In about 5 hours, I’ll be getting married. Needless to say, I won’t be posting on this blog for the next week! Wish me luck in Vegas..
Normally I’m a lot more interested in national politics than local politics, but lately the race for Colorado governor, at least on the republican side, has been pretty darned entertaining!
So let’s see. First it looked like Scott McInnis and Josh Penry were going to fight it out for the republican nomination, but Penry was pressured to withdraw from the race. Little-known candidate Dan Maes stayed in, but nobody expected him to give McInnis much competition, especially after the Post reported on campaign finance violations which eventually resulted in him paying a $17,500 fine. So far, pretty much a yawner, with all the excitement waiting for the general election against John Hickenlooper.
But wait! It comes to light that McInnis was paid $300,000 for a series of essays that he plagiarized from a water expert who’s now a Colorado Supreme Court Justice. McInnis responds by blaming a staffer who wrote the essays for him, never mind that he put his name on them and issued a statement that they were his original work. According to him, this is “taking responsibility for the error”. Suddenly his campaign is imploding…and then it starts getting interesting.
Now Tom Tancredo says that unless both McInnis and Mays pledge by 2pm Monday to get out of the race if the winner is trailing Hickenlooper by the polls after the primary (a virtual certainty), he’ll be getting into the race as the Constitution Party nominee. The overall outcome should be the same – Hickenlooper vs McInnis, Hickenlooper vs Maes, or Hickenlooper vs Tancredo vs (McInnis or Maes) should all lead to Gov. Hick….but boy, would that be entertaining!
Several weeks ago, Brit ordered a large tent for the wedding from an Amazon third party seller, Aubuchon Hardware. The delivery window extended through July 22nd.
On the 21st, it still showed as “shipping soon”, so she emailed them to find out what was up. Their reply? It was backordered and expected around the end of the month. !!!
Obviously, she told them to cancel the order. Amazon doesn’t sell that particular tent themselves, but they sell a slightly better version that costs quite a bit more; on the bright side, we didn’t have to pay the $65 shipping. The page said that it would take an extra 4-5 days to ship, so I paid $3.99 for next day shipping to make sure it’s here in time for the wedding next week. This happened two days ago.
Yesterday afternoon, the tent was delivered. $4 for next-day delivery of a tent that, according to Amazon’s page, weighs 119 pounds (142 pounds shipping weight), and we don’t have to deal with incompetent sellers.
At $79/year for the Prime membership (and free this year with my student email account), that’s what I call a bargain!
A few weeks ago, after a day spent preparing for the wedding, Brit and I decided to grab the camera, hop in the car, and head west towards the mountains. Brit suggested Lookout Point, but before we arrived we decided to just keep going; eventually we decided to follow the signs to “Hidden Valley” and ended up in Central City. I’ve been meaning to check it out for a few years, but wasn’t intending to do it this month! We went in to one of the casinos and lost $5 in a video poker machine for the heck of it, but mostly we just wandered around and took photos.
I thought I’d go ahead and post a few of the pictures here. These have not yet been photoshopped or altered in any way, with the obvious exception of shrinking down the file size so this page doesn’t take forever to load! The photos were all taken with my Nikon D300 using a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8.
Tigris & Euphrates, usually referred to as T&E, is generally considered one of Knizia’s best games; I place it right up there with Modern Art. Lately I can’t seem to get enough of it – I’ve been playing it online pretty consistently for the last few months. T&E is an area-control, set-collection game with a fair amount of conflict and a lot of tactics; the box says 3-4 players (although I believe the new edition says 2-4 instead) but lately I’ve mostly been playing two player games. Currently I’m on my 7th 2-player game against my favorite opponent, a woman I’ve never even met outside of the Tigris & Euphrates games on BGG!
A few days ago, I ran across a post on BoardGameGeek asking for advice on how to play the online version, and I ended up deciding to write a short introduction. That ended up turning into a set of three articles introducing things I felt needed to be addressed. Beginners often have trouble understanding how conflict works in T&E (and of course there’s the “collect-a-set” scoring common to many Knizia games), so I started out by rewriting the T&E rules. Next I wrote up the requested guide to playing T&E online; that one is fairly short as there really isn’t all that much to it. I finished by writing up some basic T&E strategy tips, mostly stuff that’s likely to get you in trouble your first few games if you’re not prepared for it. Not that I’m an expert, by any means…even playing mostly one-on-one, I’m still losing half my games!
So…anybody wanna play?
I’ve been reading quite a bit of different material lately; here’s a quick roundup.
As I mentioned last week, I recently finished and reviewed SEO Warrior by John Jerkovic; I’m currently reading books on iPhone application design and Javascript programming, which I hope to finish by the end of the month, and I have one on PHP I’ll be reading after that. I’m currently looking for full-time work, and I’ve always been interested in web development, so I decided to take advantage of whatever free time I have to pick up the skills that are in demand in this area. Thanks go out to O’Reilly for keeping me supplied with good books lately!
FiveThirtyEight has an interesting article, with discussion, about the history of countries cutting spending during a recession. The Baltic states, for example, slashed spending immediately after the credit bubble popped in 2008, and have since suffered the deepest recessions in Europe. China, on the other hand, increased government spending with a massive (relatively the world’s largest, although smaller than America’s in absolute dollar terms) that went towards infrastructure (as I’ve argued that most of ours should have); as a result, not only is the country being upgraded, but wages are actually increasing. In fact, China’s economy grew by 8.7% in 2009.
I’m currently contributing five articles per month to BrightHub, mostly on the topics of college and graduate school (actually, all of my articles are in those two areas right now, but I’ll also be writing on family friendly games and web development). So far my most popular article by far is the one on choosing a PhD thesis topic, though the one on PhD requirements is a strong second. Occasionally I’ll just browse through the articles and see if I find anything interesting. Today I ran across this cute Sunday School lesson about creation; if I still taught Sunday School I could totally see doing something like this.
Next week I’ll want to start reading up on the hot deals in Vegas in preparation for the honeymoon; we already got half-price tickets for Cirque, but there are a number of other shows we’d like to see. I particularly want to see Lance Burton, since I just missed his last show when we were there before and this will apparently be his final season.
I thought it was hilarious that the day after I wrote an article about properly citing sources to avoid unintentional plagiarism, the Denver Post broke a story about plagiarism by republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis. I do regret, however, that the story didn’t come up a couple of months from now, when it would be a factor in the general election; chances are, either McInnis will fail to win the republican nomination or, more likely, people will just lose interest. Which is a shame, because the issue of plagiarism is one that deserves greater public awareness.
In McInnis’ case, he was paid $300,000 to write a series of essays on water issues, which he told his employer were in final form. Recently, the post found that much of the content was directly copied without attribution from several sources, including a water expert now serving as a Colorado Supreme Court justice. His excuse? McInnis says that a staffer actually wrote the essays, and he simply put his name on them; this, he claims, vindicates him of the charges of plagiarism. Uh…no! If you’re putting your name on something, you’re responsible for ensuring its accuracy (especially when you’re getting paid six figures to do so); McInnis even claimed that the articles had been carefully documented.
So what can we take away from this? If you’re putting your name on something, make sure that it’s your own work or that you properly credit those whose work you’re reproducing; otherwise, especially if you decide to go into politics, it may very likely come back to bite you. That doesn’t necessarily mean formal footnotes; for example, this post has no footnotes but I credit the Denver Post in the first paragraph and provide a link later on that documents the information used. Someone reading this post would be under no illusions that I did this research myself – it’s obvious where the information was found.
In academia, of course, citations are even more important because they allow us to track the evolution of ideas; additionally, by citing other work that has already been reviewed and found worthy, you increase the validity of your own work by providing it with a solid foundation. Proper documentation can be a pain, but it’s essential for establishing the authority of a work.
This is just too awesome for words..
Amazon.com has a cool promotion going – sign up for Amazon Student and get a free year of Amazon Prime (and they reserve the right to possibly extend that). For those not in the know, Amazon Prime is a $79 a year service that entitles you to free second day shipping on anything that’s eligible for free super saver shipping (ie, pretty much everything Amazon sells); next day shipping costs $3.99 per item.
When I saw this posted on Lifehacker, I ignored it at first because I already have Amazon Prime; I got in on a free trial years ago and found it to be too useful to do without. Then a friend of mine who also has Prime added her student account and found that they canceled the remainder of her Prime subscription, refunded her for it, and signed her up for the free year. That got me moving; it turned out I was only a few months from renewal, so I got a year free and a $13 refund on my subscription. Woot!
I hardly ever get chain emails, because I have a tendency to do a “reply all” debunking everything in them, which annoys the people sending them. I don’t know if they stopped sending them or just stopped sending them to me; either way, mission accomplished!
However, my dad still gets them and he’ll pass them on to me to ask if there’s any truth in them (there generally isn’t). The latest one I got is regarding HR 1388, The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which expands the size of Americorps and other volunteer programs. The email claims that Congress and President Obama are secretly spending over $20 million to bring members of Hamas to the United States.
As with many email scams, it pulls from several actual bills to create something that will fool the gullible. HR 1388 is a real bill, that has nothing to do with Hamas, and Obama really did sign an order authorizing $20.3 million towards humanitarian needs in Gaza, on top of the $27.5 million that Bush allocated for the same purpose two years earlier. Neither, of course, had anything to do with bringing members of Hamas (or anyone else) to the US.
Really, people, there’s a pretty simple rule you can follow: if you get it through email and it makes outrageous claims, particularly about the democrats in Congress, it’s almost certainly not true. I’ve gotten dozens of such emails, all of them claiming that Obama or (before Obama) the democrats were doing something nasty, and every single one was easily and demonstrably false; in fact, in every case, a quick trip to Snopes provided documentation to that effect. If you must pass on chain letters, fine, but please, take three minutes to do a little basic research; otherwise, you pass on misinformation and make yourself look dumb when someone takes the time to actually look it up.
Short version: gossip is bad; malicious third-hand gossip is worse and is probably wrong on top of that, particularly when it comes in through mass email. Knock it off!
Update 7/14: got another one today, this time the one that’s been going around since 2004 claiming the ACLU (another favorite target of fake emails) is trying to keep service members from praying; as usual, a quick check of Snopes shows it to be 100% false. Chain emails, bad; forwarding emails without checking Snopes first, worse!
