Category: HT archives

What? There’s a down side to outsourcing education?

Days before classes were to begin in September, trucks arrived to take away most of the textbooks, computers, lab supplies and musical instruments the company had provided — Edison had to sell them off for cash. Many students were left with decades-old books and no equipment.

A few weeks later, some of the company’s executives moved into offices inside the schools so Edison could avoid paying the $8,750 monthly rent on its Philadelphia headquarters. They stayed only a few days, until the school board ordered them out.

As a final humiliation, Chris Whittle, the company’s charismatic chief executive and founder, recently told a meeting of school principals that he’d thought up an ingenious solution to the company’s financial woes: Take advantage of the free supply of child labour, and force each student to work an hour a day, presumably without pay, in the school offices.

Chris Whittle is also the guy what brung us Channel One.

AngelA’s carving our pumpkin. Hey, I drew the thing, my work is done.

I’m shopping for a goodbye card for someone in our group. Pickings were slim, but I managed to find something that would keep everyone happy. In that section of the card shop (muzak was mercifully silent, incidentally) was a card that said “Congratulations on joining the service” and there was a big wavy American Flag on the front. For those of you just visiting, I live in Canada. Someone else saw the same card in another shop. If Canada outsources its military to the USA in the next few months, don’t say you weren’t warned.

I got my books from Amazon.ca today. They packed the box with bubble bags instead of paper or bubble wrap. Fist-sized bags of air. Weird things. The books are much larger than I thought they were. Now I have to figure out how I’m going to get through them in a reasonable amount of time without easy access to computer equipment that can actually run the applications they describe.

Ok, the masterpiece is ready. I’ve been feasting on its brains for the past half hour, and damn, there’s something about burnt stuff served with salt.

I’m not entirely happy with it, but it’s done for now. Look kids, permalinks! As I mentioned to Zed the other day, I was wavering between links and 10 entries that would get constantly overwritten. Somehow I teetered onto the side of sentimentalism. To be fair, I just shipped off 50 or so books that I didn’t have room for anymore. There’s some work still to be done, and if anything looks really hideous send me a screenshot. Thanks go out to Shawn for offering to help with some testing, I would have replied sooner but I decided to watch From Hell with AngelA and drink a bottle of wine, and then after that it’s a judgement thing. All good though.

Yep, back to vertical views. On the plus side, there’s a chance that you’ll see more than one update in a day. Not a great chance in the near term though, because work has gotten interesting (without quotes) again. Rather than work on the problem at hand, today I elected to revamp the logging system on one of our apps and removed an entire module that I really hope isn’t being used. None of this is in the problem domain, but I’ve got another three weeks to solve that bit… Apologies once again for the technical stuff, I promise as soon as Thrust Labs is done it’ll all move there. Yes, it’ll be a DevBlog, but there’ll be other stuff too. I think, anyway. Many changes every time I near the 80% done mark.

Anyway, I have porn to find. I’ll probably post something tomorrow when I regain my senses and realize the site’s so messed up.

Took a walk over to the local electronics supply store at lunch, and there was a crowd outside, which is a bit unusual. Sure, it’s Queen St. West, but even during the peak of the dot com thing discrete logic components never got that “cool” factor. It turned out there was a PETA truck with “Meet Your Meat” playing on an exposed TV and people were handing out flyers. Outside the parts shop. I felt really weird inside. What was I buying that was made of animals? Why would a transistor and resistor emporium be targeted by animal rights activists? I finally went outside and asked them. It turns out it was the first parking place they saw. Huh.

Anyway, the store was fun. I went there originally to find out about acid disposal techniques and almost ended up leaving with a power supply and a bunch of microcontroller kits. I still think that would be cool, if for no other reason than to work on my keyboard pants, but I’ve got way too many things on the go right now. Back to the acid question, after a bit of a struggle with a language barrier, it would appear that I’m supposed to dump ferric chloride in a field somewhere when I’m done with it. The correct answer, in case you’re wondering, seems to be to add baking soda to neutralize the acid and then mix in concrete or plaster or something to solidify the stuff and then throw it out. Either way seems weird, and there’s some stuff called cupric chloride that seems to be reusable and thus less wasteful, so if I ever do start yet another project, that might be the way to go.

One project for today was this site’s redesign. It’s mostly done, but I haven’t checked it out in more than one browser and I’d like to make it a little more frightening first, what with Halloween and all. I’ll probably give up and implement it in a few days so I can go on to the long overdue Thrust Labs page plus the VP redesign. to say nothing of actual content on AngelA’s site…

I also tried some non-HTML layout stuff with some artsy-fartsy markers that I collect like weird Japanese trading cards. I had a “marker pad” that I hadn’t tried out. It said it was “bleedproof”. It “wasn’t”. Of course, I can’t really get upset about 4 pages under the one I was working on getting wrecked, since they all presumably suck as much as the top page. I ended up working with red markers a lot, ’cause hey, if there’s gonna be bleeding…

We’re finally on Moveable Type 2.5, after lingering on 1.4 for many months. The difference to you: not a thing. The difference to me: same. Still, this might cause me to do something with the layout eventually. I’ll probably go back to vertical, but I’m still looking for a good way to do it.

I saw Bowling for Columbine today. The audience was packed with white middle class downtown dwellers, and the reaction was predictable. Still a very good movie, probably the best that Mike’s ever done, and well worth seeing. For the record, we laughed at the Canadians he interviewed almost as much as the Americans, and I lock my door.

Other than the movie, my day didn’t really go as planned, so I’ll leave you with a quick link-o-rama, most of which are probably already on the major blogs, but are still funny. They include: Black People Love Us dot com, Apple’s Japanese Switch Ads, and from the Haab, Lego-like men rolling joints. The black people site comes via Fimoculous, a site I don’t visit often enough, so you should.

Oh, sweet sweet negligence…

My Palm issues with the half screen persist. While the device works most of the time, the “big gob of Kleenex” solution seems to have motion issues, resulting in the need for an occasional spanking. Let me see if I can get this right: I have problems with my Palm that involves alternation between spanking and Kleenex, and I’m sometimes half blind. Archaeologists of the future, please take note: this site is indeed a cry for help.

I’ve made some forays into eBay for a replacement, but, what can I say, I’m cheap. I just can’t see myself paying more than I would pay for a new model for a “vintage” piece of electronics. This isn’t an Altair we’re talking about here. Anyway, my last two bids were easily beaten, and the surplus stores around here haven’t been any help. I’m doing some work upgrades soon, so maybe I’ll be able to swing a machine that can actually use USB. Who knows.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I work near a major convention centre, which means I get to see lots of policemen on days when some “controversial” group is meeting. Canada is big on freedom of expression, but we’re equally big on photographing you for our police files. Anyway, the barricades were up and the police were there, but the convention centre web site only listed two events. Based on that info, the police were either there to model for a workshop by some Eastern Canada news photographers, or they were there because of an Autism society, which seemed equally weird. It turns out they were there because of the AGM for the political party in power in this province, which I think is a ringing endorsement for re-election. Hint to convention centre people: if you’re trying to keep a “controversial” event low-key, it pretty much goes to hell if you install a huge police presence. Anyway, I never saw any protesters, which doesn’t mean that there weren’t any, but I’m glad my tax dollars are being so well used.

Speaking of civil disobedience, Microsoft was getting in to the graffiti game yesterday for the MSN 8 launch. Here in Toronto we just had some big stands with big butterflies hanging on them, but when I walked by last night the butterfly was gone. There were some pretty high winds, so it’s anybody’s guess if they were removed for profit, removed for safety, or removed by nature. Back to New York, here’s the relevant quote from the article:

“It’s illegal,” [Vanessa Gruen, director of special projects for the Municipal Art Society] said, “and they’re going to get a lot of publicity for it.”

That may have been the point. “It’s a tremendous opportunity,” [MS authorized PR goon] Ms. Lacter said, “for us to build brand awareness.”

Am I the only one who thinks that people (or corporations with the rights of people) shouldn’t be able to profit from illegal activities? It would be sweet if a judge could pass down some kind of sentence to address this. I’m not talking about money, I want my damned quid pro quo (whatever that is, it sounds cool when Anthony Hopkins says it). Billboards that say “Hi, we’re from Microsoft, and we suck ass. Sorry about the mess”, or something.

It’s not that I’m slamming Microsoft especially here. In fact, I ordered some books on their technology yesterday. Note to Heather Riesman, CEO of Indigo and Chapters: instead of spending all your time and money whining about how Amazon.ca shouldn’t be allowed to even be here to do to you what you’ve done to small booksellers across the country, why not, I don’t know, make your website actually work? In the time it took to look up one of the books I wanted on your site, I found three books on Amazon, signed up as a customer, dropped one book from the order, and hit the big submit button. Again, that’s all in the time it took for one search on your site. And that search was just for a keyword; it would be longer still to find the book I actually wanted. Incidentally, for those of you who’ve forgotten an earlier rant, Chapters is the only bookstore to throw me out twice in the same day. Some experiences shouldn’t be translated over to the online world.

So yeah, the books will be here next week and I’ll be on my way to learning about the wild world of .Net. Don’t get me wrong, I like open source and Mac stuff, but my company still uses NT 4.0, so if I can use any remotely recent technology for my job, yeah, I’m gonna go for the option that makes me stop clawing my eyes out.

And that’s a fraction of where I’ve been lately.

The Toronto Star is running a story on the resignation of Solicitor-General Lawrence MacAulay. The man pushed one of his underlings to fund his brother’s college, and the ethics commission decided that that was going too far. You can tell that The Star thinks this is a serious issue by the name they gave the accompanying image: macaulay_culkin011030.jpg. Yeah, maybe we were all thinking it, but come on, guys…

We saw The Ring last night. It was probably the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long long time. To get the full experience, try not to read anything about it before you go. It’s not like there’s a big twist at the end, but these things are always scarier when you have no idea what they’re going to throw at you next. AngelA had a good idea for this type of movie. They need to install voting buttons so that halfway through the movie the audience can decide if they want the plot to continue or if they want the movie to shift so that the main characters stop what they’re doing and become funny bank robbers who are being hunted by Martin Lawrence, reprising his role in Black Knight. I managed to sleep last night, but I don’t know if that’s because we talked about the movie afterwards or in spite of that. Talking about it helps defuse the whole thing, because you have another human being to help expose the fact that it was only a movie and things like that don’t usually happen in real life, but on the other hand, it leaves you with memories of scenes that you’d totally forgotten (or blocked out), and connections that you didn’t realize at the time that make the whole thing even scarier. Anyway, we’ve seen 3 thrillers in a row now, so we’re going to stick to stuff like The Country Bears for a while. We’ve earned it. Ok, not the Bears, but something equally harmless.

I haven’t left for work yet (it’s 6:30, so it’s not like I’m slacking), but my newly fixed Palm (still working!) tells me that the same person has booked me for meetings at 9am and 1pm, my absolute favourite meeting times. Someone else has booked me for a meeting at the same time as an annual celebration with free drinks, and yeah, I’ve got to work at TVA tonight, but hey, free drinks don’t happen very often. This will be the best day ever.

The powers that be at work have blocked web access to my main email account. In other unrelated news, I got a lot of stuff done today. Of course, by “work” I mean I started converting one of our Windows apps to DHTML, which isn’t that much different from what I do in my “spare time”, so either my job has become ideal or I need to get new hobbies. In my defense, I’m letting my thumb heal up for some more Tony Hawk.

The trip home yesterday went alright, and ever since I discovered that having a credit card that waives collision damage on rental cars means you actually don’t have to pay a cent if you break the car, driving’s been more fun. Toronto has these streetcar tracks that they don’t want you to drive on, so they put these concrete barriers in the way. The barriers aren’t that high, but if you’re considering driving over one, please don’t. Your car will make a funny noise that’s quite possibly the aural representation of the word “break”. It turns out I didn’t actually break anything, which almost makes me want to do it again, but I think “luck” may have been a factor.

Lots of weird dreams last night. Mia, if you’re reading this, I dreamt that you didn’t go anywhere and you’ve just been hiding in your room these past few months. If there’s something you’d like to share with the rest of the class but can’t find a non-awkward opening, there you go. Plus it will make me psychic. It will also raise the chances that government agents are in fact taking my neighbours away and that my home is filled with ice, but psychics can’t pick and choose their visions, I guess.

My Palm Pilot problem has been resolved. I still have the problem where they’re not called “Palm Pilot”s anymore, but “palm problems” sound like something very different. Anyway, if you recall, half the screen died, and work doesn’t support USB yet, which means I can’t get a new Palm and download my calendar. After taking the thing apart without even breaking anything, I managed to find the problem – some loose wire somewhere. Unfortunately, the wire was hidden somewhere in the display that I couldn’t open, but I found that holding the ribbon cable in a certain position would wedge it in place. For once, the solution was not duct tape, but rather Kleenex brand facial tissue. I stuffed the case with them, preventing anything from moving, put everything back together, and it seems to be working now. Ironically, if I’d stuffed the thing full of Kleenex brand facial tissue back when I first bought the thing, I probably wouldn’t have had as much trouble after dropping it. Anyway, that’s four years of university paying for itself all over again.

We’re going to see The Ring tonight. We were going to wait until next week, but then I went to Penny Arcade and saw their comic about it and the accompanying review. From said review:

“Our kitchen light is out, and I’d have to walk through the kitchen to get to bed, and it occurred to me that to walk through the darkness there even for a moment amounted to suicide. Fair enough. Looks like I’m sleeping in the living room. With all the lights on … I never did get any sleep, which brought about the miserable and exceedingly moist cold I’m nursing now. I still haven’t recovered completely from the movie, I’m still frightened, and when I hear something behind me I wonder if I should turn around and look at it, or just close my eyes and hope it’s over soon.”

I can’t wait! Actually, yes I can. I don’t like scary movies. Except that I really do. This will be actual fun.

I’m still out of town, visiting family, but I’ve got a few minutes to kill…

One perk of visiting people with more than 3 channels on their TV is that you can get caught up (if one show a season is “caught up”) on shows. Last night’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught me that if you fight the undead for 6 years, die twice and go through a bunch of other crap, you too can have a job with a G4 iMac on your desk. I must go train.

Interesting trivia: I think my dad has seen more episodes of Buffy than I have. And my mom owns a bong. Think about that until I return.

Wow, there’s nothing like crashing at 6:30 in the evening to put a damper on your productivity…

I haven’t found out if it’s a cold or a flu, but there’s definitely something amiss within my Thrusty self. Aside from bad allergy days, I don’t think I’ve been sick all year, and there are parts of it that I like (dizzy spells and the incredible weightless yet really heavy at the same time feeling), but I’m starting to get into the headache and sore throat area, and that’s less fun. If it would just keep into the ratio of drunk to hangover, I’d be prepared to live with it, but I’ve got 3 hours of driving tonight to look forward to, which I guess means I have to lay off of the high alcohol cough syrup. That stuff’s one of the best parts of being sick, I tells ya.

I’ve got to admire bacteria a little. They just don’t give up, even though they always lose, until someday, ideally when I’m in my late 130’s, they’ll dance up and down in final victory. Those kids have spunk.

The invention of the day is based on an earlier idea I had, but I don’t think I’ve shared it before today. You know those shoes with flashing lights in the soles? I think they’re mostly for kid’s shoes. I want proximity sensors built into soles of shoes, so an alarm can go off if your shoes leave the ground for an extended period of time. Sure, you could rationalize that this is a good idea for stopping child abductions, but I’m more interested in what’s in it for me. For example, if I’m falling off of a building, I want to know about it. Also, if I somehow manage to gain the ability to fly, it’d be good if my shoes could let me know as soon as possible so I don’t miss out on the fun. You can send venture capital money in small, unmarked bills to my PO Box.