2004 Archives

We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.

Susan Sontag, who died today and will be greatly missed

It's December 28th, and I'm back at work after four days off. Today is hard.

I pulled up the news earlier and saw the headlines that casualties of the tsunami of several days ago will most likely top 50,000 today of whom a third are proving to be children. And it's certain to only continue climbing.

I read an article once in Harper's about natural disasters of this magnitude and the world ending. The world ends for people affected by those disasters, and it happens in smaller ways everyday when people are hit by tragedy. I just don't think about it until it's 50,000 people, and I am watching them from my comfy chair as they carry their dead children out from the rubble.

I guess that I'm just realizing the sheer magnitude of this disaster today and feeling like I can't do a damn thing to ease the suffering going on right now among a large percentage of the world's population.

Oh, and 24 more people died in Iraq today. Merry fucking Christmas!

I never got around to sending out holiday cards this year. I have a million excuses, but you don't want to hear them. And they're pretty bogus anyway. What really shames me is that Martha Stewart even managed to get out her Christmas greetings from prison.

I have had a special place in my heart for Martha ever since I saw her drink a forty and eat a Taco Bell burrito on Conan (see footnotes). May her Christmas meal this year be as good.

Anyway, happy holidays to all ... Martha included.

Footnotes: In case you don't believe me on that, you can take Conan's word for it:

Martha Stewart chugging a 40-ounce was a great moment. We had her eat a Taco Bell burrito and chug a 40-ounce. To me, that's the essence of what a late-night show is all about. I bet she drinks forties all the time at home with a cozy made of chartreuse wool.

Source: "Fall Preview 2003." New York Metro 8 Sep 2003.

I stumbled upon Nellie McKay and her album Get Away From Me this weekend, and I have been unable to listen to anything else since. At first, I wasn't sure. Nellie McKay looks like she just stepped out of a mid-20th century ad for feminine hygiene products.

Tell me that's not what you're thinking when you see that picture.

Her album featured a song called I Want to Get Married which sounded far too sugary sweet and deluded in the 30 second clip that iTunes provided. However, the same album also featured a song about the unconditional love of dogs, and we all know that I'm not the least bit freakish about dogs, don't we?

I'm glad that I took the plunge and bought the whole album. Beneath that cute facade lurks a versatile singer and songwriter who reminds me of the jazz singers that my mom listened to when I was a kid but has lyrics that are like nothing else ... yes, that is a parental advisory sticker on that album cover. I could go on and on about her, but I think the New Yorker does it better. I'm just going to advise you to check her out.

And that song I Want to Get Married might just be the best example of irony that I have encountered in quite awhile.

Photo Source: Nelly McKay

Worry no more. The bed situation has been resolved.

I get asked questions frequently about spyware, trojan horses, viruses, worms, and endless popups. Typically these questions come in the form of "My computer has so much crap popping up and is running so slow that I can't even use it. Can you come over now and fix it?" I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I am experienced on these subjects as a seasoned Windows user. Windows is unfortunately hit with the vast majority of these nasty invaders, but there are steps that you can take to protect your computer.

First download and install Firefox. I get on a lot of computers that have been completely overrun by adware. You can't open Internet Explorer without a slew of popups pushing gambling, mortgages, and larger sex organs so our first step is to quit using it. Firefox is a great browser in terms of security. It also has a lot of features that make it so much easier to use. A few days of surfing the net with Firefox, and I guarantee that you will be a convert.

Step two is to use Firefox to download some spyware killing software. There are two really great packages out there: Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy. The really great thing is that both have free versions available for download. It's useful to download and run both of these programs since one will sometimes catch things that the other doesn't. Following their recommendations and the documentation on their sites should help you to clear out a lot of junk. Keep in mind you might have to run each of these programs more than once to get everything. I also use Spybot to provide constant monitoring of my system for signs of trouble. Whether or not you end up using that feature, I still advocate running these programs every month or so to keep your computer clean.

The only downside to Ad-Aware and Spybot is that they might disable some programs that come bundled with adware and spyware. Many web toolbars and file sharing programs fit into this category. You might be bummed to find them disabled, but do you really want to be using software that requires you to open your computer up to the outside world? Firefox has loads of extensions that will meet the needs of any IE junk you've downloaded, and if you stick with IE, there's always the Google Toolbar. As for file-sharing, there are options, but you can do a Google search on your own for those.

Also Ad-Aware and Spybot may not get everything. If you are still having trouble, you might have to roll up your sleeves and manually delete some of these programs. Luckily there are good instructions available. Another way option is to use hosts to block undesired connections. There's more information on this approach here.

Step three is to tackle any viruses that might be lurking on your machine. You might have a version Norton or McAfee anti-virus software that came with your computer. If you do, keep in mind that these programs require that you update your virus definitions periodically and run these virus scans regularly. They can be set to do this automatically, but this might not be happening if you don't leave your computer on all the time. You will also most likely need to purchase a new subscription for virus definitions every year. It's well worth looking at the documentation that came with this software and ensuring that you are making full use of it. Personally I use a free version: AVG Anti-Virus. The same rules still apply: you need to make sure that this software is run frequently and that the virus definitions are kept up-to-date.

Step four is to make sure that you are current on your Windows updates. If you are using Windows XP, you should update to Service Pack 2. While it isn't a huge step forward for Microsoft, it will make a difference with popup blocking in Internet Explorer, a somewhat better firewall, and other stuff. If you aren't using XP, there still might be updates out there to help you. To find out, you'll have to visit Windows Update. From there, Microsoft will guide you through the process.

Step five is to set up a firewall. Windows XP has one included. Once you have installed Service Pack 2, just go to the Control Panel and then click on the Firewall icon. Now all you have to do is click on the right bubble, and that bubble is labeled On. However, this isn't the greatest firewall ever. I personally use Zone Alarm. Again it's free and effective so this is really a no-brainer.

If that doesn't help, don't bug me about it ... you must have downloaded the kind of evil stuff only found when surfing hard-core porn, and I just don't want to know about that. Actually you could still potentially be having problems at this point, but these people know better than me how to fix any remaining problems. Happy Windows computing!!!

Update: Check Computer Exorcism Part II if the above doesn't get rid of everything.

Growing up my mom used to insist that front yards were not for storing old appliances, upholstered furniture, or parked cars. I don't know that she'd make an exception for this, but I'm not nearly as picky as she is.

The picture doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea. You've got to love the effect.

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but my nephew George managed to take about 80 photos on my digital camera in the course of about two hours. I've filtered through his work and put the best in a gallery for your perusal. Once he got the knack of it, George managed to take some pretty good shots.

In my defense, this is actually Izzy's bed. Boo has a bigger one, but he often seems to prefer this one.

I've come into a little bit of extra money recently, and what's the first thing that I do? Being the geek that I am, I rushed out and bought a number of upgrades for my computer. Yes, I've become that much of a geek.

My current computer is actually quite symbolic of my complete descent into serious geekhood. Last spring I was salivating over HP's latest and greatest multimedia desktop. The one with a DVD burner and the 17 inch monitor. I was head over heels for it, but then it dawned on me that it weighed too much and cost too much and I didn't even have any reason to buy another laptop when I don't even use the one that I already have.

That's when I stumbled upon small form factor computing and the Shuttle SB61G2V3. Small form factor (or SFF) computing is basically taking the components of a full-size computer and putting them into a really little case. Mainly this is done for the purposes of really geeky gamer things like lan parties and whatnot. I was just sick of my current big black box and wanted something cooler.

I took the plunge and bought a Shuttle case, a new processor, and a DVD burner. I set about to combine these new components with my old hard drve and RAM into a something new, faster, and far more compact. It was shockingly simple. I didn't even have to reinstall Windows ... Windows XP actually took my new computer parts and ran with it. No problems. No questions asked. I just updated a few drivers, and it was smooth sailing.

Last night I installed my latest upgrades which made obsolete the final remnants of my old computer. I now have a full gig of RAM. How hot is that? And a hard drive that I will never come close to filling up.

I was initially worried about the hard drive upgrade, but I found a great program called Acronis True Image that can easily clone one hard drive to another. I actually managed to do it while watching Scrubs. That's how long it took ... one episode of Scrubs. That's it. Install the new empty hard drive, clone the old one to the new one, and then take out the old one. That's it. Good instructions come with True Image. And True Image is available as a free 15 day demo with full functionality so it doesn't even cost you a cent. How great is that!

I finished Chris Hedges's War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning last Sunday. I had been waiting for this crazy week to end so that I could post something meanngful about this book, but I'm having one of those unproductive Saturday mornings. In lieu of my meaningful post, I'd like to leave you with this quote:

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our own extermination. By excepting the facile cliche that the battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to ackowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.

If I could, I would assign reading this book to all Americans.

I can't tell you how long I've been trying to take this picture. Every morning when I leave Izzy pops up at the window and watches me until I get in my car and drive down the street. If she thinks I'm coming back in, she pops down and sits by the door. That's why this picture was such a rare feat. She's fast about popping up and down. Luckily Brian played decoy for me.

While Izzy is busy looking out the window, Boo huddles by our bedroom door. The dogs have recently been banished from the bedroom during the day, but Boo refuses to think we are serious about this and plants himself in a very sad way in front of the door. He then casts me these sorrowful glances, but that's just too sad a picture to take.

To get a handle on the problem's magnitude, consider some numbers from economists Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters. They calculate that, if the federal govenment were to pony up all the money needed to cover Social Security's future shortfall, it would have to fork over $8 trillion. By contrast, the entire value of the U.S. stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 500 index, is some $14 trillion.

Yet Social Security's $8 trillion headache is nothing compared to the money needed to cover Medicare's shortfall. The two economists estimate that liability at some $61 trillion.

Source: "What Privatizing Social Security Would Mean." The Wall Street Journal 24 Nov 2004.

I used rasterbation to acheive the above effect. That sounds dirty, but really it's not. It is kind of fun though.

I've grown to love paper whites in the last few years. I used to love orchids, but the ones I buy here in Utah aren't nearly as hardy as the ones that I used to get in Boston and New York. Thus I've had to find a new plant hardy enough for me to not kill it. Paper whites seem to be it.

They are shockingly simple. They come as nice little bulbs that can be stored in a cool dark place until you are ready. You secure them in some sort of container with rocks or gravel or marbles or pieces of bark that you pick up from surrounding yards while walking your dogs. Then you fill the container with water until it covers the very bottom of the bulb ... too much water and the bulb will rot, not enough and the bulb won't do anything. That's really the only tricky part. If you get that right, they'll start growing like mad and bloom in 7 to 10 days. Don't believe me ... check You Grow Girl, and they'll back me up.

This year I invested in a handy little vase made just for bulbs. They can be had for all of $4.99 at your local garden shop. Considering how much cut flowers can be and how rewarding it is to watch a little bulb spring forth, that's a small price to pay. This weekend I think I meant head back to the garden shop for some more bulbs ... I might just venture beyond the paper white and look for something more exotic like the amaryllis or the freesia. I'll keep you posted.

I've been using del.icio.us more and more recently. If you don't know about it, Delicious is a way of sharing links and bookmarks with other people. Because so many people are involved and actively sharing useful sites, it can also be a great resource in navigating the web. It's helped me out more than a few times lately as I hammer out a few freelance projects and need some new trouble shooting resources.

Using Delicious is also really simple, especially if you are a Firefox user. Default posting of links to del.icio.us is done via a little bookmarklet. It's fairly simple but not as easy as it could be. That's where the Delicious Firefox extension comes in. With it, all you have to do is right click on the page you are browsing and fill in your tags. That's it. I can't help but bookmark anything of even the slightest interest.

And FYI when I say username, I mean your Delicious username. If you don't have one, you can get one here.

Integrating Your Delicious RSS Feed into MT

But that's not the exciting part. You can also integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks into Movable Type. Initially I started doing this with Feedsplitter. Del.icio.us serves up an RSS feed of your links. Feedsplitter allows you display RSS feeds on any regular old web page, making it really easy to feed up your links in your sidebar.

The setup is really simple. Install Feedsplitter on a server with PHP following the instructions included with the download. Open your browser and point to where you installed Feedsplitter on your server. From there, plug in the location of your RSS feed - http://del.icio.us/rss/username - and Feedsplitter will spit out the code to put on your web page. It's just that simple.

Integrating Delicious Bookmarks as an MT Post

But that would be too easy, wouldn't it? I couldn't stop there. I want full integration into Movable Type with daily posts of my links and the ability to comment on those selections. I learned today that this apparently possible via the Movable Type Support Forums who apparently learned it from the Delicious-Discuss Mailing List.

Here's the deal: By going to http://del.icio.us/settings/username/daily, you can have Delicious spit out a daily post of what you've bookmarked straight to a new MT post. To do so, you'll have to enter in the following information:

• job_name: Whatever you want to call this thing, perhaps Daily Post or something similar.
• out_name: A username that can log into MT and create posts. I'd recommend creating a new one that can only make posts just to be safe.
• out_pass: The password for above username.
• out_url: This needs to be the complete url of wherever the mt-xmlrpc.cgi file is for your MT blog, probably the main folder of wherever you installed MT or where your mt.cgi file is.
• out_time: The time that you want this job to process in GMT. It appears that this is entered in just as the hour: 20 or 0. I found that my post processed at some point during that hour ... just in case you want to sit around and wait for it to happen.
• out_blog_id: The id number of your blog. To find it, log into MT like you normally would to post. Head to the blog where you'd like your bookmarks to appear. In the url, it should say at some point blog_id=X where X is your blog id.
• out_cat_id: The id number of the category in your blog where you'd like your post to go. Again this can be found by logging into MT, heading to the above mentioned blog, and pulling up the category details. In the url, it should say at some point category&blog_id=X&id=Y where Y is your category id.

That's it. At the specified time, Delicious should post the pages you've bookmarked in the last 24 hours to your blog. Simple as that.

It's about this time every year for the VAT or Vegetarian Annual Tax. If you didn't know, the VAT comes in the form of a yearly required Tofurky purchase. No, I'm serious ... if you don't take care of this requirement at Thanksgiving, then you've got to do it at Christmas. But that's not what this post is about. This post is about Tofurky's packaging this year.

This year the side of the Tofurky box features pictures of people in foreign countries with their not-poultry products. Yeah, those are the Pyramids and that is Red Square. We thought we'd won the Cold War when they were drinking Coke in Moscow ... not so. We didn't win until the Russians were snacking on some good old Tofurky jerky. We've had all kinds of diplomacy ... but this is a whole other bird ... or it's not a bird at all.

So that's my nephew Sam, Brian's leg ... and for good measure I made sure to get Sam's dog Ajax's butt. Yeah, it's the dog butt that really makes the picture. I'm not completely sure that this is sanctioned babysitting behavior.

My niece Kate hung out at the gym with me this Sunday. She played with my cell phone while I worked out. Here's the one picture that she deemed worthy of saving. Did I mention that Kate is way cooler than I was at her age? She's probably cooler than I am now.

My dad turned 70 a few weeks ago, and we threw him a huge surprise party. I'll post some more pics from that later. This picture was taken shortly after I had finished wrestling with massive amounts of A/V equipment to help get setup for the party. I'm with my nephew Jack. And I wish that was an alcoholic drink, but this is Utah and it's just cranberry juice.

I might be starting an award kick, but I have to declare this the best face painting job ever. The work is care of my sister Katy, and the models are her adorable kids Sam and Lizzy.

A couple of months ago I sent for a Salt Lake County license for the dogs. I have been living here for nearly two years, but I figured better late than never, right? Wrong apparently. I got back the form with a $50 ticket for not licensing the dogs within 30 days of my arrival in Salt Lake. I get that I should have registered the dogs when I got here, but this just seems like a mean way to do things. Although it's probably a pretty profitable revenue stream for animal control.

On the plus side, Boo and Izzy don't actually have to wear their license tags since they're microchipped. If they weren't microchipped, I'd probably end up with another fine since those stupid tags always fall off and get lost. Just to be safe though, I went ahead and ordered the kind of tags I like with the licensing info on them. I figured I was already into this $68 ... what's another $14?

I guess Boo will just have to wait to get a bigger bed.

That's all I have to say about this.

I saw The Motorcycle Diaries for the second time last night. The first time I saw it was at Sundance, and I was completely moved by the compelling story and backdrop of the South American countryside. I was equally moved last night. If you don't know, The Motorcycle Diaries, based on the book by the same name, is the story of a journey 23 year old Ernesto "Che" Guevara took with a friend from his home in Buenos Aires to the northern half of South America in 1952. This is long before Guevara became the controversial figure instrumental in the creation of Cuba. The young Ernesto in this film is a young medical student unsure of what he wants to be and do. In the course of this journey, Guevara's perspective changes. He witnesses the tragic effects on the people as corrupt regimes come to power in many South American countries, and he comes to see all the people of South America as one that should be joined rather than split by these corrupt regimes.

I don't agree with much of what Guevara went on to do with the rest of his short life for his beliefs: he oversaw the executions of hundreds of political prisoners and regime opponents while in Cuba and went onto push guerilla warfare in other Latin American and African countries. But I can relate to the young idealistic man in The Motorcycle Diaries who yearns to effect change for the better. The main question this film draws for me is how. How do we make the lives of those people better?

So often in my life, I see tragedy and I look the other way because I don't know how I can help. I certainly have no plans to go on to lead a Communist revolution, but I feel the need to do something. It's a hard question that seems to be pushed back or completely ignored often here within the apathetic United States. I don't know how to change that, and perhaps that is the challenge.

NPR has been doing an amazing series of profiles about the soldiers who have died in our current war with Iraq. I can be going about my day, living my life in all the little silly details, and those profiles bring me back to the profound sacrifices being made for this country by our military everyday. I think about these sacrifices especially now as our troops move into Fallujah.

I have to admit that I had and still have profound doubts about this war. I've never been a fan of Saddam Hussein, but the ethnic divisions within Iraq and the volatility of the surrounding area just seemed like too much for the US to take on alone. I was in London when Bush made the decision to go to war. I remember walking down Kensington High Street and seeing the announcement scrawled on a board outside a newspaper stand. My heart sank. I felt worried for our troops and for the Iraqi people.

I still feel worried as we've struggled over the last year and a half to stabilize Iraq. Today isn't really about being worried though. Today is about providing support. However we feel about the war, we have to do what we can to help the people fighting a hard fight in our names. And there is so much that we can do.

The military actually has a web page listing numerous ways to help. Here are a few of the ones that I liked:

• Operation Dear Abby allows you to send an email to service members. If you have time to be reading this post, then you have time to send off a quick note.


• I participated in Operation Hero Miles earlier this year. Until this fall, soldiers on R&R were flown to one of three airports and had to get the rest of the way home on their own. Operation Hero Miles allowed people to donate airline miles to soldiers to get all the way home. This program also helped change the law so the government picked up the tab for these flights, but they're now taking donations for soldiers on emergency leave.


• Books for Soldiers provides a bulletin board for soldiers to post books that they'd like to be sent to them. I need to purge my book collection and I get 30% off at B&N care of Brian so I'll be checking this one out and getting some packages off this weekend.


• I don't know much about this program, but I know about the problem. A lot of people called up for service have pets that have to be left behind, often in shelters to either be adopted by new owners or lost forever. This program recruits foster families for these pets so that they can be reunited with their owners at the end of their military service which sounds like a much better arrangement to me.

I always used to say, "If we can put a man on the moon, we can make a biodegradable poop bag." Actually I never said that, but these people must have. But that's not what I thoroughly admire about them. I thoroughly admire that they also made a cap that says ...

I admire the person who wakes up the morning and puts on one of those.

Picture Source: Oops ... I Pooped

Would the Halloween candy please go away? It's already November 9th. I should not still be eating this stuff.

Jacques was one of my neighbors in Brooklyn. I snapped this picture when I was out visiting in September.

On a side note, Jacques lives in the exact same apartment that Brian and I did but in the building next door. Thanks to rent control, he also pays half as much as we did. That's New York for you.

I got sent to Niagara Falls for work in early October. I didn't get out to see much, but I did get this picture walking along one of the view spots.

I've been making some tweaking to the site in the last few weeks. Mainly, I was sick of having to rebuild my pages and wanted to quit using MT plugins so I could build my pages dynamically. Here's an overview:

Headings

I have nothing to do with the dynamically generated images that have become my new headings. They are all thanks to A List Apart's fairly recent article on dynamic image replacement. It was incredibly easy to setup and I thank them for doing the hard work for me.

The Moblog

I've been playing around with Flickr and Mfop2 again. I'm not too excited about Flickr hosting my photos, and I still can't get Mfop2 to work. Easy Moblog appears to have broken so I'm currently using Simple PHP Gallery. It's quite basic as far as galleries go, but it grabs my uploaded photos and plops them into a very nice little gallery. I'd like an easy way to get them from my phone to my server, but this will do for now. It's up and running here.

I'm feeding a random image to the home page with another technique from A List Apart.

The Side Bar

I've also been playing around with the side bar. I recently discovered the merits of social bookmarking via del.icio.us, which has started occupying more and more of my time. I'm feeding my del.icio.us bookmarks to my home page via Feedsplitter. Feedsplitter provides a really easy way to put RSS feeds on a web page. There's a brief tutorial of how to do this here.

I've also become a Blog Lines addict. Not only is Blog Lines the best feed reader out there, it also allows you to share your feeds as can be seen on the side bar under "Other Blogs I Like." Here are instructions for how to do this; just make sure you setup a Blog Lines account first.

I've never been much into comic books until I was introduced to a different sort of comic book at Evergreen. One of my reading assignments included Joe Sacco's Palestine. Joe Sacco is a journalist: he goes into a troubled area and reports on the story. But he takes it a step further. After he comes home, he sits down and spends many, many months drawing out and detailing his time in that war zone or political hot spot until the story comes alive in a way that it wouldn't on page 43 of Time or the international section of your daily newspaper. I've read much of his work and have always been amazed by his powers to move me to the front lines.

This past weekend I branched out a little further into the world of the graphic novel. I read Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Persepolis II which together chronicle Marjane's childhood in Iran, her teen years in Austria, and her return to Iran. I also read Craig Thompson's Blankets which is a coming of age story about a young man growing up in the Upper Midwest, experiencing his first love and distancing himself from his parents' oppressive religion.

I highly recommend any of these books, along with Joe Sacco's work. They deal with issues as deep as in any of the longer and heavier books out there, but they are quite accessible and can be read quickly ... how else would I manage to read three books in one weekend and still have had a life? Sure. I put off a few things, but that can be rationalized for a good read.

A novel is an allegory ... It is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

Source: Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. Random House, 2003.

I'm not sure what was on Boo's mind, but he recently steathily crept up onto Brian's back and just started peering over.

Some days it is hard to be living in Utah. Day to day I live my life in a little liberal neighborhood and frequent locally owned businesses and Wild Oats. My work colleagues certainly don't agree with me on much, but they put up with me and are open to discussion.

But this November 2nd was hard to swallow on the local level. I'm not married, but I live with someone I love very much and have lived with for a long, long time. I don't see this relationship as being detrimental to society at large. I don't take my commitment to Brian lightly, and I'll always continue to work on making our relationship better. After a string of messy divorces in the family, my mother has even come to accept our unmarried state, and my mother is a very traditional person. However, this last weekend I encountered a man who told me that I am not living my life in line with the lord and I should really think about that. Some trick or treaters happily took our candy before scrawling a big yes on 3 on our sidewalk.

Apparently most Utahns agree with these people who are willing to take our candy but not to give us anything in return. That's why they passed Amendment 3 which will not only define marriage as being between a man and a woman but will most likely erode the few rights of unmarried couples living in Utah. I don't know. We probably didn't have any rights, but at least it wasn't put in our faces before.

This law does anything but make me want to actually tie the knot. I will remain one of the unmarried cohabitating couples until all cohabitating couples are either given some rights outside of marriage or all cohabitating couples regardless of gender makeup are allowed to marry. For more information on this stance, see The Alternatives to Marriage Project.

Anyway, enjoy your moral stance Utah. Maybe someday you'll extend some compassion to those of us who fall outside of your narrow definition of family.

Earlier today I complained about a certain lack of a new Law and Order episode on NBC last night. Well, I am pleasantly surprised tonight by programming on ABC ... they are actually showing Life as We Know It at the regularly scheduled time tonight.

I point this out because it didn't happen last week. No, no, I had my TIVO all queued up and sat down 15 minutes in to start viewing only to discover that my local affiliate had opted to air the worst local morning programming ever in place of my show.

Now Life as We Know It is all about teenage boys thinking about and starting to have sex. It is probably more sex than is typical on network television, but it is good and potentially thought and dialogue provoking. My guess is that a few other viewers out there disagree with me and think this show is evil enough to report to the FCC so that it gets replaced with crappy morning shows during prime time. This is frustrating to me and probably to ABC which just gained me back as a viewer with new and more controversial programming. These are probably the same people who prevent Noggin from airing the abortion episodes of Degrassi Junior High ... is it just me or am I trying to relive my adolesence through television? I think we could benefit from having these issues - sex and abortion - out in the open so that we might actually start talking about them with our kids ... of course, I only have two dogs who are very thoroughly neutered and spayed, but I'll talk to your kids.

Regardless it is on tonight. Thank you local affiliate for airing it, and please keep it coming ABC.

It's bad enough to have had to watch network news coverage of our painful loss of this last election, but did NBC really have show a rerun of Law and Order last night?

It was the one thing I had been looking forward to, just sprawling out on the couch and losing myself in a good episode of Law and Order. So not only did I not get the president I wanted, I also didn't get my Law and Order.

Utah has a nasty habit of getting snow on Halloween. This year wasn't any different.

I don't know when I initially decided that I needed to know more about the Founding Fathers and the revolution that led to the creation of this country, but I have just tentatively finished my unofficial 2003/2004 Founding Fathers Reading Spree. I kicked the spree off with Gore Vidal's Burr, moved on to Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and finished up with Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton.

I might be biased, but I believe that both Franklin and Hamilton were the most influential founding fathers in shaping our modern society. In Franklin, I see the first Horatio Alger to emerge from American society. The fact that a run away tradesman could rise to the heights of inventor, statesman, ambassador, and celebrated American hero helped to shape an ethos in the country that hard work and determination are the basis of success. His diplomatic work was instrumental in getting France to join us in war, and believe it or not, we never could have done it without France. Washington and his beleaguered troops could not have done it alone.

Hamilton also rose from illegitimate and orphaned immigrant to military hero to the creator of the economic institutions that power our modern economy. Hamilton, however, lacked the humor and the sense of Franklin which turned him into perhaps the first public character to be seen as an aloof and elite intellectual. His demise came in the face of the Republicans Jefferson and Madison who perhaps were the first Americans to express a fear of "big government." Against their fears, Hamilton's development of a federal bank, national debt, and the Coast Guard helped to make us a prosperous nation. They even paved the way for Jefferson to greatly change the face of this country with the Lousiana Purchase. Too bad he was brought down in his prime by Aaron Burr who lacked principles but craved power ... a dangerous combination that seems to rear its ugly head all too often in politics.

I find these books particularly interesting in light of the events of last night. Kerry is seen by Americans as another aloof and elite intellectual, and he wasn't able to find the public approval that he needed to win the presidency. Americans seem fairly evenly split these days between two visions of America, much like we were in the time of Franklin and Hamilton. I have no doubt that we will eventually bridge this schism, but I fear where we will have to go before it happens. May the government dreamt up by our founding fathers help to heal this split. E pluribus unum.

I recently discovered a wonderful product called Tofu Tenders. I really only discovered these because they have coupons for free Tofu Tenders at Wild Oats. The amazing thing is that these wonderful little tofu nuggets in luscious sauce are good and they are free.

So I went to go buy some more of them last night, and to my horror, I could not find the coupons anywhere. So I ended up stalking all over the store for these stupid coupons and collecting $$$ and $$$ worth of products in the process before I finally stumbled upon the coupons in the most obscure spot.

Kudos to you Wild Oats for giving me a product worth $3.29 while playing mind games with me that caused me to spend $25+++ on stuff that I didn't not really need. Kudos.

Picture Source: Silk

Over the past few weeks, flu shots have been on my mind. I have lung problems so I normally get one every year, but this year was a little tougher than usual with the shortage of vaccines. I lucked out and was able to get one through the health clinic I go to. They only got 200 though, and those went within a day or two. My parents were able to get them earlier this week through the county, but I know a few people who would have liked to get shots and haven't been able to and probably won't be able to this year.

I was really bothered during the second presidential election when Bush said that he wasn't getting one and if healthy people don't get them, there will be enough. People seem to forget that the flu kills 30,000 to 40,000 people every year. We freak out about a couple of SARS deaths, but nobody even thinks about the flu. And if you add up the people at risk, it's a whole lot more than 50 million.

In reality, I think we should be encouraging everyone to get vaccinated. It's a public health issue, and it's a big one. It's one that I want my tax dollars going towards so that I don't have to hustle to take preventative steps for my health. Given the fact that we are currently spending billions for a so-called preemptive war against terrorism, which killed 625 Americans in 2003, would it be so wrong to invest a few million in preemptive health care?

One of the few things that makes my life here in Salt Lake worth living has to be the Great Harvest bakery a few blocks from my house at 9th & 9th. It has slowly become a part of my daily routine. Every morning I hop out of bed, throw on some clothes, take the dogs out, and then head to Great Harvest for coffee and a love muffin. Mmmm, love muffins are this wonderful combination of berry and cream cheese rolled up in a delicious muffin. It just doesn't get any better than that. And I also get a slice of one of their sweet breads.

My mom always liked to point out the expense of doing something like this everyday when I was a kid. The $3.14 that I spend on my morning treat every day adds up to well over $800 per year, but I have to say that it is worth every penny. It's a small price to pay to get me to work with a smile on my face.

Several weeks ago the topics of babes over 60 came up on an online discussion board I frequent. Women like Audrey Hepburn, Angelica Houston, and Debbie Harry were mentioned, but I had to add that a woman I really see aging gracefully is my mom.

Believe it or not she's 68. We took this picture last summer for a modeling contest sponsored by a magazine that aims itself at the 40+ female set. Looking at the fine print though, we realized that they capped the age for this contest at 60. What the hell? And the previous year's winner was all of 42. Talk about being discriminatory. I want to organize 60+ women to go ring the publisher's neck. But since that probably won't happen, I'm nominating my mom winner in the first ever BooIzzy.com 60+ model competition. Go mom!

In my Dogster-induced stupor, I talked my friend Paula into putting her cat up on Catster. My assumption was that Boo and Izzy could become friends with Paula's kitty Bowie which is something that could never happen in real life as Boo is a licker and most cats don't enjoy that sort of thing. Don't such inter-species connections seem like the sort of thing made possible by the internet? Didn't the internet hold the promise of connections that would be impossible in the real world?

Well, it seems Dogster and Catster do not allow dogs and cats to be friends so here's a picture of Bowie to let him know we care:

I couldn't fully tell you who I am without telling you about Annie. She was my best friend in high school, a friendship that was sealed as people yelled at us that we were too old when we went trick or treating at 15. Then I moved away and she became an alcoholic, pot-smoking lesbian but I still love her. Plus she's not all bad ... she's been teaching inner-city school children in Atlanta for over two years and she's off to Africa with the Peace Corps this January. Anyway ...

Here's Annie with her parents, good old Mary and Dave of Rochester, Minnesota. They both have their quirks, but how can you not love them? Look at how cuddly Dave is!

Here's Annie's kitty Fang. Fang is just crying out for a web presence, don't you think?

Here's Annie's current girl friend Keidra (sp???).*

* You might think I'm a bad friend for not knowing how to spell my best friend's girl friend's name, but I was under the impression that Annie was still dating a woman named Mary when I learned that she was actually dating Keidra (again sp???). Shouldn't Annie be letting me know about these changes? Annie, you better read this and keep me in the know going forward.

So I've pretty much overhauled this site in the past few weeks with new images, fonts, bells, and whistles. I thought I had it perfect as I perused my work from Mozilla's Firefox browser. Then I pulled it up one day in Internet Explorer. Somehow IE had twisted my style sheet into some odd extra spacing. If you are viewing this site in IE, now you know that it doesn't quite look right. These annoying formatting issues are circled in the image below.

So my point is basically that IE sucks and is causing me enormous frustration. And if you are using IE, you really shouldn't be. It makes my glorious blog look funny, and it makes you prone to all sorts of security risks such as annoying popups, trojan horses, viruses, etc. You've been warned: Don't come crying to me if any one of these happens to you when using IE. I personally like Mozilla's Firefox, but there are other options. See the link below for more information.

Edited to add: I finally managed to fix part of this layout problem by changing my banner to a background image in CSS for my header. However, IE is not great for you as a computer user so I continue to advocate visiting the link above and switching.

With the acquisition of a new camera phone - Motorola V300 through T-Mobile - I decided to venture into the world of moblogging. There are lots of options available out there where you basically set up an account on some company's web site, email the photos to that site, and they take care of the rest. Since I pay for loads of web hosting, I wanted to host the photos myself. Plus the site I played around with that is in this genre had a link from my photos to the most popular photos of the day for everyone on the site. These were, of course, all of semi-nude women. I have young impressionable nieces and nephews who just may look at my moblog so I decided to look for other options.

After I couldn't get Mfop2 to work with my phone and cell provider, I decided to go with Easy Moblog. Setup was snap. The formatting on it was a little bit buggy, but I really wanted to pull them into my MT blog so that wasn't a huge deal. I just needed Easy Moblog to juggle getting the photos from my phone to my web host's server, and it does that beautifully.

Next step: Pulling the photos into MT. Thankfully directions already exist to do it. I won't rehash any of that. You can see the fruits of my labors on the gallery page(ETA: Actually I'll killed this so you can't see it anymore.). The final result uses the following MT plugins: PhotoGallery, EmbedImage, and Paginate. I simply pointed the PhotoGallery plugin to the location of my Easy Moblog uploaded photos and followed the directions in the above links. There is also an app called album.pl on Sourceforge that can do similar things, but I had issues with it and MT plugins are just so easy.

If any MT Plugin junkies ever read this: I tried to pair Paginate with Grid, and it just didn't work at all. Any idea if those two can ever exist together without producing some odd formatting?

That's it. I've run into a few hurdles since getting the whole thing up and running. I recently switched over to MT 3.1 in hopes of using the dynamic publishing functionality. This doesn't work with the MT plugins I'm using though which are written in Perl. Thus half of my site is static and half is dynamic to keep the plugins mentioned above working. I suppose I'll live until some wonderful person starts rewritting those plugins in PHP.

Also Easy Moblog has a few bugs in pulling the emails I send it. It seems to not pull them at the regularly scheduled intervals I initially set. Instead it pulls them when I pull up my buggy Easy Moblog blog page which is really ugly and I don't want to pull up ever. I'm planning to solve this with a cron job, but I just haven't gotten around to figuring it out.

My great uncle Rolland E. Griggs died the night after his 101st birthday on September 19, 2004. I haven't seen Uncle Jerry a lot in the past few years, but I always looked up to him as a child and thought he was a really nice and sweet man.

I wanted to post a photo of him in his youth. There are wonderful pictures of Uncle Jerry and Aunt Olga in exquisite dress and pose. Uncle Jerry was never without his suit and hat. I don't have any of those photos in my possession right now so the one above from his 100th birthday will have to do. I'm just glad that I got to be there for that celebration. Sorry I couldn't have been there for you more recently, Uncle Jerry.

I've learned some new euphemisms since moving here to Utah. Most recently the term "bass ackwards" has come up repeatedly in professional work-related settings.

This is mainly just a rant in the form of a rhetorical question, but why the hell is it that someone belonging to a fairly strict religion thinks it's okay to use such a euphemism in a meeting when a mildly frustrating but ultimately solvable problem comes up? Does that make it okay for someone like me who doesn't belong to any religion to feel free to throw around "ass backward" or any other "bad" word to my heart's content while I'm here at the office? Should I be more liberal with my choice of descriptive words because I could seriously air out some of my frustrations with some more colorful vocabulary?

Somehow I just don't think anyone would appreciate that so I don't get why it's okay for someone to use unconstructive euphemisms in such a vein. I just don't get it.

We went to Moab over the weekend with our friends Beth and Mike who we met while in Boston. It was generally gorgeous down there, even with the German tourists who lugged beer and cigarettes up to Delicate Arch. So nice of Beth and Mike to come out and make us explore our own backyard.

My sister Mary just gave us my grandmother's old dining room furniture. Fitting it in my tiny house took a lot of rearranging:

Brian and I were watching Jane's dog Sage earlier this summer. This was the point at which we kicked all the dogs out of the bed ... for a few weeks anyway.

This is me with my somewhat new bike - I bought it last year on ebay, but I didn't get it tuned up until a few months ago. Yeah, it folds up, and I'm sure that I look funny riding it. But I like it.

I went hiking with my sister and her family up at Alta a few weeks ago. It was gorgeous and cool and wonderful.

A Democrat knows that the leaf turns and in the human comedy we are one day spectators and the next day performers. The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. Men and women make love and have babies in the knowledge that if the baby should be born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or a hole in its heart and require heroic care, the people of Minnesota and of St. Paul will stand with you in your dark hour. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances.

This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor's car won't start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who's been through treatment.

Source: Keillor, Garrison. The Homegrown Democrat. Viking Books, 2004.

Brian and I just got back from Costa Rica. We used the local bus system to get around quite cheaply and fairly comfortably. We traveled from San Jose to Quepos and spent a day exploring Manuel Antonio. Then we headed south to Hacienda Baru outside of Dominical. Hacienda Baru is an American-owned cattle ranch that has morphed over 30 years into an amazing preservation effort. We spent a day there exploring with a guide and then a night in the jungle with a guide and translator. From there, we headed back to San Jose via San Isidro and then back home. Pictures are below:

The beaches inside Manuel Antonio are beautiful.

All of the beaches were covered with crabs.

Brian exploring the beach.

The paths in Manuel Antonio were covered with these crabs. There seemed to be millions of them and their scampering made for eery noise.

The views of the Pacific were beautiful from Manuel Antonio.

Jen enjoying those views.

Brian found an interesting fish in a tide pool.

An iguana was casually eating fruit as we came out of Manuel Antonio.

There's a sloth in that tree somewhere.

This is one of the main streets in Quepos.

The drive from Quepos to Dominical was pretty heinous on the bus.

But the ride was worth it for the sunset on the beach at Hacienda Baru.

Another view of the sunset.

A tree frog in Hacienda Baru's butterfly garden.

Butterflys laying eggs in Hacienda Baru's butterfly garden.

Hacienda Baru has a pretty amazing orchid garden too.

One of many monkeys we saw at Hacienda Baru.

A poison dart frog seen on our night hike at Hacienda Baru.

A tarantula also seen on the night hike.

The reason you only go on those night hikes with a guide: a poisonous snake.

Just for reference, here are some links to the places we stayed:
Kap's Place in San Jose (http://www.kapsplace.com/)
Mono Azul in Quepos/Manuel Antonio (http://www.monoazul.com/)
Hacienda Baru outside Dominical (http://www.haciendabaru.com/)

This trip cost about $700 per person with food, lodging, and transportation. May is a great time to go because it is only the very beginning of the green (aka rainy) season so it's cheaper but the roads aren't completely washed out yet. Plus there aren't as many tourists.