mccain argues that flip-flops are an example of a political leader who can’t be trusted — so he might as well drop out of the race.

read the rest of this story (alternet.org)

“if you’re going to pick some kind of sudden sickness to fake your way out of a court appearance don’t choose a heart attack because once they check your vitals it’s a tough one to stick with”:

just a quick note to warn everyone… if you are thinking of going to see the strangers, don’t bother wasting your time or money.

if you want to see it, wait until it comes out on dvd and then go rent it for a buck or two. it’s way too drawn out, and the ending is completely retarded — there should have been more.

totally not worth the $31 or so i spent for us to go see it ($20 for the tickets, plus cokes and popcorn).

the toronto star tells the story of chris avenir, a first-year student facing academic expulsion “for helping run an online chemistry study group via facebook“.

“so we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: ‘does anyone get how to do this one? i didn’t get it right and i don’t know what i’m doing wrong.’ exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the dungeon.”

as an educator, i think ryerson university is taking this way too far (based on what i know). if there was blatant cheating going on, then by all means punish those involved. if this is, as the article says, the students were simply using the forum to “brainstorm” in groups then it is completely absurd.

i *encourage* my students to work together in groups. working together in groups in something that higher education should teach you. every one of these students will have to work together in teams once they get out into the “real world” and will have to collaborate with their peers. it should also be common knowledge that having multiple people in your group who can provide their own insights is an asset, and makes the team greater than the sum of its parts.

again, blatant academic dishonesty should be punished. from what i’ve read, however, that is not the case here.

best of luck to you, chris avenir.

from “5 reasons to be very afraid of john mccain”:

i think i’ve mentioned before that i manage a blackberry enterprise server at work. in the nearly two years we’ve been using it, it’s been running on the free vmware server. we first purchased vmware infrastructure last summer and moving the bes v.m. over to esx has never really been a huge priority.

a few days ago, it was decided that we’d go ahead and move it over. a co-worker handles most of the vmware management but i volunteered to take care of this for a few different reasons (which aren’t really relevant).

so this morning, at 2am, i start working to import the bes v.m. off of the vmware server and onto esx. i spent an hour and a half having nothing but problems. i eventually figured out a way to make it work and, as i write this, it’s at 87% completion.

in order to get the import to work, i had to:

• use vmware converter starter edition (not enterprise edition),
• import directly to a specific esx server (as opposed to a cluster), and
• use the credentials for my local account on the esx server (not the credentials i use to access the virtualcenter server — which is tied into active directory).

isn’t that fuckin’ retarded?

it just finished successfully, so it’s time to fire up the “new” v.m. and see how it went. *crosses fingers*

in december, i ordered a shiny new apple macbook for work. i went for the 13″ 2.2 ghz model (small size is important to me) and wanted to outfit it a little better than it comes stock. specifically, i wanted the 250gb hard drive and some additional ram.

i don’t remember the exact price at this moment, but to upgrade the macbook from the standard 1gb of ram to 4gb was going to add over $700 to the cost. since i was also about to place a huge order for pc ram (for work), i checked the pricing from our preferred ram vendor, silicon mountain memory. for 4gb of ram for the macbook, the standard price was right about $130. because of the huge order of ram that i was placing, i actually got it for just over $100 (bulk discounts ftw!).

to have ordered the same thing from apple would have been a huge waste of money.

note: i’m not affiliated with silicon mountain memory other than as a happy customer.

this squid on a sportbike gets exactly what he deserves.

first, he doesn’t appear to be anywhere near “qualified” to be attempting something like this. second, and more importantly, pay attention to all the safety gear he’s wearing. i guess i should commend him for at least wearing a helmet.

i should mention that i ride bikes. i’m not always the safest person when i’m on one (in particular, i don’t always wear my safety equipment), even after two accidents — neither of which was my fault.

but this guy, geez, i wonder if he was trying to nominate himself for a darwin award.

just a heads up, don’t link to businessweek.

according to the terms of use on businessweek’s web site, you may not:

use or attempt to use any “deep-link”, “scraper”, “robot”, “bot”, “spider”, “data mining”, “computer code” or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of bw.com, any data or content found on or accessed through bw.com, or any other bw.com information without prior express written consent of bw;

i guess that means it’s also against their terms of use to subscribe to their rss feed as well.

i suppose that launching firefox and entering the url to businessweek would constitute a “manual process” which, therefore, means that even reading their web site is now a violation!