My musings and things

What a day

2009-01-20T14:13:00.003-06:00

It's been an amazing day. I've wanted to see Barack Obama in the White House for years now, and it's finally happened. I don't have the words to describe how I'm feeling about this. For the first time in my life, I've felt a passion for a politician and what they're trying to do for our country, and now that man is the most powerful man in the world. Let's see what he can achieve.

I've heard a song on CNN.com's coverage (which I've been watching rabidly all day long) that fit perfectly with how I'm feeling right now, so I thought I'd share it.

Lyrics:
I'm taking my freedom
Pulling it off the shelf
Putting it on my chain
Wearing it 'round my neck
I'm taking my freedom
Putting it in my car
Wherever I choose to go
It will take me far
I'm…

Chorus:
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden, golden
(Repeat)

Verse 2:
I'm taking my own freedom
Putting it in my song
Singing loud and strong
Grooving all day long
I'm taking my freedom
Putting it in my stroll
I be high-stepping ya'll
Letting the joy unfold
I'm…

Chorus:
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden, golden
(Repeat)

Verse 3:
I'm holding on to my freedom
Can't take it from me
I was born into it and it comes naturally
I'm strumming my own freedom
Playing the God in me
Representing His glory
Hope He's proud of me!
Yeah!

Chorus:
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden (Hope he's proud of me!)
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden
Living my life like it's golden, golden
(Repeat)

Hook:
Living my life, Like it's golden, golden, golden, golden, golden, golden

Simpsons on the couch

2009-01-11T23:58:00.001-06:00

I grew up on the Simpsons and it's managed to remain one of my favorite shows even now. I stumbled across this little compilation of every couch scene from the opening credits and thought I'd share:

Blathering about the Holy Land

2009-01-11T21:16:00.003-06:00

I am so sick of the Middle East, and especially the whole problem of Israel and the Holy Land. How dumb is it that the three biggest religions (I think - I'm pretty sure Hindus and Buddhists don't have the numbers to crack into the top 3), which all share a common background and should at least be somewhat civil to each other, claim the same 10,000 square miles as their holy land (or one of its holy lands in the case of Islam)? Couldn't at least one of them have just picked southern Europe? Or Africa? Or ANYWHERE else, just to make things easier for the rest of us?

Sure, officially religion isn't at the heart of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's "just" a matter of the Palestinians displaced by the United Nations' creation of the Israeli state - but it's still a religious matter at heart. Given the fact that both sides have been saying for more than a dozen years that a two-state solution is an acceptable one, why is this still going on? Oh, that's right - Hamas is dedicated not only to achieving independence, but also to the utter destruction of Israel itself. Man, I never would have thought that I'd be missing Yasir Arafat, but with the way things have devolved since his death, I have to say that I actually do. He at least managed to sort of rein in the extremists on the Palestinian side of things and offered a singular path of negotiation to try and get a solution figured out.

Still, given the fact that Islam shares the same tradition of Abraham and Moses with Judaism, you'd think they could figure something out that's acceptable to both sides. I mean, if you believe that Moses was a prophet and that he received the 10 Commandments (which I think is a common belief for both religions, but I could be wrong about Islam), then that basic concept of "Thou shalt not kill" is ingrained in both, so where's the peace? Tell me - WHERE... IS... THE... PEACE?? At the very least, can't they bond a bit over the fact they were both persecuted horribly in Europe for most of the last 1000 years?

Thoughts on Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy", part II

2009-01-06T20:40:00.003-06:00

"In all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. ... They invented mathematics and science and philosophy; they first wrote history as opposed to mere annals; they speculated freely about life, without being bound in the fetters of any inherited orthodoxy." - p. 3, Part I.

It really is amazing to look at what the Greeks did and the ensuing progress in the West. I've always been impressed by what they achieved and the impact that they've had on civilization ever since, even down until today. But when you frame the way Russell did here - they not only excelled at what they did, they excelled at it with nothing to build upon - it's truly mind boggling. Every great philosopher/intellectual has had at least some prior work to pull from and add to, but not the Greeks. And yet, they still pushed human thought so far forward.

I mean, the geometry we learn today is at heart the same as what the Greeks formalized 2,300 years ago. It's even still called Euclidean geometry, and is sufficient to describe nearly the entire universe under "normal" human conditions. How freaky is that to think that basic Greek mathematics is still being taught 23 centuries later??

Thoughts on Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy", part I

2009-01-01T23:23:00.005-06:00

I've gone through this book a few times, and I always stumble across bits that stick in my mind. I've decided to read it again, and I figure I'll take notes on it and give some of my thoughts on it here for my own use later and for anyone else who might be interested. This will be an on-going project as I make my way through this again as a secondary philosophical pursuit while I also tangle with Jacques Derrida for the first time (an undertaking which is kicking my intellectual behind right now, btw).

"Science tells us what we can know... Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to life without the support of comforting fairy tales. ... To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it." - p. xiv, Introductory.

This really brought into focus what it is about Russell that's first appealed to me. In my struggles with religion and belief and where it is that I stood, I had never been able to accurately describe what I was or what I believed. I bounced between calling myself a doubter or an atheist, but I knew I had unmanageable problems with the atheistic approach. It wasn't until I read Russell's description of agnosticism and why he embraced it that my own stance was crystallized and became clear. I'm a firm believer that we don't, and in all likelihood can't, know the answer of whether or not there is any form of God out there (regardless of how much we might lean one way or another). With that inability for certain knowledge on either end, the only logically sensible position is to remain undecided and keep searching and pushing. The result can either end up in finding proof of God or in coming asymptotically close to "proving" God doesn't exist (as proving non-existence of anything is rather tricky even in much simpler cases). And so the discussion keeps marching forward.

As a totally irrelevant tangent, this is the first time I've delved into philosophy using an eBook as the text. It's an interesting experience. I've always had that comfort of holding the book in my hands and having that smell of a book as integral parts of the experience, and now I'm just looking at the screen while digesting the words, as my music plays away in the background and I keep cmd-tabbing over here to type some more. It's not better or worse - just a different experience of reading.

Quotations

2009-01-01T23:06:00.003-06:00

I've always wanted to keep track of some of my favorite quotes, so I'm going to start doing that on here. Most of them are things that have made me think, or things that I agree with, or things that were funny enough that I laughed out loud when I read/heard them. Others just found their way into the land of my mind by whatever means they employed. So here's a few that I've collected over the last couple of years as a start to all this.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. -- Bertrand Russell

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. -- Bertrand Russell

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: That it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it. -- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays I" - taken from "Contact" by Carl Sagan

The tragedy of one successful politician after another is the gradual substitution of narcissism for an interest in the community and the measures for which he stands. The man who is only interested in himself is not admirable, and is not felt to be so. Consequently, the man whose sole concern with the world is that it shall admire him is not likely to achieve his object. -- Bertrand Russell, "The Conquest of Happiness", p. 20

Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. -- Bertrand Russell, Conquest, p. 22

And not only is love a source of delight, but its absence is a source of pain. -- Bertrand Russell, Conquest, p. 34

"Finding someone is like finding yourself a home
If the key fits - just open the door
'Cause you're never gonna spend a lonely day here
Come and watch your fear fly away
And you'll never hunger for a greener side than here"
-- "Cottonwool" by Lamb

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small. -- Lao Tzu

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings." -- Anais Nin, quoted at http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp12092005.shtml

If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern - if both its delights and social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press and at the dinner table - we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us. -- Carl Sagan, "Broca's Brain", p. 14

If a man is in the forest and his wife isn't there, is he still wrong? -- Fortune on Worldwinner.com

"Spinoza was persecuted during his lifetime, and after death his works were condemned as profane, blasphemous and atheistic. And yet it is probable that few men more sincerely religious than he have ever lived and taught. His doctrine was one of abnegation of self and patient devotion to the eternal. He was in love with the Infinite; it was Nature that fluttered his pulse; it was the Spirit of the universe that filled his heart with living springs. ... But in all sincerity one may ask which is the more blasphemous, nay, which is the more vulgar, the mind that pictures the Deity as a jealous tyrant who keeps the world as a separate establishment, or the thinker who seeks to banish the dream that veils the part from the whole, and who shows the soul of man and of the universe to be the same? -- Edgar Saltus, "The Anatomy of Negation"

"Aggrandise God; free Him from the captivity of temples and creeds. See Him everywhere, or say that He does not exist." -- Denis Diderot, quoted in "The Anatomy of Negation"

"Lastly, in admitting the doctrine that an Intelligence presided over the formation of the world and still watches over its well-being, it is hard to reconcile the theory of that Intelligence with the idea of infinite wisdom and power. For, to the misfortune of humanity, this world of ours is very far from being the best one possible. With the best of intentions, we are therefore unable to recognise any other God than one who, at most, is material, limited and dependent. I do not know whether this view is the correct one, but certainly it is not that of the Deity's partisans, who would much prefer to have us atheists than the Spinozists that we are. To mollify them, let us turn sceptic and repeat with Montaigne, Que sais-je?" -- Jean le RondD'Alembert, quoted in "The Anatomy of Negation"

"When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true." —- Bertrand Russell, p. 39, "A History of Western Philosophy"

A holly, jolly Christmas

2008-12-27T09:28:00.002-06:00

Well, this has been an enjoyable Christmas. I've really started to like the holiday since I've had kids, and it's getting more and more fun as they get older. Anisa was REALLY into it this year and Jasmine started to more at the end. Next year is going to be a blast when they're both old enough to be fully into the Christmas swing.

Santa came through for them with a bike for Anisa, a Sit'n'Spin for Jasmine, a Koby bear that listens to the kids and interacts with them, and some books and movies, too. I'm always amazed that Santa makes the rounds as much as he does and that he manages to stay as relatively slim as he does. He must have some awesome workout program to stay in shape after eating millions of cookies and drinking tons of milk!

I hope you all had a happy holiday season!

Is it February yet?

2008-12-23T08:27:00.003-06:00

Whine of the day:

What really sucks at work lately is the fallout of recent layoffs. It was sad to see people go, but I could understand the reasoning behind it and at least most of them volunteered for it. What I don't understand is why my department didn't lose people and yet is having to shoulder the brunt of the discomfiture. The thing is, the way it's all shaken out, my department actually is "losing" a person since they're being shifted to doing different work and yet we're not allowed to do anything less. So the desk with the smallest staff in the room is expected to "do more with less" and nobody really seems to care. And somehow, it falls on me to *cue Tim Gunn voice* "Make it work!" Yeah, doesn't that make sense? Stick the guy who's been in management for less than three months with the responsibility of doing 5 people's worth of work with only 4 people. Awesome!

Now, it does make me feel good in a way, knowing that they trust me enough to pull this off after the short time I've been doing what I do. And I'm managing to find ways to sort of make it work, but it just means the next month is going to suck. And what really sucks about that is, I've really been enjoying the actual "work" part of my job lately. I've been doing some fun things with coding and data that I think will make things present better all around and has let me really tap into the computer geek I am a lot more. But, when I can only find time to work on that stuff maybe 30% of the time while I'm dealing with everything else, it's just hard to enjoy it as much as I should.

Non-whiny stuff:

I'm really looking forward to Christmas this year. The girls are getting so excited about Santa coming. At dinner last night, Anisa looks over at me and says, "Only two mare days until Christmas Eve, daddy!" and had the hugest smile on her face and a twinkle, a gleam, and maybe even some sugar plums dancing in her eyes. Jasmine is still not quite old enough to really "get" it all yet, but she's feeding off everyone else's excitement and is bubbling about it too.

I can't wait until we put the presents out tomorrow; they've stayed in our closet so far since the first present we put out didn't last more than a couple of hours before the girls decided it needed to be unwrapped. I guess we'll just have to wait until next year to try having presents stacked out there for a couple of weeks. :)

Alright, time to head to work. Whee!

The oppressive tyranny of the cold

2008-12-22T08:06:00.005-06:00

This is just getting ridiculous. It was down in the teens over the weekend, and I check the weather this morning before heading to work and it's FOUR DEGREES. I am not pleased about this development. As I mentioned earlier, I left Wyoming - It should not be this cold in Missouri!

I swear, I could move to Ecuador, on the flippin' equator, and still find myself looking at single digit temperatures at some point in the winter... Ugh.

The bright side? At least there's no ice storm! How much would that suck, an inch of ice on everything while hovering near 0ºF.

Other than the cold, it's been a pretty good weekend. Spent some time with the fam, watched some football, read quite a bit. Oh, speaking of reading - I've been digging eBooks lately. Maybe it's just the computer geek in me, but I actually enjoy reading books on my computer. It's just a handy thing. I typically listen to music when I read, so since my whole library of tunes is digital it's nice to not spend 20 minutes picking and burning a CD to listen to before I read. I just sit down at the 'puter, push play and start reading! It doesn't hurt that they tend to be a lot cheaper than paper copies.

My only worry is, what happens long-term? Imagine it's 300 years from now - how are people then going to read these things? With a paper book, you know that all they have to do is open and start reading. But with eBooks, there's that pesky encoding thing. Not only do they have to find the file somewhere on a hard drive, they have to know that this specific type of file needs to be opened by Adobe Digital Reader... oh, and it HAS to be on the same computer it was on because of the DRM restrictions. With music, I don't worry as much simply because until the last century and a half, there was basically no possible way to pass music on. Yes, there is sheet music but that's not the same thing as the actual performance of the book. Plus, music isn't all that "informative" - it's artistic and can be a commentary on life and the world, but it's not involved in the preservation and pursuit of knowledge.

And that's the catch with books - if they all go digital, there's going to come a time when knowledge might be lost simply because of DRM and file-typing issues. It's yet another reason why I look at Project Gutenberg and love the idea of what they're trying to do. Their goal is to ensure that any work in the public domain is put into a digital format that is readable for as long as we have digital capabilities. They don't rely on PDF or any other encoding scheme as the basic format; it's all just ASCII text that any basic computer system can read and is easily convertible to anything else going forward. I know Google is trying to do something similar with their book scanning program, but I don't know enough about it to know that they're looking far enough ahead to ensure that the descendants of the Digital Age of n00bism (that being us, still caught up in the birthing pains of digital life) can read and hear and share in all the content that we're populating the world's computers with right now.

Adele rocks my socks off

2008-12-19T21:16:00.002-06:00

I stumbled across Adele a couple of weeks ago, and I can't say enough. That voice just makes my ears so happy - so bluesy and soulful - and it's superbly mixed with some jazzy melodies backing her up and some catchy lyrics.

What made me pick her up initially was a review calling her "what Amy Winehouse should have been" or something like that. Having loved Amy's "Frank" (i.e., the pre-crackhead Winehouse album) and enjoyed "Back to Black", comparing someone to her is definitely going to catch my attention. I haven't been disappointed, and it's a perfect comparison. Similar voices, similar sounds, but hopefully not similar career arcs.

If you love some powerful female vocals, give her a try. I doubt you'll be disappointed!

WTF?

2008-12-15T21:21:00.001-06:00

I moved away from Wyoming. I left it behind. I do NOT live there right now. So tell me this:

WHY THE HELL IS IT SO COLD RIGHT NOW???? It should not be 14 degrees out if you're not living in Wyoming any more!!

Springfield makes it onto Failblog

2008-12-15T15:42:00.000-06:00

see more pwn and owned pictures

I've found this hilarious since we moved here. Glad to see it getting the recognition it deserves!

Holiday greetings

2008-12-12T10:38:00.003-06:00

A fitting holiday message, given that the source is me:

Kim sent this to me today. Does my wifey know me or what?? :)

Since I'm still up - time to Simplify!

2008-12-09T01:27:00.004-06:00

I figure I might as well mention this, since I never have seemed to remember to before when I'm in a blogging mood:

GO GET SIMPLIFY MEDIA RIGHT NOW!!!!!

It is simply the best software out there for making your music library portable and sharing it with your friends. Any time I'm away from the house and have a 'net connection, I can tune in to my iTunes library with Simplify. It streams it all from your home computer and lets you listen. For friends, they can stream it as well. The only limitation is that DRM-enabled files (read: Stuff you bought from the iTunes store) will only play on authorized computers, so they can only see a subset of your library.

I've been using since they came out in 2007, and it's one of the coolest pieces of software I've come across. There were some growing pains, as I'd expect of any large, networked piece of software like this, but they've done a fabulous job. I'm happy for them that they've been so successful with their release of their iPhone app - they're finally making some money back from all their hard work! And if you've got an iPhone, why wouldn't you want to be able to stream all your music from home to wherever you are?? Just knowing Simplify is available makes me want to get one even more.... Santa will bring me one if I ask enough, right?? :D

We've got a few friends on our Simplify account right now, and it's a great way to get to know more about them and what they listen to. Call me weird, but I've always thought you can tell a lot about a person by the music they identify themselves with. I guess that makes me a rather eclectic individual! :)

Late night ramblings

2008-12-09T00:35:00.002-06:00

• Man, there are a lot of crazies out there in the world of blogging. Every so often, I'll go through the Feedjit link here on the blog to see what else is being written around the area or browse the Google blog search and just read. Maybe tonight was abnormal, but I found several blogs that just sounded like the rantings of paranoid schizophrenics in the midst of a meltdown - only the posts have been coming for months now! With some of the hatred and prejudice I encountered, it made me a little uncomfortable seeing the dark underbelly of the First Amendment. I'm not of a mind to want to silence these folks by any means, but wow there's some crazy shite out there on the Wild 'n' Wooly Interwebs.

• I hate upset stomachs. I went to bed almost 2 hours ago, and couldn't sleep, which led to my stroll through Blogland. I should know by now not to eat snacks before bed!!

• Anisa was so funny on the phone when I called home during my lunch break. "Daddy, we got the good cheesy poofs! Not the ones that taste awful, like at Jake and Jenny's!" I was glad I was stopped at a red light at the time; I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. We spent the weekend up in Columbia with our friends. Their daughter is about nine months old now and had some of the baby cheese poofs as a starter food. As you can tell, they were not a big hit with Anisa. Jasmine, however, LOVED them. I think she likes the "good" ones even better, though. It was a fun weekend all around, though. I just wish I'd been in a better frame of mind so I could enjoy it a bit more. Everything that came down last week at work was just weighing on my mind.

I mean, could I have picked a worse time to be promoted? Well, I'm sure there are worse circumstances than this, but it still sucks. I wanted to be playing with numbers and coding some stuff up for the web, not jostling job duties and telling people that, like it or not, you're going to be moving to some night shifts. Maybe it's just me, but if there are 4 fewer people working at putting out a product, shouldn't that product be reduced by something close to 4 people's worth of work? Instead, we get to "do more with less!" Sure, we're cutting our output a little bit, but I'd bet that it isn't even close to 40 hours a week worth, let alone 160. Instead, we focus on efficiency and workflow. Layoffs are a big enough hit to employee morale, but working them harder when they were already being asked to do a lot is not going to make things better. I just hope that three months from now, everyone at work can look back and see this as the low point.

• At least there looks to be some hope for an auto industry bailout. On an objective level, I'm not overly thrilled by it. There's a reason why the U.S. companies are in the position they are, while foreign auto makers are still thriving (though not without suffering in this economic climate). They've made bad choices for years - decades even - and didn't have a plan on how to survive if everything went in the crapper. So now, the taxpayers should foot the bill? Ugh, how crappy. I understand there is a bigger picture here that it affects and it's probably in the best interest of the economy as a whole to try and prop them up until things get better, much like bailing out AIG was probably a good thing for the long-term health of the economy. It doesn't mean I have to enjoy it.

On a purely selfish level, I'm absolutely ecstatic about this. The one thing the print media industry can't afford is an even bigger loss in ad revenue from the auto companies. There's already been a big drop, and if any of the Detroit Three had gone under, that would have been a huge loss for us, too. We probably would have been looking at another round of staff cuts in our near future, and that's something I don't want to see again for at least another decade.

I keep hoping that the plan that was put in place factored in the projected troubles of the next year (and that those projections are either accurate or overestimated the troubles we'll face). I just want to be able to hold on to what we have, make it through this rough patch, and come out on the other side better for the experience. I don't want to be part of a company that goes through bankruptcy like the Tribune company has. I'm still shocked that the company that owns the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune is hurting that bad. I hope the commentary that they're the exception rather than the expectation for newspapers holds true.

IsItFunnyToday.com

2008-12-08T18:53:00.003-06:00

http://www.isitfunnytoday.com/

This has been a pleasant find. I've been reading web comics for years now, and what I like about this site is that it functions both as an aggregator of comics (which is really helpful) and a social network for comics that lets us all voice our opinions on comics while voting on their funniness. It's not a perfect site yet, but having just launched I think they have a solid foundation to build on.

Some upgrades I'd like to see:
• More complete access to archives of comics to vote going all the way back, with the archetypical "First Comic" link to take you back to the beginning and start from there.

• If you've already voted for a comic while logged in, the frame at the top should reflect that. As it is now, it will say "Sorry, you've already voted" when you try to vote a second time. It should say this before you even have a chance to vote.

I've quite enjoyed the site and they're adding more comics every day (What, no Goats.com yet??), so if you like your daily dose of web comics, give 'em a try.

Number watching in an economic crisis

2008-12-05T08:49:00.002-06:00

I've been keeping my eye on several numbers that are big indicators of where we stand as the economy melts down. The biggest one that I pay attention to is the unemployment rate, which officially spiked to 6.7% today. As the NYTimes blogged about today, that number doesn't account for the 637,000 people that have given up and stopped looking for jobs. If that number were included, it would push the unemployment rate close to 7% - a far cry from the peak of 25% reached in the Great Depression, but a disturbing number nonetheless. The percentage is even more disheartening when you think about the population of the country at both times.

Breaking it down to the heart of the issue in the article:

The share of all men ages and 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940’s.

Yeah, that's not good.

Why I love the Daily Show

2008-12-02T22:40:00.000-06:00

A clip from Monday, Dec. 1:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Bits like this are exactly why I love the Daily Show: Serious news with a dose of profanity and humor tossed in to tell a better story.

Thanksgiving thoughts

2008-11-28T18:58:00.002-06:00

Well, it's been a busy week around here. My parents were out here to visit, which is always nice. The girls especially like having them around, since they've missed Grandma and Grandpa a ton since we moved out here. It will be even better when they get moved out here and can see the girls every couple of days instead of every few months!

I'm really happy about that. Family was something that I felt like I kind of missed out on growing up. It's tough to be close to people that you only see once a year around the holidays when everything is chaotic anyway! So I was really happy that we were in Laramie, just a mile or so away from my parents, and the girls would have a chance to grow up around them and get to be close to them. It was hard for me to decide to make the move to Missouri and that was a big part of why. But it was much easier when my parents said they would plan on moving somewhere in the Missouri-Tennessee area to be closer to all their grandkids. Heck, even if they had gone to Nashville, that would be close enough to make the trip in a day rather than the two days of driving it takes to get out here now. But, if they end up with the house they're going after now, it'll put them 10-15 minutes away, which is maybe as far as I have to drive to get to work - and that will be nice - for the kids, for them, and for us.

Having them around always gets me thinking about stuff like this, and Thanksgiving has made me think about it even more. I'm glad to have them around and to get a chance to know them more. I didn't get to know them as much as I could have growing up, especially my dad, since I was spending so much energy just trying to get to know myself and figure out who I was, but it's been nice the last several years getting to be an adult and deal with them as roughly equals rather than inside the parent/kid dynamic. It took me a few years of being out on my own and not being around them to really appreciate them simply as people rather than always thinking of them as "parents".

And none of us are perfect or even close to it, but when I hear about other families and what other people went through growing up, it always makes me remember just how good I had it and lucky I was to have the parents I did. We didn't always get along great, though we got along just fine far more than we didn't; we didn't always see eye-to-eye; I know my name is on a fair amount of the gray hairs up on their wizened heads. But even when I was being punished or didn't agree with them, I always had an understanding that they were doing what they thought was good for me. When so many parents don't keep that in mind as the primary motivation for being a parent, it makes me smile to know that mine always did.

I'm never all that good at vocalizing this kind of stuff and talking about it. I just have these thoughts and I've never had a good outlet for them, so I'm trying to take advantage this blog for stuff like this, since I've always been able to write better than I can speak.

So that's my Thanksgiving thought for this year - Thank you for being good parents and looking out for me without stifling me. It wasn't an easy job to do, but you pulled through admirably.

While I'm at it, I have more to say. I need to say Thanks! to Kim too. It's one of those things - I tend not to write about her or my thoughts about her on here. Mostly because I see her at home all the time and I feel like I say most of the stuff I think about to her. But when I really think about it, I don't. At least, not nearly enough. But, she puts up with my crap and manages to do it (mostly) with a smile on her face. I'm not an easy person to live with, but she always finds a way to get through it and make the best of it. So thank you for being my wife and for putting in the work it takes to keep our household and our life functioning in their own little way. And thanks for putting up with me and not smothering me in my sleep when I snore! :)

Daft Punk fan video - "Daft Hands"

2008-11-22T11:42:00.001-06:00

Had I been blogging when this first came out, I'd have been all over it. But, alas, I was not. Anyway, I stumbled across this video again today and thought I'd share because it's so freakin' awesome!!

Pets and the economic collapse

2008-11-20T12:04:00.007-06:00

The latest from Sinfest that made me chuckle:

Things can always be worse

2008-11-18T10:59:00.003-06:00

The title pretty well sums up my thoughts lately. No matter what bump in the road my life might hit, things are never as bad as they might be. Work has really been driving that home lately, and it's seriously depressing.

I've spent the past few days working on a couple of projects that have shown me just how much things can suck. One is looking at foreclosures in the area and some of the scummy ways that businesses (one specifically) targeted people with poor credit and set them up so that at the slightest hiccup in their payments, they were pounced upon, their investment taken away, their house ripped out from under them, and then taken to court to extract even more money from their straining pocketbook. All of this happening after the business assured the homebuyer that they should trust the business, that they would take care of them, that they shouldn't read the contract too closely because the company was taking care of it all for them - and the language that let this all happen to the homebuyer was right there in the contract if they had taken the time to read it.

The other project I can't say much about, since it's still under embargo for another month, but it deals explicitly with the health of kids and implicitly with the health of everyone. It focuses on the failure of government to accurately report information on conditions that could lead to health problems, and it's been going on for many years now. If the people that work for us - the government - aren't doing their job to take care of the people, then who will? It makes me wonder if government has forgotten that it actually does work for the people, not for the businesses and corporations of the country that can make the most noise and shovel the most money into Washington and state capitols across the country.

What these stories have reminded me off is that, much like tech support, journalism is not the place to be if you want to maintain a high opinion of humanity. Sure, we see feel good stories and play them up, but for the most part news is about tragedy, corruption, betrayal, pain, suffering and the people that inflict all of that on others. We get to see up close just what it is that people are capable of in more gory depth and detail than we can adequately convey in stories. Something like the housing deal just doesn't have the same impact in a story that you get from talking to the victims, in looking at more than a hundred court cases of people being evicted and seeing the swift, brutal way in which they were kicked out of their homes for missing even a single payment at times.

Which brings me to another point - why the heck does the court system here make their Web site so horrifically difficult to access? Since they already have the information in a database, it shouldn't be a challenge to get a copy of what I'm looking for in electronic format. And yet to do so required me talking to 6 different people over 4 hours before finally being told that any such "bulk" request for records would require a formal Sunshine Law request being sent to the State Judicial Records Committee to be reviewed and, if approved, acted upon.

Seriously? They're already available on the Web and stored in a database. It's going to take them weeks to put together an SQL statement that says "SELECT * FROM cases_table WHERE plaintiff = Company Name"? OMG - that just took me a whole 5 seconds to write! And it might take another 4 minutes to process that request and have the results written to a CSV file... maybe... if the computer is really, REALLY slow. But no, they can't do that. They have to muck it all up in bureaucratic red tape that ends up in me transcribing it all by hand (Yay for copy/paste!) simply to get the data we need in a reasonable amount of time rather than waiting until sometime next month, if we're lucky, to get results back.

And so, to get through just under 150 records, it's taken me a day and a half - yes, A DAY AND A HALF! - to go through and copy/paste the data. They managed to make their Web interface so damnably difficult to get through that getting a single record transcribed has been taken between 2 and 10 minutes, since you have to click through, resubmit the form, click through again, copy, resubmit the form, copy, repeat ad naseum... BARF! I swear, they must have hired the BOFH to design that system with the goal of making it so difficult to get through that users would never come back. Their motto should be "Case.Net: Using obfuscation and hindrance to keep public records difficult to access since we started!"

Hotel Cafe Tour: St. Louis, Nov. 8, 2008

2008-11-10T17:30:00.003-06:00

Saturday's show was simply fabulous. The two hours were extremely satisfying, and the format of the show was a pleasant deviation from the standard concert fare.

The venue was interesting. The bar and restaurant are upstairs, and we all lined up, snaking through the dining area, as we waited for the doors to open. The concert itself was in the Duck Room, a dark, cozy basement that had me thinking that it could easily have been a speakeasy back in the day, hiding under the cover of the legitimate business upstairs. It was such a casual atmosphere, too - the "dressing room" for the artists was right next to the stage and we saw them coming in and out, walking through the crowd, several times as we waited. A couple of people were lucky enough to talk to Rachael before the show, and Kim and I tried as well, but she headed backstage just after we went over to where she was talking. By the time the show started, the crowd had swelled to maybe 400 people. It was nice, though - a lot of enthusiasm, but not with the crush of people that can happen with open-area crowds like this.

With so many names listed to play during the night, I wasn't sure how that was going to work or if I was going to enjoy it or not. I feared that we'd get just a couple songs from each of them instead of longer sets, and that's exactly what happened. But, it turned out my fears were unfounded; the short sets and quick rotation kept things fresh and kept a wide variety of sounds pumping through the Duck Room. Each musician played 2 songs the first time through, and then we were treated to a second rotation with each artist playing another couple of songs.

• Alice Russell - She rocked my socks off!! She was by far the Queen of Funk for the night, with the bass grooves and her gorgeous voice getting the night off to a great start. She apparently needs a bit more caution around her bandmates, as the guitarist (Jason, I think his name was?) had given her a black eye the day before. It definitely added a rather unique twist to her "look" on stage, though not as much as the bandaged and bloody pinkie that Jason sported. That led to the grossest moment of the night as he removed the bandage to allow him to play slide on his guitar during Alice's phenomenal rendition of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", one of the highlights of the night.

• Jaymay - Kim had mentioned her to me before, but I was wholly unfamiliar with her work. I came away impressed with her voice and music, though I'm not sure if it's really my thing or not. I had heard she had kind of a poppy sound, but there was much more of a country/folk feel to it live. She definitely piqued my interest as someone to check out some more.

• Meiko - Completely and utterly unfamiliar with her before the show, she's definitely on my list of artists to check out in the future. She had one of the funniest moments of the night when she came on stage and said it was nice to be playing in St. Louis for the first time - only to be corrected by an audience member that she had been here a while before. I couldn't make out the name of who it was, but her response was, "I don't remember much of that tour. He likes to drink a lot of whiskey!" Another great voice that made the night enjoyable.

• Thao Nguyen - Wow, this chick can rock!! If her album had the same sound and energy that her live show did, I'd have been grooving on it a lot more. With the guitar and the way she worked the stage, I kept thinking to myself, "Hmm, she's definitely getting her Chuck Berry on up there!" I think she worked the crowd amazingly well, with her sing-alongs and her beatboxing on the mic. Any time she comes around the area, I'll be up to watch her perform again.

• Kate Havnevik - I knew the name and had heard a couple of songs, but was not overly familiar with her before the show. I would have enjoyed her performance a lot more if it weren't for the noisy crowd. A lot of what she did was quiet, gorgeous vocals that were simply drowned out by the obnoxiously loud bastards in the room that refused to STFU. Ugh. There were certainly flashes of awesome there that made me want more - pieces of Bjork, pieces of Imogen, pieces of Kate Bush, but in a way that was all her own.

• Rachael Yamagata - Man, what is there to say? She was why I wanted to go to this show and everyone else was just a super yummy added bonus. And wow, did she deliver! Rarely at concerts do I ever get to hear the songs I want them to play the most, but Rachael came out and blew me away with "Be Be Your Love" right off the bat, followed by "Faster" in her first go-round. When she came back on, "Elephants" and "Sunday Afternoon" were next up on my list of most-wanted and she rocked the house with them. The guitarist's solo on "Sunday" was all-the-more impressive knowing that his pinkie was useless and hurting him so much - now THAT is dedication to the job! She closed the show with "Reason Why" and then it was time to go home, happy, tired and satisfied from a night of great music.

Now, going back to the whole noise issue during the show: What is wrong with people? I just have huge issues with this on so many levels.

1. If you paid money for a ticket to go to the show, why would you spend your time talking when the musicians are playing? If all you want to do is drink and talk, go to a bar or stay home and have a party - it's a lot cheaper and more convenient that dropping cash on a concert ticket!

2. Do you not realize that other people are there to actually HEAR the music? If I wanted to hear Jackass A talking to Jackass B, I would buy tickets to a show with their name on it. But you know what? Your names weren't on my ticket! I saw "Hotel Cafe Tour" on my ticket, so unless you're with the tour, I don't want to hear you! This is even more frustrating for artists like this, where a lot of the music can be subtle and quiet and the background noise of Le Jackasses simply overpowered it.

3. If the artists ask you to be quiet, and several people in the crowd are shouting at you to be quiet, why is it so hard to realize that people want you to be quiet?? One lady even shouted back something like, "God, why should I be quiet? It's a concert!!", and that was just the perfect description of what is wrong with these people. That attitude of, "It's a concert so I should be able to talk loud and do whatever I want", shows such a fundamental selfishness and lack of appreciation for music that it makes me all sad and whiny.

Seriously, if you want to be loud and listen to music, just go to a bar. Or buy the CDs and crank them up at home. But out of respect for the artists and the people at the show that actually WANT to hear the music, don't go to concerts. If you can't muster the basic decency to be quiet during a show, then just don't go, or maybe just go to really loud metal concerts where no one can hear you anyway. I know that if you're one of the loud people at shows, all you really care about is yourself and what YOU want to do, but in the future, could you please just be selfish enough to want to go somewhere else so that the decent people of the world can actually enjoy the music?

"An Eternal Revolution" - Orlando Patterson

2008-11-07T12:08:00.003-06:00

Just finished reading a great article on NYTimes.com.

A snippet:

BARACK OBAMA’S victory marks the end of another magnificent chapter in America’s experience of democracy. But rather than being seen as a radical transition, it is best viewed as part of an ever-evolving process that began with the election of George Washington in 1789. To interpret it as a foundational change, ushering something new and unknown, is to diminish the past, to unduly singularize Mr. Obama’s achievement and to raise unrealistic expectations about his presidency.

It's a very thoughtful piece, looking at the full spectrum of historical trends that led to the election of Obama as president.

The "Finally Proud"

2008-11-05T17:33:00.003-06:00

A response to http://www.chris-brewer.com/2008/11/05/fair-weather-americans. A snippet:

To those who are saying “I am finally proud to be an American” after Obama’s victory last night, you are pathetic and I am calling you all out.

So you weren’t proud to be an American before? What about everyone who has, over the course of our nation’s history, defended our right to vote? Did you not forget the fact that regardless of who is in the Oval Office, you live in the nation with the most freedoms afforded to us in the entire world?

REGARDLESS of who is in the White House, you should be proud of your nation. If you cannot be proud of America during the times in which your candidate does not hold the highest office in the land, you have no reason to be called a true American in the first place.

Isn't it possible to love your country, and yet not be proud of your country and what it has done? Isn't it possible to "finally be proud" of your country after seeing an incredible reversal of the rampant racism that was at the heart of this country for 300+ years and simmering down slowly for the last 50?

When people are subject to slavery and government-sponsored racism and sexism, claiming to be a country with the most freedoms in the entire world doesn't ring true - and seeing a black man elected president is a symbolic culmination of the rise of the country out of that dark period of "Everyone is created equal - except you. And you. Oh, and you over there. Ummm, yeah, all y'all that aren't white, male and rich just aren't as equal as the rest of us."

So sure, we should all be proud and remember those that have fought, struggled and even died to protect our right to vote. But should we simply forget and gloss over all of those that fought so strenuously to deny their fellow citizens' rights? Should we be proud of the ugly side of American history - of racism? of slavery? of the Japanese internment camps? of the Trail of Tears and the rest of our bloody history with Native Americans? of My Lai and Abu Ghraib? And that's just off the top of my head.

There is much in our history as Americans to be ashamed of which could lead us to not be proud of our country. And if you or your family or ancestors were the direct victims? It would be that much harder to be proud of a country that has made your family suffer for centuries while claiming to offer you freedom and equality.

Obama being elected president doesn't have any direct, concrete impact on racism per se, but it sure as heck is a huge indication that we all are indeed roughly equal in opportunity, FINALLY!, to the point that even a black man (or a woman, as Hillary was close in this election cycle as well) can rise to the highest office in the land.

When you say that they're only proud because "their candidate" is in the White House, I think you're missing the point. You seem to think it's a political thing, but it's not. If this were about politics, they wouldn't "finally" be proud - because all of them were alive during the Clinton presidency when "their" candidate was also in the White House. It's about much more than that, and you would see much the same response if Obama had been a Republican instead and still won.

It's about America finally, concretely demonstrating what it has always claimed - that all of us, no matter our background, have a chance in this land to be what we want to be. It may not be easy, and we very well may fail. But seeing Obama elected showed them that even a man from a relatively poor background, from a mixed-race family who was raised by his grandparents, can focus his talents and abilities to reach for the very pinnacle of American power - and make it there. This would not have been possible 30 years ago; it very likely would have been illegal in many states 100 years ago and would have ended in a lynching.

It's this progress that people are finally proud of - that America has stepped up to the promises it made 232 years ago in a way that is wholly undeniable. Are we finished and at the point where all Americans can truly say they are free and equal? Not quite. Lee Greenwood sings, "I'm proud to be an American 'cuz at least I know I'm free", but what if he were gay and wanted to marry the man he loved more than anything? He would no longer know that he was free, because he would find a governmental wall between him and his basic humanity.

Does this mean I'm "finally proud" of America? No, it doesn't. But my ancestors and I also haven't suffered under the burdens of the dark side of America. I've always been proud to be called an American, and what has always made me most proud of America are those that stood up in the face of injustice and said, "This cannot be right" and then struggled to make correct it.

So I have absolutely no problem with people who say they are finally proud to be Americans. I'm not one of them, but I can absolutely empathize and understand why they feel that way. To call them pathetic is to deny the history and circumstances that led them to feel that way.

OMFGOMFGOMFGOMFG!

2008-11-04T21:25:00.001-06:00

Obama wins. 'Nuff said. I am so freakin' ecstatic right now, I don't have the words. Now to sit and watch how big of a landslide it ends up being...

Obama in the rain

2008-11-04T13:41:00.001-06:00

Stumbled across this today - awesome video and message!

Day of reckoning

2008-11-04T10:56:00.003-06:00

Well, I did my duty and went out to vote this morning. The polls opened at 6 a.m., and the whole family was out of the car and in line at 6:05. There were probably 200 or so people ahead of us, with maybe 30-40 of them were standing outside. It moved pretty quickly, only taking 33 minutes to go from joining the line to putting my ballot in the box and leaving.

The girls were so funny while we were waiting. You can tell they've been listening to their parents, because they quite often will ask, "Can we go see Obama? Is that Obama? Where's Obama?" and this morning was no different. We had talked to them about keeping who we're voting for a "secret" so that they wouldn't be inadvertently electioneering at the polling place, but several times in line they asked, "Mom, can we get an Obama sticker? Are we going to see Obama yet?", which drew chuckles from everyone around us in line.

Now it's time to sit back and wait for results while I spend the whole day working my butt off. This is the one part of election days that is so bittersweet for me - I'm always so excited to exercise my right to vote, but it's dampened by the fact that election days are some of the longest, most hectic nights of work for me. And that's just based on being in Wyoming, where elections aren't even that hotly contested or have any where close to the population of Missouri.

I'm amazed at the predictions of turnout. Several places have predicted 70% or higher turnout in Missouri - if that holds, that would be 2,805,021 based on the Secretary of State's numbers from 2006. That's huge! And it doesn't even include however many new voters have joined the ranks in the last year as part of the most interesting election of my lifetime. After bottoming out in 1996 with less than 50% voter turnout, I hope to see us smash the national record of 63.06% set in 1960 - I think it's going to be easily surpassed. And the 122 million that turned out in 2004? Easily going to blown away. I wouldn't be shocked to see it come close to or even pass 200 million!

OMG, the Cowboys won a game??

2008-11-01T16:34:00.003-05:00

Game story on ESPN.com

Amazing - see what happens when they can go a whole game without any turnovers? It also helps that they were playing probably the only team in the Mountain West worse than them instead of the three Top 25 powerhouses currently destroying MWC teams.

Here's hoping basketball season is a lot less disappointing than football has been.

Busy, busy week

2008-10-30T08:35:00.001-05:00

Man, I've been swamped this week! This whole election thing is just crazy. I've been expecting it to get hectic as we get closer to election day, but it's even more than I thought it would be. I didn't have much to base my expectations on, though - it's not like election day in Wyoming was anything near what happens in more populated areas of the country.

I mean, we were jumping around like crazy trying to gather and publish results for a single county with a population of, what, 40,000 total? And now, I'm in the middle of a battleground state in the presidential election and will be at the heart of gathering and online publishing results for 12 counties with a total population somewhere close to 800,000. At least here we have a staff to try and deal with it, instead of just having a single person sitting at the courthouse to send me results that I had to get typed up and published!

On top of that, we're in the middle of a couple big data stories that I can't just ignore. The most interesting one, to me at least, is the look we're taking at crime in the area. We've been running a Google map with real-time 911 data from the police department, which is pretty cool, but it's not all that useful in looking at long-term trends because it takes an eternity to load if you go back more than a week or so. I've pulled all the calls from this year out and put them into a spreadsheet, and we're looking at what addresses have been generating the most calls. Outside of agency locations that you expect to see a lot - police stations and hospitals, primarily - the top two locations are interesting, one expected and one surprising.

The expected location? The mall. As many stores and as many customers as it has, I fully expected it to be in the top 5 non-agency locations in the city - and it was No. 1 on the list.

The unexpected? A Wal-Mart! What?? What the heck is going on at this Wal-Mart that has it No. 2 in the city in police calls? This result alone has made the hours I've put into this project worth it (do you have any idea how boring it is to go through 80,000+ address listings and clean them up so that 123 N. Main, 123 N. Main St., and 123 North Main all turn up as the same address??). I'm really thinking we can pull a 1A centerpiece out of this, possibly even a series - "Counting down the top 5 locations that justify the police force!" - if we can just pull it out of the shadow of the election action going on.

And that is going to be tough! Heck, I've even been pulled away from data duties to get my hands dirty with some programming. We've had so much going on that the special design for the front page of the site on election day just hasn't been done, so that's what I spent probably 6 hours (of the 11 I worked yesterday!) working on. It's still not as clean and cool as I want it to be, but it's some good stuff. We'll have a real-time, interactive Flash map to show national results in the presidential election sitting to the side of an AJAX tab scheme for state races that will update live, with each race sitting under it's own tab with mugs of the candidates. And we'll have room to modify it with breaking stories or whatever we want to toss in there as the day progresses and stuff develops.

But, with Obama, Palin and Biden in the state today, and Obama coming to town on Saturday, and McCain expected to hit town in the next 2-3 days, it's going to be nuts around here. Trying to find room in the newshole to fit in a big investigative piece like this is going to be tricky, but we'll see what comes of it.

Random picture and thought of the day:

Man, when was the last time you saw gas under $2 a gallon? Probably a year and a half, at least, for me. I feel like such an old fart when I think that "back when I was in high school", I was buying gas for $0.75 a gallon on a regular basis, and I think the lowest I ever say it was around $0.62 or so. And that's only been 12 years!!

Marxism and socialism? I don't think so

2008-10-27T19:10:00.001-05:00

So I saw a clip of this on CNN today where Biden responds a bit incredulously to a question about Obama and his plan to "spread the wealth" being called Marxist:

Here's where I have a big problem - not only with his response, but with the whole accusation here: These people have no clue what Marxism/socialism actually entails, neither the accusers nor the responses from Obama/Biden/the Democratic Party in general.

Nicely summed up on Wikipedia: Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership. It is nothing like the "spreading the wealth" that has been stated. Nothing that Obama has proposed includes state ownership of any industry. Calling "spread the wealth" socialism might work as a first grader's definition, but it vastly distorts the heart of socialism.

Even universal health care is not socialism, even the way in which it's practiced in Europe and Canada. It's psuedo-socialism, but at its heart, the state doesn't own the health care system; it simply provides health insurance coverage to its citizenry while still allowing them to purchase different and better coverage if they so choose. True socialism would involve the states taking control of the hospitals and insurance companies and not allowing private competition. You can see some true examples of this in the way Russia and Venezuela have nationalized the oil industries, and see that this is very dissimilar to anything proposed by Obama or practiced in "socialized" health care.

I've heard the term tossed about in relation to the banking bailout, and it's just as bogus there. The argument goes that, because the government took stakes in the banks that they lent money to, this amounts to a nationalization of those banks. Pure BS. Why? Well, the stakes the government has taken are considered non-voting shares, so they don't get a say in how the bank is run beyond the requirements placed on them as part of the initial loan agreement. The purpose of the stakes taken is to eventually provide a means for the government to recover (a portion of) the money it has lent these banks, not to take them over and turn them into national properties that have been effectively socialized.

If you really want to get down to brass tacks, accusations that "spreading the wealth" are equivalent to socialism are accusations that every government in the world that collects taxes is socialist. Why? The very purpose of taxes is to collect money from all citizens according to the tax code, and then spread that wealth around to where the government deems it most appropriate.

Is that socialism? No; it's simply a misunderstanding of the basic definitions of socialism and government. If spreading the wealth actually was socialism, John McCain and George Bush would be some of the biggest socialists in the world based on the levels of government spending they have been in favor of over the course of the last 8 years.

So, until each and every one of these people has the courtesy to at least take a course in basic philosophy to learn the actual definitions of these terms they're throwing around, they need to check their rhetoric at the door and stick to terms they have at least a rudimentary grasp of.

Warlords: This takes me back

2008-10-27T18:19:00.001-05:00

I've been totally hooked on a "new" game this weekend - Warlords IV.

When I was in high school, I can't even try to count how many hours I spent playing Warlords II on the Mac. When I stumbled across the latest version of this (which was only released 5 years ago...), I had to try it out and I'm quite enjoying it. It's a lot different from the version I played back when I was a young'n, but it's still a lot of fun and offers a ton of replay value.

I actually had a marathon session of gaming on Saturday, racking up probably 9 hours engrossed in Warlord-y goodness (with breaks for family duties here and there, of course). I haven't spent that long gaming in years, probably since '06 when I was still playing Warcraft. There is definitely a major time suckage potential in this game!

Dee-de-deeeee: Dumbass of the Year

2008-10-24T13:48:00.002-05:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/24/mccain-supporter-who-clai_n_137484.html

Police tell KDKA that a campaign volunteer has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter B in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car. [...]

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

Authorities are expected to release more details at a news conference this afternoon.

Wow, seriously? You thought this was going to HELP McCain? You're a CAMPAIGN WORKER and you pull this stunt?? WTF are you thinking?? When you went to Pennsylvania, did you forget to pack your brain for the trip?

I keep thinking that I have seen the true depths of human stupidity, and then stuff like this happens and my opinion of humanity sinks another notch down the scale...

Solution to energy prices? Destroy the economy!

2008-10-24T13:15:00.004-05:00

On the surface, it seems so counterintuitive - everything is going in the crapper right now, but oil/gas prices are plummeting? Wasn't it just a few months ago when the high cost of oil was the biggest threat to the world economy? And now, take a look at the price of oil over the last year (courtesy of NYTimes.com):

Oil is trading at roughly $20 a barrel less than it did a year ago after topping $140/barrel in July. Wow, so this is telling me that the value of oil has dropped by half in 3 months??

I look at this and it just strikes me as one more example of why the markets (ALL the markets, it seems) are, to put it bluntly, completely fucked up. The whole process just leads to overreaction, overspeculation, panic. "OMG, we're using oil! It's going to cost more, so bet that it will cost even more than that!"

Fast forward 3 months - "OMFG, everyone's broke, so less oil is being used, now I'm even more screwed because I locked in my price for winter oil in July and now it's half that price. I'm such an idiot!"

It just seems like there needs to be a better way to do all of this, even though I have no clue what that might be. Markets absolutely need to be able to react to changes in the conditions, but can't something be done to avoid or prevent these wild swings? If you look at that graph, there was pretty stable price point for oil around $90-100 or so. And at both the high in July and the low now, I'd bet that the "actual" worth of oil is still somewhere around that point of stability, though possibly slightly lower now that we're looking at decreased demand as the economy crumbles. It's just ludicrous to me that oil is trading so low now, even though that "decreased demand" is still going to be 10-20% higher than the demand in 2007 (instead of the 25-40% increase being projected in July that pushed prices through the roof).

If Opie, Andy and the Fonz endorse it, it's gotta be good

2008-10-24T07:37:00.001-05:00

I saw this over on http://ianmcgibboney.blogspot.com/ and thought it was pretty funny, so I wanted to blatantly steal it ans put it here:

See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die

Rambling towards an identity

2008-10-23T18:34:00.003-05:00

I've been working lately at trying to categorize myself. I know that labels are utterly meaningless in the end, but they're something that can be helpful in the process of trying to define oneself and explain to others what that definition might be.

Part of what's made it hard is how easily those labels get thrown around and abused in daily conversation, which has just been amplified and made so much worse in the course of the election this year. "Liberal" and "Conservative" have gotten to the point of practically being insults when lobbed across the aisle at the other party. I try to hold myself above that level of discourse, but I'm not guiltless by any means.

So what am I? In my own mind, I see myself as a moderately progressive liberal. On the core issues, that's where I see the majority of my personal beliefs being reflected. I do think that welfare and social security are good things and form the security net that is part of the social contract the government and people have agreed to. I do think it's wrong to have a wholesale legal ban on abortion, though there are forms of abortion that can and should absolutely be limited. I do think that the Second Amendment, while (arguably) granting the right to personally bear arms, does not mean that this is an unfettered right to own any and all forms of weaponry - it just makes so little sense to me that it requires a license to drive a car and get married, but not to own a gun. I do think that everyone deserves the opportunity to marry the person they love - straight, gay, transgender, whatever.

And in the more traditional, literal sense of what progressive and conservative mean, I think we always need to keep our eyes looking to the future and trying to adapt to the present in a liberal sense rather than keep looking backwards and simply trying to maintain tradition in a conservative sense. This is something that I think is at the core of the big split between red and blue, yet it often gets overlooked. The very words we use to define the two sides have some meaning. I understand that "conservative" originated with the meaning of fiscal conservatism, and that's something I actually think about a lot, but more on that later. But if you look at where politics stands today, conservatives tend to want to keep things they way they've always been - they want religion at the heart of society and government; they don't want the immigrants coming in and changing things; they don't want to let gays get married because that's not the traditional idea of marriage. And liberals/progressives look at these ways of doing things and see changes that they believe will make things better. When it reaches the point of trying to change the way things "have always been done", there's obviously going to be a huge clash and that's where we are right now.

That doesn't mean that this stuff is at the same level of what has happened in the past. Are the reforms liberals pushing for now of the same degree or importance of what the founding fathers did? The suffragists? The civil rights movement? The closest you can come to that might be with gay marriage. To me, it's not quite the same because that's a small portion of their rights (albeit an important one), the rest of which were fought for and protected as part of the other struggles in the 20th century. But for the most part, it really seems like all the "big" battles are over and now we're picking up the pieces and fighting the smaller battles that are left to be fought.

Maybe you could make a case that the one big battle left to be fought is the one for economic equality, and there are rumblings going on in the wake of the economic collapse that could lead to this happening. The problem I see here is that there's no clear path to "victory". I think it's fairly obvious that there is something inherently inequitable about 1% of the population controlling 60% of the wealth in the world.

But what's the answer? I certainly don't have it. I see potential in a socialist-inspired method, but the problems inherent in that system are difficult to overcome. How do you prevent the greed and corruption that turn socialism into Stalinist communism? How do you provide the motivation to reach as high as you possibly can with your talent without the incentive of proportionately greater compensation? That's the flaw with the concept of, "From each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs" - there is no motivation beyond simply believing that people will work as hard as they can. And from what I've seen, most people will be as lazy as they can get away with, so there needs to be something to motivate them.

To some extent, I think there is a lot to learn from Europe in this sense. Many countries there have found ways to incorporate pieces of democracy, capitalism and socialism together in a mostly cohesive framework. They have taken the idea of a social contract between citizen and government to heart, the idea that the purpose of government is to take care of its people - all of its people. They've decided that health care and education are fundamental to properly caring for and preparing their citizenry, and they've made the sacrifices needed to make it happen.

And after rambling off on a tangent, this brings me back to the idea of fiscal conservatism. At its heart, I truly believe in this principle. The goal of every government should be to never spend more than it takes in in revenue. Obviously, there will be times when this isn't possible such as wars, famines, and other crises. But we've seen vividly in the past year the consequence of overextending. What I don't agree with, and many conservatives have connected the ideas, is that fiscal conservatism means small government and minimal spending. Just because you believe in balanced budgets, that doesn't mean you can't add programs and increase the ability of the government to provide for its people; it just means you have to be able to pay for it.

That is the crux of the problem, because the only way to do that is to raise taxes. And I can't remember the last time I heard people on either side talk honestly about raising taxes. It seems like everyone just wants to lower taxes and still enjoy everything that we've come to expect from government - and more! But it doesn't work that way, and our $10 trillion national debt graphically illustrates that. You want to spend more? Well, then you need to collect more taxes. The idea that lowering taxes results in higher total revenues works to an extent, but I believe that it fails in the long run.

The simple - and only - answer is that, if you want to spend more, you have to raise taxes. If we had nationalized health care and I had higher taxes, but didn't have the $300 a month insurance premium I have to pay now, I'd bet that at best I'd pay a good deal less and at worst have a slight increase in total amount of taxes each month. Isn't that worth it to have health care provided for me, my family and everyone in the country that needs it regardless of income?

How does this all define me? It really doesn't; it mostly just gives a basis of explanation for me. Much of this has been at the heart of my thoughts for many years now. It's what I concluded was the "right" way to do things and what I've continued to investigate to make sure that it is still the "right" way to go about things over the ensuing years. And "right" isn't the right word - these are the things I think will be most helpful, most beneficial to me, my country and my fellow citizens. That doesn't make them "right"; it just makes them right to me. If you disagree with me, that doesn't make you wrong - it just makes you less "right" than I am!! :D

Today's funny: PartiallyClips

2008-10-22T18:19:00.001-05:00

I'm going through the archives lately, so here's another couple from PartiallyClips that made me laugh:

What's really funny about the second one is how much our girls absolutely LOVE "badgersbadgersbadgers"! Jasmine will just walk up to me while I'm working on the computer and say, "Badgerbadger, daddy! Badgerrrrs!" They're so young, and yet already learning the fine art of being a hip interweb geek. I'm so proud of them! :)

Daily Show: Life in Wasillalalalala, Alaska

2008-10-21T22:11:00.004-05:00

I laughed so hard I was almost crying:

Alright, ok... alright... I'm laughing again, so gimme a sec...

Alright. So, Wasilla, Alaska, has no fire department... no school system... no social services at all. And the mayor can only describe her job as signing checks once a week and holding staff meetings.

Well, golly gee, heck and darn, that sure does make Ms. Palin qualified to be governor of the state! Oh, well, maybe it doesn't. What's that you say? OH! She's not trying to be governor, she's the Republican nominee for VICE-FRICKIN'-PRESIDENT!!!! SCHWEEEEEEEEET!!! I'll feel safer knowing that, if they win, she'll be just one heartbeat of a 72-year-old with recurrent bouts of skin cancer away from being the single most powerful person in the world.

My funny of the day

2008-10-20T19:02:00.000-05:00

From PartiallyClips.com:

Mish-mash

2008-10-20T18:51:00.000-05:00

• Hmmm, Phillies and Rays in the World Series? I'm not overly surprised by the Phils, but the Rays are just such a shock. I know, I've had the whole season to come to terms with the fact that they are for real, but I'm still shocked. Having no real preference for who wins, I'll have to throw my support behind the Rays just because of their story. "Worst-to-first" is such a cool thing to see that it makes me smile a bit.

• NEWS ALERT: The Cowboys didn't lose this week! Despite 73 turnovers and 0 yards in offense, Wyoming managed to eke out a 0-0 tie against their Bye Week.

• Bullet points make it look like I have a lot to say even when it's just a bunch of random crap I feel like talking about. This is one of the key points I learned in college. Aren't edumacation great and stuff? Still, I've enjoyed being able to write on here, even if a lot of it is just random and inconsequential stuff like this. It's a good outlet for stuff I think about and mean to say, but just never remember to.

• As much as the thought of her being president scares me, I thought Sarah Palin did well on Saturday Night Live this weekend. And it's sad to me that she seems more qualified to be on a sketch comedy show than in the White House and yet is still a nominee for vice president...

• We had a ton of photos taken at the park this weekend. One of Kim's friends is looking to break into photography and was willing to do them for free to help build her portfolio, so we said sure. I'll have to post a couple photos when we get them back - some are SOOOOOO cute! For the last bit of it, we got Anisa (flying unicorn) and Jasmine (Minnie Mouse) into their Halloween costumes and let them run around and play in the park while snapping pictures. As we were getting ready to leave, a handful of ducks walked up out of the pond/lake to check us out and see if we had any bread to feed them. The girls were just thrilled that the ducks had come up to say "Hi!" to them! :)

Kiddo cuteness

2008-10-17T19:30:00.002-05:00

The girls have been so cute lately - Anisa has grasped the concept of singing and has been learning the words, so I keep finding her singing as she goes around the house. I had to go into her room last night after bedtime and tell her to sing in a whisper because she was going to wake up her sister! And Jasmine is trying to be just like big sister now - she's only picked up words to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" so far, but any time I sing it or it's playing in the room, she'll jump right in with her sister and try to sing away. It's so awesome to hear them both crooning away in their cute little girl voices!

I keep being amazed by just how much information Anisa absorbs from everything around her. This week, she's been fascinated with bones and wants a skeleton for Christmas to learn more about dem bones. There's some show on On-Demand that takes "Dry Bones" and has dancing skeletons illustrating each bone they're talking about in the song and then it goes back and gives an explanation of just what the foot bone is made of and what it does to help us stand, walk, etc. Well, Anisa just keeps dropping little knowledge nuggets that she picked up from that on me - "You can't stand without your backbone, daddy!" - and it's just so cool.

I'm a lame-ass whiner

2008-10-17T19:14:00.004-05:00

I need something different. I feel like I'm in a total rut right now. Work is its own exciting beast right now, so that's good at least. But my personal time (which is pretty much non-existent, anyway) is just... blah. Don't take that the wrong way - I'm happy at home, I love being a dad and a husband and all that jazz. I'm just not doing anything that's simply me being me for me, if that makes any sense.

Life is just: Wake up, go to work, come home and eat dinner, put work in on Worldwinner, put kids to bed, chill for an hour or two, sleep, repeat. And I have no idea how to break the cycle.

I had been hoping that having a normal work schedule would give me a chance to be more normal and do more stuff outside of the house, and it probably will eventually. It's just tough right now and I feel like whining. I mean, I barely see the kids any more, so I try to spend time with them (even when they're frustrating me to the point of ripping my hair out!) when I get home so that I can feel like a dad instead of just a stranger that pops into their life every evening. But then it's 9 or 10 p.m., and what is there left to do at that hour? It's not like I've ever been a barfly (or could even afford it) and movies are just too damn pricey to see at the theater, let alone go by myself while Kim stays home with the kids.

And it's not like I know a whole lot of people here. Most people that I do know are working that Copy Desk schedule I lived on forever and are at work until midnight or 1 a.m., so it's not like I can go hang out with them. The sad thing is, I don't even know what it is I want to be doing - just... something. I don't have the time to spend gaming that I used to (and most good games require a significant investment of time to truly enjoy any more); I don't have the time, quiet or solitude to spend reading as much as I used to; I'm not in shape enough to enjoy playing basketball like I used to; and that's basically the extent of my recreational activities for the last 20 years. Yay me for being adventurous and outgoing!

What a week

2008-10-16T18:32:00.002-05:00

The new job is certainly catching up to me. The first couple of weeks were fairly calm as I spent my time trying to figure out how this whole Data thing worked and putting together a Wiki to roll out to the room (that no one even uses yet... Ugh). I managed to score big with a 1A centerpiece that fell into my lap about presidential campaign contributions within the first week and a half - and then the work really started.

I've got my fingers in about 6 different projects right now, seeing what I can stir up, everything from statistics on the uninsured to foreclosures to teacher salaries to funding schools with taxes on casinos.

Normally, there's always a little breathing room during the day where you can take 10 or 15 minutes to relax a little and check out NYTimes.com or whatever catches your interest, but not the last couple of days. I've been trying to get databases cleaned up for 3 different projects, while figuring out stories worth pulling out of them and how to best present the data graphically in print. I've been able to occasionally tab over to see glance at the latest update on the front page of the Times (can you tell they're my preferred online news source?) maybe every couple of hours.

It's just kind of weird having to work hard for once. I've spent so many years able to just skate by without breaking a sweat that this is a nice change. How big of a freak am I - enjoying the fact that my job is a lot harder now!

Mo' money, mo' problems - Sinfest

2008-10-16T15:09:00.003-05:00

I love Sinfest!!

Gaming on Worldwinner

2008-10-15T18:16:00.003-05:00

I figured I'd share just what it is I do when I'm gaming on Worldwinner.com. I mostly compete in Tile City on there, though I also play Golf, Sudoku, and Big Money fairly often as well. I've put a couple videos up in the last couple of months to help other players, so here they are. They're not my best performances - this particular layout of Tile City is not my best, but they're fairly decent examples of the game.

Rachael Yamagata rocks my little world

2008-10-15T11:30:00.002-05:00

Man, I am loving the new Rachael Yamagata album. The teaser she put out had me highly anticipating it, and she absolutely nailed it. And I've got a signed picture of her that came with the album, which just adds to the awesomeness factor! :D

The way she split up the tracks into 2 discs was such a nice touch. Normally, when there's an album with such distinct sounds, they're mixed together and you end up skipping through some songs that you're not in the mood for. Rachael, though? Not happening. She's got the "mellow", piano-based, traditional Yamagata sound all together on Disc 1 and the edgy, guitar-thrashing sounds on Disc 2, giving me the chance to take it all in without being jarred between her beautiful ballads and new push towards rock.

I have to admit, I was not looking forward to the "new sound" when I first read about it. Why mess with a good thing, ya know? But I have been pleasantly surprised. She's found a way to do it without being over the top and without losing the piercing lyrics that have always moved me. "Sidedish Friend" and "Accident" were perfect on the sampler, showcasing what she had done and laying the groundwork for the rest. "Faster" and "Don't" are simply awesome; some great music and the kind of lyrical depth and cleverness she excels at.

I couldn't be more excited right now about the concert next month. I just wish that instead of it being this cafe tour with like 6 artists on the bill, it was just Rachael on stage for like 4 hours playing everything on every album of hers plus whatever covers and such that popped into her head. I don't ask much, right?

A little bit of everything

2008-10-12T16:43:00.003-05:00

• Well, the 'Pokes took on another Top 20 behemoth from the land of Mormon. And the result was similar to last time - a 40-7 walloping by No. 14 Utah. Hey, at least they scored this time, right?

• I might have been just a tad early on the Dodgers bandwagon. Going down 2-0 to the Phillies is not a good way to start the NLCS, but it's not over yet. If anyone other than Manny and Ethier could get some offense going, the Dodgers still have a shot. And if the Rays and Sox keep beating up on each other they way they are and go to seven games, that might open the door for whoever comes out of the NL to steal the Series.

• I'm thinking the Broncos really need to invest in some Super Glue™ after their first half against Jacksonville so far. It's pretty sad when you're this offensive juggernaut and have dominated the game, but turnovers have sent you into halftime down 10-7. This should easily be a 21-10 lead for the Broncos but they're taking notes from Wyoming on how to kill any chance of winning by turning it over whenever they get a chance.

• I have to give John McCain credit for the exceedingly noble and humane gesture of having the courage to stand up and publicly admit that, no, Barack Obama is not actually an Arab. No other politician would have had the intestinal fortitude to, you know, actually admit the truth and correct one of the lies out there that has been boosting his support. And yes, there's just this tiny, eensie weensie bit of biting sarcasm there. I mean, c'mon, when his own ads have been doing everything they can to cast this mysterious light on Obama's background (when there's two full memoirs in print and widely read that document his background), how can he expect the less-than-diligent followers out there to think anything else?

With all the hate and anger the McCain campaign (not necessarily McCain himself) has been pumping into this race, McCain should have been putting out the word a month ago that the sort of hate and rhetoric that's been circulating was simply false and way over the top. Instead, he corrects some ignorant bumpkin lady that states Obama is an Arab and I hear pundits calling him such a good guy for doing it. Ugh.

• Following up on my earlier post about the electoral college race, I've been taking a look at fivethirtyeight.com the last couple of days. It takes a much more computational approach to interpreting the polls, with various polls weighted based on past performance and agreement with simulations of outcomes. These guys cut their teeth working on statistical analysis of baseball and have done some impressive work there, so I'm interested to see how close their projections come to the poll predictions and to actual results.

• I wish I would have had the camera with me a little bit ago. On the way home from Wal-Mart, Anisa found a red pen and managed to almost entirely cover her legs with red ink... sooo funny! The best part was when she was trying to pull her skirt down on the walk to the front door to try and cover all the pen on her legs, saying, "Jasmine is going to be mad when she sees what I did."

And now for something entirely dif... well, not really all that different

2008-10-10T18:47:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I've been focusing on the economy a lot lately, but it's been kind of hard not to. Not only is it a financial crisis of truly historical proportions (not to mention a perfect example of what unfettered and unchecked greed can result in), but through the mortgage markets it's having a profound effect on average people the way that 1972 and 1987 really didn't. Plus, it doesn't help that I've been neck deep in looking at mortgages and foreclosures in the area to try and make sense of the local impact as part of my work.

So now, I feel like writing something that has nothing to do with that.

• I'm jealous of Kim and the kids right now. While I was slaving away at work yesterday, they got to go to The Discovery Center here in Springfield. They got to dig for dino bones, see a giant tornado, turn on lights to see animals in the cave, and take turns running the Human Hamster Wheel. The girls were so excited about it when they picked me up from work yesterday, it really made me wish I could have been there. Had I been on my old schedule, I probably would have gone with them. Of course, on my old schedule, we (the adults, at least) probably would have been tired from only managing 5 hours of sleep and might have simply not gone, so I guess it's a trade off. Still, I definitely want to go with them one of these weeks soon.

• I'm getting more and more excited about the Rachael Yamagata concert. I feel like a giddy teenager again when I was thrilled about getting to see Ani for the first time. Not only that, but I get to see Alice Russell as part of the show, too! She'd been on my list of artists to get more of since I'd heard her with Quantic, but once I find out she'd be part of the concert, I went out and picked up "My Favourite Letters" and I've been seriously digging it. It's been on a pretty steady rotation in the car for my 40-50 minutes of driving to and from work each day.

• Ugh, that reminds me. I hate commuting. HATE it. And I know, it's not really commuting since I'm just driving from the south side of town to the middle of the city, but it still sucks. I never realized how lucky and convenient it was to live a total of 5 blocks away from work in Wyoming.

• This whole blog thing has been nice. Not that very many people read it, but it's still nice to have an outlet for things. Instead of losing all the random crap that floats through my head during the day, now I can manage to capture 1 or 2 of those thoughts and pretend to be a writer. Hey, at least my grammar and spelling are pretty good, right? :D

• Pizza. I like it. So there.

• You know, it sure seems like the Dodgers are going to be this year's Rockies. They're going to be the surprise team of the playoffs and then get absolutely spanked by the winner of the Boston/Tampa series, which should be a heck of a battle. I've got say, the whole Manny vs. the Red Sox storyline is an interesting one. Of course, it will get so overplayed and blown out of proportion if they meet in the World Series that I'll absolutely hate the story. I'm just wondering, how many times has a superstar-caliber player been traded mid-season and then met his former team in the championship that same year? I mean, in ANY sport. I honestly can't remember this ever happening, but I'm not the biggest sports geek in the world either so I could easily be wrong.

Freaky day on the Dow

2008-10-10T17:29:00.008-05:00

So here's a look at what's happened today. This graph from the NYTimes.com is just freaky. I spent the whole day waiting for it drop below 8,000 again and it never quite made it there... then out of the blue comes this huge rally at the end. Man, watching this stuff happen is like watching a horse race - you never know what's going to happen. Of course, the livlihoods of millions aren't tied to a horse race so it's not entirely accurate.

And here's a peek at how the market has fared this week. That's just a hell of a dip.

It's almost disturbing to think that a nearly 2,000-point drop can be shown in just an inch of a graph... it doesn't do it justice at all. I'd love to see this graph up on an Imax screen just to really get a visual sensation of what has happened.

And finally, here's a look at the last year of crushing defeat to the Dow.

A heartfelt Thank You to the NYTimes Web site for providing the data and graphs for all of this. They've been my main source of morbid fascination to watch this all unfold.

How glad I am to be young

2008-10-10T17:05:00.000-05:00

Reading this blog post made me happy about my relative youth:

Some may also wonder how long it will take the market to “recover.” It depends exactly what is meant by “recover,” of course, but one measure might be when the market returns to its pre-crash peak. The historical data is somewhat more distressing in this context.

After the Great Depression, it took 29 years — until 1958 — for the market to reach its pre-Depression, inflation-adjusted peak. After the 1970s recession, it took 24 years — until 1992 — for the market to make a full “recovery” by the same measure. So no matter whether you start from the recent 2007 peak, or from the market’s absolute inflation-adjusted peak during the tech bubble in 2000, we may still have at least a decade to go before full “recovery.”

So just to be optimistic, that means it will take at least 20 years for investments made in the last 10 years to return to the equivalent of their dollar value at time of investment. I've got plenty of time for my portfolio to recover, but what about all those folks in their 50s and 60s looking to retire soon? They'd been depending on their 401k and Roth IRAs and now in a year, the value of that has dropped by 40%. What the hell are they supposed to do, other than keep working longer?

This just underscores the need for Social Security reform being done in the right way. Could you imagine the outrage throughout the country if we had gone ahead and privatized Social Security into the markets 4-5 years ago? That would have just added a whole other layer of tragedy and human cost into the whole mess we're seeing now. I truly hope this puts an end to that whole proposal - it's never really made sense, and it makes even less sense now. Let folks do what they want with their personal approaches to retirement with 401(k)s, IRAs, savings accounts, CDs, and coffee cans full of money, but don't put the heart of the government safety net at risk of suffering the whims of the market.

The one thing that does make me a little bit happy about this is that any investments I make now are going to see a huge increase in value as the market recovers. That 40% drop in value means the investment power of my dollar is now buying 40% more. When things get better, that's going to be a huge payoff. Whee - I found a silver lining!!

Keeping up with political races

2008-10-10T16:45:00.001-05:00

A self-described "poll nerd" has put together this site to take poll results and turn them into an estimate of the electoral college outcome in the presidential race. He's also been looking at the polls to see how the Congressional races are going to impact the balance of power in the House and Senate. A very interesting site, so I thought I'd share it.

Stock market, trading and bears - OH MY!

2008-10-09T18:20:00.000-05:00

Ummm, what the hell happened?? I'd been keeping an eye on the market today, seeing it was down a bit as expected. Then I take a break and all hell breaks loose in the last hour of trading... Insane!

Today's numbers:

Oct. 9, 2008 - 8579.195, down 5618.91 from the high mark on Oct. 11, 2007, for a 39.58% loss since then.

That's also a 1015.74 pt loss since MONDAY, when I last posted numbers, for a 10.59% loss in the last 3 days...

I found an interesting NYTimes blog taking a historical look at the numbers - I guess I'm not the only historically-minded number junky out there. We should take pride! Americans always want to be the best, and now we're closing in on taking the biggest drop in the history of the market. Take THAT, 1932!!

Month without plastic

2008-10-07T17:16:00.003-05:00

I had been reading this blog and completely forgot about it until today. I had stumbled across another one of the BBC's topic blogs and it reminded me that I hadn't caught the conclusion of the plastics blog.

It's a really interesting look at what changes life requires to minimize the use of plastic in every day life. I was impressed at her achievement - without going to extraordinary measures, she was able to reduce plastic use by 80%! That's a huge difference, but I also don't see it as being quite as easy for everyone as it was for her.

One big problem would be meat. She was able to stop by her local butcher for non-plasticized meat; I'm not sure many towns in America even have that option any more, so what other avenues would there be there? It would also require a big change in overall eating habits. Just about everything we buy, whether it's components to cook a meal or ready-made stuff to eat or snack on, is encased in some form of plastic. I'm sure I could find a fair amount at more eco-conscious stores (though I have to give credit to Wal-Mart for the push they've lead to reduce packaging over the last few years), but can I afford the cost? It's tough enough making ends meet when we're buying groceries at the cheapest place in town; seeing a 10-30% increase in that cost would be a big hit to take.

Some of her revelations and recommendations are definitely in my mind. The biggest one was to get a stainless steel cup to use for drinking, be it water or soda. I need to cut back on soda anyway (drinking 126 ounces of sugar water a day is probably a wee bit too much...), so it's a good plan. We've been trying to use our cloth bags at the store when we go shopping for a while now, but it seems I never remember that they're sitting in the car. And I'm definitely going to try to remember to take our own containers to restaurants to use as a doggie bag instead of relying on the styrofoam containers they usually supply.

All in all, I definitely recommend giving her experience a read. It may not change your life, but it will certainly make you think about things a little more.

That brings me to what I think was the most interesting part of reading this. What the BBC has done with its blogs is really interesting to me. They've taken these stories that would have been features or series in a newspaper and turned them into the personalized topic blogs. Just based on the comments, these have been a huge hit. I've been trying to wrap my head around ways to make blogs more useful to the media, and this approach really caught my attention.

The traditional way the big media sites have done blogging - having an expert writing stories on their blog and posting them immediately rather than on deadline - certainly has its place and can be hugely effective. But I think this more personal touch is a great addition to the methodology of news blogging. It certainly can be tricky; you have to find the right person/people to right it, people that can effectively communicate through a blog and are willing to invest the time and effort necessary; you have to find a topic that is going to be appealing and figure out a way to tackle it through a blog setting that is going to be interesting and worth coming back for. So there's going to be a lot of planning and forethought to make it work, but it seems to me like there is a big payoff whenever you do it successfully.

More numbers

2008-10-06T13:43:00.005-05:00

Hmmm, can you tell I've been a little preoccupied with the slide of the economy into the gutter?

Just an update to some numbers from last week:

Since Oct. 11, 2007, the Dow has now dropped 4603.17 points to 9,594.93 as of 1:42 p.m. CDT today. That brings the drop in value of the market since it's peak to 32.42% in just 360 days.

Almost as disheartening? In the week since I last posted numbers on this, it's dropped 1,019 points for a 9.6% loss in 7 days.

Gaming
In lighter news, I have hardly been gaming at all lately. Now starting my fourth week on my new work schedule, it's just hard to find time to play. I'm still cruising along on Worldwinner, since that's basically my second job, but "fun" gaming just doesn't happen. I get home from work, and then it's dinner time and time to get the kiddos ready for bed. By the time that nightly fight is over and they've quieted down and fallen asleep, it's usually 9:30, 10. Then I end up finally relaxing a little and spending some time with Kim, which is about the only quiet time we get together. And all of a sudden, it's 11:30 and I'm tired and ready for bed. So where does gaming even fit in with all of that?

I can't say I'm upset or even unhappy about it; that's just the way life is some times. I'm hoping that as time goes on and we all get more used to the realities of the new schedule, things will get a little easier and my free time becomes a little more free. That remains to be seen, though.

Horror in slow motion

2008-10-06T11:13:00.003-05:00

I have to say, this whole economic collapse is one of the weirdest experiences in my life. I've been around and aware enough for many world-changing events, but they all seemed to share a quality of *SMACK* it happened, then watch the aftermath. The Challenger and Columbia, 9/11, Iraq I and II, previous collapses on Wall Street, the Berlin Wall...

Maybe I've just remembered them all as big single events moreso than the reality of the situations actually warrant, but certainly none of them seemed to me to have the kind of prolonged agony the last year has subjected us to. I first started hearing rumblings about the housing market and mortgage industry last summer. I started seeing it have a real impact on the economy around January. And now, the last 3 months I've seen it start wreaking real havoc around the world. I sat there this morning watching the Dow Jones average drop below 10,000 - the first time it's been down to four digits since 2004 - and just wondering when the bleeding is going to stop.

It really makes me wonder how people managed throughout the Cold War. At least with the economic stuff, we can be fairly certain that we'll come out on the other side. We may not know exactly when or how bad it may get, but eventually we'll get things revved up again and back on the right track. With the Cold War, there was just no such certainty, no light at the end of the tunnel, no guarantee that we were going to come out on top or that you wouldn't wake up to the roar of nuclear apocalypse rushing at you in the night. Just with the little tastes I've had in the last decade, I'm glad I didn't have to live with that kind of unresolved fear hanging over my head all the time.

King John?

2008-10-03T17:29:00.004-05:00

When I found this here, I could not believe what I was seeing.

His quote about 35 seconds in:

I’m not saying this is the perfect answer. If I were dictator, which I always aspire to be, I would write it a little bit differently. I would increase the FDIC insured deposits and done some other things.

Ummmmm.... WTF???? Seriously??? He's not joking. He's not kidding. He's saying that with a straight face. This is what you get when you see the real John McCain.

Never fails to deliver a laugh

2008-10-03T14:54:00.004-05:00

If you have the time to spare and don't mind laughing out loud (meaning - this might not be the best thing to read at work), check out the Fail Blog to see the idiocy and miscues of humanity at their funniest.

Kid stuff
Apparently, Jasmine counted to ELEVEN by herself this morning. How did this happen? She hasn't even counted to two, and now she's up to 11? Heck, Anisa's got a year and a half on her and is only counting to 8 consistently.

Anisa has finally grasped the concept of "Why?" recently. I've been waiting for this to happen, and it's such a huge leap in logic. It means she's finally connected the dots on cause and effect; she knows there's a reason things happen now, which is just awesome. Of course, it also means that most requests and statements are now followed by her asking, "Why? But why, daddy?", which adds a whole new level of discussion. At least I already know the 2 ways to answer that and end a conversation: "Because" and "Why not?"

We picked up some of the Wizard of Oz dolls the McDonalds has been selling recently, and they're a huge hit. Both girls have been playing with them all the time and insisting on taking them to bed with them.

Quick question: Is there a remedy out there for the post-waking-up grumpiness? Both girls are relentlessly grumpy for about an hour or so after they wake up in the mornings or after a nap. It's not fun.

One thing I love about the girls is that they're so into reading. They absolutely love sitting down with their books and reading stories. One thing I worried about going into this whole parenting thing was that having all the TV and video and computer stuff would make them not appreciated books at all. That worry has been completely unwarranted. It's something we'll have to keep encouraging as they get older, but there's definitely a solid foundation there for them to build on.

Pushed off the cliff

2008-10-03T08:24:00.004-05:00

Serendipity is funny - I was talking to my mom last night a bit about the causes of our current economic troubles, and then opened NYTimes.com this morning to find a rather striking article discussing just that.

Very brief summary: A 2004 SEC ruling dramatically increased the amount of debt the Big Boys on Wall Street were allowed to carry. The house of cards that led up this certainly had some foundations built in the Clinton, Bush I and Reagan eras, but this decision basically tried to see if pyramid of pachyderms (to steal a line from Dumbo) could balance on top of that house. How bad was it?

"Over the following months and years, each of the firms would take advantage of the looser rules. At Bear Stearns, the leverage ratio — a measurement of how much the firm was borrowing compared to its total assets — rose sharply, to 33 to 1. In other words, for every dollar in equity, it had $33 of debt. The ratios at the other firms also rose significantly."

Man, if that same standard was applied to me, I could carry nearly $1.5 million in debt.... that sure would be fun for a couple of years, but wow is the hangover is going to suck when the bill collectors show up.

And it makes me all the more confident that we're on the right path now to know that Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary leading us down the bailout path, sat there in this SEC meeting and thought this was going to be a great idea and had no qualms about approving it. What, are we now trying to get the U.S. government to a 33-to-1 debt ratio?

Ugh. I'm not looking forward to the next 10 years at all, regardless of who's at the reins.

Blogging from the brink

2008-09-29T13:41:00.004-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_milestones_of_the_Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average

This shows the historical milestones of the Dow Jones average. The all-time high:

Intra-day Actual:	14,198.10	Thursday, October 11, 2007

As of 2:42 p.m. today, according to the NYTimes.com feed, the Dow stood at 10,614. So in less than a YEAR, the average has dropped 3,584 points - or 25.24%....

That's just mind-boggling. Seriously, we've lost 25% of the value of our businesses in 50 weeks?? WTF?

A happy note? If this is similar to the Great Depression, it only took 22 years and World War II to pull the economy back to the previous levels the stock market had reached before the crash. Hmmm.... maybe that's NOT such a happy note.

Disturbing thought of the... week? month? #!%@$ century??

2008-09-24T09:56:00.005-05:00

I tend to enjoy sports a lot. I also enjoy politics and intellectual insight into the many facets of the world. Rarely are these two portions of my brain engaged at the same time, but Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com has been doing so successfully for a long while now and is one of my most favoritest (yes, that's a word - in my world, at least :P ) reads of the week during football season. I may not agree with some of the things he says, but he at least makes me think about things a little more.

In his latest column, he put the recent economic turmoil and the government's response to it into terms that struck a chord with me. So I'm sharing it with you now:

Last week, TMQ asked why no one was paying attention to the fact that the national debt ceiling was quietly raised by $800 billion during the summer. Well, toss that column: The White House just asked the national debt ceiling be raised another $700 billion, for the proposed financial-sector bailout. If that happens, in 2008 alone, $1.5 trillion will have been added to the national debt: every penny borrowed from your children and their children. Stated in today's dollars, in 1979 the entire national debt was $1.5 trillion. George W. Bush and Congress have in a single year added an amount equal to the entire national debt one generation ago. And the year's not over!
It took the United States 209 years, from the founding of the republic till 1998, to compile the first $5 trillion in national debt. In the decade since, $6 trillion in debt has been added. This means the United States has borrowed more money in the past decade than in all our previous history combined. Almost all the borrowing has been under the direction of George W. Bush -- at this point Bush makes Kenneth Lay seem like a paragon of fiscal caution. Democrats deserve ample blame, too. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leaders of the Senate and House, have never met a bailout they didn't like: Harry and Nancy just can't wait to spend your children's money. Six trillion dollars borrowed in a single decade and $1.5 trillion borrowed in 2008 alone. Charles Ponzi would be embarrassed.

If you ever needed more reason to feel sickened by our current state of affairs, there it is. I'm going to go cry while looking at my 401k statement again now.

Grown-ups getting a play date

2008-09-22T10:58:00.004-05:00

It seems like it has been an eternity since I was able to go to a concert. But come November, that streak will be at an end!

I'll be attending a show for Rachael Yamagata as part of the Hotel Cafe Tour at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis on Nov. 8. I'm so freakin' excited!! She's one of my absolute favorite artists and the fact that I get to actually take a day to do some grown-up stuff without the kids makes it that much better. An added bonus is that Alice Russell is also scheduled to perform that night. From what I've heard of her singing with Quantic and the samples of her solo material I've stumbled across, she's someone high on my list of music to add to the collection - and now I get to see her live!

Since the move to Missouri, the extent of events we've been able to manage that didn't include the kiddos was catching the Simpsons movie at the theater in August... of 2007! I absolutely love being a dad, but sometimes I really miss the freedom of not having kids to worry about and plan around. A big thanks to Kim's friend Jenni for stepping up to watch the kids overnight that night. We owe her big time!! :)

Kid stuff
Man, the kids just keep growing up faster and faster. Anisa has started to pick up the concept of reading and words. She's started pointing to a word and asking, "What's that word say?" and even started to recognize certain words. Not really reading them, but if you point to "cat" and ask her what word it is, she knows.

Kim has started Anisa on the path of juvenile humor already. Momma taught her the joke: "Guess what?" "Chicken butt!" and Anisa has gone on to improvise so that the answer can be "* butt!" - "Anisa butt!" "Xanadu butt!" and my personal favorite, "Computer butt!" I can't wait until she's in preschool next year and we get a call from the teacher about this joke being abused during class.

Jasmine, meanwhile, is doing her best to catch up to her sister. She's putting together sentences and is really getting a grasp on language. She knows pretty much all her basic colors now and is starting to learn her numbers and letters. I'm amazed at how much of a help having big sister around is. When they play in the bathtub or with the fridge magnets, Anisa will ask her to get a certain letter or certain color and help her get it right. It's sooo cool to see.

Almost as cool as seeing how their cooperative play has blossomed in the last couple of months. For a long time, they just played side by side - together, but not really playing with each other. Now, it's rare to see them playing alone. Anisa has been fixated on Jasmine being her "sweetie" lately. "Hey sweetie - let's play bookstore!" "Hey dad, that's my sweetie" "Sweetie needs a new pull-up. Stinky butt!!"

Go Cowboys!!

2008-09-22T10:41:00.002-05:00

Well, this weekend was totally awesome for those good ol' Wyoming Cowboys. They won 44-0! Over arch-rival and No. 14 BYU!! How awesome is that?

Oh? What was that? I'm dyslexic? BYU actually rang up 44 points, not the 'Pokes?? Ummm... crap. Well, then, nevermind. That bucking flows (get dyslexic on the first letters of those words to truly enjoy my sentiments on the subject).

At least the Denver Donkeys managed not to blow that game against the Saints yesterday...

My take on the economy

2008-09-16T11:05:00.003-05:00

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2008/09/a-ripe-moment.html

I was emailed this article today and read it with some interest. There's some good points in there, but a lot that I think is simply wrong. I initially responded directly to the email, but I think it was a reasonably good response, so I figured I'd toss it up on here as well. And so, without further babbling, here it is:

Meh. He far overstates the case.

Did Republicans contribute to the current problems? Absolutely. Their insistence on deregulation and slavish devotion to extreme free market practices led to a lot of this. However, much of the foundation was set during the Clinton administration, albeit with a Republican-controlled Congress. Certainly, of the two parties, the ones to shoulder more of the blame are the Republicans, but the Democrats aren't guilt-free by any means.

The thing is, this isn't a political thing. The government isn't the cause of all this. Yes, they should have been keeping a close eye on things and regulating the housing/mortgage industry a bit more. Bu that's like saying it's the fault of the police when a crazy man goes on a rampage and kills 30 people. Had they watched him and regulated him, he probably wouldn't have killed as many if any people - but are the cops to blame, or the person behind the trigger?

When you're looking at people to blame for this whole thing, the focus needs to be squarely on the bankers and economists directly involved. They got greedy. They saw this opportunity to make a ton of money off of poor people by giving them risky, overpriced mortgages (that the bankers pretty much knew they couldn't afford and knew that their customers were financially naive enough to not realize just how risky it was), the banks made a fat profit and then figured the could eventually foreclose, sell the house and start over again for some more fat profits for little work. On top of that, they saw that the risk itself was fairly minimal because you've got Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sitting at the bottom of the mountain with government-secured financing to back them up. There's no way THAT's going to fail, right??

If they had been able to stay just a *little* greedy, we'd have been fine. Yes, some poor folks would have ended up getting screwed, but not that many. The real problem was that those small fat profits weren't enough. So every year, the banks lowered their standards a little more... exposed themselves to a little more risk... snared even more people with risky loans... and the whole time were telling themselves, "Yeah, it's risky... but it hasn't failed yet. And not everyone can be doing as much risk-taking as we are, right?" And then it turned into almost a competition of "Which bank can have the largest portfolio of risky loans?"

And had it stayed there, we still might have been okay. But then the economists and the stock brokers got involved.They saw the fat profits on these loans and wanted their piece of the greed pie. So buying and selling of mortgages become a trendy way to make money. Investing in these risky lenders became the thing to do. And the whole time, the economists out there are telling us that this is a good thing, that profits are at record highs and that we should all be happy and comfortable, never taking the time to tell us that all of this is a house of cards built on the back of people that can't afford to keep buying more cards to build with.

Now, where in all that do you see Republicans or Democrats? Other than the fact that the bankers involved have some sort of personal politics, you don't see the government involved at all. Granted, that's part of the problem as I mentioned already - 10 years ago, regulators should have seen this starting and said, "Enough is enough. Stop it, you wascawwy wabbits!", but they didn't. So while I can understand the desire to blame politicians, especially Republicans as we're trying to find ways to ensure we don't suffer another 4 years of the vomit-inducing bullshit we've dealt with so far this century, it's simply incorrect to do so.

Putting out the word for Gutenberg

2008-08-31T17:29:00.004-05:00

So yeah, I'm bored today. Sitting at work with not much to do, so I figure I'll spill my random thoughts out here for a bit.

One site that not enough people know about is Project Gutenberg. It's an effort to publish books that are in the public domain online and make them available for free - an absolutely awesome goal! Now if only we could find a way to get around some of the difficulties of the past 30 years worth of copyright law "improvements".

A couple of my favorite books that are on there:
"The Problems of Philosophy," Bertrand Russell - A decent overview of some basic philosophical issues from my personal favorite philosopher. There's several other Russell books available, but I think this is the best of the bunch. Not my favorite work of his - need to find a way to get more of his stuff up on Gutenberg!

"The Ethics," Baruch Spinoza - This piece of philosophy has had a huge impact on my own thoughts and views on the world. It's a very challenging work to get through, one that truly emphasizes the work one must do to grasp the heart of any piece of philosophy, but the payoff is big.

Think this looks like a cool project? You can volunteer and take part in adding more books to the collection as part of Distributed Proofreaders. It's kind of like Seti@Home or the BOINC project, only it requires your eyeballs as well as your computer. Proofread some scanned pages to see that the OCR conversion of the text actually matches what was in the book. They've added more than 13,000 books to Gutenberg's library so far!

Gustav - waiting for the storm

2008-08-31T17:17:00.003-05:00

Just though I'd toss this out there. About 24 hours before expected landfall, here's the latest map from NOAA on projected path (click to make it bigger). Looks like it's going to be a Cat 3 or Cat 4 storm when it lands. I really hope we don't see a repeat of Katrina, and it makes me glad to see that a lot of folks have gotten out of New Orleans already.

Busy couple of weeks

2008-08-31T16:52:00.005-05:00

Well, I had planned to write again sooner, but it looks like every 2 weeks is about when I manage to get my blog on. So here I am.

It's been totally hectic lately. Kim's surgery went well. The back pain is totally gone; now she just has to heal and recover from the surgery itself. The only negative out of the whole thing was her wedding ring. She swelled up from all the IV fluid they pumped into her to the point that the ring was starting to cut off circulation in her finger. After trying to get it off, they asked her if they could cut it off. In the midst of her pre-surgery drugs, her response was, "Do whatever you need to do to my finger just don't cut my ring." Good thing they didn't listen to her! So, her ring ended up a casualty of the surgery. We'll have to see about getting it fixed, since they were decent enough to cut it on the plain metal spacer portion of the ring rather than in the middle of the Celtic design portion.

Kim's sister Tracy has been out here helping us for the last week, and that's been a huge thing. I took care of Kim and the kids myself for the first week after surgery and that was... a lot of work. I made it through ok, but there was a lot of frustration and very little sleep. Tracy's has helped out so much that it's more than made up for the extra work of taking care of four kids instead of two (since she brought her kids out as well). It's been nice meeting Tyler and Kaylee and getting to play at being Uncle for a while.

One thing it's certainly convinced me of: NO WAY IN HELL do I want more kids. One was challenging. Two has been hard. Four? A very trying experience, and that's with 3 adults to keep track of them all. How do people manage? I just don't see how you keep all those kids under control at the same time, especially those single moms with that many kids.

My dad got here today to help with the next phase of Kim's recovery. Tracy is leaving on Tuesday and Jasmine's birthday is tomorrow. I'm glad he'll be here for it. Both kids were so excited to see him today. I always love seeing the smiles on their faces when we open the door and *BAM* There's Grandpa!!

On the work front, things are both good and bad. We faced the first round of layoffs since I've been here, with minimal damage to the newsroom thankfully. What's nice for me is that led to my promotion-on-top-of-my-promotion. I'll be starting the new job around the 15th of this month, unless things get crazy again. As usual. So we'll see how that goes. I'm excited about diving in to some databases and getting my feet wet with some Computer Assisted Reporting.

Yeah, that's about it for now. I'll be keeping an eye on the news for what happens with all this Hurricane Gustav stuff. Looks like things may get ugly again down there. Blech.

Keeping up the tradition

2008-08-14T00:07:00.003-05:00

Well, just like my writings on Last.fm, it seems that I just can't manage to do this whole blogging thing on a regular basis. I was hoping to do it at least once a week, and I've already gone 2 weeks without posting now - yay me!

I hate stress. Have I mentioned that? Between work, Kim's back surgery and just life in general, it's just adding up. At least I get a "vacation" soon with the surgery. That seems to be a trend this year - all of my vacation time is going to be used up staying home and taking care of the kids. This time, I get to take care of three instead of just two, though. :)

I have been enjoying the Olympics, though. It's a nice change to watch sports that I pretty much never see outside of the Olympics. And it seems like every time they come around, I always feel like I'm not interested and that I'm not going to watch them at all. Then, before I know it, there I am in the middle of my 12th hour of Olympic coverage and wondering, "WTF just happened? I totally forgot how fun it is to watch!!"

I've gotta say, Michael Phelps is an absolute animal in the pool. The way he dominates is unlike anything I've seen in sports - beyond Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, even. The world record with goggles full of water? Absolutely incredible. I don't think anyone else would have even medaled in that situation - just imagine the time he could have turned in if he wasn't swimming blind!

Gaming
I picked up Madden '09 on release day. I've made it through a couple of games, and it's a huge improvement over last year. Graphics on the PS2 are a decent step up, but the game play is just superb. They made the same leap that NCAA did from last year to this year - except Madden actual improved the graphics instead of just keeping it 99% the same like NCAA did. Even better, both games have done away with the forced use of QB vision in Heisman/All-Madden difficulty. Yes, it made the game harder which was their intent, but I hated it so much that I would just stop playing. Now, maybe I can actually enjoy playing once All-Pro gets too easy to enjoy any more!

God of War has proven to me that I'm getting old in gaming years, for a couple of reasons. First, it showed me just how much I'm on Old Man Time. A game like this, I would have picked it up within a week or 2 of release and poured hours into it until I beat it. Now? It's already a "classic" that I picked up in the cheap bin... And second, it's HARD! Where have my skills gone? Granted, I've never been great at fighting games, but I find myself running into spots that take me 5-10 tries just to get past and that's never happened before. Who would have thought that 31 would be over the hill for console gaming?? I sure didn't...

Hecticness abounds

2008-08-01T20:35:00.006-05:00

Life has a funny way of ganging up on you and doing weird things. Recent events are such a illustration of the yin-yang principle that it makes me think.

See, I'm moving into a new position at work in a little over two weeks. I'll be doing stuff that I really want to do - working with databases and finding a way to actually do some hands-on journalism with all the computer skills floating around in my brain, rather than just making the journalism that others do look pretty when I put it on a page or proofread it. I don't regret having been a copy editor the last few years at all by any means. It's been fun and enjoyable for the most part (yes, I actually did enjoy most of my time at the Rumorang despite all the crap I dealt with there), but most of all, it's brought me to where I am now and helped me find a way to put all of my interests together. So now, I'm going to be kind of professionally multi-tasking, which is really what I've always wanted to do without knowing precisely how to define it. I've wanted to find a way to harness my computer geekery and combine it with my interest in history, politics, creativity - information, really. And now, here's my chance. So that's the yin.

Meanwhile, the yang is the downer side of life. We've found out in the last day or so that Kim is going to need back surgery to avoid possible paralysis from the spinal disc that is pushing and encroaching on her spine. So, I'll be taking some time off work to take care of her and the kids (until the cavalry shows up in the form of my dad and/or her sister to help out - thanks you guys if you happen to read this!!) right when I'm supposed to be starting my new position. We haven't been able to pin down a date with the doctor's office yet for the surgery, but hopefully Monday or Tuesday will have more answers.

Other than that, things have been good lately. The kiddos have been their own version of this yin-yang dichotomy of life. On one hand, they're some of the sweetest girls. It just makes me melt when the oldest comes up to me with a giant hug and says, "I love you Daddy", just out of the blue. On the other hand, finding they've pulled all the stuffing out of the pillows (again!!) or decided to take their filled potty seat into their room to play with just makes me want to pull my hair out. Kids bring a whole new perspective on "bittersweet".

Speaking of kids, part of why I wanted to do this was to start keeping track of stuff I want to remember about them and stuff they've been doing, so I'm going to start that now.

Kid notes
1. Anisa is growing up so fast. A few days ago, she started to discover the bad things in life all on her own. They love to play with the newspapers in the house, and one night she said she wanted to talk. "What happens when a house is on fire? I saw a picture of this burning house in the newspaper and it burned and then went boom. Why does that happen? Do the people get hurt and die?" It just floored me. What am I supposed to say to that? How am I supposed to tell a 3-year-old what it's like when a house burns down? So I did the best I could and talked about how sometimes bad things happen and we have police and firemen and medics that are there to help us and take care of us; that things like this are why Mom and Dad are always telling the kids to be careful and watch what they're doing because we don't want there to be any bad things like that which happen to them; that as parents we do everything we can to avoid that stuff. And I've been reading the paper with her since then, talking to her about the pictures and the stories in there and trying to be an interpreter to help explain the world until she can read and try to understand for herself what it's saying. But it's obviously had a big impact on her. Several times since then, she's asked me to talk to her about burning houses and people dying... and it's hard to know just what to say.

2. Jasmine is so cute. She's putting together sentences now and has gone from "Ni-ni" for Goodnight to "Goo night, daaad". She won't go to bed or a nap without asking for "Cheek!" so she can give us a kiss on the cheek before she sleeps. She's learning to be quite naughty from her sister - if you ask if she wants to get her butt spanked, she just grins and smacks her own butt and says "'Pank, 'Pank!" and then runs to her room giggling.

3. Anisa is adding her own sense of adventure to things. In the last few days, I've caught her standing on the windowsill in nothing but her underwear doing a full-body press against the window (yeah, both kids are such little nudists - have to almost duct tape clothes on them to keep them from taking them off!); stuck in the top bunk of her bunkbed, which does NOT have a ladder installed yet; standing on the kitchen counter; and standing on the back of the toilet. Not to mention her jumping off of everything imaginable and her "crazy foot things" where she contorts her body while lifting a foot off the ground in some way.

4. She's also starting to grasp the concept of reading. We've got one book/magazine where there's a story that has a few words that are replaced with pictures of the object instead of just the word. So we'll read it together and when I get to the picture, she'll say the word to complete the sentence. And she's always asking, "What's this word say? What's this page say?" One of these days, she's going to shock me and just read what it says.

Gaming notes
Call me weird, but I'm envisioning this blog more in the sense of a journal to look back on and capture my thoughts and experiences of the moment, rather than the repository for rants and raves that I see so many blogs becoming. I'm sure it will evolve and change as time goes by, but this is how I'm approaching it for now. In that interest, I'm going to keep track of my gaming habits on occasion as far as what I'm playing, what I want to play, what I thought of it.

Right now, Hot Shots Golf Fore! has captured my focus. I've kind of gravitated back to console games on the PS2 after spending the last long while playing games on the computer almost exclusively. It doesn't hurt that I'm trying out Gamefly right now, so I'm getting some variety in there for free/cheap instead of having to drop $$ on buying games. Plus, it gives me a chance to try some of the kid-focused games for the girls, since they've both wanted to play whatever Dad is playing. Someday I want to get a Wii so that they can game with me and do it in a way that's at least somewhat physically involved instead of couch potato gaming, as has been the norm throughout gaming history.

Initiating launch sequence... 10... 9... 8...

2008-07-27T17:08:00.002-05:00

So I'm throwing myself into the world of blogging. I've resisted it for the longest time, except for the little dabbling I've done on Last.fm. But the other night, my wife suggested that I share some of the ramblings that I force her to endure, so here I am. Hopefully this will be somewhat interesting, though I make no promises on how often (or more likely, un-often) there will be any content on here.

So for those reading this, enjoy! Maybe we'll learn something about each other in the process of this as ideas are exchanged and experiences shared. Just remember this:

This is my blog, so my ideas are always right and I always win. So there.