Saturday, November 02, 2002

coming soon ... Mahalakshmi

Monday, November 4th, is Mahalakshmi. Mahalakshmi means great wealth.
Maharishi says: "Mahalakshmi is a very precious element, it's an element of all possibilities; it's prosperity; it's fulfillment; it's a field of all possibilities. It makes life absolutely fulfilled."

So, Monday is the day we will launch our latest creation; a website that has been a pure pleasure to build both because it's beautiful and because we really like this client. Stay tuned ...
posted by lee on 11/02/02 at 12:12 AM
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Not even his mom!

I know this is a little old, but it cracked me up: Candidate's Relatives Say They Won't Vote For Him (Hartford Courant Online Edition)

October 17, 2002
Associated Press

[snip]
SOUTHINGTON, Conn. -- State Rep. Dennis Cleary won't be able to count on the support of his family this Election Day.

The Republican, who represents Wolcott and Southington, is seeking a seventh term in the General Assembly. But relatives have taken out a newspaper ad and planted signs on their lawns in support of his opponent, Democrat John "Corky" Mazurek.

The ad, printed in the Wolcott Community News, reads, "We are tired of Dennis ... Are you?"

Jude Cleary said family members believe his brother is a "corrupt" and "self-serving" politician.

"He's sort of been on a trip for a number of years," Jude Cleary said. "He just seems to have rolled with the Hartford insiders and sort of lost touch with his own family, let alone the people of the district."
[/snip]

Seems the family doesn't like the way he handled his father's estate. I wonder what the real story is here, since there are always at least two sides to every story. At any rate, he's been in office long enough -- time for him to say "bye-bye."

The ads in CT have been particularly unenlightening this silly season. Very few ads for Curry, the democrat running for governor. I guess he didn't raise enough money.

Attack ads - all attack ads. I think the only non-attack ads I've seen are for the woman, Susan Bysiewicz, running for secretary of state - those ads actually talk about her accomplishments. I guess she managed to get some stuff done despite working under our oily republican governor, who, in just a few years, managed to turn our state from one with a substantial surplus to being nearly a billion in debt.
posted by lee on 11/02/02 at 04:41 AM
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The truth, with a dose of scary humor

Advertising Deregulated: The Inalienable Right to Mislead Millions, by Carol Norris

[snip]
The FDA, absolutely, positively, cross-my-heart-hope-to-die not a special interest lackey, whose job it is to police the food, drug and cosmetics industries, says it is committed to reducing false or misleading advertising. But somehow, there seems to be a disconnect between what it says it wants and what it is doing. This year it sent out 60% fewer warning letters than last year to advertisers regarding misleading or distorted facts. Representative Waxman from California notes that, "there has been a dramatic drop in enforcement actions." These warning letters are the first step in the FDA's policing tactics. Maybe there were 60% fewer infractions, you argue. As drug ads are burgeoning, drug sales are booming and the pharmaceutical companies have ever-growing political clout, this is highly unlikely. In addition, those in the industry most assuredly know that at this very moment the FDA is actively considering relaxing the advertising rules that govern them. How hard it must be to follow what you know might soon be outdated rules.
[/snip]

I've been thinking a lot lately of all the new ways manufacturers are coming up with to sell us the same products at much higher prices. Purple ketchup. Swifter and Pledge floor cleaners. Paper towels pre-sprayed with furniture polish. Chicken meat shaped like cartoon characters. Just going through the coupon flyers amazes me.

What really brought it home for me was bypassing generic dog biscuits in favor of Scooby Doo dog biscuits -- like the dog cares. And I didn't even watch Scooby Doo.

There are some cases where generic is not a bargain. A few. Aluminum foil. Soap. Toilet paper. That's all I can think of at the moment.

We have been so brainwashed. It's frightening to contemplate even trying to "un-do" what a hundred years of advertising has wrought. So I'll just do what I can -- try to see through the crap to determine if the product is worth the money I have to shell out to get it. Or, an even more radical idea -- trying to determine if this is something I really need ...
posted by lee on 11/02/02 at 07:48 PM
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Monday, November 04, 2002

building this site made my soul happy

buddha_t.jpgWe launched Beneath Buddha's Eyes today. Beneath Buddha's Eyes is website for a novel of the same name written by Tony Anthony: "Based on a true story, Beneath Buddhas Eyes offers a tender story of love amidst the hell of war, a singular perspective of the Vietnam conflict, and ٗ especially at a time when the country appears on the brink of entering another war a thoughtful questioning of what America is really fighting for."

What made this site so satisfying to build is that we really like Tony, and it was a pleasure working with him. He communicated quite clearly what he wanted the site to be like, and provided us with some digital sketches (he is a graphic artist) with his concepts, and we took off from those.

Part of the site is devoted to Tony's recently rediscovered photos, which he took while he was a draftee assigned as a correspondent in Vietnam. Impressive photos.
posted by lee on 11/04/02 at 09:54 PM
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Wednesday, November 06, 2002

more handy sites

I don't even remember where I stumbled upon this - rediscovered it while sorting my bookmark list (which I have to google to find anything in ... ): Conversion & Calculation Center: Measurements, Currencies, World Time, Calculators & Reference Info. All kinds of handy dandy thingies.



And if you need just the facts on the nutrient values of foods, such as carbohydrate content or fiber content, etc., go here: Search the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. Click the home button to find more info. I remember now why I have this bookmarked: Stanley and I did a lot of research on food nutrient content for The Circadian Prescription, a very, very good book written by Dr. Sidney Baker and Karen Baar about circadian rhythms of our bodies and its effects on health.

posted by lee on 11/06/02 at 06:07 AM
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it’s so depressing

My Dad said last night: "I don't understand people. We had eight years of a booming economy under the Democrats. Now everyone can see the economy is still going down the tubes, and yet they're still voting Republican." I don't understand it either, but as Stanley is fond of saying: "Half of all people have an IQ of 100 or less." CNN has a good roundup of all the election results here: CNN.com Election 2002 Results. One bright spot was Michigan, where a Democrat, a woman at that, won and managed to throw off too many years of Republican control. Too bad about Missouri and Minnesota, though. And here in Connecticut our sleazy governor got another four years to further trash the economy.



Voter turnout seemed to be low around here - I'll have to look for those results.

posted by lee on 11/06/02 at 06:50 PM
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Thursday, November 07, 2002

ruins, again

My fascination with ruins continues unabated. This site is gorgeous, and spooky: the derelict sensation.



Detroit Train Station, Audrey Mantey

DetroitTrainStation_Audrey_Mantey.jpg



Audrey Mantey has a series of photographs of the ruin of the Detroit Train Station in Southwest Detroit (abandoned in 1988). I remember this station vividly - I was fascinated with it from the first time I saw it. I remember going with my Dad to pick up the out-of-town newspapers there when I was a little girl and then doing the same thing by myself when I was in college. I used to sit there and read the newspapers and watch the people.



This train station is not too far from where Tiger Stadium used to stand, and where the second-oldest Roman Catholic church in America, St. Anne (founded in 1701), still stands.



This site is worth spending time on, a lot of interesting projects and presentations. And it makes me realize I should go get pictures of a derelict building right here in Norwalk that fascinates me before it gets torn down. It's a building I would love to buy and renovate if I had the money to do it right.

posted by lee on 11/07/02 at 05:30 AM
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Saturday, November 09, 2002

mt panic & the “friendly” worm

This afternoon, I did a little rearranging of my journal index page. I wanted to add the Movable Type 2.1 search feature -- mainly so I can find things in my archives -- and reorganize the side matter some (I'm not finished with it. Seems I'm never finished with it.) Went to make sure the new template worked fine -- oh man, what a mess!

I'd forgotten that I'd changed SSH to upload on in binary because I was uploading a Flash file last night. Okay, so changed that and then I reloaded the template in ascii format. Better -- but still not quite right. I needed to rebuild.

Headed for the templates page. But no matter what I clicked, I was thrown back to the login page. Over and over. Panic -- I broke it! I'd already had muchas trouble upgrading (had to do with case-sensitive cgi. I had to change the case of about 15 files or so that uploaded as lower case instead of mixed case) so I was NOT HAPPY about this. Headed to the forums, but didn't find an answer there (which left me feeling really dumb -- could I have broken it in a unique way? I doubted it, which meant the fix was so obvious anyone could fix it). I changed the permissions on the files, reloaded this and that, tried all kinds of tweaks. No dice.

AHA! I know, I'll READ THE F*ING MANUAL. Lo and behold, down there in the Troubleshooting section, there was my problem: "I keep getting the Movable Type login screen." With an answer in plain English no less. Which was: if you've set ZoneAlarm to block cookies, the thing ain't gonna work. And what had I done before I began my MT tweaking? Upgraded ZoneAlarm -- where I'd just decided to try a tracking cookie block. I untried it. Problem solved.

The "Friendly" Worm
Yesterday I got a message from a woman at the place where I no longer spend three days a week. It contained a message with a link to download a greeting card she'd sent via friend - greeting (or something like that). I have to admit, I was a bit surprised to get a greeting message from her -- but I figured she was just touching base with all us refugees or something. It wasn't until I'd clicked the link and "install" button that the alarm bells started going off -- would she really send a greeting? But neither Norton AntiVirus nor ZoneAlarm Pro protested ... so maybe it was okay ... I did LiveUpdate only yesterday ... why's it taking so long ... and what a cruddy card -- this isn't something she'd send! OH NO!

I sent her a message asking her about it, and she wrote back apologizing profusely and telling me not to install it because it is a worm, etc. etc. etc. But of course I had. Then my desktop started going haywire. Hoo boy. Here we go ... the SECOND time this week Norton failed me.

Stanley immediately started researching it; it's called, according to Symantec, friend greet or friend greetings -- and they provided removal instructions. Which wasn't easy -- uninstalling it is incomplete, I had to freaking do a liveupdate on Norton AntiVirus TWICE to get the right virus definitions, then NA could not either quarantine or remove the files until I rebooted. Then there was a bunch of registry changes I had to make because Norton could not, and though Norton warned you to clean out all the temp files in the browser cache, it did not warn you to clean out the files in the temporary download file, were I found it again today (it did not execute, fortunately).

A would say that all's well that ends well, except that my quickstart programs are still all rearranged and I'm really pissed that Norton AntiVirus failed yet again. This is one instance where virus definition updates should be automatically pushed content, rather than scheduled pulls. At the very least, Symantec should send out warnings, like McAfee does (I dumped McAfee because it kept crapping up my operating system). At any rate, Stanley told me it's time to update ZoneAlarmPro -- he's the person in charge of all this stuff, so I did what he told me to do. And that, ultimately, is why I had the MT problem.

It amazes me sometimes, the cascade of consequences.
posted by lee on 11/09/02 at 11:01 PM
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Sunday, November 10, 2002

eq - what’s yours?

I know these things are, for the most part, silly and mostly meaningless. Still, I'm not immune from the American penchant for finding out more about ME. Following a link from lactose-incompetent, I took the Emotional Intelligence Test from Utne Reader Online. What, you want to know my score? It is 120. Out of 200. So I guess that means, while I'm not an emotional cripple, I'm not exactly in tip-top emotional condition. I wonder if my score would've been higher if it weren't so gloomy out today?
posted by lee on 11/10/02 at 06:21 PM
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Monday, November 11, 2002

Durable Digital Depository

MIT launched DSpace, which is basically a searchable repository for digitized research reports. Apparently, this is just the beginning. The search seems to work well. The documents are abstracted so you don't have to waste time downloading .pdf files you might not need. It's a promising start in an attempt provide some persistence to digital creations, which have a tendency to disappear as technologies change or webservers are shut down, moved, or rearranged.

The software for the library is open source, so other organizations won't have to pay royalties to create their own digital library using the MIT (developed with Hewlett-Packard) software. It's the first link in what they hope will be a consortium of digital archives.

The one drawback that I've noticed is there is no way to tell if the contribution has been peer-reviewed before being accepted into the depository.

More information about digitized research archives: "College Archives 'Dig' Deeper."
posted by lee on 11/11/02 at 05:04 PM
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