Monthly Archives: September 2002

Cut Incomes and Swelled Poverty

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In percentage terms, the nation’s poverty rate rose to 11.7 percent in 2001 from 11.3 the year before. Before rising last year, the poverty rate fell for four straight years.

“Like the last year-to-year increase in poverty in 1991-1992 and the last decrease in real household income in 1990-1991, these changes coincided with a recession,” said Daniel Weinberg, chief of the Census Bureau’s Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.

The “poverty” threshold, in official terms, was $18,104 for a family of four; $14,128 for a family of three; $11,569 for a family of two, and $9,039 for individuals.

Ah the poverty threshold. What a piece of fiction!

Read the rest in the NYTimes: Recession Cut Incomes and Swelled Poverty Rolls, U.S. Says. via Garret.

Loved by critics, and by fans, misunderstood by family groups

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That’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. How is it that a program that delves into the consequences of sex, violence, and cheep use of power is not better respected by groups like The Parents Television Council? They rated Buffy the third worst family show on TV.

That’s sad. If their critics are simply sitting there, counting instances of so-called explicit material, then that is what it is. A body count. But what of the nightly news when ranking shows in such a fashion?

Buffy’s storylines share a core set of values and themes that a simple, type-of-scene count will miss entirely. These are great for starting discussions on. They include the power of love, taking responsibility for others and yourself, being a leader, realizing your not the center of the universe, finding time for friends and family admist work demands (naw-I’m not kidding-really!), being a misfit yet still belonging, forgiveness, redemption, life, death, and exploring the natures of good and evil.

Christianity Today, in it’s recent article Don’t Let Your Kids Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer – But you can tape it and watch after they go to bed at least recognizes the quality of the show.

Hatred, vengeance, and witchcraft turned Willow evil, but Xander’s unconditional love showed that no sinner is beyond grace. Moments like this explain why Christians such as myself watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yep. But watching the show after the kids are asleep can be a missed opportunity. I think if I had children entering that age where these kinds of questions are being asked… well this show provides a great starting point for discussion. No – not for teaching – but for starting discussion. That can be a hard thing to do with just about anyone. And from what I’ve seen, just doesn’t happen enough between parents and kids.

Buffy does all this with plenty of humor, characters that are easy to care about (watch a few shows and I dare you not to relate to one of them), and lots of scary villians. Who could ask for anything more in a TV show?

This post is part of The Buffy Blogburst.

Here go some others to check out:

Silent Running Willow turning to evil and the Arab-Israeli situation?

Charles Kuffner compares Buffy and the Sopranos.

Nick Danger defends the latest season. Probably the darkest yet.

Stacy Sekimori Buffy mp3s.

Kathy shares her Buffy routine.

Again, this post is part of The Buffy Blogburst. Hit the link to get better descriptions, it’s the definitive index, and more posts as the day goes on. Thanks to Meryl for organizing this.

The Death of EJB As We Know It?

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People are starting to recognize some of the frailty implicit in the EJB specification. In particular, the emphasis on vendor-neutrality within the EJB specification leads to a number of inefficient ways of developing enterprise applications. In order to work around these inefficiencies, developers are forced to adopt “design patterns” that create more work for the average developer, arguably more work than if they’d just abandoned EJB altogether and started from a core architecture of just servlets/JSP and JDBC.

Read the rest at this O’Reilly weblog. Ouch.

Cam gives an update, Shelley’s back, and Roller is getting rail roaded

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We’re all going to be rooting for you Cameron.

Weblogger.com sends notice to RollerWeblogger. This is just assnine. What bullshit. Update – make sure you go there today. It get’s worst. WhyWhyWhy?!?! Update – It’s over! Calmer heads prevailed. Gotta always give credit to those that end up doing the right thing. Good news!

Shelley shares some news from her road trip. A welcome back.

The Nigerians are getting desperate. That’s what Meryl concludes after reading the scam mail that was sent to me. Yes you want to read it – “With regard to your reputation and co-worshipper of God who will not disappoint me nor deny me in faith, I am directing this letter of assistance to you. ” and it gets far, far worst. Normally I get a few of the standard variety a week. This one got me mad. Bastards.

Congratulations to Brent and Ranchero on releasing NetNewsWire Lite 1.0!

William F. Buckley Jr. takes it to Opie and Anthony and more

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I’m with Garret, this William F. Buckley Jr. piece gets close to the point I’ve tried to make.

On similar matters, this resembles a Howard Stern news weblog, if your so inclined.

Also on similar matters, the oft-mentioned Jump The Shark is a fun site.

In more serious news Michael Fraase reports the FCC is trying to finish what it started a few years back – making way for the age of the media empire.

Webcrawlers and spiders

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A co-worker was raving about cURL. It looks pretty powerful as a general web-getter toolset and library. Libraries appear to be available in the language of your choice. Java for me of course. But ya never know.

There is also WebSPHINX, an alternative that’s been around for a while.

I’ve used Jakarta’s HTTP Client in a project… but the documentation made it real difficult.