(I'm alive!) Still talking about politics... and a bit of life, if necessary.

The primary motivation for this post is my excitement about the Iowa caucuses tonight. But, as long as I'm here anyway, I figure I'll talk about my life since late October.



Huckabee wins in Iowa! I sort of expected it... polls were going that way anyway, though he was on a bit of a downslide there since his 22-point advantage a few weeks ago. In my opinion, here's what will happen...
Huckabee goes up a bit. People can see him as possibly viable (as in, they're not the only ones supporting him anymore, and he can actually win.) A lot of people who liked his message but were scared of his popularity will start noticing him, I think. If nothing else, he gets TONS of free media coverage, at least for 5 days until New Hampshire. I doubt he'll win there, but it's not impossible.
Romney does a bunch of damage control. He's denying it, but I doubt he had much room for an Iowa loss. If this helps McCain beat him in New Hampshire, I don't see him recovering.
McCain and Giuliani have parties. Their biggest problem, as of yesterday, was Romney. Now, not so much. Unless Huckabee jumps up a lot, they come out of this minus one formidable opponent. This, as McCain is rising nationally and Giuliani keeps slipping.
Ron Paul will, of course, send out his legions of cyber-spammers to add 5986743958734 comments to every news story they can find a "Comment" button on.

Democrats... Barack Obama! I'm actually quite a bit excited about this. I REALLY don't want Hillary to win. Edwards is nothing special, I don't even really think about him. But tonight was my first significant exposure to Obama. I loved his little victory speech. And, as his was after Huckabee's, I realized that a lot of things that attracted me to Huckabee are shared by Obama. He emphasizes the need to work as one nation and see past party lines, and they're both for big change. I'm still undecided on whether I approve of the Iraq war or not, but the pro-life issue remains, which is one of my biggest. But, following a Giuliani/Obama nomination, I might end up siding with Obama. Unless Huckabee was Giuliani's VP, which I could easily see.



In other news, for everyone who cares enough about my personal life (you stalkers...), I'm now a sophomore and a half, which means 2.5 years to go. (Please pass quickly.) School starts again on Monday. Blech. But my earliest class is at 9:10 on M/W/F, and 9:45 on Tu/Th. Much better than 8:00. Taking sociology at a Juvenile Detention Center should be ... interesting. I think I'm looking forward to it, but we'll see. Sociology doesn't excite me.

Got oil for my car, baked potato chips, a gift certificate, and maple candy for Christmas. I'll enjoy/use it all, and considering that I generally just buy something when I want it, I can't think of anything I wanted that I didn't get.

Back to World of Warcraft, for a few months anyway. I've got one character of each class now, all at least level 16. Woooo.

Christmas/New Year were both wonderful and fun. I was mostly sick on Christmas and the day after, but recovered enough to hang out with nifty relatives for the remaining week of Holiday goodness. Going back to work is a pain.

The Colbert Report is coming back on Monday. Hopefully it won't be too drab without the writers. I'm pretty much excited. It'll make starting school the same day not quite as horrible.

And, that's about all I have to say.

Political Ramblings

Just 2 more weeks until the library's new network/website/catalog goes live... it's getting busier, but I still love it. Maybe addiction to change will get the better of me after all the excitement is over... but then, I'll be tweaking and adding things on the website for months after this.

Even more of "Go Mike Huckabee!" than the last post: He's won the last two events (FOX debate last night, American Family Council conference on Saturday) without anyone else even coming close. (Ok, so Mitt Romney paid people to vote for him, and Ron Paul once again assembled his army of cyber-spammers, but Huckabee wins in a fair debate. If only there ever were such a thing...) But, there have been more donations on his site today than there were in the last week. I can't wait for next week's poll numbers after all the attention has time to go produce effects there. Oh, and perhaps even more importantly: Chuck Norris supports Huckabee! Clearly, nobody should even consider any other candidate anymore.

I'm still reading "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming". This is an incredible book.

If we claim our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-sixtieth the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid eighty-five million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better antimalaria policies. Which should be our first mission?

And, shockingly enough, Al Gore's logic is not flawless. He loves to say "If Greenland and a certain ice shelf in Antarctica slide off and melt in the ocean, water levels will rise by 40 feet." This is generally followed by horrible, awful, emotional pictures of the water levels in Florida and California. What he fails to recognize is that the Antarctic ice cap is at its highest volume of ice in recorded history. He also doesn't really support his theory either. Anyone can say "If all of Antarctica slides into the ocean, water levels will go up 400 feet." That doesn't make it a reality.

And, whaddya know, yet another political remark: We played with some numbers in my American Government class this morning and figured out that the average taxpayer would have to pay $20,000 every year for the government to break even, and that government spending has about doubled every decade for the last fifty years. Spooky.

Fall

Fall break was this weekend. I worked for 30 hours. That is all. Oh, and I went to the Career Center for an "Advisory Committee Meeting". There were only five people there (including Mr. Wright and Brian) but it was great to go back and say hello to assorted random people.

My single Thursday class was canceled, and I have no lab on Friday. This means that I may actually have some free time this weekend, since I didn't during the two days of break. Mmmm, free time. Oh wait, maybe I forgot what that is.

In other news, only 3 weeks and 2 days left until I need to have the new library website complete. It's been a great project so far, and I've had the chance to change a lot of things (mostly behind the scenes code stuff) and add things that I've wanted to see there for a long time. (I've now created a blogging system, a wiki system, RSS feeds generated from the blogging system, and other goodies.) This is probably the first big deadlined project I've ever worked on, and it's fun. So, no complaints there. Coding for 11.5 hours on Monday was a bit brain-frying, though.

I watched the Republic presidential candidate last night. Most of it was either vague, confusing, or both. I got a couple laughs out of it, though... like Mitt Romney's lawyers who he'll consult if he ever wants to declare war on Iran. The debate didn't change my thoughts (Go Huckabee!) though it was annoying that the four major candidates got probably 75% of the debate time, and the other four less major candidates weren't left with much time to say what I think are some very valuable opinions. Huckabee is now on Rasmussen Reports' list of major Republican candidates, though. So, getting closer. It is useful to point out that he's the only one who has been steadily increasing.

And, I think today is officially the beginning of Fall. It's 60 degrees, and wonderful outside. I could live in this weather all year. (Minus the ragweed allergies.)

Apple

Ok, so I don't claim to know a lot about how the stock market works...

But, I would tend to think that Apple's stock price doubling in the last year is a good thing.

Also, their market cap is $133 billion right now. Microsoft is $277 billion. This means that financially, Apple is now half as big as Microsoft.

Getting closer...

A Long Overdue Ramble

Though it's been a while, I guess not much important has happened since my last post.

My American Government class is reasonably interesting. It's got me paying slightly more attention to politics lately. That, combined with a weird list of Republican candidates, and a random interview on the Colbert Report, has me as an active supporter of Mike Huckabee. Mostly, I like his Conservative-yet-bipartisan attitude - he says he's not one of those people who would just vote no on anything a Democrat wants and vote yes on anything a Republican wants. And for that, he wins a bundle of points with me. I hate how divided politics are right now. Huckabee talks about "Vertical Politics", where the focus is on things that will help America, as opposed to "Horizontal Politics" where it's just Republican vs. Democrat. And yet, he has all the values I'm looking for. So, that's my quick plug for him. Go, vote, or something, I don't know.

My life for the last month has consisted of:
27% Sleep
25% Work
11% Classes
10% Random Recreational Computer Activities
6% Eating
5% Homework
4% Driving
4% Assorted Religious Activities
3% Socializing
3% Other
2% Assorted Errands

This is a schedule which I do not mind entirely. It becomes difficult to really do much of anything else when I'm working 38 hours/week and have to write about 9 pages of English homework every week. Fortunately, that's my only really intensive class.

I had to decide to not teach PSR this year due to this schedule. I'm not terribly sure I was ready to deal with a bunch of 2nd graders all by myself anyway, so maybe this is a good thing.

My gaming life of late has consisted primarily of Star Wars online text games. I tossed in a bit of Sim City 4 and Civilization 4 for a couple weeks, but as I expected, once I spent a week on each throughly smashing the objectives to pieces, I got bored. I also tried Star Wars: Galaxies (the World of Warcraft of Star Wars) briefly. There is never anyone on, so that only lasted for about a day. However, they have a very interactive environment... much of the game is built by the players themselves. But as a MMORPG, it's just not much fun without the "MM" part. I might get back into WoW sometime soon, if I get bored enough. I don't know what else to play, at this point.

So, what else. Work has been steadily busy, but productive. I'm pretty much redesigning the entire Library website before the end of October. I've been working on it for about a month and a half, and I'm definitely getting close to being 75% done with all the hard coding.

And so, life goes on.

And, it just works.

It is shocking how well life works sometimes. Example: I get my new job at the library (which started today) and quit working at Walsh, just in time for Vacation Bible School to start at our church, which I get to help at from approximately 5:00 - 9:30 every night. And, just in time for the LAN party this weekend. Working 54 hours per week like I was, there'd be no way to handle that much stuff going on. But now that I'm down to 38 hours, it's all fine. Ok, so I would have had to take some vacation days - no huge problem. But it's things like this (and getting the job I wanted last year right after I decided to go to a local college, and randomly deciding at the last minute to go to the Career Center, and randomly deciding that I wanted to work at a library in the first place) that remind me to be thankful for either bizarre circumstantial luck, or divine intervention.

Staying Up

Well, I was about to go to bed, but then iTunes picked a piece of music that I very much like. So, now I have to stay up until it's finished. Might as well write a blog post, I suppose.

Last week (the week of the 4th) was probably the best week of my year so far. I only worked one day (Monday) and took the rest of the week off at both jobs, mostly to spend time with relatives, but also to just have plenty of down time and not have to worry about going anywhere or doing anything all week. I didn't know how much I needed the break until I was right in the middle of it. I got to play plenty of nifty board games, and hang out with cousins who I only see twice a year, and entertain (and be entertained by) my baby cousins, and etc.

I was planning to go to Cedar Point tomorrow, but Brian and I are hiding from the extreme heat and picking a later date when Mike and Ben can come as well. Too bad "a later date" is July 30th or 31st. But, oh well. I can't wait to ride the Maverick...

Also: I got a new full time job at the library: "Coordinator, Virtual Services". It's yet another step toward where I want to end up in 5-ish years, even though it'll be crazy going to school and working for 38 hours/week.

Ok, that's all for now.

Toyota and Pearl Harbor?

Today I saw a bumper sticker which caught my attention. It went something like this:

TOYOTA
brought to you by the same
nice people who gave you
PEARL HARBOR

Naturally, as a proud Toyota-owner, my initial reaction was negative. But then I considered this point more.

Japan bombed a very important military target, which had strategic importance and wasn't in a location where too many civilians would be caught in the crossfire. And what'd we do? Nuked two of their largest, most heavily populated cities. Wake up, people. Just because the US Government did something doesn't mean it's perfect.

This is not to, in any way, trivialize the horror of Pearl Harbor. As with any time lots of people die, it's tragic and it'd be best if it didn't happen at all. But I don't think Pearl Harbor is the thing we should complain about. If the bumper sticker mentioned the inhumane treatment of US P.O.W.s, I'd go with that. Torture and etc. makes me sick. But anyhow.

I'm taking pretty much all of next week off so I can spend time with relatives who I see twice a year, and just relax in general. I can't wait - it'll be the first time I haven't had 40+ hours of commitments in a week since this time last year. However, I'm having difficulties with reminding myself that it's OK to take vacation time - I have 2 weeks and 4 days to use up this year, and I haven't used more than one day prior to next week. So, remind me that I'll survive.

iPhone will come out on Friday (which is tomorrow as of now...). While I'm not getting one, it looks like an excellent product, and I can't wait to see how well it does. I hate AT&T, though, for making it so absurdly expensive. (The minimum plan is $60/month) As a radio story just reminded me, AT&T will be making significantly more money from the iPhone than Apple will. Maybe when the iPhone is available through other providers, it'll become more affordable. Some day.

Growing Up

I was eating breakfast this morning, and Michelle and some Bullocks and Lofresos were leaving to go to a concert type thing... and it hit me. Not only do my friends and I have jobs, but now all of our younger siblings have jobs, and are driving all over the place. Somehow, though, it doesn't seem nearly as weird as it was when the first group of kids (myself included) were driving and working all of a sudden. Maybe it's an oldest-kid thing... but somehow, I think I'm still kind of in denial regarding the whole thing. Maybe I'm 19, but Michelle should still be 14, as far as my internal clock is concerned. And my parents still seem 40.

Time flies. Next time I look up, Michelle will be in college and Sarah will be driving.

Jobs + Gates = ?

So, at a digital/electronics conference recently, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were asked to talk a bit about their own contributions to computing, the other's contributions, and where they think things will be in a few years. Interesting stuff, if you happen to follow this kind of thing.
Click here to read the whole thing. (You can also just search for it on iTunes - it's on as a podcast or vodcast)



I do have to admit that I can identify with Bill Gates much better than I can with Jobs. Although I love macs, possibly to a fault, (POSSIBLY), Gates is so much more the "geek" of the industry. In the afforementioned discussion, he talks about how he looks at things and thinks about the mechanics behind them, while Jobs just knows how humans think and what they want. I still don't particularly agree with Microsoft's business ethic, though. So.