Brainless language defaults: not necessarily so

Though service providers seldom notify individual users of enhanced affordances, it has come to my dumb-founded attention that Google Calendar embedding code generators now offer recovery from defaults imposed according to user ISP locations. Deep among your calendars, you may find:

• Settings:
• Embed This Calendar:
• Customize the color, size, and other options (sorry, no screen shots here because they might violate copyright).
  

Then, after culturally sensitive options like "Week Starts On" (left sidebar, 2009.06.19), there's a drop down menu that enables you to over-ride the default. I've over-ridden the default on two calenders, embedded in singular locations, so far.

If you have more calendars that you wish to appear in certain languages, when embedded in multiple locations, more power to you! You may need to regenerate embedding code in Google, and then replace whatever you've embedded in other websites.

Building design and evacuation plans

How fast can you get down the stairs?

A news item on TV this evening reminded me that building designs may fail to prioritize evacuation, and that laws enacted after designs get implemented may be equally likely to fail to make evacuation feasible in existing buildings, whether there are natural or human impacts, for example: earthquakes or missiles; that threaten building occupants.

The following mind map represents consequential impacts on stairwells, rather than superstructures, without taking into account variation in individual or planned evacuation speeds; which depend in turn upon immediate floor-level casualties, and willingness of non-casualties to engage in near-peer evacuations.

Odeo player test

The purpose of this post is to test scripts for embedding Odeo players for recordings that students made.

Track One



Track Two