Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Sailing Away

Sunday, August 18th, 2002

OK, I really really promise to get the photo gallery up and run­ning, since I’ve got tons of cool pho­tos to put up. Espe­cially all the shots I’ve been tak­ing while rac­ing on Mis­tral (there’s a small site com­ing soon for that too), a Beneteau First 35.5′

Most of the races have been in Bis­cayne Bay, although we did have one at the end of June from Miami to Bimini, which was just ter­rific. Much more detail about my rac­ing expe­ri­ences will be placed in the Mis­tral mini-site, and if there’s really cool stuff I’ll post it here too :-)

Sigh…my to-do list con­tin­ues to grow…

Categories:

• Life

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Write for a Reason

Thursday, August 15th, 2002

There’s a really good arti­cle on ALA this week (well, two really, but I like this par­tic­u­lar one the best): 10 Tips on Writ­ing the Liv­ing Web, by Mark Bern­stein

I promise I will read it at least twice :-)

Seri­ously, even though there are a lot of good com­ments and con­cepts in this arti­cle, my per­sonal favorite is “Write for a rea­son”. Too often I find peo­ple (busi­nesses, copy­writ­ers, indi­vid­u­als post­ing to blogs, whomever) just putting some­thing out there, no mat­ter how triv­ial or super­fi­cial (not super­flu­ous mind you ;-) just so they have some­thing to show.

Effort is some­thing I miss when read­ing lately; it is clear that folks are turn­ing into machines, sim­ply churn­ing out con­tent as needed. It’s a lit­tle sad, and I’ve been guilty of it myself from time to time.

Write for a reason.

Categories:

• Uncategorized

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Persecuting Christians

Wednesday, August 14th, 2002

My quar­tet sang for our Bass’s church this past Sun­day morn (two ser­vices), noth­ing com­pli­cated, just our Gospel Med­ley and the Irish Bless­ing. Both were very well received, and we sold some tapes and CDs to boot.

How­ever: Part of the deal was that I actu­ally had to sit through each ser­vice and do my best to look like I was pay­ing atten­tion. The prob­lem with it is that occa­sion­ally I actu­ally did pay atten­tion, and what I heard pissed me off.

The pas­tor was in the mid­dle of his ser­mon, and started talk­ing about some Chris­t­ian radio talk show he had been recently lis­ten­ing to, and went on to men­tion this woman who called in and said that P.C. no longer stands for Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness, but instead stands for Per­se­cut­ing Chris­tians. The pas­tor then went on to say that this kind of com­ment, while extreme, is not entirely with­out merit. He said there are peo­ple in our coun­try who would like to pre­vent Chris­tians from prac­tic­ing their reli­gion, from pro­mot­ing the “Word of God ™”, from actu­ally being Chris­tians, and that all Chris­tians must be strong and fight for their right to preach their faith!

It was that last line that really got me hot under the col­lar. I’ve been a prac­tic­ing Agnos­tic for many years (that’s some­what tongue-in-cheek), and one thing that has always bugged me about Chris­tians (in my expe­ri­ence, it’s always that bunch) is how many of them force their faith and beliefs on unsus­pect­ing bystanders. I had a friend when I was about 10 who, when he asked me about God and I replied “I don’t believe in god, I need more proof”, pro­ceeded to tell me that I was going to hell if I didn’t believe in God, and that I would be for­ever damned. He was my age. His fam­ily wasn’t a crazed bunch of bleeding-edge reli­gious lunatics, they were “nor­mal” chuch-going folk. They moved from our street a few years later, and his par­ents actu­ally attend the church that my girlfriend’s parents/grandparents attend (and prior to meet­ing me, my girl­friend had known this family…of course, Lau­ren and I lived just a few blocks from each other for about 7 years when we were much too young to have been dat­ing, but that’s another story for another day).

Don’t worry, Lau­ren isn’t religious :-)

I’ve been preached to so many times by so many dif­fer­ent peo­ple that I’ve com­pletely lost count. My ex-girlfriend was a Catholic (she was a lovely girl, but I still think Catholics are the worst of the bunch), and even she couldn’t resist the occa­sional reminder that I was prob­a­bly not going to heaven, even though I was more of a ” Good Chris­t­ian” in my behav­ior than many church-goers she knew. All because think­ing oth­er­wise went against her belief system.

Now, I don’t want peo­ple to have to stop believ­ing in their faith, nor am I going to tell peo­ple that I think they are wrong, and that it’s sad to see so many intel­li­gent peo­ple act­ing like a dumb flock of sheep, etc. etc. What I do want is for peo­ple to keep their beliefs to themselves.

I don’t force my silence or neu­tral­ity upon oth­ers, and I would appre­ci­ate if oth­ers would be so kind as to not force their beliefs upon my ears.

Categories:

• Life

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VerisignOff

Sunday, August 4th, 2002

Down with Verisign!

This quaint lit­tle site/blog/portal is ded­i­cated to get­ting the word out about Verisign’s shady busi­ness prac­tices, not to men­tion their poor ser­vice, high prices, etc.

Verisig­nOff is now one of my favorite sites :-) See the brand new link on the right!

Categories:

• Internet

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The Last Haiku

Friday, August 2nd, 2002

Of course:

Con­so­la­tion Champs: Eric Meyer on CSS Contest

For my final attempt:

.pleading>begging {

Poor designer waits
Can’t afford to buy the book
Needs to win contest

}

This is my last one
So good luck to all who tried
May the best one win

Categories:

• Programming

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