Daily Links and Annotations 06/12/2009

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Daily Links and Annotations 04/18/2009

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  • Daily Kos: Why yesterday’s protests were stupid

    Now’s as good a time as any to take a break from mocking the teabaggers in favor of a more serious look at what they accomplished yesterday.

    I’ve never made a secret for my distaste of most street protests, and of groups like Code Pink that think they are accomplishing anything with their street theater. But when I set out to write Taking on the System, my book on effective organizing in the 21st century, I had to dig deep to figure out why I didn’t like them, and how to differentiate the usual ineffective ANSWER-organized protests with those that actually had a positive effect (e.g. the Jena Six and pro-immigration protests of a few years ago).

    I finally determined that for a protest to be effective it needed to:

    be novel and/or unexpected
    have a sympathetic, singular, and media-friendly message
    provide great visuals
    tap into a hot-button and timely issue.

    tags: no_tag

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Daily Links and Annotations 04/14/2009

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  • Coder’s Talk: VBScript to Replace Underscores in Filename with Spaces for All Files in a Folder

    Script to rename all files in a directory… to e.g. replace underscores with spaces… I altered to do the reverse.

    tags: no_tag

    • ‘========================================================
      ‘ VBScript to replace underscore in file name with space
      ‘ for each files in a folder
      ‘ Written by ApOgEE of http://coderstalk.blogspot.com
      ‘========================================================
      Dim sName
      Dim fso
      Dim fol

      ‘ create the filesystem object
      Set fso = WScript.CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

      ‘ get current folder
      Set fol = fso.GetFolder(“.”)

      ‘ go thru each files in the folder
      For Each fil In fol.Files
      ‘ check if the file name contains underscore
       If InStr(1, fil.Name, “_”) <> 0 Then
       ‘ replace underscore with space
       sName = Replace(fil.Name, “_”, ” “)
      ‘ rename the file
       fil.Name = sName
      End If
      Next

      ‘ echo the job is completed
      WScript.Echo “Completed!”

      • Worked like a charm. I altered it to do the reverse. – post by ideadude

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I Will Be Able to Break The Habits I’m Teaching Isaac Now

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Next in my series on the naive things I believe as a first time parent: I believe that I will be able to break the habits I’m teaching Isaac now.

It’s easiest to explain this by example. So for instance, I’m trying to teach Isaac to suck his thumb… because Isaac’s thumb will always be around him and thumb sucking is something he can do on his own to calm himself down.

Nice enough. However, if Isaac continues to suck his thumb through grade school, he could develop mouth/tooth problems. My niece is actually wearing a brace to correct an overbite (under bite?) that is probably a result of thumb sucking.

So I naively believe that I will be able to do a better job at “breaking” Isaac of his habit of thumb sucking than my brother was with his daughter. How do I plan to do that? Well, Isaac will put his thumb/hand in his mouth for two main reasons: (1) to calm himself down… when he’s upset or tired and (2) cause he’s teething. He won’t be teething forever, and as for #1 it will be my job to teach Isaac 3-year-old ways to calm himself down: count to ten, draw, read a book, play a game, talk with someone, etc, etc.

I’m sure my brother would laugh at that. Cause I know he tried his hardest to get his daughter to stop sucking hers. We’ll see how I do.
I’m doing a lot of things that members of my family would call “spoiling” or otherwise creating bad habits for us and Isaac. But Isaac is just a 4-month old. So I shouldn’t worry too much yet about how he’s going to be when he’s 4 or 5-years old. Sure, crying for “no reason” and being held could be a bad thing for a 4-year old to do. But a 4-month old doesn’t know any better. For Isaac now, it’s important to teach him that his parents are there for him when he needs them… that’s all he understands.
I know that Isaac is going to get older, smarter, and more mature. And as he does, I will be able to teach him how to be patient, control his emotions, go to bed on his own, and all the things he’ll need to do.

I’ll teach him about patience when he understands what patience means. I’ll teach him about discipline when he can understand what discipline means. I’ll teach him about respect when he can understand what respect means. In the meantime, I’ll teach him about love and happiness and curiosity. Those seem to be the things he understands now.