"I watched every avenue of social media suddenly blow up with messages of abject hatred from thousands of strangers. For the first five days, I couldn't sleep. Every time I would start to doze off, I'd be shocked awake from half-asleep nightmares about everyone I love buying into the mob's bullshit and abandoning me. The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life."
"By calling these people “trolls,” we are basically letting them off the hook. It’s a lot like the “boys will be boys” mentality that helps to keep rape culture thriving, but it’s also different, because boys are expected to be human. By calling these people “trolls,” we relegate them to non-human status, and we make it clear that we don’t expect them to live up to the same behavioral standards as human beings." Continue reading Good reads→
Greg and I are doing part two of our honeymoon this weekend with a visit to Pawleys Island. I’m not sure about the whole “arrogantly shabby” thing, but we’ve never been to a North/South Carolina beach, so it’ll be an adventure. I hope it’s not too cold for swimming.
Who is Osama bin Laden? – Boing Boing – I tend to resist the urge to blame the educational system for things, so some of the comments on this post annoyed me. That said, I hadn't thought about the fact that my own little sister was 2 (count 'em!) when 9/11 occurred. How crazy is that?
“Why do you use Internet Explorer? Do you know that there are other options for browsers?”, I asked.
“No, not really. As far as I’m concerned, when I access the internet, I just need to click on the big blue ‘e’ and do a search. I don’t know why I would use anything else.”
“What does the ‘e’ stand for, Alex?”
“The ‘e’ stands for ‘internet’”, he replied.
Lego Apartment – Look at this awesomeness. Everything folds away; it's pretty slick.
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results – "Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this."
R is for Reliability – "How to handle each type of potential failure is a choice; a choice you may not realize you are making, but a choice nonetheless, and we’ve all made them on all of the projects we’ve worked on, though we’ve probably not thought about it for most of them."
Speaking of 1995, I’ve added an opt-out option for analytics on my about page. No special browser plugin required!
Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post.
Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely play around with a system like Sphinx.
"'Many homosexuals and their sex partners may sincerely believe they can be good parents. But children are not guinea pigs for grand social experiments in redefining marriage, and should not be placed in settings that are unsuitable for raising children,' Dailey noted in the article. He cited a study in the Netherlands that found the average duration of a homosexual relationship to be 18 months and that 'committed' homosexual couples have an average of eight other sexual partners each year."
Gay former service members praise Senate vote on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ – latimes.com – "Carpenter, who comes from a family with a tradition of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, thought that he would make a career in the Marine Corps. But when he fell in love with another Marine pilot, he decided he "couldn't continue living a lie" and left the military as a captain."
"I still believe that it doesn’t make sense for us to provide tax cuts to people like myself who don’t need them when our deficit and debts are growing."
"With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, […] my feelings about this are constantly evolving. […] At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do."
"And that's going to require us cutting programs that don't work, but it also requires us to be honest about paying for the things that we think are important. If we think it’s important to make sure that our veterans are getting care that they need when they come back home from fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq, we can’t just salute and wish them well and have a Veterans Day Parade."
Lymejello – Wow. Speaking of telling difficult stories. Lyme disease is apparently no joke. I remember seeing the photos in middle school health class–a ringed rash, warnings that it could kill untreated, but not that it was so damned debilitating.
My Hopebuilders 5k page – Yeah, I'm a punk. Go donate and push me to run. If I meet my fund-raising goal, I'll run it hard.
Tim Gunn Is A National Treasure – "[W]hen I visit department stores and I go to the shop that’s called “woman,” I am horrified! Horrified by the awful, degrading, disrespectful choices that women have."
