This post might be a little scatter brained since I haven't posted in like a million years and I have a lot on my brain.

Ok... I just finished reading a ValueTales book about honesty, and I'm feeling amazing. So, in the spirit of the book I have a few things to report, and some questions to ask.

Isn't the lil Confucius on the cover super cute?


I haven't been posting half cause I'm super busy, and half because I know Meg reads my posts kinda religiously (hi honey). I used to come here to dump my brains out so that you all can help sort things for me since I sincerely value the perspectives of others and I think that airing any kind of problem out helps to solve it, but I also realize the kind of person Meg is and that she probably wouldn't feel comfortable with you all after having all of our underwear flung in your faces over these here interwebs, and she likes you guys, and so do I.

Still, after reading this book I was compelled to post something since it brought up a lot of questions in my mind as well as some fun conclusions that I don't think you all deserve to miss out on, and I could use some help.

A while back Meg did her best to explain science and religion to the midget (I know that's a terrible nickname and diminutive people the world over can send their hate mail to itsjustanickname@noreply.jez ) and Mya rung out with absolute certainty, "I pick GOD!" We shrugged and went ahead to support her decision by buying her a children's bible (my mom is pleased as punch).

Look how cute those bible people are



We've read a ton of these bible stories to her and I know their entertaining, but she has so many questions that I know when I heard these stories the first time I didn't get answers to, and that she still looks at us for some simple explanations to.

To boot, she's a very strong willed and cocksure person. She does cruel things to people, as any child will, and I haven't run across a story in the bible to help me help her with the character flaws (since that's my job). Maybe one of you peeps who know the bible better can help out with that. Still nothing has addressed this topic more directly than this ValueTales book.

A factoid For all you you who are into Larry the Cucumber who are thinking what I thought when I saw the words and font, ValueTales(mid 70's) came before VeggieTales (late 90's), but I digress...

The value tales have impressed me with the Honesty title, and I'm going to pick up the rest of the books in the series after seeing the titles and who their about.

Ok here's some lyrics to a song you can hear by watching one of the videos at the bottom of this post. Don't let the images influence you. If you want a purely musical performace of the piece try the first video, if you want the recorded version so you can understand the lyrics better check the seond. The first one is, IMHO, much more amazing since it's played in an elevator and the snare drum is a pages being torn out of a magazine.

The name of the song is Neon Bible, and though I'm not feeling particularly feisty in a religion/anti-religion sense, I'm asking you dear peeps what you make of it.

I'm really interested to ask that here where I know there are two Christians that frequent this site who's perspective please and delight me (that's right (e:mrdeadlier) and (e:drew)), but because I like the general perspective of most of you peeps on (e:strip).

So without further ado the lyrics to the Neon Bible:

Vial of hope and a vial of pain
In the light they both looked the same
Poured them out on into the world
On every boy and every girl singing

It's the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival
If the Neon Bible is right

Take the poison of your age
Don't lick your fingers when you turn the page
What I know is what you know is right
In the city you see only light

It's the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival
If the Neon Bible is right

Oh god, well, look at you now!
Oh, you lost it, but you don't know how!
In the light of a golden calf
Oh god, I had to laugh!
Take the poison of your age
Don't lick your fingers when you turn the page
It was wrong but you said it was right
In the future I will read at night

In the Neon Bible, the Neon Bible
Not much chance for survival
If the Neon Bible is true

I've read many prespectives from the general public here .

Some you tubey goodness...


The MTV version
.

So it looks like a bomb went off in my living room. The other dudes on the team with midgets have similar stories, the likes of which I just stole that line from. I received an email from one of them that asked what the best prices for a bulldozer would be around this time of year so he could get all of his daughters presents home...(ok, I embellished that report a tiny bit), here's my response:

Maybe it's cruel or unusual to leave my girlfriend to that mess, but here I am at work waiting for a meeting that no one is going to show up to, but I'm in a state of zen like peace.

This morning in bed with everyone (Mya, Fern, & Meg), Mya looks to me and says in sincerity only expressible by a four-year-old in deepest distress, "Tony, what am I gonna do with all that stuff?" It was kind of priceless... Well Meg's got her parents there to help her clean up a crime I consider them full accomplices of, though I'm sure she'll insist they don't (I think I am, at best, an accessories since Meg did all the shopping. "I don't know where my credit card was officer...") I'm playing house hooky... heh!

I may get going since I just found out about the basement sink clog that started 2 days ago. I'm waiting for my brother to get in touch with me, until then I'll hold down the fort, and only leave in an extreme case.

Merry, Happy, Joyful, Jolly Festivus (WIKIPEDIA - Festivus) to all. May your grievances be heard by loving ears, and bounce off of the hardened hearts of the rest-of-us.

--tony

eeeeehhhhhh...

I'm up at 6:44 am, and I've been up since 5.

Fern can be a tiny terrorist sometimes. She got hungry and decided to set off all of her alarms at once and we went from green to yellow alert in the blink of an eye.

Lots of screaming and 3.5 ounces of Target brand formula later and she's back to her usual curious self. Twisting around in my arms to see what I'm looking at while I try to check out some awful thing that I followed from digg to entertain me while my spawn feeds.

"Eeeh... she's a baby, she won't remember this. Hell, she don't even know she's got feet!" Well, that's what I tell my self right before my fatigue settles in and I get into a serious discussion with a 2 month old. "You have to go back to bed! You can't watch this..."

Hmm... the baby's growing. I didn't even realize how much until I looked at my estrip pic of her. She used to look like a bogger compared to how she looks now. She's heavier too. She's seriously half the height and just under half the weight of her 4 year old sister, Mya. I joke with Mya and tell her that I'm half troll (I use my crooked pinky finger as proof), but the way this baby is growing I'm starting to believe me.

There's other things in my life though. I swear. Um, I think. The baby has changed so much about what I can do, that it's almost like she's changed who I am. Though I know that's not true or fair. Hmm, I'm sure this paragraph might be misconstrued as a regret, but it's not... It's really just an observance. I'm still me in here. I just have my priorities arranged differently.

That's one of Meg's biggest gripes too. She hates being stuck in the house. Sometimes she goes out of her way to get outta here and I don't blame her. I love my house too, but if I felt like I could never leave it I think I'd rather burn it down than be in it one more minute, but isn't that what this period is all about? Living in a cocoon like state until the babys big enough...? I hope so. I need to find out. The one thing that I always defer to after banging my head on the wall is "Maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe I need some new insight".

All in all the baby's too young to leave with a stranger. Sometimes I fee like she's too little to leave with anyone. I had my mom babysit a few times. Each time leaving her with the kids for more and more time until things got a little wobbly. My mom's great, and she's no freak. She raised me...ok, I understand that that doesn't really support my argument, so just believe me, kay? The last time I left her with the kids Meg and I went to see Beowulf at the IMAX 3D and then did some skippin' around the town with my friend Jeremy,. When we got back my mom was passed out on the couch (not the air mattress we set up for her) in a (prescribed) drug induced stupor while the baby wailed on the monitor.

In my moms defense, she needs the drugs. She's missing a vertebrae. Some kinda freak accident involving a mentally retarded character with the PC label of "consumer", her spine, and a clock radio. Every time I hear the story it sounds more and more like something Rob Zombie would have directed. Anyway, I guess she needs help sleeping. I wish I'd of put 2 and 2 together before that night, but everyone is fine and we had a good time.

As the baby struggles to sit up on her own, and with news like "..your baby held her own bottle for like 20 seonds... it was cute, sorry I just had to call you..." the shell on this cocoon is getting more and more brittle.

I don't know I have friends that have kids and understanding friends that don't but I want more of a life for my self... I think, maybe. I don't know.

I'm doing a band with Nick Vega from work. We have a show January 4th at Neitchez, and the set list looks kinda tight. Mostly covers some orginals too though. I haven't been on stage in and age, but after a couple of practices we'll see if it's worth coming out to see this old goat do some tricks for the fair going proletariat again.

Till then...this is muja signing off from inside the cocoon.

She's out! After a lot of squishing and pushing at 1:56 am.

In the deliver room help ol Meggypoos with the last few dregs of babytime.

They doped her up right before she started serious laborso she can't feel a thing, which is nice cause shes no good with pain and bad cause she don't know when shes doing well.

We've been at this since early this morning when I sent a text message to a few peeps. I didn't sleep last night, I was sent out by the meg to enjoy myself on HaloHoliday know the final hour was nigh. Halos great this babys even better..what a great bunch of days. Now if only that house would close.

I saw the babies head for a second a while ago and got a lil teary eyed. Didn't think I had that in me. We have the bday cam and lil phone cam handy so U peeps will be the first to know what she looks like.. ok my break is ending to to go help this baby finish her trip...

wish us all luck.
and pray.
cast a spell.
do a jinx...

So, I am franticly preparing for the oncomming pooper, and we're setting up the crib when we realize that the crib my ma picked up for me dosen't have 3 of the 4 pins that the instruction cautions you against not omitting.

The Meggasaurus and I were swiftly off to the walmart she bought it from. I know, I know. She bought it before I could object.

The crib was really too big to transport with other humans so Meggypoos was following me on the 290, when I started to slide. I didn't want to regain my footing since I think we were both going too fast and she'd of smashed into me so I let my car slide off the road...

2 hours latter were still sitting in the car waiting for Volkswagon roadside assistance. I guess you should wait till the weekday to get into an accident.

Here a shot of the Hitlermobile in a ditch...

Ok, so paul asked me to comment on why we've...ok I've abandoned ASP and well it got really long in the tooth. I figured I'd just post a blog and link it so I could come correct my typos later. If you want to comment to this post just go back to (e:paul,40711), yeah... here' um my Response:

ASP classic (not .NET) is not a complete web language. There are things that PHP address and can handle that you need to code in a "different" (Visual Studio 6 at least, which is very similar but not the same at all) language to do in ASP classic. To boot you at times need to create server objects and install them which makes your code only work on that (friggin' expensive) box and and which just ruins your flow.

Ok, don't get me wrong, I'm not an ASP hater. I have much love for the language it's cute and quaint and how I started to learn progarmming, but I'm gonna throw some more darts atit right now.

ASP is kinda dying. A language is only as usefully as it's ablity to solve problems for you, and if you don't know how to accomplish those goals off hand you have to find the documentation to help you. Yeah, It's horribly documented. If you ever need to find anything about it that's not in an outdated overpriced bargain bin book that's likely out of print the best places tend to be fringe web sites that are dying one by one. The best of which 4GuysFromRolla have been slowly sliding off of the Classic bandwagon and into .NET land, so soon the language will be completely dead.

The language is horiffically dated. It came about well after OOP was invented but somehow didn't see the merit of becomgin fully OOP. It has some OOP qualities, but ASP is really not an OOL. You can instantiate classes, and it's a lot easier to organize your code this way but the language is not designed for it, nor is there any IDE that will let you take full advantage of it (even so much as Zend does PHP). As a result you end up spending more code on small tasks which in part ruins the fact that the feature is even there.

Really, PHP is isn't even as good, as ASP is bad. I'm not flaming ASP classic, it has it's uses, but it also has it's limitations are there are far too many, namely that's not as well suited for the web than languages that have come after it and that were competing during it's height. I don't think that you need to go to PHP to move ahead with web development, but certainly can't stick with ASP or even ASP.NET. If you check out the history of the language you'll see that it has always been a last ditch effort by MS that was never fully realized. I think they (MS) bought it off of an 3rd party to compete with SUN or someone when they come out with a web language that could be run on servers other than Windows, and was never fleshed out until .NET which is still not a very good web language.

The earliest versions of ASP.NET are completely different animals than the later, which leaves you with quite a bit of abandon work that you had to pay $500 to develop at each stage. because this language is the first attempt by MS to put a full fledged product for the web into the wild.

Their primary goal was to promote their flagship platform, the Windows desktop, for a very long time. Coming around to web centric thinking was hard for a company the girth of MS, what's worse is they didn't want to abandon their years loyal customer base or force the army of developers who were making their companies by a suite of windows products from servers to desktop applications, etc and so on. So what did they do? What does ASP.NET smack of no matter what language you program it in? (You can use c#, j#, or ASP for the .NET web platform) Desktop computing. They tried to allow desktop programmers to use their current skill set to program the web, which is stupid. I like to compare desktop and web programming like I compare American and International Football. Both are sports, you need to be athletic for both, but players from either sport would do poorly in the other. No amount of equipment /.NET will help you play well enough. You just need to retrain and

All of the "features" of that platform are if you pay much attention to it (and, ok most of this is opinion, but look at it your self and tell me what you think) capture to desktop programmers. Most .NET coders don't ever get to see HTML or JavaScript (weird right?). They didn't even get AJAX in their platform until it was past fad, which is absolutely crazy since MS was the company to first include the XMLHTTPRequest object (or what ever its' officially called). I've watched other developers senior to me who've tried to stick with MS get lost in the quagmire of what it'd like to present to the world a cutting edge web tech.

The web and the desktop and 2 different animals. MS is learning that the hard way, don't get left behind with them.

Dom responded, and his response was awesome check this out!

Very cool science show. They seem like they know what they are talking about from the little bit I listened too. These new HIV drugs aren't really vaccines exactly, but it sounds like they have great potential.

The question of "is it good for humans later" is pointless as far as I am concerned. Nature is a cruel master. Civilizations have developed to help cope with nature. We build shelters to protect us. We build social structures to help us get food and water. We build medical systems to help keep us healthy. We can do these things because we have evolved these capabilities. To not use those abilities would be stymie - ing evolution.

Mitchondria came from a symbiotic relationship between bacteria and eukaryotic single cell organisms. This infection happened before we evolved the ability to fight infections...

Suppose we did not treat HIV. Like the story says, there are some people who have a specific mutation in the CCR5 receptor that won't allow HIV infection. If everyone gets exposed to HIV, only these people and others who have other sorts of protective differences ("mutations") will survive. Now, a couple hundred years later, humanity is more "fit" because evolution ran its course concerning this one thing - HIV infection.

Good in theory, but will not happen exactly BECAUSE of evolution. Bald eagles almost became extinct because of a chemical that came into their environment (it doesn't matter that we were responsible for this point) which made their egg shells more fragile. The eggs could not support the weight of the parents that sit on them. so the eggs would collapse and the parent crushed the young. Eagles are not smart enough to realize that maybe they shouldn't sit on their eggs any longer. They are not able to build nice warm, cozy incubators for their eggs. In fact, if we had not removed the chemical from their environment in the 70's (DDT, I think) they would very likely be extinct right now.

Humans, on the other hand, have evolved such abilities. We are not wild animals and we could not survive for long without the social structures we have put in place. Why should it be OK to deny the use of a drug like this to help against a viral infection, but not OK to no longer allow trucks to deliver food from rural farm areas to cities. How would all those people in NYC eat?

There is another argument: Let's say there are some mutant eagles that build super strong eggs, so they don't crush their young. All the non-mutant eagles die off after a few generations, so now the species has evolved to have only these mutant eagles with super strong eggs are left. The chemical in the environment is not threat to these remaining eagles. Only 2% of the total original eagle population had this mutation. Luckily, the eagle population was large enough and varied enough for this mutation to be a possibility. But now, the genetic fitness of eagles is dramatically less. The population has lost 98% of its variation. What happens if another challenge comes along that these eagles can't handle? The genetic variation for many, many generations of these eagles will be so small that is it highly unlikely they would be able to survive another challenge like, let's say, an avian HIV. Maybe all of the eagles that had a mutation in CCR5 that could have saved them from avian HIV. Unfortunately, none of them had the super strong egg mutation so they all crushed their young and died off.

The exact same concepts would be applied to the human HIV story. If we let it run its course, and part of the population survived and that population is now somehow better able to withstand viral attacks because of this evolution, the genetic fitness of humanity would be much worse off.

So, my point is that evolution gave us the ability to protect ourselves and to not use those abilities is to ignore evolution. You could extend my theory to the n'th degree and say that eventually, nothing will be able to kill us. Where do you draw the line between benefiting from the abilities you have evolved, and actually interfering so much with evolution that you destroy the concept altogether? In a way, this is already happening. There are people with genetic mutations that would normally kill them before they were old enough to breed. Medical interventions now allow them to live long enough to breed. They do. Now there are more people with these mutations that would have been winnowed out without medical intervention.

I am not sure I have the answer for "where do you draw the line?". I've given this very little thought, but I think you draw the line at changing the genetic material of the gametes (sperm and egg). I think this would be wrong. But maybe it is not so simple as that. If you could take two people with cystic fibrosis, and fix the single mutation that causes the disease, I would say we should do that. These people could live normal lives with normal lung function. The gene would only need to be fixed in specific cells in the airways. In fact, some of the very 1st gene therapy experiments were to do exactly this. But what about when those two people get married and decide they want kids? Should we fix the bad gene in their sperm and eggs so that their kids come out normal?? I don't think so, because now you have pushed the line....how far do you push it? People with sickle cell anemia, which could theoretically be fixed in such a way, are resistant to malaria. What if cystic fibrosis people have some benefit we don't recognize yet?

Anyway.....I have to get back to work.

No, I don't know anyone studying bone density.

Ok... I listen to nerdy podcasts all the time. Video games, tech news, science. One of which is a podcast called "the naked scientist". I know, weird.

I also have made decent friends with a scientist at Roswell. He researches cancers, obviously, but I bug him with my science questions and tell him about my excitement in current research all the time cause he's more likely to give a hoot... but then what about you lot.

Here's the email I sent him. I'm busting with excitement, I think you should be too.

Subject: More Scientist Stuff

Body:

I swear I'm going to break down and go back to school so I can do this all the time.

Check these two things out.

They've found an chemical HIV vaccine, it was reported on this British Scientific Podcast called "The Naked Scientist". I know weird. Here's a link to the iTunes store for it and a link to the web site. They have enhanced podcasts so if you have iTunes you can scrub the progress bar until it's the title "New HIV Drugs" shows up, it's even easier on your iPod the sections are divided into bars. Relatively early in the show.

But then there's always this sort of thing where just because it's great news for humans now, is it necessarily good news for humans later? I think I emailed you a link to this podcast before. It's a sci-fi story about weather it's good that we destroy diseases since it may stymie evolution link . Think link mitochondria are some of the largest bits of debate weaponry that creationist scientists use against evolutionists (sp? bad terms?), but that's not what this is about. Figuring weather we should stop viruses before we've learned to live symbiotically with them and they improve us is, if that's what they're up to.

....ahhh. Ok, I'll stop bugging you. Really though, if I'm just pestering you let me know. I'd hate to be a nescience. I just get so excited.

Hmm, last question. I have an idea for a study but it has to do with bone density. Do you know a scientist that's in that kind of research?