I am sending this letter to Ben Nelson and if you're a Nebraskan you should too.

Don't support the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

I am writing to you today as a constituent and informing you that, should you support the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), I will push against your reelection in November.  The legislation is overly broad and violates the rights of every American, while failing to intelligently update the National Security Act of 1947.

The legislation would create an exception to privacy laws allowing companies to share private and personal data for “cyber security” reasons, but there aren’t restrictions as to who can use the information and how it can be used.  The language is overly broad and not focused enough on the purpose it claims to have.

Private communications and actions will be flowing from the private sector to government organizations like the NSA regardless of if they’re an actual threat or completely legal and benign.  This could lead to innocent individuals being targeted for doing nothing more than surfing the web, placing the wrong word in an email or text message, or searching for a phrase that someone, somewhere in the new chain of invisible recipients, might find threatening to their affairs. This bill is blatantly Draconian, and does not represent the interests of the vast majority of American citizens, let alone those whose interests you've vowed to serve.

The amount of data that would flow from private companies to the government would be immense, including innocent and private information.  Outside of cases for which there are already wiretap laws in place, the government has no need to know what websites I visit, or how many hours I play on my Xbox.

I reiterate that your support of this bill will in no way be a service to your constituents, that your support of it will be indication enough of your future inability (or unwillingness) to defend the freedoms of Nebraskans, and that a vote in favor of it will move me to vote against you in future elections, encouraging all of my friends to do the same.

Email Ben Nelson
Email Mike Johanns

The problem with Lincoln

I'm a typically closed-off individual. I don't like to directly explain what's happening in my life as much as I like to observe how I feel about those things. Okay, so maybe calling myself "closed-off" is a poor choice of words. I don't talk in great detail about the things people around me are doing. I don't gossip.

That's my general rule, at least.  Something happened last night, though, that sees me breaking that rule right now, because there's an important lesson to be had out of it.

Here's the scene: I was hanging out with my friend and we decided to go to the Q.  I had been talking with a guy named Jeremy online for a few weeks since the last time I was there and we decided it'd be nice to say hello in person, so that was an item on the agenda for this visit. The other item was to drink lots of cheap beer.  So, my friend and I arrived at the Q and got our Solo cups of the stuff, and began imbibing.  After a little of my drink, I went over to say hello to Jeremy, and I made my acquaintance with him and his friend Christina.  I didn't much know what to say, but we talked about how the drag show motif is really tired at this point, and how there should be karaoke at least some time at this place and it was a rather enjoyable, if short, chat.

What I didn't mention yet is that the ex was there, sitting just a couple seats away and keenly aware of the fact that I was talking to this guy (whom, as far as I know, he doesn't know).  After I went back to sit down with my friend, out of earshot, but with a direct line of sight back to where Jeremy was sitting, the ex took the liberty of walking up to Jeremy and pointing at me across the bar while expressing (with great emphasis on the word) that I'm crazy.

I found this to be, what they call in civilized culture, a total lame-ass below-the-belt dick move that only the most gargantuan of assholes would ever do.  But instead of relating that to my ex, I watched him sit back down, then went back over to Jeremy, shrugged, and told him that the gargantuan asshole and I used to date, and that he was still bitter about the way it ended.  Jeremy spoke to me again later in the night, and we laughed about it.

So here's the lesson I want to impart on you, the gentle reader: don't be a total dick and try to sabotage your ex's attempts to make new friends.  It's really not cool, and will probably get you blogged about.

So, I bought things...

I have been in the market for a new pair of headphones for a while now, because the in-ear buds I've been using cause me marked discomfort when I keep them in for any longer than an hour (raising concerns for the long-term health of my eardrums).  And then around the time of CES, Mashable released a story about a new company releasing headphones called "Aftershokz".  I really never trust a company with the in-your-face '90s attitude it takes to put a Z in the place of an S in their product line, but this time was different, because they promised a new method of delivering sound: bone conduction.  Being as excited as I am for things that make listening to my music a more enjoyable experience, I very quickly placed my pre-order.

But then, we're all naive sometimes.  The following is the review I tried posting on their site just now (they only allow for reviews of up to 1000 characters, and this was more than double that).

I remember these lollipop holders from when I was a kid.  They were called "Sound Bites".  They had four sound clips on them, and when you gently clamped your teeth around the candy part of the lollipop you could hear one of the sound clips in your head by pressing the button.

Of course, you could hear the sound clips even if you didn't have your teeth clamped on the candy, but when you did clamp your teeth down, the sound was of a noticeably higher fidelity and apparently louder than otherwise.  I remember even alternating from biting down and opening durning a sound clip to hear the difference, and being amazed at how different the clips sounded when I was biting down.

over a decade later, Aftershokz comes around, and I spend the most misplaced $70 of my life.

Claiming to use bone conduction technology to bypass the eardrum and channel noise directly to the wearer's inner ear, Aftershokz seem like the perfect solution to the layman who can't stand the discomfort or pain of listening to earbuds on even the lowest setting for more than an hour at a time.  I honestly thought, when I placed my preorder, that these would quickly replace my current set of earbuds.  Upon receiving them in the mail on Saturday, February 25, I tested them in multiple placements with several audio sources, and became immediately disheartened.

Positioning the speakers on the connecting point of my upper and lower mandible resulted in audio of completely abysmal fidelity.  Truthfully, listening to music through these headphones was akin to listening to music generated by the speaker on a Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS.  Vocals were tinny and bass was practically nonexistent.  Listening to music through my iPhone's principal speaker generated both higher quality and louder tones *at a lower volume.*

Conceptually, bone conduction implies that, despite generating audible noise even when not pressed against a solid surface such as bone structure, sound volume and quality should increase when those conditions are met.  So, logically, pulling the speakers away from the sides of your head (and providing air space between the two) should cause a noticeable degradation of volume and fidelity.  Yet trying this on my own pair of headphones proved ineffectual.  In fact, sound quality improved not by placing the speakers against bone, but by bringing them back so that they were situated closer to my eardrums, which flies directly in the face of these headphones' selling point.

If you are in the market for a new pair of headphones, do not believe the hype surrounding these.  I have never been more immediately disappointed with a purchase in my life.

The Internet is for porn, and rabidly ganging up on individuals

I have an acquaintance from Twitter, who works for Zipper Interactive. He is a programmer there, and while I don't believe he worked on the SOCOM series, I know that he spent a lot of hours working on MAG. Despite being a programmer of video games, though, he told me on several occasions that he doesn't play them himself. That gives him one thing in common with Jennifer Hepler.

He, however, did not receive thousands of highly public messages calling him a fat cow, a cancer on the gaming industry, a slut, a whore, or a cunt, for joining Twitter over the weekend. Jennifer Hepler did.

I'm not going to rehash the details of this weekend's events here, as Googling her name will probably give you all the details you could ask for. What I will say is that this phenomenal outpouring of rage, vitriol, and malice makes me question humanity's worth as a species. For people to make such vicious personal attacks so relentlessly astounds me, and it is one instance of a growing number which make me wonder if people have ever been able to live peacefully with one another.

The relatively immediate future

I have a feed from Dice.com for jobs in various cities, the nearest of which being eight hours away from here.  I intend to begin seriously applying for available positions in a couple months.  I'm not looking for jobs right now because I still have four months of rent to pay on my apartment lease ($1700, give or take), but I figure breaking that lease for a new job in a better town wouldn't be as painful at the two-month mark, if the pay is good.

Odds are very low that I'll be staying in Lincoln once this lease is up.  It would be a nice change of pace to end up somewhere with cool people.

I ordered Roadrunner Internet earlier this week.  Windstream was pissing me off.

Remember Nigel Thornberry?

Now you'll never forget.

How SOPA can save us from migrant workers and mediocrity

***SARCASM AHEAD***

Okay, so, I was originally staunchly opposed to SOPA from hearing about how it could give copyright holders the power to force Internet providers to block access to websites with infringing content without due process.  I use a lot of knowledge and information in my attempts to sound smart, so I tend to like the free distribution of knowledge and information.  One thing leads to another and you end up with a Josh who really wants to keep SOPA and PIPA from passing.

Then, Wikipedia went down in protest of SOPA.  And Twitter exploded.  But it didn't explode in the fun way (where it looks all cool from far away and then candy starts raining down on everyone).  No.  It exploded in one of the most flagrant demonstrations of collective human stupidity ever.

If you're too tired to click the link (I understand.  You had a rough night), it is the Twitter feed of somebody who, for the whole of January 18, simply retweeted people's snippets of outrage, confusion, hopelessness, and despair over the fact that Wikipedia -- which seems to have been the only source of information these people had -- was down.  Some of them had no idea why it was down.  Some of them had no idea for how long it would be down.  Some of them thought it was down because of a law that Congress had already passed.  And some of them thought this law that was already passed was for the express purpose of taking down Wikipedia. I can only assume that these people are from a parallel universe where absolutely no thoughts can be expressed in more than 140 or 160 characters (depending on whether you're on Twitter or your cell phone), because Wikipedia's homepage curtly answered all of these questions.  I theorize this, because "history" is the last word you will read in the first 140 characters of that page.

The most depressing fact of this all is that Herpderpedia only chronicled 400 tweets.  I haven't scoured the list for repeat offenders, but assuming there aren't any, then this is just the voice of 400 Twitter users.  Imagine how many more there were on Twitter who went unheard, or how many there were who don't have Twitter accounts.

The existence of Herpderpedia proves that we are a nation with no shortage of complete idiots.  And yet, we have so many people who seem to be unable to find work, who are reportedly overqualified for menial tasks, and who go to school, wrongfully passing their classes by wide margins because of a broken school system that lets them believe they've succeeded at something, when they haven't done the slightest amount of actual work.

So I will posit this here: Maybe we're better off without Wikipedia.  Sure, it settles countless arguments about who wrote what and when and under the influence of which mistress/substance, but it also takes the legwork out of it.  Nobody is going to synthesize their own theories about, say, Brave New World if the most compelling arguments on it are handed out to anyone with wi-fi.  We learn the most when we have to pay attention to what it is we're seeing, and apparently Wikipedia is leading (or contributing, is the more likely case) to a system where people cease to tangentially absorb information and instead zero in on the facts that are presumed the most pertinent.

And in this sort of society, I think it's safe to say that nobody is truly learning anything.  So why treat them like they are?  Does anybody remember what we did with people who didn't learn things, back in the days before the Internet?  We had them repair our cars.  We bought our hamburgers from them.  They were the ones who grew crops.  And it worked!

So yeah, censoring the Internet may sound like a really scary thing to us, because we're smart enough to know that the Internet has a lot of meaningful uses, but if breaking down the Internet has the side effect of scraping all of this out of my educated workforce, I think it just might be doing something right.

How Microsoft could increase WP7 market share

I got an iPhone 4S shortly after it released in October, and I have been incredibly happy with it thus far.  It loads applications in a jiffy, I can take calls on it without incident or hassle, it hasn't experienced a kernel panic ever, and all around it responds in a fluid and timely manner to my commands.  This all sounds like it belongs in the realm of the utterly mundane, but you should understand, I had a Motorola Droid before this.  That entails a lot of things, so let me simplify my gripes as quickly as I can: take everything I said about my iPhone and use an extreme opposite for my old Droid.

But although things are wonderful and easy-going in my new Apple-centric mobile life, in the past few months I was exposed to an HTML5 demo of Windows Phone 7's operating system, and since then I've experienced an overflow of OS envy.

If you're on a smartphone, try the demo for yourself (note that it doesn't work nearly as well on Android devices as on other hardware).  If not, take my word that the amount of polish and utility shown off in WP7 is staggering, especially when you consider that this is the same company that brought us Windows Millennium Edition, Vista, and Windows Mobile 6.  The concept of the People Hub alone is so magnificent that I'm astonished that this kind of social aggregation hasn't been done before.  Really, if our phone is meant to connect us, then why force compartmentalization onto our interactions with people?

The problem, though, is that despite the amazing potential Windows Phone 7 has to redefine our notion of the mobile OS, it is caught in the awful position of being a very late follow-up to the most maligned and stagnant operating system in phone history.  It also comes into the game years after iOS and Android, meaning that it's facing an uphill battle of numbers, both in terms of users exposed to its charms, and in the number of devices on sale from the opposing forces.

Microsoft knows this, and that's why they made the web-based demo I linked to up above.  The problem is, I checked out the demo on my brand new iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that plenty of other people looked at it on their new iDevice, or their RAZR or Galaxy S.  They're already on board with someone else, so what good is this web demo to them?

Let's go back in my own life to the summer of 2007.  I was just starting my sophomore year of college, the original iPhone hadn't been out for even a year, I was carrying a plastic, clamshell Samsung device -- which didn't even have unlimited texting -- in my pocket, and the only time I could do anything on the Internet was when I was in front of an archaic device known as a "personal computer".  Then Apple came out with the iPod Touch, described by pundits as an "iPhone without the phone".  I got one, and within the month it completely changed my life.  Suddenly, I had a fully-fledged gateway to the world wide web in the palm of my hand; less cumbersome than my Nintendo DS, and having far more real world applications.  It was the perfect companion to my Samsung phone: Now, I had a device that was, for all purposes, my personal data assistant.

It was years from that point until I finally got a smartphone in my Droid, but even after getting the Droid my iPod Touch was a staple of my pockets.  Having the ability to use an iOS device for the things that were either too cumbersome or simply impossible on my Droid was too useful to give up.

And now that I see the strength of Windows Phone 7 I'm left asking: why isn't there anything like the iPod Touch, but running the Windows Phone 7 operating system?  The iPod Touch is integral to the success of iOS in the mobile ecosystem because it gives Apple access to a market segment that Android and Blackberry don't even touch: non-smartphone owners.  I have one coworker and multiple friends who still own either the most basic of cell phones, or a feature phone, because of any number of reasons.  Maybe a data plan is too expensive, maybe they like how their current phone works just fine, maybe they're overwhelmed by how quickly new smartphones are released, or maybe don't want to be locked into a multi-year contract.  Whatever the reason, they have opted not to get a new phone, and that means they stand almost no chance of being exposed to the Android or Blackberry ecosystem.

But what's this?  A device that doesn't come with a contract?  It uses wi-fi to access the Internet?  It's smaller than my wallet, and I can play games and check Facebook on it?  It has a built in camera for photos and video?  I can carry all of my music with me?  And it's only $200?  With far less commitment on the user's end, Apple has just sold another iOS device, and the user can keep everything they love about their old phone.

Windows Phone 7 has just as much opportunity to get new users, and it needs new users.  I'm willing to bet that there's plenty of demand for a new device running Mango (aka Windows Phone 7.5) as a direct competitor to the iPod Touch.  Heck, I'd be one of the first in line for it, as long as it ran on these few guidelines:

1. It needs to run the shiniest new version of Windows Phone 7 and be eligible for the exact same updates as any other phone released in the time frame.  If the non-phone device isn't a gateway through which users can look and say, "Wow, this must be even better on phones", Microsoft will lose any upselling power it might get from this class of device.
2. It has to be cheaper than the iPod Touch.  Sell it at a nice, digestible price point like $150.  Even if this number results in a net loss on hardware sales, increasing the user base will directly increase the number of sales made in the app marketplace, which will lead to more developer interest, which will lead to  more apps,  which will lead to even more user interest.
3. It has to integrate into the user's environment.  If the device is complicated to set up, then it won't do well.  It should be as easy as possible for users to get content between their device and their computer, be it through iTunes, Zune, Windows Media Player, Winamp, or whatever else they use.  Windows Phone 7 is all about simplicity and interconnectedness; if that philosophy isn't maintained throughout the entire experience, then it might as well not exist.

It should be obvious to anybody by now that I really want to see Windows Phone 7 succeed.  That may sound really weird, especially considering that I have an iPhone, an iPad, and an iMac at home, but here's the thing: It's a damn good mobile platform.  Let alone how I feel about the history of Windows desktops, Windows 8, and any tablets that may come out for that.  Windows Phone 7 is an original idea with fantastic implementation, and if it dies out then we can all look forward to a total lack of innovation for smartphones in the near future.

Thanks for reading!

Mystery Stalker

Is the name of the achievement I just unlocked in Batman: Arkham City.

Okay...

It seems I haven't given ABC a fair shake. Pushing Daisies was... Quite charming.

Social networks and sociability

At the end of last year, I made a crucial decision for my own mental health and left Facebook.  The general atmosphere toward me within Lincoln was slanderous, threatening, and exclusionary, and my continued presence on the social network resulted in my feeling ironically detached, unwelcome, and downright unloved.

Since my profile still has relevant contact information on my info page, though, I decided not to delete my profile and instead just scramble my password and delete all saved instances of it from the computers I had previously logged in on.  I haven't received any text messages or IMs from any Facebook friends yet, but I figure that if it's really important that they get in touch with me, they'll make the effort.  If they don't try to get in touch, well, then it obviously shouldn't concern me.

Obviously, I miss some of the interactions I had on the site, but I do have to admit that my life has felt a lot more serene since abandoning it.  And, as it turns out, I'm not the only person to discover that Facebook has a negative impact on mood.  Daniel Gulati of Huffington Post wrote an article outlining some of the ways in which prolonged activity on Facebook reduces the perceived meaningfulness of our days.  In addition to driving us from close relationships to online correspondence, Gulati notes that Facebook is a place where people spend more time writing about their achievements and milestones than their shortcomings. He writes, "Accomplishments like, 'Hey, I just got promoted!' or 'Take a look at my new sports car' trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce."  Some people react to such announcements by feeling a need to one-up the accomplishment, creating an environment of competition and self-evaluation that has users comparing their successes to the success of others.  So really, anyone who has Bill Gates as a friend on Facebook is entirely setting themselves up for disappointment.

Additionally, Facebook takes us out of the "now" of our own lives so that we can read about everything that's happening with our friends. "My interviewees regularly accessed Facebook from the office," Gulati writes, "at home through their iPads and while out shopping on their smartphones."  When people do this, they're less engaged with the tasks they ought to be focused on, which leads to less efficiency, less awareness of their surroundings, and a lower sense of accomplishment on finished tasks.

Granted, not a whole lot of the depressors in Gulati's article apply to the scenario that had me leave Facebook, but it is a small comfort to know that there are legitimate other dangers to spending your life on the Internet.  Who knows?  Maybe a few of my other Facebook friends will realize this and abandon their own profiles in favor of conversation over a nice lunch.

"Facebook Is Making Us Miserable", Daniel Gulati - Huffington Post

Auld Lang Syne, indeed.

I was acquainting myself with the Blogger iOS app earlier today when I tapped on the last post I had written for this blog.  Now I know that doing this immediately puts that post into a "draft" state and will likely avoid doing it again for... at least six hours.  But as I loaded that post, I got a glimpse of where I stood almost an entire year ago, and I realized something:  2011 was, through and through, the worst year of my life.

The problems I wrote about a year ago all remained almost entirely stagnant for months, and beyond them, more problems arose.  In the past year I was prescribed antidepressants, lost my best friend over a very stupid argument, fought and lost against an enormous wave of malice and cruelty from people I truly cared about, struggled against feelings of isolation and despair, gained twenty pounds and a very unflattering gut, contemplated suicide on several occasions, and told just about all of this to a therapist with whom I meet two to three times a month.  The worst of it is the hatred... I haven't cried so much since elementary school, and just like back then, it's not a single event that I'm crying about; I'm crying because there are people in my life who actually want me to be in pain, people who might be reading this right now and smiling about their accomplishment.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I regarded my life with futility at least once a week this last year.  But then, I'm still standing, and I have to credit the new friends I made in 2011 for seeing me through the difficult times.  David, Nick, and Clint all stood by me, even when I would reiterate all of the problems I'd already told them about ad nauseam.  We started bowling together, we hang out all the time, and I can count on their company to make me smile even in the darkest of places.

And now it's 2012.  I've got a job that's on my career path, my student loans are consolidated, I'm teaching myself how to program iPhone apps, and my resolution is to publish something on the app store.

A few days ago, somebody called me an optimist, which really struck me, especially because on New Year's Eve, Nick asked me to think of a positive memory from my childhood, and I just shrugged, because I couldn't come up with anything.  I have incredible hope for the future, and a good amount of hope for the year to come. I suppose I'm an optimist of the future, and a pessimist of the past.  But in fairness, the past is done with.  Dwelling on it too much can make you wish for things you can't get back.

Should old acquaintance be forgot.  Here's to tomorrow.

You should just trust me when I say that I'm all kinds of messed up.

Seriously.  My parents are embroiled in something like a 30-year marriage that's been completely loveless for as far back as I can remember, and they've conditioned me to feel subconsciously that there is no truth to a happy ending, even though I want one more than anything in the world.  When I'm dating somebody and things are going well, I'm ensnared by the fear that for no perceptible reason it will all end and there'll be nothing I can do about it.

I'm in love with an ex who consistently tells me he doesn't feel the same way anymore, yet I rely so much on the time we spend with each other now, even though it felt like I was just going through the motions when I spent time with him while we went out.  A good number of days I feel shattered because I don't have him anymore, I even dream about him half of my nights, and at the same time I know that I'd just go back to taking him for granted if we got back together.  And I like that he's able to be his own person now, but if he were to fall in love again... it'd kill me.

I almost completely hate where I live and want to move to a bigger city, but I'm horrible at meeting new people, and I seem to repel people from asking me to go out, so if I were to do that there's no guarantee that I'd meet anybody new, and then I would have given up the few good friends I already had for nothing.

...I wish I weren't afraid of so much.  I wish I had a different childhood.  I wish I could've loved you when I had the chance.

EDIT: This song came on literally as I clicked post.  Talk about providence.

The Hardest Part of Buying a Mac

When I was in high school, I had a laptop.  It was the first computer in our family to have Windows XP.  Up until then, we’d had Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows Millennium Edition on family computers.  My family was never raised around anything different, least of all Macs. Nobody we ever knew had used Macs.  At all.  I guess it’s just the result of being in smaller communities my whole life, but that’s how it goes.  The only time we were ever exposed to Macs were in quick 30-second shots of them on commercials, and my Dad would always change the channel when they came on.  Not Mac commercials, I mean.  Commercials, period.  He hated all commercials, not just the ones for Macs.  There was honestly a large part of my childhood where I wasn’t aware Macs existed at all.  Everyone was a PC.  Everyone...

Then the 1999 iMac came out, bursting onto the scene with its garish purple pinstripe design, its forsaking of the traditional “tower”, and its minimal number of cords.  A power cord, a phone line, and a keyboard and mouse?  What about the sound cables?  What about the cable that connects the monitor?  What about the 32-pin printer cable?  Wait, you’re saying the printer uses the same slot that the keyboard and mouse use?  Wait, you’re saying the keyboard and mouse use the same slots?  And where’s the floppy drive?  I’ve gotta have a floppy drive!  This whole business is preposterous!  It’s an abomination!  PC society won’t stand for this!

In high school, as the iPod was gaining tractions, my friends and I would talk before classes about how dumb anyone would be to want to own a Mac.  It couldn’t play games, and it was weird, I mean, no right-click?  How could anybody like that?  It was entirely weird, and nobody in their right mind could possibly think that it was a sensible way of using a computer.  Seriously, it doesn’t have a right-mouse button.  That’s just wrong.

Then I got brought in on my high school newspaper staff, and the walls came down.  The entire journalism lab was nothing but iMacs.  Every single computer, lacking a tower.  Every single computer, without a right mouse button.  I had no idea how to react.  It was a world that worked entirely differently than the one I had known before.  I didn’t know how to react to it.  So, naturally, I explored the more accessible parts and then railed against them for not being like Windows.  I have to hold down the control button to right-click?  There’s only one menubar at the top of the screen?  All of the keyboard shortcuts are handled through the button with the apple on it?  I hate this all, it’s so unlike the world I came from.

On a completely different note, I was in debate class since I was a freshman.  If my utter fall into academic mediocrity can be traced back to anything, it’s that class, and its GPA-crushing curve.  It was also, not surprisingly, one of my least favorite classes.  The topics we had to prepare cases for were decided upon by some faraway consortium and argued in a style called Lincoln-Douglas.  Why?  Who knows.  The debates were incredibly stuffy and nobody in the class ever truly cared about the topics we were given, so we never talked about them (I mentioned this class crushed my GPA?).  What we did end up talking about was truly the most nefarious topic of any we could consider in the Nebraskan suburb: gay rights.

Now, there were a lot of kids in this debate class, and new ones cycled in every year, but for as many times as I can remember having an argument on gay rights, memory pushes me into a one-versus-many war of ideas.  That’s probably hyperbole, but honestly, I felt entirely outnumbered in those arguments.  It didn’t matter, though.  I knew, no matter what those kids said, that they were wrong.  Homosexuality was a sin, and it didn’t deserve the same rights as a normal lifestyle.

They kept saying my ideas were “unfounded”, but that’s ridiculous.  My ideas were founded in my childhood, in my upbringing.  My family was brought up by the military; For as long as my brother, myself, or my sister had been alive, my dad’s job dictated where we lived.  All of our schooling up until middle school was literally on a military base.  Almost all of our friends were in the exact same position, and heck, none of us knew any gay people.  We knew what the word meant, sure, but to know an actual gay person?  That’d be crazy.  Not that we’d want to, I mean, if talk on the playground was true, then having a gay friend made you gay, too.

The only time we were ever exposed to homosexuality was on TV or in the movies, and then it was only talked about briefly and in jokes before you would move on to another topic.  As a family, we didn’t know any gay people… Well, I guess that isn’t entirely true.  My mom and dad knew that one of my aunts was gay long before any of us kids knew; she was married to a man later described to me as “handsome” and “rich,” and then she left him.  Honestly, if my debate friends didn’t know homosexuality was a sin, they should have after learning that it caused women to leave their husbands who were handsome and rich.  But I didn’t know about her until much later than that incident.  The first gay person that I really knew was my uncle.  A similar story: he met a woman and proposed to her (on Oprah [clue one]), then after a few short years of matrimonial bliss, he left her for reasons my parents weren’t willing to mention.  Then he got a roommate, Scott.  And suddenly that was all nobody talked about.  I heard the word from my brother, from my mom I heard – in angry tones – talk of my uncle and his “roommate” living in “sin”.

How did I feel about all this?  Honestly?  Scared.  I’d been having gay dreams from when I was twelve, and the constant talk of how my uncle (later also my aunt) were going to Hell for their unrepentant “lifestyle” made me fear for my own soul.  Was I just that bad to keep having the dreams?  To keep looking at men?  My brother, through a hilarious incident involving a browser history that I won’t get into, was the first to find out.  It was our secret, and so was the therapist he would take me to on several occasions to try and get better.

Lyle was a really nice guy.  What you’ve probably heard about ex-gay ministries was so wholly unlike my experience.  All we did those sessions was talk; talk about how things were going, talk about how I was feeling that session, talk about my childhood, about my father who –  while he was certainly there in a physical sense – Lyle would assure me was not there emotionally, talk about my mother who – while she was certainly caring – Lyle would assure me was overbearing.  And I’m not going to say he was wrong.  Was my dad distant?  Yeah, like Alaska.  Was my mom overbearing?  Yeah, like wearing two parkas in Alaska.  But in spite of us figuring that all out and talking through it, I didn’t really feel any less gay from our talks.  Maybe he was doing it wrong.

I had my first kiss when I was nearly 18.  It was with a guy named Stephen.  He was a Mac.  It was wetter than I had expected, but it was a lot of fun.  Shortly after that I got a boyfriend, kept in complete secrecy from my parents, my friends, my teachers, and Myspace, which was easy because he lived two hours away.  Of course, after a long chain of hilarious events – starting with a not-so-hilarious suicide on the other side of town – I came out.  First to my friends, then to my drama teacher, then to my mom, then to my parents.  Never to Myspace, though, that site was already gay enough, am I right?

Thanks to journalism, I was also experiencing the Mac side of life.  So, the command button is much closer to the other buttons, which makes your hand cramp less by using shortcuts.  And the main browser is faster than the one on my PC at home.  And you can see all of your open projects with just one button.  And its control-alt-delete equivalent actually closes programs that have frozen.  Okay, using a Mac isn’t as bad or as problematic as I thought it was gonna be, in fact, it’s pretty fun.  But it still can’t play games!

Well, my parents had me see Lyle one last time, after my brother told them about him.  At this final visit, he asked me if changing was something I really wanted for myself.  I told him that honestly, no, it wasn’t.  I liked who I was, and for now it wasn’t really the core “problem” in my life.

When I graduated in May, my extended family got me a total of about $1,000.  I wasn’t allowed to come out to any family members at my graduation.  That summer, Apple made some important changes to their operating system that let you run Windows on a Mac.  In September, I bought the iMac that sits on my desk to this day (I installed Windows on it, but as time went on I used Windows less and less).  I also fell in love for the first time and had the epiphany, however late, that being gay was no more a sin than buying Apple.

There’s this joke my friends make: “The hardest part of buying a Mac is telling your dad that you’re gay.”  I think it’s pretty funny; I also think it’s backwards.  The best part of telling your dad that you’re gay is deciding to buy a Mac.

What I’m really getting at with all this, is if you need any help with your computer or with being gay… I charge $20 for either.

Point, counterpoint (I will continue until it is dead, part two)

That's really not an accurate comparison by tossing out numbers like that. Part of the iPad's power is the operating system, which is refined so that the most processing power can be made out of it. The 1.5 GHz computer you had likely ran Windows XP, which spent more computing power to run the OS than the programs. It also had all of the hardware you outlined above, which requires processing power to physically run, including thermometers, fans, and the spinning motors in the DVD drive. Battery life for laptops around then were between 3 and 4 hours--iPad is over 10. I'm also guessing your laptop wasn't $500, since the net book craze wasn't around then.

I've had an iPad since after the day is came out, and I adore it. It's far easier to bring places in public and write. Games are a ton of fun on it, and it has a gorgeous screen for watching video. It's only 1024x768, but that still includes 720p which is an HD aspect. (People seem to have no problem with their 46" flat screen TVs only reaching 1080p, which is a resolution far smaller computer monitors surpassed many, many years ago.) The screen is only 9.7", so to have a deeper resolution wouldn't really be conducive on the eyes, since text and details in general would be too small.

The iPad is a premium product, not meant to replace a more fully loaded computer, and certainly not worth all of the anger so many people seem to have with its existence. ;)

Reducing the number of applications you can have open and onscreen at a time to "one" is not a refinement. Windows 3.1 could do that quite well. The improved battery life is entirely reliant on the fact that there are no moving parts to the iPad, and there are no (sorry, iCultists. I'm sure you know I mean to say "few") background processes allowed. Yes, my laptop had a shorter battery life because it was able to have concurrent processes, but guess what? being able to watch my physical copy of Wayne's World and IM my friends at the same time was something I *liked* being able to do.

Writing in public on the iPad is also categorically harder than on a laptop, because the keyboard is on the same plane as the screen, meaning that in order to have a workable typing angle you need to have the device at some intermediary angle so that you can see the screen and make sure that your wrists aren't bent at a ridiculous, straining angle. Or, maybe you still fancy the two-plane system and decide to buy the keyboard dock. Congratulations, you just paid extra for an implement that has come with every other personal computer ever. Incidentally, I hear they're coming out with a car that has an optional steering wheel; in order to drive without it, you gesture violently in the direction you want to go and pray to Xerxes that it all comes out alright.

Saying that the iPad has a 720p screen is also a huge steaming pile of half-truth. Yes, it has more than 720 lines of vertical resolution and, yes, all of those lines refresh simultaneously, but any signal transmitted at 720p is always, always, always going to be in widescreen, vis a vis, NOT proportioned to fit your 1024x768 iPad screen. The brilliance of a 1080p TV screen isn't the number of pixels the human eye is picking up, it's in the number of pixels the hardware from which your TV is receiving its signal is sending. Consider the amount of data in a 640x480 broadcast of any half-hour or hour-long show. If you need help doing that, iTunes has plenty of them in standard definition for you to peruse, and you'll see that it's actually a considerable amount of data. Even when the stream is sent as interlaced, and only half of the data is necessary, it's still a lot. Now find something on iTunes that's in 1080p and OH CHRIST HOW ARE WE STREAMING HUNDREDS OF CHANNELS OF THIS NATIONWIDE AROUND THE CLOCK should be your default response, because if all that data were carbon dioxide, Al Gore would never stop crying. Finally, saying it would be a bad idea to have a higher resolution on that small a screen is crap; my Droid actually has a slightly smaller screen than my iPod Touch, but it has over double the resolution, and wouldn't you know it? Things look bloody fantastic when they're that sharp.

You're absolutely right when you say that the iPad is a premium product, and you're absolutely right again when you say it's not meant to replace a more fully-loaded computer. I wouldn't even use it to replace a less loaded computer, but truth be told, I'm not mad at the iPad, not really. To be mad at an inert object - be it a brick, a wall of bricks, an iPad, or a wall of iPads - belies the intelligence on the angry person's part. I'm mad at the overbearingly huge swath of the world population that's convinced that the iPad is better, more practical, or more even prettier than any computer that bears the pre/suffix "mac". The iPad's OS is an offshoot of an offshoot of OSX, and as such, is capable of doing absolutely no more than any computer equipped with OSX Leopard or Snow Leopard would be capable of doing. Absolutely any app made for either the iPhone or the iPad could run on a Mac as is, and there would be no complications. If the thousands of developers who have made half-baked iPhone apps would step up and create half as many apps for the Mac proper, there might not be the stigma that Macs are less capable than Windows computers. Hell, the programmers wouldn't even have to go through the ridiculous approval process if they went that route.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to graft a capacitive touch screen to my iMac, take it to a bar with me, get drunk and leave it there, and then sue the idiot who picks it up for millions.

I will continue until it is dead.

I got a laptop six years ago, with a 1.5GHz processor, a 32 GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, a 64 MB video card, an 802.11g wireless card, a DVD-ROM drive, an ethernet port, a video out port, two USB ports, and a FireWire 400 port. That was six years ago.

The iPad has a 1GHz processor, an unknown quantity of RAM (but I'm willing to bet it's not more than 512 MB), integrated video, an 802.11n wireless card, no DVD-ROM, no ethernet, no video out, no USB, no FireWire, and it can come with 32 GB, but it'll cost extra. The iPad also has a 1024x768 screen, just like my six year old laptop.

The iPad, however, does not have a replaceable hard drive. It does not have an expandable RAM slot. It does not have the ability to run two, or three, or five applications side-by-side. You can get a keyboard for it, but that will cost extra. You can not change its operating system, unless Apple does it for you. You can not change its battery, unless Apple does it for you. You can not install any applications on it that Apple hasn't told you that you can install on it. The iPad is six years newer than my laptop, and in all that time, the greatest advancement in computational hardware that anybody can claim the iPad has over a mid-range laptop from 2004… is a faster wireless card.

Excuse me if I don't start to foam at the mouth at this $500 insult to Moore's Law.

A short story what I did for class Wednesday

The Dark

Neither of them could see a thing.  There was hardly any room to move, and zero light.  In spite of that, both could tell that they were tethered to the walls, possibly to each other?  It didn’t matter.  They were stuck there with no hope of escape.

It seemed whoever had done this to them was a sadist, at the least.  Apart from being tied down, their bodies had so little freedom of motion that they typically remained with their hands fixed on their knees.  Sometimes, the stillness sat on their muscles to the point of agony, and one of them would thrash his legs for a few seconds if only to try and appease his nerves.  They were fed at irregular intervals; sometimes the meals came almost immediately after the other, sometimes they had to wait half a day before they got anything.

Mostly, though, what consumed them were the intense, vivid effects of their sensory deprivation: illusions, shadows, visions... sometimes they felt even like other peoples’ memories were treating their minds like a premium vacation getaway.

Both of them had long since given up hope of escape.  Even if they could get out, either one of them knew he had no idea where he’d go, what he’d do, or if there was even a life still waiting for him on the other side.  Besides, they were both naked, wet, and all but completely feeble from their stasis.

It seemed like whoever put them in this place wanted them to hate each other.  Every subtle movement one of them made, the other one felt.  One couldn’t even turn his head without rubbing against the other.  Their worst hells were an inch away from them every second of the day.

“I hate you,” one of them said.

“I hate you more,” the other shot back.

That was the most either said for a while, and then one asked, because the sound was better than the silence, “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” the other replied.  “I don’t think more than a few months, counting the meals.”  He was completely guessing; even if the people keeping them there were benevolent  enough to feed them three times a day, every day, he’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d gotten food.

“It feels like I’ve been here forever... what’s your name?”  The first asked.

“Why the hell do you care?”

“I was just wondering if you had one, alright?  At least something to attach humanity to either of us.”

The one hadn’t thought of that.  He honestly didn’t know what his name might have been, but figured he should give his cellmate an answer.  “Gene.”

“Gene, huh?  Call me Ted.”

“Great.  So glad I finally know how to address the most annoying thing ever.  Are we best friends yet?”

“Alright, fine.  If you don’t want to talk, we can just go back to the hallucinations,” Ted said.  Gene was completely silent for a couple of seconds, then groaned in exasperation.  “Fine, what do you want to know?”

Ted rolled the thoughts in his brain around until a question fell out, “Do you remember anything before this?”

“I don’t know,” Gene replied.  “I guess, maybe.  But it’s hard to say.”

“I remember things, but I don’t know if they really happened.  There’s a lot of guns, bombs, people dying.  Murders, monsters bigger than trees, and a lot of red – I don’t want to see any more of that,” Ted confessed.

“I haven’t had anything like that,” Gene said.  “I can understand why you’d want to talk... did you do any of that?”

“I don’t know.  I really hope not.”  Ted had wondered before if the blood spilled in any of the things he’d seen was on his hands.  Maybe it was why he was here now.

“I see people, but there’s usually not red.  People watching men run a ball up and down a field, a woman vomiting once or twice, men hugging, men kissing, men —” Gene trailed off, then slowly said, “There’s never men kissing women.”

Ted considered that.  “I wonder what that means.”

Gene was going to say something more, but with as much warning as a car gives before it tears out of a back alley, Ted was ejected from the room by some force neither of them had known was even there.  The tactile sensation of the experience only worked to heighten the point that he was now alone.

"Ted?" Gene paused, “Ted?”  Ted wasn’t getting back to him.  Gene waited, but nothing more happened.

For about a minute, the feeling manifested itself as solitude.  But then the empty space began to itch at him.  The air felt arid.  The thoughts in his head churned thick and slow like curdling milk.  Where did Ted go?  Who took him away?  Is he dead now?  Is he worse than dead?  But most importantly, what was going to happen to Gene now?

Something like a hand wrapped around Gene’s feet, and slowly Gene felt it creep up his body like strangling vines.  And then Gene felt himself being pressed down to meet the pit.

“What’s happening?  Ted?  What’s going on?”  Gene’s pulse elevated as the chasm slowly opened to swallow him.  There was nowhere he could turn to get out, the walls began pressing in on him, as if claustrophobia were a malevolent spirit seeking revenge on him.

He sank further and further, and the walls continued to collapse around him.  Thoughts barreled through his head faster than he could sort them out.  His heart beat in tempo with the thoughts and the frenzy within him made him want to fight, but the only thing still outside of the maw was his head.  He wanted to scream but he couldn’t.

And after what felt like an eternity of this panicked state his entire body was constricted by the walls of the tunnel.  The pressure on and in his body was unbearable.  There was nothing he could do, and the images he’d seen all before were bullets firing through his brain.  The people, the places, the events; surely they were his sins, surely this was his judgment.  He was being consumed by the transgressions he’d brought upon the others in his life.  Hell had literally begun to swallow him.

His feet were engulfed by a devastating cold.  In the matter of an instant, it felt like they were being assaulted with frostbite, and the cold, like the pit, crept up Gene’s body, one extreme to another.

All thought had began expelling itself from Gene’s mind.  The only things he could concentrate on were the sensations, torturing him.  One by one, each of the memories he’d been given passed back through his mind and then flew away from his conscious mind on angel’s wings.  Then his memory of the place itself, the walls, and the one he’d shared the horror with; each one suddenly eradicated by the trauma of the motion.

Surrounded by a cold he’d never known before, Gene could do only one thing: cry.  A hand he couldn’t see cut him free of his tether; the world was a shroud of white light, a colossus stood over Gene as he continued his wails.

A pair of giant hands wrapped a blanket around Gene, and then rocked him for a moment until the fear, pain, and cold were as faraway as the dark room.

Somewhere, a voice said, as Gene quieted, “Congratulations, ma’am,” and Gene slept.

New blog design

I know I haven't updated this blog in a good long while with anything meaningful, but nothing in this world has too much meaning, so EFF YOU.

I'm sorry, that was uncalled for.  Anyway, this is just to point out what you've already noticed: this blog has taken on a new design.  It has some eccentricities, for example, my tags totally had to go because of how far down my posts extended from it.  Anyway, I think it's pretty stylin', but I might be wrong.  Anybody have more elaborate thoughts?

A short poem

The paper ball
Unfurled
To reveal such
An intricate
Web
Of snot.

An update too long for Twitter or Facebook.

I discovered today that I'm getting a D in two of my classes. Normally, this is a very bad thing in college, because it means you have too little will to do what you think you want in life in order to actually get anywhere, except that the classes in which I'm performing remedially are about medieval England and oil wells – two subjects which, if I had to be told I could never ever learn about for the rest of my life, I wouldn't particularly miss. The unfortunate business is that these will drive down my GPA and can potentially force me out of my major. And suddenly the irony of liberal arts education becomes blaringly clear.

Anyway, maybe it's not too late to declare pass/fail.