New Rants: Plant Your Rantables Right Here, Y'all!

Okay, here is a brand new rant-ready thready. Going to link now.

So the rants began, and we came from post 270 of this long thang, here:

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/980616/

This message was edited May 21, 2009 10:01 PM

Thanks, Kyla. It was way past time for a new thread. My current rant isn't one. It is gratitude for rain which has been falling slowly and gently since yesterday evening. We really needed it! And it is gentle enough that it won't hurt the irises that we need for the show tomorrow.

We had a sprinkle. A welcome respite after rains and rains and rains the past few weeks. Montgomery, Alabama was flooded. One capitol building was underwater and had to be evacuated. There was flash flooding on the major streets and people couldn't get home. Shelters were set up down town for them.

Paj: You mentioned "Temporal Anomaly" is a wild iris in the previous thread. What does that mean? She is a beauty.

Too bad about the flooding in Alabama. I guess we finally got some of the water that had been going to Alabama and everywhere else.

I am afraid I misused the world wild in the botanical sense with Temporal Anomaly. What I should have said is stunning or surprising. That cultivar was definitely never wild. It is a hybrid by Rick Tasco at Superstition Gardens. And it is totally amazing in the number of flowers on a single stem.

There is a section of the iris world devoted to irises that grow in the wild. Those irises are generally referred to as species iris and finding new ones to cross with cultivated iris is a constant field of exploration for iris hybridizers.

Wow, Gloria. I was in Montgomery last week and it was more sunny than rainy. Glad I timed it well.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20090508/NEWS01/905080334

The Montgomery flood was earlier this month, dparsons.

LOL Kyla. Luv the new thread title ^_^

Thank you. I have a rant to plant, in fact.

The website I work for was hacked! last weekend and went down -- and I have been dealing with the aftermath since. We are back up and getting now some much needed upgrades etc, but there remain issues with various community members who can only log in sporadically, things that don't work the way they used to, etc etc so I have been fielding all that this week which is why I have not been around in here much.

I know next to nothing about computer software and all that and it is not my job to deal with; I deal with the people level and how everyone is interacting and reacting, and try (!) to translate between the two functions. Well, this did need to happen -- in terms of our getting the upgrades -- but it is a bit stress city at times.....

Okay, that was it, the rant. Not a very fun one, eh? LOL! I waited too long, maybe, and most of the juice dried out.

Anyway, now it's compost.

;-)

Not fun Kyla. I still wonder how people have so much time and energy to destroy when I don't have enough to build all that I can see to do.

Hackers are often out of work people in third world country and if they do a really really good job American companies who got hacked will hire them to show them how to close the hole. Really. Even LANL has done that. Of course, the hacking business has gone a little south because there are now big criminal penalties on hacking, but I think a lot of them still hope to get jobs.

By the way, I was wondering what happened to you, Kyla.

Poor Baby Kyla! That's awefull. Hacking for no point is in with vandalism in my book. Made so worse because it's pointless. Like slashing tires, great what did that get ya?
I hope the site gets put back together and working right soon.

I remember my grandmother saying: What is the world coming to? Now I am saying it! Pirates! Hackers! ID theft! Swindles of all kinds.

Yar!

Yo ho ho and a bottle of refreshing beverage! Yar!

lol Gloria, I catch myself saying stuff like that too. About how bad the world has gotten since "my day" whenever that was. Maybe it hasn't come yet?

Thanks for the sympathies, my friends. ;-)

Paj, that is an interesting tid bit, but honestly the reason we were vulnerable is at least partly cause we don't have money to pay anyone much so they are outa luck on that score, if that was the motive.

Dave-who-is-Dave, I hear that! But it ends up this is a good thing for us cause it forces some upgrades that we did not know how to accomplish. We have the original web designer helping us (for little or nothing, I am not privy to that info) whereas if we had managed to hire someone before the hack to do what we need done, it would have been very costly for us -- which is why it didn't happen. We were kinda limping along there.

So, anyway. I wrote a couple letters to the membership explaining what was going on and, bless 'em, they are really being pretty patient with the various glitches.

Glad to hear your membership is forgiving. It certainly wasn't your fault if you couldn't come up with the money to upgrade a while back. What's that old saw, that there is never enough money to do it right, but there is always enough money to fix it when it breaks. So sorry you had to go through that.
As for the hackers, there are some who do it for fun, but there really are hackers who hope to get money out of it -- credit card numbers or whatever. And sometimes it works.

After I was in the hospital last December I got a notice that my records were among the materials hacked by someone who hacked into the hospital records. What next?

Yar! I find myself talking to D.H. about how it was different when we were young and we aren't even 60 yet! We are the "young old". Computers are a good tool when they work and a royal pain when they don't. I can't imagine how boring it must be to spend time hacking in to information like medical records. I dare say there is all manner of evil doing that can be done with such records but why not just go shoot somebody if you want to be a criminal? Yar!

That would seem to be an honest approach at least. Well, if you could consider a criminal to be honest.

I think there is a line in an old Bob Dylan song : "...to live outside the law you must be honest; I know you always Say that you agree. So, where are you tonight, Sweet Marie?"

Ah, good ole Bobbie, he had such good lines........

Didn't he just. My D.H. and I were talking about song writers as being different from song singers. Sometimes one person is good at both but Bob Dylan always strikes me as a writer with good inflections.

Well, yes. I have to say I do like the way he sings too. You know his classic line about that, when someone made some remark about how he didn't know how to sing? Something along the lines of, what's to know, I hit all the notes, don't I?

always loved that.

Oh, now, you guys just don't understand the joys of hacking. I know these kids can be terribly destructive and I don't defend them except for the ones in third world countries who are trying to hack their ways into decent jobs.
But having been a computer person for many years, I learned the joys of being able to go to a web site and find data that was generally not known. Sometimes it was downright embarrassing to the owners of the data.
There is an aspect of freedom in the internet. Freedom of information. Though, I do not condone destructive hacking, I certainly understand the joy of learning how much money all the managers make when they thought it was secret and such.
Yes, Kyla, I don't know the details of the hacking done to your organization, and I am sure I would not condone it, but getting into files not properly secured is not illegal and can provide important information to the public.
The world is just learning what it means to be interconnected electronically. Sounds like your organization had a tough lesson in this department.

Paj, I dig it! I can totally get the joys part....... what was a drag was that they shut us down...... there wasn't any secret info to be had, really, and for sure no money! so it seemed simply a destructive act for the fun of it.

Then shame on them. Unfortunately, that is more the act of delinquent teen agers. Sorry tht happened to you.

And I would hate it if hackers destroyed some of the freedoms we have with the internet.

I was thinking, its sort of like having your own personal Aladin's lamp.

"How to repair wood windows?" I ask, and there are all kinds of answers. I only have to choose the relevant one's among them.

But yesterday I was looking for "storage cubes" - you know those stackable wooden square closet organizers. I entered "cube storage" - I got pictures of refrigerators!

The search engine has a sense of humor!

Lol. All the Yar's gave me a good giggle.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U) very interesting

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/fp.php?pid=6492020

This is a photo posted today by MsKatt in Sustainable Alternatives. Re: Swine Flu

Having made a major career change in my late 30's, then had a full career in which I changed types of work several times, I certainly can relate to that video, Duchess. Loved the Swine Flu picture, gloria!

Duchess, good youtube to think about. What I notice is that in order to use the internet a person must know how to read. Sadly, many people in this country are functionally illiterate or nearly. It makes me wonder what kind of information will be force fed or shall we say " made available to them ". Enough to take an order at a fast food restaurant? I have a naturally skeptical mind, especially when so much of the internet is about buying and selling things. Kids need to learn not only how to use a computer and make a blog but to understand how media can be used to manipulate us and how to distinguish between various sources of information. I tend to get on my high horse about this kind of thing. Obviously, I use plenty of internet myself but I try not to take it too seriously.

Roybird: Learning to read is pretty critical, but learning to read intelligently is even more basic.

One of the earliest courses I took in college was Logic and that was what it was about. Evaluating sentences. Later I became a an editor - a technical editor - and basically what I did was take all of the words out of a document that didn't contribute any meaning.

In fact I was given a manuscript to edit written by a man who was fairly famous in the profession. I reduced it by almost two-thirds! Needless to say he was not happy to have his treasured words deleted.
But the document was a Federal Project for the Corps of Engineers. They were very happy and kept me employed for another 5 years.

I had a professor who was adamant about only using the words you really needed. And also about presenting things in a step-by-step logical fashion. I used to be really bad about assuming other people had the same ideas floating around in their heads as I did, so they should obviously reach the same conclusions. Why was there any need to explain it? ^_^

I find you to be a very clear communicator, Katlian. Either that prof taught you well, or you didn't need him to teach you in the first place.

lol

I am always stunned when some one says they do not agree with me (!). After all, given a, b, & c the conclusion is inevitable. It is not a matter of opinion or whim.

" distinguish between various sources of information" Complely true. I find so often that people accept things as fact without looking at the source, considering bias, or even doing any of their own research. People so often read or even just hear something than spread it around as if it's gospel truth. Drives me up a wall.

Totaly hear you Katlian. At one point I was helping my clients put together a book of thier fav receipes. They wrote them, I typed them. And it was amazing how many basic steps they never comunicated, like that you need to bake the dish.

Written communication is an art involving both logic and grammar. I taught English in high school for 13 years and was amazed at how few students ever learn to write. There are some bad teachers around but there are also many dedicated ones. I blame the whole problem on a cultural bias against education. The smart kid is often bullied in school and many parents don't want their children to get too well educated. There is a disdain for intellectual activities, more so in the US than in Europe and Asia. Many parents are more interested in getting their kids on the football, baseball, soccer etc. team than having them do well in school.
Your U-tube certainly raises some valid points duchess. It is a challenge to teach kids to read and even more so to write. It is even more of a challenge to teach them to think critically. James Carville who ran Bill Clinton's campaign also ran campaigns in Israel. He talked about how much easier it was to run a campaign in a country with high standards or education. This is serious. Education including reasoning is essential for a democracy.
I think, as a country, we need to rethink our values. Teachers, parents, students and government leaders. We should give kids the message that being well educated and well read and up on current trends in the world is a wonderful thing.
Americans tend to be absolutely lost in foreign countries because they know nothing about them. They learn few, if any foreign languages, and don't know their values, much less respect them.
Now you all have definitely got me started. I was very frustrated in the schools because they subtly give the message that sports are more important than academics, dooming many of them to low skill jobs. Unfortunately, very few jobs are low skill jobs anymore. We have taught machines to do the low skill jobs.
Enough for now, but you have all raised important points that I agree with. And yes, duchess, I love to cook and find even recipes in respected books and magazines, lacking in how to get from a to b sometimes.

This message was edited May 28, 2009 12:05 PM

I think that's an excellent rant Paj. I was always a nerd but now I have a rewarding, well paid job and I happen to know that one of the most popular athletic stars in my high school class still works at the local lumber yard. I can't imagine the job pays all that well and the hours probably suck.

I read a sci-fi book a few months ago where the society lives in space stations and on other planets but most of them can't read because almost everything they need to know is available in narrated video form.

Duchess, we have a cook book that has great recipes but their instructions are terrible. They will have step1, turn on oven, etc. Then step two is one giant paragraph with about 20 steps involved, then step three is something like "mix this into that and bake 20 minutes. We have taken to highlighting important parts of the large paragraphs because it's easy to loose your place and miss something. My favorite format is Joy of Cooking where they list the ingredients in the recipe with the step in which they are used.

Excelent points. Tho I have to say education doesn't nessesarly mean that you'll have better wages. Even with my degree and experiance I make significantly less than friends who got into the workplace right after highschool. Now days the differance between a BS and a highschool education is less than 10,000 a year. Even so, if I could I'd spend the rest of my in collage. And enjoy being able to actualy think about things and reason.

I hear you Katlian. So often they confuse recipes to the point that people never try them. I've never been able to get that into the Joy of Cooking. My fav is a Four Ingredent cook book. Very simple and then I can go from there.