Penny Hero (dot) Net

someone explain to me why there isn’t a decent FREE wordprocessor for OS-X? Note: Neo-office and OpenOffice (with x11) don’t count. Edit: web-based stuff like writely and thinkfree also don’t count. Edit again: I forgot Abiword. It behaves similarly to neo-office only worse. so it also doesn’t count.

It seems that there is enough demand that someone would have developed something natively by now.

wtf.

I need to write my paper and I’m sick of waiting HALF AN HOUR for my mouse-clicks to register in NeoOffice.

Edit for the third time: Let me rephrase my question… I’m not really looking for suggestions on what to use instead of these ones. I’d really like to know why there isn’t a good opensource free alternative for mac like there is with windows and linux. Is it because they have to use java? Is it because mac is hard to program for? are there licensing hurdles that make it hard to write stuff for mac?

I’ve learned the hard way that there are no (legal) alternatives to the problematic options I mentioned above. I’d really like someone smarter than I am to help me understand why.

The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. The Corvallist’s blog post is a much more serious criticism than mine is, but I did write about it too in my blogspot blog. I really want to cross-post it here, but I know how annoying that is to some people. So i’m just going to link to that post: (linky)

Bottom line is that I think Blake is like a terrorist of the pen, and while I’m NOT calling for censorship in the barometer, I do wish they’d have a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking standards for their staff.

I’m not sure if Nathanael Blake is guilty of hijacking a religion to hurt people, but he IS guilty of hijacking a pen (or an apple computer in Snell Hall) to instill anger and hate. Although the article I’m writing about is almost a month old, the Corvallist drew my attention to this and I’m not going to just sit still and say nothing.

Because I’m supposed to be studying, I’m mostly just doing link-plugging here, but there is no way that I can just say nothing. The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. (Go read the Corvallist’s blog post. It’s much more informative and analytical than mine. quote: “Maybe Blake should start by picking up a history textbook. Maybe then he would learn that his statement “Christianity grew on the blood of its martyrs; Islam grew on the blood of its enemies,” is truly laughable. Maybe he hasn’t heard about the Crusades? Or maybe he is blinded by the rose-colored glasses of his own religion, which really makes him closer to the Muslim extremists than to peaceful folks in any religion.”)

I’ve read all of this and of course I’m pissed beyond belief. Nathanael Blake has a ginormous reputation for having the gall to take very non-peaceful and very anger-inciting positions on many issues. Occaisionally, his view is sound and keeps me from taking an extreme liberal side of things. I do sometimes (secretly) enjoy his articles because it reminds me that my viewpoint isn’t the only one on campus. However, most of the time he misinterprets or re-interprets facts and information apparently just to add to the sensationalism of his argument. I’m convinced he creates these columns with the sole purpose of pissing people off, and not with any redeeming motivation like solving any kind of problem or helping people to think more critically about world issues.

This article on islam is exactly the case. It does NOT help people see Islam in a fair light and it contributes to the already huge problem in this country of mistrusting people from the middle east. It looks like he maybe googled for Koran verses frequently cited as in support of violence against women and violence against others and went no further into the book. Instead of writing about how perhaps some of these terrorists are misinterpreting the core values of their religion with the lines he quotes, his article drops a bomb into a race-hate situation that has always been very unstable in the US since 9-11.

Not to suggest that Blake is ever going to be read extensively by many people outside of this little college community… but I’d say he represents what a lot of hate-filled ill-informed christians people really want to believe about their place in the world in relation to Islam.

I am angry at the barometer for being so irresponsible and letting one of their columnists be this racist and ignorant about the world’s largest religion. He’s a victim of his own ignorance if he thinks that Christianity is built on peace and martyrdom.

I am not calling for censorship, but I do wish that the barometer would have a higher standard of intelligence on their staff and when someone wants to post a column like this, that they do it responsibly and NOT attempt to encourage hate for a people who are already hated enough in this country.

So, after my compy being winblows-free for SO LONG, I reinstalled win2k last night on my smaller hard drive so that I could put ubuntu on my newer bigger one, and it’s funny… before I even could finish DOWNLOADING firefox, I was already getting gambling and porn popups and requests to add hotsex38382.com as my homepage. My second step was going to be getting all the updates and stuff, but shit… this was not even HALF AN HOUR after I installed!

Then, this morning, I woke up and installed one tiny thing (a game I miss), and win2k crashes and I have to reboot. hahaha. it can’t even hack 24 hours of uptime! (my machine is probably fucking pissed at me for temporarily removing ubuntu.)

oh well. at least the firmware in my rio karma has been updated after about a year and a half of running on what came with it in the mail.

In Other News: I have a new sore throat. AWESOME.

I’m really fricken annoyed with customer-service conventions and the way they dictate how to answer questions. I asked a pretty direct question, “can I make a payment using a rebate card?” and a simple “no you cannot” would have been fine. Instead they write 5 paragraphs about what things I can do online, like transfer funds between accounts, pay from an outside checking account, etc.

what a waste of time.

I suppose they’ll get fired if they ever just say “no you can’t” or something. that’s ridiculous when it’s a direct yes or no question.

I just had a heated conversation with a friend about how financial aid screws us over a lot… she’s complaining about how some grant she usually gets got decreased, and how she was given a different grant instead and she was trying to understand why they’d “screw her over” like that.

Blah blah blah.

She’s fucking wearing brand-name clothes, and she lives in this 3-story house in north corvallis and her parents are relatively rich. (they have their own business.) What the fuck is she complaining about? She got to go to China or something for a year last year. The pen she’s using alone costs about $10. Jesus fucking christ. I’m sitting here with a $300/month budget, living NOT WITH MY PARENTS, and she’s sitting across from me wearing $75 shoes, saying how we need to set up “some kind of complaint system” to whine about how our lives suck and the government doesn’t give us more money.

“So you live with your family right?”
“yeah.”
“So you don’t have to deal with rent and stuff right?”
“No. Because then I’d have to work.”

Jesus christ. I hate rich whiny people.

I’m probably not the only person insanely irritated by the stupid debate about whether or not Creationism should be taught in school instead of (or along side of) Evolution.

It seems to me that people who believe that ‘Evolution’ or any other scientific theory should be replaced by a creation myth has lost track of what it means to have faith in a creator. Faith is not about proving that God exists or trying to manipulate a religious belief system into explaining physical things that frankly don’t really matter that much anyway. Theology deals with stuff that should be seen as leagues more important than finding out if the layers of that rock over there were created by sedimentation or God’s paint brush. Stuff like loving your family, building a healthy community, raising your children, compassion and selflessness.

I just read this article on BBS News (it was on google news’s front page at the time of this post) and it really started to piss me off. The writer is yet another militant liberal making ALL people of faith look like bush-loving, anti-science cavepeople who are simply wrong about their beliefs.

His tone is hateful, condescending. A quote:

Bush and the ID people are fooling no one. Look who cheers when the president makes such remarks: not scientists–who overwhelmingly reject “intelligent design”–but bible toters, theocrats and preachers. (….) This is not science vs. science. This is poorly disguised religious dogma vs. the fact of evolution.

He goes on to say that Creationists interpret “gaps” in scientific knowledge as evidence that science is at an end and he implies that religious people feel that it is only these scientific gaps that allow room for God at all. He basically characterises people of faith as complete idiots when he says,

Let’s ask creationists: Someday, when these gaps have closed and all your purported examples of “irreducible complexity” have been satisfactorily explained by science, will you abandon your belief in a god?

Hopefully not! Holy fucking shit. when did this become a “you people aren’t allowed to believe in God once science explains everything” issue?

I want to beat someone over the head with a frying pan! Science and religion don’t need to be contradictory entities! Forgive me for taking a stand similar to “can’t we all just get along”, but shit. this is really ridiculous.

I do have to give this writer some credit. His story begins as a criticism of just President Bush and the notion that he is “using his office to legitimize his theistic views, which happen to be the origin myth of the believing bloc that voted him into office,” which I think is a valid criticism and I’m with him on his point of view on that. My favorite quote rhetorically asks if since Bush seems to believe that “both sides ought to be properly taught”, does he advise properly teaching the creation mythologies of other cultures, or other origin theories such as extra-terrestrial origins. Nice one.

But the story degenerates into a spiteful attack on believers that just makes me feel angry at a “fellow liberal”.

*sigh*

Metroid Prime II: Echos is almost too hard to be fun.

I’m not joking.

Remember those ice beasts that shoot freezing ice at you and you can only kill them by exploding their ice-crusted asses and then shooting them until they pop in a neat gory explosion? (heh heh. i liked killing those guys.)

Now picture one of those fuckers as a psycho aggressive lizard, with sharp-ass horns that take out about 25hp a hit, and they shoot not feezing ice, but electricity that follows you the fuck around and comes at you the second you move out of close-combat-with-sharp-ass-horns range. The thing is still only vulnerable after you explode the plating on its ass, but the amount of vulnerable surface area seems to have been halved compared to its ice-beast cousins.

Now picture it with about 4 times the amount of defense and/or hp as the ice versions, and imagine that it can also swim, and will proceed to chase after you as soon as it sees you, no matter how long you hang out in another room hoping it will stop scraping at other side of the door hoping you’ll come back.

Now imagine that these fuckers always come in pairs.

I’ve died more times (3 times) fighting these lizard things than I have in any of the bloody boss fights (1 time so far).

I hate them. Deeply. I need a weapon-upgrade or something.

It’s just so totally awesome when I search and search and search my bank’s website and my account pages looking for the answer to a specific and simple question, finally give up and email customer support, and then not five minutes later I find what I’m looking for.

The same kind of thing seems to happen when I’m trying to figure out a problem with my computer too. I’ll google and google and finally give up and ask someone, and then I’ll suddenly find my answer.

I wish I could email the support system again and tell them to ignore my first email, but I don’t think it works that way.

[insert transitional material here]

Metroid Prime 2 arrived on Monday. Yay for ebay and accidental winning it for 20something dollars. Tuesday was my day off, so guess what i did all day long. Needless to say, by 9pm yesterday evening, I was pretty gross. Unshowered, still in pjs, smelling of garlic (I ate nothing but spicy garlic fried rice)…but I completed 22% !! The game is pretty cool. Targeting system isn’t as fast as in the first one, and there are way too few save points, but whatever. It makes me happy.

I’ve really got nothing brilliant or intelligent to say right now.

Suck my pee pee, microsoft!

“Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.” (source)

I’m a student! a busy one! You don’t really expect me to enjoy having to STILL learn two ways of making shit work, do you?

*grumbles*

In Other News: in my first final, our instructor accidentally handed out exams for Eng211. That was a riot. we all wrote our names on them of course, and briefly panicked as none of the passages or questions were remotely familiar. About 1/4th of the class is actually IN 211 too, so they got a free peek. heh. Academic dishonesty anyone?