MarkDrago.com

I literally have a list of things I want to talk about. I wrote all of the things that I want to talk about down on a piece of paper, folded it up, and put it in my pocket. I’m going to try and hit each of these points real quick so I can more easily convince myself that people are reading this. Here goes.

Homophobia bothers me. It really boggles the mind. In all honesty, you would think that I would appreciate homophobia a little more because it makes it easier to identify people that I want nothing to do with. You might as well be wearing an “I don’t have original thoughts” hat on your head - that’s the thing that contains your brain, which in turn contains all of those borrowed ideas that you have. Whenever the topic of gay rights comes up at work, I pretty much just have to keep my mouth shut. It bothers me so much that I don’t think I can keep myself from directly insulting people. So, I hold it all in and write it in my blog, so that people that agree with me can read it. Am I somehow failing the gay community by not defending their obvious right to touch whomever’s naughty parts that they want? I suppose - and I feel pretty bad about that. Just one more quick point while I’m on this topic. It doesn’t matter if people are born gay, if they’re somehow influenced to be gay or if they make a conscience decision to be gay. It’s still none of your fucking business who they want to hug and what they want to kiss. I have very liberal views on sexuality and I don’t think it’s something that is as weird as people think it is. I think that humans are drawn towards sexuality in general. This could be another whole blog post, so just suffice it to say that I don’t think we live in a black and white world. I don’t think that there are 3 sexuality camps (straight, bisexual, homosexual). I think there’s a gradient from one side to the other and I think the majority of people would not fall at the polls if they would only allow themselves.

Alright, moving on. I have a problem with barriers that people place between themselves and the world. It’s hard for me to exactly describe what I mean, but I’m going to try. I don’t like it when people make it seem like they’re better at something than they really are. I don’t like it when people never mention things about themselves that they fear others might not like. I want unadulterated honesty from everyone that I know. I know that I can’t really expect this from people, but I’m ultimately not interested in the person that you’re presenting to me. I want to meet the person behind the curtain. Sometimes people even hide from themselves. Sticking with my ‘man behind the curtain’ metaphor, if the man behind the curtain looks in the mirror and sees what he’s presenting to others, he’s pretty screwed. How sad must it be to get to the point where you can’t discern traits that are actually yours from traits you’ve adopted for show. Individuals aren’t the only ones who are guilty of this. Companies are the all-time victors when it comes to the ‘only look at what I show you’ game. This is part of the reason that I like open source software so much. Try and get a company to tell you all of the things that are wrong with their product. Good luck. All of this is out there in the open in the open source world and it benefits both the product and the consumer. I’m kind of getting off on a rant here, but it bothers me when I’m looking at someone and I feel like I’m looking through one of those shower doors at them. I guess the biggest culprit is pride. Being proud of yourself and your accomplishments is awesome and there’s nothing wrong with that. But, being too proud to identify your weaknesses is bad for the soul.

I booked my flight and hotel for my trip to Germany. For those few people that I haven’t told, I’m attending GUADEC (Gnome Users And Developers European Conference). It’s going to be a blast. I’m going over there entirely by myself. I’m leaving May 25th @ 9pm, I arrive in Germany the next day @ 1:20pm their time. I’ll check into my hotel and have 2 and a half full days of dicking around in Europe before the conference. I’m going to try and jet out to Paris for a day during this thing. That may become complicated because the train ride from Stuttgart to Paris seems to be 6 hours long at its fastest. But, if I can leave Stuttgart at 5:45am, I’ll get to Paris by noon. Then, I can spend about 11 hours in Paris before jumping back on a train around 11pm and getting back to Stuttgart around 6am. So, I would pretty much have to do all of my sleeping on the train. But, when am I going to get back to Europe? Do I really want to go over there, see Stuttgart and then come home? If I have the chance to spend some time in Paris, even if its just a few hours, I think I should give it a shot. The conference lasts 3 days (May 29 - May 31) and I fly home June 1st. Germany is 7 hours ahead of us - so jet lag should be exciting. I’m all kinds of excited about this. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about it more as it approaches and I’ll most likely be blogging from Germany as well.

Alright, this is the last thing for now. I spoke with Jamie for a bit last night. It’s so weird to talk to her. There are really two things that upset me about our conversation. The first thing is that she’s dating someone. Now, hear me out. That isn’t the real problem. I want nothing more than for Jamie to meet someone whom she really likes and enjoys spending time with. But, the guy that she met (I don’t know who it is and I think that’s for the better) doesn’t seem to be the best guy for her. It’s probably not fair for me to speak about her personal affairs in a public forum like this, so I’m not going to say much more. But, from the limited amount of information I’ve gotten from her, I don’t think he’ll have an overall positive impact on her life. Which really should be the absolute minimum requirement of spending any time with someone. But, that isn’t really my decision to make, so I digress. The other thing that bothers me is more of a realization that I’ve made about my own feelings than anything that actually happened during our phone conversation. I would love to expand on my thoughts here, but I don’t think I should. I should probably just put them in an email and send them over to Jamie, because she’s really the only person that this involves. But, the 1000-foot view of this is that I don’t think Jamie and I fit together very well for the last few years we were together. It’s unfortunate, and that’s what had me bummed out pretty bad last night. After we got off of the phone I was in the crappiest mood and just went to sleep early.

Thanks for listening to my various rants. I’m pretty sure the guys at work are getting tired of hearing me run off on rants about things that most people deem to be unimportant. They call be angry. Well, they call me an “angry gnome” to be specific. I don’t think I’m angry - I just think that I expect more from the world than it is offering right now. Do you hear that, world? I’m disappointed. I think you an do better.

Judging from the title you might think that this post is going to be about how it’s spring time and the flowers are blooming and the birds are chirping. I guess that could be what this post is about, but it’s not. This post is going to be about abstinence only sex education. Now, you’ve probably already heard (or can quickly figure out) all of the arguments for and against abstinence sexual education. But, I think I have something else to bring to the table.

The basic idea behind abstinence only sex ed is that kids should wait until marriage to have sex. By doing that you don’t have to worry about a lot of things like getting STDs, getting pregnant, or any of a number of other nasties. The sane side of the argument basically wants to give kids the most information possible so that they can make informed decisions about their lives. They argue that you basically have to assume that some kids are going to have sex and that it would be better to have them informed enough to protect themselves.

I was thinking about why conservatives are so upset that kids are having sex. I really haven’t quite figured it out yet. It’s pretty clear that it’s not entirely about protecting them from disease and pregnancy. There’s something that makes parents want their children to not have sex. If it was possible to absolutely guarantee that sex would not cause STDs and not induce pregnancy, I believe that parents would still not want their children to have sex until they were married (or at least well into their 20s). Maybe they’re just jealous. Lord knows they have something to be jealous of.

This brings me to what I’ve been thinking about recently. I really can’t think of anything more pure than being a teenager under the sheets with a beautiful girl. I’m sure it goes the same way for girls also. I know that the nights that I spent figuring things out as a 16 year old will probably be the most real moments of my life. Thinking back now, I don’t know that you can be more alive than that. Now, I don’t know why you would want your kid to miss out on something like that. I know it’s hard to see your kid like they’re a real person (hell, it can be hard to see anyone else as a real person), but they are. Clearly they deserve to have the opportunity to make memories like this. I just don’t know what it is that makes a parent so afraid of their child having sex. I think STDs and pregnancy are definitely part of it, but I think there is something else. If anyone can think of a real reason why, please let me know. Maybe it’s just that the bible says it’s naughty. But, even non-religious parents seem to feel the same way. Maybe I’m missing something obvious - feel free to comment.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University. He chairs the Creative Commons Project and is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain. He has also written three books about culture, technology, and the laws that tend to mess them up. In short, he has done many things to try and keep our culture from being owned by giant media companies. There is a flash movie/presentation thing available that I think everyone who is interested in the creation of culture and technology should see. The audio of the flash movie is Lessig giving a talk at the 2002 O’Reilly Open Source Convention. The video of the flash movie is a recreation of the slides that he showed during the talk. The state of patents and over-zealous copyrights is something that I am very concerned about. Really, I think it is something that everyone has a vested interest in (it is our culture after all). So, take ten minutes and watch the flash movie. Some more information and material relating to the talk is also available.

So, instead of just telling people how much I like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and what they’re doing, I decided I should actually do something to help. So, I just donated $100 to the EFF. Now I actually feel like I’m part of the solution. It’s not enough to just sit around and rely on other people to take care of things that are important to you.

Seth Nickel wrote about some of the 3D-accelerated desktop work that is going on at Red Hat in his blog. He referst to one of the effects as ‘wobbly windows’. There are some videos on his site that will help to get the point across. I compiled all of the necessary packages and was playing around with the wobbly window effect on my desktop. It is freaking awesome. The windows are too wobbly for normal every day use, but that can be scaled down so that the windows just kind of give a little bit when you move them. It’s also neat to have real transparent windows on a linux desktop. I’m going to try and get all of this stuff to work on my laptop so I can show it off at work tomorrow.

I’m going to see Henry Rollins speak at the Zipper Theater tomorrow. He’s going to be there for two weeks and there are plenty of tickets left if you want to try and catch him while he’s in the area. I stronly recommend it.

I’m not sure exactly what happened to me yesterday, but I fell asleep at 7:30pm and woke up at 7:45am. Yeah - I slept for about 12 hours straight. I’m not sure why. I was just going to lay down for a nap at 7:30 and didn’t really wake up until later than I normally get up. It was very weird.

“This one goes out to the ones that still hold true.” — Heads vs. Breakers - Beneficial Wigs

I’m entirely engrossed in The Postal Service. The album is freaking amazing. “Such Great Heights”, “Sleeping In”, “Nothing Better”, and “Recycled Air” are all just astounding songs. It helps that they’re all right in a row on the album also. I also re-acquired Heads vs. Breakers - Apathy is the New Black. It’s great to have the chance to listen to a good band from my town. For some reason I have something against the north shore of Long Island and Nassau County. Well, maybe it’s not so much that I have something against them, but I think the south shore of Suffolk is so much better. Maybe there will be a North-coast vs. South-coast war. I’ll have to pick up a set of brass knuckles or something.

We had the second Wing Night last night. We went to “The Post Office” in Babylon. It’s a nice place. I had never been there before. They have 4 different levels of wing hot-ness over there. They have mild, regular, hot, and chef’s challenge. We ordered some of the regular, hot and chef’s challenge to start. The chef’s challenge were fairly hot, but not really hot enough. So one of my bosses, Pete, said to the waitress, “Ask the chef if he’s making these wings for girl scouts or for men.” Yeah. The next batch of wings looked, smelled, and burned entirely differently. We were all impressed. After 5 or 6 of these multen wings I tapped out. My face went numb. I’m not kidding. I had pins and needles high up on my cheeks.

There are a bunch of cool tee shirts over at prolitarianthreads.com.

I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam on this blog recently. However, there isn’t ever really any spam in the message. I keep getting just blank comments posted to the blog. Could someone explain to me what the point of this is? What good are blank messages? There are no links in it or anything. It’s just blank. I’m blocking the IP block that these posts are coming from now. We’ll see if that helps. I also took some time to fix how this site looks in internet explorer. All of the content should actually appear on the page now without forcing you to scroll side to side. I just want to take this time to reiterate that I hate internet explorer for the hours and hours of pain and suffering it has caused me. Please, if you are still using IE, or any derivate that uses the IE engine, please join the rest of the civilized world and get firefox now. It really is that much better.

In some respects I feel myself returning to a feeling that I haven’t felt in many years. It’s not necessarily any better or worse than how I used to feel. It’s very subtle. It might just be the feeling of the seasons changing and I’m fucking up the time frame. Speaking of the seasons, can I get a “fuck yeah” for Spring? I can’t wait until my first tee shirt only day.

“Again last night I had that strange dream
where everything was exactly how it seemed
no concerns about the world getting warmer
people thought they were just being rewarded
for treating others as they’d like to be treated
for obeying stop signs and curing diseases
for mailing letters with the address of the sender
now we can swim any day in November”
– The Postal Service - Sleeping In

“Each morning she wakes
with a dream to describe
something lovely that bloomed
in her beautiful mind.”
–Bright Eyes - Hit the Switch

So, I had a fairly interesting week. I went to a different intramural volleyball game on Monday. This one is much more competitive than the other one that I had been going to. The bruise on my hip and the burn on my knee are proof of that. I think I held my own despite not having played that kind of volleyball since junior year of high school. Yeah - that was 6 fucking years ago.

I bumped into Jamie for the first time since that fateful day in December. We chat on the phone every few weeks or so. Her birthday just passed a few days ago and I sent her a text message wishing her a happy birthday. On the way home from work that day I was actually right behind her at a red light on sunrise highway. We had both said that we had things of the others that we wanted to exchange. I had the stuff for Jamie in my trunk. So, being just about a mile from her house, I followed her there to exchange our things. We both got out of our cars and we had this strange conversation from about 10 feet away. I can’t really remember what we spoke about because all I was thinking about was how surreal this whole scene was. I went upstairs with her to get the stuff that she had for me. I saw her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother. This was all very weird since I used to see these people every day. I was a little upset that her cat, Arthur, didn’t seem to recognize me. He lurched away when I went to pet him. Things seem to be going well for her and I’m glad. It’s hard to captivate the utter weirdness of the whole event in words. Just think of the weirdest thing that you can and then back off a little bit. That’s the level of weirdness I’m talking about.

There are many people that I want to get in touch with. Some of them I just don’t know how to get in touch with, others I could probably get in touch with, but I’m just not sure that doing so would be well received. You know, after not speaking with someone for 5 years a phone call can seem a little odd. Anyway, I figure that enough people read this thing now (all 10 of you) that it might work out well if I just list some people that I want to speak with and let the grapevine do the rest. In no particular order, and probably leaving a few people out, here is a short list of people that I would like to get in touch with: Jen Sosna, Bryan Sullivan, Rob Kruper. If you are one of these people or you know one of these people, get in touch with me.

Also, if anyone knows where I have to go to find out about local hardcore/punk shows, please drop me a line also. The long island zoo board thing seems to have dried up a few months ago with no real clue as to where to look. Any hints would be greatly appreciated. This post sucked.

It’s hard for me to write in my blog about really anything when there is a topic that I feel that I have to write about but I can’t get the words right. This is as close as I’ve gotten:

Happiness doesn’t come from bottles and baggies, and if you think it does then fuck you - you’re not worth my time. I don’t give a shit if you don’t understand me.

I guess that’s a little aggressive, but I need to vent this out somewhere. I’m so tired of explaining myself. Yeah, I don’t drink and I do it on purpose. Yeah, I had fun in college without passing out on my bathroom floor. No, I don’t care how fucked up you were that one time. No, I don’t want to deal with your drunk ass, why don’t you take care of yourself? If you want to drink, that’s fine with me, just don’t fucking drool on my shirt or puke in my car. And really, don’t try and convince me to drink, ’cause it’s not gonna happen any time soon. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on a thing. Happiness doesn’t come from bottles and baggies, and if you think it does then fuck you - you’re not worth my time. I don’t give a shit if you don’t understand me.

This overdose of anger has been brought to you by Mark Drago®.

Now, give me a minute to defend myself. For some reason I can’t keep myself from using overly bold and inciteful titles. The point I’m trying to make is that we (and when I say we I mean the whole American populace) are all too willing to trade liberty for safety. I’m sure I’ve written about this in past posts, but I’m going to write about it now regardless, and I reserve the right to write about it again.
I was reminded of how little trust I have in the public by a television advertisement for News 12. That’s right. News 12 aired an advertisement for their doppler radar system and it reignited a feeling of worry in me so strong that it is now moving to me write this entry. Now, don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t just an advertisement for their weather report. To the untrained eye, or should I say to a less paranoid eye, that is all it was. But to me it speaks volumes about how frightened we are as a society. News 12 has recently added a second doppler radar to their fleet of weather predicting tools. As evidenced by the commercial this gives them the ability to, I don’t know, read the mind of the sun god and thereby predict the weather six months in advance. Regardless of what it actually does, they claimed that this doppler-duo is a (and I quote) “Umbrella of Safety”. Alright. Now, let that seep in a little bit. The commercial claimed that these meteorological-mates somehow combine to form an “Umbrella of Safety”. Now, the commercial wasn’t just born out of some advertising womb. There was, at some point, a group of people sitting around a table and one of them said something along the lines of, “You know what? The American public is so freaking scared that if we just tell them that we have something that makes them a little bit safer they’ll wet themselves in excitement.” Everyone else at the conference table agreed, either because they really liked the idea or their skull is so empty that it flaps in the wind. The sad part of the story isn’t that this pioneering ad executive probably got a sack full of cash and a BJ behind the copy machine for his brilliant realization. The sad part is that he is right.
Ever since September 11th (and probably for a while before then) we have been comatose with fear. It really isn’t that hard to notice, you just have to pay attention. It’s amazing how it permeates most of culture. You can overhear it in conversations. You can sense it in people’s voices when they talk about the war. Part of me thinks that fear might be what separates doves from hawks. If you fell scared enough, backed far enough into a corner, you can’t help but want to shoot everything that moves. You can sense this fear in our media also. It’s in movies, it’s in books, but most of all it’s on television news shows. We’re so pumped full of fear, it’s amazing that we carry on. It’s amazing that we get out of bed or leave the house.
FDR said it best when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Now I’m sure he was talking about how we shouldn’t be afraid to kill a few dark skinned people in some far off land or something like that. But, it fits well in my argument anyway. The real problem isn’t that we’re afraid, but that we’ll do most anything to get rid of the fear. There are few things that we wouldn’t give up for the chance to feel a little bit safer. Now, there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. If you live in the United States or Europe or some other civilized part of the world and you’re afraid of getting attacked by terrorists, you’ve missed the boat. You should be much more scared of cancer. No really, there is basically no chance that you’ll ever die in a terrorist attack.
But even I’m scared that we’ll see another terrorist attack on our shores in the not so distant future. However, I’m not afraid of losing my life, and my biggest worry isn’t the possible loss of thousands of lives. Now, don’t get me wrong. Any life lost is a horrible thing. However, I don’t think that the loss of life compares to the loss of our freedom. I’m slightly surprised that we retained the amount of freedoms that we did after September 11th. However, I feel that after another terrorist attack, we would be in a much different place. Noam Chomsky came to Stony Brook and gave a talk a few years after September 11th. I heard him say that in his eyes, if another terrorist attack were to occur in the US, that we would likely slip into a police state. He may have been exaggerating a little bit, but not very much. And if that were to come true, we would have no one to blame but ourselves. We wouldn’t even be able to blame the government, ’cause remember, we’re the ones that gives the government its power. That’s what a democracy is after all.
Now, if we really value our freedom so much. I mean, we must, that’s what we’re bringing to Iraq. Pretty soon freedom will be our biggest export. Anyway, if we value it so much, why do we want to throw it away so badly? Maybe I’m just a paranoid bastard, but I think someone has to worry about these things.

Now onto other things:

Lawrence Lessig, a board member over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, made reference to an interesting book in his blog. The book is called Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. It seems to be a refreshing look at patents, trademarks, the DMCA and a bunch of other well-intentioned ideas gone awry. I read the introduction and its both informative, hilarious, and sad. The book is available under a creative commons license as a PDF.

I really like the shows that NOVA puts on PBS every now and then. They recently aired a series called “The Elegant Universe”. It’s all about string theory and how the universe works. I missed it when it was aired on real TV, but I found out that NOVA has most of their shows available for streaming. I watched all three hours of the series this morning. It was very informative and I like to think that I understood most of it. I strongly recommend it.

Today was the first day that I sent a patch in to Coaster. I fixed bug #166788. It basically adds drag and drop support to Coaster. So now it’s possible to create a CD by dragging the files from your desktop or a nautilus window into the Coaster window. I spoke with the maintainer of Coaster, Bryan Forbes, on IRC about the patch and he said it’ll likely get into the next release of Coaster. Awesome! Now I won’t feel as much like a loser at Guadec. I want to try and do as much work as possible on Coaster over the coming months. I would really like to get it into Gnome 2.12. We need a good CD burning program. We’ll see.

This post was much longer than it probably should have been. My apologies. I just had so much to say. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re a real friend. Here we go, for fun, if you’ve gotten down this far, leave a comment that includes the word “fuzzy”. That’ll be our password. If you put it in a comment I’ll know that you really read the whole post and that you’re not just a poser. If anyone leaves a comment without the word “fuzzy” we’ll know that they didn’t read the whole post and that they’re a poser and we can laugh at them together. It’ll be fun I promise.

I updated the version of Wordpress that I use to manage this site. The update process went fairly smoothly. There were a few bumps in the road because I had customized the look of my site a whole bunch, but it was fairly trivial to fix and only took around 10 minutes. This new version has a bunch of neat new features that I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing with. Hopefully these features will make it a little easier for me to avoid comment spam. Every 3 or 4 days I get hit with a piece of comment spam for every post I’ve done so far. Most of them get marked for moderation, but then I have to log in and delete each one. This verison of WordPress should make that a little bit easier.

Novell’s Hula Project looks pretty promising. I’m tempted to install it just to poke it for a bit. Honestly, if it had been released a week ago, I would probably already be using it as my mail server because I redid my mail server just last week. Apparently Jamie Zawinski, of Netscape and Mozilla fame, warned Nat Friedman about slapping Hula with the ‘Groupware’ label. Instead he offered the following advice, “Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?” That whole post is really pretty entertaining.

I’m actually going to try and install The Hurd in the next few days. I really don’t expect much from it, but that’s the point. It’ll be interesting to see an operating system in such an early stage of development. I mean, The Hurd has been 20 years in the making and it still doesn’t do much of anything. In fact, they very recently ripped out large chunks of it and started over. That’ll probably add another 20 years to the development time. I hope I’m alive to see version 1.0. Ha!