And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.

The comments are very interesting (at least the first few I have read – I’ll have to go back when I am not so pressed for time). danah boyd posts some on her own blog:

Growing up, I loved to debate. With anyone. My debating tone used to drive my mother batty because she thought I was yelling at her. Exasperated, I would often bark back that I was simply debating. Over the years, I realized that my debating tone is one of such confidence that people believe me to be stating facts, not opinions. My mother interpreted it as yelling; my classmates interpreted it as arrogance. I also began to realize that it was the same tone as that of my male peers. I never apologized for my opinions, never deflated them with “I may be wrong but I think…” I asserted. Confidently. And loudly.

Why am I telling you this? Clay Shirky’s “A Rant About Women” has provoked all sorts of conversations in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And Tom Coates rightfully pointed out that one interpretation of Shirky is the problematic encouragement of self-promotion and lies. While a lot has been said on this topic, I feel the need to speak up and say more. Because, as I said, I’m loud.

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1. Sad commentary on the state of education
2. The King and Adulterous Women
3. A well written post

I just noticed this, but the out-of-the box settings for the above do not preserve the aspect ratio of videos (i.e. they are stretched to fit the player, or the screen in full screen mode). And there is no option to change this setting in zenphoto. (They have a dropdown for the aspect ratio of the THUMBNAIL – how useless is that?). So I did some hacking of the code, and now it works great!

So I edited the zp-core/plugins/flowplayer3.php file. There are three spots where this code appears (a few if…else blocks that depend on such things as the presence of a .jpg thumbnail for example):


{
url:"' . $moviepath . '",
autoPlay: '.$autoplay.',
autoBuffering: true,
}


I edited them all to read:


{
url:"' . $moviepath . '",
autoPlay: '.$autoplay.',
autoBuffering: true,
scaling: "orig"
}


Presto, all done.

It’s ugly, and the more elegant way would be to make a new option in the plugin settings to set this to a user-defined value… but that’s the developer’s job, not mine! :P

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1. Installing Azureus on my server
2. ‘Related’ posts plugin
3. New Gallery (almost) fully functional

* It never used to bother me, until I started the Wheel of Time series. Will it never end? Being dead is no excuse!!

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1. Medico-Legal Blogging Link…
2. A few interesting movies
3. An interesting blog for aspiring med students

I also took out my Twitter feed from the sidebar, I think it was slowing down my page loads…

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1. Twitter
2. Site facelift
3. Site Redux… yet again

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1. Site Theme update
2. Moved to a new host…
3. Site facelift

The ‘relatedness’ is a little whacky, maybe because I don’t tag / keyword my posts properly, but it does at least make some ‘interesting’ connections… :)

Enjoy! I may tweak the settings a bit, to see if it can make things more… relevant. (Wonder what it’ll link to this page?)

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1. Porting some posts…
2. Site Redux… yet again
3. Updates

So, here we go, with the things that caught my eye:

• This is your brain. This is your brain on football. Yes, concussions are VERY BAD. But we knew that already, didn’t we? (via Shadowfax).
• From the same source — flying spaghetti monster caught on video! Along with a sweet quote, that I will have to remember: “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” – Mark Twain.
• Yet another study that shows acupuncture is a placebo.
• Beautiful pictures of the City of London (England). (via BoingBoing)
• Not-so-beautiful pictures of slums, worldwide. This well put together, narrated photo-presentation deserves so much more than a bulleted mention here, but I’ll never get around to it… better something than nothing, no? (via BoingBoing)
• Hmm… industry bribing government to be anti-workers… with bailout money. Are we really surprised? (covered on BoingBoing and by Lessig)
• The UK is now fingerprinting children. Because, you know, they could be criminals or terrorists or something.
• The RCMP who tasered and killed Dezianski? Not only are they off scott-free, new evidence shows they didn’t even call EMS, and when medical personell finally arrived anyway, they obstructed their efforts to help the man. Boy, do I ever feel protected and safe. Thanks, RCMP!

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• JEvents – clunky interface. Need to use 2-3 different tabs to enter an event. Difficult to style without actually editing code, and I’d rather not spend the time to do that. Start and end times for events are only displayed in popup box on mouse-over (? possibility to print)
• GCalendar – Joomla component to help integrate the already easy to integrate (via an iframe) Google Calendar. Shows the start time for the event in the month view, but no end time. A mouse-click will bring up a popup frame that shows the details, but clueless users won’t figure that out, and it doesn’t help when trying to make a hardcopy.
• JCal Pro – doesn’t show the end time either. And it costs money in some scummy circumventing-GPL way.

Maybe this code for Google Calendar (with Simplepie) would help with my no end time display, but it seems to be more for a sidebar, RSS-feed type thing; don’t think I can get this to work in a month view deal.

My current very inelegant workaround is to include the end time in the event title (i.e. ” – 2p Dr. DancingSamurai”), which shows up as (“9 – 2p Dr. DancingSamurai”) on the month view and the ‘upcoming events’ as implemented by the GCalendar module. It’s just a really ugly workaround…

I’m not alone in this frustration, either. Is Google ever going to implement this as a feature?

Anyone have any other ideas?

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1. Synchronization Nightmares
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That’s what’s irritated me about OneNote BTW – the requirement to ‘print’ a pdf inside OneNote., which basically means I have to keep a copy of the PDF around since printing OneNote back out onto paper (i.e. for a patient handout) produces very unpretty results. And I don’t usually need to look at / annotate the actual PDF in OneNote.

So – Joomla, with the PDF Indexer plugin. And perhaps DOCMan or Attachments. I also looked at Plone, but that requires specialized hosting (i.e. not allowed on my current host, DreamHost). And Drupal could do this I guess but i found it clunky Although, my recent experience, Joomla isn’t that much cleaner. Which do the masses think would work better for my purpose (or is there an alternative I’m completely missing here)?

As an aside, I found this useful tool online, to create a favicon.ico file. Check it out!

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1. Joomla Calendar frustrations
2. Moved to a new host…
3. Site Redux… yet again

UPDATE: Never mind, I should have just started with the official widget. Works nicely!.

Anyone know how to fix the color of the ‘Tweets’ widget? Because it’s a link it’s in grey but the stylesheet for my theme is a mess (I didn’t make it – I’m not that talented – just stole it from someone else. But I can’t make heads or tails of the structure…)

Well, back to re-installing all my programs. Oh, and I have to flash my old ghost image onto a removable USB drive because I forgot to backup my Photoshop Elements catalog before I formatted. What a waste of time…

UPDATE: SAVED! Thanks google!

You can also locate My Catalog.psa by going to My Computer > Local Disk C: > Documents and Settings > All Users > Application Data > Adobe > Catalogs

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