Bradley Huber’s Site

http://amazingwow.org/miracles-of-modern-science/ep/

Miracles of Modern Science is a band that uses classical instruments (violin, cello, etc)… I really like their sound, kind of a string quartet version of Andrew Bird meets Arcade Fire meets some undetermined third band I can’t place my finger on…

But the 4 song EP is free. So why not download it and give them 15 minutes of your time.  I wish they had a full album out, because it would probably be very good.

Anyways, this is just my gut reaction. I’ve only listened to it 3 times so far, but it hasnt grown old on me yet.

I was one wobbly pin away from a 300 - a perfect game.  I got the first 6 strikes, but in the 7th frame I left one pin. It was wobbling. It had a chance to fall over, but decided not to. I then got 5 more strikes in a row, each one mocking me with increasing ferocity about the one I missed in the 7th frame.  11 strikes in one game. I have never done that before. Thanks to the 9 in the 7th frame, that left me with *only* a 267 - which is still my best game ever.

I also bowled a 660 series. My best series ever. So I broke both records in one night. I was looking back through previous entries to verify that a 660 was indeed my highest, and saw that I just broke 600 for the first time about a year and a half ago. And only hit 600 for the second time a year ago.  Now, I’ve hit 600 maybe a dozen times.

Looking over previous posts, there was a time where I was amazed that I was maintaining a 173 average… Just last season I kept a 183 for 13 weeks.  And this season, after 7 weeks, I’m at a 192.  I 192 average after 7 weeks??? I find it incredibly weird that I am actually doing this good, and it isnt just some fluke- I am maintaining it.

Just two years ago I was at a 163 average, and now I’m beating it by 30 pins.  At this rate I will be bowling only 300 games before I’m 35.

Logic.

One side has shown an ability to clearly and rationally discuss the issues, and the other side has shown a complete inability to move past smears and name-calling.  No, Obama is not my Messiah. No, I do not think he is perfect. No, I do not think he is going to enact every single thing he has talked about in his campaign. No, by defending Obama against smears like “muslim”, and “he isnt even a citizen”, I am NOT drinking the kool-aid and walking the party line. I am being LOGICAL.

The bevy of insults thrown towards Obama these last few weeks has been insane. I mean, literally insane- how can people who I have previously thought to be intelligent human beings honestly be repeating these incredibly ridiculous lies? It can only be insanity. I dont mean “Oh, I disagree with Obama’s tax plan, so I am voting for McCain,” or “I feel like McCain would be better on national defense.” Whatever, that’s fine.  That’s you applying your personal beliefs rationally to the candidate’s positions. I am 100% for that.  I would rather support someone voting McCain for that reason than someone voting for Obama purely because of race. But this isnt a racial thing for me. It’s a logical thing. When you have people claiming Obama is a Marxist or socialist who dont even know what the word means, it has stopped being about logically applying beliefs to the issues and has once again become about succumbing to Republican fear.

I’m tired of fear. America is tired of fear. But being tired of fear doesnt mean we are weak or unpatriotic. In fact, that is just one more example of the illogical nature of the far right. That somehow being against removing civil liberties and illegally invading countries makes us unpatriotic. That if youre not with them 100%, youre against America.  I’m ready for a President that will once again restore the ability for all Americans to voice their opinions without their government deeming them to be unpatriotic. I’ve read a LOT of crazy things about Obama recently.  But I have been able to shrug them off as crazy right wing lunatics because barring some sketchy voter fraud, Obama will win. And these guys will whine and whine, and claim this is finally the end of the United States of America, blah blah blah… Like I said - insane.

But the thing that sparked this rant on logic was a post I saw from some crazy far-rightwing guy who claims McCain will win. His proof? A link to 2004 polling results from the day before the election that show Kerry being predicted to win 298 - 231. Apparently the fact that some people predicted Kerry to win the EV in 2004 means that since Obama is predicted to win the EV in 2008, he will lose. But from his VERY SAME LINK, the national poll displayed Kerry: 49.4%, W: 49.1%

Notice something a little different there between 2004 and 2008?  Yes, it’s true that in both cases the Democrat is predicted to win… BUT if you spotted the part where Kerry was only polling .3% ahead, compared to Obama is 6% ahead, you are smarter than pretty much anyone who watches Fox News, reads Drudge Report, etc.

Plus, this isnt a national election- it’s 50 state elections. Go here: http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/nov/nov01.html  Look at the state polls for Florida and Ohio.  Yes, Electoral-Vote.com is predicting them to go Kerry, but shows it is VERY VERY close, as in <5% in the polls and still within the margin of error. Eventually, these 2 states went W, and he won.

If you spotted yet another difference between 2004 and 2008, you are MUCH smarter than all those guys I listed before. Kerry didnt break 270 EVs with the states where he was outside the margin of error.  Obama, however, has.  By a lot. This means, logically, Obama is statistically guaranteed to win, barring some incredibly bad poll data across DOZENS of polls (incredibly unlikely), or voter fraud (slightly more likely). Yet the far right apparently subscribes to the Huckabee-Math.

So really, it comes down to logic. Which candidate do I support? The one who has shown the ability to reason? Or the one whose supporters think that just because a poll was wrong (yet within the margin of error) in 2004, that means ALL polls will be wrong in 2008, despite an incredibly different set of circumstances?  As someone who tries to be very logical about everything, *this* was what has pissed me off the most about the far right.  Everything else I have just been able to shrug off as the far right being brainwashed by ideology. But a failure to understand cold, hard numbers? Facts staring them RIGHT IN THE FACE? It’s just ridiculous. There is a complete disconnect from reality. It’s like they’re staring at an apple and calling it a purple cat with five tails. I think the far right has officially crossed the line from “brainwashed by ideology” into “insane”. Granted, it was a thin line to begin with. But they’re there.

Fringe is the newest JJ Abrams show.  I’m still unsure how to feel about it. It feels like it wants to be the X-Files, except more quirky, more hip, and tied to a more plausible conspiracy plot line.  But I dont know if it works. Dr. Bishop seems to be quirky for the sake of being quirky. “I had to tell you something important… I want the strawberry pancakes!”  Wow, how quirky! I mean, I know he was in a mental institute for 17 years, but I dont know how many “delightfully quirky” character flaws I can take before it becomes too much. He just switches from zany and wacky to serious mad scientist too often and too fast to be believable. Maybe if they set his character up to where each episode we caught glimpses that maybe he isnt the whackjob he shows himself to be, and the innocent genius who suffered an unfortunate lab accident, and instead showed that maybe it’s all a cold, calculated act to allow him to continue his dangerous and unethical experiments, *THEN* maybe he would be an engaging characgter.

But I doubt theyre going to take that road with him. Instead, theyre going to place all the crazy twists and turns with the mysterious “pattern” and the myterious corporation who always seems to be connected.

Unfortunate. Perhaps the main thing I dont like about the show, which will cause me to stop watching, are the two main characters. The other guy from Dawson’s Creek just sits there and makes wise cracks *yawn* and Agent Dunham always look either confused, or concerned, or both.

Fringe wants to be a better XFiles so badly, but their main characters dont have the connection of a Mulder and Scully, or the compelling conspiracy of a mysterious cigarette smoking man and shadow government. And who lets an FBI rookie on to a team investigating a high level conspiracy??

Anyways, I’ll watch it for now, but it’s perilously close to losing me.

PLUS

We evacuated to Tuscaloosa, AL. The drive took TWENTY HOURS. It’s normally 4.  We left at 4am, and by 4:15am Indy had thrown up twice in the car. Luckily, he was fine the rest of the way. He really wanted to sleep in my lap pretty much the whole time… not really a good idea with a 45lb dog.

My mom’s cousin is a Jefferson parish sherriff. So even though no one can get back into town, she was able to call him to check on our house while he was patrolling.  He walked around and said everything looked fine, except one side of fence was blown down.

That’s no big deal, because it was the old fence, not the new fence we *just* put up 3 weeks ago. And I’m happy we got lucky with our windows since we didnt board any of them up.

Now we just have to worry about getting back to Kenner. We may leave on Friday, even if New Orleans is opened up Wednesday or Thursday. Mainly because thats when our hotel reservation ends, and I dont want to sit in traffic for 20 hours again.

New Orleans has been Street Viewed.

Not just New Orleans, but Baton Rouge, all the way to Slidell, to Picayune MS, to Thibadoux. Even the Causeway.  24 miles of bridge - street viewed!

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=30.180748,-90.458679&spn=1.531353,2.664185&z=9&layer=c

Have fun looking around all of southeast LA.

For the last two or three years, they’ve been doing work on I-10 to widen it. During the school year, the commute would take between 45 minutes on a good day and 80 minutes on a bad day. In the summer, when traffic is lighter, it takes between 35 and 55 minutes.

Last week, they finally opened up one of the extra lanes they were working on.  From the time I leave my house, to the time I get to my building: 20 minutes.  TWENTY minutes. I don’t know how the school year traffic will affect it, but as of right now, I *LOVE* the new Interstate.

They’ve only opened up that one lane going in one direction for now, but they are just months from having all lanes open. I am looking forward to a time when a 30 minute commute is a BAD day. I can’t believe how excited I am about something as silly as roadwork, but the potential to only spend an hour a day in the car as opposed 2 and a half is very cool.

And I can only imagine that on the weekends, I should be able to get from my house to the city in about 10-15 minutes. Nice.

All I wanted to know was how to get a list of databases in Pear. Googling for “pear list of databases” or “pear SHOW DATABASES” (which is the MySQL command) returned page upon page of useless crap. I dont even know how I found the real answer.

To display a list of databases on a server using PearDB, emulating the MySQL ‘SHOW DATABASES’, you just need to run $dao->getListOf(’databases’);

A pretty simple function, but impossible to find unless you search for it by name almost. I’m writing a pretty neat script for work, that will install a company-developed website plugin which usually requires 45 minutes of configuration work, which we do about a dozen of per week, just by typing ‘install plugin_name’.  One of the steps requires creating a database for the site, and creating a few tables. I first need to check if the database exists, then if it doesnt, create it.

When I was in grad school, had I stayed for a PhD, my dissertation probably would have been some kind of usability/interface analysis of candidate websites in election years (And, I may still do this some time, as I’m intrigued by how the internet affects and is used by political campaigns). And now that I am a web developer, this article is especially interesting:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/25/42551/8471

Basically, it’s a look at how Obama’s website was built versus McCain’s.  And oddly enough, the way the sites were built serve as pretty good metaphors for the candidates themselves. As a quick primer for the web-designally challenged, the standard practice for web sites these days is to have all your content seperated from your presentation.  That is, the content will be structured on one page (an HTML file), without any colors, formatting, layout, etc.  All of that stuff is added by an outside file (a CSS file).This way, you can change how your website looks by editing one single file, and the changes are made on every single page without having to edit every single page. It’s incredibly useful and easy.

Well, Obama’s site does that. Seperate content and presentation. This shows they hired a web developer who knows what the current best practices are for web design.  McCain’s site is a bunch of nested tables. Using nested tables for layout was conisdered bad form FIVE YEARS ago. And in the internet, that’s a LONG time. To be using practices outdated by 5 years means he may as well be sending 5 1/4″ floppy disks containing his website to everyone. I dont know who his web designer is, but 2000 called, and they want him back (that’s right, I’m using that joke - deal with it).

Also, Obama’s site animations are not flash-based, but rather jQuery. Flash is a proprietary thing, and may not be installed on everyone’s computer, and is basically a pain in the ass. Not to mention you have to buy the softwarep ackage to develop it.  jQuery is a free, open-source javascript library. Meaning it’s community maintained,  and runnable on every web browser (provided the user hasnt turned jabascript off). McCain’s site uses a bunch of proprietary javascript libraries… meaning his web developer bought javascript libraries. I mean, who buys javascript code in this day and age when you have free, open source libraries like jQuery, prototype, or scriptaculous?

I just find it funny that looking at their site technologies, Obama’s site uses a 21st century, best practices, open-source, accessible approach, while McCain’s site uses a 20th century, bloated, proprietary approach. One site/candidate is up-to-date, in touch with the times, aware of the future. And one site/candidate is old, and stuck in the past.

Not that McCain can even probably figure out how to find his way around a computer to get to his website, but that’s beside the point.