Seems I've been quieter than I intended to be.

[lance_sibley]

Wow, it's been nearly a week since I last posted... I guess nothing's been going on. Well, that's not really true, I suppose, but nothing unusual has happened in my life since last week. The stuff I've been doing at work for the past month was uploaded to the test server today, and the client is really excited about the changes. So excited he wants to know when the next batch of changes, which he gave me last Friday afternoon, will be ready.

The Programming scheduling meeting for Polaris 21 went well on Sunday. We managed to get the whole schedule done in about six hours - mind you, it was simpler than in past years because it seems that the pre-reg deadline snuck up on a lot of our regular panelists this year. We're still getting panel signups via the website. It's much easier to avoid schedule conflicts if the schedule is made before many panelists have signed up. ;)

I managed to make it to the Exec meeting on Monday night only an hour or so late. I discovered that evening that taking the Viva blue bus from work to Richmond Hill Centre, the purple line from Richmond Hill Centre to York University, the orange line to Highway 7 and Martin Grove, the York Region #7 bus south to Finch and the Martin Grove #46 bus to Dixon is even slower than taking the Viva blue bus all the way down to Steeles and then the Steeles West #60 bus from Finch station. Perhaps next time I'll take the blue bus to Finch and take the route I normally take from home (subway to Kipling, Martin Grove #46 to Dixon) and see if that's any faster (it certainly can't be any slower).

For the three or so of you who haven't been following the latest kerfuffle, there's a blog here by "Warriors For Innocence", the holier-than-thou group that's getting LJ accounts and communities shut down for listing interests that they don't agree with, in the name of protecting children from potential abusers. There aren't many posts there yet, but I'm sure that there will be more as word gets around. I read some of the comments, and it boggles my mind that they're claiming that they're not ultimately responsible just because they're not the ones deleting the journals and the communities.

Oh, and I'm a little late with this, but montrealais' post from the other night, along with this article in the Globe and Mail, highlights just why Gay Pride celebrations are still needed now, perhaps more than ever. For those who didn't hear about it, here are the opening paragraphs from the Globe's article:

Russian police detained gay protesters calling for the right to hold a Gay Pride parade in central Moscow on Sunday while nationalists shouting “death to homosexuals” punched and kicked the demonstrators.

Riot police detained the protesters, including two European parliamentarians, as they tried to present a petition asking Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has called gay marches satanic acts, to lift a ban on the parade.

Nationalists and extreme Russian Orthodox believers held icons and denounced homosexuality as “evil” while a group of thick-set young men turned up with surgeon's masks, which they said would protect them from the “gay disease”.

That's right - the police arrested the gay activists. For the most part, the mob attacking them got off scot-free.

We might have it pretty good here, but our brothers and sisters in other countries aren't so fortunate.

Oh, and the Anaheim Mighty Ducks just took a 2-0 series lead in the Stanley Cup final by beating Ottawa 1-0. As much as I hate to say it, because it implies that I'm cheering for Anaheim when I'm not... it looks good on the Senators. ;)

Comments

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Go ahead and spread the word.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

You don't even have to look as far afield as Moscow. Our dear neighbors to the south just fired a bunch of valuable military translators for being gay. I guess the combination of being gay and speaking Arabic is just too much.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Again???

They started firing Arabic linguists a few years ago, and there was huge negative publicity then. I can't believe they're still doing it. I guess they didn't learn when it was pointed out initially that firing people who speak Arabic when you're at war with a nation where they speak the language wasn't the wisest move.

Even without this particular example, however, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is one backward policy. It doesn't work. Just ask the gay guy I know who recently got out of the US Navy. ;)

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Re: you bus ride... Ouch my head hurts. It's really too bad public transit doesn't just go where we want it to ;)

Well, it kind of does... they're called taxis, and they're expensive. ;)

The problem wasn't so much with getting there, as the routes all connect and get me from two blocks south of work to the corner of Dixon and Martin Grove. The problem is with the waiting for the various buses at the transfer points. I'm sure I was waiting for at least half an hour at Highway 7 and Martin Grove, and about ten minutes at Richmond Hill Centre.

Re: Scheduling meeting... yes somewhat simpiler, but still over 200 hours on it so not so much so.

ennisdl keeps saying that, but it doesn't feel like it to me. I don't know if that's because I'm not as close to the scheduling process this year as I was when I co-headed, or because I personally am only responsible for about 20 hours of panels, or because it just looked to me like there were an awful lot of empty spaces on the grid.

Besides I still came home and had dreams about it. I guess it didn't help that I had to do another 400 hours for our Disney con after that.

That would do it...

Which BTW only took 4 hours, but we cheat and put the hard can not move events on before hand.

Well, we kind of do that too - we put the special events and the guests up first and work around them. Or do the Disney cons just have more events that can't be moved?

Re: Lj see my post

I agree with much of what you say, but what bothers me is the knee-jerk reaction that LJ/Six Apart exhibited. "Oh noez! The Christians say we have bad people! Take everything down!" And then they went back and looked over what they had done.

Plus, I think that the folks who are pointing out that all they've accomplished is to make their targets smarter about hiding are right. There are smart ways to go about handling situations like this - and what Six Apart did wasn't one of them.

Re: Moscow and Gays... my head hurts again, what century are we in again???? Although it wasn't too long ago the protesters would have been shot or sent to siberia, but still.

True... progress has happened, but I think they've slid back a little under Putin. I've read in the Globe about people who disagree with his policies finding themselves being punished. We can't take our current position in society for granted.

re: Stanley Cup: I am cheering for Ottawa only because a friend of my at work is a big fan and I would love to see his reaction if they win.

Honestly, I don't really have a horse in this race... it's just that as a Leaf fan, I hate the Senators more than I hate the Ducks. (And if a gun were put to my head, I'd have to admit that Anaheim has a pretty good team, with Giguere, the Niedermayer brothers, Selanne and Pronger. But I'll never admit that in public, not so long as the team is named for that idiotic movie. ;) )

[jj79.livejournal.com]

Okay, please please please promise not to hate me for not doing my homework.

I scanned through the WFI blog and really didn't find anything terrible about it. Yes, the blogs are getting shut down with no proof of anything actually happening (stories are *not* necessarily truth) as far as I can tell...but child porn-type activities are illegal.

I'll read some more when I get time and be ready to discuss later. :)

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Not to worry, I don't hate you. :)

Yes, those activities are illegal, but talking about them isn't, necessarily. And besides... shutting down communities for survivors of abuse? Shutting down Supernatural fanfic groups because of the writers who slash Sam and Dean? Shutting down accounts because of items listed in the owners' interests, without checking on the content of their journals to see if there was really anything to be concerned about? Shutting down groups dedicated to discussion of Japanese fashion, for God's sake? (Just because it's called "Lolita". I have no idea if it's named for the Nabokov novel or not.)

I have two major complaints with the way this went down: one, LJ shut down everything remotely suspect, then went back and looked to see whether they'd shut down something they shouldn't have. Two, by doing it this way, the people who really do have something to hide will just do a better job of hiding it.

They seem to be going back and reactivating all of the groups and accounts that were shut down in error, but it would have been better to quietly shut down the accounts that really were a problem. It's possible that none of this publicity would have occurred had they taken that approach.

BTW, you might want to run your anti-spyware software now, if you visited their site. I've read that it's infested with adware and spyware. (I ran mine, and it only found a handful of problems, so I don't know if they came from the WFI site or my regular day-to-day browsing since the last time I ran a scan.)

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Having seen a real-life case of netnanny software censoring somebody's blog because she posted about her surgery for breast cancer - this was not good. However, I think WFI may have stirred up a real hornet's nest.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Wow, there's quite a discussion going on there.

Didn't LJ have an issue like this a couple of years ago, where groups for discussion of breast-feeding and breast cancer were wiped out because someone did a global search for "breast"? I guess they didn't learn from that snafu. (It may not have been LJ, but I know that an incident like that did occur somewhere, a couple of years ago.)