barnson.org Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.

Updated Drupal today to version 6.15 from 5.X. No issues at all, it went perfectly. Not entirely sure I want to re-enable all the old modules. But I am sure I want to start writing in this dang thing again. It's been months since I've posted due to some personal reasons. Yet the compulsion to write is hitting me again!

Got a question from a relative the other day: "Why are SSDs so much smaller than hard drives?" Here's my layman's response:

Ran across this parable today, thought it was cool.

A frail old man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year old grandson.

The old man's hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, and his step faltered.
The family ate together at the table. But the elderly grandfather's shaky hands and failing sight made eating difficult. Peas rolled off his spoon onto the floor. When he grasped the glass, milk spilled onto the tablecloth.

In the midst of the recent furor over President Obama's planned address to students on September 8, 2009, I thought it would be appropriate to reprint President Reagan's 1988 address to students. I was there. I watched in German class, and if I recall correctly we were kept an extra period to discuss his address after lunch. It was on every television set in the school, and rightly so: a President choosing to address the students of the Union is an important and rare event.

The fact of it happening is etched in my ninth-grade memory, but the details are a bit fuzzy. Here are those details, reprinted from http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1988/111488c.htm .

I plan to discuss Reagan's address with my kids on the night of September 8. I will talk with them about how they felt, what they thought, how this affects them, and what their plans are as a result. I will try to inspire in them the desire to be the agents of positive change and leadership in society. I will share this President's humble beginnings -- like the early life of Reagan -- to show them how any American can rise to the highest ranks of leadership in the nation and make it a better place for all of us.

If you are one of those who plan to keep your children home from school on September 8, I submit you are allowing fear to motivate your actions. Your children are smarter than you think; they are probably smarter than you. Teach them to make decisions in light and truth, with full knowledge of the facts in every walk of life. Do not coerce them through ignorance.

Yeah. I want one of these for my back yard:

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23247/

Imagine, a maintenance-free nuclear reactor? Sure, it's for manned space exploration, but dayum it's nice to see a feasible solution.

For the first time in many, many years, my wife and I are taking a road trip right now. The kids are staying with grandparents for a week and a half, and we decided we wanted to take this time to enjoy one another and take a vacation. We swung through Las Vegas to Bakersfield, and now Santa Cruz. We had a few objectives on this trip: spend as much time together without our kids as we could, and make a memorable trip as cheaply as possible.

Slashdot is running a story today about how three geeks attending a Lego convention used the "Find my iPhone" app to recover a stolen iPhone:

I guess it's really not a news flash, but yet another uninformed article confusing cause and effect has become popular in low-carb circles, and I need to post my response.

Here's the so-called "informative" article, concluding that low-carb diets are unsafe:
http://women.webmd.com/guide/high-protein-low-carbohydrate-diets

From the article:

I know, I know, it's been around for a long time, but I just heard about [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAzvKt_8lk]Mis-Heard O Fortuna Lyrics[/url]. LOL ROFLMAO. Had to share. Safe for work, but be careful, I had tears streaming out of my eyes by the end it was so funny...

I ran across John Hummel's latest [url=http://blogthereligions.com/node/132]Blog The Religions[/url] post, and I have one thing to say.

My name's Matt Barnson, and I endorse this message. Heck, I even really like his blog theme and the software driving it :)

--Matt B.