So, today I spent around $400 on my annual dues, initiation fee, and flight logbook. I am going to get my private pilot’s license over the next year or so. It’s going to be awesome.

I attended quite a few talks, grabbed a lot of swag, and entered a few contests. I ended up buying the Arduino Starter Kit from MAKE so I can do some awesome embedded Ruby like I saw at FOSCON. It looks really fun – I can’t wait to try it out.

The talks I attended were half-way decent, but I learned a lot more on the first day.

Hadoop and EC2

A good overview of how one can use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services to cheaply process and store data on a pretty large scale. The New York Times digitized hundreds of years of articles in a single day using these services and some awesome C++ code.

Open standards in cloud computing

This ended up being a marketing talk. I don’t know what it had to do with cloud computing, and I didn’t stick around to find out.

Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

An awesome overview of all the new stuff in Ruby 1.9 given by Sam Ruby. I had no idea they were changing so much, and this was a good dive with code examples into that. There was some discussion among everyone in the middle on whether for loops should work like .each blocks with regards to scope. I happen to disagree with what ended up being the popular thought on this subject. Most were advocating that a for loop constitutes a block, and that scope variables and iterators should be localized inside of it. This is contrary to almost every language, which I brought up using the example of C. Yet, when you iterate with .each, you immediately define a block and a scoped iterator, which, if it has a conflicting name with the outside world, it doesn’t matter since that’s out of scope. The only thing this changes is the value of a variable outside after the loop finishes. I think leaving the ability to modify a variable external to the loop is very convenient – in summary, leave it how you’ve done it in Ruby 1.9 already.

Ubuntu on the Go: Subnotebook and MID technologies

This was an interesting session on where Canonical is taking mobile technology, and what the community can do to help. They seem to have a pretty neat subnotebook coming out soon.

Python, C++, and SWIG

This could have been one of the best talks, but the speed at which it was given and the lack of enthusiasm in the presentation left most of us either bored or unfulfilled at the end of the talk. He spent the first half explaining what Python and C++ were, then he got to what SWIG is. The end was a quick dive into an extremely complicated bunch of files that didn’t help very much. In the future, it would be helpful to go to a SWIG talk that details how to make a simple Python extension with SWIG. I may have to throw that one together myself…

I also attended the tail end of Designing Political Web Apps for MoveOn.org, but I didn’t take any notes.

We ended up going to dinner at Widmer Brothers, which was pretty awesome. I had the Pork Schnitzel, a very tender piece of meat if I do say so myself, along with 2 Full Nelson IPAs. Afterwards, we caught the bus from the convention center to BeerForge and the SourceForge Community Choice Awards party. Beerforge was a blast. I ended up talking to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the developers of VLC, for hours – a truly great guy. I learned a lot about France and the French people, but also about VLC. Apparently, you can use VLC from the command line much like mplayer, which I did not know. Yet, he explained that they removed Directshow support from VLC in Linux in favor of open source alternatives, which in part I can understand. Yet, the only codec available that is able to smoothly play 1080p h264 video is closed source (CoreAVC), and until the ffmpeg avc codec catches up, I’ll have to continue using mplayer. When I can play everything back smoothly with VLC, I may consider switching.

The beer at BeerForge was pretty good – I had the IPA. SourceForge had some sort of mixed drink which wasn’t too great. All in all, a good day, but now I’m dehydrated…

Things you can’t say

• whore
• drugs
• Colt 45
• balls
• green

Now, I realize that much of this has to do with context, but come on… You can’t say smoked the finest green? What’s wrong with the word whore anyway? Concubine is in the Bible, and that’s a synonym, so… Would it be OK to say that on the radio? Do we need to censor Christian radio when they say concubine?

So, I looked into it, and found this. Interesting…

root@rofl:/var/games/angband/save# ls -al
total 60
d---rwx--- 2 root games  4096 2008-01-01 23:57 .
drwxr-sr-x 9 root games  4096 2007-12-31 16:18 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 hank games 45651 2008-01-01 23:57 1000.Hank
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root games    47 2006-11-13 01:20 delete.me

The inside of 1000.Hank is complete binary gibberish, but at least I can back it up now and move it between computers. This is so encouraging me to cheat. To find out more about angband, read this article.

So, I keep seeing people posting comments around that say Ron Paul is a racist, and most of them refer to a 1992 mailing list post he allegedly wrote. First of all, the author was apparently a ghost writer, which Paul admitted during an interview.

This posting was controversial because it portrayed inner city Blacks in a bad light. It was protesting against the lack of police action against rioting, the Rodney King scandal, and inner city crime committed by Blacks. Now, I don’t think the author was inferring that only black people commit crime, or are predisposed to it by their race; quite the contrary in fact. He was admitting what Bill Cosby has admitted. Alvin Poussaint has also admitted it, as he put here:

The statistics are kind of mind-blowing and enough to alert you that we have serious problems here. You have more than 50 percent of black males in most urban areas are high school dropouts. You have black males committing over 50 percent of the homicides. We’re 13, 12 percent of the population and we make up [about] 45 percent of the prison population.

So, is Alvin, a professor of psychology at Harvard, prejudiced against his own race? NO! He’s just pointing out the facts! This is exactly what the author was doing!

Here are some of the quotes that are in question:

Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.

What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn’t that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?

If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.

This last one is interesting, and it is probably the most cited one. I, personally, do not see too much of a problem with this. I’ll turn it around here using some current events:

If you’ve ever been shot with a shotgun by a white senior-citizen male, you know how unbelievably well they can shoot.

Idea taken from here. Now, if the newsletter was about how much white Texan males liked guns, and how it was a danger to the community for them to take the law into their own hands, would it be racist? If I were to say that 95% of white Texan males wouldn’t mind shooting to kill without giving the target a fair trial, would that be racist? NO! It’s just a stupid statistic I made up on the spot, since 93% of statistics are made up on the spot!

So, saying that at least a few black teenage males rob people is not racist, because you are not claiming that their race predisposes them to this activity. Saying black people run fast could be construed as racist, which is the intent of most people who post this quote, but it’s not. In fact, there is massive empirical evidence to back this up. The 200 fastest times recorded in the 100-meter dash all belong to blacks! The book Taboo discusses this very subject. Is it racist to say that certain races have predisposed physical abilities that are superior to many members of other races? NO! It’s just the way it is! It’s like the fact the some white people are blond. If anything, saying black teenage males run fast on average is pretty close to a compliment if you ask me.

I’ve also heard that he takes money from racist people. It’s a good thing he doesn’t do business with folks who protect terrorists like Rudy Giuliani does. This is just flat out stupid. Criticizing a candidate based on who is donating to them is like criticizing Wal-Mart for its clientele. You can’t say that Wal-Mart is racist because racist people shop there – they just want low prices like the rest of us! I’m tired of these worthless arguments. Find something of substance if you’re going to argue against Dr. Paul. The other GOP candidates have a new debacle every day! Huckabee flows them constantly: women should obey their husbands unquestioningly, people with AIDS should be quarantined, etc. Do we want 4-8 more years of restriction of our liberties?

The author does not believe that Black people are naturally any different than Whites, but he does believe that the urban culture (hateful rap, materialism, race-driven comedy, etc.) is ruining American society as a whole. I tend to agree. I respect people of all races who don’t adhere to that nonsense.

The cause of the riots is plain: barbarism. If the barbarians cannot loot sufficiently through legal channels (i.e., the riots being the welfare-state minus the middleman), they resort to illegal ones, to terrorism.

He calls rioters barbarians, which rioters of all races essentially are. And doesn’t current inner-city Black culture generally pin Whites as the enemy? Ever heard the statement that Whites are “keeping the black man down?” So, really, he is angry at their culture just like Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint are.

Our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists – and they can be identified by the color of their skin.

The part about identifying them by the color of their skin is damning when taken out of context. The rest of that paragraph and the following paragraph expound on that statement, saying that there is indeed a small percentage of Blacks who adhere to beliefs in individual liberty and free market. It also describes them as “decent people.” Therefore, the all-encompassing identification by the color of their skin has been thwarted by context. It’s a bad style of writing (making declarative statements and rebutting them), but it was the style used here.

Being afraid of black men had its basis in statistics, sadly enough, especially in larger cities in the early 90’s. In the context of the article, when rioting was occurring, it was a legitimate fear given the racial prejudices of the culture involved. Anyone should fear for their lives when confronted with a racially charged mob of a different race. The consecutive sentence makes a valid point:

Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

The information found here gives a good recent example of this. It’s a terrible fact, but it has nothing to do with their race and everything to do with their culture.

Even though Ron Paul didn’t write this newsletter, people still attack him as if he did. I’ve read a few places that the person who did was immediately fired, and never wrote them again, but I have no idea if that’s true. Even though I defend the quotes here, I think the newsletter was a little more scathing than it needed to be. It should have discussed culture more to prevent arguments like this from happening.

Now, another accusation is that he is an anti-Semite for being opposed to the Israeli lobby. If he was opposed to the Mexico lobby would that automatically make him racist against Mexicans? NO! It’s all politics. He believes that Israel has a right to sovereignty just like Palestine does! Why can’t we have it both ways? Am I an anti-Semite for looking into the statistics behind the conflict between the two countries rather than blindly getting behind Israel because I don’t want to sound racist for criticizing them? NO! I’m not criticizing their race at all, and criticizing their lobby also has nothing to do with their race or their politics. Here is an interesting site purporting that the American mainstream media is distorting the facts of the conflict, and that about 7 times more Palestinian children have died than Israeli children since it began. I don’t know how credible their data is, but apparently Palestinian children who die don’t get as much MSM airtime as Israeli kids.

Ron Paul has said many things that irk people, and I think that’s exactly what we need more of in this country. The fact is that Dr. Paul will not impose his personal views on the country, which is contrary to every other Republican candidate, and many of the Democrats. He is personally opposed to gay marriage for instance, but when Jon Stossel asked him what he thought about it, he said that they had the right to do whatever they wanted and that the state should have no say in it. He believes the same thing about abortion – it should be up to the individual states whether they want to allow it or not, which leaves it up to the voters in those states. If he believed in aliens like Kucinich does, I really wouldn’t care! If the man is not going to impose his beliefs on me as president, then he is free to believe whatever he wants. I personally do not think Ron Paul is a racist. He may or may not have said that black people can run fast, or that 95% of the blacks in Washington D.C. were criminal or semi-criminal (defining semi-criminal is also difficult – you are semi-criminal for not paying your taxes or jaywalking for instance). Speaking out against riots, gang violence, and childhood gang indoctrination is not racist. It’s stating the facts, which no one else seems to want to do. He also states the facts about the economy, which everyone including Bernanke does not want to hear.

Respecting the Constitution and eliminating the power the presidency has obtained is the key. No more wars without declaration, no more signing statements, lower taxes, and an emphasis on personal responsibility and freedom is what I desire in our next president.

I’ll leave you with a nice quote by Bierce:

“Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

Oh, and VOTE FOR RON PAUL!

It’s based on this table of the candidates views on popular issues, and how strong your feelings are on each one. A good tool indeed, and it should be publicized as a guideline for voters by our caring media since we all want voters to make informed decisions…

The graph led to this:

I have no explanation for this picture.

I started trading options about a week ago, and made a little profit on Boeing. Redhat started taking off today, and I might buy a call on that. Watch Redhat!

I’m so glad he was such an idiot. They totally forensic-ed his face!

The unidentified man appears in around 200 photographs discovered by police on the Internet, in which he was shown abusing 12 young boys. Investigators believe they were taken in Vietnam and Cambodia, possibly in 2002 and 2003.

Reminds me of that first episode of Dexter…(Spoiler Alert)

Update

Here’s another picture of him – they ended up catching him.