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shadesofmauve:

tinierpurplefishes:

shadesofmauve:

There’ve been two Xerox techs in my office all day, trying to figure out what the heck is up with our brand new printer and it’s print server. One of them, Incompetent Guy, is our usual service tech. The other one, poor dear, knows what he’s doing. Watching him attempt to keep his patience has been the highlight of my day.

Meanwhile, Incompetent Guy keeps asking me to send print jobs for his troubleshooting and then bringing the resulting prints to me as if I’m supposed to do something with them. Half of them are obviously screwed up and all of them are things he requested.

It feels rather like when the cats bring me half-dead rodents. 

He’s trying.

Is this also the guy you had the discussion with about hiding kittens and baby goats in the printer?

Nope, that was a different tech! I think nearly all the xerox tech and sales people have visited us in the past month.

That guy who thought the kittens and baby goats were funny but clammed up as soon as we started talking about hiding baby babies. Amusingly, the guy here last week thought hiding baby babies in the printer was a brilliant idea, and mentioned that when his kid had been little sometimes the only way to get her to go to sleep was to set her on the washing machine. :P

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

I would really, really like to no longer live in a world where educators keep food pantries in their classrooms because their students are food insecure.

I’d love for food insecurity to be a thing of the past. UNFORTUNATELY: Every single teacher I have ever worked for has a food/snack pantry in their classroom for students experiencing food insecurity.

One of the districts I work in gives away backpacks and bags full of food to food insecure and homeless students during the weekend because we know many kids don’t eat outside of school.

My parents and most of my other relatives work in education. They’ve been buying snacks OUT OF POCKET for their students for the past 40 years. I’m continuing this trend because apparently one of the schools I work in is too small to give breakfast to its students.

I can bring snacks easily because my landlord is a vendor at the farmers market and gives us boxes of ‘ugly’ fruit. The kids in my class get to eat after school because of this.

(Thank you, by the way! And a huge thanks to all of the other wonderful Olympia Farmers Market Vendors who have donated snacks to my class!)

I work in more than one school district. From the well funded to the underfunded.  Both have populations of students who are going hungry. However, most are in the underfunded school districts that have high rates of poverty.  Hungry kids are tired. They can’t focus. They can’t learn. Often times their ONLY meal is at school.  Their housholds are chronically food insecure with multiple adults working more than one job. Many area jobs don’t want to hire folks full time, which leaves adults to cobble together wages and employment from multiple part time sources that rarely give a steady schedule.

Food insecurity is a huge issue. It’s a BIG reason it’s part of my gardening curriculum.

Everyone should always have food. No one should be going hungry. The truth is, many people are every day.

shadesofmauve:

Monkey just decided he likes strawberry icecream.

wotenoise:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Revolv is a home automation hub that Google acquired 17 months ago; yesterday, Google announced that as of May 15, it will killswitch all the Revolvs in the field and render them inert. Section 1201 of the DMCA – the law that prohibits breaking DRM – means that anyone who tries to make a third-party OS for Revolv faces felony charges and up to 5 years in prison.

Revolv is apparently being killswitched because it doesn’t fit in with Google’s plan for Nest, the other home automation system it acquired. Google’s FAQ tells its customers that this is OK because their warranties have expired, and besides, this is all covered in the fine-print they clicked through, or at least saw, or at least saw a link to.

This isn’t the earthquake, it’s the tremor. From your car to your lightbulbs to your pacemaker, the gadgets you own are increasingly based on networked software. Remove the software and they become inert e-waste. There is no such thing as a hardware company: the razor-thin margins on hardware mean that every funded hardware company is a service and data company, and almost without exception, these companies use DRM to acquire the legal right to sue competitors who provide rival services or who give customers access to their own data on “their” data.

We are entering the era where dishwashers can reject third-party dishes, and their manufacturers can sue anyone who makes “third-party dishes” out of existence. Selling you a toaster has never afforded companies the power to dictate your bread choices, nor has making a record player given a company the right to control which records get made.

The last-millennium Digital Millennium Copyright Act has managed to stay on the books because we still think of it as a way to pull off small-potatoes ripoffs like forcing you to re-buy the movies you own on DVD if you want to watch them on your phone. In reality, the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules are a system that makes corporations into the only “people” who get to own property – everything you “buy” is actually a license, dictated by terms of service that you’ve never read and certainly never agreed to, which give companies the right to reach into your home and do anything they want with the devices you’ve paid for.

https://boingboing.net/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers.html

Vert the ferk, Google.

Saw this coming approximately 80 miles off…