Year: 2014

When people talk about having standards, it’s with the shared assumption that standards are a “good thing.”  When we talk about minimum standard for something, we’re talking about a baseline, below which is considered unacceptable.  When we use the phrase  “a standard of excellence” we associate the word standard with an ideal that we should…

In the 6th Essex race the Salem News editorialized: “… Parisella has certainly earned another two-year term…”  Apparently the editors have not been reading the excellent reporting of Paul Leighton who detailed the conflict of interest complaint filed against Parisella and his subsequent quitting of his job. And though that weighs on my mind, I’m…

This is a public request for Charlie Baker or Martha Coakley to show real leadership by stepping up and demanding that

I’m proud of Massachusetts today. Last night on the debate on WBZ all 5 candidates for governor were featured, including 3 in depende

I’ve used the login name “fishdan” since 1996 — I own it about everywhere it’s worth having.  Because I’m old, my primary usage is via yahoo, but I’m also fishdan@gmail, It’s my primary interface to all things google, including my google+ account and the account I sync my android phone with. Because I’m a good…

Just upgraded to windows 8, and I’m not happy about a lot of it, but I kept digging to see if the answers I wanted are perhaps in there somewhere. Most particularly I was very frustrated that I could not see the progress of windows update as it ran from the app.  It took me…

We’ve all encountered the diehards on the web.  They’re never wrong, they will post link upon upon link

We have changed ourselves as a country and as a people when we think that the social safety net MUST come from government. When my grandparents came to Lynn in 1904 they came to a community that took them in and shared responsibility for them. If a kid was misbehaving, the first adult in the…