Month: May 2001 (Page 2 of 7)

I told my father I wanted to be a teacher.
Wouldn’t you rather be a doctor? he said.
It’s a noble profession, and you could become wealthy.
That may be true, I said.
But without teachers, where would doctors come from?

Who would have thought that a bastion of capitalism would provide such an eloquent, simple argument for education? Why can’t traditional educational organizations be as eloquent?

One manifesto I can definitely get behind. (except for 13b)

Photographic memory

My grandfather was quite a photographer, as it turns out. This picture, of my grandmother and her brother, as well as the one of my mother I posted on Mother’s Day, were scanned in from a huge collection of 3D slides my grandfather took from about 1950 to 1955. I’m struck by the different look everything had: not alien, but slightly exotic. This slide is a good example of this, I think. It’s like an alternate universe.

Watched “The Dish” tonight, about the radio telescope in Australia that relayed audio and TV signals of the moon landing. It’s truly amazing to think about how more than 30 years ago, with only a fraction of the technology we have today, people gathered around their televisions to watch a live broadcast from the moon.

A live broadcast from the moon.

It’s also sad that it was a purely political exercise, and once we’d achieved it there was no motivation to continue the exploration. Watching this movie tonight, though, reminded me that there were a lot of people for whom the moon landing meant something more than just a political race with the Russians – for them, it was about exploration, and reaching beyond the bounds of ourselves. Where is that spirit today?

It’s a sad thing to lose a friend. No matter how much hell they put you through, no matter how much you sometimes wish you’d never met, it’s hard not to think about the times when things were good. Everyone you meet changes you, in good ways and bad ways. Being without those changes, even the bad ones, means your life is a little less full. Sometimes it’s hard to let go, but realizing when people are destined to cause you pain is as important as hanging on to the people who mean the most.

We take our friends for granted way too much. And few things are more important than good friends.

Best ‘Star Trek’ captain: James T. Kirk.

I find it incredibly cool that the heretofore pretty much unknown Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont is now the most important person in American politics. Take that, Mr. Pseudo-President.

If you could go back in time and talk to your 14-year-old self, what would you say?

Got my Blogger t-shirt in the mail today. My fragile sense of self-worth received a welcome boost.

I’ve said this before, but why is web hosting so difficult? First the ISP that hosts several of my client sites has a “catastrophic failure” that causes the sites to be down for, at this writing, a day and a half. Then the BlogSpot server, which hosts some of my favorite weblogs (you guys know who you are), is down for more than a day, and even non-BlogSpot blogs that use BlogVoices are slowed to a crawl. If American society can produce Oreos that change the color of milk, we should be able to serve web pages with some regularity.