I received a Continuing Studies catalogue from SFU the other day. I glanced through it and was dumbstruck by an advertisement on page 35.
SFU Advertisement
Seriously? Did anyone even look at the picture before putting it in the ad? Are they trying to ensure that no women join their programs? Why would they choose a picture of a women who looks uncertain, or slightly confused? Why put two men laughing, looking in her direction? Two Caucasian men – one of who (to me at least) seems to be laughing at someone else’s expense? They were even so good at choosing images that it looks like the man in the white shirt’s hand is the hand in front of the lady presenting. It’s almost as though someone actually put some thought and effort into this train wreck.
Could anyone look at this image combination and say “Hey – good stuff! SFU students have fun and have interactive classes.” Obviously someone at SFU did …
I’ve emailed the Continuing Studies program and the alumni association – as an alumni myself, I find this unacceptable.
Imagine if you will a Thanksgiving that kept on giving for weeks after the day’s events wound down. I’m not talking about leftover turkey either – I’m talking some serious giving …. or is that more likely spelled ‘givin’?
Thanksgiving, around 1 hour before our big family dinner, the power went out. Over the next 3 hours the power went out two more times. Now, we managed the dinner just fine with a little “gravy on the BBQ” action. But my server? Ah, it did not do so well. Sure, the surge protector did its job and protected my precious from the surges, but it couldn’t help the silly hard drive and its silly reading head from somehow crashing into a platter. What’s it all mean, you ask? Unbootable hard disk, and immediate disaster recovery.
But that was weeks ago, you say! True, true. It has taken me this long to finally piece back together the various aspects of my blog and image gallery. I did manage to pull back all the data from the toasted hard disk, as you can probably tell (it’s all here, right?). The real bottleneck has been those crazy things in real life that take up my time. Two in particular: Marley and Cohen.
So expect a few picture albums going up by Alisa very soon. Look for a few updates from the blog, all that good stuff. It looks to be back to business as usual. I still have a large degree of work to do to get things back to where they were before the crash, but I’m working through it in priority sequence, as it were.
So forgive me for going dark for almost a month. I know you’ve all been going through withdrawal and all that. So let’s get back to business here, shall we? Let’s start with a new theme – this one looks like it will do!
So back in early fall I was looking for a nice surprise gift for Alisa’s graduation. I knew she wanted a subscription to Us Magazine, so I made a quick little joke about her being able to rot her highly educated brain now that she had graduated. I made a mistake though, I subscribed using an online magazine vendor: MagazineCity. I shopped around a little and found 3 online sites that offered Us, and chose it because it was cheapest, and had no negative reviews that I could fine.
Well hello Google, come index this page, because this is one heck of a negative review!
I was told to expect a delay of 5-6 weeks after paying them before seeing the first issue. There was administrative stuff I knew, and I was sure they were bulk subscribing to Us itself to get the lower rate and so had to wait until Us got its gears in motion.
In early January (5 weeks in) I decided to throw a quick question to their customer service contact just to make sure things were on track. I received an automated email back stating that because I was an international customer and it was a weekly magazine, I should expect a longer wait time as Us was slower in their international deliveries. About 6-8 weeks.
Ouch I thought, 2 months after paying them I could expect my first issue? Maybe saving money wasn’t such a good idea here, though the subscription cost was about half what Us itself wanted. So I decided to see what would happen. I did receive an actual human response to my inquiry a few weeks later (!) stating that my subscription had been submitted very soon after I placed the order, and that I simply had to wait. The customer service rep (Heather) said that if we didn’t see anything by the end of March that I should give their service number a call. “March!” I thought, why would it take that long. That’s just silly, but I kept the email just in case.
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It’s a real shame – it really is. My own daughter turned two on May 5th and I didn’t get a chance to blog about it. What’s that? Why didn’t I get that chance? Well, it seems my cable Internet went and got broken on Sunday, the day of her party.
Several visits by the cable provider later and we’re back in action.
So here’s a belated wish going out to my lovely little girl. I assure you pictures of the party and the ceremonial cake sacrifice will follow.
Looks like those plastic water bottles might not be so good for your health. Plastic baby bottles too …
Mountain Equipment Co-op is pulling them off their shelves as we speak – proactively. Nothing proven yet but the concen is there.
Here’s a Wikipedia article that provides a little more info on the Nalgene connection – some of their bottles contain less of the suspect chemicals than others.
As for using the bottles out of their intended temperature operating ranges … I don’t know of anyone using the obttles for freezing water, do you? Is that out of their intended operating range I wonder.
For those of you who noticed that theBside was down for a few days there, I apologize. The power supply on the server took in too much juice and overheated, about 8 hours before my taxi arrived for my trip to Boulder. I resolved the problem once I got home so I’m sorry if some kind of vital service was disrupted here.
All I know is I wasn’t able to record Lost last week. It’s OK everyone, I’ve managed to catch up – but thanks for the concern.
Arstechnica summarizes the energy-savings impact of the recent changes to the daylight savings schedule in a nice short article.
Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: “We haven’t seen any measurable impact.” New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: “no impact” on their business.
Ah bureacracy – where would we be without it?
Now how much time and money can the government spend figuring out if they should go back to the way it used to be?
