Cox Crow

Today’s readings speak of God and Jesus as our shepherd. We’re most familiar with this metaphor in Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

In John 10:1-18, Jesus continues the metaphor, and identifies himself as the good shepherd.

The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers. … All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. … I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me

God knows his own. He recognizes you, and requires no proof. You recognize God’s voice, and follow him willingly.

Contrast this with the Beast in Revelation 13:16-17.

Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

The Beast demands proof of your loyalty, a brand, and coerces us into receiving this brand. Coercion is necessary, because he is the wolf at the door, the thief stealing the sheep.

A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.

I experienced a homograph attack on my productivity today, courtesy of Microsoft Word.

This character, pasted here (–), looks like a hyphen, but it’s not. That codepoint is also Unicode Latin small letter a with circumflex: â, or â. When pasted into a PuTTY terminal window, it becomes a dot (Unicode full stop: .).

The readme file in the ConfigScripts package of example wsadmin scripts from IBM is an HTML document generated by Microsoft Word.

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10">

I’m not sure why it did this, and frankly I don’t have the time to investigate right now, but I am puzzled as to why it is pasting visibly as a hyphen, but is not being a hyphen. I suspect this is a side-effect of a helpful Word feature which turns hyphens into en dashes (–).

Look, Computer, if you don’t know how we’re encoding meaning in the characters, don’t guess. Sometimes a hyphen is just a hyphen. The meaning is in how it is read: not in the glyph itself.

In the movie Elizabeth, Phillip II remarks that he has sacrificed Spain’s forests in order to build his fleet. That’s an interesting remark, and I wonder how accurate it is. Perhaps someone knows.

While I was looking on the Internet for substantiation, I found A History of the Precious Metals, by Alexander Del Mar, in which he notes that

Spain was to the ancients what Mexico and Central and South America became in later ages to Spain, the Dorado, the richest mining country of the world, the place where gold and silver were found in greatest abundance. The fate of its aboriginal inhabitants, the subsequent struggles among leading nations for the mastery of its precious metals, the destruction of its forests for the purposes of the mines and the consequent exposure of its soil to drought and devastation, the neglect of agriculture in the absorbing pursuit of metallic wealth, and the resulting poverty and backwardness of its population, both aboriginal and colonial — can all be read by the nearer pictures which are accessible to us of Mexico and Peru.

We’re watching NCIS, and I can’t help but wondering what their jurisdiction is. If the show is in any way representative, they investigate pretty much anything.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has primary investigative and counterintelligence jurisdiction within the Department of the Navy. NCIS has a global presence, maintaining a worldwide field structure that supports Navy and Marine Corps requirements in over 140 locations around the globe, including aboard every aircraft carrier and “big-deck” amphibious vessel. NCIS special agents are authorized by law to conduct arrests of military members and civilians alike, both on and off military installations.

I’ve gotten used WordPress saving my posts, so when it doesn’t, and I accidentally close the tab…. Damn.

Somehow I get the feeling that Rick is sharing all of my posts. Wonder how many friends he has reading that shared items feed.

I have 180 or so items on my wishlist at Amazon. There are a couple of things that would come in handy. The obvious one would be the ability to search through it for a particular book, or genre. For example, I’ve just decided that I’m not at all interested in books on computing topics, so the book on Network Intrusion Detection is no longer wanted. Also helpful would be for the Amazon Associates wishlist widget to randomize selections from the list, instead of displaying them by date added.

Denise Howell found out about the information siphoning at Build-a-Bear. Wait ’til she finds out about Webkinz. But she’s right about Build-a-Bear: the methods are sneaky, they collect much more information than strictly necessary, and the parents have absolutely no problem giving it up. We’ve gotten very good at filling out forms.

But it looks like the Company may follow up on some of her suggestions.

Sometimes I just want to scribble something in my journal. Maybe I can suppress the titles on these posts that don’t really want one. But then what would I do for the slug. Oh, dear, the quandaries that modern writers get themselves in.

Anyhoo, if my grocer is tracking his sales to me, it would be nice if he would also provide a way for me to track my purchases.

I used Microsoft Vista for the first time this afternoon, while setting up a wireless network for my father-in-law. Holy shit is it annoying.

There are lots of companies pouring lots of money into digitizing MY medical records, and all I can think is why the hell would I want that?

Following the recent success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, there comes The Daring Book for Girls. The latter looks to be as entertaining and useful as the former. However, this note in the latter instructions on how to short-sheet a bed perhaps inadvertently highlights why this is a girlie book.

Important: Don’t do this to anyone whose feelings will be hurt, only to those you know will laugh hard or at least giggle when they figure it out.

Power is out in Beekman today. NYSEG’s electricity emergency phone line had a recorded message about the outage last night, and power was expected to be restored by 03:00 this morning. However, when we awoke it wasn’t.

I called NYSEG again, and the message indicated that they now expect service to be restored around 18:00 tonight. We listened to the radio to see if there was any news, and I heard a traffic report mention a transformer fire in Beekman. After a couple of phone calls, we found that part of the town had power, but the elementary school probably didn’t — their answering machine did not answer.

On the school calendar there’s a phone number labeled “School Call.” WTF is that? Whatever it is, the number is busy. Our jargon-fraught school district apparently hasn’t realized that they cannot communicate with the parents by way of the web, nor by way of an answering machine, if the power is out. Luckily, the telephone network is independently powered.

I realize that the district has some scaling issues because of the number of students, but a phone tree scales fairly well. Think of it as an organized rumor mill.

Make the first sentence pull the reader in. I’m reading syndicated content in Newsgator Online. Even in full-content feeds, it displays only the first few lines to make for easy scanning, so if you don’t pull me in immediately, I’ll never make it to the second sentence.

Dear Mega Brands:

I am not buying any more Rose Art® crayons or MegaBloks. Neither are my friends and acquaintances. Next time, listen and act when one of your customers tells you that your toys kill. [via Rick Klau]

Yours,

I’ve noticed that I am becoming more impatient with spending the time to learn new software. I don’t think this impatience extends to learning anything new, but only those things which seem to involve a large investment in time for little tangible reward.

The board of the Arlington Central School District approved yet another year of increased spending. I’m sure their hands were tied by the contract negotiations last year. One hopes the district will post the budget online before we vote “No” on May 15th.

Here’s an amusing tidbit from The Poughkeepsie Journal’s article on the subject.

To eliminate $302,000, the district eliminated all seven proposed, new non-academic positions in transportation and clerical staff….

They eliminated proposed positions? How do you eliminate something that doesn’t exist?

Gee, I’d love to be able to bring my budget under control by adding this trip to Italy or that trip to Italy, and then removing it. Look, dear! We saved $14,000 by not going to Europe! Let’s buy a car!

I’ve a story about Verizon Wireless’s anti-customer service, but the heat of anger has faded. And while I want to tell this story to destroy any hope they have of retaining customers, I have the feeling it will take longer than the two minutes this did.

The Bigger Sister and I will be performing in The Fiddler on the Roof at the Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center the first two weekends in May. She’s excited. I’m scared. There’ll be an audience.

This role is somewhat different from the last I almost had. Instead of playing Alfred in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, I’ll be the Constable.

Tickets are available online.

As a serendipitous follow-up to my problem with piles, John Gruber points the exact procedures for Not Getting Things Done.

Well, hell, I could have told you that. I didn’t, because I’m not getting things done.