Inspired by a recent Penny Arcade video, which proposes the idea that the problem of the current culture of harassment and hate in online gaming communities can be fixed, I sent the following to Microsoft.

If you care about the environment in which our young people gaming, and want to do something like it, here's the link: https://help.xbox.com/ ( Read more... )

Saw a movie last night (no title to avoid spoilers) with speakertodogs which contains what I later realized was a significant twist: part of the story line pitted a lone outsider (a blogger) against the guvermint, and... the guvermint was the good guys.

I know, shock, right?

There used to be a way to report profiles as spambots- but I think it only applies to "profiles" that comment, not merely *friend* me.

Feh.

That's my feature request: I would like to be able to respond to a "friend request" with a report of "obvious spambot".

Feh, double feh.

You may or may not know this, but headhunters have changed the way they do business. It's a consequence of the Internet, mostly - but it's now almost completely driven by scripts which connect to resume posting sites, slurp them down, and auto-match them against jobs they know about (which they often get from employer's job posting sites).

( Many of them are only one step up from penis enlargement peddlers. )

I've been interviewing lately, and as you might expect, some questions get repeated by many questioners. Some make sense, if you're trying to give the candidate a softball question to put them at ease. "Describe the difference between Java's public, private, protected, and default access levels" is one.

Others are just laziness: "What's the ( Read more... )

On the subway, headed home from my day in the city yesterday, I saw something I'd never seen: a guy talking sign language to himself. He wasn't practicing, from what I could glean: he was just talking to himself.

Last night, we went to the beach, and watched fireworks from the surrounding towns. My town no longer has fireworks of its own, because having spent uncounted millions "upgrading" the high school, we now have astroturfed fields, so we can't have fireworks. Progress, meh ( Read more... )

( I just told an automated phone survey that I thought marriage should be illegal. )

I just got back from watching Cloverfield with my daughter.

( No spoilers of plot, but it might spoil your mood )

Two items bring me before you tonight ( Read more... )