Return to Blogging

It’s that time of the year again! The weather is turning, the temperature is dipping, and the ground is becoming more and more soggy. At least, it is if you reside in the Pacific Northwest. This means I will be seeking my bed a lot earlier in the evening, but I will also be posting more as the daylight hours grow shorter and shorter.

“What?” I hear some people say. “You mean you will actually start posting again after over two months of absence?” Yep, I will. There were reasons for the lack of posts, and the lack of responses on the message boards. Er, I mean the Comments Sections. 🙂

The first thing that got me riled up and lent towards my negligence in posting is the fact that fall always seems to be the busiest time of the year for me. I don’t know why, but I’m beginning to suspect that we are culturally conditioned to become more busy during the autumn then at other times of the year because of the preparations we all go through when we are younger in returning to school, school sports, the harvest (if you are from the Midwest, at least), and then all the preparations one has to go through in order to make sure that the Holidays go off without a hitch. Not to mention that a lot of people are always busy in the even numbered years thanks to the American election cycle that takes place in the majority of states. (Louisiana, of course, being an exception.)

With that, I must point out that I became very involved with the political elections of this year. Like most Americans, I had had enough of the corruption that has been going on in Washington for far to long. Also, I, along with many others, had become alarmed that the direction that this country was heading in was nothing more but a reborn, redressed version of Fascism, and I did not want to look at my peers and just shrug my shoulders. I wanted to look them in the eye and say, “I did something about this, where were you?” Bad governments happen to people who do nothing to stop them. So, with this thought in my mind, I got involved in the netroots initiative. I pounded on doors, and outlined what had been going on in Washington to my less than politically astute friends (who were aghast at what really happens on the Hill, once they started to read the first hand accounts of some of the bills that were being passed, not to mention the amount of corruption and influence peddling that happens on both sides of the aisle). For once, I became involved in the process, and I’m proud of what has been accomplished.

Well, let me rephrase that. I’m proud right now. Now it is up to the people who were elected to continue to earn our (the electorate’s) respect and confidence by passing bills and referendums that are in the average citizen’s best interest, rather than in the best interest of the corporations, the elite, and other entities.

Then, I moved. I didn’t want to, but by the time the last attempted double homicide happened in my old neighborhood, I decided that it was time to get the hell out of dodge. Nothing like chalk outlines in the parking lot of your neighborhood grocery store to emphasize the fact that the neighborhood has gone to the weasels. (I’d say dogs, but dogs have respect, honor, never lie, and are more loyal than the majority of the people that I know.) So, that engendered a process of packing, which is a royal pain in my rear-end. This process made me question just how many 1,500 page books on programming languages I really needed, not to mention all the white papers, HOWTO’s, README files, and printed out drafts of UML code. Ugh.

So, I’m done with my political experience, I’m moved (in a much nicer neighborhood, and I actually have a back yard for my dog again! She’s ecstatic!), and I now have my main desktop computer unpacked and ready to go. Not to mention that my laptop is getting repaired now, so never again will I have the excuse of no computer to blog! 🙂

This means that I will try to continue on with my goal of at least one post a day, continuing the debates with June and Nick! (Hi guys! Missed me?)

An Absence of Posts

Well, I’ve not been posting much lately. I apologize for that. When I started this, I thought I would put up at least one post a day, on matters relating to either Comparative Religion, Open Source, or Gaming. The past few days I’ve found new obsessions that have precluded me from posting here, but I will rectify that in the upcoming days. Of course, blogging is a drug, so I should never be away from blogging for too terribly long!

What were the obsessions I’ve developed? In one of my posts in the comment’s section, I said that one of the programs I wanted to watch was ‘Lost’ on ABC. However, I wasn’t going to just start watching it without seeing the previous episodes. Once I said that to a friend of mine, she lent me her copy of Season 1 of ‘Lost’, and then I proceeded to waste Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday afternoons and evenings getting caught up! Now, I think I will buy Season 2, just so that I will know what happened during the premiere of Season 3. (Yeah, I caught the last fifteen minutes of it, but I was completely lost, pun intended.)

The other obsession I’ve cultivated was Morrowind. Anyone with a PC or an X-Box has heard of this game. I’ve lost more than one night of sleep exploring the virtual world in this game, I can tell you! It’s been awhile since I’ve played a completely open-ended game with the scope, depth, and history of Morrowind. Right now, I’ve developed an obsession of trying to complete all of the quests in the game, which will keep me busy until well into next year.

Since I consider this a “filler” post until I can put up something with a little more content, I thought I would advertise one of the classically trained pianists I’ve discovered through YouTube. I play the piano myself, but I’m nowhere as accomplished as Gen Segawa. To think, he’s a bodybuilder, a pianist, and developing a world following! To tell you the truth, I’m kind of envious. Oh well, I guess I should have taken Hannon and Czerny a little bit more seriously when I was studying…

This clip is Gen playing Beethoven’s Sonata 14, Third Movement. I chose this as this is currently the piece that I’m studying as well.

Books I Claimed To Have Read

I got tagged by Ollysk2, over at 10,000 Reasons To Doubt the Fish. In this particular version of tag, you are supposed to replicate the post and answer the questions that are put forth to you. Unfortunately, being a bit addled last night when I posted my responses, I put it into his comment’s section. Oh well. For now, I will replicate the post (Replicator! Gah, I just reminded myself that SG-1 is in its final season on Sci-Fi right now 😦 ) with two responses. One response will be serious, the other one will delve into my extensive reading of pulp Fantasy and Science Fiction novels.

A Book That Changed Your Life – The serious response would still have to include two books. Those would be the King James Version of the Bible, and the other would be Atheism, the Case Against God by Smith. The first book I grew up reading, memorizing, and breathing every single day up until I was the age of sixteen. The next book I read when I was eighteen, and completely changed the way that I viewed philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and rationality. While the extant of my progression away from the fundie camp will not be delved into here, I will say that for awhile there were thoughts and reasons that were floating around in my head that I hadn’t a framework to conceptualize yet. The latter book did that for me. Now, the smart aleck response to this would be Green Eggs and Ham by the venerable Dr. Suess. That book, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish are still on my bookshelf. (What? You don’t have the books you learned to read still?)

A Book That You’ve Read More Than Once – Most definitely The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I still read those books every single spring. Love them! Of course, the other books that I’ve read more than once would be the Wheel of Time by Jordan. Yep, I’m one of those people who re-read the entire series every time a new book comes out.

A Book You’d Want On A Desert Island – I’d like something along the lines of How To Get Rescued From A Desert Island For Dummies, so I guess my old Army Handbook that I still have from Basic. Everything you need to know in order to survive in the wild…

A Book That Made You Giddy – Here, both the serious and the smart response would be Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Also, you should check out the Discworld Series by Pratchett. Nothing, and no one, can stand up to Granny Weatherwax! And that’s just the way it should be.

A Book That You Wished Had Been Written – This would definitely be something along the lines of a combination of a thesis on the Human Genome Project and the Human Brain Mapping Project. By combining both of these into a holistic whole, and by understanding thoroughly what is going on, we would understand so much more about human consciousness, the mind, and how and why we think. Perhaps, after this is done, most of those pesky questions about ‘free will’ and ‘internal morality’ can be put to rest, as philosophy can only get you so far without solid premises to base your reasoning on.

A Book That Made You Sob – There are several. Then again, I’m a softie when it comes to animals. Any book where an animal dies will have me reduced to tears like a crying three year old little girl. That being said, the one that had the most impact on me was Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I read it the first time, and bawled my eyes out at several stages of the plot-line.

A Book That You Wished Had Never Been Written – Like I said in the comment’s section of Olly’s Blog, generally I do not approve of censorship. The only cases where I actually like censorship is where someone has been hurt, or coerced. Other than that, if I could erase one book from history, it definitely would be the Revelations of St. John. This book has caused more irrationality, fear, and fear-mongering than any other book written in the west for the past, oh, three thousand years or so. Most of the theologies that the fundies adhere to in the present day and age can be attributed to Millenial Dispensationalism, which is a direct result of this one book. Not to mention the irrational and improper types of interpretation that fundies have to go through in order to tie this book to the Book of Daniel, and you can see why I say this. If only Left Behind could really be left behind.

A Book That You Are Currently Reading – This changed since last night. Now, I’m reading Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design by Michael Shermer. Nick should be posting an article on why he does not believe in evolution any day now, and I thought it would be best to brush up on current ID arguments, and why they are not as scientific as the Discovery Institute (alas, based here in Seattle) would like to purport them to be.

A Book You Have Been Meaning To Read – This is still Bleak House by Dickens. One of these days…

And now, I think I will tag Matt from Matt’s Notepad, and Ben from Welcome. Oh, and Nick, from the Christian Right, since he’s so cool. Well, that, and the fact that he didn’t slap me for giving his wife some several naughty admonitions on how to handle him… 🙂

Much Ado About Everything

It has been a few days since I last posted something, and I apologize for that. However, I was reminded of a quote from one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors yesterday because of all the intensely differing stuff that I’ve been doing and learning. The quote? Here it is:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, give orders, take orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” -Robert Heinlein

I have certainly been living up to his proclamation in the last few days. Lately, I’ve been patching dry wall, replacing light fixtures, laying out new flooring, re-ordering the placement of electrical sockets, building the foundations for a deck, learning Python (a scripting language that is very efficient and something that I’m going to use from now on when it comes to SQL database searches), writing a book review (For a book by Terry Goodkind, I’ll post it later), manipulating images with the GIMP for inclusion of future articles on this blog, changing spark plugs on my car, changing the oil on the car (might as well, I was already out there and had the items to do so), applying for my new classes this quarter, making gourmet Salmon meals for my neighbors this past weekend (I live in the Pacific Northwest, and some of the salmon runs are starting right now, all I can say is DELICIOUS!), hiking the Cascade Mountain range with my dog, and the list goes on and on and on. Right now, I’m back to my normal routine schedule, so I should have much more time for posting articles and such.

While I prep the next article on the question of Christianity and Slavery, why don’t you good fellows check out this clip from Hardball? I find it sad that the GOP hasn’t even bothered to change their talking points yet. The points of talking that they concocted a while ago were false sounding when they first came out, and now their is no excuse for them to keep on spouting the same false, misleading messages. Now that it seems the corporate owned media is back on track for bringing public accountability to this administration, albeit in extremely limited amounts, maybe we will see some more progress in getting the truth out, coming up with a plan for bringing or men and women home safely, and prosecuting the war profiteers who put our nations service members in jeopardy. (Kellog, Root, and Brown as well as Khaki International, I’m looking right at you!!!)

Changing Themes

I’ve decided to change themes today. While I like the Quentin look, it seems to be a bit more suited to those people who discuss literature and in-depth heady theologies, and does not lend itself very well to embedding pictures. My main concern with the theme is that it does not show the hypertext links that I utilize all over the place in order to show the documentation that I refer to when discussing a topic.

Anyone have a suggestion for a theme that is clean, coherent, has hypertext links show up distinctly, and can be used better with pictures?

Procrastination and Confusion

Well now, I finally did it. Of course, to get this little blog of mine up and running took a little bit of experimentation, two crashed OS’s, some studying on the pro’s and con’s of Apache 1.3 vs. Apache 2.0, and a lot of yelling at the computer and whichever of my friends that happened to be closest. Not to mention the poor folks that man the call center for Comcast. (Which, in my not so humble opinion, Comcast should fund better in the arena of education and training rather than pouring their capital into marketing and lobbying on the Hill.) Why all of this ruckus over posting a simple little blog? In a word- Confusion.

It all started with my installation of Mepis 6.0. I had been a Suse user for years, and loved the OS, but when I upgraded to 10.1, the proverbial fecal material hit the high frequency oscillating target. First the burns for the OS images went poorly. For some reason, CD’s 1,4,5 and the Add-On CD went well, but for some reason K3B refused to burn the images for CD’s 2 and 3. At first, I thought this was an issue with the CD-Burner that I was using at the time. However, after consulting with the person who got me started on Suse Linux 9.1, it seemed that there was a problem with K3B itself. (For those of you who do not use Linux or Open Source Software, K3B is a burning utility like Nero, except most of the time it has more features and is definetly more user friendly than the burning utilities in the MS world.) This was confirmed after I switched out the CD-Burner for another, and the same issue was happening. I finally got the CD’s burned, don’t ask me how, and then went for the install. I backed up my data, did the install, and I was in! That’s when the problems started.

You see, I didn’t read the documents or the forums on Suse before I went ahead with the install. All I did for “research” was to read the glowing reviews that were posted all over the web when it was released. However, these reviews just went into how easy the installation was, how great the User Interface was, and then explained a little bit about the utility that made Suse famous: YaST. (Yet Another Set-Up Tool.) If I would have read the forums that were dedicated to Suse and OpenSuse, I would have found out that there were a lot of bugs, glitches, and down right ill-thought out design in this version of Suse. Yast wouldn’t work properly, YOU (the Yast On-Line Updater) was broken, and several hardware configurations were mis-configured. However, it did get installed, and I did get to experiment with the 3-D Desktop. The disappointing thing about the 3-D desktop was that it was not simple to implement or configure, which was yet another thing that all the glowing reviews forgot to tell their readership about. You had to install components from the CD’s, modify config files, and generally jump through hoops to get it operating in the KDE envirnonment. (I prefer KDE because it was the first Desktop Environment that I experienced on Linux. I’ve never ran Gnome, and played around with FluxBox, IceWM, and XFCE, but always felt more comfortable in KDE.) But Wait! If you read the press releases and the reviews, you would assume that getting the 3-D desktop was simple! Well, it wasn’t; at least on the KDE side of things.

At this point, my friend was tired of fighting with Suse. He tried to migrate to 10.1 from 9.3, and all of his environmental settings and hardware configurations were completely messed up. The problem with his experience, though, was that he was installing it on his laptop (a Sony Vaio) which was his production environment for work. (He works as a Web Developer for a big health care insurance company that relies on its internal web applications for day to day business critical needs.) He could not go about and muck around with the configuration of Suse. He needed his laptop, and he needed it NOW! So, one Saturday afternoon, he gives me a call and tells me to start some research on other OS’s.

That Saturday, I downloaded four different “flavors” of Linux. Out came the CD’s, and onto them I applied Kubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake”, Mepis 6.0, PCLinuxOS, and the latest from Knoppix. I tried them all before installing. I knew more than enough about the Debian architectural underpinnings of the Ubuntu flavors, had heard nothing but good things about PCLinuxOS, and had used Knoppix regularly when diagnosing my own computer when I goofed up or when removing spyware from other’s computers. He, however, decided to go with the DVD ISO of Kubuntu. Like I stated before, I like KDE. So does he, which is the reason for all these distributions being KDE-centric. Needless to say, he liked the apt-get utility in the Debian sphere of influence. So did I, after dealing with “dependency hell” for two years on the Suse platform. (Even the SMART Package Manager, Guru’s repo, and other repositories couldn’t save you from that in the RPM universe.) Onto his laptop went Kubuntu! I was more hesitant, though, as I was used to Yast. Yast is a great utility for configuring all kinds of things in the Linux world without having to drop down to the command line to edit a text file. Think of it as a more secure version of Microsoft’s Control Panel in Windows. However, the problem with Yast is that it relies on a whole host of scripts for it to boot and run, which makes it powerful, but very slow. In the past year, I was already doing the majority of the installations of RPM’s and configurations of Networking and Graphics on the command line anyway, because it was just faster to do it that way than to wait for Yast to boot up. Once my friend pointed that out to me, I finally decided on Mepis 6.0.

With that decision, I’ve been very happy! The computer was already set up with everything that would have taken me another two hours to configure on Suse right out of the box. (Or ISO, as is this case.) The only thing I had to do was to activate the Audio and Video Codecs! (Those are the files on your computer that tell your computer how to display all those wonderful movie and song files.) Once that was done, the whole environment was perfect! All my programming files were there, and the only thing extra that I had to do was to install the source code for the kernel from one of the repositories. (I like to compile a lot of the programs from source to make sure the config files catch all the variables in my particular environment. Not to mention that I think most of the time, when you compile from source, the program just works faster. Of course, that’s probably just perception…)

So, what does this have to do with putting up a silly little blog? A whole lot. The reason for it is that I was amazed at how simply every thing worked in Mepis, and thought I would try my hand at other things that I was too scared to do before. Of course, here I’m referencing to actually putting up a web site. I had never considered this before, even though I know the basics of HTML and Javascript. The thing is, though, I knew enough of web coding to get through someone else’s code, and maybe put in a modification here and there, but not enough to actually write something from scratch and have it look nice and readable when someone else would browse to it. This procrastination ended with the installation of Mepis on the computer, though. From the forums at MepisLovers.com I heard about this great little utility to help people with posting their own Blogs called “WordPress”. Hurray! This sounded exactly what I was looking for!

Then the confusion set in. I installed WordPress from Synaptic. And then I looked for it. And looked for it, and then I looked for it some more. I couldn’t find it! Their were no executables, and the only thing I found from the installation log in Synaptic were a bunch of PHP and HTML files scattered all over the place. Then it hit me: WordPress was not an application in the ordinary sense. It was a web based program to generate an HTML and PHP page! Hence the reason why Apache, MySQL, and PHP had to be running on my machine at the same time for it to do what I wanted it to do. This was quite a shock to me, as everything (yet again) that I read had led me to believe that it was an application; kind of like a pared down version of Frontpage or Dreamweaver, but meant just for blogs. So, in the process of trying to get the software up on the computer, somehow I had inadvertently installed two instances of Apache. One was version 1.3, the other was version 2.0. This was in addition to the MySQL and PHP servers that were currently running on the machine.

Now, the fun happens! In the middle of trying to set this up, I had somehow disabled my firewalls. Knowing myself, I had probably become a little too click happy with some of the dialog boxes that had popped up on my screen. (Yet another “blond” moment in my life, I guess.) So, now I had two unsecured web servers running, a database that was not properly setup, and more than likely an unsecured PHP server running. This made the system come to a grinding halt, to say the least! Not knowing very much about web development, and having felt that my system was compromised, I just reinstalled Mepis. (This time, installation and configuration of everything only took about 20 minutes). I was up and running again! And still intent on making a weblog.

Which leads me to my confrontation with the”good” folks who run my Broadband service. I called them in an effort to see if they had the specifications so I could run WordPress on my personal web page site, which is what I’m paying all the monthly fees for after all, right? I mean, no one actually gets 6 megabits per second transfer rates through their cable modems in reality, right? Of course I’m right. The most that a person can hope to attain is about 500 kBPS from most servers because of the bottlenecks in the net architecture right now. (If the DSL providers would market this, they would get a lot more people switching. I don’t know why they don’t.) I call them, thinking I will talk to competent people who know a lot about web pages. I don’t know why I was surprised when I found out that they were completely clueless about why I wanted to do what I wanted to do. They didn’t even know what type of servers they were running on their network! What they wanted me to do was pay an additional US $50 per month for them to host my personal blog!

That’s when I decided to just run with the WordPress hosting site. It does everything I wanted it to do, without the hassle of setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on top of my current Linux distro. While I love Linux, I’m not much of a server guy. (Unfortunately, the only thing I know about servers is what I know to get a linux Printer and File server up and running securely, and Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.) Eventually I see myself hosting this weblog on its own domain, with customised HTML coding, but for now the web-based version suits me just fine. It’s not like I expect a lot of people to be reading my meandering, abstract thoughts in the first place. (Unless if I post one of my Linux tutorials and it gets promoted on Digg.com, that is.)

I think that should be enough for an initial first post. My god, but did I ramble! 🙂