Everyone should watch this video about what would happen if Drugs were Legalized, regardless of what side of the issue you're on. It's an hour long, and fortunately Google lets you download it for later viewing. It is 231mb, though, so only high-speed connections need apply.
The only reason anyone does anything is because there is something init for them. You may not know that or be willing to accept it, butit's universally true. Even Mother Teresa, who probably helped peopleuntil the day she died, got something out of helping all those people.What she got out of it is what kept her motivated to keep doing it.
Aparticular action may have consequences that far outweigh what you getout of it. For example, smoking. You may get a fantastic feeling out ofit (or avert bad feelings, e.g. cravings), but it has terribleconsequences (e.g. cancer). Another example is attempting to relate to my mother. While mymother raised me, she did her best to make sure I went to a good schooland get off to college with a running start. However, at some point hergrasp on reality became questionable. She can be downright hateful,especially when she drinks. Unfortunately, that has happened a lotsince her mom passed away. She is truly a toxic person to be around. Ihave nothing to do with her anymore.
And then there's my father, which is the real subject of this post. My parents have been divorced since I was two orthree, so not having a relationship with my mother has zero effect on my father. It has been nearly 15 years since I've talked with my father.The only contact I've had was an email recently. He may have tried tocontact me before that (likely via email), but I have forgotten those times. I certainly wasn't ready to talk to him then. Not sure I'm ready to talk to him now either.
My father was very different from my mother. He was generally more even keeled than my mother, but probably the biggest thing is that he wasn't there all that much. Even when I lived or stayed with him, he wasn't "there." Oh sure, he may have physically been present, but I have a hard time remembering any meaningful interaction I had with him.
There are some things he did that for a very long time, I was angry at him for doing. I am not going to go into details here. That anger has kept me from wanting to have any contact with him for a very long time. Between the passage of time and a change of perspective on my part, I simply can't be angry anymore. I'm done.
Even getting past the anger, I come back to the question: What's in it for me? Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to this question. However, ifand when I am ready to move forward on this, I need to have ananswer to that question. Right now, I simply don't know.One of the things I really like about Vox is that it seems to encourage serendipitous reading of other people's blogs on Vox. You can see in real time what other Voxers are doing. For example, I posted a backdated article originally from my other blog and within a few moments, I had a piece of feedback on it! The same thing happened with another posting I did. I then went and read their blogs and added them as neighbors. Sweet!
I am glad I signed up for Vox and decided to use it for a more personal blog. Seems like a really good place to do that.
I've now added a perhaps voyeristic feature to my other blog: a statusmessage from twitter. I'd add it here as well except there isn't a way for me to add a block of Javascript to my Vox site. I've left some feedback for the people at SixApart about this. Maybe they'll add the ability to add a Twitter block at some point.
Twitter isan SMS-based service where you can update a group of people with asingle text message or a short message from the web. The message isthen sent to your buddies over SMS and is available to be queried overthe web. People can "subscribe" your presence and you can "subscribe"to other people's presence. You receive the updates over SMS.
I'm sure the carriers absolutely love Twitter because it drives theuse of text messaging. Too bad more people I know don't use it.
While they haven't released an API for it yet, they have madeavailable two kinds of badges: one using Flash, the other usingJavascript. The Javascript-based method was released this past week andis what I am using on phoneboy.com right now. The badge gives you mylatest status from Twitter so you can get an idea of what I'm doing right now. And all I have to do to update it is send a brief text message.
I'm sure like most of you, I get a lot of spam. Hundreds of messages every single day. I have multiple places to look through as well. Most of my personal email gets forwarded to Gmail, though a "cache" of this email exists at my ISP as well. Problem is: that cache has a spam folder that has grown quite large.
I don't trust spam filters. Nothing's perfect. Even though Gmail's spam filters have a fairly low false-positive rate, I've had it miss enough emails that were important. So I periodically go through the Spam folder to make sure it didn't catch anything. The spam filters at my ISP are much worse: pretty much everything is identified as spam. And to make things even worse: my ISP doesn't forward all my email to Gmail (either that or Gmail rejects it as spam). So I have mail in more than one place!
I think I'm going to shut down the email cache at my ISP and just forward everything to Gmail. It's too much work to sift through this cache.
Someone asked my wife the other day "when did your daughter start speaking in complete sentences?" Her response? "Who knows, nobody in our family shuts up long enough to notice."
I have been slowly but surely approving the old blog postings I sucked into Drupal from my old blog. It created a heck of a lot of articles. What I have to do is resolve the dependencies (i.e. links to other places). That takes a little bit of time--time I'd rather be spending doing other things, but hey, I was the one who blew up my old blog. :)
Meanwhile, I should be asleep instead of typing at my blog…
As I am manually going through the old postings I had in my other blog, some of the postings there may be more appropriate here as they are more personal in nature. Since Vox allows posts to be backdated, I can even maintain more or less the same time as well. You may see some "old" posts coming across your RSS reader. Nothing to be alarmed of, just me correcting mistakes. :)
I could come up with a story about how I wanted a fresh start and felt "deleting and starting over was a good idea," but basically, I did something really stupid. Shame on me for doing something incredibly stupid. Shame on me for not having backups. Basically my blog postings on www.phoneboy.com are gone--two and a half years worth of blogging into the bit bucket.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Since I use a private version of Reblog as an RSS reader, my posts from June 2006 onward are backed up. This gives me some sense of recent history. I also have postings from when I ran my website on TWiki. However, those postings are likely of dubius value these days.
In any case, since I have to do a fair amount of "starting over" anyway, I have decided to try a different CMS system. NucleusCMS was okay, but I really wanted to give Drupal a shot. I guess now's my chance.
Until I get it installed, etc, I have redirected www.phoneboy.com to my newly established personal blog on Vox.
