Sherri rolled into town yesterday unexpectedly. Awesome that the person with the slickest job is also the one most likely to go to visit pals unexpectedly. I don’t know if I’m capable of that level of spontenaity. I wish I was. In any case, it’s nice to see old friends unexpectedly. It’s nice to feel like the distance between Columbus and Bloomington isn’t so far, and it’s nice to feel like the experience and personal history contained in those places isn’t so far. Autumn is nostalgic but it’s also imbued with a feeling of motion and excitement which is a good foil, I think to the meloncholy of nostalgia. If all that’s left by the time all the leaves fall off the trees is my nostalgia, though, I feel like I’ll be in trouble.

I walked up to Chris’ house yesterday. He made us smoothies and we just sat in their eerily spartan living room and talked. It was nice and I think I’ll enjoy having so many friends in the neighborhood. Chris is excited about hanging out with a girl and he talks about it somewhat frankly, which is good actually, because I’m not sure if my akward secrecy about my feelings about such things is good. He’s trying to interpret interactions and is coming to the conclusion that staying up into the early hours of the morning talking in secret places must count for something. This makes sense, but I can’t help but remember a time when I decided that the intimacy of night time conversations did mean something, and that the something was a meaningful but occasionally frustrating platonic friendship and not that the other person had any romantic feelings towards me. The desire to have certainty rather than appreciating what you have is frustrating.

I’m looking forward to maybe riding in a courier race next week in Chicago. Short out of town trips seem exciting. I went to the skatepark yesterday and it was real fun. Maybe I’ll go see Avail tonight which should be interesting.

apparently, there is a marked increase in the number of new voters –

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/09/28/new_voters/index_np.html

http://messengers.org/events/events2004/2004.10.09.chicago.jpg
trackbiketerror@hotmail.com

I got an e-mail from MoveOn (more info available at http://www.moveon.org/tellthetruth/ probably) that had some quotations from various Republicans and military analysts about problems with the war in Iraq. These are some good sound bites to drop if you’re arguing with someone about the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College’s strategic studies institute

— and the top expert on Iraq there — said: “I don’t think that you can kill the insurgency”… “The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they’re all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed”… “Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators.”

General Odom [also] said: “This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn’t as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we’re in a region far more volatile, and we’re in much worse shape with our allies.”… “I’ve never seen [tensions] so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There’s a significant majority believing this is a disaster.”

^{The following quote is also really nice because it articulates in plain language the fundamentally frightening thing about Bush’s apparent motivations. I agree with this woman’s ultimate conclusion.}

Just as important are the opinions of those whose loved ones are serving in Iraq, like Martha Jo McCarthy, whose husband is on National Guard duty there. She says:

“Everyone supports the troops, and I know they’re doing a phenomenal job over there, not only fighting but building schools and digging wells. But supporting the troops has to mean something more than putting yellow-ribbon magnets on your car and praying they come home safely.”

“I read the casualty Web site every day and ask myself, ‘Do I feel safer here?’ No. I don’t think we can win this war through arrogance. Arrogance is different from strength. Strength requires wisdom, and I think we need to change from arrogance to solid strength.”

Nate forwarded me this warning about bicycle u-locks:

if you have a bike and use a U-lock to secure, please read this important
information.
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=44611

and

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/bik/42695645.html

I was going to post this in response to this thread on the plan-it-x message board, but I decided it was too didactic. Maybe someone will find it useful nonetheless.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/09/03/MNGGU8JAC01.DTL&type=printable

I think that this article provides an appropriate segue into what I found most distressing about the rhetoric of the RNC – the overwhelming focus on issues of “national security”.

One of the co-founders of the Code Pink, the activist group with which the women who infiltrated Bush’s speech were affiliated is quoted in the article as saying, “This is the third day in a row that Code Pink has penetrated the convention… My question to President Bush is, if he can’t secure his own convention, how can they bring security to their own nation?”

The purpose of her comment is well intended, I’m sure, but I think it shows how conservatives have forced even more radical activists to focus on the issue of national security.

I think this sucks. I kept hearing on the news about how national security was one of the key focuses of the RNC agenda and it made me really sad. There are so many real issues that Americans and people all over the world face – economic difficulties to utter poverty, environmental collapse, the reality of the consequences of war, and “national security” just comes off as contrived fear-mongering based more on prejudice and America’s general out-of-touch-ness with the rest of the world.

Taking lives for political leverage is deplorable, whether it’s toppling buildings in Oklahoma City or Manhattan or slaughtering school-children in Russia. I shouldn’t even have to make that disclaimer. It’s obvious. Still, I find it hard to believe that the American media, and presumably, many Americans, find this to be the single biggest political issue right now. At the very worst, if we make no changes to our security policy, we are only dealing with a sad reality that most of the rest of the world has had to deal with for ages.

And if making Americans safe from violence is so important, can anyone, upon distancing themselves from the fright-inducing hysteria of the media and political rhetoric, say that we’re any safer than we were 4 years ago? To me obtaining “security” involves looking at the realities of political conflicts, about how the world perceives us. “Security” requires that governments be honest about their intentions and sorry for their mistakes. “Security” means that policy makers must be willing to make concessions and compromises when they are for the best. Certainly, “security” is not the policies of the Bush administration that can best be describe as “kicking some ass.” This isn’t high school football, you fucks, these attitudes and the people who share them around the world endanger the lives of everyone, everywhere.

In times like this, people like to throw around a quotation by some American fore-father or another warning of the dangers of sacrificing liberty for security. In these times, it is not only freedom that has been sacrificed, but reason and compassion, and if there are any qualities that dignify humanity more than freedom, it must be those two. If we are people who are a little more concerned than the average American, as I’d like to think many people on this message board are, it is so important that we redefine “national security” not by how many civil liberties we can trample or prisoners we can torture to gain intelligence to bomb another village, but whether or not we can live beyond our legacy of prejudice and ignorance to the realities of the rest of the world, whether or not we can live without fearing the conflicting perspectives of our neighbors, whether or not we can raise our heads over the economic and social turbulence that we all face.

We have to forget notions of “national security” as they have been presented to us by the media and politicians not just for ourselves but for our families, our neighbors, our friends, our classmates, and our co-workers. I can’t think of any other non-issue that I feel holds so much ridiculous weight in the minds of the people I see around me. It is this issue, I think that makes the secretaries in the office where I work nod politely and say, “yes …”, “uh huh …” when my terrifying cubicle neighbor makes some proclamation about how Kerry is unfit to serve. It is this issue that stifles the outrage of otherwise reasonable people at all of the ignorance and psychosis of the last four years. I think that we must find a way to overcome “national security” if we are to have any hope of wresting any security at all from the Bush or Kerry administrations.

xo,
Geoff

from salon.com:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg hailed the Republican National Convention as an economic boon to the city, but it turned out to be a bust for the poor saps stuck serving the tight-fisted Bush girls. According to the New York Post’s Page Six, the debaucherous twins spent all night Wednesday getting trashed at the Manhattan club Avalon, and then stiffed the help. As the Post reports, “They [and their entourage of about 25] drank $4,500 dollars worth of drinks — bottles and bottles of vodka,’ says a club insider. ‘Then, having been comped all the alcohol, they left a $48 tip. We thought 1 per cent was kind of outrageous, considering they are the president’s daughters.'”

Leave aside what this says about the girls’ respect for working people. These kids and their friends swilled $180 worth of booze per person. A galloping sense of entitlement, apparently, isn’t the only thing that runs in the Bush family.

to juxtapose, here are some links to ther Kerry Children’s speeches at the DNC

vanessa – http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040729_1908.html
alexandra – http://www.dems2004.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=luI2LaPYG&b=131063&ct=162157

so of course it’s gushing grandstanding about their dad, but the fact that they seem articulate, empassioned, capable says something that John Kerry as a man is maybe more like my father, or certainly more like my father than the man who shares his first name.

Do check out dontjustvote.org. They make an important but obvious point. But also remember things like the little story about the Bush children. Maybe not on policy issues, maybe not on voting records, but somewhere in this fucked-up election, I am finding subtle but compelling differences in the candidates that makes voting important to me.

song explanation for “sometimes motion”

This is the last song I ever wrote as a resident of Columbus, Ohio. I wish it could have been a more eloquent elegy for a town that, despite its faults, has proven to be such a large part of the person I’ve become. I also feel like I should be somehow penalized for writing a song about being on tour and that uses the phrase “on the road”, as I’m sure I’ve made fun of that cheesy phrase many times myself. I wrote these words after having a conversation with BZ where we both decided that we would rather be on tour than watch our friends flee the city or mope sadly alone in their houses. It was hard to accept that something like going on tour, which has always seemed pretty unnatural to me, was a bigger part of my life, or maybe just made more sense at the time, than trying to struggle with my friends to be happy in Columbus, or the education that I had just finished, or the relationships that I was trying to figure out. So, this song, for me at least, isn’t really about being on tour, or traveling, in any more than a superficial sense. It’s about realizing that the life that you live is the one that you choose – that you can be happy with that life, or you can choose a different one, but you can’t do either of those things without first accepting what it is that your life has become.

song explanation for “promises”

This is simply about being hard on yourself when you don’t live up to your own expectations. It’s hard to find a balance between holding yourself to ideals or goals and being flexible.

• web form uinit testing that can handle javascript : jWebUnit
• creating a PDF with PHP
• creating a PDF with PHP for free!
• CSS for Printing
• Utility to power off windows xp system from a batch file
• Windows Resource Kit (use to install stunnel as services)
• Real-World PHP Security
• sending jabber message from php:

  http://phpjabber.g-blog.net/HomePage

• connecting access and mysql
• remote stunnel command:
  /usr/sbin/stunnel -P/tmp/ -p cert/mysql-server.pem -d 33306 -r localhost:3306

  stunnel local command:
  stunnel.exe stunnel.conf

• securing replication process
  i want to use stunnel to encrypt the data traveling between the computer at Boxcar and the MySQL server
• unicode in MySQL

  so i was having problems in my python script inserting data into the MySQL database from Access b/c I guess Access uses unicode and python was trying to automagically encode some weird character into latin-1 when doing the insert.

  This code shows the problem:

  >>> s = u'\u2026'
  >>> s.encode('latin-1')
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in ?
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2026' in position 0: ordinal not in range(256)
  >>> s.encode('ascii')
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in ?
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2026' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  >>> s.encode('utf-8')
  '\xe2\x80\xa6'
  

  this post proved to be a little helpful:

  http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-December/200090.html

  this document was even more helpful:

  http://python.active-venture.com/tut/node5.html

• raw string literals in python

  when constructing the DSN be sure to use r”DSNSTRING” because the \b was getting interpretted wrong

• I always suspected that the Boxcar Database design was cludgy. Check out http://vbmysql.com/articles/database-design/normalize.html for ideas on making it cleaner
• accessing ms access databases in python using ado
• Puffin – a framework for testing web applications. An article on Puffin is available here
• getting older versions of files out of cvs
• Introduction to SQL Joins and Subqueries
• printing out the contents of an array
  use print_r
• Tutorial on using PHPDoc
• backing up table structure only of mysql database

  mysqldump --no-data

• testing web applications – webunit
• allowing only SSL requests for a particular URL

       
        SSLRequireSSL
        
      

• basic mysql tutorial

  this is real helpful in refreshing my memory
  http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/Beginning-MySQL-Tutorial/

http://www.filesoup.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6780