Day: May 25, 2007

Claudette Colvin

Chris 3 Comments 433 views

From Wikipedia:

Claudette Colvin (born September 5, 1939) is a African American woman from Alabama. In 1955, at the age of 15, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white person, in violation of local law. Her arrest preceded civil rights activist Rosa Parks’ (on December 1, 1955) by nine months.

At the time, Colvin was a student at Booker T. Washington High School. Colvin’s family didn’t own a car, so she relied on the city’s gold-and-green buses to get to school. On March 2, 1955, she boarded a public bus and, shortly thereafter, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Colvin was coming home from school that day when she got on a Capital Heights bus downtown at the same place Parks boarded another bus months later. Colvin was sitting about two seats from the emergency exit when four whites boarded and the driver ordered her, along with three other black passengers, to get up. She refused and was removed from the bus by two police officers, who took her to jail.

“The bus was getting crowded and I remember him (the bus driver) looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up out of her seat, which she didn’t,” said a classmate at the time, Annie Larkins Price. “She didn’t say anything. She just continued looking out the window. She decided on that day that she wasn’t going to move.”

Price testified on Colvin’s behalf in the juvenile court case, where Colvin was convicted of violating the segregation law and assault. “There was no assault,” Price said.

Colvin had been handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. At the time, Colvin was active in the NAACP’s Youth Council, and she was actually being advised by Rosa Parks.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills

Chris 2 Comments 264 views

From Computerworld.com:

Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon’s TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it’s very difficult to declare these skills — or any computer skill, really — dead.

In fact, the harder you try to declare a technology dead, it seems, the more you turn up evidence of its continuing existence. Nevertheless, after speaking with several industry stalwarts, we’ve compiled a list of skills and technologies that, while not dead, can perhaps be said to be in the process of dying.

My Free Implants

Chris 1 Comment 287 views

A site where men can go and buy breast implants for women. (We’re going to go with a slightly NSFW on this one)

MyFreeImplants.com is the first website of its kind to harness the global power of the Internet to service the unique needs and desires of its members.

MyFreeImplants is a web-based service in which our clients and members play an active role in its day to day operations. Women come to us because they have the desire to enhance their physical appearance in a variety of ways. Our most common request, and thus our name, is breast implants. However, we do have relationships with a variety of cosmetic surgeons and often provide our female clientele with other cosmetic surgeries at no cost.

(via Metafilter)