Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Ross Mason,
But what I see is a PR machine out there that formula is OK as a substitute for breastmilk.
It's been ~7 years since I was a parent of a newborn, but I don't remember seeing that at all. I remember the trained, experienced people we trusted coming into our home and refusing to give us information on how my wife could mitigate the pain and sickness of giving up feeding, because they thought the pain and sickness of continuing to feed was somehow trivial. A few flashy advertisements from formula companies has nothing on that as a "PR machine".
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Ross Mason,
I offer to suggest the fear and trepidation to breastfeed is one of the major problems. It should come from parents that it is normal and natural to breastfeed. I proffer that those with that attitude are more likely to not have problems with “the latch” and other issues.
"Difficulties breastfeeding" take on a huge number of forms, too - my wife breastfed our first child easily, with no issues at all for the first few weeks - after which she came down with mastitis, which meant she ended up in chronic pain, on antibiotics, for 6 months, still trying to breastfeed because of the pressure from nurses and midwifes to continue. Did they really think that a antibiotic-laced breastmilk from a constantly ill mother was better than formula? Giving up was extremely (physically) painful for her, but information on how to do it and minimise the effects was nearly impossible to get hold of via the experts, because they viewed the premise of the exercise as flawed. I don't think "attitude" had much to do with it somehow.
Our second child was breastfed for a few weeks until the first signs of mastitis showed up, then promptly moved on to formula.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sacha,
what a cock
Whatevs, perhaps you had to be there :-)
ETA: Wait, wat?
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sacha,
did you look at him funny or something?
I think it was just his shtick.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Russell Brown,
Heh. Didn’t like them at all. Where was the happy?
It was in (some of*) the other sets - that's the great thing about a diverse gig. Anyway, when the frontman came down and charged at me, spilling my beer, I was smiling. Haven't seen that at a gig in years.
*Not the weird ambient-industrial guys (half of 1995, it seems) who played next, obviously.
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I got to hear The Checks play their new album from beginning to end at Galatos – it’s all languid Exile on Mainstreet grooves polished up with dance music inflections, and I liked it a lot
I didn't think that much of it - the highlights at Galatos for me were the Mean Girls, who didn't hold anything back from the 20 or so of us who were there that early (who knew a bass could make noises like that?), and Beastwars metalling it up at the end. But the evening was slightly marred by the bar running out of beer - except Mac's Light, which they happily substituted, us not noticing until we were back in the crowd and drinking (maybe they tried to mention it to us at the bar, but who can hear a bartender at a gig?).
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For my passwords I use serial numbers and model numbers of things I'm a bit fanboi about (I won't say what kind of things, as that would narrow the attack space) - easily memorable to me, because I'm a geek, but to anyone else they're just strings of random letters and digits. Also, while they may be more likely than random strings to turn up in the total corpus of written English, they're unlikely to be in any dictionary used in a dictionary attack. All in all, I feel they pack a good punch for their length.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to HORansome,
Not according to the research
Bring a gun to a knife fight why don't you.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Sacha,
Well IMHO the written word has become as much a native mode of human communication as either of those...
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Sacha,
keyboards are going to seem so ridiculous
Hmm. Consider that in the 80s and 90s, most of the people who bought home PCs were people who wanted to get stuff done - people who wanted to crunch numbers or process words, and realised that a computer was the most efficient way to do it. Now a computer has become for most people a device for consuming data, then sure, it's just an historical accident that they have keyboards and come preloaded with Office; and the devices we see now which are purpose-built for consumption, iPads and smartphones, are a better fit for this model. But the core PC getting-stuff-done market still exists, and is still a significant (and, I suspect, increasing) percentage of the population; and I think it will be some time before we see a better input device than a keyboard for those uses.
OTOH for accessibility reasons I hope someone does come up with something better soon...