Pauls Rants & Revelations

So my friend pointed out a website called Gender Analyzer (http://www.genderanalyzer.com/). Not sure how he found it but its pretty interesting nontheless.

If you plug in my blog (linky) it says its 71% sure that its written by a man. It also worked when looking at Twitter feeds (check it). However, it can be wrong. I pluggin in Mikipedia (linky) and it said that it was a man (91%) that writes it when in fact its a chick (a hot roller derby chick at that). Strange how a chick can score higher than a dude when analyzed solely their their writing.

Anyways, check it out for a bit of fun. Or if you want to see if you write like a girl. You little girly writer you.

- Cheers

Don’t ask me what’s with the title, I just thought it sounded neat (plus I always wanted to start with a title like that, so there).

Hopefully this will be my last political rant (yay) if/when the new president does something to really get on my tits.

Its been about a week since President-Elect Obama was named. And its been a somewhat tumultous time in some parts of the country and in some homes. Mostly, I going off of what people I know are saying. And some of what they are saying is downright scary.

One fellow I know and I got into a discussion about what will happen in the coming 4 years under Obama. He had his doubts (as do a lot of people) but what irritated me was that he voiced his opinion in a short sentence:

“Well there goes the country.”, he said.

I promptly flicked him in the nose and asked him to please explain what me meant by that, seeing as he voted for Bush twice and for McCain. He said that with all the threats America is facing, we need to have a strong military and he believes that won’t happen under a Democrat. Earlier in the prez race, he said that he was  quite displeased with what Bush had done to the country and our international standing, and wanted someone strong to lead us. I pointed out to him that McCain voted mostly the same way in regards to past actions the US had taken. He said that was different because he didnt vote that way all the time.

Apparently, 10% difference is enough for him. I promptly flicked him on the nose again.

Its at this point I should mention that my friend was duct-taped to a chair, unable to move (I love college pranks). He also started spouting the standard Republican rhetoric that the GOP was saying all through the race. I was about to flick him again when a friend of mine (his girl friend) did it for me.

The point is this. I don’t mind what people believe in. I don’t mind that my friend voted differently from me. What I do mind, especially in the case of my friend, is that he was just accepting what was handed to him as the absolute truth, never venturing out in the great world of information to find out for himself if it was true or not.

Now, I’m not so different. A lot of information I get are from people I trust, so I often trust that its true. I would say about half the time I dig deeper to find out more information or to see if its accurate. The other half I usually accept until someone else says something differently or I find info that doesn’t jive with it.

What has me worried is that a number of people I know are just accepting what is handed to them as the truth. Case in point, I played a trick on my friend and emailed him a “live” broadcast (god bless Flash players) of a well known news agency saying that the worlds honey bees have all died. He’s smart and saw this as a bad thing. But instead of calling someone to confirm or even checking the link I sent him he (according to his roommate) started inventorying their pantry and told his roommate that they needed to stock up on non-perishable food for at least a year. He was totally convinced and it took me calling and two other friends going over there that this wasnt true. He then sent me an email virus (god also bless Macs immunity to windows viruses) and a short 11 word sentance on where I should put all my risting farm implements.

To make a long story short; check your facts people. Don’t be sheep. If someone says something outrageous, check it out on your own. If someone else says something innacurrate, make sure it is and confront them about it.

And, Dave, if you are reading this, I am really sorry about the duct-tape trick. So, please, give me back my iPod.

- Cheers

I think that has a nice ring to it.

My wife and I were watching on the CNN website as the poll data started coming in. Aside from the slight anxiety we felt over whether or not Obama was going to win, it was pretty exciting to watch. CNN, for their part, did a pretty good job covering the thing with their real-time data and coverage of the speeches made by both candidates.

For me, though, I was a little nervous watching Obama give his speech to the crowd in Chicago. Not because I had doubts about if he would make a good president (I voted for him, so I obviously thought he could do the job, but because I was worried about some moron going and putting a bullet in him. Call it an irrational fear if you want, but I wasn’t the only one fearing this. Hence why he was flanked by 3 inches of bullet proof glass on either side of them.

So when he finished his speech (his best yet in my opinion) with no bullets flying his way, I was pretty relieved.

Still, that nagging fear will be with me probably until he steps down from office, hopefully in 2016.

But for now, I ‘ll just try to think of how I can best help him bring about the change he promised, happy in the knowledge that my vote made a difference and elected a man who, I think, deserves to be my President.

-Cheers

Its election day in the United States. And on this important day, I have only a short message to say.

Dear America, Please don’t screw this up.

- Thank You

Windows to right of them,
Linux to left of them,
Macs behind them
Error’d and Fragment’d;
Storm’d at with line of code,
While firewall and password fell,
They that had coded so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Web
Back from the mouth of the Tubes,
All that was left of them,
Left of six admins.

When can their programming fade?
O the wild policies they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the code they made,
Honor the Admin Brigade,
Noble six admins.

(with apologies to Lord Alfred Tennyson)

- Cheers

So its no secret that I am voting for Obama (see my previous post, Vote).

This, I think, is a fine thing to do. Not fine as in grand, but fine as in generally acceptable. However, some of my close friends have stated that this may have been a, not necessarily bad, but at the least a somewhat dangerous thing to do.

My wife said that I should keep my official position to myself. The logic behind this being that nobody wants to be to blame for putting the wrong person in office should things not get better. She wanted the ability, I think, to participate in a thrashing of the candidate along with her friends should they be doing so. Following the crowd in the simplest sense. While it may go deeper than that, that is what it seems like to me. Perhaps she simply wanted to avoid any unseemly remark by the same friends if they knew her political position. We tend not to talk too much about politics since I enjoy sleeping indoors.

My friend though expanded in a different direction when I asked him what he thought of it. He said that its understandable to keep such things to yourself for security reasons. If you back the wrong horse, so to speak, and the more militant portions of our civilian population know about it, you could potentially be making yourself a target should these yahoos decide to get aggressive.

Leave it to my friend to instill that extra bit of paranoia into my life (thanks Lindberg Baby).

I can certainly understand that particular position when it comes to telling the world who you are backing. However I cannot understand why people are afraid to say who they are voting for when it comes to possible arguments from their peers. These same people will tell a random stranger calling their phone asking who they are voting for. They will also post onto forums who they are voting for. They do this, I believe, because they think they have a certain amount of security in their anonymity.

This, however, is not true. You are not anonymous. As a web developer, I know how easy it is to get anyone’s life history and vital info with a few simple searches. And even thought I know this, I still spout to the world my choice. Am I crazy? Am I asking for a beat down from some militant wacko with too many guns?

No, I say. I simply believe that we should not have to hide something that we believe in from either invisible threats or from our friends and family. I also believe that we should not fear those that would sway our opinions and thoughts under duress or through fear.

But mostly because I know that should some ass-hat come to my door yelling at me and telling me I’m wrong and going to hell for my choice, I can either cause them great physical harm (if needed only) or verbally abuse them to the point of tears. Telemarkers, Jehovas Witnesses, bill collectors and Mormons are already aware of this.

In short, I say don’t fear what may or may not happen should you choose to voice your opinion on something that your name is on. After all, if you are afraid to tell people who know who you are what you believe, then you shouldn’t bother voting.

OK. Let the comment spam and rude comments begin.

- Cheers

So this weekend it was fairly kickback, for the most part. Saturday was very good as there was an event that day. And since it was sunny we had an archery competition which, I’m stoked to say, I was victorious in. I had thought I lost so it was a pleasent surprise at court. I got a nifty carved feather as a prize (bonus).

We also did our pumpkin gathering on Sunday which was, well, quiet. We got there right when they opened and were first in line for everything so we got to do all the activities (face painting, boat ride, etc). We also came away with some honking huge pumpkins. I’ll post pics in a bit (I seem to have misplaced our rather expensive camera).

How was your weekend, Internet?

-Cheers

You know you want to.

- Cheers

After a long hiatus, and a lot of sweat and tears getting WP 2.6.2 working on this blog, I can (mostly) safely say that this blog is back up and running.

I know it doesn’t look much different but believe me, there is some really cool shit on the back end and I can enjoy it (instead of curse it) now that its working.

For those of you that are also updating to the latest and greatest WordPress install, I can offer come very useful tidbits of information. I moved this blog from one site to another so info is based generally around that.

• Take a full backup of you existing site. You’ll need it.
• Start with a clean install of you can. Don’t add anything, even templates and especially plugins, that isn’t part of the install package from WP.
• Permissions. Enable them for as few folders as possible. Since I host with Media Temple (they use Cent OS) everything I uploaded had no permissions set so I ended up staring at a blank site for 10 minutes. After permissions are set (usually 775 is needed to get it going) its smooth sailing.
• Importing is a gem. From your old site use the default WP export button. This is very easy and will be great for importing. However, when importing DO NOT import the attachments. This will kill your import after 30 or 40 posts. Instead, export from the old site, modify the XML file and replace the old site URL with the new site URL, copy over everything from your old wp-content/uploads folder into the new site, then import the XML file into the new site. I used Dreamweaver to edit the file but anything that can handle a potentially 2 meg large file will do.
• Wash, rinse. If you have to repeat, you weren’t paying attention.

Now that the site is back up I can start re-publishing all the posts that were lost during the last 2 months or so. I’ve been pretty busy with work and side projects and have lots to report, including my sons front teeth coming out, but that’s for another post.

-Cheers

So I was helping out my friend Jennifer with a CSS issue (lightbox was being dunb on IE) when I actually stopped and checked out the site it was for. Bot-Lab it is called. And it looks really nifty.

Basically, a group of folks gets together (in the Seattle area for now) for a tinker day and make interesting things. So far they have done some screen printing, made some nifty artsy lights, and a couple of other things that are interesting curiosities. Makes me a little sad I don’t live up there any more.

Anyways, they have a new event happening soon where they are going to make some Fireflys (lights in the window that are solar powered and light sensitive so they go on when its dark). I keep asking for her to have another tinker day in the Portland area so if you are here also let her know.

You can check out the calendar for more information on it.

OK. Back to my cave I go.

-Cheers