A bunch of Chicago-related media crossed my path last week. I thought I’d pass on the highlights:
Plus, of course, two great Chicago-related photo pools:
Limited numbers of connections via terminal services. From time to time at work, I need to log in to our servers to perform tasks. The initial attempt is often followed immediately by swearing and a post to our common IM chat room begging for someone to release a connection. Unfortunately, sometimes people leave their connections open when they go home…
“Security” through buck-passing.
When I try to follow a link to a Word document in IE, I get the following message:
Some files can harm your computer. If the file information looks suspicious or you do not fully trust the source, do not open the file.”
Thing is, I followed that link because I believe the document has information that is relevant to my interests. Now I have to choose between not looking at it, and potentially getting h4xx0r3d by doing so. Neither of these is an appealing option. (See also: the helpful “Security Center” in Vista.)
Instead of spending the time and effort to have Windows warn me before I open a file that’s of interest so that MS can claim it’s somehow “my fault” for getting pwn3d, why on Earth didn’t they fix Word so that simply opening a document isn’t a massive security risk? I don’t have to worry about this crap if I open a Word doc in Pages on my Mac or OpenOffice Writer on my Linux desktop.
It wasn’t so long ago that we made fun of people for believing that simply opening a document could infect them with a piece of malware. Remember the Join the Crew and Good Times “viruses”? Thanks, Microsoft, for making what most technically-inclined folks thought was unlikely possible; “looking for my virus scanner” is sure where I wanted to go today!
Here’s a not-too-infrequent scenario:
What’s up with that file on my flash drive? I’d really like to delete it, but Windows keeps telling me “permission denied”. I’m pretty sure I have access to that directory.
Oh, I see. It’s in use by an application. Which one? Oh, it’s not going to tell me that.
Guess I’d better download a copy of Process Explorer.
Ah, there we are. That’s what’s holding that file. Ok. Terminating that program… Yay, now I can delete the file.
Now I’m just going to stop the drive so I can safely remove it…oh, look, the drive is still in use; it won’t let me stop it. Let’s see what Process Explorer says is in use on E:\…
Nothing. The drive isn’t in use after all. Yet I still can’t stop it.
*sigh* *yank*
…and now it’s bitching that I have to stop devices before removing them or risk data loss. Thanks, Windows!
What is it with virtually every application you install, plus Windows itself, wanting to put crap on the desktop? (Or worse, doing so without even asking you?)
The desktop is my workspace. Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!! If there’s something that I’m likely to be using soon that I really want sitting there, I will put it there. Further, to all you developers who helpfully include a by-default-selected option to add a shortcut to your crummy app on the desktop: YOU’RE NOT HELPING. There’s no point in putting an application shortcut on the desktop. If I use the application frequently, it’s going to be in the frequently-used section of the Start Menu. If I’m always using it, I’ll set it to start up when I log in. If I don’t use it frequently, there’s no conceivable point to having it on the desktop.
And why on Earth does Windows make it so blasted difficult to remove “My Computer”, “Recycle Bin”, etc. from the desktop? I don’t know of any way to do it short of registry hacking or using TweakUI. Gah.
</rant>
A cautionary note: using self-closing <script> tags generally will cause your browser to ignore the tag altogether. E.g., this doesn’t work:
<script type="text/javascript" src="foo.js" />
It took me a bit to figure out what was going on here, because it’s perfectly valid XML. However, since most web servers are going to mark webpages as HTML rather than XHTML+XML, it gets parsed as HTML, which doesn’t allow you to self-close tags that don’t have the EMPTY content model (like <br> or <hr>).
I finally bothered to snap a photograph of one of these ads the other day when I was on the train.
Dr. Zizmor Subway Advertisement
I continue to be amused at both how prevalent and how slapdash they are. I mean, check it out: “treating New Yorker’s skin problems”. “Cleanup” as a verb. And not a comma in sight. And yet, they obviously put a lot of money into the ad campaign; they’re all over many of the IRT line trains that I’m frequently on. I even remember seeing one of these ads when I was briefly in NYC a few years back and remarking on how silly it was.
It all started harmlessly enough.
My friend Jeri asked me if I wanted to take a performance swing dance class with her. The routine in the class has a lot of aerials, something that’s been missing from my dance experience, and wasn’t an open-ended commitment, so I said “yes”, I’d be happy to take the class with her.
Meanwhile, one of my flatmates has been been trying to get me to join her for dance classes for a while. The ones she wanted to take this month were on Thursdays, and since Thursdays are my regular swing dance night anyway, I thought “why not”. I wasn’t really interested in the “basic 6″ ballroom class she was taking, but I figured I’d join her for the bachata/meringue class and salsa class. Naturally, since the “basic 6″ class was after the other two classes, and I was planning to drag her out to the Frim Fram jam, I decided at the last minute that I might as well take that too. It ended up being far too basic for either of us, so now we’re taking Argentine tango instead…
And naturally, I’m going out swing dancing tonight, after rehearsing with Jeri. Tomorrow I’ve got the performance class, followed by an intensive aerials workshop. If time permits, I may do a lindy hop workshop after that with Maggie and Paolo, then I’m going…wait for it…swing dancing.
And Sunday I will sleep.
I ran across several articles recently in rapid succession that all hit on a pet peeve of mine: talking about psychological disorders as a cause of people’s problems.
This article in New Scientist about a young woman with dyscalculia particularly pushed my buttons, because aside from this error, it’s an interesting and informative article. The sentence that exemplifies the author’s confusion is
She found that while her IQ is above average, her numerical ability is equivalent to that of an 11-year-old because she has something called dyscalculia.
This is completely backwards. “Jill”, the subject of the article, has dyscalculia because she is an otherwise intelligent person who has difficulties with mathematics.
The primary authority in the United States for what constitutes a psychological disorder is the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Whether or not an individual has a disorder is determined by whether they meet a set of diagnostic criteria (roughly, whether or not they exhibit certain signs and symptoms); it does not imply anything about a likely cause. As the APA itself notes in the DSM, the diagnostic labels (names of psychological disorders) are just a “convenient shorthand” for those diagnostic criteria for mental health professionals. Or, to put it another way, psychological disorders are basically syndromes.
What does this mean? It means that statements along the lines of “so-and-so has problem X because she has psychological disorder Y” are generally going to be misleading. Such a statement implies that there’s some specific underlying cause for the person’s problems, probably one that is out of his or her control. In fact, stating that someone has been diagnosed with a psychological disorder implies neither.
This is not to say that “Jill” from the aforementioned New Scientist article couldn’t take some solace in her diagnosis. Not because there’s some specific, known cause for her difficulties, but because the fact that it’s considered a specific disorder probably means there are other people with similar problems. Based on the remainder of the article, it’s clear that it’s enough of a problem that there is research into possible causes.
I imagine that this cause-and-effect confusion stems in no small part from the fact that many diagnoses of physiological disorders, unlike psychological ones, do imply an etiology. Saying that someone has a fever and a cough because they have the flu, for example, is perfectly reasonable, because “having the flu” implies an infection with one of a specific strain of viruses. (Note that this is not true for all physiological disorders either: it’s also nonsensical to say something like “so-and-so has muscle aches because of chronic fatigue syndrome”.)
I’m going to be sending a note to New Scientist about this. More broadly, I hope that media sources will become more aware of this distinction in the future. I can only imagine that this ultimately contributes to overmedication and generally poor treatment of psychological problems, as people seek to put labels on their problems, mistaking them for a cause, and pressure their mental health care providers to fix that perceived “cause”.
An observation that I made to several people in the past couple of days:
If you are in New York, you do not order a “New York strip steak”. It’s just a “strip steak”.
If you are in New York, you do not order a “New York-style pizza”. It’s “pizza”. (Or New Yorkers think it is.)
If you are in Manhattan, you do still order a Manhattan.