From now until next week's launch of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress (AFT Local 2334) website rebuild, I'll probably not have much time to write, so don't expect much.

Today's selection of tabs I have open in firefox is:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129086941
A Man, A Plan And A Sharpie: 'The Great Typo Hunt'

I stared at that no tresspassing sign, and I wondered: Could I be the one? What if I were to step forward and do something? The glare from the extra s seemed to mock me. Sure, others before me had recognized that there was a problem afoot in modern English. Plenty of people had made much hay of ridiculing spelling and grammatical errors on late-night shows and in humor books and on websites weighted with snark. But: Who among them had ever bothered with actual corrective action?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/10/tom-delay-sentenced-to-th_n_806...
Tom Delay going to jail? Maybe justice is not dead after all.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/1/3/933075/-Free-SoftwareInternet...
Free Software & Internet Show Communism is Possible

Software is the perfect communism product because although the initial labor costs are very high, the very nature of the work and the existence of the Internet allows that burden to be born by many hands worldwide with each contributing according to his ability and since the cost of reproduction is zero, it can be freely given to each according to need.

Linux represents a philosophy about property rights, openness, equality and cooperation that is an anathema to everything Microsoft and the other proprietary software companies stand for. That is why, in 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." A *revolutionary class war has been raging in a key sector of technology for the past two decades and what is even more important, the workers and progressives have been proceeding from victory to victory, even if few people have looked at it that way.

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Today's photos are: A hawk that has moved into Tompkins Square (pigeons beware!); a discarded slab of mosaic in the trash; something strange on the fence outside the openflows office.

9 days in and I'm seriously running out of things to say. I promised myself that I would only allow 25% of the posts to be rants or complaining about things, and today that seems to be all I feel like doing. So, on to today's photos: orange peel, lonely banana, and a terrible job to have in this cold.

It's tempting to make today's post about the random nutjob in Arizona that decided to select a completely non-random target for his gun and how when one desensitizes people through violent rhetoric, one should not be shocked if some unstable random nutjob acts like a random nutjob -- but I've done enough of that on facebook today so instead here are some tabs open in firefox at the moment.

http://www.globe-democrat.com/news/2010/dec/21/blogger-sentenced-for-jud...
Article about A man that was sentenced last week to 33 months in prison for blog posts that advocated for violence and assassination of 3 Federal Judges.
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http://www.theopeninter.net/
An interesting view of the issues behind Net Neutrality
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http://gudphoto.com/bikenyc/2010/12/31/top-10-bikenyc-portraits-of-2010/
NYC Bike Portriats 2010
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http://www.antemedius.com/content/us-brink-fascism
A long article looking at an important question: How far along the road to Fascism are we.
The word fascism is thrown around a lot lately, mostly by people that do not understand that they themselves are fascists.
The article clarifies the definition of fascism as "a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."
and
"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
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And on that note, today's photos are of an abandoned scarf and balls in a playground.

Today was a long day and I don't have much to say here other than this: I'd rather spend two hours on hold listening to muzak than have to spend 10 minutes trying to talk to a voice activated phone system. Repeating the same thing over and over and having a machine tell me "I'm sorry, I did not understand, please say that again" is not fun. "You are not sorry! you're a fucking machine!!!!"

Today's photos: a trash can and snow in Tompkins Square

I have noticed that, with youtube leading the way, a lot of media and newspaper sites are now sorting comments in chronological order (newest comment first). The old-school standard was reverse-chronological order (oldest comment first).

For example, today I followed a link to an article on the New York Post's website. When I look at the comments, the first comment says "I agree with [username] and [other username], they are totally correct!" and then I have to search down through the other comments to find what this guy felt was so important that he needed to tell everyone he agreed with. It's totally counter-intuitive. On the other side are sites like slashdot.org and ask.metafilter.com, sites designed for conversation and discussion. It's so much easier to read through the conversation and therefor be able to participate in an intelligent way.

This has been a debate in the drupal community over the past couple of years because when Drupal 6 was released, the default sort order for comments went from oldest first to newest first. I've never seen the logic of this choice. It makes it impossible to actually follow the discussion; you read the replies to comments before the comments being replied to. It totally destroys the continuity of conversation (which could be part of the goal, I have no idea).

I have not installed or played much with Drupal 7 yet, but from reading the issue queue ( here and here among others) it seems that the default has been changed back to the way I prefer it.

Does anyone out there actually prefer newest comment first? Why?

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Today's photos: a stack of soon-to-be-mulched trees in Tompkins Square and some discarded flowers.