Friday, January 4, 2008

Another week shortened by a holiday leaves me with little to report, but a little thing like having nothing to write about won’t stop me.

I made a correction to all three of our police reports when I discovered that they wouldn’t display any incidents that happened in 2008. For reasons you probably don’t care about, the database didn’t want to compare dates that spanned multiple years. Effectively this meant that none of the police reports displayed any results from January 1 to sometime on the second, when I fixed the problem. No one noticed though, so don’t tell anyone.

The rest of the week has mostly been spent working on the new community site that we hope to launch in a little over a week. It’s coming along nicely. Kim has been busy filling it with content and we’ve been making tweaks here and there. There are a few more issues we want to resolve and a few more features we want to add, but we’re pretty confident that it will be ready by launch date.

Finally, the other day I found this on my desk. It’s one of those little rubber bracelets that you wear to show support for some cause or another. This one is from the Maynard Institute. Now I always thought that the idea behind these was that because you support the given cause, say cancer research, you don’t mind wearing what is effectively a coloured rubber band around your wrist. It is in fact a kind of sacrifice that you are willing to make to show your support for that cause. Why then would the “institute for journalism education” think that I would want to tarnish my already rocky fashion sense with their hideous orange band?

Not clear on what cause I have been solicited to support, I did a little research. Apparently the Maynard Institute was founded to expand opportunities for minority journalists, which is noble enough, but not a cause I typically associate myself with. What confuses me even more is why I would be singled out as the recipient of this bracelet - I am neither a minority (despite being a foreigner), nor a journalist.

So I’m not going to wear the bracelet, but as a sign of my unwavering support of the Maynard Institute and all the hard work they do there, I will happily forward it on to anyone who wants it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Danny -- regarding your comments about the orange bracelet left on your desk. You stated that you're neither a "minority" nor a "journalist" so you wonder why you received the bracelet, and decided you wouldn't wear it. I'm guessing you're fairly young. Is the concept that many of the people that fought tooth and nail for the civil rights movement were not of color, nor affected directly by the inequities, lost on you? I am not in the military, and have no family there, nor am I an Iraqi, but I participated heavily in protesting the start of that war. Point? You can openly support the fight against inequities, even if you're not the one being affected directly.

Danny said...

My point in what was (I thought) an obvious attempt at humour was that it was strange that the bracelet was given to me, rather than any other member of staff here at the Tribune. I have no prior affiliation with the Maynard Institute, nor am I a public figure who should be known to them. I am, in fact, a code monkey who works in a cubicle and has almost no contact with the outside world. I mentioned in the blog post that I felt the cause was “noble enough”, but there are many other noble causes which I freely support – just not by wearing ugly jewelry.

Incidentally, if someone were to give me a lime green headband to wear in support of “not killing puppies”, I wouldn’t wear that either. I’m all for not killing puppies, I just don’t see the correlation between lime green headbands and the cause.

Kristin said...

Anonymous...I am so glad you are out there supporting all these causes. Otherwise, it would be left up to someone else to make disparaging comments about someone whose free choice about wearing a piece of plastic offends you. Somehow, the inequities based on race are unacceptable whereas inequities based on age are acceptable to you. All in all, maybe time should be spent improving yourself and your obvious bias against young people before you go out and try to change the world to be just like you?

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