Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Appropriateness Fail

Posted

I just submitted the image at the right (click for a bigger version) to the always-entertaining FailBlog. The image, however, isn’t as much funny as it is uncomfortable.

You see, many web sites are supported by advertising. In most cases, advertisements are either applied without regard to the content itself (e.g., randomly) or ads are selected based on what an ad software product thinks fits the content of the page (with correct, incorrect, or often-bizarre results).

I’m not sure which method was responsible for what I captured on my RSS feed reader last week. The story, from TVNewser’s feed, was one of the earliest reports I caught about the untimely death of Mr. Tim Russert. The ad text displayed inline immediately following the story reads as follows:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Night Highway

Posted

This year, Melissa and I are staying with my family about 45 minutes away from Roanoke, where the Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church is being held this week (and to-which I am a lay-delegate). Since the conference runs late into the evening, that means a nice night-time drive down a four-lane country highway, followed by a short night’s sleep, followed by a morning drive back to the conference. Fun :-).

Busy Week Ahead

Posted

So, I’ve got an extremely busy week ahead of me. Following a nice weekend down-south with the family, I’ll be heading to Roanoke (with poor Melissa in-tow) tonight for the kick-off of the 2008 Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. The conference runs through mid-day Wednesday, so I’m unlikely to have hardly any time to myself between now and then.

UMC Annual Conferences are the key regional decision-making bodies of the United Methodist Church. They have responsibility for operations, church policy, and pastor assignments within the conference (the Virginia Conference encompasses most of the state of Virginia, except the south-west corner), and every four years they vote for and send delegates to the General Conference that makes denomination-wide policy. Conferences are composed, essentially, of all clergy within the conference and a roughly-equal number of ‘laity’ (non-clergy church members, like me). My church has two pastors, and I’ve been selected to be one of our two lay-delegates to the conference.

Conference business usually starts around 8:15am, and finishes around 9:15pm, so I have a few long days ahead. That means, while I’ll try to keep making postings, I may well fall behind.

Tim Russert Dead at 58

Posted

While I get much of my news these days from the Internet, it is not because I have anything against television news in principal. If the TV networks would produce worthwhile news shows, I would probably watch them. Most TV news shows today, however, are vacuous, shallow, and incredibly biased.

One of the few bright spots was Meet the Press hosted by Tim Russert. I was not a religious viewer—mostly because of religious commitments on Sunday mornings away from the television—but I always liked the show. Russert, though you can find with some research that he was a Democrat, rarely-if-ever let his personal biases show through to his lines of questioning. Politicians, whether their name was followed by an R or a D, got tough questions from Russert . . . but they got fair questions. There were no hit-pieces, no zingers, no yelling, and no interrupting. Russert simply asked a question, and gently pried until he got a real answer. Watching Meet the Press usually resulted in the viewer learning something about the politician who was being interviewed, unlike the mindless regurgitation of talking-points you usually get from interview shows.

Tim Russert, 58, one of the very few respectable newsmen left in the industry, died yesterday. He collapsed at NBC’s studios in Washington, DC, while recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s episode of Meet the Press, suffering from a sudden coronary thrombosis caused by rupturing cholesterol plaque. He was rushed to the hospital, but doctors were unable to revive him. Russert is survived by his wife, Maureen Orth, and son Luke.

June 17 is Firefox Download Day 2008

Posted

I mentioned a couple weeks ago about Mozilla’s intent to set a world record for the most software downloads in a day with the upcoming launch of the Firefox 3 web browser. Well, the date has finally been set. Firefox Download Day 2008 (and the associated final release of Firefox 3) will be on June 17—next Tuesday.

Mark your calendars. This will be a great, free way for you to support an excellent open source software project and, while you’re at it, download a great web browser. I’ve been using the betas and release candidates of Firefox 3 for months now; this thing is rock solid.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.