Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Kari has written up a report on our celebration on October 22nd and Matt now has his photos on the web, thanks to the wonders of flickr.com. Our ‘official’ photos are gradually making their way online. One more batch to sift through and I should be ready to admit to the URLs.
this vs. this.
Eastown has been waiting some time for the installation of Kava House’s wireless internet access. First advertising the impending installation back in July, the proprietors had some trouble getting everything set up. But as of this weekend, it’s all in place. And word has clearly spread quickly, with two other users beating me into the place and reports of others who’ve been dropping by. The connection speed isn’t much to write home about. dslreports.com gives reports of around 463kbps down / 334kbps up, but those seem to vary widely. That aside, the connection seems to be usable for simple work if not heavy downloading. ...
We, like many, have found ourselves granting a probably-undue amount of time to thinking about the ‘religious right’ of late. Having looked hopefully for this year’s election to break the strangehold in which right-wing politics has held evangelical faith in the US, it was a considerable blow to hear report after report on how ’evangelicals’ won the election for Bush. My instinctive reaction was denial, and with reflection I still don’t believe very much of the hyperbole that has surrounded ‘moral’ voting. Certainly gay marriage and abortion were key issues for many voters and there are likely many people who turned out to vote simply because it was their one chance to reconfirm Christianity’s bigotted image (though I suspect they’d phrase it a little differently), but Bush’s win was multi-causal and at least as much the result of the failings of his opponent and the national media as his apparent opposition to gay marriage. ...
On a tangentially related note, I hadn’t been aware that American companies are banned from publishing books by authors in Iran, Cuba and Sudan.. The BBC has the story. The BBC are also to be applauded for making this documentary about Barack Obama available as an MP3. Thanks to City of Sound for the link.
It’s hard to avoid trying to rationalise the voting behaviour of the United States’ population. Whoever wins overall, it looks like Bush will take the popular vote, a thing otherwise inconceivable to most of the rest of the world and a good chunk of those living within the USA. No doubt the coming days will be filled with dissections of voting trends, discussions of whether Osama Bin Laden’s tacit endorsement of Bush helped him at all, and such things. But we’ll all be left groping for answers that aren’t easy to find. ...
By midnight I sensed it was time for sleep. Lying awake with the TV on mute watching the middle of the country turn red was a little too depressing and already it was clear that nothing was going to change before this morning. By 5am sleeplessness declared victory and the laptop brought us the news that, unsurprisingly, everything is still inconclusive. I’m sure it’s not long before the GOP start lambasting Kerry for being “a poor loser” just as they did to Gore four years ago. I’m hanging onto a little hope that the Kerry campaign has the strength to stand up to that and maintain their entirely correct stance that all the votes must be counted. Perhaps they could start by criticising the white house for claiming statistical certainties when the number of provisional votes in Ohio are far from clear. ...
A little housekeeping work has kept me occupied for most of the day. UNCharter.org now has a feature that allows you to bring up two articles next to each other, so as to compare related articles of the charter. It was a quick addition, but with so many cross-references it seemed a natural option to add. GRWifi.net has also received some attention. As well as placing reviews through ’trackback’ users can now post comments directly onto the site using a nice easy form, and there are XML feeds ( Atom and RSS 2.0) of the locations and comments. ...
We got back to Grand Rapids on Thursday but stayed under cover until yesterday. The time away was great, despite both ending up a little ill (Kari more so than me, we’re both pretty much recovered now) as being ill forced us to stop, watch some DVDs, and not try to explore every town within two hours’ drive. We did make it to Mackinac Island, Charlevoix and Petoskey, and would highly recommend Lulu’s restaurant in Bellaire. ...
Friday night seemed to go wonderfully, and already the reviews are flooding in. Well, maybe not flooding but Brandon wrote a very kind review. Photos and such will follow in due course, now to get back to looking up film listings…