livingtech

I really can’t believe that this is even being talked about. The whole idea is so crazy it makes me wonder if it wasn’t some democratic scheme to take more votes from Bush. I guess time will tell. I really liked the Lincoln quote at the bottom of the article:

“The election is a necessity,” Lincoln said. “We cannot have a free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone, a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us.”

DrBombay pointed out today that we’ve never lived in a true democracy, “it’s supposed to be a representative republic” he says. I didn’t take so well to history or political science, (one of my least favorite contradictions in terms), so I really wouldn’t know. I’ve always been pissed that it isn’t just one-person one vote, I don’t care where they live or how disproportionate the representation gets.

Laura is out of town, and has been posting pictures to her moblog. Some of them are really good, so I recommend you check them out.

Yesterday I was over at Mike Fish’s place playing City of Heroes for like 8 or 10 hours. I can’t decide whether it’s worth the $50 and then $15/month after that. The fact that I’m even debating it is pretty indicative of how fun the game has been so far.

Tonight I’m heading off shortly for Tai-Chi (which I haven’t been to in over a week, and then briefly to juggling after. I can’t decide if I should call up Mike after that and see if he’s up for some more slaying of villians. Ooh… or maybe he’d want to play some Go… Now there’s a thought… what if, in one of these Massively Multiplayer games, you could play other games, like Chess and Go, and maybe it would even give you some kind of skill that you couldn’t get otherwise, or enhance other skills that you already posess… hmm. There’s got to be something in that idea. I saw another ad for Puzzle Pirates today. I should give it another try and see if it’s gotten any better. I do so love puzzle games.

I know I keep saying this, but soon, very soon, I’ll be moving away from MT. I’m thinking now, (yes, I know complete 180) that I’ll probably end up running some kind of custom app. I want it to be somewhat like blosxom, but I don’t like a lot of things about blosxom. Basically, they (the developers?) are sacrificing usability for the sake of customizability. I personally don’t feel that’s a necessary sacrifice.

The irony is, of course, that I will spend far more time setting up (customizing) my own personal application than I would setting up pyblosxom (or whatever blosxom flavor I chose to taste). But if I’m going to invest that large a chunk of time, I’d rather have an intimate knowledge of the inner workings.

The other reason for my turnabout is that I’ve had a small epiphany about comment spam. Basically, that it’s never going to go away, and that using any “out of the box” web application (CMS) is just asking for people to spam you. Maybe not in the short term, but definitely in the long term. User submitted data is inherently volatile.

As a result of this, one idea that I had is that I might still have comments on this site, but that they would be “unmarried” from entries. So anyone could still comment anonymously, but their comments would only show up from the front page, not in the archives, and only for a limited time. I haven’t decided yet whether there would be “archives” for this new comment system.

Another (probably better) option would be to just limit the ability to comment to the entries that show up on the homepage. (like the last 7 to 10 or so.) I have found that the moment a post slides off the homepage, the chances of it being spam exponentially increase.

Whatever the case, I want to switch from MT. OK, I really want Ben and the gang to suddenly make MT opensource, but that’s probably not very likely.

You know, there really aren’t that many differences between the scenario I envisioned just now in that last paragraph and reality. I mean, SixApart could still charge for installations and support. Hell, I’ll bet they have requests left and right for development contracts. But no, they want to play the licensing game. The arguments for free software are many, and I won’t repeat them here, but I’m a firm believer that they’ve gone the wrong way. Copyright is in for some major changes in the next 10 to 20 years. In the mean time, SixApart want to just sit back and let the money roll in. But I’m not buying it. Literally.

well, things are not really progressing very fast with pyblosxom. It’s like instead of installing movable type once I’m installing it over and over again. I’m going to disable comments for this post because it’s confusing having the form there when it doesn’t do anything, I think.

This week has been busy for me. Monday night I biked to juggling and back, Tuesday I don’t know what the hell I did, and Wednesday I went to see the newly released original Godzilla at the Oak Street Cinema. Godzilla was really good, there were parts that were still funny, but you really didn’t want to laugh, because the movie was seemingly much more serious in tone than the americanized release.

Thursday was the last day for this documentary on Scrabble that I found out about at the Oak Street called Word Wars. My mom loves scrabble, so I told her we had to go, and it didn’t disappoint either of us. The world of competitive scrabble is just as weird and inbred as any other very obsessive-compulsive hobby… juggling, chess, sci-fi fandom, all share simmilar traits when it comes to the their upper eschelons, I think.

After Word Wars, I had this strange compulsion to see Trekies. It’s been on my list (albiet not very high) for quite some time now. We also (not surprisingly) wanted to play some scrabble, so we stopped by the video store, picked up Treckies, and got Laura to join us for some 3-player scrabble. It is definitely harder to play when there is a TV on in the room though, and I always feel bad for some reason if I don’t give a game my full attention.

Tonight I had about fifty things I was suppose to do, or could have done, and instead, Laura and I sat around at home waiting for her sisters to get into town. This seems noble, but we knew they were going to arrive after midnight, so we could have made it no problem to either or both of the birthday parties that were scheduled for tonight. Or maybe done the parade that started at six-thirty. But we both needed time to unwind after work, and it was easier just not to leave the house.

I did watch Shaolin Temple, (Jet Lee’s first movie), and it was a pretty decent action-packed kung-fu movie. Lots of one-hit deaths though, and then when it came down to real battles (at the end of the movie) there were times where it felt like a some of the blows should have been killers, but weren’t. It was silly, but fun, anyway.

Laura’s sisters arrived around 1 am, (having driven from Kansas) and we showed them the house, and played a game of Phase 10. Now I need to sleep… this weekend promises to be as packed as my week has been.

Anyway, that’s the week in summary… a small slice of it anyway.

ok, for the time being, comments are disabled. I’ll hopefully have them back online sometime this evening. (When I’m not at work.) With any luck, maybe you won’t even notice!

[update 6-20: ok, things are still not fixed (only almost a week later… :P) I’ve installed pyblosxom and played around a bit with it, but it’s nowhere near to prime time yet. Sorry.]

Another brief link-post this morning via my web-trowling co-workers.

Read the surprisingly well written found poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. (I particularly like the first three.)

Truly inspiring.

A coworker linked me to this brilliant essay by Kurt Vonnegut today. It’s about politics and war and the meaning of life, among other things. Read it.

Here’s the big-ass story of my weekend and how I proposed to Laura. The important part is just that I proposed to her on Monday, May 31st, and that she said yes. We still have an open relationship, and no, we haven’t yet set a date. If you don’t really care about all the nitty-gritty details of our trip to Orlando, don’t bother reading the narrative below.
Continue reading “the weekend I got engaged”

Updates have been sporadic as of late, I know, but the next four days they’re going to be even worse (ok, non-existent) as I’m going to be in sunny Orlando Florida, soaking up the sun and enjoying various theme parks. I’m not sure how much theme park Laura and I can stand, so we haven’t purchased any tickets yet. You save some amount of money by buying tickets online, but it doesn’t seem that significant an amount when you compare it to the price of the trip as a whole. Right now the big decision is whether to do Universal Islands of Adventure for more than one day… or rather, whether we want to make the journey from Downtown Disney (where our hotel is at) to Universal more than one day, because for like an additional $40 (each) we get both Universal studios and USIOA for something like 5 days.

It’s a little late to solicit feedback on this issue, so please don’t tell me how I should definitely see XXX as Murphy will make sure that is the one thing I just happened to miss while I was there.

I’m sure I will have at least one exciting story to tell when I get back.