The “It Gets Better” project keeps growing, with more and more videos added each day. It’s great seeing so many GLBT sports organizations are stepping up.

Time Square from the Marriott

The view from my room.

Peaceful Venue

At night, after the speakers, attendees, and exhibitors have all gone back to their hotels or out to dinner, the conference venue has a very still and peaceful feel.

In my lifespan (1968 to Present) there have been RADICAL changes in the way GLBT folks are accepted in the world.  I know there is still room for improvement but for someone who was my current age at the time I was born the current situation would seem like near nirvana.  I have my own theories about why this has all happened but that would be a whole other post.   What I wonder about now is how adult homosexuals are handling this – for some – newfound acceptance within their own families and most especially with parents.

The reason this stuck in my mind is a conversation I had recently with someone in which it came up that I had gone over one and half decades without seeing my mother at one point.  The biggest reason for this was our failure to see eye-to-eye over my lifestyle.  Mind you, among the GLBT folks I have known, my lifestyle is about the most sedate and conservative sort imaginable.   The real core problem was a letter my mother had written me when I was eighteen – in 1986 – in which she referred to my partner and my home as under Satan’s influence and recommended I get out of the house to pray.  That, and other parts of the letter left me with the feeling that I would be better off just severing that relationship entirely rather than trying to find a common ground.  I was lucky in that while most eighteen year olds still relied on parental support in some form I personally did not.   By the way, my partner, Chuck Matlack, and I remained together until his death almost fourteen years later.

I now email and talk to my mother on a fairly regular basis. She has even come to visit Brian and I twice.  This is all fine with me, however I wonder about other people.     The choice to let someone back into your life because society, and its influence on that someone, has changed over time is a difficult one.  If there is an estrangement it is almost certainly the result of something going wrong with the relationship in the first place and the relationship likely ended in a way that hurt one or both people.  That ending has to either be addressed by both sides before moving forward, or it has to be completely ignored.  I think either approach is fine and which is best depends on the situation.

In the case of my mother and I it was the latter.  I have no interest in trying to resolve a disagreement my mother’s 35 year old self had with my 18 year old self.  I know people though who simply could not let go that way.  They would find it necessary to at least get a sincere apology for any ‘wrongdoing’ on the other person’s part before moving on into a new relationship with their parent.

What I wonder is how much in common GLBT adults have with adults who, as children, we adopted and have now been contacted by their birth parents.  In one way, the adopted person may have it easier in that the relationship ended before it started so there is no acrimony that needs to be smoothed out before building a new foundation.  Adopted children and adults have their own set of issues that must be resolved before they can have a relationship with the person who put them up for adoption, however, like GLBT folk, they first have to decide if they even want to make the effort to start the process.  My question is:  For the adopted and GLBT folks who decide to go for it and try to establish a relationship with an estranged parent, how many of the same problems do they need to address.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay.

Read the rest at:  Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.

I was pretty happy with the photos I got. Especially the two included here and the one I used as my Frapto Project 365 post yesterday “Natural Scrimshaw”.

Medford Watercourse 25

Medford Watercourse 30

]]> http://blog.techfun.org/2010/03/medford-watercourse/feed/ 2 http://blog.techfun.org/2010/03/the-six-main-roles-of-wikipedia-contributors/ http://blog.techfun.org/2010/03/the-six-main-roles-of-wikipedia-contributors/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:17:18 +0000 JD Thomas http://blog.techfun.org/?p=2228 Dr. Sudha Ram of University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management and graduate student Jun Liu have an interesting publication centered on the dynamics that make Wikipedia work (and not work).  The research showed that the quality of articles hinged on participation of six primary types of contributors as well as ‘Casual Contributors’.

Dr. Sudha Ram

The roles are:

1. Starters -  Focused on sentence creations and seldom engaging in other actions. Performing actions less frequently
2. Cleaners – Focuses on removing sentences, references and links
3. Copy Editors – Focuses on sentence modifications
4. Content Justifiers – Focuses on three types of actions: sentence creations, link creations and reference creations. Performing actions less frequently
5. Watchdogs – Focuses on reverts. Performing actions more frequently than an average contributor
6. All-round Editors – Engaging in many types of actions including sentence creations, modifications, and deletions and link and reference creations, modifications and deletions. Performing actions more frequently than an average contributor

Obviously almost nobody is limited to just one role and I find myself jumping back and forth between Watchdog and Content Justifier quite often.

In the published report (PDF) (starts on page 175), there is a lot more to read.

Read the press summary at Who Does What On Wikipedia? on Red

It has been a fun couple of years watching Alternet stories gain traction through Facebook sharing and via retweets on Twitter until they finally show up in the more traditional news outlets.

The set of crises facing publishing today is enough to make the most hardened of journalists curl up in the fetal position: a waning advertiser base, demands from advertisers that remain, depleted and overworked staffs, declining circulation-the list goes on and on…

Such is the case for the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, which launched in the spring of 2009 as an off-shoot of The Huffington Post. The fund (is) … a nonprofit dedicated to investigative reporting … with an initial focus on the economic crisis.

As Arianna Huffington described it at the launch: “The pieces developed by the Fund will range from long-form investigations to short breaking news stories and will be presented in a variety of media, including text, audio and video. And, in the open source spirit of the Web, all of the content the Fund produces will be free for anyone to publish.”

Read the entire story at EcontentMag.com: Funding Funds: The Huffington Post Investigative Fund Finds Support From Big Name Foundations.

I had one thought of a way that might be effective if implemented but I need to talk to out with Brian and Mike before I commit it to ‘paper’ since I may be missing something important. The idea came from a technique the virus writers themselves have used for several years now.

(Update: I was about to hit Publish and I thought of three ways to get around my idea so it belongs of the scrap heap.)

Here is Scott Charney’s statement (and you can read more at the link at the bottom).

“The [Environmental Protection Agency] comes out with second hand smoke and suddenly smoking is banned everywhere,” he said during a keynote at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. “You have a right to infect and give yourself illness. You don’t have the right to infect your neighbor. Computers are the same way.”

Charney is the latest to champion the idea that infected PC users should be put in their own rubber room, so the malware, spam, and other attacks they generate can’t harm others. The logistics of such a plan remain woefully unformed. While many say ISPs should monitor subscribers for infections, there’s considerable disagreement about how with providers should carry out and pay for such a system.

via Microsoft wants to put infected PCs in rubber room @ The Register.

Scott Charney

By the way, one thing I love about technology and the people involved:

Charney holds a law degree with honors from Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y., and bachelor degrees in History and English from the State University of New York in Binghamton.

When else in history would a English and History major be leading the “effort to help ensure secure, private and reliable computing experiences for everyone.”

Last night’s (March 1, 2010) episode is embedded below. You can go to UStream.tv/radioornot and get all her latest episodes as they air.  She seems to use the chat room there during broadcasts.  Currently there are about a dozen archived shows there from the last few weeks. That should be plenty to to see if you like her style.

There is another element that gets lost in the rah rah rah for cheap labor. The lost element is SKILLS. Despite decades of technological advancement and automation efforts, labor in the manufacturing sector is not the interchangeable commodity people want it to be. While many jobs can be done by anyone in any place on the globe, there will always be jobs that require skills that are developed over time through education and experience.

When jobs follow the cheap labor pools around the world, those people with the skills needed to make it all work do not generally move with the work. This means that when Pennsylvania sheds 1000 jobs due to the economic downturn in 2008 that the manufacturer who wants to bring those jobs back in 2010 will have a hard time filling the more skilled positions they eliminated two years before.

Financial Times

Manufacturing companies in the US are struggling to find workers with technical skills even though the sector has shed more than 2m jobs in the past two years. The shortage of skilled staff could restrict companies’ ability to step up production as the economic recovery gathers pace.

In interviews with the Financial Times, groups ranging from Boeing – one of the US’s biggest manufacturers and exporters – to small companies also said they faced a wave of skilled workers reaching retirement age in the next few years, with a shortage of younger workers to replace them.

…

“It’s difficult to find people for assembly, machining and motor-winding positions – jobs that require maths skills and the ability to read technical blueprints,” said Ron Bullock, owner of Bison Gear, a manufacturer near Chicago with 225 employees.

via FT.com / Companies / Industrial Goods – US manufacturers face skills shortages.

A few of them came out pretty well.

One of my favorites was of the tavern down the street.

Fat Pete's on Torresdale

All the photos I did tonight are here:

Whats Left of Terry Hoskin's Home

Click here for a slideshow of photos of Hoskin’s handiwork.

via Frustrated Owner Bulldozes Home Ahead Of Foreclosure – Cincinnati News Story – WLWT Cincinnati.

The video below is NOT Hoskins. Someone else did the same thing back in 2005 and posted it on YouTube.com.

The HDR image was made from 7 Canon CR2 (RAW) images taken with a tripod from the porch.

Family - Click image for high res version on Flickr

The woman in the SUV in the lower right was my grandmother Billie Jo Medlin Boulton, the man on the left was her grandfather (my great great grandfather) Dr. Robert Tanner.  The postcard above is a fairly generic picture taken from the trenches in WW I in Europe.

Oh, and the gray cinder-block wall at the top is the first home I can remember – it was on Maxon Road in Paducah, Kentucky. It was my grandmother and grandfathers when I was born. It eventually was clad in white siding before passing out of the family upon Billie Jo’s death.

The house was here:

That area’s only claim to fame or infamy is that when, on Dec. 1, 1997, three students were killed and five wounded as they participated in a prayer circle at Heath High School (my mother, aunt, and two uncle’s alma mater), the killer, fouteen year old Michael Carneal lived a few houses down from my grandparents. His was the sixth in what was to become a chain of school shootings around the world that is still going on today.

When I first got into digital art and photography I was using Windows 3.1 and an early version of Photoshop.  I am not sure if I was running a 386 or 486 then but it was definately Pre-Pentium times.  The one annoying thing back then was the fact that the highest resolution shots my camera could create (640×480 – or 0.3 Megapixels) would take FOREVER to process using some Photoshop filters.   As time went on and computers got faster the images processed more quickly.  I am probably an anomaly in that I upgrade PC’s faster than I upgrade cameras.

As a result of this process, I have the occasional magic months when GIMP and G’MIC can rip through images like a hot knife through butter.   That is where I was since moving to a 8gb of RAM, Phenom quadcore system last year.   That all changed with the new camera.   Now that I am working with 15 megapixel RAW files my PC is finally challenged.  The new camera allows me to make things like this:

Her Highness Aiko

The problem is that stages of the processing can take over ten minutes.  So now  that I have this, I may very well need a new and faster PC.  At least this time I will be set for years since I have no plans to upgrade the new camera any time soon.

Nobody was hurt but my car (the green sedan in the photos) suffered some mirror damage and the car on the other side (the new black Ford) lost its rear signal light cover and most of the back right panel to the blistering heat.

Full set of photos here:

They should also read 95% of user generated content ‘is spam’ / And 85 per cent of all emails, according to report to ensure they are not part of the problem.

In the season opener of Real Time with Bill Maher he took on the idea that the Tea Party Movement is not actually a movement and instead is actually a cult.

That section starts at about the 2:20 mark.

• People in cults believe in ridiculous unattainable goals like “decificit reduction by way of giant tax cuts”
• Cults have their own vocabularies:  Freedom means Guns, Diplomacy means Weakness, Elitist means Reader, and Socialist means Black.
• Cult members attribute all the problems to one person – in the Teabaggers case, this one:

The Problem

A poll showed 90% of Teabaggers thought that taxes had gone up or stayed the same under Obama.  Only two percent thought they went down.  The simple reality is:  for 95% of working families, taxes went down.

Only 2 percent of the people in a movement about taxes and named for a tax revolt, have the slightest idea about what is going on – with taxes.

So, it would be easy to just mock, except that those who fall under the control of cults aren’t necessarily weirdoes, they’re victims. And we shouldn’t forget that these people are our relatives, our neighbors and the folks at the next table in the restaurant. Especially if that restaurant is Hooters and it’s dollar wing Wednesday.

By the way, the poll Maher spoke about is on the CBS News site at Poll Reveals Most Americans Don’t Know They Got a Tax Cut.

Tax Poll Results

The pie chart – while showing an insane amount of ignorance on the part of those polled – doesn’t sound as bad as Maher indicated on his show. Thats because that chart shows ALL partipants. The full text of the article does go on to explain that:

Of people who support the grassroots, “Tea Party” movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

Those answers must frustrate the president who has highlighted its tax cuts for the middle class in almost every speech.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that as part of their economic recovery, his administration has passed 25 different tax cuts.

“Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes,” he said. “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.”

In his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Katie Couric, he touted the tax cuts in the stimulus package: “we put $300 billion worth of tax cuts into people’s pockets so that there was demand and businesses had customers.”