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  27. <title>A greeting card &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2016/11-November/30.xhtml&gt;</title>
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  65. <header>
  66. <h1>A greeting card</h1>
  67. <p>Day 00634: Wednesday, 2016 November 30</p>
  68. </header>
  69. <img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/11/30.jpg" alt="Another apartment complex" class="weblog-header-image" width="811" height="480" />
  70. <h2 id="general">General news</h2>
  71. <p>
  72. Being able to take the day off yesterday was fantastic, but today, my essay was due.
  73. I had completed all of my other schoolwork, but I hadn&apos;t even begun my essay.
  74. Aside from a short walk, my essay&apos;s what I spent the day working on.
  75. </p>
  76. <p>
  77. I found out today that the <a href="https://peppercarrot.com/extras/html/2016_cat-generator/">avatar generator</a> that I talked about yesterday was built in an effort for a <a href="https://peppercarrot.com/">free Web comic</a> to <a href="https://peppercarrot.com/en/article390/my-fight-against-cdn-libraries">rid their website of privacy-adverse <abbr title="content delivery network">CDN</abbr> libraries</a>.
  78. One thing that needed to be replaced was Gravitar, which provides pseudo-randomized avatars for users that don&apos;t have an avatar set, making it easy to spot when multiple comments come from the same user.
  79. The cat-based avatar generator was used as the replacement (until the comic started using Disqus as their comment system, despite Disqus <strong>*also*</strong> having privacy issues).
  80. Anyway, what I learned from this is that there&apos;s a second ongoing free Web comic.
  81. <a href="http://floraverse.com./">Floraverse</a> isn&apos;t the only one left! Nina Paley had a few free Web comic, but they don&apos;t seem to be in production any longer.
  82. </p>
  83. <p>
  84. As I&apos;ve said before, I&apos;m not Christian and I think that treating arbitrary calendar dates as special is a bad idea.
  85. Therefore, because of both, I have no interest in December twenty-fifth.
  86. It&apos;s an arbitrary calendar date and should be treated as such.
  87. However, I recently came to understand why <a href="/en/weblog/2016/11-November/25.xhtml#general">my mother doesn&apos;t feel that way</a>.
  88. As my mother seems to have nothing else to live for, I&apos;m trying to do my best to make that day pleasant for them.
  89. Today, I found <a href="https://libremas.singpolyma.net/">holiday greeting cards covered by the <abbr title="Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International">CC BY-SA 4.0</abbr> license</a>! My mother won&apos;t appreciate (or even know about) the license, but they do love greeting cards and I think that they&apos;l find the ones on the top row to be cute.
  90. The second row is almost as nice, but my mother doesn&apos;t like snow, so an indoor scene is a better idea for them.
  91. I&apos;ve ordered a card, and hopefully it will arrive on time.
  92. </p>
  93. <p>
  94. After finishing my coursework and while waiting for this week&apos;s coursework to become available, I started setting up a page of links that I&apos;d like to share.
  95. It&apos;s pretty skeletal for the time being, but in time, I hope to have quite a list of places that I want people to see.
  96. I can&apos;t help but feel that I have several such links scattered throughout my journal, but I want to have a concise page of them so that they&apos;re more likely to actually be looked over.
  97. </p>
  98. <p>
  99. My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
  100. </p>
  101. <h2 id="university">University life</h2>
  102. <p>
  103. I read the case study on the Coca-Cola company, which much to my frustration, claimed that the company keeps its recipes secret in an effort to keep their quality high.
  104. That doesn&apos;t make any sense! They keep their recipes secret to avoid having to compete with others.
  105. They do it so that people can&apos;t make the same flavors of soda and mark the prices down.
  106. If anything, they keep their recipes secret not to keep their own quality high, but to keep the competition&apos;s quality <strong>*low*</strong>! By doing that, The Coca-Cola company is able to make their product seem to be of a higher quality by comparison, but in reality, Coca-Cola would have a better product if they shared their recipe.
  107. Coca-Cola would either be able to collaborate, taking good changes to the recipe made by others, or they&apos;d be forced to continue to improve their flavor to keep their market share.
  108. In either case, while the Coca-Cola <strong>*company*</strong> profits from keeping the recipes under lock and key, the Coca-Cola <strong>*product*</strong> suffers from this.
  109. Arguably, customers also suffer from this secrecy.
  110. </p>
  111. <p>
  112. Supposedly though, Coca-Cola designs all of their packaging to be completely recyclable.
  113. I don&apos;t mean to say that the Coca-Cola company is all bad, just that this case study misinterprets the company&apos;s hoarding of knowledge as a good thing that promotes quality when in fact it&apos;s a bad thing and harms quality.
  114. </p>
  115. <p>
  116. With that finally done, I began and finished my <a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/How_Coca-Cola_should_deal_with_globalization.xhtml">essay</a> for the week.
  117. I can&apos;t help but feel that if I had more time to work on it, it would have come out better.
  118. However, it can&apos;t really be helped.
  119. I&apos;ve been far too busy through most of the week, and yesterday, I desperately needed a day off.
  120. My essay came out better working on it just today after having rested than it would have had I worked on it for two days and not gotten any rest.
  121. My schoolwork next week will likewise benefit from my day of rest.
  122. Still though, this essay isn&apos;t as long as my last two.
  123. While I&apos;ve been making an effort to write double-length essays, this one instead barely goes over the length requirement.
  124. I&apos;m not going to worry too much about it though.
  125. There&apos;s only so much time in the day, I have a lot on my plate, and I need rest or I&apos;ll burn myself out.
  126. </p>
  127. <p>
  128. This week, instead of writing an essay, we&apos;re filling out a <a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/SCAMPER.xhtml">table</a>.
  129. I don&apos;t understand what we&apos;re supposed to do with the table, but I&apos;m hoping that by the time I finish the reading assignment for the week, I will.
  130. </p>
  131. <h2 id="apartment">Apartment hunting</h2>
  132. <p>
  133. I went on a short walk this morning and found that a section of R Street is lined with apartment complexes, as is at least one of the crossroads.
  134. I&apos;m probably going to check these complexes tomorrow after work and try to pick up applications there.
  135. </p>
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  138. Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst;
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  140. If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
  141. My address is in the source comments near the top of this document.
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