Day: October 2, 2006

The horror of the irony could not be any more obvious.

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

http://www.hcnonline.com/news.cfm…rfi=6

A Caney Creek High School dad is fired up because the Conroe Independent School District uses the book “Fahrenheit 451” as classroom reading material.

Alton Verm, of Conroe, objects to the language and content in the book. His 15-year-old daughter Diana, a CCHS sophomore, came to him Sept. 21 with her reservations about reading the book because of its language.
“The book had a bunch of very bad language in it,” Diana Verm said. “It shouldn’t be in there because it’s offending people. … If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”
Alton Verm filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” Thursday with the district regarding “Fahrenheit 451,” written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.
“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read “Fahrenheit 451.” “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”
He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, “dirty talk,” references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain. He said the book’s material goes against their religions beliefs. The Verms go to Grand Parkway Church in Porter.
“We went them to go after God,” said Glen Jalowy Jr., Grand Parkway Church youth minister. “We encourage them that what you put in your mind and heart is what comes out.”

…

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.
“Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read” is observed during the last week of September each year, according to the American Library Association Web site, www.ala.org. The week celebrates the freedom to choose or express one’s opinion, even if it might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them, according to the Web site.
Jerilynn Williams, Montgomery County Memorial Library System director, said Banned Books Week keeps the public aware that it is imperative to have access to information in a democratic society. Banning books causes libraries to limit access to information by withholding a person’s right to explore a wide variety of opinions to form their own opinions, Williams said.

And people wonder why Louie said he wanted to get the hell out of Conroe as quickly as he could… *shaking head and walking away*

Fun with Windows Vista…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I’ve been running Windows Vista for a couple of weeks now. All in all, I think I’m getting used to it. It certainly looks nicer than Windows XP did (I was using WindowBlinds to make my desktop look nicer), and some of the design decisions are rather nice.

Still, it’s definitely not without its drawbacks. So far I’ve encountered five different issues that royally annoy the hell out of me. Granted, only three of them are Microsoft’s fault, but it still irks me to no end. I definitely hope they’re fixed sooner rather than later.

  • ATI’s beta video drivers for Vista have really poor OpenGL support. I wouldn’t be quite annoyed by this yet if it wasn’t for the fact that Defcon apparently uses OpenGL for rendering, and the game runs slowly as a result. (By contrast, Counter-Strike: Source runs about the same as it did under XP.)
  • User Account Control is a pain in the ass. Not only is it very intrusive (stopping EVERYTHING while it waits for your prompt), it has a bug where if (My) Documents is on a network share, it can’t read the network drive and as a result a number of programs fail to install.
  • The built-in support for Windows Mobile devices (takes the place of ActiveSync) is buggy. Installing programs for the device doesn’t work as the program doesn’t recognize ActiveSync as being installed, and transferring files to/from the device never works (it copies maybe 40k and then crashes, severing the link between the PC and the device).
  • Logitech has yet to release SetPoint software (for the keyboard and mouse) that will work properly with Vista.
  • Winamp is my preferred media player. However, no matter what I do, Vista INSISTS that Windows Media Player be the default player for most media files. Granted, I might need to check WMP itself, but it’s annoying that I can’t just tell Winamp to be default and it’s automatically recognized. (Even if I go into the “default programs” place to change that on the Start menu, it won’t let me change media settings.)

Otherwise, Vista’s been working fine for me, and I’d rather keep it. Still, it makes my life difficult dealing with some of these issues. (I got around one, UAC, by completely disabling it.) Hopefully MS, ATI, and Logitech will fix the issues sooner rather than later. Ah, well.

EDIT – 7:57 PM – Well, this thread on the Winamp Forums explains what the problem with Winamp and Windows Media Player is: apparently there’s an extra step or two Winamp needs to add to the registry so that normal programs can alter the file associations without requiring administrative access. Ah, well, I suppose we’ll see that before the official Vista release.