HBO: Not Surprising

Big Love's ratings must be really bad. Why else would HBO be pulling such an outrageous publicity stunt?

For anyone not familiar with the story, Big Love is planning on including an LDS Endowment Ceremony in their next episode. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, this is a sacred ceremony that not everyone can attend. Only worthy members of the church can go to a Temple and be in this ceremony.

It's working. The Church didn't bite (in fact, they urged members not to respond!) But individual members have been organizing protests and boycotts.

When people mock something sacred, it doesn't make the thing less sacred - it makes the mockers less sacred. Don't watch it, but don't give them what they want either. Jesus Christ lived his life not organizing protests against the Pharisees, but teaching love. Let's follow him.

(And for anyone who's tempted to tune in, let me give you this warning: HBO also made Sex and the City. If Big Love is anything like it, it's melodramatic, boring, and has ugly actresses.)

Utah by Habit

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most people who live in Utah are here by habit. It's funny because Utah culture (= Mormon culture, derived from Mormon doctrine) says that you're supposed to pray about big life decisions such as where to live. Most of the people who live here are here because they grew up here. Some of them even have myths about the outside world - that it will be destroyed (not backed by Mormon doctrine), or that it's exceptionally evil (out of ignorance).

Here's what I think. No, I'm going out on another limb - this is the truth. For the most part, God wants Mormons everywhere in the world right now. A Latter-Day Saint can do more good outside of the Great Utah Valley Bubble (GUVB) than inside. And if you haven't considered moving outside of Utah, you haven't adequately "studied it out in your mind."

So rest assured: wherever I end up after graduation, we'll have decided to go there after lots of thinking and lots of prayer. We're not ending up on either side of the GUVB without knowing that it's the right place.

25 Things

In honor of the Facebook "25 Things" fad, here are 25 completely random statements.

1. The word monosyllabic should be monosyllabic! I suggest splag.
   
2. Jack Handey was a genious.
3. I like spelling things wrong (see above.)
4. There will be no #17.
5. They have reruns of The Critic on a channel called Reelz!
6. I have a shirt that says "Keeping South Brunswick Clean."
7. In OpenGL, you rotate by glRotate{df}(angle, x, y, z)
8. In JOGL, you rotate by gl.glRotate{df}(angle, x, y, z)
9. Wii!!!!!!
10. Everybody shout, "What's the big idea?!??!"
11. This song comes from the heart of my bottom. (-Brak, on Brak presents the Brak Album starring Brak)
12. The movie The Santa Clause ruined people for spelling Santa Claus forever.
13. It's really hard to think of 25 completely random things!
14. I bet the movie Arachnophobia causes arachnophobia. They should do a study.
15. People drive bad!
16. My favorite Utah fake swears: Oh my heck, What in the Sam Hill (apparently "Sam Hell" is a term, who knew?), and of course, Good gravy.
17. #4 is a lie.
18. I never said any of these things had to be true.
19. Writing good is hard.
20. It is your birthday.
21. e^ia = cos a + i sin a
    
22. I couldn't figure out how to do a theta in blogger or HTML.
23. I should be doing my homework.
24. There will be no #17.

And the number one thing overheard at the Winter Olympics:
"Why did I come here when I could be home playing Wii????"

Re-dispatching an Event in Flex

There's a trick to re-dispatching a custom event in Flex, and I always forget what it is. Hopefully, I'll remember to look at my own blog the next time I get stuck.

Here are the symptoms this solves: You're dispatching a custom event in one component, then catching that event in another component, only to dispatch it again. But the event never gets to the next component up, which is listening for it.

The reason it's not working is because the flex.events.Event.clone() method is being called when you call dispatchEvent() the second time. All you need to do is override it that function in your custom Event class:

public override function clone():Event{
  return new MyEvent(type, mytype1, mytype2, bubbles, cancelable);
}

This fixes the problem every time, and the re-dispatched event will get to the next component. Of course, if you're doing more than two layers of dispatching to get what you want, you may want to consider a better design, but this is useful as a quick hack.

Don't be a Robot!

I am sick of American politics. Watching the past few debates has reminded me more of two preprogrammed robots than anything. Rather than seeing how their ideas bounce off of each other, they just keep saying the same things over and over again.

We already know how you stand on economic policies! We know what you think about foreign policy! What we want to know is why you think that way. We want to see that you've thought out your stance, not just that you have one! We already know that!

Conversely, here's what my ideal candidate would say:
I acknowledge both that there are benefits to both raising taxes on the upper class, and lowering taxes for everyone. There needs to be a balance between helping the poor and helping the economy. That balance is (insert a thought-out economic policy here). The balance lies there because (insert reasoning why the line is there)

The point here is that Democrats and Republicans both have good ideas, and I have never heard a candidate attempt to take the best of both! (And of course, those two parties don't have a monopoly on good ideas) Robots can be programmed to defend any policy. A human will think about those policies, apply reason, and come up with something better!

Flex Builder in Linux!

I was excited to learn today that Adobe is working on a version of the Flex Builder Eclipse plugin for Linux. It's available now in alpha. It doesn't do some of the design layout stuff yet, but it does do code completion and syntax highlighting. (Besides, only people who hate source code use the design layout tool!)

One word of caution: the plugin currently only works with Eclipse 3.3.x! Ubuntu gave me Eclipse 3.2.2, which didn't work with it, so I tried the latest release, 3.4.1. That one doesn't work either! You need 3.3.x.

Anyway, here's the download page. You get much longer than the standard 60-day evaluation period. Enjoy!

Democrats are Cool

After a lifetime of compulsive TV watching, I've learned some interesting things about politics.

Democrats are cool. Their policies are socially acceptable. They represent the downtrodden, work-class people.

Republicans are socially backward. The only reason they're not as smart as Democrats is because either:

1. They're Southern, and don't know how to read, or
2. They can read, but the only things they read are Christian.

Whether an individual Republican is to be mocked or pitied depends on their belligerence. Ann Coulter, for example, is extremely outspoken, and should be mocked as harshly as possible. Poor, religious people are to be pitied until they start talking about Christianity, at which point they become belligerent.

I'm not making an argument for either side here. I'm simply stating the message of the Viacom Propaganda Machine.