Henry Imler June 29th, 2006

“The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”
- Frank Zappa

I keep hearing bad things out of Israel. I have heard:

• Hamas killed the soldier,
• Israel is invading Gaza and is arresting Hamas political leaders, and
• Hamas might have fired a chemical weapon into Israel.

Is all hell about to break loose over there? If the chemical weapon
rumor is true, where did they get it, Saddam-Iraq to Syria to Hamas?

In other news, it looks like the Supreme Court rejected the Guantanamo war crimes trials

• Politics
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 29th, 2006

Are items sexist if they are true? Consider the following two
statements; each of which is sexist-sounding, and each of which is also
true.

Women are catty at times; men are catty at times.

When are the Knicks going to implode? I know they have imploded from
a basketball and management standpoint, but when is the stadium, the
player’s cars, the management offices, everything going to implode?

Even as a Heat fan, this spiral is hard to watch. At least Thomas will also be out in a year.

• Humor
• Comments(1)

Henry Imler June 28th, 2006

• Personal
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 27th, 2006

“If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

Meredith and I are almost done with season two of Smallville. Who
knew entire towns in Kansas were so well versed in famous literature.
Darn near everyone is quoting Neitchzie, Dostoyevsky, Machiavelli, and
Tzu. Someone needs to get the lesson plan from that teacher and have
them fax it to every town in the US.

In other news, I am trying out the newest version of b₂evolution. I am still not happy with having to approve every comment and there was one on MassTheology that is blocked by the anti-spam filter. Still trying to think about how to get around those things.

• Personal
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 27th, 2006

cNet Reviews: Top 10 Google Apps from Digg.

A lot of good apps at Google, as I have mentioned before are on that list. What they missed was Google Notebook. I have not really tried it out yet, but you bet I will the next time I take a class. I’ll talk more about it then.

Google Notebook is not the reason for the post. The funny think
about the list was the ratio of released products to beta products.
Seven out of the ten apps are still in beta, yet are used by a much
larger audience than most betas.

In other news, it sucks to be sick. I had an opportunity to see Superman Returns tonight, but I was too sick to go with Henry (T) and Q.

• News
• Comments(2)

Henry Imler June 26th, 2006

• Personal
• Comments(2)

Henry Imler June 26th, 2006

Thanks to Danny for showing me how to add polls to the newest version of B₂Evolution. You can find the polls on the right-hand side of the site. The current poll is about how wealth is accumulated.

• Blogging
• Comments(6)

Henry Imler June 26th, 2006

• Personal
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 26th, 2006

I have put up most of our vacation photos. You can find them at the gallery under Vacation 2006.
I don’t have all the captions up. So if you are wondering what a
paticular scene is of, just know that it is of something old,
important, or cool.

• Personal
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 23rd, 2006

Washington Post: 7 Indicted in Sears Tower Plot

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said today that the
seven men who were arrested in a raid on a Miami warehouse last night
are “home-grown terrorists” who were trying to solicit money and
support from a police informant they thought was a member of the
al-Qaeda terrorist network.

Gonzales, speaking at a news conference at the Justice Department,
said the seven men, five of whom are U.S. nationals, were people “who
for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy.”

He said the seven were planning to blow up the Sears Tower in
Chicago as well as five federal buildings in Miami, including the FBI
building in north Miami Beach.

Deputy FBI director John S. Pistole said at the news conference that
the groups’ plans were more “aspirational” than “operational.” He said
they had not, as far as prosecutors know, met with any bona fide
al-Qaeda members.

There is no threat part I.

• Politics
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 22nd, 2006

Well, I am finally back from vacation. We had a great time. I’ll post more and have the photos up later. As I mentioned below,
I had a bit of a hosting problem right before I left for vacation.
Lunarpages did not want to help me in any way with the spam hit with
the exception of allowing me to upgrade to dedicated hosting at the
low, low price of $100 per month. That was very generous of then if you
think about it, no effort on their part and they get more money.

I decided to switch hosting to Dreamhost.
The only problem was that I had never switched hosts before and it had
to be finished (Lunarpages was going to terminate my account) before I
returned from vacation. As a result, I spent my spare time moving stuff
over, bugging Danny about the WotN, and trying to get my photo gallery
to work. With much of Danny’s help, I am now successfully running all
the blogs again. I still have to rework several skins, but that should
not take too long. I also got a free domain with the Dreamhost package
and used it to set up MassTheology.com. If you had a bookmark to the old mass theology site, please update your bookmarks and your RSS feeds (posts, comments).

If you have not noticed, a lot of the images around here don’t work.
This is attributed to the gallery 2 disaster I had while trying to
migrate it and to the fact that I have not yet uploaded my Lunarpages
media folder. It is on the list of things to work on this weekend while
Meredith is gone.

• Personal
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 21st, 2006

While driving from Osage Beach to Kansas City last Saturday, we listened to “Masters of War”
by Dylan. It is a great sounding song and I think has a great warning
about profiting from war. However, there is subtle irony in the last
stanza of the song :

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead

The song assumes that the war is fought for un-noble reasons, yet I
don’t think that really applies to any of the wars that the US has
fought in this century. This is however beside the point.

The irony I think lies in Dylan’s professed hatred of the
war-profiteer. What is worse, enjoying profiting from war or letting
injustice corrupt your soul to the point that you hope for the death of
another person?

It is when people allow injustice (or perceived injustice) to breed
hatred that some of the worlds worst conflicts brew. Often this sense
of injustice is shifted onto scapegoats. It happened in Christianity
thought the Middle Ages, culminating in the Holocaust; and is it
happening thought the impoverished Middle East and South Asia right now.

Beware of hating ideas and attaching them to people, they often come back to corrupt your very soul.

• Philosophy
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 21st, 2006

yes. Wade huge. Zo huge.

need to get up for flight in 3.5 hours….

• Sports
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 14th, 2006

Touting Military Misdeeds, Hiding Heroes

It may be weeks or longer before officials announce
what, if any, charges will be filed stemming from allegations that U.S.
Marines killed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha last November.
But the allegations themselves have triggered a frenzy of network news
coverage over the past three weeks, much as did allegations of abuse at
the Abu Ghraib prison back in 2004.

While ABC, CBS and NBC have chosen to highlight this potential
scandal, a new Media Research Center study finds those same networks
have given far less attention to the heroic deeds of the 20 members of
the U.S. military who have received the highest recognition for bravery
since the war on terror began. In fact, 14 of the country’s top 20
medal recipients have gone unmentioned by ABC, CBS and NBC….

… If the Haditha allegations are true, it is certainly a major
story deserving widespread attention. But so much coverage — so far in
advance of any authoritative account of what happened — makes journalists seem eager to spread a story that portrays the U.S. military as bad guys.
The networks’ heavy coverage of Haditha stands in contrast to their
pattern of overlooking the stories of most of America’s top military
heroes in the war on terror.

I don’t know what happened in Haditha. The media doesn’t either.
Yet, they sure seem like they do. If they end up being guilty - that is
a story. If they are not, I guarantee that there will not be nearly as
much hoopla about them being cleared as the possibility that they are
guilty.

• News
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 14th, 2006

I love the DS Lite. I have the new Super Mario Brothers
and have spent a few hours playing it. I have all the big coins for
world one, 43 lives, and am working my way through world 2. It is a
very fun game, not perfect, but very fun. Then again, my idea of the perfect DS game is SMB3.

• Video Games
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 14th, 2006

I got a nasty email from my web-host today. It looks like I was
taking up over 10% of my server’s resources. Take a look at my access
history:

Yes, 3X the traffic. But that was not for the whole day, that was only in a short time span:

Yup, it dropped off dramatically when I blocked a few ip addresses.
I still need to demonstrate to my web-host that I can make sure that
this does not happen in the future. Danny has been working with me on
some fixes. I might end up switching hosts, Dreamhost has unlimited add
on domains, which is attractive to me because of relevintage, unsoundagument, and I want to get masstheology its own domain. Right now I have to pay a dollar a month for each additional domain I use.

• Blogging
• Comments(2)

Henry Imler June 13th, 2006

Wow. The Heat were down by 13 with less than 6 min to go and they came back and won.

Wow.

• Sports
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 13th, 2006

Each game in the finals, the Heat get to a great early lead and then the Mavs spank them.

It is hard to watch.

• Sports
• Comments(0)

Henry Imler June 13th, 2006

As of 4:30 pm today, I started my vacation. I am off work until the 23^rd. This is what Meredith and I will be up to. Tomorrow we are packing and getting everything together.

Wednesday we are trekking down to the lake of the Ozarks for a two night stay in Tan-Tar-A that Meredith won thru her work. The first night is our 4^th
anniversary. We plan on eat at a nice place. We might take a dinner
cruise on the lake, or go to some trail house place that Meredith’s
parent’s recommended.

Thursday is my birthday, or birfday,
if you are in Arizona. We might do a little shopping (I have a very low
level of summer clothes), feed the fish, play skee ball (I hear the
Lord is also a big fan), and chill out. For dinner, I think we are going to go to Vista Grande, an excellent Mexican restaurant.

Saturday
morning we are leaving Tan-Tar-A at 9AM and heading to MCI where we
will fly to Chicago and then hitch a ride to Washington DC. By the time
everything is said and done it will be nine at night. Many would
complain about the long drive, the layover in Chi-Town, the long
flights; but I am actually looking forward to it. I don’t have a lot of
chances to travel, so this is kinda exciting for me.

This is the leg that I am really looking forward to. I once visited DC when I was in high school when I attended the National Young Leaders Conference.
I remember being mesmerized by it. We toured the major monuments at
night and none of my pictures turned out. I plan to rectify that
situation. We will have three full days on the East Coast. Sunday we
plan on touring all of the monuments and hitting a couple of spots that
some friends have told us about. Monday is dedicated to the Smithsonian, and we will probably hit the Holocaust museum as well. Even though we are going to spend the whole day doing this, I am sure that we will not come close to seeing it all.

Another cool thing is that we will be staying less than a mile from the White House.

Our last day on the East Coast is Meredith’s [undisclosed] birthday.
Since her idea of the ideal vacation is to sit on the beach, we are
going to find a beach and sit on it. I think we are going to drive to Ocean City, MD. From what I hear it is a nice beach and there are plenty of nice places to eat and things to do.

On Wendesday we being the journey back to Columbia, this time flying from Regan to Dallas and then to Kansas City.

I am looking forward to it.

• Personal
• Comments(4)

Henry Imler June 13th, 2006

Is this right? The Xbox360 is going to be a transformer?

The Movie Reporter’s Robert Sanchez writes, “I almost
forgot to mention one of the most stupid scenes in the script … For
reasons that I won’t get into, we see an iPod, Xbox 360, and plasma
screens sprout legs and transform just a bit.”

Hmmm, well, yeah. Just a bit? Like the 360 transforms into a
360-with-legs? If there’s a PS3 in this movie, we can expect a whole
new metric for measuring the console wars, and just going on the two
console’s colors, we’re guessing the 360 is an Autobot. Just sayin’!

Commence Energon cube jokes … now!

I think if anything, it should be a Decepticon. Well, I am sure that the old Xbox was big enough to be an actual transformer.

• Technology
• Comments(0)