Clint Hill

I don’t want to get political. But – it is the season. I also don’t want to “preach” about my candidate. I’ll let you do your own decision making since you are your own “decider”. Allow me a moment though, to make some observations. You can piss on them all  you want. We live in the U.S of A.

There seems to me to be a great deal of closed mindedness going on and given all of the shit happening in the States it surprises me. A lot. How are we going to fix things with all of the stubborness? Good ideas are being drowned in all of the political boil. I mean we are near the brink of losing our economy. That’s serious. And I keep going back to the evidence about how it happened. No one can argue who has had power in our government over the last decade. Republicans. Don’t give me the bullshit about the Democrats having the last two years. How many executive level vetos have there been since that time? Oh. Well there you go. And why is it the President only brought out his almighty pen in 2006? Is it because he didn’t like the majority leadership change? It’s clear to me who has had the power to govern our great country and therefore who should “hold the bag” when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

Anyways. Sorry. I got rolling there and … it proves the point I’m trying to make.

Here we are. I’m not trying to stew over past indiscretions. It does no one any good. I want to look at the future and the decisions we have in front of us. That will do some good.

When we look at the decisions ahead of us I think it would do this country a tremendous amount of good to finally get to know one another. I’m talking about the Repubs and Dems finally “crossing the aisle” and getting shit done. The problem thus far with doing this I think is a blatant distrust and hatred of the other side. Each of us who claims affiliation with one of the parties, believes those who are in the other party are just plain wrong/stupid/corrupt/negligent/gay/drunk and whatever else comes to mind.

So how do you change the world? Hell if I know. But the other day I watched a 20 minute presentation on the differences of liberals and conservatives. Eye opening. Thoughtful. Made me realize I had some problems with myself. The moral matrix discussed in the presentation made me consider how I might have swallowed the red pill and avoided being truly open. I thought to myself – have I been stubborn? Yes.

Vote the way you want. I’m asking you to consider the issues. Lipstick? OK, whatever. But ideas above all. Issues based voting is important. Principled base voting is important too, but I just would rather see both sides lay down their principles for a moment and fix shit. Understand what that means. I’m not asking you to forget your principles. I’m asking you to bend for the moment. The American way of life is on the brink and I don’t think guns, religion or abortion are the reason. I think the biggest reason is the lack of good ideas.

I’m willing to allow the other party in to my hemisphere – as long as they bring good ideas.

I’ve been working on Siffer quite a bit lately and one of the things I’ve tried to accomplish is “multi-platform” development. Sounds ridiculous. It is actually. But I feel it’s important to make sure the Siffer ends up being something that can be used by both the *nix world and the non-*nix world. 

So far the other frameworks I’ve been using (Merb, DataMapper) are all non-issue. I started with MySQL and quickly ran into headaches. On the Windows platform I was developing under Cygwin. I initially installed MySQL on Windows and not through Cygwin. That works fine – but then I needed the source so I could install do_mysql (that’s a Ruby gem MySQL adapter for DataMapper). I fought that tooth and nail. I gave it a lot of time. A lot. I just couldn’t get the do_mysql gem to use the source for MySQL to build the gem. FAIL. (I know someone somewhere out there has done this and it’s so easy a 4th grader could do it – but that’s not my point here)

Then I took a step back.

Why am I fighting this? Sure – I might fix it and get it working but what about the poor IT person who might one day try to implement Siffer on Windows with Cygwin? Do I want them to suffer this too?

No.

While I was “stepped back” I asked myself: Why do I want MySQL? 

Well because it was kind of habit. Rails defaults to it, but I’m not using Rails here. And of course it’s free, but it’s not the only free one on the market. It’s perfect for projects that need a great RDMS without all of the regular deployment hassles and for sure I want to make Siffer an easy deployment. But what about other SQL database servers? What about SQLite? I’ve tried it once before. It didn’t give me the warm and fuzzies then. I found it interesting but not entirely a problem solver at the time. 

Well now my mind is made up. SQLite is the database server I’m implementing in Siffer. Not only is it easy to develop with but now the whole database server is embedded so to speak. I won’t need to say “install MySQL” in my dependencies notes. I’m still getting comfy with it and learning about it but so far so good.

The point: sometimes I need to step back and ask myself really silly questions. I find myself banging my head against problems sometimes that I shouldn’t. I should stop. No such thing as a stupid question.

With all that has gone on these last few weeks, I decided to skip the Campbell Boats regatta in Havasu. Man does that hurt to say (even to type). Grandma’s passing was a tough event, understandably, and I just don’t want to push my little family to the brink of sanity with all of this traveling. We just got back from Missouri on Tuesday night. To get back up and drive to Havasu Friday would be tough. 

The girls are all sick as well. I had a cold the whole trip to Missouri and I was feeling lousy. I want the girls to rest this weekend. 

We’ll get to go to another regatta.