Entries in Life

Next year, I need to do more to involve myself in the holidays. I get to wrapped up in everything else I do that I forget to do nice things like bake cookies and buy gifts. (Alexis told me that I didn’t need to buy her a gift — she had already bought one for me to give to her.) As it was, I’m enjoying Christmas (no, its not over yet — eleven more days to go, don’t you know!).

Last night we got together with the neighbors across the street. They’re great people who just started renting one of the shotgun doubles. Their almost-four-year-old loves to come over and play with our almost-four-year-old. They made sushi and we all had fun.

We shared our respective “spiritual journeys” — ours to Eastern Orthodoxy and theirs to Buddhism. This was especially interesting in light of recent conversations I’ve had with others. He was the “seeker” and she was areligious till she came down with a terminal illness. A 30-year-old mother Faced with death, she started looking for answers.

Then, today, the kids opened presents, we visited Ginger’s godparents, and, finally, my brothers-in-law came with their girlfriends and a couple of cousins for Christmas dinner.

This is the first time they’ve celebrated Christmas with us, so it was wonderful to sit with them, talk and goof off.

So even though I was moping around before, I did end up having a good time. Still, I need to put more effort into this celebration thing so it can be even more fun.

Oh, and my gift to the AxKit community was to enable caching for virtual hosts.

Warning: After I wrote this, I read back through it and laughed at myself for being so pitiful. I’m overly melancholy because of the holidays, so give me some slack here.

Since David McCusker is getting a divorce, he’s beginning to deal with loneliness and, self-centered person that I am, I think of my own loneliness. I’m still happily married and I realize a lot of loneliness. I simply don’t have any close male friends. This is because I’m a father of three children, I’m sure, but there it is.

I’m especially worried because I look at my father, recently retired, and see that he apparently has no close friends. He’s said as much. Yet, my mother has at least one friend that she meets with regularly. I fear that I’m destined for the same sort of solitary maleness. I suppose I could frequent bars or something (probably “or something” since bars don’t have that much appeal), but then I feel as if I’m neglecting my family.

I could join some sort of book club or users group and hang out with people there once a month or once a week.

Still, in writing this, I have to admit that I do see and talk to other men socially at church, for example. But it feels like that is inadequate somehow. Silly, I know, but I wish for the days when Jeff was around and we’d go riding or talk or … anything.

I’m not alone, I just don’t have any close guy friends.

How should Christians celebrate Christmas in Bethlehem this year? Since Nov. 22, the city and its surroundings have been under a crippling 24-hour curfew that has only been relaxed for a couple of days during the entire period. Opinions vary from those calling for a total boycott of all festivities, including the traditional Latin patriarch’s parade on Christmas Eve to those who insist that life and celebrations must go on in spite of the Israeli actions.

more…

Here is a great weblog run by a Real Live Preacher. Especially see his mini-bio:

• I am a strange mix
• College, Seminary, and Disillusionment
• Dark Night of the Soul
• The Preacher is Out of His Tiny Mind.

Lots of info about the grand ol’ U.S. of A.

• Dozens of innocent people being held at Guantanemo. And the military knew they were innocent before they put them on the plane to Cuba.
• Many Tools of Big Brother are Up and Running. He’s just not very coordinated yet.
• AKMA explains why more monitoring of the citizenry won’t help.
• Legal Immigrants have fewer rights
• Buy a flight manual, get a Grand Jury Subpeona. Ebay is even more dangerous than before.
• Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wife’s Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There?

(Last two thanks to The Accordion Guy

I just discovered (via Jonathon Delacour) the The Women’s Quarterly. They have a great article about post-dot-com-boom living, “It’s So Unfair!”:

This summer Bruce and Cathy put their house on the market for a million dollars. It may shock the reader to hear the house is not worth a million dollars. It is a $175,000 two-bedroom Cape, onto which Cathy and Bruce added two extra floors and four extra bedrooms. Those bedrooms, while not obvious desiderata for a family of three, should bring the asking price up to half a million dollars. But what of the other half mil? Well, just add up the appliances, brand new in 1998, and Cathy and Bruce probably paid that much for them. There’s a gas grill that costs as much as a Mercedes (“Grill conveys,” reads a taped-on sign) and a Sub-Zero freezer with appliances that match it perfectly. (“Freezer conveys.” “Toaster conveys.” “Juicer conveys.”) And much more. It’s a half-million- dollar house and a half-million-dollar yard sale.

The price tag has nothing to do with appraisals, of course, and everything to do with what Bruce and Cathy see as justice. They expect to live as secure as socialists in an economy that has enriched them as capitalists. They do not believe in the Law of Supply and Demand. They believe in the Divine Right of Real Estate and Stock Appreciation.

I’d love to get the xmlrpc:// url scheme implemented in mozilla. I can try to code up the C for the IDL except, well, I have no C experience. I mean, I learned a little C 10 years ago, and the IDL looks straightforward enough, but I’m not that C literate. Can I make a request of the LazyWeb for this one? Or is the LazyWeb strictly weblog stuff?

Another reason why the people inside the firewall matter more when it comes to security than the people outside the firewall. Earlier this year, Roger Duronio quit his job at PaineWebber. Shortly thereafter, he set off a logic bomb that he had been working on since November in the previous year on 10,000 desks at the firm (evidently trying to manipulate the stock price of the company). While these figures are almost a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the actual value, the government claims the cost to PaineWebber was $3 million. (NorthJersey.com and Star-Ledger. Note that the second story is headlined “Investment Exec” but he was just a Senior Sysadmin.)

Earlier this month, my mother wrote a column about Uganda’s inclusion of abstinence in their AIDS prevention program. I made a mental bookmark, but decided to return when I saw the latest from Rafe which appeared to disparage all abstinence programs.

So (using News.Google.com), I did a little research and found What Happened in Uganda? (pdf) (html from google). Harvard’s Center for Population and Development Studies’ ongoing research page says:

Uganda has recently experienced dramatic declines in HIV prevalence. Analysis of HIV prevalence and behavioral data from Uganda suggest that reductions in casual sex as well as delay of sexual debut among youth (and periodic abstinence among older Ugandans) may have been the significant determinants of decline in HIV prevalence. Similar evidence can be found in Zambia and Senegal.

as well as this AllAfrica.com story on Uganda:

Prof. Edward Green of the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies in the US, says large numbers of Ugandans must have heeded to President Yoweri Museveni’s earlier warning that ‘you either abstain, be faithful or die.’

The article concludes that there is no single magic bullet, but using abstinence as a part of an overall program seems to be more effective than not mentioning it at all.

Now, I’m not that fond of the Bush administration either, but it looks like Rafe isn’t considering all the evidence.

While thinking about posting an bug to mozilla for the “xmlrpc” URL scheme, I found that someone beat me to it.

Poking around a bit more, I came across Necko documentation that showed Mozilla’s library has a generic url scheme that looks like this:

      scheme://username:password@host:port/directory/filebasename.fileextension;param?query#ref  

So I’m changing the BNF for the protocol again so that it looks for “?” before the parameter list instead of “,”.