Barnson.org

Time Magazine is doing an article this week on the use of antidepressants in the US military: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858-1,00.html

I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Q shows Picard what the human army of the past was: drug-enhanced androids, absolutely malleable to their commanders’ will. Not so different from the Borg, really. Unfortunately, after cruising Wikipedia and some other sites looking for a plot summary to clue me into which episode that brief event happened, I didn’t find it. Alas.

Anyway, it’s interesting to me that soldiers who would have, at one time, been removed from combat duty are now given drugs, return to “normal” (or at least combat-readiness), and then are pushed back into the front lines. Is wholesale medication of our soldiers a suitable approach in the fight to police the world? Or are we reducing our soldiers to human consumables, used to their maximum and discarded when the need has passed?

My gut reaction is that a soldier’s life is harsh. Chris once described part of his job to me. Falujah had been a hot-bed of insurgent activity. For several days prior to US cleansing of the city, it was leafleted in Arabic, indicating to the residents that any person left in the city after a certain date would be considered an insurgent, and killed on sight. Chris and his unit were required to purge the city of any remaining people once the day arrived. That kind of relentless door-to-door extermination, in my opinion, must leave a deep and lasting impression on the human psyche. If an anti-depressant can help a soldier get his job done… well, I’m in favor, though I hate the necessity of killing.

Oh, and if anybody can remember the name of that episode where Picard suddenly finds himself in a kind of rubber suit supposedly reminiscent of soldier armor of the Federation’s dark past, that would be cool.

So my first month with the iPhone is over. Overall, I really do like the device. It’s absolutely best-in-class of any mobile device for web browsing and user interface, pretty close to Palm functionality (and clearly superior to Windows Mobile functionality and ease-of-use) for basic PDA functions, is an intuitive and great-sounding phone, and a decent iPod and media player.

Here, however, are my list of negatives.

• You can’t schedule mail polling. I only want to poll for my mail on my phone during weekdays, 8-5. I don’t want to poll every hour of every day. And particularly I don’t want to poll in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep and those administrators overseas have some kind of emergency that results in a mail-storm that I don’t want to deal with until I’m on-shift.
• You can’t install third-party apps without jailbreaking it. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty trivial, and I know, Apple is poised to open their store in less than a month, but there it is.
• Edge is slow. Knew it going in, agree with it more now that I own the device.
• Can’t use it to transfer music or videos from one of my computers to the other. Yes, sure, I know that’s a problem with all iPods, but there it is. I’d like to dump a gig or two of useful stuff onto the phone so I have it with me wherever I go, and can stop using this lousy 2GB keyring fob. But no, that’s not part of the Apple Way.
• Getting ringtones on the phone is annoying and expensive. Yes, there are workarounds, but they invalidate your product warranty. Stupidly.
• Limited on-board working memory. The browser chokes on complicated pages, and they can really slow down the phone.
• The web browser gives a really cryptic error message: “There are too many pop-up windows open”. I didn’t even know that I could have multiple tabs open in the browser for several weeks after owning the phone, nor did I know that they needed to be closed from time to time. Could really use some better visual clues.
• Love the mapping function, but the “Current Location” functionality is pretty darn inaccurate and spotty. I understand the lack of coverage and less-than-GPS location functionality is inherent to the way it figures out your location, but still, when I need most to figure out where the heck I am is when I’m in the middle of nowhere and don’t know where I’m going. Still have to carry around the old-fashioned map.
• Only one good and loud ringtone installed by default. The rest are way too quiet.
• Speaker output from the dock output stinks. From the headphone jack, it’s really quite good, but using the dock connector is extremely noisy with cell noise unless you shut off the mobile phone portion of the iPod.
• No Linux interoperability that I’ve been able to figure. I understand I can fix that by jailbreaking.
• No offline reader program of any sort. If I want to, for instance, read the unabridged version of the Count of Monte Cristo, I can only do so via Edge or Wi-Fi. The three core functions of a mobile device are PDA functionality, a phone, and music playback. Nice to have, immediately after that, is video playback and recording, an e-book reader, and games.
• Oh, yeah, no way to record video. Only still photos.

So, overall, I really like the device. But I like to be both picky and irritable. Thank the deity of your choice that you don’t have to live with this grumpy old man.

Unless you’re my wife.

Then I hope you enjoy your iPhone as much as I do, dear!

I got into a discussion on another board today in a discussion regarding if polygamy should be legalized, and wanted to archive this comment permanently here on my site. I have such a fundamental disagreement with this person that I needed to capture his myopic mindset to remind myself of the kind of opposition that rational people face trying to come to acceptable compromises with irrational zealots.

Our God-inspired Constitution has never really been tried…

God had nothing to do with the Constitution. I don’t see His signature anywhere.

I submit the Constitution was inspired by men trying to achieve a Republic free from the tyranny of religious leaders pulling the puppet-strings of petty dictators, free from the tyranny of kings and genetic rulership, and free from the tyranny of the majority who would grind the minority under their heels if they could. Our implementation of those ideals is flawed, to be sure, as has been every human endeavor, but it’s been one of the best runs so far.

To say that we have not “tried” our Constitution, with hundreds of years of case law indicating the opposite, is the height of black-and-white thinking. The Constitution is tried every day. Our culture is diverse, our opinions many, and our arguments heated. Yet we accomplish a peaceful revolution every four to eight years successfully, and have done so for generations.

“Never really been tried” indeed!

I am a constitutionalist.

Then you recognize the Constitution allows amendments. This includes the Sixteenth Amendment, empowering the Federal Government to again levy income tax after its suspension due to the controversial 1895 Pollock decision. We The People granted this right to the government, and these taxes may be used as we legislate, including policies to encourage public health, education, and beneficial policies like encouragement of monogamous relationships.

And, unfortunately, occupy a foreign country here and there. But that’s a different argument.

Freedom is the ultimate political good. Anything that curtails freedom is evil. There is no much vaunted “balance”. That’s a pipe dream.

I fight for that “pipe dream” in my local politics, in letters to my Representatives and Senators, in voicing my opinion in Letters to the Editor of my local paper, in my online blog, in my conversations with others, in City Council meetings, and ultimately in who I choose to represent me via the ballot box. I agree, we will never reach the ideal state of a perfect balance of interests. That’s just life. I am happy to pay my taxes because I recognize the tangible benefits they have brought and continue to bring me and my family. Should taxes grow excessive, I will oppose them to bring them back to reasonable levels.

You and I appear to have different definitions of evil. I believe that which maximizes human happiness, quality of life, quality of relationships, and human knowledge, is good. That which acts in opposition to those things is evil. Freedom is generally a good thing, but if taken to extremes, it can work against those values… I refer to such absolute freedom as “self-sufficient poverty”. The balancing act to try to maximize good is not a pipe dream, but a worthy goal that, while probably never fully achievable, can be achieved in part.

Lethal force is the ultimate power of government. It asserts a monopoly on its use, and defends that monopoly rigorously. Any law ultimately rests on that (threat of) lethal force.

While I agree that “ultimately” any law — including tax incentives — rests on the use of lethal force, it’s a real stretch to say that if you support tax incentives to encourage monogamy you’re holding a gun to the head of polygamists.

Any time someone says, “There ought to be a law,” he is saying that people who disagree with his position, should they disagree strongly enough, must die. That’s the nature of government.

Poppycock! Pure poppycock! If I favor tax incentives for a large business to move to my neighborhood, I’m not offering to kill those who disagree. You’re proposing that people who disagree on public policy issues are willing to execute those who oppose them. We The People agreed to tax ourselves to promote the welfare of our citizens and provide national defense. If you disagree with how those funds are allocated, you’re not threatening violence, you’re pleading cases and providing supportable arguments.

Extremist, black-and-white positions and unwillingness to compromise are the greatest wellspring of evil and violence in the world today. Do you really want to drink from that particular fountain?

Hey guys!

I still miss you and lurk around. As you may know I am producing and directing a feature film (because hey.. why does my son need a college fund..) and there is a trailer out there..

www.youtube.com/nvzmovie

ALSO, listen out for Matt’s music there.. I love that piece..

More to come..

JT

So on June 7, 2008, I’ll be entering my first radio-control pylon race. I encountered a cool video on Air Sports Net that shows the National Championship races.

Now, the model I’ll be racing is called a “sport quickee” — category Q500 — that runs approximately half the speed of these Q40 championship racers you see in the video speeding along at over 200MPH. Yet it’s still a race, and there’s pretty intense competition for a fun-fly. My model is a Lanier Predator 2 with a Thunder tiger .40 in the nose. A part of me wants to get a second kit just in case my first has a run-in with terra firma… but my budget and time availability probably won’t allow it.

For the past decade, my wife and I lived in the same house. It was a small but serviceable townhome-style twin home on just a little less than a tenth of an acre of land. We had a couple of small garden plots, a back yard just large enough to entertain a small party, and although I did not have a green thumb, with the help of my wife I was able to keep the lawn tidy.

I have learned a new definition of pain. I had trouble sleeping last night because I was so sore from aerating an acre of land.

A large parcel of land is good, I suppose, if you really value a lot of yard work. I don’t.

Why did our house get picked to be the local Animal Shelter? Seriously, did one of our friends play a trick on us and put a “Drop Unwanted Pets Here” sign outside?

In the past year, we have had:

-> Two cats show up at our house. Not kittens, but people-friendly cats. Luckily, we found a home for them with one of my friends from work. He was real happy with me when one of the cats delivered three weeks later 😉

-> Two more kittens showed up later. We fed them one night, then they never showed up again…

-> A baby pit bull. We found him a home with one of the wifey’s friends

-> And tonight…THREE kittens show up at the door. People-friendly, because while they were skittish around us, they allowed us to pet them.

I admit we live in a wooded area where now that the trees have greened up I can’t see any of my neighbors (and can only see a small glimpse in the winter). But how does that translate into becoming the local SPCA?

We’ll have to see if anyone wants them. Our cat peed on the wife unit the last time she tried to introduce another cat into the equation, so that precludes us keeping it. I know, my wife should suck it up, but hey, I can’t make her cowgirl up 😉

My $.02 Weed

Tonight we shoot a scene where 2 people arrive at a party with food.

I have rewritten the scene for you people. It now says”

“We’ve brought Pies!” “Pies?” “I like Pie”. “That ends that argument”!

HEE HEE.

RIP Stu Wagstaff. You loved flying, and I really liked flying with you. If there is such a thing as a spirit, may yours enjoy flying in ways you never could before.

The time: 11:00 PM The place: a data center in Salt Lake County The event: an air-conditioning outage.

Enter our protagonist. Let’s call him Bubba. Bubba hand-scans past the door of the data center floor to try to bring down some machines (and bring up some others), and is blasted with a wave of oven-like heat from the thousands of computers acting like little space-heaters in a confined space.

Bubba enters the cage containing our computers. Most of them have already shut down due to the overwhelming heat. Some few, mostly older units or computers nearer to the floor, are struggling along. Bubba sees a new, junior system administrator attempting to bring up some important production machines that had crashed.

Bubba notices three large, brand-new window air conditioners sitting on the floor. The raised-floor tiles are pulled up. These AC units are plugged in. Their fronts face the inlets of this junior admin’s machines.

The rear, hot side, faces the disk arrays to which these machines are attached.

Now, for those in the audience who think that opening your refrigerator on a hot summer day will help to cool off your house, here’s a quick science lesson. The rules of conservation of energy are simple: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. You can’t get more out of a system than you put into it; the best you can hope for is to break even.

By leaving your refrigerator open to try to cool off your house — unless it’s a refrigerator from the turn of the 20th century that runs on actual ice blocked from a river and stored for months under some straw — you’re actually making your house hotter. Yeah, really! That little space in front of the fridge is the only thing getting cooler; those hot coils in the back are blasting lots more heat than cold, resulting in an overall warming of your house.

Air-conditioners are, basically, refrigerators. But they make your house cooler by pumping the heat outdoors.

In effect, what Mr. Jr. Admin was doing was adding three enormous space heaters to the inside of a stewing oven, and pointing the hottest part of their blast cone right at the disks supporting the environment he was trying to bring up.

I don’t know what else to say, although some clever hand-gestures and sophomoric noises come to mind.