My Opinions on Voting

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.

1. Tax Revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
2. Fed Budget:     $3,820,000,000,000
3. New Debt:       $1,650,000,000,000
4. National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000 

Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they are mostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.

1. Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
2. Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
3. Amount they are happy to borrow.
4. Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.

Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.


If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:

1. Register to Vote.
2. Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
3. When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
4. Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
5. If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
6. Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
7. Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.

If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

Stealth Force Beta ... a new generation

So I was walking our new dog during the evening along one of the Albuquerque arroyos. Most of these are concrete lined behemoths that are filled with skaters during the non-rainy season.. and they can be filled with 10 foot of rapidly moving water (and any slow skaters) during the rainy season. Along the path there are multiple holes where various drainage tubes join in from various roads and such. One along the way has been very tempting because it looks like it is about 8 foot in diameter and goes under one of the roads.

As we were walking along the path, two lanky youth came out with mining caps, flashlights and what looked like a piece of paper they were sketching on. They saw me and got the usual "Ah shoot we are busted." look that one gets when you are being looked down by an old guy and a 45 kg German Shephard. I figured the best way to break the ice was to ask them if they found anything interesting, and they ran up and showed me the map. It was basically an outline they had done by timing their walking under the road.. it seems the tube goes quite a distance as they had timed themselves at 15 -20 minutes on the far hand. I told them to be careful because one can get caught in a tunnel with no-one knowing where you are... and alluded to being caught under an Elevator back at New Mexico Tech. They both looked at me and said "You were in Stealth Force Beta?" To which I had to sadly answer "Nah, I was never that cool."

Stealth Force Beta was an underground organization that pulled some cool pranks at New Mexico Tech when I went to school there. It had become a SlashDot article a couple of years ago when the Statue of Limitations ran out on any possible 'crimes' that their stunts might have been construed as. Most of the items were on the orders of "Hey you know the size of the rooms in this building would say that there is a large hidden room behind this wall. Hey cool there is a large hidden room behind here and a set of tunnels.. lets map them." And then some of their stunts did have some administrators pulling their hair about how their office got completely turned 90 degrees overnight (though that may have been the work of another group). Myself, I was more like Stealth Force Gamma Delta Epsilon.. I would hear about things and then go find out myself during some time when I had insomnia and nothing to do at 3am in the morning during the summer. That was how I got stuck under an elevator.

Anyway the two college students I ran into had both heard of Stealth Force Beta and were just doing the same thing.. there was a tube and they needed to map it. Thankfully they got out before the rain hit (and they didnt find any bodies that sometimes show up in rain tubes when someone needs to hide their hit.) Anyway, it was good to see that the spirit of hacking was known outside of NMT.

Misogyny in Computing

I was reading my normal blog entries, and ran into Mairin Duffy's reaction to the crap postings people took the time to spew in the comment section of an LWN.net article about an O'Reilly series of articles on women in computing. The trolls seemed to have arrived in force for todays postings also.

The amount of hatred spewed by people in these two LWN articles just seems to underscore how little self esteem many of us in the computer industry have. The threat of another sex getting into the profession and showing that maybe we aren't as smart as we say we are.. seems to bring out lots of anger and hatred.

To painfully quote George Lucas/Yoda: Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. ... which leads back to fear. It is a buddhist recursive circle. We are afraid of things we can't understand, we are afraid of social interaction (maybe because a lot of us are autistic or borderline autistic), we get angry and we hate those feelings so we lash out at others who represent that which we are afraid of..

Sadly, looking at most biological systems that get into this state... we are off to extinction unless we can learn to better tolerate the change that is going to happen as computing becomes more ubiquitous.

Off to sleep... my above post makes no sense, but I post it anyway :).

Ketchup #2: Week in Review

Well the week has gone as follows:

1. Turn in homework and realize I missed dealing with NULL input.
   
2. Went to class and covered inheritence, good old linked lists, and today implemented a binary search.... good-times.. good-times.
3. Worked on wumpus outline. I think I am going to try and do a classic 'BSD-games' in Java over Christmas break, and then work through the various Creative Computing games that I used to teach myself Pascal, Fortran, and Apple Assembly back in the day.
4. Found a cool site for algorithms at lunch: LiteratePrograms. It probably has been there a while but I missed it on past surfing.
5. Worked on work build scripts for CentOS-5/RHEL-5. Got them to grab and install files.. but need to do some testing.
6. Dog went home on Sunday, but we will be adopting her. She should be coming to live with us in a week or so.
   

Got Dog?

Yesterday we started dog-sitting a 4 year old German Shephard mix to see if we wanted to adopt her. The current owners are out to a wedding, and have been having to travel a lot so would like to find some people who could spend more time with her. Her name is Casey, and she is a pretty big dog.. but really really lovable. On every walk we have had, she has had to say hello to every dog even the ones growling at her. She just lets them sniff and or rolls over to play "beta" which is funny when she as the 40kg dog did it to the 4kg small poodle.

Right now she is sleeping in the living room. The family loves her quite a bit... well except for the cat. Pascal the cat is an alpha cat who once went after a stag deer who got on our porch when we lived in North Carolina. I am quite sure she thinks she is 50kg versus 5 kg, and quite happy to show anyone who comes into her territory... which Casey did. Currently we have a small barrier seperating the two... until some sort of peace comes up.

Updated (2007-09-14T21:20+0000): Pascal in order to show who was the boss just came out and walked over to Casey's dogfood and ate out of it while Casey looked on. Then Pascal looked over at Casey if to say "Oh wait you are still here?" and went back to her room.

High School Reunion (the musical)

[I wonder what Disney will do with that in 20 years.. Gabriella ended up married to Ryan after Zach and her went to different colleges... Zach and Ryan have a sing/dance fight over her.. but run out of breath and collapse. Gabriella leaves with Chad who had been married to Sharpay but had been left with their 2 kids as she pursued her future in Broadway.]

Well my 20th High School reunion occurred this weekend, and I was unable to attend. Its funny, most of my memories of high school seem to have been tinged with dread, fear, or boredom (probably the feelings that cover most people's memories of High School).. but this summer I was actually hoping to be able to make it out and see people. I got some emails from people I had not heard from in years.. and it was really nice to hear from them. I wish I had been more self-confidant back then.. as I probably would have been a better friend versus the pseudo-goth (well I couldn't afford black clothing, but listened to much of the same Cure music as the goths) who lived in the library and the chemistry lab. To the people who made it, I salute you.. and hope you had a fun evening.

One of the funny memories that came up this summer was how many chemicals and the quantities our Chapman High School had... most of them had been given to it by the various textile labs as they had either closed down or were needing to get a tax right off. A lot of it was pretty 'useless' to a high school lab as it would take close to 100 years to use up the 1kg of pure sodium and potassium we had. Add in the large containers of every caustic acid used in textiles and it is amazing the school building did not spontaneously explode (especially when all of it was stored in a small closet with only passive venting in it). I am guessing most of it was disposed of after September 11th (if not before then) as having that much material in an unguarded depo was silly.

Grumpy Old Man Post 002: Parents

A friend of the family is having a hard time getting a school PTA going. Why is it that so many parents treat their kids like check-marks they needed to be a true-adult, and then expect someone else to take care of their children as it gets in the way of their own lives? This is a problem I have seen going across political boundries... the worst offender I knew seemed to hold the back of their car together with bumber stickers of "Bush/Cheney 200X", "Pro-Life Republican", "DittoHead", etc. However, every day it would be bitching about how the kid needed extra tutoring, how the teacher assigned homework that needed their time to complete, etc etc. I do not doubt that I would meet others who had as many "Kucinich for President Someday.." and "My President is Al Gore!".

As Stan Lee penned long ago.. "With great power, comes great responsibility." One of the greatest powers we have is bringing new humans into this world. With that power comes the responsibility to raise that human to be a responsible adult who will try to make the world a better place than it is now. That means making sure that they have an education, can make informed decisions, and will not be resentful of us when we are old and feeble :).

Ok back to other topics.

Alpha The Omega The Haas Or Something

So today I was what in the world the trailer I had seen before the Transformers movie that has no name.. basically it looked like some Godzilla movie from the viewpoint of random people getting smushed as you have the Statue of Liberty flying across the screen and crushing some people. Going to imdb.com I ended up with what someone thought was a link to the movie called:

http://www.ethanhaaswasright.com/

which after solving some puzzles, you come to

http://www.alphaomegathegame.com/

I will say that I think this might be where gaming might go in the next 10 years. A gaming company would need to have a viral marketing scheme and then having a website and gaming that competes with WoW etc on how the characters, story, and game are shown to the players. I am guessing that this is what Hasbro has in mind with the D&D 4.0

The reason for bringing it up was that I had been looking at what in
1991 was pretty unique in RPG's, West End Games Torg campaign. In it there was a fairly interactive item called the Infiniverse campaign setting and
the rumour mill. WEG would send out a monthly newsletter with items from peoples campaigns, new rules, etc and they would have a section where you could run various small adventures or just vote that you thought something was happening in your world or not (or if the heroes were able to stop the badguys.) If enough badguy plots were stopped, things went well for players... and vice versa. It had a 2-4 month lag from what you wrote back in as everything happened via postal mail.. and you might not be able to run every rumour past your group.

My guess would be that if WEG were to do Torg now, it would be with a website where you build out your campaign and then have players and groups deal with rumours and storylines on a timed basis.. every world would be different but you could calculate a
center-state universe that would be 'the main' one.

There is also the grumpy old moment where I think to myself.. in my day we just used our imaginations, paper and pencils... and WE LIKED IT. Getting too damn old to have to carry a laptop to every game session... and why do I need a USB dice collection?

On the other hand.. while I do not think I could make something as slick as AlphaOmega.. there might be something that could be done via GoogleGears... will mull on that for later.

Transformers... the pain

Went to see Transformers the movie Sunday night with an old college buddy. It was an altogether dreadful experience. First the theatre was packed with people bringing their little kids to watch it. I would say that 1/2 of the theatre was under 13.. and some were definately as young as 4 or 5 (from the screaming kid who had to be taken out during one of the battle scenes.) My grumpy old man post is that there is a rating for a reason: 1 so you have an idea what might be too intense for children.. and 2 so us grumpy old people do not have to hear little kids crying when we are trying to enjoy a movie with large explosions etc. I seem to have bad movie karma.. every movie I have gone to in the last 4 years has had this happen.. even the 11pm showing of the Matrix 2. I haven't gone to many movies lately because it has become such a trend of parents who believe that inflicting nightmares on little Jimmy is ok for me to watch as much as the movie.

Next, the movie was pretty much written via the Summer Blockbuster Committee.

1. Loser Boy (Shia LaBeouf) who might become a Man, Check.
   
2. Large explosions, Check.
   
3. Not-so-subliminal political and moral comments, Check.
   
4. Girl with a past (Megan Fox) who falls for Loser Boy even when the car is a better boyfriend, Check.
   
5. Every other scene being a short comedy skit with teen actors we are trying to groom for the next 3 years of movies, Check.
6. Standard stereotypes of bit characters who are not seen 20 minutes after introduction. Check.
7. Government conspiracy group that couldnt do a competent action throughout the movie. Check.
8. Horrible gobbledy gook science that was passe when War Games came out. Check.
   

I will give the movie an A for giving me the most disturbing scene I have seen in a PG-13 movie.. and probably why the movie got a PG-13 over a PG. The story is a boy gets car, boy gets girl, boy learns that girl has a juvie record, boy loses girl to car, and the boy gets girl back in the end (for some reason.. honest honey.. stick to the car!). So for our "Boy becomes man and gets reward from the maiden" checkmark we have the boy and girl making out ONTOP of the transformer car, WITH the rest of the Autobots looking on. I was expecting to hear comments from rachet on "Boy, her pheremones shot up when you touched her there.. please do so again so that I can confirm my analysis." I don't know but it was like watching someone makeout while laying ontop of their brother.

Finally, I had a hard time not comparing the movie to Independance Day (and finding Independance Day coming out on top.) I kept coming up with ways that I would have loved to rewrite/redirect the movie to make it a bit better here, a different point.

The best acting/storylines in the movie to me were the US Soldiers and Mikaela Banes (Girl with past). I still believe she should have dumped the boy and stuck with Bumblebee versus 'just' dating the boy (Oh I said that before didnt' I?) I ended up with a complete rewrite in my head with the Decepticons coming after the two groups because one had a clue to the Cube, and the other a clue to where Megatron was. Cut the cast in 1/3 so there was a lot more screen time and still have a short amount of robot time because CGI that good costs money. Oh well.. when I take a screen writing class next year.. I will use that as my basis (GI Joe Meets the Transformers!)

Ubiquitous First Post

Well after many years, I decided to start a new blog as my last blog ended in 2001 around the time I left my job at Red Hat. The purpose of this blog is to be like many others.. a biographical log of my life, points of views etc. We will will see how this progresses.

The subjects that I will probably cover the most are:
Getting a PhD.
Computer Security
CentOS
Personal Projects

Edited (2007/08/21): To make font bigger so people could read it.