Month: September 2007

Burma

Please take a moment to pray for the people of Burma (Myanmar). They are in the midst of an atrocious military crackdown against peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks.
Right now it looks as if the worst of the violence is over, as the government has forced the monks back into their monasteries, supressing their speech for the time being.
Most nations had previously broken off ties with the country, so one of the few that can strongly influence them economically or politically is China, which has its own human rights problems.
I pray that this will turn out to be an overall success for the brutalized protesters; if the world hears their cries, they may yet have a chance at peace and freedom.

Coming back to multiculturalism

For another installment in my “The New York Times Has Interesting Stuff” series, you should check out this article about a historically white Southern Baptist church in Georgia that has recently become a truly international community. “We realized that what the Lord had in store for that old Clarkston Baptist Church was to transition into a truly international church and to help minister to all these ethnic groups moving into the county,” says one of the church members. This isn’t just “whites and blacks” multiculturalism, which is usually the only thing to come to mind when Georgia is involved. This is a group of immigrants and refugees from all around the globe.

Their transition is far from perfect or complete – the longstanding congregation had mixed opinions about “catering to foreign people” and it certainly is an amazing thing to see from Southern Baptists, who supported openly racist organizations until 1995. But overall I view this as an incredible victory for Christ’s Church as one big group. As the pastor reminds us, “Jesus said heaven is a place for people of all nations, so if you don’t like Clarkston, you won’t like heaven.”

Read: The World Comes to Georgia, and an Old Church Adapts (New York Times)

iAm aSucker.

Last week, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone. It still has Wi-Fi internet, so as long as you’re in a hotspot, you can browse and stuff.

I ordered it the day it was announced – $399 for 16GB (I sold my fifth-gen one on eBay, so don’t think that I just waste tons on iPods nonstop). They kept it with flash instead of the hard drive that I was hoping for. At first I was worried about it and considered going for the comparatively lame hard-drive model, but then I sorted my iTunes library by date last played, and found out that I’ve listened to like 10GB worth of music since about….May. So I went ahead and made the order thinking that I could keep the rest of my ~50GB collection on my laptop.

In the week after I pre-ordered the iPod Touch, I realized that there was little difference between the $399 iPod Touch and the $399 iPhone. (the Touch has 8GB more storage, the iPhone…. um, has a phone.)  I’d been planning on picking up a smartphone from Verizon in six months or so when they give me a discount, but I got down to thinking about saving more in the long run by just going with the iPhone.

So I did that. I bought myself an 8GB iPhone yesterday.  It lives up to all of the hype – it’s friggin’ awesome.

Most of all, I got it for the mobile internet- both WiFi (without having to lug my laptop) and over CingularAT&T’s painfully slow EDGE network. The $50 a month I was paying just for voice simply wasn’t worth it to me – and now I pay $60, and it includes unlimited data usage (Verizon is about $80 for the same thing).

So overall, it’s awesome, except for a couple of tiny details:

  • E-mail not instant- it aggregates every 15 minutes. Yahoo does “push” e-mail to iPhone, so I might set up a dummy forwarder to the iPhone from my other e-mail accounts
  • 8 gigs is 10% of my last iPod’s capacity. It is already full. And it’s painful.
  • AT&T’s network coverage in Colorado isn’t as good as Verizon’s. This will make or break it for me as to whether or not I keep the iPhone or get a Treo or something through Verizon. I don’t talk a ton, but if it becomes too much of a hassle anytime in the next month, I’ll return the iPhone and get the phoneless Touch instead.

Chances are 80% that I’ll keep it. We’ll see.

Whoops.

Staying up for 35 hours in a row is not a good idea. Especially when you have tests, web design projects, and homework.

Needless to say, I was a caffeinated beast yesterday and today.

Besides that strange coding/working/class marathon, not much has been going on as of late. I’ve been recruited into a band, so I guess that’s news. It’ll be nice writing drum parts, since I haven’t ever had to do much of that beyond simple comping.

Other than that, it’s just same ol’, same ol’. Work is pretty crazy, and school is keeping me busy too. I miss people in  Arizona.

I guess I shouldn’t write blog posts while crashing from a 24-hour caffeine high 😛 . Things really aren’t that dull. I just need some sleep.

Wooooooo.

What I Want in an OS

So I’ve done a good deal of bouncing around Operating Systems for the last year. Since July 2006, I’ve run the following OS distributions on my laptop:

  • Windows XP SP2 Home, Professional
  • Windows Vista RC1,  RC2, Business Edition, Ultimate Edition
  • Ubuntu Linux 6.06, 6.10, 7.04 (and Kubuntu)
  • openSUSE Linux 10.1, 10.2
  • Fedora 7
  • Mac OS X 10.4 (via MacOSX86 project – a complete disaster for my hard drive)

A lot of these installations have come from a geeky curiosity of how another OS would work for me. From a technical perspective, I could probably get by with any of these, but when I think about the OS as something that actually enables me to do “real stuff,” Vista Ultimate is leaps and bounds in front of everything else. Simple things, like indexed desktop search, live window previews, automatic file backup, and good dual monitor support reduce the “technology barriers” between my work and me. (I also have seen zero “blue screens of death” since installing Vista Ultimate)

That said, there are a lot of things I want from the other OSes I’ve tried. Windows still lacks a unified package manager that both installs and updates all of my software – so I have to remember whether my program gets automatic updates from Windows Update, Microsoft Update (yes, there is a difference between the two), Apple Software Updater, a standalone updater, or if I just need to remember to check the application’s website. Vista also has much of XP’s bloat and greed for system resources, which many don’t notice, but when I load Linux on my system, I get an amazing performance kick.

The most tempting thing to switch to would be Ubuntu Linux or Mac OS X, but Ubuntu still is missing a few crucial features (notably user-friendly configuration and good dual monitor support) and OS X requires me to drop $500 more than I would for a PC.

Basically, right now there is no “best OS” out there for my purposes. Ubuntu is really getting close. But I fear that Microsoft’s strength has locked me into their platform for all of my productivity software (Office, Adobe Creative Suite, FL Studio)
I guess to sum it all up, I’m happy with Vista Ultimate, but can’t wait to see something even better.

I’m Confused.

We’re in Iraq for some reason. No WMDs or nuclear weapons turned out to be there, which were a large part of our rationale for going in.

Iran has the beginnings of a nuclear program. They may be making weapons. And it’s pretty sure we’re taking them down next.

North Korea has (or at least had) capabilities to produce nuclear weapons. And they have malicious intent towards us – they would love to start something, and nobody is in doubt of that.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons. They are not a member of the non-proliferation treaty. They also have Osama bin Laden. Yet they are considered our ally.

Could somebody tell me why we’re going after the “maybe a threat” nations when there are countries actively threatening us that we are doing nothing about?