Month: July 2007

So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to more Big-Band music. Dean Martin. Frank Sinatra. Michael Bublé. And I’m finding that, far from feeling like an old fart, I’m energized by it. I started my day with “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, and listened to more hits from the forties — and new music in that style — for the rest of the day.

Dang, it was good. Sure, it’s music older than that which my parents grew up with. Maybe my grandparents would have been into it. But I just periodically find myself tired of the same-old-same-old pop/country/rock/metal that I’ve listened to in new incarnations since I was a teenager, and long for something more interesting.

So what music have you recently discovered — or rediscovered — that has you tapping your toes, humming at work, and waking up in the morning dancing in front of the bathroom mirror?

So it turns out the world’s fastest way to text someone… is Morse Code. Yep, the world’s fastest texter is now a 93-year-old man, and not some teenager.

All I gotta’ say is “right on!”

A recent article in the Washington Post outlines expansion of aid programs to laid-off computer workers who’s jobs have been moved offshore. Last year, there were 1400 petitions approved and 800 denied. The denied ones were predominantly IT workers with jobs that were off-shored. Up until now, they were denied aid because they did not create “goods” to reach the market.

What do you think of this expansion of government aid to off-shored IT jobs? Unnecessary intervention in free trade? Not enough aid? A valuable contribution to a growing problem of IT workers requiring retraining due to jobs shipped to India and Uzbekistan?

HPATDH just came out this weekend. We picked it up at 2:10 AM on Saturday morning. I finished reading it at 8:00 PM, which time also included two hours of sleep, an hour of chores, four hours of absolutely disgusting clean-up of toxic slime, rusted barrels, and old tires which were a breeding ground for who-knows-what at my flying field, two hours of flying and eating lunch, and of course the rest of the time spent reading. The book is currently in my daughter’s hands, and she’s about halfway through.

Maybe being able to read quickly is genetic in some form.

Anyway, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you haven’t read yet!

---

I was surprised at how well Rowling brought together so many lingering issues from previous books and wrapped them up. Her attempts to do this, in my opinion, gave the first half of the book a sort of “distant” feel, as the direction-less wanderings of Ron, Hermione, and Harry brought them into contact with former friends and acquaintances.

It didn’t really feel like the book had a very distinct purpose until the moment that Dobby died. Harry’s refusal to use magic to dig the grave for the sole free house-elf seemed to mark a changing point where Rowling said “OK, preamble’s done, now on with the show”.

I was appalled at how free her pen was with killing off favorite characters. I understand why she did it, though. She had to impress upon the reader the seriousness of the situation and show that it could happen to other favorite characters, too. Kind of like the “red shirts” of Star Trek fame.

I still don’t quite understand the wand-ownership deal, though. Voldemort stole the wand from Dumbledore’s corpse… at what point prior to that had Draco taken it from Dumbledore, and Harry had taken it from Draco? I’ll probably have to re-read to get that detail if someone doesn’t explain it.

I wish Snape had been able to explain himself earlier in the story. That was a very unsatisfying end. I guess death is never neat and clean, but the use of the Pensieve for memories which Snape just happened to be carrying with him at the time of his death felt like an “oh crap how am I going to fit this in?” plot device. Rowling’s a bit famous for those, and I think just about any book or movie which has more than a few episodes written after one another rather than as a cohesive unit is going to have similar troubles unifying the storyline.

Regardless, a good read which I thoroughly enjoyed.

So I still play City of Heroes from time to time with some real-life friends. The only reason I even log on these days is to hang out with people that I know, and have some fun experiences together.

Anyway, for the next issue of the game, the Rikti invading again, and some players participating in the Beta of the new issue have released a video promoting the update. It really does look to be pretty cool, with high-level players participating in the Rikti War Zone being able to cause or avert invasions across the entire CoH world. The villains and heroes are also united in this zone, with new story arcs to play through and new Rikti factions to defeat.

One of the more nifty features seems to be that Rikti drop ships will appear elsewhere in the CoH/CoV universe based on the actions of the player, with players who participate in repelling the invasion in that suburb given some kind of in-game reward for their actions.

Yeah, the game still has a lot of “go to this random map which looks like a lot of other maps, defeat everybody in there, and click on the glowing objects” for it, but the new stories they are producing are kind of nifty.

A man and his wife were having an argument about who should brew the coffee each morning. The wife said, “You should do it, because you get up first, and then we don’t have to wait as long to get our coffee”.

The husband said, ” You are in charge of the cooking around here and you should do it, because that is your job, and I can just wait for my coffee.”

Wife replies, “No you should do it, and besides it is in the Bible that the man should do the coffee.” Husband replies, “I can’t believe that, show me.”

So she fetched the Bible, and opened the New Testament and shows him at the top of several pages, that it indeed says:”HEBREWS”

Money doesn’t fix everything… but it fixes a lot of things.

–Kelly Clarkson

I’ve been reflecting on the lyrics to the song “Lithium” by Evanescence this morning:

Lithium – don’t wana lock me up inside lithium – don’t wana forget how it feels without lithium – I wana stay in love with my sorrow oh but God I want to let it go

Not that I’m some terminally depressed person or something, but about every month or two I have an episode — usually a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks — where I just feel incredibly down and negative. By the time I recognize it myself, or that someone else calls me on it and I’m willing to believe them, I’m on the other end of it already and pretty soon I’m back to my normal, cheerful self.

It seems as if this is true about people in general, from what I can see. The person who plainly is much more negative without their meds doesn’t believe or care that they need them until they reach some point internally or externally when they have to take action. I lived in denial that the LDS temple ceremony freaked me out for a decade before I finally took action about it. Families with abuse problems keep it the “family secret”, undiscussed and buried until it inevitably leaks out.

Over, and over, and over again, we wallow in stupidity of our own making, denying the truth until we have no choice but to face it. And then once we arrive at that point, we lament the loss of the “good old days”.

Yet for some segments of society, there were no “good old days”. Imagine being a pro-equal-rights black man in the 1950s. Or being GLBT (Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/transsexual) today, with equal rights denied under the moniker of “special rights”. Or being a woman with ten children in Utah, locked in a motherly cell of your own making and forcing yourself to wear the happy face because it’s what you’re expected to do.

It’s unfair, yet railing about it is useless. People won’t take action unless they have to, and like I mentioned in the start of this frustrated rant, I’m just as guilty as everybody else.

I sometimes wish we could just take the Red Pill and break out of our collective stupor. But, just like Neo, we won’t make that choice until we have to.

I ran across this poem in my daily newsgroup reading, and couldn’t help but to share it.

At The Smithville Methodist Church It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week, but when she came home with the “Jesus Saves” button, we knew what art was up, what ancient craft.

She liked her little friends. She liked the songs they sang when they weren’t twisting and folding paper into dolls. What could be so bad?

Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith in good men was what we had to do to stay this side of cynicism, that other sadness.

OK, we said, One week. But when she came home singing “Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so,” it was time to talk. Could we say Jesus

doesn’t love you? Could I tell her the Bible is a great book certain people use to make you feel bad? We sent her back without a word.

It had been so long since we believed, so long since we needed Jesus as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was sufficiently dead,

that our children would think of him like Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson. Soon it became clear to us: you can’t teach disbelief to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn’t a story nearly as good. On parents’ night there were the Arts & Crafts all spread out

like appetizers. Then we took our seats in the church and the children sang a song about the Ark, and Hallelujah

and one in which they had to jump up and down for Jesus. I can’t remember ever feeling so uncertain about what’s comic, what’s serious.

Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. You can’t say to your child “Evolution loves you.” The story stinks of extinction and nothing

exciting happens for centuries. I didn’t have a wonderful story for my child and she was beaming. All the way home in the car she sang the songs,

occasionally standing up for Jesus. There was nothing to do but drive, ride it out, sing along in silence.

Stephen Dunn

I saw this posted on the QOHS Alumni website concerning the class of ’92 class reunion.

~ Reunion Greetings everyone! We will not be having a 15 year high school reunion but will definitely have one for our 20 year. More details to come in the near future, but in the meantime, please be sure to update or add your information so we are able to contact you. Thank you!

Just thought I would share 🙂