makeshiftmind

Excuse me, doctor, if you have a moment?
Barbara what’s the question?
More of a situation, a gentlemen in exam three.
What is the problem?
That is the problem, we’re not sure.
Got the chart?
Right here.
Not much here is there?
No doctor, no obvious physical trauma. Vitals are stable.
Name?
No sir.
Someone drop him off? Maybe we can speak to them. Let’s get some background on this guy.
No ID, nothing, and he won’t speak to anyone.
Well then let’s say hello.

Good morning I’m doctor Lawson. How are you today?
How-are-you-today?
Look son you’re in a safe place — we wanna help in whatever way we can, but you need to talk to us, we can’t help you otherwise.
What’s happened?

Tell me everything.

Lost Keys (Blame Hofmann)- Tool

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Christian consumerism has reached all new depths with the 3D action adventure video game Left Behind, Ars Technica is reporting that the game leaves spyware tied to in-game advertising on your computer. According to the article:

The game comes fully loaded with what some would term built-in spyware, in the form of in-game advertising that tracks the amount of time ads are seen, how often the game is played, and the player’s geographical and personal information. It then sends this data back to the advertiser’s servers.

Not only is this an insulting blight on the technology market, but it should make the religious community blush with embarrassment. Using “prayer as an instant ‘power-up’ device” is such a ridiculous concept that it illustrates the utter failure of Christianity to make the supernatural any more real to us than Superman.

Today I revisited the trailer page for the movie based on Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly. So far, I’ve enjoyed every film adaptation of Dick’s other works (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Paycheck), so I’m really excited to see how this movie turns out. While watching the trailer, however, I noticed something quite interesting in a very brief sequence. It looks like there is a fellow in the film who is quite paranoid about being watched. At one point we are given the impression that he has fallen asleep while reading a book, and is dreaming about being confronted by a strange looking being with a gun. What I find most interesting is the book he was reading before he fell asleep:

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter on the radio about the NSA spy scandal that is plaguing the Bush administration. I’m not fully informed about all the details, but what I know is that the central issue is whether or not the government should be allowed to monitor phone conversations of normal Americans, without due warrant, in the name of national security. Apparently major telcos like AT&T are now under the microscope as accomplices to this “spy” scheme. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has filed a lawsuit against AT&T, accusing the industry leader of collaborating with the government by installing a top-secret “room” in one of its facilities for the purpose of monitoring telecom traffic. According to an article on Arstechnica, the particular facility in question is right here in Bridgeton, MO. Here’s a quote from the article:

In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T’s facility in Bridgeton. The room’s tight security includes a biometric “mantrap” or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were “monitoring network traffic” and that the room was being used by “a government agency.”

One Photoshop tutorial to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them…

Here’s an article that I found on Digg.com about the failure of public education. The comments are very insightful. Its interesting that the general populace is now starting to smell a rat in the public school system. I think the growing popularity — and success — of home schooling has demonstrated that education is not the domain of the experts, but belongs in the domain of every-day life. Freeing education from government corruption is a worthy goal. John Taylor Gatto, a New York school teacher of thirty years, has written extensively about the fundamental flaws in government school philosophy. You can read his book The Underground History of American Education online.

And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up? –John Taylor Gatto

Ok, I’ve added an RSS feed to my blog. Just click on the RSS icon on my navigation bar to the left and you will get the feed. If this all looks foreign to you, or if you don’t know what RSS is, check out the Wikipedia article on RSS feeds.

Norm, eat your heart out

Folks, comments are now back online. When you comment (because I KNOW that you will), you will notice the little security image thingy that I added to prevent spammers. Please follow the directions and you should be fine.

Please also note that all HTML tags will be stripped from your comment text, so if you need to emphasize something, use *asterisks* or another nifty form of ASCII markup.

Also, if you find any bugs on my site, please report them to me immediately. Many thanks!

I meant to post this a while ago, but I was listening to Matthew Good’s song “Pledge of Allegiance” from the album “Avalanche”, and found the following lyric an insightful glimpse into our political system:

“This is a commercial for freedom
while freedom is in hades
This is a rehearsal of incoherent double talk and maybes”

Here’s the breakdown:

• “This is a commercial for freedom” – Why is freedom so commercialized? I’m tired of seeing bumper stickers about supporting our troops when people don’t even understand the basics principles of liberty that our troops are supposed to be fighting for. It’s all slogans and feel-good sayings, and relatively little discourse on what makes freedom worth fighting for.
• “while freedom is in hades” – We want to “liberate” the world but our own politicians continue to shackle us with bloated laws that force us to cater to their own “good graces” in order to live. That is NOT freedom, and that is NOT something we should support.
• “This is a rehearsal of incoherent double talk and maybes” – when I listen to politicians speak, I see their mouths moving but all I hear is “blah blah blah”. Its all charades and dancing around real issues because they can’t “offend” anybody for fear of loosing their “job”. They spend more time and money trying to get re-elected than they do analyzing problems and coming up with good solutions. I want honest solutions within the scope of government authority and that is it.

I know its been a while, but I thought a new post was in order since my last post was about a month ago.

On Friday I took my Zend Certified Engineer examination and passed. Zend is the company that produces the PHP programming language, which I use extensively at my job. I am now one of five ZCEs in Missouri (incidentally, I work with two of the other five). This means that I can now prove to employers that I know what I’m talking about, and when my test results are finally posted with Zend, I can use their ZCE logo on my website. I studied pretty hard for the exam, so I’m excited that I passed. I felt confident answering most of the questions, and I hope that when my results are posted I’ll get to see the percentage of right/wrong questions on the test. All I know right now is that I passed.

I’m still working long hours. For example, I was up 23 hours on Friday — I spent a full day at work, and then came home and had to work from 11:30 PM to 5:00 AM on Saturday morning. We were pushing our new code base into production for our client, which has to be done in “off-hours” so it won’t interrupt the flow of business. Ironically, I was not supposed to be part of this release, but I was asked to do some coding at the very end. Most of the programmers who wrote code for the release were only “on call” Friday night and Saturday morning, but because I worked on a key part of the code base, I had to be up all night. That’s just phooey.

Brittany was out of town last week, and her parents had Preston so the house was very empty. You don’t realize how different it is when people who have been around you for a while are suddenly gone. We talked every night on the phone, though, so that helped a lot. And Brittany gets paid for the trip, which is another plus. I’m glad she’s home — she is truly my best friend and even though we have our own domestic spats, I would never want to be without her

The new version of Ubuntu was released about a week ago. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that aims at simple usability and cultural versatility. The Ubuntu community wants to make computing affordable and powerful for anyone, anywhere, which is an admirable goal. I do get a little uncomfortable sometimes, though, because the Ubuntu philosophy often sounds a lot like people singing “we are the children of the world” or something like that — a little bit of socialism, a little bit of Communism perhaps. But I have to remind myself that the Linux philosophy is voluntary cooperation, not government coerced self-sacrifice, and that is something that is appropriate for free peoples.

Anyway, so I was going to install the new version of Ubuntu alongside my Windows operating system, because there are programs that I can’t run in Ubuntu that I enjoy running in Windows… like *cough* games for example. However, I managed to royally mess up my Windows installation when I did this because Ubuntu doesn’t offer a lot of configuration options during setup. So after I messed up my computer, I decided to reinstall Windows, but when I went to register online, I nice little message came up that said “You have registered this copy of Windows too many times. Please call our offices to explain yourself fool!”

Now, you have to realize that when you install Windows XP, it basically sends your computer’s hardware configuration to Microsoft so if you install your copy of Windows on a totally different machine, it compares the hardware configuration and says “no, you are attempting to pirate this copy of Windows.” But here’s the catch — I was installing my purchased copy of Windows on the exact same machine that I installed it on initially. There was no hardware change at all. So I should have been able to reinstall it without any problems, but NO, Microsoft thinks the mere act of reinstalling is probable cause to suspect you of piracy.

Well, after a string of obscenities, I decided to ditch Windows and just use Ubuntu. So I did. And I am using it now. And I am very happy with it. The Linux community is making great strides to make Linux accessible to non-expert users, and Ubuntu is at the forefront of that effort. It’s clean, has relatively few glitches, provides access to a large repository of free software that can often take the place of Microsoft products (OpenOffice, for example), and comes with Firefox pre-installed. For a good documentary on the history of Linux, I recommend the film Revolution OS which is available from NetFlix, if you subscribe.

Linux is so cool, that I even got Jacob White to use it. Aw yeah!

Speaking of Jacob, he recommended that I watch an early eighties B-class horror/thriller film called The Changeling. So the other day I got a copy and watched it, and actually enjoyed myself quite a bit. It has a certain 70’s filming style that makes it just campy enough to be slightly humorous, but the story is genuinely creepy and there are a few jump scenes. There is really no blood or gore, just good old psychological spookiness. The acting was actually decent too, considering the period.

I also started watching Enemy at the Gates, which is a story about Russian and German snipers during the battle of Stalingrad. I’m about half-way through the film, and what I find so interesting is the psychology of the Russian war machine under Stalin. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, there is a scene were a group of Russian soldiers are ordered to advance on a German position that is basically a death trap. They are slaughtered in the process, and the few that survive begin to retreat. However, the Russian commanding officers set up a battery of Gatling guns behind the advancing soldiers to kill the “cowards” who retreated. The only two soldiers who remain alive and manage to escape after the fighting is over still believe in Stalin’s cause, and still hold a strong allegiance to the “motherland” even though they witnessed the moral atrocities committed by their own commanding officers. Their unquestioning patriotism is a very potent reminder that the “infallible authority” that demands total, unquestioning obedience is a dangerous thing.

That’s about all for now. I will try to post more diligently so you, my adoring fans, won’t be held in suspense for such long periods of time