First Black President

My family adores my son Jonathan. There is no question he is viewed as a jewel in my mother's crown of 18 grandchildren. As the youngest (potentially for good), he has a special place. My grandfather, even though he has yet to meet Jonathan, feels a great sense of pride on how loving his family is.

That said, I am always struck when they (both my mom and grandfather) dream of Jonathan being the first black president of the united states. They do it in pride (he is a bright little boy) but my comeback is "Boy I sure hope we don't have to wait 35 more years for a black president!". I hope Jonathan gets to settle for the second or third, or maybe he will just settle for the first black Ghezzo. Not a bad first in my book. Hopefully the first of many.

G

My latest addictions

In the process of trying to do two good things (lose weight and learn Ruby), I have picked up two new addictions:

SparkPeople: On on line diet resource http://www.sparkpeople.com/myspark/loginpage.asp?whereFrom=nutrition.asp . I am using it to track what I eat and when I exercise. However they give you points for doing things like reading articles and posting to their newsgroups. Oh for the love of points!

43 Things: A list : http://www.43things.com/. This application is built on Ruby (maybe even Ruby on Rails). It is a community way to make a list of things you want to do with your life and find others who are doing it, have done it. Kind of cool, kind of lame.

My hope is that sparkpeople sticks (at least until I lose 20 pounds) and 43Things fade.

We will see,
G

When do you have a right to choose?

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/wireStory?id=1702992

I believe the "Pro-Choice" camp are full of crap. They are all about abortion, period. I question their motives for putting their energy into killing pre-born children. I don't see how you can see a pregnancy as anything but a baby. My son Jonathan was born 6 weeks early on November 19th. To many people it would have been ok to have planned to kill him on November 20th, if he happened to still be located inside his birth mother. I thank God often that his birth mom was not one of "them". (ok, ok, I few of my closest friends are "them" so I am not as rabid as I sound today).

Which brings me to "Roe vs Wad for Men". I be you NOW (National Organization for Women ... year right) is NOT backing Mr Matt Dubay. I bet they are agreeing with me today, that Mr Dubay had a choice to not have sex, to use protection or something, BEFORE he conceived his daughter. So are you really pro-choice? If so are you supportive of men making the choice too? I hope not, for the sake of society and children, I hope you choice life ... all the time.

G

Programming Languages

Interesting article on various programming languages by Steve Yegge. Unfortunately it took me three times the normal speed to read it because I had to look up not only words (what is a polyglot) but also references (I obviously know nothing about Perl or Larry Wall). This article is like a good movie or a bad diet ... it leaves me wanting more but realizing it takes way too much time to satisfy.

Thank you to Tim Bray for pointing me here.
G

Joey Cheek on the Wheaties Box

I feel a great pride in seeing this: http://msn.foxsports.com/Olympics/story/5372152
Apparently Wheaties has decided to put Joey Cheek on the box! Yea! The day after Joey Cheek donated his Olympics winnings to "Right to Play" I wrote Wheaties to recommend him for the box. I got a polite response which I read as "Thanks but don't hold your breathe".
Seeing this story made my day!

Ginny