Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2001 > Late October 2001 Edition
Autumn puts on its ugly face today, with gray skies and strong breezes and lots of rain. It's pretty warm now, but it will be colder and colder during the next several days.
I had planned to do a translation blitz, taking some of the works of programming wizard Eric Raymond and converting them to Esperanto. However, my folks were eager to get my new dresser out of the living room and into my room, I had to do some shifting of the stuff in my room.
It has gotten to the point, where I have more books, magazines and papers in my room than I will ever read. If I shed myself of some of my books (some of which go back to my teen years), I will have more room to maneuver—and, when it comes time to move to my own place, less stuff to cart.
These books will go to Ball State's Bracken Library, but not before I sort them out into those that stay and those that go, and to keep a record of both. That means its database time. And, rather than go out and buy a database package, I can use one I already have, with a language I've using for a long time.
Late Sunday I wrote the SQL code to create the book database and record table; a Web page form to enter books; and a PHP script to process the form. Now I need to bring them all together. I will have to read my thick mySQL book to figure this out, because I never used the database before. It will be interesting to see how it works.
If the book database is successful, I will need to think about buying a tape drive for Madoka. It's one thing to have a web site on her, since my web sites are not all that big. It's another when it's used for crucial data.
You know, something bad was bound to go down when:
But then, Islam is the natural enemy of the West, because in this age an even non-Christian West is superior to Islam. It is this superiority that let the West pick apart the domain of Islam during the 18th through early 20th centuries. It is this superiority that Muslims find deeply offensive. (Never mind that they threw away their superiority by embracing al-Ashari's metaphysic: who said ideas don't have consequences?) They would be bound by honor (or, rather, ego) to remove the offense. Therefore we will be fighting them even if there were no Israel and no oil beneath their feet.
Life after 11 September has been static. There's the Anti-Taliban War and the Anthrax Scare, but their only effect so far is cheap gasoline due to a general reluctance to travel. It looks like my fellow countrymen will be going nowhere for the next couple of months, except to the malls. That is very good unless you're an airline or a tourist trap, because it frees us from an energy crisis brought on by foreign oil and our stupid addiction to what the gods call an SUV but mere mortals call a van.
A very bad effect of the war and the scare are efforts to restrict freedoms on the Internet. While a crackdown on Internet freedom was inevitable when (1) it was opened to the general public almost ten years ago and (2) the entertainment industry began to see it as a threat last year with the Napster fiasco, the rush to tighter controls has sped up after the 11 September attack.