Jefflog

Every time I read someone saying how the troops in Iraq are defending our freedom, I scream a little inside. Yes, the troops are putting their own lives at risk, but lets get some facts straight.

1. Safety != freedom. Terrorists may have endangered our safety and our sense of security, but our freedom has never been at stake. If you want more security, you might need to give up some of your freedom. The homicide rate in China is much lower than in the U.S., and they’ve never had a terrorist attack from the outside, but that doesn’t mean we should strive to emulate China.
2. The military’s defense of Iraqi freedom has no bearing on the freedom of Americans. It’s also questionable exactly how well Iraqi freedom is coming along. While they may have the right to vote now, having to respect a curfew and a potential looming civil war hasn’t allowed the operation to progress very well.
3. The greatest threat to our freedom comes from the inside. Terrorists have eroded our freedom only because the current powers-that-be have seen fit to limit them in the name of security. Patriot Act? Guantanamo? Airport searches? These all erode our freedom and our original Constitutional values.

   Some argue that these freedoms that have been taken away don’t make much difference to themselves. To that I like to ask, “Why are you so eager to take away the freedoms of other people?” I love freedom, and I want as much freedom as practical for all American citizens, not just for myself.

   If you want to defend freedom, you have to fight those taking it away from you. In this case, it’s President Bush and at least half of the 535 members of Congress. The true defenders of freedom are the congresspeople who vote for laws expanding the freedom of the American people. We can also applaud lobbying groups that fight for these same principles: the ACLU, the EFF, and the Cato Institute, to name three

The last couple of weekends, I’ve managed to steal away a couple of hours and play with Ruby on Rails again. My initial attempts from a few months ago didn’t yield any fruit, but I’m liking it a lot more on my second attempt.

I’m working on porting my photo album webapp to the Rails framework. It may take a while to finish, though, considering I’m usually limited to a couple of hours in any given weekend.

I’m especially digging the unit test framework. So far, i’ve been doing Test Driven Development on this project. Yeah, it makes development a little slower up front, but when you can rewrite youe code, run those tests, and know that you haven’t broken anything else in the process…well, it’s a very satisfying feeling.

The weather is starting to warm up, and I’m looking forward to riding my bike again. It should be especially fun this year because I’ll be taking Maggie along for some of my rides. Given her zeal for bikes, I think she’s going to have a great time.

I ordered a child carrier and a helmet for her. I got the kind of carrier that fits on the back of the bike; I don’t like the trailers that fit on the back of the bike, mostly because I’m afraid it would make the bike harder to maneuver. The infant helmet just arrived in the mail, but I completely format that Maggie has a big head, and it doesn’t fit her. We’re going to need a toddler helmet at least.

It’s been two days since the surgery. Looking out at far distances, my vision is the same as with my glasses, but up-close activities are still pretty fuzzy. I’ve had to decrease my computer screen’s resolution and bump up the size of the fonts, and I’ve used the screen magnifier from time to time as well. I’ve been using Firefox’s “increase text size” feature more than I’m accustomed to. It’s like reading the Large Type version of Reader’s Digest. Once again, I expect this to get better in a few days.

I went in for laser eye surgery yesterday. They stuck something in my eye to keep it open during the procedure, applied suction on my eyeball until it went dark, sliced open my lens, the laser went ZAP ZAP ZAP, folded the lens back over, and 10 minutes later I’m seeing without glasses.

It’s not perfect yet…things are still a little fuzzy, but they say within a week I’ll be fine. And I can expect some “halo effect” while driving at night for a few more weeks or months. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now I can go buy some awesome sunglasses instead of using a dorky pair of clip-ons. And I don’t have to worry about Maggie (or child #2) grabbing at them. That was the real impetus for having the procedure done.

Hong and I celebrated our 5-year anniversary last night. That’s counting from our legal marriage in 2001 in the King County Courthouse, not from our religious ceremony later that year. For the last few years, we had always gone back and forth, saying something like

“Hey, is this upcoming (March 19|September 1) our real anniversary?”
“No, it’s (September 1|March 19).”

and then we wouldn’t do anything to celebrate. We settled on March 19th this year, and that’s what it will be henceforth.

One user decided to take a bunch of Garfield strips and remove Garfield and Odie’s thought bubbles. Now we see exactly how lonely Jon must be, talking to his animals alone.

More strips here.

It seems like lately, Apple’s been on a tear, selling millions of iPods and increasing its market share (even if it is still only 2.28 percent). They’ve managed to make the transition from PowerPC to Intel chips go very smoothly — in fact, I don’t think any other company could do it as well as they have — which shows the company can stop on a dime and turn itself around if they have to. Thus, I hope they can do it again soon.

During their most recent “fun” special event, they merely announced a new Intel Mac Mini, the overpriced $350 “iPod Boombox”, and the even more overpriced $99 leather cases for the iPod. While I wouldn’t mind picking up a Mac Mini, I would really like it if they added a TV tuner to it. I could replace my aging Tivo once and for all and get a very flexible machine. But even though you can use it to share video, music, and photos throughout the house, you can’t directly record TV with it (at least, not without an expensive add-on).

Alas, Apple probably won’t include a TV tuner anytime soon because it would eat into their TV show sales profits and no doubt anger the networks who they are starting a cozy relationship with. Hmmmm… this sounds a lot like Sony’s problems a few years ago, where the music publishing arm of Sony conflicted with the electronic division which forced them to put out inferior digital music players. Apple won that battle, but unless they wise up and change course, they’ll lose the video one.

Just before Maggie was born, we bought a video camera, and have been recording her ever since. No doubt you’ve seen some of the better video clips on the sidebar. Naturally, we shoot much more footage than that; we’ve filled up 12 DVDs of home movies so far, and that’s just the edited footage.

On each of these DVD’s, of which we make copies to send to family members, we include a photo slideshow of the pictures taken during that period, set to music. On the latest DVD (volume 12), the slideshow was good enough that I wanted to share it with my readers. If you are so inclined, you may download the Quicktime video. It’s about 10 megabytes and doesn’t stream, so expect to wait a while before it starts playing.

The music in the slideshow is a piece called The Chase by The Wiggles. We downloaded (legally!) their Yummy Yummy album a few months ago, and Maggie loves it a lot. She likes to dance to most songs, and after each one is over, she exclaims “More!” (in a very sweet tone).

The Wiggles are surprisingly good, mostly original pieces that are simple but not dumb. They’re much better than most “children’s music” you find on the market today, which tend to be uninspired renditions of children’s classic songs. (Barney the Dinosaur, I’m looking straight at you.) The Wiggles seem to be good enough musicians on their own, but they’ve used the niche of kid-oriented themes and songs mostly under 2 minutes. Despite this, I find myself liking some of the songs almost as much as Maggie does. It’s hard not to sing along to Hot Potatoes or Fruit Salad. If you’ve got a toddler in the house, I highly recommend them.