Archive - 2007
December 20th
The Christmas Tree
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/20/2007 - 09:23The large green tree
waits patiently
next to the growing pile of wrapped Christmas presents,
the dust covered boxes of last year’s ornaments,
and the couch, where the college student,
home for the holidays,
lays half delirious,
from this season’s stomach bug.
Poetry
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 12/20/2007 - 09:22A fragment of one of last night’s dreams remains with me this morning. I was in school. I had been distracted and was trying to find my place. We were studying poetry and I commented to the instructor about having not been writing much poetry recently. She asked me why I hadn’t been, and I said I didn’t know. I’ve just been distracted.
Well, maybe there is a message in that dream fragment. Maybe some of the reason I haven’t written much poetry recently is that I read or listen to some great poetry and get discouraged. Then, I read some blogs where people are putting up poetry that just doesn’t resonate with me, and I think, I don’t want to be putting up poetry that doesn’t resonate with anyone.
Yet, like with NaNoWriMo, there is something important about just doing it, so today, I’m going to start putting up some of my poetic scribblings.
December 19th
Have we been thinking about the Dean Legacy incorrectly?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 19:24In my previous entry, I asked, “Will any of the campaigns in 2008 or 2012 show the sort of bold courageous leadership necessary to have a campaign that is of, by and for the people?” It reflects the way people seem to be thinking about the question, “what is Dean’s legacy on upcoming campaigns?” Maybe that isn’t the question we need to be asking at all.
Whenever I heard Gov. Dean tell people, “You have the power”, my mind always went to that scene in The Life of Brian, where Brian tells the crowd, “You are all individuals” and everyone responds as if by rote, “We are all individuals”. Too often, I attended Meetups where people talked excitedly about “having the power” and then asking the folks around them what they were supposed to do with that power.
More About Spock
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 15:15Since I wrote my last piece about Spock, I continue to get interesting emails, tweets, and so on about Spock. Three blog posts about Spock that are worth noting are Web 2.0 Experiments, snafus and stumbles, where the author is ‘hoping that Spock ends up in the dead pool’, Dislikeing Spock Even More, where the author compares Spock to Shelfari, and I am not Spock where the author wonders what Spock really has to do with any of the trusts that he has.
One person twitter, I'm surprised they aren't leaving us comments. Well, I sent an email to Maia Bittner a member of the Spock Team that had added a tag to my Spock profile. I pointed her to some of the blog posts and asked why there hadn’t been comments. She said,
We haven't commented (yet) for several reasons. One is that we want to be judged by our actions and not our words. Trust me, we've been paying very close attention to the parts of Spock that users take issue with, and we've been incorporating suggestions from blogs into our development plans.
I cannot emphasize enough to you how dynamic and (hopefully!) evolving Spock is. We try something out that we think is a good idea, and if people don't like it, we change it.
Another reason we haven't commented is that because of how often the structure of the site changes, we can't make any promises.
The Orkut Virus and Scripts
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 10:24Last night, I received five scrapbook entries on Orkut saying, “2008 vem ai... que ele comece mto bem para vc”. I’m not sure what that means, if anything, and it surely isn’t something my five friends would have sent me, especially not all at the same time. So I did a little digging.
It appears as if a script hit Orkut last night. The details are a bit sketchy, but apparently if you bring up the scrapbook page with one of these viral scraps in it, it would send that message to all of your friends and join you to a group, ‘Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut’. Last night, that had 396,849 members. This morning, it is at 690,513 members. The problem is that you cannot unjoin this group.
Google appears to be deleting these scraps as fast as they could and the five scraps were deleted from my scrapbook as well as the one that the virus sent to my wife.
A way to protect against this is to turn off Javascript in its entirety, or to add a tool that partially turn off scripts. I chose the later option, using a Firefox addon called NoScript. It allows you to chose which domains can run scripts and which ones can’t.
