My blogging is following a similar pattern to all of the other times that I have tried to keep a blog. I have a few days where I’m really into it and I’m writing a lot. Then, I get to the point where I have a whole bunch of things to write about, but I never find the time to actually go ahead and write it out. This is the phase I’m in now. After this I’ll have a small resurgence in the frequency of my posts, and then it’ll all die out for a few months. It’s pretty sad actually. You’d think that I’d be able to write on some kind of a consistent basis.
I’m entirely addicted to the olympics. I’ll watch freaking anything. My favorite events are indoor volleyball, ping pong, long jump, high jump, and gymnastics in general. There’s something about volleyball that is really special. I played volleyball throughout most of high school. I think there are few sports that require as much teamwork as volleyball. It’s really impossible to get much of anything done by yourself in a volleyball game. Basketball, hockey, baseball, and soccer all make it atleast marginally possible to do something amazing entirely on your own. The only thing in volleyball that doesn’t depend on teamwork is the serve. Weight-lifting is on the olympics right now. These guys are lifting something like 530 pounds up over their heads. That’s just disturbing.
This post is only going to get longer. Now that I’m writing, I feel like I should write everything that I’ve been meaning to write. There are some people at work who have different political views than I do. That is to be expected. And, for the most part I can understand where they’re coming from. I just tend to disagree. One idea that I find it really hard to relate to is that the United States can’t do wrong. Now, in orer to make a judgement on anything, it is very important to maintain an air of impartiality. That is to say that you have to try and not see what it is your judging from any one side of the argument. If you can’t think about an action from an unbiased position, you should be wise enough to not draw any conclusions regarding its justness. Now, all of this is well and good, but it isn’t human nature. It’s in our nature to say, “Hey, whatever we do is good by virtue of us having done it.” In other words, “We wouldn’t do anything that isn’t right and just.” I think we all know that this isn’t the truth, but we’re only good at deciding that way after the fact. We can look back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and think, “Maybe we shouldn’t have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens while they were on their way to work and otherwise going about their daily lives. Maybe that wasn’t entirely necessary. And, even if it was what was required to stop the second world war, was stopping the second world war worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens?” We find it very hard to criticize actions that we take as a country while they are happening. I guess what I’m getting at here is that the situation that we find ourselves in right now is a whole lot more complicated than ‘good guys vs. bad guys’. I don’t want to come off as sympathizing with terrorists or anything like that. I want terrorists to be brought to justice just as much as the next guy, but I don’t think we should be entirely haphazard about actions that we take in the middle east. Going over there and waging wars could do more harm than good. I also don’t think we should be comparing our actions to the actions taken by our enemies. Do I think that the American citizens who were beheaded by terrorists would have much rather worn panties on their heads than been beheaded? Yeah. But, that doesn’t mean that we should be putting panties on people’s heads.
I really wish I started writing these things earlier in the night, or could just stick to one topic and finish it coherently without running into rants. It’s 1:30 and I have to get up at 7:00. I’m done writing for now.
Monthly Archives: August 2004
We can get through anything
I read this post by Dave Winer a few weeks ago called, What is Stop Energy? It’s all about people that want to get something done and other people who come up with all sorts of reasons why it shouldn’t get done. Just to be fair I should probably link to this response by Simon St. Laurent titled, “Stop Energy” is important stuff. They’re both pretty interesting reads. I tend to agree more with Dave than with Simon.
I didn’t get out of work until 11:15 tonight. That kind of sucked. I stay until around 9:00 on a normal night, but the time kind of got away from me tonight. It’s pretty hard to dive into a piece of code that you know isn’t going to be fun to debug when its 10:00pm. So, I spent the last hour or so of work forcefully removing ‘bgcolor’, ‘width’, and ‘cellpadding’ attributes from our interface. I’ll see what breaks tomorrow and fix it with CSS.
I’ve started trying to eat better than I have been. I’ve really been eating like crap recently. And, I don’t mean Burger King, Wendy’s McDonald’s kind of crap, I mean Checkers and White Castle kind of crap. White Castle is a whole other kind of crap that I prefer not to think about right now. So, I went to the health food store with Jamie the other day and bought some Gardenburgers™ and some Oat Bran bread. This whole thing really isn’t because I think I need to lose weight or because I want to have more energy or whatever. It’s more of a will to eradicate any kind of weakness that I see in myself. And, when I say weakness I mean more than just physical weakness. I figure that by taking a firm stand against my desire to eat White Castle, I’ll be able to work on both my physical weakness and my weakness to temptation at the same time. With that said, the guys at work got White Castle for lunch today, and I had a Gardenburger™ BBQ Chik’n sandwich, dried fruit and a cup of apple juice. Yipee!
While staying so late at work tonight did kind of suck, the night was saved because I was able to really enjoy my ride home. I let ‘The Movielife’ kick my ass for the 25 minute ride back to Jamie’s house and it was great. I’m pretty upset that they’ve broken up. If anyone reading this knows who ‘The Movielife’ is and knows of a band that is similar and is actually still making music, let me know. I’ve decided that I don’t have enough time to find good music on my own, so if no one helps me, I’ll be stuck listening to the same 4 Movielife records for all of eternity.
What if the Iraqis aren’t terrorists?
So, I’ve been thinking a little bit about that whole war thing. Oh yeah – we’re in a war. That means that our soldiers are getting killed and killing other people as you’re reading this. War. So, I was thinking about it, and I started thinking about the Iraqi people. I started thinking about the Iraqi people and what it would be like to be one of them. Now, I’ll have to give some background information so that everyone (anyone?) reading this will be able to understand where I’m coming from. We have yet to find any link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and any major terrorist organization. Even if we did, I doubt the link would be any stronger than our link to Iraq in the late 1980s … or our link to Al-Qaeda in the late 1980s for that matter. We have yet to find any ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, and we haven’t been able to prove that they were removed at the last minute or anything like that either. Iraq has never attacked the United States. Iraq has never threatened to attack the United States. So, with all of that settled, I find our war against Iraq to be entirely unprovoked. I’ll have to ask you to try and ignore your patriotism, your American-view, your fox news propanda, and your fear of thinking for yourself for a minute. The only way to understand your enemy is through empathy. If you can’t feel the way your enemy feels, if you can fear what your enemy fears, if you can’t understand where your enemy is coming from, you won’t be able to understand your enemy’s actions. The Iraqi insurgents, whom I will refer to as the Iraqi people, are fighting our soldiers because they don’t want us to be there. But, what if these people aren’t terrorists? That’s right – people can dislike the United States and even try and kill our troops and not be terrorists. What if these people are just trying to protect their land? I really think that if I was an Iraqi citizen, I would be fighting the American troops that were trying to conquer my land. Hell, I know I would do the same if people were trying to take over America. What if the European Union decided to come over here and stop us from fighting unjust wars? They decided that they wanted to end the regime of George W. Bush and put a stop to the war crimes that our leader has been committing. Well, even after they remove George W. Bush, I would be fighting for my country. I love my country. I love my country and I hate my government for turning my country into something that it was never meant to be. Well, to put an end to a long post that I didn’t want to be so long, I think it would be really great if we thought about the Iraqi people as if they were ‘people’ and not just ‘insurgents’. The Iraqis are real people with real emotions and real motives. They’re not just fighting our troops because they hate the American way of life, it’s much simpler than that.
Overhaul of Markdrago.com
I found myself feeling both bored and motivated, and decided to finish the (re-) design of markdrago.com. I changed the color scheme to something I like, but not something that I thought I would choose. Jamie helped pick out the colors. I actually took the picture on the top of the page after a rather large snow storm when I was at school. I am very impressed with wordpress. It really does making keeping a blog more fun. I’m dead tired right now. My brother had his 17th birthday party today. It’s pretty weird to be the older brother of someone who is getting so old. I’m going to be giving a talk at LILUG this Tuesday about wireless on Linux. This talk’s success is still very up in the air. I have only been using wireless on Linux for a few weeks, and I know there will be people in the audience who are more familiar with it than I am, but it will be fun none the less. I left my laptop on during the ride over to Jamie’s house today. I was running kismet and tried to pick up as many wireless signals as I could on my way over. I found 3 networks, 2 of which were encrypted. I probably could’ve gotten access from the unencrypted one. It’s a real shame that it is so easy to leave a wireless access point unsecured, and so hard for a person of average computer skills to secure one. Hopefully that gets resolved in the near future. Anyway, like I said, I’m exhausted. Goodnight.