The primary motivation for this post is my excitement about the Iowa caucuses tonight. But, as long as I'm here anyway, I figure I'll talk about my life since late October.



Huckabee wins in Iowa! I sort of expected it... polls were going that way anyway, though he was on a bit of a downslide there since his 22-point advantage a few weeks ago. In my opinion, here's what will happen...
Huckabee goes up a bit. People can see him as possibly viable (as in, they're not the only ones supporting him anymore, and he can actually win.) A lot of people who liked his message but were scared of his popularity will start noticing him, I think. If nothing else, he gets TONS of free media coverage, at least for 5 days until New Hampshire. I doubt he'll win there, but it's not impossible.
Romney does a bunch of damage control. He's denying it, but I doubt he had much room for an Iowa loss. If this helps McCain beat him in New Hampshire, I don't see him recovering.
McCain and Giuliani have parties. Their biggest problem, as of yesterday, was Romney. Now, not so much. Unless Huckabee jumps up a lot, they come out of this minus one formidable opponent. This, as McCain is rising nationally and Giuliani keeps slipping.
Ron Paul will, of course, send out his legions of cyber-spammers to add 5986743958734 comments to every news story they can find a "Comment" button on.

Democrats... Barack Obama! I'm actually quite a bit excited about this. I REALLY don't want Hillary to win. Edwards is nothing special, I don't even really think about him. But tonight was my first significant exposure to Obama. I loved his little victory speech. And, as his was after Huckabee's, I realized that a lot of things that attracted me to Huckabee are shared by Obama. He emphasizes the need to work as one nation and see past party lines, and they're both for big change. I'm still undecided on whether I approve of the Iraq war or not, but the pro-life issue remains, which is one of my biggest. But, following a Giuliani/Obama nomination, I might end up siding with Obama. Unless Huckabee was Giuliani's VP, which I could easily see.



In other news, for everyone who cares enough about my personal life (you stalkers...), I'm now a sophomore and a half, which means 2.5 years to go. (Please pass quickly.) School starts again on Monday. Blech. But my earliest class is at 9:10 on M/W/F, and 9:45 on Tu/Th. Much better than 8:00. Taking sociology at a Juvenile Detention Center should be ... interesting. I think I'm looking forward to it, but we'll see. Sociology doesn't excite me.

Got oil for my car, baked potato chips, a gift certificate, and maple candy for Christmas. I'll enjoy/use it all, and considering that I generally just buy something when I want it, I can't think of anything I wanted that I didn't get.

Back to World of Warcraft, for a few months anyway. I've got one character of each class now, all at least level 16. Woooo.

Christmas/New Year were both wonderful and fun. I was mostly sick on Christmas and the day after, but recovered enough to hang out with nifty relatives for the remaining week of Holiday goodness. Going back to work is a pain.

The Colbert Report is coming back on Monday. Hopefully it won't be too drab without the writers. I'm pretty much excited. It'll make starting school the same day not quite as horrible.

And, that's about all I have to say.

Just 2 more weeks until the library's new network/website/catalog goes live... it's getting busier, but I still love it. Maybe addiction to change will get the better of me after all the excitement is over... but then, I'll be tweaking and adding things on the website for months after this.

Even more of "Go Mike Huckabee!" than the last post: He's won the last two events (FOX debate last night, American Family Council conference on Saturday) without anyone else even coming close. (Ok, so Mitt Romney paid people to vote for him, and Ron Paul once again assembled his army of cyber-spammers, but Huckabee wins in a fair debate. If only there ever were such a thing...) But, there have been more donations on his site today than there were in the last week. I can't wait for next week's poll numbers after all the attention has time to go produce effects there. Oh, and perhaps even more importantly: Chuck Norris supports Huckabee! Clearly, nobody should even consider any other candidate anymore.

I'm still reading "Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming". This is an incredible book.

If we claim our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-sixtieth the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid eighty-five million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better antimalaria policies. Which should be our first mission?

And, shockingly enough, Al Gore's logic is not flawless. He loves to say "If Greenland and a certain ice shelf in Antarctica slide off and melt in the ocean, water levels will rise by 40 feet." This is generally followed by horrible, awful, emotional pictures of the water levels in Florida and California. What he fails to recognize is that the Antarctic ice cap is at its highest volume of ice in recorded history. He also doesn't really support his theory either. Anyone can say "If all of Antarctica slides into the ocean, water levels will go up 400 feet." That doesn't make it a reality.

And, whaddya know, yet another political remark: We played with some numbers in my American Government class this morning and figured out that the average taxpayer would have to pay $20,000 every year for the government to break even, and that government spending has about doubled every decade for the last fifty years. Spooky.

Fall break was this weekend. I worked for 30 hours. That is all. Oh, and I went to the Career Center for an "Advisory Committee Meeting". There were only five people there (including Mr. Wright and Brian) but it was great to go back and say hello to assorted random people.

My single Thursday class was canceled, and I have no lab on Friday. This means that I may actually have some free time this weekend, since I didn't during the two days of break. Mmmm, free time. Oh wait, maybe I forgot what that is.

In other news, only 3 weeks and 2 days left until I need to have the new library website complete. It's been a great project so far, and I've had the chance to change a lot of things (mostly behind the scenes code stuff) and add things that I've wanted to see there for a long time. (I've now created a blogging system, a wiki system, RSS feeds generated from the blogging system, and other goodies.) This is probably the first big deadlined project I've ever worked on, and it's fun. So, no complaints there. Coding for 11.5 hours on Monday was a bit brain-frying, though.

I watched the Republic presidential candidate last night. Most of it was either vague, confusing, or both. I got a couple laughs out of it, though... like Mitt Romney's lawyers who he'll consult if he ever wants to declare war on Iran. The debate didn't change my thoughts (Go Huckabee!) though it was annoying that the four major candidates got probably 75% of the debate time, and the other four less major candidates weren't left with much time to say what I think are some very valuable opinions. Huckabee is now on Rasmussen Reports' list of major Republican candidates, though. So, getting closer. It is useful to point out that he's the only one who has been steadily increasing.

And, I think today is officially the beginning of Fall. It's 60 degrees, and wonderful outside. I could live in this weather all year. (Minus the ragweed allergies.)

Though it's been a while, I guess not much important has happened since my last post.

My American Government class is reasonably interesting. It's got me paying slightly more attention to politics lately. That, combined with a weird list of Republican candidates, and a random interview on the Colbert Report, has me as an active supporter of Mike Huckabee. Mostly, I like his Conservative-yet-bipartisan attitude - he says he's not one of those people who would just vote no on anything a Democrat wants and vote yes on anything a Republican wants. And for that, he wins a bundle of points with me. I hate how divided politics are right now. Huckabee talks about "Vertical Politics", where the focus is on things that will help America, as opposed to "Horizontal Politics" where it's just Republican vs. Democrat. And yet, he has all the values I'm looking for. So, that's my quick plug for him. Go, vote, or something, I don't know.

My life for the last month has consisted of:
27% Sleep
25% Work
11% Classes
10% Random Recreational Computer Activities
6% Eating
5% Homework
4% Driving
4% Assorted Religious Activities
3% Socializing
3% Other
2% Assorted Errands

This is a schedule which I do not mind entirely. It becomes difficult to really do much of anything else when I'm working 38 hours/week and have to write about 9 pages of English homework every week. Fortunately, that's my only really intensive class.

I had to decide to not teach PSR this year due to this schedule. I'm not terribly sure I was ready to deal with a bunch of 2nd graders all by myself anyway, so maybe this is a good thing.

My gaming life of late has consisted primarily of Star Wars online text games. I tossed in a bit of Sim City 4 and Civilization 4 for a couple weeks, but as I expected, once I spent a week on each throughly smashing the objectives to pieces, I got bored. I also tried Star Wars: Galaxies (the World of Warcraft of Star Wars) briefly. There is never anyone on, so that only lasted for about a day. However, they have a very interactive environment... much of the game is built by the players themselves. But as a MMORPG, it's just not much fun without the "MM" part. I might get back into WoW sometime soon, if I get bored enough. I don't know what else to play, at this point.

So, what else. Work has been steadily busy, but productive. I'm pretty much redesigning the entire Library website before the end of October. I've been working on it for about a month and a half, and I'm definitely getting close to being 75% done with all the hard coding.

And so, life goes on.

Ok, so I get home from work and (somehow) end up in front of the TV. Except this time I'm not watching some pointless sitcom or something. I watched C-SPAN for two hours. They're talking about the national budget. At the moment I turned it on, there were a few Republican representatives griping about how the Democrats were going to raise taxes. We are to believe that this would be bad, because the money the nation gets from taxes actually goes up when you lower taxes, because people have more money to invest, and to start new companies with, and as a result everyone is better off and can pay more taxes anyway. They proposed instead that taxes should be lowered further, toward the end of prompting more of this same effect.

So the Republicans are done. Now it's the Democrats' turn. It took all of about 5 seconds after the representative set up his little easel and big cardboard diagrams for him to start whining about how President Bush has increased the national debt by a few trillion dollars. He argues, then, that the President has borrowed money from other nations in order to help fund a tax cut for Americans making more than $400,000 every year. That is a nearly exact quotation. So now I'm to believe that, if this representative is speaking accurately, America borrowed $3 trillion and handed it to a bunch of rich Americans. But the fun doesn't stop there! We're not planning to raise taxes, but we are going to lower taxes, says the Democrat. And while we're lowering taxes, we will increase spending on education, veterans, and healthcare. Gee, doesn't this sound familiar? Oh yeah, that's the same promise that President Bush campaigned on in 2004. So it sounds to me like the Democrats are saying that President Bush's budget plan has put the country in a ridiculous and insurmountable amount of debt, and yet they are proposing the very thing he did.

Where can our country go? This is not politics, this is some sad kind of schoolchild playground war. The Elephant gang and the Donkey gang are so blinded by their own superiority that they refuse to see past the shortsightedness of their own team and accept that the other side might have anything valuable to contribute. Ok, so there were several Republicans who got involved in scandals of some sort. Therefore, all Republicans are bad. So there are some Democrats who think taxes and spending should both be increased. Therefore, all Democrats think taxes and spending should be increased. HELLO! It's not rocket sceince! It's BASIC LOGIC! What if our congresspeople would, for once, forget what "side of the aisle" they're on and just look at an issue as no more than it is. A Republican proposition to lower taxes should be treated no differently than a Democrat proposition to lower taxes. And yet, if the Democrats have the majority, the Republican bill will lose simply because it was a Republican who created it. Does no one else see it? Surely, you'd think that if enough regular citizens would speak up on an issue, politicians would have to actually read the Constitution for once and realize that they are supposed to be representing their districts, not representing their party. What I'm seeing is top-down government, not the bottom-up government that was intended. Authority is supposed to come from the people, through the congress, into the laws. But instead it comes from the majority in Congress, into the laws, down to the people. Never mind who started the war, never mind what party that last scandal involved - why can't politicians vote based on the merits of the propositions rather than their affiliations?

Vote for Nader!