Category: Uncategorized

I’m an idiot. I neglected to enable commeters to actually, you know, comment. For the time being, posts that have comments turned on should allow anyone to post. However, if you aren’t registered with TypeKey, your comments are moderated, which means they won’t show up until I approve them. Sorry, but spammers are everywhere. If I get hit with a spammer, I may go to requiring a password from TypeKey, but I hope that doesn’t happen.

Proving once again that Barton Watson and his ilk are not representative of the West Michigan work ethic, soon-to-be-former employees at CyberNET spent their Thanksgiving weekend salvaging Roadlink USA’s computer system. For their efforts, Roadlink will give them contracts for employment.

Congratulations to the soon-to-be-former CyberNET employees. And thanks to Roadlink USA. A bright spot here and there for these people is more than welcome.

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In the interest of full disclosure, I do not like the Beatles. Commence the hate now.

Done? Cool, because the Guardian today unleashed its writer on every huge act from James Brown to Bob Marley to, yep, the Beatles.

There’s sure to be something in this article that makes you nod with approval and then curse in disgust. Brilliant stuff.

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Amongst the clamour of people trying to associate themselves with the Van Andel family now that Jay has shuffled off this mortal coil, TV 8 managed to get inside a warehouse with a pile of goodies that Barton Watson kept for himself, apparently on the company dime.

The list of vehicles includes a Bentley, a Ferrari, a BMW, and… a Ford Focus??? I’m wondering if someone got wise to Watson and decided to help themselves to something, just nothing that would blip too hard on anyone’s radar.

Link to story (Link to previous entry, 2)

I’ve been using Avast as my primary anti-virus application for a number of years now with great results. However, in the last couple of months, Avast has upgraded the application (a common occurance), but broken something. My system is slower and, when I had the Network scanner turned on, noticably lowered my connection speed.

So, I’ve gone looking for a new, free, AV program, trying things out before I shell out for McAfee or Trend Micro (screw you Symantec and you’re resource-hogging applications). First up, AVG.

God cut from Dark Materials film

The director and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is to remove references to God and the church in the movie.

…

“You have to recognise that it is a challenge in the climate of Bush’s America,”

Uh, right. And the same result wouldn’t have come about if Kerry were President. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Making a movie of this series of books (I want those hours of my life back, Pullman!) would be difficult under any circumstances, and the administration in the White House would be pretty low on the list of issues. First, despite Mr. Pullman’s statements to the contrary, this series of books is a stinging attack on the Church. Mr. Pullman obviously has some issues with the Church, and wrote about it. He’s not unique in that, and I hardly think he deserves to be held up as The Neo-oppressed.

The books themselves trade heavily in Church mysticism and elements of Gaia-based religions. Guess which one is always right and ends up solving the problems in the book? Making this movie is difficult because the themes are huge (religion as a war), the characters are complex to visualize (lots of CG) and the size of the audience is inversely related to how faithful you are to the story.

So, cheers to the BBC for biting on the beginning of what is sure to be a years-long PR campaign to make “His Dark Materials” a watered-down blockbuster version of what were mediocre books.

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The main argument from religious circles to prevent stem-call research is that you have to kill an embryo in order to harvest the stem cells. Apparently, the Catholic Church has defined a point at which the death of an embryo is actually the death of a whole person.

William Hurlbut, “an earnest young member of the [President’s Council on Bioethics] conservative wing”, has come up with a novel, if not creepy solution: harvest the cells before they become an embryo.

As Hurlbut puts it in his presentation paper, “Incompletely constituted or severed from the whole, subsystems with partial trajectories of development may temporarily proceed forward with a certain biological momentum.” In other words, the parts of an embryo—or the parts that normally would become an embryo—might produce stem cells, even if, to avoid the moral problem, we kept these parts incomplete or severed.

Basically, he wants to turn off a gene that tells the cells “you become an embryo”. The cells continue to develop, eventually producing the desired stem cells, but never become a defined organism. Of course, not just stem cells form. Other things, called “organ primordia” also form. That’s limb and organ “primordia”, “a ball of tissue, grown inside some poor creature, full of bits and pieces of what would have been a body.” Definitely high on the shiver scale.

I think it’s a brilliant solution, if it works. I have little confidence that it will ever be a long-term, widely-used technique. While conservatives have a high tolerance for activities that aren’t covered by their beliefs, they also have squeamish stomachs. All it will take is someone posting picture of “organ primordia” on a high-profile religious website and opinions will turn in a hurry.

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Krista Watson, formerly Krista Kotlarz, of Rockford, and also wife of the late Barton Watson, is under investigation for running the Ponzi scheme known as CyberNET (or Cyberco). She may not be charged for months, but you can bet that, when they find her, she’ll get the punishment due to Barton.

Wow, someone from Rockford who thought they deserved everything. There’s a shocker.

Link (Previous entry)

Someone posted this to the HATT Yahoo group today; Nvu, an open-source WYSIWYG HTML editor with an integrated CSS editor. Since I (currently) work for a draconion tech company staffed by Luddites, I will have to check this out at home.

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