Interesting Article

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Myth America 2002
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
(from this morning’s NYTimes)

LONDON

Here are a handful of myths that cause what’s left of Europe’s left to misperceive U.S. foreign policy:

Myth 1: America is temporarily dominated by self-serving isolationists who reject treaties designed by sensible Lilliputians to tie down the superpower Gulliver.

Reality: In the past decade, the U.S. saved Europe from becoming an economic vassal to Iraq, which was on its way to conquering Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A few years later, as Europe temporized, we led NATO’s defeat of Serbia’s takeover of the Balkans. Recently, we drove Islamist terrorists, who threaten Europe as much as America, from their training bases in Afghanistan. Is it too much to ask to protect our 250,000 troops defending freedom abroad, along with aid workers and journalists, from a treaty enabling publicity-hungry prosecutors to harass them?

Myth 2: (flip side of first myth) We’re interventionist bullies, with no regard for the sovereignty of countries whose threatening leaders are better dealt with diplomatically.

Reality: Saddam Hussein has been jerking around the United Nations for seven years, ignoring his surrender agreement and buying off French and Russian defenders while building a nuclear and germ-warfare capability for delivery by North Korean missiles or, more likely, through terrorist cutouts. Sanctions, dumb and smart, have dismally failed; the danger of nuclear blackmail grows to head-in-the-sand Parisians and Berliners as well as vulnerable New Yorkers. Brits and Turks may reluctantly help us, but European handwringers and Arab monarchs want a free ride.

Myth 3: The Bush administration, with its disdain for treaties, does not understand the nuances of dealing with nuclear-armed Russia, which must never be allowed to feel humiliated.

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Growing

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You may (or may not) have noticed some new widgets on the site. First, I’m working on the JazzQuotes system. Right now all it does is echo a random quote, but eventually as the database becomes more inclusive it’ll have more features, including being able to browse by author (jazzer) and the ability to submit your own favorite quote. Also there is work being done on the toy section of the site, and I’m coding out a little script that will show what I’m listening to on my computer right now.

Keyboard Compare Applet for Dvorak and Qwerty Keyboards

Asides

I’ve found a very cool site: Keyboard Compare Applet for Dvorak and Qwerty Keyboards. The Dvorak layout places the keys you most under the fingers best suited to use them.

Plugging the top 500 words from the english language into the applet came up with some interesting results: your fingers would have moved 72.09 meters if you used QWERTY, but only 42.44 meters with Dvorak. See the site for more details. If anyone is interested in switching and want’s some computer help feel free to contact me.

Birthday mess

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On the front page of Mullenweg.com I’ve been using a query that grabs all the birthdays for that month and displays their information, ordered by the day of the month. Here is the query I’ve been using:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, private, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e, %Y') as nicedob, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M, %Y') as mob, DATE_FORMAT(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob)), '%Y')+0 AS age, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e') as day, DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '%M %e') as today FROM people WHERE MONTH(NOW()) = MONTH(dob) ORDER BY DATE_FORMAT(dob,'%d')

This has a couple of problems: first, it has a bunch of junk in there that I’m not using anymore and/or should be done in the PHP, not the SQL. More fundementally is the problem that it reports birthdays incorrectly! My sister Charleen pointed out that the front page had the date of her birthday, July 21st, right, but it was going to be her 28th birthday and not her 27th. The problem was the code was calculating how old she is today and then reporting that. The column is even being called ‘age’ because I took the code from another part of the site where I was calculating age. Obviously some changes were needed. I started by removing the stuff I don’t use anymore, and making it a little tighter:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e, %Y') as nicedob, YEAR(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob))) AS birthday FROM people WHERE MONTH(NOW()) = MONTH(dob) ORDER BY DATE_FORMAT(dob,'%d');

Now we have a much more managable chunk of SQL, but still nothing to fix the problem. After much deliberation, and thinking about ways to implement a conditional statement to check whether the day had passed yet and then add a year to the ‘birthday’ column if required, but after a while I just realized that the simplest and most accurate solution would be to just subtract the year of birth from this year. This has no issues since the year never changes in the middle of a month. Here’s the final product:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e, %Y') as nicedob, YEAR(NOW())-YEAR(dob) AS birthday FROM people WHERE MONTH(NOW()) = MONTH(dob) ORDER BY DAYOFMONTH(dob);
Ahhh that feels good :).

MIB II

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I saw MIB II on the IMAX screen yesterday, and it was impressive. I don’t think the movie was quite as good as the first one, if anything it seemed to be a bit of a spoof on the first one. It was quite funny at times, it’s just the plot struggled sometimes. But the screen was amazing, and the company, as always, was great.

Danger of games

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Yesterday I did nothing. Not a lazy day, not a restful day, a day where a video game completely took over my day. The game is called Black and White, and it’s not even that new, about a year and a half old. But anyway I just got it and once I started it I couldn’t put it down. This isn’t necesarily a testament to the game, that’s just how I always start games. Anyway, according to the game statistics, which are quite good, I’ve spent 16 hours on the game as of this morning. Sixteen hours! It’s a fun game, but it just feel wierd that Sunday was an entire day when I didn’t produce anything. Oh well, the only solution is to beat the game as soon as possible :).

Summer Cleaning

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Who knew that cleaning could be so nostalgiac? Every thing I pick up seems to make me think, whether it be computer magazines from the height of the dot-com boom to the piece of paper with a number on it that facilitated a certain prank on the last day of school. I’m a terrible packrat, and for the past four years I’ve been saving tons of schoolwork, assignments, handouts, absent notes, everything because of some misconcieved notion that somehow I might need it at some point in the future. The downside to this was of course when I did need something I had so much other stuff I had the hardest time finding the thing that I was looking for. The other thing that strikes me is all the stuff that I saved that hasn’t been used since. It has put me into a strange mood, but the cleaning must go on. I just hope I don’t throw away anything important.