QOTD

"Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot."
-Paul Graham

Addendum

A few notes on things people have mentioned (over im, no comments yet :( )

The MSM is an acronym used in the blogosphere which means Mainstream Media. The general public gets their information from places like CNN, which have been shown again and again to push their own agenda. If you want honest reporting, you do not get it from the MSM.

There was a study put out by the pew foundation proving the strong leftism (dont care if its not a word, it is now) of the MSM. Cant find a link for the life of me, but i read it awhile back and it was enough to convince me. As despicable as it is, pretty much across the board there is a heavy bias in journalism, and for the most part it is leftist. (with some notable exceptions like fox news, who would shift the planet on its axis if they were any more right)

That against me song at the end is pretty much exactly about what i am talking about. After rereading the entry, i realised that only about a quarter of the meaning is actually in the words. any am! fans will appreciate it though ;-)

And last but not least, some of that rant reads as a tad arrogant. I apologize, that is not my intention at all. I do not believe everyone is wrong but me. I was trying to say the people who will bring this world forward are learning to keep their mouths shut. I believe I share some of the qualities of the revolutionary, but am sorely lacking in others.

Stay tuned, I will be giving my views on why things are the way they are. If anyone wants to get a heads up on subject matter, it will center around the effect of institutional authority on the human mind, and how that directly applies to almost all facets of our lives. Ive also got one in the works on why the windows taskbar sucks in a huge way if you are doing serious work, which comes first is totally dependant on my mood tomorrow ;-)

Terri Shiavo, or "How free thinkers are being culled from our society"

Yes, yes, I know, she's dead, and the issue is kind of moot at this point. Thats ok, because I dont want to talk about the issue. The issue was so clear from day one, that only someone who believes what the MSM tells them. A quick overview for those who dont get where im comming from:

• She said she didnt want to live life as a zombie.
• She is now a zombie. Her condition is not contraversial. There has been such an incredable amount of grey tissue loss that there is nothing left that is "Terri Shiavo" other then a shell.
• This campeign has been spearheaded by a mother who cant let go. I figured this out in under a minute. I know its tough to read people sometimes, but when someone describes a corpse (whether breathing or not) as her "life", that means they havnt let go.

That is all there is to it. Anything else was a media invention. And what an invention! America was in an uproar, and for what? To enable a breathing corpse to continue breathing, and to keep the false sense of motherhood alive in a desperate woman. Yeah, now theres a worthy cause we can all get behind.

Anyways, I'm not going to argue about Terri. To quote Paul Graham, "Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.". Anyone who believes she should have lived is an idiot. What I'm going to talk about is the level of reaction that we have seen from it.

First of all, lets look at the MSM. We all know that as a general rule, todays media has heavy left-wing bias (or as one conservative commentator described it: “echo chamber of left and further-left scribblers and talkers and self-reinforcing head nodders who were overwhelmingly anti-Republican, anti-Christian, anti-military, anti-wealth, anti-business, and even anti-middle class". I just love that quote, all the statements apply to me even though I believe in christ and think liberals are just as dumb as conservatives). But this is most definately not a left-wing cause. The christian right is against euthanasia of all kinds (other then the kind that involves nukes and arabs), the american right is huge on family, and such a big deal being made of her husband remarrying is a good indicator of where this came from, and who it is targetted at.

We are watching propaganda in action folks. The american president pushing for special laws for a special situation consisting completely of dishonest hype. The country embroiled in an arguement over an issue that doesnt matter in any way, shape, or form, while remaining blissfully ignorant of the things going on which are imparative to address. Why dont we talk about globalization? Or the patriot act? Or the fact that the entire fuckin world is furious at you for acting like hitler, but are too scared of you to do anything about it? But instead of the global economy, the president of their country throwing away civil liberties that were bitterly fought for by their forefathers, or the fact that they are blithely walking towards ww3, the American public would rather blather on about shiavo.

Lets think back a few months ago, we saw a very similar situation. The american elections. After the previous ones, I said "Bush will not get another term, unless the democrats put up a total and complete incompitant to run against him.". I still stand by that. You watch the news, or the debates, or the interviews, waiting for someone, somewhere to ask a question that is real and that matters. Instead, we get this partisan bickering, arguments over gay marriage or abortion (which are far outside any conceivable jurisdiction of a federal governament by the way. The late, great Canadian Prime Minister Trudeux said it best: "The governament has no place in the peoples bedrooms".). Of course, this is nothing new, but in my short span on this earth I have never seen such firm division between right and left. It is like someone took all of north america, devided them up, and told them if your on the red team, you believe this. if you are on the blue team, you believe that.

It is just stunning the level of stupidity involved in partisan beliefs. I have halted pro-lifers in their tracks by saying "Noone wants to have an abortion. The fact that so many teens are having them nowadays means that there is something horribly wrong with the way we are bringing up our children. Attacking abortion will be bringing down the only possible way out these kids have, and give them no superior alternative. Fix the problem, or at least come up with a better band-aid before you go off on something you obviously havnt thought through.". Now, I believe I am an intelligent guy, but in the grand scheme of things there are PLENTY of people out there brighter then me. So where are they? Why is my voice the only voice of reason in this cacaphony of zealtry and idiocy?

I believe these people, people like me, are the free thinkers. We make our own beliefs, and pass them down to others. We dont accept the tripe that our culture tries to shove down our throats. We are also in short supply.

Once, long ago, america was lead by free thinkers. Read some James Madison (known as the father of the american constitution), and you will see an incredable amount of intelligence and forsight. It is no longer the case, we are targetted now at the elementary school level as troublesome, and have our excess will, determination, innovation, and creativy beaten out of us. We scare the leaders, because we challenge the very reality they have constructed. So they have created an environment that doesnt stifle us so much as strengthen our greatest opponent, idiocy.

Our world today is black and white. Red or blue. Left or right. Christian or muslem. I am constantly attacked for things I do not believe in, and have never professed to believe in, because the assumption is made that since I believe in something else, I must believe in this too. I am considered left wing by the right, right wing by the left, anti-christian by the christians, christian by the atheists, a warmonger to the pacifists, and a coward by the warmongers. I have learned that to say anything worth saying will result in meaningless arguments around things that mean nothing, and will continue until I lose the will to fight it any longer. I have learned to keep my mouth shut, to keep my ideas to myself, and to distance myself from the very things that NEED people like me to change them.

So to answer my question, the reason the world is so devoid of free thought is because the free thinkers are tired of trying to shout over the throngs of sheep that will fight to the bitter end for something that someone else believes in. That isnt the case accross the board, there exist small candels in the darkness. The old hackers are pretty much to a man free thinkers, by very definition they have to be to be true innovators. You see men like noam chompsky, who started out full of purpose, but have wasted their lives arguing petty arguments and accomplishing nothing. You hear the protest singers of the underground screaming their songs, but the only ones listening are the informed, or kids who are in love with the image, not the soul that lies behind it. But these are the exceptions. Daily life is tightly controlled, pasturized, and rationed in familiar and comfortable bite sized morsals. Dont rock the boat, dont challenge someones mind, dont grow beyond yourself. Just continue in mindless, boring, day to day routine until any desire for something different is bread out of you, and you become another brick in the wall.

"Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists"

Sleep on pillows made is Singapore
Wrapped in comforters
Sweatin through sheets
Drinkin coffee in the morning
Floatin on Airplanes across the vast seas

And your house is made of wood
Central air, central heat
You got your furniture on particle board
Your doors are locked for, for safety

And your walkin around in shoes
Pants of denim, a black cotton sweatshirt
And you do what you do
because doing, you start to form a habit

And you drink all night long
And you sleep through the morning
And if something doesn't break
I'm just gonna go, go fucking insane

And you sweep up the floor when its dirty
You do the dishes, when the sinks full
And when the refridgerators empty
well its time its time its time, its time to go the store

You put your books on a shelf
Clothes arranged in the closet
You hang the things on the wall that you dont wanna be so easily forgotten

I hate these songs
I hate the words
That the singer is singin to me
I hate this melody
I hate this stupid fucking drum beat

But I'm not gonna tell anyone
What I'm really thinking about
Keep the convorsations on the surface
Just keep on smiling
Just keep on saying
Everythings gonna be alright
Its gonna be alright
Alright

-Tom Gabel, Against Me!

Blogger Hax0ring

Well, finally managed to kill that bar at the top. Added some light borders to the entrys, and am trying to figure out what the hell im going to do with the sidebar. Also, the green used in the titles has gotta go, I'm thinking maybe some sort of yellow tinted grey. The plan is to do some collapsable sections in the sidebar for things like recommended reading, music, etc. That about me thing has gotta move too, still not sure where though.

I must say, firefox makes this a breeze. View selected source makes checking out the generated code easy as pie, and the dom inspector is invaluable for finding specific elements fast. I would say its high time to start pushing for firefox compatibility at work, developing for ie is a hell of alot more painful.

Oh yeah, if you want to kill the banner, the way I did it was to set the innerHTML of b-navbar to "", and set the border/background color to black. Getting rid of ad banners will alwas be a hack, but if anyone has a better way of doing it, let me know.

QOTD

"And it makes me ashamed, to live in a country where justice is a game."
-Bob Dylan

Why does Internet Explorer have to suck so bad?

So I'm trying to turn this asstacular "template" into something thats actually half decent. Once again, I am struck with awe at the idiocy of IE "standards".

#1) The "alt" and "title" properties are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS

alt is for alternate text. This is used by browsers accessable to the handicapped to be able to text-to-speech images. However, Microsoft (doing their typical breakage of standards) decides that alt tags should show up in tooltips. Real handy, whoever came up with tooltips diserves a medal, and I advocate their use wherever appropriate. Microsoft would get props from me except for one small detail.... the purpose of the "title" attribute is to give tooltips over anything (tds, tables, divs, imgs, you name it). So once again, Microsoft shafts the end user by breaking a standard. What makes this one particularily dispicable is that it was the standard that allows people who cannot see to use the web.

#2) document.all is the root of all evil

The DOM is there for a reason. Javascript, being a language that is far too loose already (thank you common man, you have lowered yet another common denominator to your level), needs all the structure it can get. I dont have beef with it forgiving a missing comma. I do have beef with it breaking the logic of the way to reference elements. Thank god the W3C is moving towards a more standard xml node navigation scheme, but since that requires intelligence beyond that of a chimp (there is no such requirement to use frontpage), chances are the only places your gonna see that adopted is by people who actually know how to code proper js.

#3) ActiveX

Guess what the number 1 reason malware is so prevelent on windows machines? No, its not because they are the biggest target. It is because of activex. If you take a step back, there was this wonderful invention back in the day called the java applet. It added functionality to a webpage previously impossible to implement. Not only that, it was cross platform, and extremely secure (so secure that java is synonemous with enterprise development, where security is a top priority). Microsoft saw this technology and said "We dont have it. However, its a standard, so lets corrupt it and shaft the user base with our un ethical practices like we usually deal with things like this." And that was the birth of visual j++. Sun Microsystems, the guys who own java, were furious (if i remember right, John Schwartz gave out Bill Gates email, and asked for the community to flame the hell out of him). They sued and sued and sued, and eventually won. Microsoft dropped their attempts to steal java, but the way they killed the applet were much more devious.

They simply kept supporting it.

Now, microsoft supporting a technology that is not under their patents is usually a sure sign that they are trying to kill it. This time they went for an extremely elegent solution, they kept their version of the jvm (late 80s technology), and never upgraded it. Sun of course had plenty of upgrades, but remember, we are talking windows users here, the very definition of sheeple. Since the archaic microsoft version was already installed, they simply didnt bother downloading something better. At the same time that this was going down, microsoft rushed their answer to the applet out the door, calling it (thats right, you guessed it) ActiveX.

Having your browser download and execute code off the net is an EXTREMELY risky proposition. Because of this, java has about a billion levels of security. Microsoft seems to think that people are generally trustworthy, so they have a grand total of one, that is easily overriden by the dozens of ie exploits that come out every month. As such, Microsoft shafted their userbase yet again, and the users accepted it with open arms. IE has a 95% marketshare, and activex is the standard for live content, java applets having gone the way of the dinosaur.

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Anywhoo, theres my top three gripes with IE. There are many, many, many more, but the promotion of sloppy coding, altering standards to shaft the blind, and the fact that using it can break your computer are at the top of the list. Expect a part two of this post sometime, need to stop slacking and get back to work.

I am of the opinion that the vast majority of the planet are lemmings, who mindlessly follow their neighbor, and judge "quality" by how hip it is. The monopoly of Internet Explorer is the first of the justifications of that opinion, expect more in future posts.

Take 2

aparently my first entry did not look like a real blog. so here is take two

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Hi, my name is Matt. And I am depressed. You see, this girl I've been with for a month left me. Oh life, why must thou taunteth me? I will go and cry and eat some ice cream now. Ciao.


Current mood: Depressed
Currently listening to: LiNkIn PaRk - PaPeRcUt

the art of losing your blogging virginity

ahhh, there we go.

Now that thats over, I guess a short intro would be apropriate.

I am a 23 year old j2ee developer with opinions on everything. I figured this would be the most efficient way to deliver my rants on topics that interest me. Considering I have passionate opinions on almost everything, this blog will most likely be quite eclectic. But expect a strong focus on technology, the IT industry, politics, religion, and the overall stupidity of the general public.

Welcome to my soapbox.