Entries in Life

Since I’m a little more interested in politics this year (working for a candidate does that), I’m reading up on Dean. From Dean-o-Phobe, I came across this apology by Atrios for the perceived secularism of the Democratic party:

Another thing that everyone knows is that Democrats are God-hating heathen pagan atheists. Much like gay rights issues, there’s literally nothing they can do overcome that image. Divorced Ronald Reagan went to church about as often as I do but that didn’t stop him from being portrayed as a God-fearing devout [insert your own denomination here] Christian.

There are plenty of Christians who’ll vote more Democratic than Republican. The problem is not that Democrats are secular (or that Republicans are particularly religious — they aren’t). It is simply the image that groups like the Christian Coalition have created of the two parties — an image that Republican’s have encouraged with their nominal politiking on the abortion issue.

Many of my closest friends are devout Christians who vote Democratic. My uncle is a Mennonite minister who feels much closer to the Democrats than the Republicans. I’d invite anyone to read through the pages of Creation Care for a good sampling of Evangelical Christian thinking that isn’t tightly bound to the Republican platform.

It looks like Dean has seen this weakness — his secularism — and begun to exploit his nominal Christianity by giving sermons in churches. If he continues down that path, he’s gonna sink faster than ever. People recognise falseness. Bush’s and Liberman’s religion feels authentic. Dean’s doesn’t.

There are a lot of “super-secular” Democrats who, like Atrios, think the fact is that the people who care most about this stuff aren’t going to be happy until we have Ten Commandment monuments on every street corner, but these super-secularists are just as wrong (and annoying) as the fundamentalists that they decry.

Just as Christians can’t let themselves be lulled into thinking that a government, set of laws, or political party is going work for what they believe is best, ardent Secularists can’t allow themselves to dismiss all believers as ignorant and irrelevent.

While skimming through my virus trap, I found amessage titled why me? that contained the following text:

    You say in the www. that i'm a terrorist!!!    No way out for you. I REPORT YOU !    You've said THAT about me  

The best part? The attachment was named www.boards4all-terror432.com.

Even the latest Outlook stops you from opening files with more than one dot in the filename, but I really like the cleverness shown here. Some people will think this is a link and click on it. They’ll think that all their training about not opening attachments doesn’t apply.

So Wired wrote an article about Clark TechCorps. It turns out that Dave Winer hates the idea.

We get a clue of what exactly he’s thinking with this comment: My issue isn’t with open source, it’s with the campaigns reinventing software that already works, and being two-faced about supporting American software developers.

Clearly he doesn’t understand exactly what we’re doing here. Some of techcorps.net is how we’ve adapted existing Open Source Software, like bugzilla or RT (yes, we really use both).

Another is heavier modifications to software like Scoop to adapt it to our purposes.

Finally, there is software that we are building from scratch. It isn’t because we’ve not tried the existing commercial software out there — we have. Where it works, we use it. Where it doesn’t, we have to create our own.

Finally, there’s the issue of “getting software for free”. We have lawyers, accountants, publicists volunteering, and, a lot of the time, all they do is stuff envelopes. We’re trying to use the people’s skills better. The Internet is obviously playing a role in this election, so we can use any programmers, system administrators, or web designers who volunteer. It makes no sense to keep anything put together to ourselves, so we may as well open-source it.

I strongly believe that the marriage is a religious act — even a sacrament. Since “gay marriage” has recently become an issue, I’ve gotten into a discussion about this with family members, and there is definite confusion about whether a marriage is instantiated when the minister says “man and wife” or when the state issues a marriage license.

As a point of reference, my brother, a Mennonite minister and a devout Christian, recently got married to an Indonesian woman. He had one church ceremony in Indonesia, a civil ceremony in the U.S. and a church ceremony in the U.S. Evidently, the first ceremony wasn’t enough for him to consider himself married.

As much as I love my brother, I think that this sort of thing is going to cause pain for those Christians who think like this. As I’ve asked many times, who decides when you are married? If it the state is involved in the process, then what happens when the state makes the decision to alter its definition of what marriage is.

I’m glad I’m not the only loon who understands this. Scott Rosenberg writes:

But if you believe that marriage is “largely a religious matter,” shouldn’t you want the government out of the marriage business entirely? Why do you think the government should enforce your religion’s dictates? Wouldn’t you be a tiny bit worried that the government that enforces your religious beliefs today might turn around tomorrow and enforce someone else’s?

Christians need to recognise (again) that they that they are not “of this world” and they can’t expect this world to behave the way they think it should. Christians cannot define marriage for the state in a democracy because they are only a signifigant minority.

Here’s a bit of what I wrote decribing this job to someone else:

FWIW, this isn’t exactly a steady job (lasts, at the most, 1 year).

What it is, is a mad dash for the Democratic nomination and, ultimately, the presidency.

Right now, I’m working on installing SpamAssassin, Amavis, ClamAV, OpenLDAP, various configurations of Apache, various authentications off of LDAP, diagnosing bulk-mailing problems, writing Perl scripts to automate this or that, etc.

You name it, I do it. Same for anyone else here.

For what its worth, this is almost completely Open Source Software running the joint. We might have a couple of proprietary apps here and there, but we’re using apps like Thunderbird, Firebird, OpenOffice, etc. on the desktop as much as possible.

This is a great change from the job I had in New Orleans where I was supposed to be closing down the UNIX side of the house, things were quiet, and they didn’t ask me to implement anything new. If you have skills and know how to apply them in new and interesting ways — if you can come up with good solutions using an OSS solution — we need you.

I encourage you to come up one weekend and check us out.

Low pay and long hours, but exciting as all get out.

I’ve become a political mercenary. This week, I took a temporary job at the Clark Campaign in Little Rock and I’ve barely had time to breath since. I had no idea that people put so much energy into getting a person elected president of the U.S.

Of course, given the power that the president wields, I should’ve guessed. And, Cameron Barrett intimated that he was working 16 hour days here. Still, it is crazy. Not that I mind the craziness. This is the kind of craziness I like. For a little while, at least.

I call myself a “political mercenary” because I’m not really a Democrat or a dyed-in-the-wool Clark supporter. Heck, I haven’t voted since I was 18. I’m here because it was close to where I was (working on a contract in southern Arkansas) and it sounded exciting. Raised in a fairly Republican family, I find some of the Democratic philosophy that this campaign inevitably embraces disconcerting.

Still, because politics is naturally “us against them” and, by virtue of being here, I’m an “us”, I’ll be passing out Clark schwag to my family and friends. Who knows? I may even vote this time around if it means getting past Super Tuesday.

Dan talks about strip-mall culture and cynicism which got me thinking about my recent trip to upstate New York

New Orleans is a pretty decrepit place. Factions fighting the “disney-ification” of the French Quarter fight with those trying to clean it up (or put in chain restaurants). But the outlying areas (Metaire, Slidell) are pretty much “big box” stores and strip malls.

When we drove up to New York on the east coast, we took Highway 81 for a significant part of the way. The areas we drove through weren’t falling apart, but they weren’t strip-malled, either. Every once and a while, we’d hit a sizable area and Alexis would say “Looks like Slidell”. Which is sad. (Of course, not all places were like that. Harrisburg, PA was nice, for instance).

Dan says … if I can’t see flaws I assume you’re being dishonest up-front. Which I can certainly relate to. When I was in Ames, IA for my friend’s wedding, I hung out in a dive of a coffee shop (and no WiFi, thankyouverymuch) instead of the nicer places. It was more fun to watch the people there.

But, Dan goes on: Is anyone else plagued with this? I wonder what opportunities I’m missing, what products that claim to be ‘new and different’ might actually be, and whether this blind hatred of the glossy is holding me back. and goes on to ask Anyone found a good compromise?

Well, I wouldn’t consider it a compromise, and I doubt Dan would appreciate this approach, but traveling with kids is a good way to look at things through new eyes. True, they had too much appreciation for “Cereal City” (definitely not my type of place), but their view of things was almost always new and helped me to appreciate even chain bookstores.

Today, we we visited the Indianapolis Children’s Museum. Fabulous.

Imagine a children’s museum so good that many people come without kids and enjoy it. Alexis and I split up — she took the Ginger and Violet and I took Basil — and spent five hours on two separate floors of the five story structure. It was incredible.

Jeff didn’t make the whole Hilly 100 on his trip this past weekend. “Only” 55 miles.

Back when I was in college, I did the Tour for Cure. 150 miles. From SLU to Mississippi and back. As I recall, it wasn’t really easy, but it wasn’t impossible and I did make it all the way. It was made easy by the fuel stops they had every 10 miles. Pedal 10 miles, grab a bananna and go again. Kind of fun. And, no, I didn’t prepare for the trip.

Still, that was back in my college days. Since hitting 30, I’ve noticed things here and there not or two doesn’t working quite as well as they used to. Nothing to complain about, mind you. Just minor pain in my arm after long typing stints; a little back pain; etc.

So, I’m thinking that I might not find that 150 miles as easy as I once did. I’d probably have to work up to it a bit more than I did then.

Last night I saw this version of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. I marveled that Wilder was skillful enough to write a play about everyday life that would be so compelling.

Looking at what people have written about it on the Internet, today, I’m finding that some people have the attitude that this play is just too far in the past. They can’t relate to it. As the review I pointed to above says: … one can’t help get the feeling that this sleepy-town is having its intended effect. Allegory hangs heavily over Grover’s Corner, to the point where you start wishing they’d open a Starbucks. To me, this says the reviewer is a little too tightly bound to the times, that or this sort of play just isn’t his style (Read his review of Bat Boy, The Musical to see what I mean. Bat Boy is based on a re-curring charecter from that bastion of fake news: The Weekly World News.)