Home » 2012

Year: 2012

Election 2012, Part VII

Same stuff, different year.  Catch phrases change but purpose stays the same.

  • 2000 – “Hanging Chads”
  • 2004 – “Swift Boating”
  • 2008 – “I can see Russia” AND “The fundamentals of our economy are strong”
  • 2012 – “Eastwooding” AND “Bain Capital” AND “47%” AND “Big Birding.”

And Election Day 2012 is still more than a month away.

Update: From Second Presidential Debate on 16 October 2012: “Binders Full of Women” AND “War on Women.”

Update: From Third Presidential Debate on 22 October 2012: “Horses and Bayonets” AND “I Love Teachers.”

Election 2012, Part VI

How times have changed!  Years ago, my pre-school age kids taught themselves how to read, write, count, and many other things by watching Big Bird and his friends on Sesame Street on the local PBS channel.  Now, in some circles, PBS is viewed, among other things, as an expensive luxury not worthy of the miniscule subsidy it gets from Uncle Sam.

Kids who grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania during the 1950s and beyond also had the benefit of watching Mr. Rogers, whose children’s show was a mainstay of the Pittsburgh, PA PBS channel.  I wonder what Fred Rogers, were he still with us, would have to say about the potential loss of federal funding for PBS?

Election 2012, Part V

There are many versions of the truth.  It’s up to each individual to decide what version to believe.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

What I See (Or Not)

For longer than I care to admit, I’ve thought that the screen on my monitor needed alignment as every once in a while I noticed lines of text would appear to be slanted to the right.

I never did get around to “fixing” this problem as it really wasn’t that big of a deal…until I tried out my new eyeglasses.  I had lost one of the lens in my prescription sunglasses and decided it was time to get new glasses, both of the sun and regular variety.  I got a new prescription from my ophthalmologist and became the owner of two pairs of ridiculously overpriced eyeglasses a few days ago.

The first time I sat down in front of my monitor with the new glasses on, the slanted text was much more noticeable.  After getting over the initial shock, I realized the “slanted text” problem had nothing to do with the screen alignment.  When I looked at the screen with my right eye only, the text was level.  When I looked at the screen with my left eye only, the text was slanted to the right.  I was the problem!

It also occurred to me that most of the time I’m staring at the screen, I do so with my glasses off.  And that explains the mystery of why the slant appears occasionally.  With the glasses on, the prescription “levels the load” on both eyes and the slant becomes noticeable.  When I don’t have my glasses on, the slant disappears as my right eye does the most of the work since it is much closer to normal vision than the left.

Fortunately, as my eyes adjusted to the new prescription, the slant became less noticeable and now appears about the same it did with my old glasses.  I’ve have to remember to ask the ophthalmologist about this on my next visit.

Is Apple the Next IBM?

Maybe it’s a good thing that Apple is on a mission to destroy its Android-based competitors.  Once the competitors are gone, or reduced to a miniscule share of the mobile device market, maybe the US Government will bring an anti-trust suit against Apple similar to the one brought against IBM that, although unsuccessful, resulted in IBM unbundling their hardware and software products.  Or, alternatively, doing the same thing to Apple as they did to “Ma Bell” back in the 1980s.

I’m Responsive But …

HR’s halfVAST Blog now has a responsive design, which basically means it looks semi-decent when displayed across a wide range of devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones).

Why, you ask, did I say it looks “semi-decent?”  Well, the display of more recent content is just fine; however, this site has content that dates back to 1997.  In terms of Internet time, that’s back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the net.  The content display was controlled by parameters hard-coded into the HTML statements rather than CSS files.

So here we sit, with older content that does not conform to the rules we set for our responsive design. To make this content conform, we have no choice but to edit each page one by one as we find those that break our responsive design model, or let them stay as is and put up with a “semi-decent” display.  Here at HR’s halfVAST Blog, we have taken the latter approach.