Fat Tuesday

My sleep cycles got pretty seriously messed up over the weekend, but I managed to get up and get things done this morning in time to catch the bus. Thank goodness the cold snap is over; it looks like we'll be above freezing here for the rest of the week, with a slight dip into the twenties early next week before it warms up again in time for March.

The right leg continues to heal slowly. It hurt a little bit this morning, but not enough for me to go for the Tylenol, so I ignored it and the pain eventually went away.

I've started teaching jamestrainor the rudiments of Excel. There's no point to his trying to compete with all the unskilled labor out there when he can go into the (non-violent) family business, and for better wages at that. Last night's instruction didn't go very far since there's only so much you can do without data files, which I didn't have. I'll probably e-mail him some old files from work or something that he can fiddle with.

Tonight, laundry. Unless I decide to veg out with Civicrack instead, which is what ate most of yesterday.

Fat Tuesday

My sleep cycles got pretty seriously messed up over the weekend, but I managed to get up and get things done this morning in time to catch the bus. Thank goodness the cold snap is over; it looks like we'll be above freezing here for the rest of the week, with a slight dip into the twenties early next week before it warms up again in time for March.

The right leg continues to heal slowly. It hurt a little bit this morning, but not enough for me to go for the Tylenol, so I ignored it and the pain eventually went away.

I've started teaching jamestrainor the rudiments of Excel. There's no point to his trying to compete with all the unskilled labor out there when he can go into the (non-violent) family business, and for better wages at that. Last night's instruction didn't go very far since there's only so much you can do without data files, which I didn't have. I'll probably e-mail him some old files from work or something that he can fiddle with.

Tonight, laundry. Unless I decide to veg out with Civicrack instead, which is what ate most of yesterday.

Square pegs in round holes

Jane Galt and her commenters express frustration over an online survey by the Pew Centre that seems bound and determined to shoehorn everyone into a range of predetermined outcomes that don't seem to fit Jane or her commenters very well. None of this really surprises me. The Pew Centre are the same shitheads who successfully astroturfed the campaign finance issue, so the fact that they load the questions and slant the answers is completely unsurprising. The other factor is that there are a lot of people these days who don't fit neatly into anyone's political pigeonholes, and when they respond to typology tests (whether given by Pew or anyone else) they might as well be speaking Serbian.

On a related topic, this is precisely why the popularity of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney confuses a lot of media people. Most people aren't simple single-issue voters. They have a number of issues that they think are important, and they'll evaluate a candidate based on how he speaks to those issues. For a lot of people, national security is the most important issue, and they don't much care what Rudy's stance is on gays, gun control or transvestism is. They see him as totally hardcore on the war issue, so he's their man. By the same token, Romney's Mormonism doesn't repel evangelicals, because they're smart enough to see that on social issues Mormons and Southern Baptists aren't all that different. Unfortunately for the media people, they aren't smart enough to see that, and they're all like, "LOL WUT?" when they see this. So much the worse for them.

Square pegs in round holes

Jane Galt and her commenters express frustration over an online survey by the Pew Centre that seems bound and determined to shoehorn everyone into a range of predetermined outcomes that don't seem to fit Jane or her commenters very well. None of this really surprises me. The Pew Centre are the same shitheads who successfully astroturfed the campaign finance issue, so the fact that they load the questions and slant the answers is completely unsurprising. The other factor is that there are a lot of people these days who don't fit neatly into anyone's political pigeonholes, and when they respond to typology tests (whether given by Pew or anyone else) they might as well be speaking Serbian.

On a related topic, this is precisely why the popularity of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney confuses a lot of media people. Most people aren't simple single-issue voters. They have a number of issues that they think are important, and they'll evaluate a candidate based on how he speaks to those issues. For a lot of people, national security is the most important issue, and they don't much care what Rudy's stance is on gays, gun control or transvestism is. They see him as totally hardcore on the war issue, so he's their man. By the same token, Romney's Mormonism doesn't repel evangelicals, because they're smart enough to see that on social issues Mormons and Southern Baptists aren't all that different. Unfortunately for the media people, they aren't smart enough to see that, and they're all like, "LOL WUT?" when they see this. So much the worse for them.