·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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The recent credit card bill passed by Congress and signed by the President to give some measure of protection to credit card consumers contained an additional provision to allow gun owners to carry loaded firearms into national parks and wild life reserves.

Yes, read it again.

I can go all manner of ways on this one. For starters, how about we make it so that we pass one bill at a time, or at least require the amendments to be related to the bill? We can also get into how the NRA owns Congress and pro-gun people should have zero worries about their second amendment rights being trampled. And how about the mainstream media at least cherry picking these easy ones and making some real news about it?

Hey, I like guns and I think it is important to be able to defend yourself because people on the whole are stupid and crazy. And let’s not forget the ever-looming zombie threat. But come on!

What more do you expect me to say except keep voting for “one or the other” and we’ll keep doing this insane dance.

The PR department at our school not only manages the content on our websites, but also controls the technology and design of the sites.  Normally I would not get antsy about this, but consider my beefs with the way things are today:

• Sites are not standards based.  CSS is “sort of” used, but the underpinnings of the sites use file includes and depend on certain paths in order to work.  In other words, if you don’t write .NET code for deployment on Windows/IIS using their directory structure, your stuff won’t work and you  won’t get their standard look and feel.
• Forms written for use by other departments simply have an action of “mailto” instead of saving data to a database, so it is impossible to do anything meaningful with the collected data.
• The home grown content management system is problematic at best.  As with many home grown solutions, it is not easy to manipulate certain details of HTML.  Of course, everyone complains to the IT department about it.
• Our main internal site is used to provide news and notes, but does not contain any type of search or archive functions.  The amount of time that an article stays on the site seems to be arbitrary.  In addition, many news stories are crammed onto one page, so an anchor link for a story may take you to the general vicinity of an article but you still have to search for it within the page.
• The online employee directory does not have pictures for everyone and is rarely updated.  When someone new comes along, what is the first thing you might want to do?  Look at their picture!  Pictures are readily available because we use them on our school ID cards.
• The online student directory is one long, long, long table.  Anchors exist at the top to jump to a letter section by last name and there is a “top” link at the top of each section, but one section may be several scrolls long.  Also, there are no pictures to be had at all.
• There is a “happy birthday” tab that lists faculty and staff birthdays… and it plays an audio file of “Happy Birthday To You!” when you click on it.  Woof.

Add to all this the kick in the shin that really gets to me: somehow, PR gets to decide what e-mails are allowed to be sent “campus wide”.  So there’s a new spyware or phishing e-mail making the rounds and people are falling for it?  Don’t send an e-mail, post it on the internal site instead.  Planning a large migration/upgrade that will affect all users and you need to provide instructions?  Nope – not via e-mail, goes on the internal site instead.  Oh, and it might stay around a few days, it might not.

Don’t get me wrong – lots of e-mail blasts are a bad thing and people will eventually stop reading them if they come too often.  But don’t hoarde my important information just to drive readers to your site.  There is a reason (several actually) that you don’t get a lot of traffic.

Fortunately in my world, he who installs Mailman and writes scripts to keep the faculty/staff/student mailing lists up to date is he who sends e-mail when he wants.  Take no prisoners, comrades!

One of the nice things about getting older is that you start to have an appreciation for the little details that you didn’t pay much attention to when you were younger.  Case in point: my mom’s delicious fried cornbread.  I’ve had this stuff many times, but only in recent years have I come to truly enjoy it.  There’s nothing like going home to visit mom and dad and being treated to some real down home cooking.

I gave mom’s cornbread recipe a shot this weekend and it turned out pretty good.  Here’s what you’ll need:

• One and a half cups of Quaker white corn meal
• Half a cup of flour
• One egg
• One cup of buttermilk
• Two teaspoons of baking powder
• One teaspoon of salt

In a bowl, mix everything with a whisk to a consistency a little thicker than pancake batter.  Heat a skillet to medium heat and melt Crisco to cover the bottom – yes, Crisco!  I started with half of a one cup shortening stick.

Scoop two or three tablespoons (I used one large serving spoon) of the batter into the skillet to make one cornbread patty.  You can probably cook four at a time and this recipe makes eight patties.  Watch for the bottom of the patties to start getting brown – it only takes a few minutes.  As they brown up, flip each patty one time with a spatula.  As the second side gets brown, remove each patty and place it on a plate covered with paper towels to absorb a little of the grease – hey, we’ve gotta draw the line somewhere!

Melt the other half of the Crisco stick for the second set of four patties.  Rinse and repeat the scooping and flipping process.

I made them a little big in the first batch, but you can’t argue with the results!  Thanks mom!

A couple of points that folks have made to me after reading this one:

• You don’t have to use Crisco; I have followed my mom’s recipe and she has tried other things, but they just didn’t taste the same to her.
• The importance of a cast iron skillet cannot be understated – it spreads heat evenly and of course can be “seasoned” for flavor!