Brandon Live!

IE7 wasn’t working with my feed before… Turned out this was because a WordPress plug-in I use had an error in its PHP file that was causing debug spew to appear at the bottom of every page, including the RSS/atom feeds!  This led to some invalid XML that most readers just ignored.  But not IE7!  I guess they got tired of taking flack for letting messy mark-up slide.

I also disabled a redundant (and I think slow) plug-in and did some database maintenance/optimization that will hopefully speed up the site a little. 

The ceasefire that began a few weeks ago could be the beginning of the end for this war which has waged on for 20 years and affected millions.

But it needs your help!

On October 9-10 the 2006 Northern Uganda Lobby Day and Symposium takes place. If you’re in the DC area, get out there and show your support for the invisible children and help put an end to this war. And with it, and end to the abduction of children to be turned into soldiers at an age when you were probably still learning to read.

Uganda Lobby Day

Or, contact your senators or representatives in the House. Don’t underestimate your own ability to make a difference!

Here’s an idea: It’s election season. Why not take this opportunity to call your congressmen and find out what they are doing to support the peace process. If you’re in Washington as I am, you could contact Maria Cantwell who is up for re-election in November. Or her Republican opponent, Mike McGavick.

President Bush wants to “redefine” the Geneva Conventions to allow brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists and prisoners of war by the CIA and/or military.

However, in this he stands alone. Democrats and Republicans are saying that Bush has gone too far. Retired General Colin Powell (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under G.H.W. Bush and Secretary of State during G.W. Bush’s first term) has led the battle against his former boss:

“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” Powell wrote.
Powell said Bush’s bill, by redefining the kind of treatment the Geneva Conventions allow, “would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”

He’s supported on the left and the right by most of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which shot down Bush’s proposal last week. Senator (and former POW) John McCain is also vehemently opposed to Bush’s plan, and supports counter-legislation that falls in line with the Geneva Conventions.

Here are my two reasons for supporting Powell and McCain in this fight:

1) If we can do it, they can do it. Bush’s proposal would endanger our troops in the event that they are captured.
2) We are supposed to be the Good Guys. Does anyone remember that? We condemn foreign governments for pulling shit like this. We prosecute war criminals based on the Geneva Conventions. We aren’t supposed to be finding loopholes and having congress “redefine” treaties that we signed in good faith. We would lose what moral high ground we have and send the world a message that we are nothing more than arrogant hypocrits.

Mr. Bush, I ask you: Where are your values now?

Mr. Bush, you have had five years to prove to our enemies that we will not yield and you have squandered it.  On this September 11th, 2006 we remember those who died at the hands of evil in New York, Shanksville, and Washington.  We remember the heros who fought back in the skies over Pennsylvania, and those who responded on the ground.  But we also remember the unity that we all felt after that fateful day, the solidarity so clear from where we gathered at my school’s Chapel to the Capitol where politicans from both sides of the aisle joined in song.  Today we remember how this president and his administration chose to toss it aside and drive a wedge between us.  And for what?

Mr. President, you have not kept the promises you made five years ago.  You told us you’d persue the terrorists who attacked us.  Not for a few months or a year, but until they were brought to justice.  Instead, you abandoned that effort.  Worse than ignoring them, you’ve handed Al-Qaeda a place to thrive in Anbar.  You give lip-service to the persuit of terrorists just like when you promised to rebuild and left New York with a hole in the ground.

Keith Olbermann, thank you for not holding back.

Everyone is talking about the new Facebook updates that happened yesterday. I first heard there were new features when I saw a friend’s personal message on Messenger exclaiming how great the new “Feeds” were.

My first reaction was, “Whoa, cool.” Which quickly was replaced with “What the hell!” I was really only bothered a little bit, mostly thinking that the execution was the problem and not the idea. That didn’t stop me from posting status messages like “Brandon is going to the bathroom. This update brought to you by Facebook, your one-stop stalk shop.” Because I’m just too damn clever like that.

But really I don’t think these features “go too far” as others have said. But I would have done things differently. For example:

1) No warning. No one knew this was coming. There was no chance to provide feedback.
2) A lot happened at once. These kinds of changes should have been rolled out gradually (which is what people are used to with Facebook features), so they’d be less overwhelming.
3) It was retro-active. So status messages, updates, etc that had happened in the past (and most users thought were gone forever) were suddenly visible in a nice little timeline for the world to see. If they’d said “Okay from now on your changes will show up here unless you turn this feature off” I think it would have softened the blow. Instead, you logged into your profile page and saw a list of things you’d done on Facebook over the last days or weeks that you had no idea were being tracked for public view.

4) Not everyone uses Facebook the way it’s intended. Judging by their response to the uproar, it sounds like they want Facebook to be a place where your friends are really your friends - and each of them is just as close a friend as the next. In reality, many users (myself included) have people as “friends” on Facebook that we haven’t talked to in years. And while every once in a while it’s interesting to check up on what old high school acquaintances are up to, it’s another thing to see a daily account of everything they do delivered to your Facebook homepage.

What would help them a lot would be if they’d implemented this on a group level. Instead of having a News Feed of everything all 120 of my “friends” do, it would show just updates from my closest circle (or circles) of friends.

That said - I do see their point. Even though there are a lot of people on my Facebook friends list that I haven’t talked to in ages, they’re all people I knew personally at one time. This is in contrast to MySpace where I think the paradigm is a bit different. In some ways, this move is almost counter to the MySpace direction - as it distinguishes Facebook as a place where you keep in touch and share with your close friends - whereas MySpace is a more public-facing view of your online social life.

Here are some more links about the changes:

Fred Stutzman on Facebook as an “Identity Archive“

Liz Gannes says Facebook makes itself useful.