancer there would be an outcry, and rightly so. But where is the outcry now?
It is right and necessary that past injustices are corrected. I refer of course to addressing the imbalance between the opportunities afforded to females compared to males. However, there appears to be a fear these days that those who speak out in favour of the rights of men are going to be labeled as a misogynist. This situation can not be allowed to continue.
This inequity is apparently to be “reviewed later in the year”. What’s wrong with right bloody now!
I have always wanted a back yard shed. There is something inherently masculine about the shed. A place of refuge from the fast pace of everyday life. Somewhere to go to cut things up and put holes in things. A place to build something. A place to hang shiny tools on pegboard with tool outline shapes to show where things go. A place to shed blood and sweat in the quest for the perfect dovetail joint. A place to strip a motor and then forget where all the pieces go. Of course with my lack of skills it could also be a place to lose a finger or two in an attempt to master the drop saw but we won’t dwell on that.
My shed would be an out of bounds area. The fact that I don’t know how to build things or cut straight lines with a hand saw would be hidden from the world. Half finished projects would be safe from prying and judgmental eyes. There would be no other secrets here but these.
In the Utopian parallel universe where money concerns do not exist the shed is quite large. There is room for a large screen TV, a comfortable chair or two and a bar fridge. When you visit the shed dear reader you come empty handed. There is always a full beer fridge.
There is also space for the motorcycles. Did I mention there will be motorcycles? Probably three or four. A couple of road bikes and a couple of dirt bikes. These will be ridden on days when there is no football to watch in the shed and I feel no need to tinker with power tools. This assumes of course that I have not removed the appendages required to ride motorcycles with said power tools.
The shed will be the place where potential suitors for my daughters will be interviewed prior to being sent on their first date. There will need to be various items of terror contained within the walls of the shed to ensure the safe return of my princesses. Perhaps a vicious dog or two, shotguns are of course illegal in Australian sheds.
Will I ever have the backyard shed? Probably not. Other things have priority now and other things will come along to take their place. That’s OK, it’s nice to dream.
The cards are dealt, the chips piled high, cigar smoke fills the air and players sweat with anticipatory tension. It’s the weekly poker game where the guys/girls gather to challenge each other in a game of skill and chance - or is it?
As with many aspects of modern life, gambling has secured a firm foothold in the online world. And the game that lends itself perfectly to be played online is poker in its many variations. I have just discovered an online poker resource for users of Mac computers - macpokeronline.com. Not being a Mac user (yet), I have not previously considered the need for a specialist online poker resource such as this. The site offers information on Mac poker sites where Mac users can play and learn. They research and report on online poker rooms that cater for Mac users including No download poker rooms, Mac download rooms and Windows/Emulator rooms. For more information about the site and what they are all about you can visit their about page.
Definitely worth a careful read is their poker spyware and adware page where advice is given on how to keep yourself safe when satisfying that gambling itch online. You can never have too much information when dealing with financial transactions online.
The macpokeronline site is well presented and easy to find your way around with clear navigation. It is available in 8 languages, gambling after all is a universal pleasure. Each of the poker rooms listed are ranked so that a potential user has an idea of what to expect before they visit. The poker novice is not forgotten either with information provided on poker rules and strategy.
So if you are a Mac devotee and enjoy a bit of online risk taking for profit (or loss) you might get something out of macpokeronline.
Remember - “Gamble with your head, not over it”. Seek help if gambling has become a problem for you.
Decisions, decisions. As I said in my last post I am seriously considering buying a new Mac Pro. Several of my online friends were kind enough to drop by and let me know their feelings and all offered sane, rational arguments without any hint of the hysteria one sometimes reads when Windows/Microsoft and Mac/Apple are mentioned in the same paragraph.
One fact learned during my research into the Mac Pro has surprised me. I have always believed that Apple hardware was significantly more expensive than the equivalent Wintel hardware. While this is true most of the time, for me and the decision I am in the process of making the opposite is true. At the budget end of the market there is no contest, Apple just doesn’t make a budget computer. Even in the middle of the market they are still more expensive. There is just not the same competition to bring prices down as there is in the Wintel market segment.
My purchase is at the top end of the market. I am considering the Mac Pro with two dual core Xeon processors, at least 2 GB of RAM, a decent video card with possibly 512 meg of video RAM and some serious hard drives. Of course I am going to have to drop some serious folding stuff to make one of these my own. As a teacher, Apple offer me a 12.5% discount. With this discount taken into account the cost of the Mac Pro is actually slightly cheaper than a similarly spec’ed Dell. I could of course build a machine of similar specifications myself for much less than either a Mac or a Dell. While I may still do this I am leaning away from this idea. I am time poor as well as cash poor so would not like to have to deal with warranty type issues myself when something inevitably goes wrong. Windows Vista will of course run very well on a machine with this much grunt. I am just not sure I want to put another 3 or four years more faith in Microsoft.
Once I realised that my capital outlay was about the same for each platform I turned my mind to software. Could I do everything on the Mac that I can do on a Windows machine? So far the answer is yes. It even turns out that the site license my school is about to acquire for Adobe Creative Suite 3 includes both the Windows and Mac versions and the license allows teachers to install on one personal machine. Teaching Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and other multimedia applications necessitates me having them at home. I also dabble in 3D modelling and animation and video editing. From what I understand the Mac will excel in all these areas.
What I really want is all three operating systems - Windows, Ubuntu and Mac (WinBunMac). Windows has served me well over the years, although I am becoming disenchanted with it of late and haven’t got excited about Vista. I enjoy using Ubuntu and it’s free. It has limitations in the software I cannot run on it though. I haven’t tried Mac OSX yet but I am willing to give it a try. The fact that it is optimised to run on only one hardware platform appeals to me.
And the Mac Pro just looks cool
The following people were kind enough to give me their honest opinion:
I love a good conspiracy theory. It is not that I necessarily believe them I just find them interesting to think about. The interwebs is of course an excellent source of said theories. I recently heard a good one concerning Windows (the source slips my mind otherwise I would quote it here).
The story goes that Microsoft are intentionally slowing down Windows XP through the patches delivered through live update. The conspiracy theorists would have us believe that this is being done to encourage the switch to Vista.
There are two issues in this particular morsel of anti-Microsoft propaganda. Firstly, are patches and updates slowing XP down, and secondly would Microsoft be doing this intentionally.
In response to this second issue, my thinking is that the potential downside to Microsoft of such action would be so serious that it just couldn’t be true. It does make for a good story though and stranger things have happened.
As for the idea that XP is being slowed down by patches and updates, I offer my own anecdotal “evidence”. I have recently reformatted two of my Windows machines, my everyday PC and my music jukebox PC. They both have received a fresh install of Windows XP. While one is a laptop and the other a desktop they have similar configurations. They are both Pentium 4 machines while the laptop processor is faster, they both have 512 meg of RAM and they both have 7200 rpm hard drives. One key difference in the two setups is the fact that the laptop has been updated for all Microsoft patches and updates while the desktop has not. The desktop is a bare install of Windows XP with service pack 2 installed. This machine does not connect to the internet so I see no need to patch it.
Theoretically, these machines should show similar performance. And drum roll please - they don’t. The laptop computer with XP fully updated and patched is noticeably slower in performing basic tasks. For example it takes longer to open a “my computer” window and the right click context menu takes longer to appear. Now you might be thinking that I am making claims without proof or evidence to back them up, and you would be right. I don’t plan on going as far as timing various operations for comparison purposes, I have better things to do.
This is just another small nail in the coffin that will bury my loyalty to Windows. As for moving to Vista I am left cold by the thought of the system specifications that are needed just to run the operating system. I am 90% decided on a move to an Apple Mac Pro. Go ahead, talk me out of it.
Recently, Matthew at eJabs tagged me for his meme on My Favourite Unpopular Posts. Given the reasonably small readership of my blog (growing slowly and I appreciate you all) it could be argued that all of my posts are somewhat “unpopular”. Therefore, below is a list of the posts that I enjoyed writing the most (apologies to Matthew for taking some license with his meme topic)
Interesting to note that these are generally less than serious pieces of writing (except for “protecting the innocent”. Perhaps there is a lesson for me there.
Thanks for the idea Matthew.
I am going to link here to all in my Friends list - no expectation on my behalf to take part but the link love is good.
As human beings we are constantly learning things. I love the process of learning and I am always trying to understand this process to make me a better learner and a better teacher.
Here are some of the things I have learned this week:
I have just finished watching an episode of The Lab With Leo on The Lifestyle Channel and learned something very interesting. Michael Dell uses Ubuntu Linux on his home laptop. Admittedly he does use Vista on his high end (gaming?) machine but I find it intriguing that the Chairman of one of Microsoft’s biggest customers thinks that Linux is the way to go for his laptop.
More food for thought here in my mental gymnastics over my future computer direction.
The Alexa rank is something I have completely ignored up to this point. I thought therefore that I would participate and see what happens.
~Start Copying Here~
Rules:
* Put anything you like above this list – Chit Chat, talkies, introduce what this is.
* Start copying on the “~Start Copying Here~” and copy all the things listed without removing the links (Of course, the train would be no use without those links)
* Move all the sites labeled “Newcomers” to the list labeled “Oldies”.
* Add 5 sites that you want to include in the train and make their “Visit My Site” link like this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.criticalassumption.blogspot.com/ then invite them to join the train.
* Visit all the listed sites using the Visit My Site link. (That’s not much work! Remember, if you plant good seeds they will also grow good) and look at your high Alexa ranking next week!
Keep an eye on the newspapers folks you should be seeing a headline like:
Dell Laptop Seen Re-entering Atmosphere Over Brisbane
Did I mention I hate Windows? I seem to have fixed the issue (said with fingers crossed, rabbit’s foot in hand, knocking on wood, stroking my four leaf clover while caressing the penny picked up in the street today). It appears that the video card driver was corrupt and after four reinstalls of said video card driver things are a little more sane here. Yes you read that right, it took four attempts to get the video card driver to install correctly.
This was an incredibly frustrating problem to diagnose and fix. The problem only occurred using Firefox and only on certain web pages when scrolling. It just so happened that it was happening on two blogs that I like to read regularly.
For anyone interested here are some useful things I have learned from the experience:
Windows errors are logged in the Event Viewer, available through “administrative tools”. I was aware of this but had not used much to this point.
Once you have an “event id” and “source” you can go to eventid.net for information on what problem generated that code. This is what tipped me off to the video card driver
There is a separate issue with Windows Live Update that causes a period of 100% CPU usage on start up and connection to the internet. I am still looking for a solution for this one
Laptop computers do not respond to profanity or physical abuse
In times of high stress, the adage “panic slowly” is a good thing to keep in mind
As for the 100% cpu usage issue, I have no idea why it would be happening now and not before my recent clean install. I suspect a Windows update has broken something. It looks like I will have to turn off automatic updates until I can find a solution to this one. Process Explorer from sysinternals.com (now part of Microsoft it would appear) is an excellent free utility to see which services are running and the processes under those services.
The new system is still on the wish list. Might have to go back to still life modeling to pay for it
Who is the Coach? - Self styled life coach to the masses; part time ballet critic; full time sports critic; nude twister umpire; unemployed still life model; "trust me, I'm on the internet"
A more serious look at who I am can be found on the About page.
