gonewest

Today was a very un-socal like day in Pacific beach. A heavy fog set in early and cast an uncommonly warm and sticky pall over the area. The fog was rolling so densely through the buildings in my neighborhood that at first I thought there was a fire nearby.

On the brighter side, I took advantage of my east coast hours (in theory my workday ends at 2 pm but the practice usually isn’t that good), and headed out to a theater in Mission Valley to catch a matinee showing of Serenity. I tried hard not to expect too much going into the movie so that I would not leave it disappointed but need not have bothered — Serenity the movie was every bit as good as a two hour adaptation of a series (even one with only 14 episodes) could be. I certainly didn’t like a couple of the choices on where to take the story, but overall I think Joss Wheden created a wonderful movie.

Approaching Mission Bay on the drive back home, I could see the fog steaming off of the water and hanging above it in thick curtains as if to mark the boundary of some dreary nether-world. It was a good thing that I was returning from such an enjoyable movie to help buoy my mood as I reentered the pall.

Getting too many spam comments, so I’m turning comments off for a while.

A geek’s gotta have his toys and I seem to require about two new ones a year to keep my habit satisfied. Earlier in the summer it was a Mac mini, and last weekend it was a Palm LifeDrive.

I’m still figuring out how much of what I want it to do it can handle, but so far my opinion of it is quite good. I’ll write more about it after I’ve had a few more days to play.

This is a test post from my new PDA. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

I’ve been playing with the Twisted framework a little bit recently. I’ve read great things about the package but have been frustrated with the learning curve and haven’t progressed past toy programs yet.

Luckily, O’Reilly is about to release a book that will hopefully make it easy to to adjust to the twisted way of doing things.

IMG_1238.JPG, originally uploaded by lordjoe.

There’s nothing like sun and sea spray to brighten up your mood. Here are some random pictures taken at the tide pool area at Point Loma today.

I was hearing unsubstantiated rumors about this in the days right after the New Orleans flood and it now has been confirmed:

A Louisiana police chief has admitted that he ordered his officers to block a bridge over the Mississippi river and force escaping evacuees back into the chaos and danger of New Orleans. Witnesses said the officers fired their guns above the heads of the terrified people to drive them back and “protect” their own suburbs.
The Independent Online Edition

One of the reasons why I am so glad that I was finally able to get out of the South after all the years I was stuck there is that I was so tired of the pervasive racism. Don’t get me wrong, racism is a form of prejudice that is prevalent no matter where you go, but it just seems to be so deeply ingrained and virulent in the South.

Part of that may be the whole slavery thing, but I believe a lot of it has to do with the South losing the Civil War. Despite what anyone would like to believe, the Civil War was about ending slavery, period, and being on the losing end of that war left southerners with a grudge that I think many of them have held onto in one form or another for generations. And one way to hold onto that grudge is to embrace the kind of extreme racism that could allow something like slavery to exist, as if to say “you may have won the war but you can’t make us change what we value (and who we don’t).”

The New Orleans relief disaster has exposed the ugly truth about poverty and racism in the US and should offer an opportunity to finally recognize and address this problem that has been hiding just under the surface for so long. Unfortunately, nothing is likely to change in the South because your average white-southern-baptist-conservative-republican is not going to notice the important details. He won’t notice that most of the poor in the south are black, that most of the poor did not have the ability to leave New Orleans before the storm, that they also did not have the resources to stock up for the storm, that even if they did stock up that they were most likely to live in neighborhoods that got the worst of the damage and would have lost most or all of those supplies, that the looting and violence did not start immediately, that little to no food, water or other support was available for the first several days, that they were physically prevented from leaving New Orleans to escape the mounting chaos, that anyone — anyone — without food or water in 90+

I’ve got to get out of the house soon, maybe I’ll go to the zoo or Torrey Pines tomorrow morning, because I’m starting to go stir crazy with all the recent indoor time. Unfortunately I need to spend most of the weekend playing catchup for work though. Again.

I’m hoping that I can finally get on top of a couple of projects with fast approaching deadlines so that next weekend will be real and I can finally forget about work for a couple of days.

At least I hope it works out that way.

Playing in iTunes
Civilization from the album “Grown Backwards” by David Byrne

When I get in a reading mood, a rarely have the patience anymore to stick with one book cover-to-cover (at least if it’s non-fiction) but instead have a handful that I rotate through depending on my interest at the moment. Here are the main books that are currently on my reading list:

And finally, my old copy of the the book that Amazon has no cover image for:
“Dine Bahane: The Navajo Creation Story” (Paul G. Zolbrod)

I finally got around to creating an account on del.ico.us and am copying many of my bookmarks to it (see my del.icio.us). Now all I need is a nice Safari plugin to make them look like normal bookmarks too.

Playing in iTunes:
The Man Who Loved Beer from the album “Grown Backwards” by David Byrne