All posts by John Goerzen

Bush Politicizes Churches

Politics

Take a look at Resonance: Pot Lucks for Bush — it’s a little scary what he’s trying to do. Apparently many conservative churches are nonplussed, and have traditionally asked people to “vote their values” without naming specific candidates or parties. I’m fine with that, but it always seems odd to me when churches endorse a particular candidate or party, regardless of whether the church is conservative or liberal.

Find A Job By Blogging?

Online Life

One year ago, I noted the Quovix experiment to find candidates for a job by blogging. That experiment didn’t work out.

This year, they tried it again. This time Quovix CEO Marty Morrow reports Blogging beats Monster.com for job posting. He lists some benefits, which center around greater interaction and ability to learn about what makes potential employees tick (and the ability to learn what makes potential employers tick).

Meanwhile, Dan is going the other way: he’s blogging to find employment.

Maybe someone should write something to match up the Martys and the Dans… but then we already have monster.com, right?

Does the whole thing stop working if “everybody” starts doing it, because then you have all the riff-raff too? Or does that just make it better, because the social network is larger?

Study details school sexual misconduct

Politics

There’s a lot to be worried about in this study about sexual misconduct in our K-12 education system.

Apparently, 10% (or 4.5 million) students face anything from inappropriate jokes to forced sex.
What’s more surprising are the reactions:

  • National Education Association spokesman said “Lumping harassment together with serious sexual misconduct does more harm than good by creating unjustified alarm”. I think that teachers sexually harassing students is cause for alarm, even if it isn’t physical; damage from that can be long-lasting.
  • The Deputy Education Secretary said that find findings could be “considered insufficiently focused.” In the next sentence, the report says the officials “did nothing to downplay the importance of the problem.” Huh? Isn’t that what they were doing? Claiming that only assault is a problem?

The article does make a good point at the end, too, about the unknown truthfulness of allegations. “Teachers increasingly fear making even the most innocent gestures, like hugging a child having a bad day.” Let’s fix the real problems, not non-problems like hugs.

MythTV Hints I

MythTV

Here are some hints that I have gleaned so far:

DVD stuff:

And some MythTV-related sites:

MythTV Hardware Review

Hardware, MythTV, Reviews

Last week, I posted a list of hardware that I’m buying for my MythTV. Most if it has arrived and I can make some comments about it now.

First, the Chenbro case is really bad. One of the hard drive bays is inaccessible due to being placed over the motherboard (!) and the other one requires the drive to be mounted upside-down. The 5.25″ bays are also poor, not letting one drive in all four screws (one of them only permits two, and right above each other at that, anchoring only 1 of 4 possible anchor points.)

The Biostar board is nice, but here’s the rub: while it features TV out and S/PDIF out pins on the motherboard, the board doesn’t ship with the connectors necessary to make it work! They charge $12 and $15, respecitvely, for the requires connectors, so this thing is not yet working with a TV.

The Samsung hard drive is great and it is indeed quiet as claimed. I’d heartily reccommend it.

And the Athlon XP 2200+ CPU is, of course, also a very nice one.

The Hauppauge card hasn’t arrive yet; I’m using a very old WinTV card until it does. More on that when it gets here.

MythTV remote suggestion

MythTV

A lot of MythTV users are using lirc for their remote receivers. There are a lot of problems with lirc. For one, it doesn’t come with 2.6 drivers, and it also is limited to working with a single device on the system (or a very nasty hackish solution for multiple devices).

Here’s another option: get an infrared keyboard and a learning remote. I picked up a wireless infrared keyboard for $17 at newegg.com. This keyboard has a receiver module that plugs into PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, and the transmitter is infrared.

Next step: get a learning remote. I picked up a One For All URC-8810 at Walmart for $20. Contrary to the documentation, almost all keys can be learned, not just L1-L4. It does have a limited memory, but it is enough to program all the keys I need.

All in all, a slick solution. Total cost: $37, and you get a useful remote and keyboard (with mouse stick) that you’d probably have wanted anyway.

MythTV Hardware

MythTV

Here’s what I’ve ordered to build my MythTV unit. I’ll let you know how I like it all once the stuff arrives <grin>

  • Chenbro PC40522-BK Micro-ATX case, $46. It looks nice, sorta like a VCR, I guess.
  • Biostar M7NCG 400 AMD Socket A Micro-ATX motherboard, $61. Has built-in TV out and S/PDIF digital audio out. Perfect for this project.
  • AMD Athlon XP 2200+ CPU, $67. Wow, these things are cheap.
  • Samsung 160GB ATA133 hard drive, $91. Got this particular one because it’s suposed to be really quiet.
  • Kingston 256MB RAM, $46.
  • Hauppauge PVR-350 TV capture card with hardware MPEG-2 encode and decode support, $165.
  • IR blaster, homebrew: $8 of RadioShack parts.

Total cost: $484.