Two more days of school. No work, for another three months. Well actually, that’s only partially true. There is no more school work, but my entire summer is filled with volunteer work.

The really sad part about it is that I have to leave all my friends. I’m leaving the school in my area to go to a charter school, “High Tech International”. I have chosen kind of an interesting approach to telling people, and it seems that it has not worked so far. I haven’t actually told anybody, but I sign it in everybody’s yearbook, along with my contact information. So far, only two people have sent me email, but I’ve gotten promises from at least two more people.

I’m really sad about leaving all my friends. I’m sure I’ll find some interesting people at my new school. I’m sure it won’t be that bad. I can still hang out with people.

If I gave you the link to this site, please bookmark it. I will be updating it more than I email people.

I just finished Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. I had never read Bradbury before and found his writing a little dificult at first, but as the story progressed, I grew to enjoy how he works in emotion with his writing. It’s actually a very cool style of writing that I don’t think I have ever seen before. Emotion is incorporated via repetition and listing certain things. Like if Guy was getting chased by a helicopter, it would say the helicopter is getting closer multiple times to get the effect across.

The plot was very cool, along with all the characters, the Mechanical Hound, and the T.V. like things. I would recommend this book to almost anybody, I don’t think it would offend many people, the whole basis of the society was to keep peace and order by destroying all media that could upset some group.

On Thursday, I went with the school band up to Disneyland for a “workshop”. I payed $60 to spend 4+ hours on a bus, wait an hour to get a ticket, and go on four rides. That’s not the greatest use of money, especially when a soda costs in excess of two dollars.

The workshop, however, was pretty cool. Not the playing part, I personally think we sounded horrible, expecially on the recordings. Behind the scenes is at disneyland was probably the coolest part. We saw all the wharehouses and buildings that you can’t see from the actual park.

I was angry that none of my friends came, so I had to spend the day with a group of kids from the grade below me, but the anger quickly went away as I got on Indiana Jones for a second time. Overall, the day was fun, but not worth the $60 I paid for it.

Earlier in the week, I posted about a play where the characters were radicals and their parents were all communists. That led me to ask why communism was popular in the 40s and 50s. Now I can comfortably say I have an answer.

After the stock market crashed in 1929, the great depression followed. This was not the only ‘depression’ in the nations history, but it was the worst. There were, in fact, six depressions around that time, you can read about some of them. So the great depression showed people a new side of life, with no sign of a program similar to welfare in sight. It was also proof that an unregulated capitalism could lead to bad things. People were looking for a stable system, and what would be better than one that everybody was equal in, ruled by one power hungry person. A dictatorship looked like the only form of government that could actually get anything done, and improve their way of life.

Sadly, it did not turn out that way. The rich turned out super rich, but the poor were dirt poor. After the great depression, communism continued. One senator from Wisconsin decided to try to do something about it in the 50s. I guess it worked because now there is a lot of conservative propaganda about communism and such, even still.

In this entry, I was sort of afraid to say that it was “popular” in the 30s-50s, but it did gain popularity. Now there are a lot more ‘communists’ than there were back then. Wow, how people interpret the 1st ammendment really changes over time.

Here Anil. Nigritude Ultramarine

I watched the Fahrenheit 911 trailer last night and, from what I’ve seen, this movie looks better than his others. I have seen Bowling for Columbine and Canadian Bacon, a lesser known Michael Moore movie. Canadian Bacon is about a United States president who feels he needs to be known for something. He decides to spread these rumors about Canada and make them look like they’re about to attack the northern United States. It has John Candy so you know it has to be good. Anyways, Fahrenheit comes out on June 25, so get out to your local theater and watch this fine film.

Trailer

Last night, I say a very interesting play. It was very political and I’m sure most of the jokes went right over my head. It was paired with another play, called “Mothers Against”. Together, “Mothers Against” and “Daughters of the Revolution” gave both sides of the same gubernatorial election. “Daughters of the Revolution” gave the left side of the race. The thing was that this one was not actually about the gubernatorial candidate, but instead a man that was connected with the campaign manager.

The show starts out when the main character, Michael, comes home to find his friends dressed up in circa 60s peace movement attire reading a script written directly off his FBI file. This continues on for a few minutes, naming all the protests he attended in college as well as all the underground revolutionary movements he was in. It doesn’t stop there, it turned out there was a plot Michael was affiliated with in 1972 to kidnap a prominent Republican politician’s daughter and demand the release of an african american militant. There was only one meeting to plan for this attack and there were only eight people attending the movement. One of the attendees was the democratic candidate’s campaign manager. If the snitch reveals this terrifying plot during the campaign, the election is lost and the right will definitely pass “Proposition 92″, requiring all voters to pledge allegiance to democracy. This play is as action packed as a political play of this sort of topic can get. Every new scene brought a new twist to the plot and the end was as shocking as the plot itself.

I would definitely recommend this play to anybody who is into politics. Most of the history relates to the time between MacCarthy and the Vietnam War, but it was not totally in depth. My little brother could grasp the concept and he is in 6th grade so it must not be that bad.

Sorry for not updating lately. I embarked on a quest to find a better weblogging tool / content management system, but failed horribly. The only one that actually looked decent was Expression Engine, but it costs money and I could just as easily code my own for free. As a matter of fact, I tried to write my own. That failed horribly, just as the search for one did.

So I am stuck with this… A new template that is in the works. I’ve been working on it for the last week. “Archive” and “Search” templates are in the works now, along with some more work with the styles. So anyways, I’ll catch up later, if ever.

It seems that Apple has filed for a patent, for a pretty interesting feature, possibly for “Tiger”. The way I understand it is that, you have a window. That window goes unchanged for a certain amount of time and it becomes semi-transparent. If you leave it that way for even longer, it becomes more translucent. Once it gets to a certain point, a click on that area of the screen is considered an action on the windows underlying the translucent one. Pretty cool, but I can’t seem to find a practical use for it. Maybe somebody could help me?

Update: Sorry about the link, I have no idea how that got in there, thanks ecto .

Now that Movable Type has gone into 3.0D (at the time of this publishing), they have also updated their terms of service, as anybody who has updated should know. Also, you may have noticed the following statement under the sidebar box titled “Movable Type Free” on http://secure.sixapart.com :

No more than one author and three weblogs

I’m sorry to say it but these eight words will lead to the downfall of Movable Type. Many developers, authors, and just plain old bloggers have long enjoyed this great, once free product. Currently, I only have one blog running, but I have been planning to turn my root directory into a Movable Type powered system.

Many bloggers have switched to Drupal, blogger, WordPress, or even their own home grown content management system. I really admire what Mark Pilgrim did ford WordPress. It won’t matter for the developers in the long run, but the purpose was a very admirable one. Instead of paying the ~$535 it would cost for him to buy all his Movable Type licenses, he donated it, which is bound to piss of at least one person at Six Apart, and it has let a lot of people know about the fine product.

Then comes to the problem, since everybody is writing their own blogging system, why don’t they collaborate and take back the blogging community. We could keep it free, and even release it under an open source license.

Currently, I’m semi-working on a CMS in PHP with the basic features, I still haven’t thought of a design for the admin panel. I will hopefully release the source code under an open source license and everybody will be able to work on it.

What the heck? What are we coming to? This post is an outrage! I feel that Michael Powell may go wherever the heck he wishes to go to switch phone carriers. No average person would care, and frankly I don’t think abnormal people should care about that sort of thing either. The article was about how many people have switched carriers, the point was not that the FCC Chairman went to Circuit City.

Yay, I’m going camping this weekend, how could it get any better. I mean, the thing is like a competition, except worse, one event you have to “Build a raft” and navigate across a “swamp” with it, could it get any more retarded. I may be a little biased because I have done this competition many times before, and I think it sucks. Well, I’ll have to make the best out of it, so I’ll try to have fun.

Wow, Movable Type was in beta for a whole, 2-3 weeks before the “Developer” edition was released. Now I have nothing to say that I’m better than everybody else. To make it worse, you have to be 18 to enter the plugin contest. I think I’ll go sob in a corner until June 18. The upside of this is, there will be a lot more support for movable type 3. I won’t have to specifically find one person to help me, there will be a lot of sites that have the same problems that I have had (hopefully).

I think I’ll develop a plugin despite the fact that I get nothing out of it. Hey, it would be pretty interesting. Not quite sure what I would do it on, but I have a lot of time at school to figure out.

I still haven’t edited the style, I was planning to do it last night, but I got home to find out that I deleted an iTunes Music Store gift certificate off my linux box, and then reformatted the linux box, not realizing I deleted it until I got home last night, to my iBook. I was so pissed and I couldn’t do anything, except play games.

Yeah, I installed Debian, I guess it took me long enough, but I didn’t do it all straight in a row. I still have tons of stuff to upgrade and reconfigure. It’s kind of annoying really,the ’stable’ packages are way out of date, but nobody will admit it. Right now I’m working on upgrading to the ‘testing’ packages. Thanks Justin for helping with my “newbie” questions.

Well, I’m back from Disneyland. I’m pretty happy, and tired. Happy because it is the “Happiest Place on Earth”, and tired because, hell, I’ve been walking around for 6 hours. I got out early though, we left around 2:30, and the park is open until like 10 or 11PM. I got to go on all the rides I wanted to go on, and even some more that I didn’t expect to go on. Surprisingly, there weren’t very many people there. The lines weren’t nearly as long as I expected them to be, probably then longest wait I had was for the Matterhorn, and that was only about 15 minutes. Nothing was really happening for Mother’s Day though, they basically gave out flowers and everybody said “Happy Mother’s Day.”

I had never been on Splash Mountain before, it was kind of strange. You have this really happy ride, “Zip-a-dee Doo Da.” Then, boom, there is a huge waterfall that you go falling down. I don’t get it! It was an awesome ride though, well worth it.

I had also never been on Tom Sawyer’s Island, or rather, I had not been on it in many years. What a cool place? I mean, it’s an island with tons of little caves and “forts” that you could explore. I spent a good 20-30 minutes just exploring it and still found new caves or places to climb up. I know this sounds a little immature but what am I supposed to do at Disneyland. The one thing I have to complain about is the bell. It’s not a good idea to give a bunch of small children access to a string that rings a very loud bell.

There was also a new ride, about Winnie the Pooh. It was one of the better story rides, but this is coming from a person who can’t get over the little bear.

I also went through the usual routine, Matterhorn, Mr. Toad, Indiana Jones, Jungle Cruise, et al. The imagineering place was really cool, all the games and my Mom road a Segway. Oh yeah, and there was a cool show with Abe Lincoln. It was so realistic, I can’t even explain it. Just the average trip to Disneyland, I’d say, but it was Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day all!