Month: March 2003

Damn straight

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Most major Democratic presidential candidates also said they would abandon their criticism of Mr. Bush’s diplomatic efforts and support him now that it appeared the nation was about to go to war. One Democrat, former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, broke from the pack.

“This is not Iraq, where doubters and dissenters are punished or silenced — this is the United States of America,” Dr. Dean said in a statement issued shortly after Mr. Bush spoke. “We need to support our young people as they are sent to war by the president, and I have no doubt that American military power will prevail. But to ensure that our postwar policies are constructive and humane, based on enduring principles of peace and justice, concerned Americans should continue to speak out.”

Good for you, Dean. Speak out we will.

Random downtime fixed

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At least, I hope it’s fixed.

I’ve had a recurring problem for a while now, where at seemingly random times, I’d lose my connection to the ‘net. It seems that this is some sort of odd problem with my Linksys router. Since I host this domain (and three others) off of one of my computers here in my apartment, I’ve had my LAN isolated behind the Linksys router (as seen in this diagram).

Unfortunately, for some reason, every so often when I’m browsing my own website from any machine on my LAN, the Linksys router will freeze up. Since it sat between my computers and the outside world, this effectively killed my network connection. I’d recently upgraded the firmware of the router to the latest version, hoping that it would fix the problem — unfortunately, that seemed rather to exacerbate the difficulties, where the Linksys proceeded to randomly freeze while browsing my website even if I was using a computer outside my LAN.

Needless to say, this is quite annoying. Especially on days like today, when it froze at five in the afternoon, and I wasn’t able to come home and restarted until after I got off work at 9pm.

However, my account with Speakeasy allows me two static IP addresses. I got ahold of them, got my second IP address configured, and rewired my network (here’s the new diagram) to take the Linksys out from between the webserver and the world.

Technically, this is a little less secure, as there is now a direct line between my webserver and the world, with no intervening firewall for protection, but OS X is fairly secure, and I’m willing to take that slight risk if it allows my sites to have better uptime. The Linksys does still protect the PC, however. Somehow I just can’t justify leaving a Windows box open to the world, even if I think I’ve got it locked down. So much for ‘trusted computing‘.

The speech follows no logical pattern

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From Tom Tomorrow:

The entire situation is reminiscent, as someone pointed out on Atrios, of the old Star Trek episode “Patterns of Force” (in which) Federation history professor John Gill becomes the drugged leader of a Nazi planet:

GILL (seen on TV at a rally): If we fulfill our own greatness,
that will all be ended. Working together —

SPOCK: Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern. Random sentences strung together.

MCCOY: He looks drugged, Jim, almost in a cataleptic state.

GILL: …reach our goal, and we will reach that goal. (cheering) Every thought…directed toward a goal. This planet…can become a paradise, if we are willing to pay the price. As each cell in the body…works with discipline and harmony for the good…of the entire being —

Building 42

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An entertaining little bit of trivia about Microsoft’s building numbering schemes over on Scott Guthrie’s blog produced this amusing bit of MS trivia:

[Building 42] is also a little unique in that it straddles the line between the cities of Redmond and Bellevue. This was apparently something of a challenge when getting planning permission — since Redmond had a town ordinance that prevented buildings from being more than three stories tall, while Bellevue allowed an unrestricted number of building floors to be built.

Microsoft wanted the new Building 42 to be a nice four stories tall — but despite the fact that 2/3rds of it would have lived in Bellevue, the planning permission folks in Redmond apparently insisted that it not be more than three. After a lot of wrangling, they finally reached a compromise whereby the 1/3rd of the building that lived in Redmond was built to be 3 stories tall — and the 2/3rds of the building which lived in Bellevue was built to the full 4 stories in height.

If you are ever driving past campus on 156^th^ Avenue, you can spot the exact Redmond/Bellevue city border by seeing where an otherwise normal, professional looking building suddenly changes height.

This isn’t my building — MSCopy, the Xerox printshop for Microsoft, is over in Building 123 — I just thought it was interesting.

Candlelight Vigil at Green Lake, Seattle

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Little girl at the candlelight vigil

I was just starting to go through my regular online reading tonight when one of the first posts I read was Shelly Powers’ post about the candlelight vigil she was planning on attending (Update: her post about the vigil she attended is up). I checked the MoveOn page where the vigils were being organized, and found that there were many planned for Seattle. The largest was being held at Green Lake, so ten minutes later I was on a bus out to Green Lake.

The entire vigil was very nice. Hundreds of people turned out (literally — when I was on the MoveOn page, over 500 people had signed on with intent to attend, and I’m sure that many more showed up that hadn’t hit the website) for the walk around the lake. Greenlake is already one of the prettiest areas of Seattle that I’ve seen so far, but it was absolutely gorgeous tonight. Lit by an incredibly bright full moon, at any point along the three mile path you could look across the shimmering waters of the lake and see the softly flickering lights of candles being carried along by participants. An area by the main parking lot had been set aside as the primary staging and meeting area, and some people had set up a quick sculpture that looked like it may have been modeled after an American Indian dreamcatcher (I’m not sure if the design had any special significance, it’s just that that was what it reminded me of).

As has been the hallmark of the recent demonstrations, the assembled people were from across the spectrum, from students to businesspeople to entire families. Everything was nicely low-key, as people worked their way along the path either singly or with friends, talking quietly, enjoying the cool weather, the walk, and the companionship of so many others gathered together in their hope for peace. As people left, one section of flowerbed started gathering candles that hadn’t gone out yet, carefully placed between the daffodils, creating a softly glowing island of serenity on the way out of the park.

As I made my way around the lake (candleless, unfortunately, but with camera in hand), I came up behind a family with two little girls. One of the girls (shown in the picture at the beginning of this post), striding in front of the group, carried her candle in front of her and proudly set the pace for her family by singing “My country ’tis of thee.” The simple sound of her young voice singing that song as she walked gave the lyrics an air not of irony, but of hope — words of a land of liberty, letting freedom ring from every mountainside.

How I hope she’s right.

I’ve posted some pictures (those that weren’t too dark to be visible) of the evening’s walk on my family’s website. Feel free to take a look.

Evergreen student killed in Gaza Strip

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Evergreen College student Rachel Corrie, a peace activist/”human sheild” in the Gaza Strip, was killed yesterday when she was run over by a bulldozer.

Joseph Smith, 21, of Kansas City, Mo., said he, Corrie and five other British and American protesters who are part of the pro-Palestinian “International Solidarity Movement” had spent the afternoon “trying to disrupt the work of the Israeli bulldozers” at the Rafah Refugee Camp.

Wearing a fluorescent orange vest for visibility, Corrie then “sat down in front of them like we had done all day,” Smith said. “But this time the bulldozer didn’t stop.” Protesters heard her scream, then “we were hollering and waving our arms.” The bulldozer then backed over her again and retreated, he said.

On the one hand, this is a tragic incident, and my condolences go out to Rachel’s friends and family.

On the other hand — and I’m certainly not trying to belittle Rachel, her ideals or work, or her death — I have to admit that I’ve always found the idea of “human shields” to be naïvely optimistic, at best, and quite possibly downright suicidal at worst. You’re placing yourself in an extremely volatile and dangerous situation, between two factions that have repeatedly shown very little regard for human life, be it military or civilian. As horrible as any resulting deaths may be, I can’t see them as unexpected or surprising in the least. If you’re going to stand in between two warring sides, you’re knowingly taking the chance that one or the other (or both) is going to end up killing you.

I’m very sorry this happened, but some of the indignation I’m hearing from other people strikes me as a rather ludicrous response to an event like this. Being sad, upset, or even angry makes sense — being indignant doesn’t. At least, not to me.

More protest songs

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Salon has posted links to six protest songs that have been released by the artists to the web as free-for-download .mp3’s:

  • The Beastie Boys “In a World Gone Mad…” (which I posted about earlier)
  • Billy Bragg “The Price of Oil”
  • Chumbawumba “Jacob’s Ladder (Not in My Name)”
  • Ani DiFranco “Self Evident” (which Kirsten quoted in February)
  • John Mellencamp “To Washington”
  • Saul Williams “Not in My Name”

Remixes of the Saul Williams track, along with two other tracks from him (“Bloodletting” and “September 12^th^”) can be found at the Synchronic Records website.

This is cool.

(Via Kirsten)