I just read a post by Philip Van Hoof discussing his decision to not travel to the US. Having read many of his other politically-oriented post, I’d say we have quite similar political views. I take issue however with this last post however; not because of the political views expressed but rather the action (or lack thereof) taken.

First a little background. I left the US in 1999 largely due to my discontent with the American system. Bill Clinton was President at the time. I lived in Berlin, Germany until very recently and also spent quite a bit off time in the Sweden. Ironically, I moved back to the US at a time when the worst President in history is in office. The system and the President have only gotten worse. So why am I back. Basically just to get my education.

Actually, what I wanted to mention was the experiences that my wife, Annika, had when she told friends she was applying for a greencard to the US. Most of her friends responded with open disapproval. They couldn’t realise why someone like Annika would want to go to a place so backwards and with such a militant regime in power. Most all of the people who responded like that had never been to the US. Those who had been to the US where much more understanding of her decision.

A nice parallel when I hear people take this line is to ask them if they’d go to Italy (this was when Belesconi was in power). Most would answer positively and many admit that they had just recently been there. When you ask these same people if they thought Belesconi was more or less as bad as Bush, they’d mostly agree. There seems to be a double standard. Also with this logic the UK should be a no-go zone as well.

Another thing is that the US has a very large progressive community. Bush does not have the support of the majority of Americans. Nor does he or his regime give even a small picture of the US. It’s the diversity in the US that I longed for when in Europe. I believe you are only doing yourself a disservice when you cut yourself off from a full understanding of the US. For all its fucked-upness, I most admit it’s a very stimulating place.

To close I’ll quote, as well as I can remember, what an Iraqi who had asylum in Sweden said to me when I apologized to him for my countries bombing of his country. He said to me, “You know, it’s not about what those in power do. It’s us the people like you and me talking now. You have nothing to apologize for.” I still felt like I needed to apologize but what he said is exactly right. We can’t let the politics, no matter how fucked up, or lines drawn in sand separate what should rightfully be united: People. Polorization plays right into the hand of the neo-cons.

That said, if you want to refuse to come into the because of the finger-printing eye-scanning mumbo jumbo, I’m all with you.

I mentioned a few posts back that RyanAir also thinks the security measures at airports are a farce. Well, it also seems like they have a sense of humor about it. The following image can be found through this link.

The caption is “NEW AIRPORT SECURITY PROCEDURES, PUT FUN BACK INT0 FLYING”

UPDATE: Just noticed this was on Boing Boing.

Yesterday, Josh left after a short visit here in San Diego. He came over from Atlanta to do some interviews for design jobs. This was the first time we had seen each other for a couple years and also his first time on the west coast.

He arrived late on Tuesday after driving down from Redwood City, where he was visiting another friend, and interviewing for a job in LA. First thing we did was get a Little Caesar’s $5 cheese pizza and go to the park to eat and chat. The next day we went to Ocean Beach where we had to wait about 2 hours for the marine layer to break-up during which time we strolled along the main drag and eventually onto the longest pier on the west coast. Once the sky was clear, we discovered that the water in the Pacific is freakin’ cold this time of year. After forcing ourselves to get in, we quickly turned back. We had to be satisfied with just sunning ourselves on the beach.

For lunch we went to the best and one of the cheapest mexican places in town, Pokéz. This place is awesome for anyone but it gets plus points from vegetarians and vegans for thier great tofu and veggie options. I got a Chimichanga and josh got a Tofu Burrito. We ended up splitting them. After that we visited Waid and soon thereafter went to bed.

The next day Josh had an interview at a really snazzy design firm in Santa Monica so we got on the road at 7am so there would be no chance of him being late for his 12pm interview. While Josh was in the interview, I walked around The shopping area and ended up spending most of my time at Barnes and Nobles reading up about universities, majors and other school related stuff. Once we met up we headed to Venice Beach which turned out to be really cool. They have a very interesting bunch of street performers there. Unfortunately, when we where leaving Josh backed into a sign. But he has insurance for the rental car so it should be no problem; just a couple small scratches.

On Friday we were both a bit tired so we just hung out and surfed the net for half the day. For lunch we went to Pokéz again. It’s that good. We eventually decided to go see the Padres since we had nothing better to do. We walked to the park which takes about an hour from South Park. on the way Josh a six pack of beer that he wanted to take into the ball park. A couple weeks the folks at the gate had said nothing when I brought in a can of Root Beer so I though it’d be ok. Well, after buying our tickets, we went to the security checkpoint were the lady found the 6-pack and refused to allow the beer in. Josh was upset and said something like, “I just paid 30 fuckin’ dollars!” I took the beer and told here we’d drink a couple then come in. Of course, my intention was to go try our luck at another entrance. Well, the guy at securty checkpoint #2 was an old, probably, retired guy. He acting like he was checking the bag and let Josh through. We chuckled a little once we were through. We then chuckled alot when we found out that the free hand-out that night was a cup. So now, Josh had his beer and a cup to drink it with.

Surprisingly, Josh really liked the experience of the game. Our seats were in the upper deck on the right side. On that side you get a great view of downtown. To get Josh to go to the game I had to really stress that going to see baseball doesn’t have to be about the game. After the game he agreed. Actually we rarely watched the game. Just to the right of us there was a group of kids who were acting up. The two idiots of the group provided everyone with some laughs. For over half the game they had been play fighting and smoking. While “fighting” the two guys got entagled and ended up falling 2 rows into some empty seats. The guy that was sitting in front of them, who was already annoyed, just flipped out and started screaming. Once the guy as finished and turned back around the kids, along with most everyone else, all laughed under there breath. The two idiots decided to smoke another pair of cigarettes. The screaming man got out of his seat to look for security. At this point the group decided to leave the area and that was the end of that.

Other Josh’s obsessing over a small scratch on his rental car, I thought the visit went quite well. Now I’m here all alone again. But only 2 days till I restart my studies after 9 year break.

Last week I found myself in the middle of a car chase. That’s right, a real helicopters-overhead, cops-in-hot-persuit car chase. I’ve even got proof.

While looking for a link to an article about the car chase, I happened upon an article with a small video. If you view the video, I’m the guy on the scooter passing the stolen car in the first seconds. I’m on my lime green Vespa with a white helmet.

While filling my Vespa up at the 7-Eleven on Fern st., I saw 2 police cars race by. Once I was finished getting gas, I got on my scooter and headed north on 30th. Just before reaching Switzer Canyon I noticed a dark grey car coming over the hill. The first strange thing I noticed was that the tires were shredded. There was a young guy driving. He looked completely relaxed; even had his arm resting out the window. He was travelling about 20-30 mph. When I was able to see over the car I noticed a line of about 15 cop cars following neatly behind; in not-so-hot pursuit.

By the time I realized that I could possibly be in some kind of danger, I had already passed the car. I pulled over till the cops passed and contimued on. A few meters ahead I saw another cop rolling in what seemed to be a spike strip. That would have sucked to have gone over that thing on my scooter.

Read the article for the details. And more photos.

All I could do was laugh at the situation. I’m fairly new to California and I get in a car chase just like on TV! How weird is that. First thing I did was go tell Waid. He later said he saw me on the news, which I’m assuming was the footage in the article.

Well, at least it wasn’t a tank.

Just read Chris Toshok’s blog entry about his experience with airport security. In it, he had the bravery to confess he had taken a bottle of visine on board. I commend you for you bravery Chris.

As it turns out, I also have a confession to make.

About a year or so after the September 11th attacks, I inadvertently took a Leatherman multi-tool on board my flight across the Atlantic. After I arrived home from the airport and started unpacking, I discovered it. It was in the front pocket of my carry-on backpack. I would have thought something like that would have been very easy to spot.

After looking at and thinking how crazy it was that it got through, I got this huge sense of relief that they actually didn’t find it. I had visions of marathon interogations and some FBI agent grilling me about why I had it. I’d be saying, “I forgot it was there.” He’d say, “Who are you working with?” And that would go on and on till they were convinced I was harmless. Of course, the plane would be grounded and the airport would be shut down. You know, the usual stuff they do when someone forgets they are carrying a camping tool with sharp edges.

Also in line with the subject of this entry, the RyanAir boss also thinks the security measures are a farce.

Tonight I went to a Padres vs. San Francisco game and while the game itself was very eventful, even more eventful was the dispute that came about after the guy sitting in front of me semi-shouted out, “Go Home Homos!” in response to some Giants fans chanting “Let’s Go Giants.”

The dispute started just after the go-home-homos guy’s friend was yelling out “STEROIDS!… BALCO!…etc.” extremely loudly at Barry Bonds about 15 times and caused a guy next to me to quite aggressively tell him to stop the yelling. Well then the steroid-yelling guy stated his rights and mentioned that thing about living in a free country and all. Well, I took this opportunity to tell the go-home-homo guy that I found what he said to be much worse and that it was offensive. He said “Sorry, if I offended you” and I said he probably offended more people than myself. So after the 2 other guys got finished everything simmered down and the guy who told the steroid-yelling guy to stop left.

A while later the two guys go on and on about how everybody around us, shouting anything at all, should just shut up. This was meant sarcastically of course. Eventually, I remarked (which I probably could/should have refrained from) that I think it was more the way he were yelling and the repetitiveness of it that ticked the guy off. –I was REALLY annoyed too but I’d have probably never said anything.– Well, he took the repetitive thing and ran. “The guy with the popcorn is repetitive. He should shut up.”, “The people over there are repetitive. They should shut up.”

We somehow got talking again and I mentioned that the only reason I got into it was that I took offense to the “Go Home Homos!” remark. During the little discussion about whether “homo” is offensive, the go-home-homos guy brings up some guy’s name that I’m not familiar with and repeats, “You don’t know who so-and-so is?” disbelievingly a couple times. I tell him I may not know the guy because I’ve been outside the country for much of my life. He asks me, “where I was?” and I reply, “Berlin.”

He rares back with his eyes widened, as if he’s gotten me now, and blurts out something to the effect off, “Germans fucking burn people over there!” Taken aback I tell him that Germans, including my wife, would take offense to that, being that we were on the subject of offensiveness. He then said something to the effect of “Your wife burned 6 million people in gas chambers.”

At this point I took out my still/video camera which actually helped to intensify the encounter because I simply had to get this stupidity recorded. The steroid-yelling guy says he doesn’t want to be filmed and I tell him he’s in public and I have the rights in this country as he had taught us earlier. He then precedes to tell me to “Go back to Germany and kill some people.” and then insult my wife, which I was later told by our self-appointed mediator, was an attempt to start a fight. Being that I haven’t been around aggressive people in at least decade I didn’t detect this intention. Looking back at the video it was very much an attempt to start a fight. I later explained to them that a fight with me would be the other guy hitting me, me falling and me being hurt.

It basically goes on and on in circles with the “mediator” talking about how I started it (which could be true if you think people shouldn’t object when people say blatantly offensive things) and that the go-home-homos guy was only responding back to an insult by the Giants fans. Our “mediator” claimed that an opposing team rooting for their visiting team in a home stadium is an insult to the home-tea fans. Therefore, insults such as “Go Giants”, “Let’s Go Giants”, “Come on Giants” warrants counter insults such as “Go Home Homos!”

Basically, the three were against me and our “mediator”, who wasn’t there when the “Homo!” comment was made by the way, got the others to apologize and then demanded that I do the same. I didn’t, due to the fact that they were suggesting I apologize for objecting to the “Go Home Homo!” comment. I should have apologized for taking out the video camera, though. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time because it had long been turned off. The camera was a little much and if you guys are reading this, I do apologize for that. And no, I’m not putting it on the net.

I guess the question is if one should even say anything when someone says such things. I think one should. The way I judge it; if you can’t say it to someone’s face, it’s a pretty good sign its insulting and offensive. When this is based on race, sexual orientation, religion or similar it becomes a societal issue. That’s my justification anyway.

Now to answer the question of whether “homo” is offensive; according to these links, “Homo” is very much offensive. “Gay” or “Lesbian” (for women) are preferred and “Homosexual” is acceptable.

One of their arguments was that “homo” is the equivalent to “black”. Of course, I dare say you’d here anyone call out “Go Home Blacks” without hearing some objections. This is explained well here.

True, gay people aren’t widely hated. But fear of a way of life that is foreign to a large part of this country plays a huge role. A lack of understanding prevents empathy, which is why homo doesn’t have the same taboo attached to it as “wop,” “kike” or “chink.”

As an aside, I found it very odd that during the steroid-yelling guys attempts to make me a fighting man, his tactic was to ask me if I liked to suck cock, take it up the ass and so forth. I seems to me that being that the whole point of me saying anything in the first place was to fight homophobia in my own little way, that that wouldn’t be very effective. Doesn’t the fact that such “insults” are used to make “real men” fighting mad show how ingrained homophobia is?

These guys are basically good guys and I know that. I heard quite a few things about George Bush I would agree with, for example. My one insult was that I called the guy an asshole after the “Wife burning Jews” comment and the other guy too, I think, after his insults. The justification of this I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader. Everything got really heated, extremely stupid things were said and my bringing out the camera probably made things worse.

I’ll end by listing things we agreed on:

1. The Padres should’ve won.
2. Bush is an asshole.
3. Germans gassed ~10mill people.
4. Barry Bonds juiced.
5. Food is way too expensive at the ball park.
6. We probably don’t want to encounter each other again.
7. There are homosexuals in San Francisco.

By the way, The Padres lost in the 13th inning. Bummer.

I’ve been in San Diego nearly a week now. The heat wave that was still in effect the first couple days I was here has seemed to have passed. It was still not as bad as it was in Berlin, though.

The first day I had my lovely little scooter (Vespa p200e) on the road a lady backed into it and knocked it over in front of Big Lots near 30th and University. I was coming out of the bank when I saw her struggling to get it upright again. It caused damage along the left side as well as big dent on the right side. Two days after this happened my new neighbor did the same thing. The second fall caused a few additional imperfections. I now have a short clutch lever, which I actually like, and a big dent on the left side to match the right. I hope that was it. Poor scooter.

I went to the city college to get all the info I need about signing up for courses. I’ve got some special issues with my transcripts and was glad to hear that everything will be ok. I’m looking forward to getting back to school. I’ve been brushing up on my algebra and geometry skills. I’d like to transfer into the Computer Engineering program at SDSU although I’m also thinking it would be nice to major in something like Physics in order to widen my possibilities. I’ve got time to decide, still.

I’ve had to take more time off my current project than I’d wanted to. The move is of course one reason. The second reason is because Annika is giving in her thesis tomorrow and I’ve been going through it each night making sure the structure is right and reading through it. She’s in Berlin so there is a 9 hour difference. In a couple hours it will be printed and she’ll be free. Oh…. then she’s got 3 oral exams over the next 6-8 weeks. Then she’ll be free!

Anyway, I’m in San Diego and I’m sure everything will be wonderful from here on out.

So last week I completed migrating Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. to Ubuntu 6.06 (codename Dapper). Everything is working quite well and they are pretty happy with it. They definitely have noticed a difference for the better over Ubuntu 5.04 which they had been running. The Nautilus changes (path buttons, places, etc.), the Ubuntu updater (only for the admin of course), Tomboy are among the things they’ve mentioned. One thing that needs to be changed is the location of the shut down/logout button. It’s way to easy to inadvertently click on it when trying to close an application.

One of the pc’s has instability problems. It crashes (actually freeze) about twice a day. I’ve tried all available kernels and 3 different (vesa, radeon, fglrx) xorg drivers both with and without dri enabled. I can get it to crash each time by running OpenOffice’s document format converter on a large (~1000) number of files. I’m next going to try the 2.6.15-21 kernel once I find it. Switching to the 21 revision fixed my wife’s Thinkpad T21 which was having the same problem.

In other news…

On Monday I got finished with 90 percent of going through my stuff before the move; deciding what to take/keep, ebay, or take to the flee market. This was made very easy this time since when I did my “real” move last July I sorted everything quite thoroughly. It’s so nice to know exactly where I’m going to stay and be doing once in San Diego. Last time I flew in without any connections, rented a car, went through craigslist on my laptop while outside of a house with wireless and after about 21 hours and only one night sleeping in the rental car I had an almost perfect, for me, place to stay with really nice folks.

Less than 2 weeks before I go now. Yeah!

This guy has found a really nice way to vent his frustration at seeing obtrusive ads everywhere you freakin’ look.

On Sunday I installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) at Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. a small language school in Friedrichshain. It took all night and I’m still not finished. Someone had installed a Tomcat server that was serving a custom jsp app. Having never installed tomcat nor having ever developed Java Server Pages and only finding out about it when I arrived I didn’t have enough time to do all the other thngs plus learn about tomcat and install jsp apps. So I installed Ubuntu on the 4 “student” computers and left the 2 office computers for some time in the next couple days. On Monday in the comfort of my own home I learned about Tomcat and I had everything running in an hour or so. I also wasted a good amount of time ridding the single duel-boot Windows install of viruses and spyware.

I’ll do an Ubuntu 6.06/Tomcat install how-to soon. No, really… I promise.

On Tuesday Annika and I packed a picnic and went to the Fan Mile to watch the Germany vs. Italy match. Of course, Everyone knows the outcome of that. I was so looking forward to the penalty shoot-out. Oh well. May Italy suffer a humiliating defeat in the finals. They are such whiners; falling at the slightest touch. I’m hoping Portugal wins it all now.