Privacy boon-(doggle)

I was just reading about a new tool that Google will soon offer, allowing users to see the information collected about them by Google apps.

Bits: Google Offers Users a Peek At Stored Data, explores the different features available in the new tool.

“Everyone always talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”

So…once we know all that’s going on with the information that Google collects on us – what can we do about it?

Breast Health

It’s important. So do a breast exam and remind the people you love to do them as well.

 

Here’s some info on how to do a Breast Exam: http://breastcancer.about.com/od/risk/tp/bse_illustrated.htm

 

Also Check out these sites for more info:

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

National Feel Your Boobies Week  Oct 9th thru 16th

 

 

 

 

In Praise of the American Worker

It’s Labor Day Weekend!  Time to take a few days off to rest and relax. But before I go, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what Labor Day means…

According to the U.S. Dept of Labor, the first Monday in September ”constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

Amen.

We always talk about executives and politicians when we talk about our country and its economic well-being. During good times or when a company is flush, CEOs get all the credit. Media outlets do big, glossy profiles of the head of the next big thing and talk about how important they are to the future of the company/industry/world. During the current economic crisis, politicians are being counted on to “save” us.  Stimulus checks and tax breaks are touted in every paper as the way in which the country will be put right.

I counter that it will be the workers who save us.

What will bring us out of the current economic lull is the hard work and sacrifice of the common worker. All around the country, employees are rolling up their sleeves and working harder. They’re learning new skills to be more valuable. They’re taking unpaid vacations and cutting back hours to help their companies stay afloat.

Will they be thanked? No.

Should they be? Yes.

When I was just entering the workplace, American workers were often compared unfavorably to workers in Asian countries. It was believed that American workers were fat, lazy and spoiled, while companies based in the Asia-Pacific region were chock-full of workers who lived and breathed for their company.  Of course, any hard statistics that you could pull showed that the American worker put in more hours and had less vacation time than workers in most other industrialized nations.

The prejudice that American workers are somehow less than others has continued and frankly, it’s time for  it to stop.

So… this weekend: Stop. Reflect. And give yourself an “Attaboy!” for all the work you do. You work hard. You are the backbone, savior and protector of this country, its economy and its citizens. 

Thank you and pass the lemonade.

Defining Social Networks To Punish

The State of Illinois enacted a law which bans convicted sex offenders from using social networking site.  Fine. Good.

I’m anti-sex offender, so frankly it seems fine by me if they don’t get to reconnect with their high school buds on Facebook.

The rub — and there always is one — is that the law defines a social network as:

an Internet website containing profile web pages of the members of the website that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs placed on the profile web pages by such members, or any other personal or personally identifying information about such members and links to other profile web pages on social networking websites of friends or associates of such members that can be accessed by other members or visitors to the website. A social networking website provides members of or visitors to such website the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile web page and may also include a form of electronic mail for members of the social networking website.

Taking a good look at that language….hmmm, really? what doesn’t that fit?

• If a columnist for the NYTimes has a 50 x 50 pixel photo next to his byline and the site allows users to comment…it fits.

• The official site for my town – which is where I go to find changes in the garbage schedule and a calendar of zoning board meetings – has user and contributor photos, email, comments…if fits.

• In my industry, big companies are looking to employ all manner of interactive, community-driven, Web 2.0 & 3.0 type enhancements to even the most staid of corporate urls….it fits.

What this law does is ban convicted sex offenders from the Internet. And I’d be willing to consider that viable on a case by case basis, but I want a judge to say “Your crimes were so heinous, I ban you from the Internet.” What I don’t want is selectively-enforced, loosely interpreted legislation that bans all sex offenders from the Internet.

Deciding someone’s actions merit a BAN is an important consideration in that a ban could severly impact a person’s ability to lead a normal, productive life. And if someone is banned from living a normal, productive life – that person is going to have to go for an abnormal, destructive life. I don’t think we want that.

Personally, once a person has served their time, they should be helped (if at all willing) to normalize. If we give them a chance to lead normal lives with access to online newspapers and services, we might not have to be so worried about them. If we decide they will always be outcasts – that is how they will always think and act.

They Should Send Us Old Guys

On Friday, I commuted. – an event in and of itself. But I remark on it because of a person I met.

I met a 57-year-old Army veteran from Poughkeepsie, who was headed down to Montrose to the VA Hospital there.

He was a nice guy.  Willing to chat or rather willing to let me pepper him with questions.  (What can I say, sometimes I’m nosy.)

We were sitting behind a rather ill-behaved family. Whose mother was either deaf or entirely indifferent to having 2 children scream and jump around incessantly. Rather than listen to them, I decided to talk.

He told me he was headed to the VA for his “bum leg.”  I asked him about the current war and the current military. Frankly, I was surprised by his answers.

John grew up in the Yonkers projects in a large Irish family – by his own account, a fairly rough upbringing. He went to school – sometimes — and has an iffy education. But he joined the army as soon as he could, recognizing that he wasn’t trained for much, but at least he could protect his country.

“I was always in one fight or another…for who knows what. In the Army, I was fighting and I was getting a check every month.”

About Iraq and Afghanistan, he said there was definitely a reason for us being there. However, he wasn’t too sure it was what W. said it was.

His sense: they needed our help, whether W realized it or not.

He wished he was over there. He wished he could “tag out” some kid.

“I was just a kid who fought –these kids, they thought they were just gonna go to college.”

He told me that when he was a kid, the Army picked up the thugs out of the bad neighborhoods and put them to use, or at least got them killed somewhere out of sight of his mother’s stoop.

Nowadays, the kids who are really trouble don’t join the military; they just go on to bigger and better crimes. It’s the basically nice kids who are poor that make up the army and they don’t have the fighting instinct.  

“I got a bum leg, but I can still do this,” he said, making a trigger pulling motion.  “{The current young soldiers] don’t need to be over there, they should just send us old guys.”

Gaining Leverage

Leverage Regulars. Parker and Hardison on the right

So, I’m a huge fan of Leverage. Love me some Hardison and Parker!

And as you can imagine, I am eagerly anticipating the return of the show on July 15th. But the true cherry on top will be another fave of mine guesting this season! Wil Wheaton on Leverage. woo hoo!

If you only know Wheaton from Star Trek, you really need to check out some of his writing. I’ve added a link to his blog in my links section – check it out. It’ll make you snort/laugh for sure.

Eagerly,

Editor M

Escapism: Wonder Why?

CNN ran an editorial today:

What happened to movies made for grown-ups?

Give Robert Downey Jr. a suit made of metal, and lines will form around the block. But cast him as a columnist who befriends a homeless man and it’s a different story. In the wake of high-profile dramas flopping at the box office, studios are increasingly gun-shy about making movies that don’t offer pure escapism. full story

Really?

I wonder why escapism would be so popular now……hmm….wonder…wonder…wonder.

Is it because we’ve all either lost our job or are working in double overdrive to keep our jobs?

Is it because most mortgages are underwater and there are too many for sales signs up?

Maybe it’s just because our 401K are worth a lot less than they were a year or two ago?

I will make a prediction: Escapism will rule through the economic upheaval.

Hummer’s New Daddy

The day after GM filed for bankruptcy, the carmaker announced it signed a deal to sell its Hummer truck unit, according to CNNMoney. It didn’t name a buyer or a price.

So….

Homes as Scrapnel, the American Dream as Collateral Damage

Foreclosures add to hurricane hazards

By TAMARA LUSH, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jun 1, 12:08 am ET

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. – Mike Manikchand points toward his neighbors — a half-dozen empty, foreclosed-upon homes, sitting on weed-strewn yards — and he wonders: What will happen if a hurricane slams into southwest Florida this year?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/stress_map_hurricane_foreclosures

Homes as Scrapnel, the American Dream as Collateral Damage.

I read this story and a chill ran down my spine.

That’s true.

This isn’t a techie issue, the kind that I usually tackle. But it’s an important one.

I’m stil shaken by what happened in New Orleans. I’ve never lived there, but it’s a city that means a lot to me. I was married in New Orleans and I went back 2 years after the Hurricane Katrina and there were things that were still wrecked – that still looked like Kat had passed through the night before.

That sucks. And we should be ashamed. and W, should hang his head everytime the city is mentioned – ever.

But the idea that the homes lost in foreclosures, the abandoned homes that honest folk can no longer pay for are now a weapon is terrifying to me.

The year after, I thought about all those people whoe were essentially squatters on their own land. Housed in inadequate trailers supplied by FEMA and sleeping every night in large, furnished “Dirty bombs.”

There was a lot of worry that if major hurricanes hit the region, these makeshift shelters would just supply scrapnel to the raging storms and result in more needless, senseless death.

Now, we have a new crisis – built on top of the old for many in New Orleans and surrounding areas – an economic crisis that has caused many a families home to be blown away in a new kind of storm.

Can you imagine the horror of sitting in your home, while a storm rages outside unable to go to a safe spot. And knowing that you are made all the more vulnerable because the neighbors you had hosted BBQs with, the neighbors you had chatted about weather and local politics with, couldn’t weather the financial storm and aren’t around to secure their old homes or properties. Do you wonder if that tree house the guy down the block built for his kids will somehow wind up in your 2nd floor bathroom.

The winds of change, indeed.

Concernedly,

Editor M

I read this story and a chill ran down my spine.

I’m stil shaken by what happened in New Orleans. I’ve never lived there, but it’s a city that means a lot to me. I was married in New Orleans and I went back 2 years after the Hurricane Katrina and there were things that were still wrecked – that still looked like Kat had passed through the night before.

That sucks. And we should be ashamed. And W, should hang his head everytime the city is mentioned – ever.

But the idea that the homes lost in foreclosures, the abandoned homes that honest folk can no longer pay for are now a weapon is terrifying to me.

The year after, I thought about all those people whoe were essentially squatters on their own land. Housed in inadequate trailers supplied by FEMA and sleeping every night in large, furnished “Dirty bombs.”

There was a lot of worry that if major hurricanes hit the region, these makeshift shelters would just supply scrapnel to the raging storms and result in more needless, senseless death.

Now, we have a new crisis – built on top of the old for many in New Orleans and surrounding areas – an economic crisis that has caused many a families home to be blown away in a new kind of storm.

Can you imagine the horror of sitting in your home, while a storm rages outside unable to go to a safe spot. And knowing that you are made all the more vulnerable because the neighbors you had hosted BBQs with, the neighbors you had chatted about weather and local politics with, couldn’t weather the financial storm and aren’t around to secure their old homes or properties. Do you wonder if that tree house the guy down the block built for his kids will somehow wind up in your 2nd floor bathroom.

The winds of change, indeed.

Concernedly,

Editor M