The New Road

Really bad

This is really bad.

Story idea

I woke up with this stuck in my head. In the first part of the story we meet a young college professor who writes his first book. It's a story about two friends who went to war. It's a story of sacrifice as one dies trying to rescue the other.

In the second part of the story and older struggling businessman finds the professors book, which was a bestseller. He remembers that he told the story to the other man when they were in college. He angrily writes his own version about the story. His version is a story of one of a friendship betrayed.

In the last chapter we meet one of the grandkids of the original professor, who is now attending the same college that her grandfather attended. While she was working at the local paper she finds in the archives of the paper a small version of the original story. The byline lists both men. She takes it to her grandfather who reads it. He takes it to his long-estranged friend, now in the hospital dying. The dying man reads it aloud. It's a story about two young men, their plans for the futures, their struggles and their enduring friendship that endures through their whole lives.

Amazon reviews

I've got 90 Amazon book reviews, and I'm currently ranked 3,600. Woo hoo! I'm sneaking up on the century mark.

Paddy's art show

Paddy had an art show in his coffee shop this weekend. I took a bunch of pictures. One may show up in the Tri-City Voice.

Once upon a time

We were Greenleef-5-0673.

Megan and the cows

Getting off of the political beat for a moment. Here is a view into my daughter's world:

Everything is a 'dee' to her. Cows. Birds. Planes. Trees. Me. Lori. Herself. Ripley. Sadie. Everybody and everything. I took her on a hike to see some cows yesterday and she was excited to see and chase the dees all around the paddock.

Why vote for Bush?

I live in California. Which is firmly Democrat and will be a Kerry state. Bush doesn't campaign here. He raises money and then flies off to Ohio and other swing states to try and win re-election. So while my vote will only ensure a Kerry victory in the state, I think it's important to try and convince whoever I can, particularly in swing states, to vote for Kerry instead of Bush.

So I got to thinking, why would someone vote for Bush? I came up with some reasons and some rebuttals. I've probably missed a few, but I think I got the major ones.

Fiscal conservatism: You are being misled. Republican administrations talk about small government but then spend on a blank check basis. Bush has turned a surplus into record deficits in his four years. It's true that the economy was already dropping when Bush came into office, but his questionable economic policies have done little to create a turnaround and have cost the government billions. What will he do in the next four years when he knows that his administration has no chance at re-election and he can govern at will?

Strong military: The true war on terrorism is an asymmetric fight where traditional military might is not appropriate. The last Democratic administration focused on intelligently using the money to build a more advanced force and it has proven a wise course.

Issues like prayer in the schools or abortion: These are local issues, opinions vary widely by region, and while the help of the President is important you will have a larger impact on these issues with your votes in the House, Senate and in the local races. The President has specific powers and you have to think of your vote in that context. If you have any doubts at all about the war in Iraq you should judge your vote for President on that basis.

Supporting our troops in the field: Both of the candidates will most likely bring a sensible end to the war in Iraq and bring the troops home. The question is, do you want to keep your trust in the current administration, the same administration that got us into the current problems in Iraq? Or one who will take the fight to our legitimate enemy, Al Qaeda, who has only gotten more support from our invasion of Iraq.

Same sex marriage: Again, this is mainly a local issue. You could argue that you need a President to get an amendment. But how likely is that with a 50/50 House and Senate? The current crop of Democrats are moderates. They won't be legalizing gay marriage across the country. So while you won't get an amendment, which you probably won't get even with a second Bush term, you will not get legalized gay marriage with the Democrats either.

Switching horses midstream: There is a war on. Shouldn't we be patriotic and support the president in this time of national crisis? If that were the case every President looking for re-election would declare war in the fourth year of his term. We have to be critical now more than ever because we are choosing whether we want him to lead us for another four years. Was it the right decision to go to war? Only those on the extreme far right consider the case for war to be without fault. Do we have a good plan for getting out? Not from the start, and the administration hasn't come up with any clear plan to date. Now we are depending on the U.N., once the enemy of progress, to bail us out. Is he a good commander-in-chief? He certainly looks good a in flight suit. But has he ever fought? No. Have Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz fought? No. Most of the men behind the war have never fought. They are Chickenhawks (people who call for war but have never served.) Kerry served with distinction. If anyone understands the imperative of getting the job done and getting the troops home, it is him.

This coming election will be about the war. If you firmly believe that we were right to go to war, that there were weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam had direct links to Al Qaeda, then vote for Bush. If you want to get out of the war, and get back to pursuing the murderers in Al Qaeda with no hidden agenda, vote for Kerry.

Woodward Compressed

I'm reading the Woodward book at the moment. It's great. If you want the compressed into a single page version check out the Slate article.

Costly war

There was a lot of coverage about war costs this morning on the news. The defense department thinks that keeping the additional 20,000 troops on the front line for another three months is going to cost an additional 700 million.

So lets say we need between two times and four times the number of troops, in total, to secure and stabilize Iraq. How much would that cost? Taking the original 700 number, doubling it (conservative) to get troops to the theatre, multiplying it by four to get to a year, and then multiplying that by between 6 to 18 to double to quadruple the force load, and you get... The price of the war will require an additional 33 to 100 billion, on troops alone, to secure Iraq, for the next year. So let's say it's 50 billion per year for troops, I would say that number is probably double to quadruple that in reality.

What people don't realize is that, while our military is the best in the world, it's also the most expensive. Every times an insurgent with a $300 RPG files a $30 shell at one of our Humvees we probably incur about $500K in damages, transportation for the injured, medical care, reporting and long term benefits.

This is going to be an expensive war at a level which we have never seen.

Quote of the day

"It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it."

-Robert E. Lee

That was a moment

From one of the best movies ever. (Not safe if you have your speakers on).

Side light

When I was in Chicago I stopped by a photo shop on a lark. I wanted a cable that would go between the speedlight shoe on the camera and the speedlight. The Bay Area was sold out but it turned out this particular camera store had one. Woo hoo!

I didn't have a chance to play with it in Chicago, but we have been playing with it here. You control the emphasis of the light by moving it around the subject. Underneath give you an erie cast. From the top gives the photo a formal feel. From the sides (and slightly above) give you nice portrait shows. Then you control the amount of light and shadow by moving the flash either close or further away.

It gives the images a portrait feel in any setting. Obviously a portrait studio has more lights, but I think people are used to the straight-on flash provided by point and shoot cameras. So moving the light source around gives a really unique feel to the shot.

Disturbing Dreams

I've got another cold, which is probably the best I could have expected when I went to Chicago with a group of people, all of whom were sick already or got sick during the trip. Anyway, I've been taking Nyquil at night to get a good nights sleep and it seems that when I take medication I get the craziest and most disturbing dreams.

Last night my dream was set in a Japanese nuclear submarine in World War II (which is crazy). In the dream the Japanese had built the extremely experimental submarine with an unprotected nuclear core. It malfunctioned and irradiated everyone and it became an instant horror movie that I was watching but not participating in. The images were very graphic and disturbing.

Thankfully the dream only came as the last thing before I woke up. So I still got a good sleep, but it makes me a little concerned about the effect that this stuff has on my dreams at night.

Car Talk Puzzler

The puzzler on Car Talk on KQED was kind of fun today. Turns out it was an old episode. So it's not this weeks puzzler.

A guy walks into his friends barber shop and gets a cut. He asks his friend, the barber, how much it is and the barber responds that it's free. They argue for a little bit and the barber decides that the friend can go to the register, double the amount in the register, then subtract $20 and leave that amount. The friend does that and another customer comes in.

The barber does that cut and tells that customer to do the same thing. Double the amount in the register, subtract twenty and leave that amount.

Another customer comes in and does the same thing. Then one more. Then a fifth customer, and when he goes to the register he says he can't do it, because there is nothing in the register.

The question is, how much was in the register to start with that would have the register get down to zero on the fifth customer.

Anyway, I figured it out, so I'll post the answer in a couple of days. Feel free to put the answer in the comment on this post if you can figure it out in the meantime.

Kill Bill 2

I saw Kill Bill 2 last night with Mel. It was great. David Carradine can actually act! So can Uma Thurman. I was very impressed. There was a lot more talking in this, which I think favors Tarantino. He does action well, but he does talking an intricate plots even better.

Megan's first activism

Megan is down with the Move On Bake Sale:

More pictures are here.

Chicago pictures

Here are the pictures from Chicago, organized by day. The last day was a trip to Evanston:

Day one was mainly walking the area around the hotel. As a team we spent some time at the top of the John Hancock building, where I took some panoramic shots.

Day two I took a hike into the central area of Chicago, where the Sears tower is. On that walk I got some panoramic pictures of the real downtown area.

Day three I took an evening trip into Oak Park, which is where the Frank Lloyd Wright house is and about thirty five of his buildings. I took pictures of his house and a few more.

On day four I took the purple line into Evanston and found our old house where I only spent a couple of years but my sister and brother spent many years. Even though I had only spent a little while there and had no large memories of the place I was able to find the house quite easily. Evanston was by far the nicest portion of Chicago I saw on the trip. I can see why my parents chose Swarthmore for their next house. There are a lot of similarities between the two places; colleges, big houses, friendly people.

The web does these pictures little justice. The panoramic shots are enormous and very detailed. If my web quotas go north sometime I would upload better versions of the panoramas.

Bake back the Whitehouse

Move On is hosting bake sales across the country to fund raise for the DNC today. Bush gets his donations in the thousands of dollars from millionaires. Move On is trying to get their money with $2-3 dollar cookies. Love it.

I read three books recently; Against All Enemies, Worse Than Watergate, and The Price of Loyalty. They have convinced me that a second Bush term would be far worse than the first. Unleashed from re-election interests Bush could take his insane policies to the next level. They know Cheney could not run, and they aren't going to change out the VP this time around.

Chicago

I'm in Chicago. It's cold. Very, very cold.

Pictures will be on the way tonight.

Panoramas

Marsha and Jon are visiting from L.A. Marsha came up with a great idea to make a panorama with Megan peaking out from both sides of the mini-fence in the backyard.

This is one of Megan's favorite games. She runs behind the fence and then watches as you say, "Where is Megan? Where is Megan?" Then she pops out from the side and laughs and laughs.

Come one now

Who thinks this stuff up?

QuickSilver

I downloaded QuickSilver as an alternative to LaunchBar. I really like it. I particular like the Bezel mode where the commands pop up in a similar fashion to Alt-tab.

If you aren't familiar with these utilities, they are 'launchers'. Their job is to make it easy to get to any application (or important resource) from the keyboard. For example, you hit Apple-Space, then 'i' and 'p' and that will bring 'iPhoto' up in the command window. You then hit 'return' and iPhoto starts up or activates. If you want to mail someone you type in Apple-Space then 'l', 'o', 'r' and you will probably see Lori's email address. If you hit return it will bring up mail with a new message addressed to Lori. And all if this is from anywhere. You could by writing a Word document, and do Apple-Space and start this up.

QuickSilver also has iTunes browsing, clipboard buffering, an application shelf, and it's free.

The only downside is that it's Panther only.

Megan's first haircut

Some pictures from Megan's first haircut.

How do I spell quagmire?

I. R. A. Q.

Here is the situation as I understand it.

• There are between 10 and 14 cities in a state of civil unrest
• Both Shia and Shiite's are currently fighting against us
• There are, according to Rumsfeld, 4,000-6,000 fighters in the Mahdi army alone
• The new Iraqi security forces are dissolving
• Five members of the coalition of the willing have pulled their troops out over the weekend

How much worse is this supposed to get before we call this a quagmire?

Plus, once this current crisis gets resolved we have the handover deadline to meet.

I'm really worried about our troops out there. If they go in hard it is going to be very bloody, and if they back off it's going to be worse.

We need to impeach Bush and go back to the international community for help and support to get ourselves out of this senseless nightmare.

Finally getting back to it

I was out of it all day yesterday. Some gut bug that Megan picked up last week and gave to Lori and me came back to me with a vengeance on Sunday night. Thankfully this morning it was pretty much gone and I was able to get back into work. There is nothing worse then bad afternoon TV. Even the 999 channels of digital don't help. The only saving grace was The Daily Show on Comedy Central, which is off-the-hook funny.

New pictures of Megan and the rest of the family from the weekend.

Hellboy

Saw Hellboy with Mel last night. He didn't see the point of the movie. I thought it was good saturday afternoon popcorn fair. It had a Ghosbusters/Men In Black feel to it, which was a welcome change from the usual super-hero stuff.

Life is Good