The lies we tell in social work

Submitted by devin on Mon, 10/06/2014 - 23:06

I feel like I tell lies as a part of my job in social work. With more frequency than I'd like.

This is more pronounced at the summer camp I work with, since we work with children. I'll talk about that, but I experience a similar feeling of "I'm being patronizing right now" when working with adults at my workplace.

At camp, we lie to campers for many reasons.

Leadership Camps

Submitted by devin on Mon, 10/06/2014 - 22:57

When I was in grade 12, my entire class went to a leadership camp day. We did team building and group exercises. I'm not sure what kind of leadership I did. The student council stayed behind for 2 or 3 more days to do more leadership training.

Now that I'm a camp director, I'm responsible for staffing a leadership camp of my own. For two weeks a summer, 16 teenagers learn to be leaders. They do team building, a canoe trip, and learn a lot about the style of leadership Jesus used.

Ubuntu's lack of new features is exciting!

Submitted by devin on Thu, 10/02/2014 - 16:16

I've used Ubuntu on a daily basis since version 8.04 in 2008. I used to follow the new releases religiously, reading up on the new features and getting excited. I used to install beta versions, then moved to installing the version on the day it came out, then to waiting a month after release. Nowadays I use LTS releases only and I wait the extra month.

Accessing the Canada Post Sell Online API using curl

Submitted by devin on Tue, 09/23/2014 - 16:07

I've been trying to access the Canada Post Sell Online API (if it's even still called that, in 2014) and I'm having lots of trouble. I'm using an Ubercart module (uc_canadapost) and it doesn't seem to work or something. It looks like you used to get a Merchant ID when you used Sell Online, and with Canada Post's new APIs you get a username and password as your API key.

It took me a good 2 hours to figure out how to successfully use curl to access the REST API. I'm now going to document the examples of successful curl commands that have actually worked.

Moral outrage

Submitted by devin on Sat, 04/26/2014 - 11:32

I have a problem with moral outrage. 

On the one hand, I often believe in the causes people are outraged about. On the other, I get so sick of the way they treat the causes as God's own truth. Let's pick an example cause: people being angry because they want a higher minimum wage.

I think the best salespeople truly believe in what they're selling. So it's a good thing that people really believe that there should be a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, the argument that a higher minimum wage would lead to less jobs has its merits too.

Parkinson's Law

Submitted by devin on Sun, 04/13/2014 - 08:27

I just found out about "Parkinson's Law", which simply stated says that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". Students, take note! You could spend hours in the library procrastinating on Facebook and saying you don't have time to hang out with your friends, or you could hang out with your friends and then do the work on a deadline and get it done decisively.

A Slashdot Thread

Submitted by devin on Sun, 04/13/2014 - 08:09

Re:If you make this a proof of God...  (Score:4, Insightful)
by marcello_dl (667940)  on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:52AM (#46724593)

Let's simplify.

Conway's game of life creatures became sentient.
They discovered they are made of cells.

People love their titles

Submitted by devin on Wed, 03/19/2014 - 22:09

One of the things I noticed when I started university was that my peers started signing their emails like this

Jane A. Student
Honours Bachelor of Aviation and Biochemistry
Class of 2020, part time student
jstudent@uwaterloo.ca

There is a lot of hilarity hidden inside this signature, and most of it isn't mine. 

Why do people love titles so much? Probably has to do with identity, grumble, grumble, grumble...

Wordpress permissions script

Submitted by devin on Tue, 03/18/2014 - 15:33

In the same vein as my Drupal permissions setup script, here's a script that should set up a Wordpress install with file permissions that are secure, except Wordpress will allow editing of the files through the admin backend. Permissions are locked down in the same way as with Drupal, except wp-content is set up like Drupal's files directory with write permissions for the webserver.

Partisanship

Submitted by devin on Sat, 03/08/2014 - 19:12

People love complaining about YouTube comments, and I do too. I disagree with lots of people in YouTube comments.

People also love hating democratically elected leaders; which is their right. Among the people I know, it's common to hear people saying "Stephen Harper doesn't do anything right" or "Rob Ford should never have been elected". I'm not really in a position to evaluate these claims and probably agree based on what I know.

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