Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at June 29th, 2005

I’ve read that listening to music through headphones is ultimately bad for a person’s hearing. I’m not completely sure why this is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that a person tends to crank headphones up to a higher level of volume. I know that the noise of the car engine tends to drown out an ipod’s drums and bass when I’m driving, tempting me to do exactly that.

Whatever the case, I’ve been interested in finding a way to listen to my ipod shuffle via speakers.

Kristen, in a combination Father’s Day/birthday gift, bought me Extreme Mac’s iPod Shuffle FM Transmitter. One might reasonably ask why I didn’t buy an mp3 player that included the ability to transmit to radio instead of the shuffle. The answer is simply that the main purpose for buying an mp3 player was to allow me to go running. The mp3 players with transmitters aren’t flash players. They have hard drives. Thus, they’re much more likely to break if I fall.

So now I’ve got an add-on to the shuffle that I plug into the cigarette lighter. It then transmits to the frequency of my choice.

I had a little trouble initially, but that was actually my fault. I wasn’t pushing it far enough into the cigarette lighter and it wasn’t getting any power. Once I figured that out, I still had a little trouble finding the frequency I wanted, but in the end, things worked.

As it turns out, the signal is pretty strong, even blocking out frequencies that a radio station is actually using. I don’t recommend that though. There is still some bleed through from the station. I tend to use frequencies that are pure static, preferably without used frequencies on either side.

Though the sound isn’t as good as it would be if I could plug the shuffle directly into the radio, it’s as good as most radio stations.

I’m actually curious as to how far out from my car it goes. Imagine finding a station only to find out it comes from the car ahead of you in traffic.

For the moment though, I’m happy to have the ability to inflict my musical preferences on my family. Nearby drivers are just a bonus.

Posted by Jim at June 27th, 2005

I took a survey that someone at MIT is apparently conducting. As someone who put in a substantial number hours of my life learning how to write and analyze surveys, I can’t help but note that the people taking this one are a self-selected group. This is potentially hazardous in that you always have the potential to get too many people from one group or another.

Bearing in mind that the survey is about blogs and that there’s no decent list of bloggers, self-selection may be the only realistic way to do it. If you’ve got a blog feel free to click on the link below…

Posted by Jim at June 25th, 2005

So after writing a blog entry on how I try to avoid trouble as a result of my blog, I’m going to write a blog entry on one of the more divisive issues of our time.

I do not claim consistency as one of my strongest traits.

Worse, I tend to come at it from a perspective that seems unlikely to make anyone on the left or right particularly happy. My views could be summarized as:

1. Against Invasion
2. For continued occupation (if done well)
3. Fear it’s being handled badly

This doesn’t seem like a particularly consistent view either, but here’s how it comes about.

The RAND Study
There’s a study by the RAND Corporation (a think tank originally formed by the US government to study military issues) that apparently considers the success and failure of occupations in terms of building up a stable (possibly even democratic) society by the end.

Success is greatly determined by the ratio of troops to the population and how long they stay. Apparently a more correct number of troops by their ratio would be something like 500,000 instead of the 135,000 we currently have in there. In terms of years we should be staying at least 5 years or so, possibly as many as 10.

Casualties supposedly go down greatly with an appropriate number of troops.

The RAND study is at the core of my views on the situation and I haven’t seen anything that causes its conclusions to be greatly questioned. Thus, I’ll assume it’s accurate for the rest of this post.

Why I was Against Invasion
I was against the invasion for a few reasons. The strongest for me was simply that the administration wasn’t talking about the occupation that would have to follow. I remember some administration officials claiming we would be met with celebrations, but no one seemed to be saying, “We’re going into Iraq now and we’re going to be there for quite some time.” That made me nervous though I can see why they wouldn’t mention it. Considering the probable results of invasion might have made people less likely to invade.

The lack of international participation in terms of troop deployment also bothered me. When the previous George Bush went against Saddam Hussein, he started working for international support months previous to the actual action. The current administration didn’t.

Finally, as you might guess, the fact that we were sending in 120,000 troops rather than 300,000 plus bothered me. I’ll grant you that we couldn’t have gotten that many troops because the maximum we have available throughout the world for this sort of action is around 450,000–and we aren’t going to pull people out of all our bases everywhere. In theory, international troops could have solved that problem.

The point for me that I decided I was more against than for the war was Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. After that speech, it seemed unlikely to me that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Continued Occupation
Despite the current difficulties there, I’m inclined to believe that getting out soon is a bad idea. If we leave now, we leave an Iraqi army/police force that doesn’t yet have the training or numbers to keep order.

If the RAND study accurately reflects reality, we need to be there for a while and we need to recognize the reality that there will be a constant, climbing body count while we are there. That’s the nature of occupation.

On the bright side, if we stay there long enough (and handle things well), things will eventually get better.

My Fears
Of course, things might not get better. The core problem with having less troops than one ought to isn’t just a climbing body count. The point of putting 300,000+ troops out there isn’t just causing less people to die (though that’s important).

The core problem with having less troops than one ought to is the things that don’t get done. A large amount of money that was allocated for rebuilding Iraq simply hasn’t been used. They’re waiting for things to calm down before trying to rebuild certain areas. Other money for rebuilding Iraq has been used for security instead.

In the meantime, basic infrastructure (water, electricity) remains worse than it was under Saddam Hussein. Beyond the question of insurgents, there are people who make a habit of kidnapping wealthy people or their children and holding them for ransom. And then there’s employment… Despite the bombing of new recruits for the police or army, people still get in long lines to sign up–in part because it’s a job that’s actually available.

It strikes me as an environment that feeds insurgency.

Thus my fear is that because we haven’t committed enough resources to this that at some point the situation will go out of control and we won’t pull out. Some people believe that point is already past. I’m not one of them, but, I think it’s worth asking when we pull out. Under what conditions is failure more likely than success?

The Flypaper Strategy
The flypaper strategy refers to the idea that Iraq will suck terrorists and potential terrorists into Iraq where they will likely be destroyed, saving us from having them attack the United States.

The first time I heard this idea, I thought it might have some merit, but later I decided it was probably a very bad idea. I’m hoping it’s just a justification as opposed to something intentional.

Here’s why:
When you place people into a situation, people learn skills. They generate new ideas about how to adapt to their environment. When you attract terrorists and enthusiastic new recruits to someplace like Iraq, they learn skills related to guerilla warfare and how to fight the US military.

I’m confident that our armed forces will kill a lot of them, but I’m quite sure they won’t kill them all. Someday, some percentage of them will come home. They will come home with the knowlege of how to fight us and possibly with the will.

That’s kind of how Osama Bin Laden got his start after all. He went to Afganistan to fight the Soviets and eventually became a leader in Al Queda. Ironically, of course, we supported him against the Soviets–something that raises another point… People who learn warfare in Iraq may not attack the United States. They may attack governments in other countries. I do not see that as likely to spread democracy.

Similarly, the flypaper strategy (if it really exists as a policy) may work against the goal of having a stable Iraq. Having foriegn and local insurgents fighting the US may create a culture of opposition to government that might survive our occupation by many years.

I spent a lot of time taking courses in sociology. One interesting thing I learned was that the universities which were active in political movements 30 some years ago often continued to be active later. Despite the constant four year turnover of students, a culture of political opposition had formed. I can’t help but think that could happen in a situation in which people stayed in the same community.

A possible example: When we occupied the Phillipines, our soldiers fought against Muslim insurgents. Currently (more than 100 years later), the Phillipine government still has problems with Muslim terrorists. I can’t help but wonder whether that’s connected.

Conclusion
By writing all this, I don’t claim to know whether ultimately our invasion of Iraq will do more harm than good. I ultimately believe that the real test is looking at Iraq in 10 or 20 years. Do we have a democracy there? Does it last? Or do we have another dictator? And if we do, do we go back in to straighten things out or are there better ways to solve the problem?

At core though, I’m bothered both by the “pull people out immediately” crowd and by the “put the troops in but not nearly enough of them and stay no matter what” government policy. I think it’s possible that things will work out despite the way things currently appear, but, I can’t help but think that it will require more cleverness in foriegn relations than I’ve so far seen from this administration.

Posted by Jim at June 22nd, 2005

This weekend Kristen, the kids, and I went up to Ludington State Park with my parents and sister. As a kid, I remember the whole family camping there for a week of hiking and fishing. Sometimes we did it with other families and sometimes just by ourselves.

It’s interesting to do something that you did as a kid with your children. Abby and Rebecca seemed to have a good time hiking despite that the hikes lasted a good 3-4 hours. Granted, they didn’t walk the entire way and we didn’t take any particularly hard trails, but 3 hours of motion is a long time for a 3 and a 4 year old.

I took a few pictures while I was out there, experimenting with the assistance that my digital camera gives for panoramic shots. You can see the results above. You might wonder why I would want to take a panoramic view of what is obviously a swamp, but this is one of those views that seemed incredible to me in person.

I’m going to guess that it needs 3d vision and the greater resolution that actually being there provides.

A larger version is available for those who care… Just look for the file named “swampmerge.”

Posted by Jim at June 20th, 2005

A while back, Audioscrobbler came out. Basically, it’s a service that allows your mp3 player to automatically submit the music that you listen to to a website. You can then find other people who listen to the same music, find out what sort of music people who like a particular group also listen to and generally learn interesting yet not immediately useful things.

Alas, audioscrobbler got so bogged down by people’s interest that a person couldn’t actually sign up to use the service (or even submit anything) until just recently. All you could do was download the plugin that allows you to do it.

Well anyway, it’s fixed now and everything works again. And I signed up. Thus, you can now find out exactly what I’ve been listening to lately.

Due to the fact that I ripped a bunch of Yes albums into mp3’s this morning, the picture of my listening habits is rather skewed. I’m sure this will be corrected over time.

Posted by Jim at June 16th, 2005

I’ve read a number of articles in the past few months about people getting fired for things that they wrote in their blogs.

Though I’m inclined to think that people shouldn’t be fired for what they write about, I’ve read some of the things that people got fired for. Some of them are not particularly bright.

Personally, I’ve always come at blogging assuming that anyone I know could type in my name and come up with my blog. Even beyond deliberately trying to find me, it’s possible for people I know to find me unintentionally. My wife once told me that someone we know (but not all that well) at church had asked her if I had a blog. I don’t know how she found it. Another person from church was doing research on local political blogs and came across mine in the process. My blog isn’t all that political, but he found it nonetheless.

In short, I tend to assume that there are no safe spaces online.

Thus I don’t blog about work or people at work. If I do mention work, I mention specific tasks I’m working on or something complimentary. I don’t mention names and I don’t make nasty comments about anyone other than myself.

I also don’t make a point of writing about my faults. I’m sure it’s possible to pick up on a few of them indirectly, but I don’t mention any that I don’t want a current or future employer to read.

I’m not sure why I come at blogging from this particular angle. Part of it, I’m sure, comes from working for non-profit organizations and having to constantly ask what someone will think about finding this on our website.

Part of it comes out of years of writing and writing classes. I constantly imagine who the audience for what I’m writing might be.

In the end, the reason I do it may largely turn out to be personality. When I have time to reflect on something, I almost always end up analyzing the probable results of what I’m doing. Sometimes this results in my being slower about things than I want to be. Hopefully it also allows me to avoid certain errors.

Posted by Jim at June 10th, 2005

So maybe I’m behind the times, but I’ve been rather annoyed just now to discover that HTMLArea, a nice little wysiwyg texteditor that you can put into forms no longer exists.

At any rate, it doesn’t exist as an open source project any longer. I’m guessing that the company that created HTMLarea decided that they didn’t want to bother with support or possibly just wanted to control the project entirely themselves.

Whatever the case, all that remains is a website that lists wysiwyg text editors for forms. Through that, I found another decent looking text editor for forms. I’m in the process of putting it into a project for a client at the moment. We’ll see how that goes, but for the moment, it looks relatively easy to work with.

I’ll tell you how well it goes.

Posted by Jim at June 8th, 2005

I can’t say I like having firetrucks in front of my house, but perhaps I should be getting used to it. I had to call 911 today.

Twice.

When I got home, Kristen told me that there was a horrible smell in the house. It smelled like turpentine and seemed like it was coming from the drain in our basement. She called the Grand Rapids City Water Department. They told her to pour water down the drain and see if it stopped. It didn’t.

She asked them what to do. They had no suggestions.

I called 911. Less than 10 minutes later, we had 2 firetrucks and at least 8 firemen in our front yard. As the captain got out I asked him, “Isn’t this overkill for a bad smell?”

The went through our house, checking for things that might have caused the smell. The best candidate seemed to be the paint that we kept in the same basement room as the drain and the washer and dryer. We took it out to the garage and then they pulled out 2 massive fans, opened the side door to our house, and blew the smell out of our basement.

Before the captain and the 2 crews left, he mentioned that it didn’t make much sense to him. Normally, he’d think that it was due to paint being poured down the drain, drying and then stinking. In this case it seemed unlikely because we do a lot of laundry and thus send a lot of water down the drain. It also seemed unlikely to him that our paint was causing the smell because it smelled different from the basement. Besides, the trap should have stopped it.

He told us to call him back if the smell returned.

We went out to dinner and by the time we got home, it was obvious the smell had returned.

I called 911 again and in less than 10 minutes the firemen returned, this time taking only one truck and crew. The lieutenant (the captain didn’t come this time) had me run the water while firemen again looked through the house (opening drawers, closets and everything) for possible sources of the smell.

This time I had some new information. One thing about having firetrucks in your yard is that the whole neighborhood comes out of their houses to check what’s going on. Apparently, our next door neighbor’s former boyfriend had been painting her porch for the last couple days. Today he had finished and cleaned up the brushes and paint.

She didn’t think that he had done anything bad with it, but… Well, I’ve met him and he is a nice guy, but I can easily imgine him pouring turpentine down the storm sewer, figuring that no one will notice a little bit.

I mentioned this to the lieutenant and while he didn’t say that that had to be it, he did mention that he knew of cases like that. He had me open up all the faucets and run water down the drains, flush the toilets, and wait for 15 minutes. After that, they ran the fans again.

Before they left, the lieutenant mentioned that if the smell came back, they would send in a crew with the necessary equipent to find out exactly what the smell was and whether or not it was dangerous.

The smell didn’t come back.

I phoned Kristen (who had taken the kids to her mom’s house) and let her know. Bearing in mind that it was now 10:30 pm, I drove over there as well. As of Thursday morning, there’s little smell at all.

The only lingering effects of this seem to be in my children’s imaginations. Kids tend to like firemen. The firemen who came here were great with kids, playing with them, offering to show them the firetrucks, and pretending to steal Rebecca’s tongue (and give it back).

Rebecca was highly disappointed to see them go, saying “Where firefighters go?” and “Firefighters, come back!” Also, during supper she would occasionally announce, “I call 911 again.”

I hope not. They’re nice guys, but, this was a major pain in the butt.

Also, if anyone out there feels an urge to paint, please, please do not pour anything down the drain that you don’t want in your own basement.

Your neighbors will thank you.

Posted by Jim at June 4th, 2005

Having come across the phrase “air blogging” on Nate’s blog, I’ve got to admit that that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been thinking about lots of things that I could blog, but haven’t actually been writing much. From a 3 to 4 per week schedule, things have slipped to twice a week. That’s better than a few weeks earlier this year in which I managed to write absolutely nothing, but not as good as I’d like.

In particular, I’d like to be writing more reviews of things that I’ve found cool or interesting (webcomics, kid’s programs/movies, software, ethnic foods/restaurants). I’d also love to be writing more about religion. I spent a few years of my life getting a B.A. in religion as well as a couple years in seminary and often feel an urge to write about all that, but haven’t so far.

In lieu of writing something interesting, I’ll just give a quick rundown of some things I wanted to write about:

Master’s Project:
I haven’t done a thing on it in the month. I’m not sure why. I imagine I needed a rest from it bearing in mind that it was the source of much stress for me in April. Basically, if I hadn’t gotten an extension on that project, I would have had to finish it at a very unsatisfactory point in it’s development or simply take my master’s project hours over again. That would have been a massive waste since those hours are all I need to finish the program.

Gaming:
I really want to do more role playing games, possibly even run a campaign. At this moment I’m tryng to figure out some basic rules for conflict resolution and character creation. Then I’ll be ready to playtest things. Ed… I may need to bounce some ideas off you with regards to mechanics.

Novel:
Again, I haven’t done much with this since beginning my master’s in Information Systems. Masters degrees tend to kill what spare time you have.

Computers:
Basically I’ve got a pile of stuff to write about here. I’ve recently installed FreeBSD 5.4 on my FreeBSD box. It’s less convenient to install that the 4.x series. In the 4.x series, you could pick your window manager and install Xfree86 as part of the install process. In 5.4, you install X.org and the window manager as packages (or ports) after you’ve installed the basic system. There’s some sort of patch necessary to make gdm work that I still have to research and install. Once I get that going, I’ll be able to get back to things like my soundcard, cd-rw, flash, java, cvs, usb 2.0 (it works in 5.4…), and all the other programs I like have running on Freebsd.

Knowing that I’m going to spend hours configuring my machine is the sort of thing that makes me run screaming toward the Mac OS X or Windows XP. Which reminds me…

My iBook no longer recognizes my router to be a wireless access point. I’m pretty sure that the router’s the problem as the laptop works just fine at Kava House, detecting something like 4 available networks the last time I was in.

Politics:
Remembering the previous President Bush’s visit to Hope College while I was attending, I was interested to watch the whole mess at Calvin College a couple weeks ago. One thing irked me though…

Dr. Jelks appeared on Hannity and Colmes. In the course of the conversation, Hannity said the following to Dr. Jelks:

“HANNITY: I find this fairly amazing coming from — you know, you’re upset about the president’s position on the issue of a war and the last resort. And you believe the administration launched an unjust war, et cetera.

You say that his environmental policies have harmed creation as part of this letter.

Do you know what bothers me about your position? This is for both of you professors. If both of you had your way, those mass graves would still be being filled. I have yet to see a letter to Saddam Hussein (search) from either one of you.

If you guys had your way, the torture chambers and the rape rooms would exist. You two obviously haven’t looked at the pictures of dead babies laying in the street because Saddam launched weapons against them.

Where’s your letter against Saddam? Because it would still continue if you had your way.”

This sort of thing annoys me immensely. There are good arguments for going into Iraq with force just as there are good arguments for using other means to remove Saddam Hussein from power. This sort of attitude toward other people’s views makes talking through an issue and coming to some sort of workable agreement impossible.

That I’ll write more on that sort of thing is more or less inevitable. It’s admittedly pointless since extreme views probably make better television than careful, nuanced views, but I just can’t think that that sort of speech helps anyone either on the right or the left.

Posted by Jim at June 1st, 2005

I’m guessing that Sideways was a bigger movie than I’m aware of. At any rate, it’s not every movie that has it’s own table in the local grocery store’s wine section. This one contains a lot of Pinot Noir. None of it is branded with “Sideways,” but apparently the success of “Sideways” caused demand for Pinot Noir. Knowing that that particular type of wine figures in the movie, I picked up a bottle to drink while watching.

The movie is about two people going up to California wine growing country to taste wines and generally hang around. Miles and Jack were college roommates. Now middle-aged, Miles is a middle school English teacher and currently unpublished novelist. Jack formerly worked as an actor in soap operas, but currently does commercials and voice-over work (”This medication may cause bloating, vomiting, and diarrhea…”).

This trip comes as Miles’ novel has a chance of being published and Jack is about to get married (on Saturday of the same week). Miles is nervous about the novel and clearly still depressed about his divorce two years previous. Besides knowing a lot about wine, he’s also clearly using as a way to handle his feelings about the divorce. Jack, in turn, is using this trip as a way to decide whether or not he wants to be married–mostly by having a lot of sex with women that are not his fiancee.

As I write this, it sounds rather sad and pathetic. In a way it is, but the movie ranges in tone from subtle humor to slapstick to drama. The funny parts are very funny. Even the dramatic parts are funny at points.

It’s very much a character driven movie and the humor largely comes out of that. There weren’t any lines or scenes that existed solely to get in a joke.

So anyway, Kristen and I both liked the movie. Rent it at your own risk.

Sidenote: Owing to our inconsistent renting of movies, I’ve never quite been able to justify getting Netflix or one of the many copycat services. Thus, I go to Blockbuster. As you may know they’ve recently stopped charging late fees. You may wonder what they do to get you to bring back the movie. Other than charging you for it after a few weeks, they also leave automated messages on your answering machine. I got one today–2 days past the due date.

Another Sidenote: It seems to me that there are a bunch of books/movies out there these days in which you bring someone into a private world that you have (winetasting in this movie) and that person causes so much chaos within it that you aren’t sure if you can ever come back again. Is this a particularly modern concern? I first ran across this situation in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”