//Delete this later

You hit Engadget or Gizmodo, and I swear, whenever someone brings up “Palm”, it’s almost as if they really want Palm to go out of business. It’s a visceral hate for a small company that has innovated so much in the market and has really been a great player in the mobile market for much longer than most. They were the ones with the vision 14 years ago, when Apple and Microsoft had given up on the mobile space. When phones were getting smarter, they gave you the first Treo. They have a long history of really taking great care of their developers and delivering a real personal touch, instead of hiding behind a mass of “MVPs” or “Apple Geniuses” or “constant beta programs” that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have always utilized to keep an arms length from developers.

When I was coding my first app, I actually had an email discussion with the top engineer on the PalmOS. He encouraged me to really integrate my app in a way I wouldn’t have tried on Apple or Microsoft, or even Google. They were way cool to me for such a long time and I owe a big chunk of my career to them because I can honestly say they helped me get my start in this field over 10 years go.

Now today, I look at the different hot operating systems out there…and I shake my head. The sorts of things that Apple uses to explain why the iPhone single tasks reminds me of the same things Palm said were the reason why the old PalmOS single tasked…except Palm’s excuse actually made sense. Their event driven operating system ran on 8-16 MHz processors early on. Microsoft recently decided that their new Windows Phone 7 would be “single tasking” but would “preserve the state” each time. PalmOS apps had a built in database that stored each applications state within the executable (well, prc file) itself. So if you backed it up, it had its settings baked in. If you beamed it to someone, it was already configured. It was ultra simple and worked really well…provided developers actually saved state. All of them had lists of application icons you had to search through. How many different names must you have for a launcher? And look at how many mobile devices out there that had those little buttons at the bottom of the phone. Because that design just worked. Just from basic concepts, Palm had PalmOS flogged to death for doing basically what all these modern OS’s do.

But that wasn’t the end of the flogging from the geek community…oh no. There was this thing that Palm’s spinoff, Palmsource, made called Cobalt. PalmOS 6. Never got onto any devices. Utilized a microkernel based operating system running multithreaded C++ apps in different threads, all managed by their own kernel in each thread. The geeks mocked it and called it a joke without even working with it. I actually DID write some apps for the emulator. Now, a couple years ago, Google bought this little company called Android that made an OS that has gotten some headlines recently. Apparently, their OS runs multiple apps in java virtual machines. Which basically is a way clunkier and overheady architecture than Cobalt was. But it’s basically the same concept. Who got flogged, and who got the headlines and fanboys?

There’s a reason why I have a Palm Pre, and not an iPhone or a Droid. I’ve been there, done that, for both the iPhone and Droid. And I was there 8 years ago for the iPhone with oldschool Palm OS and the Treo, and I was there 5 years ago for Android with Cobalt (which I never was able to have a phone for, sadly). I’m past all that. iPhone and Android are old architectures that have had lipstick applied to them and a big corporation’s name stamped on ‘em (in some capacity).

The Pre and webOS do something different and new. They make extensive use of server side processing power and storage to make the device work “better” for less. Of course, too many people can’t see that far ahead and can’t get their heads wrapped around how cool this will be. They’re still living in 2005 and their expectations for an operating system on a smartphone are out of date. Palm always finds a way to stay a step ahead of the game, but they always get spanked for it by the PR and marketing forces that surround their competitors.

However, since we can see how your favorite non-Palm smartphone basically copies Palm…if Palm were to “go away”, I guess you’ll have to settle for less innovation, huh?

The irony, though, is that Palm can’t “go away” anymore. They played a card that no one noticed…webOS is an open technology. It’s infinitely modable and improvable outside of Palm. If Palm were to go under, because the core of webOS is essentially linux, it can continue to grow as a result of the already thriving webOS internals community that has grown up around it. Think those people are making money on it? Nope. They do it because they like it. It’s a fun hobby and they think it’s really cool. It’ll live on no matter how people who analyze stocks for a living feel about it’s technical aspects. And guess what? If Palm as a company folded, you can bet those guys would find a way to load webOS on all sorts of hardware.

I heard that a school here in town banned hugs. Apparently, middle school kids were hugging TOO much. Now, my first response was “what kind of neo-puritan fascist crap is this?” Then I heard the other side…apparently, kids hug each other so much before classes that they’re late for class, and they “peer pressure” other kids into hugging.

That’s when I realized…kids today are fucking dorks. My generation really didn’t do them any favors when we raised them up to be complete goobers. I can almost imagine them seeing grown ups hug each other once in awhile at bars and parties on TV and taking it way too far. “Oh wait, I have to hug like 15 people, including that guy over there that I don’t know too well” before I go to class or I won’t be popular. When I was a kid, that kid who went around hugging people got his ass beat down at some point. That’s because we didn’t put up with that kind of nonsense back then. I don’t know. Maybe it was because these kids were raised with social networks or something and they’re starved for physical contact. In any case, kids are fucking dorks today. We screwed them up bad if they’re that needy for physical attention.

Republicans and Libertarians are the sorts of people who’d willingly lose everything they have to a shell game, and can’t figure out that the people who make all the money couldn’t care less about their “ideals”. Those people are money junkies. They only want to make more and more of it. If they can get it through a government program or by swindling stupid Libertarians into thinking they’ll get more return on their investment by handing their cash over to a private entity for important services rather than government…only to have that private entity make off with the cash…there’s no difference.

Libertarians and Republicans just don’t have street smarts. When you get a bunch of people to pool their money together, then elect one of them to manage the pot, there’s considerably more transparency there than if “some guy” came along with a marketing pitch and you handed your cash off to the guy, only to have the guy decide that providing that service to you isn’t “financially viable”. You can’t help but know what’s going on when you know the guy who is managing your money and he’s not getting the job done, but the private company that takes your cash? Go ahead, try and sue them. They already covered their bases by quietly changing their contract on you when you weren’t paying attention because you were just trying to deal with everything else in your life. Now, they have your money and you’ll get NOTHING for it.

Need me to explain how a shell game scam works? Apparently, Libertarians and Republicans sure do.

And for all Democrats who think they can stay home just because of one bill this November…think about the Citizens United decision. Our Supreme Court, a group of APPOINTED officials, who have the last say about the law of the land, decided in an activist right wing decision to give corporations “personhood”, thus effectively killing anything remotely similar to campaign finance reform. And before you think it, unions do not contribute anywhere as much as corporations on account of Republicans effectively breaking the unions down into pretty much nothing over the past 40 years.

Their argument was that because corporations were made up of a bunch of individuals, that the whole collective was actually an individual itself…which might work if corporations were actually collectives and not dictatorships ruled by a small number of people. If the voice of the company janitor is the equivalent of the CEO, then that argument holds true, but that’s obviously not how things are. And that sort of stupid, crazy decision is only going to be the first of a lot of bad decisions made by Supreme Court justices with an obvious right wing corporate bias. Unless you hold on for dear life and keep Democrats in office to keep the balance of the court, it’s just going to get worse. Think the Health Care bill isn’t progressive enough now? You wait until the President is trying to make bills even more “Republican friendly” to get them passed. You’ll be feeling pretty stupid about your little silly protest vote then.

It’s so, so simple. Look, stop giving money to politicians. When they look at you, with that longing, pained look in their eyes because they need to finance another commercial…pull your wallet away. Put your wallet right back in your pocket.

And when it comes time to vote, vote for the candidate that raised the least money.

Look, we all tried to fix the system by voting with our wallets. It served a purpose: It put someone in office that isn’t continuing the crazy march into the utter bankrupting of our country. It’s staunched the bleeding…a little. But it hasn’t really had the fast acting effect we were starving for.

Then the Supreme Court came along and, under the guise of preserving the first amendment, decided that property should have the same rights as people. This effectively made it so that those people who own corporations not only can give individually to their favorite candidate, they can open up and dump loads of cash into their favorite candidate’s arms. Even if that corporation produces toxic chemicals and needs a cheap place to dump them, you know, like that empty chunk of land a few miles upwind from your home. Your piddly 2 grand isn’t going to change that candidate’s mind away from several million.

The Supreme Court has ultimate power over the law; even if Congress were to try to do something about it, their precedent would render any attempt short of a Constitutional amendment useless, and there are just too many politicians completely bought off to get 75% needed for an Amendment.

While you may love Barack Obama as a person, his administration has had to turn to the corporations first, then the people of this country, when it comes to major issues. They can’t afford to drive the corporations to dump their cash into the coffers of those greedy politicians who’d do whatever their corporate owners tell them to do.

The only answer, the only one, is to stop voting with your wallet. Don’t give anyone any money, then as a rule, only vote for the candidate that has the smallest war chest. If you can’t figure it out, it’s the candidate on the ballot whose ads you HAVEN’T seen. The candidate that is taking the stance AGAINST the majority of the ads you HAVE seen. It’s very simple, you don’t have to think that hard about it. Just vote for the guy with the least money. The one doing the most door to door stuff in person is probably the most trustworthy person to vote for. The one who isn’t pushing nonstop ads into the media. And don’t give any money to them. None. Ta da! You’re done voting. It’s that easy.

Look. Again, we tried voting with our wallets. The problem is, the corporate wallet is bigger than ours no matter how you slice it. It’s like a drop in the bucket. We put a whole lot of drops into that bucket, but the problem was, the corporations saw that, and made the bucket much, much bigger. They dumped even more, then threatened to dump even more into the bucket on the other side. This money game of chicken has got to stop, and I say we let these corporations dump tons of dollars into losing politicians. Let their stockholders get frustrated and drop their stock and fire these CEOs who think it’s more important to own politicians than it is to make a decent product.

The only way that would work is if you tell every single person you know to vote for the candidate with the least, and stop pulling out your wallet for these people. The more they get from you, the more the corporations will give them to keep up.

We have a shortcoming of funding in Medicare. Obviously. Of course we have a shortcoming in Medicare funding…it’s a health insurance system that, instead of only ripping people off by insuring only healthy people like the private insurance companies, it only insures people who are elderly and probably have more health problems.

And there are a lot of people who can’t get health care in this country, whether it’s due to a pre-existing condition or whether it is due to an inability to budget monthly premiums. Check. As a result, when these people get sick or hurt and go to the emergency room, they can’t pay for it. Who does? The taxpayers pay for it. That’s a problem. Considering health care costs take up 1/6th of the entire US Government budget, it’s a huge problem.

Fix both at once. Pass Medicare for everyone. A baseline health care system that ensures everyone in the country is paying into a system. Kids under the age of 21 are free…after all, this is a system that may even more than pay for itself. Why? Simply because there are more people in this country between the ages of 21 and 45 than there are 46 to 75 (or so). A lot more. So much so that the insurance companies would be making a load of cash even if they weren’t dropping sick people off their premiums after those people paid into those plans. And they have. Which kind of throws the entire purpose of health care…out the window. It’s not working if that is happening. It’s broken. It has to be fixed.

To discourage frivolous hospital visits, all you need is a 100 dollar copay. Most people can pay 100 bucks. It’s like a traffic ticket. It hurts, but you can do it. You can have an exemption in there for economic hardship for those who can’t. Most people wouldn’t abuse their hospital waiting room that much anyway…because we have to work to pay our rent and to live in this country, and you can’t just take an afternoon off every time you get a paper cut or tweaked elbow playing tennis.

You have Medicare capable of paying catastrophic, necessary, and preventative treatments. Elective surgery will still be paid out of pocket.

In Canada, all those people pay about 50 bucks a month in taxes for their health care system, and they have fewer people. The thing about the insurance business is that the more people you have paying in, the bigger the pool of cash you can potentially create. So by that logic, potentially, with proper regulations in place, you can have a Medicare based universal coverage system that actually MAKES money. You think insurance companies aren’t making money? What, you think they pay their CEOs 20 million dollar salaries for nothing? Why they always hire a zillion more people than they need to sell health insurance in regions where they have a state government ordained monopoly on service? Spend millions of your health care premium dollars on “investing” in politicians to keep their monopolies going? They’re making a LOAD of cash.

Look. If it’s just a state program, you don’t need to hire people to sell it. And if you’re laying those people off…they’re salespeople. Think about it. If you’re a small to medium sized business and you’re suddenly saving 4 grand for each of your employees, what are you going to do with that money? You’re going to hire a salesperson to help sell your product. There’ll be some available, unless they were so stupid as to think they could only sell insurance. That’s a whole lot MORE jobs than you’ll lose by having some big insurance companies downsize, rebrand as supplemental/comprehensive insurance providers.

There you go. There’s a system that anyone can understand and get behind. It’s fiscal, it covers everyone, it will probably make a lot of jobs by saving every business (other than health insurance providers) huge money, and it’ll make doctors happy because they only have to deal with one agency that isn’t trying to scam everyone. It’ll take some money out of politics, too. Everyone wins all around. You solve the health care crisis in this country AND you shore up the Medicare system for good.

So, I hit a link last night where a ton of people, looking for their Facebook login by searching it off Google, left all these hilarious comments all over that blog’s site complaining that they couldn’t “log in to their facebook”.

After laughing and leaving a comment that the author of the blog shouldn’t encourage people to “type things into their google” to “find their facebook”, I began thinking…people have been telling me for years that all they want out of their computer is to type something into it, and have it go where they want. I began to realize that I’m possibly a different kind of user, one that is used to scanning through lists and finding what I want instead of typing what I’m thinking.

One of the features of the Palm Pre that people don’t really talk nearly enough about is that to really use the device well, you use the universal search built into webOS and use it religiously. You start typing, and your applications, files, phone numbers, contacts, appointments, email addresses, etc. all start popping up in the search list, and the more you type, the more the automatic filters remove the things you’re not looking for until you have what you want. You can use the device like you would an iPhone or Treo, but the universal search is amazingly powerful (and from what I hear, voice activation is coming to the platform…and if that gets coupled with that search, it’ll make the Pre just about the best “on the road smartphone” on the market. You would literally be able to do almost anything with voice commands…and that’s not just fluff.)

It’s the thing about the Pre I haven’t been able to nail down since it came out. I like a lot about webOS, but that all kind of came together for me all at once. You can really use the Pre to the best of its capabilities in almost the same way that these people use Google to find their Facebook page, and it’s actually not that much slower or faster than swiping and flicking your way through lists of applications or contacts or whatever. You have a general idea of the name of what you’re searching for, and you just type a few letters…then bam, you’ve got it. Probably a big reason why the Pre and Pixi love that physical keyboard so much…a virtual keyboard really doesn’t let you use the device as effectively in that manner.

We’ve all been taught by Apple and Microsoft to visually scan for little pictures instead of remember words. But the truth is that most average users remember words, not pictures. You read a whole lot more every day than you think, and most people think in words, not pictures. (Well, unless you’re an ancient Egyptian or no one taught you how to read.)

Can Ugly be a Roman numeral? That’s what the U stands for.

I’m a pretty reserved dude for the most part. In the last 12 years, I’ve cried roughly 5-6 times that I really remember, and believe me, this last decade wasn’t too good to me. When my wife left me, that was one. When my grandmother died, that was 2. When my family’s golden retriever died, that was 3. I got into an argument with an ex once (or twice, can’t recall), that was 4. And when I watched the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and saw the destruction and pain it caused, I cried like crazy. It actually hit me as hard, or harder, than anything else that had happened to me, and I’d never even been there. I’ve always been really interested in the history and culture of the area, and always wanted to go but never could get the funds up for a real road trip there.

That said, 4.5 years later, with New Orleans’s football team playing in the Super Bowl, and, at last check, ahead in the fourth quarter, I have hit my limit.

I like sports. I like sportsmanship, and I understand the importance of rules to keep the game clean and entertaining. After all, that’s all it is. Entertainment. To keep it entertaining, we have rules that we follow that make sense. Like, for example, we fine players who decide to take cheap shots at the other team’s quarterback after the play is dead. Those are called late hits, and generally speaking, that’s playing extremely cheap. The fact that the NFL practically rewards a team like the Saints for basically crafting their game plan around late hits is pretty disgusting and disrespectful to every team that follows the rules and tries to play a clean, sportsmanlike game for their fans. I say that they “reward” a team for playing dirty because the punishment is primarily monetary. They get fined something like 15k-30k or so. Which is basically walking-around money for a player making 4 million a season. If your coach is basically telling the players to lay into the other team’s quarterback with cheap shots, one has to wonder if the organization isn’t secretly paying off those fines and keeping that off the books anyway.

In hockey, they take a guy out of the game for playing dirty and he sits for awhile. When you only have 5 skaters on the ice and you lose one, it puts your team at a disadvantage of 4 against 5. I think that’s a pretty fair way to do it. In basketball, the other team gets a couple free shots. If you do the same dirty crap twice, the refs boot you out of the game. That’s very fair. Puts your team at a disadvantage because they’re down a player (though with roster sizes in football about 5 times what they are in basketball, it’s easier to just throw a few players to the sharks and let them sit). In baseball…well, you just don’t get that many opportunities. But in a game like football where you have loads of opportunities to literally put someone on a stretcher and/or end their career, the NFL punishes dirty play with…a little monetary fine. What does that do for the fans of the team that lost because the other team played dirty? NOTHING.

Oh, so New Orleans deserved a shot at winning a Super Bowl because they have never won one before? What about Arizona? Minnesota? Both teams haven’t won one either. Both teams have potentially Hall of Fame quarterbacks that are both fairly old that the Saints felt was fair game to take shots at their knees, lay into them after the play, and generally play like complete jackasses because the only punishment would be a little monetary slap on the hand. The fines they get would be pretty substantial deterrents to a player making 100k a year…but no one makes that little in the NFL anymore.

I hate to take all that away from New Orleans, but after watching 4 years of them electing scumbags to political office that pumped all the reconstruction money into building up wealthy neighborhoods for their own investment purposes…and I could forgive them all that, as politics makes fools of us all…but to ignore how dirty their NFL team plays is just pathetic. They don’t need a Super Bowl any more than Arizona or Minnesota needed one. It’s not going to get any more funding for reconstruction of the ninth ward or any of the other areas that still look like war zones. If anything, politicians are going to say “hey, they won a Super Bowl!” and continue to look past them, figuring that the morale boost would let pols off the hook for another year or so.

It wasn’t long ago that the Saints were pretty much my second favorite football team. I felt like they deserved a shot just like my Vikings did, and thought if the Vikes couldn’t make it, I’d hope the Saints could, right?

If I had heard the Vikings defensive coordinator get on a local radio show and detail his game plan as “laying into the other team’s quarterback with late hits, and try to take the guy out of the game”, I’d be calling for his head as a fan. That shit is just uncalled for in any sport that tries to pass itself off as “professional”. That’s “professional” wrestling type shit. But apparently, that shit is good enough for Louisiana!

So, we started off the week watching the Saints play the dirtiest game they could possibly muster against the Vikings. Literally, Gregg Williams admitted that his game plan was to have his guys ignore penalties and try to injure a 40 year old future Hall of Famer. I’d say that’s going to come back to haunt them in the future. Instead of playing a clean game against an evenly matched team and showing some semblance of sportsmanship, Gregg Williams and Sean Payton decided it was better to crap all over the notion of sportsmanship. So what if New Orleans had a disaster and hadn’t been to a Super Bowl…cheap shots and home refs won that game for them. A lot of those Vikings turnovers, which most admit lost the game for them, came as a result of cheap shots, and on one of them, even the league admitted that the refs screwed up the call. If I were Brad Childress, I’d be scheming for that game against the Saints next year right now. And if I won that game, I would tell my team to ignore any Saints player looking for a handshake, because they don’t deserve shit.

Then we got introduced to one of the biggest head scratchers I’ve ever seen in the tech world. I now know why Apple decided not to release it at CES a couple weeks ago…because it really isn’t anything different (and probably more expensive) than most of the tablets demoed off there. It literally is the offspring of an April Fool’s joke I thought was hilarious last year, and an SNL joke about electronic women’s “hygienic items”. If these iPads came with substantially more memory and a fully multitouch MacOSX interface, I think they would be worthy tablets. But all they did was take an iPhone and make it bigger, then change the UI around slightly. I’ll reserve judgment on the processor, but it sounds like a wimp. And this thing is supposed to add multimedia playback to a typical Kindle type book reader…but it’s really only an iPhone with a bigger screen. I think…I’ll pass on that. The ideas I’ve seen so far for the iPad just sound like they’re trying to make an expensive device do something that a 100 dollar device could do just as well.

Then there was the State of the Union speech, and the even better conference with the Republican Party on the political front. The State of the Union speech was really the sort of speech that I think a lot of people wanted the President to make last October…but it still should be effective, if nothing else, as a campaign advertisement. After all, you can’t go home to your district and say you’re trying to pass tax cuts and be bipartisan, then sit on your hands when the President tells everyone that he’s cut taxes for 95% of the working families out there. But that wasn’t all…that conference with the Republicans proved, once and for all, that the right wing talking point that “Obama uses teleprompters” is a load of shit. And possibly, comes from subconscious stereotypes. The people pushing that talking point have all made blatantly racist comments in the past and have gotten in trouble for it. Glenn Beck lost a whole lot of Fox advertisers, Rush Limbaugh lost his “dream job” as a sports color man. Even Frank Luntz, the guy who’s job it is to craft right wing talking points, run them by focus groups, then push them out to right wing media types and various pols, admitted that Obama mopped the floor with the Republicans. Obama didn’t have a teleprompter, he didn’t have any knowledge what questions were going to come across the bow. He just nailed them all right to the wall. He came across as the mature, stable one in the room calling out a classroom of children who have cried wolf one too many times, and now they can’t do anything other than cry wolf.

Lastly, it’s time again to hunt for a new place to live. I found out from crunching the numbers that I’m roughly 300 bucks short of making mortgage payments + average monthly budget if I were to buy this house. Not coincidentally, that 300 bucks is roughly 80% of what I’m paying for getting a new vehicle. So, that woman in that SUV who didn’t know how to park properly who totaled my old car probably cost me my home as well. Let that be a lesson to everyone driving large vehicles…you can’t use your rear view mirror for parking. You have to use the side mirrors. You are lifted so far off the ground that you can’t see what’s behind you, especially if you’re backing up on a hill. Anyway, I found a place, I think, that should work. It’s a little small, but it’ll be fine. It’s really just a one bedroom with a really nice office type space, but it’s listed as a two bedroom for some odd reason. But the location is excellent, right by the MAX, and the view is tremendous.

And tomorrow, we do the Shiba meetup. So, looks like things are on the upswing. Plus it’s my little sisters’ birthdays.

I heard that line again. If there is one phrase from this last decade that needs to die, it’s “We fight them there, so we don’t have to fight them here!”

How, pray tell, do you stand up and cheer at the Olympics for a nation of people who hide and cower behind their troops and hired mercenary army…a nation of people so unwilling to fight to defend their own homes, that they would rather send their children to kill people in someone else’s homes?

This last decade was a nearly unbearable shame. A complete humiliation. As if having our economy turn into a joke wasn’t bad enough, we had a President, our “avatar”, our “representative to the World”…couldn’t string together complete sentences. Threw out quotations in public like the town drunk. I want the smartest, most charismatic person I can find to represent me to the rest of the world, not the biggest idiot I could find. But what’s worse of all, the American people turned into the biggest bunch of pussies I have ever seen in my entire life because we were attacked.

I was raised with all the standard propaganda. I was led to believe that we were a nation of “rugged individualists” who would “fight for our freedom at any cost”. And yet, here we were, saying something as cowardly as “We fight them there, so we don’t have to fight them here!”. Except, of course, the people doing all the fighting…weren’t them. Those people were hiding HERE. Not fighting. Not defending our freedom. Not giving a chickenshit terrorist who hides in caves, among innocent civilians, and in holes who has brainwashed kids do his killing for him…not giving that guy the keys to our freedoms, just giving up what we fought for, just becoming a locked down, less free society. Not let this scumbag play our country for fools.

The humiliation of all of this is too much to bear. The only options people like me have is to give up, or go sign up and be cannon fodder. I’d rather our country be REALLY strong, not let these scumbags drain our country dry AND not hide…but to tell the middle east to fuck off, take our troops out, tell them that there’s no way in HELL we will sell our massive water supply to them unless they turn over these criminals and pledge to do the same to anyone who’d attack us from then on out, shore up our defenses here at home, and make it a massive, singular mission to reject fossil fuels entirely and replace them with our own resources. Run our economy on our own terms.

But that’s not all. The humiliation leaks over to the job market. It’s awfully hard to prove how good the American worker is when corporations get paid to take their jobs away and stick them in other countries. There’s no way that the American worker, especially in the high tech arena where there are plenty of good paying jobs, can compete with people who are getting government run health care out of the gate AND can live comfortably on 10 bucks an hour because their government represses the value of their currency. The saddest thing of all is that two generations were completely brainwashed into thinking that they were being noble by accepting, and even defending, being screwed over and robbed by people with so much wealth already that they can’t even really spend it all in a lifetime. Literally, they’re taking your hard-earned money out of your children’s college fund and using it to wipe their backsides. They don’t need it! But these people being robbed, for whatever reason, think it’s okay and that “the rights of rich people have to be protected too!”. Yes, their rights have to be protected. But they have no right to steal from you…they used some of that extra cash on hand to buy up politicians so that they could legitimately steal from you. Then they go offshore some jobs and you have no options but to take your Computer Science degree and work fast food with no health care and hope you can figure out how to get through the month.

People need to start breaking through those walls and get comfortable with the notion that to save this country, we might have to take what we need to survive out of the pockets of those who have far, far more than they need to get by. The bottom line is that it’s for their best interest. They’re drunk on cash. They’re obsessed to the point that they’re nearsighted…what good is their money if the society collapses, if the economy collapses? It would be worth nothing more than paper. Maybe it would be better to solidify the economy, the job market, and in turn, the society…and protect what you’ve got left, then to let it all turn into toilet paper. You’d think.

Okay, so my old, exceptionally expensive laptop’s graphic cards blew up. Don’t work. Then my desktop died. Thankfully, in a pinch of spend craziness, I bought a sub-400 dollar netbook last year (MSi Wind, great netbook by the way)…and I used that to get myself a job. Had two offers on the table, one was East Coast, the other was here…with where I worked before…well, I took the latter despite lower pay because I just couldn’t bring myself to leave Oregon. I’ve been here for so freaking long, and it represents a rock of stability that I just can’t let go of.

Anyway, I’ve been working again…but I just didn’t have the blog linked on my laptop, and I had kinda sorta forgotten the password, so I had to do some data recovery on my old system to get all my info back. Took awhile, but here I am for my audience of possibly 1 or 2 readers.

Hated leaving it on that old blog, too. It was kinda personal and not a way I wanted to leave things on.

Well, back to political geekery. Seems we won’t have much of a public option with the Health Care bill. I’ll be fine with it, though, if we have a real, serious, jobs bill and I don’t have to keep working these 3 month contracts that skirt around having to get me employer based health insurance. Hell, if the exchange would let me come in and say “I feel that I shouldn’t have to pay more than 250 a month for insurance and that rate shouldn’t increase beyond the average cost of living increase”, and they can get me something, I’ll be satisfied. I think 250 a month is a very fair amount to have to pay, considering how I already pay into Medicare and other programs. If I had my druthers, it’d be Medicare for all and we’d leave it at that, and if you didn’t like the baseline that Medicare provided, you could hook up your own supplemental or opt for private insurance. If they had gone with that from the beginning, the current bill wouldn’t stink so bad and most likely it still would have passed…if older people were thinking that by killing “Medicare”, it would kill their lifeline, they’d put the fear into Republicans like you’ve never seen.

One can dream. Of a world where we think that protecting people from getting sick or hurt and dying is just as much a right provided by our government as protecting people from blown up by terrorists. When you put it that way, yeah, it sounds fairly reasonable regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum (I guess…unless you peddle health insurance…in that case, you better REALLY hope the jobs program hits it out of the park). Can’t quite figure out why no one says it like that, though.

As for techie stuff…well, I’ve been getting into more WPF development lately. It’s kind of weird, but Intel is finally sorta shifting into Agile, sort of step by step. I guess it’s probably because so many people who have been getting hired by Intel are pitching it to them on many different levels, and it must have struck a chord with enough people. I recall pitching it to my boss last April, and having it thrown back at me…but now my team is jumping into it as well. It’s kind of funny that both of the contractors in the team have multiple years of experience in that paradigm, and the guys in charge basically are just learning it for the first time. They’ll probably be in charge of the scrum, though, and most likely make us contractors suffer through the learning process because running the scrum makes managers feel like they’re “managing”. Well, been there, done that…so I better pick up my scrum certs and pmp cert quickly. At some point, I’d kind of like to be the guy running the scrum, rather than the exasperated contractor who can’t believe the ineptitude of the newbies who are trying to learn as they go.

Allow me to provide a perspective for you from the perspective of someone who came dangerously close to the point of no return. This will most likely offend your sensibilities, so be warned.

Yes, it’s about society. More importantly, it’s about your society, and your social mores, and whether or not you participated in this, you shouldn’t have to ask yourself “why?”, ever. It should be completely obvious to anyone.

Here’s a scenario that should register with you. Take 10 people, and out of those ten, let’s make one of them very different from the rest. No fault of theirs, he/she might have a different skin color, be of a different religion, not be as close to the ideal of beauty that the other nine hold…maybe they’re overweight. Maybe they have a different sexual preference than the norm. Now, lets say that those other 9 people taunt, tease, disrespect, and otherwise violate that one person’s humanity unmercifully. Let’s say this happens over the course of a year or two. Let’s say that these people are all stuck together for an unforeseeable amount of time. And let’s say, after years of this, after every attempt by that one person to find a way out of it…changing their appearance, their religion, losing weight…whatever…it doesn’t stop. The other 9 still hold that one person in that same category. Some of those 9 might actually enjoy taunting and hurting that person. They may feel pleasure afterward, because it makes them feel better about their own various situations.

Then, “out of the blue”, that person finds a weapon and kills a couple of them. The rest express shock! Outrage! Confusion! Why would this happen? “We’re all good people!”

Is it obvious yet why it happened? If it isn’t, you’re not very bright. Human beings require only a couple very basic, simple concepts from other human beings in order for society to function properly: basic, genuine dignity and respect. You don’t have to look up to every other person, but just accept their reality, their existence, and at least think about how they feel, if only a little. Feel for their position, try to understand them. That’s all it takes to prevent this.

It’s all humanity has to do. If all of humanity achieved it, and began treating each other with that dignity and respect, humanity would reach enlightenment. Wars, violence, crime, all of these things would fade away.

It’ll never happen. Why? Because from that original example, some of those 9 people actually felt pleasure in hurting that person. Do you think the classmates of the Columbine murderers ever learned that lesson? All of them? Did all of them go on to treat every other human being in their lives with that level of understanding and respect? I doubt it.

There’s your answer about what happened at Fort Hood. I know what the answer is, because I know where the point of no return is. It’s when the human mind cannot find a way out of a horrifically painful situation. Much like the concept of torture will cause a person to say anything to make it stop, if a human being cannot find a way out of something, that human will resort to something as drastic as murder because while all humans know that crime is wrong, we have it beaten into our heads from an early age (well, unless you’re truly psychotic), when there’s nothing else a human can do, the innate animalistic survival instinct will disregard those mores and do what it perceives it has to do to survive.

I learned where that point was when I was 13 years old. I had thick glasses, was perceived as a nerd (despite the fact that I liked sports). Moved around a lot, wasn’t from a wealthy family, didn’t have a lot of connections. Every day I woke up, there were onethings that went through my head: I didn’t want to go to school…not because of the work, but because of the ridicule. Behind that, was a quiet voice that kept growing louder over time…until I moved and it ended. I wanted to hurt anyone who would try to hurt me. Anything. I was just this 13 year old kid who didn’t know what the hell was going on with my body, and at the same time, I was being ridiculed in front of people I respected, people I wanted to be like. There are always a handful of kids like me at every school, in every social situation. The one that isn’t in the loop, and because they want to be, the loop shuns them. To be humiliated, hurt, abused, disrespected in front of people that you want to be like drives most of these people to adopt fear as the cornerstone of their beliefs. They are “afraid” of God. They are “afraid” of foreigners. Most times, they turn out to be conservatives because they are “afraid” of not being able to “get theirs”.

The rest develop hatred and anger to be the cornerstone of their beliefs. Hatred, unlike fear, can burn away much faster…if that person feels they have a way out. But when that person runs out of options, that hatred is far more dangerous. I got out. I moved away and started over every few years. That kept me from going down that path, and that anger burned off and was replaced by caring about other people. That reforged me as a raging liberal. But in junior high, I was the one who fought back. I threatened to hurt other kids, burn their houses down. You name it. I read comic books to try and escape, to try and act out my rage alone and try to control it. I was always teetering on the point of no return…but then things happened, I got another chance far away with a new set of complete strangers, and I tried something different. I tried to be the class clown, to emulate those who didn’t get hurt. I played sports. I did the things I felt I needed to do to not be at the bottom of the pile. It worked, I became well-adjusted.

But when Columbine happened back when I was in college, I knew exactly why it happened when they described the two kids responsible. I didn’t need video games to do what they did…in fact, I figured they used those video games to act out their rage, to try and manage it like I did. But if I had stayed at that same school, I might have turned out like those kids, too. And when I heard their classmates asking “Why?” afterward, it made my skin crawl. They knew damn well why it happened.

Human beings crave only two things from other human beings, and that’s all they need to survive and exist within society. Genuine, simple dignity and basic respect. You need to let them know they always have a way out to the light to stand with everyone else on a level field.