Just a quick note to all my FaceBook fans and Twitter followers that they can actually use FaceBook Connect or Twitter logins to leave comments on my website. Rather than take the time to fill out all the necessary fields in order to leave a comment here (email address, name, website), you can simply click on the FaceBook or Twitter badges (or WordPress.com, OpenID or IntenseDebate, if you use those) and your credentials for those sites will be used to log you in to DFE!
No Security Hassle!
It’s important to note that none of your information from those other websites is shared with mine: you don’t need to worry about how I will use your information, because I’m not touching it. The only thing that social network logins do is:
- Redirect you back to the other site (FaceBook, for example)
- Ask if you actually want to grant me permission to use your credentials.
- Send you right back to start commenting.
It makes life easier for people who don’t feel like filling in forms and getting new accounts all over the Internet. Now you can better manage your online identity by keeping it only with a few trusted sources. Best of all, you can use the service to post your comments to your New Feed, letting all your friends know that you like arguing politics with us here at DFE.
Sorry for the untidy mess around DFE parts. I’m working on a new theme which is still in development and haven’t been able to work on updating the site. Blah, blah, blah. You read a lot of this crap from me, lately.
But the pace of things at DFE is definitely slowing down. And since it is, I’m creating a new theme that will reflect that while still maintaining a lot of content for viewing. Also, I’m trying to allow the new site to reflect a lot of what’s NOT happening on the site but is happening in the DFE network: FaceBook, Twitter and elsewhere.
Soon, I promise, you will see an entirely new and re-imagined DFE!
A friend of mine asked about the whereabouts of the DragonFlyEye.Net Swag Shop. Click here to enter!
And the rest of you can check it out as well. Get yourself a super-trendy (from like eight years ago) oval tri-letter bumpersticker to show your support for DFE!
My apologies to my readers who’ve been wondering where I’m at. Sometimes, lack of work is even more work than work! BTW, for those interested, you can also become a fan of my FaceBook page or friend me if you like. Micro-blogging there is easier than DFE, which is a lot of work!
This site is a political site, primarily, with a ton of other random subjects as suit my fancy and that of my blogger friends who are good enough to help me out. I am generally uncomfortable delving into subjects such as the Brittanee Drexel case because there’s not a lot I can add to the conversation and because I feel like those of us in alternative media and media generally who have nothing to contribute aught not to interfere.
I understand that this crisis affects a lot of people and that those people deserve to have their pain acknowledged by their community. In fact, I am much more personally aware than most readers know, though by no means among the directly affected. But at the same time as I acknowledge the need for local media coverage, I find the national media coverage of such subjects largely ghoulish, voyeuristic and opportunistic. So while this space will remain largely silent on the condition of the ongoing investigation and on the suffering of Brittanee, her family, her friends and the coping of all those kids and teachers and parents and custodians and security guards and principles and so many others whom she knew and or went to school with, I felt as though I aught to address the one subject for which this website is suited: the media.
The South Carolina press has finally caught wind of the fact that Brittanee Drexel’s prom – along with that of hundreds of other Gates-Chili kids innocent of the entire awful affair – is this Saturday night. That means that the national media – who has already been watching this case – is also aware. You know what that means, don’t you?
Swarms of cameras outside of the party house where the kids are having their prom. Cameras and journalists pushing for a spot closer to the door, eager to interview kids who know nothing more than they do. Kids who can’t get inside because the media’s in the way; Can’t get in the way to their own prom because of people who will forget this case in a month. Maybe even a few kids who won’t go in, just because the media is there.
So, if you’re listening down there in New York, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Fox News and all the rest of the Katzenjammer Kids: do us a favour and have your local affiliates – who have to live here – do a bit of light filming and let it go at that. Let these kids have their prom.
Friend of the website MP sent me a link to TheConsumerist.com where they used my photo to illustrate an article about Time Warner’s new habit of cutting off users they deem as using too much of their Internet connection they paid for. Actually, they used my photo of someone else’s sign protesting Time Warner’s Internet cap proposal.
It’s fun and gratifying to give out my photographic work as Creative Commons Share Alike works. Having had my stuff catch the eye of a big national blog like this is especially gratifying.
Rachel Barnhart has the story at 13WHAM.com, and it appears as though Senator Chuck Schumer was the one who ultimately put the pressure on TW to “Stop the Cap,” as they say.
Tomorrow morning at 7:30am on CW-16, I will be discussing the post-mortem of what happened and why and what happens going forward. Tune in and comment on the site!
So, I was bored this morning and decided that, rather than code, I’d play around with a few graphic design ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while.
First off, for those of you who love inscrutable three-letter acronyms in oval format for your car/truck/SUV/el Dorado, I give you the very latest in annoyingly trendy acro-sticker technology:
Next up, a bit more with the acronyms. Show your friends you know more than they think you do about fashion with this hot little trend-setter, available in men’s and women’s sizes. Read carefully:
That print features the skyline of New York in the lettering, in case you aren’t able to see it. There’s lots of other half-assed stuff you can buy at the DragonFlyEye.Net Swag Shop.
I’ve just been informed by a friend of the website that DFE appears to be getting blocked by a local store offering WiFi access to its customers. I shan’t mention their name until I’ve confirmed it myself, and since this is a store with multiple locations, I’ll also be checking more than one place. There don’t seem to be any other blogs from Rochester blocked, according to our friend, SM.
This could be an oversight: proxy filters tend to be overly restrictive by default. This could be technical: one store could have a minor bug, whereas if DFE’s being filtered in more than one location, it suggests a policy. Either way, its the purview of any company to allow or block whatever they like on their own network. But it’s an interesting case, nonetheless, and an excuse to take the laptop and do some investigating. So, I think that’s what I’ll do.
To workers I’m just another drone
To Ma Bell I’m just another phone
I’m just another statistic on a sheet
To teachers I’m just another child
To the IRS I’m just another file
I’m just another consensus on the street
Gonna cruise out of this city
Head down to the sea
Gonna shout out at the ocean
“Hey, its me!”
And I feel like a number
Feel like a number
Feel like a stranger
A stranger in this land
I feel like a number
I’m not a number
I’m not a number
Dammit I’m a man
Note to the uninitiated: Pete and Bob Seger are not related. Yet in this song at least, they and I seem to see eye to eye.
Because as I sit here at 1am in the morning, unable to sleep, I find that no matter how important I thought I was to how the system worked, I am merely a single digit on some unseen bean counter’s tally sheet. One single bead – very low set – on the giant abacus of our economy whose problems I have been recounting for the last year or so, sounding what alarm I could with my one small voice, knowing all the while that this day might come. I’ve been slid to the unpleasant side of the board: as of February 12th, my contract is expired and will not be renewed.
The air around me now is as indescribable as any I’ve known. On the one hand, I am grateful for three weeks of notice that gives me a bit of time to reconnect my network and get feelers out for a new gig. This is, after all, the life I’ve chosen as an IT professional; instability and opportunity in this profession go hand in hand, since IT people are always needed yet we’re also always the first positions cut when bean counters with foggy memories need to save a dime.
At the same time, I feel like a day to process what’s happening would be a good thing. But instead, I’m going into work to do. . . what, exactly? Surely, starting new projects doesn’t seem like a very good idea. But professional ethics make simply sitting there and job searching seem unseemly, somehow. Meanwhile, I feel in some ways like I’m the canary in the coalmine for my fellow employees, since my contract expiration – along with at least two others I work with – is a convenient way to do we are not sure how much of the housework yet to be done.
This was a good job, too. The trouble with pinning too many of your hopes on a dying star like Kodak is that I’m unlikely to get another job doing the same thing for the same pay. I’ve enjoyed the company of my coworkers, gotten settled into what I thought was a pretty good position. I even have a Britta filter sitting on one of the tables in my office. I now look forward to the possibility of working in a cube farm somewhere, stripped of my little cubicle-office, left to suffer the fate of so many Office Space characters, with dread.
Once, long ago, I dated a woman I worked with. Then it ended – badly – but we still needed to see each other at work. This feels rather a lot like that: some space to stop damaging each other seems like a good idea.
Looking back on my career to this point, I can say I’ve never been unemployed for more than a month, save for the year I went to school to switch from manufacturing to IT. Those are good odds, and frankly if there’s anyone who knows how to hustle to find a job, it’s me. But I get a pretty awful feeling that road construction projects and the Renaissance Square project are going to take a long time to start paying dividends for one in my profession. This could be a long one.
Said the old Zen master, “We shall see.”
