Joe White’s Blog

I was in Ames this weekend at a church meeting. On the way back, I stopped at a gas station that offers free Sunday papers with a tank of gas.

Cover story: U of I, ISU use student data to sell credit cards. Subhead: “Bank of America cards are promoted despite public worries about debt loads”.

I can’t even believe it. Someone had the balls to think it was okay to sell private student data to these predators? Someone thought it was okay to railroad these students into debt? (Yes, the students can choose whether to go into debt — but it’s not an educated choice; nobody’s teaching them what debt is actually going to mean to their lives. Nobody but the credit-card companies… and, apparently, these two universities.)

How many students already declare bankruptcy as their first act after graduation? We want this to get worse?

Apparently most of the money isn’t even going to benefit the schools; it’s going to privately-run alumni associations. Alumni associations. They’re preying on the younger generation. And these people can sleep at night?

If I still lived in Iowa, I’d be working my butt off writing to the legislature right now. As it is, I should probably do what I can to make sure this doesn’t happen in Nebraska (or gets fixed, if it’s already happening), and write to the federal Congress as well. This is unacceptable.

Somebody should be getting fired over this stunt. Somebody should be getting arrested.

No spoilers in this post, but I link to a page that does have spoilers. FYI.

Today’s newspaper had an article that said J. K. Rowling had done “a recent 90-minute web chat” with readers, “her first public comment since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows debuted on July 21″, answering some of the over 120,000 questions that had been submitted. The article did not, however, mention anything about where this chat had taken place, or where transcripts could be had. Odd.

After a bit of searching, I’m doubting the bit about “her first public comment”, because Rowling got interviewed by Dateline, and that interview aired last Sunday. And most of the article’s tidbits from the chat could have been copied right out of the Dateline interview. Hmm.

Anyway, I didn’t know about the Dateline interview in time to catch it on the air, but NBC’s Web site has a transcript that covers a great deal (all?) of the interview. Lots of really good stuff, about what the characters are doing now, what it was like to kill characters off, fandom, and a fair bit else. It’s five fairly long pages, and worth the read (assuming you’ve already read Deathly Hallows, of course). I figured I’d blog the link to the transcript, partly to share, partly so I can find it again.

Transcript of J. K. Rowling’s interview with Dateline’s Meredith Vieira, July 29, 2007

Raymond Chen (and if you’re a geek and don’t know who he is yet, you need to read his blog) is participating… sort of… in something called the shopautodotca seocontest.

It’s kind of a spam competition, and he’s participating by being a conscientious objector. Sorta.

From his “shopautodotca seocontest online contest tacitly encourages comment spam” post:

There is a Canadian web site that is running a contest to see who can get their web site to rank highest for the terms “shopautodotca seocontest”. There’s $14,000 in prize money at stake (presumably in Canadian dollars), as well as a contract as the company’s SEO manager. Since the contest rules do not rule out spam as a mechanism for improving search rank, this web site (and no doubt others) are getting hit with comment spam…

This web site has a Google page rank significantly higher than the current contest leader, and I think it would be a nice touch if I, as one of the victims of their antisocial little contest, ended up winning it.

Just figured I’d join in the fray by contributing to Raymond’s page rank for the offending phrase. I think it’d be a riot if he wound up outranking all their spam-contest participants.

Some of you may already know about this, but I didn’t. The Big Three-And-A-Half^* credit agencies (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, and Innovis) have a Web site where you can opt out of being on lists they sell to companies offering “firm offers of credit”, i.e. pre-approved credit-card offers. The opt-out site is at optoutprescreen.com.

This is not for general junk mail; this is just for pre-approved offers of credit and insurance. And not even all of those — just the ones that come via mailing lists sold by the big credit agencies. Still, I’ll bite.

Their Web form asks for your Social Security Number, which raised my hackles, but I did some poking around and they seem to be genuine. For example, LifeHacker speaks favorably of their site, and here’s a Wall Street Journal article that talks about them. Pretty good recommendations in my book.

There’s also a phone number: 1-888-567-8688 (1-888-5-OPTOUT). I assume it’s the same deal, with asking for your SSN and all. I used the Web form.

^* Sure, everyone’s heard of the Big Three credit agencies, but Innovis? Who the heck is Innovis?

Well, whoever they are, they’ll be selling a little less of my info now…

So I’ve signed up for Script Frenzy. Fame and fortune, here I come.

I’ve finally (almost two weeks after learning about Script Frenzy, three days before curtain) decided on a plot… of sorts. It’s still just the one-sentence summary from Step 1 of the Snowflake Method. But hey, it’s a start, right? Here’s what I’ve got:

In the modern Midwest, a teenager must rescue the girl she loves from a power-hungry Faerie Lord.

We’ll see if I’m still using that same plot by the time June is over.

As with this past NaNoWriMo (which I never did actually finish), I’ll be writing this on Google Docs, so I can share it with a few people without making it totally public. That way, I can sell it for more money when all the Hollywood studios come knocking my door down. Denial springs eternal, and all that.

Let me know if you want to read along as I write. My contact form doesn’t seem to be working (grumble grumble blog software that doesn’t report the actual mail server error grumble grumble), but you can e-mail me using my hotmail address, which has “ip255″ before the at sign. Put something about Script Frenzy in the subject line so I know not to feed you to my hamster.

DavidI just posted about Delphi developer jobs available in the US. He said “some of you have asked me where the Delphi jobs are… You can always find the latest Delphi job openings at the PermIT job openings site.”

I checked it out. They only list five Delphi job openings for the entire United States, and one of them is closed.

My question is, why list the closed one? Wouldn’t just listing four have been depressing enough?

The folks behind NaNoWriMo — aka “let’s everyone write a novel in a month” — are at it again.

This time, the NaNoWriMo team — newly re-christened The Office of Letters and Light — is introducing Script Frenzy, aka “let’s everyone write a screenplay (or stage play) in a month”. And, not to break with tradition, they picked a month — June — with only 30 days.

They’ve got some good articles on screenwriting on their site. I’ve already followed their advice by reading the screenplays for two movies I already know well. (Oddly enough, I managed to pick two that both starred Bill Murray and were both directed by Harold Ramis: Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day (PDF).)

Even if you think the idea of writing a screenplay sounds a little too crazy, I really would recommend reading some screenplays (their Web site has some links to screenplay sites to get you started). It was really cool to see, not just how a screenplay is formatted and how it flows, but also to see early drafts of movies I already know. I was really interested to see places where the early script kind of rambled, that had been tightened up in the final movie — and on the other side, to see bits of dialogue that were virtually untouched from the early draft clear through to the final cut. You never get to see early drafts of the books you read, but early drafts of movie scripts are out there to see. Very worth reading for any kind of writer — everyone talks about how important editing and revising are, but here you can get a chance to actually see what they look like.

Just had to pass this on. Via the rotating news links at the top of Gmail.

A Rolls for the Man with a Price on His Head and a Taste for Absolute Luxury

The Phantom Armoured, engineered to the highest current international protection rating, will stand up to an AK-47 attack from 10 feet away

Here’s the full article. They don’t mention how much it costs.

Marco Cantù today mentioned that Google Maps will give you driving directions from Italy to New York. Included in the directions is a step that says “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean — 5,572 km“.

To give you an idea of the kind of geek I am, I went on to look for other ocean routes that they support. Mainland to Hawaii? Nope, they can’t do it. U.S. to Australia? No can do.

Then I tried using Florida instead of New York. They routed me all the way up the East Coast. So apparently they only have a single route across the ocean, a single “road” if you will.

So then I tried to narrow down where this “road” starts and ends. (Am I scaring you yet?) I had two reasons for this: one, because I was curious; and two, because I wanted to know how long they thought the swim would take, so I could figure out how fast they think I can swim.

At this point, I found two bugs in Google Maps.

Bug #1: If you ask for a route directly from the starting point (Long Wharf, Boston) to the ending point (Terminal Grande-Bretagne, Le Havre, France), it doesn’t tell you to swim. It just tells you to “head south“. (Here’s a better version of the Google Maps swimming directions; it starts a block away, and does tell you to swim.)

Bug #2: They think you can make the 3,462-mile swim in 29 days 0 hours. Which means they think you can manage an average sustained pace of 5 miles an hour, or 2.2 meters per second, or 4.3 knots. Swimming. Average. If you swim 24 hours a day.

I mean, come on, guys. You could have at least done some research. The swim across the Atlantic actually takes 72 days.

(They also got the start and end cities wrong — it should have been Cape Cod, Massachusetts to Quiberon, France. But one mustn’t be too picky.)

I know this isn’t relevant to what I normally blog about, but it’s compelling.

You’ve probably already heard all the news coverage about the conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But most of the coverage so far has been from the media looking for sensationalism, and from brass hats and politicians covering their asses.

Here, on the other hand, is an account from a senior chaplain at Walter Reed.

The news media and politicians are making it sound like Walter Reed is a terrible place and the staff here has been abusing our brave wounded soldiers; what a bunch of bull!

I was in shock when the news broke. We in the chaplains office in Walter Reed, as well as the majority of people at Walter Reed, did not know anyone was in building 18. […] Building 18 is not on the installation of Walter Reed and was believed to be closed years ago by our department. The fact that some leaders in the medical brigade that is in charge of the outpatients put soldiers in there is terrible.

What I am furious about is that the media is making it sound like all of Walter Reed is like building 18. Nothing could be further from the truth. No system is perfect but the medical staff provides great care in this hospital. What needs to be addressed, and finally will, is the bureaucratic garbage that all soldiers are put through…

I appreciate this guy’s agenda — improving hospital conditions for wounded soldiers — a whole lot more than I appreciate the CYA agenda of the politicos. Go read what he’s got to say.