It wasn’t long ago that I murmured the phrase, “Where’s the rest of my Lego Springfield?!”
It seems that my wish has been fulfilled…
(photo via Pepa Quin on Flickr – click through for an entire album of Lego Springfield goodness!!!)
Seriously, he’s got the Nuclear Power Plant, and the Kwik-E-Mart, and Flanders’ house to go alongside The Simpsons’ house, and Moe’s, and Krusty Burger, and The Android’s Dungeon, and even the elusive Stonecutters Lodge!
Best. Lego display. Ever. 😉
It would be inappropriate for a prospective employer to ask about your religious beliefs in a job interview, but after today’s ruling by the Supreme Court with regards to “religious freedom” trumping healthcare with regards to offering contraceptives, it’s almost a necessity for the interviewee to ask the same thing of his prospective employer…
Do you believe in a religion that has strong views with regards to medical care, be it contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization, blood transfusions, vaccines, antibiotics, or even any medical treatment in general in favor of The Lord’s Will to heal his true believers?
How about the CEO and Board of Directors??? What are their current takes on these life-altering medical procedures? And which of them have the most weight in terms of dictating religious policy for the organization as a whole?
Are there any plans to sell the company or change ownership in the next 20 to 30 years to another party that might decide “the corporation’s religious beliefs” no longer align with any that will allow me the proper medical care that I require or may require 20-30 years on down the road in my career???
If there’s any positive thing at all to come out of today’s ruling, it’s why it’s time for America to catch up with the rest of the civilized world and leave employer-sponsored health insurance behind in favor of a single-payer model that doesn’t leave employees at the mercy of their employer to determine the quality of medical care that they deserve. Sure, you could just pay for it yourself, except no you can’t because the current system so vastly favors those with insurance that anyone seeking care without inanely pays multiple times the fees that insurance companies have mandated for their own costs … that’s why it’s pretty much vital to have insurance in America today.
A business being able to declare religious beliefs as a reason for denying certain kinds of isn’t religious freedom, it’s religious oppression. Businesses should not have the right to dictate what kinds of medical care one of their employees are allowed to receive – that decision should be between them and their doctors. Either provide health insurance or don’t, but this idea that they can pick and choose which specific line items in a person’s healthcare needs that they’ll cover is appalling.
If you need to prevent someone else from doing something in order to express your freedom, you’re an oppressor.
Freedom of Religion means that our government cannot establish a national religion that all US citizens are required to follow … it’s kind of why our ancestors came over here from England in the first place. Yet with today’s ruling, your employer now is allowed to establish a religion for his business, and by simply working there you’re expected to follow it because that religion will dictate the type of healthcare that you receive.
Last time I checked, freedom is supposed to cover everybody – freedom isn’t earned by taking it from someone else.
I’ve been working on a new WordPress redesign for one of my sites this weekend because my head just hasn’t been in the place to get much writing done, and for whatever reason I somehow stumbled onto this article from a few years back that talks about the dangers of malware within a WordPress theme and why it’s so important to download your themes from trusted sources, or ideally directly from the free theme repository hosted by WordPress themselves…
http://ottopress.com/2010/anatomy-of-a-theme-malware/
I mean, I’ve come across the themes that use a little trickery to preserve the SEO spam links that they’ve sold and built into the footers where they typically create a function to look for those specific links that won’t display the site if it doesn’t find them, but reading through the example above, I never would’ve thought of something as elaborate as concealing a piece of code at the end of an otherwise expected preview image, then breaking it back out on the fly and searching for places to execute it to create a backdoor into the server that is triggered by the attacker setting a cookie and then simply visiting your site … it’s really a pretty crazy scenario if you’ve got a few minutes and you know enough about PHP to follow along!
I know that every so often when I notice something odd on my server, one of the first things my mind jumps to is whether I did something stupid that opened myself up to being hacked. So far I’ve kind of lucked out and they’ve been fairly benign – once I got a notice for sending spam because I had created a test email account a long time ago with “test” as the password (?!) and then forgotten about it … and somebody else found it. Another time I actually found a piece of malicious code in a random sub-directory that was a little creepy – again for sending out spam.
You like to think, “Bah – I’m nobody and my sites hardly see any traffic … who would bother targeting me?!” But a quick check of the logs is all it takes to reinforce that most web attacks aren’t really targeted at all … they’re just randomly scanning for machines that can be compromised, sometimes to be used for DDOS or spam boxes, and no doubt sometimes just as another notch in the bedpost to see who can infiltrate the most systems.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about around this crazy, mixed up interweb! 😉
You know, maybe it’s not so bad that I won’t be going to the movies as much this summer with new baby in the house and babysitters admittedly scarce! Normally when I do these, I end up with a decent list of movies that I want to see … there was a time that the wife and I were going to the movies a lot, but this definitely won’t be one of those years and although lord knows I’ll probably end up catching every last one when they come on HBO later on this year, there’s no way I’m paying $22.50 + concessions to see any of these “blockbusters”…
22 Jump Street (6/13) – I literally face-palmed when I heard that this was going to be the name of the sequel to 21 Jump Street … which wasn’t that great to begin with. What was the last good movie that Jonah Hill was in, anyways???
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (6/13) – Don’t get me wrong, I loved the first movie. I just can’t possibly imagine how it would be right for a sequel other than by being a cash cow, which as a storyteller is a terrible excuse. Who knows, maybe it’ll be like Toy Story 2 and still carry its weight, but I doubt it.
Transformers: Age of Extinction (6/27) – I think it says a lot about the viability of a series when you can’t/won’t bring the original actors back for sequels anymore. I mean, Shia isn’t the greatest actor and he has been kind of going publicly crazy lately, but still, Transformers has sort of always been his franchise and it feels weird replacing him with Marky Mark, of all people.
Tammy (7/4) – I miss Sookie. Why does every role Melissa McCarthy takes these days put her in the hardened, white trash, punching bag comic relief character these days???
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (7/11) – I kind of can’t wait until the apes finally do takeover because then they’ll have to stop making these things, right? Right???
Sex Tape (7/18) – Bad Teacher wasn’t nearly good enough for a sequel. Or a half sequel. Or whatever the hell this is.
Guardians of the Galaxy (8/1) – I know a lot of people are really excited about this, but frankly it just looks stupid to me. I don’t get the raccoon and I haven’t liked Chris Pratt since I first saw him on Parks & Recreation. Plus, I can’t tell if this is supposed to be silly space heroes or serious space heroes, so maybe that would help. 🙄
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (8/8) – I guess crapping all over one childhood memory with Transformers wasn’t enough for Michael Bay … in fact, at this point I picture him not stopping until he ruins all childhood movies – Voltron, Care Bears, Nintendo – you name it, he’ll transform it into tears. Not that the original live action movies were shining pillars of quality or anything, but come on…
So the ones that I actually wouldn’t mind paying to see? Well, it’s a much shorter list, and apparently they’re all already out!
Oh well – maybe next year, Hollywood. 😥
I just amused myself…
Gave Christopher his Pooh bear to cuddle with because he’s having trouble pooping, along with the comment, “Is Pooh going to help you poo???”
But I wasn’t even thinking about the simple Pooh Poo joke. It gets deeper than that.
No, instead my mind went to that Winnie the Pooh story where Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit’s House, and it just made me figure that if anyone is uniquely qualified to get a large object through a small hole, it should be him!
I’m off to buy antlers for my son’s butt now.
![tumblr_lm2o8pvhBW1qfr1m4o1_500[1]](http://www.scottsevener.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/tumblr_lm2o8pvhBW1qfr1m4o1_5001.png)
I couldn’t login to my account just now – it kept giving me that second security question about “In what city is your vacation home?” which seemed a little odd because I don’t remember ever buying a vacation home, so it would be silly for me to pick that as one of my security questions.
For a brief second, I was worried that maybe my account had been compromised and somebody had went and bought $4,000 worth of lumber on my card, but while waiting for their IVR to let me talk to an actual person, the website finally said, “Oh, I see you’re having some trouble answering this question!” and let me login with my account number and that crap instead.
Note that it also had me select new security questions at that time.
Nonetheless, the first thing I did when I logged in was pull up my security questions to verify that my new ones were listed so that I wouldn’t have that problem again.
I think we found the problem – who would’ve guessed that I had a vacation home in “a” … which just so happens to be the same “a” where I went to high school?! 🙄
I got a real kick out of this series of posts from a long-time Nintendo fan where he’s actually been able to interview a handful of Nintendo Game Counselors on what their work experiences were like back in the day.
I definitely agree that at least at the time, being a game counselor would’ve pretty much been the awesomest job in the world for a pre-teen me who played Nintendo 23 hours a day and wanted to live inside of that Nintendo Power ad that showed a bedroom decked out from floor to ceiling with World of Nintendo gear! Of course, in hindsight having worked in a call center several years later, it may not have made for the best long-term career goal, but if I had been straight out of high school with the options help kids beat video games vs. sweep the warehouse until you’re lucky enough to get to drive a truck at 3am instead … I guess that still would’ve been pretty sweet!
I never was allowed to call the 900-number, but I’m still amazed how they took the time to actually write return letters to kids like me who would write in about their greatest achievements and the games that currently had them stumped. I kind of wish that I somehow had access to the original letters that I had sent out to Nintendo because I can just picture an 11 year-old me studiously typing away at the typewriter about how he just can’t figure out how to defeat Odin the basement of Baron Castle in Final Fantasy 2! 😀
That said, what I do have is the actual responses that I received from the various times that I wrote to Nintendo, and after a bit of Morning Toast inspiration, I went ahead and scanned mine, too. It doesn’t look like he’s managed to interview any of the three folks who answered my questions, but hey, there’s still time!
