The Redheaded Penguin

Mmmmm…. waffle fries… gluten free no less

Okay, decided to switch themes for the site again… still haven’t found “the one” but was growing increasingly unhappy with the old one. I figured this one will work until I can either find one I like better or have time to modify it more to my liking…

But I don’t wanna get out of bed this morning…

They’re doing some construction on campus and have a large area blocked off now. This isn’t the best picture, but it’s of some of the construction supervisors trying to tell students they shouldn’t be jumping the fence to walk through the construction zone to get to class… the real construction work should be getting underway in the coming weeks…

Well, saw on another blog just a minute ago that Sun has “acquired” MySQL, a popular open-source database system that I depend on heavily for just about everything I do on the web from on-line surveys and research studies to websites to this blog and more. From the sounds of it, they will still have the “free” version available for me to use with things…. hopefully this will be a good thing in the long run, but only time will tell…

Okay, being a little new to this whole bloggin’ thing, I haven’t been taking full advantage of the use of tags. Recently I’ve been thinking about them more, especially in terms of how they could be used to help organize files on my computer more than blog posts. Basically, if you view things in a “folder” structure, everything ends up in one folder or another. With tags, you can have one copy filed in multiple places. Obviously this will make things easier to find later on since you only have to remember one of the things you tagged it with rather than one specific folder name. It also helps you to see things that are related to each other in some ways that you might not have originally thought about when assigning the tags. Anyway, in the coming days I’ll probably be going back through old posts and adding tags to them… figured I should do this before I end up with more posts than I really want to go back and go through… oh, and being the organizational freak that I am (though you wouldn’t know it by the clutter in my office), I’m actually trying to think of a “tag structure” to use… we’ll see how that goes though…

Oh, and probably one “catch” to tagging is to make sure you don’t “over tag” something… or at least that’s my thought at the moment…

Okay, I told Ruth a few weeks ago that Huckabee “scared” me and I wouldn’t vote for him. Well, part of that fear was over one of his campaign staffers (I believe) who made a comment about the “Holy War” in reference to the US approach to terrorism and radical Islam. Well, I’m sorry, but the US can not and should not approach it as a Holy War. In order to defeat radical Islam, we need the support of moderate Islam. Turning this into a Holy War will do nothing but strengthen the radical viewpoint. Also, it pulls the US away from where I believe it should be at a very fundamental level. In my view, the US was founded (in part) on religious tolerance. Not just tolerance for the religions we agree with, but tolerance for the religions we don’t agree with as well. The latest quote though has me even more nervous. It essentially boils down to the fact that Huckabee feels we need to change the constitution to be more in line with God’s Word, more specifically though, God’s Word as Huckabee interprets and understands it. To me, this flies in the face of the Bill of Rights to such an extreme that I can not even pretend to support him. Even if I were to agree 100% with his views on right and wrong, I do not agree with the government legislating “morality”. I think that actually goes back to something I heard growing up, probably in the mid to late 80’s. Of course, then it was in reference to the Democrats trying to pass some sort of legislation that had a morale undertone to it. Now the situation is reversed it appears and it’s the Republicans trying to pass legislation based on what they feel is the “moral” way of living. So, both sides are guilty of trying to do this in my mind… and if taken to the extreme, you end up in a theocracy, just like the radical, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists want… of course they want a theocracy based on Islam rather than Christianity, but in the end you are forced to live your live by a morality being dictated to you by your government’s view and interpretation of what you should believe . I will live my life following my moral code, which is based strongly in Christianity. Although I might not agree with the moral code someone else choses to live by, I don’t think it’s the role of the government to force either one of us to change how we live as long as I don’t interfere with their rights and they don’t interfere with mine. So, this being probably the most “political” blog entry I’ve made so far, I should probably stop before I go off on a rant about the problems/issues I see with all the other candidates… main point though is that after this latest statement by Huckabee, I am so strongly opposed to him that I felt obligated to post something about it…

Soon, I’ll get back to posting pictures though… I have the ones for the past couple of days, just haven’t had a chance to get them posted yet…