Monday, March 30. 2009
I came across this article entitled, " PETA Killed 95 Percent of Adoptable Pets in its Care During 2008." For those who are unfamiliar, PETA stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA's slogan is "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment." The organization focuses on four core issues: factory farming, fur farming, animal testing, and animals in entertainment.
From the article:
Hypocritical Animal Rights Group’s 2008 Disclosures Bring Pet Death Toll To 21,339. oday the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) published documents online showing that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) killed 95 percent of the adoptable pets in its care during 2008. Despite years of public outrage over its euthanasia program, the animal rights group kills an average of 5.8 pets every day at its Norfolk, VA headquarters.
According to public records from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, PETA killed 2,124 pets last year and placed only seven in adoptive homes. Since 1998, a total of 21,339 dogs and cats have died at the hands of PETA workers.
Despite having a $32 million budget, PETA does not operate an adoption shelter. PETA employees make no discernible effort to find homes for the thousands of pets they kill every year. Last year, the Center for Consumer Freedom petitioned Virginia’s State Veterinarian to reclassify PETA as a slaughterhouse.
CCF Research Director David Martosko said: “PETA hasn’t slowed down its hypocritical killing machine one bit, but it keeps browbeating the rest of society with a phony ‘animal rights’ message. What about the rights of the thousands of dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens that die in PETA’s headquarters building?”
I'm sure people pick on PETA because they probably rub some people their wrong way because they're usually perceived as extreme and/or militant. I mean, if you look at PETA's website, their leader wants the meat from her body to be used for a human barbeque to highlight that eating meat is wrong. This is also the same organization that launched a PR campaign, telling people that we should call fish, " sea-kittens", in hopes that people would stop eating fish if they thought fish were cute and cuddly like kittens.
Thursday, March 26. 2009
One of the things I absolutely despise at work are meetings. If I seem grumpy in a particular week, it's probably because I had 20+ hours worth of meetings that week, and I feel very unproductive. As a programmer, I subconsciously measure the amount of work I do, by the numbers of line of code that I write; days when I'm stuck in meetings all day, I contribute zero lines of code.
There's several reasons why I hate meetings. One is that it fragments my time. In order for me to really get into the groove of programming, I need a large contiguous block of time to get in the zone. If I have a meeting at 1:30-2:30pm, and then another one at 3:00-3:30pm, that half hour gap in between the meetings is useless because I can't use that time to program. Another scenario is, meetings where I'm invited to them, but I have absolutely no reason to be there, and it's a complete waste of my time. The last type of meeting I hate are the ones that take 30 minutes, but it could have easily been resolved by a couple of e-mails. These meetings are an incredible inefficient use of time.
The straw that broke the camel's back was last week when I was invited to join an 8am meeting. For those that know me well, I am not a morning person at all. In that entire meeting, I literally said two things, "hi, I'm on the call", and "bye." A day later, I was on a conference call where all these people needed answers, but they didn't invite the right people onto the call, so it was a waste of everyone's time.
All this has changed when I read a message that my division manager wrote in an internal mailing list. He will reject meeting invitations if:
- The meeting has no agenda.
- The meeting organizer has no convincing reason why his presence is required.
These two criteria are simple, yet powerful. I applied these rules today, and rejected two meetings. It felt very liberating to do so. What was the net effect? After those two meetings I was supposed to go to, someone posted the meeting minutes, and I spent a couple minutes reading through them. One of the meetings, they talked about stuff that I didn't need to know, and I wouldn't have had anything intelligent to say. The second meeting was a complete waste of time because no one had done their homework in advance of the call, so yet another huge waste of time. This little trick freed up two hours in my day to work on stuff that I should actually be working on.
So, hats off to my divisional manager for enlightening me. If anyone complains about it, I'll just say I'm emulating the powers above that govern me.
Monday, March 23. 2009
I came across this article at Yahoo News entitled, " Fox News jokesters forced into retreat over Canadian military jibes."
They bashed the Canadian military but an American TV host and his guest were forced into a strategic retreat Monday in the face of a national uproar.
A Fox News host issued an apology over a talk-show segment described by the Canadian government as "despicable" and "disgusting." [...]
The recent talk-show segment was taped just before four more Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, and it featured a group of pundits taking turns trashing Canada and its reliability as an ally.
They were spurred by comments from Canada's army chief that the military would need a year's hiatus to regroup and refurbish after its Kandahar mission ends in 2011.
In the Fox News segment, widely accessed on the Internet, Gutfeld said the Canadian military "wants to take a breather to do some yoga, paint landscapes, run on the beach in gorgeous white capri pants."
"Isn't this the perfect time to invade this ridiculous country?" he said. "They have no army."
That opening crack from Gutfeld prompted his comedian guest, Benson, to chime in: "I didn't even know that they were in the war," he said.
"I thought that's where you go if you don't want to fight - go chill in Canada. I guess that'll be their tourism selling point: We're not in the war for a year. So come on by while we nap."
This video shows the clip from Fox News that's causing quite a stir in Canada:
And here's a response from the Canadian Defence Minister, Peter McKay:
For me, I'm definitely not impressed by this Fox News guy's comments, especially since the base I worked at was one of the launching pads for Operation Apollo, which was part of the opening act in the War on Terror. If you look at Canada's contribution to the combined NATO operation, Canada has taken a higher proportion of casualties. This is because our forces operate in the most dangerous area which is the south. Other countries have actually disallowed their troops from operating in that zone because of the danger.
Well played Fox News. Way to make friends with your allies.
(For the record, I'm not some partisan hack that only hates Fox News. I also hate MSNBC with a passion. I find both these media outlets way too partisan, ideological, and in some cases, extreme.)
Thursday, March 19. 2009
I came across this video via Myron.
Pretty funny stuff. Perhaps we are a bit whiny these days.
Monday, March 16. 2009
With each passing day of this recession, I find myself increasingly annoyed by these bankers and money men of Wall Street who basically ruined the economy for the rest of us. The latest outrage of course is A.I.G. trying to pay out $165 million in bonuses to its executives.
The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year. [...]
The payment of so much money at a company at the heart of the financial collapse that sent the broader economy into a tailspin almost certainly will fuel a popular backlash against the government’s efforts to prop up Wall Street. Past bonuses already have prompted President Obama and Congress to impose tough rules on corporate executive compensation at firms bailed out with taxpayer money.
A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled. In a letter to Mr. Geithner, Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., said at least some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives.
“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.
It's just infuriating that a company who recklessly bet the house on housing mortgages and failed could even consider rewarding its executives with bonuses.
I think it's also quite remarkable how the mistakes of this sector has such massive ramifications on all of us. I mean, a lot of us did nothing to deserve this, yet somehow, I find my salary being frozen because businesses are in cost-cutting mode. I see round after round of layoffs from companies all around me. I have friends struggling to get enough work in order to pay the bills. A quick look at my retirement and investment accounts will reveal something synonymous to a large impact crater. I looked at my savings account, and interest rates have come all the way down to 1% which makes holding cash a pretty poor return on investment, even though it's one of the few safe havens left (it's practically a disincentive to save). All of this is happening to everyday people, and yet we're rewarding those who engineered this financial disaster.
And so, I salute Wall Street for creating such a glorious housing bubble, and making off with a ton of cash, and then having the balls to pat themselves on the back with bonuses after they burned down that house. Kudos.
/end rant.
Friday, March 13. 2009
I came across this on reddit. It's a Flash application called the Daft Punk Console. Basically you hit buttons, and it'll play words from various Daft Punk songs. I'm currently listening to the Daft Punk - Alive 2007 album, so this was a timely find.
I'm hoping to try to use this thing on some conference call as a prank. I want to use it to say, "Do it, over", "Make it, faster", or "Never make it harder." Here's "Around The World / Harder Better Stronger Faster" from Daft Punk's Alive 2007 album:
Time well wasted.
Sunday, March 8. 2009
I was searching on Wikipedia for an episode list for Battlestar Galactica, and I came across something interesting. Apparently at in 1998, Richard Hatch (who plays the character of Apollo in the original series, and Tom Zarek in the new series) tried to revive the Galactica franchise. From Wikipedia:
The original series maintained a cult fandom, which has supported efforts by Glen A. Larson, Richard Hatch, and Bryan Singer (independent of one another) to revive the premise.
Richard Hatch produced a demonstration video in 1998–1999 which featured several actors from the original series combined with state-of-the-art special effects. This video, titled Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming, was displayed at science fiction conventions, but did not lead to a new series.
In 1999, Wing Commander producer Todd Moyer and original series producer Glen A. Larson revealed plans to produce a motion picture based on the television series.[3][4][5] It would have featured Battlestar Pegasus.
In 2000, the director and an executive producer of the X-Men film, Bryan Singer and Tom DeSanto, began developing a Galactica television miniseries with Studios USA for FOX. Intended to air as a backdoor pilot in May 2002, filming was scheduled to begin in November 2001.[6] However, production delays caused by the September 11, 2001 attacks meant Bryan Singer had to drop out, due to his directing commitment on X-Men 2. This led Fox to lose interest in the project.
On 20 February 2009, IGN announced that they had information regarding a proposed revival of the 1970s version of the series as a feature film, with Glen A. Larson as writer and producer.[7] Universal Pictures has denied the rumours.
I actually found the trailer for Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming
[Update] Looks like the trailer got taken down. Here's a lower quality bootleg version.
Compare that with the trailer for Battlestar Galactica (2003):
Lets just say I'm very glad that The Second Coming never did air. If it did, we may have never gotten the current manifestation of Battlestar Galactica. The Second Coming looks really cheesy.
/Tear. Only 3 more episodes until it's all over.
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