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Do we really need another book about Google? First there was John Battelle's intelligent The Search, then the entertaining if hagiographical The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed, then New York Times reporter's Randall Stross's darker Planet Google, and finally the provocative What Would Google Do? by über-blogger Jeff Jarvis. And now Ken Auletta, New Yorker columnist and the author of ten books, including four national bestsellers, has thrown his big mainstream media hat into the ring with a book entitled Googled: The End of the World As Know It.
So what's new about Auletta's Googled?
Unfortunately, not that much. For the Google literati (if that isn't a contradiction in terms), much of what Auletta covers will be old ground. Googled is mostly made up of that now all-too-familiar story which began on the Stanford University campus when Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page — the multi billionaire Siamese twins mythologized throughout Silicon Valley as "LarryandSergey" — first met in 1995 as computer science graduate students. Auletta then whisks us on the conventional Google magical mystery tour from the original search-engine idea (1996) to the garage start-up (1999) to the first venture capital investment (2001) to the public offering (2004) to ascent to the status of feared media leviathan (post 2005) in thirteen increasingly frenetic chapters.
For that rare reader completely ignorant about Google's remarkable history, the first section (1998-2005), entitled "The Google Story," is by far the most readable part of the book. As a heavyweight journalist, Auletta had access to all the major figures at Google. He writes authoritatively about LarryandSergey, whom he surgically separates and who therefore emerge from Googled as autonomous individuals with separate personalities and agenda. Auletta is original too on the complex and sometimes tense relationship between Page, Brin, and Dr. Eric Schmidt, the former Sun and Novell executive brought in to bring some adult supervision to the start-up. Best of all, however, are the anecdotes about the often surreal unconventionality of Google's corporate culture, especially those that Auletta extracts from traditional media sources like IAC CEO Barry Diller and ex-Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin.
But this strength is also a weakness. For all its anecdotal virtues, Googled remains a conventionally old-media treatment of the new-media story of the early 21st century. While Auletta has clearly done his homework, he remains a stranger to the open-source ethic of this truly groundbreaking Silicon Valley media company. And so his very traditional from-above narrative tries to transform Google into an old-media company, presenting Brin, Page, and Schmidt as quirkier, more contemporary versions of 20th-century Machiavellian media moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Karmazin. For Auletta, who has been the media columnist at The New Yorker since 1992, rather than being the end of the world as he/we know it, Google is presented as a digital version of News Corp, Verizon, or Viacom — a behemoth seeking to monopolize not only the conventional media business but also the telecom and advertising industries.
The biggest problem with Googled, however, is that, as a traditionally published book about the dramatic pace of change in contemporary Silicon Valley, it doesn't really work. The more contemporary Googled gets — the closer we get to today — the more flawed it becomes in its attempts to chronicle real-time history at its most dizzyingly vertiginous. Auletta's post-2005 chapters, aggregated in a section ominously entitled "Google Versus the Bears," are increasingly claustrophobic and reflect the author's lack of distance from his subject. Indeed, in this portion the book is rather like the contemporary Internet — the blogs and always-on real-time networks — with their ever-changing torrent of information.
The author argues that Google is a "brilliant" company, but not necessarily a "wise" one. Ironically, the same could be said for his own work here. There's simultaneously too much and too little in the latter chapters of Googled: an avalanche of data, but a paucity of wisdom.
Such a data-rich approach to contemporary developments in Silicon Valley is, I'm afraid, necessarily problematic. Because things change so quickly in the Valley, the more immediate you try to make your narrative, the more dated it appears. So even though Googled was finished earlier this year, it's already behind the times. For example, Auletta fails to write about Google Wave, the communications initiative that attempts to combine e-mail, instant-messaging and micro-blogging in a single real-time platform. Nor does he cover the development of Google's new Chrome Operating System, a product that represents the company's most serious challenge to Microsoft's twenty year control of the operating system market.
One gets the sense that Auletta is such a quintessential old-media guy that he doesn't really know what he should be looking for in the remarkable Google story. Thus his kitchen-sink strategy of overloading the poor reader with reams of data about Google's latest forays into telecom, media, advertising, and even space travel. For all the data, what's missing is an organizing theme.
That theme exists in the data-overload itself, but, amidst the chaos of detail, Auletta fails to notice it. He quotes the Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi on the most efficient way to graph the future. "If you need four hundred slides to explain it," Vardi's Law states, "it really means you don't have a clue." It would be unfair to say that Googled doesn't have a clue; its problem is that, like a bad mystery novel, it has too many.
So how to explain Google in one clue — in a single Vardian slide?
It would contain one word: EFFICIENCY. As Auletta reminds us, LarryandSergey's managing credo — from the moment the two young digital turks met at Stanford in the Fall of 1995 — has been, and remains, "Question everything." Nothing, absolutely nothing, is sacred for the religiously scientific LarryandSergey — not traditional search technology, nor the traditional advertising industry, nor the world of books. These uncompromising guys are the postindustrial Henry Fords, using digital technology to eliminate all inefficiencies in traditional economies — in media, in education, in telecommunications, in space travel, perhaps even in that poster child of inefficiency, the book publishing industry.
Take, for example, Google's cash cows, its AdWords and AdSense programs. By introducing an autioneering model into online advertising, and by quantifying price by charging advertisers on a per click basis, Google has revolutionized a classically wasteful and inexact industry. Google is, therefore, the paragon of Joseph Schumpeter's law about the destructive hurricane that drives the capitalist market.
Perhaps the reason Auletta misses that single slide is because his book is so inefficient. By covering a lot of material already included in many other books and by focusing on the ephemera of contemporary history, Googled epitomizes many of the problems of the increasingly archaic publishing industry. The medium, as everybody knows by now, is the message; and today, the medium of the book business is trailing way behind the ever-changing message of Silicon Valley's technological revolution.
An unconventional company like Google requires an unconventional informational product, a next-generation "book", if you like. The perfect informational product about Google would be an updatable mash-up of all the information we currently have about the company; it would contain Auletta's access to the powers-that-be, Jeff Jarvis's idealism, John Battelle's wisdom, and Randall Stross's insight — as well as all the books in the future written about Google. Plus, of course, it would contain the interactive commentary of the Google user, without whom there would be no wisdom of the crowd, no online search engine, no SergeyandLarry.
Could such a liquid "book" exist? Yes it could. Google is developing its own book product which will eventually enable readers to customize their own open-source textual products by aggregating "snippets" of information from a universal library of online published books. Ironically, then, it will be Google — via Google Books initiative — which may eventually write the best book about Google. For the moment, however, we have Auletta's Googled, an imperfect introduction to the most perfect revolutionary storm of the early 21st century.
Reviews & Essays
By KEN AULETTA
Do we really need another book about Google? First there was John Battelle's intelligent The Search, then the entertaining if hagiographical The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed, then New York Times reporter's Randall Stross's darker Planet Google, and finally the provocative What Would Google Do? by über-blogger Jeff Jarvis. And now Ken Auletta, New Yorker columnist and the author of ten books, including four national bestsellers, has thrown his big mainstream media hat into the ring with a book entitled Googled: The End of the World As Know It.


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Age range: Birth to 2 months
Developmental skills: Babies can discriminate among patterns after they are 1 week old. To grab the attention of newborns, patterns have to be made of sharply contrasting colors. Black on white makes the boldest design. Expect your baby to study these pictures most carefully between the ages of 6 and 8 weeks, but present them sooner.
1. Glue the photograph to poster board. Cut out picture.
2. Cut a 4 1/2 x 6-inch oval from poster board. Draw a simple face on it with the pen.
3. Cut out a circle of poster board about 5 inches in diameter and draw thick concentric circles with the pen.
4. Cut out a piece of white poster board 5 1/2 x 7 inches. With the pen, draw and color in diagonal lines about 3/4 to 1 inch wide and the same distance apart.
5. Cut a square 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches from poster board and color in a checkerboard design.
6. On the back of each of these pictures, tape a tab made of a little strip of poster board. Bend the tab to allow space for a string to fit through.
7. Thread a piece of string through each tab. Tie or thread pictures onto taut string, elastic, or a wooden dowel across the crib.
Age range: 3-9 weeks
Developmental skills: At this period your baby will express interest in his world if the immediate environment contains some bright objects. The bottoms of the mobile ornaments should be broad and shiny or colorful, since that is the side the baby sees.
1. Tie a length of string onto each end of chain to attach it to the crib.
2. When you fasten the objects to the chain, pair them toward either end so the baby will see them when his head is turned to the side.
3. Punch two small holes in center bottom of a foil tart pan. String yarn through the holes so the pan hangs upside down. The length of yarn depends on the distance between the crib rim and the mattress. You want the objects to dangle about 7 to 9 inches from the baby's eyes.
4. Cut out the bottom circles of two tart pans. Slit each from the edge to the center and punch a small hole farther along the edge of one. Slide the slits into each other. Keep the circles at right angles to each other with bits of tape applied where the circles intersect. Thread yarn through the hole and hang the ornament on the chain.
5. Cut out the bottom circle of another pan. Starting from the edge, cut a spiral. Stretch it out. Make a hole in center. Thread yarn through the hole and tie it to a link on the chain.
*Safety Note: Hang the mobile out of reach after your baby is 8 weeks old. This mobile has some sharp edges and is not meant to be touched or pulled.
Age range: 8-14 months
Developmental skills: Fiddling with these rings gives your baby something to do when she's standing in the crib. Babies like to see objects change in shape. These rings keep altering in appearance when handled. They cluster together sliding inside each other, or spread out in a colorful row.
1. Cut four rings, about 2 to 4 inches wide, from containers of varying diameters. Cover any rough edges with cloth tape.
2. Cover cardboard or plastic rings with contact paper or fabric. If you use fabric, cover the rings with glue and then attach fabric. Cut to size.
3. Thread rings along string and tie the ends to the crib rail near footboard. Or move the dowel to foot of crib and thread rings on the dowel.
Age range: 5 1/2 to 8 months
Developmental skills: With very little effort, babies can launch these cylinders into a forward roll. Babies often prefer a moving toy to a stationary one. The cylinders won't roll far, though, and the desire to handle them again may encourage your baby to inch forward. These roly-polies can also serve as a great turn-taking activity as you roll them back and forth with your child. For additional fun, try stacking the lightweight cylinders. Your baby will delight in knocking down your tower!
1. With sharp knife, cut off the tops of the empty boxes about 1/2 inch from the end.
2. Put lentils in one, nails in another, and small rocks in a third. (The heavy box, full of salt, rolls differently.)
3. Place the tops back in position on boxes.
4. Cut three circles of contact paper big enough to cover the ends of each box and the seams where the cut-off tops meet the bottoms. After slitting the contact paper edge about every 1/2 inch (so that it fits around the box better), adhere it over the top and across the seam of each box. Cover the bottom of the boxes too, if you wish.
5. Either use epoxy to secure the top or place a strip of tape around the seam to make sure the top won't come off. For appearance, add more strips of contact paper or tape around the body of the boxes.
*Safety note: Keep checking to be sure that the glue or tape on the lids is holding.
Age range: 9-12 months
Developmental skills: Pull toys can give your baby support as he learns to use his wobbly legs! Bright colors attract the child to the toy. Pulling it encourages grasping and walking skills. The sounds of the bells encourage listening and help to keep the child's interest.
1. Cover each tube with different colored contact paper.
2. Slip the wider tube over the thin tube.
3. Cut a long piece of string and pull it through the long thin tube.
4. Put the bells on the string so they are inside the long thin tube.
5. Tie the two ends of the string in a knot about 12 inches from the tubes.
6. Tie the rest of the string in knots so it's easy for the child to grasp.
*Safety note: Keep checking to make sure that the bells are safely secured and staying inside the tube.
Age range: 6-12 months
Developmental skills: Children will delight in looking at the colorful contents of these bottles. Crawlers might enjoy pushing the bottles along the floor and watching the contents of the bottle swirl and shine!
1. Rinse out plastic juice containers or soda bottles and remove labels.
2. Add water, food coloring to change the color of the water, and glitter to add sparkle and shine.
3. Spread epoxy on the threads where the lids screw on. Attach the lids as tightly as possible and wipe away excess epoxy.
*Safety note: Keep checking to make sure that the glue on the lids is holding.
Age range: 14-24 months
Developmental skills: Younger children will be motivated to shake these rattles when they discover that they make noise. For older toddlers, the variety of sounds produced when they shake these canisters will give them the incentive to listen closely. Gradually they'll get interested in comparing the different rattles. They may even become aware of the different weights. They'll be developing their ability to notice similarities and differences. Loud and soft or noisy and quiet are words you can use often to teach the concepts they describe.
1. Fill each container with a different item or group of items. For example, you could put a penny in the first container; a button in the second container; unpopped popcorn in the third, etc.
2. Spread epoxy on the threads where the lids screw or snap on. Attach the lids as tightly as possible and wipe away excess epoxy.
*Safety note: Keep checking to make sure that the glue on the lids is holding.
Age range: 14-24 months
Developmental skills: For toddlers, a favorite form of play is fitting one object to another. A child will often show pride when she fits puzzle pieces into their positions, and an adult's praise of the child's accomplishments is reinforcing. A child may also show signs of frustration, such as throwing the pieces aside, if you encourage her to fit them when she is not ready to enjoy such a task.
1. With the mat knife, cut two cardboard rectangles 7 x 13 inches. These will be your puzzles frames.
2. Cut out of one frame a square of 3 1/2 inches on each side and a triangle 3 1/2 inches on each side.
3. Lay the first frame with cutouts on top of your other frame. Trace the shapes through the holes and cut out another square and triangle.
4. Trim 1/8 inch off all sides of your puzzle pieces (so when bound with tape they still fit the holes).
5. Glue (laminate) the two squares together, then the two triangles, and finally, the two puzzle frames.
6. Cover both sides of the puzzle pieces with plain contact paper and cover both sides of frame with patterned contact paper.
7. Bind all edges with cloth tape.
Age range: 24-36 months
Developmental skills: Tube poke provides another fun opportunity for toddlers to fit one object into another. Children will enjoy pushing the tubes through the holes and watching them pop out the other side and fall into the box. While younger toddlers may not put the tubes through the holes, they will enjoy filling up the box with tubes and then reaching in to take them out again.
1. Tape the bottom of the box closed. Cut off the top of the box.
2. Cover the outside of the box with colorful contact paper.
3. Carefully cut four or five holes, the diameter of your tubes, in each side of the box.
4. Place all the rolls in a dish tub.
The information on this Web site is designed for educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for informed medical advice or care. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems or illnesses without consulting your pediatrician or family doctor. Please consult a doctor with any questions or concerns you might have regarding your or your child's condition.
Quick tip for all you parents all out there: My baby never slept well (especially through the night) until I started using the website >>>>SleepBaby .org<<<< - that website has been by far one of the best things I've ever got my hands on to get him to fall asleep quickly. Best time is 45 seconds from awake to asleep! I heard about it through a kindergarten teacher who uses it to put to sleep a group of 30 children. Check it out! Sorry, you can't post links here so you'll have to turn it into a normal link. >>SleepBaby .org<< Best of luck to you and your family! :)

subset: commoncrawl


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Dreams Salon/Nail Technician
Dreams Salon (07856047746) - Nail Technician (07446908139)
A brand new Salon located just five minutes from the busy Belfast city centre. We carry out services such as hairdressing, beauty and nails.
A fresh new friendly salon offering a brand new look. All our staff are professionally trained with at least 8 years experience working with the public. Simply outstanding services at unbeatable prices, you will not hesitate to book your return appointment. Why not pop in and see the girls and have yourself feeling like a new person.
Zel/Akryl, depilacja, henna, przedluzanie paznokci zel/akryl, zaawansowana depilacja bikini, regulacja brwi.
Zapraszam do Salonu lub w domu klientki 07446908139


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Submitted by John Garratt on June 12, 2018
Cohesity has raised $250m in a Series D funding round to help build its global channel reach. The round was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund with participation from strategic investors Cisco Investments and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), along with others.
Cohesity supports data centre and cloud operations with solutions for managing secondary data. Total equity raised by the company now stands at $410m. "We are using the new investment to power large-scale global expansion," the company said.Company CEO Mohit Aron, who was a joint founder of hyperconverged infrastructure firm Nutanix, said: "My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data – backup, test and development, analytics and more. We have built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started."
HPE offers a suite of solutions built with Cohesity's platform. "HPE's expanding relationship with Cohesity stems from our commitment to deliver the best technology solutions to solve our customers' crucial business challenges, whether through organic development or partnership," said Vishal Lall, chief strategy officer at HPE.
Cohesity entered the EMEA market at the end of 2016. Earlier this year, Cohesity appointed Johannes Kunz as senior director of channel sales for EMEA. He was previously VP of channel sales for EMEA at SimpliVity, and had also held various roles at Hitachi Data Systems, NetApp and CA.


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See free & cheap NYC events for tomorrow, Thursday, April 23rd (more added later today) or our top April NYC event picks.
Tag your #NiftyNYC moments on Instagram for a chance to be featured in our next roundup. We can't wait to see NYC events you enjoyed and other things that made you smile.
Today's Events
Wednesday, April 22nd: Neil Young & 'The Monsanto Years'
Wednesday, April 22nd & Thursday, April 23rd: 'Mad Men' at the Movies
Wednesday, April 22nd: Earth Matters Conference—Design, Policy & Social Justice
Wednesday, April 22nd: Free Travel Photography Workshop
Wednesday, April 22nd: Cocktail Classics with High West Whiskey, A Ski-In Gastro-Distillery
Wednesday, April 22nd: Menswear Dog!
Wednesday, April 22nd: Educators Inspiring Sustainability and Justice – An Earth Day Event
Ending Today
See more ongoing & upcoming NYC events
Through Summer 2015: Spencer Finch's 'A Certain Slant of Light' Turns The Morgan Into a Calendar Based on the Movement of the Sun
Through Sunday, November 1st: 'Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye'
Through Saturday, April 25th: 'Faking It: Originals, Copies and Counterfeits' in the Fashion Industry with Garments from Chanel & Yamamoto
Through Thursday, April 30th: 'Avian Aviators' Take Over the Garment District
Through Sunday, June 7th: 'Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation'
Through Sunday,May 3rd: 'SELF: Portraits of Artists in Their Absence'
Through Sunday, May 24th: 'Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic' at Brooklyn Museum
Through Thursday, April 30th: 'Performing Franklin Furnace' & Making the World Safe for Avant-Garde Art
Through Sunday, July 19th: 'Elaborate Embroidery Fabrics for Menswear before 1815'
Through Sunday, July 19th: 'Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand'
Through Sunday, May 24th: New Museum's 2015 Triennial
Through Friday, September 4th: 'Sinatra: An American Icon' with Never-Before-Seen Photos & Rare Recordings
Through Saturday, April 25th: New Voices 2015: The New School for Drama Playwrights Festival
Through Sunday, June 7th: Björk Retrospective at MoMA
Through Sunday, June 7th: 'Life of Cats' Depicts Japan's Love of Felines
Through Sunday, June 14th: Go Behind the Scenes of 'Mad Men' with Costumes, Full-Scale Sets, Talks & Films That Inspired the Show
Through Sunday, August 30th: Giant Spools of Thread Represent 212 Ways to Walk Through Central Park
Through Tuesday, June 30th: See Overlooked Sections of New York Over the Decades in 'Outer Boroughs'
Through Friday, May 1st: $5 Tickets to Nordic Film Fest
Through Sunday, September 13th: 'Hip-Hop Revolution' Photography Exhibition
Through Sunday, July 26th: 'Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette' from Musée de la Mode in Paris
Through Sunday, August 23rd: 'Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks'
Through Saturday, April 25th: Free BritBits Short Play Series Tickets
Through Sunday, April 26th: Tribeca Film Festival 2015
Through Thursday, April 30th: Exclusive Tours with OHNY
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Sculpture of Vishnu Anantasayin at Vijayawada. 21-24 August 1815
Artist: Anonymous
Medium: Pen and ink on paper
Date: 1815
Pen and ink drawing dated 21-24 August 1815, of a colossal sculpture of a reclining Vishnu from Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, taken from an album of 37 drawings (43 folios), including one duplicate, of sculpture at Jajpur, Puri, Bezwada and Sitanagar made during a journey from Bengal through Orissa to the Coromandel Coast, dated 1815. Some drawings are by MacKenzie's draftsmen, J. Newman, J.H. Schencks and Pyari Lal.
Vijayawada, formerly known as Bezwada, was an important centre of the Vishnukundin rulers in the fifth-sixth centuries. The city was taken by the Early Chalukya (later known as Eastern Chalukya) of Badami and became the headquarters of their eastern domains. The strategic position of the town commanding the coastal trading routes of the Bay of Bengal determined its economic importance through the centuries. It is surrounded by picturesque hills with the river Krishna flowing on the south. The remains of Buddhist structures at Vijayawada suggest that there must have been a monastic establishment. When the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang stayed in a monastery in 639 he already noticed the decline of Buddhism. There are five rock-cut cave-temples which were excavated during the Eastern Chalukya period in the 7th century in the hills outside the city centre. The caves have porches with undecorated squat columns and inside have carving of various divinities. In the west part of the city there are other two cave-temples. This drawing depicts a figure of Vishnu Anantasayin; at the end of a cosmic cycle, the god reclines on the 'serpent of eternity' Ananta or Shesha, floating on the cosmic waters; these contain the unmanifest reality from which the new life cicle will begin. Above Vishnu is the god Brahma sitting on a lotus who will execute the process of creation. he is surrounded by other figures. Kneeling behind Vishnu' head is the bird Garuda, the god's vehicle.


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Not long ago on this blog, I wished that the network powers-that-be would create a TV show about real-ish people with real-ish problems who live in real-ish homes, with real-ish jobs that they wore real-ish clothes to.
Unfortunately, somebody did.
Quarterlife is the latest situational drama from Marshall Herskovitz, creator of Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. It originated as a web program via MySpace, and recently made the leap to network TV. While I have never seen the show in its original format, I can only suspect that something was lost in its translation.
The show centers around Dylan, a woman in her mid-twenties who chronicles and commentates on the life of her circle of friends via her blog of the same name. I'll get to that part in a minute.
Dylan is beautiful. But because she has dark brown hair that she never seems to comb, and wears semi-frumpy clothing, we're probably supposed to view her as the sensitive, smart plain-Jane of the group. She works as an Editorial Associate at a women's magazine called Attitude. One day, she suggests an idea for a potential new editorial section of the magazine to her boss, who scoffs it off as a stupid idea, and then predictably pitches it as her own in an all-staff meeting not long after. Dylan is understandably incensed.
I, and I am sure many of you as well have been in similar situations at work. We pitch a great idea and it takes off, but we don't get the credit for it. That is what people in the real-world refer to as "paying your dues." Normally when this happens we complain about it to our friends over a few beers, sulk a bit and then suck it up and move on with things. We don't do is deliver a rambling, passive-aggressive speech in front of all our colleagues where we take credit for the idea in the most inarticulate and pathetic way possible. But that's what Dylan does and her speech reclaiming the idea from her boss while complementing-but-not the woman who claimed credit for it is one of the most horrifying and cringe-inducing scenes in recent scripted television history.
I'm not sure if this effect was intentional on the part of the show, but way to go for painting mid-twenties career women as whiny, simpering, insecure know-it-alls.
As I mentioned earlier, Dylan has some friends. I can't remember any of their names, but they consist of a pretty, yet insecure actress who beds random men in an attempt to self-validate; a nice brown-haired girl who looks a little like Sarah Polley; two guys who recently graduated from film school; and a weird geeky guy who has yet to reveal his actual purpose on the show other than to fill the "wacky guy" prototype.
Of course there's a complicated love rhombus in there too. The film school guys (a meat-heady player and a sensitive artiste respectively) are both in love with the Sarah Polley look-alike. In typical TV-girl fashion, she is torn in her alliances but for now has chosen to play it safe with the meat-heady player. Meanwhile, Dylan broods over her unrequited affections for the sensitive artiste.
As I mentioned earlier, the complexities of these dynamics are documented by Dylan via her blog.
Now this is the part of the show that I take the most issue with. As anyone who has ever taken pixel to screen knows, the first rule of personal, diary-style blogging is to tread lightly when it comes to mentioning the lives of those around you. If your friends wanted the intimate details of their lives broad-casted for the world to see, they'd have their own blogs.
Predictably, Dylan's friends somehow discover her blog and temporary alienation ensues. Now, I will admit to having written some things about friends that I shouldn't have in the past. Even the slightest criticism of a friend can be construed as a passive-aggressive snipe. I've learned my lesson and try to keep my friends out of my blog as much as possible, especially when I am having a problem with one. But nothing I have ever written comes close to Dylan's so-called revelations when she plays armchair psychologist. In assessing the issues plaguing the pretty actress girl, she writes of her tendency to sleep around and then drink too much in order to forget. Ouch.
In reality thems fighting words akin to those slambooks that were all the rage in the 80's--likely to get you punched and then disowned as a friend. Instead the pretty girl just broods over it for a while, admits to Dylan her sexual inadequacies, downs a shot of liquor and overcomes her insecurities by singing at a bar. In other words, Dylan not only gets to be right, her passive aggression is validated.
Um, yeah.
Given the span of time in between the resolution of the writers strike and the arrival of new programming from all your favorite shows, Quarterlife seems likely to drag on for a few more episodes. I'm curious to see if it will get better.
Will Dylan learn from her mistakes at work and with her friends, or will she continue to enlighten us all with her unsolicited opinions?
Will the wacky guy reveal a purpose for himself? 10 bucks says he's in love with Dylan ala Ducky in Pretty in Pink. Or he's gay, ala Steve Zahn in Reality Bites.
Will the Sarah Polley girl stay with the meathead, go with the artiste, or choose herself ala Kelly Taylor in 90210?
Will Dylan comb her hair?
Will the actress girl grow a spine and become more sure in herself, or will the show follow TV history in punishing the slut by giving her terrible disease?
Will I keep on watching this show for its trainwreck appeal? Probably. But like Dylan, I will hate it, and myself, just a little bit more as a result.


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Where To Go Trail Running In Dufferin County Part 1 of 10
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Why am I here in Waldemar you ask? I guess I needed something to do after showing houses in the area.LOL While I was parked on the side of the road, I thought the Grand river was at the highest… Read More ›
Day Tripping Outside Of Dufferin County Part 5 of 50 – Old Baldy Lookout
A few months ago, yes, I'm only getting to this now, I was showing homes in the Beaver Valley, to my clients of mine from Toronto. I haven't been up that way for awhile. So on the 6 hour drive… Read More ›
Food & Water First GPS Tour & Scavenger Hunt in North Dufferin County
The other day I went to the food and water first event that was very well attended in Honeywood and while I was there I saw this booth that was enticing people to try the self guided GPS Tour of… Read More ›


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|Bill Allombert on Thu, 5 Sep 2002 13:52:39 +0200
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|Re: mnemonics
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 12:03:03PM +0200, Karim BELABAS wrote: > On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Karim Belabas wrote: > [answering to myself:] > > * Ilya's mneumonic patch --> fixed a typo (no-xxx didn't work) + commited and > > documented [ cf ploth, log, and the beginning of Chapter 3. ] > > I've committed Ilya's tentative patch for testing purposes. As far as I can > see, it works as documented in the code and the manual. Please check the > manual and see whether this looks satisfactory. > > > I still have 2 major problems, and 2 minor ones: > > 1) no interface to library programming. PARI already has mnemonic flags > corresponding to the GP ones (actually often more general, for internal > purposes): there are a number of #define's scattered in a few header files > (parinf.h is the prominent one), but it would be quite easy to unify > everything (and use enum's). > > In particular, a GP2C interface needs to be designed: we don't want GP2C to > duplicate and maintain privately the data necessary for litterate > translations (from GP mnemonics to PARI mnemonics, as opposed to integer > litterals). I believe we first should try to implement the description system and then decide how we will interface. Maybe we can an optional Mnemo: field and a perl script that output a parimnem.h file and then teach gp2c to understant this field. But first we need to make sure we want mnemonics flags values depend of the calling function. Cheers, Bill.


text: It has occurred to me that perhaps the reason my car's player sometimes displays cover art and sometimes not is because some of my files have PNG covers while others have JPG covers. Is there any freeware out there that can batch process all files and subdirectories to convert PNG to JPG? Or perhaps something with a command-line tool so I can construct a batch file myself?