Chris Meller

OK, I know I’m going to get bashed for this, but I don’t care. I think I have a valid point, and that’s all that matters… I certainly don’t mean any offense towards those in the mists of mourning over their loss. If you are one of these people, just try to picture this from a 3rd party perspective and appreciate the humor and point as intended.

Through this sincere post, I found a link to this story in the Houston Chronicle about a 21 year old Yale student who was killed while cycling cross-country with four of her fellow students.

Please read the rest of the story out of respect for the poor girl and her friends and family. However, I will paste here the part of the story I found of consequence:

Rachel *******, 21, of Houston, the daughter of Houston patent attorney Howard ******* and Melinda *******, a teacher, was a graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, where she had studied the vocal arts. “Rachel had a very full, but short life,” said Howard *******. At Yale, ******* was majoring in music history, said her mother. “Even though she has enough talent to perform, that can be a very tough life. Her ambition was to go on to graduate school and become a music history professor for a top-notch university,” Melinda ******* said.

So, let me get this straight… She studied vocal arts at one of those preppy exclusive high schools for the “gifted” and then went on to Yale on mommy and daddy’s dime to study in the glorious field of music history.

W
T
F
?!

Honestly, I think this is just Darwin in action… God decided this girl was wasting her life so horribly that there was simply no reason for her to continue on to its inevitable end. Why not just save her 70+ years of misery and skip to the end of the movie?

I mean, come on… I bet she even thought she knew all about the “typical teenage experience” too, didn’t she? What with her public school upbringing (ha, riiiggghhhttt) and her ivy league higher education, she was an expert on the topic. To top it all off, once she got out of Yale, she had no need to go get a summer job like the rest of America, but rather had nothing more important or pressing on her schedule than to take a bike trip across the country?

The way I see it, it was just mother nature evening out the system. She saw a horrible injustice being done by further attempting to propagate this wanna-be field of study (music history?!) and got rid of a future source of misery for many many students.

But hey, that’s just me?

Author’s Disclaimer: As noted above, I have nothing against this girl, nor her family. I do not know her personally and could be totally wrong about her life in general. I’m simply attempting to illustrate the way common media is able to twist and portray every situation in any light they desire, and how the classes of American society have become so greatly divided that some “Ivy Leaguers” could have nothing better to do than ride bikes for fun during their summer sabbatical while others are struggling to help their family provide groceries next month. This is more of a commentary on the state of society as a whole, rather than that of a single life in particular.

Update: After reading this entry, please direct your attention to the comments below. There are some very sincere and heartfelt views expressed which I have not and did not intend to address in this post. Before commenting, they deserve your time as well…

Update 2: As requested by Brian Barnes, a grieving friend of Rachel, I have removed all occurrences of her last name and replaced them with ******* in the hopes that Google and Yahoo! will both re-index my site sometime in the near future and remove the old entry, preventing further mishaps such as this. I will soon do the same for all comments listed on this page…

It was Father’s Day today, which means the entire family gathered at my grandparents’ house for lunch. Of course, “entire” is such a relative term. Half the family had to work and couldn’t come, 1/4 randomly didn’t show up, and yet another percentage best not show their faces in this county again because someone would kill them, then go to work on them…

Anyhow, one constant with these “mini-reunions” is that at some point we’ll get into family politics. Who’s done what, who’s moving where, etc. etc. Most of the time we have a united opinion on things, but occasionally there are mixed feelings and emotions expressed.

During these mixed sessions, I prefer to sit back and observe. The observant third party can easily sit back and start to see the lines form early on in the conversation, whereas the person who’s getting more and more hot-headed as the topic progresses is too wrapped up in the matter to notice. They can’t see the forest for the trees, as it were.

Even if I do feel strongly about a topic personally, I rarely chime in with my opinion. I mean, honestly, what is the point of getting all worked up in an argument? If the opposite party is confident enough in their decision and stance to argue with you in the first place, then the chances of you actually changing their mind, regardless of the legitimacy of your claims, is virtually non-existent.

Besides, it’s often much more fun to sit back and watch the situation unfold before you with an objective eye for both sides. Only then can you truly come out of the argument and form your own opinion based on all the cool logical facts.

I was reading one of the blogs in my news reader yesterday, which I hadn’t really kept up with for a while now. I read an entry he posted on Wednesday, where he stumbled upon a site that had linked to his excellent entry on How to Blog.

In his entry, Tony gives a bunch of tips for blogging. His most important note is that you should blog every day. Don’t worry about the content or the quality. Just blog every day. After all, practice makes perfect, right?

In this woman’s entry, she says that you shouldn’t blog daily. Instead, you should edit this shit out of everything. And then edit the shit out of it again. And after the 17th time you’ve done this, 6 to 8 months later, you should post it on your blog.

This is obviously a woman who was brought up with traditional journalism training. When you’re writing for a magazine or a newspaper, you don’t publish random things (at least, you’re not supposed to… Modern media seldom abides by rules of the trade(s)). No, instead you write the column, your editor reads and edits the shit out of it, then his editor reads and edits the shit out of it, and so forth. A month later, it actually makes it into your publication.

Unfortunately, blogging doesn’t work that way (wait, who am I kidding? It’s great that it doesn’t work that way!). No, with blogging, the idea isn’t to give a totally professional view of the topic you’re discussing. Instead, you’re here to give us your biased one-sided stance on why you think you’re right and everyone else has lost it. Since you’re already breaking the Golden Rule of journalism (objectivity), the rest doesn’t really matter.

Blog every day or every other day or once a week, just make sure it’s from the heart and gets your point across. Don’t FORCE yourself to blog every day, if you don’t have that much time or creativity to put into it. Once it becomes a chore, it’s lost its point…

Ed Bott, the author of an excellent Windows tips blog I subscribe to, had a request today. He wanted a “Simple / Short URL” system he could use to create permanent links for the book he’s publishing. Rather than risking dead URLs as soon as the book is published, he wanted a dynamic system that would allow him to link to one place and then go back and update any dead links in the future.

You can read his entire post here.

Welp, I thought this was an interesting idea. Since I had never heard of a pre-packaged system for providing this functionality, I thought I’d help him (and possibly others) out… I wrote one myself using PHP and MySQL.

If you’re looking for a similar system, or just want to look at my code, check out the system and source code at http://dacnomm.com/simpleurl/!

This post is in response to this post by Asa Dotzler (a member of the Firefox team). It should really be read before you keep reading this…

I agree with all the points you’ve made against the new tabs, but isn’t there something to be said for their willingness to listen to user requests and make an attempt (finally) to meet them?

Tabbed browsing has already been confirmed for IE7. The MSN Toolbar team was just doing what they could (remember, they’re not the IE team, just the addon guys) to try and grant user requests a little earlier. Sure it’s a hack, but what can you expect from an ADD-ON that makes no changes to a browser that wasn’t originally designed to perform this function?

Personally, I find the feature totally useless, but the effort made to present it admirable. I think we should at least give a little acknowledgement of the hard work these guys have obviously put in over on Microsoft Way…