24-IX-2008.
My 2nd best score of all times 285547 on blockout... on zmajček, nobody else plays it on that box.
Not objecting directly, just not expecting it to have the same effect as direct ownership or direct investment. When you own a bit of this and a bit of that and you actually don't know what you own, and you didn't really give any money to the people where you're "investing", you bought their papers of value on open market - you don't know them, they don't know you, and you have about as much electrostatic as financial influence on each other - nearly zero. There are at least two or three layers of middlemen between you (managers, brokers, bankers), each of them having their own interest - and the long term wellbeing of the enterprise is not their primary. They rather want to build their own names, to be known as wizards, to boost the value of their warez, which may as well mean cutting the branch on which they sit (firing the enterprise's knowledge base to cut cost, closing down refin... plants to reduce supply and cost while keeping the demand etc) but effects of which may come years later. IOW, their goal today may coincide with yours - let's make the most out of this investment - but may at any time do something to profit on the demise of the enterprise. You may profit with them, too - but that's not stewardship. The whole point of capitalism being efficient is that the owner is not crazy to cause damage to his property, or allow damage by others. Now with the remote owner, paid managers and ownership mediators, this is no longer true. It's a different capitalism, where the pursue of profit doesn't necessarily mean an automatic increase of overall wealth as a result.
In another thread, Željko was commenting on my rant, dedicated to my black neighbors, about their offer to have our stolen bicycles returned. Yeah, right, and I was supposed to just ask how much would it cost me. His comment was just a link to the yoochoob, with, as I guessed, „Riblja čorba“ and their „Amsterdam“, where the first two lines read „someone stole my bicyclo / for I haven't tied it well with chain“. I just explained, for lurkers, „And as for why "bicyclo" - well, we still haven't decided the gender. I say "bicikl" (male), but I have an uncle a bit more south who says "bicikla" (female), and Bora here sings "biciklo" (neuter). And let's not forget our Hungarians who still often say "bicikli". And... Željko mentions biciklu (accusative case of the female variant), the song has it as neuter, and my bicikl is male. My mother-in-law has one of a fifth kind, though :).“.
Replying to Kristin:
>Bikes that get left outside do sometimes get stolen around here. Things get taken from unlocked cars, too. (The Obama magnet on my car got stolen from a synagogue parking lot a couple of weeks ago, for that matter.)
>
>But none of that is an excuse to blame a whole group of people.
I'm not blaming everybody who's black, just my neighborhood, which is maybe fifty people who may have made a difference, but didn't.
And this wasn't left on the lawn, or in the open. It was behind a tall fence, invisible from the outside, unless you happen to be around when the gate in the fence is open. So this was either someone riding on a tall vehicle, or visiting a neighbor and seeing the bikes from above, or someone who saw inside when we were coming or going. The bikes were not in the open; the gate wasn't locked.
As for blaming a whole group of people, I haven't done that lightly. I know how it feels, as I know you do. It's just that this is the peak of a long line of small things that happen here, like feeding whole slices of bread to seagulls who then can't take that away, as they're too big, so it all falls into our back yards and attracts rats - we caught a dozen last winter but nobody else seems to notice; dog turds on the lawn (I was seriously thinking of hiding a camera and posting a "you and your dog can be on YouTube..." notice), stealing the front license tag off the car (found the second one two weeks later, 30m away). There's garbage too, but can't complain much, saw far worse in the back alley in downtown Richmond. OTOH, the lawns are mowed regularly, and the mowers shred most of it :).
Like Tracy said, it's the attitude. I'm not blaming them for being black, but for buying into this "we're a black ghetto" attitude. Civility and respectfulness (and teaching one's young so) wouldn't diminish anyone's cultural identity.
Unrelated:
When you say "do the math", what do you have in mind?
Set theory? General topology? Functional analysis? Differential geometry? Game theory? Queue theory? Euclidean geometry? Any other geometry? Trigonometry? Complex analysis? Theory of differential equations? Number theory? Boolean algebra? Fuzzy logic? Probability? Galois groups? Field theory? Vector spaces? Tensors? Linear algebra?
Now do the psychology and find the answer.
In CAAR, locking mechanism now looks like this. The editbox is supposed to have a list of selected options, which are just words listed in it, but since they aren't free text, they come from a predefined list of options, this editbox opens a little form with a list of checkboxes... where the simple list becomes a bit more complicated. I got this to work, but it didn't stay like that, had to actually add that list of checkboxes straight into the page, and convert to a comma delimited list only on save (and back on load or refresh).
Yes, complicated, but then needed that for SHET too, if not now then later.
Or... hmmm... perhaps this is not CAAR at all, but its Australian counterpart. They had slots for up to four babies and each had its own set of fields. Agencies suck.
David and Suez are at ASRM, I'd say, and they seem to run into various customers and others. They also mention some guys from Lab who proposed a way to have our demographics flow into their database, to avoid duplicate entries, as both our apps serve the same patients.
During the same meeting we got into a brief tweet - just one sentence each on what we're doing at the moment (me: bug inventory) - which was, IIRC, George's idea. He actually introduced us to twitter at some point this year, and I even went there just to see what it is, and to see if that's the next hot thing after the success of facebook (and the slow death of myspace). I think I spent some ten minutes there, failed to see what's the big deal, never went there again.
Oliver is diving into the DTP area (drugs, tests, procedures) area of documentation. Feds has gotten so big that even writing the documentation may take months.
Mentions: blockout, CAAR, čorba, David Berton, Feds, George Whiteley, Grant Laurel, Kristin Peiser, Lab Intro, Oliver Byford, SHET, Suez Lima, zmajček, Željko Nikolović, in serbian