Singularly Uninformed

It's pretty sad when you are paying someone to be your laywer and they don't seem to know your current job title.

Damn You Dell!!!

I never liked that stupid Lollipop song to begin with. Now you have paid to air it 300 times a day -- and that's only the channels I watch. A pox upon you!

If you must use the lollipop metaphor, at least have the decency to use Lil Wayne.

When I was doing tech support for EarthLink I liked Dell. You can sure as hell kiss that goodbye.

It may have been in the past that I would have recommended Dell. But especially now (never mind their pandering to MS) no freaking way in hell. I tell people to go to TigerDirect.com. That's where I spent $400 for a bare bones system -- Suse as my OS was free. I spent my money on components and memory where others spent theirs on Microsuck.

suckahs!

More FaceBook Mayhem

At least this one involves FB only indirectly. Sure, people are always warned not to post things that might incriminate them later, or might cause a potential employer to look askance at certain behaviors.

But in this case, a school demanded a student's login information and then shared otherwise private posts with other teachers. I don't blame the student's family one bit for suing and I hope they win big.

A pdf of the complaint is posted here.

The thing I don't get is how in the hell it is the business of a school district what its students do on their own time? The teacher had no right to ask for such personal information as a student's FB login info. What is the teacher's info? If she has the right to ask it, surely others have the right to demand same of her.

E-books and the Fate of Paper

Here is an interesting blog post that illustrates so well my feelings about e-books. I think I told someone essentially what this post does (but way back in library school when the discussion was really about digital texts in general back in the olden days before everyone and his brother's dog had a Kindle or a Blackberry).

Yeah, yeah, I get that digital is cheap and easily disseminated and manipulated. But IMO it will never take the place of snuggling up with the sort of book that you would want to snuggle up with, drinking a cup of hot chocolate.

Beyond the Sea

I'm the first to admit that younger I was not a fan of Bobby Darin. For one thing he was a generation or so ahead of me. He was born 5 years after my mother. But as I cruised DishNetwork's lineup Saturday I saw a biopic with KEVIN SPACEY as the lead and I watched most, but not all, of it. As an eternal fan of American Beauty, I bit. And was not disappointed.

I totally dug the big band arrangements (yes, total orchestra/stage band geek here, in the 70's I grooved to Led Zep AND Glenn Miller), and Kevin Spacey..how the hell can you go wrong? The script could have been better, but on the whole I thought it was decent. I never really did get "Mack the Knife," even though I know it was from Weill's Threepenny Opera.

When I looked at Bobby Darin's wikipedia entry at first I thought it seemed lame to go toward folk music and assumed that this was purely a marketing decision. But when I heard his "Simple Song of Freedom," I changed my mind. This man was a songwriting genius...as is the case with so many Italians. (I had a huge crush on my flute teacher in high school, Phil Baldino. My fiance, an Italian, is a music loser but his brother teaches piano).

Too bad that he did not have more personal fulfillment. But when I look for music to download, this is an area I will definitely consider in the future.

Thanks to Kevin for giving me one more reason to appreciate his work and vision.