Category Archives: general

Computer wallpaper as sexual harassment

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While surfing around today for some new wallpaper for my computer desktop at work it occurred to me to wonder when a piece of artwork might be considered sexual harrassment.

Given that the only other person that works in my office with me on a daily basis (Hi, Ashley!) is a open-minded art major and tends to appreciate a wide variety of artwork I am not worried about whether she will be offended by my choices in artwork, however the same cannot be said for every individual that comes into my office.

Federal law defines sexual harassment as:

  1. Unwelcome sexual advances
  2. Requests for sexual favors
  3. Other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when: submission to such conduct is made explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment or academic success or; submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment or academic decisions affecting such individuals or; the conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or sexually offensive working environment.

Since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protects students from unlawful sexual harassment in all school programs and activities, and I work in an educational institution that receives federal funds, then this means that I need to cognizant of the environment I create in my office.

Of course, even if I am within the law, I also should have an environment that is friendly (for the most part), if for no other reason than it is the right thing to do.

What sort of criteria should one apply to determining whether or not a piece of desktop art (or just art hanging on the wall) constitutes sexual harassment?  How do you determine this in your own workplace?

Website outage

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Due to a problem with the grid-cluster at MediaTemple, the site was down for well over a day.  They still don’t have everything up and running 100% yet, so their are at least two posts that are missing images.

Hopefully they will get everything finished today.  According to the latest update on the status entry for Incident 754, they have approximately 155 sites to restore out of the almost 2500 that were hosted on gs cluster 2.  Fortunately this didn not affect the database cluster, so none of my actually posts, pages or comments were lost.

The affected content at the moment is:

Great conversation leading up to being fired

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I just got finished reading Stealing MySpace by Julia Angwin.  In it there was this great conversation about the firing of Ross Levinshohn by Peter Chernin, the soon-to-be former COO of News Corps.  Here it is:

“You’re not happy, are you?” Chernin said.
“No, I’m not,” Levinsohn agreed.
“This isn’t working out, is it?” Chernin said.
“No, it’s not,” Levinsohn replied.
“We should probably part ways,” Chernin said.
“Yes,” Levinsohn replied.

That’s just awesome.  I wish I could make it work like that the next time I have to fire someone.

Ref: Stealing MySpace, p. 234.

Sony needs to fix the PSN billing system

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So I just finished Prince of Persia on my PS3.  I decided that I would go and purchase the $9.99 Prince of Persia: Epilogue DLC from the PSN (PlayStation Network) store so that I could have some more PoP game time.

Turns out that I can’t purchase anything using my Bank of America debit card, because Sony’s billing and account system is seriously messed up.

First I tried just entering in my account information in the PSN store interface as a direct purchase.  I put in the card information and billing information.  I get an error back that says “Credit card is invalid. Check your entries.”  Thinking that I may have punched something in wrong when relying on my memory, I go get the physical card and verify that all the data was correct.  Hit continue.  Same error.

I then tried to just enter the billing information into the account management thinking that maybe that would work.  Same error.

I tried logging into my PSN account over the web on my laptop and entering the information there.  Same error.

Having now exhausted all the possible avenues for entering in my information, I search the Google to find out if others have had this problem and what the fix might or might not be.  Turns out there have been numerous people with the same problem.

  1. 5-page thread on PSN Forums
  2. 1-page thread on PSN Forums
  3. 1-page thread on PSN Forums

The first thread I listed had the most information.  They were discussing the possible values necessary in the address fields, etc.  I checked all my information.  Here’s what you need to double-check:

  1. Make sure your console has been activated using the System Activation item in the dashboard
  2. Make sure that if your billing address is a post office box that you are not adding in punctuation
  3. Make sure that your zip code is matching exactly with the bank records, especially if your bank uses an address verification system
  4. Make sure that your phone number, if listed, matches the bank records

The problem is that I checked all of this and none of it helped.  So I called the Sony Computer Entertainment America support number (800-345-7669) and waded through the menu system to get a support representative.  I have to give kudos to the support representative, because she was very calm and nice, and she didn’t even have a problem with the fact that I had already checked everything that she had on her checklist for me to check.

Unfortunately, she said “Sometimes the PO Box addresses just don’t work.  The only suggestion I can make is that you use a different credit card or go buy a PlayStation Network Card.”  She was very sorry that it wasn’t working, but there was nothing she could do to help.

I am not blaming the support folks, but that kind of answer is really pretty unacceptable.  I use my BoA card online, in stores, and over the phone all the time with no problems at all.  To make matters worse, when I logged in to my BoA account over the web I had a $1 pending transaction for each of my attempts to connect my card to the PSN store.  The customer service representative did assure me that they would drop off since a complete account transaction had never occured.

This is unexcusable.  Why even bother creating an online store for your game console if it doesn’t reliably work to purchase things?  Someone at Sony really needs to get this ironed out.

The Digital Divide Hits the Airwaves

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This next week the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to delay the transition of broadcast television in the United States from analog signals to digital signals.

The initial deadline was to have been February 17, 2009, however some in Congress as well as President Obama claim that more time is needed due to the fact that evidence has shown that consumers are not prepared. The new legislation sets a deadline for the switch to June 12, 2009, however broadcasters can switch over to digital prior to that deadline if they so choose.

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