JesseDyer

Devo Dad - How Sitcoms have destroyed the Father

2011-12-07T10:20:00.001-08:00

Over the years, I find myself less and less willing to watch television sitcoms.

Sure, in part, it's because the the descent from high comedy to low comedy, the condescension of the writers, and the complete disconnect between the values and lifestyle depicted versus my own. We just don't really click any more.

However, there's one particular aspect of the usual sitcom that, above all other things, has disgusted me, and convinced me to turn them off. That aspect is the depiction of the father, and how it has descended.

Look at Leave it to Beaver. Dad, in this incarnation, is a figure of wisdom, morality, discipline, and respect. When the Beav and Wally are caught in a moral dilemma, they turn to Dad. (OK, sometimes Mom, but that's a different post.) When they want an authority, either in knowledge or ethics, they turn to Dad. And when they do wrong, they see swift and terrible consequences. From Dad.

June respects Ward, and tolerates zero disrespect for Dad. This isn't because she's afraid of him; far from it. She simply knows the quality of the man she has, and displays her faith in him.

It's funny; I know Dad's name in this show is Ward Cleaver, but I can't bring myself to call him that. He's quintessentially Dad, and that's how I think of him.

Then we get all the way up to the 80s and run across Heathcliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show. Again, Dad is still something of an authority. However, we begin to see the warts.

Heathcliff lacks willpower; we see it in his inability to refrain from buying gadgets. He lacks confidence; we see it in his ever abused ego and the over the top shenanigans he gets into in order to compensate.

He is still a leader, however he too often abrogates this role, turning the really heavy moral lifting over to his wife.

Heathcliff's relationship with Claire is really where he falls apart. He is weak, in that he too often plays th whipped dog in speaking to her. He averts his eyes, lowers his head, and turns from her in their confrontations. This isn't because he lacks the will, but because in these situations, he's wrong, and she's had to point it out to him, or because he finds it easier to surrender rather than to lead.

She senses this weakness, and it shows in the way that she speaks about him. She has some modicum of respect for him, but there's still a layer of contempt there, as if she's simply raising another, larger son. Sound familiar?

Cliff's a good guy, but we begin to see chipping around the edges. He's not perfect, but then, none of us are. My problem is that these problems are the elephant in the living room; he sees his own faults, but makes no move to correct them.

Come about 1987, however, the brakes come off, and we get stuck with Al Bundy from Married.. with Children. Husbands everywhere breathed a great sigh of relief; instead of having a role model to make them feel smaller, they were given an anti-hero to feel bigger than.

Al is over the top nasty. He's amoral, slovenly, petty, licentious, and you wouldn't want to leave your kids alone with him.

At this point, any attempt to paint a father as a figure of respect is gone, but because he's so over the top, you tend to think of him as a caricature rather than a depiction. He's not a real dad, he's anti-dad. So it's okay, they're not really mocking dads. Right?

Well, yes, and you can see the results in Everybody Loves Raymond. This isn't meant to be a caricature; Ray is supposed to be something of an everyman. You see this by the way sympathy is evoked in the difficulty in his relationship with his parents.

Ray is no kind of father. We can't even see his relationship with his children, since in most episodes, you don't even see them. This reflects an interesting attitude towards parenting; children are yet another job (you don't see him at work much, either) to be dismissed whenever possible.

This lack of parenting might be a good thing; Ray himself is childish to the point of petulance, dishonest to a fault, and requiring the care of two mothers; his mom and his wife. Debra has no respect for him at all, and he deserves none.

Is this what the modern father has become? Is this what we wish him to be?

It keeps getting worse. I can't even bring myself to discuss Family Guy. Homer Simpson comes to mind as well. I can't think of a single strong father role in modern sitcoms.

Now that I am a father, I find myself regularly offended by the depiction of my role as not only contemptible, but meaningless.

Our culture chooses all the wrong targets for their outrage. We carefully monitor against slights against gays, minorities, illegal immigrants, while we sit every night and watch the things that matter most to us being denigrated and reviled, more so than the worst criminal.

I don't know. If we as fathers are so simple as to fail to see how we are being depicted, maybe the image is true. I doubt it, though. I know a lot of very good dads. However, I will say that should we fail to counter, or even discuss this trend, then eventually we will deserve the stereotype, we will become the subject of this terrible humor.

Our sons are watching, too. And they may not get the joke.

Dear You, ( a family form letter)

2011-09-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

Hi, it's me again.
You haven't been seeing much of me lately, and so I offer you my apology for that. I'm sorry!

But why?

I've been in a fugue for the last two years.

See, I get migraine headaches. When I was in my teens, I had them constantly; doc said that I'd grow out of them. And I did. But a couple years ago, they came back.

I've been withdrawn, depressed, angry, sullen, lazy, and pretty much every other negative emotion you can come up with. I've missed opportunities both professional and personal, and I've stagnated.

But I'm back now! I found a doc who has found a way to make me better, thank God. I'm a whole and complete human being again, and I'm looking forward to reconnecting with you, if you'll let me.

I need you to help keep me accountable for a few things I've let slip:

I will be a better father
I will exhibit joy over anger, as I have so much in my life
I will lose weight and get healthier
I will continue to learn and to grow.

Thanks so much for still being there.

-jess

Vim - Zero to Hero

2011-09-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

"God gave us Vim to train the faithful. One must not go against the word of God.." - Anonymous Fremen Developer

Wow, so my blog's still here? Neat! Like in that movie you've memorized, I'm not dead. I'm getting better. I'll talk about that later. Right now, I want to talk about Vim.

I really want to thank whoever it was (Google fails me) who said that you should master one text editor. It made sense to me, so I considered which to use.
"Hmm," said I, sezzee, "it has to be free, because I'm cheap. It has to be cross platform, because I use at least three OS's daily. It has to be command line, because OpenSSH is the gift God gave all IT people for their faith through the dark days of DOS. It's either going to be emacs or vim."

So it was either emacs or vim. Every time I diddle a file on a remote machine, I fire vim. Vim it is.

I am so glad I decided to learn more.

See, the ability to manipulate a text field in as quickly and flexibly as possible is the difference between tedium and artwork. Your editor is an extension of your hand, which in turn is an extension of your mind; the more layers of hindrance and abstraction you put there, the more your work suffers.

I'm going to tell you about some things I love most about Vim. Well, I'm going to tell myself, and if someone else happens to read this and get something out of it, that's good, too.

1) Digraphs
You ever need to type a ©, ®, £, ¢, ⅳ, or a ぉ? Well when you do, you need it now. Each OS has bad to terrible ways to go about this (I'm looking at you, Microsoft), but in vim, there's one easy way, and it's called a digraph.

For example, for a © symbol, while in an edit mode (press i, dang it), press Ctrl-k, then C, then o. You get a ©. (Co, short for Copyright. Easy, right? Not A9, 00169, &#0169, etc..) Want to know the value for some other symbol? In command mode (hit escape, dang it) enter :digraph for a list.

2) Splits
I do more than one thing at a time. So should my editor. :split for a horizontal split, :vsplit for a vertical split, Control-w/ControlW to move back and forth, and :close to remove a split. If you're familiar with gnu screen (and you should be), this is cake.

3) Shell and Ranges
This is where I really started hearing angelic choirs. Let's say you've got text that looks like this:

1 You will need :
2 6) Onions
3 4) Peppers
4 3) Garlic
5 1) Soup
6 2) Kettles
7 .. in order to prepare some foodish thing..

.. and you want to sort lines 2 through 6, but not 1 or 7. Yes, there's a lot of ways to do it, but here's the fastest I've ever seen:
Press :
Type 2,6 ! sort -n
Press enter.
Poof.
2,6 was the range of lines in which you wanted a shell command (!), specifically sort, to operate in. Vim passed the range out to sort, and wrote back what it got.

This means that you can extend your text editor with any script you care to write that accepts standard in. Which means it can do anything, like Zombo.com, only for real.

That also means you can suck values right out of shell, like this : r ! random_script.py

4) Macros

Yum. Before you do macros, learn markers:
Press m, then any alpha, to mark a position.
Press ~, then that same letter, to move your cursor back to that spot.

Now the macro:
Press q, then any alpha.
Do something repetitive.
Type q
Now type @, then the alpha, to do it again. Better, do 99 @ letter to do it 99 times. Macros are, blessedly, nesting. Wanna comment a section of code in a language that doesn't accept multi line comments (there are some)? Easy...

5) Regex

If techs are magicians, then regular expressions are the bastardized latin their spells are cast in. Unless you are down tight with grammars (and I acknowledge your superiority if you do, sempai; teach me), they are the most powerful way to manipulate strings in the universe. And Vim uses them easily.

:%s/regex/replace/g
And yes, that will accept a range:

:2,6 s/\)/:/

.. OK, that's all for now, but heaven help us, it's enough. Although I see I haven't even mentioned visual mode, or file management (:Ex), or a thousand other things that my trip through studying Vim has yielded. Know something I didn't mention? Learn something? Comment!

Looking up to my children

2011-04-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

The most intimidating concept about being a father is that your children are going to use you as the standard by which they measure the world as well as themselves. If that doesn't frighten you, you're either a narcissist, or under appreciating the enormity of that idea.

Our children emulate us, warts and all. If us fathers are angry, stubborn, disrespectful of their mothers, they see that, and behave similarly.

Of course, I knew that coming into it. What I didn't know was that I'd find my children to be people that I look up to, and see things about them that I want to emulate.

Take, for example, my oldest son, David. He's six years old. He is also, as Topham Hat in Thomas the Tank Engine would say, a "very useful engine". If you don't get the reference, what I mean is that he is a very helpful child. My wife and I use him for all the little jobs around the house, and he never complains. He likes being helpful, likes doing for us, and his selflessness is a trait I never picked up, but am striving to learn.

Or look at my second son, Jonah. He has a strong sense of empathy, and whiles he's struggling with all the internal drama of being three, he's sensitive, caring, and giving. He shares without being asked, and never fails to notice if someone is down or hurt, and tries to help them feel better. I am far too detached from the people around me, and it's Jonah who teaches me to reconnect.

My daughter Audrey teaches me about innocence. I was robbed of my own at a very early age in an event I don't care to discuss in this post, and I always thought that getting that view of the world back was impossible. Audrey is teaching me otherwise as she shares her view of the world with me.

The child I look up to the most, however, is my eight month old son, Benjamin. He is the most joyful person I have ever known. He always has a smile on his face, is always happy to see every person he meets, is always quick to laugh. Even when he's crying, which isn't often for a baby, you can see him still trying to smile. I am a dour person by nature, but thinking about Ben always puts a grin on my face. That joyful little boy reminds me of how it is that I should be behaving.

My children truly are a gift from God, and I thank Him so much for five new lives; theirs, and the new life which they have given to me.

Yoda was wrong. It's OK to be humble.

2011-02-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

Yoda said, "Do, or do not. There is no try."

Yoda must have been born innately able to juggle, perform brain surgery, and fly an airplane. The 'just do it' mindset of the statement does not allow for humility, and while that gung ho spirit works for jedi and marines, the rest of us have shades of meaning needed to describe our level of aptitude.

This stems from some discussion on Twitter about describing one's self as an "aspiring" writer, versus just claiming to be a writer.

The tide seems to favor eliminating the word aspiring, on the basis that if you write, you're a writer. There is an excellently written post on the subject here.

While I find the concept motivating, I don't happen to agree. As wise people once said, if the cat has kittens in the oven, that don't make 'em biscuits.

Describing yourself as an aspiring writer displays a sense of humility; to whit, it's a way of saying that while you feel compelled to string words together into pleasing constructions, you don't feel you've mastered the knack quite yet. It's a way of admitting to a need for polish, practice, and training, and prevents folk from asking to inflict your untried works on themselves just yet, or at least when they do, cushions the blow of the inevitable constructive criticism.

On the other hand, to just come out and say, "I'm a writer" poses many questions on the opposite side of the verbal fence. Using the word "writer" denotes a profession, and if your words aren't paying your bills, the person you're talking to has a certain acceptable amount of incredulity towards your claims.

While I might fulfill your definition of writer, that doesn't mean I meet my own success criteria. If everything I've written up to now isn't good to me, but I still feel driven to write, 'aspiring' is an apt description, and correcting me in my claim is incorrect.

Working Late

2011-01-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

In case you don't know me, my wife is a stay at home mom. We have four children, and we home school. When quitting time comes, I try to get home and spell out my wife; she could use an adult around by then, as you can imagine. Our kids are 6, 3, 2, and 5 months old.

So, working in software development, late hours are something of a given. Whenever seventeen hundred rolls around, and I see that more time is needed, the internal dialogue sounds a little something like this:

Me: Oh, man, this is only three quarters done. I need it done by tomorrow.

AlsoMe: How long is it going to take to get finished?

Me: If I hustle, maybe another two hours. More like three.

AlsoMe: Two hours? THREE hours? You're gonna kill dinner, bedtime? Dishes by herself?

Me: I hear dinner time on the unemployment line is pretty unappealing. You wanna try that?

AlsoMe: Oh, be serious. You're not cutting it close because you've messed things up, you're cutting it close because you're given unrealistic deadlines.

Me: This again? Like it matters? There's no shortage of people who'd love a turn at making unrealistic deadlines right now, who'd work cheaper than you to boot, if you can't cut it. One person in every ten needs a job. How safe is yours?

AlsoMe: So put in an hour and a half, get home, finish in the morning.

Me: Yeah, ok, sure. After morning meeting, escalations, the usual "gotta minute" hour from all comers, and whatever the next project is, you're pushing into the next deadline. That's wise.

AlsoMe: You're leaving her alone in this, you realize that? Those are your kids, too.

Me: Yes, yes they are. And when I get home too late to have talked to them, hugged them, played with them, is she the one hurt by that, or am I? If I can't hold up my end of this arrangement during a global recession, will it have mattered if the house was clean while we're all on the street? I know she's tired, I know I've got the less physically demanding part of the job, and I can't help that. On the other hand, I've got the fear.

What fear?

Don't you hear it?

Now here's the interesting thing about this post, just before I submit it. I ran this by the missus, and she said, "It sounds as if you think I'm going to let you have it when you get home."

Actually, I don't. It's not even implied. I was sincerely looking at her plight, and looking toward trying to relieve her. So I don't have that problem.

She also said, "If you publish that, you might make a lot of women think you're asking them to back off of their husbands."

I know several men in this same position. Men fighting a war of attrition against their own fears, working in a youth worshiping IT sector, trying to hold the line against the front and rear, all the while taking both barrels when they walk in the door giving a day of overtime for which they receive not a penny of extra pay or even thanks.

So in this regard, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Katharina - The Taming of the Shrew - Act V, Scene II

Starting two novels

2010-12-26T18:39:00.000-08:00

Hello again!

I'm starting two novels.

One is a science fiction idea, the other is general fiction.

I love both ideas, and I'm not saying much about them yet, but committing myself here to help get me started. The more people you tell that you're writing, the less likely you are to just stop writing, so here I am.

Just Wow.

2010-12-12T09:25:00.000-08:00

Twelve Days of Testing

2010-12-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

On the 1st day of testing, my test case it gave to me; an unreproducible bug

On the 2nd day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 3nd day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 4th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 5th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 6th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 7th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Seven info leaks

Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 8th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Eight boundary errors

Seven info leaks

Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 9th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Nine code injections

Eight boundary errors

Seven info leaks

Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 10th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Ten type mismatches

Nine code injections

Eight boundary errors

Seven info leaks

Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 11th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Eleven syntax errors

Ten type mismatches

Nine code injections

Eight boundary errors

Seven info leaks

Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

On the 12th day of testing, my test case it gave to me; Twelve buffers dumping

Eleven syntax errors

Ten type mismatches Nine code injections

Nine code injections

Eight boundary errors

Seven info leaks

Six race conditions

FIVE MEMORY LEAKS!

Four missing files

Three crashes

Two blue screens

And an unreproducible bug

Merry Testing, Charlie Brown!

Don't do it, kid; life's worth living!

2010-11-30T18:36:00.000-08:00

The wife showed me this commercial, and asked; what's the first thing that pops into your head?

"That kid's going to jump out the window!"

I'm not dead..

2010-11-29T17:18:00.001-08:00

.. despite my prolonged absence from.. well, life, really.

I've not been posting to message boards I usually frequent, I've not been writing, studying, living.

Why?

Well, lessee. It started with the admission that I suffer from depression. "Yeah," says those of you that know me, "like we didn't know." So after quite a bit of prayer, discussion, and thought, I came to realize that the cause wasn't a problem I could fix, and was probably chemical. So I asked for medical treatment. I was given a prescription for Prozac.

Then I started getting migraine headaches every single day.

My life for the past two months has been a kind of living death, and that's not my analogy. While laying in bed one afternoon, my six year old told my middle son that it sounded like "there's a zombie in the bedroom." He also said "I wish Daddy would be a Dad again."

I've been weaning myself off of Prozac. I think (hope) that the frequency of headaches is lessening. I feel more myself than I have in quite a while anyway.

David and I played chess tonight, Jonah and I played checkers. I had some ideas for short fiction, I'm writing this, so I must be getting back to myself.

I've missed humanity. It's nice to be back. As I told Cindy the other day, I may have some small idea of what Lazarus may have felt like.

Pill

2010-10-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

Another Repost

Preface

This is a short story.

This is quite possibly the darkest thing I've ever written.

It came to me, fully formed, in a dream last night, and as harsh as it was, I had to write it.

I won't say that I hope you enjoy it; I certainly didn't. But I do hope you'll take a moment and hold someone close to you.

Pill

For to love, loveless, is a bitter pill:
But to be loved, unloving, bitterer still.
- Jan Struther, The Choice

Drudgery mode.
You fill out Form A, which gives you the information you need to complete for B, which is a rider of Form C, which will ultimately require you to fill out dozens of Form A.
My hands and eyes are on automatic pilot; if you put a gun to my head, I'd never be able to tell you what I was writing.
My eyes strayed to the framed picture on my desk of my wife and two sons, smiling happily at me. I'd taken the picture while they'd been horsing around on the carpet of our living room. The sun shined brightly into the room, illuminating my wife's hair, and the boys eyes. I could still feel that moment in time, could still smell the room, feel the carpet beneath my knees and the camera in my hands. If I tried hard enough, I could make that image move, hear and see that moment as if I were there. If only..
As it was, drudgery mode.

I looked up at the clock. The hands moved altogether too slowly, keeping me here with their ponderous refusal to advance. I sighed and reached for my water bottle, taking a slug to ease my dry throat.
My throat caught, just slightly, as I drank, feeling as if something had caught sideways for a brief moment. I swallowed another gulp of water, and the feeling passed. Strange, the sense of deja vu that brought about, but I ignored it.

Time passed; the words on the pages ran together, and my eyes felt tired. I looked up at the clock.
The hands were gone.
I rubbed my eyes, and looked again. The clock was handless, its face a moronic expression of uncertainty with it's tiny center post useless. It seemed to be a long oval rather than the round circle I was used to staring at.
I thought perhaps my glasses were blurry, but I wasn't wearing them.
Odd, since filling out these forms was difficult for me without them, but I had no memory of difficulty. I began scanning about the desk, looking for the glasses.
The desk was empty, but for the framed photo.
Without the glasses, I shouldn't have been able to see that the light behind them had gone out; that they were no longer smiling, and that they reached out for me, desperate.
The frame began to deform, running like Dali, like candy in the Sahara. I felt afraid, clutching my pen, as the walls began to shift and fade.

The room in which I sat was an office, but it wasn't mine.
My office never had a large mahogany desk, nor had I ever seen the man leaning on it. My office never had a couch.
I sat on the floor, cross legged, pen still in hand. I looked down and saw sheets of paper; the forms. I picked them up and tried to hold them out so that I could read them, but they were covered with senseless loops and whorls, ending in jagged lines like lightening.
The man started speaking to me, saying things. Soft things, at first, pleasantries. Then, harsh things, sounds I didn't, couldn't hear.

Again, I am sitting.
The pill bottle sits before me, on the kitchen table. I'm staring at it, waiting. Waiting for the room to change.
The room is my dining room, which adjoins the living room. Both are dark, filthy. The living room is filled with soiled laundry and disposable food containers; the mess forming something that looks like an ape's sleeping nest. Somehow I think the allegory isn't far off.
The kitchen is a horror I couldn't contemplate for very long. I can't imagine how my wife would react to the incredible mess; she never would have stood for such a thing.
The bedrooms, other than a layer of dust, are pristine. I couldn't look at those either, for similar reasons.
I sat and waited.
I slept.

I awoke to the feeling of small hands, tugging at my shoulder. I sit up, and see my oldest son, smiling at me, asking me to come and play with him.
I can't smile back, but I try.
I call out to her, and she comes, holding the little one, looking at me with concern.
I ask her to sit, and seat my son beside me.
"I hoped you would come," I say, "because there was something I never got to do. I never had the chance to do it after the.." My throat closes, strangling for a moment, like something had caught sideways for a brief moment, but I force the word out: "..accident. I left for work that day without so much as a touch of your hand, I was so caught up with.." Images of loops and whorls, handless clocks rush through my mind.
"Anyway," I say, standing, coming around to her side of the table, "I never had a chance to.." I lean down, enfolding her into my arms. "To.. say goodbye"
I smell her hair, feel the warmth of her cheek against mine. I rise, looking at her. I have no idea what she would say, how she would respond. So of course, neither does she.
I take the little one from her and hug him tightly, then return him to her and cross to my oldest, and for a moment, I hold him tightly. I can feel the raw energy of his youth radiating from him like a power transformer on a pole. I return to my seat.

"I have to leave now," I say, opening the bottle and taking a pill from it. I dry swallow it, forcing it down despite it's size and the dryness of my throat. It hurts, but they say you can't really feel one pain if you have another, stronger pain to distract you. They say a lot of things that aren't true.
The room fades. I hold her eyes with mine, trying to keep them for as long as I can. I stare into them until they become reflected light from the glass door of her china cabinet, the china long gone.

There's a bitter taste in my mouth. I've had to start chewing them to get them down, and they taste awful, but the bottle is nearly empty. Once it's finished, I'll keep sitting here, keep waiting for the room to change.
There is a chance they'll be here.

Mulligan

2010-10-21T17:34:00.000-07:00

Another repost.. I wrote this one when the housing markets crashed.

There's echos in the hallways

paper flutters as the wind at 36 stories

passes through the jagged windows

whistling through the gutted cubes

Old Anansi spins upon the leather power chair

the mid morning sun sparkling on the picture frames

he left them, the chair's former occupant

before he went out the fast way

And in the trees near his landing

there's the creak of the ropes

dry as the men they suspend

above the grassy paving cracks

One patent leather shoe slips from the decaying foot

of a former financial advisor, now scarecrow

startling the feeding ravens, who fly out

out of the necropolis, into the sun

Out, over the empty fields, the fading houses

over the billowing tents, mismatched and cobbled

from old air bags, pool covers, and more lately

skins of the dying cows, too tame to survive

She scrapes the fat from the skin with Discover

she can't read the word, but the card lasts forever

and there's dozens more, imprinted with strange names

last epitaphs of the fallen suburbanites

She stops, listening as the baby stirs, silent,

then murmuring, as the child twitches back into slumber

"It's goan be arite, baby baby, goan be fine

Cause we'll build it all again, baby, light it all again."

And the baby, snoring beneath the soaring raven

warmed by the burning pages of illegible knowledge

carries the seeds of the unseen millions, who shall

seek, and strive, and destroy it all again.

FishingTrip

2010-10-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted in a while, and I'm collecting some stuff 've been writing. Here's one wrote a while back..

We'd been floating along on the current, my father and I, for about infinity, when we finally got a nibble.

I waited, him looking over my shoulder expectantly, waiting for the quarry to take the bait before I reeled it in. Closer.. closer..

Snap! I could feel the tension as it fought, but I pulled it up to us, higher and higher, out of the murky blue depths. We reeled it in over the side.

"This is what we came all this way for?" I asked, examining it? It was, I had to admit, the strangest creature I'd ever seen!

It's lower half was bifurcated down the middle, creating two long appendages that were bent in the the middle and again just before the end. The creature only had two upper stalks, again with that strange middle and lower bend; the trailing ends splitting into many little stalks. Above these two stalks was a large bulbous sphere, with a gaping hole filled with sharpened fangs and another small tendril; these seemed in constant motion.

Father chuckled uproariously, and with the practiced motions of a veteran sportsman, moved the strange creature onto the measuring table, which began taking the legally required lengths and depths. "Imagine what you must look like it, son. Remember, he only perceives three dimensions." He took another drink from the cubby and began to quaff it; he'd be lubricated into drinking songs soon. I shuddered.

The measuring device trilled it's findings. "Huh," father said. "Too bad, son. Looks like you'll have to throw this one back. Too small."

"Dad," I asked, "do I have to touch it?"

"Use the beam," he said amiably, "but you will have to mount the one you keep." He motioned toward the far end of our craft, where his own rather grizzly trophies were kept.

I set the beam on reverse, and the creature, who had stopped struggling under the ministrations of the measuring device, was lowered back down into the depths of it's blue-green world, roughly into the same high-pressure atmosphere location, surrounded by the thick trunked plant life that they seem to congregate near. The measuring device supposedly cleans the memory of these simple minded beasts; can't have them remembering the psi-lure that draws them, else how would human-fishers like my father continue to hunt this isolated spot?

I cast the lure out on another one of the odd shaped continents of this world, steering our craft around a tracking satellite that had no more chance of seeing us than I had of weaseling out of this horrid weekend trip, and waited for my father to sing.

2010-09-03T09:48:00.003-07:00

Working

2010-09-03T09:48:00.001-07:00

Doc's visit with Audrey; hate it when my kids are in pain.

Three Stones

2010-06-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

I had a kidney stone. Have you ever had one? It's not an experience for the faint of heart. The pain is often called "the worst pain ever", and I've even had several women tell me it ranks up there with birthing a child.

It started in the morning as a faint burning sensation during my standing visits to the Men's room, and became a pain that blossomed over the course of a few hours into what suddenly felt like appendicitis. A friend at work drove me to the ER, and it was on the way that the pain moved to my back, and I realized that it was probably a kidney stone.

A CT scan confirmed that, and found that the stone was about two millimeters in diameter; just about the size of a large mustard seed.

Matthew 17:20: And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

I didn't need to move a mountain, I needed to move a mustard seed!

Now, here's where things became interesting. I knew that, prior to my conversion, I would have screamed, "Why are You letting me suffer like this??" Instead, I said, "Lord, I know that this pain is temporary. Please help me to move this stone." You see, I know a little something about the movement of stones, and of pain.

There's a twitter account that I follow called AsteroidMisses. Whenever an asteroid comes anywhere near the Earth, they report it. The same day that I worried about my mustard seed sized stone, a rock 205 meters wide passed within 26 lunar distances (that's 26 times the orbit of the moon) at about 26 kilometers per second. This carried enough kinetic energy to deal a gigaton of destructive force should it have struck us. To put that into perspective, Castle Bravo, the largest above ground nuke the US has set off, weighed in at 15 megatons. AsteroidMisses reports similarly sized stones passing within similar distances nearly every day. So you see, I have faith that the Lord could move my mustard seed.

As bad as my pain was, and as crazy as this might sound, I've had worse. I've been having migraine headaches since I was about nine years old, and wether you believe it or not, I assure you that the pain of a full strength migraine is as bad if not worse than a kidney stone, at least for me. As geeks like to say, your mileage may vary.

There came a point in my life where I honestly considered suicide, rather than face another headache, and it wasn't all that long ago. Even the time between the headaches becomes sorrowful, because you live in fear of the pain that you know is coming. You become angry, superstitious, and afraid. It's hard to find joy in life when you know pain so bad you'd bargain your eyesight away rather than face it again.

I knew that there was something missing in my life; I had been hearing Christ calling me for years, and tried desperately to fill that yearning with other things. When I finally surrendered to Him, I learned that my pain, sharp as it is, is fleeting. You see, there was another stone that God moved.

Mark 16:3: And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?
Mark 16:4: And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.
Mark 16:5: And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.
Mark 16:6: And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

This experience hurt, yes, but it was bearable. It was bearable because I knew that this little pebble was easily moved by the hand of He who has kept us all safe in the midst of a cosmic hail storm since time began, and that I have the promise of the Son of the Father, Him who does not lay behind the tomb stone, that no matter what pains this life might bring me, there is another life waiting for me.

Resigned from Facebook

2010-04-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

I dropped my Facebook account today. If you're looking for a way to contact me, try venerable old email :

Jesus Wasn't a Pacifist

2010-04-14T09:40:00.000-07:00

First Clown : What, art thou a heathen? How dost thou understand the scripture?

--Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1

I've had to do a lot of thinking and reading to come to this, but it always came back to the same conclusion; I hadn't really been paying close attention to the Bible. Had I really been looking closely, I would have understood that while our Saviour taught to always search for a better answer, complete pacifism in place of self protection is unacceptable.

Then Jesus asked them, "When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?"

"Nothing," they answered.
He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.
It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment."
The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords."
"That is enough," he replied.
--Luke 22:36-38

While Jesus armed his disciples, he didn't arm them heavily. Why would a pacifist teacher go about with armed men?

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
-- Matthew 10:34

Not the statement of a pacifist: a true pacifist would never resort to such images.

There are two verses, however, that caused me most of my confusion.

But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

-- Matthew 5:39

There's an easy way to resolve this, if you truly stop to consider this.

Consider what a strike on the right cheek is. In the Greek, according to Strongs, the word strike here is "rhapizo", which means to slap with the palm of the hand. It's not really an act of hostile aggression in the same sense that a punch to the stomach is, or for that matter, an attack with weapons.

What I believe Jesus is saying is that you should bear insults in the face of the enemy, because that's what a slap is; an insult, at least it was back in the days before we became soft enough to believe that to touch someone was assault. He's not saying you should accept a beating, He's saying that we should not be quick to anger over trivial things. Would that the world had accepted His teachings here!

Then there's the other one :

"Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword."
-- Matthew 26:52

This is also easy to understand when taken in context. Remember Matthew 26:47, Mark 14:43, Luke 22:47, and John 18:3. It was a multitude, a detachment of soldiers and officers, armed with swords and clubs, that Judas had led to Gethsemane. When Peter drew his sword and cut the ear from Malchius, servant of the high priest, Jesus told him to put the sword in its place, not cast it aside. If the verse meant that the use of a sword meant your death, would He not have told Peter to throw it away? Why would He have asked him to purchase it in the first place?

No, this cannot be the meaning. Remember that armed contingent! Jesus isn't passing along to us a message that violence in all cases is evil, He is warning Peter that this is a foolish battle that Peter cannot hope to win! This fits with Matthew 26:53-54, where He goes on to tell Peter that if it were battle that were needed here, Jesus, as Son of the Father, is well equipped to handle it, but His submission at this moment is required to fulfill scripture.. and to provide us our salvation.

Ever a loving God, Christ heals Malchius before admonishing the contingent, being abandoned by the disciples, and finally bound and dragged to Caiaphus.

I think most of us here in the US wish fervently for peace, but to attempt to disarm ourselves completely is folly. In Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein summed it up quite well when he wrote:

But on the last day he seemed to be trying to find out what we had learned. One girl told him bluntly: “My mother says that violence never settles anything.”

“So?” Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. “I’m sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that. Why doesn’t your mother tell them so? Or why don’t you?”

They had tangled before -- since you couldn’t flunk the course, it wasn’t necessary to keep Mr. Dubois buttered up. She said shrilly, “You’re making fun of me! Everybody knows that Carthage was destroyed!”

“You seemed to be unaware of it,” he said grimly. “Since you do know it, wouldn’t you say that violence had settled their destinies rather thoroughly? However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea -- a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue -- and thoroughly immoral— doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”

I do not write these words to attempt to justify violence as a primary form of problem solving. I believe Christ teaches us that we should pursue peace as far as our enemies allow us to do so. I believe that Jesus knows that there are limits of endurance, and when those limits are reached, the sword must still be close at hand, honed and sharp.

The Bicycle Metaphor

2010-03-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

I was not brought up with any religious education, sadly, and so I would call myself young in my walk with Christ. I'm still learning. Should I say things that sound odd to you when I speak of my faith, please blame my inexperience, and chalk it up to growing pains. Also, let me know.

Jesus taught in parables, and I find them appropriate vehicles for conveying concepts. I tend to think in the same way. Recently, as I lay awake thinking about my own experience in coming to Christ, this one came to me.

Imagine yourself as a small child, learning to ride a bicycle. Your father warns you of the dangers involved in falling off of a bike, but he's there for you, his hand firm on your shoulder, his presence reassuring beside you as you float along the pavement, exhilarated by the new sensations of speed and gliding.

Suddenly you are struck by a thought; you don't need him, do you? You're able to guide this bike on your own! Sure, you just saw him put it together this morning, and you know you could not have done it with your small, weak hands, but that's beside the point. You can do it!

The feeling grows and grows in you until at last you take one hand from it's white knuckle grip on the handle bars, grip the hand of your father on your shoulder, and throw it off. In doing so, you over balance, lose control, and go wobbling and crashing into the pavement.

The pain is intense; you've never seen your own blood before. You lift your torn flesh up to your father and yell into his face, not seeing the concern, sadness, hurt, and indeed the righteous anger at our rebellion against his instruction, saying "Why did you let me hurt? Why did you give me this pain?"

The child, for me, represents humanity, having fallen, as it was inevitable for us to have done. The shame of it isn't that our father let us fall; he couldn't have stopped it anymore than we could have stopped ourselves. The shame is in our gall, our temerity, in holding our pains to our Father and holding Him to task for them.

It's a hard analogy to grasp if you aren't a parent, I suppose. If you've never actually had a child whom you've warned over and over, "don't touch that", "don't jump from there", and so on, and then seen the child come to grief over it, then I don't think you can make sense of it. I think perhaps that's why the Lord gave us children; to help us in some small way understand our place in His love.. and his wrath.

Tom Tebow Ad - Major Dissapointment

2010-02-07T17:11:00.001-08:00

My wife and I don't have cable; those funds are better served adding to our down payment. So we haven't been watching the super bowl. (Yep, I used lower case. It's a football game folks.)

I did, however, see folks twittering about the ad. An example:

That Tim Tebow commercial was freaking stupid.. someone please slap that family.. #Fail

So, with much hope and some trepidation, I trekked over to the FocusOnTheFamily website, and sure enough, they have the video available right off of the main page.

The tweets are correct; that ad was a disappointment.

The struggle to get the kind of funding for that ad was gigantic.
This was the first time an ad on a topic like this has ever been allowed during the ~~stupid~~ super bowl. The Pro Choice side won't hesitate to take advantage of this gap, and their better funded.

See the problem? This chance will never come again. The ad FotF aired built up a huge amount of controversy, and then aired with no mention of the very notion of a choice existing, of Pam Tebow choosing to bring Tom into the world.

The missus suggested that perhaps FotF pulled a rope-a-dope; after having seen NOW throw a fit, they toned down the ad to take the high road and make the opposition look foolish. Alternatively, perhaps the networks refused any ad that mentioned certain vocabulary.

In either case, Focus failed their mission miserably. The goal was to bring a message to the largest single television audience that life is a choice, and to illustrate the amazing potential every single human life has. Instead, they brought a cryptic bit of nonsense that, if anything, seems to be an ad about health awareness, not abortion.

If this was indeed a rope-a-dope, shame on them. It was a false supposition that that audience knew about the ad before they saw it; it's exactly that audience that hadn't heard, because they don't watch the news, they don't take the time to follow up, that they need to reach. Those folks aren't going to get anything from the millions of dollars Focus spent.

If it was the networks, then Focus wasted the political position of opening the wedge into super bowl ads. The opposition will waste no time in gearing up for next year, and they will play hard ball (no pun intended, sorry) to make certain that they can use whatever vocabulary and imagery they can to get their message through.

I am deeply saddened by this. In the commercial, Pam gets tackled by her son, which comes as a nasty surprise, but she recovers well. I think Pro Life will have to do the same.

Tim Tebow and NOW

2010-01-31T08:50:00.000-08:00

Tim Tebow's very existence is a tribute to the faith in Jesus, and the bravery of his mother, Pam.

His parents were serving as Christian missionaries in the Philippines. Pam was in a coma due to a sever amoebic dysentery, and the treatment they'd given her to bring her up caused her to have a placental abruption. Anyone who's ever heard that term knows it's a horrific problem that can easily end the lives of mother and child very quickly. The doctors told her that they certainly expected a stilbirth and urged her to abort the baby. Pam said no.

"We were grieved," she said. "And so my husband just prayed that if the Lord would give us a son, that he would let us raise him." -- The Gainseville Sun

Much to the chagrin of the National Organization for Women, the Lord answered that prayer. Tim represents many things that run contrary to the grain of popular culture. He's a highly successful athlete raised by a woman who stayed at home to do so, all the while teaching him about the love of Christ along with algebra and alphabet. And now, to top it all off, he has the temerity to try and speak while a Christian organization called Focus on the Family pays the astronomical tab for the air time during the Super Bowl so that he can thank his mother for his life.

Oh, the humanity.

The Colorado Spring Independent carried an article that's just vitriol masked as sarcasm. Reducing it to it's lowest elements (no mean feat), it's a puling rant on how 'this is our cess pit, you have no right bringing your ethics into it!' Funny how when that argument came about back when cable began it's descent into filth, the consensus of the day was 'change the channel'. Gentlemen, I hand you back your words.

Our society rails on about "tolerance", but it's fascinating how fast that flies out the window. "Pro-Choice" is all a veneer, it turns out. When the choice to keep a child, to become a parent, is made, people get antsy:

Make no mistake about this ad: it's offensive to women. Yes, it features Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, who had been advised to have an abortion after a serious illness. Standing alone, it sends the message that all women who give birth are heroes; it sends a message that abortion is always a mistake; and it is insulting to the one in three women in this country who have abortions. -- now.org

Does it? "Methinks the lady doth protest too much."

I never hear these same ladies boycotting romantic films and novels about marriages that last the lifetime of the spouses, yet surely the number of women in the country who've had divorces is as high. Perhaps they're a bit more secure in their positions on that front. I would be; an ex-husband can move on; a 'fetus'...

Besides, how many National Women are alienated by NOW's statement? Every woman takes a risk when delivering a baby. Every mother undergoes pain, sacrifice, and hardship. All Tim Tebow wants to do is offer the praise his mother and Father deserve, and illustrate the other side of a debate. NOW is trying to stifle debate rather than answer it at the cost of belittling mothers.

Forgive a pooh of little brain, but who's offensive to women again?

Amazon, Apple, McMillan

2010-01-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

Amazon is one of my favorite companies. I buy my music from them instead of Apple because they know that DRM is ridiculous. They understand their market. That's why they're such a behemoth.

Apple is trying to edge into eBooks. I've already voiced other reasons why I think they're going to tank at it. To say nothing of Apple blatantly stealing the bookstore technology from Wil Shipley.

Now there's a new twist happening. A pricing war. I couldn't be happier.

Allegedly (don't hear that often enough, do you?) Apple is trying to woo publishers by telling them "we're not as restrictive as Amazon! Amazon wants you to charge 9.99 for eBooks, but we'll let you charge higher if you like! Go ahead and support that bloated middle management infrastructure you're tugging behind you thanks to the deteriorating print model, we'll help!"

So of course the publishing house, resistant to change, smell money. Macmillan wants to up the ante to 15 dollars. So they spun round to Amazon and said "Apple will let us sell for 15 bucks a pop for digital media. So will you."

Like I said, Amazon knows their market. We can't resell ebooks. There's a lot of reduced value for us with the missing tactile value of that embossed cover, paper smell, or that spine on the shelf. We don't want to pay anywhere near the cost of a hardcover, and we're not happy as it is paying more than the 7.99 average on a mass market paperback. So how did Amazon respond?

Remember what happened when some states insisted on state taxes to be invoked against internet purchases? Amazon simply stopped dealing with dealers out of those states. See it coming?

Authors started noticing that ebook links from Macmillan published books had vanished. Entirely. No explanation, no apology.

I love this about Amazon. They will not be bullied, they will not submit to pressure. They acknowledge the power they have and they're willing to use it. In a world filled of fearful PC passive aggressiveness, I find it refreshing.

Here's what I keep wondering; if this escalates, what's to stop Amazon from cutting Macmillan's print links as well? "Ah," says the skeptic, "but that's a lot of authors left out in the cold, Amazon couldn't afford to eliminate such a large section of their stock." I think you fail to understand the implications. The more likely scenario is that those authors would leap from Macmillan and renegotiate contracts with other publishing houses, who would be waiting with open arms and firmer commitments with Amazon.

Amazon is synonymous with books, folks. It's the reason why brick and mortars are looking more like sticks and straws, and no aged black sweater hipster with a third trimester LCD and stolen software playing fast and lose with a pricing model is going to unseat that.

If you want small government, stop taking the bribes

2010-01-29T16:15:00.000-08:00

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
Matt 7:3

I try to keep that in mind. You'd be amazed how often it comes into play when you're paying attention.

For example, I think a lot of us are thinking a lot about the size of our government, and how much it costs. My own company loses quite literally half its profit to Uncle Sam. Congress wants more. Half's a lot. We could use part of that to hire more people, expand our product line and become more profitable, thus generate more taxable revenue.

I got sick looking at the money pouring through government jobs. Lavish retirements, brand new equipment beyond the needs of the people sporting it, comp time running into the months. It's enough to make anyone in the private sector choke.

Then I started thinking about me. And people like me.

"You can't cut the budget on Parks and Rec. We use those." "Don't cut Library funding; how would I get along with the library?" "You can't cut Education! We need our schools!" "I can't imagine our country without the Arts." "I'm where I am today thanks to government grants."

Government surplus fuels a dizzying array of odds and ends markets in everything from boots to laptops to houses (to say nothing of criminal seizures), grant programs will pay your ride through college for being part Indian, left handed, or good at duck calling.

My wife and I have been repeatedly urged to sign up for government assistance programs that we don't need, like WIC and Foodstamps, which tells me that plenty of folks are, ah, subsidizing their grocery budget.

How many of us bought a Digital Signal Converter on a federal chit? How many of us sent back those Federal Stimulus checks?

We are as much the reason the federal government feels obligated to spend into more zeros than most of us knew existed. Before any of us can truly rail on about the size of the Fed, we should first examine how much of it we're willing to release.

iPad; Umm, no.

2010-01-27T16:55:00.000-08:00

I've been wrong about Apple products before. It's a lot like my experiences with watching Project Runway with my wife (and no, idontwanna). I'll see it and think, 'man, that bites' and the judges will rave about it. So my taste compared to modern aesthetes is not to trusted.

That said, look at the thing, and be honest with yourself. Tell me this doesn't look like a bad Photoshop? All that cool that Apple is famous for, and the best design they could come up with was to take the iPhone and swell it up? "NO, WAIT" says mac-zealot, "it's got a bezel round the screen, see? It's different from the iPhone!"

It's different in other ways, too. They left off the camera. An absolutely perfect platform for video teleconference a la 2001, and they left the bloody camera off. Genius. But it is similar in that, like the iPhone, they trick the eye into thinking it's slimmer than it is by making it rounded on the back. That's going to make this thing a joy to use while resting on a table. Tap screen for key press, iPad rocks. Rinse and repeat. Yeehaw.

Apple's alleged megamarket here is ebooks. I'm skeptical. Two reasons.

I've been reading electronic books for twelve years. I started out on CRTs, then when the first PDAs became accessible to mere mortals, I used Apple Newtons, Handspring Visors, Compaqs, Sharp Zaurus (Zaurii?), and more recently, a Sony eBook and an Amazon Kindle.

eInk isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Backlit screens are monumentally horribly hard on the human eye. Sure, they're great for television, they're good for movement such as flash enabled pages, they're decent for short blurbish functions like twitter and such. But most human beings without cybernetic implants cannot handle long haul documents on a back light without lots of breaks, attention deficit, eye strain, and so on.

Ever since I moved to eInk, it's been a blessing. The difference is incredible, and I will never go back to trying to read for long periods of time that way again. I'm fairly certain that reading novel length docs on backlit LCD is the reason why I'm sporting specs these days; I urge folks looking to buy this thing as a book reader to reconsider. If you happen to know me, I'd be happy to lend you one of my old hand helds as a test run, then let you try my eBook reader for an hour or so. You'll see what I mean.

The other reason I'm skeptical about Apple making a dent in this market is Amazon. Taking on a giant like that is quite an ambitious undertaking, and frankly, I just don't think Apple has the balls to do the job.

Granted, they can handle music. But music and books are very different fields. Books are more like software, and we've seen repeatedly that Apple has no qualms about restricting access to software for political motivations. You might be able to get away with that in the App Store, but you pull that off on what folks can read, and they'll bury your supposed 'cool' company hype faster than you can say book burner.

I hope it doesn't pan out that way, though. Apple stock jumped like salmon during mating season on pure hype alone when rumors leaked that Apple was selling a great big ol iPhone. Let's hope it works for the stockholders' sakes, eh?

Thanks Massachusetts

2010-01-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

I grew up moving between New England and North Carolina. In New England, I spent many years in Everett, Massachusetts. It was a suburb just outside of Boston. Nice place, I suppose; I was really small then, so I don't remember it well beyond a few blocks.

One story I do remember, though. My family and I walked up to Broadway to see a parade one Fourth of July when along comes the then Governer Mike Dukakis (yeah, the shrimp on the tank who ran against Bush that year). I believe this was in 84, so this would have been his second term, making me just shy of seven years old. He's glad handing the crowd, all smiles. We'd just moved up from NC, and my accent had reset back to Deep South mode. Sure enough, he makes a beeline for me.

"How ah yah?" says the great man.

"Hah," says I.

"Woah, weah you from?" he says, hearing my accent.

"North Carolina."
"I have a friend down theyah named Jim Hunt, have you evah heard of him?" he ask me.

"Yes sir," I say, "my daddy says he's an as***le."

Off goes Mr. Dukakis, leaving my laughing family to buy a very confused little boy ice cream without explaining why.

I never, ever would have expected Mass to elect Scott Brown. I remember learning to call my home state "Taxachusetts" in grade school, all the while hearing about the virtues of labor unions. Now that it's happened, though, it makes perfect sense.

I think Obama won the election because we expected him to come through on his promises of change. Yet a year later, we see more promises broken. He promised us that these health care negotiations would be open to the public, that he would lead a non partisan effort yet the last round has been behind closed doors and strictly partisan.

I'm still confused as to why health care is the issue we're all being distracted by, when the economic disaster we were all so terrified of has not been addressed for a year, but merely postponed. The foreclosure rate is increasing, the jobless rates are getting worse, and the best the administration can come up with is to punish the banking industry for offering bonuses? Health care might be an important issue, but it lacks the urgency the economy needs.

I think Massachusetts knows that, and that's why Scott Brown won.

Of course, the talking heads this morning were full of spin on how this is all because of how Obama took over a host of problems from previous administrations. Well of course he did, he asked us for them. Begged us for them, told us he could handle them. Then spent a year ignoring the most urgent of them, except for pulling out these ridiculous statements like "green jobs." Oh sure, they sound great until you examine them. For example, "let's build wind farms." The first government sponsored wind farm is to be built in Texas, and they're buying the turbines from China. Pray explain to me how this will create jobs in the USA? How it will do anything but send our dwindling cash value out of the country to the same people we already owe money to? That and his lunacy about "caulking our windows", yeah that'll create jobs. For a month.

That's aside from the rest of his wastrel activities such as trips with Oprah to pitch the Olympics in Chicago, accepting a Nobel Prize for Not Being George W Bush Whilst Fighting The Same Useless Bloody War, and of course getting nothing done in Copenhagen. I'm actually pleased with the latter, though.

This isn't over yet, but there is hope. Come mid term elections, I think the writing is very clearly on the wall in very bright neon. Obama just got the worst anniversary present ever; a lost of the filibuster-proof majority. I'm hoping next year, if he hasn't bankrupted the country in the immediate sense, or my children in the long term, he gets an even crappier one.

New Church

2010-01-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

Cindy and I decided to try out a new church; we like our old church, but we really need to be a part of a church that's closer to home.

We attended Alliance Bible Fellowship this morning, and it was a wonderful experience. I felt as if I'd been fed for the first time without realizing I'd been hungry.

Senior Pastor Scott Andrews gave sermon from Romans 1:24-27. He spoke first humorously on the strides our society has made technologically in his own life time, summating with the line "We've come a long way."

The humor faded quickly when he counterpointed the many avenues that these advances have created to allow sin into our lives. He quoted Alexander Pope's Essay on Man:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Paul spoke of a large number of vices in this very short passage, and how the ultimate expression of evil is not only the performance of sin despite the knowledge of the penalty of the act, but the approval of such acts in others. I found myself thinking back to Jesus speaking of the millstone in Capernaum.

I found myself sitting in a service that was engaging me on an intellectual level for perhaps the first time in my life. Please follow me carefully on this, because it would be very easy to insult the many pastors and churches I've known, and that's not my intention. But it must be said that a great number of churches speak largely or entirely on an emotional level. They discuss what being a Christian feels like, and to be frank, that's always left me out in the cold.

I love Jesus. I love God, and it is an experience that deepens over time. That said, I was not raised in faith, I am still somewhat new to my faith, and to attempt to witness to a convert almost solely on feelings is very much like trying to teach airline pilots the same way mother birds teach baby birds. Granted, this approach does indeed work for some people, but I found myself sitting in the pew thinking, "OK, now what? I don't feel what I'm supposed to be feeling, does that mean I wasn't really saved? Maybe I should sneak out?"

That feeling wasn't there because of the people, mind. It wasn't easy, leaving our old church, which was filled to overflowing with some of the kindest, most wonderful people I've ever met. Had it not been for the love and acceptance that they showed me, I don't believe I ever could have seen my need to ask to be baptized in that creek behind the church. I love them all, and I know that God has and will richly bless them.

Anyhow, Alliance also has Children's Church, which means that you check your children the same way you check your coat. While I'm kidding, having not experienced this before (other then one visit to a Baptist church a while back), there was a pang of guilt for a bit. Alliance, however, does this in one of the coolest ways I've ever seen.

When you arrive, they have a check in desk. We (ok, Cindy; they can read her handwriting) filled out some paperwork, and they printed out stickers for each child with names on them, and a second sticker with us w/ a matching number, then assigned us a volunteer from the congregation to show us the classrooms that our kids would be spending the service in. Alliance used to be a Christian school, so there's plenty.. more on this in a bit. The stickers have numbers. They told us that if the child should need us, then in the worship center, on the screens (still getting used to the fact that they have them), they pop up the name and number of the child, so the parent knows we need to head back to attend to the little'un. They told us that after three visits, they'd dispense with stickers and give us swipe cards for checking in; I guess they figure after three visits, we mean it.

Alliance is growing; by that, I mean you can see that the bones of what will eventually become the worship center stand outside the current one. They need it; they're currently holding three services every Sunday morning. It warms my heart to see a growing church, folks.

"Gosh," says all two of my readers, "he's certainly going on a lot about a new church, isn't he?" Yes. Yes he is. Today felt like a homecoming, and for a guy who spent his whole life moving around, that's saying something.

Geek note: Alliance has a podcast, so if we should have to miss a service, we can hear the service, which is absolutely awesome. What is not quite so awesome is that they only provide an iTunes link, not a direct RSS feed, which means that for those Linux loving Christians out there (all seven of us), subscribing is a bit of a hassle. (Alliance's web site does list using iPodder, but getting iPodder, or Juice, to work under Ubuntu 9.10 or Debian Sketch proved beyond the 30 minute threshold I allotted it; I left off at seeing that the python xmms client libraries apparently are not the same libraries provided by apt).

In case Google directs you here, or if I need it later, the link is : http://alliance.goboone.net/ABFMessages/abfmessages.xml

The Minds of my Children

2010-01-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

I love the way childrens' minds are able to put things together.

Case in point; we went out to lunch yesterday. David, my five year old, had to go to the bathroom. While he was sitting in the stall, he start looking at the graffiti on the walls around them; he can read a little, but thankfully not a lot yet.

"What does this say, Daddy?" he asked.

"You don't want to know, " I said, "people write filthy words in bathroom stalls."

"Why do people do that?"

"I don't know," I said, "I've never had the urge, myself."

He thought for a second, then said "Maybe it's because people do filthy things in here."

The more I think about it, the more I think he's right.

Obama Administration - Might makes Right

2010-01-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

Imagine that I went to court cause I mugged some guys.

"See, yer honor," I said, "I lent two guys some money. One guy payed my back, but the other guy didn't. I really need my money, and now I'm losing money I could've been making in interest. So I rounded both guys up at gun point, and told them I was going to take a fee from them because I wasn't happy with the loans we made."

I am in the wrong in this, so I'm gonna pay the price, see? There's bigger guys than me with bigger guns, and they say that you can't renegotiate loans after you make them at gunpoint.

Of course, if the guy with the biggest gun of all decides to pull the same stunt, that's just life, isn't it?

Swallow your mob mentality hatred of them derned bankers for just a moment and think about what it is that's happening here for just a second. This is government sanctioned loan sharking, pure and simple. Will we appointing someone named Vinny the Knife as 'Collections Czar' now?

There's not even a pretense of justice here, people! Wake up!

CA to legalize Cannabis

2010-01-13T07:49:00.000-08:00

I have no problem with this.

I don't partake, myself, but if you wanna, I don't mind. I feel the same way about motorcycle helmets.

Honestly, look at the "drug war". What has it cost us, who's winning, what have we won? We have people living incredible lifestyles because they happen to be at the top of the cartels, we have brave men dying, and for what? Did prohibition teach us nothing?

The war on drugs is nothing more then another futile attempt at crime prevention, which is not the purpose of law enforcement. "We can't allow you to do drugs, because you'll go out and do stupid things." Fine, then bust me when I do those things, because that is solely the purpose of your existence, otherwise you get to tell me what I can listen to, watch, what games I play.. sound familiar?

Funny that a conservative Christian is voicing the defense of his neighbor's right to watch and consume what he wants, isn't it?

What gets me about California is the reason why they're moving forward:

It is estimated that the proposed $50 tax on each ounce of marijuana sold, along with license fees charged to cultivators, would generate $1.3 billion a year to be used to pay for drug education and treatment. - LA Times

Yeah, bob; the jolly ol state of California, who's payin state employees w/ IOUs, is sure enough gonna use that money for drug education and treatment. Right. Why would you train people not to do something that creates revenue? Of course, the tobacco industry's been scratching it's collective head over that one for a long time now, so go figure.

Fascinating; we'll fight tooth and nail the proliferation of drugs.. until we're broke. Then we'll tax it, and it's ok.

I told you before, I'm ok with freedoms, I'm just curious about what moralities are next on the block in the name of revenue. Prostitution? Gambling? Midget tossing? California police academy graduates : If you're gunning for a spot in vice, you might rethink your strategy a bit..

Fun with Tech # 1

2010-01-12T13:12:00.000-08:00

Master the Magic Packet, verify that a co-Worker's PC has Wake-on-Lan enabled.

Write a looping shell script and daemonize it such that every time you can't get a ping response from the machine, you send it a wake on lan packet.

Watch him come day's end.

Sony Reader 300

2010-01-07T16:54:00.000-08:00

This was the Christmas of eReaders. Cindy got me a Sony Reader, and my mother got us a Kindle.

Cindy got the Kindle, and I carry the Sony.

Epaper makes for fascinating reading on how it works; the schemes on colorizing it are even more fun, and worth a trip through Wikipedia.

The Sony and the Kindle are two very different pieces of hardware. Picking one depends very much on what it is that you intend to do with it, and what kind of consumer you are.

Cindy is a homeschooling mom who collects Amazon gift cards through Swagbucks. She uses Amazon heavily, she has no stake in previous data, and she's not a nerd. Price point wasn't an issue since it was gifted. Having to sync to a PC is next to impossible for a lady who's always got both hands around children, spoons, books, papers, whiteboard markers, etc, so Whispernet, the EVDO wireless connection Amazon uses to update the Kindle remotely (as well as allow you to surf Wikipedia for free) works out well for her.

I, on the other hand, am a geek. A hopeless nerd. I've been reading ebooks since the Apple Newton, and I've amassed a pretty large collection of existing data, so Whispernet isn't necessary; that, and I read a whole lot of white papers. I also test POS software, so epaper rocks since you can stick barcodes on it and they scan on pretty much everything.

I've been really enjoying managing my books with with Calibre, which does for books what XBMC does for video; it'll obtain metadata, manage collections, and will sync quite nicely with your Sony or Kindle.

I love this thing. I've probably read somewhere in the neighborhood of eight thousand pages since I got the thing, and it's such a magnificent reduction on eye strain!

I've sold my iPod, since eBooks were really the last thing I was doing with it. (Back to Creative Zen for mp3 needs.)

Now if you'll excuse me, it's back to the NIST Consumer Package Labeling Guide. Good times...

Blogger? Again?

2010-01-07T08:08:00.000-08:00

Yep.

Cindy and I set a goal; we're gonna make our down payment this year, and that means cutting costs.

Hosting fees are cheap, but they're still fees, and they're still moneys that could be used towards a home, so I cut 'em. Instead, here I am, back in blogger territory.

This actually makes more sense for me, anyway, considering I post just about as often as pandas mate.