Stein’s got some amazing photos of Norway in his DeviantArt gallery.  Alas, DeviantArt is one of those gay must-register-to-post-comments websites.

I also stumbled across the site of a guy named Julian Coccia, and he too has some really great photos from around the world in his gallery.

I mailed the mailing list!  I never do that.  If you missed this monumental event, be sure to scroll way down and enter your email address to sign up, and I’ll send the message out again in a few days.

Also... The Guide is finished.  By following the guide, you can set up your own website on your own system, and share your digital photos with everyone, for free.  (Well, as free as a cable/DSL connection, which you should already have.)  Or, you can use the website for whatever you want, like a blog.  You can check out the guide here:

Tell all your friends.

Kim sent this to me:

i did blood work at walter reed for my first rotation of co-op... sometimes we would centrifuge the samples down, which separates the red blood cells from the plasma.  you can absolutely tell if someone has had so much as one cigarette a day, by the turbidity of their blood plasma.  a person who doesn’t smoke has completely translucent blood plasma, but it’s cloudy for smokers.

Sick.  Sick!  Ugh.

The Europeans have little interest in such unimportant points as Constitutional limits on Federal power. They tried to include clauses in a treaty regarding chemical weapons which would have violated the Fourth Amendment, and the ICC treaty violates Article III and amendments 4, 5, 6, 8, 14 and probably also Article I and amendments 9 and 10, and likely other Constitutional provisions as well. There was a proposal for a treaty regarding the Internet which would have infringed the First Amendment. This keeps happening, and when US negotiators point out that such treaties cannot be ratified, and would be nullified by the courts even if they were ratified, the Europeans fall back on denunciations of the Americans as not being team players, not being multilateral. It seems as if they don’t really understand just how serious we are about the Constitution, or that they do understand but think it’s an atavism, something we can and should outgrow, and that the US government should demonstrate its political maturity by ignoring the Constitution.

Meanwhile, diplomacy continues to create new meanings for words and phrases. The French ambassador says that the US and France must "work together" ... Work together means that the US should forget everything that France has said and done over the last two years, forget that it is the publicly avowed policy of the French political class to try to limit American power and influence, and to once again embrace the French as friends and allies.

Work together means that the French have no real power to force us to do anything, and thus can only manipulate us if we’re naive and trusting. As long as we’re suspicious, they no longer have any ability to shaft us, and they’d like us to drop our defenses so they can shaft us again.

And sending a powerful political message of empowerment to the Iraqi people means making sure that democracy fails there so that America gets no benefit from invading, even indirectly. ...

Somehow they still think that it’s all temporary, something we’ll outgrow. All the calls for "healing", for "new cooperation", for "working together", really mean only this: "Have you come to realize just how unwise and wrong-headed you’ve been? Are you ready to start listening to us yet?"

"Healing" means America stops doing things the Europeans don’t like. "New cooperation" means that America cooperates with Europe, not the other way around. "Working together" means American surrender. ...

The majority of Americans don’t respect Europe’s opinions or take their advice seriously. ... They never really did, but for many Americans the current crisis has changed apathy regarding European opinions into active contempt. (And that’s why they’re voting with their dollars.)

Too many of Europe’s leaders still live in a retro-fantasy that Europe can somehow once again dominate the world, as it did in the golden years of the 16th through 19th centuries. So they agree to grandiose plans to make Europe the most competitive economy in the world in just ten years (3 of which have already elapsed), while their economies are going into the toilet and are holding back the rest of the world. They promise to build up militarily but contemplate cuts in defense spending. They praise themselves for their clout, ignoring how little clout they actually have. They strut and bluster and preen, offer unsolicited advice to others, get angry and resentful when their advice is ignored, and take great pleasure and satisfaction from those few cases when they’ve been able to say, "I told you so!"

And when they want to manipulate others diplomatically without having anything to trade in exchange, and the others refuse to talk to them, they whine plaintively, "Why won’t anyone negotiate with us?"

Because negotiations are a two-way process. Because no one engages in diplomacy unless they have something to gain by doing so, or something to lose by not doing so. Because all parties in negotiations are self-interested, and the Europeans have many demands but little to offer in exchange, and therefore those negotiations would be a pointless waste of time for everyone except the Europeans.

Because at the beginning of the 21st Century, Europe no longer matters as much as it once did, and there’s every reason to believe that its importance and influence will continue to decline.

- Fruitful Dialogue

I am constantly amazed by the number of people who misspell definitely as definately.  I used to do it too, until I saw someone who’d written it with an I instead of an A, and I looked it up because I thought they’d spelled it wrong.  But it’s seriously an epidemic; almost everyone I’ve ever seen type that word has typed it with an A.  I wonder where we all got it from.

I’m moving my site to a new webhost (with 3 gigs of space and root access to the linux box that’ll host it (!!)), and as a result, my site may be intermittently available, not available at all, or available in two different versions, over the next week or so.  Such is the nature of DNS.

I’m also almost done writing a guide that shows you how to quickly set up your own webserver on your own computer to host photos (or whatever else you want), using the scripts that I’ve written over the past 2 years to power sites like my mom’s and my test site.  I’m pretty excited about this.  With a broadband internet connection, anyone can run their own website for free on their own system, so I’m hoping to help a few (or maybe a lot of) people do just that.  And since lots of people have digital cameras nowadays, I think it’d be really neat for lots of people to be able to easily share their photos, without having to upload them anywhere.  Plus, come on, my photo scripts are awesome... there’s a slideshow mode, and users can change to a framed mode if they like that better, and visitors can post comments on individual photos, and can post their own photos with their comments if you choose to enable that...

Awesome, awesome, they are the awesomest!  Five Iron Frenzy played in Anderson last night and it was so fricken’ awesome!  It’s the "Winners never quit Tour" with Holland and Bleach.  Holland was kind of disappointing live, though I do like what I have heard of their CD, but Bleach put on a pretty good show.  Well, the fact that we got to go backstage for their preformance might have helped, too.  But, of course, Five Iron put on the best show.  They’re not my favorite band to listen to, but they are my favorite to see live.  Reese, the lead singer, is so goofy.  Just the stuff he does on stage is hilarious.  Also, random stuff just seems to happen with them.  Somebody gave him a comb while he was singer and it started a whole barrage of items being thrown on-stage ranging from shoes to a stuffed turtle to a potato masher.  (Yes, a potato masher)  The really cool thing about Reese is the fact that, unlike other bands, he doesn’t act all high and mighty.  Before and after every concert, he is always out front talking to people.  The funny thing is, most people don’t recognize that it’s him and freak out when he goes on stage when they realize they were just talking to him.  Well, unfortunatly, I will never see Five Iron live again, but hopefully Brave Saint Saturn can suffice me for a while.

I keep wanting to post about how alone and depressed I’ve felt lately, but every day there’s a bunch of interesting and non-sad stuff to post about.  So I guess that’s a good thing.

Today my 465 exam went a little better than I expected, which is good.  I hung out with Jeremy a bunch and we got some CSE428 homework done too.  We also played frisbee with Konst and Kevin, and some of our neighbors -- two of them being 7 or 8 year old girls -- wanted to play.  They were cute little kids.  One of the times when Jeremy threw the frisbee into the woods (which only happened one or two or seventy times), the girls insisted on getting it out themselves.  After a few minutes I walk over to the edge and ask if it’s lost.  They say no.  I get closer and see that it’s stuck in the low branch of a tree.  "Oh, it’s just stuck in the tree," I say.  "The jagerbush tree," says one of the kids.  Jagerbush!

And my mom is the best.  She clips articles out of newpapers and magazines and mails them to me.  I just got an envelope full of articles about things like Bill O’Reilly, linux, and wind power.

Today I also extracted several choice quotes from my friends:

"Kevin, how do you make hamburgers?  ’Cause the way I make hamburgers, it sucks."
- Konstantin

Me: The printer just swallowed my print job.
Me: I told the printer to print, and it says it received the job, but nothing’s printing.
Me: Don’t you care??
Jeremy: Care about what?

Jeremy: ...I just think all OSes should come with Perl.
Me: All real OSes do.
Jeremy: What, Windows is a real OS, just not a real good one.

My away message: exams and stuff
Mark’s IM to me later in the day: and stuff eh... I see what you’re up to there

But the thing is... all of a sudden, all my older siblings are married.  OK, not quite all of a sudden, but all 3 of them within the span of 3 or 4 years, and that seems pretty sudden.  That leaves just me and Nick.  (And Maria, but she’s only 10.)  We’re both far more shy than could be considered healthy.

And my friends are getting engaged left and right.  Nate a year or so ago, John a month or two ago, Johnny a while back, Kris a few days ago, and there’s a couple more (who shall remain nameless) on the "probably soon" list.  And I have two friends named Josh who both got married within the last year.

There are a few highly predictable responses to this.  Some people will say, "You’re young; enjoy being single and independent while you can."  My general response to that: either "grow up," "kiss my butt," or "go discourage someone else."  I’ve been not married for nearly 23 years; I’ve had plenty of that, thankyouverymuch.  And I have never been a typical kid.  I’m not into partying, I’m certainly not into freaking dating, and I’m honestly not interested in "meeting lots of girls" or "having lots of girl friends."  All the supposed "benefits" of being single are things that I’m not interested in at all.

That rant was only tangential, though.  It’s not actually that I want to be married right now.  It’s just that I’m completely alone now, and being around lots of people in various stages of getting married casts my solitude in stark contrast.  More to the point, it just makes me sad.  I know and I believe that everything is in God’s hands, but that does not quell the longing for human companionship at every sunset and on every long drive and every time I’m around everyone else who has someone.

[Achtung: this blog is a place where I vent, and it’s a diary of sorts where I reveal those personal things that I feel like revealing about myself.  Public comments are a huge part of what I cherish about this blog, but they can also work against my ability to control the level personal detail that is manifest here.  In particular, a person who is very close to me, for the sake of argument let’s call this person "mom," such a person is probably too close to me and knows me too well to be able to make a public reply that will be considered kosher by me, on a post like this.  In that case (and also for other readers of my ramblings here), personal replies to highly personal posts like this one are more than welcome via email.  Finally, this post is basically me feeling really alone and needing to express that somehow.  I don’t need to hear that "it will all be ok," and as well-intentioned as one may be in saying that, it’s going to come off as belittling and implying naivety to me.]

Why do I think Davis was recalled yesterday? Because 55 percent of the voters wanted Davis out, and 48% of them wanted Schwarzenegger to be his replacement. That’s why.

I know that sounds prosaic, but I think it’s really the most important message of all. Yesterday we demonstrated that the government of the State of California works for its citizens and is controlled by them, and if the people become sufficiently dissatisfied with what the government does, they’ll replace it. And if they think the entire system is rotten, they’ll choose an outsider to become their new leader. If they’re contemptuous of career politicians or decide that all the "insiders" have become corrupted, they’ll send someone with no experience in government. ...

Yesterday the citizens of the State of California performed a coup without firing a shot, and equally important, the government didn’t resist it. On the contrary, the government ran the election by which that coup was implemented, and counted the votes honestly, and its leader accepted the result. ...

Yesterday’s recall demonstrated that the citizens are more powerful than the governments of this nation, and that in the final reckoning our government serves us, but does not rule us. It is our government; it belongs to us. We do not belong to it. ...

The lesson for the world from yesterday: Do not underestimate the power of the American people.

- Guess who