Entries in Life

Or so says Kuro5hin. That article links to Creating the Innocent Killer which has a pretty good analysis of Card’s novels. I’ve read and enjoyed a few of these, but I tend to read pretty innocently — I let the text speak for itself and don’t try to find subtext — so reflecting on the novels with this article in mind is helpful. I was disturbed by the “surprise” ending to Ender’s Game — that a child’s game was responsible for the destruction of an alien race — but I didn’t really think about it till now. Especially disturbing is this:

“I don’t really think it’s true that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’” Card stated in a 2002 interview. “Good people trying to do good usually find a way to muddle through. What worries me is when you have bad people trying to do good. They’re not good at it, they don’t have any instinct for it, and they’re willing to do a lot of damage along the way.” The import of this statement is that there are some people who are good before they act, and some others who are bad before they act, and that goodness or badness is exhibited in their actions. These “bad” people can’t do good, and “good” people can’t do bad.

(I just read that last sentance to and she said “Yep, George Bush can’t do bad because he’s good.”)

Christian groups’ boycott of P&G worked. I’m surprised. I thought boycotts don’t work. Especially boycott’s against commodity companies like Proctor and Gamble. (The article quotes Hutcherson as saying that a boycott of Microsoft is possible. Surely that wouldn’t work… would it?)

You reap what you sow when it comes to customer service. Which is why users of open source turn into maintainers or creators of source: because it’s what the “customer service reps” do. They treat users as co-maintainers. And a user will get a lot closer to a solution if he shows that he’s done his footwork first. Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone, but the iterative process means that Linux is rapidly approaching the point where users who don’t want to be that involved don’t have to dig so much to use the operating system. Sixteen or seventeen years ago, I had my first exposure to Emacs in the suggested editor that was bundled with Coherent. I next used it in Lucid Emacs on the Sun workstations in my computer science labs in college. From then on, in fits and starts, I’ve used emacs for most of my hacking. These “fits and starts” have gotten so bad that I’ve managed to get committer access to the Emacs CVS repository. In fact, until the past six months I was using it to read email and RSS. I’ve been re-thinking this and, when someone contacted me about problems with weblogger.el, I re-discovered what makes Emacs so fun is not its polish, but it humane interface. That, and its hackability. So, I’ve switched back to Emacs for editting my weblog and am already implementing some great new features in the emacs of my mind.

Boing Boing continues to be an interesting diversion, but I don’t trust it. For example, they posted a link to something I thought was common knowlege “Clams, mussels and oysters are … vehicles for … disease” Hmm… Maybe I lived in New Orleans too long and heard too many stories about hepatitis an other nasty vermin in the oyster supply. It leaves me wondering “This is news?” Walk into any oyster bar, and you’ll see signs all around that warn you that you could get very sick there. So, maybe it is only news to people who’ve only fantasized about the mythical aphrodisiac power of oysters.