Monthly Archives: July 2008

History of Me, Part III

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[In case you care to look, here are parts I and II.]

In the middle of my 8th grade year, my world was shattered. My parents announced to us that we were moving away from everything I knew and loved in Milwaukee to a tiny little backwoods ‘burg in Ohio. I was devastated. But, considering I had no choice, I decided to try to make the best of it.

Eighth grade was difficult in my new town. To the kids, I talked funny. They called me “Old Milwaukee.” Nice. So for the rest of my 8th grade year, I hardly talked. I’d go to school, do my work, eat lunch alone…basically try to be invisible. Just surviving, in a very pre-adolescent sort of way. You know the feeling, I’m sure. This is my 8th grade picture (no toothy grin – had to hide the braces).

Well, I got through the last 4 months of that year without too many humiliations. The summer got better. I had more friends, and I felt like I might someday belong. I changed my accent – right danged now. I made it my business to talk like all the other kids. Fortunately for me, I was good at the dialect thing, and I blended in pretty easily. Anyway, I was looking forward to my freshman year, which was to be a vast improvement over 8th grade.

Some hairstyles should not be photographed.

When 9th grade rolled around, I was still at the junior high school (that’s how they did it in my district) and a couple of my friends told me I should join the choir. My thoughts were, “Why not? I get to be with my friends more.” I then met a man who forever changed my life.

Michael Jothen was my junior high school choir director. How lucky was I? Under his direction, I realized that this singing thing was what I’d been missing in my life. I wanted to be a singer more than anything else in the world now. What Jothen got out of a bunch of 8th and 9th graders was nothing short of amazing. We sang SATB arrangements; there was a men’s ensemble; we did sacred stuff, madrigals (stock arrangements, not watered down SAB versions), and contemporary things, like Godspell, with a rhythm section. He brought in guest soloists, and featured a bunch of us on solos as well. It was more music than I had ever been exposed to before. I had to be a part of it — and I was, in my high school years, with some interesting (and some nasty) outcomes, as we shall see on the next episode of History of Me….

Fink out.

PSA III

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In order to avoid stepping on someone else’s title (that of “myth busters”), I shall instead call this Public Service Announcement:

Deception Destroyers

(or, It Wasn’t My Intention to Render Your Childhood a Complete Sham)

Deception: Chewing gum stays in your digestive tract for years. Truth is, gum takes longer to digest, but it breaks down like any food substance would in the digestive tract. Besides, if someone was cut open and gum was found, who’s to say how long it had been in there? It would make me wonder how they knew that Uncle Phil chewed gum seven years before he died. Is there a carbon-dating process for Bazooka?

Instead, doctors say that the old husbands’ tale likely started with parents scaring their children into not swallowing it. I don’t worry about the digestion part of it; it’s the ooky factor that gets me. Like…why don’t you tear the eraser off this pencil here and swallow it.

Deception: Eating turkey makes you sleepy. People have long insisted that the tryptophan in turkey meat makes people drowsy. In fact, I believed it, too.

However, according to modern scientists and the medical community, it is likely the size of the holiday meal altogether — and its effects on insulin and the decrease in oxygenation of blood flow to the brain — that makes people want to nap after a huge turkey feast.

And speaking of turkeys…

Deception: The first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony was a brotherly gesture by the Pilgrims to reach out to their neighbors, the “friendly savages” of the Wampanoag tribe. Ha. Sorry, kids. According to Chuck Larsen, who researched and wrote extensively about Thanksgiving because he was an Ojibwa and Iroquois Indian teaching in an American elementary school (and therefore uncomfortable with the whole Thanksgiving charade in the schools), it was the Indians who actually provided much of the food for the feast. And the “peaceful Pilgrim” thing was basically a myth as well, for the Puritans who came over from England were largely religious nuts, political wackjobs and garden-variety hooligans who couldn’t get along in daily society. Many were intent on overthrowing the English government (and actually did). Indeed, against their strange Indian “friends,” they plotted thusly:

“The Indians were comparatively powerful, and therefore dangerous; they were to be courted until the next ships arrived with more Pilgrim colonists and the balance of power shifted.” *

And shift it did. Over the next forty years or so, almost all the Native Americans in New England were either exterminated, banished (many were refugees to Canada), or sold into slavery. Happy Thanksgiving, here’s a musket up your nose. Nice.

But, so I don’t completely dash to the pavement every childhood memory you ever held close to your heart: Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus.

Heh. Fink out.

* “Teaching About Thanksgiving,” Tacoma School District, Washington, 1986. Other source: LiveScience.com.

PSA II

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Bag o’ Web Tricks

(This post is basically for Firefox users on a Windows OS, but the tricks are doable on your Mac as well. I just couldn’t tell you exactly how.)

Everyone browses the web differently. Some like several windows open at once, and some like tabbed browsing, where you have one window open and several smaller windows inside. Others don’t care. As much time as I spend online, my priority has always been ease of access. Fortunately, the Firefox browser allows users to customize to the nth degree — which I have done. I thought I’d highlight some tweaks and time-savers in case anyone’s interested. Below are a few of My Favorite Things about Firefox customization.

(And since several of my friends and family label themselves “web-challenged,” I’ve included pretty pictures, too.)

1. The Bookmarks Toolbar. This is by far my favorite tool, because I have a ton of sites that I visit every day, several times a day, and I absolutely hate the 4-step process of select Bookmarks – bring down the list – fly out the menu – find the site. I want one-click simplicity.

In case you can’t see the Bookmarks Toolbar, here’s how to activate it. Right-click in an empty space on the main navigation toolbar (like next to your “Back” button). Then select “Bookmarks Toolbar.”

Then go to your favorite site, grab the favicon (the little graphic next to the “http”) with your mouse button, and drag it to the empty toolbar until a little rectangle appears beneath your cursor:

Et voilá – one-click access to your favorite site. From then on, you can just drag sites to the Toolbar with impunity. Another tip: Once you have the bookmark on the Toolbar, right-click it, select Properties, and you can rename it to whatever you want. As you can see on this screenshot, I have done that with all of mine.

2. The Navigation Toolbar. You can customize this, too. I like a clean look, with only the buttons that I use most often. (I don’t use the nav buttons for Print, History, Cut, Copy, Paste, Bookmarks, etc.) Just right click on the navigation toolbar and select Customize:

On the window that pops up, start dragging the buttons you don’t want into the open space below (click the image):

And there you go. Those are my two biggies. Firefox also can be customized with Add-ons; I use a lot of those, too. You can get:

  • Themes – I use Blue Ice, because the buttons are big (which helps my horrendously poor eyesight) and it looks super-clean.
  • Extensions – There are a metric ton of them, designed to save you time and increase productivity. There are a bunch at Mozilla, as well as at userscripts.org, after installing the add-on called Greasemonkey. (Geeks will spend hours on that site.)

The best Add-ons, in my opinion and for my purposes, are:

  1. Adblock Plus. It does what the name says. It blocks those stupid Flash ads and other annoying popups. You can customize it to not run on certain sites (for instance, my Boston U. class website uses popups for content). As of today, over 21 million people have downloaded it. You need to get it.
  2. The Google Toolbar. When you research and write as much as I do, this is a godsend.
  3. Handy Xtra Stuff for the Xtra-geeky individual.
  4. PDF Download. I open a truckload of these files on a regular basis (ever been to JSTOR?). This extension lets me decide what I want to do with it before I open it. Very handy.
  5. Go Up. J’ever want to retrace your steps back to a home page when you’re six miles deep into its subdirectories? It usually involves highlighting part of the URL and pressing delete and all that madness. This extension puts a button right next to the location bar, which, when pressed, will take you, step by step, back to the top-level directory of a website. For instance, if you’re here: http://finkweb.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=462&message=4 — pressing the “Up” button takes you here: http://finkweb.org — one level at a time. Nice.

Ok, that’s all for today. But there’s a lot more where this came from…

Finkus outus.

What do you call 6,000 cheaters…

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…at the bottom of the ocean?

Business majors whose careers were ruined before they ever started, because they cheated on the MBA test.

Seems the numbers are getting bigger every couple of days. Business Week posted on its website that the mega-cheating scandal, whereby business school undergrads got advance questions for the MBA qualifying exam through a shady online service, has grown exponentially in the last 5 days. The original number of cheating test-takers was estimated at 1,000. Now it’s 6,000 and climbing.

Although many claim to have been unaware that they were shelling out $30 for what amounted to stolen goods, they still may have to pay the piper. The Graduate Management Admission Council took swift action when it got wind of people posting things on the site like, “Hey, thanks! I saw this exact question on the test I just took!” and similar, uber-intelligent, self-incriminating tidbits of wisdom.

The GMAC filed an injunction and seized the domain name (and, unfortunately for some, all the credit card transactions that will lead them straight to the participants). The site’s owner — who was living in Aurora, Ohio, of all places — hightailed it to China to live life on the lam. As you do.

Now, when you go to Scoretop.com, you see this. Yikes.

If you’ve a mind to, you can read the whole sordid tale.

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Hey, since today’s Independence Day and all….

Some Cool Various & Sundry

  • Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the 4th of July — in the same year. Creepola.
  • We all know the Declaration of Independence was signed by the Second Continental Congress. But what happened to the First Continental Congress? There definitely was one, and they argued on a resolution stating that the Colonies should strive to peacefully work out their differences and come to some kind of agreement with Britain. You know, the Rodney King resolution. It ended up being defeated, but by only one vote.
  • Talk about the heroic ideal. The 56 men who voted for independence (and did so unanimously, which in itself is incredible, given the gravity of their crimes against the Crown) knew one thing well: that if they lost the war with England, they’d all hang as traitors, no questions asked. It was a tremendous gamble.
  • According to the US National Archives, the delegates who signed the document placed their signatures on the paper according to the geographic location of their state (see this copy). Groovy.

So, light a sparkler tonight, in honor of the Second Continental Congress. And rent the movie musical, 1776. It’s awesome, and one of my all-time favorites. I can’t believe I forgot to include it in my Top Ten Musicals list. Feh. I’m a ninny.

Enjoy the fireworks!

Fink out. *kABoOM*

Twitter me this

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Why can’t I do it? I’ve tried several times. At twitter.com, I’ve gotten as far as this:

And that’s as far as I go. Can’t give up the cell phone number. Why is this? Why do I distrust any “free” online service wanting my mobile number?

For those who may not know (or care), Twitter is an insanely popular application whereby you post little personal updates about what you’re doing/thinking/feeling at the moment — and I do mean “little,” as you’re only allowed 140 total characters to say your piece. Anyway, the Twitter folks say that it’s more fun to use on your phone, because you’re not always at your desk when cool/amazing/infuriating/random stuff happens. So they want you to give them your mobile number so you can post directly to your Twitter profile from anywhere.

According to the official Twitter Directory, there are over 2 million users worldwide. That’s a lotta web posts and text messages, friends. And I’m no hand-wringing scaredy-cat when it comes to doing things on the web; it’s just that my cell phone is one of the last bastions of basically spam- and hassle-free communication devices that I own. [Has anyone used their cell number on Twitter and lived to tell the tale? If so, post a comment here.]

Still — I can see how Twitter can become addictive. I only have one person on my “follow” list (meaning the list of people whose Twitter updates I signed on to see), and going back over his posts, it’s quite interesting to look at some random stuff that’s happened in his life. But where does all this lead? Glasshoppa have many questions.

I remember reading a blog several months ago (wish I’d bookmarked it) from a guy in Japan, I think, who suspected that it was only a matter of time before Twitter’s business model was picked up by competitors, and then we’d have this mass glut of posts and text messages on the web from people saying that they saw a guy on the street walking a three-legged dog, or that there is a mad sale on socks at Macy’s, or that you’re sitting in a rehearsal and you hate your director (which never happens, I’m sure). In the big scheme of life, where will this huge archive of snippets fit? If I remember correctly, the guy said that maybe it could serve as a time capsule of sorts; your grandchildren can read about the day in 2008 when the drive-up lane at the bank closed just as it was going to be your turn. Or whatever.

So my point, and I do have one, is that I think an experiment is prudent at this juncture. For the next 12 months, I will post to my Twitter page on a semi-regular basis (though I’m still not sure I will post from my cell phone). I encourage you to “follow” me, if you like. And I’ll do the same with you. And feel free to respond to my “tweets” as well. If nothing else, it will hone your skills at saying what you want to say in 140 characters or less.

On 3 July, 2009, I will post my reactions and any data I’ve collected. Sounds positively twittillating. So do join me in the experiment, if you like.

But you have to get an account first, so stop reading this drivel and get on it, pard.

Fink out.