“Indeed, it has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” - Winston Churchhill

There has been a lot of talk recently concerning the CIA and their interrogation techniques with Terrorism suspects. Specifically, the talk has centered around “secret prisons” in Europe and the fact that the UN can’t go and investigate the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, I suggest that the debate is centering around the wrong tennants. Most of the debate has centered around whether we have been torturing prisoners. I don’t want to minimize the evils of torture. We obviously don’t want to use torture because it undermines our message to dictatorships and it increases the chance that Americans will be tortured when they are captured.

Life seems to be a series of waves that I ride until they crash on shore. Then I wait for the next one and have another go at it. I’m not talking about life fundamentals - those are on a much slower evolution and change much less often, but I’m talking instead about the fun things I do in my life.

Take, for example, my recent fascination with haikus. I don’t even have an event I could pinpoint as the cause. I just saw the snow and remembered how I always loved seeing it fall at night at Cornell. Then, for some reason, I thought the best way to express myself would be a haiku. Now, it seems they are coming to me for all sorts of reasons. And so it will be for a while, until they suddenly stop.

Apparently, MS’s new $400 console is having a lot of problems. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if I plunked down enough money to buy a cheap computer and my video game console didn’t work correctly. However, the real problem for Microsoft is touched upon in this blog.

In the past, such a faux pas would have taken weeks to get attention. One person would have a broken box and think maybe it was just them. After a few weeks of reports, someone at a store like EB would leak the problem to the press and THEN it would be a big deal. That’s how things used to work. Unfortunately for MS, that’s not how they work anymore.

As I spoke with my in-laws last weekend about viruses and anti-virus software makers, they voiced a thought everyone has had at one time or another- perhaps the viruses from Norton and McAfee. After all, why would you spend $40 a year to keep your computer safe if there weren’t any viruses? As I explained to them that, actually, most viruses nowadays come from Organized Crime in an attempt to steal identities, I thought about the fiasco it would be for such a thing to occur. It would be like Microsoft purposely creating a virus for Linux.

Photographic You; Previously avoided; Now in so many!

First winter’s snowfall; Flakes falling from a dark sky; Morning: All is white.

The timing of this holiday is perfect. Coming near the end of the year, there are basically 11 months upon which to look back on. As my wife reminded me last weekend, a lot have happened this year. As a matter of fact, I think this has been the most eventful year of my life. Here are the things I have to be thankful for this year:

May: We both graduated from Cornell with excellent grades; I had two job offers and selected one in the last week of school.

The movie was great and a faithful adaptation of the play. There were only a few differences I didn’t like as much.

--------------- Warning: Spoiler ——————— A lot of the smaller singing parts were converted into speaking parts and that kinda ruined some parts for me. For example, when Angel saves Tom Collins and they sing, it’s a little more evident that they like each other. This isn’t really revealed until later. Also, some of the dialogue isn’t as effective when spoken when compared to singing.

Sarong Party Girl (SPG), who ironically does very little blogging about parties, wrote this hasty article, tackling an issue she talks about a lot - relativism and good & evil. The key point of her post, which has been a theme in some of her other posts is:

At the end, whatever we do, there will never be more good than evil, and good can never triumph, because from someone else’s point of view, what is good for you might not be good for him. We sympathize with the victors as history is written by them.

Rent comes out tomorrow! Ever since I saw the play in NYC I thought about what it would be like as a movie. Tomorrow I’ll get to find out and I’ll let you all know what I thought.