Picture of the day: Best Twitter Bot Ever
Via John Myles White.
Can you spare a dollar?
Yesterday there was a news story about a man who committed a bank robbery for only one dollar.
In North Carolina, on the morning of June 9th, James Verone walked into a bank and handed the teller a note that read, “This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar.” Once given his meagre loot, he said, “I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police.”
And why would he do this? In the hopes of receiving health care in prison. Mr. Verone has some serious health problems, no insurance, and is unable to work. Having exhausted his savings, he decided this was his best option, calmly put his affairs in order and went for a walk to a bank.
It’s one of those stories that gives me the impulse to smugly sit here around the other side of the planet, shake my head and think, “Only in America.” But there are disenfranchised and desperate people in any society.
Last year I was going into the city a few evenings a month for various user group meetings and the like. I was surprised by often being approached by homeless or street people asking for any spare change.
In the past, I’d tended to give these people short shrift and keep walking, but a friend of mine turned me around on this one evening when he was approached by a man who was asking for some money so he would have a safe place to sleep that night. He talked with the man for a little bit, gave him the few dollars he had in his pocket and wished him luck.
I gave what is probably the usual reaction. “Hey, you don’t know why he really wants that. He’s probably gonna go drink it or shoot up or something.” His response realigned my thinking. He said that here was somebody in front of him who was in such desperation that he would approach strangers in the street, asking for help. Had swallowed their pride and needed to beg. The very absolute least you can do is take them at face value and give them a few bucks. Shrugging he concluded, “Never miss an opportunity to practice compassion.”
Some rights reserved by looseends
Mr. Verone’s heist reminded me of another story I heard not so long ago. In the early 1900’s the Mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia had a habit of showing up at a municipal court and presiding as judge. An opportunity that not many Mayors availed themselves of.
The story goes that this particular night during the Great Depression, and old woman was being charged for stealing a loaf of bread. She told the mayor that she did it because her two grandchildren were starving. The shopkeeper refused to drop the charges, wanting her as an example because it was a “real bad neighbourhood.”
His hands tied, LaGuardia charged the woman a fine of ten dollars. As he was pronouncing this judgement though, he took off his hat, threw in ten dollars, and announced this he was remitting the fine. Not only that, but he fined everyone in the courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.
The hat was passed to the bailiff, who used it to collect the fines from seventy odd people in the courtroom that evening: petty criminals, traffic offenders, a few lawyers, and one narked shopkeeper. The bewildered grandmother was handed the collection and sent home to her family.
“Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion.”
I hope public opinion is warm for Mr. Verone.
A Slice of π
In honour of today (March 14) being Pi Day, a musical interpretation of Pi to 31 decimal places by Michael John Blake:
And if you think you can do better, head over to http://pi.highsign.de/ and make your own composition!
Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is of course the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, and is also the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. Ever so versatile, the number π is used in all kinds of maths. Geometry and trigonometry obviously, but also calculus, physics, statistical probability and even chaos theory.
Celebrated in song and poem, there was even a movie called Pi about a number theorist who tried to understand the entire world through numbers and ended up drilling a hole in his head (an impulse I’ve often shared during my career working with computers.)
(Click image for a larger version.)
So do something today in celebration of the wonder of π. For Aussies, a meat pie for lunch would be fitting. You could order a pizza (sometimes called a pie), set your desktop wallpaper to the image above, read up about Pi on wikipedia, try and memorise the digits of π (the world record is 42,195 digits), or just run around in a circle like we do most days.
My Life With Pets — Cats, Birds and Bibs
One of our cats has a bib-like cloth attached to his collar these days to stop
him catching birds. It is suppose to interfere with his stalking and so far
it's worked.The other cats in the neighbourhood do point at him and laugh and call him a kitteh [sic], but he’s reaped his own reward as far as I’m concerned as he kept bringing birds home and hiding them in the house…
Anyway, just now a nice old man knocked on my door because he saw Kismet with this thing on his collar and was concerned it was something stuck in his collar and might be choking him.
I explained what it was and assured the man that if anybody was going to have the pleasure of throttling that bloody cat it would be me and not some inanimate piece of cloth.
¿Qué?
I’ll never forget the time my brother-in-law was telling me about the movie, Like Water for Chocolate. In trying to sound worldly and hip, he enthused, “I love French films!”
If you’ve ever really used Google in anger, you’ve no doubt come across search hits in a foreign language, and been offered a link to read a translated version. Google Translate is a wonderful service, but they recently added even more awesome with the ability to translate Latin!
Now we can all sound like pretentious scholars. I’m hoping the next addition will be either Pig Latin or Tok Pisin.
My Life With Pets — Tag Teamed
If Pavlov used a Labrador I think his experiments are void.
Well the cats are still at it. Last night Michelle was dishing up dinner and turned her back for a second and one of the cats nipped up onto the bench and tried to take off with a chicken drumstick.
It turned out to be a bit too heavy and while trying to dodge various objects being thrown at him he dropped it onto the floor, where of course Toby instantly vacuumed it up. (Toby is actually very well behaved – we’ve left food out on the coffee table and he knows not to touch it – but once it hits the floor it’s his domain.)
For the non-dog owners out there, cooked chicken bones are generally not very
good for dogs. They can splinter and cause problems, so when you see your dog
gobble down a drumstick you react with some urgency.I immediately stuck my hand down his throat to try and retrieve the drumstick – which has left me with a very nice imprint of one of his molars on the side of my finger and taught the children a few new expressions they’re not allowed to repeat.
Thus, with one hand covered in slimy dog spit, and the other holding on to his collar, I took the last action left to me and hoicked up on his collar so he couldn’t swallow. We danced that way for a little bit until he finally dropped the bone.
At this point all pets were encouraged into the laundry either by the scruff of their necks or pure inertia and locked away until after dinner.
It was actually quite nice to eat a meal without having furry eyes watching your every move for a change.
My Life With Pets — Labrador Retriever (noun): A Stomach On Four Legs
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
— Groucho Marx
We have a three year old Labrador named Tobius or “Toby” for short. He was supposedly the runt of the litter, but turned out to be a big black doofus with an attention span about as wide as the space between his eyeballs.
He is not especially good at playing fetch. He'll be running along after the
ball and something will divert his attention --- one sharp left later he's off
rolling in God knows what and you're the one fetching the ball. About the only
time he's any good at fetch is if we play it in the house, up and down the
hallway.So of course, Toby swallowed a ball a few weeks ago. It was one of those small rubber super-balls that I’m continuously telling my daughter not to play with or the dog will eat it which, sure enough, is what happened. She was bouncing it up and down the hall, there was a flash of black and a scream of, “No Toby!” and the ball was breakfast.
The advice from the vet was to wait and see, and to check his poop for the next few days to see if the ball appears (a task that was delegated to my daughter for obvious reasons – that and because it was her fault he ate the ball in the first place). If it didn’t turn up in a few days or he showed signs of distress then call them back.
Luckily he threw up the ball sometime during the second night as we found it in the laundry the next morning. None of the animals have been inclined to play with it for some reason.
Coda
Being the first dog I’ve ever had, he has certainly been a learning experience for me. The general failure with the whole fetch thing for one. Toby has had surgery twice on his left eye to laser out a growth, so perhaps his vision isn’t all it could be and he has trouble tracking the ball. He’s certainly not always the most visually observant.
At the start of June I had my head shaved for a good cause. Shaggy hair and beard completely gone, run over twice with a straight razor, the whole nine yards. After which we went bowling — but I digress. When we got home, with the excitement of everyone arriving and pats and such he just didn’t notice, but a while later, after I have been sitting at the computer for 20 minutes or so then got up and turned around he totally freaked. He jumped up and barked, “Who the hell are YOU?!” His nose and eyes were telling him two different things.
Fortunately he calmed down quickly once I gave him a cuddle and distracted him with a cat to chase.
My Life With Pets — Bedtime Blitz
“A cat by any other name is still a scheming little fur ball that craps behind the couch.”
— Unknown
The two new cats we’ve got are incorrigible. Despite our best efforts to date they will still go on the kitchen benches whenever they can get away with it. Every other cat we’ve had we’ve been able to train to stay off the benches, but not these two.
They will also steal any food that is left unattended for even twenty seconds. The little buggers have gotten into meat that was left out to defrost (in the sink with a heavy glass breadboard over the top to keep them away, mind you) and even steal bread left out on the bench.
They will literally try to steal food off the kids plates while they are eating their dinners if adults are not around.
Ever since Michelle and I got our first cat the day after we got back from our honeymoon, we’ve maintained the habit that the animals get shut in the laundry at bed time and let out again in the morning. They’ve got baskets, water and other amenities to make it comfy. They soon get use to it and it becomes part of the routine. These days, with two cats (Kismet and Bazyl) and a hulking black Labrador (Toby), it’s the only way to get a peaceful nights sleep without something four legged tearing over you in the middle of the night.
Kismet, however, has gotten into the habit, when it comes that time of night to
put them into the laundry, to sneak under the table and only be lured out by
food --- which grates because if I give in a put some food down I feel like I'm
rewarding him for being a sneaky prick. And he is sneaky too, because he can be
fast asleep in my daughter's room, but will hear me let Toby out the backyard
for his pre-bedtime ablutions. So while doing this I see him slink out of her
room and under the table were I can't get him.Then last night absolutely tore it. I’d done the trick of looking like I was getting food out of and panty, and when he runs into the laundry I’m was empty handed one too many times, and he wasn’t buying it, even when I actually put food down. I would chase him out from under the dining table, and he would run up the other end of the house and hide under the couch. I would chase him out from under there and he would move on to the next bit of cover, ducking and weaving commando style until he makes it back to the dining table, and around we’d go again. The very last thing you want late at night before heading to bed is to be playing a game of tiggy with a damn cat.
Let’s just say that as 12:30 last night the house was neat and by 12:40 half of the furniture had been upended so the cat couldn’t get under it, the little bugger had finally been cornered behind my bed, carried by the scruff of the neck and given a lesson in aerodynamics as he was jettisoned into the laundry.
Since that night, we’ve come to a certain understanding. I invested in a water pistol, you see, and so now it usually takes no more than two circuits around the house before he declares defeat and slinks damply into the laundry, while the other pets try not to giggle too conspicuously.
The cats’ continued and brazen brattishness led me to research these electric fence type things where they wear a collar that gives them a jolt if they get too close to the proximity sensor. This would be ideal to set put the sensor in the kitchen to just keep them out of there, but there are two problems:
It appears to cost in the order of $600 or more to get the equipment for two cats. This seems hideously overpriced. I guess they’ve gotta make sure the equipment is safe and wont kill the animal (although that’s not a deal-breaker at this point), but still overpriced.
None of them come with a remote where I can trigger the jolt on demand. I know this can be abused, but would be damn useful in encouraging them out from under furniture and as stress relief. I would call it, “the joy buzzer”.
Ah well. For now, the war of attrition will continue unabated.
USB in a Box
I’m happy to say the number of gadgets I own has been growing a bit unmanageable in the last few years, in particular the number that need USB either for power, communications or both. The downside is the number of cables and other debris that gets strewn around my desk. So I made a USB box to tidy it all up:
Internally it has two powered USB hubs, one of which is connected to the computer, the other is just for use as a power supply (for the GPS and battery charger, which don’t need to talk to the computer).
The seven port USB hub, with five in the front and two in the back, is hot glued into the front of the container for each ad hoc USB access.
Keyboard, mouse and backup drive are all direct into the computer as the motherboard has plenty of ports.
Will you be one of the 7% that reads this rant?
A couple of days ago, a couple of friends put the following on their status on Facebook:
People need to understand that children with special needs are not sick. They are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. This week is for special needs education. 93% percent of the people will not copy and paste this. Will you be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?
Now raising awareness and understanding is a fine thing, and I know and love the kids my friends were thinking of when they cut and pasted this message. Today’s topic is not the important subject of children with special needs, the above just happens to be the latest example of what I do want to talk about, which is how not to win people to your cause.
I’ll admit I’m fairly cynical of mouse-click activisim, avatar activism or any no-commitment, no-effort -isms. I think Lyz Lenz summed it up best when she tweeted, “I am pretty sure no matter what I put in my Facebook status, I won’t cure cancer, help Haiti or raise awareness for anything, except my Facebook status.”
But that’s just me (and Lyz). I’d rather you use your own words for something important to you, but if you want to cut and paste a status message concerning a cause you have some skin in, then go for it.
The bit that really raises my ire is the, “Will you be part of the seven percent that will and will you leave it on your wall for at least an hour?” How many emails, tweets or what-have-you have you seen that try to stick it to you with the “most people will just ignore this, will you?” line? How many of those have you sent? It reminds me of the old, “If you forward this email, Bill Gates will personally send you a new mobile phone” email that did the rounds years ago, and hundreds of others.
For one thing, 80% of statistics are made up, so “seven percent” is fiction – but more importantly: I don’t like being manipulated. Guilt trips and pressure tactics are about the surest way of not getting my cooperation, no matter what cause you represent or what you’re trying to sell. I grew up going to both Baptist and Pentecostal churches, so I know how to be a critical thinker and I know when I’m being manipulated.
You want to really get people to buy in to a cause, then appeal to their intellect and move them with your passion. Share your stories of how it effects your life, and give them enough information to understand, to agree (or not), and to know how to participate (or not). Leave the manipulative tactics to the politicians. If your cause is true then you don’t need ’em. A guilt trip is a short journey that ends at about the same place it started. Commitment carries you much further.
This week is for special needs education awareness. Many people don’t understand that children with special needs are not sick. That they are not searching for a cure, just acceptance. I know and love some children that have special needs and am frustrated by how some people view them. How about you?
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