Second Plan

Come by later
she said as she passed
pulled on my shirt sleeve
I know it will never last

How can I trust you
I barely know who you are
All of this could fall through
I don't have a second plan

Sending glances across the room
meant to be decoded soon
Interception could lead to
my definate ruin

How can I trust you now
You could lead me down
the wrong wicked path
I don't have a second plan

I know the weight of what
we do here and now
I just need some assurance
of when where and how

How can I trust that you
won't turn me in
How can I decifer
my second plan

Deciding on what to take
may be the hardest part
I'll have to consider what's at stake
and take it to heart

How can I trust
Knowing your ilk
How can you sleep at night
Knowing my second plan.

Dropping Out

OK, ok. I know I said I was changing this blog to be more artistic, but I must post this. It's important.

Lately in the news there have been tons of information about kids dropping out of high school. Call it the implosion of (Rome) the United States.

Rome collapsed on itself. It imploded in its greed, decadence and sheer weight. That same phenomenon is happing right now in the U.S.

The problem: Kids dropping out of schools, and parents letting it happen. The U.S. is one of the largest consumers of goods in the world. Those goods cost money. However, since kids across the U.S. have decided that "school isn't for them," it puts us in a pickle.

It is a proven fact that you can stand to loose hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, over your career if you don't attend college. Now amplify that by throwing on it less than a high school education. Now I am not saying that everyone has to have a doctorate, but you need an education. That education comes in different forms: A formal educational system; On the job; Apprenticeship. The latter doesn't exit anymore. The middle works, but it takes you a lot longer to get there. The former is the best route.

And here is the big misconception: You don't go to high school and college for what you can learn from a book. A book education will only get you so far. You learn to interact. You learn to think critically. You learn to be creative. Those are skills that a book can't teach you. But your educators can. Your fellow students can. Your experiences can.

I am not bashing anyone who did not finish high school. I am not bashing anyone who did not finish college (I attended 3 schools and only received an Associates Degree). I am saying those of you who are in school, stay in school and better yourself. If you have dropped out, educate yourself.

Can you make $150,000 per year working at a burger joint? Probably not unless you own it. And the likelihood of that is minimal. Just the facts.

Learning is something you must continually do. Its something you must do event after graduating. It’s the only way you can stay ahead of the very competitive game we call a career.

What's the evidence of this? Look at the trends of outsourcing. India has invested heavily in their education system. Their culture has changed to push education, as a way out of their 3rd world country. They are advancing and winning the jobs that were traditionally found here in the U.S. That's because they are paying attention to their education.

We have become fat a bloated over the decades. Gone is the time when working hard and having pride in what you did mattered. We have been over influenced by the media like MTV Cribs and the OC to know what it really means to make it in this world. To have pride in the journey it takes to get "there" instead of the shortcuts that we see.

Teeth Nashing

Simple things
have left me
Bruised and broken
Wet and heavy

But as delerium
Sets in
Get out of my way
Before I sin again

The last thing
that I want
is to hurt
is to haunt.

Blistering reality
Forces me
To believe
that I am what I see

But I can't keep
the demons down
Bubbling up
through my crown

Once was shiney
white and pure
now I am dirty
ruined for sure

Lost for ever
gone is he
Going nowhere
Sailor to the sea

As the hand
of God descends
Helping me up
Forgiving my sins

A light so bright
so warm and inviting
I can't go up
I can't stand fighting

The teeth nashing
has caused my change
in Him I believe
No longer deranged

Gravity

Lonely girl,
why do you cry?
why do you cast so much
negativity in my eye?


Load me with regret
Spin me in your direction
Let gravity do its job, well.

The last thing I want
In our so called relationship
Is to be polar oposite
Shooting from the hip.

Load me with regret
Spin me in your direction
Let gravity do its job, well.

Bottomless pit of nothing
Looks so dark and empty
but you fill it well
Enough that I can see

Load me with regret
Spin me in your direction
Let gravity do its job, well.

The lesser of this evil
Was cast down below dispair
Collating what was needed
Seperating us into pairs

Load me with regret
Spin me in your direction
Well, let gravity do its job.

Prune

Time of change
Time of doing
Event so duranged
Time for pruning

Cut away the dead
Remove the old
Cut off the head
Make the cut bold

Life will spring forth
Don't worry bout me
You see what its worth
And what it can be

After removing the bad
You can believe
You don't have to be sad
You can now see

Loosing whats holding you back
Marked difference for sure
Now its not what you lack
But its even more pure

Beauty abounds
where there once was none
Songs sing a wonderful sound
And the dead is now gone

Shift

So, I haven't posted to this blog in a long time. I guess I kind of got burned out talking tech stuff. I do it all day. I'm going to start posting here again, but I may shift to my writing and poetry. It's probably not very good stuff, but I feel that if I at least have an outlet then it will help me improve.

I do have another site that I write on, but its more of a community site. It can be found at http://collabatron.blogspot.com. Some fun stuff there.

Anyway, here it goes.

Firefox 2 Login Rememberence Is Implemented Wrong!

As we speak I am posting this with Firefox 2.0.0.1. I have been using it for the past several days because my IE 7.0 has decided to start screwing up and crashing.

If you have ever signed into a site that has password authentication using a password field in HTML you know that almost all browsers these days offer to "remember" your password from now on. Well, I think in this aspect Firefox got it wrong.

They remember your password, and other information, but it won't remember my username. That means that it is keeping my password somewhere on the computer I am on and I have to type my username in. Now, if it is really going to remember my information, why will it not remember my username? If it is going to force me to type something in, I'd rather it be the password and not the username, because the username is a constant and the password is most likely going to change over time.

The beauty of XML Transformations

So I have been hard pressed to find any real world situations where I would really need to use transformations. Well, today I found one:

I am dealing with a project in which I need to manipulate data from a sql database that has 90 columns of data. I have several systems and interfaces that I need to pass the data to. Sql Stored Procedures, JScripts and so on. I was dreading typing all of the column names in over and over again.

So, I created the Transformer, which takes an XML document, a style sheet (XSLT) and performs the transformation for you and spits out the result in a textbox in the window that you can then copy and paste into your other environments.

This has let me write two XSLTs that are no more than 20 lines long to produce two different sets of JScript methods that would have taken me an hour or so to write. I'll be using this for a long time I'm sure.

Future of the Net

This post is about net neutering, er neutrality.

There's a big push to split the internet. The high road (those with money) and the low road (those without).

What do I mean?

Congress is considering a bill that would allow ISPs to effectively split the internet into chunks. They would initially do this by offering two different bandwidth modes; the high bandwidth mode would server up company's sites who have paid the ISP premium fee for being in that mode. The low bandwidth mode carries everyone else.

Ponder that one for a minute.


Why do I care?

If I were building the next killer app, lets say an app that would help people manage their lives, then I would need the funding to essentially payoff every major ISP in the country so that my app would appear to be snappy and fast. If I don't have the funds to do so, then my app looks like its running on a circa 1989 14.4 modem. Er, non geek, it would be slow. Very slow. Maybe not show up on your desktop at all, kind of slow.

So what you say?

Well, don't you think that might quash some (even though very small part) of the country's entrepreneurship? What will happen to the garage started companies?

My theory: they will cease to exist.

That's right, the Apples, the Napster, the Microsofts of America would no longer have a place to incubate. They would not longer be welcomed into the American, or global, landscape, without having extreme funding available to them.

Why do I care, I don't run a company?

Because I like innovation. I like to see someone pushing the boundaries. Take Pandora for examplehttp://www.pandora.com. The company streams music over the web. For free. I can't copy it to a CD. I can't save it on my portable. But I can listen at work. And you know what is different about them? They create "channels" that you listen to. You create a station, and add artist or songs you like,and they stream to you songs from artist that match what you asked for. It's unlike anything on the web, or the earth for that matter.

Could they exist in a split web? Probably not. They could not get the funding to, essentially, buy off all of the major, and minor, ISPs so that their service is crisp and clear all the time. That would kill their service model.

What can you do?

Contact your representative and explain to him what I've explained here. It's a bad idea. It's an idea that comes from the greed and love of money and not from the love of innovation and advancement of the human race.

Shall we call it the Minority Report?

Did you watch the Minority Report with Tom Cruise? One aspect of the movie is that as the main character walks through public places his eye is scanned constantly and he is presented with contextual marking glitz.

So, today I read this article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12188577/ about how Google is now going to provide free wireless service to all of San Fran. Sounds cool. But why I asked myself.

Then I read the article. Google plans to provide contextual marketing data to you. They claim to be able to track you within a 100 foot accuracy. OK. So, that means that if you are at the coffee house across the street from the Barnes and Noble, they can deliver ads to you about the new book sale going on across the street.

OK.

So, at first glance, me being a technologist and all, I think 'cool. context. so many times we miss context in our interaction'. But then I think back to the Minority Report. It was freaking annoying! Every step he took he was being presented with something else. And that might be fine if it's wanted, or even tolorated. But OK, so Google with it's "do no evil" policy might be sensitive to my feelings and make the ads less obtrusive. But guess what Google, there are evil people out there. There are people who could give a crap about my contextual feelings. There are people who don't care that I really don't like people, or things, invading my space!

I guess ultimately I am affraid that this will eventually go to far.