justdrew

I often wonder, “Don’t the creationists ever stand up, look around and recognize how much what they’re saying [in defense of creationism] is a mirror image of what flat-earthers and geo-centrists said just four or five centuries ago?”

It borders on insanity to look past the overwhelming evidence of evolution, yet maintain it does not exist simply because your religious texts say otherwise.

Apparently, these buffoons are no more students of history than they are of science (and reality).

I guess it’s okay if a few of us wish to believe that the moon is made of cheese, the sun rotates around a flat earth, and some god made it all in 6 days a mere 6,000 years ago. But teaching innocent children this nonsense serves only to retard the human race and to stifle their innate curiosity and creativity. Why bother searching for facts when those facts contradict our nice little illusion?

Fortunately, there are voices that hold a light up to the forces of willful ignorance. One day we can move on to solving the real problems we face- and stop getting in our own way by propping up these childish fairy tales as literal facts.

While this priceless quote values the immediate need of jobs, I agree the same is true of long-term human progress:

Baton Rouge high school student Zach Kopplin said up-to-date biology texts are critical to training Louisiana students to compete in a global economy. While there are plenty of jobs for biologists, “There are zero creationist jobs. Zero,” Kopplin said.

Read the full article.

Sometimes I really, really love the interwebs…

Go to full screen and enjoy!!

-Drew

Dresden Edition Complete Works of Robert Green Ingersoll Volume 07

Recently I posted a snarky comment on a friend’s Facebook post that highlighted a recent Onion article that calls into relief how a certain conservative moron has thousands of equally moronic conservatives under his sway.


The headline is a classic:

Nation Once Again Comes Under Sway Of Pink-Faced Half-Wit

In case you don’t care to read the article, Glen Beck is the asshole moronhalf-wit in question.

I chimed in with this comment,

Drew What is it these days with conservatives and stupid people? At least Bill Buckley Jr had a brain… why do these morons now choose to follow other morons? So bizarre.

which was followed up by Jon, an apparently incensed conservative who took offense at my characterization of conservatives as moronic… which isn’t what I meant to say.

Jon If ya’ll think conservatives = morons I’m not sure this disconnect you feel is their fault…

Okay, deep breath. Obviously painted with too broad a brush there, Drew. So I replied with

Drew Okay, not all conservatives are morons; but Beck is, Palin is, Rush is… and every dumbass who swallows what these clods serve up is- at the risk of sounding redundant- a moron.

To which Jon says

Jon You’re proving my point. Doesn’t screaming `you’re an idiot’ at someone you disagree with (without, of course, actually addressing anything specific) show more about your own lack of understanding than anything else? And by the way, Buckley and Rush were friends, I was a big admirer of his. Was it the PBS show and his aristocratic accent that made him more palatable?

Really? What does he expect, citations? This is a Facebook comment thread, not a formal debate. Also, I was not screaming anything.

In any case, a mutual friend’s FB wall is no place for what was shaping up to be a good ol’ political argument. Still trying to keep it light, I clarified my position and ignored the fallacy implied that just because Buckley was friends with Rush (something of which I was unaware) that makes Rush smart by association. Very smart people are bound to have friends with room-temperature intellects. The law of averages demands it.

Drew I’m not saying they’re morons because they disagree with me. They are morons because of their reckless and childish adherence to logical fallacies and hate-filled speech.
I referenced Buckley as a counter-example. He was smart- not because of his accent -I’ve read many of his books and articles and in my head he has a very different accent

Of course, our intrepid conservative is having none of that

Jon Reckless and childish adherence to logical fallacies = faith? Hate filled speech = the state has to shrink?

Really? not sure I said anything about faith (though I will) nor the size of the state (which I feel is a red herring- conservatives are generally quite happy to increase the size of the state when it can enforce their agenda- remember faith-based initiatives and the Patriot Act?)

Still, neither of those are things I even remotely referred to, so I posted this rejoinder… plus an apology to the friend whose wall is now filling with these comments

Drew Wow, I didn’t think it was possible to present a strawman in such a short post. Well done, sir.
Jon, you’ve inspired me. Let’s take this to my blog- FB comment thread is not the best forum for a political debate. Sorry, Sian

Hence this blogpost where the debate can continue, should Jon care to.

He has the last word on the thread with

Jon Strawman? As you didn’t give me much I was guessing. And I’m not interested in debating, just trying to understand. You’re a liberal (right?), and that’s fine, I’m just fascinated by the dismissiveness. Political opponents aren’t just misguided, they’re morons, hated filled, etc.
And Sian, I’m sorry too if this has gone too far.

For the record, a Strawman is when you characterize an opponent’s position in such a way that you can easily tear it down.

The example here is Jon assuming that my (liberal) argument equates the concept of faith with logical fallacy. Many people of faith live their lives based on a house of logical fallacy cards, however I never said or even intimated that faith was even part of the equation.

So, I have invited Jon to come read this post and comment in a more robust forum where he can refute my proposition, which follows:

Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh areis a stupid and/or disingenuous peopleperson who havehas managed to sway thousands of credulous and stupid people into believing practically everything they sayhe says.

Since I am affirming, I accept the burden of proof and will provide it, should Jon accept this friendly debate.

Yeah, it's for real...

Now you know what to get that someone in your life who has absolutely everything… everything BUT a super-sharp pencil. (pencil not included)

Great movie, if you haven't seen it, it's wonderful. Old skule Austin at its finest.

Anyway, news to come of a new travelblog my lovely wife Jeanette and I are putting together. Don’t believe she’s lovely? just look at her! she’s gorgeous- [pic to follow]

We both love to travel- though lately she’s been doing all the fun travel. Over the past few years I was doing all the business travel. Spending time on both coasts and even the Caribbean (it’s not nearly as much fun to work there as you’d imagine).

Hoping to put together an entertaining and informative podcast that will likely alternate between audio and video segments.

Still need to figure out how to scale an image to post here… last attempt pushed this gawd-awful, pore focused snap of my big head on the main page. Nobody should have to face that.


Also need to get used to the quirky UI of this Android app.

Well, I haven’t blogged about this whole mess until now but the final straw has got me steamed.
Last Spring I bought what I thought was a pretty slick (and pretty) HP Pavillion entertainment PC.
It’s a good-looking machine but came with Vista installed. I started having problems with it almost right away.

My first thought was to blame Vista. I’ve been less than impressed with it as an OS and of course, hearing all the problems others have had made me think that Vista really might be worse than I had thought. Honestly, I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I really felt people were “over-complaining”… that sentiment soon changed to feeling that the worst of the stories I had heard about Vista were in fact too kind.

Basically, my machine would hang and crash unexpectedly (I had no funky devices connected or unproven, experimental extensions) several times each day. Worst of all, the biggest problem cropped up when I was sharing my desktop in WebEx meetings with a big client. Anytime I resized a window while hosting a meeting, the thing would hang. Of course, I would only remember this key event after inadvertently grabbing a corner and trying to move a window out of the way… d’oh!

Anyway, once I had finally had enough, I figured I’d rid myself of Vista altogether. This was back in June but I was able to land an advance copy of Windows 7, so I loaded that up and was prepared to be rid of my Vista woes forever.

Win7 didn’t impress me (still doesn’t). And the problems didn’t go away… though they slowed enough to delay even further troubleshooting that finally uncovered some bad sectors on my hard drive.

Frustrating, but hey- these things happen. I’m not ready at this point to damn HP for a simple hardware fault. Happens to the best of ‘em. Since I’m still under warranty, I figure I’d better get this replaced soon.

I’ve been backing up and recovering enough in the previous weeks (I reinstalled Vista three times and Win7 once… this was getting to be second nature) so the thought of starting over yet again with a clean HD didn’t phase me.

Now, to contact HP customer service you can whip out the credit card and call their tolled nickel-and-dime line to get them to address your problem with their product. That didn’t appeal to me on principle, so I pulled up the free option to chat to a rep via instant message instead.

The process was fine; a little stilted and it was obvious I was getting many responses that were an auto-bot, not a person… or at least a person with some canned responses. I can’t blame them- that sort of thing will make sure you deliver consistent customer service and save your people some time and keystrokes… but it does feel less than personal.

We soon established that I do indeed need a replacement HD and that I do indeed qualify for a warranty repair. But I discovered that when I installed Win7, the installer wiped out my old Vista restore partition.

That sucked because when I installed it, I thought it would have left the restore partition (with the HP Vista recovery software on it) that came with my laptop in tact.

Turns out the Win7 installer wiped everything. So now, I’ve got a fresh (working, hopefully) hard drive on its way from HP but get this: they won’t send me one with the same recovery software on it that was on the original HD in the laptop. They’re sending one along tabula rasa.

HP customer service generosity knows no bounds- they will give me the software I so foolishly failed to back up from the HD they originally sold me … but it’ll cost me twenty bucks. Seriously?

I mentioned to the rep in my chat session how stupid I thought this was and could they please just send me that friggin disc without dinging me a lousy twenty bucks? I guess my persistence was enough since my chat rep agreed to send me the disc gratis.

Not really a big “win” in a contest “against” a major corporation in the interest of getting good customer service (I mean, really! – they are finally just agreeing to replace their defective hard drive with another one that looks exactly like the one I originally shelled out at least part of my 1400 bucks for…)

But the replacement hard drive arrives… but no recovery disc. “No biggie”, I reason. “Surely the disc was sent under separate cover…”

Weeks later. No disc. Wait- didn’t the chat dude say “don’t worry”? It’s a phrase they use a lot. I can’t tell whether it’s because they’re shelling out canned expressions or English is not their first language and they believe American English speakers pepper the phrase “don’t worry” every few lines of every conversation. Either way, it’s equal parts annoying and unnerving.

Well, in any case, I’m venting here not only because I’m pissed off at getting less than stellar treatment, but because I promised (okay, it might have sounded like a threat) the chatty-Cathy I pinged today that I would post this if I didn’t get some satisfaction.

Turns out, this ‘Cathy’ whose name in the chat session was Sherry, wasn’t too interested in my pleas for a little (tiny, really) concession. She did say she would log the issue- woooo, that should satisfy me.

It is the height of insanity in my opinion, that HP & other hardware manufacturers will lay out hundreds of dollars in rebates to try and attract new customers, but they cannot make an exception to a 20 dollar charge for a disc with data on it that comes free with the original hardware.

Would love to write up something positive here, but HP has failed to deliver on a simple little point of decent customer service. Hard to believe they’re willing to give up customer satisfaction by clinging white-knuckled to their 20 dollar bill. Morons.

I, for one will not purchase HP products again because I want to be treated like a valued customer- not an opportunity to keep paying out 10 bucks here, 20 bucks there, ad infinitum.

My next laptop will be from Apple… or anyone but Hewlett-Packard.

Well, it’s true that being accountable to someone makes you more likely to stick to your plan. Writing a blog about progress is one such accountable artifact, but truth is I’ve been only half-assing it for the past few weeks.

I’ll consider the next kick back into gear to be something of a restart.

I have been eating fine, but more along the lines of my previous diet (which is honestly not all that bad- it’s totally sustainable).

Where I feel I have really fallen down, however, is in getting to the gym. Lately it seems work and looking for work have occupied my time and I haven’t made as much an effort as I should to get to the gym for a real workout.

In the meantime, I’ve compromised by doing pullups and sittups in mad sprints which make me feel better, but it’s not as intense as my usual workout.

Oh yeah, did I mention it’s been raining here like crazy for the past couple weeks? Yeah, lame excuse. Still, it has left me feeling more like hunkering down and staying inside than getting out to the gym.

Will have to work on that.

More soon. Fewer excuses. Promise.

Adonis Index 1.370

Still can’t seem to get to daily updates on this. For any of you following my progress, I guess you’ll have to be satisfied with the occasional update from me on this topic.

Burning through some big issues on my work projects, but I have maintained my diet program. I keep missing days at the gym, which I try to make up for with circuits at home.

Once I get my garage back (our daughters’ stuff is filling it to the rafters at the moment) I’ll have access to my exercise equipment again.

The gym I joined is just down the street, but it’s small and quite crowded. At peak times, I don’t bother to go because I can’t keep the intensity up while I wait for equipment- very frustrating.

Anyway, tomorrow I go on the road. This will be a real test of the diet plan. In fact, it will be completely impossible to adhere to the plan for food & schedule. However, I plan to keep caloric intake relatively steady and under 2,000/day… though I think I may have more than one week’s “splurge” meal.

Going to the DC area and there are some amazing restaurants there including one of my favorite Indian places. Actually, I should be okay there because the Chicken Vindaloo is so hot, I can only eat a little at a time even if I wanted to gorge myself. Which I would do, if only I had iron linings along my G.I. tract.

Well, off to get some sleep before my early am flight.