Not that I’ve read that many, because there are so many bad ones that it’s easy to not give them a chance, but MAN this was good.

Better than books 5, 6, and 7 of the actual Harry Potter canon.

The hook is that Voldemort is finally defeated when Harry Potter is 30, and everyone Harry loved is dead. He has nothing to live for, and manages to send his soul back in time to merge with his 11-year-old self. Bottom line: Book One starts with Harry having a complete knowledge of the future.

Of course, this taps into a fantasy I’ve long had, about “if I knew then what I know now.” I’ve often daydreamed about such a thing myself, either when life gets cruddy or just to make things better or more interesting…

(Of course, when my daughter was born, that put a stop to that kind of fantasy. I could never, even in dreams, go back in time to before she was conceived, as that would undo her existence. She’s so important to me that I can’t even entertain the notion, not even in a daydream, about her being erased; none of the amazing benefits of this sort of time travel come close to outweighing the devastating cost of such a thing.)

So Harry has future knowledge, but he’s also got horrible nightmares from seeing everyone he cared about murdered by Death Eaters, and he has guilt of all the manipulating of his friends he’ll have to do to make things turn out better this time…

It was started in 2005 and isn’t finished yet. There are 38 chapters, all of them brilliant. Some fics have good plots, this one has that and has very high quality writing as well.

I went to the author’s site and donated some money to hopefully encourage him to continue, sooner rather than later.

Take a listen to the 10th anniversary spectacular show, featuring the long-awaited part IV to the radio-play parody version of the 1986 classic film, The Transformers: The Movie.

And pro-life people are mainly condemning the murder, because while they are against abortion, they are also against adults murdering adults as well.

But I’ll be straight and tell you how I feel about it. And yes, I’m breaking Godwin’s law here, but bear with me. And if you don’t understand how analogies work, please stop reading now. In fact, close your browser and sign off the internet. We don’t need you here.

Anyway. Imagine an SS Officer. He goes to work at Auschwitz, and kills some Jews, and comes home to his family, in the suburbs. He plays with his kids, he eats his dinner, and then he goes back to work the next day, and his job involves killing people. He doesn’t feel bad about it, because they aren’t really people, just Jews, and they are in the way.

Now, imagine that some German citizen, who happens to think gassing Jews is bad, breaks into his home and kills him. This is a violation of German law against murder, of course.

Now, let me ask you this: do you feel sorry for the SS officer? Do you feel the one who killed him should be punished?

People that believe abortion is wrong usually do so because they think it is killing a baby. KILLING A BABY. So to them, an abortion doctor is someone that kills babies for a living.

Now, if you don’t think a fetus is a baby, if it’s a lump of tissue, then yeah, murdering an abortion doctor is like murdering a dermatologist who removes warts for a living.

But at least try to look at it from the opposing point of view. If people don’t feel sorry for George Tiller, it’s because they think he killed hundreds or thousands of babies. They would be horrified if a dermatologist was murdered, but they don’t think that’s what happened. To them, an SS officer was murdered.

Was it murder? Of course. The pro-life people who are denouncing it would probably have also denounced the murder of an SS officer. Even if you don’t feel sorry for the victim, even if you think it’s better that he’s dead, it doesn’t mean you support a vigilante taking justice into his own hands.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The pro-life people denouncing the murder of George Tiller don’t think an innocent man was murdered. They think a murderer was murdered. Perhaps they feel the same way as when one drug dealer kills another. Murder is bad, but not because we always care about the victim. A murderer murdered a murderer.

I would certainly never kill an abortion doctor, or a rapist, or a child molester, or a murderer, because I don’t think it is my place to do so. But if they get hit by a bus, I am not going to weep.

Why is that I can see the abortion-is-fine point of view (though I think it’s borne of self-deception) and understand their outrage, yet they can’t understand the anti-abortion point of view at all? If a fetus is a baby, then killing it is bad, and someone who kills babies for a living is a bad person, and if that person is murdered, while we don’t celebrate one more murder (since murder is bad and all), we’re also not really sorry?

To me this seems a pretty easy concept to figure out. If you want me to feel bad that an abortion doctor is murdered, you’ll have to convince me he’s more like a dermatologist than a member of the SS. Because it really doesn’t bother me when murderers die.

Me: Man, allergic to bacon! How do you live like that?
Wife: I think if you’re allergic to bacon you should just kill yourself.
Me: Preferably by eating a whole lot of bacon.
Wife: You’re a bad person.

The plot is that a black man and a white woman fall in love and want to get married, and their families have to deal with their attitudes about interracial marriage.

Through most of the movie, the main problem anyone has is the black/white thing.

More importantly though, everyone in favor of the marriage acts like the only reason anyone could not give their blessing would be because they were racist, or romantically dead inside.

However there were several major, big-time problems with the proposed marriage:

1. They only met 10 days ago. 10 days on vacation in Hawaii, a whirlwind romance, and they now want to get married. Not only that, they want to get married in another week’s time.

2. They arrive in San Francisco and tell her family. They have one day to get to know their future son-in-law, John, then he will fly to Geneva, and their daughter, Joanna, will leave a week later to get married, in Geneva.

3. Joanna believes her parents will have no problem with the marriage, but indicates she’s going to do it regardless of what they say.

4. John, however, privately tells her parents, without her knowledge, that he doesn’t want any problems in his life so that if they don’t give them a full blessing with no reservations, he won’t marry her.

5. John is 37, she is 23. He is 14 years older than her. He has been married before and had a son; they were both killed in a car crash.

6. They later decide that Joanna will fly with him to Geneva that night, instead of waiting a week.

7. John’s father expresses his disapproval and John responds with a speech which includes this: “You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it’s got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs!”

Now, I don’t care that they are an interracial couple. Actually I kinda like to see interracial couples, just because the contrasting skin tones make for a nice aesthetic.

So from a 2009, not-raised-to-care-about-race perspective, the racial issue was a complete non-issue.

Putting myself in the father’s place, I would have zero problem with my daughter marrying a person of another race. I wouldn’t even have the initial shock/surprise that everyone seemed to have.

However, I would totally have objected to the marriage!

It’s ridiculous to make a lifelong commitment after 10 days. There’s just no reason to. What’s the rush? Seriously, why does it have to go so quick? And to only get to meet the guy for a few hours… I could never give my blessing for my daughter to marry a man I’d only met for a such a short time.

Then there’s the fact of the age difference. I’m 8 years older than my wife and while dating it didn’t seem to matter but it actually does, sometimes. Not necessarily a lot, and not necessarily enough to be against a marriage, but it could be relevant, and 14 years is likely to be even more relevant.

Of special concern is the fact that John is giving an ultimatum to the parents that Joanna doesn’t even know about! And they know she doesn’t know… that he’s doing this behind her back, saying he’ll not marry her if they don’t approve because he doesn’t want that problem in his life… to me that would indicate he didn’t love her that much or was too selfish to be worth marrying. I’d definitely object on that ground if no other.

I was horrified at the way John talked to his father. Obviously Joanna’s parents weren’t there for that. Sure, John’s father had racial problems, but have some patience, he’d only know for about an HOUR that his son was marrying a white girl. And even if he didn’t have any problems with white people, he had a point that it was going to be a big deal to a lot of people. At that time, it was illegal in several states (though thankfully overturned by the Loving case before the movie actually hit theatres).

Give the man some time to adjust. If he’s a good man, he’ll come around and give his blessing, but it’d ridiculous to expect that in an hour or two. Again, the rush of the marriage (for no good reason from the pov of the parents) ends up putting completely unnecessary pressure on the parents.

(By the way, after John’s horrifically disrespectful speech to his father, his father never utters a single word for the remainder of the film.)

It’s also pretty selfish to get married in another country when you know your parents would really like to have a nice wedding and such that they are other friends/relatives could attend, without a pretty good reason. A wedding ceremony is a part of the community. They did at least belatedly invite the parents to fly to Geneva for the wedding.

The worst part of the film for me was that all these completely valid reasons to object to the wedding were either not addressed at all or only given lip service, and those in favor of the marriage had nothing but pity or contempt for those who weren’t, painting them as bigots or being against love or something.

At the end, Spencer Tracy’s character Matt gives a big speech which ends with approving of the marriage. We, the audience, are obviously supposed to have been on the side of the “young” lovers all along and therefore to be happy about this.

To me, it just seemed sad that Matt was so bullied by everyone and distracted by irrelevancies that he lost track of the many and major reasons to object.

I don’t care what the guy looks like, if my 23-year old daughter comes home from vacation for a few hours and informs me she’s leaving that night to fly to Geneva and marry a man she’s known for 10 days, I will object. I don’t care if he’s got the cure for cancer in his pocket, there is no reason to do it that quickly!

Unless you simply don’t care how other people feel. In which case, why are you even asking for a blessing in the first place?

Now, from a 2009 perspective it wouldn’t make sense to object on the grounds of race. How about in 1967? What if you, yourself, had no problem with a mixed-race marriage, but knew that 100 million people in the country did, and they’d face a lot of persecution for it? Might you object to spare them that?

For a “we’ve known each other 10 days” relationship, definitely. Joanna might have been raised not to care about race, but that’s easy when you’re in the majority race. We really have no idea how she’ll react when she and her husband go to a predominantly black location and she ends up on the receiving end of racism and hate.

She’s probably never experienced that and probably thinks it’s only an issue for John, not her. Or she might weather the persecution just fine, but the point is we don’t know, and there’s no way they do either, yet. Joanna displays remarkable naivete throughout the film so I have little doubt it’s never occurred to her.

If they both know the score, and know it’ll be an issue they have to deal with, and want to get married anyway because they love each so much, then fine. But they didn’t have time to have reached that level of thought.

Of course, “I don’t have a problem with race, I’m just worried about how you’ll be treated by other people” is frequently just code for actually having a problem with race. But it doesn’t have to be… I think, under certain circumstances in history, it’d be right to voice misgivings because of that.

When I was 17, I asked my dad what he’d think if I were to marry someone of another race. He said he wouldn’t care but he wouldn’t advise it because of society’s problem. But that wasn’t code, because even just a few years down the road society had changed, and when I was in a long-term-relationship with a girl from another race, he didn’t have any problem with it at all. I think I only caught flack from “society” once or twice in the form of some random guy on the street, and that was it.

At least in the social circles I move in, it’s a non-issue today. I was hoping this film would be a good exploration of 60’s racial issues, since I wasn’t around then. Instead, the racial issues were mentioned but not really discussed, and the myriad of reasons the marriage was a bad idea, at least at that time, were glossed over.

In all, I was very disappointed. It must go to show how deeply racial perceptions were at play in 1967 so that people were so focused on the racial issue that they didn’t pay attention to everything else.

And, it did have one of the all-time best film scenes ever, when Katherine Hepburn’s character fires her assistant for being a racist busybody that calls her daughter stupid:

“Now I have some instructions for you. I want you to go straight back to the gallery – Start your motor – When you get to the gallery tell Jennifer that she will be looking after things temporarily, she’s to give me a ring if there’s anything she can’t deal with herself. Then go into the office, and make out a check, for “cash,” for the sum of $5,000. Then carefully, but carefully Hilary, remove absolutely everything that might subsequently remind me that you had ever been there, including that yellow thing with the blue bulbs which you have such an affection for. Then take the check, for $5,000, which I feel you deserve, and get – permanently – lost. It’s not that I don’t want to know you – although I don’t – it’s just that I’m afraid we’re not really the sort of people that you can afford to be associated with.”

What we need to do is create mod_deflate.so where the .so stands for shared object.

First find where apxs and apr-config are located. For me it was in /usr/local/apache/bin

Edit the apr-config file and change this line:

LDFLAGS=""

to this one:

LDFLAGS="-lz"

Then go to your Apache source files (or download them off of apache.org). Go to modules/filters and find the mod_deflate.c file.

Run this:

apxs -c mod_deflate.c

You should now have these files:

mod_deflate.c
mod_deflate.dsp
mod_deflate.exp
mod_deflate.la
mod_deflate.lo
mod_deflate.o
mod_deflate.slo

Notice there is no mod_deflate.so file there. This is where I got stuck. Fortunately on Apache’s site they indicate to do this:

apxs -i -a -n deflate mod_deflate.la

That creates the mod_deflate.so file, puts it in the modules folder, and adds this to your httpd.conf:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

There you go.

I am not by anyone’s standards a Microsoft fan.

But I really don’t get this. What is the problem with them including their own browser. I don’t see WS_FTP suing them over including their own [useless, command line] ftp client.

So they include a browser. Why wouldn’t they? If they didn’t, how would people even download an alternative?

MS Word isn’t included in the OS. What’s there is notepad and wordpad. Does Wordperfect sue them over wordpad? No. A text editor is a standard tool for a robust OS. If Wordperfect doesn’t want to create their own OS, they can create a document editor better than Wordpad. And they did. (MS Word might be preferable, but we’re talking OS-included vs. 3rd party here.)

The point is no one thinks MS is evil for including basic tools. You know who should be upset? Users. They should complain that they want a bare-bones browser (like wordpad is a bare-bones editor), which would result in a cheaper OS they can then customize by adding the browser of their choice.

Oh. But that wouldn’t result in a cheaper OS, because without the revenue brought in by MS search engine being the default in their own browser, the OS would cost more.

Maybe that’s why users aren’t complaining. Just other software companies.

Who are upset that MS has a better business model than they do.

Um… tough.

Let’s be clear, I hate Internet Explorer. I stayed on Netscape 3.01 for years rather than switch to IE. I finally switched, and as soon as I learned Firefox existed I went to that. IE is rubbish.

But so what if it’s included in Windows? It doesn’t hurt me. It doesn’t take away my choice.

Now, if MS refused to allow any other browser to even install, that would be bad. (Whether the government should get involved is another story, there are points on both free market and anti-free market sides. I lean free market a lot but when it comes to, say, children dying of cholera from unpasteurized milk (read your history), I’m firmly on the side of government regulation, and the free market can go hang.)

So Opera doesn’t think MS should have a browser embedded in the OS at all? That’s a bit daft. I’d hate for installing Wordperfect to eradicate Wordpad. There’s a use for having default tools, even if the user chooses to install better tools.

Opera thinks MS should install their software? Why? Just to be nice? They don’t have to. Whatever income they would get from such a partnership is less than continuing to emphasize IE, so why would they? Only if they were as dumb about business as they are about security. (Zing!)

My wife is making custom birthday hats now. We’ll see if we can make any money at it. The hats are quite nice. But either the product is good enough or our marketing is good enough to make it work, or it isn’t. We’re not going to run to mommy and sue Party City for not carrying our hats in stock.

All this does is make Opera look lame.

In the meantime, I’ll still be using Firefox.

This guy’s been in prison 15 years for kidnapping, raping, and murdering a little girl.

He was sentenced to death, but of course no one has gotten around to doing it yet.

Polly’s death at the hands of Davis, who had an extensive kidnap and assault record going back to the 1970s, led to the creation of California’s three-strikes law.

How about the one strike law for things like kidnapping? We have millions and millions of people in this country. Kidnapping is something no one should ever do at all, so why give people a second chance? We’re not going to run out of people, we don’t need kidnappers to shore up our numbers. Let’s get rid of the kidnappers right away, not wait until they do it two more times.

But let’s get rid of the death penalty. We’re too wussy to use it (else Davis would already be dead, as there is NO ONE who thinks he’s innocent, he CONFESSED). So let’s just stop arguing about it and lock people up forever.

I’d prefer us to execute these scumbags, but since we never will, let’s at least lock ‘em up in supermax prisons.

Polly’s still dead, and this guy is still alive, trying to get out. If you don’t remember, at his sentencing, instead of remorse, he claimed Polly told him “Just don’t do me like my dad.” A confessed kidnapper and murderer, it wasn’t enough to end Polly’s life and destroy her family, he had to make a pathetic last-ditch effort to hurt the family even more by vicious slander.

And the old main entrance on Sloat is closed too. The new main entrance is a three minute walk from the street through their new paid parking lot which costs $8.

So we’re sure not paying for parking, so we figure, we’ll park at the South Gate, walk all the way around (about a 15 minute walk) but then when we leave we’ll be right by the car.

Great plan, except the South Gate isn’t an exit now either. It’s nothing.

Even though the maps still say “South Gate (exit only)”!

And it’s the type of exit gate with a revolving gate that only turns one way, and it’s simply not possible to go the wrong way. In other words, it can be left unmanned as an exit.

But instead there’s a padlock on it so we can’t get out.

So we have to walk all the way back across the zoo with an 18-month old child who was assured we were going home.

And then I get to push the stroller back to the car (15 minute walk!) and drive back around to get wife and child who stayed to watch the horsies (the carousel).

So thanks, SF Zoo, for lying on your maps and closing all exits except the one in the paid parking lot, just to try to get another $8 out of me.