I’m enjoying the season for the most part. I like the new Doctor (Matt Smith). He’s no Tennant, but Tennant was amazing, so I can only hold that against him so much. My bigger problem is the writers, not the actors.

Love Amy.

Rory is an idiot… or perhaps just reacts more realistically than I want in my campy sci-fi adventure series.

Love that they brought back River (from Season 4, “Silence in the Library”) to play a prominent role this season.

I really like how they have woven the overarching season’s story into almost every episode. That’s much better than past seasons. They have placed small hints throughout the earlier seasons (Bad Wolf, anyone?), but they have gone full out this season, bringing in the main season plot in the first half of the first episode. It really makes the two part season finale seem a continuation and resolution of the story we already know, instead of just another plot that springs up to close out the season.

So mostly I love the season… except for the Doctor. I want the laid back, confident, very wise persona that comes with being 900 years old and a Lord of time. Instead, they have Matt Smith playing a Doctor who doesn’t know what is going on and not quick witted enough to have survived 900 years. They want me to believe this man lead the charge and defeated the Daleks in the greatest war in the history of time? He doesn’t even seem to be able to put 2 and 2 together half the time. This isn’t a problem with Matt Smith. I think he is playing the Doctor they have written. After surviving (winning) over 900 years, the Doctor should be incredibly smart (the most genius in any room of genius), insanely clever, perceptive, and just because it makes for great tv, incredible lucky. We are getting the lucky Doctor (he has to be, he’s an idiot), but he can’t perceive anything even when being blatantly told (see episode 12 where River is trying to get through his thick skull). This is the man humanity and aliens alike are supposed to put their trust in to save the day? Not bloody likely.

That being said, I can’t wait for part two of the season finale.

Ok, perhaps some very basic styling in a moment.

Well, my project the past months has been random bits of HTML5 here and there and everywhere. But nothing on any site where I can seriously play and break things and just get it wrong without consequence. Those things sit on my computer for no one, as these side tasks are wont to do.

So it rectify that, I’m going to strip the theme off of this site and rebuild all the html and css and whatever javascript I want to add it as I do. Nothing new about that. But I’m going to do it on the live site. So things are about to break. Badly. Perhaps for a good long time. But the content will be here. That is the point of a blog, after all. Hopefully at the end of this, we’ll have a very very clean html structure that can be referred to for how to do things correctly.

Or maybe I’ll screw it up. Let’s see.

I didn’t move comments over, mostly because I didn’t feel like figuring out a decent way to do it. Sorry if you commented on something previously. Feel free to comment anew.

I also added a Facebook ‘like’ button since Facebook’s goal is to own our lives. Might as well do my part. And I put in an OpenID sign in. Since that is probably gibberish, just know that it means you can leave comments by using your facebook or google account (among anothers), so you don’t have to register an account here.

I’m sure you have seen the news lately, or seen the blog posts, or the facebook pages, or hell, the President himself speaking about Arizona’s immigration law. I’m sure you have (or know how to use Google), so I’ll keep this short.

The President needs to mind his business (that is, federal, not state, government), and the media needs to shut up.

Oh, that too short? Ok. A little more.

Let’s get the most important part out of the way first. The part that Obama and those who surround him seem to have completely forgotten. It is a federal crime to be in this country illegally. They are illegal immigrants. Here things are in practical terms.

The cops in Arizona find an illegal immigrant and detain him, because that is what they are wont to do when someone breaks federal law. They then call up the feds and ask them to come get whoever it is. The feds may take anywhere from a day to four months (or never) to come deal with this lawbreaker. For all of this time, Arizona is footing the bill for their stay and Arizona cops have no power to do anything. But they must hold them, because now they have told the feds that they have them. Basically, it’s just a money sink.

So, Arizona passed their own law, which, just like Federal law, makes being in their state illegally… well, illegal. So now when they discover someone is in the country illegally, Arizona cops actually have recourse that doesn’t require just sitting on their asses waiting for the feds to finally show up. That’s what this is about. I’m confident Arizona would have been just fine without making this law if the federal government had simply enforced the laws they already had.

This isn’t about Arizona suddenly trying to be tougher on immigration. This is a state that saw how the federal government refused to enforce it’s own laws to the detriment of its citizens and decided to act.

And how dare our President criticize a state for enforcing (and extending, yes) what was already federal law. Arizona made it a state offense to have committed a federal offense. And the President of the United States is too busy complaining about it instead of fixing the items that are actually under his own purview. It’s shameful, really.

I’m not sure how this will turn out for them, but bravo to them for having the guts to do what most states refuse to.

I had thought better of this President. I had thought that embracing technology in other areas meant that he understood. It is not the technology. It is people. People want attention. People want to be heard. And they will say great and terrible things for both. This is not, and has never been, the fault of technology. Technology is not challenging our democracy. It simply spreads the word quicker.

Our ipads and blogs and droid phones are not hindering education or emancipation. If anything, we should be pushing to put an ipad (or similar) in the hands of all school children. Imagine textbooks that could be updated as new research is discovered, instead of being out of date by the time any child sees them. This is what technology gives us.

What we have today is a means for more people to be heard by more people than in the entire history of our race. We are closer to democracy than we have ever been as a nation. Technology has given national voice to people who never could have been heard a decade ago.

This may not be the democracy our President wants, but it is most certainly the democracy we have. And this nation will certainly be better for it.

You and I don’t agree on a lot, that much is not in contention. But I am of the opinion that you are an excellent orator and that you have very good speech writers. That is, until I read the commencement you gave in Hampton, VA. As I don’t agree with you in many respects, I am usually more than happy for you to be proven wrong on most any point. But you are still the President, so I would prefer you not appear ignorant while speaking in public. I have ideological issues to address as well, but for now, I will start with where your speech writers just plain dropped the ball.

At first I thought people were taking things out of context. We both know the national news outlets can’t deliver the facts without their own version of the truth, so as is my usual when I don’t trust what I am reading, I went to find the source; in this case, the transcript of your speech. In case you don’t recall the particulars, you can follow along here, where the transcript is posted on your very own whitehouse.gov.

I’m sure you know the paragraph in question. It’s the one everyone is talking about. For the moment, let’s step away from the politics and just talk about why your speech writers must have been hung over. First, the sentence in question…

And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

Now if you don’t know how to work any of these devices, I can forgive you this statement. But I can’t forgive your speech writers for making you look ignorant to anyone who actually keeps up with technology. The fact of the matter is that of the four devices mentioned, two are video game consoles, and thus, a form of entertainment; and another is simply a music player. Again, a source of entertainment. As the statement is basically saying that these sources of entertainment are being used as sources of entertainment, and that that is somehow a bad thing, you can hopefully see the problem. It is like saying that baseballs are being used to play sports instead of educating the masses. Well, yeah, that’s what they are for. The playstation was designed for entertainment, not emancipation. I’m not even sure the two words have ever been in the same sentence before, and that’s the way it should have stayed. It just made you look ignorant, and I would prefer my President not appear ignorant.

I’ve got comments on the politics behind that very paragraph, but it is getting late, so that can wait until another time.

Sincerely,
~ A US citizen

I suspect most of what will be here will be rants on such evils as politics, religion, and the standard crazy that is people. The standard disclaimers will always apply, in that anything I say is not the opinion of my employer, or friends, or probably even me once I have calmed down about things. In the way that good musicians do, there is a kernel of truth, but I may take artistic license in how far I push things.

I may also pull over some old posts now that I am going to split my other site into two, so if you see something you recognize, that’s why. … Or it’s because you can see the future. Sound good? Awesome, let’s go.

We do what we feel we should in a way that we believe to be fair to everyone involved. We don’t want to hurt anyone. We say what we say and tell what we tell and give the glimpses that we are able. We don’t want to mislead. We don’t want to cause pain. We don’t want to cause strife.

But we just might.

This is what we have to come to grips with. The possibility that each thing we think we are doing to protect others may not be. That in our effort to not cause difficulty, we have caused pain instead. Even though our stated goal was to not hurt anyone. This is the choice we make with each action. With each decision. And it is ours to make.

But we don’t always see the other side. Our entire goal is to not hurt the other side, but because we are not on it, we don’t actually see it. We think we will do what we do and say what we say and act how we act in an effort to cause no pain. But we have not been them. At least, not today.

So we guess.

At our best, we are able to put ourselves in their shoes and act in the way that we would then want. But there are other times when we cannot. We simply do not have the experience required to put ourselves in their shoes. We do not know how we should act because we are incapable of understanding their motives and desires. We cannot know how they will or do feel because we have not or do not feel it. We cannot know how they will or even might react because we have not walked their walk. We think we do. We allow reason to provide us with answers. But that is a lie. That is our fallacy. It is our pride stepping in to say that we know what we do not know. This is especially arrogant because sometimes, not always, but sometimes…

Sometimes we could simply ask.