Year: 2005

It’s Thursday night. I like having a laptop. I added Amazon links to the bibliography page. woo-hoo. Trying to find a new apartment. We’re up at the end of the month, and rent is going up. We are going to be SO broke. Send money. Paypal donations, clicking on the Amazon links, winning the lottery, MKM, anything! I have an idea for investment funds too. Send money. Erika says “hi”. She wants a “black hills gold” jewelry 3 ring bridal set.

Here’s the week: More physical therapy, pizza at B.J.’s, looked at apartments on Sat., church, meeting Sun., did sound for the Laguna Beach Community Band at the Sawdust Festival, watched fireworks at the Mission Viejo lake.

Sandra Day O’Connor resigned. This was (and still is) big news. Everyone was expecting Rehnquist to go first. She was a moderate conservative, and the first woman on the court. She had a mixed legacy, no matter what your political persuasion. The nomination process is going to be interesting-Christian conservatives are putting pressure on Team Chimpy to nominate a hard right, and Bush is pushing back. Pray, pray that he nominates someone who isn’t going to undo years of hard work-especially Roe and environmentalism. We’ll see-this may get ugly.

Live 8 was this weekend-MTV botched the coverage completely. It was bad. Great performances, and they would cut away, or chatter inanely over it, or run a commercial. Uck. AOL nailed it. I can’t get to them at work-oh whell.

Interesting piece on NPR about evolution in the schools-this time in Maryland. Yet again Christians making noise over teaching science in science class-they want religion taught there too. I don’t think so, and so did the board of education. One preacher said: “if we reject the first 12 chapters of Genesis, then why can’t we reject the rest of the Bible…if Genesis is a myth, then there was no fall, no sin, no need for salvation, no need for Jesus.” Not such a bad thing. These people are amazing. As if one thing has anything to do with the other. The Bibble wasn’t made to be taken literally. <sigh> They just don’t get it, and aren’t smart enough to figure it out. You don’t need to take it literally to get the message. Love everything, act right-it’s pretty easy. Fuckin’ sheeple.

The United Church of Christ has OK’d gay marriage. YAY. This completely contradicts the previous paragraph. At least some Christians get it. I mean, really. Would you rather have committed, monogamous pairs or singles? If the goal is strong families, who cares how you get there?

Time, Cooper and Miller have been forced to give up their sources or face contempt of court. Time and Cooper acquiesced, Miller want to jail. This is all about outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Apparently Novak is cooperating too. Word has it that Rove is definitely involved. I’m of mixed opinions about this-on one hand, reporters and anonymous sources need to be assured they can talk freely. On the other hand, if this involves criminal activity, all bets are off. I don’t know. I do know that there’s no shield law in Federal court…

Deep Impact succeeded in nailing Tempel I. Bigger plume than expected. We should find some interesting things out about the early solar system. I wonder what the crazy Christians think about this? Some nutball is suing NASA for altering the heavens and her horoscope. Fuckin’ sheeple.

And the big one-Al Quaida bombed 4 sites in London. Many people dead and injured. Pigs. They interrupted G8-now they want to talk about terrorism rather than poverty and pollution. This won’t touch the English at all-they went through the Blitz, fer chrissake! I’ve gotta give them respect, though. I don’t like innocents getting hurt, but from an operational standpoint they’re really good-they only undertake one or so operations a year, but everyone expects another one immediately. They succeed, or try again. The tactics are working-they may not get to their strategic goal, but people pay attention.

The end of the month. Woo hoo. Short cycle-didn’t get around to posting last week’s until Monday.

Not much has happened since then-Erika got a chalice tattoo. Kids went swimming. Working on icons.

Looks like Team Chimpy is flipflopping more than John Kerry in a Presidential campaign. Or a 650 pound catfish. Now they’re going from never negotiating with terrorists to negotiating with “non-criminal insurgents”. Political hairsplitting at its best… I guess they figure the only way to stop the “in its last throes” insurgency is to get them to the table-then ask them operational questions they should already know if they had anybody doing intelligence. Guess not.

Then Bush gives a speech to the nation, basically saying “we’re going to stay the course” “thousand points of light” Wait. That’s his dad. (Who by the way has said he wouldn’t have gone into Iraq. Smart guy.) I don’t think it worked. No one believes the 9/11 Iraq thing anymore, unless they’re brainwashed or braindead. I don’t think the staying the course thing is working, guys.

The Supreme Court split on display of the 10 commandments. They’re tiptoeing back and forth over a line about what the rules for displaying religious items-seems it’s OK when it’s one item of many, but not on its own. I have no idea if this is the right place to draw that line. I think it might be better to say “if you have one, you have to have others from other traditions”.

I downloaded SnagIt for getting a video capture of the Linda Ellerbee piece on the Shoah. I also got GlassFish, the Sun Java App Server and Google Earth, which doesn’t like proxies…

Here I am again-a very busy week-Erika’s at GA, the kids are at a day camp, and I’ve done not much work at all. And it doesn’t help that I’m going to physical therapy twice a week. <sigh> At least it’s Friday… Correction-Saturday. Correction-Monday.

Here’s how the week went: meeting, went to UUFLB for a concert-did sound & lights, dinner afterwards, walked there Sat., Erika left for GA, IHOP, bowling , kids at camp all week. Colin was upset Tues., went to Boomers with church and won! Glass concert Friday, Erika’s parents came down. Church, scavenger hunt at Top of the World in Laguna Beach, picked up Erika today, cleaned the car, etc.

Sen. Danforth did a nice guest editorial(sorry-gotta pay now) in the New York Times last week. It was a very well written piece about how the right wing doesn’t speak for all Christians. I give him a lot of credit for standing up and saying what a lot of Christians either feel or will feel.

Check this out. There’s no denying these statements. Nope. Not at all. All well documented. When are they going to pay the piper? Hopefully before we all go to jail.

Here’s an interesting analysis of how conservatives end up reacting to things. Basically that they run on fear.

Here’s what I downloaded: the new jBoss portal, BIRT, a new MagicDraw UML, Startup Cop, Super DVD Ripper.

Another week gone. Erika goes to GA next week… We just had a 5.3 earthquake.

The past week: Circle supper, UUFLB workshop Sat., mall, Rainforest Cafe Sun., started physical therapy Tues, Sealight Weds., more physical therapy today.

Pretty quiet-Bush’s polling numbers are dropping. I looked at them in more detail and the guy is definitely losing ground. In every category. I wonder why? Can you say Iraq, a lackluster economy, torture?

Michael Jackson got acquitted. Big surprise there. The jurors said that they couldn’t believe that the mother would let her kid stay with him. As if that has anything to do with him being a molester.

I picked up the Java 1.6 source, OpenSolaris and the latest Java 2 standard edition-if you don’t have it, get it-Sun uncovered a security hole in older versions.