Tarandon's Blog » Education

2.7 Uploaded

Tarandon — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:16:04 +0000

Well, the 2.7 Install went off without a hitch, except the zip extracted to the wrong directory. easily fixed however, and we’re back on track. To my amazement the plugins all seemed to work. and right now I’m trying out the QuickPress Widget in the corner of the dashboard. I’m immediately frustrated by the lacking option to choose my categories. Save as a draft.
Okay, now in the new editor, which is finally fluid enough to give me a decent typing area. I also like the collapseable sidemenu on the left for added space. I really appreciate all the AJAX effects they seem to incoporated into this release.

For free software this is really slick.

I’ll do some more playing around when time permits.

Cheers,

Hank Green’s got it right!

Tarandon — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:20:13 +0000

I just finished reading Hank Green’s post over at EcoGeek.org where he outlines some of the problems with the 15 year old Kyoto Protocol. I think he’s got it right, so I’m spreading the word!

Cheers!

Tarandon

The fear of being left behind leads everyone to places they don’t want to be

Tarandon — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:22:27 +0000

I just finished reading this post on the BBC website and it really highlighted for me a point I was trying to make with my sister on the weekend. Esentially my premise was, ‘when making a decision, always do whats best for you, and don’t consider what everyone else is doing’. We were talking about the then upcoming federal election in Canada, and who we ought to vote for. I was trying to explain to her that if everyone made their decision based on themselves Democracy would play out the way it was designed and the correct party would be elected into government. She argued that she should choose the local representative from the party whose platform would benefit the country the most.

Michael Blastland’s article re-enforces for me why my sister’s point of view is the wrong one to take. Herd mentality is why the same party gets elected even though nobody want’s it. Here in Canada we have 4-6 parties represented in any given riding. The number of people I talk to who say to me “I’d like to vote for party X but I don’t want party Y to get elected; So I’m voting for party A to make sure they don’t” is astonishing. Everyone votes defensively to try and prevent some party from getting elected and chooses a party they don’t agree with because they think everyone else will. This is the herd mentality at work, and what it ends up doing is electing a government that nobody actually wants, with local representatives most people don’t agree with.

I think the point that Michael leaves out of his article though, is that the herd mentality is psychologically reinforcing. When people like my sister vote for a winning candidate she might not agree with, there is still a sense of gratification in correctly choosing the person who wins. A sense of victory for defeating the candidate she wanted to lose. The shortsightedness of having elected a candidate she didn’t really want in the first place gets lost in the gratification of victory or success. But that’s only half of the reason a herd mentality prevails.

The other half is that when we’re wrong, we can’t be singled out for the mistake. We have handy excuses like “Nobody saw it coming!” to dilute the responsibility of making a bad decision. Being wrong isn’t so bad when everyone else is wrong too. It’s not fear of wrongness that leads people to move with the herd, it’s the fear of feeling isolated that comes from being the only one making the big mistake. Others have noted this of course (seen here) but people continue to be powerless against these social pressures.

In this sense being wrong is only an illusion that appears when a comparision is made between one choice and the choice of everyone else. If the comparison is removed the only evaluation of wrong or right is how the decision impacts the individual, and that’s where my reasoning comes from. The only mechanism I have to ensure my views are represented is to vote for the candidate that best represents them, regardless of the consideration of eveyrone else.

This is why I voted for a party the herd told me I shouldn’t. Because if it comes down to being wrong or supporting a the success of a party that doesn’t represent me, I choose to be wrong.

Cheers,

Tarandon

P.S. My candidate didn’t win

MurderBall

Tarandon — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:21:14 +0000

So we got murdered at basketball Thursday night. 46-15 was the final tally. We brought 6 guys to the game, and the other team brought 11. They showed dominance from the start and my legs just weren’t working. By the half we were down 22-5 so the second half was by far the better of the two. We switched to a zone defense to save our energy and just ran like feinds on the other end of the court. We got destroyed on offensive rebounds and just gave up trying so we could focus on defense.

The referee’s started handicapping the game near the end which just lead to really rough play which doesn’t help anyone.

Next week it looks like a couple co-workers might join us, one of which is six foot six so we should fair a bit better. I just hope we can pull up our ranking a bit over the next 10 weeks.

Cheers,

Tarandon

Pop quiz? Oh no, it was a scheduled ‘Test’…

Tarandon — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:57:58 +0000

So I show up 10 minutes late for class today and the instructor informs me that there is a two hour test today, which is awesome because I didn’t know about it!

Fifteen minutes later I’m finished the test with a score of 95/100 when I notice that our teacher had one of the answers wrong, so it’s really a 97.

I’m now sitting here killing time until 3:00 waiting for everyone else to finish.

This course is such a waste of time.

Cheers!

Fun with Flash

Tarandon — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:59:49 +0000

I just found out a really fun way to expand your flash vocabulary when coding in ActionScript 3.0. If you feel the need, try deleting some of the folders in the en\configuration\ActionScript 3.0\Classes\fl\ folder. This the situation I encountered on the computer I happened to be using in the computer lab. I realized that the only folders available for import were motion and transitions. This was a very interesting exercise. All the operators I’ve been used to using had been removed and I was limited to a much smaller sandbox. To my surprise I was still able to hack together a functional submission for my first assignment. It didn’t come out anywhere close to what I had originally planned but it worked nonetheless. While this normally would have been extremely frustrating I found the added challenge to be welcomed entertainment considering the subject matter of the lecture included how to distinguish between = and == when making statements. OMFG!!!

If you actually decide to do this; make sure of course to back everything up, you could probably just move the folders up a level and then return them when you’re done playing.

Cheers!

Tarandon

The Chuckers

Tarandon — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:10:06 +0000

Just spent an hour or so throwing together a website for our Basketball Team. We’re calling ourselves ‘The Chuckers’ referencing of course the classic Seinfeld episode where George gets called a chucker by his friends. Our games are on Thursday nights, and I’ll be blogging about everything after the game to let you , or anyone else who happens to read this, in on the action. I’ll update in a day or two with the url for the site so you can check it out. Our captain has opted to host it since he’ll be the one doing most of the communicating it makes sense.

Here’s hoping we don’t come in last, fingers crossed!

Tarandon

Continuing Education sucks

Tarandon — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:17:55 +0000

Just got the course outline for the Adobe CS3 for the web continuing education course. Oh my god am I going to be bored for the next 13 Saturdays. It’s almost enough to bring someone to tears. Why set out prerequisites when you’re going to spend the first 3 weeks going over the basics of everything before the course actually starts.

Looks like I’ll have to keep my optimism level at super high, in hopes that I might learn something useful.

Off to my Dreamweaver Intro… sigh.

Flash Advanced

Tarandon — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:12:39 +0000

So releived to find out that the Flash Advanced course I’ve signed up for has finally adopted AS 3.0. Last semester I declined to sign up because it was still AS 2.0 and I was using 3.0 at work. Now the only question that remains is will I learn anything I didn’t already know?

The anticipation is unbearable!