Category: Personal

Is he referring to himself, or to one of us?

I loathe daylight savings. I’m sitting here with an eight-month-old baby boy who doesn’t know how to tell time — someone who, until this morning, was getting up during the (far too early) hour of 5. Now he’s getting up an hour earlier, because despite the best efforts of Paige and me, he can’t tell time. Our older two know they’re not supposed to get up before 7:00, and now we have to relax that rule because what their bodies think is 7:00 is really 6:00.
Besides the fact that I’m up way too early, here are some other reasons to dislike daylight savings:
— It kills people. I’ve read in several places that traffic fatalities are slightly higher during the week when we “spring forward,” and as far as I know that’s not balanced out by fewer fatalities when we “fall back.”
— It doesn’t save that much electricity. Even advocates of daylight savings say that it reduces energy usage by 3%. Granted, that’s a lot of power, but does anyone take into account the lost productivity for people whose lives are disrupted? Besides, energy is meant to serve man, not man to serve energy.
— It makes programming times and dates difficult. The content management system we built has to take into account the time change, because it runs a newspaper Web site and a 24-hour newswire. There are always users logged in at 2 a.m. on Sunday mornings (not many, but some).
— It’s hard to coordinate time with the rest of the world. Not only do you need to know how many hours they differ from GMT, but you have to know whether they’re on daylight savings (probably not). Again, at work we have people filing stories from all over the world, and they have to figure out the EST vs. EDT distinction.
— The daylight-savings junta says we’re doing this “for the children.” Whenever you hear that phrase, you know somebody is up to no good. Schoolchildren otherwise would be “coming home from school in the dark.” So it’s better that workers drive home in the dark? If the kids need daylight to wait for the yellow bus, adjust the time of the school day. Why do the rest of us need to adjust to them?
To save a small amount of electricity, we disrupt the entire nation and let people die on the highways. Smash your clocks!

At the risk of looking like an ass for interrupting the continuing coverage of judicially sanctioned murder, I’d like to ask you all for some help. At long last, I’m going to finish my master’s thesis, hopefully in the spring, and I need to get a new web hosting company to do it.
I need mySQL, PHP, Perl, and the ability to host at least two domains (plus all the regular stuff like e-mail accounts). Shell access would be quite nice, but I could live without it. I don’t need lots of bandwidth or disk space, and I do want to pay less than $10 a month. I’ve found one company, Lunarpages, that has such a plan, but I don’t want to jump in without knowing my other options. Can anyone else make a suggestion?

Right now, I’m listening to the overture from “The Marriage of Figaro” for the second time. (if I were John, I’d have typed “Le Nozze di Figaro,” but I’m not as cultured as he is.) I can’t listen to it just once — like Al Franken and pie a la mode, I have to have more and more until I’m satiated. What a little gem of a piece — sprightly and tuneful, one of the few perfect earthly things.
When I tell my older son Charlie that living in heaven is better than anything in this life, he says, “But I like living on this planet.” (He’s under the impression that heaven is a different world.) There are a few pleasures that incline me to agree with him.

I’m going to get a new tattoo soon, and it will look something like the image on the right. Normally, I would not solicit opinions about something this personal, but I’m curious about others’ opinions on this one.
The tattoo will be on my left bicep, and will be covered by a normal short-sleeved shirt. I have another one that says “USMC” on my right bicep in the same place. The cross itself is a variation of the one worn by the Knights of Saint John, a.k.a. the Hospitallers, a.k.a. the Knights of Malta. A colloquial name for it is the Crusader’s Cross, which is why I like it — in a sense, every Christian is a crusader, right?
While I like the cross itself, I have a few concerns, namely:
— Is the shield outline too much?
— Does the design remind you of a nurse?
— Does the design remind you of the Luftwaffe?
Both nurses and the Germans used a modified Maltese cross, though they are distinctly different than this one, which I found in a book on the military religious orders. (I hasten to add that the cross used by the Germans in WWII, called the Iron Cross, predated Hitler by a century and a half.) What do you all think? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life saying, “No, it’s not a Nazi symbol,” or “I’m not a nurse, darn it! Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”