One benefit of the “Friday Funnies” is that not only can I use comics from the past week that didn’t fit on the day they ran, but sometimes they roll around in my head and gain additional meaning.
In this case, Pajama Diaries provided a nice rundown on the chaos of modern pictures, but it was a day or two before I said, “Wait … printing out pictures is a thing?”
I did print out four photos of my g-granddaughter and her folks two months ago, for a friend who I was going to see in person and who deserved more than a peek on a handheld screen.
That means that, over the past decade, I’ve printed out … let’s see … four photographs.
My pics live on my computer, including some old ones I took out of albums and scanned, and I see them far more often than if they were in a scrapbook because they rotate in a slideshow whenever the computer is idle.
Though I’ll confess to being somewhat diligent about curatage: I don’t let photos build up on my camera, but drag them out and name their files, then take out the best two or three for the aforementioned slide show.
And keep the rest.
I’ve got 39.8 Gigabytes of photos on my hard drive and I’d estimate that about 30 gigs worth are out of focus or shots of the inside of the car roof or pics in which people make unintentionally bizarre faces.
Though I sure remember the days of film, when you could shoot a roll of 12 or 24 or 36, and then, a week later, find out nothing had come out.
Oddly enough, I have to instruct my young reporters to take at least six shots of anything and to take — and immediately check — a test shot in each new location.
They’re too young to have ever seen a roll of film, but they’ll still pop off one photo and hope for the best.
Well, they’re recruited as writers, not as photographers.
And, while Deflocked gave me a laff, my mostly-female gang is pretty hep to the STEM stuff.
STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math,” and is a priority for schools that have realized we need to expand our efforts in those areas.
(In some places, it’s called “STEAM” because the liberal arts people there got pissy and territorial and insisted on adding “Arts” to the acronym. If your kids’ school talks about “STEAM,” transfer them to someplace that gets it.)
In any case, yesterday I edited two girl-written pieces dealing with coding, one an evaluation of a robot that teaches the topic, which was hard to edit because I had no idea what she was talking about, but I figured it was a good thing that
Root has three different levels. The first one is basic block coding, the second is a little more intricate block coding, and the third is simplified JavaScript.
As for bringing in the girly-girl aspect, my 10-year-old book critic gave a fairly detailed description of an app the protagonist was designing for a contest and only hinted at a minor complication in the process:
But things get a little more complicated than Allie expected, and she is also starting to have a crush.
The takeaway being that girls just want to have fun and writing code is fun but does not require a vow of celibacy.
Still, reaching them takes a certain touch. A kit that was supposed to teach STEM skills to girls didn’t pass muster with one of mine a while ago:
It is peculiar how they direct this product towards only girls. On the box it isn’t that obvious besides the pink color and the picture of a girl playing with the switch, but if you go to their website, it seems like they don’t even want boys to touch the pieces.
I wouldn’t bother to run the “Princess Coding Club” past that grrrl.
However, before my feminist cred gets too high, let me note last Sunday’s Stone Soup and admit that I don’t get yoga pants.
I’m willing to believe yoga pants are comfy, but I’ve noticed that some women wear them with a shirt or jacket that covers their butts and some women don’t.
Which either means that some women are exhibitionists or it means that some women don’t know the difference between pants and tights.
To be fair, I also don’t get guys wearing billowing nylon basketball shorts in near-zero weather.
There’s a lot about fashion that I don’t get, okay?
This I get. Retail has been running an arc about laying off the holiday help, bringing things down to a level that won’t sustain but that meets the budgetary criteria that Corporate has sent from atop Olympus.
When I’ve quit, I’ve always given two weeks notice, less for corporate’s benefit than to avoid leaving my fellow workers in the lurch. In fact, at one place, I stayed another month to finish a project.
The two times I was canned, it was “Here’s your box, now GTFO.”
I had a friend who — after a dozen years or more — didn’t even get the box: She was called into her boss’s office and found the HR director and two security goons. They frog-marched her out of the building and she had to ask friends to bring her her personal belongings later.
Granted, one time, the writing on the wall was so clear that I had my personal stuff all in one drawer and an empty box next to my desk.
Shouldn’t need a weatherman.
Breaking format
Okay, today’s Non Sequitur is political and we don’t do politics on Fridays, but Mueller is rolling out the indictments at this point such that, even if they refuse to release his report, it’s gonna be pretty hard to not know what’s in it, which, yes, should streamline things, inshallah.
Meanwhile, Morten Morland has slightly edited Dear Leader’s remarks of the other night, and I can’t embed the resulting video, but you really really ought not to miss it.