Mormonism and Scientology have been under a lot of scrutiny recently. This scrutiny of Mormonism occurs because of Mitt Romney's religious affiliation and the scrutiny of Scientology occurs because of some high profile Scientologists and the "War on Scientology" being waged by "Anonymous."
The feeling that these two religions are kinda crazy and more or less cults is quite widespread. I tend to argue that any cult, given enough time to mature, will become an "acceptable" religion, but most people believe that there are big differences between the two. I hear many people condemning the crazy belief systems, and who doesn't get a giggle out of Xenu and his Thetans or the Conversion of Dead ancestors to Mormonism?
The real problem that drags these religions one step closer to being a cult than most other modern belief systems, though, is that they try to keep secret what it is that they do believe. Scientologists have a very active legal division to their church that attempts to stop the public dissemination of their core beliefs. Mormons have secret teachings and their Temples are not open to non-Mormons. This air of secrecy makes it easy for outsiders to believe that these religions have something they need to hide and much of the evidence indicates that they do, indeed, have "secret" practices worth hiding.
This secrecy makes it difficult to say with any certainty what the tenets of these respective faiths are and what the intentions of their congregations members might be. This is the exact same reason that the Skull and Bones Society and the Masons get similar bad raps. I don't think this practice of secrecy is likely to change for either of these religions any time soon, but I do suggest that the leaders of these religions give transparency some thought if they want to lose their "cult" status.
You have nothing to fear but your own beliefs!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
LibraryThing Widget
I took a minute and added the LibraryThing Blog Widget that you can use in some different ways, but that I have set up to simply show five random books from my catalog. I guess this is another reason to keep "adult" titles out of my public catalog. The whole setup process was incredibly easy. That's one of the things I love about LibraryThing, they try to make everything as simple as possible.
I tried to do something similar with flickr so that it would show random photos from my collection, but flickr didn't seem to have an easy widget to do that and I couldn't get the slideshow option in Blogger to be limited to only my photos. Oh well, there are only about a billion flickr widgets out there so maybe I'll try doing it with somebody else's java later.
I tried to do something similar with flickr so that it would show random photos from my collection, but flickr didn't seem to have an easy widget to do that and I couldn't get the slideshow option in Blogger to be limited to only my photos. Oh well, there are only about a billion flickr widgets out there so maybe I'll try doing it with somebody else's java later.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Wiki Creation
I set up a wiki, again as part of the Blue 2.0 activities. Right now I don't think I have any need for it, though.
I do already have a wiki I created for Webmaster Section of SLA's IT Division. I've got to say that I prefer the default look of PBwiki to the look of SLA's Confluence wikis by quite a bit. PBwiki is clean and uncluttered while Confluence pushes a lot of options on me that I don't really need and the flow between pages kind of sucks.
In general, wikis are nice when you want many people to be able to edit a single web page. They seem to be quite useful for times when you have an active group of users that all want to contribute to information on a topic or just the general creation of a site. I have seen them used when I think a regular web page is more appropriate. Sometimes people are using wikis just to say they used them, which I think is a little silly.
So PBwiki is probably missing a lot of useful advanced options (why else would there be pay versions available?), but it only seems to be missing stuff that I don't need. Too bad I don't have any use for it right now, hence my wiki's name: Unnecessary Wiki :o(
I do already have a wiki I created for Webmaster Section of SLA's IT Division. I've got to say that I prefer the default look of PBwiki to the look of SLA's Confluence wikis by quite a bit. PBwiki is clean and uncluttered while Confluence pushes a lot of options on me that I don't really need and the flow between pages kind of sucks.
In general, wikis are nice when you want many people to be able to edit a single web page. They seem to be quite useful for times when you have an active group of users that all want to contribute to information on a topic or just the general creation of a site. I have seen them used when I think a regular web page is more appropriate. Sometimes people are using wikis just to say they used them, which I think is a little silly.
So PBwiki is probably missing a lot of useful advanced options (why else would there be pay versions available?), but it only seems to be missing stuff that I don't need. Too bad I don't have any use for it right now, hence my wiki's name: Unnecessary Wiki :o(
Stop Micromanaging my Budget!
Anybody who's reading this probably knows me, and you are probably aware that I run a small corporate library for a Fortune 500 (at least it was last year) company. This means that I have most of the control over almost half a million dollars of company cash. It sounds like a big fat pile of dough, but you might be surprised how little that actually buys.
In any case, I have been left on my own to negotiate 10 and 100 thousand dollar database contracts with vendors like LexisNexis, Elsevier, and Nerac. They even trust me enough (or don't care enough not to) to sign off on increases in those contracts without much additional scrutiny. This all seems pretty good so far, doesn't it? We'll set aside, for the moment, the fact that I've been unable to initiate any new contracts even if I was able to cancel other services that would make up for the cost.
So here is the problem. Just recently, a manager who sits three levels above me decides that we're going to cancel our newspaper subscriptions. This unilateral decision saves our half million dollar library an absolute maximum of $350 a year. Whoop-dee freakin' do! Thanks a bunch for making that call for me. I'm sure that $25 a month will save the company from bankruptcy and restore our budget solvency, despite the fact that it's going to cost me nearly $25 an article if our employees need any of that information.
The second, similar, problem is that the library has needed new computers for a long time. Our two publicly accessible computers are still running Windows NT and one of them has a monitor that needs major gamma correction on a daily basis to even be usable. Is it too much to ask that we spend $500 on a new computer to bring us into this millennium? This is not to mention the staff computers that are in better shape, but are still running Windows 2000 and are definitely starting to show their age.
Hell, I've got stuff that I'd be happy to cut to make up the cost, but I know that every time I've made cuts in the past, all I get are those cuts. I don't get any new spending ability, I don't get any new leeway in purchasing decisions, nobody with any clout even really notices that a cut was ever made.
All in all, it's really no way to run a company.
In any case, I have been left on my own to negotiate 10 and 100 thousand dollar database contracts with vendors like LexisNexis, Elsevier, and Nerac. They even trust me enough (or don't care enough not to) to sign off on increases in those contracts without much additional scrutiny. This all seems pretty good so far, doesn't it? We'll set aside, for the moment, the fact that I've been unable to initiate any new contracts even if I was able to cancel other services that would make up for the cost.
So here is the problem. Just recently, a manager who sits three levels above me decides that we're going to cancel our newspaper subscriptions. This unilateral decision saves our half million dollar library an absolute maximum of $350 a year. Whoop-dee freakin' do! Thanks a bunch for making that call for me. I'm sure that $25 a month will save the company from bankruptcy and restore our budget solvency, despite the fact that it's going to cost me nearly $25 an article if our employees need any of that information.
The second, similar, problem is that the library has needed new computers for a long time. Our two publicly accessible computers are still running Windows NT and one of them has a monitor that needs major gamma correction on a daily basis to even be usable. Is it too much to ask that we spend $500 on a new computer to bring us into this millennium? This is not to mention the staff computers that are in better shape, but are still running Windows 2000 and are definitely starting to show their age.
Hell, I've got stuff that I'd be happy to cut to make up the cost, but I know that every time I've made cuts in the past, all I get are those cuts. I don't get any new spending ability, I don't get any new leeway in purchasing decisions, nobody with any clout even really notices that a cut was ever made.
All in all, it's really no way to run a company.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
RSS Activity
Alright, I have continued along the Blue 2.0 program and was happy to find that I had already basically completed the "Explore a Feed Reader" activity. As soon as I saw Blue 2.0 had a feed I went ahead and added it. I believe that was some time before the first set of activities.
I did use Google Reader (hereafter abbreviated as GR) instead of Bloglines, since that is my reader of choice. I used to use Bloglines, but became a GR convert sometime last year.
I'm going to give a couple of reasons why I prefer GR, in case anyone out there is deciding on which reader to use. Keep in mind that I haven't used Bloglines in several months so it's possible that they've updated their interface and have picked up some of these GR advantages. In any case:
1. Read or Not? - When viewing a feed in GR individual posts are only marked as read once I have scrolled past them. In Bloglines all posts would appear as read as soon as I viewed the first entry.
2. Oldest or Newest First? - In GR I can choose, on a feed by feed basis, to view by oldest or view by newest. So feeds that I don't keep up with on a daily basis I can set so that the new posts appear first. Feeds that I obsessively read every post from can be viewed with the oldest showing up first so that I don't miss a single delicious morsel, and so I don't see posts referring to older posts that I haven't had time to read yet.
3. It's Purty - I think GR looks a little nicer, but they really are quite similar.
4. Other Fun Bits - I don't use most of this stuff very much, but you can view your reading trends, apply tags, and quickly clean out inactive feeds.
I did use Google Reader (hereafter abbreviated as GR) instead of Bloglines, since that is my reader of choice. I used to use Bloglines, but became a GR convert sometime last year.
I'm going to give a couple of reasons why I prefer GR, in case anyone out there is deciding on which reader to use. Keep in mind that I haven't used Bloglines in several months so it's possible that they've updated their interface and have picked up some of these GR advantages. In any case:
1. Read or Not? - When viewing a feed in GR individual posts are only marked as read once I have scrolled past them. In Bloglines all posts would appear as read as soon as I viewed the first entry.
2. Oldest or Newest First? - In GR I can choose, on a feed by feed basis, to view by oldest or view by newest. So feeds that I don't keep up with on a daily basis I can set so that the new posts appear first. Feeds that I obsessively read every post from can be viewed with the oldest showing up first so that I don't miss a single delicious morsel, and so I don't see posts referring to older posts that I haven't had time to read yet.
3. It's Purty - I think GR looks a little nicer, but they really are quite similar.
4. Other Fun Bits - I don't use most of this stuff very much, but you can view your reading trends, apply tags, and quickly clean out inactive feeds.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Typ0s
Alright, so I just added this blog to my feed reader and I took a look to make sure my posts were coming through correctly. It was at this point that I noticed several substantial typos, grammatical errors, and simple proofreading problems in my posts. One sentence from my most recent post had a totally reversed meaning because I accidentally said congressmen dislike voting "for" rather than "against," which was what I actually meant.
This kind of stuff really annoys me in other people's writing so I'm going to attempt to proofread myself a little better. Luckily, almost no one is reading this blog except for me so I'm mostly just annoying myself. Yay!
This kind of stuff really annoys me in other people's writing so I'm going to attempt to proofread myself a little better. Luckily, almost no one is reading this blog except for me so I'm mostly just annoying myself. Yay!
Friday, February 1, 2008
Awesome!
There are just so many things wrong with this light switch (hat tip to skepchick.org, original source: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/01/inappropriate_iconography.php):
Let me count a few of the wrong-ish things:
1. Just the fact that we are displaying a religious icon on a lightswitch in the first place.
2. The obviously inappropriate placement of the switch.
3. The unhappiness (or at least lack of happiness) of the children as they take a weird sidelong glance at the "switch."
4. The inscription on the plate that is somewhat worn, but seems to repeat the bible quote "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." It's just a nice indoctrinating message for prominent placement in what was presumably a child's room. Another good argument in favor of Christianity being a cult.
. . . and I'm sure there's more, but this is plenty for now.
Let me count a few of the wrong-ish things:
1. Just the fact that we are displaying a religious icon on a lightswitch in the first place.
2. The obviously inappropriate placement of the switch.
3. The unhappiness (or at least lack of happiness) of the children as they take a weird sidelong glance at the "switch."
4. The inscription on the plate that is somewhat worn, but seems to repeat the bible quote "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother." It's just a nice indoctrinating message for prominent placement in what was presumably a child's room. Another good argument in favor of Christianity being a cult.
. . . and I'm sure there's more, but this is plenty for now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)