Utoxin's Random Insanity

It’s the time of year that many people turn their thoughts to patriotism, me included. I love my country. Always have. I’m damn proud to be an American, and I would never want to give that up. But this year, I have some perspectives I haven’t had before.

First, I have recently begun to pay much more attention to the political climate, and to what is going on in Washington. For most of my life, I have preferred to ignore the politicians in Washington. They’re a bunch of windbags who normally have very little impact on my life. But lately, especially since the most recent presidential election, although hardly starting there, they have begun to act in what appears to be a deliberately destructive manner. It’s as if they want to tear this country down, and turn it into something else. Something un-American. I’m not pleased about this.

This country was founded on great principles, by great men, who were guided by God’s hand. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are divinely inspired documents. Everything the founders put into them was put there for a reason, and it needs to stay there. Changes can happen of course, as they always will. But those changes should follow the process laid forth in the Constitution itself. The Constitution should not simply be ignored, as if it was an old outdated relic. This seems to be exactly what many of the ‘leaders’ in Washington these days believe.

I believe that the people of this fine nation need to wake up and let Washington know exactly what we think of their decisions and their push towards goals that we, their employers, do NOT want. They need to be taught that they can’t ignore our wishes. Please note that I do not condone violence, although I have wondered if it might be inevitable soon. Thomas Jefferson is famously quoted as saying that the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots. But I think the quote in its entirety is even more important:

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” — November 13, 1787, letter to William S. Smith

I believe we are approaching a crucial time in American history, where the people either realize what a dangerous path we’re on, and correct the course peacefully through the democratic process, or they wake up too late and we have to go through a ‘dark age’ where we suffer under the oppression we are inviting on ourselves with this fascination with socialist programs and entitlement.

I said I had thoughts on a couple different things. The second has to do with the fact that my brother is about to ship out for a year long deployment in Iraq. As should be obvious from what I have said above, I am a strong supporter of the ideals this country was founded on. One of those ideals is respect and honor to those who willingly put themselves in harm’s way to protect our freedom. My brother has previously served a year in Iraq as well, and I respect him greatly for his choice to continue his service and help defend the freedom of people he does not know. I worry about him, but I know that God will watch over him and keep him safe.

I believe that members of the military are some of the greatest patriots in this nation. They deserve our utmost respect and support. I don’t care if you don’t agree with what they’re doing. You should still honor the fact that they are willing to risk their lives to do what they feel is right.

I also hope that what I said here made some sense. I am not good at expressing my feelings on these subjects clearly, partly because they are so strong. Please feel free to comment below, but keep your comments polite and no personal attacks. This is a time of respect and appreciation.

Man, life has been too busy to keep this as up to date as I really want to! Sorry for that, but here’s another update for everyone.

First, since my last post, I have also passed my Extra class ham radio license test, and received my vanity callsign. I’m now N7TOX, which I picked because of two references you can get out of it, if you know me really well. First: N7 is a term from the Mass Effect universe, signifying a special forces operative of the highest level. Second: TOX is a reference to the online handle I’ve been using for the last 15 years, Utoxin. Plus, I like the sound of it more than KF7JLF. And it’ll fit better on a ham license plate.

Next, I’ve had a rough few weeks for weight loss. No major setbacks, but I haven’t made a lot of progress, until this last weekend. Finally started dropping pounds again on my daily weigh-ins. I’m still ahead of my new goal of 900 calories a day, and WELL ahead of my original goal of 750 calories a day, so no harm done by the brief hesitation in my weight loss. My last two weigh-ins have been under 270 for the first time, and my trend is heading towards the 270 mark in the next week or so I would guess. Very soon I’ll be at 40% of my goal. I’m almost halfway there. It’s so hard to believe, but so wonderful at the same time.

Speaking of diets, my project TweeterDiet hasn’t had many updates lately, for a few reasons. I’ve been working like crazy on paying work, first of all, because I had to take a pay cut recently at work. (Better than getting laid off, which happened to a bunch of other people.) Also, in the time I have had to work on it, I’ve been struggling with bugs in the new features I’m trying to add. I desperately want to get them done, but I have to pay my bills first. I hope to make some time in the next week or so to finish all of that stuff up. Also, if you’re hiring, and looking for a senior PHP developer, I’m in the market. I need a decent salary and medical benefits, or a VERY good salary without benefits. I’ve got 10 years of experience, and plenty of good references, so get in touch if you or someone you know is hiring.

My wife has been posting regularly to her blog, and her latest post is about Doctor Who, which we’ve both been enjoying immensely for a while now. Go over and read it, and browse her other posts as well. She’s running her site as a review blog for various media, and doing a good job of it so far, I think.

A few things to cover in this update, but I’ll keep it short, and try to have something more substantial for later this week.

First, I’ve hit 25% of my weight loss goal! As of this morning, I’ve lost 25.1 pounds. My trend weight is at 283.9, and heading down at a very steady pace. I’m thrilled, and flabbergasted that it’s going so well.

Second, a couple weeks ago, I took and passed the tests for both Technician and General class, so I am now the proud holder of an amateur radio license. My callsign is KF7JLF, but I’m not on the air yet because I don’t have a radio. I’m in the market for a good handheld or mobile radio, preferably at least VHF/UHF dual band. Can’t afford much right now, but I’d be glad to do some PHP or Perl development in trade. Pass the word if you know any ham operators.

Third, my wife has just launched a blog of her own, where she’ll be doing reviews and who knows what else. She’s just getting her feet wet, but check it out sometime, if you have a minute! You can visit it at http://www.tarynn.net/blog/.

That’s about it for today.

Here’s a quicky. I like to have a random quote in my signature, but most mail clients only read a static file, and trying to fool them with a command pipe socket is tricky, and often has other issues. So I wrote this little bit of magic:

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
my $fortune = '';
 
do {
	$fortune = `fortune -e -s -n 480 bofh-excuses calvin chalkboard chucknorris computers cookie definitions discworld dune firefly fortunes hitchhiker homer kids law linux magic mormon paradoxum perl pets riddles science scriptures smac startrek starwars taow work`;
} while ($fortune =~ /filter|these|words|out/);
 
print "Matthew Walker                      h: (xxx) xxx-xxxx\n";
print "Software Architect                  m: (xxx) xxx-xxxx\n";
print "Marketecture                        e: fake_email\@domain.com\n\n";
 
print $fortune;

Replace the ‘filter|these|words|out’ bit with a | seperated list of words you don’t want to show up in your fortunes, and adjust the fortune command however you want to tune the type of quotes you get. Then install it as a cron job like this:


* * * * * perl ~/.signature.pl > ~/.signature


There you go! Your .signature file will get regenerated once a minute with a new random quote. Enjoy.

I promised more programming related posts, and here’s one for you.

As part of developing TweeterDiet.com, I needed to interface with Twitter and Bit.ly to post tweets and the links back to the public profiles on TweeterDiet. I searched around for a while, and didn’t immediately run across any good components for what I needed, so I wrote my own, and now I’d like to share them.
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