Think on These Things

One thing I absolutely love about Apple’s OS X is how all the iLife applications seamlessly trade information with one another. Add all your friends to your Address Book and when you want to write an email, you can launch mail, start typing their name and the rest will be auto-filled. I simply find this fantastic. However, it’s always annoyed me how this synchronization of information can’t span multiple computers as well. Well, it can, if you don’t mind paying $100/year for Apple’s .mac service, which is already considered by many to be obsolete. With .mac you can do things like, synchronize mail and contacts and calendars across multiple computers. But why would I pay $100 a year to synchronize such information between my desktop Mac Mini and my PowerBook? It’s a waste of money. Clearly, the .mac service would come in handy if you were synchronizing between home and work computers, but what if your work computer is a notebook which you bring home every day? Also what if your desktop machine were the center of your home office? This is my case. I have a mac mini, which I use for everything while I’m home and a PowerBook that I take with me to school and work. When I add or remove contacts, events, to-do’s, bookmarks, from one computer I’d like to have the changes made on the other. Let’s say I’m out in the school library writing a paper, I get a phone call, some things come up and a few more items are added to me to-do list for the week, I add a couple bookmarks, I write a few e-mail drafts. I add them to iCal/Mail on my PowerBook, and ideally when I come home and set the PowerBook aside to charge, I’d like to synchronize and have all those changes made onto my Mini, where I usually do all my e-mailing and organizing. I’m not going to pay $100 to do this, it seems so obvious, it’s .mac synchronization without the internet. Both of these computers share the same network, why can they not also share such information like contacts, events, and tasks directly? I don’t see any reason why I should pay to synchronize information between computers on the same network. If I knew anything about computer programming, I’d do it myself, but I only have an average grasp over HTML and even that I haven’t used in years. If there are any programmers or Mac aficionados reading this post who know how to accomplish what I seek to achieve, please, please tell me!

I just finished up filling out an online application for the Peace Corps. I got rejected right away because I don’t have a college degree. Never mind my intense desire to help other people, and further the cause of world peace; never mind my strong work-ethic and stick-to-it-tiveness; never mind the fact that I’d be willing to do anything I can to the best of my abilities. No, I don’t have a college degree. Sure, I can wait until I finish up at Bunker Hill, but even then opportunities for Community College graduates in the Peace Corps are still negligible.  Peace Corps: I’m sorry I wasn’t a dedicated student in high school, but I’m smart, I promise. I’m sorry that even if my grades were better in high school, I would’ve gone to BHCC anyway because my family is stuck in the missing class. Won’t you please reconsider?

Via breibart.tv, a man in a Vancouver airport was tazed to death after being held in a security checkpoint for almost ten hours. As you’ll see in the video report, the man is agitated and begins throwing objects, but once the police arrive the man abruptly stops throwing things. The man does not take any aggressive action toward the  police, yet they taze him anyway. The police continue to taze the man even after he has fallen to the ground screaming.

I’m going to follow this story, I’d like to see how these police officers are punished. Most likely they will not be punished very harshly if at all. I don’t think police nor government authorities realize that tazers are not safe “non-lethal” weapons. It’s a shame a man had to die for it, but hopefully the incident will force them to realize this.The police officers, from what can been see in this video, had no reason to use such excessive force on this man.

This goes beyond excessive force, what happened in that airport was plain murder.