I've had a rough time lately and the old blog has been neglected but I think I'm back to the point that I can focus on it. I'd rather not go into personal specifics and all that stuff here on the Interwebs, but I can say I have a good story if you catch me at FlashForward or some other conference and ask me about it..

Oh, and I am planning on being at FlashForward.
It's been a while since I had a breather and had time to go to a conference so I'm looking forward to it.

I've been working in Flex some.. wow. I tinkered with it way, way back but stuck with AS2 for work so didn't want to dive in and muddy the waters in my noggin. So it's fun to get back to it and start working with it. I keep wishing for a "groundhog day" so I can spend a year or two doing nothing but learning Flex and other things that I need to catch up on. Ah well.

I had a hard drive on my mac pro get wiped out. Totally. It was my "data" drive. The sad thing is, it was because I was setting up backup software (Chronosync) and configured it in such a way that it decided to totally erase the drive before my first little test of backing up my iTunes files on it with no warnings. Nice. I sent an e-mail to their support folks and after clarification of exactly how I set it up and what it did I got this response:

Ouch. We should get rid of Delete immediately or make it harder to use.
The Targets don't copy over otherwise you would end up with something like a
Documents folder inside a Documents folder. Which does not make sense. But I
can see where initially you would miss that.

Our next version does have stronger warnings about using the Archive.
Sorry for the mess.

Ahh.. ok. Good thing I had a somewhat recent backup and was able to recover the few other files I missed. In their defense it was kind of a crazy setup I tried, but if it'd given me a big warning (dude! you're about to wipe out data!) I would have changed course. As it was I lost some hours restoring my files and getting things set back up. The other irony is I'm normally super paranoid about data backup and back things up to 3 or 4 places and had my "data" drive set up as a mirrored raid array in case of hardware failure between backups... well.. before this little incident I'd been having some apps crash and other weirdness.. once I pulled that raid array out all the weirdness went away. I checked the drives and one was bad. I hadn't gotten a warning about it, but it was failing.

I ended up setting Chronosync up and have it doing all kinds of synchronizing and backing up fun. It's actually a nice app and easy to use. Eventually I'll upgrade to Leopard and use that nifty Time Machine thing, but in the meantime Chronosync will do fine as long as I'm careful.

I've been sitting on the sidelines of the democratic process in the US for oh.. about 20 years. I've voted, but I've never donated to a campaign, never put a bumper sticker on, never really gotten involved in it. I've always voted for the lesser of two evils and had just written the whole 2008 election off. I figured the Democrats would win this election (the online gambling sites and polls agree). However, this election I see something very, very different happening and it's actually scaring the crap out of me.

What I see happening is a clear, blatant, and successful attempt by the media and the GOP to sway Republican voters away from a a Republican candidate. There were weeks where I never heard his name on CNN, but heard the other candidates hundreds if not thousands of times. In hour and a half debates he might get 6 minutes of time. When cornered on the issue they point to low numbers in the polls. You don't get high numbers in the polls unless people see you on TV a lot first. I'm not alone in seeing this bias in action, as others are noticing it.

I'm not quite sure what we as citizens can do about it at this point and that's what frightens me. You see Dr. Ron Paul has the most support by far of the Republican candidates (and by support I mean people who are willing to do more than just walk in and vote like they've been told to). His grassroots volunteer support is the top at fundraising, the top at getting signs out, the top of going around knocking on doors and talking to people, the top of gathering and waving signs on street corners, the top of commenting on anything that moves on the web, the top of actually going and voting in online polls, and on and on.. and yet they can't come close to countering the effect of the "old" media. If his 200,000+ rabid supporters can't overcome the bias of the media, then heaven help us.

Enough about my fears of the menace of the media - here's some info on Ron Paul since you probably haven't heard too much about him other than the false memes presented by the media.

He:
- received more donations from active and retired military personnel than ANY candidate (Dem or Rep) and more donations than ALL other Republican candidates combined during the 4th quarter of 2007. Think about that next time you hear one of the candidates say they have the "support of the troops" or that the troops "want us to stay to finish the job with honor".
- has come in second (above McCain, Romney, and Huckabee) in two states (LA and NV) and may have won the most state delegates in Maine (the final vote isn't in yet).
- raised more money from individuals than any other Republican candidate in the 4th quarter.
- is a ten-term Texas congressman
- is a practicing OB/GYN doctor and has delivered over 4,000 babies (yes, he's pro-life but doesn't want the federal government overseeing that)
- voted against the Iraq War but is not opposed to war for defensive purposes (rather than preemptive war).
- is against NAFTA and steps we are taking towards a "North American Union"
- voted against the Patriot Act
- voted against the Real ID Act
- voted against internet regulation
- voted against those acts last year that stripped Habeas Corpus and Posse Commitatis
- voted against this week's Democrat sponsored Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (a precursor to internet filtering and University monitoring by the Department of Homeland Security).
- has written several books (he currently has one on the Amazon best seller list) on economics and unlike other candidates has put his economic plan out for us to see. See how McCain reacts when Paul asked a simple question about the "Working Group on Financial Markets" during one of the debates (McCain doesn't know the answer and just name drops).

He beat McCain in Maine, and is rumored to be set up to do well in at least 4 states tomorrow.

Now.. I don't know about you, but he seems like a viable candidate. Especially when the majority of the people in the US (and the world for that matter) want the US out of Iraq. So why would the GOP sit back and allow the media to force a pro-war candidate to be their nominee? Maybe they don't want to win this next election?... because they'll have to deal with this:


The value of your dollar:




The US national debt:



It's a mystery to me.

This is interesting too.. NC is currently considering not having him on the ballot (um.. he finished second in two states recently..maybe three of them when all the dust settles) and take a look at this:

Here's part of how NC determines who should be on the ballot:

"The list must be compromised of candidates whose candidacy is generally advocated and recognized in the news media throughout the United States or in North Carolina, .."

Yep, that's right. The media picks who goes on the ballot. Ugh.

Am I hoping people will vote for him based on this little blog post? Nope. I think the media has done it's job well of spreading the "long shot" and "McCain vs Romney" memes and there are very, very few people who will ignore what the talking heads on TV tell them. I'm hoping that as people come to this post they might read it, and then the next time they're watching CNN or reading a paper maybe a light bulb will come on when they realize that the media is choosing our candidates for us and democracy has lost.

(updated to add.. just to clarify.. I was aware of the media manipulating voters before, but what has shocked me this go-round is that it's much more evident. We now have YouTube to instantly share every instance of abuse, we have volunteers who put together sites like this one to track the media.. it's so obvious now, and yet it's still so widespread and it's not merely bias - it's censorship and blatant misinformation. The media is incredibly brazen with their attempts to sway the election.. as if they are above the people, above the government, and above the law. It's scary.).

The table below is from Journalism.orgs analysis of January 21 - 27, 2008 .. now you can't possibly tell me that the media gave equal time to the candidates. Bias is somewhat ok, but this is far, far beyond that. Bill freaking Clinton got almost three times as much coverage as Huckabee and more than ALL of the Republican candidates for crying out loud and Bill isn't even running for office.. well.. ahem.

I've got a decent number of sites that I've set up over the years using either Mambo or Joomla. I also use ExpressionEngine and some others that I'd rather not name.. heheh.. um.. anyway, I run Mambo and Joomla so I can keep an eye on the differences with the intention of eventually migrating one way or the other. Things can move slowly when there's not a lot of motivation involved. That's key here. I haven't seen much on either side to motivate me to spend the time to switch sites one way or the other.

I've had a Mambo site cracked because of a crappy, outdated, unsupported 3rd party extension. I've had a Joomla site (with no 3rd party extensions) cracked because of a security issue in the Joomla code that became known while I was too busy to stop and upgrade. In both cases I was able to reload or rebuild without too much hassle. I try to keep things updated and secure but this is the web and there's a lot of people out there who don't know about karma. It'll suck to be them when they have to pay up for all the pain they caused web developers. Anyway, with both systems there are features that I don't like or wish were better. With both there are promises that the next release will be a major break from the old code and things will be better.

I didn't like the spirit in which the Joomla team split off from Mambo. I like even less how they are now treating the 3rd party developers. I'm glad to see that the 3rd party developers have banded together, but I'll still wait and see the outcome. Eyez has several great posts on how the actions of the Joomla core team has caused him to take a wait and see approach to Joomla. Maybe I'm missing something, but what it boils down to is some of the Joomla core team decided that Joomla was supposed to be GPL (I think that's why they split off from Mambo in the first place??) and therefore all derivative work including 3rd party extensions had to be GPL as well. The 3rd party developers were the ones who followed the Joomla core team away from Mambo and helped them build things up. Now the Joomla core team is throwing them under the bus. Nice.. and a repeat.

The trend of interest in Joomla

currently shows Mambo interest trailing off drastically since Joomla was created. Joomla on the other hand has seen a steady increase in interest. What's interesting is despite the upheaval in the Joomla camp there hasn't been a rise in interest in Mambo. At least not according to that Google trend.

The end result for me is I'm still holding off on making any drastic changes. I'll wait and see what Mambo cooks up from cake in version 5, and I'll see how many developers mutiny from Joomla.

I've been putting off getting a mac for a year or more.. mostly waiting on Macrodobe to come out with Flash for the Intel macs. They finally did that and I went yesterday and picked up a nice new Mac Pro (dual 2.66Ghz) at the local Apple store.

Switching back isn't easy since I've spent roughly 6 years using pcs, so I'll be on the lookout for info on shortcut keys, must have apps, etc for the mac. The last FlashForward I attended had loads of people using macs and the recent release of universal binary Flash will encourage others to get off of Windows.

One of the first things I did after firing it up was download the latest Flash Player and then run a few of my old moldy ActionScript Performance tests on it. I only ran a few tests (geez I need to update those things..), but they were consistently about twice as fast on the mac pro as on my old AMD Athlon 2Ghz pc. That's pretty cool. I'm pretty certain the Flash Player is only using a single processor so getting double performance is good. I opted for for the quad processor model (rather than getting an imac or a laptop) because I don't like to switch computers very often since it's really disruptive. I like to buy good hardware, get it all sorted out, and then use it for years. I also like to edit home movies, so the quad processors will get used and it should be enough power to last a few years. The eight processor model was just way too expensive. I could justify ~$4000 for an "octo mac" if I were doing video editing for a living... but for Flash development it seemed like major overkill.

I should also say something about the buying experience.. and it was an experience.
- I thought that I'd get some good treatment going in and dropping ~$2500 in their store. Nope.. the place was packed with people buying systems. I walked out thinking I'd maybe bought an iPod.
- None of that special kool-aid was offered to me. No specially tinted glasses given to me. I wonder where people get that stuff?
- I overheard a sales person telling another guy that he got a 10% discount on hardware... wonder who he works for? I got a nice discount, but not that much.