Olbermann And Stewart on Math by Hillary Clinton

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Jon Stewart makes this even more amusing:

"So, what it comes down to is that you [Hillary] would win the nomination.....

....if Democrats were Republicans.


That sounds like one tremendous "if you..." to the process."

- Jon Stewart

Real, Modern, Illegal U.S. Government Propaganda

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This is all about what is discussed in this NY Times story.

"What they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we've had various laws on our books in our country going back to the 1920's.

It is illegal for the U.S. Government to propagandize citizens in this way.

In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign."

- John Stauber

Factual History According to Daniel:Caveman Birth Control

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In the past, there was no such thing as a pill to keep one from getting pregnant when one had sex. There were no such things as condoms, and, likewise, there were no "we don't believe in birth control" Catholics either. (Ok, Catholics long proceeded birth control, but birth control wasn't an issue until more recently...(no offense intended to Catholics here...))

No, before we had any of these things, birth control involved a "simple" procedure:
Two days after having sex, one would simply club one's wife in the stomach several times with a large, blunt stick.

There are the facts, unaltered and true.

and, if you believe that, something might be wrong with you!!

Mr. Tumnus: It's not something I have done, Lucy Pevensie. It's something I'm doing.
Lucy Pevensie: What are you doing?
Mr. Tumnus: (whispers in tears) I'm kidnapping you.

- The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Movie)

On Threading and Birthdays....

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It was a long day. Today (as in April 23rd) was Sarah's birthday. Sarah being Lilly's best friend here in big D. Not ironically, Sarah is German. (She giggles pretty loudly whenever I speak German) She's from Hamburg in fact (and that is close to Bremon, which is where Lilly always says she is from...). Anyways, there was a birthday party, and it was fun.

Before that though was a long day at work. (It's amazing to me how, even though I generally have shorter work days than everyone else, they still feel really long... ) When I got there, the water was off. Apparently, a water heater in the building across the parking lot had "exploded". The city of Mesquite had apparently shut down the water as a result. Since, it turns out, there is only one shutoff valve for the whole building complex.....well, that's why we had no water.

Unfortunately, that was the most interesting part of the work day. The rest of the afternoon was spent working on our big, upcoming project. In working on it, I have, recently, been employing some new tricks.

It was not until recently that I had ever played around with threading. I had always kind of managed to avoid it, or to use systems which employed it without me having to do anything special. (I.e. Timer classes) This was only until recently though.

I had decided to write a program involving BSD sockets. (this is another programing facet I had never used directly before) So I set out to write a server. It didn't take long for me to realize that, in order to handle more than one connection at a time, I would need some way of making the program multitask. The server examples and tutorials I was studying generally just fork()'ed another process off, but they also mentioned that threading is better (just not within the scope of discussion in their document). Next thing I knee, I was embarking on a journey into the land of threads. These are actually very similiar to processes, but, whereas a fork() command generally creates a whole new process (think: program) containing a copy of the "parent" process in its current state, a thread exists inside the same program that created it, shares the same memory, and the same overhead. Both, however, allow a computer/program to multitask. So, I wrote a multithreaded server in C/C++. It mostly works... I'm having some issues reading the data from the connections, but that's all BSD socket issues. The threaded part works great.

So, how does this relate to work? Well, I started incorporating this threading stuff into my big C# project that we've been working on. The results have been astounding. The speed and functionality of the program have improved drastically. Now, I know that's not entirely an accurate statement because the program should still use the same number of clock cycles, but it certainly seemed better and faster. My boss was impressed by the difference. ( note: running this on a multi core or multi processor machine would increase the speed substantially since the program can actually take advantage of multiple processors/cores now. )

I like threading. I also like C#'s implementation of it. Easy and simple to use. You can even access instance variables from two threads in the same class!!! I don't think you can do that in C/C++.......

So, such is my life. Programing and birthdays. (there's another birthday party to go to for my friend, Merry, on Sat.!!)

I think I'm going to I to bed now though. Goodnight!!

sidenote: Daniel's got a great post about our government's propaganda machine over on his blog, including links to stories on the subject in such places as the NY Times and the Washington Post. It's pretty bad, and you need to be informed on this kind of stuff lest the Republican party (which is corrupt to the core right now!) lead us into a new Hitler like era of fascism.

Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.

- Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV' - The Independant


"Phase one: collect underpants. Phase two: [silence]. Phase three: profit!"

- Underpants Gnome - South Park

What happens when you combine Tchaikovsky and Sci-fi?

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Farscape greatness.

Jon Stewart on the ABC "debate"...

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"The first hour of last night’s debate was a 60 minute master class in questions that elevate out-of-context remarks and trivial, insipid miscues into subjects of natural discourse…which is my job! Stop doing my job! That’s what I’m here for! I’m the silly man!"

- Jon Stewart

Made to Love

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I bought this song off of iTunes this weekend. (I've become a big iStore user since the aquisition of the iPhone....it's just too easy. It's like the whole one-click thing on Amazon, but for music....and, generally, a dollar for song, too...) This song rocks. In fact, in my opinion (at the moment), this may be the coolest/best tobyMac song ever. (not including D.C. Talk here, but it's up there...)

Here's a youtube video I just found of a live performance. (The album version seems to have a lot more energy in it....but you just have to turn it up....)

Made to Love

The dream is fading, now I'm staring at the door
I know its over cause my feet have hit the cold floor
Check my reflection, I ain't feelin what I see
It's no mystery
Whatever happened to a passion I could live for
What became of the flame that made me feel more, feel more, feel more, feel more
And when did I forget...

That I was made to love you
I was made to find you
I was made just for you
Made to adore you
I was made to love
And be loved by you
You were here before me
You were waiting on me
And you said you'd keep me
Never would you leave me
I was made to love
And be loved by you

The dream's alive with my eyes opened wide
Back in the ring you've got me swinging for the grand prize
I feel the hate is spittin vapors on my dreams
But I still believe
I'm reachin out, reachin up, reachin over
I feel a breeze cover me called Jehovah
And daddy I'm on my way
Cause I was made to love...

I was made to love you
I was made to find you
I was made just for you
Made to adore you
I was made to love
And be loved by you
You were here before me
You were waiting on me
And you said you'd keep me
Never would you leave me
I was made to love (I was made to love)
And be loved by you (Be loved by you)

I was made to love you
I was made just for you
Made to adore you
I was made to love (I was made to love)
And be loved by you (Be loved by you)
You were here before me
You were waiting on me
And you said you'd keep me
Never would you leave me
I was made to love (I was made to love)
And be loved by you (I was loved by you)

Na na na na
Na na na na na
Na na na na
Na na na na na
Anything I would give up for you
Na na na na na
Everything, I'd give it all away
Na na na na na
Anything I would give up for you
Na na na na na
Everything, I'd give it all away
Na na na na na
Anything I would give up for you
Na na na na na
Everything, I'd give it, I'd give it all away, oh yeah!

Cause I was made to love you
I was made to love you
Yeah, I was made to love you
I was made to find you
Cause I was made to love you
I was made to adore you, made just for you
Na na na na na
I was made to love you
I was made to adore you, made just for you
Cause I was made to love you
I was made to adore you, made just for you
Na na na na na
I was made to love you
I was made to adore you, yeah I was loved by you
Love......
Yeah I was loved by you
Na na na na na
Love......
Yeah I was loved by you
Na na na na na
Love......
Na na na na na
Love......
Na na na na na

- tobyMac

One Year Down, the Rest of Our Lives to Go!

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Today is the one year anniversary of Lilly and my marriage. Papi called us at midnight to wish us a happy anniversary.

He was asking me what I would give her, and, because Lilly was standing nearby, I said, "ich kannte nicht sagt. Es ist nicht allübe" (that means: "I can not say. It is not allowed") Apparently, "allübe" was not quite right, but both understood.

Today (tomorrow from my current perspective), is going to be a long day. I'm lying in bed writing this, and I just finished, a moment ago, going over all the events I have on my phone. It's a long list. Not least on the list is Rob and Stephanie's rehearsal for their wedding!! We're kind of holding off a bit on our celebration because of this. (I feel bad about that, but I don't see any way around it...)

The day after all of this (Friday) is my mom's birthday. Oh, there's also an official wedding rehearsal dinner that night as well... This is all a bit crazy!!

On Saturday is Rob and Steph's wedding. It's a little bit krass thinking about it... I've known Rob for close to 14 or 15 years now!!! He's always said he would be the last to get married among us. I guess Stephanie is just to good of a catch for him to let her get away. (hehe... The irony is that she's always saying that about him!!)

I have a priviliged honor of being a small part of the story of when they became a couple. The three of us went down to Galveston. I kind of caught wind that something was in the air with them, so I endured being a third wheel, and skipped out on things like dinner so that they could have time together without me. (I can't remember the dress Stephanie wore out to their "first date" that night, but I do remember she was very proud of it.) I've got pictures of this Galveston trip, too.... (blackmail or just evidence..? Their kids can decide!!)

Anyways, my point is that it is about to be a really long weekend. Oh, and to add too all that I've mentioned above, Sunday is Lilly's Geburttag (birthday). Happy birthday in advance, my love!!!

It's 2:44 am here, and so I'm going to go to sleep now. Goodnight!

iPhones, Threading, and Other Good Stuff

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So, I haven't really been writing on here a lot lately. That may start to change...

Lilly and I got iPhones. Apparently, when one gets married, one gets to pay less taxes. (I did know this beforehand..) our tax refund was thus sufficient for these crazy things.

They are awesome!!! Typing, Among other things, is so easy!!! So, maybe I'll start writing more now since I can pretty much write from anywhere.

It feels like I've been programing for the last three months straight. I've been helping Daniel with a project at his work. Then, there has also been my work. There was about three weeks straight where Daniel would come over every evening, and stay until 3 or 4 am. None of us enjoyed that!!

Things have calmed down a bit, but we're starting to get into a bit of iPhone software development. That was part of the reason I got an iPhone... (it's a good cover story, right???) Daniel took a big risk and bought a couple of MacBooks so we could this.

Then we started tearing into objective-c. (that's the primary programing language used on the Macs and, consequently, the iPhones as well) So, yea...

Objective-c is so different from what I'm used to. I mean, C#, C++, PHP, Java, and even Javascript are all so similiar. Of course, most of those are styled after C++. Here's the thing though: C++ and Objective-c are both basically supersets of C. That means that you can write C code in either one without any changes.

The big difference between them is how they deal with objects. But, when objects are at the center of modern programing, that can make a large difference.

At any rate, we're learning. Tonight, we were both digging into standards based C++ programing though. Both for different reasons: he is learning how to interact with databases to see if he can get better on his work server. I am attempting to learn how to write a multithreaded server involving sockets and threading, two fundamental areas of C and C++ programing that I have never needed until now.

We have a really good idea for something to write on the iPhone, but, unfortunately, it will probably require some kind of outside investment to get it up and running.

It might also mean starting a company. Heck, if we want to really write anything serious for the iPhone, we'll need to start one. We definately want to work on developing something though....

The big problem then is: How do we find the time to do this? And, equally important, what about our current jobs right now???

This is frustrating me, and I keep coming back to the same root question: What does God want us to do?

I believe...no, I know that, if God is on our side, we can accomplish anything. So, is it His will for us to do this????

I don't believe He has answered that question yet. And that is what is making me crazy.

So, in the meantime, I'm writing a server. We'll need one for this project at any rate. And, if we don't end up doing it, then at least I'll know how POSIX threading and Berkeley sockets work...

Please pray that God will help us make the right choices on this!!

(Incidentally, this was all typed on the iPhone...except this little message here)

"This message has been sent and endorsed by iPhone."

- my new email sig when sending mail from the iPhone...so much fun...