August 11, 2000 – Brian.Carnell.Com

GetOrganizedNow.Com

If you are as disorganized as I am, a site like GetOrganizedNow.Com might be a godsend.

I own about a dozen books about getting organized, but I still read things
on this site that I had not thought of, or read in other books. I have already
started using suggestions from this site to help get more organized. The site
also features a free-biweekly e-mail newsletter which I’ve found really helpful.

And, of course, if you find the site helpful the person who runs it, Maria
Garcia, will be happy to sell you her books or conduct organizing workshops
for your company or group. Actually I am tempted to order the “Finally Organized,
Finally Free” book — if only I could remember where I left my credit card.

Gore: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

In a New York Post story on how Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman are going to reconcile their differences on school vouchers (Al Won’t Be Voucher Grouch), there is a quote which perfectly sums up both Gore and many of the liberals (and conservatives) in Washington, DC:

If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner city school that was failing … I might be for vouchers, too.

    Wow. My next door neighbor is very poor and has to send her children to the local public high school; she’d like to send them to a private school but she can’t afford it. How bad is the public school? Forty percent of students there fail the basic reading and math classes. Most students are reading at far below grade level.

    While the teachers deserve a lot of the blame, many of the parents aren’t much help either. On any given day 1/3rd of the student body is absent. The discipline problems some of these unwanted and unsupervised kids cause is just a mess.

    So, Gore admits, if he were in my neighbor’s position he’d want to be able to send his kid to a private school with vouchers. But he’s not in her shoes. He’s a wealthy liberal who sends his kids to an elite private school, so to hell with people like my neighbor. She’ll just have to teach her kid to read on her own.

    Gore is, in fact, so knee-jerk ideologically opposed to the idea of anybody but people like him sending their kids to private schools that he even told a bald-faced lie about his own schooling. According to the Post:

At one point, Gore waxed nostalgic about a childhood education received inside the walls of Carthage Elementary School [Carthage, Tennessee].

Gore aides later clarified by saying the veep spent part of second grade at a Carthage public school, although his education was otherwise at an exclusive, all-boys private school in Washington, D.C.

    It was okay for Gore’s wealthy, politically-connected father to send him to the best private schools available, just as it is okay for Gore to send his children to the best private schools in the country, but the moment the poor kid down the street wants to go to a private school to get away from his failing public school he becomes part of a right wing, “risky” scheme.

    And this all from the party that claims it speaks for the working poor!

LAPD Corruption Scandal: Up to 30,000 Cases Need to be Reviewed

Los Angeles taxpayers are going to be paying the price for years to come for their city’s tolerance of corrupt cops. After initially suggesting that only a few thousand cases would need to be reviewed, the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office recently admitted that it would have to re-examine upwards of 30,000 cases that the corrupt officers were involved with over the last 5 to 10 years.

Michael Judge, who heads the public defender’s office, told CNN that his office is already employing 20 lawyers at a cost of $4.5 million a year to re-examine cases and it will take “many years” for his staff to go through them. Add to that the wave of civil lawsuits against the city, and the ultimate price tag for the scandal could be staggering.

Of course the very same community victimized by an out of control LAPD will then be expected to turn around and compensate itself, though at one point there was talk of setting aside part of California’s stake in the tobacco settlement to cover some of the costs of the scandal.

Unfortunately this is certainly not the last corruption scandal that will hit L.A. (or other major cities, where cop corruption always flares up every few years). When you have police required to go into communities and treat everyone as suspects thanks to the war on drugs, this sort of widespread corruption is all but inevitable. It’s about time to declared the U.S. a demilitarized zone and cease hostilities in the war on drugs before nobody has any respect left for police.

Source:

Public defender: Up to 30,000 cases need review in light of LAPD scandal. CNN, August 10, 2000.

Mini-MindRover

If you are a robot afficianado, Cognitoy
makes an excellent computer simulation of robotics called MindRover.
MindRover is a game of robots that battle each other or race to cross a finish
line or retrieve some reward, but unlike most computer games where you control
the onscreen action, in MindRover you configure your robot with the right equipment,
then use an intuitive visual system to program its behavior and let it go.

There have been a number of games over the years based on this concept, but
none of them delivered like MindRover does on both the graphics end and the
programming end. Most such games have programming paradigms that are excessively
simple or require you to be a programming wizard — MindRover strikes an excellent
balance between the two extremes with a system that is easy to get understand
out of the box, but can easily be expanded to handle more complex behaviors.

If that sounds interesting, check out the browser-based version of the game,
Mini-Mind Rover.
It requires at leaat IE 4.0 or Netscape 4.5 and gives a real sense of the sort
of tinkering you can do in MindRover.

Robotics Links

When I was in high school many years, as a class project we built a robot from a kit. The robot kits you can buy for under a $100 today put the expensive robot kit we used to shame:

ArsRobotica – portal-style web site for all things robotic. Update — this domain expired and was grabbed up by some lame marketer.
Robot Store – online source for all things robotic.

WIPO=Morons

In a
column on CNet today, Brian Livingstone reports that the World Intellectual
Property Organization is accepting comments on a proposal to disallow domain
names based on geographical areas, personal names, or tradenames. Of course
this is completely illegal, but the WIPO is a United Nations subsidiary — they
did not want to stop genocide in Rwanda, but apparently they want to make sure
I cannot register briancarnell.com.

The WIPO is a symptom of everything that is wrong with how domain name disputes
are handled. First, the ICANN guidelines clearly say domains should be taken
from users only when they are registered or used in “bad faith.” But WIPO and
others have simply decided on their own to take domain names from people if
they are tradenames. For example, it recently took Crew.Com away from a legitimate
small business and gave it to JCrew.

In addition, the ICANN guidelines are set up so that the plaintiff in a domain
disupte case gets to choose the arbitrator. So if somebody decides I should
not have carnell.com, that person gets to decide which arbitrator to use. Most
choose WIPO, and what do you know WIPO returns the favor by favoring the plaintiff
in close to 90 percent of cases. eResolution, which favors plaintiffs only about
half the time, gets far less business. That is a process that needs to be changed
immediately.

On the other hand, the good news is that if WIPO actually approves this, it
would create a ruckus not only from folks like me but from the big guys too.
They would have to get rid of all domain names that are geographical? The Amazon.Com
folks will just love that move.