Sigh

Well I had hoped to catch up on SAFARI tonight, but things didn't work out that way. I ended up with a project for a client instead. It went well though, so maybe tomorrow…

Rant: Has the GOP Outlived Its Usefulness?

Think about it: “our” party has recently decided to nod approval toward a Medicare prescription bill… a bill that will cost an unimaginable amount of money to provide prescription drugs coverage to medicare recipients. This is crazy. It makes sense that Medicaid provides prescription drug coverage, but why Medicare? Why does every American senior need socialized prescription drug coverage?

Frustratingly, the part of the bill that might help dodge the large costs, allowing people to go to managed care providers for “enhance” coverage, is just a senior scam in the waiting. Right now, through what my grandmother is going through, I can see what managed care does to medicare: steal it from those who can afford to pay extra for the managed care and are tricked into signing up for it. In this case, the managed care provider called the shots as to how the hospital treated my grandmother and then refused to pay for rehab afterwards, assumedly, all the while collecting the medicare benefits my grandmother paid for through taxes — benefits that would have paid for all of these things!

So, at best, the prescription drug benefit will socialize an industry and bring the government more into everyday life. At worst, it will just feed more money into the beast that is HMO's. Neither option is good, and I can't see why any sane politician would support this.

At any rate, I'm going off track. I'll just say this: This bill is such a odd thing to support for Republicans that I think Rush Limbaugh was stumped as to what was going on — the best he could come up with was that this was an attempt to take a campaign issue away from Democrats. If I recall correctly, he even admitted once to being stumped. When was the last time that happened?

There are lots of other problems with the Republicans, right now. Many support the, I'll say it, evil PATRIOT ACT. Many support destroying embryos for stem cell research. The administration has supported turning a blind eye to Microsoft's behavior that violates antitrust regulations. The administration and congressional Republicans supported the final McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform bill. Colin Powell went on MTV and told teens to ignore the biblical morals that parents and religious leaders teach them and decide their own morals — “forget about taboos, forget about conservative ideas” regarding premarital sex and condom usage. The GOP Chairman was “honored” to meet with an organization that actively promotes the homosexual agenda to show the party's “tolerance.” These are all catastrophic failures going against the positions of the very people that elected these politicians.

I wonder if it isn't about time we started a new party. We've been stuck with the same two parties for far longer than any of their predecessors. I still agree with most of the Republican platform, but I think the politicians within the party are ignoring that platform. Hatch, McCain, Bush, Powell, and Ashcroft are just a few people, all of which I have agreed with at times, who are supporting these bad policies.

I think President Bush still has potential, but maybe it's time people spoke up to remind him and other leading Republicans that it's good if they are [campaign slogan]”uniters and not dividers”[/campaign slogan] but it's more important that they support the policies the people who elected them thought they promised. Thought the party stood for. The policies many people still think are right.

That leaves the question: where did the old Republican party go and how can voters who still support its positions get it back?

St. Paul's Newsletter and Content Management

For that purpose, I wrote a simple CMS (Content Management System) during March and April of 2000 (that was time consuming, it's one of the only things I remember vividly from those months). Not having any practice at such it took a long time to figure out how to write the system. In fact, other than Slashcode, I was unaware that Free Software CMSes even existed. Never having used one previous, SAFARI (Standardized Automated Format And Retrieval Interface) is a bit different than other CMSes — in fact, in many ways, it doesn't really even resemble other CMSes. For example, at the moment, SAFARI is what I term an “issue-based” CMS, meaning that it divides article sets into issues, like a print magazine.

At any rate, I'm getting ahead of myself. What I was aiming to note in this entry was that I've really gotten my speed refined on posting. Posting a newsletter (30-40 articles) use to take me about three to four hours — that includes reading over things somewhat to make sure nothing gets lost in the translation from print to web, mailing out a teaser to “NewsAlert” subscribers, and updating The Navigator/Site of the Month link on FaithTree.com. The last few times I've posted the newsletter I've actually gotten that down to between an hour and a half to two hours. I'm pretty happy with that, although I've learned some places where SAFARI needs improvement.

This works out perfectly. As some Asisaid.com readers may recall, I started a project to create a new blogging software package in March. In actuality, the new software is version 2.0 of SAFARI, but with many improvements and ideas I've gotten since I released SAFARI IssueWorks 0.90 in 2001 (which differed little from the unreleased SAFARI 2000 that runs my church's newsletter and dated from… 2000).

My idea revolves around some simple concepts that I hope to reveal very soon. If all goes well, SAFARI ContentWorks, as I've nicknamed the new version, will provide some pretty neat stuff that will make posting my church's newsletter much easier and will also have some applications to blogging. Stay tuned.

Sunday Five

1. Is your hair naturally curly, wavy, or straight? Long or short?
Kinda wavy and curly, actually, which is bad, because I really prefer it to be straight. When it's about time for a hair cut, it can get down right disagreeable with my normal style (see below). Hmm… is hair naturally short ever? I keep mine short, if that's what the question is asking.

2. How has your hair changed over your lifetime?
It darkened from a reddish color to dark brown.

3. How do your normally wear your hair?
I normally have it parted on the left side and combed over to the right. For some reason having my hair cover my forehead
more than a little bothers me, so I constantly battle with it to keep it up on top.

4. If you could change your hair this minute, what would it look like?
I don't think I'd change it much, just maybe make it a slight bit more controllable

5. Ever had a hair disaster? What happened?
Not that I can think of…

Busy, Busy

Well, I've been so busy I haven't gotten back to blog about anything, so I'll just mention what I want to blog about — Ozark Trip Review (Part 2, only one month late!), How I Like Mac OS X Jaguar, My Take on Harry Potter, and finally thoughts on Worship Services. All that and more whenever I get around to it.

In the mean time, since I already let the cat out of the bag (ahem), I did get Jaguar installed without killing Macbert the Ruby iMac. Woohoo! So far so good.. I've been trying out Safari, AppleWork for OS X, Sherlock 3, etc. It's a little disorienting the way Macs work, but it's been fun so far.

Maybe I'll get a good post on here tomorrow…

...or maybe not.

Well, before installing Jaguar I wanted to get my PC's monitor hooked up to the iMac so that I could insure that Jaguar didn't drive the screen at the wrong frequency (the thing that kills iMacs, or more correctly, kills their displays). Well, it seems that the VGA port for some (idiotic) reason is placed behind a small grate that must be removed by plying it with a screwdriver. Okay, I don't like prying on things, but I can do that. Oh, but wait, I also need a new grate (according to Help) that has a hole in it so that I can connect the VGA cable. I don't think I need that grate, but just to be safe, I figure I should go get that grate first. There was suppose to be one in the iMac accessory kit, but one of the casualties of a used system is that these kind of things aren't included. Oh well, off to the “macstore”…

Jaguar Tonight!

Well, I'm hoping to, uhm, paws tonight to give Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar a try on my iMac. This is a moment of truth in several ways. First, and foremost, Jaguar has been known to kill iMacs. It seems for the most part this is caused by not upgrading the firmware before installing, but it still makes me a wee bit nervous. Secondly, it is a moment of truth in that I'll find out whether I made a big mistake not saving up some more to go for a faster Mac (I've heard mixed reviews about this system and Mac OS X). It is also a moment of truth in that I'll finally really be able to put Mac OS X head to head with Linux and see how the two stack up as *nix desktops.

All this truth and more… coming to soon to a blog near you. Stay tuned!

I'm Thinking Different Now...

I got it really for three reasons — (1) It'd be cool to spend some time playing around with a Mac. I do a lot of helpdesk work and I felt it was time I knew my way around a Mac, (2) I want to do a Linux vs. Mac OS X piece on Open for Business, (3) it should make a nice box to use in a previously uncomputerized room. Additionally, while not a priority, I will probably try LinuxPPC as an added bonus.

At any rate, as I said, right now it has Mac OS 9.0.4, but I plan to acquire a copy of OS X Jaguar soon (Amazon was selling it for $79.95, but I decided to wait until I had the system in my hands before I bought software for it, and now they are selling it for $109.95!). While I am more interested in Mac OS X than OS 9, one good thing about buying an older Mac is that it does still runs OS 9 so that I can try that out too.

Anyway, I'll post more experiences as I get them, especially once OS X arrives. My first glance opinion is that it's a very nice system with an elegant design (the Apple Pro mouse looks like a piece of art), although the way things are done in Mac OS 9 seems a bit awkward to this Linux (previously Windows (previously DOS)) user. For starters: gimme a shell!

Thanks and Thanks Again

I'd like to thank anyone who prayed for my grandmother. Things are going much better now, although your prayers continue to be helpful. Prayer is certainly powerful, at any rate, and I appreciate it very much!

In all of the commotion, life indeed did trump blogging (I think that is MeanDean from blogs4God that coined that phrase), and not only blogging but BlogShares activities as well. It seems the BSEC election has come and gone, and even though I didn't win, I want to thank everyone again for your support. While the election certainly wasn't “real,” I really appreciate your real support. In reality it was a blessing I didn't win anyway considering how crazy the last week has been. Anyway, as I said, I really appreciate support. Because of my friends here in the blogosphere I still ended up in 7th place, not bad considering many of those running had far more name recognition than I did.

That actually is an interesting demonstration of how it would be very possible, if we as Evangelicals really tried, to make a much larger political dent than we do right now. In the BlogShares example, to the best of my knowledge, every regular reader of asisaid.com was kind enough to vote for me. They knew me, knew where I stood, and made an effort to go vote. On the other hand, while some of those who won have very popular blogs, none of them won by a large margin. The name recognition didn't really help them as much as you might expect. I was running without any name recognition, and for a time made it all the way to third place (out of six seats).

In the real political world there is similar power in unknown but well supported political hopefuls. If Evangelicals could focus our energies on promoting political candidates that we thought best represented our concerns and didn't automatically assume we didn't have a chance to influence the “system,” we very well could rally enough support as our people would have a reason to go beyond the average 30% voter attendance. Think about that: if just 30% of the country supports traditional values, and unlike the other 70%, it mustered 80% voter attendance on election day, that 30% could be more powerful than the 70% majority that only has 30% active voters.

This would be a major victory for traditional values! If we, as those supporters, did this, we could let candidates know that we wouldn't just vote for the lesser of two evils. We wouldn't compromise on positions concerning embryonic stem cell research just because the other choice is to compromise on the entire pro-life agenda. Instead, we would be able to hand pick the candidates that actually stuck to pro-life views across the board (while it was lost in the shuffle after 9/11, don't forget many leading Republicans — “prolife” ones — supported and continue to support destroying embryos to create new stem cell lines).

Even if it didn't work out that well, but like my BlogShares run, only placed the candidate at a small-margin loss, it would still serve to let the politicos know that name recognition alone wasn't going to keep them going — they must also remember the powerful force that Evangelical Christianity can be and should be.

Pray, Please.

I got a call from my mother this morning that she had called an ambulance to take my grandmother to the hospital. We don't know if its a stroke or what happened. My grandmother has been suffering from Alzheimer's for awhile and has gone down dramatically this week. Perhaps that has a connection to what was going on this morning — the only symptom I know at the moment was that her pulse was fluctuating from 60-120 fairly quickly and the Doctor decided she needed to go to the emergency room. Right now, I am just sitting here waiting to know where she is and what's wrong with her. Please pray for her.