Tuesday, 10 July 2007

We finished watching Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price last night, and, well, this user comment pretty much summed it up.

It was a fairly poorly presented, heavily one-sided piece of "documentary" work. A lot of their claims we're really backed up with anything.

I've no doubt that Wal-Mart is an evil mega-corporation, and we didn't really shop there much before, and we'll certainly never shop there again, but I would have preferred to have a seen a more balanced, better presented piece than what this had to offer.

There were a lot of "Mom and Pop" businesses going "wah wah, Wal-Mart stole my lunch", and frankly, that's capitalism for you, sorry. I can appreciate that the "Mom and Pop" businesses may have provided better conditions for their employees, but that didn't seem to be the focus of those stories, just that various governments provided subsidies for Wal-Mart to come in, and all of the local small businesses had to shut up shop as a result. At no point was there any discussion about sales-tax benefits to the cities that provided incentives for Wal-Mart to move in.

So yeah, the movie was an eye opener, even when taken with a large salt-shaker, but it could have been done a lot better. The user comments on IMDb are quite interesting in and of themselves.

Just because I'm a geek, I try to keep my blog standards-compliant.

I've managed to keep the HTML compliant for some time now, and tonight I figured out how to embed Google Video the right way (rather than using the "HTML" that it provides) thanks to Flash Satay.

So after I managed to maintain HTML compliance and have an embedded video, I thought I'd have another look at RSS feed compliance, because I've noticed that my feeble attempts at embedding video don't seem to make it into the various Planets that aggregate my blog. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to placate the Feed Validator with my blog's RSS feed. It seems to get bitter and twisted about embedded HTML, no matter how hard I try to escape the HTML.

I've no idea if that's got anything to do with why my embedded videos won't show up on the Planets, but it's as far as I've been able to get with compliant RSS feeds...

Last night NBC11 was running a story and an email poll about the impending new legislation requiring that all cats and dogs over 6 months of age be spayed or neutered.

Anyway, the legislation seems (surprisingly, in my opinion) divisive within the community. Since Sarah has done a lot of volunteer work at the Palo Alto Animal Services animal shelter in the past, as well as doing a bit of feral cat trap/neuter/release work, she's strongly in favour of the legislation as it'll help reduce the number of unwanted kittens and puppies that get dumped at shelters (or just dumped) every year.

Unfortunately, plenty of pet owners seem to feel some need to not have their pet spayed or neutered, even if they have no intention of using the animal to breed, and these people have been kicking up a fair bit of fuss.

So, as I was saying, NBC11 ran an email opinion poll, and Sarah wrote in a fairly informed piece about why she felt the way she did, and got an email back this morning for a reporter wanting to interview her, and that happened today.

It's funny, Sarah was saying on the way home from work, that in hindsight one of her answers was pretty lame, and sure enough, the one sound bite they decided to use was that one... Oh well, she's had her 30 seconds of fame.