Christmas Podcast

It is back!  By popular demand, the Unwilted Christmas podcast is uploaded for your listening pleasure.  It is in M4A format this year -- deal with it.

Facebook and Friends

I've been interested lately in  the impact that Facebook may be having on friendship.  Unlike Myspace, it seems that Facebook is a way to connect with people that you actually already know in one capacity or another  For me, it provides an easy way to share photos and information.  It also allows me to "passively" keep in touch with people with whom I may not otherwise share frequent emails or telephone calls but who I still care about to one degree or another. 

The interesting problem, though, is who exactly do I know?  Assuming I know a person, do I really want to be friends on Facebook?  

Unless you are a salesman, politician, or entertainer, the value of Facebook diminishes as you get too many friends.    After all, being friends entails getting (in some cases) multiple updates on the daily details of their life.  Do I really need to now that the dude I hung out with for a few weeks back in 1998 is sick today?  Or even worse, that he is doing great on some trivia quiz?

So this all creates some difficult decisions when I get a friend request.  One of the hardest decisions concerns people that I know now or sort of know now.  This category of person is somebody that I actually see on a regular basis for whatever reason.  By adding him as a friend today, it almost seems that I'm committing to following his daily updates for the rest of my life.  Perhaps the standard procedure will be to quietly drop the friendship after not being in regular contact for a few years.  On the other hand, it may still be good to have some sort of link to that kind of person going forward, especially if we are in the same profession or have a lot of mutual friends.

Another dilemma is what to do with the person you sort of knew years ago.  Yes, we went to school together years ago.  But we were not even really friends then.  Is there a sufficient basis to be "friends" now for the first time just based on the common experience and perhaps mutual friends?  In this situation, it at least helps if the friend request has a message to go with it.  Otherwise, it is this almost creepy agreement to open myself up to your voyeurism (photos, updates, contact information) in exchange for the same -- looking at each other through a double blind window (if such a thing exists).  

I should disclaim that although some of the friend requests have been close calls both ways (both accept and reject), and I've been fairly limited with respect to the people that I'll allow into my Facebook life.  I'm happy with the friends that I have (and there are still many real life friends who I hope will join Facebook).   It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the years and decades to come, and what my reaction will be to finding out that the dude I met at a conference in 2002 reached a new level in the Nickelback trivia game.   

Nothing to Do

With the election over, I'm not sure what to do with myself.  Even right now, I'm watching football.  That ought to be enough, but I've become accustomed to multitasking with the TV going and the laptop on the coffee table.  So right now, the commercials are playing and I've nothing to look at on the internet.  

Rush and Sean and the Rest

I spend a lot of time listening to talk radio. Most of what is available is the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity sort of stuff. During this last election season, much of the Republican message was generated by talk radio. Whether it was Ayers, ACORN, socialism, or Barack Obama wanting to bankrupt the coal industry, I always heard about it first on talk radio. Talk radio is the most influential conservative think tank and the primary Repub election strategist.

On the one hand, I suppose, that is a compliment to talk radio. On the other hand, I wonder if the Repub's reliance on talk radio as a source of new ideas is really hurting them. Certainly, there are intelligent, thoughtful conservatives such as David Brooks or George Will. Ronald Reagan and the conservatives ruled the 1980s on the strength of their ideas. They won in 1994 based on ideas -- the old Contract with America. But talk radio deals in broad generalizations concerning their own ideas, and mostly caricature or outright distortions of their opponents. Mostly, they attack liberals or any Repub. who is not like them (i.e., Rush today said "good riddance" at the loss of Repub. Chris Shays). They work themselves into a frenzy, and they begin to remind most Americans of their crazy old uncle who used to think that the government controlled the weather and who kept gold coins in his basement. Don't you think that is exactly how John McCain looked when he tried to compare Barack Obama to a socialist?

Republicans who are now searching their souls should search for leadership who will return them to ideas. And Sarah Palin probably does not fit that bill.

Must See -- Daily Show Exposes the BS

Back

Ready to kick this blog back up. Keep checking.

Hiatus

Hiatus for at least the next year. Maybe in that time, I'll figure out what I really want to blog about anyway.

More Mac and Youtube Disabled

The Mac switch is going fine. It does not always "just work" as they say. I was just learning to use garageband to make a podcast, went to the help file and it froze up. Then the "force quit" feature wouldn't force the application to quit. I had to restart.

That was a minor annoyance compared to my primary Youtube account being disabled. One too many copyright violations, I guess. No notice, even after the fact. And now all the videos are gone. So just as with Napster (years ago), it is off to find an alternative. Leading contender is dailymotion, although I'd love to hear other suggestions.

Mac Switch

Well, the old PC went kaput one more time. So becasue I won't be able to fix it myself during the next several months, I decided we should become a Mac family. Got a low end Mac Mini really just for web surfing, email, music, etc. That's all everybody needs (other than me), and this should appease them and hopefully "just work" for the next several months.

Having some probably normal adjustment issues, but everything is working very well. One highlight was plugging in my printer and then printing 20 seconds later without having done anything to set it up. On the old system, I kept getting printer driver errors every time I restarted (even though I had the driver disks and had reinstalled everything). Another highlight was uninstalling a program that I had downloaded but decided not to use. All I had to do was delete it. No restarting, no registry changes. And I didn't feel like I had gunked up my system (on the old system, I was very reluctant to install anything because it would just mean that I'd have to reformat sooner).

I was not able to function without a right clck on the mouse, but was able to configure the mac mighty mouse to have a right click anyway. The process for installing programs was a little bit different as well, but is not a big deal once you know what you are doing. Just a different way.

Liquor and Guns

I really can't stand Conan O'Brien, but this segment with Hunter S. Thompson is cool despite him.

Lifestyle Choices

Seeing a family with about five children today, I finally understood how Christian conservatives feel when they witness the homosexual lifestyle choice. I disapproved and was offended.

Cultural Adventist

I've been meaning to write about being a "cultural adventist" and thought the concept was pretty unique. Turns out there is a damn blog with the same name. And a timeline of the term. I want to say that I was using the term before 2001, when the timeline starts. But I can't be sure, and couldn't prove it either way. Unless Eric remembers me saying something along those lines. I remember first thinking about cultural adventism (although I don't know for sure if I used that term at the time) in Boston in 1998 when we met this gay uncle who still had vegetarian food in his pantry. He had learned a new use for Big Franks, perhaps, but the food item still united us.

Unlike some of the so-called cultural adventists I've found online, I don't consider church attendance a part of cultural adventism (although it can be). There have been times in my life when I returned to the bosom of the church not because I believe it to be true, but because it felt comfortable during uncomfortable times. When living in Washington DC, I recall going to an adventist church to get a good vegetarian meal at the potluck dinner afterwards. Living in Ireland, I went to the church to meet people and managed to get a job from one of them. Even now, if I became ill, I'd want to go to an Adventist hospital. Not just because of the food, but because it would feel like home.

Cultural adventism goes beyond food and comfort, of course. It is an essential part of the nurture side of your personality. The inability to dance or play card games. A love for nature and the outdoors that comes from going to places like Jump Creek every Sabbath afternoon. These things linger -- even if you slowly become a lesbian neo-feminist poet living in a commune. Even that person, deep down inside, will pause and take notice if a news story makes it sound like a Sunday Law could be coming. And yes, even she knows where the local ABC is and goes there -- piercings and all -- every few months to stock up on Fri Chick.

Change?

Should I convert this to a porn blog in order to boost traffic and/or interest?

Reformat

A geek post . . .

I have been intending to reformat my desktop for about a year. It just gets harder and harder, though, because I bought the system in 2004. So the system restore brings me back to 2004 and I spend a weekend updating it. But it became necessary.

I had restarted the computer and was informed that some system file was missing or corrupt. It was quite a dark feeling for about two hours because I had not backed up my pictures, music, and such for a few months. With my (scratched) system restore DVD, though, I managed to get in and get a prompt. The fixboot command looked good and that must have worked, because I was able to get in upon restart to backup all my crap.

Did I mention that my DVD was not only scratched, but the DVD drive is about to die? It makes really loud noises and seems to go slower than it should (can't watch movies on it anymore). Despite this obvious difficulty, I popped in the system restore DVD and reformatted the muther. Slow and noisy, it managed to reinstall everything. Literally about 100 Windows Updates later, I'm up and running better than ever. Or at least as good as in 2004.

While doing all this, I kept thinking about a long term solution. There has to be something better than my 2004 PC, right? After all, I'm on video card 2.5 (replaced the fan on the first one, then the first one went out . . .and now this one's fan is about to need replacement). The only CD/DVD drive is shot. The hard drive is hanging in there, but does a lot of work and could go out any day (I use the computer as a DVR to record tv shows and watch them later). Time for a new computer! Except I couldn't find anything better. But that will be the subject of a future post.

Avawatz Climb

I've decided that desert peaks are more interesting than your standard mountain peak with trees. The views are just better and they tend to be less crowded (or downright abandoned). Of course, you have to get these during the winter months when the temperatures are down -- although winter mornings can be downright cold. Another downside of climbing in the winter is that the days get short -- you need an early start unless you want to be on the mountain when it is dark (which I would actually like to do someday -- the view at night must be even more spectacular).

Most recently, I climbed the high point in the Avawatz Mountains in Southern California's high desert. The range is just to the south and east of Death Valley and to the north and west of the Fort Irwin military base. I followed the climb as outlined here. It took about four hours up. I parked sooner than I should have. But the advice about parking before you get to the communications tower is good. You'll end up in the canyon below because the road is washed out if you go too far. Or you'll have to go back down the hill along the ridge in reverse -- a tough task in itself.

I did almost burn down the whole damn range when I started a little fire that morning before the hike up. A spark or something got some dry grass and it was out of control. Burned about a 10-foot area when it was all done, and I sacrificed nearly all of my water.


I also found a cool abandoned mine site on the way back down. It was better preserved than most, and had a pit mine into the ground that was covered by a few boards. I had this fantasy of coming back with a five gallon can of gasoline, dropping it down there, and then throwing a Molotov cocktail down there. Whoosh! Then throwing a bunch of other crap down there to burn. But after having already nearly burned the whole range down, that is probably not a good idea.

The first picture is from the summit looking toward Fort Irwin. The second picture is looking toward Death Valley. Neither do the view justice, particularly because I had a crappy camera and not my good one. But the day was clear with very little wind or haze and a high temperature of about 60 degrees. Perfect.

The third picture is of the mine site (see the little pan still there and the boards covering the pit). The fourth picture is down the pit.