Friday, March 28, 2008

Sorry for the prolonged absence - I was out of town for a week and a half without the right timing of Internet access, and then I was just lazy.

Suggs commented on my last post with a link to a transcript of Obama's speech. This is the real deal, folks - win or lose, he's inspired me more than any political figure/speech I can recall, and I hope he has the chance to further these ideas in the Presidency or elsewhere. I'm certainly open to anyone else's political inspirations - leave a comment so I can check them out.

My out-of-town included a trip to DC which was great to catch up with friends. One day we walked around the National Mall and the nearby monuments - walked by Washington, WWII, Vietnam, Lincoln, and within eyesight of the Korean War Memorial. Lincoln always is more powerful than I remember - something about the temple he's in, the marble statue, and the words inscribed - not written, inscribed - on the walls. We also went to the National Portrait Gallery, admittedly primarily to see Colbert's picture by the second floor restrooms.

Readingwise, I finished The Many-Colored Land and through The Golden Torc and am currently on The Nonborn King, all in the same series. Great fun reads.

March Madness is especially satisfying this year, with UT stomping Stanford tonight. It's not so much that they won, but that they beat Stanford at its own game in the paint as well as with the quickness and shooting that Stanford couldn't contest. I like the way the team takes on every opponent at its strongest point, holds on/pulls ahead, and forces them to respond with UT's strengths. I suppose it's risky, but it also seems to work well as UT has beaten so many good teams. Here's hoping this holds against Memphis on Sunday, which would make the third #1 seed to lose to UT this year.

I found out today that a coworker was also raised in the church of Christ, but in a much more old-school one than I knew existed in the 90s. We talked for half an hour about stories of our home congregations, and our religious experiences since - we're both heavily seekers looking for the amazing a capella worship style of coC but with less dogma. She said I'm the first person she's met in a while who grew up coC and is still willing to talk about it.
posted by Unknown 11:45 PM | 0 comments

Monday, March 17, 2008

CNN has a poll they say shows Democrats prefer Obama for president over Clinton. I think I heard about a similar but more widespread poll: the primaries. But I'm glad CNN's catching up. I'm starting to think Clinton might get the Florida delegates seated - I really don't want to have to sit out the November elections but I'm not voting for anyone who pulls this crap.

Rather than Intervention, I started reading The Many-Colored Land which was May's first book in the Galactic Milieu series - I read this part last when I read these books before so it should be interesting to see how it fares in reverse order.

A joke came to mind in today's Java training class based on the instructor's frequent example. "Where'd you get that object?" "I pulled it out of MyClass." C'mon, techies, you know you laughed before you groaned.

What is required to call something a "new version" of a movie? The new I Am Legend DVD boasts "the version not shown in theaters." Unless Will Smith had a couple of months to film an entire movie that wasn't shown, I'm betting it's 10-15 minutes of "extra" footage? Except for LOTR, never seen extra footage that didn't obviously belong on the cutting floor.
posted by Unknown 9:12 PM | 3 comments

Saturday, March 15, 2008

I'm proud to say I finished A Distant Mirror in just over a month yesterday. It slowed down towards the end, but remained a good book. Lots of good info on the late Crusades and European life high and low. If you ever needed evidence that the Pope isn't a special office maintained by God (besides most of the rest of the history of the office), the schism should handle it. Next I'm going back to re-read some old Julian May - Intervention's next up.

Saw No Country for Old Men tonight. Well-made, good acting (even though Tommy Lee Jones didn't seem to have to do much), and good Coen-style dialogue. My problem is the ending - the last 10 minutes really didn't seem to add much of anything. If I'm missing something, please let me know.
posted by Unknown 11:07 PM | 2 comments

2.5 miles today, so 3.5 miles today, 56.5 miles for 2008. Woot! We'll see what will happen for the next coupla weeks though as I'm about to travel. I drive to Dallas tomorrow for Java training Mon-Thurs, which should be fun and will let me meet up with some friends. Then we leave (5:40AM departure!) Friday for a wedding in Winchester, VA, and then a few days of vacation in DC. So good times, but lots of moving around.

A friend sent me this story about The Equity Project Charter School, which is paying teachers $125,000 plus bonuses for meeting strict standards. The two most interesting things in the comments has been that the principal only getting $90K seems as exciting to teachers as their salaries, and that all the union folks are strident about this school having to be union. Trust me as a programmer - when the compensation is high enough, the instinct to collaborate falls apart. I really look forward to hearing how this works. I saw one comment from a teacher who would prefer to get $100K and have a half-time assistant handling supplies and other bureaucratic tasks. That sounds like an interesting tradeoff. Anyway I'll be keeping an eye on it.
posted by Unknown 4:31 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Fado's tavern downtown has a St. Patrick's Day sign outside that says "Green Party Headquarters" like a campaign button. Wanna bet they get more customers than the political Green Party gets votes?

Walked 1 mile yesterday, so 1 mile for March, 54 for the year. I was going to walk this morning, but found out yesterday I had to have 37 scholarship applications ranked by today, so I was up until 3AM getting that wrapped up. No shame whatsoever for sleeping in until 8AM. And now I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's selection meeting - should be a lot of fun.

Watched The Weather Man on Monday night. I have an odd tendency to like Nicolas Cage movies - no idea why. Wife can't stand the movie - no plot. I thought it was an interesting character study, and really like Michael Caine's performance.
posted by Unknown 10:55 PM | 1 comments

Sunday, March 09, 2008

I rarely find much to remember in the UT alumni maazine The Alcalde, but there was a good quote in a story about award-winning teacher Joan Shiring. One of her 3 principles is described by this quote from child psychologist Haim Ginott:

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses; women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become more human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.

posted by Unknown 4:00 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, March 08, 2008

One thing that bothered me about the primary itself - one of my screens had a "Ballot Pledge". Most of it was the standard not-voting-in-any-other-primary thing, but it started with "I am a Democrat ...". I am pro-democracy and a far more devout democrat than many Democrats I know. I just didn't like the assumption in an open primary. It also reinforces my desire to have primaries/caucuses/anything but the final election out of government hands and pocketbooks - the government should not be dictating which parties are the default choices.

I'm always impressed at what Bush has been willing to veto - in this case waterboarding. Had it somehow eliminated something it shouldn't, great, but he seems more or less dedicated to formalizing torture in our operations. I'd be immensely surprised if we've stopped more attacks by torturing than we've inspired by our high moral standards of torture and lack of civil rights for any non-American (in all fairness, they tried not to discriminate and include American citizens in their POW definitions). Whoever wins, January 2009 can't get here fast enough.
posted by Unknown 9:26 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Now I'm all participatory-democracy'd out. Yesterday morning I was there when the polls opened, along with 24 others (3 for the Republican party, the rest of us interested in the real matchup). Another 10 showed up in the first half hour - I know because only 2 of the 7 voting machines were working, and one of the working ones stopped 2 voters in front of me. It took a while, but I like the interface for Hart's voting machines. I'd rather have a paper receipt for accountability, but it was quick and painless. I did notice, though, a set of shelves with flyers for real estate and spring break camps and other non-school-associated groups - I was definitely surprised to see that in a school.

The precinct convention/caucus was a farcus. Supposedly we only had the room for 45 minutes when the Republicans were supposed to get it. Good thing they worked out another arrangement, because the 200+ attendees weren't done signing in for over an hour. It could have been faster except they ran out of sign-in sheets and working pens. We left once people were signed in as there were enough volunteers to be delegates. I'm thinking about getting involved in the Democratic party to see if I can help organize these elections - I was a great Parliamentarian in high school. :-) I still can't stand political parties, but it would be one avenue to get involved, and I find this party's usual goals/methods usually more to my liking than the other one's.

As far as the results, Hillary got a lead of maybe 20 delegates on the day, possibly less as caucus returns come in. It doesn't seem like that's enough of a dent to give her a real chance of winning the primary round, so I hope this will be over by Pennsylvania. Not that I want to disenfranchise those voters, but I'd rather move to the main event than see McCain rest up for a couple of months and keep taking potshots at both of them. If Hillary loses the primaries but wins because of superdelegates, I'll have real trouble voting for her in November. But I won't be alone - I can't imagine her winning the general at this point.

That's about all - not much else going on. I've been slacking hardcore on the working out, and reading's been mostly catching up on magazines in between chapters of A Distant Mirror. Moviewise, I saw The Deer Hunter and The Dark Crystal this weekend. Deer Hunter was good, but not my type of movie. Dark Crystal hasn't aged well, but the story is good.
posted by Unknown 4:24 PM | 1 comments