George Entenman

Two days ago I was fantasizing about how I will feel on Jan 20th and I suddenly realized that for the first time in my life, I wanted to buy an American flag and display it on my truck. I couldn’t believe it.

I was forced to pledge allegiance to the flag when I was little, but somehow that didn’t make me love it and want to display it. Until now, my country’s flag has represented power, not freedom. It’s used to sell gasoline, militarism, racism.

But in my fantasy, my feelings suddenly changed. I’m feeling hope, hope!

Maybe we will finally have an affirmative answer to that old question, Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free…?

I’ve been intrigued by SQLite for a long time because it reminds me of MySQL back in the old days when it was a simple system of related tables. I’ve got the SQLite Manager extension to Firefox, but I don’t find it very interesting.

It turns out that a whole lot of OSX and its applications keep their data in SQLite, so I think that having a way to look at the databases on my computer, give them user-friendly interfaces, etc., could be a lot of fun.

Now comes Xbase, an OSX Leopard application built on top of SQLite. I want to start keeping more of my personal information in a database without having to write web pages or use FileMaker.

I’m going to give Xbase a try. Documentation is pretty sparse. We’ll see!

I have trouble with the way that people on the “liberal” end of the political spectrum (people like me, in other words) talk about nuclear power.

Too often I see discussions like this one from Alternet.org entitled
Let’s Kick Nuclear Power out of the Climate Change Debate. The title already tells you that we are not even supposed to debate the possibility of using nuclear power.

The article appears to make some interesting points, but I admit I had to stop reading it when I got to this statement:

(McCain of course makes the apples and oranges argument that nuclear is needed to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Unless I’ve missed something and our cars are powered by nuclear reactors, one has nothing whatever to do with the other.)

The author writes as if we’re going to charge up our Teslas and Priuses without additional supplies of electricity!!?? And how about all those hydrogen cars that some people believe we might have someday? As a kid I used to make hydrogen and oxygen from water using electrolysis: do you see that this word has the same root as “electricity” in it? There are other ways to make hydrogen of course. They use stuff like natural gas. No problems there, I suppose?

Every solution to our energy needs - even solar and wind - has a cost. Let’s agree to talk as rationally as we can about these solutions without removing any of them from the debate ahead of time?

This formula somehow outputs today’s date, June 20th, and means that it is the happiest day of the year, at least in Great Britain.

The symbols in the formula are explained thusly:

O stands for being outdoors and outdoor activity, N is connection with nature, which is in full bloom now, S is socialisation with neighbours and friends, Cpm stands for childhood positive memories, T is the mean temperature which is now usually warm, and He is holiday expected.

This is also a very special day for a very special person.

I’m adding Fadela Amara to my list of heroes.

Mlle Amara is the daughter of an illiterate Algerian father who moved to France. She is now France’s secretary of state for urban policy.

I particularly like the description of an organization that she created named “Ni Putes, Ni Soumises”, which she started because

“I claim the heritage of the French Revolution. I’m universalist. I believe strongly in the values of the republic — liberty, equality, fraternity — and secularism.”

Or, as the organization’s website says:

La promotion des valeurs républicaines d’égalité, de liberté et de fraternité, mais également de laïcité et de mixité, constitue le moteur de notre action; la liberté étant irréalisable sans égalité, qui elle-même s’accomplit dans la mixité garantie par le cadre laïc.

That sounds pretty heroic to me.

I don’t remember exactly when it started, but presidential candidates have been asked in recent years who their heroes were.

That set me to thinking about my own heroes. My problem is that I can never think of any of my heroes when I try to. So I’m going to start remembering them here, on my blog.

The people I label “heroes” might more properly be labeled “heroic” because the adjective is a little less inflated. But I’ll stick with the noun for now.

I got email from Qweewqewqewq Wqeweqewq today. He sent if from Turkey. I miss Qweewqewqewq and wish I could be tagging along on his adventure. Hope he brings back lots of photos. I know he’ll bring back lots of stories!

I’m feeling hope again. It’s been a long time.

People my age have memories of a hopeful era. Dare we hope again?

We all know that China has gained enormous dollar reserves as it has hollowed out US manufacturing capacity. If they dumped their dollars, they could easily drive our economy into a deep recession.

Of course, China knows that hurting our economy so badly would hurt theirs as well, given that we buy so much of their output.

Instead, they buy US companies. What sort of companies might interest them? Hmmm… how about companies that make computer hard drives? Sure enough, a Chinese company is interested in buying Seagate Technology. (Is the US government is concerned about this? Yes. But not allowing the Chinese to invest freely in our country might also have serious consequences.)

A headline in Sunday’s Taipei Times announced that Chinese Trojan on Maxtor HDDs spooks Taiwan:

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Hmmm…

Thank goodness our military is vastly superior to any other country’s, right? We’re the only superpower now, right? And our military technology will maintain our superiority for the forseeable future. Right?