Yey insomnia

412 days ago

I have been up since 3:30 am.  It is now 4:50.  No idea why, just woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.  This completely unsatisfactory.

I was trying to think if it was something I ate.  No caffeine last night, no sugar.  I believe we had some shrimp & garlic cream pasta, and a glass of red wine.

I know whats going to happen.  I’ll be wide awake all through the early morning here, then 7:00 will roll around (when I normally wake up) and sleep will hit me like a ton of bricks.

Comments

What is the point of tailgating at football games

413 days ago

Why exactly do people do this? Especially I’m referring to alumni from the school who come back at 25, 30, 40, 50, 60+ yrs of age to tailgate.

Is it because they love football that much?

Or, is it, if only in a symbolic way, they do get to “come back” for a night, for a saturday afternoon. See all the old faces and all the old places and bring back memories of the college years?

Or, is it just to be around good friends, eat good food, drink good alcohol and have a good excuse to party?

Is it just tradition, that people have been doing it so long, they couldn’t fathom not doing it?

For me, its a little of all of the above. Its a chance to tell old stories about what we were like back in our “crazy” college days, and for a while just escape the monotonous drone of our daily lives, forget our cubicles and our mortgages and our credit card debt, and just enjoy an afternoon in the sunshine relaxing.

To all the tailgaters, I salute you. Here’s to hoping your deep fried turkeys, grilled chicken wings and cups of whiskey bring a bit of warmth to your heart this saturday, as we bring about a close to the 2007 regular NCAA football season.

Go Tech! But go on MARTA. Oh… and To Hell With Georgia, may the surface of a thousand suns burn the flesh from your bones, your children forever be scorned by their peers, and your lives be desolate wastelands of fear, insecurity, and regret.

Comments

Tagged as Football • Georgia Tech

How to make a perfect thanksgiving turkey

414 days ago

If you strap ice-packs to the outside of a turkey before cooking, it results in taking the breast meat longer to cook than the dark. This gives us juicy, perfectly cooked white meat along with the dark, instead being dried out. Plus if you use a blow torch at the end to darken and crisp up the outside, you’ll have a perfect turkey.

Bringing science to the dinner table, bitches
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/dining/24SCIE.html

Comments

ClickQuote

414 days ago

As part of our “two week projects” series, Romels and I recently ported the quoting technology from MetaForum into a Wordpress Plugin, and named it ClickQuote.

Coincidentally, this just so happens to be a wordpress blog, running that very plugin.

Basically ClickQuote just lets you quote what other people have said in previous comments or posts by simply clicking the paragraph you want to quote. Just hover over any paragraph (while on the comments page) and you’ll see what I mean.  Go there now and try it

Comments

Tagged as ClickQuote • plugins • startup20

What a pretty day

418 days ago

Looking on the 12th & Midtown construction project, and the rest of midtown. This was taken 12 minutes ago.

And I don’t know how this happened, but I swear two days ago all the leaves were green. I get to work today and its like a giant Leaf Monster went and vomited all over the ground after eating a bunch of pumpking pie.

Everything certainly has the appearance of being fall, finally. But for some reason it just doesn’t “feel” like it yet. Thanksgiving is exactly a week away, which seems preposterous. Maybe the lack of classes, and the final exams and projects that go along with them, is whats doing it. Here in my windowless cubicle I have little awareness of the changes going on outside.

Comments (1)

Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue Prays for Rain

419 days ago

ATLANTA — Bowing his head outside the Georgia Capitol on Tuesday, Gov. Sonny Perdue cut a newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for rain to end the region’s historic drought.”Oh father, we acknowledge our wastefulness,” Perdue said. “But we’re doing better. And I thought it was time to acknowledge that to the creator, the provider of water and land, and to tell him that we will do better.”Hundreds of Georgians — ministers and lawmakers, landscapers and office workers — gathered in downtown Atlanta for the prayer vigil. Some held bibles and crucifixes. Many swayed and linked arms as a choir sang “What a Mighty God We Serve” and “Amazing Grace.”As Perdue described it, “We have come together, very simply, for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm.”

I don’t even know what to say about this. I kind of thought shouting at the clouds to get them to rain kind of went out of general practice with the indians.

I sure hope it rains anyway. 10 day forecast calls for nothing above a 10% chance. Oh those pesky meteorologists, always predicting macro climate trends accurately.

Comments

Atlanta Startup Weekend

421 days ago

Saturday night someone finally got around to informing me that Startup Weekend - Atlanta had started and was actually halfway done. I’d heard a bit about it before and thought it would be fun to join up with, but I guess I’m not on the mailing list. After the fun of barcamp I think I would have enjoyed it just for the learning experience and to network a bit. What they’ve come up with is something called “Skribit” which is, as far as I can tell, a glorified way for blog readers to give feedback to blog authors about what they think should be written about.

Which kind of seems counter intuitive to me. If I knew what I wanted someone to blog about, why wouldn’t I just go read about it somewhere else? If I want a steak for dinner, I’m not going to go to a pizza place and then suggest they grill me up a ribeye.

I won’t hate on it too much though, as its clearly not really meant to make them all millionaires. But the idea of a group of 50 or 60 people locking themselves up for a long weekend and coming out with a full fledged, legally recognized, equity-shared startup is just freaking awesome. The “skribbit” idea itself is rather lame IMO, but the event itself is just a really really cool idea. Of course, I also thought Twitter and Scribd were really stupid ideas too so shows how much I know.

One of the major contributors to the weekend posted about it. I don’t know who this guy is at all, but I sure feel sorry for whoever was on the UI and design team, he fuckin layed into them pretty hilariously.

One of the major frustration points of the whole weekend was that some of the groups didn’t understand their roles and responsibilities. We had a 10-person “usability and graphics” team whose responsibility, I had assumed, was to create a logo and site design and deliver it to us so that we could insert it on to the site. While the logo got done, and looks great, as of mid-day Sunday, they were still drawing interfaces on paper. There was no appreciable difference between the mockups that the dev team had done on Friday Night and the mockups that the usability team were still goofing with on Sunday afternoon. They eventually delivered a design for the home page, but it consisted of a JPG that still needed to be converted into HTML/CSS. There was simply no way to get their design into the site before launch.

I LOLIRL’d a bit, I admit.

Comments (2)

Tagged as atlanta • software • startups

La mia Bicicletta

421 days ago

Last weekend, having to endure the hell that is my Uhaul Storage Unit, I finally got my trusty old walmart-purchased road bike back home. She’d had her front tire stolen by a crackhead off of my porch, and sat dusty and abandoned in that 8′ steel cage of death for about a year and a half. I took it to Intown Bikes over on Monroe. I usually have glowing praise for Intown, and still do, don’t get me wrong its a great place. Especially the owner of it, he is just the nicest guy. But it was expensive like you wouldn’t believe. Considering the entire bike only cost $97 to begin with, it was kind of shocking to learn that a new wheel and a tuneup was going to run me $175.

Anyway, I suppose its worth it. As best I can tell, here are all the good things about it.

• I get to work faster, and defiantly get home faster. It’s about a 1.4 mile ride each way, and those 21 gears sure help with the couple hills that there are.
• Its good exercise. If I come home for lunch too, we’re talking over 5 miles of riding a day.
• Bums no longer bother me. Even if I’m not moving and waiting for a light to change, I still don’t get bothered. Maybe subconsciously they are ingrained to the fact that its pointless to try and ask for money from someone on a bicycle. The fact that I’m just standing there apparently escapes them. Oh well, no one ever accused bums of being observant and deductive.
• It’s kind of fun. Especially on the hill leading from my building, I can really get it up to a pretty good clip. Its nice to hear the wind whistling through the handle bars, and it acts as a nice little noise cancellation effect as well.
• Saves gas like you wouldn’t believe. 350hp in a 6spd, trying to make your way through 11 street lights and unrelenting stop and go traffic does not make for good MPG ratings. On the fillups that I didn’t ever get on the interstate I think I was lucky to break 12 or 13 mpg. Plus it cuts down on the wear and tear.

In fact in a lot of ways I almost feel like work is closer now. I just hop on my bike and go. No going round and round the 5 floors of parking deck, no waiting on lights or passing cars.

Trying to convince lauren to get one too so we could bike around like retards. However, it would be rather remiss of me to not point out the negatives as well.

• Its cold! When it gets down to the mid 30’s, that wind is not kind. However, considering its exercise, I don’t get too cold.
• I get hot! If I really push it and try to make a good time, I arrive to work somewhat disheveled and sweaty. A 5 minute breather to relax outside though and I’m fine.
• It’s probably going to result in my death.

All in all, totally worth it.

*edit* - Took me 8 minutes today.  Normal evening commute?  20, 25 minutes on a bad day.

Comments

Tagged as bicycle • eco-friendly • incoherent rambling

Magic fingers

423 days ago

Considering we live less than 2 blocks from what is consistently touted as *the* best sushi place in atlanta, I suppose its about time we got around to going to it. Despite Atlanta being landlocked, I’ve read of several people say that MF Sushi Bar provided them with the best sushi they’d ever had.

Yeah, ok. We’ll have to see about that. Of course considering my entire sushi life experience is restrained to Ru Sans (which apparently is the McDonalds of sushi places), maybe it technically will be the best sushi I’ve ever had, if by nothing other than default.

(some time goes by …)

Well, I’m back.

Crappy cell phone picture and all.  So it was a pretty classy joint, waitress woman put my own napkin on my own lap for me and crap like that.  I had a rainbow roll and Lauren had a typhoon roll or something.

Was it better than Ru Sans, in terms of taste?  Well, in a word, yes.  Its hard to describe, but the fish itself just had a quality to it that made it creamier almost.  Like it melted in your mouth, whereas at Ru Sans it might be described as “tougher” some how.  Was it the best sushi I’ve ever had in my life?  Have to go with yes obviously on this one as well, but beating out Ru Sans as its only competitor probably wasn’t that hard.

On a scale of 0 to 5 with 0 being a filet-o-fish from mcdonalds and a 5 being the best food i’ve ever eaten in my life… I put Ru Sans at around a 3.18(still pretty fucking delicious) and MF Sushi Bar at a 4.391.

And it wasn’t that expensive.  I had two 8-peice rolls, lauren had a roll and some nigiri, we got some edamame as an appetizer, a couple heinekins and a $10 glass of wine, and the total was still only $70 for the two of us.  Minus the drinks and you’re actually approaching what I’d reasonably spend at Ru Sans anyway.

Next up I want to try this place called “Fune” that is in the Spire building on peachtree.  Its supposed to have this huge long conveyor belt that wraps around the restaurant and thats what your order comes out on.

Anyway.  MF Sushi Fingers, good, yes.  Go.

Comments (1)

Why its great here

424 days ago

I love articles like these; Stumbled across this one on the SkyScraperPage forums.

Why Atlanta, Why?

There’s a reason the metro area continues to be one of the leading cities in the United States. Here’s a refresher course on why you – and your customers – continue to do business here.
There was a plan. And among those who were forward-thinking enough to see the vision realized that, at some point, those “Rust Belt” companies would want to pull up their roots and head South. And not just anywhere in the South, but a location that would serve as a strategic cultural and economic hub to the United States and beyond.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the cities of Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta were positioning themselves to be that hub. While Birmingham was advertising itself as a leading financial center, Atlanta was jockeying itself as a thriving transportation hub – defined by expanding road and rail systems and a burgeoning airport. Their respective economic fates would eventually be played out during one of the most volatile times in our country’s history – a time when racial tensions would explode beyond the realm of consciousness.

The Civil Rights Movement changed everything. While city leaders such as Mayor William Berry Hartsfield and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were guiding Atlanta through racial unrest and overseeing the peaceful integration of its city’s schools, Birmingham was mired in civil unrest from the top of the state’s political chain down to its streets. Defined by highly publicized race riots, school protests and emphatic political declarations on the need for segregation, Birmingham began to distance itself from its vision as the South’s social and business epicenter.
It was Atlanta, with its credo as “A city too busy to hate,” that rose to the forefront. For businesses – and people – looking to head South, Atlanta showed that white and black leaders could work together to embrace and extend cultural diversity.

Fate had made its choice. That handy work from four to five decades ago can be seen in the Atlanta of today, a city that truly epitomizes the economic and cultural diversity that both cities had pioneered. Atlanta is spread out over 28 counties in north-central Georgia; the metro area is home to more than 4.9 million people (2005 statistics), some 470,000 of who live in the city itself. The attraction of this “suburb city,” as it is sometimes referred to, combines the advantages seen in smaller communities with an array of assets, including world-class education institutions, major corporate headquarters and one of the world’s leading airports.

Atlanta’s success lies in its diverse economic and culture structure and adaptability to change. Take the recession of 2000-2001 that pummeled some of the city’s key industries, including information technology and construction. “The area’s well-rounded economy enabled it to take full advantage of the current, broad-based recovery,” says Hans J. Gant, senior vice president of economic development division for the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. “Atlanta has adapted and continues to evolve into a diverse business and culture center. It has all the ingredients that companies need – people, airport, low cost of living, etc. – when they are considering doing business or relocating here.”

For a refresher course, Atlanta is the ninth largest U.S. population center and one of the fastest growing areas in the country; ranked second in job generation; first in air passenger traffic; third in Fortune 500 headquarters; fifth in Fortune 500 companies; and fifth for software development. And the list goes on and on.

“Atlanta has adapted and continues to evolve into a diverse business and culture center. It has all the ingredients that companies need – people, airport, low cost of living, etc. – when they are considering doing business or relocating here.”
Hans J. Gant, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

Don’t listen to people like Paul Graham who say that being anywhere other than the bay area is a death sentence for a startup.  Isn’t it convenient that he just so happens to run a startup camp in the same place, and obviously then would want to convince as much talent to relocate there?  Especially with web startups, physical geographic location is becoming more and more irrelevant.  I know of one such company that has 7 employees, none of whom live in the same state as any of the others.  They have weekly conference calls and the rest of their (highly lucrative) business operations are run online.

And lets not forget one other key element - cost of living.  For all the things the ATL can offer, living here is ridiculously cheap.  A studio on Peachtree can run as low as $550 a month — what will that get you in San Francisco?  A packet of ramen, maybe?

Comments

Setting up Subscriptions

426 days ago

This has been bugging me the past couple of days.  I’m trying to build a subscriptions mechanism into MF that will send out email notifications upon new replies to a thread you subscribe to.

The current logic flow goes something like this:  You subscribe to a thread.  There is a bit flag on your subscription called “notify”, which is true or false.  When you first subscribe, its set to true.

So, then some time later, someone else comes along and posts in that thread.  It goes through and gets a list of all the subscribers for that thread, who also have notify=true, and emails them saying a new post has been made.  Then it sets all those people to have notify=false.

Only until they return to the thread, does notify get set to true again — this would protect against you getting 200 emails if the thread took off and had a bunch of posts.

The problem is, you come back to the thread, your notify gets set to true again… but now you’re just sitting there reading the thread.  Now if someone posts, even while you’re reading it, you’re going to get an email.  This is an undesired behavior — you’re well aware that there is a new post, because of the fact its all live.  So then if you get in a conversation with someone, its going to constantly be cycling back between notify being true, someone posting, notify getting set as false, you get emailed, but you’re reading it, so the update ping will set  notify back to true.  So if you have a conversation with someone in a thread in which you are subscribed, you’re going to get an email for every response they made, even though you’re sitting there reading it.

There’s no way for me to tell when you closed your dang browser and went away, so as to set notify back to true.  This is confusing and I hate problems like these.

Comments (6)

Cascading destruction of child objects

428 days ago

Found a good tip today. Say you have a has_many relationship between two types of objects. For example, lets just use “posts”, and “comments”. A post has_many comments, so it would make sense that if you destroy a post, its comments would get destroyed as well. Up to now I’ve just been doing it manually:

for comment in Post.find(:id).comments
  comment.destroy
end
Post.find(:id).destroy

But a wonderful shortcut for this is just to add a “destroy” dependency to the Post::has_many declaration, like so:

has_many :comments, :dependent => :destroy

Now when you destroy a post, its comments get destroyed along with it automagically.

Comments

Three pounds for a curve of color

429 days ago

Lauren downloaded that new radiohead album online and paid them £3 for it. It’s radiohead through and through of course, but I like it. I’m glad their little experiment worked out for them. I read somewhere else that they actually averaged about $8 per download.

It would seem, then, that consumers don’t mind giving up their money in exchange for music — what they mind is the RIAA getting any of it. Perhaps in as much the same way that they say free food always tastes better, sitting here listening to it on a cool sunday night, music sounds better knowing that the artist who made it got every bit of that $8.50 you paid them for it.

Comments (2)

Avocado is the new mayonnaise

429 days ago

You heard it here first. Mayonnaise, you’re on your way out. You can’t even compete. What is mayonnaise, anyway? Just like vegetable oil and .. raw eggs? Mixed together? Oh yeah that sounds delicious.

Avocado, on the other hand, is natural. Comes from the earth, not some factory in Pittsburg. Lately on all my sandwiches I’ve just been taking half an avocado, mashing it up in its own convenient half-shell skin and smearing it on bread like its the motherfuckin Jolly Green Giant’s version of Miracle Whip. Its so fresh and crisp and creamy tasting, and really really good for you too.

I think next I’m going to make tuna salad with avocado instead of mayonnaise. Holy crap I think I just fainted from how awesome thats going to be.

Comments

Waking before 12 is swell

430 days ago

Breaking from our usual pattern of getting assaultedly drunk on friday nights at parties, we took it easy last night and I woke up at 7:30 am refreshed and relaxed.  I think I could get used to this.

We went up to the deck for 45 minutes of tennis.  Our fine city, shining and sparkling and towering around us in the clear morning light, served as a the backdrop for our game, its brilliance matched only by my deft manipulation of the racquet.   Plus I just popped open a brand new sleeve of balls.  You can’t fucking top that shit son, don’t even try.

Now just listening to some choice selections from Beirut - The Flying Club Cup and about to get ready to go up an have brunch in midtown at Vickery’s.

I sincerely hope that Google’s Open Social network completely wipes that smug grin off of Zuckerburgers face.  Insolent little prick.  $15 billion for a glorified directory listing, who does he think he is?

Comments (1)

And Lo, it returns as the prophecies hath told

434 days ago

McDonald’s venerable imitation meat rib sandwich dubbed the McRib, complete with heroin laden sauce and faux grill marks, has returned for yet another farewell tour, this time on its 3rd round.  I love them, of course, but know I may not taste of their forbidden sauce.  It is my curse, it is my eternal bane, my cruel twist of fate, that such a tender morsel of HFCS glazed synthetic injection molded meat product cannot be mine.

I mean, sure I could just go get one.  But I’d also like to not have a heart attack.

Oh who am I kidding, I’m having it for dinner.

My friend justin suggested we make a McRib / Taco bell smoothie in a blender. To that I say, good day sir!  I will be involved in none of that damnable witchcraft.  You are messing with powers that you cannot possibly fathom.  The resulting concoction would taste so good that one could not even smell it without one’s tongue bursting into a writhing, convulsing mass of satiated ecstasy.  Mushroom clouds would swell from the corner of Northside and 14th street, the sun would be extinguished, the universe would collapse.  These are things that are not meant to be known, these are things that mere man was never intended to experience, lest ye pay the eternal ultimate price!

Oh who am I kidding, I’m having it for dinner.

Comments

Add it to the list

435 days ago

It seems the only thing that has remained stable and reliable over the years are the halloween parties.  Ah, such good times.

And here’s lauren, as a giant piece of bacon.

Pure mischief, that one is.  Perhaps she’s simply giving us a visual illustration as instructions for what to do with the jello — “it goes here”.  Or something much more evil..

Comments

Intrinsic Worth

438 days ago

I was wondering today about what precisely makes a person’s life worth anything.  What defines the sanctity of human existence.  We’re a rather arrogant species for sure, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to realize that outside the scope of this planet, what we do or whether we live or die is wholly irrelevant.  We’re just specs on a pale blue dot,  with our wars and our victories and our defeats and our triumphs going unnoticed by anything or anyone else.   If you take the stance that there is nothing else even out there, or at least nothing else that is aware of our presence, then really our very existence has absolutely no meaning.  We are a blip on the timeline of the history of this planet, let alone the universe.

It is only when you come down to the scope of this planet do things begin to have worth.  If we wanted to define, just for fun, exactly what makes our lives worth something, what would you say?  Why can I not shoot you down in the middle of the street?  Whether you live or die has no intrinsic implications.  If you’re dead, you’re dead.  If you’re not, so be it.  The universe doesn’t care one way or another.

So, of course, the answer then is that we have worth in relation to the other living things around us.  Any person that is aware of your presence and would be affected by your absence, gives you meaning.  Who would care if you died, indeed?  Well first off, I’m sure *you* yourself would care.  Then you might say your wife or your friends, your coworkers, your family, your goldfish.  Your neighbors, even if they’ve never met you, probably would be upset about seeing you executed in the middle of the street.  Indeed, most people would be upset by that, and when asked if they would care if an innocent person was executed in front of them, would they care?  People generally say, yes of course.  Human life is sacred, you can’t just go around murdering people.

So an important distinction to make at this point is that it isn’t just the simple fact that you’re alive that matters.  Its your relationship with other people that matters.  Life itself, it seems, is not a requirement for being worth anything.  We commit bovine holocausts on a weekly basis.  Slaughterhouses are well oiled machines of death.  Chickens live their entire lives in a 1′x1′ cage, ruthlessly having their eggs sucked from their body, eventually to be slaughtered themselves.  Their lives are meaningless to us, we care not whether they live or die; they’re just animals, and steaks taste good, right?  Extend it further and the value of life becomes even more empty.  Trees are alive;  do we care that a tree dies?  When a plant on our porch does not get enough water and shrivels up, do we weep for days and mourn its loss?  Of course not.  Hell, every single breath you take into your lungs mercilessly slaughters hundreds of thousands of living single celled organisms, and no one gives a crap about that.  So simply being *alive* in no way implies any kind of worth, or meaning.  The point here is that just killing something that is alive doesn’t necessarily mean its bad.  It’s only when you kill something that matters, something that has meaning, that we use the word “murder”.

I would propose then, that the definition of what makes us worth something, is that someone, anyone (including yourself), would be upset about us being killed.   Indeed, we could then measure your worth by how many people would care that you were dead.  When JFK was shot, lots of people cared.  JFK was worth a lot.  If, instead, one of JFK’s nameless body guards had taken the bullet, fewer people would have cared.  The bodyguard isn’t worth as much as the president.  Thats not to say *no one* would have cared, just fewer.  It’s a comparison.  Certainly someone, somewhere would have cared that the bodyguard was shot, such as his family, his friends, JFK himself.  So the bodyguard still had worth.

So what, then, would be someone literally without worth?  Who could you kill, and it wouldn’t matter?  Who could you kill and it would be equivalent to killing a tree, or a salmon, or a bacteria?  You could be callous and say “a homeless person”.  Who cares about a homeless person?  Well based on the way society takes care of homeless people, not very many people.  But you still can’t just shoot a homeless person and expect people to react as if you’d killed a rabbit.  Even if literally no one knew that homeless man, he is still aware of himself — HE cares about not being killed, so thus we have met our definition of worth.  Someone, anyone at all, cares whether he lives or dies.  In this case, its himself.  And thats perfectly valid, he has worth, if you kill him, its murder.

There’s something to be said here then, about the fact that the farther away and removed someone is from you, the less you care.  Someone flies a couple planes into some skyscrapers in your country?  I bet you’ll care a fucking lot.  You knew 100’s of people personally who were at work that day and died?  I bet you’ll care even more.

Remove yourself from the sphere of association, and most people begin to care less.  For example, 600,000 Iraqi’s have died in Iraq.  3,000 died in the 9/11 attacks, and that was an unspeakable tragedy.  600,000 people die on the other side of the world though, and largely most americans don’t particularly care.  Oh sure, we all say its awful, tsk tsk, but we go about eating our Frosted Mini Wheats and our cup of coffee over the morning paper, and turn over to the stocks page to see how our 401k did.

So to be able to end the life of an organism without it being regarded as murder and without anyone really caring, such as we do to animals and plants on a daily basis, we have to remove the elements that make something have worth, which was defined above.   Can it still be a person, though?  Say we have a chronically brain dead person in a hospital bed.  Zero electrical brain activity.  No one knows who he is, or where he came from.  In fact, lets say no one knew him, ever.  If the hospital pulled the plug … who would care?  If you yourself saw in a headline “Nameless, unknown comatose brain dead patient has life support turned off”, would you weep, would you mourn, would you damn the heavens for this injustice to human life?  Likely, not.  In this case, that shell of a person had no worth as a human being.  Sure they are technically alive as an organism, but being alive isn’t sufficient to have worth.  You have to BE someone.  You have to, at the very minimum be aware of your own existence.  That shell of a human body isn’t a person, its just a body.  There’s no one there, the lights inside have permanently been turned off, the “person”, whoever he was, is long dead and gone.  You would care about that person dying even less than you care about the 600,000 dead Iraqis, likely.  At least those were conscious, functioning adult human beings who had memories and feelings and experiences and relationships and cared about and were cared by other people.

Indeed, one need not even limit this to the human species.  Take for instance a family pet dog.  Lets say it grew up with the kids, became a part of the family.  No one would argue that if that dog got hit by a car, the family wouldn’t be devastated.  People get very close to their pets and form strong relationships.  So by the definition, a pet family dog certainly has much more worth than an unconscious, brain dead, comatose, nameless, unknown human body.

So the end point is that if an organism isn’t conscious of its own existence,  if an organism has no relationships with anyone else, then it has no worth.  What defines our worth is how other people care about us, and how we care about ourselves.  If those other people don’t exist, and neither do you, then your life has as much worth as the life of a tree or a lobster or a cow or a bacteria.  Which, just like ALL life outside the scope of our human existence, are all equally meaningless.

Have a good day

Comments

Atlanta and some stormy skies

440 days ago

This is the view from the 7th floor of our apartment building. Click to see the full sized version.

I need a tripod

Comments

Its Ooh - Boon - Too

441 days ago

Apparently, the Ubuntu linux distribution is pronounced like it is spelled up above there. I’d always said Ooh - Bun - Too.

Oh well, at least its not as bad as people who say you - bun - too.

Coincidentally, they just released ubuntu 7.10 the other day. Once my mother gives me back my laptop, I’ll have to try it out considering its got a stable version of compiz-fusion in it by default.

I wonder how long it will take for the Avant Window Navigator guys to get in there as well…

Comments

New theme

441 days ago

So I redesigned the CSS for the ole golbhet here.  I wanted something clean and simple for a change, not too much going on.  Going to try and integrate it better with the other stuff I do on the left there as thats pretty barebones currently, but that shouldn’t be too hard.

Comments

Seems like a good fit

441 days ago

In what appears to be a first for me, there are actual 2008 candidates that I felt would I would vote for. Kucinich, mostly, as he kept coming up in quizzes I’d take online where you state your position on issues and then it shows you which candidate best matches. Ron Paul was always hovering around up there near the top as well, along with Gravel. The more I read about Ron Paul though, the more I started to lean towards him, mainly *because* he’s a republican. He has a much better chance of getting the conservative vote than someone like Kucinich does. Really in an ideal world I would have loved to see Ron Paul get the republican bid, and Kucinich the Democratic. Those debates would have been wonderful to watch as two guys who respected each other, who both wanted the same result, but just had different ideas about doing it, could get into a serious, rational, logical debate with one another. And whoever came out as President, I would have been happy with.

So it came out as a very very pleasant surprise to learn that Ron Paul has actually been commenting on the idea that Kucinich, instead of being an opponent, could actually be a running mate for 2008 as vice president. Talk about a fucking grand slam, home run team. Ron Paul has the balls to do what Kucinich doesn’t, while at the same time Kucinich would be a good balance for some of Ron Paul’s more radical ideas. And combined they would be perfectly positioned to work WITH congress instead of against it. But most importantly, they both want to end the occupation of iraq, they want to bring our soldiers home and they want to reel in this crazy borrow-and-spend republican administration. And finally provide a cohesive team that could unite this country, instead of divide it down party lines. Someone mentioned the following as a comment to all of this:

I’d vote for RP if I had to… I don’t think the job in Iraq is done, I wish a leader would’ve let the boys do their job without the PC bullshit.. Should’ve been done years and years ago. An immediate pullout isn’t the answer.

The only militaristic action of “letting the boys do their job” would be to just kill everyone in the country. PC Bullshit getting in the way? Exactly what part about “600,000 dead iraqis” is politically correct to you? Because as long as there is one shia, one sunni, and one kurd, they’re gonna be fighting each other.

Winning this war with guns and missiles was never going to work. It never worked from the start, its not working now, and it will continue not to work in the future. No amount of patriotic chest thumping and magnetic ribbons on SUV’s is going to change that.

In the mean time, american soldiers are dying for a needless cause; terrorism is skyrocketing directly because of our presence; and its throwing this country into crippling debt.

We can spend 500 billion to train iraqis how to kill each other but we can’t spend 5 billion to give our own american children health insurance?

America has lost its way, lost its soul, and lost its conscience. We’ve lost the support and admiration of the world, replaced now by vitriolic hate and smug condemnation. The US Dollar is plummeting, our borders are being overrun, our government has been bought and paid for by multi national corporations. Our health care is in shambles, our disaster recovery capability is a joke, and the economy is limping along like a wounded animal, just waiting for a death blow from some unexpected event to send us spiraling down into a recession.

It’s time to step up, admit we made a huge, huge mistake with letting Bush run the country, and elect someone who can actually unite this country instead of divide it. Forget terrorists with box cutters, the biggest threat to our national security is ourselves. If we don’t stand together and turn this sinking ship around, The United States of America will fall in our lifetimes. Something has to be done now, something that isn’t just “more of the same”. Because that is what precisely is killing us, day by day, soldier by soldier, billion dollar check by billion dollar check.

Ron Paul 2008. With Kucinich on the side as the perfect running mate.

Comments

Subprimes

484 days ago

If the government does indeed pull off a massive bailout for the subprime mortgage industry… I’m going to go max out all my credit cards and then demand they bail me out too.

 http://images.salon.com/comics/tomo/2007/09/10/tomo/story.jpg

Comments