An eccentric's views on politics, philosophy, spirituality, and technology

State of affairs

akerasi — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:11:11 +0000

This is just a personal log entry about my state of affairs.

1. I’m feeling somewhat better than I have in a while. Still not perfect, but I had a strong downturn for a while, and I finally got the upswing. A lot of it, honestly, seems to be my newly acquired PDA, an ipaq 3870 w/expansion dock… a truly mobile internet tablet, that also plays my music and games, is a wonderful thing. I’m glad I got it instead of a PDA phone, as I don’t have to worry when it runs out of battery power. Otherwise, things are finally moving forward again… and the snow arriving helps. Snow arriving, to my body, seems to be like the end of winter/beginning of summer for most people…

2. I need to spend more time with people. Especially people that make me think. Preferably people who practice metaphysics, play games, and otherwise seek new things and try to improve their minds.

3. My sleep schedule needs to get closer to most peoples’ normal, rather than my normal (which means being up all night and sleeping till noon). Even sleeping CONSISTENTLY from 2 AM to 10 AM would work well… but 1 AM-9AM would be better still.

4. I need to take some time out to meditate/work metaphysics soon, hopefully tonight. Working with technology is good, too ^^. Doing both would be wonderful.

5. My attempt to finish college WILL require a lot of work and administrative crap. If I can’t bull through it, I shouldn’t do it anyway… so I need to just buckle down and do it. Hopefully the people around me won’t make it harder… they’re good at that, ESPECIALLY when their intention is to “help”.

6. I wonder where that bloody serial cable is, so that I can convert my new PDA to linux… it might work better there, as I’m starting to run into limitations under Windows Mobile 2003.

7. It’s time to finally form a semi-official group of seekers. If you know what I mean by that and are driven to contact me about it, you might be someone I want to include. Hell, you may be the reason I posted this publicly ;)… so don’t be shy.

That’s it. I’m done for now. More later, maybe even later today.

Compiz Fusion is released

akerasi — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:58:16 +0000

Compiz Fusion, a window manager re-integrating the Beryl fork into Compiz, has been released as version 0.5.2. More details here. This release is a major one for the best eye-candy WM for XWindows, re-merging both development forks of Compiz into one coherent whole. It looks pretty good now, yet there is a lot of room for improvement… the Open Source community will provide the improvements over time, like always. As a Linux user myself, I’m excited to see what happens with this. I tend to use more minimalist window managers, myself, but we’ll see if this release is worth using.

Think Ron Paul will win the nomination? Put your money where your mouth is and make 22-to-1.

akerasi — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:23:46 +0000

Intrade.com, the trading site for world events, rates Ron Paul at having a 4.6 percent chance to win the Republican primary. This means that if you were to buy shares of this now, you could make 22-to-1 return on your investment if he wins the primary, not to mention what you could make on other bets expecting him to win the election. Good luck!

Karl Rove resigns.

akerasi — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:16:28 +0000

Apparently, Karl finally noticed the excrement about to fall into the whirling blades. Karl Rove has resigned, and will be out of office by the end of the month. More information here. I’m mildly surprised that he finally threw in the towel, but see it as a sign of prosecutions and convictions to come within the Bush Administration. I expected Gonzales to be the first to resign or be forced out of his office. I don’t know if it’ll be a good thing, having Karl out of the White House, though. The policies there may actually get worse, rather than better.

Remember that Straw Poll yesterday? If you watch Fox News, Ron Paul wasn’t even in it!

akerasi — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:36:56 +0000

As you may have read yesterday, there was a “straw poll” in Iowa for the Republican presidential candidates. Mitt Romney won, Ron Paul got a respectable 5th… yet according to Fox News, Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul don’t exist, so they didn’t even list them in the poll! More details here. I wonder if anyone who’s not a right-wing religious zealot has any respect for Fox News anymore…

Iowa straw poll results and controversy

akerasi — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 01:38:56 +0000

First, the official results:

1: Mitt Romney, 4516 votes

2: Mike Huckabee, 2587 votes

3: Sam Brownback, 2192 votes

4: Tom Tancredo, 1961 votes

5: Ron Paul, 1305 votes

6: Tommy Thompson, 1009 votes

7: Fred Thomson, 231 votes

8: Rudy Giuliani, 183 votes

9: Duncan Hunter, 174 votes

10: John McCain, 101 votes

11: John Cox, 41 votes

Ron Paul’s showing is pretty impressive, and John McCain’s and Rudy Giuliani’s remarkably underwhelming. However, the results are only the beginning of this story. The poll used the Diebold machines recently decertified in California for elections, and at least one of the machines malfunctioned, requiring a hand recount. Due to this, and the possibility of other malfunctions, these results should probably be taken with a grain of salt. I wonder who it was that chose and set up the machines used… and who they back in the upcoming primary.

How we long for the days when our country had morals

akerasi — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:51:35 +0000

I’m not talking about Christian morals here, either. I’m talking about basic human rights. It’s finally coming out, like in this story here, that our capture and torture of a Canadian citizen really did happen, and Canada even knew about it and wanted to protect our administration by keeping it quiet. This is, in a word, deplorable.

How is somebody not being prosecuted or impeached over this? I honestly don’t understand why our administration believes it has the right to torture people. No other administration believed that, ever. At the very least, this story should be another nail in the coffin of Alberto Gonzales’s career. Yet our esteemed President was recently given more power to continue his witch hunt on terrorism, rather than rebuked publicly. Things like this makes me wonder who owns Congress… and why they allowed a few honest people to get into it.

New York Times reports on Ron Paul supporter’s plans to catch Romney’s bus

akerasi — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:40:53 +0000

In the story here, the New York Times political blog reports on the plans of some Ron Paul supporters to take advantage of Mitt Romney’s offer of a bus to Ames and a free “voting ticket” for the straw poll. Although it does get him more publicity, the story seems to be an attempt to discredit the honesty and intergrity of Ron Paul supporters.

I’m amazed that the Times considers a plan like this news, especially when it isn’t part of Ron Paul’s campaign, but just something some of his supporters are planning on doing independently. In my opinion, this shows that the mainstream media is getting a little scared of the affect Ron Paul might have on the election. People of Iowa, please don’t let Mitt Romney and Big Media buy the Iowa straw poll… buy your own ticket, make your own trip to Ames, and vote for Ron Paul!

SciFi channel’s Flash Gordon was actually worth watching!

akerasi — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:39:35 +0000

I’m much more of a reader of Science Fiction than a watcher, but occasionally I watch things, if often only to see how badly they screwed up the book (like any movie form of anything Philip Dick). However, I am known to watch the occasional movie or show, and I decided to give SciFi channel’s Flash Gordon remake a try. Amazingly enough, I enjoyed it.

An hour-and-a-half (TV time, not actual time) pilot episode premiered tonight, and was actually worth watching. They seem to be going for a far more serious bent, rather than the often unintentional comedy feel of the original. The actors act believably, the effects are pretty but don’t get in the way, and the sets on Mondo are well-done but not overdone. The storyline hasn’t gone very far yet, but it looks like it might be interesting. This one could be as good as their Battlestar Galactica, but takes an entirely different direction… watch it if you can ;).

An impressive display of bigotry on the floor of the United States House of Representatives

akerasi — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:30:08 +0000

The story here describes a good example of the Republican party and their blatant bigotry towards any religions other than Christianity. Bill Sali, a Republican from Iowa, complained about a Hindu leader offering the opening prayer, as well as disparaging a Muslim congressman and threatening hellfire and damnation for the United States due to allowing non-Christians to participate in the House of Representatives. Apparently, the separation between Church and State is getting thinner every day…