The still relearning the value of things

While in the car today, I made an interesting realization about why I can get so obsessed about the little worthless things. If there’s a good reason for giving a child an allowance, this is one of them.
How do you decide how valuable something is? I ask myself if it’s useful, nice, durable, easily replaced. The last one is the tricky one. I care a bit more about the nail clipper that I got in Las Vegas as a souvenier than one that I can pick up at any pharmacy, department store, or grocery store. I don’t neccisarily need to use that one to clip my nails though. Growing up, parents have a lot of control over that last one. So, these things in mind, what has more value, a fork or a kite string?
A fork is increadibly useful, where as a kite string is used infrequently for part of the year. Both will last fairly long if not abused. As for the last one, it’s hard to make general statements about how easily a kite string and a fork can be replaced.
As an adult, both items are fairly cheap and easily replaced. Thus the fact that the fork is more useful means that we probably like the fork a bit better.
To a child though, forks are never in short supply, whereas to get a kite string, you have to convince your parents that you’re going to fly your kite often and enjoy it. Relatively speaking, more work has to go into getting a kite string. It is not easily replaced. So, my message for parents is that, no matter how much you stress not to loose your utensils at school, a child is more likely to get worked up over cutting a kite string to free it from a tree than a lost fork.
Giving a child a bit of pocket money is about more than learning the value of saving. It’s hard to really sum up the lesson in a brief saying. I’d say that sometimes the dollar value of an item really reflects what it’s worth, but I’m writing this on a computer that I spent $18.46 on. Replacing the keyboard and mouse would probably be $3, the cables have got to be worth an extra $1.50 at least, save some for the monitor. Well, I’m just going to trust that if you’re reading this and raising children, you can derrive some meaning from what I’m trying to convay without me condensing it into a single short snappy phrase. I have a kite to go fly.

Life or something like it

Today was fairly uneventful. I went to some charity booksale at a farmer’s market today. There wasn’t really anything of interest there. There was a cookbook that dealt with recipes involving four ingredients or less, which would have been interesting if I had any interest in the food in there. If you live alone, chance area that you seldom go through enough of anything to have much variety in your diet. Cutting down the number of ingredients in a meal helps get through stuff. I’m hoping to be living alone again soon instead of with family. It just feels like the way things should be.
In other news, I finally generated the last plot I wanted for my polarization article. It just needs to be resized and a dash of colour. I also wrote the heavy water article. There’s a mess of equations in it, which I’m not sure what to do with. Hopefully MS word’s save as webpage thing will convert them all to images for me. That’s going to be a big page when it’s done. So, I’ve got a bit of a sense of accomplishment right now. I’m getting the feeling that I should print and proof read these before putting them online, then again, it’s unlikely to get that many hits the first day anyway. There’s still plenty of time to make revisions before I have a layout anyway. Whatever will the next article be?

Gay Pride In Calgary

Someone who worked in media once told me that people seem to be under the mistaken impression that news media has some intrinsic obligation to keep people informed, while the only real obligation they have is to generate revenue. Contreversy leads to readership, leads to advertising revenue. In this situation, an event such as Gay Pride is a gold mine. Highly polarized views with people eager to devend their opinions.
I happen to have an article called “Anger flares at gay parade” from the Monday June 12th, edition of the Calgary Herald sitting in my lap right now. From what I gather, these are the facts of the event:

one of the marchers hit one of the protesters
there were two protesters in the group holding a sign that said, “No Pride In Sodomy”
somone spit near one of the protesters, but not on him
there was a fight
about 2000 people attended the event
the protesters were not arrested or warned about provocation

People have written into the paper on various topics. Participation, readership…
On Tuesday the newspaper published a letter from an individual who views the protesters as “[promoting] hate and intolerance and then justify it as a religious position.” As well, a letter from someone who ran for office was published. It was a very diplomatic piece speaking of values and ideals.
On Wednesday there was a letter from someone who called police “excessively ignorant” for bringing up provocation. The letter went on to proclaim, “Free speech dies, and we all follow.”
I’m missing the thursday paper because someone else in my family must have taken it. Either that or it was used to line the table or something.
Anyway Friday’s paper has three letters about Pride in it. One of them clarifies what the protesters were yelling. It helps to know those things if we’re going to say that police were attacking free speach. The other two are in response to the letter written by our would be public official. One of those focuses on the comments about becoming a “severely sexualized society” accusing him of saying one thing and wanting another by participating in the parade. At the end the letter states, “a few years ago, I thought there should be a parade for slightly chubby, single, 50-year-old women. They someties have a hard time of it.” The other letter questions why he didn’t make his sexual orientation clear when he ran for office and asks “when our society will reach the bottom of the barrel.”
With that said, I have no desire to contribute to the efforts of groups to exploit people’s struggles for profit. My blog might not have the readership, but this is where I vent about things, starting with how I feel that this issue has been skewed for the purpose of generating contreversy.
If news media kept people informed, it would be relevant to say that gay pride parades started with the Stonewall riots, a turning point in the gay rights movement. The Stonewall riots began on June 27th 1969 in New York City at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. It was a time where homosexuals were frequently charged for indecency for things like holding hands, kissing, and being in a gay bar, unless you happened to be there to arrest people for indecency. That night the patrons decided that they had enough decided to stand up against the police and rioting followed. On the aniversery of that event, people organized a parade as a statement against the various oppression that homosexuals have faced over the years. Gay people used to burn during the witch hunts. Gay people were also one of the groups that Hitler tried to purge the world of during the holocaust. Gay sex used to be illegal in North America. Gay people are regularly arrested and executed in the middle east.
Much of the history of the event has been lost because people don’t want to remember homosexual history. Most people don’t even know why there is a gay pride parade. I wasn’t there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the people in the parade itself didn’t know how the parade got started. So much of the history has been lost that people don’t hold the parade on the aniversery of the riot any more.
I also want to vent about the letters a bit. The issue of homosexuality highlights one of the greatest moral dangers to society. Many people are no longer capable of making moral judgements and many youth aren’t taught how to tell right from wrong. Instead, we try to tell people what is right and demand that they follow. Morality does not come from a book, and society really reaches the bottom of the barrel when people loose the ability decide between right and wrong. The best arguements have been those that go something along the lines of, “I feel that homosexuality is [a good thing/a bad thing] because it leads to… which [positively/negatively] affects society.” Notably there are few of these and it’s even harder to find ones where the claimed effect is directly related to the cause.
Just for the record, this is my parent’s news paper subscription, not mine.

Wow, long time without writing

I keep meaning to write, but never getting around to it. This morning, I had a very strange dream. It started with going for a drive with my dad, then I went to get fast food and when I got back to the car, my sister was driving and going pretty fast on some tight turns, a spiral kind of like a parkade. The next while is a blank. After that I’m at my brother’s place and I have desktop model of a nuclear reactor. It boils over so I start to adjust it and while I’m playing with it, someone throws out the outer casing, which in this case was a styrofoam cylinder kind of like a take out soup container. Then I kind of went nuts.
This dream and my trip to the Canadian Museum of Science and Technology inspired me to start a writing a new article for the science website I’m working on. There was a mother there with a child looking at a display on heavy water and it was explained that it was used in the nuclear industry, but that was about it. Nothing was said on what it was used for or why it was important. I’m most of the way through the basic stuff on that and almost done the polarization stuff. There’s just one more figure I’d like to put in and I want to expand on one last paragraph, where I compute the amount of unpolarized light blocked by a single polarizing filter. After that, it would be nice to have a layout and a home page linking to my articles in some easy to navigate way.
I also purchased a few things lately. Two LED flashlights and a computer for the science lab. $2.14 for the lighting, $18.46 for the computer, $20.60 in total and I don’t really have anything in a showable condition yet. With a little luck, I’ll have a layout and home page soon enough. I think I should make a goal of averaging some number of dollars per project. Get a mix of cheaper and more expensive things going, aka justifying the big purchases.
I bought the computer at an auction, it’s a PIII, like 7 years old now, but it came with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the price was right. There’s two family computers that I use, but I prefer to have my own. After I bought it, I was worried about what my parents would say because to some extent, it isn’t neccisary, while at the same time, I just have a hard time focusing on things when I’m in the living room and just plain don’t feel comfortable working around my parents. It’s been a few days now and they haven’t said anything to me about it. This should probably hold me down for quite a while and the price was right. It’s a mid range PIII, not too good, not too bad. My friend’s review of it is that it had too little ram and too little hard drive space with too slow of a processor to use a DVD drive with. One of the family computers is a slower computer with less ram and a comperable hard drive and at the time of purchase, we had a choice between cd burner and dvd drive. We picked CD burner. There’s so many more things I want to write about, but it’s late and I want to fuel my nuclear ambitions for a while before going to bed.

More of the Mundane

A bit of an update on my life right now. Cleaned up my old laptop and installed a new set of software. The old thing lives on. Unfortunately, my toilet doesn’t live on. Part of the handle is broken. I’m not sure how to replace some of it, but I think I can do this easily enough. I wonder if it’s something that needs before and after photos.
I’ve also noticed that I haven’t really made any really interesting posts yet. I’m not sure what kind of topic I really want to write about yet. Maybe a book review.
My polarized light blurb is almost finished. If only I had a somewhat decent layout and colour choice. I look forward to showing it off.

Things to do

So many things to do. One of them is updating my resume. I just hate doign that. I never really know what to say about myself. When I had my resume reviewed, I was told that I should add a summary of my qualifications where I should say that I can work independantly, and all the other little BS things that anybody can say about themselves as well as say a few things about the projects I’ve done.
Sometime eventually, I’d like to get a few science articles online and say that I’ve tried to write for an all ages science website. I’ve gotten all the polarization photos that I need. Just need to draw a few diagrams and write my stuff. I also got two more ideas for things I could do and write about. One is redoing my bike’s lighting system. I do a lot of after dark cycling so good lights are a must. I have illuminated turn signals, but only on the back. I’d like to be able to control them from one arm so that I can do all my hand signals with the other as well as put some turn signals in the front and I’d like them to blink too. The other idea is to setup a hyperbolic positioning system. One in my room to autovac and one in the yard to mow. Though from those distances, I could just paint something on top of a robot and webcam. Right now, I’m thinking of a robotic vaccuum and lawn mower in the long run.

The Best of Times

I just woke up from a dream about my best friend in Ottawa. We did a lot of things together, specially in the last few days before I left. Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what makes me happy and the time I spent with him was some of the best times I’ve had.

Firefox Web Browser

Somehow, I feel like I’m the only one who isn’t amazed by this. To me, version 1 and before never felt like a finished browser. There are some nice technical merits to it, and it beats IE. It also kind of frustrates how people tell me that IE is horrid when I say that I don’t like firefox. There’s a big difference between firefox being better than IE and firefox being better than everything else, a very big difference. That’s another story for another day. I seem to have a habbit of never installing the same program on any two machines that I use and early on opera became my browser of choice.
Tabbed browsing is very nice and has been a part of opera since I started using it, which would probably be around 98. I’m not sure. It’s designed to function as a tabbed browser. New windows open as tabs, popups open as tabs and the main window as a whole remains untouched by common web functions. The latest version of firefox isn’t too bad when it comes to tabbed browsing. It’s not really a default, it’s a mishmash of styles that defaults to seperate windows when the tabbed browsing menu doesn’t give you an option. New links that open in new windows can be opened in tabs, but there’s no option for pop-ups. I can’t seem to force them into a tab. Granted, it’s better than the earlier versions where pop-ups would resize the main browsing window and any scripting meant to close the pop-up closed everything else as well. I haven’t found any websites to try the scripting part on yet.
The human factors have improved quite a bit since people first started raving about it. It took me about an hour to find all the add-ons that I wanted to make my life easier. One of them is the session saver, so now I can close the browser and have all my tabs ready to go again when I open it. Notably something you don’t have to look for in opera. Mouse gestures is another plug in that I simply can’t do without. In the latest itteration, gesturing over images actually does something besides bring up the standard right click menu. Once again, something that opera has had for quite some time. I also installed the tab switcher only to discover that the default settings on that meant that I can’t use control-left and control-right to jump between words when I’m typing. I tried assigning , but it doesn’t seem to work. One add-on feature that I really like that I haven’t seen in another browser is the Control Tab Preview add-on, which shows a little preview of the tab when you switch using the control-tab key combination. I have however seen that on various desktop managers though.
Right now, I’d say that it’s better, but still has a lot of little annoyances. I still haven’t figured out which of the various add-ons that I installed brings up some html comment line when I hit alt-t to get to the tools drop down menu. It seems to attempt to be a browser that can be customized to anybody’s preference, but not everyone will have the patience to go about doing that. There isn’t really anything that makes it really stand out as being good or bad. The only thing that I feel is really noteworthy about firefox is how people seem to feel like they’re a part of it and fiercely defend it against any and all criticism, which as mentioned earlier is something that annoys me.