So it’s been a year

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I’d like to come up with something amazingly deep and profound to say, but for one reason or another, it’s just not in me. Besides, plenty of other people have worthwhile things to say.

I think part of my little bout of writer’s block is just that the entire situation is frustrating. One year ago, something huge and immensely terrifying happened. In the year since then, however, a multitude of other, smaller, less immediately noticeable things have happened (usually in the name of ‘patriotism’), that added up scare me as much as (and quite possibly more than) the attacks themselves. It’s a different kind of scare, but it’s a scare, nothenless. Awareness of this side of things does seem to be growing, though, which is good.

I guess, most of what I’d really want to say I’ve said already, either in some of my rants over the past year or in the links I’ve chosen to highlight in this blog (the majority of which, unfortunately, still reside in limbo).

I dunno. I’m rambling. Caught between wanting to say something, and not really having anything of real import to say.

Portland protest

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Bill of Rights, R.I.P.An interesting and nicely even-handed writeup of an anti-Bush protest in Portland that went wrong — from a peaceful protest march to conflicts with the police, including pepper spray and rubber bullets. What happened? Murphy’s law…

…I felt that the police and the protestors were, behaviorally, mirrors of each other. The police officers were mostly acting within decent bounds, and the protestors were mostly peacefully making their views known. However, just as the police had a few unprofessional punks who felt compelled to spray and shoot at protestors, so did our side have its share of adolescent morons who thought it was a good idea to spit at the cops, throw things at them, try and force their way past them, and generally try to provoke violence. As some of the asinine “kill a cop” “they are subhuman” sentiments one hears clearly show, our side cannot claim to be free of infantile, violent cretins, much as we might like to believe it.

It is time to be serious-minded, friends. All the best things about this nation are under assault, and we have lost a great deal of ground already. We have mostly lost it through shortsightedness, internal bickering, and an annoying habit of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to stop acting as though “smash the state, stick it to the Man” is anything other than a child’s point of view. We need to take actions that will have a real effect, supporting candidates who can win even if they’re not 100% ideologically perfect, forming alliances with people who might not share every one of our pet issues, and generally approaching this problem as adults in the real world approach problems. Our freedoms will not be won back in the streets by dashing young revolutionaries. Get that image out of your mind. Our freedoms will be won back by dull people at city council meetings, by policy wonks in congressional office buildings, by months and years of painful, uninteresting, and EFFECTIVE work.

(via Boing Boing)

Search re-enabled

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I know that the majority of my posts lately have been site-oriented, and are probably insanely boring, but…well…from time to time, I fall into full-on-‘geek mode’. Just bear with me, I’m sure things will be back to the normal boring drivel (rather than the current technical boring drivel) soon enough.

The site search function has been re-enabled. I’m currently using the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine, which has the dual benefits of being very easy to set up and configure (I’ve even got it matching the look and feel of the rest of my site, something I hadn’t bothered to do before), and is extremely powerful. Since I’m still in the process of re-entering all my old posts after the recent crash, it’s only got so much to draw on, but by the time I finish putting two and a half years worth of babble back online, it could be quite useful for finding specific posts.

9-11 tributes

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Yahoo! on 9/11 2002Several sites across the ‘net are altering their front pages as a tribute to the 9-11 attacks. Some aren’t bad, some seem to be pretty ridiculous (to me, at least).

Of the ones I’ve seen so far, Yahoo‘s seems the silliest. Essentially the same old Yahoo! as ever — just all in greyscale. I kind of prefer the approach that other sites have taken (such as Excite, who set their main page to a simple black background, a rememberance message, and links to enter the content area). This just gives me the feeling that while Yahoo figured they had to do something, they sure as heck weren’t going to hide their content — why, some poor soul might actually get distracted by thinking about actual issues and miss out on some ads!

Then again, maybe I’m just too cynical.

(via MeFi)

The Height of Ambition

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There’s an incredible article at the New York Times Magazine giving a great history of the World Trade Center, from its politically-charged beginnings to the architectural choices that both kept the towers standing as long as they did after the impact of the planes and contributed to their eventual collapse. Just be sure to set aside some time — I just spent the past hour reading this.

When the north tower, the first to go up, was finally topped out on Dec. 23, 1970, it was foggy, and no one could see the view. But James Endler, the West Point grad and construction contractor who oversaw the entire job for the Port Authority, made a point of showing up at a celebration for the workers held on one of the skeletal upper floors — the first open-air party ever to take place 1,300 feet above the street. There was a band, soda and sandwiches. But when the band played the Mexican hat dance, the construction workers started stomping in unison, and Endler — standing next to Jack Kyle, the Port Authority’s chief engineer — began to feel odd vibrations in the structure. The floor did not seem steady. After all the wind-tunnel tests, the computer calculations, the structural innovations, had something been missed? Had the thousands upon thousands of steel parts been fitted together incorrectly?

”Jack, how do we stop that vibration?” Endler asked.

Kyle turned to him, expressionless. ”Don’t play that song anymore,” he advised.

(via MeFi)

Font tweaks and hiding links

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Just on the off chance that anyone visits my site tonight (the evening of Sep. 9th, possibly into the morning of Sep. 10th), no, the site normally doesn’t look quite this wonky. I’m working on adjusting my font stylesheet to be a bit more what I’ve got in mind — but things may be a bit odd in the meantime.

Deal with it.

;)

Update: All done now — now things look the way I wanted them to. And, of course, I’m playing with a few more tricks…

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So long, Webloggers

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Well, it’s official — the Webloggers Webring is dead. Not a big surprise, really (some sort of crash had wiped out the linking system a few months ago, and it had been in limbo as to whether or not it could be recovered), but still something of a shame. Better remove those links from the sidebar….

Kung-tunes is back!

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I took a little time last night to get Kung-Tunes back up and running again — as before, there’s now a ‘Music of the Moment’ box displaying whatever .mp3 I’m listening to, updated every 30 seconds so that it’s always current.

Technical details follow…

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What kind of God…?

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Thinking about the upcoming one year anniversary of Sept. 11th, Dave had this to say:

A common theme — what kind of God lets this happen. I answer that with another question. What kind of a country is so selfish that it doesn’t see that 9-11 was [the] tiniest big tragedy viewed from a global perspective. What about famine in Africa? What about AIDS? They wonder at the spiritual vision of a person who jumps from the World Trade Center to certain death, but don’t wonder about the millions of people who do the same thing with tobacco? It’s out of balance. We’re out of balance. 9-11 was, IMHO, a small upheaval in getting to some kind of equilibrium in how the U.S. participates in the world, both from the U.S. perspective, and the world’s perspective. That we got so much sympathy says how big the human heart is. That there wasn’t more celebrating in the streets of world capitals says that they forgive us for our selfish attitude, which is back in force as if 9-11 never happened.

So what was the lesson of 9-11 that the U.S. has failed to learn? I think it’s that God doesn’t think we’re as important as we do. The concept of national security is obsolete. We can’t close our borders. We live on this planet with everyone else. Global warming, AIDS, terrorism, all penetrate all borders. New York is a world city. The last gasps of isolationism will be snuffed out by more humiliation, until we get the truth, we aren’t above the rest of the world, but we are part of it.

Amen.

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Don’t hold back!

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Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, “who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of the Universe. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do…we were born to make manifest the Universe that is within us. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

— Marianne Williamson, Return to Love (via Unamerican)