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A Short Essay after watching CBS Sunday Morning’s 40th Anniversary episode

Sunday, January 27, 2019

11:26 AM

It was a good run, really from 1609 until today we tried. Different people at different times taking 2 steps forward 1 step back. From colonialism, to mercantilism and democracy to oligarchy we are what we are in spite of th enlightened angels of our better nature. From Supreme Court decisions to Constitutional Amendments from Wars on “X” to National Security it’s all one big melting pot of ideas and more often hidden agendas. We got Koch Bros., Shel Adelson, Scaife Foundation, Grover Norquist, Steve Bannon, Karl Rove, Newt Gingerich, Dick Cheney, Frank Luntz and David Addington and all of Talk Radio and Fox Network helping us take one step back on a daily basis. Then there’s everyone else with their own hopes and dreams and less hidden agendas, working out in the open under the cold light of day trying to have a “society” here and avoid the chaos and darkness of the Honey Badgers (who don’t give fuck).

I remember once learning about a Canadian Broadcast Corp. project they did for radio with the piano virtuoso and polymath Glenn Gould. The program was called, “The Idea of North”. Eventually a film was made and while I never listened to the audio recording, I did hear bits and pieces of it in the film entitled “31 Short Films about Glenn Gould” where the topic came up and Glenn showed how he directed the editing of the audio recordings like music for the radio version. I still need to track that one down. As for the film version (which I think Gould had some connection to as well), that was very much about:

1. A particular province in Canada north of 40
2. People who go to visit that town and stay there
3. Native rights over the land and how to best share with the Indians

But the title itself (seemingly as innocuous and mysterious as an idea) is what I found most compelling. Playing with that and turning over and over in my head it got caught like a rhyme, an earworm or mindworm of sorts. The “idea” of something that is itself a kind of arbitrary but still vital thing, an ordinal point on a compass, a map, a direction. Something that could lead you to safety or to danger (as in venturing too far North). But the beauty of an artist like Glenn Gould is the “openness” of a title like that and the multitude of interpretations it might have. That’s the work of a true artist. And even more so an artist that can spur other artists with a small choice like that, the “idea” as a title, a topic seemingly vague and open to interpretation.

PBS decided to hint or glance at something like the “Idea of America” during the late days of the Bush administration. Instead using the U.S. Constitution as the “idea”. Host Peter Sagal drove a motorcycle around the U.S. doing interviews asking questions. It’s all there still on the PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/tpt/constitution-usa-peter-sagal/home/. The title “Constitution USA” is not open to interpretation but roots everything into the framework of the mythos of the founding fathers, the mental work and emotional work they performed leading up to and following the ratification by each state of the U.S. Constitution. To quote the series blurb on their website:

“Traveling across the country by motorcycle, Sagal is in search of where the U.S. Constitution lives, how it works and how it doesn’t… how it unites us as a nation and how it has nearly torn us apart.”

From <http://www.pbs.org/tpt/constitution-usa-peter-sagal/home/>

Tear us apart? Do they mean Roe v. Wade? Or Civil Rights? Or the Right to Bear Arms? What about the right of the President to declare war unilaterally without an act of Congress? That’s happened a few times too. I dare say the tie between the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. citizen is barely there. No one asserts their rights, we beg for them. Unsponsored illegal immigrants are summarily tried and thrown in jail before they can claim political asylum which is more often legitimate than any assumption of someone seeking seasonal work in good ol’ “El Norte”. But we don’t care, just so long as our cultural assumptions and societal inertia are left unchecked. No, I would argue the U.S. Constitution doesn’t come up very often in the majority of people’s thinking or lives as they are deal with the daily commute, errands and drop-offs required to just get through another damned week. That to me, that daily tactical decision making, survival especially in the bottom 25% (just to pick a strata), that I dare say is the “Idea of America”, the dream that people were sold. Otherwise, why would they stay here, struggle where there is no meritocracy, darned little justice socially speaking, and random justice legally speaking? What stake do they have in a casino where they are the necessary marks that keep the lights on by providing Federal Income Tax and Social Security Benefit taxes to a central Federal authority. What’s the pay off for them? It’s hope. It’s hope for that 2 steps forward occurring each day in spite of the one step back. It’s the stereotype ALL Europeans have of Americans of being child-like and “hopeful” in their outlook and demeanor generally. And if there’s any reason to fight or preserve, or legislate or lobby to preserve that child-like “hopefulness”, to me that’s the true North, the guide star, the core being of “The Idea of America”.

The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

The Inserter Tool

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

• Text & Headings
• Images & Videos
• Galleries
• Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
• Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
• And Lists like this one of course 🙂

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Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

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You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

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The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry

The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.

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Thanks for testing Gutenberg!

One of the small joys of refusal visits to Japan is learning the ebb and flow of morning TV programs. And for me that is defined by the National broadcaster NHK. You know the morning has properly started at 8pm JST, when the morning drama opening credits fire up. It is a rotating program that airs for limited part of the year, opening and Unfolding for 15 minutes each morning, 8-8:15a. Topics can vary widely, but they are truly original, last year at this time it was a series about young women working at an electronics factory, that shuts down early in the series, then you follow the women as they find other jobs. This year, on this trip, the series is called “Half blue”, which seems to be about a young woman trying to be an artist/illustrator. It’s an interesting tradition NHK has developed, “Morning Drama” or Asa dorama as it is called in Japanese. I look forward to it every time I visit, even though I don’t speak Japanese, I feel like I can follow the story well enough.

Note – If you are viewing this page on a mobile device some embedded code may not display, switch your mobile browser to desktop mode. Since the release of the cumulative update model, managing Windows updates has become a much simpler process. Updates are typically released broadly to enterprise devices monthly after they have gone […]

via Windows 10 Image Maintenance & Cleanup — Exec|Mgr

Great little write-up regarding the process by which Win10 is updated completely offline and injected with updates, optimized and exported. Some people do this with MDT Task Sequences, to get monthly roll-ups, and Cumulative updates. But this is all commandline, with DISM and it’s multitude of switches and features. Is there anything DISM.exe cannot do? I wonder.

Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is […]

via How To Read Laterally: A Lesson for New York Times Columnists Including But Not Limited to Bari Weiss — Hapgood

Full credit to Mike Caulfield (@holden on Twitter). This is the quickest most succinct takedown of a NYTimes columnist I’ve ever seen. Hands down he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the lack of effort and due diligence put into what he and everyone else believes is the “national source of record” for news. NYTimes is not helping solve the Digital Polarization problem by having someone spend put so little effort into repeating the mistakes of Digital Polarization. That’s a fact Jack!

Every time I hear something about limiting screen time I cannot help but think about how poorly the concept has been thought out. If we talked about “food time” instead maybe that would help us think that while time matters (eating for hours each day is probably a bad idea), how long you eat probably…

via Screen Time — Bionic Teaching

Content, and context is everything when it comes to consumption. Not all consumption is bad. But know what it is you’re stuffing into you at all times. Mindfulness will out no what the activity may be.

So you have a Personal ConfigMgr lab, but you want to add some app deployments to better simulate your actual environment. So you add Chrome, Reader, and a couple others (NOT JAVA). Next Month, they are out of date. You probably don’t have time to keep your personal lab app deployments updated, so you keep…

via ConfigMgr Lab – Adding Ninite Apps — GARYTOWN ConfigMgr Blog

Looking into doing this for the MDT Production Share I have at home. I’ve got Ninite installers I use manually to build and rebuild Win7 and Win10 PCs. But having this built-in as a task sequence on MDT would be fantastic. It would help immeasurably in automating the build process and get the final deployment much closer to being ready to deploy.