So, Obama is going to be president and we have a Democratic majority in Congress. I guess it was pretty much inevitable. People work in cycles when it comes to elections. One of these days, they're going to realize that the problem is not the parties, but the people. But, for now, we've elected the guy who thinks that partial birth abortions are swell, a procedure which involves bearing a child to full term, doing a breach birth, then inserting a set of scissors into their neck and sucking out the brains to ensure death. It's a procedure which has absolutely no medical justification. It's one step from infanticide. It's currently illegal because people came to their senses and realized it had gone too far. And our president-to-be fought to keep it legal. I don't know his reasons. Maybe he gets good money from that lobby. Maybe the Democratic party told him he couldn't be nominated unless he toed the line. Maybe he gets off on it. Honestly, I don't really want to know. *sigh* Like I said before, it was a hard election. I think that Obama is more on the ball for dealing with the economic situation, although will time will tell on it. I also do like that he's against the Patriot Act. But ultimately, we elected a guy who thinks that we should keep legal the practice of sucking the brains out of babies who are literally inches from being born. Combined with the Democratic majority in Congress, I predict that within the next four years, we're going to have a baby fully born, alive and healthy, and then killed by a doctor and it will be legal. And in the wake of that, we'll have rashes of mentally ill people killing children feeling that if the government can do it, it must be alright. I know people don't see eye to eye with me on the abortion issue. And I really wish that I could help people understand, but as long as people are willing to relegate some portion of humanity as less than human and are therefore willing to let them die for convenience sake, I don't anticipate being able to win someone over.

So... I'm not planning on skipping the country. I'm not planning on some bloody demonstration as people from both parties threatened to do if their candidate didn't win. I'm just a bit disappointed. And this just means that those of us who believe that one should never be able to take a human life for the sake of convenience (incidentally, I'm against the Death Penalty for similar reasons) will have to work harder to get people to understand. We won't be the first country to have blindly followed the advice of our leaders and scientists only to come to regret the atrocities we've committed.

They say Mussolini made the trains run on time (he didn't) but that still doesn't excuse him.

So, I've decided on who I'm going to vote for tomorrow. It was not an easy choice, quite frankly, for most of the offices. Heck, I'm voting third party on the Senate because I couldn't agree with either of the main party candidates. As for others, I did my usual method of looking up their positions on prominent issues and tallying it all up. For me, human life is a big weighting factor, with an even bigger weighting towards those who cannot defend themselves. So, of course, abortion and the various foreign massacres/refugee situations weighed heavily on my mind. I also did my best to figure out where the candidates stood on the issue of the Patriot Act and similar legislation, but ultimately, those issues, while important, were less important to me because they tend to affect people who do have ways to fight back even if some of the ways require changing the rules of the game to fight.

No, I'm not going to say who I wound up voting for. I will say that I did not vote a straight ticket. I think that voting a straight ticket is idiotic and a misuse of one's right to vote unless, of course, it just so happens that the best candidate for every office happens to belong to a single party. On the few situations where I felt that things were too close to call, or I disliked both primary candidates equally, I've either decided not to vote, or gone for a third party candidate, for all the good that that does.

What kind of scares me is how angry people are this election. We've had death threats from both sides should the other side win. Friends of mine who I always accounted for as rational people, are threatening to disown any friends who vote opposite to them. I've heard accounts from both sides of proponents of one party or the other trying to force a vote down peoples' throats. It seems like so many people can't believe that others would have a different opinion. I have actually seen people stating that "anyone who votes for <redacted> has been brainwashed because no one could vote for <still redacted> if they knew anything" without any sense that they were setting themselves up for the exact same scenario as being brainwashed. Come on people... we're all human beings. We can make choices. You don't have to agree with our choices. And ultimately, unless they're one of the asshats who are yelling and threatening physical violence, why should who they voted for break up a friendship? *sigh* Well, the country will survive, one way or another. There probably will be riots and violent demonstrations given I've seen both Democrats and Republicans state that they would do so if they other party won. Sure, most of them will come to their senses before they pick up that bottle of gasoline with a rag stuffed in the top, but all it takes is one good fire and everything can go up in smoke.

Ok, so it's horribly rough and I'm over a day behind schedule... but there's some of it.

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The moment Norman tried to turn the
door knob and it didn't turn, he knew something was dreadfully wrong
with his universe. And, in that moment, he knew that the idea was
utterly ridiculous. Sure, it was odd that the door was locked at this
time of day – his wife was usually in the middle of making dinner
right around now – but maybe she'd locked it either accidentally or
in a fit of absent-mindedness. Or maybe she stepped out. Or maybe...
his train of thoughts started going down deeper and darker paths, but
he soundly squelched it before it got far from the station. No,
nothing terrible had happened. The door was just locked, that's all.
People get premonitory warnings of great and terrible things in books
and movies. It didn't happen in real life. Having won the brief
mental argument with himself, Norman switched his briefcase from his
left to his right hand and started absently fumbling for his house
key.

A drop of sweat trickled down his
receding hairline and blinked its way across one eyelid. He shrugged
it off with one suit-clad shoulder as he finally found the errant key
and inserted it. It wouldn't turn. Again, a moment of panic overcame
him, quickly calmed by his cooler thoughts. Why wouldn't it turn?
Maybe there was something wrong with the key? He pulled it back out
and brought it close to his eyes, its shiny length apparently clear
of any burrs and obstructions. Now, his armpits dropped a freezing
strand of sweat down the inside of his suit. He quickly punched the
doorbell and resumed looking the key over in case she really wasn't
home right now. The key still seemed in perfectly good working order.
He put it back in and again tried turning it, this time applying more
pressure. The key actually started twisting slightly before he gave
up on it as a bad job, stepping back to leave the mildly mangled key
in the lock. He swiped the growing perspiration on his forehead away
with the back of his hand, his irritation growing. How long had his
key not fit this lock, anyhow? He darted forward again, quickly
twisting as if to trick the lock into letting him in, but to no
avail. Finally, in exasperation, he reversed the motion, hoping to
free the seemingly stuck lock. And it clicked open.

He stood there in amazement, sun
beating down on his brow, realizing his error. The lock turned the
other way. He quickly swung the door open, ducked inside, and slammed
it shut, enjoying the dark and the cool of the air conditioned house.
Surely, none of the neighbors saw that... he took a few quick steps
to one of the windows and peeked out the curtain for hidden
observers. Suburbia seemed alive and well, and as quite and devoid of
life as it usually was this time of day. Norman straightened from the
window and automatically adjusted his tie. He mused that the
situation with the door being locked had put him more on edge than he
might have expected. True, it was out of the ordinary, but it had
happened before, why just... Norman stopped and stood a while in
thought. It had been at least a year, he realized. Always, his wife
was there when he came home from work. And when they went out, she'd
always taken great pride in getting the door for him, something to do
with her childhood making her want to feel useful, she'd said. That
silly moment of dread had made him panic, and made him forget that
he'd installed that lock years ago, when they'd just bought the
house, and he hadn't realized that he'd put things in backwards until
too late. They'd had a lot of laughs about that, he remembered, along
with all of his other mishaps as he'd tried to “become the proper
husband” as he'd said back then, insisting on doing all of the
house repairs himself. It was her who'd brought him back to Earth,
pointing out that he was spending more money between building
supplies, medical supplies, and hiring repairmen to fix his projects
than he was saving by doing them himself. She'd had charts, he
remembered, bar graphs and pie charts. She always did know the way to
get through to him. That night he put those tools away in the shed
for good, she showed him that she still appreciated him and thought
he was quite the proper husband. Norman was lost in his thoughts when
something beeped and brought him out of it.

His automatic reaction was to bring
his right hand down to the holster on his hip, slide out his cell
phone and flip it open. Nothing. The display was the usual one, his
wife holding up her hand, mostly blocking the camera phone. The
minute ticked over on the digital display. The battery power was at
least half full, so it wasn't this that beeped. In retrospect, Norman
realized that the sound of the beep had been different from that of
the cell phone, more brassy and insistent.

---

Unfortunately, I can't submit it to the NaNoWriMo site to update my word count because they're horribly overloaded and the page isn't loading. They saw this drops off shortly after the first week.

Well, didn't really do anything during for Halloween this year. There was a brief office party on Thursday. Absolutely nothing happened on Friday (including, as I half expected, no trick-or-treaters, probably due to me living in an apartment complex off of two major highways). There's a party tonight run by two of the people from Capoeira. I don't have much of a costume on hand (I wore an inflatable baby costume to work that I'd bought years ago as an after-Halloween special, but I found it was far too bulky to move around in much. I can't seem to find my Phantom mask. And I can't exactly pull off the Goth Anne costume what with currently growing out a beard for Babes in Toyland), but I'll probably try to cobble something together and show up. Eh. I also fired up Kingdom Hearts 2 again. I had put it down some time ago because it kept freezing at this one point in the game and I hadn't unpacked my Game Doctor to try to fix the disc. Well, I found it and ran the disk through. And... it freezes in the exact same spot, right after the visit to the Haunted Mansion in the beginning as Roxas. I've tried approaching from different angles. I've tried skipping the cutscenes. Nothing doing... it goes to black and I get a few clicks from the PS2 as it tries to read but fails. I did some poking around online and apparently this game has problems with various PS2 models and there's really not much you can do short of playing that section on another PS2. *sigh* Well, life.

Oh, and NaNoWriMo started today. I just now remembered. Which means I'm probably going to start out a little behind on my novel... although no time like the present to put some work in on it.

So, I signed up for NaNoWriMo about three years ago and never got further than a chapter into my story. Today, as I was sitting at work, I suddenly remembered about it and that it started in November. And one of the story ideas that had been sitting nascent in my brain for years suddenly sprung into full life and started battering at my skull, begging to be let out for the love of God Montressor. So I renewed my account and posted my story summary. I think I can do this. It won't be easy and I'm sure there will be times when I'll be desparately trying to catch up on the average of 1,666 words I'll have to write each day, but even if I fail, I can say I tried.

Continue reading →

The words once came to me so easily
There was a time when I just went and wrote
But now, the rhyme, the meter desert me
I write but haltingly, writing by rote
Back then, I had a silver tongue and pen
My words could seduce, transduce, transform you
But now, that gilded tongue is lead and dross
I try to heal, but I only harm you
Is this the price of living, growing old?
It seems so worthless for the life I've sold.

It's been a long time since I've written a sonnet. It used to be something I would do in my spare time, scrawled on the back of karaoke slips. I remember the meter and rhyme came so easily... now, I know I broke my iambs in several places, but I find I just can't care. *sigh* Eh.

I ran into these recently while I was reading up on computer programming techniques. Computer Words of Wisdom. A few of my favorites excerpted below:

4. Every program is a part of some other program and rarely
fits.

5. If a program manipulates a large amount of data, it does
so in a small number of ways.

10. Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way.
Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!)
between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list -
not the size of his vocabulary.

24. Perhaps if we wrote programs from childhood on, as
adults we'd be able to read them.

27. Once you understand how to write a program get someone
else to write it.

35. Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would
have had to be taught not to. So it is with great
programmers.

39. Re: graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only
those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words
can be adequately described with pictures.

46. Like punning, programming is a play on words.

48. The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in
Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on
anything for the layman.

57. It is easier to change the specification to fit the
program than vice versa.

63. When we write programs that "learn", it turns out that
we do and they don't.

69. In a 5 year period we get one superb programming
language. Only we can't control when the 5 year period will
be.

70. Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language
for communicating phenomena of interest. Programmers from
different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could
use one that doesn't require them to carry a blackboard on
their ponies.

71. Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies
because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its
benefits.

83. What is the difference between a Turing machine and the
modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's
ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton hotel on
its peak.

84. Motto for a research laboratory: What we work on today,
others will first think of tomorrow.

87. We have the mini and the micro computer. In what
semantic niche would the pico computer fall?

92. The computer is the ultimate polluter: its feces are
indistinguish- able from the food it produces.

95. Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be
responsible for them.

98. In computing, the mean time to failure keeps getting
shorter.

99. In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The
machines can't.

104. The proof of a system's value is its existence.

108. Whenever two programmers meet to criticize their
programs, both are silent.

112. Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

113. The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience
and psychology will arise from the study of software.

116. You think you know when you can learn, are more sure
when you can write, even more when you can teach, but
certain when you can program.

117. It goes against the grain of modern education to teach
children to program. What fun is there in making plans,
acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting
attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
119. Programming is an unnatural act.
120. Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means
adapting new machines to behave like old ones.

Ok, so I take an Amtrak train to and from Ashland, KY. It was cheaper than either flying or driving and I've been told that it's pretty comfortable. It was cheaper and it was comfortable. It was not timely. Each way, the trip was supposed to take about 14 hours. In both cases, I arrived a good four hours after the time when I was supposed to have arrived. On the way down, the train left on time, but we lost somewhere between a half hour to an hour in Washington DC because they couldn't find the train engine (also, the electricity was out in our car, but that's another matter). Then, a CSX freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in front of us, so our train dropped us off in Charlottesville, VA and we were bussed to Prince, VA, a trip which took two hours after waiting for two hours for the bus. On the plus side, they did feed us fairly well for our inconvenience. On the way back out, the train was delayed about about two and a half hours, and then we faced further delays along the trip including having to stop once so that the track could be cleared of debris and another delay in Washington as they tried to locate engines and conductors. I suffered in comfort because they have nice plush seats, lots of leg room and (for the most part) electricity to plug the laptop into. And it was cheaper than driving. But still, I don't like not knowing when I will arrive at my destination.

And I had an off night at karaoke tonight. Several of the songs I picked, I know I didn't do well, and even on the ones where I think I did do well, the audience was dead. It might have been a matter of that we had one or two really good singers (including one that was right after me in the rotation). Or maybe I just sucked. *shrug* Oh well, it happens.

On one of my entries a bit ago about how I felt like an unintentional voyeur, I commented below about how I'd read an article years back where the author got a thrill out of viewing amateur porn and watching for the little details of their life that they didn't think to obscure, everything from family photos to yearbooks to their movie selection. Well, courtesy, of the fail blog, I have another example. Continue reading →

I have been known to comment to my friends that while I think the "proposals at huge sporting events" are cute, I certainly hope they come prearranged, or else someone is bound to get a faceful of rejection in the most public manner. Well, courtesy of the Fail blog, here's one case: