Archive for December, 2010
“pro-choice” or pro-abortion? “progressive” or …?
Posted by Roger Brown in Civics, Uncategorized on December 31, 2010
Just a few thoughts …
When people use a term such as pro-this or pro-that the logical corollary is that those that disagree with them are anti-this or anti-that.
Therefore, if you say you’re “pro-choice”, people that disagree with you are “anti-choice”, right?
It’s an insidiously evil tactic used to silence opposition — to cut off discussion and debate. It distracts people from the true issue at hand.
Allowing a baby to be born is a choice. Those that are “pro-life” are absolutely pro-choice! Every choice is a choice. Making a choice is not the underlying issue. It’s disagreeing over what the right choice is that’s the issue.
And alternatively, “pro-life” can be abused also because the opposite of that is “anti-life” or “pro-death”, right?
Everybody, let’s refuse to use such inaccurate labels and use something that describes the choices like “pro-abortion” and “pro-birth”! Pro-abortion and pro-birth describe the two main camps, right?
Similarly, some people try to silence opposition by saying “oh, they’re not progressive like we are.” “Progressive” is such a misused and abused word. The unspoken corollary is that those who oppose you are regressive. Do not the vast, vast overwhelming majority of people want progress?! Hello, of course they do! The disagreement is over what constitutes progress.
So to label yourself as “progressive” is intellectually lazy; it makes you sound self-righteous too.
The sad thing is that people have been haphazardly tossing around the term “progressive” for decades now without realizing the effects of such sloppy communication. The word has been abused so much that it’s almost meaningless now.
Everybody, let’s stop using the word “progressive” to define one group of people on the political spectrum. Do we not all want progress?
If we want more civility, we absolutely have to throw away the lazy inaccurate self-righteous labels.
Let’s all start today being more accurate in our choice of words!
P.S. check out http://congress.org to contact all of your national, state, and local legislators — a very cool tool!
Peace,
Roger
Customers say the darndest things… :)
Posted by Roger Brown in computers, Internet, Uncategorized on December 31, 2010
A coworker just showed me this post:
http://notalwaysright.com/when-open-source-meets-closed-minds/3305
So yeah, NotAlwaysRight.com — lol, i now have to add it to my list of websites for a good laugh — add it next to Engrish.com
“Daily Action”?
Posted by Roger Brown in Uncategorized on December 24, 2010
forget GoToMyPC, check out Mikogo!
Posted by Roger Brown in computers, Internet on December 24, 2010
Many are familiar with remote desktop viewers that cost money such as GoToMyPC or Team Viewer. But Mikogo is free, even for commercial use.
It rocks, check it out — http://www.mikogo.com/ — it works for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
Yes, you can go peer-to-peer with something like TightVNC but who wants to walk a newbie through configuring their router to port forward TCP port 5900? That’s no fun so that’s when I use Mikogo.
I’ve used it for a few years now and am very, very pleased with it. Only drawback is that it can be slow for someone that is on a little slower connection like the first levels of DSL access.
Other than that, it seriously rocks. One file to download and run; and from a Mac I can control somebody’s Windows computer and vice versa. Very smooth!
“just a second” OR … “just a minute”?
Posted by Roger Brown in Civics, Personal on December 14, 2010
Another thought for the day:
When some people say “just a second” they’re pretty close to being literal. You literally only have to wait for 5 to 10 seconds at the most. Or if it will be longer, they say “just a minute” or “give me 2 minutes” and they’re pretty close.
I appreciate the precision of their communication.
I love accuracy of language. It eases communication and prevents misunderstandings. When you deal with people all day long, believe me, little things like that add up. And true business professionals and relationship counselors and diplomats know that keenly. It is so important to not understate things.
Reminds me of this quote:
Words are a means of communicating, and
faulty signals give wrong impressions. Disorder
and misunderstandings are the results. Words
underlie our whole life and are the tools of our
business, the expressions of our affections, and
the records of our progress. …
It was Paul who said: “Except ye utter by
the tongue words easy to be understood, how
shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall
speak into the air.” (1 Cor 14:9.)
source: Spencer Kimball, 1975
So thank you to all those that communicate with precision, neither overstating nor understating things!
Download files via command line (curl or wget)
Posted by Roger Brown in Internet on December 14, 2010
Sometimes either as a programmer or a setup guy, you just need to download a install package via the command line of your BSD/Linux/Mac account.
Enter the “curl” and the “wget” utilities.
Some hosting providers like Jonesolutions.com prohibit you from running “wget” but they allow “curl” so here’s an example:
curl -O http://domainname/filename.zip
That will download filename.zip and put in in your current folder.
Cool, much faster than wasting time with a web browser!
change is coming in Provo… :)
Posted by Roger Brown in Civics, Provo on December 13, 2010
Hi everybody,
Just want to give a little preliminary heads up…
Some good change is going to be coming to Provo next year.
I’m really excited about it! And so are many of my friends and associates. This is going to be big! I can’t wait.
Look for an announcement here in January!
Merry Christmas every one!!!
Roger Brown
ProvoCitizens.net
There is no such thing as DNS “propagation”!!!
Posted by Roger Brown in Internet, Uncategorized on December 1, 2010
Technical people of the world — please, please, please — stop telling your customers that “you have to wait for DNS propagation” or “propagation time”!
I hear that all the time when someone changes the “name servers” for their domain to point to a new hosting company.
That is misleading — it’s just plain not true. Stop it! You only confuse people in the long run and create more work for yourselves!
Why?
Here’s the definition of the word “propagation”:
: the act or action of propagating: as
a : increase (as of a kind of organism) in numbers
b : the spreading of something (as a belief) abroad or into new regions
Do DNS changes get magically spread around the Internet from network to network to network?
No!
Therefore there is no such thing as “DNS propagation”. That’s a bogus term. It’s “pull” not “push” if you’re familiar with those client-server terms.
You need to take the time to explain what’s really happening. What really happens is so unlike the definition that we have to use different words. Because otherwise you’re confusing people. Words should mean what they mean and not something else that is remotely similar but misleading!
Use the phrase “DNS caching”. It’s only caching based on the record’s TTL! Call it a “cache time” if you wish.
Explain that their network previously looked up the DNS record before they made the change and then their network cached it for the TTL — X amount of seconds. Ask them when was the first time up to X amount of seconds ago that they might have looked at the website or sent an email to it.
Then count X number of seconds forward from that time in order to give them a good estimate of when it will expire from their network’s cache.
When it expires, then any lookups after that time will lookup the updated info. And then it will work from their network!
No more lazy guessing of 24 to 48 to 72 hours!
Capiche?
Good, thanks!