Indiana

Daylight Savings Time and Cable

I noticed with some grumpiness this morning that although my digital cable had adjusted correctly to the new daylight savings time, my DVR settings did not, so my show recordings are all off by an hour — instead of recording Desperate Housewives, then Gray’s Anatomy, my DVR recorded Gray’s Anatomy and the evening news instead. Combined with the general wonkiness of the DVR’s recording in general, this didn’t make me happy. I have to go in an tweak my settings in ways that I should not have to, or I occasionally will miss something.
I know must have happened because I had the selection of “record all episodes of this show in this time slot” instead of “record all episodes of this show at all times.” But the second setting results in recording five versions of the same episode, or causing repeated episodes to “bump” other original airings of shows off the schedule without warning. I have no way to tell it to prioritize one show over another, and it doesn’t tell me if it has bumped a show off my recording schedule, so I don’t know to go back and add it in later. That’s broken.
With some other video recording programs, you can tell the recorder to get every episode of a show, but to only record any episode one time, so the when a network re-airs a program, the DVR sees it’s a duplicate episode and ignores it. You can also program them to prioritize one show over another if the schedule moves around and you accidentally try to record more than two things at once. And they will tell you what show was bumped off the schedule, so you can go back and re-set it to record the next week
I have some friends who were showing off their satellite TV/Tivo combination package, which currently weighs in at less money every month that my cable, with more features and reliability, including the ability to transfer shows from one TV to another, so I could move a show upstairs to the bedroom to watch it. I hate to go to all the trouble of doing that, but given that I’m paying more for less service, it might be time to make the switch.

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How to Evaluate Candidate’s Stands on the issues

On Bilerico, Sheila Kennedy provides a great checklist of things to think about when candidates start talking about their pet issue this campaign season. Read the whole post (it’s great!) but here are the highlights:

when Congressional candidate A unveils his “Major Initiative to Solve the Boll Weevil Problem,” I suggest the following four questions to help you evaluate the candidates and their proposals:
Question One: Is there general agreement that Boll Weevils are a problem?
Question Two: Is there agreement on how to solve that problem?
Question Three: Is this a problem only government can solve?
Question Four: Does the proposed solution pass the ‘smell test’? (Does our earnest candidate demonstrate knowledge of available evidence on this issue? )

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e-mail – a tool for good, and for evil

Every once it a while, you get an e-mail that’s so shocking that it could either destroy your soul, or make you a completely better person.
Recently I got blind carbon-copied on an exchange a friend of mine had with “respected activist” Marla Randolph Stevens, a former resident of Indiana and former “political activist” here in the state. If you don’t know her and aren’t politically active on the gay community in Indiana, you won’t care about this at all, so don’t bother clicking through the continued link. But if you do know her, you’ll find the following e-mail enlightening, to say the least. My favorite part is the subject line “Unsolicited and probably unappreciated.” Oh, it’s appreciated more than you’ll ever know, my dear.

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Advance Indiana, Carson’s Challenger, and Ted Fleischaker

Julia Carson is facing a democratic challenger to her office — a gay man, Kris Kiser, with very little political experience. Much of the GLBT community supports Carson, who has been a friend of ours politically and gone to bat on gay issues with no hesitancy whatsoever. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) both support Carson over a challenger with little experience.

However, local sleazeball gay “newpaper” publisher Ted Fleischaker endorsed Kiser over Carson in an editorial in his “newspaper” (the only part of that term that is accurate is that the trash he publishes gets printed on paper), generating some controversy in the gay community and a great deal of discussion over the issue on the Advance Indiana website, which has done a decent reporting on the details.

I can’t say much about Kiser or whether he’d be a good candidate, although I think he can’t have very good judgement, since he’s trying to create a schism in the community by running against one of the best elected officials Democrats have, rather than running against a Republican incumbent. And if I were him, I wouldn’t count an endorsement from Fleischaker as a positive thing. I’d be running as far away from that as I possible could.

After a heated discussion of the issues on the Advance Indiana site, along with commentary on the validity of Ted’s paper, someone hacked the Advance Indiana site and deleted the related posts. Gee, that’s an awful striking coincidence. I remember back in the day when I was libeled on the gayindy mailing list by an “anonymous” source for expressing opinions Mr. Fleischaker disagreed with.

Continue ReadingAdvance Indiana, Carson’s Challenger, and Ted Fleischaker

Kids suspended for massive food fight

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I love kids, and this is why. Rock on, kids.

Associated Press, CHESTERTON, Ind. — A massive middle school food fight left several students suspended and the eighth-grade class footing the cleaning bill that included the cost of scraping mashed potatoes off the ceiling.
Last week’s fight at Chesterton Middle School left ceiling tiles damaged and could cost the students as much as $1,000 to pay for overtime, maintenance and repairs, said Duneland School Corporation Superintendent Dirk Baer. “It wasn’t just one or two kids throwing grapes,” Baer said. “There were mashed potatoes sticking to the ceiling.”
Security cameras captured the fracas that broke out about halfway through the 25-minute lunch period Wednesday at the school in the town 15 miles east of Gary.
The school suspended between six and 10 students for two or three days for launching the day’s menu of chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and milk into the air.
As many as 50 students might have been involved. Principal Jim Ton recommended one student be expelled.
Cleaning costs will be taken from the eighth grade’s extracurricular activity fund.
Baer said the whole class was punished because many of the grade’s 500 students knew about plans for the food fight but failed to alert administrators.
“It was planned and it was widely known that it would happen, but nobody said anything,” Baer said. “Everybody has to take responsibility.”

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Political Sites I Like

If you’re looking for intelligent stuff about Indiana politics, these guys are great:
http://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/
http://www.masson.us/blog/
http://www.takingdownwords.com/taking_down_words/
And on a national level:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/
http://www.goodasyou.org/
http://americablog.blogspot.com/
http://www.biggaypicture.com/
http://atrios.blogspot.com/

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When you pay attention to work, you miss all the good stuff

For the past couple days, StAllio! has been covering a fun controversy brewing in Indiana politics concerning the “Bloody 8th” congressional district race between Republican incumbent and right-wing loony John Hostetler, and his hottie Democrat opponent, Sheriff Brad Ellsworth.
Ellsworth’s daughter is an IU student, and happened to have a facebook page where she’s alleged to have had pictures of herself holding what might have been a bottle of beer, or might have been a bottle of root beer. I’ve seen the pictures, and I couldn’t tell. Similarly, Maggie Daniels, the daughter of Mitch Daniels, had pictures that appeared to show her engaging in underage drinking on her facebook page.
Fellow IU student Joshua Claybourn has a blog at In the Agora, where someone provided links to these two facebook pages. Claybourn, being a Republican and an employee supporter of Hostettler, proceeded to send the Ellsworth link to the newspapers, while concealing the Daniels link.
Chaos ensued, Claybourn was attacked, then he tried to cover up his involvement, blah blah blah. Go read the story at StAllio’s page, which has been published on Atrios, BTW. I’m so jealous.

Continue ReadingWhen you pay attention to work, you miss all the good stuff