As a followup to my previous post, I think this will be my last post into the Blosxom section of my blog.

Instead, I've spent the last week or two feverishly coding plugins for a new Wiki+Blog, using Kwiki as the engine. The end result is far nicer, both on the administrative end, as well as the front-end and features as a whole.

The goal is to create more of an information repository, rather than just a simple blog.

The new code is at: openthought.org

The RSS feed is at: openthought.org/?action=RSS

Mostly none of the old site has been moved over, I may do that for some of the more interesting entries. Also, I'll probably use mod_rewrite to redirect the old RSS url, though I haven't added that yet.

Have fun :-)
-Eric

As has been aptly pointed out, I haven't posted a thing in durn near a month. Well, here's the problem.

Believe it or not, I've actually developed more of a desire to have more things written down. Interesting links, pictures, and quotes. Not only my usual mumblings about this or that in Linux, more even more of a general "I got X working by doing Y". How life is going, with the ability to add onto it later.

It's become clear to me that I don't just need a blog, I need a wiki. But I don't want two seperate sites, as I'll often want to blog about what's it's in the wiki, or wiki about what's in the blog.

As soon as I figured out what I really wanted, I completely lost the desire to write at all, I feel like I'm wasting what I type. Instead, in the last few weeks, I've been pounding out some code for the site that I really want.

I'm using Kwiki as a base, but building a number of plugins to get it to function the way I want... Kwiki is a wiki, so I needed a blog and comments plugin, and of course one for RSS. In all, I've written or modified 7 plugins, and it's nearly ready for use.

I have not yet decided how exactly I want to migrate stuff from the existing blog. I certainly don't want to lose it. But do I migrate as is? Or maybe I can migrate a few at a time and make them fit in better with the whole wiki+blog thing. I guess option #3 is to migrate everything, then slowly modify them. I dunno.

Anyhow, things are comming along... in the not too distant future something cooler should be online.

A classic from the LP.

"With your vote, we'll remove you're politician, and release him into the wild, unharmed. Relatively."

Hah. Nice :-)

I'm a late bloomer when it comes to cell phones. I've never really needed or wanted one. I tend to enjoy being away from the world when I'm eating out for dinner, for example. Yeah, I guess I can turn off the phone. But afterwards, I'd immediatly turn it back on, and want to deal with any messages there. If I *can't* check messages or email, I tend not to care... if I know one is there, or have the ability to check them, it bothers me until I do :-)

Alas, for various reasons, I'm giving in, some of the reasons being:

• The occasional desire to get in touch with someone while I'm not at home
• I run a business, where I do consulting and hosting. People like being able to get in touch with you, not just when you're next to a landline
• If something goes wrong with the hosting, I need to be able to fix it, where ever it is I am

So, I've begun poking my head around the various offerings. I've been learning about things like GSM and CDMA. Apparently, CDMA allows for more users on a single tower, and has a broader range per tower. But, GSM is more popular internationally, and claims a higher digital voice quality.

Then there's all the providers... Verizon and Spring use CDMA. Verizon has a large presence in the North-East, where I spent most of my time. Cingular and T-Mobile, using GSM, do have coverage as well. T-Mobile tends to be more-so near highways, but otherwise, often considered to be rather poor coverage. Cingular seems to have an even network around the US... maybe not as good in the North East as Verizon, but better in other areas.

It gets tough though, as you can run into pockets of people who will suggest any of the above. Some people love Verizons network and connectivity. Others love Cingular for the same reason. Some like TMobile because it works well enough, but is cheaper.... especially when including data into the plan.

The thing that gets me with all this is cost... it kills me that I'll end up spending so much to be able to have a phone that allows me to connect to the Net in the case of an emergency.

We'll probably get a phone for Shana at the same time... so, for the both of us, family plans tend to start at $60/month. Data, for one user, is at least another $20. So, we're suddenly spending $80/month. And then there's at least another $5-$10 in taxes. Yay! So, we're almost at $100 for two people to carry around phones, one of whom can use it to get on the Net for a brief period of time. Ugh!

Anyhow... the next issue at hand is in choosing a phone. There's a ton of them out there. And if you look at say, the CNet reviews, you can find at least 5 things wrong with each one, and an additional 2-3 if you read what the users have to say in addition to the actual review.

So, what level of imperfection are you willing to tolerate in order to gain the privilage of spending $100 a month to be able to have people interrupt you during dinner?

Well, in any case, if I'm going to be doing Internet work, it's going to be over ssh. And with ssh, a keyboard is nice. The Treo's and such are tempting, but they're quite large, and they run Windows. I was really just considering dealing with one of the standard LG phones, or perhaps a flipout keyboardthat the LG-9800 offers. With it, you can use the free BitPim to upload wallpapers and ringtones, modify the filesystem, and other goodies that seem to come disabled (so not only am I spending $100 on phones, I'm spending that much on phones with features taken out!).

But, in poking around the Net, I ran across this rather cool looking Nokia, the E70. It sports not just a keyboard, but over 7 hours of talk time, WiFi access (b, g, e, and i), a 2MB camera, a 352 x 416 screen with 16 million colors, 75MB of space and a mini-sd card slot, and it supports Java so I should have no trouble getting my ssh client.

After all is said and done, it seems like a winner of a phone. I'm leaning towards going with Cingular... as Tmobile doesn't really seem to be cheaper, you just get more features for your money (ie, it's still $60 for a family plan, but you get 700 minutes, instead of 550). So, I'm leaning towards the better coverage, since I don't really need the extra minutes.

The unfortunate part of all this is that the Nokia E70 isn't available yet... Nokia claims it's fixing some software bugs it discovered, they claim it'll be out later this quarter. We'll see how that goes :-)

I ordered a slick alternativy CD from Amazon called Copeland / In Motion. I popped it in the CD player on the way home from work, and was a bit surprised to hear what appeared to be a "country twang".

I was a little unsympathetic with the plight described in the first song about winding up in jail... but I knew something wasn't right when I learned the name of the song was "My Cellmate Finds me Sexy". Hrm.

It turns out that they sent me the right CD case, but the actual CD contained therein was something from a group called "Cletus Judd". Interesting.

So my heat pump / air conditioner decided to continuously run the fan. Even when the heat/air was turned off. Well, I'm lucky enough that my next door neighbor runs a full time business repairing those sorts of things. In the meantime, I figured I'd like to make the fan stop running.

You'd think that would be simple... but no button on the thermostat affected it's desire to keep running... and it even kept going after I turned off all the power on the circuit breaker it was on.

Or, so I thought. I ended up just wondering over to chat with my neighbor, and discovered that heatpumps have their own circuitbreaker, outside. Probably so that they can be turned off, and when someone sticks their head in the unit, they don't have any fear that it'll get turned back on :-)

Most folks remember him as the inventor of the telephone. And, having invented something interesting, he also must have been a US citizen. Only partial truths!

Below contains a number of tidbits I picked up largely from Wikipedia.

First, Bell was born it Great Britian. At 23, he went off to Canada. And 3-4 years later, then began researching at Boston University.

It's debatable whether he was the first inventor of the telephone. Outside of the US and Canada, many countries credit the telephone invention with the Italian inventor, Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci.

But, that by no means makes Bell a dunce, this was a bright dude.

Bell is listed in the 100 Greatest Britians, 100 Greatest Americans, and 10 Greatest Canadians (they don't get so many people up there ;-)

One of his inventions is a photophone, which sent sound over a beam of light. He didn't really go far with it due to poor communication quality.

He also invented the metal detector and HydroFoil.

He was also a big proponent of Eugenics, a philosophy which promotes compulsory sterilization of those who, as Bell put it, were a "defective variety of the human race." These ideas were adopted by many states -- in fact, by the 1930's, half of all states in the US had eugenics laws. The ones from California were used as a model for Eugenics in Nazi Germany.

Bell did a lot of work with deaf education, but that was exactly the population he didn't feel should be allowed to procreate.

Ironicly, his wife was deaf, and they had kids. None of his kids were deaf.

Bell labs, and the decibel, were named after Alexander Graham Bell.

I went out to see The Violet Burning last night. Kevin Max was playing as well.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover Brennan Strawn from Monarch actually opening for the other two.

The Violet Burning were their usual "alternative with a twist of punk" selves, a great show. Kevin Max was good, though they are bit more of a pop'y style of music than I usually prefer in bands... I'll probably get their stuff in time though. Brennan Straw was a surprise, and put on an accuistic guitar show (unlike his usual piano based music). He has a new album coming out in a month or so, which I look forward to.

Okay, so, this video really made me want to get my hands on an RC jet :-)

Looking around the net, it looks like you can buy something like this F4 Phantom for about $6000. No time soon I suppose :-)

I accidentally ran across a followup article to the one I mentioned recently on people who don't think once they've chosen a political candidate. This article went a bit more in depth, and discussed more issues that were noticed from the study.

First off, we already discussed this:

"Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed."

"When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior."

They also ran into other info, regarding racial bias:

"That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did."

Of course, it's not just conservatives:

"The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias."

But, as a whole, seems to be worse in conservatives:

"But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush."

A buddy of mine will be having a baby soon. Anyone can see the women get all the fun in pre-birth celebrations, so we wanted to do a little something for the guy. So, what better thing to do than go out and play lasertag.

We went to the Laserdome in Lancaster, which is a fairly neat place. Their room is two levels, which makes things more fun. And they keep track of all your stats for additional bragging rights.

After the game, we played another game... they had a bunch of Halo2 games hooked together, and we spent a few hours beating on each other that way. Fun fun.

When it comes to politics, people don't think. No really. Both Democrats and Republicans. Check out this article.

The article shows that, when people listen to statements made by candidates they have chosen to endorse for one reason or another, they cease to think, and begin reacting emotionally. They verified this using brain scans. When shown clear evidence of their candidate making statements that contradicted something they previously said, people were unable to recognize that, and instead made up excuses for why that was the case. OTOH, they were able to clearly recognize contradictions by opposing candidates.

So, when it comes to politics (perhaps more, but I'm sticking to politics ATM :-), people are irrational and don't think.

I think it goes a long way to showing off the problem we have here in the US... people are so concerned with being right, with their party getting elected, that they ignore facts. If we keep this up, our system will never get better. If we keep electing people who don't speak the full truth, people who do clearly contradict themselves and only half the people care, how can we get a better government?

I continue to feel that the problem would get better if people snapped out of this need to vote Democrat or Republican, read through the issues, and chose a candidate who best matches their views. Even one that's *closer* to their views.

I can't help but notice how many people speak out against this war we're in with Iraq, how terrible it is that we're involved at all, yet continue to support pro-war Democrats such as Kerry and Clinton, because it's somehow better to have a candidate who doesn't support your ethics if the word "Democrat" is in their title. If you speak out against "war mongering", don't do it unless you're speaking out against Kerry and Clinton at the same time. Again, Republican's are just as guilty in this whole mess.

No candidate will ever support *everything* we stand for, it's impossible. But something as big as a war? Vote for someone else!

Yeah. So...

It's a bit unlike me to get the flu, I haven't had it in years. I mean, like, maybe 8 or 9 years. Which makes it all the wierder that not only am I getting over the flu right now that I've had for the past three days, but I got it over Christmas vacation as well. Huh.

I woke up this morning and took my temperature. Woah, the first time it's been low... actually, it was 96.9. There are dead people warmer than me :-) I do feel much better though.

Of course, now that I'm feeling better, it's time to figure out what to eat for dinner. See, I've gone three days, and ate not much more than 4 pieces of toast, a bowl of soup, and some cheese and crackers. That, and a little over a gallon of orange juice. With enough acid in my blood stream, and flu virus doesn't stand a chance. Maybe I should have thought of that last time.

I had a similar diet during my Christmas vacation bout with the flu, minus the OJ. So yes, I'm probably the only person to lose weight between Thanksgiving and now.... about 7 pounds. Heh. Shana's ready to kill me. Anyhow, it was time for something extraordinary to eat for dinner... my mouth informed me that it was going to have to be McDonalds. Who was I to argue?

I went to the McDonalds within the local Walmart (I just love saying that, it gives so many people the shivers) and got a two cheeseburger value meal. I can't help but think there may have been something I could have eaten tonight that could have been better for my stomach. But my mouth continues to remind me that it was worth it. It was indeed "yummy".

If I survive the dinner I ate, I'll be back to work tomorrow. It's looking pretty good though :-)

Some people seem to go out of their way to make it tough to be a nice guy.

I'm experimenting with a Wish List application, in an attempt to solve the mess that is our family gift exchange.

Any time one of us buys a gift for anyone, emails fly to everyone else in the family telling them what we bought.

If someone wants to add to their list, they have to email everyone the new item.

Soon, there's gift related emails all over the place... who knows what everyone wants and what's already been bought.

It looks like the app myGifts does most of what we'd want... it handles group registries, allows people to claim gifts (without the list owner being able to see), add new ones, send the list to others via email, and the like.

It's a little late for Christmas this year, but I added a few items to it that aren't on any other lists, we'll see how it goes.