Fiat Lux

Thinking about mashups this morning, I had an idea for one that I don't think has been done yet.

It would be a three-way mashup of Google Maps, job listings, AND information from local mass transit so that you could pinpoint all jobs in your area that are accessible by public transportation.

In other words, it would help you find a job that you didn't have to drive to.

Perhaps this has already been done -- I need to get to work, or I'd look right now. But if it hasn't, then you read it here first!

Our friend Dragoncaller needs your help finding a home for a puppy.

Isn't he cute?

The full story is here. The pup is in Hartford, CT, and as far as I know they would prefer someone within driving distance for the placement.

So if you can help, or know someone who can help this boy find a forever home, click through and let Dragoncaller know.

Per KCBS:

For nine students camped at the University of San Francisco, Monday's march for immigrant rights was the kickoff of a week long fast to show solidarity for a struggle that is very personal for them.

Sophomore Max Orozso’s father came from Mexico, and the young man calls himself privileged to be receiving a college education.

“We're camping out here in the middle of the school. Most of us sleep in this large tent we have here,” Orozso told KCBS reporter Margie Shafer.

Senior Maria Vivanco’s parents also immigrated from Mexico.

“Only one percent of this world's population has a college education. It is a privilege to have a higher education,” Vivanco said. “So we as Chicanos, we said, OK, we have a responsibility, so we need to act.”

Students from the school’s nursing program make regular rounds at the camp, checking the protesters’ vital signs.

That's about all I've got right now. I'm in the run-up to end of classes & finals.

Been a rough week and next week won't be much easier. A nap sounds really nice.

I'm here, just running quiet due to the last week of classes & a ton of stuff due.

This is the least bloggy I've been in quite some time. Only one final to go and the semester is over, but nothing's really inspiring me to blog.

Yes, I know, there's a lot going on, but since KGO this morning told me that 66% of the country seems to think that collecting information about every phone call you've made since 9/11 is perfectly OK, complaining about it seems rather pointless.

The plot thickens...

The U.S. prosecutor in the CIA leak case has told a court he plans to use as evidence a newspaper article with notes that he says were hand-written by Vice President Dick Cheney referring to Valerie Plame shortly before she was exposed as a CIA operative.

My guess: we will soon be told that Cheney's health is worsening, which is why he's been photographed nodding off in meetings recently. He will step down "for health reasons" and then when he is put on trial we'll be told that the medications he's been taking have messed with his memory and he can't remember anything having to do with l'affaire Plame.

Best line of the day:

"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system."

Hat tip, Discourse.net.

Love you, Mom!

It would be funny if it weren't so sad .... but actually, the bit about California was just funny, period.

I so, SO hope he runs again in 2008. Gore / Obama? Mmmmm.....

Although anyone who knows me (or reads this blog) will tell you that I am not shy about my opinions, I do try not to leap to conclusions about people's motivations. Given the choice between calling something "evil" or "stupid" I'll gravitate to "stupid" until there is good reason to move to "evil".

That said, this "Vox Day" person is either supremely unaware of the subtext in this passage (and therefore deeply stupid), or he's one sick, evil fuck. In this case, I'm leaning towards the latter.

[President Bush] will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

This is exactly the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that Orcinus regularly reports on. No wonder WorldNetDaily is publishing it. (And no, I am not giving them a free link. If you must, AmericaBlog has the link.)

I took my Finance final tonight. The Spring semester is officially over!

I should be back to a more normal blogging schedule shortly. I know I've missed a lot of topics I wanted to post about but just didn't have time or energy. Some topics I'll just have to let slide, but others will be forthcoming.

It's difficult to begin expressing my outrage that our Federal government has issued a new set of guidelines that basically assumes that a woman is nothing more than a walking uterus for more than half of her life.

I took the trouble of reading through not just the WaPo article, but also the actual guidelines. They're infuriating on a lot of levels. For example, take this nice lapse in logic. Even though the report makes a point of stating that: "The risk and the burden of disease is unequally distributed, and a small number of women experience the majority of the pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality (emphasis added)", the guidelines also state that "the target population for preconception health promotion is women, from menarche to menopause, who are capable of having children". So -- which is it? Target at-risk women (which would not be a bad idea, by the way, if it actually included a real plan for those women to get free or low-cost health care, something most of them lack due to the fucked-up health care system in this country) or just assume everyone with a uterus has no clue on how to take care of herself and therefore needs to be told how to stay healthy for the sake of her future children.

Menarch, by the way, occurs around age 12 or 13. So according to these guideline, a 14-year old girl should (among other things):

1) Take folic acid supplements
2) Have a "reproductive life plan"
3) Avoid all hazardous chemicals, lead-based paints, alcohol, caffeine, Accutane, anti-epileptic drugs (tough luck, you female epileptics!), and cat feces
4) Consider herself to be in a state of "preconception" at all times and act accordingly

What's particularly infuriating is not the actual health guidelines. They're standard stuff, really -- excercise, eat right, avoid smoking, etc -- but what pisses me off is that the report believes that the reason women should be enouraged to do these things is not for themselves, but because they MIGHT get pregnant one day and if they did, how terrible it would be for the child if they were not in a perfect state of readiness.

"Why is this such a big deal?" you might ask. "Most women have kids sooner or later, all this is doing is trying to raise awareness about how to do it right." That's true, most women do have kids sooner or later. But why are men almost completely invisible in this equation? To read the report, you'd think that women just wake up one morning and magically find themselves pregnant. It does take two to tango, last I checked. And yet, as Echinde so aptly put it:

Men are never asked to consider themselves as the potential purveyors of healthy goldfish for women's aquaria. Even though medical evidence shows that sperm quality can be affected by workplace exposure to toxins and by smoking and drinking.

And a second pet peeve of mine also gets raised here. This plays perfectly into not only the sexist presumption that women are no more than fragile walking uteruses, but it also ties into the whole Culture of Fear. "Ohmygod! I had a sip of caffeinated coffee! My Baby! Will! Not! Be! Perfect!!!!1!!1!"

Here's a tip, folks: If it were that easy to screw up gestation, the human race would never have gotten this far. Yes, not every baby is perfect. Bad things can happen. But you can do everything perfectly, and still have a problem, and you can do a ton of stuff wrong, and end up with a healthy baby.

But that's a secondary issue next to the larger one, which is (not surprisingly) completely absent from the report. Birth control. You'd think that amidst all this great advice about how to be a perfect incubator, the CDC might say something about educating women on proper uses of contraception, so that those unplanned pregnancies they're so worried about might instead be planned ones, right? Nope. The only mention of contraception happens in the section devoted to "high risk" behaviors, such as the consumption of alcohol and drugs. Brilliant.

I could rant on some more, but this is long and disjointed enough for one night.

On a lighter note, I tried the bit about "Honey, the CDC says I shouldn't be cleaning the cat's litter box becasuse I'm in a state of preconception," on Scott tonight. It didn't work.

Finals are over, all papers and projects have been completed. Only five more classes stand between me and my MBA. Yay!

To celebrate completing my 3rd semester of school, I'm using the gift certificate my sister kindly got me for my birthday and having a Day of Beauty at a really nice SF spa. Four treatments plus lunch. It's been years since I was at a spa, I'm looking forward to it.

After that, I'll be heading off to the school's official graduation party. It will be fun, but also a little sad. Quite a few of my closest friends in the program are graduting this semester, and I'll miss them. Some will be staying nearby, so staying in touch won't be that hard, but others are heading back to their home countries, and that's not quite so easy.

Tonight, though, is about having fun and celebrating what we've achieved. I'll be sad tomorrow.

Now that the spring semester is over, my thoughts are turning to my summer plans. I'm taking 2 classes this summer, one of which is a 'study tour' -- two weeks in Barcelona, to be spent with a professor from chool and 10 other classmates, visiting Spanish businesses and learning more about doing business in Europe. I'm excited; this will be my first vist to Spain.

After a lot of struggle and shopping arund, I even managed to get a decent fare to Europe. This, though, got my spirits down a bit.

Rough Summer Is on the Way for Air Travel

Planes are expected to be packed fuller than at anytime since World War II, when the airlines helped transport troops. Fares are rising. Service frills are disappearing.

[snip]

With airlines generally not expanding and traffic rising, is "fully loaded" the new normal in a business that for decades flew planes at 60 to 70 percent capacity? The ability to compare fares easily on the Internet has driven down ticket costs but also helped airlines to sell the very last seat.

[snip]

"The thing that's starting to bother travelers more than anything else is the comfort factor, not the fare factor," said Kevin Maguire, the in-house travel manager for Applied Materials, a technology company based in Santa Clara, Calif. "The airlines, federal government, general public need to sit down collectively and find a way to get the transportation system back in order," he said. "I've never seen it this bad."

Oh joy.

I've done what I can to try to ensure a comfortable trip. I cashed in all my built-up AA miles and am flying First class SFO - NYC (woohoo!). Then I switch to Air France for the international leg. That flight will be in the cattle car section, though. SeatGuru says Air France has been reconfiguring some of their planes, but whether that's for the better or worse is unknown.

This trip will also mark the longest time Scott and I will have spent apart in more than a decade. I hope it's not too lonely without him.

Tonight was the second class meeting for my Social Entrepreneurship course. We had four guest speakers from the Digital Vision Program over at Stanford come by to talk to us -- three were program fellows and the 4th was a staff member.

We got to hear about each person's project and plans, how they arrived at their decisions to start social ventures, and the challenges they were facing. It was fascinating. And the thing that struck me the most was how optimistic they all were. You have to have a pretty high degree of self-confidence in order to commit to doing a startup, but this was a different kind of optimism -- these people felt that they could not only start a successful venture, but also that what they were doing would make a real difference in the world's problems. By the end of class, the room had a distinct buzz as people swapped business cards, ideas, and networking plans.

I left class feeling really great, and am hoping that the rest of the course will be as inspiring and informative as tonight was.

Ezra's got a blog post about the pros / cons of blogging anonymously or under a pseudonym. It's an issue that comes up periodically.

It did get me thinking, though -- it's easy to talk about blogging's potential downsides. What are some of the positive things that have come out of having a blog?

Everyone's answer will be different, I think. For me, it's definitely helped my writing -- I've always been a decent writer, but I'm a faster one now, more confident in my 'voice' and hopefully a bit more polished.

For a lot of reasons, Scott and I haven't been to the movies in a long time. Last night, though, we finally got over to the theater in downtown San Mateo to catch X-Men: The Last Stand (don't worry, no spoilers to follow).

It was OK. Not as bad as I'd been lead to expect from the reviews, but not OMG awesome either. Some of the 'continuity' issues bothered me more than others. I'm fine with the fact that some changes need to be made to turn a comic book into a movie. But others just didn't make sense. Argh. I really don't want to give spoilers, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

On the bright side, Kelsey Grammer turned out to be a hoot as the Beast. And what's not to like about Hugh Jackman and Halle Berre?

As a bit of a bonus, there was also a tiny "DaVinci Code" protest going on outside the theater. Four people and two signs, plus a couple of bored-looking cops to make sure nothing got out of hand.

Nice juxtaposition of the US flag in there. *Sigh* I guess some people just don't understand the concept of movies being fictional entertainment.

Sorry for the blurry shot. We spotted this sweet white calico wandering around in the courtyard of our building this afternoon; apparently she's been hanging out there for at least a day, if not more. She was clean and very social, and was wearing an obviously homemade beaded collar, but no ID tag. We fed her and then brought her down the the local shelter, where we discovered she was not microchipped. She's at the Peninsula SPCA for a 4-day stray hold, and we're hoping her owners will find her there.

Even if her family doesn't find her, I'm quite sure she'll get adpoted, because she's young, cute, and social. But her original family may never see her again, and some poor kid, who made this kitty's collar, is going to wonder where kitty went and never know for sure what happened to her.

PUT ID ON YOUR PETS DAMNIT PEOPLE!

Apparently the new music meme is to post your iTunes list of "most played" rather than a randomized list or the list of things you consider your favorites. So here's what my home PC thinks are my most-played tunes:

1) Let's Get It Started - Black Eyed Peas
2) Where Is the Love? - Black Eyed Peas & Justin Timberlake
3) Pavement Cracks - Annie Lennox
4) Desperado - Eagles
5) In the Shadows - The Rasmus
6) Shape of My Heart - Backstreet Boys
7) Get Up Stand Up - Bob Marley
8) Banu Hoshch Legaresh - Subliminal
9) Vertigo - U2
10) Peaceful Easy Feeling - Eagles
11) Sky Blue - Peter Gabriel
12) If I Had a Hammer - Peter, Paul & Mary
13) Send Your Love (Dave Aude Remix) - Sting
14) The Journey Home - Bombay Dreams (London Cast)
15) Chimes of Freedom (live) - Bruce Springsteen

I'm a bit embarrassed by having not one, but two, Justin Timberlake appearences on the list. As for the rest, I'm not really surprised by the rest of the artists (although what The Rasmus is doing there I'm not sure). I'd have though different tracks would be on the list, though.

Philip Kaplan, who ran the controversial Web site FuckedCompany.com during the dot-com bust, has stepped aside as CEO of a small, profitless start-up he founded in 2004.

Kaplan, 30, told CNET News.com on Wednesday that he made the decision to turn AdBrite, which sells online advertising, over to "professional management." While he said he wasn't forced out, he acknowledged that his board of directors didn't try to dissuade him from stepping down.

Karma? Only a little bit. AdBrite's not fucked -- it is still in business, even if he's not running the show anymore. And given Pud's habit of serial entrepreneurship, I suspect there will be other ventures in his future.