play of light
a photograph
the way I used to be
some half-forgotten stranger
doesn’t mean that much to me
trick of light
moving picture
moments caught in flight
make the shadows darker
or the colors shine too bright
(Rush – Available Light – Presto – 1989)
CNN.com – U.S. plan: Threat level for every flyer – Feb. 28, 2003
Summary: The US government adn airlines are going to do background checks on everyone with the audacity to buy airline tickets, and categorize them as to their risk level.
And what’s amazing is not so much that they expect people to put up with this, but the fact that the sheep (baa baa baa) will welcome this invasion of their privacy with open arms in the name of “National Security.” Yes, the same National Security that confiscated a bungee cord from my father’s luggage cart because he could use it to “restrain” someone.
I keep hear people saying, well, when they do X, people will rise up and protest, and something will be done. I hear this about absurd patents, I hear this about the DMCA, and a variety of other things, and now I hear it about these absurd, and unconstitutional, travel restrictions. But we (the collective we of all the travellers who have to get places, and realize that we have to put up with this nonsense to get there) will put up with it, just like we put up with them stealing our Swiss Cards because we could use them to hijack the plane (presumably if the pilot was really small), just like we put up with unbathed strangers pawing through our underwear, just like we put up with the assumption that we are terrorists (guilty until proven innocent, right?), just like we put up with sweaty strangers groping us in public without our consent, and just like we put up with a thousand other absurd things that have been laid on us, in the name of security and blind patriotism, since our nation was attacked precisely because of the freedoms we enjoy. Our response should have been greater freedoms, not eliminating those that we still have.
I’m getting seriously steamed about the treatment that I get when I travel. Travel is one of the fundamental aspects of being American, since moving to America in the first place (ie, in the 1500’s through the 1700’s), through the move to the West Coast (in the first half of the 1800’s, I believe), through the road trip you took in college. travelling is part of what it is to be an American. And, yet, when I arrive at the airport, and I need to get to my destination, I realize that one does not insult the crocodile before one crosses the river, as I read on a plaque at the border crossing between Rwanda and Zaire, during my 1988 visit to those countries. And so I feel helpless to protest, realizing also that the people carrying out these acts are not themselves the source of the problem, merely the tools via which it is inflicted on us – although many of them are taking undue advantage of their position to exploit the situation for personal benefit.
What, exactly, is it that we can do to fight these profoundly unamerican moves on the part of our government, and restore the liberties that make us Americans?
I’m trying to get “Putt Putt Saves The Zoo” to run under wine on Linux (RedHat 8.0 if it matters). The only use I have for the operating system from Redmond is games. In particular, games for my daughter. When I want to do actual work I use a real operating system. When I want to play, I use a toy operating system. Seems fitting.
I discovered that “Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo” will run under wine, but it is painfully slow. Thinking that it was a problem with my lack of memory, I have added an additional 512M of memory. However, it it all cpu. This game, which is, as far as I can tell, a shockwave or flash thingy, consumes 100% of the cpu, and runs so slow that the 15-second intro sequence takes about 10 minutes.
There’s got to be something that I can do to make this go faster, but I’ve turned off all the other things that I can turn off without shutting down the system, and it has no effect. If anyone has any clues, I’d be glad to hear them. It would be a great shame to have to get Yet Another Computer just so that I can play a few silly games.
After about 2 weeks of listening to NPR news in the morning, I have come to a number of conclusions.
First, I don’t have time to panic, as much as the US government is encouraging me to do so. I don’t have room for 3 weeks of bottled water, or whatever it was, and I don’t have money to spend on Duct Tape. I have way too much going on, on a daily basis, to devote a single moment to panicing, which is actually quite time consuming once you get started. The web site put up by the Department of Homeland Security succeeded in making me afraid. It contains all of the security tips that you learned in kindergarden, and makes you think that all of those situations will happen to you tomorrow. Do yourself a favor. Give your kids a big hug. Tell your loved ones how much you love them. Have a glass of your favorite wine. Sing your favorite songs in public, loud enough that people give you strange looks. Wear silly hats. Enjoy life. Let that be your preparation for dark times. I’m not suggesting that being completely unprepared is a sensible thing. I’m suggesting that spending your time worrying will not make you any more prepared than following my simple recommendations. Life is too short to waste it in planning for it to end. If we get nuked, all the duct tape in the world is not going to make up for the angry words you said to your daughter, or the rude remark you made to your coworker, or for the fact that you spent your money on plastic sheeting rather than on a good Mourvèdre.
Secondly, there is nothing going on in the world that I need to hear about on my drive to work. That time can be spent listening to books on tape, and when I arrive at work, I will be more relaxed, happier, and in general better off. Listening to the news on the way to work makes me stressed out, afraid, angry, sad, and generally unhappy. Besides which, I am exposed to the news on the web all day long, and on IRC when something happens that I really need to know about. That’s already too much.
So, I got more books on tape, and I won’t be listening to NPR any more. There are too many good books in the world to waste good drive time listening to Corey Flintoff tell me that I should be in a panic about … whatever it was.
I’m increasingly alarmed with the degree to which internet porn is considered normal, acceptable, and good. In particular, people talking about it on irc. People that seem, otherwise, to be perfectly well adjusted and respectable. However, I’ve also heard porn discussed at technical conferences as though looking at porn online was a fundamental part of being male, and that there’s no real difference from, say, reading the news or checking your stocks. From the platform. I think that the speakers in question were just trying to play to the crowd, but that says something as well. What alarms me is that there is no longer any social stigma attached to it. When people make comments about their own pornography habits without any trace of shame, it tells me something about their assumptions about me, the world, morality, etc.
Perhaps these attitudes about pornography predate the internet, and I was just unaware of them. Perhaps our culture at large really sees pornography as a completely acceptable form of entertainment. Perhaps I’m just old fashioned (something to which I readily admit, with some pride). But I find this attitude to be shocking and unacceptable. Pornography is an addiction, and a sickness. It is an industry that exploits people on both sides of the camera. The culture that accepts it as normal, acceptable, and even healthy behavior has its priorities turned around to an alarming degree.
On a related note, the degree to which porn is marketed to me, ever day, hundreds of times a day, via spam, is a further indication that this is just assumed to be ok. The fact that porn web sites are available in such enormous numbers (evidenced by the results almost every time I mistype a URL) is an indication that there are customers to be had, in their thousands or millions.
So, if you find my views on this matter vaguely archaic, I can only reply that archaic is good, in many, if not most, contexts. (Please reference the “Smarter People Than Me” criteria.) If you take offence when I refuse to help you with your Apache configuration issues, having found out that it is for a porn site, please take it personally – you are involved in an industry that is despicable, and this rubs off on you. If you find that I bounce every piece of email you try to send to me, or users on my servers, perhaps it is because you, or your ISP, or someone on your ISP, is distributing pornography, either via their web site, or via unsolicited email. And if you make pornograpy-related jokes on IRC, and I seem not to get it, it’s because it wasn’t funny.
This morning, as I listened on NPR to what Germany and France are saying about Iraq, I found my self suddenly reminded of Europe in the years between WWI and WWII, and, in particular, in the late 30s and early 40s, when everyone was so terrified by what had happened in WWI that they were willing to overlook anything rather than go to war.
There was an interesting commentary, by some guy who was an expert on Franco-German relations, talking about the motivation of each of these folks. Germany just has an aversion to war. This is understandable, but may result in them being somewhat voluntarily blind to things. France, on the other hand, appears to have an aversion to a world in which the USA effectively does whatever they want, and so have set themselves to oppose the US view whenever possible. Now, I’m not sure that either of these assessments are actually accurate, since I don’t really know who that guy was, or what he had been smoking, but these both seem very plausible to me, and it further seems that this may result in some disagreement in the future that may cause this historically-improbable alliance to fall apart.
And, before anyone thinks that I’m comparing anyone to Hitler, I’m just not. It seems to me that just about everyone is making silly decisions for silly reasons. Hussein is condeming his people to a long stretch of misery at the hands of the rest of the world, because his pride does not permit him to submit to the demands of the international community. The USA is, in my uninformed opinion, sticking to our initial decision, and will stick to it, regardless of what happens. We will go to war with Iraq, and we will depose Mr Hussein, and I can’t imagine that any turn of events will avert this outcome. It’s really just a matter of time, and a matter of who will be in it with us. If I were to assign reasons for this, I can’t say that they would be far from the pride that I attribute to Iraq.
France and Germany and Russia – who can say? Certainly not me.
And I can’t say who is right, although I am much more persuaded now of Mr Bush’s position than I was 4 or 5 months ago. The issues seem fairly clear – the UN asked Iraq to do something, and for 12 years they have refused to do it. The UN promised drastic outcomes in the event that Iraq refused to comply. So what is in question is, what are those outcomes, so vaguely specified, and is 12 years long enough to comply with the requests? I am glad not to be a politician, and I am glad that these decisions are not mine to make.
But, back to my initial point, it seems that the insularism and “gosh we hope everything will just work out nicely” attitude that we’re seeing now is alarmingly reminiscent of what we saw in the last years of the 1930s, and as Phydeaux observed, the very same people that are saying that we should not take any pre-emptive action are the ones that said that we should have taken pre-emptive action prior to the second week of September, 2001.
Wollabot – A modular service bot for IRC channels written in PHP
Apparently I can’t make this stuff up fast enough to keep ahead of the … um … resourceful gentlemen who are actually doing it.
Please note that my opions regarding PHP IRC bots and eternal damnation have not varied with this discovery.
Note: This will probably only be of interest to folks in the central KY area. I suppose I should create a “Kentucky” category for these sorts of things.
I saw some bumper stickers on the way to work today. Some said “Growth is Good”. Others said “Growth is Bad”. Or “Growth Destroys Bluegrass Forever” or “Growth Pays Your Bills” or “Jesus Loves You, Everyone Else Thinks You’re An Asshole”. Ok, so that last one is not related to my topic, but, there it was.
I’m continually amazed at how politicians take simple matters and make them complex (Do you like Estrada or not? Vote, and get on with the job we pay you for.) and take complex issues, like the issue of growth, sum it up in one word, and ask us to be for it or against it.
Is growth good or bad? Well, no, of course it’s not. Unchecked growth for the sake of growth is silly, but nobody is advocating that. Demonizing your opponent does nothing for understanding of an issue. Mischaracterizing your oponent’s position in order to make your own seem more attractive has always struck me as a tacit admission that your own point is rather weak.
So here are some rather more useful questions.
Do you want your kids to have good jobs? If so, do you want them to stay near home, or are you content for them to move to California in order to get a decent wage? Are you ok with the fact that beautiful horse farms are being converted to housing developments? Or, asked differently, do you think it is more important for a plot of land to support one multi-millionaire family and their dozen horses, or for it to support hundreds of families working to put money into our local economy? It’s really all about your perspective.
I have always been an advocate of supporting local businesses whenever possible. Given a choice, I would rather pay a few dollars more at a locally-owned bookstore, for example, than buying from a national chain. Why? Because it enriches my community, rather than someone else’s. And I try to do the same thing when I travel, going to restaurants that are clearly local, rather than the chains I could eat at at home.
How is this connected? Well, if local businesses are to prosper, this is going to cause a certain amount of growth. Not wild, untrammeled growth for the sake of growth (see the east end of Man-O-War for examples of this, I think) but purposeful growth, with an eye to improving the quality of life of the people that live here.
So, once again, I’m rambling. But take note, the next time you see these bumper-stickers, that the “growth is bad” people are driving expensive, new cars, which they would not have without said growth. And the “growth is good” ones tend to be on older cars, driven by people looking for a brighter future in which their kids won’t have to worry about their next paycheck. Perhaps this is an unfair generalization, but it seems accurate thus far.
After 150 years, Wheaton College has decided to change their rules and permit dancing. This may strike you as non-news, particularly if you did not go to Wheaton, or to Asbury.
Well, call me old fashioned, but I’m … well … old fashioned. Tradition is a valuable thing, even when you don’t understand it. Are the reasons for forbidding dancing less relevant now than they were for the last century? If anything, they have increased, not dimished, and if those reasons were considered valid for all that time, why do they think now that they know better than the previous 30 or 40 administrations?
I watch my alma mater, Asbury College, remove many of the rules that have been in place since 1890, many of these changes being made since my graduation in 1992, and I wonder if it is really progress. Is it actually desirable for them to “catch up” with the times, when the times are clearly so very unsavory.
And was it sensible of NPR to do a story on this, in which they basically poked fun at Wheaton for having standards, rather than lamenting the fact that they had given them up?
I’m sure that the students are pleased with this change, as I am equally sure that the Asbury students are pleased that they can now watch R rated movies on campus. But it seems to me that in the absense of understanding of traditions, a move to abolish them is ill-advised, at best, and damaging in many cases.
Sure, if you went to a state University, or pretty much any educational institution that doesn’t *claim* to stand for anything, these are really not relevant issues for you, and you probably don’t see why it even matters. But organizations that claim to stand for something should actually stand for something, and be unashamed, and unwavering about it. If folks outside that tradition don’t understand why these things matter, well, that’s because they are outside that tradition, and their opinion is largely unimportant in that regard.
So, do I think that dancing should be permitted as Asbury College? Well, I refuse to answer that question, on the grounds that 113 years of Asbury College administrators have seen fit to say that it should not, and I would not presume to imply that my opinion should carry more weight than theirs. And I’m quite disappointed at Wheaton, and at Asbury, for overturning traditions in order to appease the very people who are unwilling to take the time to understand those traditions. And I’m disappointed with NPR for lacking the journalistic integrity to investigate those traditions, and rather to be content with poking fun at them.
Tim and I went out to High Bridge to take some pictures, but all the ice had already melted. However, we did get some pictures of the river at flood stage. This one, for example, shows the river locks. Note that you can’t actually see the locks.
I particularly like the bench, which is a board that two trees have grown around over the last few decades.
No, I’m not a great photographer, but I figure if I take enough pictures, a few of them will be good just out of dumb luck.
