Checksum Arcanius

orkut, the by-invitation-only online community network that seems to get slower and more bogged down every time I log on every few weeks, gave me a surprise today. Out of the blue, I got a message from Eli, an old friend from high school days. Apparently, he tracked me down in orkut and decided to send me an email. I promptly responded, and four replies later, we’re stil going at it, catching up on the 4 years since we last saw each other. He’s seen a lot of what life has to offer, but it sounds like he’s doing pretty well, all things considered. And it surprised me how happy I was to hear from him after all this time. I could care less for a lot of the features on orkut – communities, for example, are sporadically interesting, but can never keep me for long – but if orkut provides a few more experienes like this, I may become a believer.

Today, I woke up at 6 and ate breakfast, got up again at 7 and revisionist blogged until 8, folded until 9, worked on the lawn until 10:45, Played Ultimate (my team finally won!) until 1, worked more on the lawn until 2, showered, and participated in the third hack session until 5, helped prepare for a partay until 6, partayed with glorious food and friends until 8, met with the TRC leadership until 9:45, then saw Spiderman 2 until 12:30.

Yikes!

Today after a wonderful day at work in which I ended by successfully generating on-the-fly a control barcode for the Flic barcode scanner using code written from scratch by yours truly, I went with Maneesh
to see Farenheit 9/11.

My first reaction to the release of this movie is that I would not see it. This because Michael Moore is an avowed leftest, and I didn’t want to support him, his propoganda, or his causes. But then, after some reflecting and reading of reviews, I decided that watching it would be useful. I wanted to hear oposing viewpoints, if for no other reason than knowing what they were. While I went in with more than a grain of salt, I also tried to keep an open mind.

First, since it is a movie, I think visuals should be discussed. Large parts of the movie consisted of footage blown up from TV quality images. While it was bearable to watch, anybody who gave it a high score in visuals is retarded. And there were plenty of people that did just that on Yahoo! Movies. ‘Tards.

The attempts to direect the audience emotionally were well done. I’m not terribly emotional to start out with, and I had to grimmace to make it through the emotionally charged parts still keeping my wits about me. The hardest were the mother who lost the son in the war and the Iraqi woman who lost some family members.

The large array of factual evidence presented is the most convincing. For example, the military commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq were oppisite of what it sees they should have been. Fewer troops went to Afghanistan than police patrol the streets of New York. More than ten times the number committed to Afghanistan are in Iraq. It tooks months for US forces to penetrate Afghanistan, and only days for Iraq. Its not to hard to believe Mikey, then, when he suggests that this is the reason Osama got away, and Sadaam got caught. It is also fairly easy to believe, with the other evidence presented, that the Bush administration took on Afghanistan out of neccesity, whereas Iraq was the prize they sought, with 9/11 as the means to that end.

And that became the most disturbing theme in the movie, because of how true it seemed upon personal reflection. September 11th was used as a justification for agendas that existed long before. Take the Patriot Act. It was very telling when Michael Moore was interviewing a congressman who said that members of congress don’t actually read what they turn into law, because to do so would take too long. So Mikey decided to go and read the patriot act to them. If it takes someone whose job is to legislate too long to read a single new law, how in the world are the rest of us, who have real jobs to do, supposed to read all the laws that we are supposed to abide by?

Other interesting tidbits

• the Afghani pipeline for natural gas
• the tactics of Marine recruiters
• Only one member of congress has a child overseas in the service
• Members of congress don’t like the idea of getting their kids to sign up for the Army

Overall, seeing the movie was a good experience. I just wish there were a conservative version of Michael Moore, so we could have an equally skewed version of this sort of commentary from the right. Maybe then people would realize how screwed up the system really is. While the rest of the movie went on to try to paint Bush and Cheney as unique in their ties to Enron and Haliburton, one truth remains. If you filmed anyone in politics for 4 years, you could make them look any way you wanted, because they will certainly provide enough ammunition. Unfortunately, the truth is that most of our government is corrupt and its not getting any better. Sure, its called politics as usual when senators get contracts for their home state and they get campaign contributions in return. But pretending that is somehow different than bribery doesn’t make it any less harmful.

In the end, this movie reaffirmed rather than challeneged my core beliefs. It did shift my perspective on Bush, but it didn’t rule out my voting for him. It certainly didn’t make me any more likely to vote for Kerry, even though an old lady wearing a Kerry for President pin tried to get me to register to vote (I am already registered). But it still seems clear to me that the government which governs least governs best. Government started the War in Iraq for a number of legitimate and probably a number of illegitmate reasons as well. But government also supplied and supported Hussein and Bin Laden in the first place. Imagine the lives and money that could have been put to better use had government just stayed out of it all.

Vote freedom first.

Peace.

From 7 until 9 today, I played Ultimate, the disc sport game known to some as Frisbee Football. The turnout was fairly good, considering there was confusion about the location being switched from the large but crowded Grass Lawn Park to the smaller but more open Robinswood park. Robinswood’s soccer fields just opened up, so for the first time since we started about a month ago, we had a flat surface to play on. The level of play has really picked up as well.

However, no matter how much I like the game, I seem to be a curse to my team. I don’t remeber yet having won one of the games. My team always manages to loose, although we usually make it close. Today, after getting down 4-9, we rallied to get up 13-11. However, we lost 13-15, despite all of our best efforts and for the last part of the game having an extra person. Fortunately, loosing doesn’t seem to make the game any less fun. If anything, it gives me more incentive to work harder. There were a couple of catches and blocks I think I could have made, had I been a step faster or a bit more agressive. So I have my work cut out for me.

As it is, we are playing regualrly two times a week, on Saturdays 11:00-1:00pm and Tuesdays 7:00-9:00pm. We may need to shift to 6pm as we move later in the season. All skill levels are welcome. Just bring someone that can match up with you and a willingness to have fun. We compete, but we keep it nice (usually, but thats another story).

Well, hopefully 13 hours of sleep makes up for twelve hours of Counterstrike. I fell asleep shortly after cancelling the movie last night, and I slept straight through for a good 11 hours. Then I rolled over and get another two hours. I am refreshed. I still haven’t put my desktop back into place yet, though. I think that yesterday pretty much was enough counterstrike for the next month.

Today, so far, I’ve had breakfast and I caught Theo (who is in Iraq) online while I am at home for the frst time in a long time. Although his internet connection isn’t the best (he drops offline periodiclly), it is good to be able to talk to a friend even when he is so far away.

Email fun
Yesterday I modified my aliases file to send mail both to my mailbox on silverfir and to my gmail account. Its quite nice to access my main mail live while at work and whatnot, a d I’m noticing myself almost liking gmail better than thunderbird. Its hard to beat Thunderbird’s offline capabilities though, so I’ll keep it around at least to store all my mail locally.

Work
Work was good. I had two big stacks of boxed Flics than my head when I was done. Good stuff. I also sent out additional Gmail invites to members of the TRC that wanted it. Just another perk of the club. I don’t know how many invitations are normal, but I’ve had 14 given to me so far. Some people thought that there were usually a lot fewer than this. Anyone else have info on this?

After Work
I left just after 5, and tried to find a Big Five in Kirkland. The directions (Frm QwestDex.com) were crap, and I ended up on NB 405 again. So I turned around at 160th and just went to Gart Sports in Downtown Bellevue. There, I was mistaken for the store manager before I found out that they didn’t have any normal frisbees. I did get an interesting LED nightglow Disc out of the deal though. And ome cones. That might be nice at the next game. The reason for all this hoopla is that I was teaching (or just coaching really) a youth group my mom works with on frisbee techniques. Although it was the first time for a lot of them, many showed some good potential. They were invited to Saturday Ultimate at Robinswood park.

FireFox 0.9
I haven’t really had enough time to test it out extensively, but except for the ABSOLUTE CRAP default theme, it seems to be pretty good.

Belkin Sux
My brother not-so-recently bought a Belkin 54g wireless ethernet bridge. Except for absolutely sucking like no other, its very nice looking. Don’t buy anything from Belkin EVER, except maybe cables. My USB hub from them is a piece of junk as well. Well, I wanted to transfer some mp3s I had just ripped from my Santana CD to the hard drive on the desktop. And it was taking forever using the linksys WET11. So I swaped out for the Belkin. Well, its fast… at least 10 times faster in throguhput it seems. But, well, it seems to die once about every minute. The connection goes kaput. The more packets you try to stuff through, the worse it gets. So probally most of you will have trouble getting this page. But thats ok, it will only give me more incentive to get this darn house wired.

Goodnight, folks
Yay, overuse of subtitles.

Today went a lot better than yesterday at work. Thing got moving early, and I was able to get a lot done. I took a ridiculously long lunch break (2.5 hours, but it wasn’t supposed to be that long) in order to go up to a building that my brtoher manages to take a look at the sprinkler system, because suposedly I am an expert on the things because I spent a summer installing them a few years ago. With some ideas from the the maintenance guy, we got the water flowing again. Unfortunately, in a vain attempt to get water ut earlier, all the valves were manually set on. So I got to go around, braving the spraying water (which wasn’t too hard on such a warm day) turning the valves back off. But some of them were really hard to find. After that was done, it had been way too long and I didn’t really have time to try dinking around with the controller to program it. Either somebody else will or I’ll have the “opportunuty” to try it later.

After getting back from work, I got back to work and things went well through six o’clock. Then I wrapped things up and headed for Grass Lawn park via a place to eat. The place to eat ended up being Subway on Willow’s road. The park was extremely busy, so we ended up playing on some not-too-nie grass, but the game ended up being very good. My team got down by six at one point, but we managed to tie it. Unfortunately, the other team scored again with just seconds left and took the game. But it was still good, because I am noticing that I am either jumping higher or simply timing my jumps better and have a better idea of how high I can jump. I like to think that I’m jumping higher though. And my forehand flick isn’t up to snuff yet, but its improving, especially for lighter throws. The two-a-week frisbee is going to be good.

After ultimate, I tok Dan and Bob home, and then Bob and I talked about the TRC summer hack sessions for a while. We laid out tenative dates, and I will be checking with Larry for availability of his place and my mom for availability of some resources at the office park. What would be ideal is simply a place large enough for two or three groups of 3-5 people to meet where there are simple things like soldering irons and electricity. Ok, a milling machine, lathe, and bandsaw would be nice too. But still, that really isn’t asking too much, I don’t think, especially after a $2+ million addition to the school that benefits primarily the drama club. But hey, we have our very own room now (never mind that its smaller than the space we had before, and its all we have now, and its really just what the Drama club vacated because its too far from the new Perfoming Arts Center. Meh. Enough for now.

And after that, I came home. Pretty good nice long day.