A stupid unemployment insurance question...

So, I was looking at my job search journal, and I realized that I have a number of entries that look like this:

• Sent resume to job-2ekzp-0123456789@craigslist.org
• Sent resume to job-kavkp-0123456789@craigslist.org. It looks scammy; "work from home developing iPhone apps." I bet the contract has a huge IP noncompete.
• Sent resume to job-tegzr-0123456789@craigslist.org. Bleah, is this redacted again?

I wonder if entries like these are acceptable to the unemployment insurance office? A lot of stealth start-ups (and unscrupulous recruiters) are using craigslist's email-obscuring proxy capability to stay hidden behind the curtain, but I wonder if the UI will buy those as legitimate job contacts.

It doesn't really matter, in the grand scheme of things. I'm sending out far more than the requisite "three a week" job contacts. This is just one of those weird intersections between a new technology and an archaic government procedure.

School lunchs in other countries.

One of the things that I've found recently, in my job search, and for no reason I can fathom, is School Lunch Talk, a website about, well, school lunches. One of the things they've been discussing recently is school lunch programs in other countries. Here's Japan:

Japanese schoolchildren eat lunch in the classroom, and students take turns serving the meal and cleaning up afterward. Their teacher eats the same food with them - typically rice, soup, fish and milk - and pays close attention to manners. Virtually all students eat the school lunch, as they're usually not allowed to bring their own food.

Lunch in Japanese schools is part of the curriculum just like math or science.

And here's France:

Basque chicken thigh with herbs, red and green bell peppers and olive oil; couscous; organic yogurt and an apple. For snack, they had organic bread, butter, hot chocolate and fruit.

The French take school lunch seriously. The mid-day meal is supposed to teach students good manners, good taste and the elements of good nutrition. Recommendations from the French government assert that eating habits are shaped from a young age and that schools should ensure children make good food choices despite media influence and personal tendencies.

And Italy:

On a recent Friday, students in the northern city of Piacenza ate zucchini risotto and mozzarella, tomato and basil salad. Tomorrow they're getting pesto lasagna, a selection of cheeses and a platter of garden vegetables. Meat only shows up on menus only once or twice a week, and it's usually not the main course.

Italy views lunch as an integral part of a student's education. School meals are supposed to teach children about local traditions and instill a taste for the regional food. To that end, Italian law allows schools to consider more than just price when making contracts with meal providers. Schools can take into account location, culture and how foods fit into the curriculum.

That's a pretty impressive set of distinctions between school lunch in other countries and the school lunch that Omaha and I had the other day: USDA Cutter quality burgers, iceberg lettuce and "creamy vinagrette" dressing, unripened watermelon, guar gum-laden cookies, and a half pint of milk.

In the US, the tendency has been to view the cafeteria as a necessity: we have to feed the kids to keep them from collapsing somewhere in the afternoon, and we have to provide a cafeteria (and government money) to feed the children from poor families. There are abstract nutritional posters and the classrooms handle "nutrition" seperately from the actual act of feeding the kids. Reading through these examples from other countries, though, I know how poorly we're failing our kids now.

Daniel Larison on the Huntsman nomination

One of my favorite voices in the conservative wilderness is Daniel Larison. Larison is my kind of conservative: thoughtful, intelligent, capable of compromise and of seeing the bigger picture. We disagree on ideological ground here life begins (and whether or not my religious faithlessness constitutes "confusion" on my part, or his), but I always respect what he has to say.

Today, Larison has a great read on the nomination of Jon Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, to the position of Ambassador to China. Larison writes:

Fluent in a foreign language, trained in diplomacy, and experienced overseas, Huntsman represents in foreign affairs many of the qualities that his party has come to loathe–and his acceptance of the post indicates that he knows this. … Now, instead of being a voice of reason and experience in internal Republican debates, Huntsman will be supporting Obama's agenda. …

To gauge the depth of the GOP's predicament and its obliviousness to it, one need only note how many conservatives were in fact glad to be rid of Huntsman–even if he was overwhelmingly popular, intelligent, and largely on board with the party's priorities. The nomination and the Republican reaction send clear signals both that the administration is ready and willing to embrace Republican dissenters–however mild their so-called heresies may be–and that Republicans are actually pleased to lose them.

I'm actually really concerned for the Republicans. The Democrats, should they actually get their act together and start passing legislation, would be a disaster without a proper check and balance in the Congress. But all the Republicans have done recently is pass a party resolution calling on the Democrats to change their name to the "Democrat Socialist Party." They're stamping their feet, and that's all they have right now. It's insanely sad, and they're never going to be a national party within a generation if they don't figure out how to be more than the "The Party of Economic Oligarchs on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and the Party of Religious Fascists on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday." Nobody gets Saturday: we all ought to have a break at least once a week.

"The Republican Fascist Party."

So, I've got a question. Without asking the Democratic National Committee to vote on it, should we start referring to the Republicans as "The Republican Fascist Party?" As it turns out, the Republican did not pass their much-ridiculed resolution, instead passing one that accuses the Democrats of "pushing our nation toward socialism." (Hey, did anyone see Eric Cantor (R-VA) and his recent statement that, if the government is going to hand out Pell grants for students, it ought to optimize those grant amounts toward majors the government feels it needs more of? Now that's a socialist idea! And this guy is the spokesman for the Republican's "smaller government" wing!?)

But, y'know, the voice of the Republican's "national security" wing is going around saying stuff like this in public:

And when they (our enemies) see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

In short, Dick Cheney believes that debate, democracy and the rule of law are themselves "weakness" and present terrorists with "opportunity." What this country really needs is a strong man, a leader, a dictator, a tyrant (sorry, finished season one of HBO's Rome last night), to show those evil terrorists what's what about America. What's great about us is the industrial might we can leech dry for generation after generation, not our freedoms. Dick Cheney and his ilk hate us for our freedoms.

Why shouldn't we call that "The Republican Fascist Party?"

Why Hannity won't do it.

Absolutely no one should be surprised by this. Talk show host Erich Muller wanted to prove to his audience that waterboarding wasn't torture. So he had himself waterboarded. The result?

Muller lasted half the length of the SERE training session before he threw his safeword token, a toy cow, across the room and ended the session.

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Muller said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face. … I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke. … I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

So when will Sean Hannity put out on his promise to allow himself to be waterboarded? I haven't been watching MSNBC recently, but I have to watch tonight's Olbermann just to see what he says about this.

I'm kinda pleased with the use of a safeword, myself.

Underwhelmed by the Symfony install documentation

I’ve been helping a close friend with her website, which is written in rails. She admits that’s a mistake, now, because it shares database tables with a PHP application, and the communication between the two has always less than stellar. I’ve been looking into her current major problem, but while I’ve been at it, I’ve been looking for easy solutions to put her back on an all-PHP track. (This seems to be the right thing to do; PHP is the only language she knows well, and the PHP component is the only thing that works reliably.)

I looked at Symfony as an easy PHP-based route off the rails.  It’s not bad, but getting it to run on my box was a nightmare. Undocumented are the number of things with which PHP must be configured to get Symfony running. For the record, to get the sandbox application to run, you need not just the stock PHP, but PHP with PDO, SimpleXML, and SQLLite. None of those are stock on Gentoo (and apparently not on Ubuntu, either).  Once I had rebuilt PHP (3 times!), it was all working.

But now it’s up and I can play with it. Oh, and I got Drupal running, but I had to use my production box to make it so. Annoying, that.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com