redhurtmachine

Hillary to replace Biden?

2008-09-24T20:45:00.002-06:00

I'd be more worried about the more-likely Hillary to replace OBAMA. I received a paranoid / conspiracy-theory email about Hillary replacing Biden soon, and I'll post it in a minute. First, the things that don't make sense:

1.) "There has been talk all weekend.." Amongst who? The illuminati?

2.) This assumes having Hillary as a VP would be GOOD for Obama - they keep calling it an "Obama" strategy! The best thing Obama wants from Hillary is for her to get hit by a bus.

3.) Funny that it references a "serious gaffe" by Biden....as if saying Hillary would be a better candidate, insulting Indian Americans, or making fun of disabled people wasn't gaffe enough:

4.) It says we have this "from the DNC". I don't remember anyone else seeing it at the DNC. Maybe "the plan" was posted in one of the side tents, and not in the main one where news people spent most of their time.

Anyway, here's the email:

On or about October 5th, Biden will either make a serious gaffe and/or excuse himself from the ticket, citing health problems, and he will be replaced by Hillary. This is timed to occur after the VP debate on 10/2.

There have been talks all weekend about how to proceed with this info. Generally, the feeling is that we should all go ahead and get it out there to as many blog sites and personal email lists as is possible. I have already seen a few short blurbs about this - the 'health problem' cited in those articles was aneurysm. Probably many of you have heard the same rumblings.

However, at this point, with this inside info from the DNC, it looks like this Obama strategy will be a go. Therefore, it seems that the best strategy is to get out in front of this Obama maneuver, spell it out in detail, and thereby expose it for the grand manipulation that it is.

So, let's start mixing this one up and cut the Obamites off at the pass - send this info out to as many people as you can - post about it on websites and blogs - etc.

And they say McCain is like Bush...

2008-09-12T15:26:00.002-06:00

....let's talk a little bit about Biden, who says more offensively stupid things than anyone in Politics since, well, President Bush:

This is a great collection:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/11/america/biden.php

"Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America," Biden said Wednesday in Nashua, New Hampshire. "Quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me."

***

Earlier in the week, in Columbia, Missouri, Biden urged a paraplegic state official to stand up to be recognized.

"Chuck, stand up, let the people see you," Biden shouted to State Senator Chuck Graham, before realizing, to his horror, that Graham uses a wheelchair. "Oh, God love ya," Biden said. "What am I talking about?"

***

The guy who, reading his vice-presidential acceptance speech from a TelePrompter, bungled McCain's name, calling him "George" ("Freudian slip, folks, Freudian slip," he explained).

The guy who, on the day Obama announced him as his running mate, referred to his party's presidential nominee as "Barack America" and noted that his own wife, Jill, a college professor, was "drop-dead gorgeous" but who, problematically, possessed a doctorate.

The guy who has said he is running for president (not vice president) and who confused army brigades with battalions. Who referred to his Republican vice-presidential opponent as the lieutenant governor of Alaska.

***

Awesome.

Who you are according to wordle

2008-09-06T22:13:00.008-06:00

I analyzed the blogs of my friends an I using Wordle and got some interesting results. Wordle uses your blogs RSS feed to load all the words, tallies the number of times each is used, and displays the result in some sort of interesting layout. Here's how it turned out:

Redhurtmachine:

Unsurprisingly, the word "know" appears on my chart bigger than anything else. I just wrote a long post about how we know what we do and how we can be sure, so that's not too surprising. I also like Mountains and the Broncos, I guess. :)

Anglican + Calvinist:

Unsurprisingly, Adam's blog is focused on being "intelligibile". He also concerns himself with knowledge, God, Christianity, and apparently the can-can. It's ironic to me that Adam is no longer an Anglican OR a Calvinist.

Brumma-whatever-hammer:

No surprises here.

Blue Stockings:

Looks like Mair tends to post about whatever she's up to at the time. "Lotion" also ranks pretty high.

Pragmaticism:

Nick's and Josh's are tied for my favorite. It sums up their blogs just about perfectly. "BILLION TAX INCOME!!" "GOOD SOCIAL CULTURE!!" Ha!

Poetry and Scotch (old):

Poetry and Scotch (new):

I like that "Ebola" makes an appearance in Justin's new blog's chart. We clearly need some more content. :)

Filosofia y Flores:

Clearly EAP is the most balanced. She uses lots of different words, which is probably why her blog was ranked at a college level back in the day (mine was 2nd grade or something.)

For fun I also ran our family blog, which is written 99% by Marty:

As expected, Quinn comes in a big number 1.

Here's Phil's blog. I think it's currently called "Child of Dust", but it might be "Ask not for whom the solemn bell tolls." Anyway, here it is:

And last but not least, here's Scott's:

Pretty cool stuff, that wordle.

Obama = Taxes; or, my Cafepress store

2008-09-03T22:44:00.003-06:00

I opened a store on Cafepress.com using a picture I photoshopped all by myself:

You can now get it on all sorts of t-shirts and whatnot. Buy some here and help educate your friends and family on Obama's message of Hope through high taxes for everyone - especially poor people.

the weird things Christians do

2008-09-03T10:32:00.001-06:00

This is one of them:

Jesus is my friend by "Sonseed" from Peleg Top on Vimeo.

You know you're from Colorado when....

2008-09-03T10:29:00.001-06:00

A friend of mine sent me this today. Pretty funny, and so true.

A winter statistic:

98% OF AMERICANS SCREAM BEFORE GOING IN THE DITCH ON A SLIPPERY ROAD. THE OTHER 2% ARE FROM COLORADO AND THEY SAY, 'HOLD MY SODA AND WATCH THIS.

NOW:

You're from Colorado if You'll eat ice cream in the winter.

When the weather report says it's going to be 65 degrees, you shave your legs and wear a skirt.

It snows 5 inches and you don't expect school to be canceled.

You'll wear flip flops every day of the year, regardless of temperature.

You have no accent at all, but can hear other people's. And then you make fun of them.

'Humid' is over 25%.

Your sense of direction is: Toward the mountains and Away from the mountains.

You say 'the interstate' and everybody knows which one.

You think that May is a totally normal month for a blizzard.

You buy your flowers to set out on Mother's day, but try and hold off planting them until just before Father's day.

You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around your coat.

You know what the Continental Divide is.

You don't think Coors beer is that big a deal.

You went to Casa Bonita as a kid, and as an adult.

You've gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities.

You always know the elevation of where you are.

You wake up to a beautiful, 80 degree day and you wonder if it's going to snow tomorrow.

**You don't care that some company renamed it, the Broncos still play at Mile High**

Every movie theater has military and student discounts.

Everybody wears jeans to church.

You actually know that ** South Park ** is a real place not just a show on TV.

You know what a 'trust fund hippy' is, and you know its natural habitat is Boulder

You know you're talking to a fellow Coloradoan when they call it Elitches, not Six Flags.

A bear on your front porch doesn't bother you.

Your two favorite teams are the Broncos and whoever is beating the crap out of the Raiders.

When people out East tell you they have mountains in their state too, you just laugh.

You go anywhere else on the planet and the air feels 'sticky' and you notice the sky is no longer blue.

cool lightning picture

2008-06-26T14:04:00.002-06:00

We don't get thunderstorms worth mentioning very often in Denver. Something about the mountains and the lack of humidity in our air combines for some weak storms. Last night was a good one, however, and a co-worker of mine managed to snap this picture:

I did a little photoshopping, and then this happened:

For the comic-impaired, that's Thor, god of lightning.

Could you be wrong?

2008-06-12T15:22:00.002-06:00

First post in a really long time! Here's some updates:

1.) We have a family blog where we've been posting pictures of the new baby Quinn. If you want to know what it is, email me.

2.) I've started blogging on the side for work. I get paid to blog on InsideRIA.com about RIA related news and development tips.

3.) I'm also keeping a work blog at rjria.blogspot.com.

All this amounts to me not feeling so inspired to blog about my own life anymore, but I will try to keep it up on occasion for those of you who might still be interested.

Onward!

The other day I was talking to a friend of a different faith about our different perspectives on religion. It's been a really good exchange and helped me understand a lot about her tradition that I hadn't before, but it's brought up some interesting questions for me.

For one, I've been trying to figure out what it is that lets so many of us consider our religions to be "right" while everyone else is "wrong." Most religions claim that everyone has some truth, but they also claim that they're the only religion with ALL of the truth. In the case of my friend and I, her faith claims that mine is only partially correct and mine claims that hers is only partially correct. How can you tell?

I spend a lot of time wondering about this question. When looking at a particular religious tradition you don't agree with, I think it's important to question whether or not the things you find faulty with the other religion are also faulty in your own. It's important to consider that maybe you're the one who was brought up incorrectly, however well intentioned or even positive your faith experience might have been so far. Maybe you're just wrong.

So this has lead me to a question I think it's imperative that any thinking religious person answer about themselves: what would it take to convince you that you're faith is wrong?

If the answer is nothing, then it seems to me that your faith isn't really based in anything, and that's probably not good. It's faith in faith, or faith for the sake of faith, and that's not really faith in anything at all. For me that's a faith untestable and a faith that's untenable - I just can't believe without a reason for believing, and reasons can always be disproved.

There are a number of things that would convince me my faith is wrong, but the most salient one would be if someone found Jesus' body and could prove it was him. How this could be proved doesn't really matter at this point - the important thing is that there is a criteria by which I would agree that my faith was misguided.

Ultimately I believe any religion worth following should be "true" in the purest form of the word. If it's true, it should be testable, and if it's testable, there's a set of criteria by which it could be proved false.

Thinking about this lead me to come up with a few tools I use to evaluate religious statements. I came up with three ways I test religious things I'm told that fall under three major disciplines of thought:

1.) History: Does the religious statement make sense in light of the rest of history?

2.) Sociology: Does the statement correctly asses the way people think and act, and does it encourage them to be better?

3.) Logic: Do the things the statement says make sense?

Do you use some set of criteria to judge your own faith? Is it anything like this? Are there more categories I'm missing?

Welcome to Denver

2008-03-01T15:22:00.001-07:00

That's about right.

I am victorious!

2008-02-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

or something. I know this is a rather lame topic with which to break my bloggish silence, but today it was announced that Starbucks has dropped T-Mobile as their exclusive wi-fi provider and is hooking up with a much cheaper date in AT&T.

I've been sending nasty letters and emails to Starbucks on a periodic basis (2 every 25 years) for a while now, and I'm glad to see my efforts have finally paid off. The old t-mobile system was retarded - $6 per hour, $10 per day, or $30 a month. The new AT&T rates are much better - $4 for two hours, or $20 per month. Hooray AT&T!

In other news, I made this:
Discovery Earth Live

I know it's a little awkward to use, and if you're using an older computer the videos might run slow. I apologize. Get off my back already.

You must have the Adobe Flash player installed to see this app. Please download flash here.

I was the lead (of three) developers on this project along with the highly esteemed Brad Umbaugh and the not-as-highly-esteemed Kevin Skrenes. The app has gotten lots of sweet press from the likes of Wired and many others - the first 25 hits on Google are all real and all about our app, and it was just released today!!!

blogging accidents

2008-01-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

As we all know, blogging can be quite a dangerous sport from time to time. It looks like it got a little too dangerous for me lately, and now I'm dead:

http://blog.sillica.com/2008/01/11/rj-died-in-a-blogging-accident/

Apparently I'm also some other guy who lives in Florida:

http://blog.sillica.com/about-rj/

It all started with trying to learn whether or not this graph from XKCD.com was true:

I don't think it was, but it looks like enough people were curious to get "died in a blogging accident" up to the 6th most searched term on Google yesterday.

badass bible verses

2007-12-23T12:06:00.000-07:00

this is hilarious:

The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses

This Just Happened

2007-12-20T11:37:00.001-07:00

We had a company Christmas party last night. It was a great time, except these three chaunchy jerks showed up:

Lieberman, McCain not really crossing party lines

2007-12-17T13:01:00.000-07:00

CNN: "Sen. Joe Lieberman is crossing party lines and endorsing Republican Sen. John McCain for president."

Article

Not really. He's really just proving that 1.) McCain is not really a Republican and 2.) Lieberman is not really a Democrat. They're both some sort of wishy washy moderates; party-line saboteurs who are recognized less for crossing the red-blue divide and more for turning purple. Announcement: no one wants a purple president.

If nothing else had nailed the coffin in McCain's campagin by this point, getting endorsed by a democratic senator and former VP candidate on the Democratic ticket ought to do it. You certainly don't see him raising 6 million dollars in one day.

Apparently he missed the part of running on the Republican ticket that includes looking good to Republicans. It's called rallying your base, and it's something you need to win primaries.

Fixing your genes

2007-11-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

Duke Scientists have successfully mapped about 200 genes that are often "silenced" in humans - one of the copies fails to turn on when the other gene fails, resulting in a genetic deficiency.

The scientists further found that many of these genes prevent conditions like cancer and obesity.

I'm all for turning these back on. Give me the gene therapy that corrects my suppressed genes, and give it to my babies please. Make me as fully human as possible here, please.

I'm interested to see what J. Morg and Hans will think about this. On the one hand, I can see them arguing that this sort of therapy is just restorative - on par with wearing glasses or taking antibiotics - and so acceptable. On the other hand, knowing Hans's disdain for allow technology to change his life, and J. Morg's assertion that frustrating physical ailments are the only thing left that give life meaning it seems like they might not like it so much.

So, have at it boys - what do you think?

EAP has me killed.

2007-11-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

Get a Cash Advance

A little conservative email

2007-10-18T10:22:00.001-06:00

I got this from my mom this morning:

AND NOW .. HOW ABOUT A LITTLE QUIZ?

A little history lesson: If you don't know the answer make your best guess. Answer all the questions before looking at the answers. Who said it?

1) "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

A. Karl Marx

B. Adolph Hitler

C. Joseph Stalin

D. None of the above

2) "It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few...and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity."

A. Lenin

B. Mussolini

C. Idi Amin

D. None of the Above

3) "(We)...can't just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people."

A. Nikita Khrushev

B. Josef Goebbels

C. Boris Yeltsin

D. None of the above

4) "We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own...in order to create this common ground."

A. Mao Tse Dung

B. Hugo Chavez

C. Kim Jong Il

D. None of the above

5) "I certainly think the free-market has failed."

A. Karl Marx

B. Lenin

C. Molotov

D. None of the above

6) "I think it's time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched."

A. Pinochet

B. Milosevic

C. Saddam Hussein

D. None of the above

Answers:

(1) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/29/2004

(2) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 5/29/2007

(3) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007

(4) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007

(5) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007

(6) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 9/2/2005

funny things Grant says, take 1

2007-10-17T09:00:00.000-06:00

Grant:
recently I put together a list of all the places in NY that I want to go and eat

RJ:
you did?
really?

Grant:
I just sent you my list

RJ:
thanks - next time I'm in new york I'll be sure to look some of them up.

Grant:
I have the location in the city, the websites, the cost, the phone and the address
there are some cool spots. I did a bunch of research on places to eat
or go for drinks/dessert or apps
brb, I have a meeting

France's deadly heat wave

2007-09-20T11:54:00.000-06:00

Did you ever hear about this? I didn't. From an email forward I received,

"The summer after 9/11, France lost 15,000 people in a heat wave. In August, the country basically shuts down when everyone goes on vacation. That year, a severe heat wave struck and 15,000 elderly people living in nursing homes and hospitals died. Their children didn't even leave the beaches to come back and take care of the bodies. Institutions had to scramble to find enough refrigeration units to hold the bodies until people came to claim them. This loss of life was five times bigger than 9/11 in America, yet it didn't trigger any change in French society."

USA Today coverage:
"Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei has ordered a separate special study this month to look into a possible link with vacation schedules after doctors strongly denied allegations their absence put the elderly in danger. The heat wave hit during the August vacation period, when doctors, hospital staff and many others take leave. The results of that study are expected in November."

Two Music Apps You Need to Try

2007-09-13T17:04:00.000-06:00

1. Anywhere.FM - online iTunes. You upload your music and you can listen to it from anywhere.

2. SeeqPod - enter any song name - anything at all. It googles for the mp3 on open servers and plays it for you. Hello RIAA lawsuit!

Misquoting Jesus

2007-09-11T19:24:00.000-06:00

This past weekend I read the book "Misquoting Jesus." An anonymous commenter recommended it to me on the Hitchens post, and I discovered it on my shelf this weekend, so I read it. The short version is that it's great - Bart Ehrman does an incredibly fair job of educating lay people on the history of the written Bible and the variations between our historical texts. I highly recommend it.

The real reason I'm posting on it is because I can't for the life of me remember who gave me the book. Was it you?

More US Americans

2007-08-31T08:40:00.000-06:00

This is awesome:

"In the last 5 days, a YouTube video of Miss South Carolina giving an incoherent answer during the Miss Teen USA pageant has been viewed nearly 9 million times. Asked why 1 in 5 Americans can't locate the USA on a map, she essentially said we need more maps. And South Africa, and Iraq, such as. Or something.

But while you may have laughed, the folks at G4TV's Attack of the Show took action. They created MapsforUs.org, a web blog dedicated to maps. Users can e-mail maps of pretty much anything, from their high school parking lot to Sparta, to the blast door map from the TV show Lost."

from DownloadSquad

http://mapsforus.org/

The US Americans

2007-08-29T12:56:00.000-06:00

This is funny:
Here's the video if you don't know what I'm talking about:

Christopher Hitchens: Wrong, but for surprising reasons.

2007-08-28T14:41:00.000-06:00

Christopher Hitchens is the author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and recently completed a tour of evangelical America, where he debated many evangelical and Jewish leaders as well as a few Muslims. I've not read his book, but I did read his article in Vanity Fair which Charles sent to me and you can find here.

My problem with Mr. Hitchens is not that he's wrong. It should be quite obvious to anyone with eyes that the God we've been selling ourselves and our children is not exactly the real God of the universe. I'm not saying we're 100% wrong by any means - just that God certainly isn't involved in our universe in the way that many Evangelicals like to claim. If you find yourself getting huffy, read the Vanity Fair article, and see if you don't agree that the French were massively influential in winning the Revolutionary War or that a Jewish prayer thanking God that one isn't a woman isn't ridiculous.

My problem with Mr. Hitchens is that he's playing a stacked game against religion. He claims that religious people are either clearly wrong or not really religious, preferring to choose their beliefs "cafeteria style", while he the atheist is....what? Consistent? He implies that religion is wrong because religious people do not follow the doctrines they "claim" to, while he's free to believe whatever seems reasonable. He takes religious people to task for the history of religion while claiming absolutely no allegiance to the ridiculous history of Atheism.

Let's talk about that history for a second, shall we? The Enlightenment, the pinnacle of organized Atheism, has, by it's own metrics, largely failed. Nitzche, Kant, Russel, Hegel and Marx, not to mention Lenin and Hitler, have all failed to create the perfect world they envisioned, and in some cases failed miserably. They have had small successes, some of those directly related to breaking the silly restrictions of religion, but they've had equal failure. Failure equal at the very least with the failings of Religion, and religion has had it's glory moments as well.

If I as a Christian am to be compared to Jerry Falwell and thrown into the same basket, can I throw him in with the Neo-Nazis? The anarchists? Can I choose any crazy atheist and call Hitchens the same thing?

No. I can't, because it's absurd, and that's my problem with Christopher Hitchens. His criticisms of religion and religious people are often spot-on; to assume that religion is the fault is, by his own reasoning, absurd. It's people that poison everything; Hitchens just chooses to ignore any "poisonings" that involve atheists.

What Hitchens doesn't acknowledge and what many religious people themselves are afraid to admit is that religion, and Christianity specifically, evolved and evolves, and this isn't a bad thing. For example, just because the Vatican declared that Mary was Immaculately Conceived doesn't mean that we couldn't all agree this is silly without losing our status as Christians. Christianity is based most generally on a belief that Jesus Christ was someone of singular importance to the world and that the story of his life holds an important meaning to everyone. That we might at times communicate this message wrong or use it to conclude something ridiculous is entirely possible, and given the history of human belief in anything at all, very likely.

Absurdity aside, Hitchens' book poses a very important challenge that the Church desperately needs to examine, and for that I'm eternally grateful to him. The challenge, in his own words, is this:

"My challenge: name an ethical statement or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet."

Put in more general terms, what's the benefit of being religious? Applied to Christianity, why be a Christian? We're taught since we're very young that the point is that being a Christian will make you a better person, and that God will physically involve himself in your life to work for your benefit. While those things might sometimes be true, this absolutely can't be the crux of it, or else, as Hitchens is so quick to point out, our God must not be very great at all, since Christianity itself has failed to solve many of our personal and social woes and turn us into perfect people.

I've been struggling with this very question for the last few years, and it's difficult for me. I don't have a great answer, but I think it starts with this: the crux of Christianity is simply Jesus. We believe that he was a real person, that the biblical stories about him are true, and this belief causes us to struggle, with varying degrees of success, to re-orient our lives around it. Just as you can't (or shouldn't) be able to hear about starving children in Africa without wanting to send money, we don't believe you can hear what Jesus has to say about humanity without wanting to know more, and eventually wanting to change your life. Whether or not you do, and how it's done, and how God's involved are issues we must continue to wrestle with, but in the end I'm guessing our centuries of church tradition, while sometimes silly, will do so much more to inform us on these issues than detract from them.

And that is why, despite the lunacy of modern Evangelicals and the short comings of the historic church, I am still a Christian. So say whatever you want about God's greatness, Mr. Hitchens (though his definition of "greatness" could be an entire post of it's own), and I probably won't argue - I might even agree. What matters to our faith is the person and story of Jesus, and this post-modern approach to faith seems to be something your "à la carte or cafeteria-style" modernist obsession with order may have caused you to overlook.

The Listeners

2007-08-23T17:37:00.001-06:00

"Is anybody there?" said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence chomped the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the traveler's head:
And he smote upon the door a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveler;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his gray eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveler's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

-- Walter de la Mare

quotes about work, etc.

2007-08-06T10:54:00.000-06:00

Some interesting quotes from C. Northcote Parkinson (via 37 signals):

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

Expenditures rise to meet income.

The Law of Triviality… briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.

Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

green hysteria

2007-08-05T10:22:00.000-06:00

punnard sent me an interesting article:

"Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes."

Life and Music

2007-08-03T16:16:00.001-06:00

From ColdHardFlash:
"Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, was raised in Colorado, where his father attempted to teach him Buddhism. Now, years later, Parker and his animation pal Matt Stone have brought to life the teachings of Alan Watts, the comparative religion expert and philosopher. Under the FurryCarlos Productions banner, the two tapped South Park animators Chris Brion and Todd Benson to keyframe three of Watts' recordings, which can be viewed below."

Find the rest at cold hard flash.

4 stupid things that refuse to die

2007-07-28T23:39:00.000-06:00

1. Saturday Night Live
2. Uwe Boll
3. Bird Flu
4. This zit on my chin

The Dangers of the Internet

2007-07-26T16:12:00.001-06:00

Charles sent me an interesting and great article on Slate about the "Dangers of the Internet." It's a review of a book called Data Smog by it's own author. The book was written in 1997, forcasting the dangers our information age might bring.

I love the review, and would probably love the book, because the author is quick to point out that the situation is highly nuanced. In all of our "is the internet killing our culture?" discussions, spanning my blog to JMC's to Mair's, I've been trying to say something like this:

"The more interesting reality, of course, is that—as with cars, planes, and nuclear power—progress and trouble often come intertwined. We are blessed to have these extraordinary tools, which empower us, entertain us, educate us, and powerfully connect us to friends, family, and strangers. But these same tools also threaten to fill up our every waking moment with speedy information, drawing us away from slow, unfragmented conversation and contemplation."

The internet is part of a new, fascinating and terribly dangerous tool set. The dangers shouldn't be ignored, and certainly many people are, but they shouldn't keep us from using those tools either.

J. Morgan's real point, I think, is that using these tools can fundamentally change the way we perceive ourselves and our environment. I don't disagree with that either. It's true and very important and something we need to keep in mind.

The author goes on to describe some of those dangers - things like ignoring your family in pursuit of the cell phone and letting your mind become bloated with useless information and being constantly distracted at work. These are things we all need to consider when using the technology our information age offers.

I like to think I do a fairly good job. I love the internet and all of this new information and I'm the first to defend it, but I think I know when to turn it off. I take my computer home with me every night in case I want to work from home later, but I rarely take it out of my backpack. I ignore my cell phone during dinner, on the light rail, or any time I'm speaking with anyone unless the call coming through is an absolute emergency. I ignore instant messages frequently at work and rarely run off to search the web in the middle of any task.

I think I'm getting most of the benefits of the internet while only suffering a few of it's dangers, and I can't help but wonder if some of the propensity towards distraction isn't generational. I've grown up with this technology and learned to work during the age of the internet. I've always had email and IM, so I learned to ignore them in college when I realized it was taking me 10 times longer to complete my homework when I let myself be distracted.

The only distraction I see really hurting people in my generation is text messaging. For some reason many people responsible enough not to answer their phones in the middle of a meal or conversation think it's perfectly acceptable to tune out and type with their thumbs every 5 minutes or so. That's one I could do without.

Culture Killing Internet?

2007-06-21T10:44:00.000-06:00

In a recent article entitled "Internet Smackdown: The Amateur vs. the Professional", author "The Luddite" speaks out in favor of "professionals" whose careers are being trivialized by the "amateurs" of the Internet. Specifically, he's writing in favor of a book called, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture", more or less agreeing with that sentiment. MySpace is for losers who can't find friends in real life, YouTube is for people who can't make real videos, and blogs are for narcissists who want to masturbate their intellects.

To an extent, I agree with him. The most popular parts of the Internet are often directly focused on "low-brow" entertainment and mass consumerism. By it's very definition, if something is intended to be consumed by the masses, it's beneath the intellectual level of half the population. MySpace really is, more or less, a collection of really really bad web pages, and many people say really stupid things to each other there on a daily basis. Most YouTube videos are crap, and most blogs are worthless.

But at the same time, he's overstating his case. The Internet is full of crap, and that needs to be said - not every blogger has the same intellect, worth, value, or journalistic integrity as the pros. But sometimes they do, and in those times, the Internet has given the masses a voice to share information with and a shield to protect their minds from elitist lies. Often the Internet is garbage, but sometimes it's not, and to say it's "killing our culture" is ridiculous. It's changing it, and it's probably changing it in ways that professionals who've lost their monopoly on distribution don't like, but that doesn't amount to "killing" anything. His overstatement and trivialization of the Internet, on a blog no less, and under a handle like "The Luddite" that you'd rarely see anywhere else, our friend here is participating in the very phenomenon he's attempting to discredit.

To his credit, he admits it's not a "black-and-white issue," and attempts to be fair. He's trying to take the topic seriously, and I respect that. I just get a little annoyed whenever blogs are trivialized as nonsense created by egoists.

I don't write this blog for the masses. I write it for my friends - to share ideas and opinions with people I've met in real life, mostly, when I write it at all. And I've seen some darn funny videos on YouTube - things I'm happy to have seen that don't sink to the stupidity of watching the video blog of a guy I've never met.

I think the most fair assessment of the Internet is simply that it exaggerates the fringes. Like all forms of mass media, it gives the loudest voices the appearance of credibility. Learning to understand and filter that is a skill we need to cultivate as the Internet becomes more and more a part of our culture. Using phrases like "killing our culture" is ridiculous -- our culture has been "dying" ever since its producers opted to earn more money entertaining the masses than responsibly educating them.

Besides - everyone knows that video killed the radio star first. If the Internet turns around and kills the video star, you can't justifiably start the blame there.

Kissing Hank's Ass

2007-06-15T08:30:00.000-06:00

Good video showing how weird the way religion is presented sometimes. Tony "TBag" sent this to me.

Iran's free-sex culture

2007-06-02T07:58:00.000-06:00

"Iran's Interior Minister, Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, has started promoting temporary marriage as a solution to the country's social problems. Shia Islam allows a man and woman to marry for a fixed period of time, ranging from an hour to a century.

A man can also have any number of temporary marriages...[the minister], himself a cleric, said marriage was a human need and temporary marriage should not be used just for sex but to solve social problems.

Iran first started promoting temporary marriage as an alternative to living in sin 15 years ago. The then President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said it was a way for men and women to satisfy their sexual needs.He even said there was no need for a cleric: the couple could read out an oath in private in order to marry."

full article

'Temporary Marriage' IS your social problem, you idiot. Commitment that lasts for an hour and a half isn't commitment. There's nothing "temporary" about marriage. Your social problems stem from the fact that your law encourages men to act like barbarians and forces women to be slaves. You want social justice? Allow women to sue the men who leave them with children; allow them to dress however they want; allow them to hold jobs. Temporary Marriage - who do you think you're kidding?

Islamic law in Iran is enforced to repress women and mean whatever Dictator Ahmadinejad and his ruling class of misogynists want it to.

Mohammed should be jihading in his grave over this.

Vineyard Columbus' huge Community Center

2007-05-29T12:49:00.000-06:00

The Vineyard in Columbus is the definition of a successful mega-church. Throughout the 90's, attendance grew from 200 to 750 to 1,000 to 3,500 people by May of 1998. They now meet in a 3,000 seat sanctuary and had somewhere around 12,000 people pass through this past Easter. They're huge.

Huge churches, the mega-churches, have a bad name here in America, and rightly so. It seems like every few years we're greeted to a new person selling Jesus to huge crowds, building gigantic buildings and televising Sunday services, creating a cult of personality focused around their name and movement. Usually it's some kind of success-based theology about how God wants you to be rich and happy, if you'll only follow our 40 day program or pray like Jabez or try to get your best life now. The Columbus Vineyard is not this kind of church.

According to Uhle, statistics exist showing that mega-churches are the last stop before secularism for most Christians. Disillusioned with local churches, adult Christians are drawn to the massive non-denominations for a variety of reasons, but most leave after a few years and never return to the church.

Standing directly opposed to mega-church stereotypes, the Columbus Vineyard is actually putting it's immense collection of resources to amazingly good use in the form of one gigantic community center. Measuring some 45,000 square feet huge, it provides residence for a number of community out reach programs such as free medical and dental services, GED services, English-as-a-second-language classes, exercise rooms, sports activities, and art, drama, music and dance classes. All offered as cheaply as possible, for the benefit of the community.

This is provided, largely at the cost of the church, in addition with services the church and it's immense building are already providing, which include a number of ministry classes (Vineyard Learning Institute as well as Alpha courses, youth group, etc.), support groups for people dealing with abuse and grief, and recovery groups for people with eating disorders, among many other programs.

An outline for plans for the new facility and reasons for providing it is available on the Columbus Vineyard's website, here. The building was finished and dedicated late last year. The community center's official website is here.

I generally don't like mega-churches for most of the reasons outlined above, but this is really amazing. I want Christians in America to be known for stuff like this more than the boycotts and protests and WWJD bracelets and tracts most people know about right now, and this Columbus Vineyard is doing something very real, very powerful and very tangible to make that happen. Awesome. This is a huge and hugely neglected piece of what the gospel should look like.

Update: Here's an article written by Rich Nathan, the Columbus Vineyard's Pastor, about service.

Got Joost?

2007-05-25T13:13:00.000-06:00

"Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping."

http://www.joost.com

I just got an invite to Joost (pronounced "juiced") last week, and it's been really cool so far. There aren't tons of channels, but there's enough to keep it interesting. What's more interesting about it is how cool the Joost player is. It just works, and for the most part, it just makes sense. It's a great example of a well done piece of software. I highly suggest you check it out.

Right now you can only get Joost by invitation, so let me know if you want one, and what your email address is, and as long as mine last I'll send them out.

Mean Pope

2007-05-11T17:11:00.000-06:00

Pope Benedict, being hostile:

'Benedict said desertions from the Catholic fold were due primarily to the "the lack of an evangelization completely centered on Christ and his Church."

He said people who are "insufficiently evangelized (are) most vulnerable to the aggressive proselytizing of (evangelical) sects" adding that such people "are easily influenced because their faith is weak, confused, easily shaken and naive, despite their innate religiosity."'

Tell us how you really feel.

Does he WANT to get these deserters back? Maybe he thinks calling the deserters weaklings will keep the current faithful from departing, or maybe it's his classic German heritage of strength and survival bulging through the veneer of Papal dignity.

Even if he's right in fact, he's wrong in delivery. Maybe most of his converts are people with weak faith - of all people, the POPE ought to know that saying these things about their faith conflates to the faith of evangelicals everywhere, and that making his point in such a base manner both offends those on the other side of the fence, who he ought to be trying to bring in, and degrades the dignity of his office. Any Pope should know these things - this Pope especially should've learned this lesson already.

His "evangelical" is a straw man. I've been known to make straw-man-Catholics in the past, so I'll resist it here, but it's things like this - this sort of weird, senselessness and unnecessary conflict; this sort of religious name-calling; this unnecessary use of offensive language - which continue to reinforce the belief that the Catholic church is just another sect of Christianity with no better management or claim to truth than any other.

If this blows up, maybe we'll get to see Benedict pray with Joel Osteen.

Spider-Man 3: not good.

2007-05-04T10:36:00.000-06:00

I was convinced earlier this week to attend a midnight opening showing of Spider-Man 3 because a certain flash celebrity wanted to go and got my office psyched up about it. We all bought tickets, but then he canceled on us at the last minute, preferring to stay home and laugh at all those geeks he'd made sit in a theater until 2:30 am. And if he knew how awful the movie would be, he'd be laughing even harder.

Marvel has taken pains to force the Spider-Man series to follow the same trail they blazed last year with X-Men. It goes something like this. In your first film, introduce the characters, and make them fight a bad guy in a stupid costume. In the second film, make the movie longer, increase the character development, and find a villain who doesn't look quite as retarded. In the third and final film, throw everything out the window with an abysmally awful piece of crap featuring the same actors pretending they resemble their earlier characters.

I'm happy to report that Spider-Man 3 was still better than X-Men 3, and much better than Star Wars 3, but as far as 3's go, it could've been so much more. The film's tag line was something like, "every hero has a conflict within". Spider-Man's inner conflict consisted of dressing in all black, adopting an emo hair cut, and dancing around Manhattan saying rude things to people. It was strange and stupid to watch - if I want to see inner conflict against evil in my heroes, I want to see them start killing innocents and call it collateral damage, or at least get really angry and spit a little when they yell at the villain, or maybe even get some new evil power that steals people's souls. Wearing a black suit and snapping your fingers at super models who clearly think you're dumb isn't an expression of inner conflict - it's an expression of inner retardedness.

The movie was also riddled with crappy cliche situations: things which ordinarily wouldn't challenge the mighty spidey at all become suddenly life threatening (oh no! it's a big stick!); Mary Jane, Peter, and Harry take their relationships to new levels of dysfunctional stupidity by misinterpreting situations in ways no sane person could and saying things that even the most insensitive idiot wouldn't; the bad guys stop suddenly and give cheesy orations on how they just wanted to be good, but couldn't, fifteen seconds out of beating the crap out of both Spider-Man and the city of New York, and Spider-Man gets teary-eyed and sympathetic rather than asking the obvious question: if you really wanted to be good, why did you throw so many cars through buildings?

Thankfully, this is the first Spider-Man movie that doesn't end in some horrible acted sentimental nonsense by Kirsten Dunst. Unfortunately, that's because most of the rest of the movie features equally superficial idiocy, but it's spread around to everyone.

I'm trying to find something good to say about this movie and struggling. I guess the....costumes....were well done. It's also one of the first movies who's teaser poster, shown above, doesn't so much tell you about what's going to happen during the movie as how you're going to feel afterwards, which I'd appreciate more if that feeling wasn't "depressed." It probably wouldn't have seemed so bad if I hadn't watched it at midnight, and if it hadn't been set up so well by the first two movies, and if it hadn't been such a god-awful movie.

I'll post about our trip sometime, I think, but it's hard to find a good way to condense two weeks into anything short enough to post.

safe in england!

2007-04-17T06:07:00.000-06:00

Well, we made it to Oxford, where the weather is nice and sunny. It reminds me a lot of Grove City out here, both from the architectural styles and all of the trees.

We met up with Uhle yesterday at JFK, where we saw our first real live British people and their butts:

We entertained ourselves for a few hours (read: 6) making faces at the camera and then boarded the plane to London.

We landed safely this morning and went through customs without any problems, although customs was trickier than I expected. Answering simple questions without sounding like you're lying or taking too long to respond is much harder at what your body thinks is 3 am than I remember.

We caught a bus to Oxford and walked a few blocks to Uhle's room.

Sorry there aren't any captions - I'm a little too hungry and brain dead right now. Fill in your own.
We're leaving in just a few minutes to wander around. I'll post more later.

leaving soon.

2007-04-16T04:06:00.001-06:00

ug. it's early.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2007-04-15T22:04:00.000-06:00

We're getting up at 3:30 am tomorrow to head to Washington to head to New York to head to London for a two week trip with Uhle around the British isles. We'll post pictures and stuff as time allows once we're there. Just think - by tomorrow at this time, I'll be on a plane across the ocean to see this girl:

Little known fact: "Kiss me, I'm Irish" first became
popular after British men discovered Irish women

Ok, ok. To be fair, there's also a few like this:

Not many, but a few.

And none of that really matters to me, of course. I'm going to see the bogs, and the fogs, and the barrow downs, and get in touch with my anglo-saxon roots, and hopefully come back saying "blarney!"

Violent Legos

2007-04-12T08:39:00.000-06:00

Sometimes companies try to be PC by restricting their products and services to those that won't offend people. They market the non-offensive product extremely well, creating a huge market for their product or service, but leaving several holes due to their restrictions.

Into these holes pop small vendors who, through the power of the internet, are able to cheaply market "filler" products that make up the sometimes-offensive stuff the major company won't produce.

A good example of this is Lego. In reading the wired article I posted about earlier this week, I learned that Lego has a rule that they will not produce toys that reflect realistic 20th century violence in terms of guns and things. So you'll see Batman Legos with bat-a-rangs, star wars Legos with blasters and lightsabers, medieval legos with big swords, but absolutely no gangster legos carrying glocks, James Bond legos carrying sniper rifles, or...um...Under Siege ninja legos carrying Stephen Seagal.

Lego's restrictions have created a hole in their market. Everyone loves legos, but some of the little boys (and too many grown up men) who spend countless hours in their basements playing with legos want the real stuff. They want marines with MP5's and rocket launchers and grenades.

Into this hole jumps internet company BrickArms, who specializes in custom lego weapons and figurines that Lego won't produce.

BrickArms is interesting because I don't think a company like this could make it without the internet. The "real guns" hole in Lego's market isn't big enough to sustain a chain of retail stores or enough production to get their product into stores and fight off the lawsuit that Lego might file. But it is big enough to allow a guy to run a business out of his basement if he can ship his product all over the world.

As of today, they still don't have the Stephen Seagal lego, but I'm pretty sure he'll be included in the next weapon pack.

On a totally unrelated note, Stephen Seagal's online store sells a line of skin care products, and has released several CD's, the latest of which is called "mojo priest." Simply amazing.

Use my foot cream.

kids and video games

2007-04-09T20:34:00.000-06:00

I read an interesting article in Wired today about kids and video games. The author is discussing the interesting change in family dynamics arising with our generation, since we grew up playing the sorts of violent video games our parents and Hillary Clinton were worried would turn us into sociopaths. How do we decide which games to let our kids play?

The general consensus is to view video games like movies. He also suggested applying the "lego rule" - no 20th century violence or weapons, so halo and medieval games are okay, but Grand Theft Auto isn't. I think this is a great way to judge it, but what I thought was really interesting wasn't the article, but something he said in passing, right here:

"I was playing a round of Gears of War, trying to redo a level on "insane" mode, and the walls were painted with guts. I slaughtered my way to the boss, revved up my chainsaw, and sliced into his chest -- releasing a fractal fountain of gore. Woo!

At that instant, I heard the front door to my apartment open, and in walked my nanny ... with my 15-month-old son, his eyes agog."

You were doing what? Playing video games, while you payed someone to watch your kid?

A lot of things could have happened here. Maybe he's just gotten home from work, and is either a single father or in a family where both parents work, and the child goes out with the nanny each day instead of heading to day care. I think that's great - I hate day care centers generally, and I like to pretend I'm open minded towards working while your kids are young. The weird thing to me is that this guy doesn't acknowledge that it's weird. It doesn't seem to occur to him that thousands of judgemental readers like me are going to wonder what's going on here, and whether or not he has the nanny just to free up enough time to whack some zombies.

I'm all for killing zombies. I'm completely in favor of spending hours on end finding creative ways to violently plot their demise. I'm just not okay with paying someone to watch my child while I do it - that's bizzare.

Someone should market this idea and build an arcade that has child care.

In other news, Chipotle's gift card scanner was broken today. Who has two thumbs and got a free burrito? This guy.

I like X&Y now

2007-04-03T18:36:00.000-06:00

After a year of listening and not really loving Cold Play's "new" album and not really loving it, I've changed my mind, and decided that it's actually pretty good, and I really enjoy listening to it.

I'm hopeful that maybe somehow, someday, I'll be able to enjoy U2. I've tried, and so far, I just can't, and it makes me feel weird - like I've got a third eye or something. If I can like Coldplay, maybe I can like U2. Until then, I remain a one of the staunch lonely few who think they're as exciting and interesting as white paint on grey concrete.

You can go back to whatever you were doing now.

Community and Facebook

2007-03-29T10:05:00.000-06:00

I've never been a big fan of facebook. It seems like a huge waste of time - the sort of thing people who like superficial conversation and typing nonsense like "OMG LOL!!! Ok, gtg, l8r!" enjoy.
I'm a snob and consider myself above nonsense conversation and stupid abbreviations, so I've never wanted to use facebook. It's the N'Sync of social networking - pop-crap mass-produced for idiots.

But I joined facebook last week anyway, on a whim, because my good friend Grant threatened to shank me if I didn't. And I have to say, in the last week, I've discovered that I was mostly wrong, and that things like Facebook, and maybe even myspace, can be a good use of time, and also sort of addictive. Facebook is great. I really love it, but it's taken me a while to figure out why.

I've noticed, as I'm sure most of you have, that we don't blog nearly as much as we used to. Last summer I was part of a fairly solid blogging community, mostly made up of friends from college and a few from other places, where we'd all blog or at least comment on someone else's blog several times a week. Now I'm lucky if I get a weekly post out, and I'm one of the more frequent bloggers from that era. E.A.P. is probably the only one still blogging more than once a week, but even she's slowed down in recent weeks. I've been missing that a lot lately.

Facebook has totally scratched that itch.

Facebook provides the most basic and most essential form of community: attention. At it's most basic level, community isn't about deep conversation or shared experience or common values. It's about paying attention to each other - giving our time, our most basic commodity, to each other. It's features don't lend themselves well to long, drawn out conversations or intellectual discussion. It has some basic photo-sharing, but no ability to upload files, and even these features are geared towards getting and giving attention. It's about asking people to notice you, and telling others you notice them.

While I do miss our indepth conversations, what I really want is to just be "poked", although I think Facebook could've picked a better word for it. I liked J. Morgan's intellectual diatribes and the way he'd occasionally lambast me with four pages of insensitive ranting, but 90% of why I liked it was because it communicated to me that I was important to him, and that he noticed me, and that noticing me was worth his time. Life happens in short bursts - in running in to people at work, down the street, at church, at the grocery store. College and high school are such formative times for friendship because the close and regular proximity of class gives every a great opportunity to notice each other. Facebook provides this same sort of thing for the internet without requiring that we come up with some great idea worth sharing - we can simply notice each other.

All this being said, I still don't think I can ever get in to myspace. MySpace gives people too much freedom to "express" themselves by loading a billion pictures on to horizontally scrolling image galleries, and lets others upload songs onto anyone else's homepage that start playing whenever the page loads. It's a visual and auditory insane asylum I just don't think I can ever stomach. Facebook has some downsides too. The notion of finding old friends can be great, but lots of times there's a good reason you don't keep in touch with those people, and the initial, "hi! how have you been?" conversation quickly leads into both parties awkwardly wondering why they took the time to find each other again anyway. There's also a strong temptation to list people you barely know as "friends" to up your friend count and make yourself feel a little more important.

So, that's my facebook revelation. If we're really friends, find me on facebook, and we can spend insignificant minutes each day building community through simply noticing each other. If we're not really friends, then you should still probably try facebook, but don't send me a friend request because chances are I'll ignore it, and you'll feel a little spurned, and I'll feel like a jerk, but it's better than getting updates on my mini-feed every day about what you're eating for breakfast.

It doesn't help to ask

2007-03-20T10:25:00.000-06:00

Have you ever applied for a visa? A worker's visa - as in, the permit required by the United States government to work in the United States. I haven't, but my company is helping do the paperwork to get one of our international employees out here, and we're finding the process rather, well, humorously frustrating.

Here's a few of the questions you have to answer, and I'm totally serious about this - these are really on the application:

Have you ever been a member of the Communist or other totalitarian party?
Have you engaged, or do you inted to engage in sabotage, kidnapping, or any other form of terrorist activity?
Have you ever participated in the persecution or killing of anyone because or ace, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, or political opinion?
Have you ever engaged in any unlawful commercialized vice, including, but not limited to, illegal gambling?
Have you ever left the United States to avoid being drafted into the U.S. Armed Forces?
Do you plan to engage in any activity to control or overthrow the government of the United States?
Do you plan to practice polygamy in the United States?

Honestly...who's going to say yes? They might as well just have a box that says, "are you an idiot?"

Monday is unkind - please send Tuesday soon.

2007-03-12T10:28:00.000-06:00

I'm really tired today. Somewhere between the time change and playing a few lacrosse games yesterday, I wore myself out, and I feel pretty exhausted and in a bad mood. I feel a little bitchy. I feel like my brother Phil.

I went to a Catholic mass last night because I've heard the Bishop of Denver is an amazing individual and worth coming to hear speak. Unfortunately, his mother is ill, and so he wasn't there. We went with the newly married Dave and Anne Richardson from GCC. Dave became Catholic while or just before dating Anne, who's been Catholic for a while now.

Mass was fine, but I'm always a little culture shocked in Catholic churches. Everything from the style of building to the dress of the clergy to the smells of the incense contradicts what I've grown up understanding church to be. On top of that, it's wildly anachronistic: the architecture is left-over baroque, the ceremony (from singing to the role of alter boys as 'servants') is medieval, the mood is.....well, medieval, and yet the towering dome of the cathedral is lit by electronic inset skylights, the priest wears a microphone, and the music was piano, guitar, and violin, rather upbeat compared to traditional hymns.

I don't want to criticize any of this - it just struck me as an entirely different culture, coming from a protestant tradition where we threw out the robes and the incense and the baroque when we installed our electric lighting and started using a microphone. We assumed it was okay to modernize a lot of our traditions as long as we were modernizing a few. I think that's fine, though I also think it's okay to keep some of the old tradition, as long as it doesn't take the place of the more important things both branches of Christianity should hold in common, which it all too often does, for both sides.

Another thing that's hard about Catholic mass is that I'm not allowed to take communion. A generalization of my protestant upbringing holds Church as a celebration - a partaking of the abundant life through getting excited about our faith and singing happy songs. Communion is included sometimes at the end as a way of re-stating our commitment to our faith and our community, but it's often done almost as an after thought, and the primary experience we're sharing in as Christians is the service rather than the Eucharist. In Catholic mass, the entire service is extremely somber, and feels more like a funeral than a birthday party - that's the "medieval mood" I referenced earlier. The service seemed to take for granted that I should be miserable in my sin, feeling extremely worn down by life, and that the church was offering solace and at the end would provide a form of renewal. This is a strange thing to participate in as an outsider, because I really don't feel miserably sinful. I was starting to get into it by the end, but then the service leaves a protestant feeling empty, because you're not permitted to take part in communion.

I have to admit I really don't understand this part of the Catholic mass. I haven't grown up in the Catholic church, but it's really sort of a misnomer to call me a protestant. I'm not protesting anything. I probably have fewer issues with the Catholic traditional than I do with the protestant/evangelical branches, and it seemed like there was a lot of stuff following Vatican II which should've opened communion to the sort of Christian I am. But since I'm not Catholic, I don't think I'm supposed to take communion there. Am I right? Why is that?

So that's the way we capped off our Sunday. I think I'm going to try to go again sometime soon, when the Bishop is in town, and see how it goes.

In other news, here's a hilarious video of Patrick Stewart from the British television series "extras". My brother Scott sent this to me yesterday:

I don't like Best Buy.

2007-03-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

I don't like BestBuy. They're often far from the "best buy" around, and are a total pain in the butt to deal with. They make you jump through hoops to get the price match policy they took their name from, have horrible customer service, don't always honor rebates or returns, and never answer their phones. But none of that has much to do with their recent scandal, which is pretty darn close to fraud.

Best Buy has an internal version of the best buy website. When a user comes into the store and claims that they saw a price advertised on BestBuy.com, sales associates go to the nearest computer and look up the deal on their internal version of BestBuy.com rather than the "real" one you or I have access to, and apparently this "internal" site doesn't feature the same deals. It looks like the same website, minus the sweet prices, so the sales associate claims the deal must have expired and tries to sell you the item at full price. Techdirt released this story about a month ago, and it was featured again today on Engadget.

Best Buy itself denies that this is fraud and offers some vague excuses for how this could've happened, and claims it'll never happen again. I don't trust and don't believe them. Last year I bought my wife a car stereo and they promised free installation. When I went to get it installed, they said they couldn't provide free installation because I hadn't purchased it for over $100 - it had only cost 90, because it was on sale, but was no longer on sale, and now cost $10. To get the free installation, they made me return the stereo and buy it again through their customer service department. What a pain.

Never shop there.

That's all I've got.

Monday Update and a Cool Bookreader

2007-02-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

The first project I ever "completed" at my new job is now live on the web. I say "completed" with quotation marks because it's been out of my hands for months now and was being tweaked and finalized by others at both RandomHouse and Adobe, but is now finally finished. I suppose we're not supposed to get attached to our rich internet applications, but since this was one of the first ones I've helped with, I am. :)

Anyway, check it out. Click on one of the pages to make it expand in "big view" in a new window (you'd have to allow pop-ups to see it.) Adobe did all of the skinning and I did most of the grunt engineering to get the thing together. It doesn't seem like a simple application like this would take much "grunt engineering", but you'll just have to believe me when I tell you that it does.

In other news:

I got back from Las Vegas last Monday. We had a good time there, visiting my wife's grandfather, but I don't really like las vegas. It's a weird place where people pay too much to do things that don't seem very fun to me. I don't spend my time there wanting to gamble - I spend it wondering how I can get in on the action. I'll keep you posted if I do.
Last Wednesday I took off again for Boston for a business meeting with a new client. We learned a ton and had a great time getting to know their team - these people are all very nice and very smart and should be very easy to work with. I'm pretty excited, and will give you more news when we're able to talk about it. :)
That's all.

not a new post

2007-02-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

Look, I'm in Boston on Business. You know - busy business. With clients, and meetings, and power point presentations, and hotel soap. So I can't post right now. I'll post this weekend, or Monday, or both.

the grammys are stupid

2007-02-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Last night the Dixie Chicks proved that you can win grammys simply by pissing off conservatives. The Chicks managed to win 5 grammys, including "Best Country Award", despite no longer being a country band, no longer being played on any country stations, no longer being listened to by any majority of people claiming to be "country", and no longer writing any sort of good music. I'll be honest: I hate country music, but I can recognize talented musicians when I hear them, and the Dixie Chicks certainly are. Their previous albums blend a wide range of musical talent with inspired lyrics. The new album is a marketing facade of pre-menopausal angst from three women no one really cares to hear whining about anything anymore, and yet it's now been acclaimed by critics much more highly than all the rest.

It's a weird case of "statement over substance" - it didn't even bother to be stylish this time. The left-swinging entertainment moguls wanted to show their support for a band who caused a stir, and they did. It had nothing to do with their music.

The only other part of the grammys we saw was John Mayer proving he's still a pretentious ass, despite claims to the contrary, by speaking japanese to answer the question of whether or not he's really dating Jessica Simpson. This was dumb for two reasons:
1.) Speaking a foreign language is not cool, clever or witty.
2.) Any answer longer than "No" is a bad answer. A few exceptions are, "No, that woman is dumber than dirt", "You've got to be kidding me" or "I'd rather be shot".

And that's probably all you need to know about the Grammys.

the half week in review

2007-02-07T11:08:00.000-07:00

This morning the light rail station's parking was full by 7:20 am. Three floors, over 400 parking spaces or something, and they were all taken. I'm glad that everyone's excited about public transportation, but I could usually find a parking space on the first floor, and always on the second, before this darn lightrail started. I enjoy the frequency of the train, but if it's going to get me to work half an hour LATER on the days I have to drive to a different station, I'd rather have the express bus back, thank you very much.

Yesterday Steve Jobs made posted an open letter to the digital music community on Apple's website. Responding to absolutely-true allegations that Apple's Digital Rights Management software is keeping people with iPods from buying music from places other than the iTunes music store, Jobs said that the DRM is necessary to placate uppidy recording labels who wouldn't let their music be sold online without it. Jobs goes on to say that the music sold by the iTunes store amounts to about 3% on any iPod, so it's not really a problem, and that he'd really love to sell music without any DRM at all. DRM is about the worst thing to enter our post-napster world besides law suits against 80 year old men and 9 year old girls, so this is pretty exciting news. Hopefully there will be some serious and significant pressure on the big 4 recording companies to get with the times and make their songs available as open mp3's.

I started reading "Wise Blood" by Flannery O'Connor this week after hearing some really amazing quotes from her other works. I'm almost done, and I can't make much sense of the book so far. It contains lots of allusions to southern culture that I don't understand and lots of characters who have absolutely incoherent conversations. Any Flannery Fans out there who'd care to explain a little more about it?

That's about it from here for today. No exciting news, no weird muffin stories, and, worst of all, no funny videos. Sorry about that - I just haven't seen any lately. I just haven't.

ebay apollo app by effectiveUI

2007-02-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

I recently did a small part of an application for ebay using a new technology called "Apollo" for Adobe. Apollo lets developers right desktop applications using Flash/Flex. It's pretty cool stuff because Flash and Flex are both MUCH easier languages to make cool interfaces in than Java or even, gasp, Microsoft's own "visual" .NET languages and their nefarious offspring.

Some other guys here did the initial application for ebay's MAX conference earlier this year, and we did a quick update for the recent "DEMO" conference.

The presentation Adobe did at DEMO is online here, if you're interested, and shows some cool things developers can do with apollo. They also mention "effectiveUI" near the end of the product, which is what we like to hear.

In return for getting our update done in about a week, I got an official "Apollo" candybar, which I ate earlier today and probably should've taken a picture of first. Oh well.

Tetris!

2007-01-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

I play tetris in the bathroom. It helps to pass the time, if you know what I mean, and today I set high scores in my two main events: "40 lines" and "Ultra." The goal in "40 lines" is to see how fast you can break 40 lines and how high your score can be. Today I broke 40 mines in 182.3 seconds with a score of 7580. In "Ultra" the goal is to see how high you can score in 3 minutes. I scored 7697, making it to level 4 with 35 lines. These records represent a new breakthrough in my tetris skillz, since I last set records back in November, and also represent roughly 7 minutes of my life that I'll never have back. It's also a testament to how much better we do at things like this whilst hyped up on caffeine, which I'm not anymore but was earlier.

flush!

It's snowing here again today, which kind of sucks. El Nino is an inconvenient truth. I wish Al Gore was here to take our SUV's away and return us to happier, sunnier times, when our snow falls were always followed by 3+ days of 50 degree sunshine.

In other news, Windows Vista was released today, which means all the hackers and 13 year old danish kids will be working all night long to write us up some new fresh viruses. If you're thinking about upgrading, and you probably will, don't. Wait at least a year, maybe two, and see what happens. Either that, or disconnect your computer from the internet, and, to be safe, never turn it on. And if you really, really, really want/need all those great features Vista's offering, and you absolutely have to have them RIGHT NOW, then go buy a Mac, because it's safer, prettier, easier to use, and not much more expensive than upgrading to Vista.

I make computers fun!

In the mac vs. PC spirit, engadget had a post earlier this week featuring the weird british version of those ads we all know and love. Here's a sample:

Apparently they're in Japanese these days too.

Monday on Tuesday

2007-01-30T15:21:00.001-07:00

Good morning - I'm sorry, Good afternoon. Today I have a case of the Mondays, even though it's Tuesday, because I took yesterday off, and it was wonderful. We had an action packed weekend with the Sharp's (Charles and Wife-Of-Charles) who were in town from Thursday to Sunday. Our activities included, but were by no means limited to, hiking, watching a lacrosse game, watching an improv show, going to the art museum, and buying groceries. It was wonderful, and I'd share pictures, but we characteristically took exactly zero, and so, as usual, here's a picture of someone else buying groceries instead:

Fun for friends and family!

I have a case of the mondays because it's been pretty busy here at work for the past few months and I'm just now hitting the first small lull I've had in a while. It's not really that bad, but it has been stressful, and I don't mind the break. So, I took a day off, bought a new garage door opener, and started playing the new Zelda for the Wii. It's awesome.

Am I cool or what?

Today I've been a little worked up about a change coming in my company's benefits. We have decent benefits right now with a prominent local HMO. Basically, as long as you're mostly healthy, the HMO coverage is excellent and cheap. Most notably, if someone in your family happens to get pregnant, you only have to pay $1000 for the entire delivery and hospital stay etc. Since the possibility of pregnancy is a reality for me, or will be soon, I worry about this. Under our new plans, it'll probably cost me around $3000 to have the baby, and our yearly coverage will also be more expensive. We'll be out from under the HMO umbrella and able to see anyone we want, but we're going to pay for it. I talked with one of our operations people here, and I think we have a few other options to explore. I guess the good news is that either way we'll be insured - we just might have to take on the equivalent of another car payment to pay for it. Oh well. I guess given the choice between this and socialized health care, I'd still choose this.

In other news, if you haven't noticed, I haven't updated my blog template, unlike some of you who, enticed by Google's new tools, have seen fit to change your look and feel lately. It's not that I don't want to - I just don't have the time, ok? Maybe I will, sometime, and sometime soon, but I still owe a few people templates from a long time ago. You know who you are. Maybe if you ever posted I'd worry about it more. Maybe.

That's all for me. Have a good rest of your Montuesday.

First Prize!

2007-01-25T09:14:00.000-07:00

Today (tonight?) is Burns Night, which means a rousing hoarde of artistic scotsmen will be celebrating the life and works of Scottish poet Robert Burns. The night is celebrating with a speech, dancing, eating, and lots of toasting and drinking in the scottish fashion.

To celebrate Robert Burns, who I know absolutely nothing about other than what I've just read from Wikipedia, please enjoy this excellent song that my wife introduced me to. Apparently it's rather old and has been sung by many performers and has lately been featured on an abundance of morning radio talk shows, but I've stumbled upon this rendition on you tube which features some excellent acting by a few nerds spending too much time in the World of Warcraft:

Well a Scotsman clad in kilt left a bar on evening fair
And one could tell by how we walked that he drunk more than his share
He fumbled round until he could no longer keep his feet
Then he stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street
Ring ding diddle diddle I de oh ring di diddly I oh
He stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street

About that time two young and lovely girls just happend by
And one says to the other with a twinkle in her eye
See yon sleeping Scotsman so strong and handsome built
I wonder if it's true what they don't wear beneath the kilt
Ring ding diddle diddle I de oh ring di diddly I oh
I wonder if it's true what they don't wear beneath the kilt

They crept up on that sleeping Scotsman quiet as could be
Lifted up his kilt about an inch so they could see
And there behold, for them to see, beneath his Scottish skirt
Was nothing more than God had graced him with upon his birth
Ring ding diddle diddle I de oh ring di diddly I oh
Was nothing more than God had graced him with upon his birth

They marveled for a moment, then one said we must be gone
Let's leave a present for our friend, before we move along
As a gift they left a blue silk ribbon, tied into a bow
Around the bonnie star, the Scots kilt did lift and show
Ring ding diddle diddle I de oh ring di diddly I oh
Around the bonnie star, the Scots kilt did lift and show

Now the Scotsman woke to nature's call and stumbled towards a tree
Behind a bush, he lift his kilt and gawks at what he sees
And in a startled voice he says to what's before his eyes.
O lad I don't know where you been but I see you won first prize
Ring ding diddle diddle I de oh ring di diddly I oh
O lad I don't know where you been but I see you won first prize

Listen: LoFi | Download

January: Another Busy Month

2007-01-24T08:19:00.000-07:00

This morning I couldn't sleep and I got to work early. Really early. 7:30. Not that early, I guess, but 2 hours earlier than usual, and 3 hours earlier than many of my co-workers. If you think about it, that's only one hour away from half of a day, which, in work time, is quite substantial.

I like being here early because very few other people are here. The morning flies by, and if I were working instead of typing on this blog, I'd be getting a lot done. I'll get to that in a second though. It's been a busy month already, so five minutes won't hurt anyone.

The first project I've worked on here at work was done a few months ago, but it's still not live on the clients website. I want to show it off, but I can't yet, so stay tuned on that one.

I watched some of the state of the union address last night. The media people and a few people here at work keep referring to President Bush as "on his way out". This seems a little weird to me because he's got two years left, and that's half a term. If this wasn't his second term he'd be only half way done, and as it is he's only 75% done. Though the bulk of his impact has certainly been in the last 4 years, it's not like the first two didn't count, so why shouldn't these last two?

But regardless of who is and isn't president, I think the country is losing serious ground in world affairs, and that China's going to pick up the slack. It might take them 20 years, but I'd be amazed if our grandchildren grow up thinking of the US as the same sort of super power we did. But then again, I don't read the New York Times, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Well, let's face it. I don't have anything funny or inspirational or controversial or interesting to say this morning. On a scale of lame-10, feel free to rate this as a 1.5.

Mind your own business, Mr. Peanut.

2007-01-11T10:38:00.000-07:00

David Beckham is playing for LA, the Dems are coming to Denver in '08, and Mr. Peanut is staring at me from the can of mixed nuts on my desk, casually tipping his hat while smiling past that monocle.

Pretentious bastard. On the positive side, these nuts now come with more cashews.

why mommy is a democrat

2007-01-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

Check out this awesome book. The sample pages are really great.

I've thought up a new page they can add in the next edition:
"Democrats take 50% of your allowance and give it to lazy strangers who don't do their chores, just like Mommy does."

Or, we could write the sequel, "Why Daddy is a Republican":
"Republicans kill bad people, just like Daddy does."
"Republicans don't give a damn what the UN thinks, just like Daddy doesn't."

Happy Post-Christmas!!

2006-12-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

Look, I'm sorry, but I've been sick. Really sick. Fevered up and knocked out like E.A.P., only not nearly as bad as she's got it. And it's been snowy, and that's a lot of work sometimes for some people too, ok?
This is how my week has been:

Wednesday: Snow starts falling like it's going out of style. I got my wife's car stuck driving around getting everything I needed to work from home.

Thursday: Snow is everywhere. I work from home. My Friday flight gets canceled. Christmas plans dashed. Spend most of the day hating United Airlines and their crappy terrible horrible no-good very bad totally stupid insufficient phone system that makes you call back constantly for 2 hours before being given the privilege to wait on hold for an hour before speaking with someone in India who cannot book you on any flight you might possibly want anyway. We book my wife a flight for the 26th and are content to Christmas in Denver.

Friday: I got in to work to pick up my new Laptop, which is a spiffy new MacBook Pro and makes my friendly old Dell look like a monolithic piece of computerized cuneiform. Throat starts to hurt, getting really tired.

Saturday: Exhausted. Sleep most of the morning. Very light headed. Sinuses exploding. I went to the doctor and paid $75 and waited an hour only to be told it's "just a virus" and to call in a few days if it doesn't go away. This doesn't bode well for Christmas.

Sunday: Fever up to 103.5. Call Doctor again. Get prescription for sickeningly high dose of Amoxicillan. Take medicine. Sleep all day. Watch Matrix. It's good.

Monday: Feeling somewhat better, go to Christmas at Parents house and try not to breath on anyone. Mewwy Chwistmahs! I beat my sister twice at chess despite being the sickest I've been in ages.

Tuesday: Allergic reaction to nastily high doses of antibiotic. Call doctor. Get yelled at for being Allergic. Told to take benedryl to counter allergic reaction. Take wife to airport. Get new antibiotic. Take brother to airport. Sleep.

Wednesday: Wake up exhausted. Take more benedryl. Go to work. Come home. Get whiny emails about old blog post. Take more benedryl. Go to bed soon.

Thursday: That's tomorrow, stupid. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's supposed to start snowing again, so I brought my laptop home from work tonight to save another snowy drive. Bring it on.

What'd you get for Christmas? I got a great brown hoodie and some nice books and a pretty dog. But I think we might've already had the dog. My wife is gone to see her family and Hans is coming in on Friday. Hooray! Now for the sleeping.

Putin and Batman

2006-12-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Russian president Vladamir Putin takes some time off to visit Batman's department of public relations:

Darth Vader being an Ass

2006-12-15T11:20:00.001-07:00

I know I already posted today, but this is much more entertaining:

Early Morning Run

2006-12-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Today I got up and went jogging. I'm not in great shape, and this weekend will be the first lacrosse game in 3 weeks, and my back is hurting like mad, so I took my dog and went jogging around the neighborhood. It was pretty nice. The sun wasn' t up yet, but it was rising, and so we got to see some cool colors which my Dog, being mostly color blind, couldn't appreciate, and which Hans, being also rather colorblind, would've thought a funny shade of brown.

Lately I've thought that one of the reasons I don't do a lot of the things I want to do is because when I've tried to do them, I didn't make them sustainable activities. Here's what I mean: in the past, when I've gone running before work, I've gone RUNNING, and run hard, like we did in highschool after lacrosse practice when our coaches thought that throwing up made better players. The results had been that the rest of my day was spent feeling sore and tired and miserable. Another example was the time I tried to read the One Year Bible. I tried to dilligently read a little bit every day, and I died somewhere between Leviticus and Numbers. I'm too busy to read that much about the old law every day, and if you disagree, well, I don't care.

So this morning, instead of running my guts out, I took things really slow, and barely ran, mostly jogging, and it was really good. My dog didn't get nearly as good a work out, but she's a dog, and has bad breath, and is happy just about all of the time anyway, and from what she eats or tries to eat doesn't seem that concerned with her health. I don't know if I'll keep doing it, but I'll probably do it more often than I have (never), and that'll be great.

This sort of "low effort sustainability" puts me in sharp contrast with Charles, who has no problem lifting for 3 hours before work and running 27 miles in the evening, each and every god-forsaken day.

EffectiveUI on the web!

2006-12-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a post someone did about an application my company developed for ebay.

The application is a desktop app that connects to ebay and makes buying and selling a breeze. It's cutting edge because it was developed in Apollo, which is a new technology by Adobe that uses the flash player without a web-browser.

Our name is even mentioned about half way through, with a link to our webiste. Awesome!!

Dear Microsoft: "Free" better mean FREE.

2006-12-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

As you probably know, I'm no fan of the evil empire - that is, Microsoft - which has alternately blessed and cursed the home computer/software world since it's inception over 20 years ago. Microsoft has been staunchly against freedom in home computing since the beginning, striking out through patents and litigation to restrict access and use on computers from any methods on than those that they explicitly control and profit from. While this worked and maybe even benefited us-the-users back in the day, that day is over - the day of the large, expensive, bulky operating system filled with large, expensive and bulky software.

Microsoft's taken hits in recent years from visionary companies like Google who've set out to give people what they want: great products at really cheap, often free, prices.

Recently, Microsoft's been making gestures as if they've finally gotten the clue. Bill Gates is stepping down from his position as master of the Dark Side and turning most of his responsibilities over to Darth Ray Ozzie, who will allegedly take the company in new, better, more hopeful directions. First and foremost, they're going to try to understand this "Internet" thing, and why it's so big.

In an effort to restore some of their long flagging street cred, Microsoft recently began reskinning all of their services to look just like Google, and even started talking about giving things away for free. One of these things caught my eye this past week: Free domain name registration and web hosting for small websites! I've had RedHurtMachine.com for a year now, but never wanted to shell out the $40 to get a hosting plan behind it through GoDaddy. I was excited at the prospect of switching to a free server. This isn't something Google offers yet. Maybe Microsoft is really turning over a new leaf!

Maybe not. Four steps into a registration web-page that can only be accessed through Internet Exploder, Microsoft asked for my credit card number. Why? This is supposed to be free! I clicked the, "why do you need it?" link, and this is what it said:

"We also require a credit card to facilitate payment of services during the beta (e.g., the purchase of additional domain names) as well as at the conclusion of the beta period, when customers will be asked if they would like to continue using our services on a paid, monthly subscription basis."

There's nothing saying that the standard basic account is in Beta, or that the Beta trial period will ever end, so maybe this message doesn't apply to the standard account. It's hard to say - they certainly don't. I might try it, but I don't trust them. I want to believe them, but it's hard to put faith in a company so determined to take my money and keep decent products like FireFox out of the game.

Thoughts?

Jacks, I had two doughnuts this morning. They were good. That's kind of like a muffin.

Things I Got Wrong: Christmas Edition

2006-12-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

Like many Dads out there, my Dad, and grandfather too come to think of it, is the kind of guy who purposefully mis-interprets things people say to be funny. And it is - nine times out of ten it's clever and makes me laugh. I can't think of an example right now, but it's sort of like in Ocean's 11 when Brad Pitt misinterprets himself, repeating "I'm having the time of my life" as "I'm running away with your wife." That's right - my Dad is just like Brad Pitt, only a little bit older. But not much.

Anyway, this tendancy of my Dad's lead me to adapt a weird ability to hear the wrong thing being said in most situations, but unlike him I often don't realize it's a joke, and as a consequence I grew up misinterpreting a lot of things. One of those things was Christmas songs. Here's a few examples of lines I got wrong:

"Let nothing you dismay remember Christ our savior was born on Christmas day" - I heard it more like, "Let none of the things that dismay you remember that Jesus was born on Christmas." I was dismayed by things like this itself - what the hell did it mean?
"Outside the snow is blowing, and friends are calling you 'who?'" Why does winter make my friends forget who I am? Why would they call me that?
"Dashing through the snow, in a one whore soap 'n' slay" - what the heck is a soap 'n' slay? And why is this appropriate material for Children?

Well, I guess that's all of them. Unrelated to Christmas, I also grew up thinking that "Dawnserly" was an appropriate adjective to apply to light thanks to misinterpreting our national anthem.

Death is a Force that Gives us Meaning

2006-12-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

CharlesPeirce:
You around?

RedHurt:
yes. are you?

CharlesPeirce:
I suppose

RedHurt:
good.

CharlesPeirce:
Here's what Hans's doing:
“Finishing up my paper on a Thanatological Anthropology through Heidegger."
I kind of wish you were a little more thanatological...

RedHurt:
is that the theology of death or something?
google can't define it

CharlesPeirce:
I think so

RedHurt:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/thanatological
science of death

CharlesPeirce:
Yep

RedHurt:
esp. psychological and social aspects
that sounds neat
I'm into death as a social/humanizing force
that's why I can't conceive of immortal human beings
it sounds in-human to live forever
death defines the human experience

CharlesPeirce:
I know you are
I am too
We need to talk about it more

RedHurt:
do we?

CharlesPeirce:
Not you and me
People in general

RedHurt:
oh, ok.
yes!
esp. Ayn Rand
that idiot.

CharlesPeirce:
I feel like people tool along not thinking about anything

RedHurt:
totally

CharlesPeirce:
And then all of the sudden they're dead

RedHurt:
we need more skulls on desks

CharlesPeirce:
I feel like people's lives are totally uninformed by death
ANd I can't understand it

RedHurt:
except in short bursts
when it totally shocks them

CharlesPeirce:
Right

RedHurt:
yeah

CharlesPeirce:
Then they go back to paying the bills

RedHurt:
and playing Wii
and paying Wii bills

CharlesPeirce:
Yep

RedHurt:
I bet you'll pay Wii bills in super-tax evader 3
when it's released later this year
it's by the same people who brought you CropDuster
and Granary Loader
and....um.......
pong.

CharlesPeirce:
Granary Loader was disappointing.
I had such high hopes for it.

RedHurt:
Your mom was disappointing.

the program-world

2006-11-29T16:31:00.000-07:00

Mair has a good post up today talking about religion and sociology, and how sociology often can't examine religious cultures honestly if it presupposes God's non-existence.

I had a slightly similar thought the other day about Computer Science. Ok, so it wasn't really similar at all, but I had a thought about God and computer science, and that's sort of like God and sociology. Right?

In computer science, we write programs (duh.) The programs these days are made out of unique pieces, called objects, and it's the programmer's job to define the objects and how they can relate to each other. For reasons I won't go into, it's important in a good program that objects not be allowed to interact with each other outside of these sorts of determinate, well-regulated sets of interactions.

The programmer, on the other hand, can see things from a much different perspective, and instantaneously write in any sort of interaction he or she required. The programmer could even start breaking all sorts of "rules" in the program, and interact with objects in ways the objects themselves don't "know" are possible.

In the spirit of Flatworld, I began to wonder what it must be like for my programs to see me change the way their world works. Here they are, going about their business, displaying images and reading databases and parsing text, and suddenly, something changes. Something happens which doesn't seem possible; something that breaks the rules and defies their reason; something that, technically, according to every piece of information they could ever fathom, is completely impossible. They must be baffled.

Some of them probably assert that the rules were never broken. The program is absolute, they believe, and so whatever happened must have a logical explination within the bounds of what the rules allow, or possibly due to some rules they haven't discovered yet. But ultimately, the rules persist, and cannot be broken. These are the program-materialists; the empiricists and modernist thinkers who assert themselves over everything. Some other group, the believers, think I am breaking the rules, and these people sing my praises, write cheesy songs, and where "W.W.R.H.D." t-shirts. Some of their more misguided pagan members probably sacrifice their program-children on program-alters in confused attempts to keep the program-sun rising each program-morning.

So, maybe it's like this for God. Maybe he wrote a consistent set of rules and relationships and interactions, and sometimes he messes around with them, and we inside this little program world are completely confused by it. It seems like I've heard something like this said a few times before, but thinking it up on my own about computer science gave it more relevance to me this time.

Anyway, as a reward to those of you who've made it to the end of this post, here's the funniest Borat video clip I've ever seen. I think it's even better than the movie:

bad post

2006-11-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

It's snowing here today. Furiously; and it's really cold - the high is 20, and we hit it already. By this weekend, the temperature should reach a balmy 35, if we're lucky. Sweet!

I haven't posted much lately, and I apologize for that, but it's been because there hasn't been much to post about. I could write things like, "today we ate thanksgiving turkey" or "yesterday we took my dog to the dog park", but why? Would you really want to read it? While I don't want to limit myself to only posting about politics or religion or something, I think it's good form to stick to posting about topics or weird events that others would find interesting. Apparently, the topic of this post is why topics are important.

Here's a topic for you: why Internet Explorer sucks. I've had major problems with Internet Explorer recently both at home and work. They'd be minor problems except for the fact that fixing Internet Explorer is horribly hard. It's hard because since IE is integrated into Windows, you can't uninstall and re-install it, and Microsoft's website only works with IE, so you if you can't get to webpages you can't get to microsoft.com to use their horrible "fix my computer" stuff. In conclusion, integrating just about any software into an operating system is a horrible idea. Leave it separate, so that I can manage it on my own.

Well, this post isn't good, but at least it's not a not-a-post, which is all you've been seeing for the last week or so. Anyone have an idea for a better topic? Post an idea, any idea at all, and if it's not horribly inappropriate, I'll do it for the next post. Really! Won't this be fun?

And to make up for the bad post, here's a video of Russian people fighting on their version of Jerry Springer. It's funny because the fight starts when a guy in a suit jump kicks a woman wearing a wedding dress in the stomach.

semi-gothic nerdfest

2006-11-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

If, in some European twisting of Paula Cole, you're wondering where all the Vikings have gone, I have some good news for you: I've found at least one of them. I saw him, live in the flesh, last night performing as the lead growler for a band called Leave's Eyes.

I couldn't find a real picture, but this is about what he looked like:

Grrr.

He was trying to rape and pillage Englewood last night, restrained by the fact that he's in a band, left the stage for every other song, and was touring with his wife, who wears a funny red dress with a weird corset and doubles as the lead singer for the band. Still, I was on the watch for the rest of his horde, which luckily never materialized.

Yes - she was really wearing this. It doesn't look remotely hot in real life.

Leave's Eyes was the opening band at the concert I attended last night. Judging by the 4,700 hits the band has in google, I'd say there sort of a big deal in Europe. But we're not in Europe, so they really weren't over here. I spent their portion of the show, seriously, trying not to laugh at the ironic scene of scrawny kids and middle aged, balding men, all dressed in black, making Satan horns (metal fingers) and screaming at the top of their lungs towards the costumed internationals on stage. It was funny, and I wish Jackscolon had been there, as he's proven in the past to be much better at making fun of weird concerts than I am.

It looked about like this. Mostly normal, with awesome hair.

And, also unlike Jacks, I can't pretend that I was forced to go to this concert. I went willingly, because the main band playing was a German heavy metal group called Blind Guardian that I've loved with all of my intensely nerdy soul since 9th grade. They sing about a variety of topics, usually focused on Tolkein or some sort of medieval imagery, and play some of the most amazing music I've ever heard.

I confess too that I let myself get totally into it, screaming and jumping up and down and stuff, because there's no use in going to a concert if you don't. You'd be better of to sit at home and listen to the cd. Not only would the music sound better, but you'd avoid the permanent damage to your hearing that most concerts, including this one, come packaged with, free of charge.

Suffice it to say that I thought Blind Guardian was totally sweet and that you, if you're a relatively normal person, wouldn't have been able to distinguish between their awesomeness and Leave's Eyes silliness. And I don't blame you.

In other news, the new Denver Lightrail is pretty darn nice. It gets me to work in the same amount of time as the bus, but it leaves the station regularly at 15 minute intervals. The only down side is that many other people have started taking advantage of our new public transportation, meaning that it's getting harder to find a good parking space. Oh well.

Like driving without the traffic or terrorism!

post 231: hard(er) questions

2006-11-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

At church tonight, someone said we need to ask hard questions about God, and about life. Usually this implies that someone will ask why we don't trust God more, or that maybe God can do anything, and that "expanding our view of God" is about learning to trust that God does "outrageous" sorts of things on a regular basis. And maybe this is true, and maybe this is a good thing to learn about God.

But conversely, I think it's important to ask the opposite question about God, and it's something that's always bothered me because I don't hear it often asked. Tonight, someone mentioned a person they knew who'd been diagnosed with cancer. He and several other of the persons friends began praying, and roughly a week later the person was healed. A miracle, and supposedly we should all trust God because of this.

So here's my question, the one that bugs me: even if God healed this guy, why does that mean I should trust him? There are tons of people with cancer. I can't imagine that most, maybe even just many, of them, when faced with the true reality of their imminent death, don't cry out to God, whether they call him "God" or not, and beg to be healed miraculously. When we really believe we've got nothing to lose, we'll try anything. And long before that, most people have some shred of faith buried in their past, and it's enough to conquer their pride and cause them to pray for healing.

And many of these people - most, if we believe that terminal illnesses really are "terminal" - still die.

So the question is, even if God does heal people sometimes, why should I trust him? It's quite clear and apparent that he doesn't heal people all of the time - putting my trust in him will not guarantee healing. It seems like I could take this same sign to prove that God is not necessarily kind, but whimsical and fickle - not trustworthy at all, but the sort of being who dispenses blessings at an order I can't trust or rely on.

I know this question is nothing new - that this "problem of pain" has been debated and explained and struggled with a million times over the years, maybe more, with many different answers, some satisfactory, some not, but it's not the sort of thing I hear good answers to often, or the sort of thing I hear talked about much in church. And I think that's dishonest. We as Christians are all about praising God for the blessings and crediting him with the good things that happen to us, but when things go wrong, it must be our fault. With so many things going wrong all of the time, it seems like this should be a big deal, and something that we talk about more than just every once in a while.

I think we do this because we desperately WANT to rely on God. We WANT to think of him as a fixed point; unchanging, reliable, trust-worthy. Some people, including me, want to run around thinking about life as a secure fixed place with an orderly God on top who dispenses good things to the "spiritual" people who help others, and lets the rest of us mess ourselves up. It's nice - it fits, clicks, makes sense, seems to be the way things should be to us.

But that's not the way things really are; at least not in the way I've seen and experienced them. Maybe you live in a world where God will catch you if you jump off of a cliff. I don't. God will let me fall. He'll probably let me wreck my car, cut off my fingers using a saw, die of cancer, whatever. And it has absolutely nothing to do with how spiritual I am, or how much I pray. God is, along with everything else, not the sort of being who acts in ways I can ever predict. To begin a sentence with "God will" is usually to open the door for error - he very well might not.

Now I'm not saying that this makes God bad, or that his unpredictability implies that he doesn't love us. I'm just saying the opposite isn't true either - a few miracles don't prove that God is the sort of being we should put our trust in, and to represent it this way is disingenuous. I think it's really important to struggle and wrestle with the topic of God's lack of response - God's silence, refusal to answer our prayers, often "in the way we expect", but sometimes at all.

I don't have a good answer. I think one of the reasons God leaves it this way is to force us to struggle over it - to make us uncomfortable. Because it's through that sort of frustration that he often chooses to work, though sometimes maybe he'd rather speak in obvious blazing visions of glory. I think he does it to me to be elusive, to prove that I can't keep him in any of the nice neat categories or systems I want to build for him. In ways I don't have time or space to go into here, he reveals himself as good, ultimately and undeniably, then refuses to be tested on that point, and refuses to agree to constrain his behavior to seem good on my terms. He makes it quite obvious that he will act in ways or allow things to occur that seem quite evil, and that there's nothing I can do about this. I must simply trust in the goodness to the extent that I've seen it and love him, come what may, or reject his faith and stay safely within the bounds of things and people whose actions I can categorize and anticipate.

I know that sounds a little stupid. "Just trust" is not a good answer. I completely agree. That's why it's a hard question.

So, that's the hard question I thought of in response to the question posed tonight. I think it's important, and it's certainly been the focus of what I've spent my time thinking about God for the past 5 years or so. What do you think?

Wild at Consumerism

2006-11-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

When Wild at Heart was first published in 2001, it read like a retrosexual call to arms. It tapped into the growing backlash in society against feminized men and responded in a strikingly evangelical way with a single basic message: Men are different than Women. Men are supposed to be wild and strong, and there's nothing wrong with that, and trying to make a man into anything different is wrong and will kill him rather than change him.

Not quite a call to live in caves and eat raw meat, the book challenged cultural conceptions of men, specifically in the church, and called on church leaders to stop trying to make men into something they weren't intended to be. Specifically, it helped men understand why they felt so out of place in what seemed like an endless series of smiley Sunday sermons, bible studies, and pedantic Christian living work-books. The reason was that these things didn't satisfy a man's basic need to be free and strong. It left a person with the impression that activities like sports and hiking and smoking pipes and watching good movies was more important than the bible studies.

Suburban evangelical men, struggling beneath the malaise of their too structured, too simple, too easy, too boring lives ate it up. Sales soared. The books author, John Eldridge, founded a ministry and started doing seminars. He was interviewed for magazines, and wrote several sequels that said pretty much the exact same thing, though no one seemed to realize this.

Now, in 2006, the Wild at Heart frenzy is waning. Specious theology and growing irrelevance have landed the book close to the Promise Keepers movement in the evangelical world. Suburban men are, for the moment, either over or ignorant of the malaise, and a growing number of less testosterone driven metrosexuals are making their consumer needs felt and pushing the book more towards obscurity.

The solution? Join the malaise.

I opened my email this morning to find an amazon.com email advertising "The Way of the Wild Heart Manual: A Personal Map for Your Masculine Journey." This is the second "Wild at Heart" work book Eldridge has published, and it looks more desperate and even further from his thesis. If the thing men don't need is more programs, more work books, and more systems, why does he keep publishing them?

Because someone behind this whole thing, whether it's Eldridge or his publishing company or his editor or his wife or whoever, someone wants to keep the cash coming. Someone's more interested in the money than the message, and is selling out to the "WWJD"/"Prayer of Jabez"/"Tickle Me Elmo" movement of mass consumer Christian marketing.

It saddens me because, for better or worse, I read this book first at a tough time in my life when I needed to hear exactly what it said. Crappy theology aside, at 19 I was having a hard time feeling like I was up to being a man. This is kind of awkward to write about, but the transition out of being an irreverent kid interested in fantasy novels and comic books and video games into a mature adult interested in fantasy novels, comic books and video games was hard for me. I need someone to tell me that it was ok, that I could do it, and that was I supposed to do it, and made for it. I needed a little inspiration. Wild at Heart gave that to me, for whatever reason, and its a little disappointing to see it diminish into one of the things it spoke so strongly against, at least to me.

Will there be an October tally? I don't know! Do you want one?

Happy Halloween

2006-10-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween. This year, I'm going dressed as a nut-job who advertises their badly marketed, totally ridiculous book on google . Apparently, a mastery over space and time doesn't include good graphic design skills, or even the ability smile pretty. The good news is that I linked the same link I received in my gmail here on the blog page, which means it goes through google and charges her a few cents every time you click it. On second thought, maybe I'll just go as a dentist. I hate dentists.

Whether or not you click the above link several hundred times to extract some small stupid tax from this lady as a public service to help keep money going to google and things like blogger, gmail, and google maps free is entirely up to you and probably dependent on how much you're willing to get festive and embrace to true (evil) spirit of Halloween. I know I will.

In other news, in the past week, I've seen four movies. I've been compelled to give a 1 line review of each lately, so I'll do that here and now, because there's no good reason not to.

The Departed: Good, violent, interesting. My wife thought the last scene was cheesy.
The Prestige: Good for people, a little disappointing for Physicists.
Running With Scissors: A little disturbing, only sorta funny, but a good example of the child care system in the US going wrong.
The Break Up: Like watching your couple-friends fight for 105 minutes, punctuated briefly by frat-pack jokes that don't really break the tension.

This year I did not dress up, decorate a pumpkin, or even dress up my Dog. My wife may have, but I didn't - I swear. I feel like sort of a Halloween-Humbug, but hopefully giving away candy and rocks to the children tonight will help to make up for some of that. That, or clicking that link a million times.

The New Atheism

2006-10-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

I read an article in Wired this past week titled, "The New Atheism." It was very well written and quite interesting, thought provoking, and a little frustrating. Here's why.

The New Atheists, as the author names them, have good criticisms of religion and American Christianity in general. Religion is used as a crutch, as a hindrance, as an escape, as a way to avoid upsetting thoughts that might challenge their conception of the world. The New Atheists are people who've called this what it is - bogus - and are, sometimes quite radically, trying to make people face the music and question their lives. I'm down with this.

What I'm not down with is the rest of the "project," if it can be called that, which is, for all intents and purposes, a completely ignorant perspective on the enlightenment, faith, and meaning. At least to the extent that this article portrays them, none of these "new Atheists" recognize the similarities between or make any attempts to differentiate themselves from the stalwart Atheists of our recent history who failed so miserably to make God useless. When Russell, Freud, Marx, Engles, etc. failed so totally, why do these new comers think they'll succeed?

When I say "fail", I mean that they failed to create either a successful society or successful people from their radical atheist philosophies. When I say "successful", I of course mean happy, productive, and fulfilled. The greatest thinkers of the 20th century wrote volumes of philosophy that culminated in founding several societies which ended in abject poverty and total despair. I know religion has a sordid legacy as well, but given that atheism and "reason" have done no better, doesn't it seem like perhaps the real problem with the way we're living is something else?

So that's my issue with this. I don't want to see any more religion vs. reason debates, because they're missing the boat, and degrade into a spectrum of useless agendas that have all been tried at one time or another in different parts of the world and have, quite literally, largely failed. Religion is not the problem, and reason is not the problem. The problem with people is that regardless of what they claim to believe, they ultimately believe that the world's problems are someone else's fault, and that if they could only fix this or that about other people then things would be fine.

On a less preachy note, I also take issue with the "New Atheists" for failing to improve on what I consider to be the enlightenment's largest failing: the topic of death. Regardless of what you believe, you are going to die. I'm not trying to pull Pascal's wager out here - I simply want to know how an atheist deals with death. I believe that death is the most defining and common aspect of human experience, and it does an excellent job of crushing our idealistic forays into the greatness of reason with, well, reason itself. The bottom line is that regardless of how productive, honest, wholesome, and critical you are during your life, you're still going to die, and time will pass on without you, and everything you've worked for and built will be destroyed and forgotten. Can you deal with that and not fall into nihilism? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm just saying I've never seen it done before.

What most atheists do is to construct some wonderful ideal out of productivity or an abstract "goodness" to hide behind, and claim that this makes life worth living. It sounds quite valuable, but underneath the gloss it's just an intellectual shield to keep the idea of total nothingness away. It's not real critical thought - it's ignorance; it's hiding from the truth. It is, in short, everything that atheists accuse religious people of. This is, I think, one of the singular things keeping most non-religious agnostics, who seem to make up the majority of Western society today, from diving headfirst into real and devoted atheism.

But maybe I'm wrong. Was the enlightenment really a failure, or did it just hit a few setbacks, and the vast and lofty promises of utopian reason are simply yet to be realized? Maybe Marx had more to offer than I give him credit for. Regardless, I thank the well-mannered atheists who are truly seeking for the truth and truly convinced of God's absence, because if nothing else they do an excellent job of providing much needed criticism for a cultural church mistakenly convinced of it's total supremacy in all things.

All of MP3 gets Whacked

2006-10-19T09:06:00.000-06:00

Yesterday VISA announced that they'll no longer allow payments to allofmp3.com , the questionably legal music download store run out of Russia. In their defense, VISA probably did it out of a desire to stay out of the piracy debate by ensuring they can't have any records to be subpoened or face a lawsuit themselves, rather than any desire to support "the man" and his money-grubbing antiquated business models.

Allofmp3 responded by announcing plans to drastically change the way they offer their music. Rather than offering raw mp3 downloads at a price, the company will now offer free downloads, but the songs can only be played on a computer running their special ad-supported music player, and can only be used on one computer at a time. Those of us using allofmp3 to AVOID restrictive DRM think this is a very bad idea, and won't be using the service. The vast majority of the rest of their users are using the service to buy songs for their iPods - not their home computers - and also won't be using their service. So, in effect, allofmp3.com is nearly dead.

I couldn't find when the paid service will actually stop, but it's probably soon, so if you have a positive balance, spend it fast.

Update: This article says that AllofMp3.com will offer two services - the current system, where you pay as you go, and the add supported computer-only player. This means we might still be able to get great, drm-free music -- if we can only find a way to pay for it.

In other news, things here are going quite well. My job is fun and busy, the church is moving along steadily, my dog is happy, and my wife is gorgeous, so things are good. And I think today is Mair's birthday, so happy birthday, and congratulations on making it through another year of grad school, you old hag.

2 for 1 Vacation

2006-10-11T14:37:00.000-06:00

This past weekend we traveled back to Grove City college to show the campus off to my brother. It was an exciting and fast paced trip in which we saw most everyone who's still in the area and many people who aren't. First, a quick recap of the GCC trip, with some news on the campus for those of you who're interested:

We hit lunch in the new and revised MAP cafeteria, which has been expanded and remodeled and looks really great. The food has not yet been improved, but allegedly that's coming soon...maybe by homecoming '07.
This summer, Hicks dining hall is scheduled to be remodeled completely, and Freshman guys are living in Hicks now instead of Ketler along with Memorial, making Hicks the dorm to live in.
Wolf Creek is back to a reasonable level of water, making creekings worth it again.
The lacrosse team is now allowed to play on the main field, under the lights, with the turf. Sweet!

I won't list everything we did and everyone we ran in to, beacuse you don't care - suffice it to say it was awesome. GMack and I put in some good video game time in the evening with Drew, and we left on Sunday for the airport, where more excitment ensued.

On the way home, our flight was overbooked, and volunteers were called for to give up their seats. We gave ours in exchange for 2 free tickets, and were booked for a Pittsburgh->DC->Denver flight later that evening.
In DC, 4 hours later, we faced the same situation, as United is the worst airline still in operation and apparently always overbooks their flights. We volunteered again, and were again given two free tickets, and arranged things so we didn't leave until 4:40pm the next day. We made a quick call to Charles Pierce and Mrs. Charles Pierce, and spent the surprise evening and next day with them. It was fantastic, and I'd like to publically thank them for their flexibility, and also for the socks.

Bottom line: 2 vacations for the price of one, seeing 75% of our friends in a single weekend, and 4 free plane tickets to anywhere in the US. SWEET.

In other news, here's something for you to play with - a webpage that plays MP3's at different (annoying) frequencies so you can see how badly all that loud music you listened to as a teenager has affected your hearing. I can still hear up to 17 kHz, but my friend Andy here at work can't hear more than 11. Try it out, and let me know if anyone can get them all. Coincidentally, my headphones die at 16k.

Brian Bosak, please read this

2006-10-02T08:38:00.000-06:00

Well, it's been over a week. I hope you're all feeling rested and replenished - I know I am.

Before we get going with our September tally and the bulk of this post, a quick note to Brian Bosak, one of the many sneaky readers of this blog who never comments: I got your message two weeks ago, and meant to call you back promptly, and obviously haven't. I've since lost your number, since I didn't save it quickly enough, so call me back sometime. I have your old number, but that wasn't the one you called me on, so anyway, call me back. And that's all I have to say to you for the moment.

First things first (or next things next, rather) - here's how you all measured up in the month of September:
Pragmaticism: 4
Standingoutinthecold: 6
Poetry and Scotch: 7
Anglican + Calvinist: 1
Sociological Imagination: 3
Filosofia y Flores: 19
Fashion, Trends, Movies, Etc.: 11
Heavenly Hosting: -12 (due to penalties incurred)
Angels on the Sideline: 2
Inside Out: 1
Red Hurt Machine: 10

I guess what this says is that we've all been pretty busy this past month, because none of us had time to post much except EAP, who diligently posts regardless of what's going on in her life, usually.

I for one have been working like a dog, a hound dog, you might say, to get a project done here at work. I can happily say it's on schedule and that I can probably slow down some in the coming weeks, which is just dandy.

My wife and I spent this past weekend in Wisconsin, tasting cheese and attending her cousin's wedding. The wedding was nice and we spent some wonderful time with her family, who were also nice enough to put us up. We stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn on their credit card points, where I slept on a king sized foam mattress for the first time ever. I'll never be the same. It was by far the best bed I've ever slept on and some of the best sleep I've ever experienced. The cheese was okay, but paled in comparison to the mattress.

Not the taste of the mattress. Just over all greatness. But we didn't have much cheese.

In other news, it's going to be another busy week despite my relaxed work schedule because this weekend we're going to out of town, back to our old roots at PA. I'll be there exactly one week before the rest of you, who are probably going for home coming, as we're flying out with my brother for one of those Senior Days we all loved to hate while we were students. I'm excited to see a few professors and a few old roommates including GMack, whom I love, even if the rest of you won't be there.

Well, that's it for me. Have a great Monday, and I'll do my best to check back in before Friday, and if not, I'm sure you don't care, so, see ya.

Adventure Rabbi

2006-09-22T09:02:00.000-06:00

For anyone who thought the Christians were the only people abusing their religious heritage, I read this ad in a local newspaper:

Hike, Bike, Yoga Pray. Rosh Hashahan Our Way!
Join Rabbi Jamie Korngold (a.k.a 'The Adventure Rabbi') for an adventurous Rosh Hashanah retreat outside Winter Park, Colorado. Return to your Ancient roots - like the Israelites who wandered the desert and received the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Families, Couples, Singles, Young & Old.

Nice! Nothing remembers tradition like a little yuppy-ism. In case you're not from around here, there's nothing remotely similar to trekking through the desert about driving your SUV to Winter Park for a nice morning hike in the trees. Celebrating Rosh Hashanah like this does a lot more to destory your "ancient roots" than return to them. You can read more about this amazing guy here.

Forget the Marines - an "Adventure Imam" could end our problems in Iraq much quicker.

An answer to our music pains?

2006-09-21T10:15:00.000-06:00

If you've been reading this blog at all for the last few weeks, you should know by know that I absolutely hate DRM and everything it stands for. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it refers to a slough of different methods being used to "protect" music rights online so that files can't be shared between owners.

The idea isn't bad, but the result is usually a loss of complete ownership rights by you, the user, and causes things like iPods which delete their music files if you don't have a backup copy stored on your computer, only being able to use your iPod with a select 5 computers, not being able to play your iTunes-bought music in any player other than iTunes, etc. I hate this because I want to own the things I pay for - if I buy your songs, they're mine, and I should have the right to play them in whatever player I want, store them in whatever format I want, and generally use them in any way I want as long as it doesn't result in me infringing on your right to sell your music.

Another complaint is that DRM isn't about protecting music or the musicians - it's about market share, and about allowing big companies to dominate the music industry. The idea that DRM protects musicians is a complete lie - it protects Apple, or Microsoft, and that's about it. The iPod is a perfect example - it forces you to use iTunes, which leads users to using the apple store, which sells only songs infected with a brand of DRM that can't be decoded by any player other than the iPod. Microsoft's Zune will enforce the same system. Both companies support the RIAA in keeping non-DRM music files off the internet under the auspices of protecting the rights of artists, which results in a market in which small companies can't be profitable.

Anyway, a German company called "Akuma" has perfected a technique of "watermarking" songs with subtle sounds that are undetectable to human ears but easily perceived by machines. This allows music retailers to mark songs with an identification tag traceable back to the person who bought the music, and gives them someone to hold liable if the song shows up on a file-sharing system or the internet at large.

This is a huge step in the right direction, as it removes all of the experience-hindering ownership problems of DRM while enforcing a strict way to track music purchases, but raises an entirely separate set of questions. First, what about privacy rights? What sort of data will I have to give the music company in order to buy their songs, and how much if it will be stored in the songs themselves, and how secure will that data be? Second, how breakable is this? It seems like it'd be pretty easy to write a filter program that removed the sort of digital watermarks they've made so far. Lastly, who's going to police it, and how? Who's going to wander the p2p networks, scanning the watermarks, and then going after the owners, and when they do, how are they going to prove it was the owner's fault that the music arrived on the p2p network? It seems reasonable that someone could steal my mp3 player and upload all of my songs to limewire, so good luck trying to hold me responsible. It's sort of like those cameras taking pictures of people running red-lights: sure, you can prove that someone in my car broke the law, but good luck proving it was me.

To conclude, I think this is a great step in the right direction, but I think there's still some huge issues that need to be resolved before we'll see this replace DRM. The biggest advantage this system has for users like me is that I no longer WANT to break it. I download songs from iTunes and immediately strip the DRM, either by burning a CD and re-ripping the songs to MP3 or using some DRM removing software to convert the iTunes files directly. Since I don't want to engage in piracy for piracy's sake, I have no desire to remove the watermark on an MP3 I can already play unhindered, savvy?

If those idiots at the RIAA weren't idiots, they'd champion alternatives to impairing DRM like this in the hopes of making the system work and improving their absolutely horrible image.

monday it is.

2006-09-18T09:09:00.000-06:00

Well, let's just pretend that I've already apologized for not updating the blog, and pretend that you cared, and just move past that. So what if it's been a few days, or even a week? I don't really get that upset when your blog sits for under a month, so why should I act like you do when mine lapses? More than a month and I do start to wonder, though.

Anyway, things have been happening, and here's a little update:

This weekend was Oktoberfest again. You may remember last year when I blogged in outrage at the number of people who came to Oktoberfest to pay $5 for 20 oz.'s of Coor's Lite, or the people who did it multiple times. This year, wind and cold kept the festivities to a minimum, and allowed me to leave at 11 instead of 1:15, so that was great. I have a small cold, and don't remember much of what happened, but it wasn't as frantic as last year.

Now, a quick update on the technology stuff you've been missing out on:

1. Windows Live Search. In anticipation of Windows Vista, Microsoft has thrown in the towel and decided to copy everything about Google that makes them awesome. Windows Live Search is a search page, provided by microsoft, that looks like a re-branded version of the Google homepage. It's a nice touch, but I don't really care for it. The evil empire of software engineering can't do anything right, so I see this as a sign that they're losing the all around battle for your technological attention, and when Vista fails to revolutionize the world, Microsoft will reap the bad harvest sown by two decades of bad software focused on making money more than good products. You can leave feedback, and I'd encourage you to do so. Mine went something like this:

"Can you look any more like Google without being Google? Nice work, but seriously, this is too little too late. As long as there's a competetor to use instead of Microsoft, I will."

2. XDrive: You may remember something called "XDrive" around the year 2000. It was a free online virtual harddrive where you could store up to 1 GB of data, or something like that. AOL has resurrected XDrive and is now offering 5 GB of free space for you to use on the web. I don't think I'll start moving all of my personal files over just yet, but it's a great place to stash your MP3's. And then maybe give the password to your friends, or post it on your website. Anyway, between this an their new free email (what a great idea!), free calendar (what a great idea!), and now new free domain names (this one really is a new idea), AOL is making a strong bid at being a relevant internet powerhouse again. Google's allegedly working up some free online harddrive thing, rumored to be called the "GDrive", but it was announced in March and hasn't materialized yet, so who knows.

3. WikiDot: Wiki's are the new blogs, sort of. WikiDot provides free online hosting for wiki's the same way Blogger does for blogs. If you don't know what a wiki is, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog, or at least not until you click the link above and educate yourself.

I think that does it. Time for me to get to work.

just about the funniest thing I have ever seen

2006-09-13T15:38:00.000-06:00

Game shows in Japan are so weird. Here's a hint: they're trying to say tongue twisters, and the punishment for failure is swift and entertaining.

why is my computer slow?

2006-09-12T10:30:00.000-06:00

Ever wonder why your computer, once a station of quick booting and fast information, has slowed to a crawl? I know I have. I've heard lots of weird explanations from the uneducated masses as to why this happens - everything from the number of desktop items to the number of programs installed on your machine - but nothing conclusive. Finally, some guy somewhere did a real test, and I'm here to share the results with you.

You may be a bit surprised. The number one worst thing to have on your computer, if you want it to run fast, is Norton Internet Security. That's not the surprising part - this is: the second worst thing to have on your computer is more than 1000 fonts. It's about 3 times worse than any program other than Norton that this guy tested! Weird, huh? Whoever thought having so many fonts could be so harmful? 100 fonts is up there too - about half as bad as 1000 fonts. Yahoo messenger also seems pretty bad, but that shouldn't matter as most of the world is slowly realizing that Google is better at everything.

Since Norton is the worst offender, it's worth looking into using other software to supply your firewall and antivirus needs. Windows includes a firewall in XP that gets the job done but isn't preferred by many, or a light weight free firewall from "ZoneAlarm" is available here (thanks to Standingoutinthecold for recommending this - I'm running it on my desktop now with no problems.) For your antivirus options, the first and possible best is "none." Do you download programs? Do you download programs from people you don't know? If the answer is no, then why do you need it? But if you simply must have it to sleep soundly, check out AVG free anti-virus here (thanks again to Standing.) I'm also running this on my desktop, and 2 days later, I haven't had a single problem.

During my recent hard drive crash, I was forced to reinstall all of my software, and I opted to use these free versions instead of Norton. I can say without a doubt that removing Norton has seriously sped up my machine, although I haven't installed a lot of other programs I used to run still, so your mileage may vary.

new office picts!!

2006-09-08T10:35:00.000-06:00

Here, in all their glory, are pictures of the new office. Most don't have the best lighting, but I'm no photographer, and no EAP, as you should know by now, so take what you can get.

This is the lobby. This is where people are invited to sit while they wait for stuff. Our most socially creative application developers, Jim, sits at the front desk. He's not a secretary nor particularly gifted in secretarial duties, so I have no idea why - I heard he wanted to, and someone let him, and now it's really happened (note: Jim is not in this picture. That is an arm chair.)

This is the conference room. This is where the magic really happens - where we gather to really brainstorm, or get vulnerable, or synergize, or really give 110%. It features bright colors and large windows, just like the rest of the office, except it also has a large TV, just like the lobby.

And speaking of the lobby, here's another shot. Blurred in the background is our executive office, which is up next:

Two desks a piece of marvelous productivity and wonderment are the least we could do to say "Thanks" to two of our 4 "founding partners."

And at last...this is my office. Featuring lime ricky (read: mint green) and "intellectual" grey walls, and a big diagonal beam, it's a nexus of creativity and inspiration. In the back there are my halo man wailing on his guitar and Superman vigilantly observing the city below.

Here they are again, along with a bottle of contact solution.

This is Andy, who sits across the hall, diligently working to keep Apple in business.

This is one of our common areas. As you can see, we're still doing a little unpacking. Please forgive the mess.

The office is pretty big, but I can't do it justice here without lots of redundant pictures and barging in to people's offices. Hopefully this has given you a good taste of the glory that is our new office space, and if you're ever in the area, feel free to stop by and check it out for yourself.

To close, here are some shots of Denver taken from our windows:

And here's that church I was raving about before:

Amazon Unbox

2006-09-07T15:01:00.000-06:00

Earlier today Amazon released Unbox, their new video download service. The service is similar to iTunes' video, and allows users to "rent" and buy videos. Movies are around $4 to "rent" and $15 for a permanent download, while tv shows are hovering around the traditional $2 iTunes price per episode.

The service offers most major channels - with the exception of Disney, every major studio seems to be well represented.

I think the download service is great and pushes the industry away from the dying model of brick-and-mortar rental at places like Blockbuster, or even red-box, but at the moment, I don't think I'll take advantage of it. For one, I don't have a good way to play them. My computer doesn't have a TV out port, and my TV doesn't have a computer-in port, so I'd have to watch the movies on my computer. Secondly, I don't have a good way to save them. I don't have a DVD burner, and even if I did, the cost of raw DVD-R disks is around $4 a piece right now, bringing your total movie purchase cost close to $20. While it's nice to get that DVD you've been wanting RIGHT NOW, most DVD's hover between $10-$15 at Target or Wal-Mart, and I don't run the risk of messing up the burning process.

Yet I think these concerns are being addressed by new hardware and won't be an issue in the next few years. I think Amazon's making the right decision to break into this market now, early, while they're still a big name in media, before someone else does, and rely on vendors like Microsoft (xbox360), Sony and Toshiba to bridge the computer-to-tv gap.

Gegereking

2006-09-06T11:59:00.000-06:00

If you couldn't guess from the title, I've found a new website worth checking out: it's called Gegerka, and it's basically google for ftp servers. For those non-technical in our audience, ftp servers are a way of sharing files on the internet that's existed as long as the internet itself. Gegerka allows you to search for any known file type, including mp3's and movie formats (.avi, .wmv, etc.) Once the files are found, a few clicks and you're downloading. So if you're too cheap to pay $1.47 for the Raconteurs on allofmp3.com, you *might* be able to find an open ftp server making it available for free.

This is, of course, ethically questionable. Some might liken it to taking things from someone else's house just because they left the front door open. I prefer to think of it as if they've left the stuff out on the curb, free to anyone who happens along and wants to take it. Except instead of taking it you make your own copy, maybe using one of those replicator things from Star Trek or something.

In other mp3 related news, here are a few other sites worth checking out (most of which I learned about through DownloadSquad):

MP3Tunes.com: provides 1gb of free space on the internet for you to store your mp3's and stream them to your computer. Upgraded accounts with more space available for more money.
SpiralFrog: free, legal, free, unlimited music downloads, but with ads.
AllPeers: a FireFox enhancement that serves peer-to-peer file transfer mechanism
TubeSock: a free utility for OSX to save and convert YouTube videos for the iPod.

5 things

2006-09-05T11:57:00.000-06:00

I am eating strawberry/banana yogurt. It's fat free, but it's not bad.
I just bought The Racontuers album for $1.47. Take that, Punnard!
I played Oblivion for 15 hours from Saturday - Sunday, with only 1 hour break in the middle for dinner. It started off fun, and seems like a good idea to just play forever, like GMack and I used to do in college. But now that we're out of college, and he's not here with me to play, I'm just an over-aged geek in his basement by himself. Before I was an underaged geek in a dorm room with his roommate.
Today is moving day at the office. We're moving up to our new offices. Maybe I'll post pictures sometime - I guess I'm allowed to bring a camera in here. Amazing!
And that's all I've got. Hope your weekend was more productive and responsible than mine.

August Tally

2006-09-01T10:35:00.000-06:00

And here's the tally for August, in no particular order, but with the names of your blogs changed in subtle mockery. EAP continued normal trends of dominance while Poetry and Scotch showed marginal growth for this past quarter and nearly kept stride. Investors were most shocked to see earnings fall drastically in the Fashion, Trends, Movies, etc. market, with only 4 posts this entire month. Finally, the bugs and glitches on this blog lead to a decrease in enthusiasm during the month of August which analysts hope will be corrected by an error free September.

Shakespeare, Yeats and Scotch-Irish Whisky: 14
Pragmaticisticalsophism: 9
Sociological Constipation: 4
StandingoutintheFreeze: 6
Anglican + Chapmodo: 1
Filosofia y Flora y Fauna: 15
Fashion, Trends, Movies, I'mgay: 4
Blue Love Plant: 9

all of mp3

2006-08-28T11:38:00.000-06:00

Attention to everyone buying music on iTunes: don't.

Several years ago, I heard about this great, can't-possibly-be-legal site named AllofMp3.com. Today I gave it a shot. My conclusion: it totally rocks. Are you sick of limewire or bittorrent? Worried about being sued by the RIAA, or wary of illegally downloading music, but still feel like $10 for a CD you don't know if you'll like is too much? Then allofmp3.com is for you.

The site is totally legal, somehow, probably due to legal oversights in the chaotic feudalism of mob-ruled modern-day Russia, but they'll sell you legal MP3's based on file size. You pick your bit rate and start downloading at prices much cheaper than iTunes. For instance, this morning I've downloaded all of the Tool songs I didn't already have (2 and a half albums) for around $8. Wonderful!!

So, check it out. And ask your momma I said how she durin:

[Video removed to try and fix stupid broken blog]

It's dumb, but it's funny. Special thanks to Mark Landry for the finding of this video.

The 8 Planet Solar System and Dell

2006-08-24T09:29:00.000-06:00

It's official, if you haven't heard yet - Pluto's out, relegated to the sub-planet class "dwarf planet" along with two other hunks of ice and rock (Ceres and "Xena", the warrior drawf planet-princess.)

The official planeteers have spoken, and the new definition for planet is officially "a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Disney has said this announcement will not in any way change it's depiction of popular cartoon character Pluto, though NEA spokesman Mark Suckerface was overheard morning saying it intends to request 2 million dollars of additional funding to properly research a replacement for the common mnemonic device "My very educated mother just showed us nine pizzas" with an appropriate 8 word update reflecting the removal of Pluto. "It just doesn't make sense anymore", said Suckerface. "Educated Mothers don't show their children nine pizzas anyway - obesity is a serious problem in today's schools." Current contending slogans are "My very enraged mercenary just shot up Ned" and "My very embarrassed mother just showed us nothing."

Pluto itself was quoted this morning as feeling slightly discouraged at having lost it's status as a real planet, but that it will apply this afternoon to change it's official name to "Pluto Rodriguez" in hopes of gaining legal status as a Hispanic American, which has some of the same benefits as being a planet, including lower admission standards to Ivy League colleges and free admission to theme parks on Benito Juarez day.

In other news, forget mixing chemicals in gatorade bottles - terrorists can just get a dell, dude. Pictures and stories have been circling the internet for months about Dell laptops and their famously exploding batteries, forcing Dell to sponsor a "too little too late" style recall on the batteries, because, you know, they really care about their customers, and all that. Apparently Australian airline Qantas was two steps ahead of Al-Qaida on this one and started requiring passengers to remove the batteries during flight, though this policy was recently lifted. Still no word on whether Dell will recall it's millions of dangerous third-word call centers, which contribute to the frustration and death, or maybe just frustration, of hundreds of Americans daily.

quick update and a recipe

2006-08-23T15:14:00.000-06:00

Well, since I haven't posted in like a week, I figured I'd follow the trend and write a few things and follow it up with a recipe.

Things are good! Work is busy, oblivion is well, and I haven't worked on any of the blog templates I'm supposed to have. Email me and harass me if you care. But it's good to have my blog back, and I ought to take advantage of it, but I need to get a lot done during the day lately. You know how it goes.

And now, on to the recipe:

Die Eier Von Satan (The eggs of Satan)

Half a cup of powdered sugar
One quarter teaspoon salt
One knifetip turkish hash
Half a pound butter
One teaspoon vanilla-sugar
Half a pound flour
150 g ground nuts
A little extra powdered sugar
...and no eggs

Place in a bowl
Add butter
Add the ground nuts and
Knead the dough

Form eyeball-size pieces from the dough
Roll in the powdered sugar
And say the magic words:
sim sala bim bamba sala do saladim

Place on a greased baking pan and
Bake at 200 degrees for 15 minutes
...and no eggs

Bake at 200 degrees for 15 minutes
...and no eggs.

Please tell me if anyone tries this - I'd like to know if it's as good for you as it was for us.

Art and Technology

2006-08-17T10:21:00.000-06:00

I apologize if this post doesn't get up for a while....stupid Blogger sent my blog back to July 7th, and isn't playing nice.

Wired has an article out this morning stating that new digital media isn't art. The author, one Tony Long, makes the point that his darkroom had more character and creativity involved than computers, and that today's world of graphic art lacks the artistic element "real" analog photography provided. To get specific, he says that people using digital cameras, storing tons of pictures on their ram sticks and editing these in photoshop to throw up on Flickr or Picassa, simply aren't artists the way he was in his darkroom.

Firstly, this is a bad argument - he'd been more justified to lament the casual photographer who shoots using a disposable camera and has the film developed by Wal-Mart. But regardless of his misleading circumstance, Long is attempting to make the case that Digital Art isn't art simply because it's digital - it requires analog tools and hours of frustration to make art, and the ease provided by today's technology destroys that process.

Secondly, this is absolute garbage. It mirrors a conversation J. Morgan and I have had a number of times, where he wonders whether crafts like art or medicine or war were more pure before technology made them so easy, and I feverntly disagree. Here's why:

Raphael, DaVinci, or any master of the pre-modern age might have said the same thing about the invention of photography - that real painting took more work, more struggle, had more personality, etc., than lugging around a bunch of metal and glass plates and trying to get people to stand perfectly still, not to mention the fact that painters had color. And don't forget how Socrates lamented the invention of books and accessibility of writing, feeling that reading was a useless advancement that would promote ignorance while old-fashioned memorization was clearly the superior route to knowledge.

New, mobile, efficient technology, be it books or photographs or wikipedia, always seems to have less personality than the old medium, especially to those intimately acquainted with it, precisely because "personality" is an experience created over long hours of struggle. What Long really misses isn't so much the process of developing a photo itself as the work and self-discovery that went along with perfecting his craft. This isn't contained or constrained by your medium.

Philosophers across the ages have tried diligently to define what art is. Princeton calls it " the creation of beautiful or significant things," and that's good enough for me. What analog artists miss in the digital era isn't art - it's validation for the effort and suffering that their art cost them. It's a feeling that your efforts were wasted, or made less significant by the advances of young cyber punks and their fancy computing machines. But that's not art - at best it's nostalgia; at worst it's pure jealousy.

I wonder if Tony Long has ever tried using Photoshop to paint a digital master piece.
I certainly have, and I'm here to tell you it's ridiculously hard. I've always had a small degree of artistic talent - on a scale of 1-10, I'm maybe a 6.5. I've sat in front of my computer for hours with photoshop or fireworks or illustrator open trying to design a great website, do a great flash mock up, and my results are decent but not great - the program simply won't create art for me. It still takes a great artistic mind and the innate creativity art has always required to produce really beautiful things. If anything, technology like this seems to make art MORE pure - the artist is free from the technical difficulties of finding and mixing paints or playing chemist in his darkroom, and the only struggle left to wrestle with is the most important one: that of translating vision or inspiration into a communicable form, be it physical, digital, auditory, etc.

This painting, called "Houses" by Jennifer Bricking,
was actually done in Photoshop.

Technology, be it digital or analog, does not have the innate ability to create or destroy anything - it's the way we use our tools that have always defined the value of our products. Stephen Wolfram is not any less of a mathematical genius than Sir Isaac Newton, nor is Stephen Hawking so different from Albert Einstein nor Stephen J. Gould much less than Darwin. There's nothing wrong with whimsically looking back to simpler times and reveling in the memories of your analog tools - just don't mistake your own experience for the truth about the digital age, and certainly don't assume every tourist with a digital camera thinks of themself as an artist any more than your Mom did with her $5 disposable.

How to save a Pipe (hint: juicy fruit)

2006-08-15T22:13:00.000-06:00

Recently I bought a pipe on eBay. It's a good pipe - a cool pipe. The kind of pipe not many people have, that you like to carry around because it's big and fun and looks weird and has that "I'm cool because I smoke something esoteric" vibe about it - sort of like the hooka before every high-schooler and their moms started smoking them (heyo!) It came in the mail a few weeks ago and I've been dying to try it. Here's the picture I bought it from on eBay:

my pipe, posed all sexy like against a faux-stucco wall

I found out from the not-very-friendly man working in the tobacco shop on 16th street that this pipe is actually called a "wine pipe", because the farmers used to put wine into that secondary small compartment on the bottom. This flavored and cooled the otherwise dry and harsh tobacco and made for a more pleasant smoking experience, sort of like a hooka you could carry around without you without having to worry about spilling it, or attracting a bunch of high-schoolers and their moms.

But the pipe doesn't make me cool. Not just because I'm a big nerd, not (just) because my next purchase on eBay will probably be a nintendo power glove. Not because I only know about this pipe because my brother's best friend has one, and not because the depths of my geekiness are beyond the redemption offered by so simple a tobaccania.
The pipe doesn't make me cool because the pipe is broken.
The beautiful birch stem is cracked, right down along it, and trying to smoke it is like trying to...um...breath through a straw that has holes in it.
A straw attached to a bowl full of burning tobacco, to be exact.

I should mention that I wasn't screwed - the listing said that the stem was cracked, but it made it sound like it wasn't such a big crack, and that the pipe was still smokable, which it might be if you've got the lung capacity of a good year blimp and the sucking power of a hoover sport utility z. What can I say - I was desperate for a cool smoking thing. You understand.

I know, right?

The solution has been to cover the crack in chewing gum (it wasn't actually juicy fruit - that was just a hint. It was orbit wintergreen or something like that.) I then wrapped a layer of toilet paper around the stem of the pipe, so as not to contaminate the birch wood, or something, and wrapped the whole thing in electrical tape. What's left is a pipe that looks exactly like the one above, except that the stem is now black and sort of plasticky looking. I'd show you a picture, but I don't have one - I probably should've documented the entire process, like a good blogger, but I didn't so I guess you'll just have to imagine it.

This pipe will probably smoke wonderfully - a preliminary ~~sucking~~ ~~toking~~ drawing on the pipe reveals that no excess air is getting in, so we should be good to go. I think all this goes to prove is that the gods of the pipe world won't let a nerd like me smoke a good vintage German pipe without making sure it's been thoroughly defiled and nerdified first. Maybe I'll call it Darth Pipage - more tape than birch now, twisted and evil.

But, regardless, I have a plan to get them back: just tonight, with the help of my minion, we purchased another pipe on eBay of the same sort. This way we're sure to have two whenever you come over to visit, whoever you may be, and we can both share in the great pipe smoking experience without having to pass the pipage betwixt us.

Sweet sidekick of smoking superbity!

So come on over, and we'll give it a try. But bring some gum, just in case.

And now for something so unrelated I can't possibly understand why I'm putting it in the same post: check out this cool reading speed tester thing called "Zap Reader!" I just read EAP's last post at an ambitious 675 wpm, and I have to confess it didn't make much sense that way. It was better (but less fun) around 500, but anyway try it out. Try it with something like the dictionary, or a phone book maybe, or a long entry in Wikipedia, or the morning news, or whatever. I don't even care. Just try it. All your friends, and everyone cool, are definitely doing it.
And smoking wine.

niche music and pandora

2006-08-11T17:14:00.000-06:00

As I pointed ou t a few irrelevant posts ago, the recent rise in web-based technology and broadband connections is leading to a niche focused entertainment model in America - the blockbuster is dead, and entertainment providers must drastically change their business models to fit the new niche-focused approach the web requires.

This afternoon I found an amazing free music player online that's following this trend and sure to be huge very soon. It's called Pandora, and the idea is simple: you provide the name of a few bands or songs that you like, and they create a free internet radio station playing songs you'll probably like. The people at Pandora have spent what seems to be quite a bit of energy cataloging and categorizing every song in their database, claiming to have recognized "hundreds" of attributes on each of the bands I entered. The pandora player comes in two varieties: a free player, which displays ads on the website, but doesn't make me listen to them, which is a lot more than I can say for other free players (that's right, AOL), and a paid subscription service which kills the ads and lets you skip as many songs as you like.

The business model is perfect: Pandora asks users to tell them if you like the songs as they play them, and this serves two purposes. First, it gives them some information to pick your next song from, and second, it provides them with a little free market research. They provide the service for free or at a small fee, and clicking on the songs gives you the option to head over to Amazon and purchase the album. In short, everyone wins.

The effects this could have on the music industry are huge. If a musician can get his or her music onto Pandora, they'll become instantly accessible, and through sales on Amazon, instantly profitable. If Pandora keeps the submission process open, this could be an excellent legal solution to the current music-pirating problem, and spell the middle of the end for the bloated corporate hacks at music labels and in the RIAA who we all know and hate so very much.

Music currently exists in two (legal) forms: for free on the radio, with ads, or for a price on your CD. So far the exclusion of niche marketing and ipod accessibility has crippled internet radio, but with the growing momentum behind wireless browsers, it might not be long at all before free services like pandora can make their way onto your mobile device. I think the radio/ownership dichotomy is here to stay, and hopefully services like Pandora can successfully implement the radio model without frustrating or restricting their users.

desktop two

2006-08-08T17:50:00.000-06:00

Speaking of interesting web apps, I stumbled upon something really sweet this afternoon called DesktopTwo. The application operates within flash as a sort of online computer desktop, complete with all of the tools and programs you'd ever want. The company gives you 1 gb of online storage, and then makes the desktop useful by giving you a blog, email address, and im name, all tied in and integrated with your virtual desktop. I was surprised by how easy it was to set up - I got my blog, email and im in about 5 minutes. They also let you use the 1 gb of storage space to host a website. I didn't do that, but it'd be cool.

I uploaded a few files and got the mp3 player running after about 10 minutes....the hardest part was figuring out how to get songs onto the playlist. Once I did, it worked perfectly.

So, all in all, this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. I don't have much use for it and probably won't be using it on a daily basis, but still, you gotta admit, it's pretty slick.

In other computer-esque news, the blogger formally known as Grey Drifter noticed today that Apple has released the specifications for their new desktop, known as the Mac Pro. The base version starts at $2,500 with pretty amazing specifications, but it can be ramped up to a $12k super-computer that rivals the processing power and storage capabilities of NASA and probably has all sorts of export restrictions. Pretty sweet.

rough underbelly

2006-08-08T11:11:00.000-06:00

Every find yourself thinking, "If I could just manage my life to the most minute detail, I'd finally be whole as a person"? Me neither, but I think Charles has, and if ever you do, we've got a wild new Ajax application for you.

Continuing the trend of things online named after totally unrelated things in reality, it's called Rough Und erbelly, and it's a beautiful little application that lets you lay out your to do list in terms of time and priority, and then click off your results when you're finished. Your points are tallied automatically, and then you can view graphs of your performance to know when you are and aren't measuring up.

I like the idea behind these sorts of things - help people find their priorities, keep them on task, etc. But there seems to be one major flaw in the premise, and it goes something like this: if I'm too lazy to stay on task anyway, what makes you think I'm going to be disciplined enough to get online and regularly publish my lazy progress?

Anyway, it's a good idea, and a really pretty internet application. I might play around with it a little bit later, but probably not. If you do, please come back and comment on why you use it and how much you like it.

On a totally different note, I stumbled upon this very disturbing picture earlier today. It shows someone who looks frighteningly like my little brother dressed frighteningly like my little brother, if he'd gained about 20 pounds and owned a power glove. Check it out:

Guess where he's hiding the console all that crap's plugged into?

Getting back is hard to do

2006-08-07T11:21:00.000-06:00

An un-eventful 4 hour plane flight brought us home yesterday, where everything is fine. The flight was good and easy, though I'm always a little irritated and claustrophobic at so many antsy people in small spaces, some of whom are extremely stupid. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

I spent the flight reading half of "A Scanner Darkly" by Phillip Dick. Although the recipient of an unfortunate appellation (gmack: name), Dick is the novelist who died in 1982 after writing the stories that Blade Runner and Minority Report were both based on, and came highly recommended to me by EAP, so I picked it up. It was good - sort of a "futuristic" psychedelic thriller. The movie uses some new technique whereby the actors were retraced to look animated and hasn't made a huge splash in the box office, as far as I know. I plan on seeing it. I haven't watched this yet, but the first 20 minutes are available online (legally) here.

The weather in Denver yesterday was amazing. We left the upper 90's heat of the east coast and returned to a mild-yet-sunny 77 here in Denver. It also rained last night, which helped cool things off even more.

Now for some substance: it was hard leaving VA. I had an amazingly wonderful time with all of you who went, and I wish we lived closer and could share in each others lives more directly and regularly. The further I get away from College, the less I remember how stressful the work was, and the more I miss living IN community with some of the most wonderful and brilliant people I've ever met. Coming home from vacation always sucks, but last night I was struck with that slight feeling of emptiness that accompanies leaving your friends behind.

To top that off, we watched a few episodes of Friends before bed, and just happened to hit the one where Rachel and Ross break up. I can't even believe I just wrote/am writing this, but I was in a vulnerable place already, and forgetting how scripted the circumstances were, it was tough to watch Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer pretend to be so hurt and upset with each other. I'm better now, but it was kind of a depressing end to yesterday.

I'll leave the trip recap to someone else - hopefully EAP, who has all of the pictures - so that the 2.5 of you who couldn't come and want to hear about it can. Our plan is send a big group picture of us into Grove City's alumni magazine - the GeDunk - and get it printed in the next issue after carefully photoshopping in either Chuck Norris or Kevin Sorbo, or maybe both. I'll let you know how it goes once EAP gets me the picture, and probably petition some help in finding good norris/sorbo images. :)

July Tally - updated!

2006-07-31T20:56:00.000-06:00

Well, unless you post in the next hour or so (update: and some of you did), July posting is officially closed, and here are the tallies, in the not particular order you appear on my google homepage:

Poetry and Scotch: 15
Pragmaticism: 10
Sociological Imagination: 5
StandingOutInTheCold: 10
Filosofia y Flores: 11 12
Fashion, Trends, Movies, Etc.: 15 16
RedHurtMachine: 19 (20 if you count this post, which I don't.)
InsideOut: 3
Angels on the Sideline: 2
Anglican Calvinist: 1

So, for the first time ever, I've taken the lead, and Jacks (update:almost) managed to tie GMack for second place. I credit my new job and several rather short posts, and would like to thank my mother and the academy.

Tomorrow will be a day of sunburned golfing - pray for my scorched skin - and then we're off to NOVA to see most of our favorite friends on Wednesday. Sweet.

Lack of Recognition

2006-07-31T14:21:00.000-06:00

Hilarious video of Microsoft trying to demo the new voice recognition "features" of Windows Vista. Bet they'll think twice before letting cameras in on new technology once this makes its route around the web.

Google Reader

2006-07-31T11:52:00.000-06:00

The great folks at google have done it again - taken a product already widely available on the web and made it even better, giving it that google twist I know, trust and love. This time it's google reader, a web-based Ajax blog reader that subscribes to feeds and manages your news as if it were email.

I've used a number of these products before, and I haven't liked any as much as this google reader. Firstly, it's because I'm a shameless google fanboy, but secondly because it simply works better. Up until now, I've been using the google homepage, but that only gives the titles of new posts. I've also tried using the integrated feed support in Mozilla's email application, Thunderbird, but thunderbird isn't always available, and it's formatting for things like graphics and embedded content is sketchy at best.

I don't know how long Google reader's been out, but now that I've subscribed to the official google blog, I'll probably know right away next time. And that is a wonderful thing.

In other news, it continues to shock me that "google" is not a recognized word by Blogger's spell checker.

Beach day 1

2006-07-30T15:14:00.000-06:00

This morning we packed up and headed to the beach. It was pretty nice. The water felt extremely cool in the morning, but by the afternoon it was so hot outside that we didn't mind it one bit. The waves were good, the wild life scarce, and the sand fun. It reminds me of Virginia beach, where we were just about a year ago, which makes sense since we're just a few hundred miles up the coast. The only thing I might possibly complain about, if I were the type of person who complained about things, is the sun, and my inability to properly apply sunscreen, which as left my left tricep scorched, face slightly pinkened, and lower back somewhat red. I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying not to flex my tricep, lest the taut burned skin burst under the pressure of my massive muscles. Or something.

Pictures? Why would I have pictures?

Welcome to Rhode Island. It's only muggy if you're from Colorado.

2006-07-29T21:17:00.000-06:00

Well, we arrived happy and healthy in the warm and humid state of Rhode Island this afternoon without any major travel events. Tomorrow we're heading to the beach with three boogie boards and the threat of man-of-war (man-o-war? manowar? manos, the warring hands of fate?) jellyfish attacks, which apparently have been quite high lately and had this same beach closed earlier this month. Luckily for all of us, there's plenty of beer, which quickly leads to everyone's favorite household remedy for jellyfish bites/stings/strangle marks.

I'm stealing wireless from someone named "linksys" down the street right now, and I don't know if I'll have it before we make our way down to Baltimore/DC later this week (Wednesday, for those of you keeping track at home.) There we'll be staying at the Charlie Pierce hotel, along with Jackscolon, Mair, and the illustrious J. Morgan Caler, I think. That'll be nice and cozy, but I'm planning to steer clear of j. morg in the mornings before breakfast. So, the point of this paragraph is that if I don't find a free network before then, get those late July posts up for our tally later this week.