William Reardon’s Blog

Excellent editorial in today’s LA times: China’s stealth war on the U.S.

Never mind Iraq, Iran or North Korea — China is the biggest long-term threat to our national security.

I don’t remember much of Pope John Paul’s 1993 visit to Denver for World Youth Day, but I do have rough memories of its opening. The Pope, probably one of the most solemn & most revered dignitaries in the world, came forth in the stadium saying softly and gently “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit I say to thee…”, then in a sudden boisterous roar “GOOD MORNING!”

Of course the crowd went nuts, the Pontiff looking & smiling down upon them.

Having been barely five years old on his election, Pope John Paul II was the only Pope I really can say I knew. I know that within a few weeks the Cardinals will have signaled the selection of a new Pope through the message of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel, that we should celebrate his life here on earth and his life now in the Kingdom of God, but still there remains the grief & sadness for having lost the man who has taught me so much.

And taught not just through words but through actions.

To love thy neighbor. Love thy enemy. Forgiveness. Embrace each other. Seek understanding. Compassion. Judge not. Value life. Help those in need. Protect those who cannot do so for themself.

To do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Thank you, John Paul, and God Bless.

May we be able to pass on to our fellow a man an ounce of what you passed on to us.

Awesome: Ebay auction for Michael Moore’s relevance.

Expires in 7 days, after which it’s gone.

Addictive
http://www.theflashgames.com/road_blocks-swf.html

Got to level 15. (Password ‘webcam’ if you want to jump there and tell me how to get past it.)

After visitng Target & Office Max with my mom, we headed next door to Vroman’s bookstore. A sign of upcoming apperances listed Orson Scott Card appearing on Monday, Sept. 6th. While I didn’t actually know today was the 6th, I did know it was Monday. Damn, I thought — the time of his talk was at 7pm, so I must have just missed him. Except I realized that I had no idea what time it was either, and after flipping open my phone, found out it was 7 o’clock on the dot. Apparently, the fates had scheduled me to see Mr. Card.

Not one to argue, I got directions to where he speaking in the store & headed over. Apparently, he was in there to pimp his new book and a play. I had heard him talk once before, up north, with Neb & Miza. For whatever reason, I liked his first talk more. It could be the audience asked more compelling questions, but it was interesting to hear his views on the war (in general & in Iraq), history, and a few other topics. Not much was asked this time other than “Tell us about you. How do you go about writing?” Feh. I’m not a writer and thus have no interests in how he goes about writing. Actually, even though I’m a developer I have no interest in hearing about how Carmack or Linus codes, so I suppose even if I was a writer, I still wouldn’t care. What the hell does the logistics of writing have anything to do with anything anyway?

Long day, so quick entry. An Op-ed piece in today’s NYT did a good job expressing my frustration with a lot of “Anyone but Bush!” and F-9/11 pieces of late:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/opinion/30KRIS.html

Two quotes in particular:

• “I’m against the “liar” label for two reasons. First, it further polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.”

• “…liberals love subtlety and describe the world in a palette of grays — yet many have now dropped all nuance about this president.”
  

Despite my best wishes, I’m spending a fair amount of time these days in TWiki. I have come to appreciate the collaborative nature of it. It’s still a royal PITA to modify documents, in particular, because working in text area boxes isn’t that fun.

Some coworkers showed me a neat trick to mitigate a bit of that pain – a command line browser called w3m. It’s different from lynx in that it will pull up your favorite editor for modifying text-area boxes. That is, you can now use emacs/vim/etc. to modify a text area box. Makes life a lot less painful.

If you want to use emacs and if you’re TWiki site is protected by some sort of cookie-based authorization, you probably want to add the following two lines to ~/.w3m/config:

editor /usr/local/bin/emacs
use_cookie 1

(w3m didn’t seem to respect my EDITOR or VISUAL settings.)

If you want emacs to automatically kick into html-mode, you can add the following to your .emacs file:

(setq auto-mode-alist
      (append auto-mode-alist
              '(
                ("w3mtmp" . html-mode)
                )))

(If you already have a block like that, just add the “w3mtmp…” bit.)

My mom passed along the results of my sister’s visit to the doctor today. In a nutshell, they thought she’d probably deliver in the next 24-48 hours! Earlier than they thought, but apparently in Reardon style, the baby’s already pretty big.