I’m not saying guns are bad; I’m just saying they’re not the answer.
Tag: opinion
Opinion, provocative, editorial, perspective, call-to-action, soapbox, pet peeves, prescriptive…
GOP: Change or die
Personally, I don’t care if the Republican party dies, but if they want to live, they need to not just “reach out” to people of color; they have to abolish their policies that oppress people of color. They need to not just “speak better” about their policies that infuriate people; they need to abolish those policies. They have tried to “spin” their anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-middle-class, anti-intellectual platform. It didn’t work! They tried to be “the party of No” and make the President fail. It didn’t work! They tried to be the “pro-life” party, against women’s right to abortion even in the case of rape. It didn’t work! I think of the Republican party as anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-woman, pro-man, anti-color, pro-white, anti-worker, pro-millionaire… and that’s not just what I think they are. That’s what they are. If they want to be that, I hope the party dies. If not, I hope it reinvents itself from the platform up, not from the message down.
Ever forget an assignment? Make it less likely with automatic agenda emails.
I hate to admit it, but there have been those mortifying times when I’ve forgotten I had a job to get to. It’s easy to follow a schedule when it’s the same every day, but when you’re a community interpreter and your schedule changes every day, you might need a little help.
Lately, some of the agencies I work for have started sending out automatic agenda reminders via email, such as “Here is your schedule for this week” or “Here is your schedule today.” These reminder emails are very helpful — so helpful I was about to ask an agency who doesn’t send them to send them. I rethought that, though, because I had forgotten a job with them that week and I didn’t want it to come across as, “Well, it would help if you sent me a reminder.” So I did some searching and found that I could set up my own email reminders in my Google calendar. Here’s how:
In your Google calendar, go to Settings. Currently the way to do this is to click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the page. When in Settings, click the Calendars tab from the tabs toward the top left of the page (where you see General, Calendars, Mobile Setup, Labs). For your work calendar, look for the Notifications heading just right of the center of the Calendar line (where you see CALENDAR, SHOW IN LIST, NOTIFICATIONS, SHARING). Follow the Notifications link for your work calendar. Scroll to the bottom of the page where it says, “Daily agenda: Receive an email with your agenda every day at 5am in your current time zone.” Check the box next to Email and/or SMS, and you’re done! You will now get your very own agenda reminders at the crack of dawn.
Go forth and serve thy Deaf and hearing consumers!
P.S. I know not everyone uses Gmail or Google Apps, but maybe the calendaring program you use does this too. If not, maybe you should get with a program that does.
Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion: Let’s do the time warp. Again.
I was unpleasantly surprised when Apple took a step backward a few years ago with their skeuomorphic Address Book, Calendar, and Notes apps — the stitched leather bindings, the yellow ruled paper, the bits of paper in the cardboard binder where the pages were torn out, the handwriting fonts, etc. Now they’ve done it again with the same apps and with the new Reminders app. I understand that a GUI has to look like something, but I don’t think it should look like ancient artifacts. Why should OS X apps look more old-fashioned now than they did the first decade of OS X? Probably because they have to match iOS, and maybe Apple made iOS so skeuomorphic because they thought that’s what they had to do to sell iPhones and iPads.
Personally, I don’t use any of the OS X apps anymore anyway. I have all I need in the browser: Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Messages, etc. And they’re not so skeuomorphic. I’ll just enjoy the overall system enhancements of OS 10.8 and not do the time warp again.
