Category Archives: Asides

Are you shutting down for Earth Hour?

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Earth hour, which takes place on March 29th at 8:00 P.M. your local time, is an event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to raise awareness of the dire ((Hyperbole much? Yes and no. My view of climate change is: if we want to kill ourselves slowly, let’s go ahead and do it.)) threat of climate change.

What do you have to do? Nothing much, just turn your lights off for an hour when 8pm rolls around. I’m planning on hitting my circuit-breaker for a total blackout, but you don’t have to go that far. Want to participate? Head over to the Earth Hour website for more information.

Now this is one of those “make a lot of publicity but not have much of a real effect” events, so not even the organizers would argue that this would save the world, so don’t worry about that part of it.

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Failings of American Education system.

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Many people feel that outsourced jobs are a problem in American; however, it is just a reflection of the failings of the American education system. For several generations, America was a technological leader, and this technology created what are essentially low-leveled white-collar jobs such as telemarketing, informational technology, computer programming, and other support services. While America was the technological leader, these jobs were the source of revenue for the middle class as they moved away from the factory-type jobs. The American education system prepared people to work in these jobs that could not be performed by the most of the world. However, time marched on and the level of technology in the rest of the world caught up. Suddenly, the developing nations were capable of performing the same duties for a much smaller cost.

This is not the first time the American economy has shifted many of its lower-skilled jobs to developing countries.

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I’m running WordPress 2.5, and so far so good.

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There are still some issues, but for the most part, everything seems pretty good.

  1. The automatic upgrading is nice, but it still has a couple kinks in it: it says one or two plugins are at the latest version even though it says they aren’t, it died when upgrading wp-phpmyadmin but not until it deleted it, and it upgraded me to a bum copy of Redirection which wasted two hours of time while I thought that AWP was broken.
  2. I still think the Admin panel is way too washed out. If it stays this way, one of my first tasks will be to release an Admin theme. I think everything has a cartoony feel to it, and it is way too bright. (As well as difficult to see.)
  3. For some odd reason the Gravatars aren’t working even though they were on the test install.There is a reason you should allow at least 24 hours between hitting the save button and hitting the publishing. I just forgot to echo it.
  4. Love the new media library. It alone will be worth the upgrade for some people. It auto generates galleries, and makes uploading and editing several pictures extremely easy.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below the fold.

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