Month: May 2007

Categories
life politics

Potential Candidate

I think I would make a great elected official. That is, I think I have the qualities that I would like to see in candidates and elected officials at all levels of government. I’m intelligent and interested in learning a wide variety of new things, I care about our government and society, and I like to find solutions that are good now and beneficial to future society.

One of my core perspectives when I discuss issues was perfectly stated by Jason Black while I was talking to him yesterday – I always have the underlying question in all my thinking, “what can we do about this from where we are?” One answer to that with regard to political issues is to get involved. Laura and I have talked about this for some time and concluded that we want to do that.

I have decided to actively explore my options with regard to running for public office at some time in the future. That is a nice vague announcement. Initially it means that I will continue to share my ideas about current issues of the day in hopes that I can get a sense for what ideas resonate with other people. I have been asked before if I would consider running for office. (I have asked others the same question about their willingness to run.)

I will be looking to figure out whether local people are interested in the areas of local politics that I am concerned with. I will want to know if people in my state are concerned about the same issues that concern me on the state level and if the like my perspective on those problems. I will want to discover if, by some chance, my perspectives on our national political issues resonate with a wider audience.

So let me know what you think about my ideas and the issues that I cover. Am I right, or wrong? Are the issues I consider relevant, or superfluous? Do I deserve votes based on those ideas?

Keep in mind, on the local level that more is happening on the state and national levels at any given time. Unless I start to hone in on local issues I will likely have more to say about things at those larger levels. This is not meant to reflect greater interest in those levels of government – only to acknowledge that they provide more fodder for commentary.

Categories
life

More Than a Hero

As I have continued to think about the heroes after my post yesterday I have tried in my own mind to clarify the definition of hero more fully. One thought that I had was that a hero was someone you could emulate – someone you could hope to follow or who you could hope to become. Another thought was that the ultimate hero in my life is my Savior.

The moment that I tried to add Christ mentally into my list of heroes I encountered a problem. While a hero is someone that I would wish to emulate – and Jesus certainly qualifies there – Christ presents a problem in that all of the people who I might classify as heroes I have hope that I could do the things that they have done to be heroes to me. With Christ that is only partially true. I can hope to care for others as He did and strive to obey the commandments of God as He did, but His heroism goes well beyond anything that I could ever hope to do. He gave a gift to me and the world that I could never hope to give – the opportunity to return to our heavenly home. All the good that I could ever do would pale in comparison. More importantly, all the good I could ever do would be worthless if He did not also give the gift that He gave to the world.

He has thus separated Himself from all others who I might call heroes because whatever is good and worthy of emulation in them I could hope to duplicate in my life. My conclusion is that there must be a separate category for Christ. Either He is the Hero and all others could be classified as models, or else they are heroes and He has a designation all His own – perhaps LORD.

Categories
culture

Heroes and Idols

Laura and I were having a fascinating conversation with good friends which rolled around to the topic of teaching children about their future roles as adults. We got to talking about the types of role models that children have and the messages that they are being fed from our society about those adult roles. Out of that conversation came the following gem – speaking about a person being sensitive to the needs of those around them and responding to the needs of others rather than being focused on their own needs and their own image:

“That’s the difference between being a hero and being an idol.” Denise Black

The meaning being that an idol is someone who we might look up to who is more concerned with their image than their substance while a hero is more concerned with being worthy of emulation than they are with their level of popularity. In case anyone is wondering, there are those among the ranks of our social idols (musicians, athletes, actors) who qualify as heroes under this definition. The key is to help our children understand the difference between the idols and the real heroes.

Categories
politics

Mike Jingozian

Although he is running for President, Mike Jingozian is more focused on the idea that we should remake our political machine. While the core values expressed have some merit, he fails to recognize that the vast majority of those who have the skills necessary to successfully operate our government are those who believe in, or more often have learned to work in conjunction with, our current political system. Calling exclusively for candidates outside that sphere will not result in better government, it will result in even more confusion and more room for exploitation by businesses and political professionals (like lobbyists and lawyers). It would be foolish to endorse this approach.

Categories
technology

Posting Rich Text Email

I have created a hack for wp-mail.php that allows rich text emails to be processed. I call it wp-mail-rich. To use it you simply copy the wp-mail-rich.php file in the folder where WordPress is installed (where the wp-mail.php
file is) and use wp-mail-rich.php in place of wp-mail.php. If you have a cron job, just point it to the new file. To rollback just point it back to the old file.

I have also included some files that I used to test and develop this – in case anyone wanted to make further modifications. Instructions are in the readme.txt file.

Download wp-mail-rich.

I have only tested this with Gmail so it is possible that other rich text emails might not be exactly right coming from Yahoo, Hotmail, or your company mail server. Let me know if this is the case.

Categories
technology

Behind The Caucus

Random wanderings took me to the code view of the New York Times political blog – The Caucus. Like the Library of Congress blog, it is based on WordPress. They have modified it enough to make it difficult to detect, but they have left some small clues and they use a very popular WordPress plugin – Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Categories
politics

Where Do I Fit

This morning I was thinking about my political orientation and wondering where I fit. I’m independent from a republican region. I am more and more in favor of a smaller federal government. I am convinced that we rely too much on the government, especially for things that the government is not well-suited to address. Libertarian ideals hold some appeal for me, except that I think there should be some measure of social norms that people should conform to – the chaos of anything being acceptable does not make an environment conducive to prosperity. This sounds republican so far, but I also believe that there are things that are more in line with the democrats or green party – such as the need to be responsible in our treatment of the earth and its resources – that tend to be ignored more in republican circles in favor of shortsighted business interests.

Conveniently, I ran into a pre-debate analysis of tonights republican presidential debate which offered some insights for me:

To what extent are the candidates going to be playing to a national audience rather than a California audience . . . There are issues that are important here — the environment and global warming, energy conservation, stem cell research — that are not as important in other states.

From the sound of it I have a lot in common with California Republicans – who’d have guessed.

Categories
meta technology

Classic Posts

I have been wanting to implement a “greatest hits” section in my sidebar ever since I read the lessons for would-be bloggers. Yesterday I discovered the classic posts plugin from Chris vs Chris which displays posts which you have designated as “classic.” That sounded like the kind of thing I wanted, except that I was looking for a sidebar list. I added a function to their plugin which returns a list of posts rather than the posts themselves. I also discovered that their plugin does not successfully handle selecting and deselecting posts as being “classic” if you are on anything except the default list of posts – in other words it only works on the last 15 posts. (I went into the database so that I cold manually select some older posts)

I have no particular desire to own this plugin so if Chris and Chris want to adopt my modification into their official plugin they are welcome to it. If they do I will link to their version of the file, but until then here is my version: Classic Posts plugin with List Option.

UPDATE: I found the error on the plugin (I had to add two characters to the code) and I have the working version up now (same link as before).

UPDATE 2: Chris has added my modification and the bug fix so I will include a link to the official version.

Categories
technology

Twitter

It seems that I can’t help but hear about Twitter. I’ve been hearing about it for a while from a number of people who’s technology opinions I respect. Again today I read more from Alan about Twitter. Twitter is one of those things I have not picked up but eventually I have to ask myself “why not?” Thankfully Alan’s post pointed me to an analysis of Twitter that explained why I have not touched it yet. Besides talking about what Twitter is (which I knew, and it’s fine even though I have not touched it) there is a comparison of what it’s like. It is compared to instant messaging, which is also fine, but I don’t use it much – it does not suit me as well as other tools. (By the way, someone ought to make a Web 2.0 version of Twitter, they could call it Warblr – I can’t believe the audacity of people who would leave all the vowels intact 😉 )

After reading the analysis I thought I should see if Twitter does have some use for me, even if it never consumes me. I decided that it might suit for the many articles that I come across which are worthy of a blog post but which I often never get back to posting about. I created a Twitter profile an then thought about what I was doing. I remembered del.icio.us which is for bookmarking pages like I was thinking. When I first heard about del.icio.us my thoughts were much like Twitter – fine, but it does not suit my patterns. Now my patterns have changed enough that it might be a good fit. I created an account and I am starting to mark pages that I might want to post about later. When I get time I will get that list displayed in my sidebar in case anyone out there cares to read the things that I’d like to post about but never do.

Categories
culture

Mob Intelligence

I love reading Terry Pratchett, for the humor, but I just discovered an extremely useful mathematical equation in Maskerade to calculate the intelligence of any mob.

“The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters.”

Now if only we had an accurate definition of what a mob is – a definition that catches mobs even when they are not wielding clubs and other weapons.