yaleman.org

We are getting closer to what I have dreamed and written of before – a universal information access device that allows people to learn from wherever and whenever they are. The WikiReader is a portable, low power device which has a full copy of Wikipedia that you can carry with you and access from anywhere.

It was designed by the team that brought the OpenMoko to the world, the first true open source mobile phone. I will be interested to see what happens with the developer’s side of things – hopefully they will allow open access to the software of the device so that it can be hacked and used for other things as well. Maybe this is the cheap ebook reader I have been looking for?

Buy yourself a WikiReader by clicking here and support an incredible project

A truly honest view from an enlightened person on a drug that many think is the root of all evil. Please do not take this as me encouraging its use (as I am not a big fan), but I am fascinated by how he looks at the use of mind-altering drugs.

I think this pretty much explains my views on some drugs:

…there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words…

The idea of R which he introduces late in the piece is an interesting one – and especially for those that do not have experience or knowledge of drugs. The time between taking a dose and experiencing the effects is an important thing which many people fail to understand and which can cause no end of trouble. How many times have you heard of someone taking a dose of a drug and then when they thought it was not working, taking another dose or something else before the first dose hits? How many times was this potentially (or actually) catastrophic?

If this was the first piece of education provided to people at a young age with respect to recreational or mind-altering drugs I would be quite happy. It does not promote drugs, nor does it have the normal religious or societal warnings imposed on it. The next thing I would hope for would be an honest discussion on the physiological affects, but how would we get honest discussion on drugs going in society anyway?

I like that forty years ago one of the most intelligent and inspiring people of the time was hoping for the legality “of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

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The most common way to connect a drive to a network path in Windows is this command:

net use X: \\SERVER\Share

Where:

• X: is the drive letter you wish to map the share to,
• \\SERVER\Share is the UNC path to the share.

Assuming you have permissions to map drives and to access that share, it will map the drive and tell you that it mapped successfully.

If you want quick access and do not want to map a network drive, you can access a UNC Path directly from the Command Prompt using pushd.

For example:

pushd \\SERVER\Share

This will connect to the path automatically for you and make it your current working directory.

When you are finished on the network share enter the popd command. This will return you to the directory you were in before and delete the temporary network drive.

The popd and pushd commands can be used with local directories. If change to a directory with pushd it stores the previous location you were in so that when you issue the popd command you are returned to it. This is similar to bash-stacking in linux where if you open a shell within an existing shell, quitting that will take you back to where you were when you opened it.

“Saratoga Springs school district prohibits kids from biking to school, but a mom and her son defied the law. A state trooper was there to greet them.”

I’m completely and utterly gobsmacked at the nanny-state behaviour that’s happening more and more in today’s society. If a kid wants to ride or walk to school along a designated bike path with their parent supervising them no less, when does is it become the school’s choice to ban them from doing so?

I have to ask how the “State Troopers and an unhappy group of administrators” became involved, other than the fact that they had been pre warned or something else had happened to spark it.

One section of the school policy states: “The Board of Education forbids the riding of bicycles by students to and from Maple Avenue Middle School.” Another section also prohibits riding to elementary schools.

Why would they do this? What is the justification? There is mention that it has something to do with the bicycles being on the property – possibly sparked by parents making it the fault of the school for bikes being stolen in the past.

There’s a reader comment (that seems to have been written by someone with the spelling ability of a bucket of sand) which complains that if a child got injured, the town and school district would be sued.
The concept that a parent would sue the school or the town for a child’s injury caused by a motorist is nothing less than disgusting.

They go on to say that the mother is setting a bad example by teaching their child to break the rules. While I agree that while it’s bad for them to break the rules, being taught to question political decisions and perform peaceful protests isn’t such a bad idea. This is especially true in the face of a generation of children that will likely be buried by their parents because of their terrible nutrition and weight problems, poisoned by the culture that they want so badly.

I hope I’m not one of them – I am trying to cut back on the garbage and get a bit healthier these days. If at all possible my kids will walk or ride to school with me, reinforcing the message that it’s good fun to be outside and getting some road sense.

What do (or will) your children do?

Saratogian via Mother Nature Network

Well, I should have known better than to have trusted all those in the chain that my contract paperwork had to go through in order to go from a temporary employee to the comfort of a permanent role. Of course once I had made the assumption that all would go well, it did not. Instead of attaching my paperwork along with some others, it lay forgotten in the digital wasteland that is an Executive Assistant’s computer and did not reach the appropriate people to get me paid.

Of course, the people that it was destined to reach are a government-run outsourced nightmare of bureaucracy and stupidity so I thought it would be them at first. Alas, they had not received the paperwork so it was most likely to be a fault on our end.

The complete lack of information on who to call and talk to in this place is just mind boggling. I had to ask two different people before I could find the wrong person that just happened to know who the paperwork had gone.

They had to call me back because there was much walking and discussing to happen. I’m sure there’s Tolkien-esque paragraphs I could write about the rage that boiled inside me.  I won’t, I hate Tolkien.

I will say that I was physically twitching and feeling decidedly unwell with rage. And lo, it was solved! I got a call from RR, the wonderfully sweet young lady that is the Executive Assistant to someone incredibly important far up the chain. As the fires of anger raged within my gut, my heart and mind were instantly calmed. I can’t explain it, I couldn’t yell at such a Nice Young Lady. Her sweet voice was the music to the beast within.

As it stands, I got paid enough to pay rent and have splash cash, and I should have the rest by the end of the week. Sigh.