My second attempt at applying to PhD programs has been a little less frustrating than the first. Not having the pointless GRE exam* as an upcoming hurdle is nice, I can actually focus on getting the applications in rather than relearning a bunch of algebra, geometry and their relationship (thank you Rene Descartes, asshole). This victory has been Pyrrhic though because without that sword over my head I can look clearer at my failed attempt from last year.

Most notably I am at the stage where all the materials are ready and they merely have to shipped out. Of course, that is what I thought until I re-read my SOP (statement of purpose). If the GRE was the worst thing about applying to these programs, then this is for me easily the second. I hate writing these things because I feel that their ultimate purpose is known to the final arbiters of the application. They know why I am applying, they just want to hear me say it.

I have always felt this regarding any letters of intent, application notices, and the like. When I send out resumes I know that I have to write the letter of intention, to which I always think to myself that I could do it one sentence: "Dear Sir or Madam, I am applying for this position in the hopes that you will hire me thus allowing me to earn money for the work that I will perform. Thank you for your time, Dave."

Ok, two sentences. As much as I want to write that as my statement of purpose I know from the many guides that I have read this isn't what they are looking for. I suppose that they want to feel as though the institution that I am applying to is special and not merely a cog in the wheel of my life. Something to make it known that I am not just applying anywhere I did some looking and this place is where I want to be. Which they should know isn't exactly true. Sure, I want to be at school A, but I also applied to a couple of other places because it's not smart to just apply to one.

Probably, in Liberal Art disciplines, it matters more than others as we don't have the track record of being uber rich sending out the mad money in donations. I know it matters but I just don't see the point of all of this. Can someone with three publications, almost three years of teaching experience at the college level, really be eliminated from contention because they wrote a shitty statement of purpose?

This is the rationalization that I have been telling myself for the last several days as I continue to churn out dreck after dreck with only moderate signs of improvement.

My other favorite aspect of these applications is the "Course List" requirement. For those who don't know this is a list of all the classes in a particular subject that you have taken in your academic career. It makes sense to have this as a requirement. But it is completely superfluous since the school also requires you to submit official transcripts that not only contain the list but also the grade you earned on it. It's an easy one but it seems that most of the information that these applications require are only necessary because they require it. That or I am just tired of this process.


*The GRE is a perfect example of circular logic. Why is it important? because you need to get a good grade on it to get into graduate school. Why do you need a good grade to get into graduate school? Because ETS says that the test is important.

Since the Fort Hood shootings I have been pondering how or what I should post regarding the event. Of course this was a tragedy, it's even worse for the victims who spent all that time in a warzone, survived, only to be killed in a hospital inside the United States by a doctor. My problem was that the previous sentence sums perfectly my feelings on the subject. My only other thought was that I was happy they got him alive, which sounds odd but whenever these mass shootings occur we are only left to speculate on the shooter's motivations because they usually end up dead. The rash of high school shootings in the 90s could probably have been shorter if just one of them had been captured and could tell us the answer to the question of "why."

Then my thoughts turned toward something else. The question that many people were asking and then many other people were shirking from answering, "Is this about Islam?" Did Nidal Hassan do what he did because he was Muslim or because he had some other issues?

The evidence is quite damning, pictures of him dressed in Islamic garb at a convenience store prior to the shooting, the reports of him shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) during the shooting, pretty much indict Islam as being a primary motivator for his actions. Reports of him partaking a visit to a strip club before the shooting are reminiscent of the 9/11 hijackers partying in vegas before their actions. I suppose when one decides to be a martyr then one gets a free pass. Islam is the only religion promising sex in paradise but I digress.

My problem with wanting to indict Islam in this shooting is that we don't do this in other crimes of this nature. Take Scott Roeder accused of shooting Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, during a Sunday Church service. Roeder has denied feeling any guilt, and also claims that the shooting was justified, yet we don't ask the question that is apparently so obvious when people like Hassan commit their crimes: is the man's religion responsible for the actions?

Would Roeder have killed Tiller if he weren't a Christian? Would James Kopp have murdered Barnett Slepian if he weren't a Christian?

I guess the difference is that Islam tends to have more violence associated with it. There is no "active martyrdom" aspect of any other major world religion. There's the Christian notion of dying for the cross, but not going out and killing yourself for the cross. Islam is also the youngest of the three Abrahamic traditions and seems to have burned out on intellectual criticism of its own text and history. It had its renaissance before Christianity did, but then something happened and its leaders seem to have decided that it must stay in some sort of medieval backward period where desperation is breeding the desire to die for one's god and applying the most backward of legal systems with the harshest of punishments.

This is the 21st century not the 15th, this should not still be happening, but it seems endemic to the sort of desperation present in ultra-fundamentalist Islam where the idea of being persecuted is encouraged. It's almost as if their faith in their own religion is so tenuous that any dissenter is scared into hiding from the death sentence laid on their head.

For the most part I'm pro-Islam, well I guess "pro" isn't the right adjective. I should say that I am as tolerant of the idea of Islam as much as I am as tolerant as the idea of any religion. In general it seems to be an ok practice, it will never happen for me as I like my alcohol and bacon too much, but I think their alphabet is pretty cool looking, and their major book is alright. It's just that in the Western world we generally tend to like the idea of ignoring our religious fundamentalists. When Jerry Falwell spoke it was nice to hear the crazy and then go on to ignore it. When their fundies speak out, it tends to proceed either a really loud bang or several successive bangs.

The desire to tie Islam and Hassan to this act, I think, is not only predictable (although not from some of the places that I have been hearing it--NPR) but acceptable. Unless we find out that he is a paranoid schizophrenic with dis-associative personality disorder his religion is going to be the prime motivator in his crime. This is of course conjecture, it may just be that in a another world the atheist/Christian/Buddhist Hassan would have done the exact same thing but that doesn't seem as plausible. It's not racism to point out the connection. In cases like this what is more dangerous: to make the connection visible or to pretend that it doesn't matter so that we can all feel better about our tolerance?

I haven't discussed Scientology in a long time. Probably not since I did two lectures on it when I was teaching Philosophy of Religion back in 2006. This was during the controversy concerning South Park, Chef, and the episode "Trapped in the Closet;" where Stan is determined to be the reincarnation of Scientology founder and sci-fi hack writer L. Ron Hubbard. Apparently Isaac Hayes felt that the show had gone to far in insulting a religion, which I thought was odd since they have spent their entire career insulting everything including religion (I guess he missed the episode where they lampooned the Passion of the Christ). Then we found out that the press release was in error and Hayes never intended to quit the show to begin with but only took some time off...or whatever.

The odd thing is that whenever I post something about Scientology I always get an immediate anonymous response from someone who is defending the religion and telling me that I have it wrong. No response I ever write gets answered and I in the three or four times I have talked about the religion my response to the anonymous comment has always been, "what exactly do I have wrong?" Opinions, by their ontological nature cannot be wrong so I never retract those, and any facts that I post I do so to the best of my ability. If the occasion occurs that I have something wrong and it's pointed out to me then I will post something in my comments stating the error and correcting it. So the fact that my responses never get answered is puzzling to me. I'm apparently wrong, but no one ever wants to point out specifically what it is that is wrong.

Which brings me to this interview. It's been making it's way across the internet today, and since the only thing I hate more than religious fundamentalism are religious cults I decided to post it as well. The clip shows Martin Bashir asking a question about the beliefs of Scientology to Tommy Davis who is head of the celebrity center of the religion.* By now we all probably know that Hubbard wrote of an intergalactic war, space ghosts trapped in a volcano, and nuclear weapons having to do with the origin of the religion. This is the story that is circulated on the internet, that South Park episode, and the essence of the question that Bashir asks.

Davis quickly becomes insulted calling the story "a perversion." Which causes Bashir to ask the question again and Davis gets upset and leaves. Davis has some explaining to do, and right here was the perfect opportunity to do it, but the blame also has to go to Bashir who should have changed the question. At 5:19 Bashir explains why he is asking the question then proceeds to asking the question again at which point Davis leaves. Davis warned him that would happen, but what would have happened if Bashir had inquired as to what exactly the "perversion" was?

Davis becomes evasive, but he never calls the story a lie. He never explains what it is that is wrong. The orcs in Middle Earth were perverted elves. In order for something to be perverted there has to be a fact which becomes twisted and mocked until something new is formed. If Bashir was interviewing a Catholic asking him if he believed that Easter was "Zombie-Jesus Day," which can be found on the internet I think there is even a facebook page for it, and the Catholic responded that this was a perversion. It would be like the same situation in the interview except that I don't think a Catholic would have any trouble explaining why "Zombie-Jesus Day" is a perversion of the truth according to their religion.

If the accusation of Xenu, the aliens, the DC-8s, and the Volcanoes are twistings of the truth then what is the truth oh future Scientologist Commenter? Help me out, help your religion out, because your public face seems to be occupied by a bunch of jackasses lately.

*Which is an odd thing itself as it must be the only religion that has a celebrity center.

First off: because I haven't read any of the books or seen the movie.

The great war of nerd-dom continuing on from the previous year is over the book series by Stephenie Meyer and the franchise phenomenon that has been all the rage at least until the next thing comes along. The nerds are pissed off because "these aren't vampires" according to the traditional definition of the mythical* creature and now the entire world of nerd-fiction is flooded with people wanting more vampires but not real vampires, those kind of vampires that drink animal blood and are good looking.

Well let's get straight to it: the typical nerd isn't popular. He (because it's usually a he) likes the sorts of things that nobody else likes and now his realm of fiction is flooded by people who have turned off Gossip Girl and new versions of Gen X shows (90210, Melrose Place) to start reading about things that they now like...and it pisses them off. To all the nerds out there sitting at your computers posting in forums about what a hack Meyer is or how Bella is neither hot nor creatively named I have news for you: She won.

Meyer won, because she wrote a popular series of books about teenage romance that featured a vampire and she won because for all of the rough drafts of stories that you may have started and never finished with the long haired brooding vampire she's been published, adapted, and popular. She won your war and she wasn't even trying to fight it. The worst part is that the victory is so Pyrrhic for you that you wished she had lost it. Now you have to share your domain, your sacred fantasy life, with the same people that wouldn't look at you in high school.

In short, all the backlash against her is the same shit we heard five years ago with Avril Lavigne. Avril brought punk to the masses by watering it down. And like the rage directed at Avril Lavigne, the viscera directed toward Stephenie Meyer isn't because she wrote a bad book, although they will claim that is one reason. It isn't because the Vampires in the novels, allegedly break the "rules" of Vampirism,** although they will claim that is another reason as well. It's not because it adds to a cheapening of intellectual aspect of undead fantasy fiction (often times this comes from the militant defenders of Joss Whedon's insipid dialogue and thinly veiled misogyny) although again they will claim....No it's because Stephenie took it away from them in the same way that Avril took the elitism of punk away from its fans. Vampires are no longer the domain of gothic types sitting in Denny's at 2am writing in their black leather-bound journals with red ink. It's now the talk of the cheerleaders who pine away for their quarterback boyfriend to act for one second as devoted to her as Edward does to Bella; and that is what pisses them off more than anything.

For every story that someone penned about vampires in a journal or in a buried file on their computer (so that on one could accidentally see it) half of them are about a lonely, smart, and misunderstood girl meeting a mysterious guy who turns out to be: a vampire. The other half are about a guy who is smart, lonely, and misunderstood being a hero to an attractive woman who turns out to be: a vampire. By Epicurus I think I wrote the latter in high school (never finished it) and the former is how the HBO series True Blood begins.

A friend of mine called the series a "pop-culture abomination" but the thing about pop-culture is that it pops in and then it pops out. Avril Lavigne is hardly on the radar anymore, the boy band craze ended, this too will end. The thing about it is that it is so insanely popular right now that the counter culture people feel that they are being personally attacked by the mobs of people invading their turf. When the craze is over those people will hold on to the books for nostalgia purposes while the "true" vampire fans will still be penning their stories. If the series' popularity is the only reason you hate it then go buy a "non-comformist" shirt from hot topic and get ready for your formulaic complaint for the next craze that runs through the media because it's coming.

The Twilight series isn't really about Vampires, it's about teenage romance issues as the target demographic is young girls. One of those girls, my cousin, told me that she doesn't read them because they are popular. At least she's honest about the whole thing which is a lot more than most people who level such polemics against the movies and the books. If anything the vampire thing is hot right now and the very people that hate it and her, should be thanking them for making their interests so much more accessible. Why not enjoy the fact that you now have something in common with more people than ever before, isn't that what all of those "no one understands me" complaints are about in the first place? Instead of hating a woman who struck gold with her first novel just let her fans have their fantasy.



*Mythical: Of or relating to myths, described in a myth, of the nature of a myth; fabulous; IMAGINARY; fanciful, mythological.

**Which is complete bullshit by the way. Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel is hairy palmed, ugly, and can walk in daylight. When was the last time a vampire movie followed that arch-type? And where was the bitching for Wes Craven's Dracula 2000 when he made Dracula's true identity Judas Iscariot?

Since I tend to rotate the subjects of my various blog posts an idea struck me many months ago to do double reviews of games. One of the problem with reviewing video games is that there is a discrepancy between how a game appears when it's first played and how the game lasts over time. Halo 3 is a good example of this, my review of the game was based around two things: it being brand new thus better than previous installments and one of my first games on a new generation console. Looking back the game doesn't hold up against its immediate predecessor in both campaign and online play. It's good but not as great as almost all reviewers have rated it upon release.

With my first review of Civilization IV I played through three run throughs getting used to the new controls, features, and changes of the game. I concentrated most of the writing on the religious aspect as that was the newest feature. Would the game hold up against the years I have spent playing the previous two installments?

The good news is that it does. The bad news is that some of the problems in the previous games still carry over into this one.

The first major problem that I have found with the series is that progression through time is still too fast. The game should feel like you spend forever in the prehistoric, classical, and medieval ages. This is reflected in the games chronology as you do spend quite a number of years in these periods but that is not reflected in the number of turns. The turns in each age take a different number of years. So one turn in the pre-historic age may equal 50 years while in the modern age it only takes one year, even on the "epic setting" which promised a fix for what I am currently complaining about nothing changed.

The second problem unique to this game is that the AI for opposing civilizations is too easy to placate. In previous versions this was reversed. What they changed was giving you the numbers and specific instances of why they are pissed off at you. If an opponent is at minus 6, they are angry which can be moderated by just handing over something that they don't have free of charge. This will raise them to a minus 5 which means that they won't declare war. Previously, the war declarations seemed out of the blue and thus unfair, but that did keep a player on their toes to constantly ramp up the defense spending or at least keep the most modern units guarding the borders. Here i can faithfully predict what enemies will want to fight me, and often goad the weaker into making the mistake.

The biggest improvement has been the introduction of many more World Wonders. Previously each age only had about one or two wonders that needed to be built or else you were at a severe disadvantage. In Civilization II, not being the first to complete Leonardo's Workshop meant having to pay for every unit upgrade while the civilization that had it did not. When that person discovered gunpowder all of their melee units just changed into musketmen, this was a huge advantage. The new version mitigates the importance of one wonder by adding almost one for every technological discovery, and scrapping the Workshop altogether.

My favorite world to play is a discovery world where every civilization starts on one or two super continents with a "new world" that exists on the other side of the planet. This changes the game as you have to both play against existing opponents while racing to develop the ability to traverse oceans in order to seek out and colonize the new area. It makes the game kind of easy, but only if you are the first one there. Plus the continent is developed by barbarian tribes. It took a couple of landings before I was able to actually put in place a permanent settlement, damn Skraelings*.

The game definitely holds up. It still allows for various creativity in how you want to win the game and the difficulty level is reduced on the lower settings. I'm still searching for that happy medium between impossible and easy. The game's rating and recommendation hasn't changed at all, so maybe this experiment was a failure but we will try again.

*Kudos if you get that reference, no wiki-cheating either.

I'm used to playing assholes on the internet in all sorts of games. Mostly this is confined to the XBOX Live, where players "camp" over objectives, refuse to finish the game type in order to rack up their kill count, or just yell and scream into their microphones. These things unfortunately become normal and the best thing to do is ignore it going idle so that their victory becomes more tedious to them than the loss does to me. This is why I usually keep a magazine near me when I am playing.

For some reason I thought it would be different playing chess. I've been a member of chess.com for a couple of months now playing once or twice a day. Then, today, I encountered a most unpleasant experience. My rating is pretty low, fluctuating around 1200 in Blitz (5 minute games). My opponent was at least 60 points above me. I thought I could win but I made some pretty sloppy mistakes early in the game that I never recovered from.

The situation ended up with me possessing only a pawn, dark squared bishop, and a king forever evading check. My opponent, playing white, had a Queen, six pawns, and a light squared Bishop. My pawn was blocked by one of his pawns, which were both isolated along the center line. He had enough to place me in checkmate and could very easily have done so with only the Bishop and Queen. My king was along the G column and it was a matter of simple time. Given the proximity of our two ratings and the fact that I had a full minute of time on him I thought I may be able to pull a win off using time. It was a long shot and next move clearly illustrated that this was not going to be the case. I was pinned up and had about three moves in check.

The correct move for him was to slide his Bishop to the F column where his Queen would then proceed into the final mating dance ending the game. This he did not do, instead along the A column he pushed a pawn. I thought it odd since it seemed completely unrelated to the game but I shrugged and moved my king again. He pushed the pawn again, and again.

Then I figured it out, he was going to promote the pawn into another unneeded Queen. In disbelief I ran my clock trying to see if I was missing something but in my position I could not discern it. It wasn't for added protection, my existing material wouldn't allow me to checkmate him. Then the ingame chat* started out, "the resign button is to your right."

I knew this, but with mate in three moves why even bother resigning? "I know, I'm trying to figure out why you are moving the pawn."

"I'm going to promote all of my pawns to Queens."

"Why?"

"...?"

"You can end the game now, unless you don't see it."

"I see it I just want to promote all the pawns."

"Isn't that kind of a dick move?"

He didn't have an answer for my question only asking me why is getting upset about it. I responded that I wasn't upset, I was just wondering why ruin a win like this. My thinking was that chess is about outsmarting your opponent, something he clearly already had accomplished, now his goal seemed to be to rub it in more by reminding me that I was powerless to stop him from doing whatever it was that he wanted to do. I restated my "dick move" accusation which again garnered no response.

I suppose that the bright side of the conversation was that it was more civilized than most online encounters. Instead of being called "fag" or "nigger" he was at least addressing me as a person. Although that is little consolation as the internet has found yet another game experience to ruin.

The philosopher Xenophanes questioned the Greek pantheon by noting that Ethiopians drew their gods as long necked and dark skinned while the red haired Thracians described their gods as being red-haired. Xenophanes wondered if horses could draw gods would they be horse gods as well? It's a fair question as gods tend to fall into Emile Durkheim's idea of cultural necessity, and it's one of the various questions undertaken in Jennifer Hecht's book Doubt: A History.

Doubt compiles a history of religious skepticism throughout the history of world civilization. Not one group is left out as Hecht jumps from the origins of the Jewish culture to Western Greek civilizations to the Eastern Chinese and Indian traditions which predate them both. The book is impressive in both it's scale and execution but with that comes a sacrifice that the author makes and it leads to other mistakes that take away what is otherwise an excellent book for people interested in the history of religious thought and philosophy in general.

The problem is that the book reads at parts like an encyclopedia, with entries on various people that are often too short in one aspect and too long in others. For instance William of Okham, the formulator of "Okham's Razor" gets a mention and that's it. Which is unfortunate because his idea, "that one should not multiply pluralities beyond necessity" or more succinctly put "between two options the simpler explanation is the one that should be adopted," is so important in not only religious skepticism but also skepticism in general. Yet this gets only a slight mention to which we then move on.

The book does this repeatedly, the more it happens the less invested I am in reading the narrative instead wishing it to just be an encyclopedia or reference book. The French Enlightenment gets a greater deal of attention than I would have liked which comes at the expense of the American Revolutionaries whom founded the novus seclorum. The ideas of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine are mentioned as being important but most of the content in Paine's Age of Reason is glossed over. The same occurs in the ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Why skip over the contributions of these philosophers where it instead concentrates on the Galilean and Copernican discoveries? At almost 500 pages the book has room for both, and while the Astronomers' discoveries do prove that scientific inquiry trumped cultural inherited knowledge the writings at the time would better illustrate whether the new science had popular support or not.

Detractors of the book will view it as anti-religious depending on the scale of their respective religious beliefs. I won't pretend the book is completely unbiased as it deals with religious figures as being regular people. Hecht takes the remarkable stance that Jesus himself was a religious skeptic overthrowing the religious orthodoxy of the Jewish society at the time. An interesting take that I have never considered before. Coming to this book from Hitchens this is a much more toned down writing that is more pro-agnosticism than it is anti-religion.

There are questions of choice as well. Why concentrate on Freud's ridiculous theory of religion when it is almost completely rejected by everyone?

What is nice is that it tends to go through the "martyrs" of religious skepticism without passing the overly snide judgment that is usually reserved for the "don't-say-god-bless-you-to-me" crowd. It lists them in every period never failing to accompany the tragedy with the lesson that it would have been better for the powers that be to have just ignored them.

Some might say that the book tends to omit the skepticism that permeated Islam from the between the late medieval period to the modern age. There seems to be almost a millenia that goes by in the book without the word "Islam" or "Muslim" directly referred to, and this becomes the point of the book's final chapter. That Islam, hasn't had the skepticism that Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. has thus allowing the fundamentalists to become more and more fundamentalist and dangerous. Ibn Ali-L-Awja was executed in 772 AD for doubting the truth of the Koran and then aside from mentioning the great Aristotelian commentator Averroes, Muslim recedes until the modern age.

If the book has a final message it is that skepticism and questions are healthy and normal for a society's development. I would say that this applies not only to religious issues but to any issue. The inherited beliefs that any culture bestows upon its younger generations can all become dogmatic orthodoxy whether it has to do with god or not. Suffrage and Abolition are two of the more recent examples. Doubt can't be a bad thing unless a person is so afraid of the answers that they cannot abide even the questions. Doubt is a very interesting book, and while the writing and editing choices can be odd at times it still makes for an education.

In undergrad I wrote a scene for a class that was supposed to train us in how to notate scripts for lighting, camera shots, etc. The scene used the idea of a conspiracy junkie (and I actually was at the time) being told that the only true conspiracies were the ones that seemed to innocuous to actually be conspiracies, the antagonist ended the scene with the line, "that's why they never fail." It didn't actually have a context and the plot lived and died with that one scene. We didn't shoot it in class instead opting for some segment in a soap opera or something like that.

The protagonist asks about the more popular theories that existed at the time (late 90s) most of them were explained by the axiom called "Hanlon's razor" which states that "one should never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity." I bring it up now because I think it bears relevance to something that I read on Deadmoneywalking's journal regarding a memo Governor Schwarzenegger sent to the California State Assembly. Apparently the first letter of each line can be read as "I Fuck You" or in the more normal way "Fuck You" in order. No squinting, no bible code shenanigans, no Mayan-look-at-it-a-certain-way-and-the-planets-line-up, it is there plain as day.

The author of the blog entry wanted to know what the odds are of this happening randomly, obviously she is attributing a malice behind it since there was some snag between the Governor and a state Assemblymen (but motive? I don't think so) so she asked two math professors. One gave the low estimate of 1 in 10,000,000 simply by raising 10 to the 7th power. I would like to see a wider formula on how he even came to that simply an idea. the odds of the first letter being "I" are 1/26, not counting numbers or special signs so wouldn't the formula be 27 to the seventh power?

Anyway the high estimate comes from the second person who also factored in the spaces needed to place the letters in the right places and he came to 1 in 2,000,000,000. Personally, I am more willing to go with the second estimate since it helps my case all the more. See, I think this is total bullshit and believe the governor's "message" to be random. One might think that would compel me to go with the former, lower odds but it doesn't. No matter how much the odds stack against the natural occurrence of "fuck you" appearing in the message it has to be random because most people don't understand probability anyway let's do a simple experiment:

Open up minesweeper on your computer and change the difficulty to hardest (or the size to largest). This gives a 16x30 grid which means 480 tiles. There are 99 mines on this board which gives us the probability of 99/480 of hitting a mine. We can boil that down to .20625 or for simplicity's sake 20%. So that means that 20% of your clicks are going to be mines. The way the author is using probability is to use it cold and machine-like, equating this with mine sweeper means that only one out of every five clicks should be a mine. Try and make it to four clicks three times in a row. Very soon, if you are like me, you will begin to posit a malice in the machine that is moving the mines around.

Where Hanlon's razor fits in is that they are attributing to malice what can be explained by the author's stupidity. Obviously the author doesn't like the governor and is trying this stretched bit of logic using the aegis of math to push intent where there is none. I have no particular feelings regarding Arnold as a politician: he will never be president unless the Constitution is changed and I think most of the state's problems seem to be a result of the initiative system so I am not defending him out of political loyalty. To further back up my claim I was going to make first eight lines of this post read "b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t" but it was very difficult.

If Arnold or his staff took the time to do this then kudos to them. It's very difficult unless you are writing poems or shortening/lengthening the margins. Furthermore this isn't even that bad for him anyway, he did call the state assembly a bunch of "girlie men" back when he was first elected.

I didn't want to be a retroactive hypocrite, I've yelled at too many of my classes for not voting to just up and skip voting in this election. This is the first time that I have been registered beforehand, and the first time that I got to go into the little punchcard booth that one would assume that New York of all places would have replaced with some sort of electronic super voting machine. Always the production, coming in, signing my name and leaving were a bit frought with difficulty as my name was no where to be found amongst the books.

Then it was found by the voting attendant that was half asleep. It was 1pm and I was the only person in the basement of the Brighton town hall, which is the same building as the library although the two are not connected. I thought to myself, 'I'll vote, then pick up the Thomas Hobbes translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesean War' and then it's off to the laundry. My days are so full of excitement...

Upon approaching the voting hall, I noticed the slogan "You're Right to Vote," on the glass door. Immediately I rolled my eyes thinking that some idiot forgot to proof read for grammar until I realize that the sentence makes sense both ways. In the booth itself I scanned over the prospective candidates who haven't really been doing that much to win my click of the lever. The previous elections I was always the most sought after bell at the ball, the mythical independent-undecided voter, I felt special because I knew that a majority of the ads were aimed directly at me.

See most people think that I am a raging pro-abortion, marxist liberal; which is a bit understandable because I do have a Master's degree in the most liberal of the liberal arts, but then there are the ultra leftists who think that just because I know that the last President isn't the worst president this country has ever seen or that while the Iraq war wasn't started under true pretenses that I don't agree that it was a totally bad thing that I must be some sort of closet republican conservative. No, I'm the mythical middle of the road voter. I lean both ways, although admittedly a little more to the left on social issues and a bit more to the right on crime issues, but these past years always made me feel special.

Friends and family members shrugged when it came time for the elections knowing waaaay ahead of time that they were going to vote right down the Democrat line, but I smiled knowing that sometimes the Democrat line was the way to go but there was no way in hell I was voting for Clinton. So this election day, I was not as enthused as I was previously. No one was courting my vote, when I walked into the booth I really had no idea who half of the people were and thought to myself, "it would be better if I brought Gwen to do the picking." I clicked on the incumbent for country sheriff, because in my view more experience is always better when it comes to police work, and then voted for the challengers in town council and whatever else it was.

I was about to pull open the curtain when I noticed that there were two propositions on the ballot as well. I read the newspaper, listen to local newsradio, and I had no idea of any of them. Anyway proposition 2 was this: "Amendment to article 3 of the Constitution, in relation to authorizing the Legislature to allow prisoners to voluntarily perform work for nonprofit organizations.

The proposed amendment would authorize the Legislature to pass legislation to permit imates [Sic] in state and local correctional facilities to perform work for nonprofit organizations. Shall the proposed amendment be approved?"

I guffawed. Hell No! was my response. As I said earlier I'm a bit conservative when it comes to crime, I'm all for education and work release because those statistically reduce recidivism rates among convicts, but the problem here is that there is a fuzzy line when it comes to connecting the subjects, "inmate" and "volunteer." A volunteer is supposed to believe in the thing that they are doing and inmates are special because they will do a good deal of things they otherwise wouldn't just to break up the boredom and monotony of prison life. That's why prisons are good places for medical experiments but are infrequently conducted there (anymore), it's a willing population that is completely regimented in diet and activities.

I guess what I don't want is to see some "charity corporation" like United Way mining prisons for their call out campaigns because they have the political juice to get the contract. I clicked "no" and walked out of the booth satisfied that I had made some sort of attempt to make a difference. It was nice, it turned out to be like going to an exam without studying and realizing that the essays were stuff you knew anyway.

I voted today, anyone else?

Spending the greater part of the day installing Windows 7 I came to a realization that it doesn't matter what OS my computer is running. I'm not a computer guy, though most people are under the impression that I am, so I don't get the subtle differences between Windows 95 and Windows 98.

I understood why Windows ME was supposed to suck, but I didn't really get the practical hands on experience of the sucking. I think I worked on Windows NT at both Convergys and Buckeye but I can't really be sure, no matter which OS it actually was I didn't really notice what some of the techies were complaining about. It worked for me, it worked just fine for using the programs for work and surfing on the internet.

My first laptop was installed with Windows XP and again, I didn't notice the real changes in the system. With this new laptop it started with Vista. I was working at Office Max when Vista was released and heard the numerous complaints about it. I thought that the aesthetic overhaul was nice looking but not having a computer that ran it, I missed the manual experience of using it. Finally having a computer with Vista I found it a bit annoying: it added one more layer of "are you sure you want to do this?" which after awhile I became accustomed to. The only thing I did know about Vista was that it ate RAM just to have the computer sitting idle.

From a technical aspect this is definitely a minus, but I don't use the computer for much. My primary uses for this computer are three: internet, word processing, and the occasional game. The game I play is Civilization, and my current version of the game is almost two years old so any RAM needs were going to be more than met by a current computer. I guess I just don't understand what the problem with Vista was, then again I only received it after the service pack fixes were out.

When it comes to Macs I tend to stay away being that I don't meet two requirements of Mac users: the extra two grand it costs to own one and the smugness usually reserved for Prius owners. I have used Macs, and whether it was OS 8 or Leopard the only real difference I noticed was that the menus are on the top and the mouse only had one button. I like switches and buttons which means that Macs are uncomfortable for me because almost everything is run through the software which means that when the computer crashes (it does happen) I need a paperclip in order to eject a CD.

So now, I'm typing this entry on a Windows 7 computer. Other than a cosmetic difference which I will play around with customization in the next week, I can't see the differences. I'm told that it takes less RAM to run but as I said earlier this isn't something that I am going to be aware of from a practical standpoint. If someone tells me that 7 sucks because...I will probably pay a bit more attention but it will only be in the back of my mind.

Maybe this should be one of those things that I pay attention to more but it's tough to care as none of it really matters for the uses that I will need the computer for. Even in programs that I use frequently, like Microsoft Word I can't figure what the changes are from 2000 to 2003 to 2007, and I use those programs all of the time. Things move into different places but that seems to be really it. With the installation complete everything appears to be running fine but then again maybe I will discover that my pictures don't load or most of my music won't play, maybe my cell phone is no longer linked to the computer the way it was five hours ago. Unless it's one of those things it won't really matter.