Dawn of the Geeks

Since I was putting on a blog on the front page anyway, I decided to see what Hosting Matters was offering. Turns out they have a few blogs ready to be installed. I decided to go with WordPress. I havn’t decided yet how much to integrate into the front page. Currently It’s just reading the 10 newest entries from WordPress’ database and displaying those. This is probably a terrible idea because now I can post whenever. Eventually I may link to the blog itself from the front page but for now I’ll leave that a mystery which isn’t too difficult to solve.

My girlfriend is putting up her own journal now to counter my postings. She thinks it would be a good idea to have polls in the case of a disagreement between us. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve never been swayed by popular opinion. She could get 100% of the votes but I’d still be right. Bong!

We’ll see.

The Suns lost again. The Drunken Master of Basketball, Steve Nash, made some stunning moves but couldn’t pull off the game tying shot at the end. Too many turn overs and missed shots. Nash gave Richardson a few chances at some three pointers but he missed them. He did not have too good of a game yesterday. They need to get it together if they want to win this.

Comming up with a business is easy it’s creating a web-site to advertise it that’s hard. Icarus Independent has been designed and redesigned countless times in it’s 5 year 5 month history. In the comming days I’ll be working with my girlfriend to design her company web-site. She graduated from Remington College as a massage therapist and has been working as one for awhile now. She’s looking to build up her own business so she can go to school full time and work weekends.

I went in for an exam last week and had some x-rays done. Turns out I may have had scoliosis as a teenager. My spinal cord is twisted still but not too bad. My hip is also out of alignment. Back in elementary school I was checked and was reported as fine so any degree of problem my spine developed was later. I was adjusted by the chiropractor yesterday and for the first time in years I woke up with my back feeling fine. I’ll be going in three times a week to have it taken care of. Fortunatly my insurance is excellent and the doctor is waiving much of the deductable.

The introductory videos they show you are interesting. Basically, drugs can kill you, surgery can kill you but chiropractic treatment is natural. Spinal surgery is highly risky with less than a 50% chance of success and drugs of course are simply used to dull the pain. They don’t actually fix the problem. I worked with a guy a couple years ago that had serious back problems that started pretty much the same way mine did; lifting weight wrong resulting in a thrown back. He had the surgery finally after years of unbearable pain and I’ve seen him around and he doesn’t look to be in pain at all. He’s working and happy. I don’t remember him being happy much when I worked with him.

I’d really rather not have surgery so I’m going to stick with a chiropractic treatment for awhile and see how well it works. As an added bonus I get a massage after every treatment as well. Since it’s deep tissue and my muscles are incredibly tight it hurts quite a bit during the treatment but within seconds after the pain goes away and I feel much better. It’s going to take awhile to get everything loosened up the way it should be. The idea is that your muscles should be firm but flexible. Mine are firm and stiff which is bad.

Forsake the Troops is back up with no mention of the alledged murder that supposedly happened on Monday. My guess is that it was just a publicity stunt. I mention this because the guy was on Hannity and Colmes today on Fox News. For those who don’t know Hannity represents the Right and Colmes the Left and they thoroughly agreed Mr Crook was an idiot. The fact of the matter is that we need a standing government backed military force to defend our freedoms. The question is not do we need a military. The question is how we use them to defend our freedom. One of those freedoms is the freedom of speech which allows idiots like Crook to run a hate mongering web-site against the troops which allow him the right to speak his mind.

More on the faked death. According to this forum which starts on the 17th talking about his death ends on the 19th pointing out it was faked. Pretty pathetic that he accuses the people who defend his right to free speech of killing him because he gets hate mail.

On one hand you have to wonder why they gave this guy air time on Fox but on the other it gives both the left and a right a chance to say he’s not one of them. They can distance themselves from this kind of idiocy so that intelligent discussion can be had.

I think this needs more commentary because I don’t think most people get the real lesson learned from Newsweek. The media just keeps droning on about jounalistic integrity completely missing the larger lesson. What they miss is that the story could just as well have been true. In fact, why don’t we just pretend it was for the sake of argument. Now, since we’re assuming a Koran was flushed down a toilet by what the militants call an ‘infidel’ let’s try to justify their response to it. Let’s try to justify at least 17 people dead over it. Are you done performing mental gymnastics yet?

From National Review
‘Minor indignities? How can you say something so callous about a desecration of the Holy Koran?’ I say it as a member of the real world, not the world of prissy affectation. I don’t know about you, but I inhabit a place where crucifixes immersed in urine and Madonna replicas composed of feces are occasions for government funding, not murderous uprisings. If someone was moved to kill on their account, we’d be targeting the killer, not the exhibiting museum, not the ‘artists,’ and surely not Newsweek.

The media should be focusing on what kind of culture allows this kind of mindless rampage over such a minor offense and be done harping on Newsweek for publishing fake stories. If they had published some story about a Bible being flushed down the toilet nobody would have flinched. It could have been a fake story as well but nobody would have died and so nobody would have cared to investigate.

I’m sure there’s some rationality in there somewhere but I’m having a heck of a time finding it. Turning on the news it’s either Michael Jackson, murdered and kidnapped children or Newsweek. In case you missed it Newsweek reported that *a* Qur’an was desecrated. The result was riots and about 17 dead. *A* copy of the Qur’an is flushed down the toilet and 17 people are dead because of it. Little Green Footballs had a picture of some guy holding a sign demanding an apology from President Bush. Sure thing buddy, as soon as the leaders Islam apologize for the murders of those who decided they didn’t care to be Muslim anymore and the arresting of people who dare to practice and preach Christianity and other religions to those around them.

Meanwhile, in April 2002 a Bible was used as toilet paper by Palestinians. And shock of shocks, no riots broke out over it. So while we’re on this apology streak, go ahead and put up a formal apology for desecrating Christian holy sites and relics. It’d be healthy for all who are actually responsible to apologize for being raving jerks and needlessly offending people.

The web-master of Forsake The Troops was murdered Monday evening for the idiotic things he posted on his site.

It’s absurd. If you want to quietly burst into flames in the privacy of your home because someone dared to say or do something you don’t like then fine. Going on a rampage and killing people is entirely irrational. It’s absolutely unbelievable what a rediculous reaction people will have to the destruction of *a* copy of *a* book. Uh oh I’m pretty sure somebody just threw away a bible or tore a page out of it to use to roll a joint (#888). I better go start a riot.

Absolutly rediculous. All this Newsweek story has accomplished is the death of people and the highlighting of how irrational some people are. And you can’t reason with unreasonable people. These people want the US to play nice with them but how can we when they’re this absurd? Hopefully Newsweek and other news agencies will finally get a clue that false reporting can have serious consequences. The death of 17 people is not an ‘oops.’ And hopefully more people will finally be aware of the type of people we’re dealing with in this war on terror.

Time to try something new. It’s summer so naturally that means fixing and rearranging things that neither need to be fixed nor rearranged. indie-mobile is the big new thing these days. The goal is to make it the best and largest collection of polyphonic ringtones on the net. And then of course the goal is to make it popular. I’m not a big fan of spending $2.00 or more for a ringtone so I use the site quite a bit myself.

Also new is this blog. AdSense has a bad habit of getting stale if the content doesn’t change. Stale ads equals a drop in revenue which is bad. So, I’ve decided it would probably be a good idea to post random things on the front page to keep the ads circulating. It’s summer so I have time to write about things that nobody really cares about. But, it makes the ads change up a bit.

Also, since it’s summer it means that I can get back to doing more tutorials for the Real Time Software Rendering section. I have a summer game project planned that will be the source of the next batch of tutorials. More on that later. As it’s the end of the school year I have many things that need to be touched up and posted on-line. Since I’m working on becomming a math teacher I thought it’d be a good idea to start posting math related things on the web-site. Thanks to my methods of teaching class I’ve got quite a bit of source material.