Because of a movie (Avatar) about a fictional race on a distant moon who encounters human beings attempting to mine a substance called “Unobtainium” for profit to be made back on Earth.

How is this movie being perceived as racist?

The “hero” is white. And he’s not even much of a hero, in my eyes at least. He was a crippled ex-marine of average intelligence with simple, borderline crass, communication skills who relied heavily upon the deeds of the supporting members of the cast to be propelled into the “white messiah” status he’s being given. Pardon me for being different, but if that’s what we’re calling a hero, then I’d much rather be in the supporting cast. The kick-ass, helicopter pilot; the dedicated scientists/researchers (who, by the way, make every effort to do no harm to any living being or thing), the Na’vi high priestess/shaman to name a few examples. Heck, I’d rather be one of the flying creatures, or a tree than the actual “hero”.

To circle back around to the topic of this entry, I just didn’t get racism from this movie. It may have been there, but far more apparent to me was the humans’ destruction of the fantastical natural environment and their complete lack of concern for it. Instead of taking time to research and study the native environment and cultures, they stopped once they found one thing of value and completely fixated on it with no regard to what was destroyed in the process. Hasn’t THIS theme been repeated over and over again on various regions of our own planet? Does this not still continue to this day? I’m sorry to those this may offend, but racism takes a backseat to the loss of that which sustains life of all races; our natural resources.

So what did I take away from this film? What was most sad to me (and I hope others)? That even with the amazing advancements to technology that are going to surface in the future that will enable the human race to explore other planets, will also come the rape and destruction of those planets and their life-systems.

“I am online. Click here to chat or sex with me”
Hey, why was that SPAM? I will sex with beautiful girl! NOW!

So, I never even got to that caffeine. Not sure if that’s worse or better. Now I’m getting delirious from the stress of the rest of the week. Getting excited as I see the light start to shine through from the top of the snowpack.

Ryan! Ryan! I’m digging my way out! Mmmmpffmmfffmppp…mmmmphf…

Project for this weekend: Find Spammer e-mail. Sext them deeply.                           Aaaaaw…yeeeaahhhh!

Welcome to Friday in all its magnificent, caffeine infused glory! Hope you all had your delicious morning Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs, Spam and Spam. Ryan is currently in class for the next couple hours, so I am commencing takeover. I’m Noelle, bytheway, Ryan’s girlfriend and torturer. He has reached a level of crazy sufficient to allow me blog priveleges on his web site, and now I’ve come to abuse them. Now the question is, can the Internet be abused? Bring us your tails of Internet abuse! Not to be confused with self-abuse, mind you. Some things should be kept to one’s self… Anyhow, off to chug more caffeinated beverages.

Anybody who knows about usability, this hopping back and forth between the mouse and keyboard slows a person down no matter how fast they think they are. Staying on one device will be faster. One of the things you can do to speed up your bookmarklet speed is to give them keywords. Depending on your browser, determines how you do it.

• Firefox – v 3.5.5 – After putting the button/bookmarklet in your toolbar, right click it, and choose properties. You should see a field labeled keyword, put whatever word/phrase you please and hit ok.
• Internet Explorer – 7 & 8 – There is a shortcut key field after getting into the bookmark properties like described for Firefox. I recommend that you do not use this tip in IE because setting a shortcut key only just launches a new window/tab in your default browser using that link.
• Opera – v 9.5+ – Once in the properties window, there willl be a nickname field. Input whatever nickname you desire.

Now since you have a keyword/nickname/whatever, you can just type that into the address bar and automatically be sent there. The most speed that will be gained is when people use URL shortners, over things like blog pings. I have tried a handful of shorteners, and the best so far is: is.gd. The way I have mine set up is I have the is.gd keyword set to is. So I browse to a long URL site, press <CTRL> + <L> and it jumps to is.gd’s shortened version. Since is.gd puts the new url into a text input box with the text selected, I can copy the url without pressing anymore than the copy hotkey. Then I am set to go.

A lot of people like the bit.ly service. I don’t exactly want to use that as my update platform. Since bit.ly is designed to be namely a status updater with links, their shortened url is in an HTML textarea element. So you have to highlight it if you are not planning to use it in a status update.

Why am I so harsh?

Well, I instinctively put in my site. One of the “potential problems” reported is the following”

Tabular information may be missing table markup.

Well I am sorry to say, nothing on the page in question has a table, nor data of any kind that makes it look like a table. So if you try this checker, I wouldn’t take the results to heart quite yet.

With that being said, it has some hopes. The information is quite complete, with samples of valid code. I would however make the code in question highlighted somehow (color, a border, background color) within the code block. Currently it gives a full source code sample, which is a bit tedious to skim through if you don’t know what exactly is wrong.

I also have been terribly busy with school. I am currently trying to write a policy review on something from the Social Security Administration. It is really hard to track down stuff beside the laymen level explanations. I am slowly getting there.

President Obama’s first press conference, courtesy of C-SPAN. Mainly about the economic stimulus package. I am not 100% on his ideas. I believe that while it is good that he is wanting to give money to the people. However, I think that it is important that citizens should begin saving again… It is a long video, but is worth the watch.

Technorati Tags: press conference, obama, president

One way I can tell is the default notification on where you are at if via keyboard navigation, is gone. I personally rely on this quite heavily. If I know I need to hit Tab 10 times to get somewhere, I am forced to count now, versus watching visually. Another thing is since I have the wp.com stat plugin activated, the cursor is by default is placed in the login box for that. While it is cool that I can login with just hitting enter, since that password is saved, but my focus is now halfway down the page. Where will I be located after a few tabs? Who really knows.

The sad thing about this is, I was asked my opinion if WordPress would be a good option for a blind user. At the time, I was still running 2.6.* and said it’s ok, not the best thing to use. I added that if the said user was considered a power user, they could make it work. I don’t think this will be the case anymore. Like I said, this is sad, so many people are using WordPress not only for bloggin but things like a CMS! It is shame that the dev team doesn’t adhere to standards. Going off that, it says they have no interest is accessibility. You can stretch that out to include usability even.

My birthday is coming up, it is actually this Saturday. Yes, the 14^th. My mom, her boyfriend, and my sister are coming up most likely for lunch or dinner. Mom wants to do something at Pike Place Market, but considering it was snowing a little bit ago, we’ll see what happen.:)

Anyhow, I saw that at Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 EET 2009, the Unix time for the given date is: 1234567890, unfortunately that’s only 3 in the afternoon on Friday (Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 PST 2009) here in Seattle. I was so close!

Hi Ryan,

We have investigated the issue that you describe, and have determined that this error is caused by the firewall on your computer. Sometimes computer software will block sites that are important for Facebook to operate. If you temporarily disable your firewall before making profile changes, this should resolve the issue.

Let me know if you continue to experience problems after attempting this solution.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

xxxxx
User Operations
Facebook

I wrote back to them saying how utterly ridiculous such a solution is. I said that if you hovered over the link, the link pointed home.php, and no firewall can intelligently redirect a link unless I had hand-coded it. I also informed him that for a firewall to block a firewall, the link would have to be something along the lines of: http://iam.goingto.spamyou.com/, then your firewall would nullify the link OR give you some warning message.

Of course I didn’t stop there, I asked why Facebook was telling people to disable their firewall to use their product. Doesn’t sound right to me. Thoughts?