“The tactic points up a stark difference between the presidential campaigns: while Senator John Kerry is using his rallies and forums to try to reach undecided voters and to close the deal with standoffish Democrats, Mr. Bush is packing his audiences with supporters who must identify themselves as such in questionnaires and whipping them into brigades ready to blitz crucial districts to get every last voter to the polls.”
Remember though, in this election where image will create the winner, it’s much better to have hooked, loyal supporters in your crowd rather than thinking people. Maybe there’s still hope.
My Mom, being the letter-writing activist she is, responded to 10 TV’s request for input from undecided Ohio residents. Her aptly put response:
I honestly don’t know which candidate I will vote for or more realistically, against.
Typically, I vote republican. This election, I’m voting on the issues and only the issues.
Issue 1: My family pays more than $800 in insurance costs per month and we have a plan with less coverage so we also pay a much higher deductable and copay. Health coverage for my mom, who is retired, keeps going up and she can’t afford it. This is a top concern of mine. This makes me lean towards Kerry. My concern is that he may talk a good talk but can he, individually, make this plan pass in the house and senate and where will the money come from? Bush, meanwhile, is saying nothing with any substance, regarding healthcare. Kerry, talk - possible no action, Bush, no talk - no action. VOTE - KERRY.
Issue 2: A very close family member, as well as a very good friend of the family, is gay. I know, through very deep discussions with these individuals, that being gay is, for most people, not a choice. It is a constant struggle to live in harmony with how their body and mind makes them feel. I see the heartache and devastation that a gay person lives through, if they don’t commit suicide as a teen. It infuriates me that Bush wants to put in our constitution, a document guaranteeing the rights of individuals, an ammendment that will trample the rights of a specific group.
The sanctity of marriage; what a load of crap. I know so many heterosexual families that are in bitter divorce proceedings, who conveniently forget the well-being of their children and instead use them as pawns in a vengeful tit-for-tat tug-of-war. The divorce rate is pathetic.
Until every heterosexual couple, including myself and my husband, treats the institution of marriage like the holy sacrament that Bush holds it up to be, then we have no right to say that another group does not deserve the same right to the happiness or devastation that marriage can wrought.
My simple solution: Grant individuals, gay or straight, the right to a federally recognized civil union. Place marriage, with no federal recognition as a civil union, in the realm of the religious institutions. Marriage is between a couple and God. Separation of church and state, blah, blah, blah… VOTE - KERRY (more accurately, AGAINST BUSH.)
ISSUE 3: Iraq. What a quagmire! And how convenient it is that most everybody is forgetting how Saddam was not forthright with the U.N. for YEARS! The U.N. is a papertooth tiger. Why does the responsibility of this war and its consequences lay with Bush? What about everyone else, including congress? Also, shame on the fellow Arab nations that have allowed one of their own to come to such low levels of barbarism. Where is the Islamic fortitude and brotherhood in protecting it’s fellowship?
Can Kerry change this? No. Can he pull out of Iraq? No. Can he mend fences with the international community? Maybe. Can we risk the changing of the guard in the middle of a war? If it is just getting rid of the obnoxious Rumsfeld, then yes, otherwise not so sure. Kerry seems wishy-washy but the Saudi-Bush connection bothers the hell out of me, along with the arrogance and jock mentality of Bush. Damage is done, now what? VOTE - VERY UNDECIDED (sidenote: Who the hell cares about Vietnam records now. We have more important issues to address!)
Issue 4: Tax cut. Stupid spin not worth the paper the check was written on. VOTE - KERRY (more accurately against BUSH.)
Issue 5: Stem cell. I do not believe in harvesting a soul to save others. Placenta yes, babies no. Man was not meant to live forever. VOTE - BUSH.
Issue 6: Courage, strength and balls. Kerry does not inspire; he bores me to tears. He seems like a company man,you know, one of those IBM guys that used to be in all those commericals. Bush may be so wrong, but then again, within a historical perspective, if Iraq can become a democratic republic then Bush will be the hero, accident or not, oil or not. VOTE - BUSH.
Issue 7: Family man. I am very pro-family. I love his mom, dad and wife. VOTE - BUSH.
Issue 8: Outsourcing to foreign countries as well as benefits to illegal immigrants. Very against. I have
too many friends that cannot find work because the companies do not care about Americans or more specifically the community in which they are incorporated. I say to them, “If you want to reap
the benefits of Indian labor, then live in India!” Upper management has gotten so greedy that no profit is ever enough. There must always be more. Bush has allowed this outsourcing to happen and as ironic as the Heinz connection may be, VOTE - KERRY.
As you can see, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive…”, what in the heck will I do come November.
I’m so crazy in love with this song, that I decided to use the Blogger button on the Google toolbar for the first time. And if you’re just as hot about it, well, you’ve got to grab the official wallpaper. 
Update: 10/13/2004.
Listen to this track.
Update: 11/08/2004.
Support this track with your vote — in fact, you can even stream it from BroadJam in low-fi mp3, high-fi mp3, and realaudio formats!
I was working with a rather large and complicated Java-based program when, as with every other Java app running on Windows XP SP2, it was giving me absolute hell. Rather than try to figure out what’s wrong with my *brand*new* laptop that already sucks it, I believed it’d be easier to simply decompile the one class from the jar that was giving me all the problems … patch it up … and go on my merry way. Granted all compiled bytecode can be reversed into it’s original source, it’s the translation that occurs before hitting the linker that gave me problems last night. Lord, jad has done a fabulous job deciphering everything I’ve thrown at it and to the point where it can be modified, recompiled, etc without any real drama.
Anywho, I started looking around at obfuscation programs, code beautifiers, “newer” decompilers (that still suck), and the likes — the last time I did that I found a crazy abundance of people peddling HTML “encryptors” and JavaScript “packers.” While it may look confusing at first glance, anyone that’s ever written code in Java, and possibly even those who’ve just played around with JavaScript, could very easily figure out what’s going on. If we’re unescaping a quoted string, that means we’re lookin’ at hex. If that’s being passed into a function called eval *cough*evaluate*cough*, that means it’s going to evaluate the unescaped (aka “decrypted”) string. I swear, all of the packages, suites, toolkits, and whatnot are nothing but a load of marketing bullshit; even Microsoft still promotes their JScript.Encode lil’ scheme…which never was secure in its’ logic.
Right, so what’d I waste last night doing? Writing a free encoder/obfuscator for HTML and JavaScript, since no one should have to pay for such a trivially written thing. Now, that’s not to go without saying that the current implementation doesn’t do a large deal of code mangling outside of the basic removal of wasted space (comments, spaces, tabs, etc ). Eventually, I’d like to get it to the point where it’s able to absolutely destroy JavaScript code, both on it’s own and when it appears inline with a document. It’s using a custom built engine and requires, trust me, plenty of steps to reverse it into useful, readable code. I’ve tried to go beyond the basic unescape/eval crap that one to many companies charge good money for … even though, at first glance, it may appear to be as easy as trapping the eval.
This isn’t meant to deter someone with the slightest bit of Java* knowledge from getting back the original code as long as time is put into it, but it’s built to give professionals and amateurs alike a free, easy, and (to a fairly high degree) secure solution to protecting their intellectual property. And for the those Javalites out there, I’m working on a beautifier as I write this!
I couldn’t just play one side of the field, could I? 
So tonight … mmm. I was getting on the elevator in the fabulous new Fenway dorms, and I dropped my Sidekick. That’s not too bad, it’s taken three foot plummets many-a-times. Tonight it was a bit different because I watched it slip through the crack, fall three and a-half full stories, and smash into concrete. This summer I was honestly under the impression that my life would cease to exist should I not have frequent and consistent access my Hiptop and the Internet. Good news though: after riding the elevator up and down three or four times, I was able to spot it IN ONE PIECE!
I’ll keep ya’ll up to date — wish me luck!
Update: 09/19/2004.
As you’ve probably noticed, I gave into the temptations of revenue via Google’s Adsense program; just glance to your right. I’m not sure what I think about having advertisements on my personal site yet, so feel free to send me your thoughts! On another Google related note, one of my long-lost friends was boasting about the number of results that appeared while searching for her name in quotes, so I decided to check out my results. Damn, am I ever a looser.
Although I’m thoroughly annoyed that this site isn’t the first result when querying “Austin Heap”, I’ll live. I mean seriously … if I can handle placing contextual marketing boxes that say “God and Homosexuality” on my site — which most certainly annoys me — then I’ll suffice.
On a random note, because I’m ridiculously bored and avoiding my work, that two of the classes I’m taking will be talking about, and studying blogs. Granted I don’t think Bentley is the best of schools by any stretch of the imagination, especially considering their history of pumping up reality through technology … have you gone on a tour lately? I’m impressed that the day come where blogs, and the people who write them, wield enough power of social and economic variables that college’s are now building them into their curriculum.
It happened much faster than I envisioned.
The past year has brought about many advances in our quest to understand the human brain, with science getting closer and closer to developing a digital gateway to it. Not only has science gotten closer to a biological explanation for the things I do, but it has also learned the ability to annotate what my life neglects — and I thought one really made a conscious choice.
Granted their is, and has been since early 2000, a large deal of evidence suggesting that homosexuality is not a “choice,” the most astounding information rose from the work of Simon LeVay. Through dissection of some forty brains from deceased males, he was able to find a physical difference — not to mention in almost every case — between a heterosexual and homosexual male. As the information pool on this subject continues to grow, I feel every more confident that things will some day change for the better. After all, discrimination is discrimination; no matter what form it takes place.
Simple logic would suggest that because I was raised in Ohio (read: bible belt) as a young gay male, that I would reject the abundance of conservative Republican ideals that surrounded me. I too thought that this played a large role in forming my opinions … guess it didn’t play as heavily as I thought. A recent New York Times article suggested that the difference between Reds and Blues can, again, be linked to traits in the brain. From Slashdot: Researchers from UCLA have seem to have found that liberals have, on average, a more active amygdala than conservatives. … According to the article, studies of stroke victims “have persuasively shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy.” So is this scientific “proof” that liberals tend to be more compassionate but also more cowardly?
I don’t like violent video games … hell, I don’t like video games for that matter (which the BBC reports as another brain trait). But I’ve never really been an aggressive, violent person, nor a completely happy-go-lucky person. I thoroughly believe the saying that if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention; after all, there are most certainly more than enough horrific (and pathetic!) things to be appalled with in our 21st century world. One of my favorite things to do is discuss things, have a fierce debate, and most importantly be passionate and correctly informed about the subjects which I love. As any social psychologist would tell you, human beings, as the social animals we are, inherently dislike being wrong. Myself included, I take great pains to ensure that I’ve got the facts, statistics, and resources to backup my opinions — it really angers me when people are wrong because they’re simply ignorant to the truth. The study, which was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, suggests that one’s ability to accurately recall information is drastically affected by mood. Essentially, being in a bad mood while first being exposed to information greatly enhances the accuracy at which one will be able to recall it at a later time. Not that I’m a piss ant, but as I said, I’m a stickler for accurate, factual information; doing my damnedest to make sure I’m right on key. Maybe that’s because I’m looking to change things.
Recently, Tim O’Reilly was interviewed on the roles that “Alpha Geeks” play in this world. If you’ll just trust that I definitely fall into the geek category, then this may explain why I incognizantly attempt to, “make things that aren’t available … available to everybody,” exactly what the (previously mentioned) open-source movements are founded upon. BoingBoing reader Mark Frauenfelder quoted O’Reilly: So often, signs of the future are all around us, but it isn’t until much later that most of the world realizes their significance. Meanwhile, the innovators who are busy inventing [and spreading] that future live in a world of their own. They see and act on premises that are not yet apparent to others. In the computer industry, these are the folks … that “roll their own” when existing products don’t give them what they need. Well, I categorically believe that (the countless) tools I’ve built served my needs much more effectively than any other product could have, since it was explicitly designed to fit.
I also believe, and have been told one too many times, that I live in a world disconnected from the mainstream. One of this site’s introduction pages sports the bumper sticker saying that, “the optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible words, the pessimist fears this is true.” I’m not afraid our world is intellectually stagnant to the point that there won’t be great changes and improvements during my lifetime. But I do believe the way I see our world is greatly different … perhaps that’ll be another entry for my blog.
Are you ready for the first case of Bentley irony this semester?
My first class, mind you this is at 9:55 AM, which is titled “Web Journalism,” didn’t take place — the professor is MIA. So instead of sitting in class, I’ll use this free time to (finally) write a new entry…My Brain: What Science Knows. Stay tuned!
Okay, so I’ve had some wine — or maybe an entire bottle of Chardoney … but I’m still amazed at the efficiency of The Sharper Image’s marketing team at countering the claims made in/during Hoover’s knock-off infomercial. Tonight I un-soberly witnessed the latest advertisement for the Ionic Breeze (followed by a paid advertisement for Pfizer’s Viagra where the women are, “very greatful,” and the men are, “living their lives again”) where they directly counter the claims made by Hoover, the first company with a product to hit the same market. If only John Kerry’s team would figure out the marketing game, this election could have been much easier … at least in respect to destroying George Dubway.
Oh, and school starts this upcoming Tuesday. Did someone say 21 fuckmesilly credit hours?!
