on Disney's WDW Opening...

No Event Too Small: Disney World Opening Day Crowd Control (Disney Dispatch):

Then we hit upon another scheme.

Our laborers had been working 12-hour shifts, without much time off, and that ran us afoul of labor laws. So we decided to pick a weekend and have the laborers come into the park not to work but to enjoy the day with their families.

Dads proudly showed their kids around the park, explaining that they were the ones building it, but at that time there were only 3-4 rides running, and so the kids would say: "well, hurry up and finish."

(Great motivation! The next day, when work resumed, it seemed to go a lot faster.)

on Google+

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Plus - O'Reilly Radar:

In general, the UI makes it hard to find the stuff I care about. What do I care about? I want to see new things from my friends, I want to see replies to things I've written, I want to monitor comment threads I'm a part of, I want to see the stuff my friends like, and I don't want to see the same stuff again and again. The Google Plus UI mushes all these into a few overlapping streams such that I see the same threads again and again yet can't find the categories of things I do care about. I think they hope that machine learning will promote relevant items to the top, but the results so far do not make me confident that they can deliver a useful service on this approach. My experience is one of noisy irrelevance.

Currently, Facebook and Twitter both offer a more functional user interface to social activity.

but earlier the author wrote this caveat about security within your "circles"

The good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Plus - O'Reilly Radar:

The problems arose when I started to use the circles. If I post something to a circle (e.g., kid pictures to "Family"), someone can reshare that outside the original circle with two clicks. There has, of course, been considerable debate about whether this is a good thing (after all, some say, they could just copy and paste the picture anyway), but I come down firmly against it. If I'm using circles for privacy, I don't want items to be reshared. Just being able to see my photo doesn't make you the administrator of it.

It should be said that facebook *kinda* has this problem but generally the original photo can be locked down so that though the person shared it, it *supposedly* can't be seen by any who couldn't see it in the original security model. I have, however, never tested that feature to see if it really works.

ok, i'm pissed off now...

Loudoun's Republican majority just redistricted the county seat districts, and put us and one other zone, both of which had voted Democrat in the last local election, into uber-right-nutcase Delgaudio's Sterling district.  A similar "consolidation" hits Leesburg as well.  Basically, the Republican board just redistricted 2 Democrat-held seats right out of existence.

Fuckers.

On the other hand, it does slightly increase the left-leaning edge to Sterling and gives us a chance to kick this royal homophobic bastard out for the first time in decades, if we can somehow unite to get some turnout...