Category Archives: Uncategorized

Wheaton permits dancing

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.

HighBridge

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.

Crazy weather

Last sunday we had ice on the trees. Yesterday I zipped the lining out of my jacket because it was too warm. Today we have an inch of snow on the ground. Perhaps tomorrow it will be warm again.

This sort of fluctuation plays havoc on the roads, and we have a big crop of potholes out there.

Write every day

Numerous people, over the years, have encouraged me to write every day. And I really have tried. This is probably the closest I have ever come.

Strangely (dunno, maybe other folks do this too) my thought process seems to be very much akin to my writing process. I start with a thought, and I edit it, until I have a statement, or a passage, expressing an idea. Most frequently, I do this if I am going to speak to someone about something – I plan out exactly what I am going to say, and, for the most part, I stick to the script. This is why, I suppose, when I write and when I speak, I tend to use the same phrasing. Also, I suppose, it is why when I speak on a topic, people will often tell me that I seem to be lecturing. Incidentally, this is where I got the moniker DrBacchus in the first place. I was speaking to a fellow imbiber about the wine we were drinking, and he said I sounded like a college professor lecturing on some academic topic.

So writing in a medium like this, where the technology lets me put down my thoughts as they come to me, seems to be well suited to my way of thinking, and my way of writing.

And if, occasionally, I actually write something that other folks find worth reading, all the better, since I don’t expect to ever write the Great American Novel, or even the Great Apache Book, although I continue to strive for the latter.

So, there, I’ve done my writing for today. Now, perhaps later, I’ll actually write some of the stuff that I’m supposed to be writing, and for which they are paying me.

Saddam’s shields

These folks are going to Iraq, where they will (they think) prevent the war by being human shields. I suspect that our men and women in uniform, who are risking their lives for the safety of the American people, will be only too glad to help them along with their wish for martyrdom. Whether or not I am completely persuaded of the necessity and/or validity of our complaints against Iraq, I am completely persuaded that these folks are enemies of the United States, and should be treated as enemy combatants in the event of a war, and as treasonous traitors in the event that they return to the US once things have been resolved, whatever that resolution may be.

Downloading music

Although entirely too long, Salon.com Technology | Embrace file-sharing, or die, by John Snyder and Ben Snyder, is worth reading, or at least skimming. At a bare minimum, read the Thomas Jefferson quote.

Ever since the demise of Napster, I have not downloaded music from the Internet (except for a few isolated cases) and, in that period, I have purchased perhaps one CD. Prior to that, I was downloading music and buying CDs of stuff that I liked. Clearly, I’m not an isolated example of this, but this link between hearing a song and buying a CD is just as obvious as it at first seemed to me. I’m somewhat at a loss to see how the RIAA does not see this. I think that it is, perhaps, a generational thing, and the folks that are currently in control just can’t bring themselves to make that jump. While it is possible that the next generation of leaders will make this step, the current lack of movement would seem to doom the RIAA to forever be one generation behind the curve.

LPLUG February

Yesterday was the February meeting of the LPLUG. Doug DeYoung spoke about Linux security, the methodology of cracking into Linux machines. It was a very interesting presentation, and demonstrated how useful even the smallest piece of information can be to a cracker.

Hopefully we’ll have his presentation for the web site eventually, but I’m not sure if he’ll be anxious to give us that or not, since he gives this presentation a lot.

Top Stories!

I’m really having a lot of trouble understanding this. The top four stories on CNN.com right now are:

1) Turkey wants aid in writing
2) Teen gets second transplant
3) ‘The Bachelorette’ falls for fireman
4) North Korean fighter jet sparks alert in South

In that order. Apparently, the plot of a prime-time soap opera is more important than a possible war in the Korean peninsula.

I’m honestly baffled by this phenomenon – the idea that a supposedly unstaged television show (yeah, right) in which nobody has any talent, would capture the attention of the average American to such an extent that a (I thought) respectable news source like CNN would run this as their number 3 top story. Why does anyone care, even a little bit, about which one of a group of shallow men will be picked by this shallow woman? Yes, I suppose I can understand the “fairy tale” aspect of this all, but only slightly. Maybe the folks watching this are the same folks that watched those ghastly MTV reality shows back in the late 80s and early 90s.

So, as the US is trying as hard as it can to procure a staging ground for attacking Iraq, a teenager in Mexico struggles to stay alive after receiving the wrong organs in a transplant, and North Korea makes more threats to nuke South Korea, people really, honestly, seem to care which one of these guys will be picked for a marriage that will be broken up before the year is out. I suppose, maybe, it’s just a bit of escapism.

In upcoming news, the next thing we have to look forward to is the HotOrNot craze from 2 years ago coming to television. Makes me very nervous about what they’ll pull next year.

www.ready.gov

I just want to point out that http://www.ready.gov/ is running Apache. When you tell the entire nation they need to go to a web site, I guess you want to be running a real web server. 

riesling% HEAD ready.gov
200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:56:50 GMT
Age: 1931
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 21554
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 00:27:15 GMT
Client-Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 23:58:27 GMT
Client-Response-Num: 1