Never been one to let the carrier drop

It’s not that I don’t think Jesus had some good messages – it’s just that I don’t think he had enough of them, and I don’t think that they’re clear enough. If Jesus really was the son of God, I’d think he’d stop by occasionally to update us with the latest suggestions based on the changes that have happened – you know, things like, um, birth control, and, um, there being too many humans on the planet?

There are lots of religions, all claiming to be the ‘one true path’. Christianity actually claims you’ll be tormented for eternity if you don’t believe in their stripe. I know I’m repeating myself here, but, it’s stupid. It’s wrong. And every generation forces it on their children anyway. As far as I can tell, Christianity leads to some sort of strange insanity which makes some of the pure evil of the so-called God in the o.t. invisible to its followers – in fact, makes any data that might lead to concluding that the American Christian Way is in any way less than perfection invisible to Christians… and it certainly seems to make Chrisitans feel that they should be allowed to dictate policy for non-Christians on moral issues which are, at best, unclear.

I really loathe it. Most of all I loathe the absolute certainty with which Christians respond.. oh, yes, we know we’re right. We absolutely should be allowed to control you, and to take away your rights because we think your behavior is immoral or the color of your skin happens to be wrong or we disagree on at what point life becomes life. Why? God told us. Never mind that he won’t talk to you, and that our religion strikes you as sick and wrong. Clearly, you’re the broken ones here because we’ve been saved, it says so in this book here..

And from their standpoint, I’m going to hell – and you think that this is *right* – and nothing I can say will open their eyes, and nothing they can say will close mine. I guess the only solution is to not talk about it – but we live in a country run by Christians, and as a non-Christian I kind of resent that, and on holidays which are mysteriously Christ-centered despite seperation of church and state, that resentment occasionally leaks out a bit and remaining silent is difficult.

I just had the strangest craving for Fayetteville, AR, of all places. Probably brought about by trying to remember John’s area code so I could call him (they changed it after I left – sneaky, sneaky – and yes, I found it, via Google Local).

Fayetteville – where my rent was 1/4th what it is now for a bigger house. (Granted, it was majorly lacking in things like right angles.. but…) – I also miss John’s house.. it was very, hm, homey.

Kayti wants  to move to Denver – I’m wondering if it would have Fayetteville-esque charm. It seems like a very similar sort of city (albiet a bit bigger and more cosmopolitan). Part of me is convinced that SoCal must be my True Home because I keep returning here, but part of me is also getting very sick of the down sides – enviornmentally unsustainable, extremely expensive, entirely too plastic.

I always feel a little out of place no matter where I move. One amusing thing – if I lived in Fayetteville, I could pay the bills by working four months a year…

Affirmative action was mentioned recently by Clint. It’s not something that I have a fixed opinion on, but I do think that it is a band-aid solution that attempts to make the universe more fair. Now, the ultimate solution is to make infinite resources and infinite knowledge available to everyone equally, but that’s going to require some restructuring of reality.

Failing that, I don’t think that affirmative action *should be* about the sins of our fathers – I suspect, based on the advantages to being native american, that it probably is, but really it should be about the dispairity of wealth and information between the races – once we all have access to the same amount of wealth and knowledge growing up, AA won’t be needed, but until then, something has to make up for the inbalance or we will be perpetually locked in our current, rather broken situation.

I suspect that talking about issues like this on my journal probably risks offending somebody, and I feel kind of *sigh*, or maybe meh, about that.

I still want a president who isn’t another old white man.

One of my mom’s favorite songs is ‘Take me home, country roads’.. this afternoon, I was messing around with it and decided to record it to give to her as a Christmas present.. this is the first thing I’ve recorded for many, many months so I thought I’d mention it here. In addition, and noteworthy, this is the first recorded track (with the possible exception of a performance with Kayti’s voice class on the 12th that was videotaped) in which both me and Kayti appear – she is the flute solo at the end.

The URL is: http://www.sheer.us/stuff/SheernKayti-CountryRoads-2007-ForMomXmas.mp3

Yes, my singing is less than perfect. I also really need to buy some of those foam balls that go over the heads of microphones – I’ve tried the clamp-on-pop-filters, and they are *way* more trouble than they’re worth when you’re at my somewhat amatuar singing level.

Well, Jcurious rightly observed that I’m being both racist and sexist by not wanting another old white male in the white house.

Okay,  I get that he’s correct, but it is how I feel. I don’t really even know that I think that how I feel is wrong, even though it is plainly both racist and sexist. We’re supposed to be a representative government but throughout our history, we don’t seem to represent anyone who doesn’t happen to be both white and male.. and lately we’ve added wealthy to the list of requirements for government officials.

What to do? I guess I just come to terms with being a racist asshole and move on.

Speaking of racism – or something – I recently learned about the seven principles of Kwanzaa, and I must say, I approve. Since all our holidays are made up anyway, let’s make *good* made up holidays 😉 Unfortunately, apparently Kwanzaa is supposed to be a black thing and therefore I would get some very strange looks for trying to participate and anyway I’m missing all of the neccesary cultural heratige. But perhaps I’ll celebrate it anyway.

We were discussing the possibility of shifting our major gift-giving holiday from Christmas to some other date – right now, because everyone gives gifts at the same time, the gift-giving infrastructure gets seriously stressed this time of year – it seems like it’d be better for everyone for people to agree to have different dates for gift-giving – days we were toying with included but were not limited to beltane, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Ghandi’s birthday, and candlemas. I don’t know that we actually decided on anything – I do suspect that next year we will be giving our gifts on a day other than Christmas. It also underscores my lack of support of Christianity as it is implimented in the U.S., which is always worth doing..

.. so, friends, if you don’t get a Christmas card or gift from us in 2008, don’t dispair. 😉

in all my whining about TCP slowstart and UDP, I was speaking of UDP *inbound* from $streaming_server on the internet to $my_pc behind a NAT (or, technically, a NAPT). Yes, I understand that $my_pc can send UDP any time it chooses, and I apologize for any that felt I wasn’t clear enough in my complaint. It strikes me that if you already understood the problem then what I said was clear enough, and if you *didn’t* already understand the problem then my very skimpy note on the subject wasn’t going to make any sense to you anyway. Of course, I suspect the person who complained the most was actually just annoyed at me for not liking Ron Paul. (Okay, I can’t prove that. But I wasn’t trying to write a treatsie on UDP, I was complaining that because it’s stateless it doesn’t go through NATs well – which is true – but because TCP is stateful, it doesn’t deal with congestion and delivery of time-sensitive data well – which is also true..)

Currently I’m supporting Kucinich, Hillary, and Obama. I really wish there was a strong contender that *wasn’t* part of the already highly questionable political system.. but there doesn’t seem to be. Mostly I’m trying not to get that involved because it will only lead to greater unhappiness. I sent moderate donations off to each canidate, and now I’m waiting for one of them to stand out – most likely by doing something I can’t stand. 😉

I really like the idea of someone with a bit of diversity as president. We’ve had old, corrupt, and sometimes evil white men for the last 200 years.. it’s time for a change.

For no reason I can directly identify, i don’t like Ron Paul

In case anyone is curious, the tricks to making the LucasArts game ‘The Curse Of Monkey Island’ run on a modern (SMP) system without constant crashes and sound issues are as follows:

1) In the control panel, under sounds and audio devices /  audio tab / sound playback / advanced / performance, set hardware acceleration to ‘basic only’

2) Monkey island has a launcher – it’s the autorun application for the cd. Once the launcher is running (either via autorun or via running monkey.exe off the cd), open the task manager (control-alt-delete), find the application in the list, right click and choose ‘go to process’. Then, right click on the process, choose ‘set affinity’, and uncheck all but CPU 0.

3) Now, go back to the launcher and click ‘launch monkey island’. Because the process is invoked by a process with a affinity mask, the game process will also have one and will therefore work correctly.

This trick may work on many games which otherwise have audio problems on SMP/dual core/quad core/multiprocessor systems. I apologize if everyone in the world but me already knew this. 😉

http://www.stansberryresearch.com/PRO/0704OILCOL49/WOILHB01/200704AUT-COL-49.html

Oh, Gee! There’s oil in the Rockies! We’re all saved…

oh, wait..

According to that article, what’s there is actually not oil, but oil shale, rock that yeilds oil when heated. You’ll be happy to know that heating a ton – literally – of this rock – will yeild 15 gallons of oil.

Anyone bored enough to figure out how much energy it takes to heat a ton of rock, and compare and contrast it with how much energy is in 15 gallons of oil?

We got a kitten.. named Allie.. obligitory kitten pics at my gallery.