Going into tonight’s Presidential Debate I expected that Senator Kerry, with his years of experience debating in the Senate, to be the better overall debater. I was not disappointed. I feel that Senator Kerry did a better job of presenting his points and of rebutting President Bush’s points.
Senator Kerry had better rhythm to his speaking, and overall was smoother in his presentation. President Bush is a less polished debater, and several times during his answers he seem to falter or stumble in his speaking. However, it was obvious that the President’s coaching team worked hard on the last 30-seconds of each answer period. As soon as the green, 30-second warning light came on there was a dynamic shift in President Bush’s presentation. He speech rhythm increased in speed and his delivery was more dynamic.
In terms of content I think Senator Kerry presented broader, and deeper answers to the questions. His platform appeared to be more extensive. President Bush had only a few themes, “wrong war”, consistent message, and war on terror. In terms of who would be a better president, I personally think broader is better, unfortunately I fear the country has a three-theme attention span.
On my score card Senator Kerry won the debate, he started strong and continued in the same vein throughout the debate. President Bush stumbled in his opening answer period, trying to thank the moderator and commiserating with Florida. His answers were often rambling and disconnected. Throughout the debate President Bush was less polished, seemingly less prepared.
I fear the country will only remember the few points President Bush repeated over and over and over again. I fear that the seemingly easier to digest answers from the President will win the election. In the end it really doesn’t matter who wins the debate when the entire country, and the world by proxy, loses.
I first saw this image over at i heart mena, and it made enough of an impression that I wanted to post it here.
The tracks of Jeanie and Francis as they cross Florida at frighteningly similar to my eye. Spooky.
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The image seen below is taken from my ShortStat page. It is the list of browsers that have visited my humble page in the past two weeks or so. All the browsers version are included here, i.e. each row is a summary row by browser type. The version shown is the highest version seen.
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At least in my little corner of the Internet, Windows IE isn’t the powerhouse it once might have been. Firefox is gaining ground, and fast.
I had a wonderful day of cooking today. Michele and I have been talking about a homemade carrot cake for a while. We even bought the cream cheese and carrots last weekend. Today I was in the “mood” and the resulting cake was spectacular. While this apartment may have some faults, the accuracy of the oven temperature isn’t one of them. It makes a great cake.
We also had a nice sirloin from our new favorite butcher. We had talked about making beef stew with it, but while I was perusing the Betty Crocker cookbook for a suitable recipe I stumbled across Szechwan Beef Stir Fry. Carrots, corn, green pepper, thinly sliced beef and a spicy hoisin sauce with garlic, ginger root, and crushed red pepper flakes. It was delicious.
Oh, and we started the day with a brunch of Huevos Rancheros. When we make the Old El Paso taco mix there is always a small portion of taco-seasoned meat left over. I make a baked omelet, with the spicy meat and some shredded cheese. When it is ready we spread salsa on top for a fantastic flavor combination. MMM-mmm good.
We eat pretty good around here.
It was a good week here for me. My new job continues to be engaging and rewarding. One of my assignments was to oversee the creation of a network link between the client and a resource center outside of their network. Over the course of several weeks I managed to identify all the players at both ends of the proposed connection, and to get them all headed in the same direction. As of early last week we had a virtual private network (VPN) connection established between to the two firewalls, and work to configure the firewalls was underway. It turns out that this is the first time in the history of the client that such a connection has been successfully established. I guess it’s really true what they say about nothing being impossible if you don’t know what you are doing.
I also started working on a database for the local campaign I am assisting. I downloaded and installed MySQL on my PowerBook using the Server Logistics MySQL Package. It could not have been any easier. In less then 10 minutes I had MySQL installed and running. In less than an hour I had created a database and the necessary tables for my part in the campaign. Sometimes information technology is truly fun.
I’ve also tweaked the new site statistics page I’ve been using, ShortStat to not track hits from my IP address. As I get more into PHP I am finding it to be enjoyable and easy to work with.
Michele and I are being more social here than we’ve been in a long time. Last Sunday we had a wonderful couple of hours at the local Panera Bread with some people we’ve met through the campaign. We are repeating that outing this afternoon at another local coffee shop.
Interview game: THE RULES
Heather Champ gave me these questions:
If you could travel back in time, what would you tell yourself 10 years ago? I’m not sure that I’d tell myself anything 10 years ago. You see it will only be 9 years this December that my wife and I met for the first time, online in an AOL chat room. I’d be afraid of disturbing that event. At most I’d tell my 10-year younger self to stop chasing after the perfect job and focus more on building a life outside of work.
Sweet or sour? Sweet.
What is your dream car? I always wanted a Triumph Spitfire. I’d settle for any recent car that was fully paid for. I’ve had a continuous car payment since 1984. Eek! Let’s see: 36 months @ $188/month equals $6768 (‘84 Pontiac Fiero) 48 months @ $225/month equals $10800 (‘87 Honda Prelude) 36 months @ $335/month equals $12060 (‘91 Mazda Najavo) 42 months @ $390/month equals $16380 (‘94 BMW 318i lease) 08 months @ $450/month equals $3600 (‘91 Lexus ES300) 12 months @ $750/month equals $9000 (‘91 Lexus ES300 + 2000 Nissan Altima) 18 months @ $600/month equals $10800 (‘00 Lexus ES300) 30 months @ $1100/month equals $33000 (‘00 Lexus ES300 + 2001 Audi TT lease) 13 months @$850/month equals $11050 (‘01 Lexus LS430)
Or $113,458. Oh. My. God.
Who is Deep Throat? Linda Lovelace suffered under that unfortunate title. In political circles s/he is the mysterious underground parking lot denizen who provided Woodward and Bernstien information they needed to expose the Watergate coverup. While speculation runs rampant at to their true identify I personally think it was a senior aide, someone with access to information but overlooked since they weren’t really a player.
You wake up one morning and a new tattoo adorns your chest. What does it say? “Do not try this at home, I am a professional” Or a ying-yang symbol.
I’ve been having fun with a new site statistics package called ShortStat from Shaun Inman. Not just a counter of hits, this slick PHP/MySQL combination shows me the browser breakdown of my visitors, and what country they are from. I can see search strings and pages viewed.
I know know that 48% of the “hits” to my site are from web crawlers, and that another 41% and Windows users; Macintosh holds in at 6%, with Linux right behind at 5%. The browser list includes several flavors of Internet Explorer, and several version of Firefox as well. Safari, Camino, Netscape, Konqueror, Lynx, and Mozilla round out the field. I’ve had visit from 18 countries including the Republic of Korea, Greece, Estonia, and the Czech Republic.
Very cool indeed.
Almost every day when I wake up I have music running through my head. Songs, well not so much songs and just refrains from songs, fill my head in the morning. Usually one song, repeated endlessly on my internal MP3 player. This morning is was “No One Is To Blame” by Howard Jones. I honestly can say that I haven’t heard this song since it was popular in the early 80s. How it got into my head is beyond me.
Usually as the day progresses I am able to replace the tune with something else, or turn it off entirely. Other times I am forced to find a copy of the song and listen to it from start to finish to erase it from the playback loop. Thank God for the iTunes Music Store. Otherwise I’d still be listening to faintly remember lines from “No One Is To Blame” this afternoon.
Michele and I just finished reading “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” by Thomas Frank. The subtitle of the book is “How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America.” It is a fascinating look at the radical shift towards the right that is happening in America today. Using Kansas, and the century or more of Populist movement that originated in here in the 1890s, Frank paints a clear, concise picture of how the radical right is is using polarizing issues to leverage the very people they are hurting the most.
For the first time I understand that the new conservatives, the neo-cons, eliminate economy from their arguments, that their entire house of cards is built on the idea of victimization and attacks from the liberal left. I cannot begin to do justice to his arguments. Mr. Frank’s presentation is lucid, engaging and ultimately shocking.
If you live in the United States you owe it to yourself to read book.
The Hopi Native American word for “a state of life that calls for another way of living” or “life out of balance” is Koyaanisqatsi.
Since March of this year, and perhaps extending further back, my life has been out of balance; I’ve been in a state of Koyaanisqatsi. The depression in my emotions, the hesitation in my decisions, and the fear in my soul are all the result of being in this unbalanced state. As a child of Western culture and thinking I am sometimes crippled as my first inclination is to act, to use movement to leave the depression behind. That only acknowledges part of my integrated self. I acted when we moved to Kansas, and the depression and hesitation, the fear, continues here just as it did in Illinois.
As someone who considers himself on a quest for enlightenment I have pondered many times what makes up my integrated self. The image I have is of a four-side pyramid, with each side representing one facet of my self. The four prime areas in my opinion are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. I believe that living solely though action, dealing with just the physical aspect of being, strengthens just one side of the pyramid, leaving the other three sides withered and unable to provide balance. Devoting yourself wholly to spiritual pursuits has the same result, the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of your being are not in balance with your spiritualness. Only by giving each aspect of your essence its proper due can you achieve and maintain as state of balance.
The first major unbalancing force that toppled my pyramid was the death of my sister, Amy. I was twelve at the time and it was decades before I finally put to rest all of the emotions her passing created in me. During the time between her death, and my regaining balance emotionally I struggled with numerous physical problems, and I was spiritually adrift without direction or even understanding direction was possible. Only when I started to explore my spiritual side, and strengthen its aspect in my life, combined with truly dealing with the emotions I was feeling towards Amy, did I start to regain my complete balance.
I believe I have experienced brief periods of total balance in recent years, but a lifetime of conditioning has made me reject these moments of clarity and understanding as aberrations. Through my relationship with Michele I have opened up my emotional aspect tremendously. I am strong enough now to express my true feelings regularly and appropriately. Physically I have started to care more about my body, not just through exercise or eating proper foods, but through actual emotional and physical care. And I have begun a deep and far reaching exploration of my spiritual aspect, rather than shunning it as I did for so many years. On occasion I think I have had all four aspect, all four sides of my imaginary pyramid in balance. I think of this balanced state as inflating the pyramid and turning it into a sphere capable of rolling in any direction without much effort at all.
The ease of life that comes from this transcendent state is alien and new to most of us, certainly to me. With no resistance from any of my four aspects life was almost too easy. The absence of emotional or physical pain, the clarity of spiritual contentment, and the smoothness of intellectual understanding created a state, which was painfully refreshing. Without something to push against; physical pain, emotional fear, mental confusion, spiritual ennui, I felt out of balance when in fact I was truly in balance.
As I go about my daily life these days I am depressed emotionally, and I am physically very tired. Mentally and spiritually I feel blocked and exhausted. I am in a state of Koyaanisqatsi. Looking at just my job, or just moving back to Springfield, or just caring for Michele, or just any one thing is not the way to regain balance. I must find it within myself to approach all four aspects of my being in order to feel balanced once again. Physically I must tend my body and care for it tenderly and with love. Mentally I need to seek out places of rest where I dwell on one thing at a time and not everything all at once. Spiritually I need to focus on my belief of essence, karma, and the Tao. And perhaps most importantly I need to deal with the emotions of quilt, anger, and fear I have about my situation.
My web site is named zanshin, which means literally “remaining mind.” In my life it has come to represent the state of enlightened balance we all seek consciously or unconsciously. Only by giving each aspect of my self proper due and no more, can I regain a feeling of harmony with myself and with the world I inhabit.