wiredfool

I want peace, and I don’t want to drag the world to war to get it.
I want freedom, and I don’t want to give mine up to protect it.
And I want peace and freedom for everyone.

If we go to war, we will fight an enemy who wants to die. A small decentralized enemy who believes their divine purpose is to take as many of us with them as possible. An enemy who will not abide by rules of war. An enemy who wants to polarize the world into an Islam vs. West world war. An enemy with probable access to biological and nuclear weapons and agents in western countries. When we kill civilians, it will be justification for more attacks. If we starve a country, it will be further justfication for suicide bombers. For every one we kill we will make 5 more.

And what if you track down these men and kill them? What if you murdered all of us? From every corner of your Republic, thousands would rise to take our places. Even Nazis can’t kill that fast. from Casablanca, 1942

Since the attack, America has been thoroughly predictable. Incredible heroism, volunteerism and courage. A feeling of unity. Scattered abuse of Arab-Americans. The desire for revenge. Congress meets, supports the president, and suspends civil liberties. The President attempts to reassure the nation and makes war noises. Most of us are expecting the US to bomb some third world country farther into the stone age. I’m sure the people in the candidate countries expect it too.

Lets stop the predictability now. What we need is not (at best) a protracted land war in Afganistan, nor do we need to cause collateral damage to force the Taliban from power, nor do we want to get into an atomic shooting war on our own soil.

We need to attack with intelligence, courage, and compassion. And we have to do it ourselves. We’ve spent too long manipulating others to our ends, arming dictators and insurgents then dropping them when we get bored.

We need to excercise fanatical fundamental compassion. We need nonviolent noncompliant action in those countries where our leaders want to drop bombs. If the people need medicine, we should send doctors. If the people need food, we should smuggle it in. We should bring the internet to every village. We should stand up for the oppressed. We must to respect the people’s customs, while resisting their leadership’s oppression. We must fight terror with compassion.

We have surplus grain, lets use it. We have technology, let’s use it. We pay farmers to leave their land fallow, let’s pay them for using it.

Let our actions speak against the terrorists words and deeds. Let our actions choke off the flow of volunteers for suicide missions.

Many of these items I’ve implemented in manila, but are difficult use except on custom modified sites. It would be nice to get them into the standard distribution stream. permalink

1. Make gems work out of the box on mac servers, using frontier as the server for gems. (i.e. fix the type/creator/mimetype/filename issues.) Have/allow sitename.com/gems point to the gems folder. (Supposedly fixed now)
2. Allow arbitrary values in the xml site structure for categories, and have them interpreted as #directives when traversing. Require them to be strings and not evaluated, or safe script them. Make sure they survive a round trip through radio. Give plugins and possibly a specific macro access to it.
3. Custom 404 pages. see http://www.wiredfool.com/notFound. If the page doesn’t exist, and 404 does in the site structure, redirect there, and record the error. (404s now are returned, I guess it’s a start)
4. Traverse site logs and email text versions to the admin daily. (errors, hits, referrers, useragent). This could be a plugin.
5. Multi level navbars. Check the Photo Album navbar link above. On the back end, I’ve done it by done by nesting items in the xml. Either implementation of the feature or some way to override the existing navbar renderer so that I don’t have to render the manila one, throw it away, and render mine.
6. Synergy between navigation and the site structure. Especially with the multi level bits, it would be nice to be able to automatically add site structure directories to the navigation.
7. A callback that has access to pre and post changes versions of anything in the dg that changes, along with a description of the change.
8. Robots.txt pref. Allow all, disallow all, allow google only, and custom options.
9. If you change the name of a picture through Discuss ->edit, update the shortcut to reflect the new name.

Added 1/29/2002 —
{includeMessage(890, false,false,false)}

A small plane crashed in the Yucatan wednesday. This was the flight that I was on on 8/19 (3 weeks ago) when I visited the Mayan Ruins, and may have been the same pilot and plane.

http://espn.go.com/ncf/news/2001/0912/1250991.html
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/010912/23/news-mexico-plane-crash

I shot this picture on the approach to the airport in Chichen Itza.

I have never been just small steps away from so much death and destruction. One family member was supposed to get on a train from Boston to NY Tuesday afternoon. A cousin in the financial district, but not the WTC, and is safe. Family around DC was one major traffic jam away from harm.

We live our lives with the implicit assumption that the future will look something like the past. Things don’t just blow up and dissappear without a trace.

At least that used to be the case…

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An offering of something bright on a day of darkness.

A set of pictures where your interpid narrator takes a jungle tour from a Californian, hangs out on a beach, and goes to the local sunday night fiesta.

Local Coffee Store Owner Arrested

It appears that we have a war on the street outside my office. In the red corner, we have Coffee Messiah, a really quirky independent coffee shop containing such relics as a box of Popesicles, a Disco Hell bathroom, and enough sacrilege to damn an army. Oh yeah, and pretty good coffee.

In the green corner, we have Starbucks. Aggressively the same as all of the other Starbucks, this one features leather seats, cellphones, and an Airport network.

And in other news today…

Adding to the mix of insane mayoral candidates, a Capitol Hill feline is making a bid for the city’s highest office. Meow Meow King Friday, the furry resident of Coffee Messiah … “King Friday has seen that this city apparently wants a mayor who’s asleep on the job,” Opus says. “So he’s the right one for the job.”

Note that so far, we have mayoral candidates who: Insist that Kurt Cobain was murdered, Handled the WTO and Mardi Gras Riots, Assaulted the current mayor with a megaphone, Made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk, and blown the Sound Transit budget by a billion. At this point, sleeping on the job sounds pretty good.

While in Cozumel, I got to watch the local conservation effort for the sea turtle population. The east side of the island has lots of sandy beaches where sea turtles lay their eggs. Unfortunately, there’s enough human and pest interference to disturb the nests. So they are transferred to a secured and monitored area to gestate and hatch. I saw a couple of tracks in the sand from the mother turtles as I was wandering about the beach that day waiting for the release.

The nests are then dug up and the baby turtles transported to one of the nearby beaches to be released into the surf at dusk.

More Pictures ->

Pictures have been posted from my recent trip to Chichen Itza.

This little fat gecko hung out on the wall for a few days. Didn’t seem to need any food.

The main pyramid at Chichen Itza, as well as the hall of warriors and the ball field. More Pictures…