“I understand my opponent disagrees with me, he doesn’t want to give you a gas holiday, he doesn’t want to go after the oil companies.” - Hillary Clinton

I don’t think it takes a very big economic expert - which I am not - to figure out that encouraging people to buy gas doesn’t really hurt the oil companies.

This one made me actually laugh out loud (from a CNN article):

Clinton said she didn’t understand the resistance her plan is getting since its intention is to provide relief.

Yes, thank you for your good intentions. Now give me a plan that’s based on a long-term solution.

What it reminds me of is President Bush refusing to participate in the Kyoto Protocol because he’s afraid it would hurt the economy too much. The fundamental problem is preferring short-term solutions (the economy, or dropping the gas tax for a few months) over addressing long-term problems (greenhouse gases, or the root causes of high gas prices).

People like short-term solutions because instant gratification is always appealing. But when you take a serious, objective look at the situation, it becomes obvious that only long-term solutions will work, while short-term solutions tend to make the situation worse. It’s just really hard to get that kind of level-headed, logical thinking into politics.

I usually enjoy the Daily Show (when it doesn’t get too raunchy), but this week Jon Stewart had me literally rolling on the floor laughing for the first time, with his comments about the latest Democratic debate.

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!

It really was pathetic. After spending the first half of the debate on questions of bitterness, Bosnian airstrips, and people that Barack Obama happens to know, they finally got around to talking about the economy, while at the same time calling it “the number one issue on Americans’ minds”. Yes, thank you for taking a little time to discuss an issue that we actually care about.

I was happy to see that Barack Obama recognized the inanity of the questions. Hillary Clinton’s response to that was to claim that Obama was complaining about having to deal with “tough questions”. Is she trying to compete with Jon Stewart too? Well, Hillary, if you think you can handle that kind of question, then why is it you weren’t wearing a flag pin? Not that I’m questioning your patriotism, I just want to know if you believe in the American flag and everything it stands for.

You’ll have to forgive me if I sound a little bit bitter about these things.

Contrary to my previous expectations, I’m getting into American Idol this season. I guess I just didn’t expect to like the music, but I find I actually do in most cases. I’ve developed my favorites and non-favorites, and even voted a few times.

When they had Dolly Parton night last week, it got me thinking of another possible theme - Weird Al night. Not that it would ever happen, but maybe that makes it that much more fun to speculate about. So here’s my list of which songs I think they’d do. I decided to stick to Al’s original songs - “style parodies” as he calls them, since they’re supposed to sound like a particular style or band, but not a specific song. I did that because most of the ones I thought of were originals anyway, so I thought why not make that part of the theme.

Brooke White - Why Does This Always Happen to Me?
Carly Smithson - Midnight Star
David Archuleta - One More Minute
David Cook - Velvet Elvis
Jason Castro - Good Old Days
Kristy Lee Cook - Good Enough For Now
Syesha Mercado - Don’t Download This Song
Michael Johns - She Never Told Me She Was A Mime
Amanda Overmeyer - That Boy Could Dance
Chikezie - Generic Blues

I couldn’t think of one for Ramiele, and wasn’t much into David Hernandez.

I’m in a situation which I suspect is not very unusual, and yet I’ve seen surprisingly little written about it: I’ve been using Time Machine for a while with a local drive, but I’m thinking of getting a Time Capsule so I need to find a way to transition from local to network backups.

At first I thought it might just be a matter of copying over my existing backup data, but it turns out Time Machine does network backups in a slightly different format, using a “sparse bundle disk image”. It does this, presumably, so it can have more control over the file system used to store the backups, since the implementation depends heavily on certain file system features.

Yesterday an idea hit me, and I wish I’d thought of it from the beginning: I can take my backup drive, connect it to my Mac Pro, and then mount it over the network from my laptop. That gives me effectively the same scenario as with a Time Capsule. Now, if I’d thought of this to begin with, this whole local-to-network transition thing wouldn’t be an issue because I would have been doing network backups from the start. Oh well.

Just to see what would happen, I went ahead and plugged the drive into the Mac Pro and mounted it over the network. It actually seemed to work. It appeared with the Time Machine drive icon, and I was able to activate Time Machine and browse the previous backups, even though they weren’t in the usual network backup format. So far so good.

The problem came when I tried to back up to it: it created a disk image and started to do a full backup, instead of adding an incremental backup to the existing data. So I disconnected the drive, and connected it directly to the MacBook Pro like I usually did before. To my surprise, it started to pick up where it left off, doing a full backup to the disk image that was still there. I canceled, deleted the disk image, and started the backup again. This time it went normally, using the old backup database.

What would have happened if I had let it do a full backup to a new disk image? I’m guessing the old data would be ignored from then on, and I wouldn’t be able to browse it anymore. At worst it would be redundant and take up a lot of extra space.

But I’m left with the idea that I could take my existing backup data, put it into a disk image, and get Time Machine to recognize that as its new network backup database. Hmmm…

My wife has this seven-week dinner menu system all worked out, and she wanted something on her computer to manage it so she could do cool things like automatically generate a shopping list. At first we looked at doing it in Numbers, but it soon became apparent that this was not a job for a spreadsheet.

Fortunately, Mac OS X has Core Data, which makes it easy to write database applications. Just the thing for keeping track of recipes and grocery lists. One of the example Core Data applications is even a recipe organizer, though it’s too simple for our needs.

I’ve toyed with Core Data before, but I haven’t actually used it. I looked into it for XVG, especially since the Core Data documentation frequently mentions a drawing program as something you might use it for. But the problem was that Core Data deals only in sets of things, not ordered lists. A drawing program needs to keep track of the front-to-back drawing order of the shapes, so Core Data was out for that project.

But for recipes it’s just right. I had fun assembling a data model, figuring out a good UI design, and even learning some more tricks for using Cocoa’s tables and buttons.

Then I decided I ought to look around and see what else was out there… and found YummySoup. It does pretty much everything I had in mind for my own app, plus cool stuff like you can tell it how to import recipes from any web site.

So the good news is I don’t have to write a recipe organizer. The bad news is I was actually looking forward to it, and now I need a new excuse to learn Core Data. But I’ll probably go back to writing Flag Domination for Unreal Tournament 3 instead.

In last night’s debate, Barack Obama talked about one way in which he plans to address the illegal immigration problem, and it’s something I think is not discussed nearly often enough: working with Mexico to improve their economy. This is the only approach that actually addresses the root of the problem: people are so desperate to leave Mexico and come to the US that they are willing to do it illegally. Everything else - amnesty, fences, driver’s licenses, health care - ignores the root and just hacks away at the leaves. Yet another example of far too much time and effort wasted on short-term solutions with no regard for the big picture.

Looking at Hillary Clinton’s web site, all I see are solutions that focus on this side of the border. Her immigration page was also harder for me to find because the list of issues was all phrases like “Reforming Our Immigration System” rather than simple nouns like “Immigration”.

John McCain (who refers to the issue as “border security” instead of “immigration”, which also made it harder for me to find) talks about “building strong allies in Mexico and Latin America”, so at least there’s some hope on that side, though I still don’t plan to vote Republican in this election.

So on top of everything else, it looks like Obama has the best web site too. Every issues page has an “at a glance” page at the top, with links to sub-sections so it’s easy to find the details you’re looking for. Clinton’s pages have lots of big paragraphs that are hard to scan. McCain has the shortest pages, and the fewest. He doesn’t even seem to have anything to say about education, or “Improving Our Schools” as Hillary puts it.

I just finished reading (or rather, listening to) Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, the third book in His Dark Materials, the series that starts with The Golden Compass, which recently appeared in theaters. Critical response to that film was mixed (which was the reason I didn’t get around to seeing it), but it mainly made the news because of the story’s controversial nature. Basically, it portrays churches as corrupt, controlling, power-hungry organizations, and it advocates atheism.

The atheistic agenda doesn’t really become apparent until the third book, and it was between my reading (listening to) the second and third books that the film came out and I learned what I was in for in the final installment. But I figured my faith was up to the challenge, and I was curious how the story ended anyway.

One of the characters in The Amber Spyglass calls Christianity “a very powerful and convincing mistake”, in a way that sounds like it’s one of the primary messages that Pullman is trying to communicate to his readers. But the only piece of doctrine he actually attacks in trying to prove this claim is the idea of the vow of chastity (the character is a former nun), which is hardly a fundamental part of Christianity, since many Christian churches don’t subscribe to it. So it’s not really a worthy target for such a broad claim.

The series also seems to promote the idea that religion is evil because evil things are done in its name, mainly because the Catholic church is portrayed (at least in an alternate universe) as an inherently corrupt organiation. But that just doesn’t follow. People also do evil things in the name of love, but I’d hardly call that a corrupt institution. What’s really going on is when people do evil things, they need an excuse, a rationalization, because they don’t want to face the evil in their actions. The most appealing solution is to hide behind something good, like God or the church, so it can take the blame instead. So this fallacy that churches are evil because of the failings of their followers falls apart pretty soundly. I would say instead that if you find a good thing that hasn’t been used to justify evil deeds, you might do well to question how good it really is. Those of us that believe in Satan would say the more good there is in something, the more he wants to attack it.

(Spoiler warning for this paragraph) The third book is also supposed to have a kind of reenactment of the Adam and Eve story, but I just found that to be a disappointment. It was supposed to be the moment Lyra fulfilled her prophesied destiny, but it turned out to be nothing more than her first kiss, and unlike Eve with the forbidden fruit, there was no disobedience involved at all. The “Satan” figure in this instance “tempted” Lyra by telling the story of her own first kiss, but kissing hadn’t been forbidden by anyone. So this part I simply found disappointing and anticlimactic rather than objectionable.

It’s interesting to me to compare the His Dark Materials series to The Life of Brian, since the release of that film was also met by protests from religious groups. There is a key difference, though (aside from being a comedy): Brian didn’t make fun of religion, but rather fanaticism - and not even religious fanaticism exclusively. The whole “People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front” situation gives equal opportunity to political fanaticism. The Sermon on the Mount scene is one part where Jesus appears in the background, and yet no jokes are made at his expense. Instead you have a bout of name-calling erupting in the fringes of the crowd, which is a classic example of people getting hung up on their own trivialities when the most important thing in the world is right there staring them in the face - and in this case, pretty much literally.

A while back I installed MediaWiki on my PowerBook for use as a personal journal and notebook. I chose MediaWiki because a) it was free and b) I thought the installation process would be educational. Well it was, but it wasn’t enjoyable enough to make me want to do it again on my MacBook Pro.

So I’m thinking about alternatives. The problem with MediaWiki is that it’s not designed for the single-user scenario; just the opposite, it’s designed for super-sized situations like Wikipedia. I’ve looked at other wiki-like programs, but one of my concerns is being stuck with a proprietary format. As a personal journal, this is data that is going to be with me a long time, and it has a good chance of outliving whatever program I choose to use right now. So naturally the option of doing it myself has come to mind.

Here’s my idea: an application with the easy inter-page linking of a wiki, but where each page is based on a simple standard format, like HTML (instead of choosing one of many wiki mark-up formats). Each page is also a separate document, and easily searchable with Spotlight. Most wikis keep an edit history for each page, but for my purposes that just isn’t important so I’ll skip that feature. I would use WebKit’s built-in editing features, with some stuff added on for easy links, categories, and a few other things. I suppose that, since it’s based on HTML, such an app could be used as a web site management tool. That depends on how it evolves.

So, dare I take on another project? Well it looks like I can leave XVG in favor of GCDrawKit, so I just might have an opening.