blueZhift Blog

Most parents with young school aged children know the Flat Stanley story and exercise. In our school, each child makes a flat, paper, version of themselves which is then mailed to friends or relatives. The flat children are mailed back along with accounts of all of the adventures they have had. It’s great fun which is why it breaks my heart to hear about the flat daddies that are starting to make their appearance in the US. From the Chicago Tribune article.

FT. STEWART, Ga — Sgt. Andrew Ponton has been in Iraq since January, but if you’ve visited Florida’s SeaWorld recently, you might have seen him sitting on a bench between his wife and son watching the dolphins perform. Or perhaps you noticed him, dressed in his Army fatigues, sunning on the beach at Tybee Island near Savannah.

A closer look, however, would reveal that it’s not Ponton in the flesh. It is a life-size vinyl foam board cutout that his family uses to keep him close even when he is far away.

While this can and does offer some comfort for many while their loved ones are away, wouldn’t it be better to bring the troops home? If we must have a presence in Iraq, why not deploy the flat daddies and mommies instead? Most of our forces have performed with honor and courage, now it’s time for us to honor them by bringing them home to their families.

There’s so much talk about how the US is losing its edge and how we need to improve our schools. Yet we seem to do everything we can to make sure that good teachers are discouraged and talented people are forever kept away from even considering teaching as a profession. The story that’s got me angry today is a CNN report of an Indiana school teacher who is being transferred for allowing the school paper to publish an editorial advocating tolerance of gays. Rather than being fired, she is being transferred to another school where she will not be allowed to teach journalism. What a great lesson we have there! Advocate tolerance for gays, or any unpopular group for that matter, and either lose your job or be barred from teaching something you love. Yeah, that’s the way to make our schools and America great. In the end, I cannot see how God is going to bless such a close hearted land as the US has become. That we get the good things that we do is nothing less than either evidence of a graceful god, or that this universe is mad and meaningless. Our bad schools are no one’s fault but our own. We’re just getting the schools we deserve.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, the gun debate rages on. This isn’t anything new, but this time around, the notion that armed students or professors would have prevented the massacre is getting significant play. Admittedly, it is plausible, and some might argue, even cool that some heroic student would have just blown Cho away thus ending the carnage before it could fully blossom. The view that an armed populace is necessary for general safety immediately reminded me of the Star Trek episode entitled, “A Piece of the Action.”

In this episode, the Enterprise visits a planet that has chosen to based their society on the old Chicago gangs (Al Capone, etc…). The different gangs are constantly fighting each other for territory which, apparently, necessitates an armed populace. Every adult is armed, even moms have a machine gun stashed in the baby carriage. Would we really be safer in such a society? I don’t know, but I do know that there is one scenario that people have left out that bears mention.

We all assume that if there were other armed students, they would have acted to stop Cho. But it is certainly possible that some of them could have decided to help Cho! There are a lot of angry and disaffected people in our world, and just like looting seems almost infectious after a blackout or disaster, why shouldn’t some people choose to take part in the developing carnage? A lot of the time it just takes one “deviant” to show the way and push others over the edge. We see this with copycat crimes all the time. So in this worst case scenario, there could easily have been far more deaths than actually occured.

I remember growing up that when my dad took a newspaper into the bathroom, we were in for a long wait before he came out again. This is a tradition that I have continued in my own family, though my bathroom tends to be stocked with gaming mags rather than newspapers. Today I feel I have taken this tradition to a new height, quite unintentionally.

I finished the second of the two anime music videos I had planned to enter in the Anime Central AMV contest just in time last week. So I’ve been pretty happy the last couple of days since it did not seem that the second one was going to be completed on time initially. Well I’d just transcoded them to an mp4 format my iPod could play and resynched the pod when nature called. Without thinking too much about it, I took the iPod along with me and wanting to check the playback, watched the AMVs on the crapper! A new era of bathroom “reading” has begun!

Yubisaki Milk Tea Volume 4 is out now and continues to cross all sorts of lines. I’m pleased and surprised that it has made it to volume 4. Without giving any spoilers, this volume features tales of duel attempted lolicon seduction, well sort of… And guys kissing guys, also with some qualifiers, which is actually one of the highlights of this volume because it almost feels like the completion of some part of Nori-kun journey of self discovery or it could just be bowing to the inevitable. After all, with everything else that has happened in the series, what’s one more kiss between friends?

I love crazy love triangles, but one of the things that endears this particular series to me is the incredible selfishness of Nori-kun/Yuki-san. Perhaps this is a sad commentary on humanity in general, but this selfishness is what makes him very real to me and a fascinating character. This guy isn’t always going to do the right thing which makes it harder to predict where the story may be going which I like. And with a healthy dose of fan service, Yubisaki Milk Tea is a guilty pleasure that I hope will continue for at least a few more volumes!

Found this linked on Digg, search warrant reveals that Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung Hui did not have any video games in his possession. That kind of blows some big holes in accusations being raised by the likes of Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil, that violent video games had a part in this and other shooting sprees. While video games can be and are stereotyped as, a solitary pursuit, they can be, and often are, very social. Perhaps if this young man had been involved in the gaming community, he would have found some of the support he so clearly needed.

After the Columbine shootings, there was a rush to judge the parents of the shooters and vilify violent video games. Despite the similarities, I think the Virginia Tech tragedy has one fundamental difference. The evidence coming out, clearly reveals a person who was mentally ill is any sense one would define mental illness. I don’t think the parents, or anyone else, can be blamed for Cho’s condition. However, I can blame the media for exploiting and over sensationalizing this tragedy. Was it really necessary to show the video that Cho left? Are all of the pictures of him plastered all over the TV and Internet really helping? This is really sending the wrong message. There are still a lot of mentally ill people out there, who are going to be getting the wrong idea about what’s happened. Cho has not found any salvation in what he did, so for the media to essentially make him the patron saint of troubled youth in their pursuit of ratings is just plain wrong. They are not helping the victims, and may well be laying the ground work for future copycats. How can they criticize Al Jazeera and then do something like this?

I really didn’t get too much into the Nextel Cup race at Texas this past Saturday. I was happy that Jeff Burton was able to get the win because he’s one of the nice guys who’s been so close to victory over the last few weeks. So he and his team were really due for some good fortune.

The most interesting part of the race was the battle between Juan Pablo Montoya and Tony Stewart, which left Stewart spinning into a collision with Jimmy Johnson. When I saw that, I was sure we’d be hearing about an off track fight later. No problem, Juan could take Tony. It’s gonna be fun to see how things shape up next week. But no one should be surprised. There are no free gifts in NASCAR, it’s not a race if you’re not trying to win.

Having played with Flash over the years and seen it become a defacto standard on the web, it was with some interest that I read about Microsoft’s Flash rival, Silverlight. My only complaint about developing Flash apps is having to buy expensive software from Adobe in order to do so. Microsoft has generally excelled at making it easy to develop for the platforms they support. Silverlight is slated to run on Windows PC or Mac in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. This is pretty broad support for Microsoft, so maybe they’re serious about mounting a challenge to Flash after all. And their plan to support Silverlight development in a variety of languages, including Javascript definitely intrigues me. I think that unless Adobe significantly lowers the barrier to Flash development, they’re going to watch kids and cheapskates like me flood the web with Silverlight applications.

More on Silverlight in Tim Sneath’s MSDN blog

Right now we have a strange juxtaposition of things in the media. On the one side of the page we have embattled Don Imus being barbequed for calling the NCAA Champion Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos”. While on the other side of the page, we have a triumphant Larry Birkhead celebrating his paternity of a child with another man’s dead woman/companion(???) which puts him in line to control a fortune of millions of dollars. Hmmm, who’s the real ho here? Strange world we have here, honor is dishonored while dishonor is honored. T_T

I got the shoes for the R Dorothy costume project yesterday and they fit! Women’s shoe sizes can be such a pain to get right sometimes because of inconsistency from style to style. But now over that hump, the real fun of finding a dress pattern to use as a base for Dorothy’s dress. I can almost create my own pattern, but since I have to get a few more supplies anyway, I might as well get a pattern while I’m at it.