Stunslinger.com Blog

That’s right, one score ago I entered academia, and I haven’t stopped until now.  This week I turned in my last paper and walked out of my last formal class after 20 straight years of school.  Now, I know that I will have to take continuing education classes, and if psychologists get prescription privileges I will be forced to get another masters… but no matter what, this week was the ending of school for the forseeable future.

It’s weird, I actually will miss it.  When people find out that I’m getting my doctorate they routinely make comments like, “man, don’t you hate still going to class?” or “there’s no way I could go to school after undergrad!”  But for some strange reason I really enjoy it.  Sure the busy work is annoying and it’ll be nice to have true relaxation time without ten homework projects waiting on the horizon.  Yes, when I was up at 2am trying to finish a paper I wasn’t exactly loving life… but if I had the chance to do it over again with all the good and the bad, I’d definitely do it.

I think there’s some element of predictability and safety that I’m clinging to as well.  Now I have to go out and actually put what I’ve learned to the test in a career.  Granted it’s a field that I love and have enjoyed doing part-time for free, so I think I’ll switch my love to actually working, but it’s different.

Here’s to a new period of life.  Oh, and I’m turning 26 next week, so yay me.

Perhaps I’m coming late to the party, but I just came across the idea that Wordpress, with it’s little “Write Page” feature can be used as a nice Content Management System which can allow Joe Consumer to manage their website without me spending hours writing a whole system in PHP.  So it saves me effort, and the client money, and still allows them to have a flexible and nice looking, custom website.  All of this is, of course, assuming that I do my work as a designer and write good CSS to match my design.  Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

In fact, I’ve been working on a redesign of my web design company’s website, and I think I will make my first project making my site run off of Wordpress.  Since you may be asking, “What’s the point of using Wordpress over a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or iWeb?”  Well, WordPress has great code that is not bloated and is fully XHTML compliant…plus it’s a true Content Management System as opposed to a code editor, which is what Dreamweaver and iWeb are.  Not to mention the fact that iWeb generates about 6 times more lines of code than is necessary for the website, ugh.  Plus, Dreamweaver is expensive, WordPress is free.  WordPress appears to give the right amount of control to the end user (Joe Consumer), without letting them completely wreck the good semantic code the site is built on.

I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Oh, I must say, this light dawned on me by stumbling across Matt Brett’s web site (he designed the Good Riddance website, which I was browsing).  He does great work, and when I saw that he uses WordPress, I was pleasantly surprised.  Kudos to Matt Brett!

So I’m a pacifist.  Pacifism, for me, is believing that we should strive toward an ideal.  I value every human life, be that person born in the US, Vietnam, or Iraq.  I believe that it is a tragedy when people die, regardless of who they are.  As a Christian, I believe that our example is to respond to violence with love, as love for God and others is the highest commandment.  Sometimes I think parts of Christianity lose sight of that (e.g. Pat Robertson saying that we should assassinate world leaders), often very visible parts of Christianity.

Now, when I mention that I’m a pacifist, a number of people automatically assume one  (or both) of two things: First, I’m a coward.  Second, I don’t honor the troops and wish bad things on them.

As for the coward part, I may fall into that definition in some people’s book, although I think that it takes a great deal of strength to commit to not paying back violence when my whole human nature is telling me to strike back.  Regardless of this, I really am not too concerned if someone considers me a coward.  Their belief doesn’t define me.

As for not respecting the troops, I want to combat this head on.  I wish absolutely no ill will on those serving in any military capacity.  In fact, I pray for their safe return to this country, and I pray that they will not be forced to take another human’s life.  From a psychological perspective, taking a life is no small task.  While some people deal with this action and don’t show negative effects, many do and I don’t think anyone would argue that they are unchanged after taking a life.  I am not mad at soldiers for doing their jobs, even when it involves killing.  I don’t think they are horrible people.  I don’t think they’re evil.  I think that they are human beings who deserve love and respect, just as does everyone else in this world.

I could even play the “I have good friends in the military” card (because I do) or the “my grandfather served” card, but I don’t think that proves much of a point.  My point is that it is very possible to oppose war and be pro troops.

If this made you mad, I’m sorry.  If you’re currently serving, or are a veteran, my prayers are with you.  If you are a human being, my prayers are with you.

Well, the wife and I are traveling to Washington to attend a memorial for her grandmother, so I’ll be incommunicado for a bit.

I do have to say I was quite disappointed by Ghana’s win over the US in the World Cup.  I know it’s exciting for Ghana, but I was really hoping to see the US get into the top half of the competition.  Who knows what could have happened if we made it through and were able to field Mastroeni and Pope along with the rest of the team.  After the way they played against Italy, hanging on to the tie with two players out, who knows how far they could have gone?  Well, another four years and we’ll have a very different team.

Lately my wake to sleep ratio has been too far skewed towards wakefulness, so this will be a short post.

Today in class we were discussing the wonderful “nature versus nurture” debate, talking about whether or not biology drives our every experience.  A friend came up with a great analogy that I thought I’d steal and post on my blog share with you.  Your biological makeup is sort of like the hole cards in Texas Hold’em.  You’re dealt these two cards and it’s up to you to make the best hand possible, but there’s no changing them…they are what they are.  Then comes the five board cards, and your hand can be made or broken at this point.  Now, it’s easy to say that pocket Aces are automatically the best hand (and granted, I do love to see these when I play!), but sometimes a good old 10-2 wins the day.  There are hands with which it is easier to win, but you never know which cards will drop onto the board.  These board cards are the environmental situation into which you are placed.  Sometimes a crummy starting hand hits big on the river, and sometimes pocket Aces hold out.

It’s not perfect, but it certainly fit our discussion today.

Tomorrow I shall (hopefully) catch up on my World Cup watching.  I’ve got five games on my DVR, and the two most important games of group play are tomorrow (US has to beat Ghana, and Italy has to beat Czech Republic for the US to move on).  I must say, Spain impressed me quite a bit in their dominating game against Tunisia, and I can’t wait to see more of Brazil.  Safe money is on Brazil, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Spain gives them a run for it!

So I went to see Nacho Libre, the new Jack Black movie.  Ok, so I’m guessing because of all of the advertisements and cross-promotions you’ve heard of it by now.  It was enjoyable, I laughed, but overall I wouldn’t really call it more than “pretty good”.  I felt like they tried unsuccessfully to appeal to too broad of an audience (something School of Rock did very well).  In the rush to add more farts and obvious site gags they forgot to develop the characters and the story a bit more.  But, like I say, I did laugh quite a bit…so it was pretty good.  A moderately enjoyable time.

But what I really wanted to bring up was a minor sub plot in the movie and its implications about our society.  Granted, I’m taking a Gender Issues class so these types of things are primed for me to notice right now, but bear with me.  So Jack Black is not what we would consider traditionally handsome, in fact he’s on the plump side.  In Nacho Libre there is a romantic story line that develops with an attractive female coworker.  JB’s character has a sidekick who is sort of the Laurel to Black’s Hardy.  At a party an overweight woman becomes enamored with said sidekick and hilarity ensues as she tries to force him to make out with her while he runs away.  This is obviously funny because even the kids who thought JB farting was the highlight of the movie were laughing hysterically.  Why is it funny?  It isn’t so much that he doesn’t want to kiss a girl who is chasing him, rather it is that this obviously fat girl would dare to think that she could attract a man.  Jump cut to JB (no stranger to the dinner table himself, as is displayed by the large number of shots of him sans shirt) wooing the thin, attractive woman who is the “romantic lead.”  So, it’s funny if a fat woman wants to go out with a thin man, but romantic if a fat man wants to win over an attractive woman?

And remember, even the young children picked up on this.  This is the legacy our media is promoting to society: physical attractiveness is very important to women, not so much to men.  Try this: how many TV shows/movies have an overweight male lead romantically paired with an attractive female lead?  Ok, now how many have the reverse?  Now I know things are changing somewhat.  It’s more common to see a “hot guy” gratuitously walking around shirtless than it was in the past, but things are far from equal.

I know this isn’t funny or pleasant to read, but that’s kind of the point.

Well, we were hoping things would improve, but we just found out this evening that my wife’s maternal grandmother passed away today.  Needless to say we are quite sad about this, and we appreciate all the thoughts and prayers and support for the whole family during this time.

I’ve only been a member of this inlaw family for a few years, but I felt very welcomed, especially by my wife’s grandparents and it’s hard to say goodbye.  It’s hard to know that we’re stuck here for the work week, when we want to be up helping out the family.

So, I didn’t blog for two whole days.  Please don’t stone me…or worse yet, ignore me.  I will not be ignored, well…I guess I really have no say in the matter.

Anyway, yesterday the wife and I went to visit her family for a little get-together.  We drove a few hundred miles last night, gathered today and then drove home this evening.  Now, it’s supposed to be a simple little 3 hour drive.  And for the most part it was…until we were about 80 miles from home.  All of a sudden the 3 lane highway merged down to one lane and traffic crawled along at 8mph.  So there I am, geeking out to my nerdcore rap (MC Frontalot and MC Lars this trip), inching along the freeway, staring at two empty lanes to my left.  Apparently the Washington Department of Transportation needed space to store a whole mess of cones, so they picked 6 miles of I-5.  There was literally 6 miles (I was so bored I watched the mile posts creep by) of cones blocking off nothing.  No trucks, no men working, no potholes, no oil slicks, nothing.  Thankyou WDOT.  Finally, the last half mile had people working, but by that time I was actually speeding up (and had spent 45 minutes idling through The Great Cone Corridor).  Luckily, my wife was asleep in the passenger seat, so we had wonderful conversation.

In a weird contradiction, while we were up visiting the family in their part of the woods, we were driving on a 45mph road when all of a sudden the pavement stopped and it turned into gravel.  No signs, nothing.  Just, wham….crunch crunch crunch.  They couldn’t even be bothered to put up one sign that says, “Watch out, you’re about to be dumped off civilized concrete…maybe you should slow down a bit”.  So apparently the WDOT finds it appropriate to allow people to drive on roads that have no pavement whatsoever, but they can’t allow you to use all 3 lanes of a perfectly functioning highway.

And the family keeps telling us we need to move up there?!?  I’ll take Oregon’s giant potholes that randomly spring up overnight thank you very much.  At least we put up a “Bump” or “Dip” sign so that you can see it 2 seconds after you experience the aforementioned bump or dip.  That’s just common courtesy.

Ok, so I really like iTunes.  For a long time I was apprehensive about letting it have control of my mp3 collection (20+ gigs and growing), but after I bought my iPod, I gave in and let it run wild in the streets.  I very much enjoy it now, and I’m glad I switched from Musicmatch Jukebox.  Even though I do like it, I’ve thought of some features that would be nice additions to an already solid program:

• Right Click (or whatever Mac users do to bring up a context menu) on an album and be able to switch to viewing all the tracks on that album (like when I’m playing an individual artist’s song from a compilation, and then I decide I want to hear the whole compilation CD)
• Have a separate category (in the Artist section) for compilations.  On my iPod I can view all of the compilations I have correctly tagged, why not in iTunes?  Related to this, I can tell iTunes to keep compilation tracks in one folder, so I would like it to do the same with my tracks so that I don’t have a whole bunch of artists with only one track.
• Tag lookup.  I know this is controversial because it could be encouraging piracy, but you can also make a strong argument that I ripped a bunch of tracks before I got a good ripping program, and I would love to go through and have iTunes look up the CD information to retag everything properly (adding things I didn’t, like release year) and find the album art.  This is one area that Musicmatch has a leg up on iTunes.  They’ve had this feature for a long time, and it made my life easier.
• The last suggestion has to do with purchasing tracks.  How come when I purchase an album from the music store, I have to go find the artwork and add it to the tracks?!?  When I purchased the album, they showed me the artwork, so I know they know artwork exists…why make me go and get it?!?  I just paid for the album.  Not that I’ve ever downloaded tracks illegally, but I’ve known people who have, and they confirm that it is possible to have artwork embedded in the mp3s you download…why is iTunes behind the curve here?

So those are my humble ideas as to features I would love to see improved in iTunes.  And yes, I already downloaded a program that will search Amazon for the album art and then import it, but I think iTunes should just include it in their package.

So, for some reason (mainly because I’m laid up with some unknown stomach illness) I’m watching “My Coolest Years: Dirty Hippies” on VH1.  Ok, so I find it highly ironic that a show about coolness would include dirty hippies.  I’m no elitist jock, but hippies?  They smell like patchouli and dirt, and one time a dirty hippy “tipped” me when I worked at a gas station by playing me a song on his banjo.  Seriously.  Thanks, I’ll take the memory of that song with me as I go buy lunch with the tips of other out-of-state people who know what “tip” means.  (By the way, for those traveling through Oregon, it is not indeed customary to tip your gas attendant.)

So anyway, here’s this show with random “celebrities” talking about their life in high school as a hippy.  The typical discussions abound: how horrible they smelled, the atrocious personal hygeine, how retarded jocks are, how wonderful the Grateful Dead, Phish, and other bands who can’t figure out how to write a concise song are.  Then along comes Ann Coulter talking about how many Dead shows she went to.  Excuse me, did I write that correctly?  Ann Coulter, mouthpiece of radical conservativism and the woman who wrote in a book and then went on TV saying that the 9/11 widows are “witches” who are “enjoying their husband’s deaths”, talking about being a hippy and into the Grateful Dead?!?  Something does not compute.

As much as I like to detest dirty hippies, I would never insult them by lumping Ann Coulter in with them.  Although, knowing some hippies, they would probably welcome her into a drum circle as long as she didn’t harsh their buzz.

I need to go listen to August 8th by NOFX…