QOTW: Adopt a Theologian

I decided to revive my old Question of the Week meme once again. Let's start out with a bang.

Q - What theologian would you say you align yourself most closely to?

O - What appeals most about this theologian's theology?

T - How would you respond to those who disagree with that point?

W - What do you find yourself disagreeing with this theologian on?

Day After Tomorrow

Thanks to an airing on one of the Cinemax channels that I was able to nab via DVR a few weeks ago, I watched the Day After Tomorrow tonight. Given the critical thumbs down it seemed to receive, I did not have very high expectation for it, but it was able to exceed those expectations.

Note: this post is a spoiler on a number of plot elements.

This movie, in my opinion, shares a lot with the Da Vinci Code. Yes, more than that I happen to disagree with the world view displayed in each. More importantly, both dabble on the line between truth and fiction, and as such, probably mislead a lot of people unable to deal with such blurrings. In both cases, the fiction/fact blending is what makes the storyline compelling, so I'm not saying that such a mix is a bad thing, only that people need to be cautious.

Having watched the latest iteration of War of the Worlds a short while back, I couldn't help but see much of the plot as the same. An invasion from the skies, something covering most surfaces, cities utterly destroyed across the globe — in short, simply good summer mega budget movie fodder. The difference between the two movies is that far more people, people I'd not question the mental state of, believe in the eventual reality of Day After than of War of the Worlds. Aliens with tripods probably won't invade, but perhaps the Atlantic conveyer really will shut down.

If we get past that and put the two films on the same level, science fiction, then I would say that Day After Tomorrow offers a much more compelling version of the cataclysmic than does War of the Worlds. The acting was good and the characters were well written, likable people. While Tom Cruise never managed to make me care about his character's fate, Dennis Quiad did so early on in Day After. Both are men that are absorbed in their own projects to the detriment of their children, but Quaid's Jack Hall comes off as misguided, not just a jerk.

No, I don't think tomorrow we will face “super-cool” winds that will instantly freeze everything. But just because I don't expect something to happen doesn't mean it can't make for good fiction. We just have to remember it is fiction.

Other Notes of Biases: One other thing should be said. The film is politically tilted about as far as it could be without donkey logos flashing on the screen. The well meaning, if not terribly fast to respond, president looks very much like Al Gore, suggesting all kinds of possibilities. (“This is where Gore should be,” perhaps?) Likewise, the evil vice president, who later sees the light, has a Cheney-esque air to him, though not as much as the president matches Gore. More importantly to the story, the global cooling seems to stop for the most part precisely at the U.S. border, allowing Mexico to be the “good guy” that allows all of the “illegals” to come from the U.S. fleeing the storm. At the end of the movie, when the vice president has become president, he spells this out, noting the “hospitality” of the countries that we previously looked down on as “third world.” Finally, the last remarks from the space station note how clean the earth looks now that the Northern Hemisphere is shut down, but that seems unrealistic both because pollution wouldn't disappear that fast, and (here's what Hollywood doesn't want you to know) the worst pollution comes from newly industrialized countries such as the ones hosting the refugees.

Independent Democrat

That's what Sen. Joe Lieberman is running as now that he lost the Democratic primary. I have to feel sorry for him — it surely is pretty bad going from being the VP nominee of your party to losing the primary for your seat that you've held for 18 years in just six year. Ouch!

Nevertheless, I wonder if there is room for the Joe Liebermans of politics in the country we live in. Social conservatives such as myself would not vote for him because of his pro-choice position on abortion. Conversely, Democrats despise him for his support of the Iraqi war and his generally friendly attitude toward more conservative politicians. His seemingly genuine adherence to nearly-Orthodox Judaism has made him unusual among the powerbrokers of the Democratic party, and probably hurt as much as it helped.

It'll be interesting to see if a Lieberman unencumbered by a particular party is able to win, and if he is, whether he moves right at all.

Late Night Delivery?

I ordered some books through BN.com the other day, and they were scheduled (according to UPS) to arrive today yesterday. As of midnight, they are still being shown as “out for delivery.” Think I should expect a really late night delivery?

Testing the Waters: Reseller Accounts

I've purposely tried to keep my company's hosting business small: I'm the only person around to interact with customers (even though there are technicians at my datacenter who monitor the server and occasionally work on it), but I've tinkered with the idea of offering reseller accounts. Primarily, I envision offering 1 GB to 5 GB of storage space that the individual reseller would be free to divvy up as he or she pleased. You could give away accounts, charge whatever price you liked, etc.

Imagine some theoretical plans, such as:

• 1 GB of space/30 GB of transfers.
• 2 GB of space/60 GB of transfers.
• 3 GB of space/90 GB of transfers.

Plus the following standard features: weekly off server backups, Web Host Manager access so that the reseller can create custom hosting plans to subdivide the space and manage those plans, CPanel access for each sub account, etc. Essentially, this would be very much like a VPS, except that it wouldn't have its own root; because of the way WHM is setup, you would get access to many of the tools I have access to however.

What if I left the transfers as noted above, but doubled the disk space on each of those accounts? Then how much would it be worth?

Any thoughts on what such a service might be worth? Anyone actually interested in such a service (no pressure, just curious if I'm thinking about marketing something no one would want). I'd probably want to sell no more than five of these types of accounts, because one of my primary goals is to insure that the server is not oversold (most hosts sell more service than they can provide, based on the fact that almost no one fully utilizes their account; however, I'm not interested in doing that).

Thanks for letting me pick your collective brains.

Defining the Canon of Literature, Part I

In Eduardo's excellent second piece in the series On Porn: A Catastrophic Pastoral Failure, he touches on a separate, but touchy issue in the defense of the content in Arabian Nights. Works such as that one, which contain content that would be condemned as pornographic in pop fiction, are often defended on the basis of being great literature. The problem here is simple: what is great literature?

Let's consider the logic. The works of William Shakespeare are great literature because they exhibit the characteristics of the great dramas and poetry of literature. What are the characteristics of great dramas and poetry of literature? Characteristics, in the Elizabethan times, best portrayed by William Shakespeare. The logic, in other words, is cyclical. Many have argued because of this that literature is really just that thing which we choose to call literature.

I tend to dislike schools of thought that suggest that important definitions are merely arbitrary designs of the elite or general populous. The Intertextualist-Structuralist critics of literature are quite reverent in their view of literature, but nonetheless insist that for literature to be meaningful, one must be indoctrinated into literary thought. I cannot, they say, point to X, Y and Z and say this is why literature is literature. The Intertextualists in this regard remind me of the liberal theologians that came in force in the nineteenth century: they do not deny the usefulness of the terms, in fact, they appreciate them a great deal, but they destroy any inherent meaning that allows for the long term ability to support interest in the object they describe. In the case of religion, this problem came to light in the early to mid twentieth century when Karl Barth and other neo-orthodox theologians — whom we might call moderates — called for a return to orthodox foundations even while retaining the academic tools of the liberals.

The message is clear: if the foundation is arbitrary, people will rebel into either total rejection or a refreshed orthodoxy. There is no reason to go to church if the primary purpose of the rituals is to be a good person. I can be a morally good atheist, one might say quite rightly. Likewise, there is no reason to teach Shakespeare instead of some romance novelist's work if the primary reason we study Shakespeare is because he has been awarded the title of “literature” by the academic elite to perpetuate their existence. As the Historical and Formalist schools of literary theory gave way to Reader Response, Intertextualism, Post Structuralism and New Historicism, people have rightly increasingly found arguments for the study of the literary canon indefensible and promptly rejected the canon. A side effect of this change is to place a work such as Arabian Nights on the level of the trade paperback romance novel at the supermarket, and hence eliminate a roughly objective aesthetic justification of the one over the other.

Why read Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Marlowe, Johnson, Milton, Blake, Dickens or Hardy when Dan Brown or Tom Clancy appeals to our “modern tastes”? Is it possible to define and defend the literary canon? Would literature by any other name be indistinguishable from pop fiction?

These are important questions. Questions I hope to address.

Late Night Haiku XIV

XXXVIII. Time. When did it pass?
The winged chariot flew by
When I looked away.

XXXIX. Wind fluttered the leaves,
A friendly voice heard near too,
Fade as distant now.

XXXX. Summer's energy
Burns fast in the waning days,
Do the crickets know?

SAFARI 3 Progress

I've never taken SAFARI 2 out of “beta,” but what I'm working on now is sophisticated enough and different enough that I've decided if I ever release the SAFARI codebase, it will be released as SAFARI 3 (well, probably under a different name since Apple took my name and it makes it confusing saying I'm using Safari to look at SAFARI).

SAFARI 2 was essentially a port of SAFARI 1 to MySQL, with additions to make it a blogging tool. SAFARI 3 moves from there into new territory that I believe is not currently being covered by content management systems. My big initiative is metadata — each post will not belong to just one category, it will belong to tons of categories and an unlimited number of other, user definable classifiers. You can find any post by any of the metadata objects owned by that post.

By necessity, I've now introduced a new feature that I think is also innovative. For lack of something better, I'll call it Word2SAFARI. W2S allows you to upload a Word document and have it output into your new SAFARI post for further editing or posting. I've tested using both wvware and the heir of its technology, AbiWord, as the backend to process the documents. Right now, the W2S codebase runs a server side copy of AbiWord to do the processing, which seems to work beautifully. Bold, italics, highlighting and various other Word formatting bits seem to be preserved. Also, and most importantly for my present purposes, it fully supports Unicode.

If I get time and it proves worthwhile, maybe I'll add more uploading features, such as photo uploading or PDF2SAFARI.

AAPL and the "Butler Curse"

My dad has always joked about the “Butler Curse,” a curse that dooms any stock that a Butler invests in to sinking share prices or something worse. He came to believe this after having the two or three forays he made into the stock market plummet quickly after he took ownership of the shares.

At times, I almost think there was something to it. As you may recall, I purchased a small number of shares of AAPL (that's Apple, if you don't keep up on your stockspeak) right before Jobs' keynote at MacWorld in January. The stock went up about ten dollars beyond what I bought it at ($72 a share, I believe it was), but then began a steady decline that continued until about two or three weeks ago. The shares sank when the new Intel Macs came out ahead of schedule. They sank when critics lauded the new Intel Macs. They sank when more Intel Macs came out. They sank when Apple outperformed the rest of the industry. They sank and sank, bottoming out at about $50.

I planned to buy more before WWDC '06, but it started going up just before I did so, and I almost did not go through with the plan to buy my pre-WWDC shares. I decided to go ahead and buy some at $69.50 yesterday and then sell it when it appeared to top out after the keynote — I'm thinking we'll see it hit between $85 and $90 after the keynote.

That sounded really good when I ordered the shares right before the market close yesterday. I logged on this morning to find something had happened last night: Apple announced it would have to restate its earnings back to 2002 due to accounting irregularities with stock options. Fortunately, my order did not go through until this morning, when after-market trading had already forced the stock's opening price down to $67. Unfortunately, it was already about a dollar lower than that and sinking by the time I looked.

I almost decided to cut my losses and sell. I actually setup a trigger to sell if it hit $64. The Butler Curse had struck AAPL shares not once, but twice — in six months! I was a believer, I really could destroy companies by buying their stock. Sure, I own a bit of a few funds, but the only standard stock I own falls every time I buy it. (This could actually be a thing I could make money with, I suppose, but killing companies isn't exactly my type of business.)

Fortunately, the stock closed up about a dollar from where I bought it, but I'm still not so sure. Beware if I buy into any company you own equity in or work for.

Greek Posting

I'm working on a web site for a client that requires posting in Greek. When this did not work, at first, I blamed it on (my) SAFARI, however it has turned out to be a problem originating in the way Microsoft Word exports Greek and compounded by how Apple Safari sends Greek characters via forms.

Switching to OpenOffice/NeoOffice and Firefox solved the problem. Good 'ol FOSS for you, huh?