I took the Plunge

As noted before I hate MySpace but after being asked countless times by countless people I finally dove in and created a profile. Which as you can see from my icon that I'm quite into ponies. Since you need to be my friend to see it in full here's a screen shot of it to help visualize:


Pretty classy eh? I blatantly stole the idea from Slashdot's April Fools OMG!!! PONIES!!! makeover from 2006 and then used and modified the basic CSS layout from Mike Davidson. I used a little GIMP action to then pull the hearts of the OMG PONIES! image and created a 272x124 table image for the functionality links. Finally I changed the color scheme to use color code #d67bb4 for the wonderful pink color.

Now just because I have a myspace account doesn't mean that I've comprised any of my virtues I triumphed before. I only have friends of people I actually know well and I will not constantly use the site in lieu of something constructive with my time. Although I do have to admit it is fun to post comments on people's pages and keep people updated with what you're generally doing with your life.

In the future I will most like redo the theme again to something a little less "sissy", but I'm happy with it now and the reaction it garners is priceless.

Make sure you hover over all the links on the page too for little surprises...

Where are you Protest Warrior?

It was senior year of college when I first heard of the right-wing website Protest Warrior whose slogan "Fighting the Left and Doing it Right" was the battle cry for a new generation of neo-conservatives. The site originated when it's founders began "crashing" liberal and anti-war protests with signs having such clever phrases like:

"Except for ending slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, war has never solved anything!"

and

"Saddam only kills his own people. It's none of our business!"

Now if you haven't figured it out yet I'm quite liberal and why would a person like me even care about such a site? Well for one, I don't consider myself a hard line progressive, rather I try to see all points of view and then decide on certain issues, with coincidentally usually falls to the left.

Protest Warrior for me over the last few years has acted like a checks and balances to my own personal convictions. The forums were almost always lively and you could see first hand why people were for or against things, both conservative and liberal. Most of it was utter drivel, which lead me to read it more for comedy than seriousness. Occasionally though you could find some good discussion going on and there were a few level headed regulars who were actual conservatives and not flag bears of the New American Century.

This fall I was looking forward to seeing the forum reactions both leading up to and after the elections, but unfortunately that didn't happen since over the last few months their forums have been down. Now, less than a week after the election, the website is no longer responding and seems to be down for the count with no explanation. So what happened? Was the entire project created by some conservative think tank to promote a type of revolutionary thought for young neo-conservatives and their funding dried up? Did the original founders finally realize that their racists and intolerant views were completely askew with humanity and have a change of heart? Did the founders fall in love and run away to Holland? I guess we'll never know.

I'm not really disappointed the site is down, but I wish it would have stayed up for this election. I had to live through the torment of reading the celebrations and prayers that the country was finally on the "right" path on November 7th 2004, and I was itching to see what excuses and conspiracies they came up with this November 7th. It's probably for the better though, I'm not like them and I don't need revenge to satisfy my disappointment. Protestwarrior is gone and there's finally positive change in America, and I couldn't be happier.

Rule of the Many

Throughout my daily routine I always make it a point to check out more conservative sites and forums, mainly because if I read only liberal ones I'll always see things the way I want to see them. Reading sites such as Redstate and ProtestWarrior (although their forums are down) one really gets a sense of why they believe what they and others do. I rarely ever post any responses since arguing online is usually a waste of time and nothing other than animosity comes from it. The other day though I just couldn't help myself.

On election day, while cruising for opinions on our local elections, I came across a thread where a poster was spewing the same drivel that I normally see, but decided not to let it slide. He was all over the conservative spectrum, going off on poor people taking his hard earned money through taxes, Kerry not serving any real time in Iraq while Bush was a war hero, etc.

I responded curtly, telling him to strap on a pair and to quit whining because society has contributed more to him that he'll ever be able to contribute back. I also threw in a cue from the evangelical defense and commented on his avatar (a guy pounding a stick in his hand) and his apparently "touch guy strength" and that it must have been one of those books on the decency of humanity like the Bible that called for the strong to protect the weak. I haven't checked back for any responses yet, because I know what he'll say and it'll just turn into YASIA (Yet Another Stupid Internet Argument), although am going to post tomorrow with a comment of "Oh sorry it took me so long to get back, I was busy celebrating sweeping Congress".

Which leads me to my main point, currently I'm reading two pieces of socialist propaganda; Common Sense by Thomas Paine and Democracy & Revolution by George Novack. The first should be know to any American who's familiar with our countries history, while the second not so much. They fit together well though, with Novak dedicating the book to Thomas Paine and referencing the bulk of Common Sense in his forward. Coincidentally I bought them at the same time but didn't realize this until after I started reading them.

These two points meet up because that is what democracy is, the rule of the many over the rule of the few, or if you want to look at it this way, the rule of the strong over the rule of the weak. Of course it doesn't work exactly like that since democracy is about ideas and not physical strength. This does however lead to an interesting conclusion about the capitalist vs socialist economic system. If Democracy is the rule of many over the few, then why is it paired with a system that promotes the rule of the few over the many (through "survival of the fitness")? The two are ideologically black and white, and it seems a dictatorship or monarchy would go better with capitalism.

In the whole scheme of things, conservatives love to chastise the weak but then hold the flag of democracy, whose strength protects the weak, to their chests. That's not the way it works fellas, good bye.

Mid-term Election Night 2006

Tonite is the first time in my voting history that I watched the results come in and didn't physically feel sick after a while. With the Democrats having control of the House I actually feel like now maybe a platform other than "we're not republican" can be launched and the people of this country and see what it means to be progressive.

Furthermore with the Senate coming down to Virginia I'm not trying to get my hopes up, but with Democratic control of Congress finally there will be some sort of checks and balances restored to our Republic. The other day I picked up Common Sense by Thomas Paine, more out of curiosity, but once I began reading I understood why our Nation was built and what Principles it was founded on. Our government is historically the best in the world, but in order to keep it that way single party control is completely the wrong direction. I may be a democrat, but I'm also an American, and America is built on the principles of diversity, Democrat or Republican.

Ironically I live in a traditionally "blue" state, but by looking at the current results of our state propositions it almost looks like we're as conservative as a Southern red state. For instance there are multiple progressive props, such as 86 which taxes oil companies and directing funds into clean energy. That prop should have passed passed in a progressive state, but due to huge rallying by Big Oil people assumed it meant higher gas prices, which is one of the easiest issues to scare on. Other props for women's rights and clean elections also aren't appearing to do well. We (The Democrats) may have taken back the country, but it looks like my state lost it's integrity.

Guess you can't win them all.

NYT Interactive Election Map

Today while doing my daily browsing of the New York Times I came across their interactive 2006 election guide.


With it you can break down the country by all sorts of variables; safe bets, leaning D or R, who voted for Gore in 2000, etc. I've found it useful to see a big picture of what exactly is at stake tomorrow.

San Diego Prop Voting Guide 2006

Local Props

• Prop B - Pension increase (SD does great with pensions) - No
  
• Prop C - Privatization of local services (When has privatization actually done anything other than make things worse?) - No
  

State Props

• Props 1A-1E - Various improvement bonds (Because I don't want to live in a hole) - Yes
• Prop 84 - Coastal protection (Holy shit! Half of CA is bordered by water?!) - Yes
• Prop 85 - Parental Notification (Cause daddy just loves to hear his little girl got knocked up) - No
• Prop 86 - Cigarette Tax (Do I smoke? No. Would an extra $2.60 a pack help stop smoking and provide a new revenue stream. Yes.) - Yes
• Prop 87 - Clean Energy (Oil companies are against it, so it must be a good thing) - Yes
• Prop 88 - Property Taxes (I thought republicans were all against taxation?) - No
• Prop 89 - Clean elections (Lobbyist not controlling a candidate, sign me up) - Yes

A Macs Best Friend

Yesterday Penny Arcade geared up for their 2007 Childs Play Charity and I checked out their newly updated site which includes what looks like Egypt, a huge leap from the original US only hospitals when they started. While scrolling down I saw the sponsors and thought I'd see what kinds of companies were helping them out, which lead me to a page for Bruji, or as the title calls it A Mac's best friend.

I love using my Mac and all, mainly because OS X is awesome, but I haven't found any must have Mac only applications until now. Bruji makes media database software that resembles the look and feel of Apples iLife apps like iTunes and iPhoto. There are four products, DVDpedia, Bookpedia, CDpedia, and Gamepedia, all of which catalog what their name says.

At once I was impressed by the free demo for Bookpedia. Even on my old G3 iBook the app starts almost immediately and in less than five minutes I had cataloged ten books on my bookshelf. It uses a simple keyword search to look up titles and authors on Amazon and other book websites, displaying the full details of each title. It even grabs the cover image and puts all that information into your catalog, very slick.

Once you've completed your library there's all sorts of cool things you can do with it such as tracking books you've lent to people and custom exporting of your library to all sorts of data formats (cvs, webpage, .mac, iPod). It even keeps statistics on your library and will look up a title on listmania to find similar titles.

These apps are why I love using a Mac, everything is exactly as it should be, no surprises just simple power that immediately produces results. I will most likely buy the Bookpedia app (18$), but they have a bundle where you get any three for 39$ and it could be nice to catalog our DVDs and games as well.