Greenhouse Gas Reduction Opportunities for Local Governments: A Quantification and Prioritization Framework , released by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at University of California, Davis

Množství politiků po celém světě v posledních dnech trápí zásadní otázka. Jak zabránit druhé vlně koronaviru bez škrcení ekonomiky? Možnou cestu ukázalo hlavní město Litvy. Majitelé menších podniků zde museli stejně jako na jiných místech v Evropě dočasně pozastavit svou živnost. Vedení Vilniusu ve snaze zabránit jejich krachu v rámci uvolňovaní restriktivních opatření rozhodlo o umožnění bezplatného využití veřejných prostor.

Find Local Classifieds browser hijacker removal instructions

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Find Local Classifieds browser hijacker is designed to promote the findlocalclassifiedstab.com address, a fake search engine. Like most apps of this type, it promotes it by changing certain browser's settings. Usually, browser hijackers not only modify settings but also collect various (mostly browsing-related) information. Since users often download and install apps like Find Local Classifieds unintentionally, unknowingly, they are categorized as potentially unwanted applications (PUAs).

I live in Stockport, just outside Manchester. It's 10 minutes by train away, but I’m not sure if the trains are running – and in any case I’ve not actually been in my office in Central Manchester since February 20.
That got complex. I was in Iraq for work and came home in early March with a virus. Just not that virus but they wouldn’t test me because Iraq (you know, right next door to Iran) wasn’t on the WHO list.
So. Context. We live in a suburban semi-detatched house with a garden (big for Edgeley). There’s me. Matt the husband.…

Platform.sh removes a major pain point for developers: having to invest time in managing servers, virtual machines, or containers. Instead, Platform.sh enables developers to focus 100% of their time on their code. Since the beginning, Platform.sh has provided instant cloning capability, so dev teams can work on perfect copies of their production sites in the cloud for every Git branch. Now, in partnership with Lando, we’re extending that capability to the desktop.

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 17468 bytes)

Have you heard of Heath Freeman? He's a thirty-something hedge fund boss, who runs "Alden Global Capital," which owns a company misleadingly called "Digital First Media." His business has been to buy up local newspapers around the country and basically cut everything down to the bone, and just milk the assets for whatever cash they still produce, minus all the important journalism stuff. He's been called "the hedge fund asshole", "the hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry", "a small worthless footnote", the "Gordon Gecko" of newspapers and a variety of other fun things.

Reading through some of those links above, you find a standard playbook for Freeman's managing of newspapers:

These are the assholes who a few years ago bought the Denver Post, once one of the best regional newspapers in the country, and hollowed it out into a shell of its former self, then laid off some more people. Things got so bad that the Post’s own editorial board rebelled, demanding that if “Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

And here's one of the other links from above telling a similar story:

The Denver newsroom was hardly alone in its misery. In Northern California, a combined editorial staff of 16 regional newspapers had reportedly been slashed from 1,000 to a mere 150. Farther down the coast in Orange County, there were according to industry analyst Ken Doctor, complained of rats, mildew, fallen ceilings, and filthy bathrooms. In her Washington Post column, media critic Margaret Sullivan called Alden “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.”

And, yes, I think it's fair to say that many newspapers did get a bit fat and happy with their old school monopolistic hold on the news market pre-internet. And many of them failed to adapt. And so, restructuring and re-prioritizing is not a bad idea. But that's not really what's happening here. Alden appears to be taking profitable (not just struggling) newspapers, and squeezing as much money out of them directly into Freeman's pockets, rather than plowing it back into actual journalism. And Alden/DFM appears to be ridiculously profitable for Freeman, even as the journalism it produces becomes weaker and weaker. Jim Brady called it "combover journalism." Basically using skeleton staff to pretend to really be covering the news, when it's clear to everyone that it's not really doing the job.

All of that is prelude to the latest news that Freeman, who basically refuses to ever talk to the media, has sent a letter to other newspaper bosses suggesting they collude to force Google and Facebook to make him even richer.

You can see the full letter here:

Let's go through this nonsense bit by bit, because it is almost 100% nonsense.

These are immensely challenging times for all of us in the newspaper industry as we balance the two equally important goals of keeping the communities we serve fully informed, while also striving to safeguard the viability of our news organizations today and well into the future.

Let's be clear: the "viability" of your newsrooms was decimated when you fired a huge percentage of the local reporters and stuffed the profits into your pockets, rather than investing in the actual product.

Since Facebook was founded in 2004, nearly 2,000 (one in five) newspapers have closed and with them many thousands of newspaper jobs have been lost. In that same time period, Google has become the world's primary news aggregation service, Apple launched a news app with a subsription-based tier and Twitter has become a household name by serving as a distribution service for the content our staffs create.

Correlation is not causation, of course. But even if that were the case, the focus of a well-managed business would be to adapt to the changing market place to take advantage of, say, new distribution channels, new advertising and subscription products, and new ways of building a loyal community around your product. You know, the things that Google, Facebook and Twitter did... which your newspaper didn't do, perhaps because you fired a huge percentage of their staff and re-directed the money flow away from product and into your pocket.

Recent developments internationally, which will finally require online platforms to compensate the news industry are encouraging. I hope we can collaborate to move this issue forward in the United States in a fair and productive way. Just this month, April 2020, French antitrust regulators ordered Google to pay news publishers for displaying snippets of articles after years of helping itself to excerpts for its news service. As regulators in France said, "Google's practices caused a serious and immediate harm to the press sector, while the economic situation of publishers and news agencies is otherwise fragile." The Australian government also recently said that Facebook and Google would have to pay media outlets in the country for news content. The country's Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg noted "We can't deny the importance of creating a level playing field, ensuring a fair go for companies and the appropriate compensation for content."

We have, of course, written about both the plans in France as well as those in Australia (not to mention a similar push in Canada that Freeman apparently missed). Of course, what he's missing is... well, nearly everything. First, the idea that it's Google that's causing problems for the news industry is laughable on multiple fronts.

If newspapers feel that Google is causing them harm by linking to them and sending them traffic, then they can easily block Google, which respects robots.txt restrictions. I don't see Freeman's newspaper doing that. Second, in most of the world, Google does not monetize its Google News aggregation service, so the idea that it's someone making money off of "their" news, is not supported by reality. Third, the idea that "the news" is "owned" by the news organizations is not just laughable, but silly. After all, the news orgs are not making the news. If Freeman is going to claim that news orgs should be compensated for "their" news, then, uh, shouldn't his news orgs be paying the actual people who make the news that they're reporting on? Or is he saying that journalism is somehow special?

Finally, and most importantly, he says all of this as if we haven't seen how these efforts play out in practice. When Germany passed a similar law, Google ended up removing snippets only to be told they had to pay anyway. Google, correctly, said that if it had to license snippets, it would offer a price of $0, or it would stop linking to the sites -- and the news orgs agreed. In Spain, where Google was told it couldn't do this, the company shut down Google News and tons of smaller publications were harmed, not helped, but this policy.

This surely sounds familiar to all of us. It's been more than a decade since Rupert Murdoch instinctively observerd: "There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production... Their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it's theft."

First off, it's not theft. As we pointed out at the time, Rupert Murdoch, himself, at the very time he was making these claims, owned a whole bunch of news aggregators himself. The problem was never news aggregators. The problem has always been that other companies are successful on the internet and Rupert Murdoch was not. And, again, the whole "misappropriation" thing is nonsense: any news site is free to block Google's scrapers and if it's "misappropriation" to send you traffic, why do all of these news organizations employ "search engine optimizers" who work to get their sites higher in the rankings? And, yet again, are they paying the people who make the actual news? If not, then it seems like they're full of shit.

With Facebook and Google recently showing some contrition by launching token programs that provide a modest amount of funding, it's heartening to see that the tech giants are beginning to understand their moral and social responsibility to support and safeguard local journalism.

Spare me the "moral and social responsibility to support and safeguard local journalism," Heath. You're the one who cut 1,000 journalism jobs down to 150. Not Google. You're the one who took profitable newspapers that were investing in local journalism, fired a huge number of their reporters and staff, and redirected the even larger profits into your pockets instead of local journalism.

Even if someone wants to argue this fallacy, it should not be you, Heath.

Facebook created the Facebook Journalism Project in 2017 "to forge stronger ties with the news industry and work with journalists and publishers." If Facebook and the other tech behemoths are serious about wanting to "forge stronger ties with the news industry," that will start with properly remunerating the original producers of content.

Remunerating the "original producers"? So that means that Heath is now agreeing to compensate the people who create the news that his remaining reporters write up? Oh, no? He just means himself -- the middleman -- being remunerated directly into his pocket while he continues to cut jobs from his newsroom while raking in record profits? That seems... less compelling.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple News and other online aggregators make billions of dollars annually from original, compelling content that our reporters, photographers and editors create day after day, hour after hour. We all know the numbers, and this one underscores the value of our intellectual property: The New York Times reported that in 2018, Google alone conservatively made $4.7 billion from the work of news publishers. Clearly, content-usage fees are an appropriate and reasonable way to help ensure newspapers exist to provide communities across the country with robust high-quality local journalism.

First of all, the $4.7 billion is likely nonsense, but even if it were accurate, Google is making that money by sending all those news sites a shit ton of traffic. Why aren't they doing anything reasonable to monetize it? And, of course, Digital First Media has bragged about its profitability, and leaked documents suggest its news business brought in close to a billion dollars in 2017 with a 17% operating margin, significantly higher than all other large newspaper chains.

This is nothing more than "Google has money, we want more money, Google needs to give us the money." There is no "clearly" here and "usage fees" are nonsense. If you don't want Google's traffic, put up robots.txt. Google will survive, but your papers might not.

One model to consider is how broadcast television stations, which provide valuable local news, successfully secured sizable retransmission fees for their programming from cable companies, satellite providers and telcos.

There are certain problems with retransmission fees in the first place (given that broadcast television was, by law, freely transmitted over the air in exchange for control over large swaths of spectrum), and the value they got was in having a large audience to advertise too. But, more importantly, retransmission involved taking an entire broadcast channel and piping it through cable and satellite to make things easier for TV watchers who didn't want to switch between an antenna and a cable (or satellite receiver). An aggregator is not -- contrary to what one might think reading Freeman's nonsense -- retransmitting anything. It's linking to your content and sending you traffic on your own site. The only things it shows are a headline and (sometimes) a snippet to attract more traffic.

There are certainly other potential options worth of our consideration -- among them whether to ask Congress about revisiting thoughtful limitations on "Fair Use" of copyrighted material, or seeking judicial review of how our trusted content is misused by others for their profit. By beginning a collective dialogue on these topics we can bring clarity around the best ways to proceed as an industry.

Ah, yes, let's throw fair use -- the very thing that news orgs regularly rely on to not get sued into the ground -- out the window in an effort to get Google to funnel extra money into Heath Freeman's pockets. That sounds smart. Or the other thing. Not smart.

And "a collective dialogue" in this sense appears to be collusion. As in an antitrust violation. Someone should have maybe mentioned that to Freeman.

Our newspaper brands and operations are the engines that power trust local news in communities across the United States.

Note that it's the brands and operations -- not journalists -- that he mentions here. That's a tell.

Fees from those who use and profit from our content can help continually optimize our product as well as ensure our newsrooms have the resources they need.

Again, Digital First Media, is perhaps the most profitable newspaper chain around. And it just keeps laying off reporters.

My hope is that we are able to work together towards the shared goal of protecting and enhancing local journalism.

You first, Heath, you first.

So, basically, Heath Freeman, who has spent decade or so buying up profitable newspapers, laying off a huge percentage of their newsrooms, leaving a shell of a husk in their place, then redirecting the continued profits (often that exist solely because of the legacy brand) into his own pockets rather than in journalism... wants the other newspapers to collude with him to force successful internet companies who send their newspapers a ton of free traffic to pay him money for the privilege of sending them traffic.

Sounds credible.

The coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdown in most countries has forced major changes in the way people live, work and study. Online learning is now routine for many, and is largely unproblematic, not least because it has been used for many years. However, online testing is more tricky, since there is a concern by many teachers that students might use their isolated situation to cheat during exams. One person's problem is another person's opportunity, and there are a number of proctoring services that claim to stop or at least minimize cheating during online tests. One thing they have in common is that they tend to be intrusive, and show little respect for the privacy of the people they monitor.

As an article in The Verge explains, some employ humans to watch over students using Zoom video calls. That's reasonably close to a traditional setup, where a teacher or proctor watches students in an exam hall. But there are also webcam-based automated approaches, as explored by Vox:

For instance, Examity also uses AI to verify students' identities, analyze their keystrokes, and, of course, ensure they're not cheating. Proctorio uses artificial intelligence to conduct gaze detection, which tracks whether a student is looking away from their screens.

It's not just in the US that these extreme surveillance methods are being adopted. In France, the University of Rennes 1 is using a system called Managexam, which adds a few extra features: the ability to detect "inappropriate" Internet searches by the student, the use of a second screen, or the presence of another person in the room (original in French). The Vox articles notes that even when these systems are deployed, students still try to cheat using new tricks, and the anti-cheating services try to stop them doing so:

it's easy to find online tips and tricks for duping remote proctoring services. Some suggest hiding notes underneath the view of the camera or setting up a secret laptop. It's also easy for these remote proctoring services to find out about these cheating methods, so they're constantly coming up with countermeasures. On its website, Proctorio even has a job listing for a "professional cheater" to test its system. The contract position pays between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.

As the arms race between students and proctoring services escalates, it's surely time to ask whether the problem isn't people cheating, but the use of old-style, analog testing formats in a world that has been forced by the coronavirus pandemic to move to a completely digital approach. Rather than spending so much time, effort and money on trying to stop students from cheating, maybe we need to come up with new ways of measuring what they have learnt and understood -- ones that are not immune to cheating, but where cheating has no meaning. Obvious options include "open book" exams, where students can use whatever resources they like, or even abolishing formal exams completely, and opting for continuous assessment. Since the lockdown has forced educational establishments to re-invent teaching, isn't it time they re-invented exams too?

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Increased microvascular permeability to plasma proteins and neutrophil emigration are hallmarks of innate immunity and key features of numerous inflammatory disorders. Although neutrophils can promote microvascular leakage, the impact of vascular permeability on neutrophil trafficking is unknown. Here, through the application of confocal intravital microscopy, we report that vascular permeability–enhancing stimuli caused a significant frequency of neutrophil reverse transendothelial cell migration (rTEM). Furthermore, mice with a selective defect in microvascular permeability enhancement (VEC-Y685F-ki) showed reduced incidence of neutrophil rTEM. Mechanistically, elevated vascular leakage promoted movement of interstitial chemokines into the bloodstream, a response that supported abluminal-to-luminal neutrophil TEM. Through development of an in vivo cell labeling method we provide direct evidence for the systemic dissemination of rTEM neutrophils, and showed them to exhibit an activated phenotype and be capable of trafficking to the lungs where their presence was aligned with regions of vascular injury. Collectively, we demonstrate that increased microvascular leakage reverses the localization of directional cues across venular walls, thus causing neutrophils engaged in diapedesis to reenter the systemic circulation. This cascade of events offers a mechanism to explain how local tissue inflammation and vascular permeability can induce downstream pathological effects in remote organs, most notably in the lungs.

I’ve been to Forks and La Push, where the Twilight book series takes place, but I’ve never been to the actual filming locations from the movies! That’s because while the director wanted to film in Forks, when he came to scout the town he realized there was just not enough infrastructure to support an entire film crew– there were literally not enough places to house and feed all of the people who would be working on the movie, and there was no other large town within driving distance! (Yeah, Forks is really far out there) Enter Halloweento— I mean, St. Helens, Oregon! St. Helens stands in for most of Forks in the movies, and a few places in nearby Portland, Oregon make up most of the rest. I ended up nearby by complete accident, as it was only when I picked up a brochure at Halloweentown that I learned that Bella’s house was just on the other side of town! LUCKY!!!  So, we took a short break to drive over to the locations that were still standing, and made a special detour to Portland because how could we leave the Cullen house behind?! I WANTED TO GO INSIDE SO BADLY! It is a real house with real people that live there, and although they encouraged taking photos from outside (according both to a brochure from City Hall and a sign in front of the house), the inside was off-limits. Honestly, it’s not Bella that I particularly love. I didn’t care for her portrayal by Kristen Stewart (sorry!), or her melancholy, passive attitude in the book. Actually, I didn’t care for Edward, either. It was the idea of a love so strong that forces of  nature were pulling you together. It’s the idea of fitting together so perfectly that you can’t do anything without the other that I am a complete sucker for! I said it on my old Livejournal years ago, but Twilight is just a big Mary Sue anyway, so I like to imagine myself as Bella, with a gorgeous (female) Edward out there waiting for me. ???? Like I said, it’s the love, not the characters themselves. I’ll fight you on this (just kidding). ???? Here is where Edward rescued Bella from some catcallers, complete with the mural that the movie crew painted (!) on the building. And the theater that they drove past, that you can’t really see well in the movie but hey, it was on the map!! This is Jilly’s, which supplied all of the dresses in the shop when Bella went to pick out something with her friends for prom. Oddly enough, they had this sign outside but no actual merchandise inside. Go figure. ???? This place, which is a private house now, was the bookstore where Bella went to find out more information about the Quileute myths. And then, though we only had a little bit of time, we drove over to Portland and checked out Edward’s house. I have to say…. THIS HOUSE WAS GORGEOUS. Whew! I would LOVE to live there. LOVE LOVE LOVE! I would also have loved a tour, but it is a private residence, and therefore we kept our distance. Mmm, but it sure is gorgeous! Twilight brings back a lot of memories for me, and it’s special because I grew up (mostly) in Washington. It’s also not the only book series to claim that there are werewolves living amongst the local residents. The town that I spent most of my childhood in also has a series revolving around it! I’m planning to take a trip over there to see my old friends and photograph all of the wolfy places of interest, so I’ll post about it then! Love ya, and see ya tomorrow!

Media confront a week of viral news as the pandemic sends us closer to lockdown. Plus, Tracy Grimshaw is left hanging by Josh Frydenberg. And Seven’s Mark Stevens brings us a news flash.

The critical media debate over easing the COVID-19 lockdown. Why we must not minimise the dangers.

IBM and AOS, - a Colombian company specializing in providing business solutions- today announced they are collaborating to create a solution to enhance efficiency in the logistics and transport industry throughout the country, built on IBM Blockchain and Watson IoT on the IBM Cloud.

Walmart, JD.com, IBM, and Tsinghua University National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies announced today they will work together in a Blockchain Food Safety Alliance that will kick off with a collaboration designed to enhance food tracking, traceability and safety in China, to achieve greater transparency across the food supply chain.

Bank of Montreal (BMO), CaixaBank, Commerzbank and Erste Group have joined an initiative launched by UBS and IBM in 2016 to build a new global trade platform based on blockchain technology. This new platform, called Batavia, is built to be openly accessed by organisations of all sizes anywhere in the world, and can support trade finance for transactions across all modes of trade, whether goods are being transported by air, land or sea.

SIBOS: IBM today announced a new blockchain banking solution that will help financial institutions address the processes of universal cross-border payments, reducing the settlement time and lowering the cost of completing global payments for businesses and consumers. Using IBM Blockchain, and in collaboration with technology partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group, the solution is intended to improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time.

A.P. Moller –Maersk and IBM today announced their intent to establish a joint venture to provide more efficient and secure methods for conducting global trade using blockchain technology.

China Construction Bank (Asia) Corporation Limited (“CCB (Asia)”) and IBM today announced the development of the first blockchain-enabled bancassurance project in Hong Kong. Built on the IBM Blockchain Platform, the solution is designed to streamline CCB (Asia)’s bancassurance process and greatly enhance customer experience and the quality of services delivered through faster transaction processing time and increased transparency.

IBM Japan today announced that Sony Corporation and Sony Global Education, a subsidiary of Sony that works to provide global educational services, have developed a new blockchain-based student education records platform. With the solution, school administrators can consolidate and manage students' educational data from several schools, as well as record and refer their learning history and digital academic transcripts with more certainty. The new platform, developed using IBM Blockchain, uses blockchain technology running on the IBM Cloud to track students’ learning progress, as well as establish transparency and accountability of scholastic achievements between students and schools.

El actual entorno tecnológico impulsa a las empresas a transformar sus modelos de negocio en un escenario en donde, según la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), el 25% de la economía mundial será digital en los próximos cinco años. De esta forma, el uso de nuevas tecnologías se vuelve la pieza clave para asegurar tanto competitividad, como su alto desempeño.

IBM y organizaciones aliadas lanzaron la iniciativa global 'Call for Code', el esfuerzo más grande y ambicioso para reunir a desarrolladores del sector académico y empresarial, para resolver uno de los problemas más acuciantes de la sociedad de nuestro tiempo: prevenir, responder y recuperarse de desastres naturales.

In an experiment designed to show what a household with a computer puts itself at risk of everyday, NetSafe and IBM today uncovered fascinating and shocking results. The experiment was held to mark International Computer Security Day – Sunday 30 November.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) anunció hoy que está trabajando con más de 300 universidades y más de 400 instituciones educativas en toda Latinoamérica para respaldar la inminente necesidad de desarrollar habilidades asociadas a los requerimientos de la transformación digital, ya que el 60% de los ejecutivos se esfuerza hoy por mantener las habilidades de la fuerza laboral actualizadas y relevantes frente al rápido avance tecnológico.

MineHub Technologies e IBM anunciaron hoy una colaboración para utilizar la tecnología blockchain con el objetivo de mejorar la eficiencia operativa, logística, financiamiento y reducir los costos en la cadena de suministro de concentrados minerales de alto valor, desde la mina hasta el comprador final.

Unitec today announced that the number of people employed in two Delivery Centres at its Mount Albert campus now exceeds 500, and continue to drive benefits for Unitec students and the Auckland economy.

ANZ and IBM are working together to develop a blockchain solution for the insurance industry that will help make the data transfer and payment reconciliation process faster and more transparent between brokers and insurers.

ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, IBM Scentre Group and Westpac have jointly launched a live pilot for Lygon, a new digital platform using blockchain technology to transform the way businesses obtain and manage bank guarantees that are often required as part of a retail property lease.

ANZ and Westpac have teamed with IBM (NYSE:IBM) and shopping centre operator Scentre Group and have now successfully digitised the bank guarantee process used for commercial property leasing.

IBM today announced a new analytics-based tool for its data centre consolidation and relocation services which help clients gain up to 50% operational savings from the consolidation of IT assets and data centres.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Melbourne start-up Localz as the winner of IBM SmartCamp Australia 2015, a global competition that brings together entrepreneurs, investors and experienced mentors. Localz provides software that connects the digital and physical worlds for enterprise, using the latest micro-location technology to enhance customer’s in-store experience, improve asset and inventory tracking and provide frictionless mobile payments, at scale. One of the key differentiators of the solution is that it works across different technologies (iBeacons, Bluetoth Low Energy, GPS or even QR Codes).

2019.12.23まじ今日年末感感じたうす塁斗寂しいような清々しいような慌ただしいようなうす塁斗最近さ朝さ寒いと思い着たコートん外でて駅についたころには暑い、汗が、、まだコートいらないのか歩いたから？寒くないの今日？てなるコート着て外あるく、暑いな、寒くないのか？？中は薄着だぞ？？いやみんな外歩いてると寒いと言う声朝も夕方も、夜も、寒いー寒みーーと言う声が聞こえてくるあれやっぱ寒いのか？？あ解禁したやつコイツのおかげってことよもふもふのもっこもこのコートドフラミンゴとか言われるやつ、、、とりあえずダ続きをみる

『著作権保護のため、記事の一部のみ表示されております。』

Most stakeholders agree that holding smaller competitions will be the best way forward post-lockdown.

Well, as they say, that escalated quickly.

Day 5 (Friday): Stayed home all day with jack. We ordered takeaway for our date night while we still can. The delivery guy wore a proper facemask.

Day 6 (Saturday): Woke up feeling kind of grim. Decided, on consultation with my partners, that I was fairly sure it was just a cold, so we agreed I would go ahead with my planned evening with cjwatson and the children.

In the morning I virtually 'attended' a livestreamed service, which is a really really new thing for my community who normally ban telecoms and electronics on the Sabbath. It was weird, but I felt good for praying with the community even if I wasn't actually interacting with them directly. In the afternoon I did a virtual play readthrough over Zoom, organized by the lovely wildeabandon. It was really really fun, and I got to see the faces of friends I haven't seen for ages, as well as a couple of internet acquaintances I had no mental image of previously. The play was Loves labours lost and I played a couple of small but fun roles, Lady Katharine, a slightly bitchy court woman, and Sir Nathaniel, a pompous curate.

And then I walked to my partners' house, and it was sunny and seemed basically normal. Plus I was feeling completely better by mid afternoon. I took a winding route to stay most of 2m away from any other pedestrians. We played Labyrinth and watched TV and I stayed the night.

In the morning (Sunday) there was more TV and another game, Robot turtles, a sort of cut-down, child-friendly version of Robo Rally, which the children have got much better at since we last played. And we walked part way together to metamour's house where there was mother's day planned, which I didn't join in with, I went home to jack. We went out to the local shop, I walked with him to enjoy the spring weather and he did the actual shopping, as I'm in theory more vulnerable than him.

Sunday evening I did my chevruta (traditional paired Jewish text study), which has always been online because my partner is in New York, and we had a long and pleasant video call with some old friends of jack's I don't see often enough.

Today, day 8, well, jack and I stayed home, mostly working. And anxiously watching the news of how most of the country treated the weekend as a bonus bank holiday and flocked to tourist spots and crowded into parks and gardens. It was kind of obvious the restrictions would have to get stricter, if that was how people were interpreting more gentle restrictions.

Then they cancelled the daily "briefing" (I haven't really been listening to them as it's mostly just our incompetent prime minister waffling with no substance) for a COBRA meeting. I carried out my intended plan of collecting Judith from OSOs' for a Hebrew lesson, and am I ever glad I did. Because as of an hour ago, and starting from tonight, we're no longer allowed out at all except for "essential" purposes. And we're explicitly no longer allowed to meet friends and family. So I don't know how long it will be before I get to hug my partners again.

In a way, lockdown isn't very different from how we were already behaving, with one vulnerable person in each of our three houses (me and metamour have asthma, girlfriend is pregnant). We were already going out only once a day for exercise, we were already only visiting shops to buy, like, food. But what it has taken away from us is that we can no longer bounce between the three houses, treating the polycule as a closed pod. I think our behaviour for the past week has been safe. If I walk a kilometre to my partners' house, that's no different from walking a kilometre in a random direction to get exercise. But the problem is everybody thinks they're an exception, (and multi-household poly relationships are never thought of in official rulings), so now it's forbidden.

The announcement says three weeks, but I think what's actually going to happen is that people will again not take the restrictions seriously and it will have to be extended.

Personal status: I thought I was doing ok, and the tighter restrictions are almost certainly necessary and not really a surprise. But it hurts.
Social circle tally: three cases, including one person I see face to face (though not for at least a month). 8 mostly online acquaintances with suspicious symptoms.

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It's a new month, and that usually means I'm supposed to write a monthly update on the progress with Kandria. Thinking about that though made me feel very depressed because I realised that I hadn't really done anything at all for the game, all of April.

I can blame however much I want of that on the quarantine and university stress, or whatever else, but it won't change the fact that there has not been much progress on any front. While I have been slacking a lot, it's not like I haven't been working at all - plenty of time has gone into Courier, after all.

When I had this realisation yesterday, I tried my best to push myself to work on the game any way I could, but I failed to find anything that I could actually convince myself to do. That isn't to say that there aren't things to do; god forbid there's a tonne of things! Tuning combat, drawing animations, writing the UI, fixing dialogue, starting on enemy AI, optimising performance - just to name a few. And yet, despite the breadth and depth of things to do, there was absolutely nothing that looked appealing to me.

This kind of feeling is nothing new to me. It's a creative block, and happens more often that I'd like to admit. It's also why I often don't like to start long running projects, because I'm afraid of a creative block that would ruin it. The worst part about the creative block is that there's no remedy for it. You just get stuck in a rut, and it sucks a whole lot for a completely unpredictable amount of time. Often what I end up doing, whether consciously so or not, is switching to another project and just working on that.

So far that project has been Courier, but that's at its end and I'm also starting to feel burnt out on it, too. I don't have any other projects queued up that I'd like to tackle, or new ideas on what to do at the moment, so I'm just... stuck.

I suppose the right thing to do in this situation is to take it easy and not fret too much over it, since that's often one of the many factors causing the block. I've never been good at actually doing that, though. Maybe I should try to take a break from programming in general? I don't know.

You may be wondering why I'm writing this all to begin with. Well, partly I feel like I promised to do monthly and weekly updates, and I really hate to break that promise without notice. Another part is that I just feel like I owe you the discretion to tell you what's going on with me. I'm very thankful for the email replies and general responses I've gotten for Kandria so far, I really am! Because of that genuine interest, I feel all the more pressured not to disappoint. Since I have nothing to show though, I thought the only proper course of action is to just be open and direct about it. So I'll just say it again: aside from updating the public demo, no progress has been made at all.

Maybe it would help me to have a more open discussion about this topic in general, instead of just it being me telling you that I'm in a bad place. So please, let me know: have you been in similar situations before? What helped you deal with them? Is there something in Kandria I could try to focus on that you, personally, would like to see?

You can reach me at shinmera@tymoon.eu.

Event cancellations at local bodies due to COVID-19 will reduce revenue, but not rent and other fixed expenses. Many local bodies already operate on extremely tight margins and struggle to pay their bills even during normal times. All members are encouraged to continue to financially support their local bodies, even if there are no events …

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Let's talk about Blockchain. Goal is to use this forum topic to highlight its usefulness to programming language theory and practice. If you're familiar with existing research efforts, please share them here. In addition, feel free to generate ideas for how Blockchain could improve languages and developer productivity.

As one tasty example: Blockchain helps to formalize thinking about mutual knowledge and common knowledge, and potentially think about sharing intergalactic computing power through vast distributed computing fabrics. If we can design contracts in such a way that maximizes the usage of mutual knowledge while minimizing common knowledge to situations where you have to "prove your collateral", third-party transactions could eliminate a lot of back office burden. But, there might be benefits in other areas of computer science from such research, as well.

Some language researchers, like Mark S. Miller, have always dreamed of Agoric and the Decades-Long Quest for Secure Smart Contracts.

Some may also be aware that verification of smart contracts is an important research area, because of the notorious theft of purse via logic bug in an Ethereum smart contract.

1. Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat"  VRT NWS
2. Het Corona Debat met Marc Van Ranst, Erika Vlieghe, Maggie De Block (Open Vld), Bart De Wever (N-VA) en anderen  De Morgen
3. 'We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is'  De Standaard
4. Het grote coronadebat: “We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is”  Het Belang van Limburg
5. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

I feel like I should be writing in here more given the historicness of everything happening right now. But mostly I’m just tired and want things to stop being so terrible. And it’s only like week three or whatever. In … Continue reading →