Internet

Of course, according to the natural law of maximum irony, my very next Facebook post resulted in this screenshot.

In my withering defense, I rate anything I read based on the relative historical trustworthiness of the writer. Ebert, Gibson, my wife, rate very high and are near-unimpeachable sources. William Gibson rated a cursory check of Google News to see that, yeah, there are other headlines from other sources telling the same story.

That said, don't do the crime if you can't do the good natured time :-)

Previously

Since Facebook sucks at telling time, the meat all happened within ten minutes of the tweet I read

I've been running IMAP services on my mailserver for many years, previously using Courier. I always had a pretty basic but solid-running system. Postfix, doing a Spam Assassin check, then delivers to the user folders, and Courier running IMAP.

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."" -- Jerry Falwell, with Pat Robertson, discussing why God sent religious zealots to attack American cities on 9/11/2001.

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This post is not an attempt at suppression of anyone's speech or opinions. It is an expression on my part of how those words make me feel. People's feelings, bigoted and horrifying though they may be to me, are their own. Americans have the right, and duty, to non-violently advocate their position as strenuously as possible. History and the sands of time will be the judges of which opinion was right or wrong. If you disagree with me and want to comment, feel free to speak your mind. I will certainly speak mine right back. This is ethical advocacy and will not prevent me from having a beer and a dog, and then another beer, with anyone, ever. And we shall breezily talk of other things. Weather. Inferior corn-height (I am a born Hoosier, remember that. I instinctively know what corn is supposed to look like, and when). Baseball. Kittens.
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I've made it clear through the history of my posts that I'm a vocal advocate for equal protection under the law for all Americans. Many of my inlaws do not share this belief, and out of an abundance of respect for my wife, and the fact that their opinions are their own, I've not said anything about the bigotry I see on a pretty regular basis. I have simply kept my mouth shut and turned the other cheek when I have seen attacks against gays, women and those who they perceive to worship religions different to their own.

However, the last week of batty Chick-Fil-A nonsense has brought things to a head. A string of updates, beginning with "It's unconstitutional for people to protest Chick-Fil-A" and culminating today in "[National Same Sex Kiss Day] is the start of Christian Persecution".

"I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,'" -- Dan Cathy, President and COO, Chick-Fil-A

There is no requirement for people to support a company which actively works to discriminate against those very same people. Just black people and Jews "boycott" Resistance Records, so shall Gay people (and the people who love them) boycott Chick-Fil-A. Resistance Records' first amendment rights are not being infringed upon simply because the object of their hatred doesn't give them money, and neither are the rights of Chick-Fil-A being infringed upon.

This "persecution" angle has finally prompted me to respond.

In the lifetime of our nation, we've seen:

• Southern Christians abandoned the Republican party for 100 years after Lincoln took away their biblically mandated right to own other human beings. It wasn't until the 1960s until the Nixon/Goldwater Southern Strategy got them back on the team. (This makes me especially upset, because I often see people say both "Republicans, the party of Lincoln" and "Democrats, who opposed equal rights for blacks in the '50s/'60s", because it's not about the party when the demographic shifts 180 degrees, twice. Southern Evangelicals fled the Republican party because of Lincoln, and only returned to the party when racial intolerance became a plank of the Republican platform)
• Christians protesting the right for women to vote.
• Christians protesting the right for black people to vote.
• Christians protesting the right for black people to eat in the same restaurants, drink from the same fountains, and attending the same schools as whites
• Christians protesting and making laws against interracial marriage.
• Christians abandoned the Republican party for 100 years after the Republican Lincoln took away their biblically mandated right to own other human beings. Until the Nixon/Goldwater Southern Strategy got them back on the team. (This makes me especially upset, when people say both "Republicans, the party of Lincoln" and "Democrats, who opposed equal rights for blacks in the '50s/'60s", because it's not about the party. Southern Evangelicals fled the Republican party because of Lincoln, and only returned? to the party when racial intolerance became a plank of their platform)

Since it's been said that boycotts are first amendment violations of the rights of Chick-Fil-A's free speech, and that we are seeing the start of Christian oppression in this country. Below is what "Christian Oppression" would actually look like when presented as mirror images of acts of oppression which have actually happened to other groups :

• The 85% Atheist majority passes laws requiring science be taught to children in Sunday School
• The 85% Atheist majority taxes churches to the point that it's not financially feasible for them to hold services (Taxes churches out of existence)
• An Atheist-values-based chicken company gives millions of dollars to hate groups advocating the extermination, expulsion and imprisonment of Christians (Genocide! Ethnic Cleansing!)
• A pair of lesbians in Wyoming viciously beats a straight Christian man and leaves him to die tied to a fence post for the crime of speaking to them in a bar
• A lesbian Atheist group rises to national prominence by protesting that same Christian man's funeral carrying disgusting placards stating "God Hates Christians"
• That same extremist group grows over the next twenty years, protesting the funerals of American soldiers because those soldiers fight for a country which permits Christians to practice their faith
• A Christian is legally fired from their job simply because of the fact that they believe in Christ. The federal government does not recognize Christians as a protected group, safe from firing based on their religious beliefs.
• The federal government refuses to recognize Christian marriage, and denies federal tax and death benefits to Christians who were lucky enough to marry in the tiny minority of states which have chosen to permit them to.
• Athiest hate groups picketing and intimidating Christian Scientists and Jehovas Witnesses and shooting those who legally refuse to take their family to hospitals for medical care and blood transfusions
• The 85% Atheist majority looting and burning entire countries to find Christian believers and forcibly convert them away from Christ. If the Christians don't renounce religion, they are murdered after watching their entire family die
• A written test is required for segments of Americans to be allowed to vote. That test includes questions specifically pertaining to things of which Christians as a group have no knowledge. Additionally, a fee is imposed at the voting booth, which is then selectively enforced, but which Christians all must pay in order to cast their vote. If they pass the test, and pay the fee, the Christian vote then only counts as 3/5 the vote of an Atheist

Honestly, to equate yourselves to actual oppressed people is childish, disgusting, and shows a lack of knowledge of history and the struggles of oppressed peoples. The equal rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans is just the latest in a very, very long list of basic human rights and equality measures which have been violently opposed by Christians in the name of their bible over the last 400 years in the New World. For Christians to self-identify as some second-class put-upon minority class is frankly sickening.

I've made some much needed updates to my Music Collection Browser, and thought I'd mention it. It now does a case-insensitive sort of artist names, while ignoring leading special characters ( "'",":","(", etc), as well as throwing away leading "The"s for sorting. This was a big deal to me since it annoyed me every time I had to scroll through 50 The Whoevers to get the band I want.

I also fixed the compilations piece, so linked that back in. I just settled for big ugly links for soundtracks/compilations and individual artists at the top of whichever page is loaded. It sucks but there's really not much of a better way to go.

Now I just have to re-tag a few albums and artists to make things consistent, since some artists have both a "The" and "non-The" variant in the list, but at least now they're right next to each other.

Also, I want to vent about Gracenote. Fucking Gracenote. That is all. ... For many artists who have lots of featured guests, it appends all the "feat. whoever"s to the Artist tag. That is wrong. It should be appended, preferably in parentheses, to the song title itself. It's the only way to maintain a reasonable collection.

Of course, iTunes is stupid enough to create different artist folders based on this idiocy, so now I have 15 Bootsy Collins directories on the FS.

The goal list for this project, after 24 hours, now stands at:

Here's where I justify not crossing the rest of the items off my list:

(1) I've barely bothered to look at iTunes XML files because every time I open one and try to make sense of it, I end up weeping to myself. I think what it's going to end up being is me taking my iTunes DB and munging into either sqlite3 (probably) or MySQL (unlikely), in a stripped down version of the same form that Amarok built its sqlite3 databases. I can't help but think that all the searches I run against the DB would be slow as hell if I was searching an unindexed XML file every time I do anything. So now I just need to write a perl script to parse the iTunes XML database file and puke out SQLite3 in a schema my site already handles.

(2) I don't personally care much about searching. The point of this tool is so that when I'm in a record store or otherwise away from my computers I have quick access to an accurate copy of my CD collection, so I don't purchase dupe CDs or whatever. Or if someone asks me if I've heard of some band I can pull it up. Also, helpful links to YouTube, Wikipedia and Amazon searches for each artist. That's pretty useful really. Searching is irrelevant. The only place it would really be handy is if I send the page to someone else and they want to quickly find an artist or song, to which I say "Suck it up and scroll".

(3) I was thinking of porting it to PHP just because I've written like, 6 lines of PHP and figured I should know it. This thing could stay Perl until Unix time rolls over and I wouldn't care at all.

Since upgrading to 7.6Mb/sec DSL, I've had an occasional issue where the Tubes get all slow-like. The modem will say it's connected at full speed, and that things are, highly technically, "GO!". However my latency is horrible. Even to my first upstream router I end up getting like 50+ms ping replies. Pinging my site or 4.2.2.2 or other "Things that are fast on the Internet" ends up well over 100ms.