The Arcane and the Obvious

I'm up and running again!

I wasn't going to be partisan. Not here.

But there are a couple of things I did want to say on the matter of the election.

Frankly, I didn't care much for either Bush or Kerry. However, I dislike Bush more and I felt that I would make that statement more clear by voting for Kerry.

Had I not felt so strongly, I would have voted for the Green Party candidate. Their platform of sustainable agriculture and renewable energy is far more important to my worldview than expanding the American empire.

I think the war in Iraq was a bad idea, although now that we are in it I feel strongly that we should not back down or back out until we have done our best to achieve our goals.

It kills me to see people picking apart the strategies of the political parties and labelling each other as misguided. I hate the smugness of each side. The elitism. The condescension.

You know, we're all highly evolved humans with very individual experiences. We all have freedom to choose. In an imperfect system with only two choices, things do start to look as though they are black and white. But it's so much more complex than that.

Read your own party's platform. I'll bet you can't get through it agreeing with everything.

Now read another party's platform. And another.

Don't they all have good ideas?

I have terrible guilt for not communicating better with my friends.

And that produces anxiety, which makes me procrastinate.

Which makes me feel more guilty.

It's a stupid cycle, but one with which I have dealt (albeit poorly) most of my life.

Any suggestions for getting out of that loop would be appreciated.

In the mean time, please forgive me. And do not think for a moment that I'm not grateful for your friendship!

I love it. Apparently "hjälm" is the Swedish word for "helmet."

I think it might sound something like "hyelm," using english phonetics.

While I have never executed, I have spent a great deal of time trying to come up with a more book-like interface to a web journal.

It just occurred to me that it would be funny (amusing to me, at least) to change the style sheet on the archives such that older pages would discolor, like the way acids in some papers cause the paper to yellow and disintegrate.

I would not want the pages to become illegible, but it occurs to me it might be a sort of visual queue that would indicate the relative age of a post.

Yeah, that or the actual date associated with the post? ;)

Yeah... I installed some web statistic tracking tools for this blog.

I found out this morning that I was getting some hits for an entry almost two years old on Windows themes for IBM ThinkPad laptops.

So while I could have been responsible and eaten lunch, instead I researched a new location of said themes and updated my links. Of course, IBM doesn't own the ThinkPad trademark anymore, and Lenovo doesn't seem to have the same sort of community focus. I couldn't find anything similar there. As a side note, though, their driver support for older models is *excellent.*

After updating the journal entry, I downloaded a theme, installed it and tweaked it. I then went to another site for a desktop wallpaper.

When I looked at the clock, I had 5 minutes left out of my 30 minute lunch.

Whoops!

I thought this would be a fun one to add to my Outlook recurring events...

However I can't figure out what day on July it should fall on. I have seen several sources all indicating different days: July 13th, 14th, 15th and 18th.

Google doesn't seem to point to anything more authoritative than Chik-Fil-A. About.com is way off from everyone else (they're the ones showing the 18th), and it doesn't even rate an entry in the Wikipedia.

So... clearly this is no nationally recognized event, nor does anyone appear to claim they are the first to celebrate.

If you had cows, what would you do?

This morning, pulling into the parking lot at work, my iPod played the Shaft Theme.

I'm talkin' 'bout Shaft. John Shaft!

So, yeah...

Two more speeding tickets this year. That's got to put me around 12 for my driving career of two decades, but honestly I've lost count. I don't know how many speeding tickets I've had anymore.

So I need to quit it.

I'm going to try really hard for the next year to stay at or below posted speed limits.

I've developed a lot of really bad habits. I tend to drive in the left lane, and I tend to drive as fast as the car in front of me. Or 10 over. More if I felt I could get away with it.

The last speeding ticket I got, though, was just because I let my car coast down a hill. Tagged at 40 in a 30. I didn't realize I was travelling that fast, honestly. I just was thinking about getting home. And the thing is I was almost there.

So I'm trying a lot harder now to pay attention where I haven't before. I'm trying really hard to not drive like an ass. Like other people are in my way. Like I'm in a hurry.

It's hard to keep myself in check, but I know most people don't feel the need to pass others all the time, so I can learn to ease off a little.

It helps that the dash of my "new" car is full of information. There are two places on my dash that can show average miles per gallon. One place can estimate instant mileage. It's been fun adjusting my habits and challenging myself to keep those numbers as high as possible.

The last thing I want is to be an obstacle. There is a lot of traffic moving well in excess of any speed limit I have ever seen, and it can feel a lot like pressure to move faster.

I'm doing my best to not make it my problem.

I'm trying hard also to be polite about it. I stay right. I will not do the speed limit in the left lane--I'm not oblivious. And I'm starting to get upset when people pass me on the right, although I am famous for that same maneuver.

So yeah, that will actually be me driving the speed limit. It doesn't mean I'm getting old or conservative. It does mean I do not want my license revoked.

Feel free to call me on it. I need the reminders.