Don't Back Down

An article in today's Observer (free registration may be required) talks about one solution to violations of a school dress code. The school provides an oversized shirt for the person to wear. This frees the parents from having to go get proper clothes, it puts the violator back in class almost immediately and it has the benefit of adding humor to the situation.

The problem? Those bothered by such obviously humiliating tactics feel that such action on the part of the school can psychologically damage a young mind. Are these people for real?

A dress code exists. Your child decides not to adhere to the dress code. Whether you allow this behavior directly, or indirectly by not challenging the child, you support it. The student goes to school, where someone calls them on it. They have to wear a baggy shirt the rest of the day to cover their violations.

What do you think about such a decision? Should the school just let the student wear whatever they want, in direct violation of the school code? Or perhaps let them sit there until you can get off of work, go home, get some new clothes and take them to the school? Perhaps just suspend the student from school instead and give them a day off? Maybe we should bring back spankings in the school, and let the principal break out the paddle?

I want to hear your ideas. But before you write, take a look at the facts: At two other schools, representatives say that the problem of dress code violations is now nonexistent. So the policy seems to work.

A new release of MT-Notifier is available. There is little to no functional improvement in this version of the plugin. If you already have the plugin installed, you may want to skip this upgrade. At the same time, there are some cool new features, so you may want to pick it up. It should be painless to upgrade MT-Notifier for those who are already using it.

Read "MT-Notifier 1.4.0" »

Today, Denise and I were cutting the nails for the dogs, and noticed something laying in the backyard. Looked about like a bird's nest or something, so we let it lie there for a little bit while we finished. After we finished, we're playing catch with the frisbee - that is to say that we are throwing the frisbee and the dogs are catching it - and we decided we needed to take a look.

Read "The Chicken has Landed" »

I've just finished making the final adjustments to the code for MT-SomeDays version 3.6.0.

This version adds exactly one new feature: The limit attribute. The limit attribute works almost exactly like the lastn attribute on the <MTEntries> container. That is to say, it determines the number of entries that are returned by the container.

Read "MT-SomeDays 3.6.0" »

I tell you, this wish list thing is cool. Just today, I received The Shawshank Redemption (on DVD) delivered to my door (well, to the mailbox), with absolutely no effort on my part. Many thanks go out to Patrick from Nova Scotia, who seems to like MT-Outliner!

Read "I've Got Mail!" »

I've noticed lately that stop signs seem to be malfunctioning. Something in my brain tells me that they used to work much more efficiently. I know it was a long time ago, but didn't it used to be possible for more than one vehicle to enter the intersection at the same time?

For instance, the North and South cars could both cross simultaneously if neither was turning. The same for the East and West. Yet these days it seems as if only one direction goes at any given time. And what's worse is that drivers now seem to have the mentality that their arrival at the line for the intersection is the most important aspect. Taking turns just doesn't happen.

I appreciate that if I'm in a line waiting my turn that it's difficult to do just that. But the stop sign-governed intersection used to be able to handle the round-robin action. Now people are so interested in making sure they don't lose out to someone, they often take their turn well before their direction should be moving.

The same is true for one-lane traffic, specifically if you're talking about a bridge. Or merging. And if you don't, you lose your place to someone who will do so rather than wait. What goes around comes around and all that is nice, but it would be awfully satisfying if it came around a lot faster.

It was bound to happen. Microsoft's Internet Explorer finally just broke. Nothing fancy, no bells, whistles or fireworks. It just died. For some unknown reason, cookies are no longer working. There are a handful that are set, and more are accepted because they keep piling up. But the ones I want to work (Observer login, Bloglines login) don't.

Read "Kicking IE to the Curb" »

For those of you who have been trying to read my site in a Mozilla-based browser, you'll be happy to know that I'll probably be keeping up on the compliance now that I'm using one on a regular basis.

Read "Browser Compliance" »

Due to popular demand, I've added an opmlpath attribute to the MTOutliner tag in MT-Outliner, which allows you to pull in a file from the filesystem rather than through an HTTP request.

While I was in there, I fixed the problem with carriage returns in descriptions (they are simply removed now) and I also fixed the problem with HTML in the item description. HTML will now display as it should, provided the characters are correctly escaped.

Finally, I've added a new tag, MTOutlinerDataSource, that you can use to display the full URL or path to the file being processed. This should help you with troubleshooting your installation by making sure the correct data is being processed.

It's often strange how we perceive the world around us. Most people, I think, would like to believe that they are completely unbiased when they look at most any situation. But it seems that the more I look at it, the more I realize just how one person's perception can be completely subjective.

Today I was driving. Not an unusual condition, by any means. But for whatever reason, the planets have aligned to make this an exceptionally annoying driving day. There is roadwork to be found about everywhere, accidents on many roads, and just a general sense of road rage waiting to happen.

A left turn lane was closed for repairs. I pulled up in the lane next to the left turn lane to wait on the turn arrow. Naturally, this meant that I was blocking a lane of traffic. But I needed to turn. Plus, there were five other cars behind me doing the same thing. So this moron pulls up in the lane next to me making all sorts of hand and head motions, and honking his horn, trying to figure out why we weren't moving. The light changed and we all moved.

I was in the DMV the other day. There are two lines. One is direct, and wraps around the outside of the room. The other is more indirect, and wraps back on itself, so it's roughly twice as long as the direct line. It looks something like this when both lines are full:

rrr
llr
l*r
llr
llr
llr
llr
llr

The asterisk indicates the ending position of the left hand, or inner, line. As you can tell, this is about the same place as the end of the right hand, or outer, line (which was full). Yet a lady came in and stood at the end of the right line. Just after me, in fact. She was relieved to find out she was in the wrong line and got to go stand in the other line. But she didn't actually make her wait any shorter. If anything, it got longer as the inner line moved more slowly as it was for processing lengthier transactions.

I just don't understand how people can miss things that are so obvious. Has it become such an issue that we can't be bothered to assess the entire environment, and not just that which is two feet in front of us?

I ran into a problem with MT-Outliner's handling of OPML files that included both carriage returns and line feeds. Until recently, I had only seen one or the other. So I updated the processing and it seems to have corrected the problem. This specifically was coming from NetNewsWire when there were carriage returns in the descriptions. Please let me know if you're seeing any issues.

The other day we found out that our youngest had the croup. Pretty nasty sounding cough accompanies the croup, but luckily, it didn't seem that there was much damage. Mostly just dried out from the lack of humidity in the winter air. Our heat pump is badly in need of repair or else it might provide the needed humidity, but that's another story for another time.

So we're supposed to get a "humidifier". Hmm. Seems to be lots of choices. Warm mist, cool mist, humidifier, vaporizer. How to choose? How indeed. According to the helpful lady at Wal-Mart, we should get cool mist (ie, a humidifier). From what I can tell, in the beginning there were only vaporizers. But as time wore on, dainty little hands were burnt from the warm mist produced. You and I both know that warm things don't burn. That mist is downright hot. But I digress.

Read "Humidifier or Vaporizer?" »