Golden Compass or Satan's Compass?

Who has heard of this, the Catholics are boycotting the movie Golden Compass because the author of the book it is based on is an atheist. What type of crap is that? That would be like saying that they aren't going to look at the Mona Lisa because it was painted by a homosexual. This is taking it too far, once they ban a book based on the author's unstated beliefs they start down a slope that won't stop until we have a Fahrenheit 451 type situation. If they want to start banning everything that is offensive soon we will have nothing worth reading left. Quite frankly banning a book publicly is the stupidest thing a church can do. They should try banning the bible, more people would read it then. Honestly, what can they gain by this? I haven't seen the movie, and more than likely I won't. Nor will I read the book. But I cannot stand to hear a person judged merely by their professed beliefs. I will come right out and say I am not a Christian. I will also tell you I am not an Atheist. The problem with all religions is that they tend to force you into a rigid belief structure without explaining why. Look at the Catholics with The DaVinci Code, they revolted against it. Was there anything in there? No. I read it. I was also raised a Catholic and know more about the history of the church than I should. Guess how much was accurate? A fair amount, but how much of that was controversial? Got news for you, the Templars existed. Oh yes, their real riches weren't found in the Holy Land. They were the bankers. But I digress.

The Catholics tend to over react. This just pushed me the wrong way. I know for a fact that judging someone based on whether they call themselves something or not is a bad idea. I have been judged negatively because I don't call myself Christian. It was assumed I didn't have any morals and was a 'bad' person. Am I? Heavens no. Is a person bad or immoral because they are an Atheist or other non-believer? No.

Just some food for thought to everyone out there, if we ban all that could be offensive we leave nothing of any value. Realize that, in America, our greatest strength is our ability to think for ourselves. To the Christians out there I challenge you, prove to the Atheists you are right. To the Atheists, prove you are right. To both, do it politely and logically.

Busy

I have been totally busy lately. Yesterday I bought my digital camera and tutored my friend in Calc. Then tonight was spent in Flint working with 397 on programming. Actually this whole week looks to be pretty much booked. I can usually toss up a quick Twitter update and I will try to start doing that more. I really need to tell mom to just check that to see where I am/where I am going. Ah the wonders of Twitter. So not that anyone reads this and it is really just for my own use but I decided I would write that I probably won't be updating here this week. Saturday night I will try to update but I will either be passed out exhausted or maybe spending some time with Mindy. More than likely the first or the first AND second.

Work is going well. I'm really getting the hang of everything. You would think after nearly 2 months there I would be but for someone who doesn't like programming on the internet and has no experience with it I would say I'm doing quite well. I would like to get more involved in the graphical side of things than the programming. I am beginning to see a slight shift in my interests. Yes I am still very interested in programming but the more I do in Photoshop and Illustrator the more I enjoy it. I really like Illustrator as a matter of fact. I also learned of a new tool from Doug at work today, Google Sketchup. It seems to be pretty powerful and flexible. I will be looking into it sometime soon and will post my initial opinions.

That is it for now, a quick tip though, if you often name files based on their date use the date format yyyy/mm/dd or yy/mm/dd as a prefix to the file name. This way when you sort them alphabetically they will be sorted by date. I know it's pretty simple but I'm exhausted and busy.

Out of Town

This Thanksgiving weekend I am going to Tawas. Before I go I should just write up some thoughts about what I am thankful this year. Well, of course I have to be thankful for my friends and family. Of course Mindy is on that list. I should be thankful, she helped me through all the rough times I've had this last year. So for that, I have to say thank you, to her and to everyone who helped me.

So this is me telling everyone thank you. I know none of you read this. Thats not a big deal to me.

I won't have internet access this weekend so I hope everyone has a nice weekend and stays safe.

Oh, yeah I should write something tech related shouldn't I? Ok, we all know about GeekTool, well us Mac fans at least. How about for you poor souls stuck using a PC. Well Samurize (http://www.samurize.com) is a similar tool to GeekTool (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool). Now I run Mac so I haven't tried the tool yet but in truth it looks much simpler than GeekTool. From looking around the site there seems to be several tutorials on how to set stuff up.

Twitter as a tool

Twitter is cool. Really, I love Twitter. I tend to use it as a way of showing where I am or what I'm doing. What I want to see from someone is some sort of tracker. Integrate Twitter with Google Maps, or better yet, Google Earth. Allow Twitter users to use a #location tag for their Twitters and put in their geographic location, town or zip code. Then the location needs to be found as a latitude and longitude. For this I would use yahoo's geo-coding tool which give you the data as xml. Then plot these points on Google Earth/Maps.

Ok, no you are wondering what use that would have. Imagine that I am a company that has sales people traveling all over the world. I get a customer that is in Zimbabwe, I want to find who I have that is the closest. This would work as a nice visual way of checking. To me that would be cool.

Now, this wouldn't be hard to implement, actually I've said most everything needed to do it. Throw it all into a php page and its mostly done. The only thing that php lacks is an effective and simple xml parser that parses it into an associative array.

Hello World

Ok, well I am going to use this to post articles I find in my trawling of the internet as well as to post my opinions on things. Really this is going to be a whatever comes to my mind and I feel like writing blog. This means it will probably be very liberal, very anti organized religion. Pretty much like me. So, if you like me and all my cynicism and humor, enjoy. If you don't well thats fine to.