TRMW Archives

* FYI, this stuff is old. The current TRMW is here.

March 26, 2003

While staying at my parents house, I have been enjoying the luxury of satellite TV. The variety of information available is amazing. Yesterday, I watched coverage of the war in Iraq on CNN, DW-TV in Berlin, and throughout the Middle-East. I found this last program on a channel called Worldlink TV. They show in-depth news coverage and documentaries from all over the world, with English subtitles. Fascinating.

Following a link I saw on that channel last night, I came upon an International Appeal from Birzeit University in the West Bank, one of the Isreali occupied territories in Palestine. It seems that the Isreali military has set up a checkpoint along the road to the university which is effectively preventing the students from reaching their classes. As a result, the university is on the verge of closure. I urge you to read this page, and consider signing one of these appeals to the Isreali government.

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March 23, 2003

This year I have chosen to celebrate my last ever Spring Break by having my tonsils out. So here I am, back home in rural Auburn, California, floating in a sea of movies, war coverage, parental love, and liquid vicodin. The organs in question came out two days ago, and I am handling it pretty well. I am in a lot less pain than I thought I would be at this point. In fact, I even ate solid food last night! All in all, I am enjoying the enforced downtime and using the opportunity to stay fully up-to-date on the sadly-now-unfolding war in Iraq.

Yes, I am against this war. I feel that it will harm America’s security interests more than it will help them. It will do this by further radicalizing the Islamic world, and alienating crucial allies, whom we need to cooperate with in order to share important intelligence regarding terrorist threats.

Also, America cannot afford this war. We have a monstrous deficit, and yet GW has proposed a budget which makes no allowances for war costs, while offering up a massive tax cut. Meanwhile, the school year in Oregon has been shortened almost a full month, due to lack of funding.

And of course, people will die. I don’t want to see and human beings, Iraqi or American, die unless it is absolutely unavoidable. I do not feel that this is the case. I am happy to say that my representative in the House of Congress, Earl Blumenauer, agrees with me. I wrote him a letter today, expressing my support for his efforts to speak for the anti-war stance within the current hawkish administration. He has also proposed the “Bike Commuter Act” which will provide a tax cut for people who ride their bikes to work. Sounds sweet to me!

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March 7, 2003

So the Blogger website has this thing up for a free trail of this strange service called Audblog. The way it works is that you call up this number and speak and it records an mp3 of your voice and automatically posts is to your blog (if you don’t know what a blog is: you are reading one). I thought it would convert my words to text, which would have been cooler, though I had no idea how that could possibly work. Anyway, I gave it a (free) try, and you can click on the little icon thingy below to hear the results. This is me at the end of a long week, feeling tired, trying to make myself excited about the weekend, and about to procrastinate by messing around on the internet before getting back to work. It gets cut off at the end.

Audblog Post

(click)

In other news, there is an awesome indie press store here in Portland called Reading Frenzy, and I have spent the last half hour checking the links on their site. One of them eventually led to this, which is really pretty odd and funny. Also, this is a really cool little creative forum, so check it out.

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Blast from the present!