While not the first sign that american high school students may not be getting the best civics education, this is certainly the most alarming in recent memory. &#8220The results reflected indifference, with almost three in four students saying they took the First Amendment for granted or didn’t know how they felt about it. It was also clear that many students do not understand what is protected by the bedrock of the Bill of Rights.

Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It’s not. About half the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the Internet. It can’t.”

Begone, generic template! I was able to recreate my old template and stylesheet a lot more easily than I thought. My old webhost has come back up again, as mysteriously and randomly as they disappeared in the first place. I’m still sticking with blogspot for now, for many reasons, not least of which is reliability.

Note that I say for now, though. To put it in a more convoluted way: if I were the sort of person who had business cards, and this website were the sort of site that I would put on a business card, this is not the address I would use. I would probably use this one, since I pay Joker good money to park it for me, and it redirects here.

It’s funny, how adult registering that domain made me feel. I’ve been publishing stuff on the web for almost a decade, but I never really considered registering a domain. Now here I am with two, and considering paying for real hosting. Weirder yet is the collection of brochureware I’ve been amassing about my pie-in-the-sky web design firm. The stuff is getting a little too refined to be called doodles anymore.

I even have a logo. I don’t do logos. And it’s fabulous. Iconic. It came to me whole and I banged it out in 5 minutes in photoshop.

This may actually be happening. I might become of those people who have a place they work for a paycheck, and then there’s the thing they actually do. And being one of those of people makes it that much more likely that you can become a person who gets paid for what they do. That’s an exhilerating, scary thought.

I should have put this disclaimer at the top, but I am on an awful lot of cough syrup.

It’s nice to be reminded once in a while that the US isn’t the only country in the world where the blatant stupidity of one person in a bureaucracy, government or corporate (however negligible the difference these days), can snowball all out of proportion and totally fuck up a person’s life. And that the media will then report complete falsehoods by dint of having no idea what they’re talking about. Makes your national pride swell up a little, dunnit? No? I thought not.

Pretty soon, it’ll be a badge of honor to never have overpaid for coffee made by underpaid barristas. For now, join the search for the maximum starbucks density.

With all this talk of pagerank as a form of currency, I hate to think of how much I’ve wasted over the years by changing webhosts. I’ve finally had enough of the kind of unreliable service I can afford, though, so it’s blogspot for me for the forseeable future. Also, pardon my generic template, but I’m still feeling the effects of the great hard drive crash of ‘04. I can’t seem to find a local backup of , well… anything. Does this seem familiar to anybody? May I draw your attention to the name of the blog?

If you have few minutes to read it, here’s a really interesting piece of writing called What You’ll Wish You’d Known. It’s in the format of a speech to a group of high school students, and I think it may have changed my life if this guy had come to speak at my school.

Ten reason to love George W. Bush:

“He is a uniter, not a divider. He said so. Twice. And it is true. Dubya has done more to unite Europe than anyone since the fall of Rome. Given time, he might manage the same in the Arab world too. He has also united the left, [… o]kay, they failed utterly to win the election, but there is a lovely feeling of togetherness.”

A brit looks on the bright side of having a good ol’ boy in the highest office in the land.

Upon more consideration, maybe I won’t be buying a Mac. Ever.
“Usually you would want to sue your enemies and not your friends,” said Gary Fine, a Northwestern professor of sociology and expert on rumors. “I can’t think of an instance in which a corporation would sue its own fans. I haven’t heard anything like this.”
Unfortunately, I can think of all too many examples. Just one more nail in the coffin of Apple as the more “warm and fuzzy” computer behemoth.

I’ve wanted to have a Mac at home as part of my own little multi-platform web development studio, particularly since the advent of OSX, but I could never justify the cost. Now, though, I can definitely say that my next computer will be one of these. Now if I just had a spare $500 lying around…

I have to say I can’t remember experiencing a real-world / game-world bleedover, or at least not one as bad as some people describe in the linked story. I can cop to having dreams that took place entirely in the world of the Sims or a Final Fantasy game, and I frequently reach for a new sticky to jot something down, even when I’m nowhere near a Mac or any type of computer. It’s reassuring to know I’m not a total freak.

My wedding band is made of stainless steel. It’s not traditional, fancy or rare. But it is strong, simple and beautiful. I think you can see where I’m going with this. Five years, baby. I love you.

Well, I was feeling pretty good, but come to find out that that working the evening shift and taking pretty much any OTC pain reliever, both things I do regularly, are risk factors for severe gastrointestinal problems. Between that and my coffee addiction, I’m apparently going to have a catastophic GI bleed and die any moment now.