The first casualty of the depression: pride.

Megan, a friend, and I were at a coffee hangout down the street from our apartment today, and I saw the following sign.



The text of the sign reads:

Help Escape during this time of Economic Crisis
Invest in the Community by Donating to Escape
Checks can be written to: Escape Java Joint

Never in my life have I seen a business openly beg for donations to stay afloat. There were definitely fewer customers around, but I think that's in part due to their new wifi policy: when you buy something, you can get a password good for two hours of wifi use. Normally, there's a room full of people on laptops. Today, only a couple. It's most likely that the people not there were the ones who weren't buying anything anyhow, but it was still a significant decrease.

There are four hip, urban coffee shops within a few blocks of my apartment. This economy can't support all of them. I'm really hoping that if someone goes, it's the place on the corner, Mother Fool's. It's Vegan, so all their bakery is made without dairy (even though you can get cream for your coffee...) and tastes horrible. Their scones are mealy paste. I rarely carry cash, and they don't take credit cards. This means that nine times out of ten I can't buy anything from them anyway. No credit cards? Seriously? What is this, 1974?

After we left Escape, Megan and her friend walked down the street to a great little restaurant called Bab's French Quarter Kitchen. They were planning to get a snack and have a couple beers. I ducked back into the apartment so Megan could have some "girl time" with her friend--but mostly because I wasn't hungry.

A few minutes after I'd taken off my shoes and jacket, Megan called my phone. Bab's was closing at 3pm today... and never opening again. If I wanted anything off their menu, this was the last time I'd ever be able to get it. Their pastalaya, a jambalaya made with pasta, was delicious. I figured I could get it to go and have it for lunch tomorrow one more time.

I hit the street again, and walked in and sat down. By the time I got there, the kitchen had closed.

Old blog, new tricks

Well, I guess I'll welcome myself back to this old Blogspot account. It's been years since I posted here. Since I had my own server and domain at my old job, so I had no use for this account.

As some of you may know, I was fired the Friday after Obama's inauguration. I find it ironic that just as things were looking up for the United States, things went to hell for me.

I'm hoping to keep this blog sort of quiet, and have a different focus for it. I'm not planning to send links to anyone, and I'm turning off commenting. I'm sure some people will find it, and that's fine. I think I'm writing this for my children or grandchildren, which is why I'll refer to events that are in the constantly in the news as if they're obscure. When you read, imagine you've picked up a dusty, moldering book in your grandparents' attic, and you learn something about your granddad's life you'd never guessed at. My main purpose is going to be a first-person, personal documentation of America's decline and the beginning of the second great depression.

Right now, the jury's still out on the depression. A massive, $700 billion stimulus package was passed a few weeks ago that's supposed to lift us out of this "recession" by the end of 2010. I doubt it will work. All the signs point heavily to the public digging in deep, and preparing for the worst.

Personally, I've never seen anything remotely like this. Massive, nationwide chain stores--the sort of businesses that seem far too large to die--are shutting down operations and liquidating their inventories. Driving down one of the main streets here in Madison, East Washington Avenue, is shocking. Block after block of closed businesses, space for rent, and boarded up windows. I heard on the radio this morning that Wisconsin's unemployment rate has shot up to 7.6%. A year ago, it was 4.9%. Everyday the news gets worse. Today, the Dow closed at its lowest since 1997.

I grew up during the Clinton 90's, which were a boom time. I saw the dot com bust, but it was a blip, and anyone with half a brain could see it coming. This... this is terrifying. I have no idea where the bottom could be. I don't think anyone does.

As for my statement about America's decline... the facts are plain. People like to scream that America is number one, but we haven't been anywhere close for decades.

• In Adult literacy, the US is tied for 17th place with (among others) Guyana. Moldova is beating us. (source)
  
• We are 45th in the world for life expectancy, trailing Macau and Andorra--two countries I've never heard of because they were never mentioned in my lousy public school education. (source)
  
• As of Darwin's 200th birthday (February 12th, 2009) only 39% of Americans believed in evolution. (source)
• Our infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births is 6.3. Countries with better rates: South Korea. Cuba. Slovenia. Malta. (source)
• We are by a very wide margin the world's greatest debtor nation.
• The big three auto manufacturers, once the greatest in the world, are now on the brink of bankruptcy. They recently went to Washington to beg for enough money to keep making cars no one wants. We can't even compete in a market we created.
  
• We are embroiled in two pointless wars which we cannot, or will not, extricate ourselves from. They are a massive waste of money and human life. Because medical technology has managed to save far more soldiers in this war than in previous ones, the cost of their benefits and long-term care will be staggering.
• The list goes on and on. I'll post more as I think of them, and as they occur.

We're still the world's economic and military superpower, but this will not be another American century. The 21st century will be the Chinese century, or (more optimistically) an international century, powered by the growth of regional coalitions like the European Union. Our decline will mirror the Roman Empire's. Slow, steady, and brick by brick, the American empire will be reduced to a memory.

That's enough for now. This idea has been brewing for a while, and the list of depression symptoms is long and growing daily. I'll have plenty to write about.

New blog!

You've probably noticed it's been a while since I posted--there's a reason for that.

I've been working on building a new blog on my server, which until now has basically been worthless.

It's just about complete now. I've copied over all my old entries from Blogger, as well as all the old Diary-X entries I managed to salvage after their server went completely to hell.

There are a few things to fix yet--there's a missing image on the main page (it needed to die. It was an animated rotating skull and crossbones GIF) and some "Hi! Look how generic and uncustomized I am!" looking things scattered about. I'll get to these pretty soon.

I'm also not 100% I want to keep the theme. It's cool, but it's very dark.

If you have any comments, recommendations, or hey-this-here-don't-work, drop me a line at marc.teale@gmail.com.

You can find the new blog at www.PoweredByOrphans.net.

Career Day

[This is just more whining. I'd skip it if I were you.]

I am, ostensibly, a network engineer at a small Internet server provider here in Madison. Up until last weekend, I had pretty strange hours: 9:00am-6:00pm on weekends, and 3:00pm-12:00am Monday through Wednesday.

Now, however, I've switched to 3:00pm-12:00am Sunday through Thursday. I was looking forward to it before it happened, because now I actually have a weekend for the first time in well over a year. What I didn't realize is just how boring my job is going to be because of this.

On Saturdays and Sundays, I'd basically get to run the place myself all day. It was actually fun a lot of the time. It made me feel important. As it is now, the only things I'll be doing are what can't be done during the day. I get notes saying "so-and-so will be coming in to do something around 8:00" and "replace this item after 10:00." And that's it. I read through a hundred and fifty emails when I got in today, and the only one that pertained to me was to reboot something after 11:00pm.

I get no projects to work on and nothing to do. I feel isolated from the rest of the staff, (did I mention there's no one else here for 55% of my work week?) and I feel completely useless. The only reason I'm here at all is because the company is trying to go 24/7 to compete with the big guys, and they need someone to fill hours. That's not much for job security. If the economy ever went to hell, I'd be first or second on the chopping block.

I'm going to start keeping an eye out for another job. This is ridiculous.

Censorship

I mentioned in passing in my last post about how "subconscious mental blocks in my vocabulary dissolve after a few whiskey and cokes." I suppose I should I explain that.

I grew up in a tiny town that was, to put it politely, anti-intellectual. A more succinct phrase might be "aggressively ignorant." In the school I attended from kindergarten to 12th grade (all in one building, I might add) there was a pervasive atmosphere of "I will only do as much as I need to do to get by."

Personal expression--quashed.
Creativity--quashed.
Anything that didn't involve tractors, beer, or pot--quashed.

It was even considered effeminate for guys to join the choir. However, that this was not the fault of the teaching staff. I did, and still do, have a great deal of respect for anyone in the teaching profession. I hope to be a teacher myself some day. The student body had a character all its own that they could do nothing to change.

Anyway, I'm trying to set the stage for the rest of this story. I hope you have some inkling of how intellectually repressive my hometown was.

When I was in elementary school, I did everything I could to prove to everyone just how much smarter I was than they were. While everyone else was reading 100-page novels for class, I read 1000-page epics on my own. I excelled at everything academic I laid my hands on, and I rubbed it in everyone's face--This is how much smarter I am than you. This is how much better I am than you.

As you may have guessed, this behavior never won me any friends. Quite the opposite: most of my childhood was very, very lonely. It wasn't uncommon for entire summer vacations to go by without me doing anything with someone my age. I never made any real friends until high school.

Somewhere around middle school age, I finally realized that my behavior was insulting to others, and that they didn't want to be my friend because of the way I behaved towards them. How did this escape me for so long? To this day I believe that I am to some extent, socially retarded. (You'll excuse the connotations of the word "retarded." I mean it in its denotative sense.) I suppose you could call it a mild case of Asperger's syndrome. I simply didn't understand the rules of social interaction. In a lot of ways, I still don't.

When this finally dawned on me, I did everything I could to hide my intellect. Like every adolescent, I just wanted to fit in. To be one of the crowd. To be liked.

If there's a moment that sums this up better than any other, it's this: I was in the school library with two classmates. I don't remember the context, but I do remember saying something similar to:

"Oh, man, I thought he was going to have an aneurysm!"

To a pair of blank, hostile stares.

"...it's like a heart attack." I muttered apologetically. Aneurysms aren't like heart attacks, obviously, but the point is that I was attempting to once again show off my brilliance by using a big word. I'm absolutely certain that my classmates didn't know the definition of aneurysm, much less that I was wrong.

"Then why didn't you just say heart attack?" One classmate replied, contemptuously.

I have no idea what I said next, but I can say for certain that I was abashed and humiliated. From that point on, I did my best to muzzle myself and only use words that I knew virtually everyone would understand.

Sadly, it's been so long since I began doing this that it's no longer a conscious decision to restrict myself. The only time I feel I fully express myself is after I've had a few drinks. The subconscious filter I've placed upon myself is apparently alcohol soluble... it dissolves in the booze flowing through my blood, leaving me able to write and speak without the impositions of a restricted vocabulary.

I firmly believe that all of the best writing I've ever done has been done in the interim between the first sip of booze and the brink of drunken incoherency. When I wrote about my fight at Turner Hall (an entry now lost to history, fuck-you-very-much Diary-X.com) I made a point of drinking while I was writing. I knew that my description would be a pale, ineffective shadow of the events unless I drank as I wrote.

The words, quite simply, flowed halfway into my first Canadian Club and Coke. It was some of the best writing I ever did, and I was damn proud of it. I was deeply hurt when it was lost along with my original blog.

I can feel bits of my original speech seeping back into me as the years go by. I hope eventually I'll be able to use sober what I can now only access while drinking.

Starting over (again)

If any of you used to read my Diary-X blog, you'd know that I used to blog significantly more frequently, and my posts were more... significant. Virtually everything I've written in this miserable abortion of a blog have been tidbits of meaningless crap. Even I don't want to read most of what I've written.

There are a few reasons for this, ordered for you in a lovely and totally unnecessary list:

• I don't really have much to write about. My life is increasingly banal. Describing how I bought and installed an under-counter light above the kitchen sink to disinterested third parties--that would be you--seems rather pointless.


• I spend way too much time watching TV, and nowhere near enough time reading. Seriously. It's all I do, and it's really sad. I decided tonight that if something isn't worth recording on my DVR, why waste time watching it? The more I read, the more I want to write. It's already the eighth, and I don't think I've picked up a book yet this year.


• I've been reticent about being overly personal in my posts. Blogs have become the essential means of saying either "Hey world, look how fucking great I am," or "I have so much pain to unload on the world. Thank god I have my blog to vent in... or I'd need to go cut myself while listening to Dashboard."
  
  I've been shying away from these stereotypes for quite some time, though I don't really know why. On my last blog, I let total strangers see my psyche laid bare on the asphalt. I think the reason I was so comfortable there was because I knew no one was reading it. When I belatedly found I had a small audience, I felt the need to censor myself. Well, fuck it. If I've got something to say, I'll say it. I'm tired of pulling punches. From now on, I write for me, and any readers are incidental.


• Most of the work I take pride in is unintelligible and uninteresting to readers. When I'm at work, I spend my time doing seriously technical work. A good deal of it is in-depth enough that even Microsoft Mikey doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about.
  
  I could easily post an entry proudly describing how I put third party firmware on a WRT54G, hacked it to act as a wireless bridge with 128-bit WEP encryption, had issues with the ARP proxying not working when I tried to netboot a headless FreeBSD client--but who's going to understand that?


• I spend less time drinking alone. This is a good thing, obviously. Unfortunately, I've always done my best writing while half in the bag. The words flow smoothly and the subconscious mental blocks in my vocabulary dissolve after a few whiskey and cokes.


• I have very few friends in Madison. Or anywhere, for that matter. I've always had a hard time making and keeping friends. No friends means I spend most of my time in my apartment, means I spend too much time watching TV, means I do nothing and have nothing to talk about.


• I've spent too much time making this list. What the hell was I talking about when I started this whining?
  
  :: scrolls up ::
  
  Oh, right. Explaining why my posts have been crap for the last year.

So I'm starting over. A fresh start for a new year. I'm going to blog more often, about whatever the hell I feel like that day, and just write because I want to write.

I hope you'll continue to read. Chances are pretty good that my quality and quantity will increase in the near future. I appreciate people reading my writing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop myself from saying things you may find offensive.

Fuck Yeah Seagate!

I bought a Seagate 120GB drive a while ago from Best Buy. It was on special for $50, and the drive in my current workstation is slowly dying. I figured it was time to upgrade.

Unfortunately, the drive was b0rked when I got it. I mailed it off to Seagate for repairs, and lo and behold, I received a new drive in the mail today--a 160GB drive. I didn't even have to waste any time talking to a "technician" in India. I told them my drive was fucked, they believed me, and I got a better drive in exchange a few weeks later.

Therefore the headline: Fuck Yeah Seagate!

An Open Challenge to Meh

There's been a rise in graffiti in Madison over the last few years--nothing particularly serious, just some taggers trying to impress people by writing their pseudonyms all over town.

To be honest, it all looks like shit. I haven't seen anything anywhere in this town that was inspired by anything but four cans of Red Bull and having borrowed Dad's minivan.

Meh has scrawled his tag all over town in a juvenile attempt to make a name for himself. Well, Meh, I've seen your "work"--and it sucks. Simply writing your name all over everything doesn't make you an underground artist, it just makes you a vandal. Here's a chance to redeem yourself.

I hate my car. It's a piece of shit, and it looks the part. So here's my challenge: prove you're not some useless little punk shit by actually making something people want to look at. My car is an open canvas, waiting for you to make your mark.

I drive a black '93 Ford Tempo, and it's parked on or near the 1000 block of Willy St just about every night. Go ahead, do anything you want with it--so long as I can still see through the windows.

I fucking dare you.

Going for a reaction

I printed out the picture below and put it up in my cube at work. I'm hoping it will offend someone. (Clicky pop)



As a follow up, I haven't seen Barefoot Broom Lady since I talked with her a few weeks ago. I'm hoping she's someplace warm.

Barefoot Broom Lady

We have a number of interesting characters in our new neighborhood... so far Megan and I have discovered Barefoot Broom Lady and Drunken Patrick. Drunken Patrick will eventually get his own post, but Barefoot Broom Lady is today's subject.

Barefoot Broom Lady is a woman who wanders the Willy Street neighborhood with a broom tucked under her arm and (as you may have already guessed) wears no shoes. She seems to be a neighborhood fixture. I saw her the first day I was walking around the area looking for apartments for rent, and many times afterward. Megan has run into her into her at the laundromat, and dutifully reported to me that she smells bad.

As I was walked to the hardware store today, I saw her industriously shoveling snow in front of Grandpa's Gun Shop. (Seriously. There's a store called "Grandpa's Gun Shop.") As I approached, I couldn't help but stare directly at her feet. It was well below freezing, but she was still barefoot. I couldn't believe it. She was either oblivious to the pain or the nerves in her foot had already been destroyed by frostbite.

I stared directly at her feet as I walked by--amazingly, her feet didn't appear to be frostbitten. Even after being outdoors presumably all day, her feet were of normal flesh tone. There was none of the blue-black coloring that one would expect from severe frostbite. The toenail of her right big toe was pure black and her toenails needed a trim--but other than that, her feet looked relatively normal.

I went into Ace and purchased two window insulation kits. On the way back, I started to feel guilty about not offering to help her. After all, the St. Vincent de Paul was on my way home, and they have shoes for sale. I could spend 15 minutes and $10 and she'd be far better off for it. What if her feet got so severely frostbitten that they had to be amputated? Could I live with myself knowing I could have prevented that?

The other side of my brain argued back. It's been shown by feral children that the human body is more than capable of dealing with such harsh temperatures with no protection. Temperature tolerances are learned, not inborn. Buddhist monks spend frigid nights meditating high in the Himalayas, clothed in only a thin robe. They generate such incredible internal heat that they actually melt the ice and snow that they sit on. Maybe this woman is crazy or focused enough that she can do the same. So I don't need to help her... I can just take the easy way out, avoid her, and let her be. She's fine.

Bullshit. She's a nutter, and she needs some kind of help.

Dammit.

I continued walking down the street, and found her not far down the way shoveling the walk for the Willy St. Coop grocery store. Her familiar broom rode atop a snow shovel as she pushed the slush from the parking lot crosswalk. Never having had a skill for diplomacy or tact, I came straight out with it.

"Aren't your feet cold?" I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

"You only lose a third of the heat through the tops of your feet than you do through your head." She replied immediately.

I was momentarily taken aback--this was absolutely true. I wasn't sure what I had been expecting in response, but it certainly wasn't a reasonable scientific fact. Nevertheless, I sojourned on.

"Ok," I said, still failing to sound casual, "How come you're not wearing any shoes?"

"Oh, I can't stand the way that sweat freezes between the toes. Not worth it."

"Oh." I replied, unsure how to respond. Fortunately, she continued the thread of the conversation for me.

"I stopped wearing shoes in protest of strip searches," She continued, as though we were merely discussing the weather. "The shoes are the first thing they make you take off when they strip search you."

I nodded dumbly, wholly unprepared for the conversation I was now engaged in. I suspect my mouth hung agape. It's not that she was terribly nonsensical... BBL was surprisingly lucid and approachable for a barefoot homeless person of debatable sanity. Quite simply, I'm not a good conversationalist, and I'm easily confused when the topic turns to something I'm utterly at a loss to discuss. Among these topics are first-hand accounts of strip searches.

"I don't think it's right that anyone should have the right to strip you naked that you're not married to."

My brain, by this point, had stopped processing any new data. As much as I may have wanted to listen to anything she was saying, it was simply rejected outright in favor of desperately churning over the question What the fuck can I possibly say in response to this?

After she concluded her statements on the the evils of strip searches, I nodded in agreement with... whatever she had just said.

My mouth forged ahead where my brain was still unready to go.

"So... you don't want shoes?" I asked, stupidly. This was really the crux of my conversation with her. If she said yes, we'd go to St. Vinnie's and I'd buy her some shoes, or boots, or slippers, or... something. Whatever her crazy broom-toting heart desired. If she said no, I could walk away with my conscience assuaged, knowing that she didn't want shoes and that no amount of rational arguments could persuade her otherwise.

I have no recollection whatsoever of what she said in response to my question. None. I believe my brain was still attempting to formulate some sort of cogent response to the topic of strip searches, because it was certainly making no attempt to record whatever it was that she said next.

Since I immediately turned and walked back down the street towards my apartment, I can only assume that her response was in the negative, and that she neither desired nor missed shoes.

Even so, the next time I see her on the street I want to offer her a pair of shoes on me at St. Vinnie's. I don't want her to lose her feet because I didn't know how to offer to buy her some footwear.

Church Signs

Anyone else seen this? The Church Sign Generator?

I think I might have unintentionally stolen this from The Simpsons. It seems familiar for some reason.




This is cheap, but funny...




No comment.




First, apologies to Danulai, who is a devout Catholic. Then apologies to everyone else for referring to an obscure practice of the Catholic church dating back to the middle ages.




Yeah... I don't know.



I had a few other ideas I had and rejected...
"Now with 50% more Jesus!"
"Does this look infected to you?"
"Buy one baptism, get your next funeral free."

You'll notice I steered clear of child molestation jokes. They're not funny. Stop making them.

Dear Sony

Dear Sony,

It's over.

I used to be so loyal to you--the first boom box I ever got was an inexpensive Sony cassette player that worked beautifully from day 1, until I accidentally dropped it down a flight of stairs. My first pair of headphones were equally inexpensive, and did their job beautifully. I was hooked. I was impressed by the quality of even the cheapest of your equipment. I swore by you, and would buy from you whenever I could. Even if your stuff was a little more expensive, I'd buy it because, hey--it was you. I trusted you. It was worth the extra 10-20% in the price.

Then I bought a Sony Clie PDA from you. It cost $40 more than an equivalent Palm Inc. model, but it was worth it, because, hey--it's was you. Or so I thought. In the first few months of ownership, I ran into completely random lockups that would erase every bit of data... taking with it my appointments, class assignments, and other irretrievable bits of data. The Memory Stick format it takes cost 20% more than any other memory card on the market because you try to force your customers to use only your proprietary formats. After six months, the screen backlight failed completely and I had to wait two weeks for you to replace it. While it was covered under a recall and was free to me, that's really no excuse for poor manufacturing in the first place.

I was losing my faith in you.

Then, not too long ago, under the guise of digital rights management, you put rootkit software on your music CDs--installing hidden backdoor software on the computers of anyone who inserted your music into their computer. My reaction--and a lot of other people--was what the fuck were you thinking?! Your rootkit is so malicious that Microsoft released software to remove it. Otherwise, removal would nuke the entire Windows installation and completely trash the operating system.

How could you betray my trust like that? It's like you stopped respecting me.

I'm sure you've heard about the Apple and Dell laptops using your batteries that have been banned from flights... because of the piffling fact that several of them have burst into flame. The battery recall is causing you to hemorrhage money so terribly that the the only profitable bit of your business is your Playstation division, which you seem determined to sodomize with the PS3.

You're tying to force the Blu-Ray video format on me with the PS3. If you hadn't figured it out when Betamax, Memory Stick, and the PSP's UMD format all died pathetic whimpering deaths in the marketplace, no one is interested in your proprietary media formats. Demanding that Blu-Ray be put into the PS3 has increased the price well out of the reach of the casual gamer, and has limited production so much that it will be mostly unavailable for the holiday season. $499 for the non-upgradable base model? $599 for the premium model? Are you fucking insane?! No thanks. Nintendo and Microsoft have been trying to get my attention for years now, and I have to say that I'm finally going to give them their chance. I can get a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360 for the price of one of your premium PS3s.

Look, Sony, it was great for a while. I really loved you for a long time, but you've just got way too many problems. I can't see myself being with you now or ever again. You need to get your affairs in order, or you're headed for an early death. Maybe Microsoft will take you when that happens, I don't know. Frankly, I don't care any more. I just hope that when you hit rock bottom, you'll start working for the people who care for you, instead of forcing what you want on them.

Sincerely,
Marc

Marriage in Catholicism

While driving back from dropping off a carload of stuff at the new apartment, I caught a news report on the top of the hour: A Kenyan Archbishop by the name of Milingo was excommunicated for getting married, and ordaining other married men as bishops without papal authority. (Article)

For those of you who weren't brought up Catholic, excommunication is a sort of religious censure imposed by the church. Until and unless the excommunicated are willing to admit their guilt and repent, they are not permitted to take part in any sacrament. If the excommunicant is unwilling to repent, this essentially condemns them to hell. The inability to attend confession = stains on the soul at death = eternal damnation. It was used as a weapon during the Middle Ages in order to exact obedience from those who would challenge the authority of the church. If a king dared to disobey, entire countries could be excommunicated--the entirety of Scotland has been excommunicated on more than one occasion. To me, this has always seemed like man attempting to impose his will upon God, and completely illegitimate.

This news story set off alarm bells in my head, particularly after hearing the punishment meted out to the priest who admitted to fondling former Representative Mark Foley in the 1960s. The priest, Anthony Mercieca, has been banned from the priesthood, stripped of the ability to celebrate Mass, and may no longer wear vestments... and that's it. (Article)

Where's the eternal damnation for this asshole? How can anyone justify this as a reasonable course of action? Let's break this down: if you ordain a bishop without the Pope's permission, because you believe priests should be permitted to take part in one of Catholicism's seven sacraments--eternal damnation. Fuck a thirteen-year-old boy--lose the robes and you're all good.

To be fair, either Milingo or Mercieca could be redeemed in the eyes of the church by admitting their guilt and repenting. However, I don't think that the punishments fit either of the crimes presented here.

By allowing priests beneath him to marry, Milingo is attempting to infuse new life into the waning Catholic priesthood. Yes, he may be working against Papal authority, but he's doing what he believes to be best for the religion as a whole. Mercieca, on the other hand, used his role as a trusted member of the clergy to exploit and sexually abuse at least one child. If that doesn't merit damnation, I don't know what does.

Don't try to convince me of Papal infallibility in this case--I'm a Buddhist, and I don't believe for a second that the Dalai Lama has never done anything he's later regretted. You show me a man who refuses to admit he's ever made a mistake, and I'll show you George W. Bush.

All in all, the hypocrisy of these cases reek. To paraphrase Archbishop Milingo (from a different article), something is wrong in the Catholic church.

Johnny Cash - Hurt

A while ago, Karyn showed Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt. It made the front page of Digg Videos today, and I was reminded how emotionally powerful it is.

I've always loved cover songs, provided a few caveats: the coverer has to add their own distinctive style to the song, and they have to improve upon the original. Cash easily does both. Trent Reznor even said the following about the video:

I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps... Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore... It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning--different, but every bit as pure.

Although the song was released on his 2002 album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, the video is interpreted as after his wife's death--Johhny followed his wife into the grave four short months later. It's heartbreaking to watch Johnny's shaking hands spill a glass of wine on a feast table as images of June and his life flicker on the screen.

I couldn't help but tear up watching an old man mourn for his wife, waiting for death to take him so that they could be reunited.

You can find the video here.

Change of Plans

I realized that I have some pretty huge changes coming up that I haven't actually mentioned here... mostly for the reason that the only people who actually read this are people I would have already told.

Megan and I have done a complete 180° on the Seattle-based plans: I was under the impression that my lease expires at the end of November--wrongo. It expires at the end of this month. Therefore, the job search was cut much shorter than I had been anticipating, and I wasn't able to find a Seattle-area position during the brief window that could have allowed me to flee the dairy state.

Instead, Megan is coming to live in Madison. We're getting the second floor of a triplex in a really cool section of town. If you're interested, you can take a little tour here. Have you ever seen the Chad Vader shorts on YouTube? They're filmed a couple blocks away.

I'm flying out on 24 October so we can load up her car and drive back to Wisconsin... and it's going to be an adventure. Driving a '95 Toyota Tercel across most of the country is enough of a challenge: now add a hopefully-drugged-up-cat, a trailer full of all of Megan's worldly possessions, and the fact that long car trips tend to make me completely batshit insane.

Well, it's nearly 3:30AM, and I have a lease to sign tomorrow morning.

Congratulations Christine and Mike!

Christine got married on Saturday! For those of you who don't know, Christine and I dated for something close to a year, split between two semi-functional relationships. And in what I'm sure sounds like a very backhanded compliment, I've never been so glad that she and I broke up.

That requires some explanation--watching her and her new husband last night at the reception, it was obvious that she was very much in love, very happy, and very excited. The two of them were adorable. Never in all the time we dated were we anywhere near that happy; we weren't even close to right for each other. She and Mike definitely are. (Not this Mike, who shall henceforth only be known only as "Mikey" to reduce confusion.) If she'd never had the good sense to break it off with me, she never would have found Mike.

I'm doing my best to make this sound complimentary to the two of them, and not sound bitter or resentful. It's not really working. Unfortunately, I do my best writing when half in the bag, and I'm stone sober at the moment. So, trust me until I have a few drinks and revise this--there's no envy, bitterness, or resentment here. I'm genuinely happy for them.

Anyhow... congratulations, Mike and Christine. All my best to both of you.

Post-Partum Depression *

If I were the pizza guy, I'd be offended by the coupon on the lower right.

^* Get it? It's a delivery joke.

Generic Blog Post

No real purpose for this one, other than the fact that I haven't posted in quite some time.

I had a dream the other night that involved knife fighting a pair of shoes. As you would logically assume, this ended in receiving head from a woman who had been hiding in a pile of crates covered by a canvas dropcloth.

Microsoft Exchange vs. Unix Sendmail - Rant and Comparison

[Microsoft Exchange and Sendmail are server programs for sending email. You have almost certainly sent mail to one or the other before, and there's a pretty good chance that your email service is using one and you don't know it. They operate behind the scenes, so most people don't even notice them.]

I absolutely loathe Microsoft's server software. There has yet to be a single occasion where I have said, "Wow, that was way easier than doing the same thing in Unix."

This is not to say that I believe that all Unix systems are superior to all Microsoft systems. That would be a broad generalization, and a stupid one at that. I'm sure there are applications where Microsoft server products outperform equivalent open source and Unix offerings.

I just haven't found any.

Case in point: minor changes, the focus of this rant, are far easier to deal with in Unix. Tonight, I had to change the address that some guy's email was being forwarded to. Sounds simple enough, right?

This is a link to how to change someone's forwarding address in Microsoft Exchange. Look at it. Don't bother to read it, that's not really important. Just take a look at the number of steps necessary to do something this simple.

Go ahead, I'll still be here when you get back.

You didn't read it, did you? Is it really so much work to click the link, and then click "Back?"

Fine, here's the synopsis: you need five printed pages of explanation.

Now, here's how you do the same thing in Sendmail, a Unix email server program. (You don't really need to read these either, but I'll write it out for the sake of completeness.)

1. Open /etc/mail/virtusers in a text editor.
2. Find the email address for the guy that wants to change his forwarding address. It will be in the format
   someguy@here.com        forwarded@somewhereelse.com
   .
3. Replace forwarded@somewhereelse.com with the new forwarding address.
4. Save and exit the text editor.
5. Restart Sendmail so it knows about the change.

Seriously, that's it. Five steps as opposed to five pages. I don't think I'm wrong here.

I'm sure some Microsoft fanboys will say, "But Exchange has so many more features than Sendmail! It has to be more complex." Let me take that argument apart here.

• I really don't think that complexity is an excuse for really, really terrible user experience.
• Simple tasks are the tasks most likely to be performed on a regular basis. If you know that a task is a pain in the ass to do, find a way to make it easier. Add a wizard, find a way to obfuscate the complexity, do something that doesn't make your admins want to cut your throat.
• Most Exchange users don't use the extended features offered. (The server I was using today did email services for three people. It's in a closet behind the receptionist's desk.) If they're not in use, disable them until they are. It will not only speed up the system, it will eliminate the painful need for five pages of text to do a simple task.

I'm well aware of the fact that a good user interface is difficult to write, and that the more complex something is, the harder it becomes... but come on, Microsoft. You are the premiere software developer in the world. Is this actually the best you can do?

Adaptations

I come almost entirely from northern European stock--there's rumor of some Cherokee heritage in my background somewhere, but it certainly hasn't manifested itself in me--blonde hair, blue eyes, tall and lean.

As such, my body seems to be adapted for long, cold winters. I generate heat like a furnace, and I'm comfortable walking around in a T-shirt in weather that would make most people run for a parka. I typically keep the heat in my apartment set at 50 degrees in winter.

These are nice benefits to have, but there are weird side effects. Every fall, when the days start to get shorter and the weather gets colder, my body becomes convinced that there's a famine-stricken Artic Circle winter coming. It tries to adapt accordingly, apparently by making it very easy to put on a massive amount of fat.

For the third day in a row, I've had to force myself to get out of bed after twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep--presumably because bodies at rest don't burn any calories.

I'm hungry all the time--even when I've just finished a meal.

All this seems especially pointless when you consider the fact that I'm hoping I won't have to be anywhere near Wisconsin when winter sets in for real.