Author: Ashley Bischoff

Working Time Directive

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Perhaps related to my post yesterday about European vacations, I just read a post from Albanach in the comments of a Slashdot story on work hours that goes over Europe’s working time directive (previously unknown to me).

Indeed, in Europe if they had you working 15 hour days, you could go home at 11am on the Thursday and not return to work until the Monday.

Why? Because the European Union protected its workers by introducing the working time directive which emans the maximum hours you can be contracted to work is 48 per week — you can work longer if you wish and agree, but no employer can force you too, and if you decide not to there's not a thing they can do.

Damn! Remind me why I’m living in this country, again? ;)

SMTP Access?

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I’m looking for access to an SMTP server. This would be just to send a couple e-mails a day; and, I’m not asking for an open relay, as I could provide an ip address from where I would be accessing the server. If you have an SMTP server that I could use for this, please let me know :).

More Black Men in Prison Than College

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

A new study from the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based think-tank that advocates for alternatives to prison, has found that after two decades of harsh criminal justice policies, there are more black men in jail or prison than in college. At the end of 2000, 791,600 black men were behind bars and 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast, in 1980 — before the prison boom — black men in college outnumbered black men behind bars by a ratio of more than 3 to 1, the study found. […]

Whoah. I know that many black men are in prison, but I had no idea that it was to this extent.

Techno Internet Radio

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I haven’t brought my CD player in to work yet (when you have to leave for work at 7:30am, mornings always seem to be a rush), so I was jonesing for some music this afternoon.

Figuring that I wouldn’t mind hearing some non-mainstream, a quick Google search turned up Digitally Imported, which has all kinds of techno — trance, hard trance, hard house, eurodance, and so on. I listened to eurodance for a while, and I’m listening to hard house at the moment — but they’re both very good.

If it weren’t for the poor audio quality of streaming MP3s (compared with Redbook CD audio), I would be half-tempted to leave my CD changer at home and just try streaming Internet radio for a while ;).

PS If you have any techno or melodic death metal streaming-radio stations to recommend, please post them in the comments :).

European Vacations

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On NPR’s radio show “Marketplace” yesterday, there was an interesting bit on European vacations. I can't seem to find the segment in that show’s text archive, but I’ve confirmed that it’s in the RealAudio version (at about the 10-minute mark).

I agree with almost all that the author of piece has to say. Americans are being stifled by such short vacations, and Euopeans probably are well-rested after theirs. However, contrary to what the author suggests, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a 4-6 week vacation should become law.