Political commentator Michael Moore got in a peace message at the Oscars, jarring those isolated actors out of their cushy make-believe world (memo to the Academy: those aren’t blanks they’re firing over there). To much cheering, he made a grand anti-war speech and said “we don’t support your war Mr. Bush.”
Meanwhile, people are dying overseas.
So Kelly and I went to Cirque Du Soleil Thursday night. Absolutely blown away. Definitely go if you can afford it.
Anyway, the site has a nifty “print your own tickets” thing, which I did. I was thinking that CdS was doing this through the Raleigh-based Etix company, a TicketMaster competitor. Turns out it was TicketMaster itself, under the guise of Admission Network.
Which is cool, I guess, if they were doing electronic tickets right. In typical form, however, TicketMaster added a few bucks for their “handling fee.”
Uh, what handling? These are E-tickets! The only handling done was my picking up the paper from my printer. I think if anyone deserves a “handling fee” it should be me, dammit.
TicketMaster sucks. Any company that nickels and dimes you the way they do deserves to lose business. They are one reason why I steer clear of most big-ticket events. I won’t mention the other right now because it will soon have its own, lengthy entry.
Dubya chose the NCAA basketball tournament to stage His War. Did he pick this time because Saddam would be a sitting duck, sharing a couch with his buddies in front of a big-screen TV?
We’re witnessing March Madness, my friends, but it’s not the basketball type. As if I needed another reason to oppose this war.
I thought the time was right for a little reminder of what makes this country great.
For your reading pleasure, I present to you the United States Constitution.
As a bonus, you may also review the Bill Of Rights.
America rulez!
I decided to go on a hunt tonight for a suitable replacement for the weblog software I’m running, bplog. Bplog was easy to set up and does what it advertises: it is simple weblogger. The only thing is I’ve outgrown it.
Movable Type is one gaining much attention in the weblogging world. While I like the way it looks, I have to admit that I’ve become an open-source convert. Don’t get me wrong – I am happy to spend money on good software. I just detest spending my own money on good software. Movable Type is good software but its license differentiates between work and play and somehow that just rubs me the wrong way.
My search began by Googling the phrase “movable type”+GPL. Up popped an article by Doc Searls, the editor of LinuxJournal (and also previously mentioned here), talking about just that very thing: free competitors to Movable Type.
Choices include Geeklog, the sexy B2, the international Drupal, new upstart XOOPS, and the granddaddy of them all, GreyMatter. In addition, I found some discussion on the topic that should help narrow my choices.
I haven’t had time to sort through all the candidates yet, but I’m glad to see so many good possibilities are available.
Actually, that’s one of the pros and cons of the open source movement: so many choices. Rather than work together on projects, some developers would rather start their own projects from scratch. Thus the Linux world is littered with half-finished software that sucks. One of the promises of the GPL is that you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. Ironic, huh?
I’ll be test-driving these new bloggers soon with the goal of picking a winner very soon. Don’t be surprised if you visit this page and it’s had a facelift!
After listening to Dubya’s speech tonight cranking up the war machine, I was feeling down. I kept asking Kelly to wake me up from this bad dream. The prez is really going to put aside this country’s allegiance with our European friends just so he can control Iraq’s oilfields.
And just in case you didn’t think this isn’t about war, Dubya made sure to mention the wells in his speech. Nice touch. It was also a nice touch to issue an impossible ultimatum in an effort to gain some high ground. As if.
I was going to go to bed angry until I decided to follow up on a news tidbit mentioned on ABC News after the speech. Old Pete Jennings casually mentioned that Robin Cook, Tony Blair’s foreign secretary, resigned in protest over Blair’s march toward war.
I managed to find a link to Cook’s resignation speech courtesy of the BBC. (Betcha money you don’t see a peep about it in tomorrow’s U.S. papers). Cooks speech laid it out in a manner so simple even Dubya could understand it. In short, he said he couldn’t support a war that has no international or domestic consensus. Amen.
Tuesday morning, the House of Commons votes on the war resolution. I expect the resolution will be utterly defeated.
That, my friends, is why I will sleep soundly tonight. Even though Dubya will probably get his war (every president needs a war, right?), there are millions of people united in the cause for peace. And their numbers grow every day.
Peace.
I’ve had some noticable mood swings lately. Actually, its probably only that I’ve become much more aware of my mood. The past few weeks I’ve felt fantastic. Just bubbling over; feeling happy and loving. The past two days I’ve come down from that, but I suppose I felt so high that “coming down” merely means feeling like my typical self.
My emotions are in much greater focus than they have been. If pressed for an answer, I would have to credit becoming a daddy. You can’t help but become more intuitive when you are asked to care for an infant. How else are you going to know what she needs?
But there’s more to it than that. I’ve been dreaming more, which is always welcome, though the messages aren’t as clear as they have been. I’m left upon waking with mere wisps of meaning and buried hunches that tend to reassemble themselves as I go about my day.
I remember yesterday being at work and guessing my morning’s dream was about my grandmother choosing to leave soon. The dream was shrouded to my early morning mind, or perhaps consciously blotted out, the comprehension arriving only when I was a safe distance away.
I didn’t fear my grandmother’s choice. It felt more like a good friend was moving away. It was that kind of feeling that seemed to be lurking just outside my waking mind yesterday and today.
The weekend is here, which means I have time to catch up on all those things I have sorely neglected around here. It is also the weekend of the ACC Tournament, what some consider the best of college basketball. N.C. State beat Georgia Tech in the first round today, 71-65, and take on Wake Forest tomorrow at noon. If I needed motivation to get things done quickly, there it is right there.
We got our new phone books yesterday. As usual, they weigh a ton and are almost too big to flip through. A burning question (ok, not really. I slept pretty well last night) I have is why does the phone company still print these damn things?
Telephone use has exploded in the past few years – so much so that many areas now have to dial ten digits to call across town. Mobile phones, fax machines, PDAs. Everything has a number now. There are even a half-dozen different companies who can provide your dial tone.
So why, after all of this growth, does the phone company print these enormous books and then pay a small fortune to have them distributed? Hasn’t anyone considered putting it all on a CD?
It can’t be cost. AOL made a name for itself by its relentless mailing of free AOL CD’s in a scheme to get people using their service. If AOL can mail out millions of unsolicited CD’s for free, why can’t the phone company do the same with their directories?
I can’t help but consider this hunk of dead tree as a sign that the fable of the monolithic telephone company has a ring of truth to it (ooh, sorry). These fat, monopolistic companies are happy to sit on their anticompetitive goldmine and let everyone else lead the way with innovation. With size comes timidity.
It is no surprise it took the breakup of AT&T for the Internet to finally prosper. I hope the Net will someday replace these dinosaurs entirely.
If it weren’t for my wife patiently waiting for me to come to bed, I would probably write a novelette tonight. Lots of stuff on my mind and I’ve got the itch to sort it all out.
In another amazing example of how the web can sometimes take you where you never expected to be, I got pleasantly sidetracked tonight while looking for stuff on my new Sharp Zaurus.
A web search for an answer to a technical problem brought me to Michael Erana’s weblog. I don’t know Michael from Adam, but I instantly got drawn into his writings about his day. He is a fellow geek, but one with great writing and photography skills. Not only that, his pages held the answer I sought.
More searches led to other weblogs, such as Doc Seare’s weblog. Doc is the senior editor for Linux Journal magazine. This led to a link to RageBoy’s blog (also known as Chris Locke). Don’t know the guy, but got caught up in his excellent writing. Back on Doc’s site, I found Joi’s page. which led me to Blogger in Baghdad, known as “Where is Raed?”
human shields tourists recently kicked out of his country. It seems we are not as different as some would have us to believe.
The potential of the web is not to connect people to the traditional news sources – it is to connect people to the newsmakers themselves. Here is a link to every side of the debate: now go make up your own damn mind.
The web allows us to connect person-to-person. No censorship. No taking things out of context. In the digital world, the letters and spaces that compose this entry are as legible in Australia (or Iraq) as they are right here. (Ok, ok, legible for English readers, maybe. But you get the point.)
The fun is in the chase, n’est pas?
Kelly, Hallie and I enjoyed a wonderful spring-like weekend this weekend. Both days were sunny and warm – today’s temperature reached 75 degrees. It was exactly what the doctor ordered to cure the winter blues.
Looking out at our trees and shrubs I saw many buds and new growth. Having taken the brunt of the winter fury this season, the plant life has decided enough is enough: bring on spring!
