ↁ's Notebook

The Twilight Sad - "Another Bed"

I've been searching for the best description of this video.

Strange?
Weird?
Disturbing?
Haunting?
Twisted?
Perhaps a little of each one.

Greetings fellow citizens. I am here to talk about the State of the Blog. I can report that the State of the Blog is changed. Read on for the news.

It’s been a whole five months or something, thus it was time to implement some changes to Ye Olde Blog. I’ve bored you in the past (if you’ve chosen to read through such posts) explaining why I changed this or that. I shan’t do that again.

Basically I changed elements because I had the time and ability and, as usual, minor fiddling turned into a bigger project. The only changes you should notice are (hopefully) better overall performance of the site. The platform I used for the past year or so (Tumblr) had some issues and was occasionally slow to load, or didn’t load at all. That shouldn’t happen anymore.

I’ll admit the funny thing about my tinkering over the past year or so is the looks I’ve settled on each time have been quite similar. I guess I should get the message and quit messing around with it, huh?

The only area of controversy with the new design is that I’ve basically started from scratch with the posts. I wasn’t satisfied with how importing old posts worked. Thus, I decided to have no formal archive of posts before this month. If you dig around enough on the new setup, you will eventually find links to some of my old posts.

I felt bad about this at first, as eight-and-a-half years of archives is a lot to leave behind. 1 But then I ran across this line, which made me feel better:

Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality

Michael Loop

Indeed.

As always, thanks for reading.

ↁ

I saw this kicking around Twitter the other day and thought, "Surely not." But apparently it's true. John Tyler, the 10th president of the US, has two living grandsons. Tyler was born 222 years ago.

Wow. Just wow.

If there ever was an argument for American exceptionalism, I think we've found it.

This is a terrific article on several levels. It examines some of the inside story of the development of the iPhone. It points out fundamental demographic advantages that China has over the U.S. And it gets into the potential moral delimma Apple, and other successful US technology companies, has when balancing profitability, share owner value, and the needs of the American worker.

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say. Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.

I did not do this game, but wish I had.

South Dearborn scored the final 30 points of the game to defeat visiting East Central 55-54, setting a record for the biggest fourth quarter comeback in state history. "I've seen some rallies in 18 years of coaching, but nothing like that," Shumate said.

29 points down, South Dearborn will savor win a long time