Author: Brian Carnell

Switching Ads

Slashdot is making fun of an apparent Microsoft “switch” ad. Okay, the ad they link to is stupid, but the worst ad I have seen in a long time is the Apple Switch ad with the cop who explains that he went from a Wintel machine to a Mac because he couldn’t figure out which cable he needed to buy to transfer video from his digital camcorder to his PC. Yeah, I know, it took me like 3 minutes to get the attention of the salesperson at BestBuy to find out where the FireWire cables were. I think I’ll go out and spend a few thousand dollars on a Mac now to avoid such inconveniences in the future.

That is as lame as the Microsoft feature where the obviously fake person claims that the best thing about MS Office is how, “Toolbars and menus customize themselves to the way I work.” That “feature” is the single worst thing about Office. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t simply go in and turn that annoying bug off (I have had numerous colleagues thank me for showing how to turn off this lame “feature.”)

Senator Can’t Update Web Sites 60 Days Prior to Election

According to this Washington Post story, the Senate has rules in place which forbid senators up for re-election from updating their Senate.Gov web sites within 60 days of an election. So senators who are up for re-election on Nov. 5 have been unable to update their web sites since Sept. 5.

As Brad Fitch, deputy director of the Congressional Management Foundation, tells the Post,

If 9/11 had happened during a campaign year, the New York senators would not have been able to update their Web sites to tell their constituents how to contribute to relief programs.

This time around it prevents them from updating their web sites to describe their position on the recently passed resolution dealing with Iraq.

The limit essentially took the 60-day limit during which no mass mailings are allowed and applied it to the web sites in order to prevent incumbent senators from using their government web sites for campaigning. But as the article notes, senators who use their government web sites to campaign could be punished through existing Senate ethics procedures.

It just seems dumb to prevent constituents from reading press releases on developing legislation and issues from their Senator because it happens to be October 14 rather than August 14.

Source:

Senators Stymied by Web Restrictions. Jim Geraghty, Washington Post, October 14, 2002.

PETA Protesters Pelted

PETA’s Sean Gifford and an unidentified person in a cow suit showed up at Aberdeen Grammar School to make their case against milk to students. Instead two police ended up having to rescue the protesters from the students.

As many as 100 students surrounded the duo and began throwing cartons of milk at the PETA protesters. Gifford told The Daily Record,

I have been all over the UK with this protest and I have never seen anything like this before. It must be something to do with children in Aberdeen. I think they just got a bit over-excited but I’m sure they will still go home and think about our message.

But 16-year-old Alan Smith responded that,

This is a stupid idea. We should be encouraged to drink milk. I certainly won’t stop drinking milk just because a man has dressed up as a cow outside my school.

Source:

We’re Udder Attack. Charlie Gall, The Daily Record (UK), October 12, 2002.

PETA Screens Slaughter for Restaurant Patrons

Representatives of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals showed up at Greenshields Brewery and Pub in Raleigh, North Carolina, and screened an hour-long video of an animal slaughter for restaurant patrons on a big-screen television.

According to PETA’s Bill Rivas, “Most people really need to know that if they are eating meats in any way, they are supporting this type of industry, and people actually appreciate us showing this video to them.”

WRAL.Com added that “PETA officials said they consider showing the video a vegetarian campaign, saying if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”

Which is an odd claim, because even when the United States was a largely agrarian nation where large numbers of people would have had more first hand experience with the slaughter of animals, there was hardly any move toward vegetarianism. In fact, the reality is just the opposite — it is precisely because many people have never seen an animal slaughtered that the video is shocking.

Source:

PETA Targets Lunchtime Patrons In Raleigh. WRAL.Com, October 9, 2002.

PCRM: School Lunches are 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has launched an ad campaign directed at the US Department of Agriculture accusing it of using “Weapons of Mass Destruction” against American children via the school lunch program. According to PCRM’s ad,

It doesn’t take an arms inspector to spot one of the biggest dangers facing kids today: School lunches are loaded with saturated fat and cholesterol. The reason? The U.S. Department of Agriculture props up sagging farm profits by buying pork, beef, and other products and dumping them into school lunches and other government programs. In September, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman announced that she’d buy another $30 million of pork products and push it on kids in school lunches. Last year’s total was 420 million pounds of surplus meat. Does anyone really think America’s out-of-shape kids need more pork chops?

The ad will run the week of Oct. 14-18 (which is National School Lunch Week apparently) in the political newspaper The Hill.

PCRM also plans to ask the USDA this week to require schools to provide soymilk and other dairy alternatives in the federal school lunch program.

Sources:

School Lunches Labeled “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Provocative New Ad Pork-Barrel Politics Is Ruining Children’s Health, Say Doctors. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Press Release, October 7, 2002.

Weapons of Mass Destruction. Advertisement, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, October 2002.

Topical RSS Feeds

Seth Dillingham sent me an e-mail the other day that reminded me I had started but never finished a project to create RSS feeds for pretty much every topical page on this site. Well, now I can cross that off of my to do list.

Almost all of the topical pages now have their own RSS feed. The little orange “XML” graphic on the right provides a link to the particular RSS feed and there is also a link tag embedded in the header information for all pages that have their own RSS feed.

For example, if you really want to read the next thing I write about Zimbabwe, simply visit the Zimbabwe page and copy and paste the XML channel location into whatever RSS newsreader you’re using.

Is it overkill to have 150 RSS feeds for a personal weblog? Probably, but Conversant makes it so easy to set up that there wasn’t much point in not doing it.