April 2005 Archives

My random attempt at creating a collage of my ticket and confetti from the concert

This Wednesday, for the second time in six months, Gerry and I went to a Green Day concert, this time in Binghamton. The line there was insane, but Gerry and I cut into it about twenty feet from the door without a problem, which probably saved us a good 45 minutes.

The line outside that we didn't wait in... Because we're too old for that junk!
(Copyright Press & Sun Bulletin)

The opening band was My Chemical Romance, which was pretty bad live, just as Sugercult and Newfound Glory had been in Rochester. Green Day was insane again though. Nothing like a good bruising a week before exams!

There were also a ton of reminders for me about how I'm slowly but surely becoming an old man. As I looked around I couldn't help but laugh at the fact that about half the people there were under the age of six when Dookie came out eleven years ago. While they were watching Lamb Chop's Play-Along I was sitting in the back of the elementary school bus yelling out the lyrics to "Longview" at the top of my lungs!

Yet now we were all smashing our bodies against each other to the tune of "Jesus of Suburbia."

Read the Press and Sun Bulletin article (PDF File)

I finally finished installing the pretty neat "On This Day" plug-in for Movable Type by Brad Choate. The plug-in itself was really easy to install, but I had trouble getting this main index to automatically rebuild itself every day so that it would always be up-to-date. I ended up using the "MT-Rebuild" script by Timothy Appnel. Thanks to some help on the MT Forums, I was able to get that to work, upon which I had to figure out the "crontab" command so that it would happen automatically. Luckily my host uses cPanelX, which has graphic controls over that function.

Anyway, the "On This Day" section is all set and is towards the bottom of the right column on this page. It'll probably make me even more sentimental about my past.

This past hour I got the "great" idea of back-archiving some of my old weblog entires that haven't made it to this site yet. I started webloging in December 2000 while at home in Vestal, New York for Christmas Break.

This weblog is probably one of my favorite parts of my "web conglomerate," but reading old entries is horribly depressing beyond belief. I browsed through some of my hundreds of entries and now I feel like crap.

My major problem back in my high school years is never realizing what I had when I had it. Even well into 2001, when in my junior year, I was still writing stupid junk like this:

"Vienna, a city of nearly two million inhabitants, is your average big city. You can get around easily, do a lot of things, but I miss the tranquillity of Vestal. The only reason I stay there is because I like the school better. I go to the American International School there." -April 20, 2001

The summer after my senior year, only a little more than a year later, I was filling my weblog with pages and pages of depression about no longer being in Vienna. I guess I could never have what I wanted.

Anyway, if you want to take a look at the old weblog entires, you can do so here. (It's a 713kb file, so be patient)

Today I read a quite funny article by Jeff Kramer, who writes a weekly humor column in the Post-Standard. This week he compared Syracuse to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, and managed to find over a dozen similarities.

Is Syracuse just another Neverland?

This past week Syracuse Police began teaming up with the Onondaga County Sheriff's Department and the New York State Police to crack down on crime in Syracuse's worst neighborhoods, which has gotten horribly ridiculous.

Hardly a day passes without reading or hearing about shootings. Today I got to read about five people being injured Saturday in two separate shootings:

"Three teens were shot just after 2:30 p.m. when a shooter walked through a convenience store parking lot, firing off shot after shot in a spray that went in several directions." -The Post-Standard

Wonderful... And the closest-to-home incident in the past few months was last month's discovery of a body in the park at the end of my block.

Body found in Thornden Park

Thornden Park

I love days (or weeks) where I am a complete waste of space. Take this past day for example. I woke up at six for work, but had to call in because I felt like complete crap. Then I proceed to sleep another six hours. Then it was off to Rite Aid and then Acropolis with Gerry for some pizza. That was probably my biggest "achievement" of the day. The rest of the day was spent sitting in front of the computer or TV. I left the apartment one more time for dinner, after which I wasted some more time. I did watch the second part of that A&E FDR documentary, so I guess I built my education up a little.

Now I have heartburn... Wonderful.

Primitive shouldn't be a naughty word

Today in my International Human Rights class, my friend used the word "primitive" ...And then all hell broke lose. Why the oversensitivity?

The anthological definition of the word "primitive" is simply "Of or relating to a nonindustrial, often tribal culture, especially one that is characterized by a low level of economic complexity: primitive societies (American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.))."

All Gerry was trying to ask if these primitive (gasp!) societies continue to rely on simple economics, whether they will be able to survive. He never got to the end of the question because upon hearing the word "primitive" the class reacted as if he had just hailed to Hitler.

And this happens all the time in this class. You can't even question female genital cutting (notice the neutral term instead of "mutilation" actually used by the presenters on this topic), without being told to "get off your moral high ground."

Society is becoming too oversensitive about words, especially those with multiple definitions such as "primitive."

Or take a look how "physically challenged" came about:

"Invalid (a long obsolete term) became disabled, then became handicapped, then became disabled again, then became people with disabilities (the emphasis being on "people"), then became differently abled, then became physically challenged (the current term)."

Or perhaps a dark look into the possible future:

"The fireman put a ladder up against the tree, climbed it, and rescued the cat" might look like this:

The firefighter (who happened to be male, but could just as easily have been female) abridged the rights of the cat to determine for itself where it wanted to walk, climb, or rest, and inflicted his own value judgments in determining that it needed to be 'rescued' from its chosen perch. In callous disregard for the well-being of the environment, and this one tree in particular, he thrust the mobility disadvantaged-unfriendly means of ascent known as a 'ladder' carelessly up against the tree, marring its bark, and unfeelingly climbed it, unconcerned how his display of physical prowess might injure the self-esteem of those differently-abled. He kidnapped and unjustly restrained the innocent animal with the intention of returning it to the person who claimed to 'own' the naturally free animal."

The above to quotes are from the following Wikipedia article, which I also recommend for further reading: Wikipedia: Political Correctness

Sounds exciting...

Is it just me or has the whole text book "requirement"/actual requirement ratio gotten ridiculous lately? Not sure of what I mean? I'm talking about when a professor lists five 300-page books as a requirement, but doesn't use more than a few sentences of each for tests, and has you read a separate book for another assignment.

For my "Politics of Western Europe" class here at SU I was "required" to purchase five books. About a month later the class was informed that we weren't going to use the fifth book at all. When it came time to do a book review, I wised up and only used the library's copy.

Professors today really need to take a second look at what is being asked on their tests and assignments today versus what is being required of students to read. This of course holds especially true for undergraduate classes. I, as most students, am taking this 300 (upper undergraduate)-level course to fulfill some element to receive my diploma. I do not need to read 1800 pages in 15 weeks to acquire the basic knowledge necessary to make this course worthwhile. This isn't my doctoral thesis here!

SU faculty, staff, and students waiting to see who the pope will be

The first thing I heard around me today when the pope was announced today (besides my German friend cheering) was talk about "the conservative guy" being elected. This has led me to publish the following rant:

The Catholic Church had to elect the most conservative pope ever because Catholics today are the most liberal they've ever been! It's counterbalance, people!

Under Pope John Paul II, the "Pope of the People that wouldn't let his people do what they wanted to," less and less people were "being Catholic." Catholics around the world reformed the Catholic Church themselves, even if the Vatican didn't like it.

The fact of the matter is that the pope is a figurehead today. He has no real power outside his institution. About the only thing he can do is keep women from becoming priests and try to prevent homosexuals from from getting married in a Catholic church.

People, even those claiming to be "true Catholics," are still going to have pre-marital sex, abortions, and beef on Fridays, because he can't do anything about it. That's a main reason why Pope John Paul II was so popular in the first place, because he wasn't feared. He was a lovable man who forgave everyone and gave great holiday blessings.

It doesn't matter which pope was elected today. Even if it had been the most "liberal," there wouldn't have been women priests or sanctioned homosexual marriages and abortions by the Catholic Church.

And either a liberal or conservative pope ought to crack down on priests abusing children, something a lot of people, including myself, believe JPII didn't do enough about.

Anyway, in a week or two everything will go back to normal. Rome will shrink back to its normal size, and the next time we'll see the Pope on TV will be around Christmas.

Not much has happened since last November... Or, I'm just lazy to write that much...

Over Christmas Break I just worked 40 hours a week at Target and mostly stayed in Syracuse. I took one week off from Christmas to New Year's to spend with my family down in Vestal.

Over Spring Break I flew over to Vienna and spent 10 days or so there. Vienna is not what it once was, but I still had a pretty good time.

This semester I've only been taking four classes (after dropping one). That hasn't made my life easy though. In fact, I should be studying right now for a damn Politics of Western Europe exam which is a real pain.

Spring is finally here, and today it reached 80°F (27°C) and it hasn't rained in over eleven days. I'm planning on studying in Vienna this summer, which should satisfy my Vienna addiction.

The SU Quad today. The yellow tape was some kind of architecture class's project/protest thing.

Well, after four months this weblog is finally back in action! Let me explain what happened:

Last November I decided to move my site to a new host which offered me a better deal. In the course of one night or so I moved about 95% of my content to the new host. (I still haven't moved AISVIENNA.COM) Problems came up with just about ever aspect of the site that used a database to store data. This includes AIS2002.COM, this weblogs (life and site), my guestbook, my link site, and my "Ask Kai" section (which I'm getting rid of anyway).

So after fixing up a few things like AIS2002.COM, I became lazy and didn't do much here at all. Well I started to get sick of people asking me to fix the site up, so I'm working on it again.

I'm going to combine both weblogs into one and separate them by category. You can filter out what you want to read about using the category selector to the right. I'm also going to make the blog a little more "bloggy" by giving my opinion on current local, national, and international politics. So let's see how long I can keep it going this time!

Note: To comment on my entries you now have to register with TypeKey. This only takes a couple seconds and lets you comment on thousands of blogs out there. I enacted this because the comment boxes were being used for spam over 99.99% (no exaggeration, there are over 20,000 spam entries I'm working on getting rid of right now) of the time.

Register with TypeKey.

Oh, and I'm also missing over 200 entries from 2000-2002 and 2003-2004 that I'll have to manually add back.