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Monday, 14 April 2008
Time is a singular thing. Long before we are aware of its existence, it
has borne us imperceptibly along as a current bears a swimmer ever further down
the seashore. Unlike the swimmer in the ocean, however, each of us is
powerless to change our course in time, powerless to correct its
errant drift even after we become aware of it. We must continue
to drift inexorably.
When we first become aware of time, it looks like a good
friend. As time goes by, we get stronger. We get wiser.
And though we can't see far down the winding stream, yet we project the fondest
of our expectations upon it, and see time as a highway that will
bring us wealth, fame, love, and satisfaction. For must of us,
at a phase of life, our refrain is "someday". Someday, I will
get married. Someday, I will have kids. Someday, I'll start a
business. Someday, I'll get rich. Someday, I'll be famous...
Don't we arrive at a great milestone in maturity, however, when we stop
projecting our fond expectations upon time? When we realize that while
time is inexorable, it does not inexorably lead to a harbor filled
with returning merchant ships? When we realize that sometime,
someday becomes today. That fond expectations don't just materialize,
that to get married we must date wisely, that children can't be put
off forever, that businesses must be started.
The trick in all of this though, is that time keeps moving. Once we
have decided that fame and fortune will not just come to us, that we
must chase them and wrestle them to the ground, that we have to choose a point
in time to grab and to hold and stubbornly ride, yet the water just keeps
flowing, and so much flows past before you know that it's gone.
Recently, my grandma moved into a retirement home, and she is giving away most
of what she accumulated over 88 years. I was wondering, as I talked to
her, when is the last time I saw her house as I fondly remember it? It
was years ago, and I had no idea it would be the last time. Similarly, my
other grandma passed away last month.
Poignantly I tried to remember when I last saw her and grandpa
rocking in their la-z-boys. Again, it was years ago. And again, I
had no idea it would be the last time.
When I contemplate these things, I recall a passage from the
incomparable wisdom of Solomon, Enjoy life with the woman
whom you love all the days of your fleeting life which He has given to you
under the sun; for this is your reward in life and in your toil in which you
have labored under the sun. Ecclesiastes 9:9 (NASB). Properly
understood, in a sense Epicurious was right. Maybe your ship is waiting
down in the harbor, and maybe not. The most prudent approach to life and
the time that bears it is to work diligently toward your goals, but never
to lose site of the blessings of the moment. That way, as the "last time"
comes and goes unnoticed, it will be a sweet memory stored away for another
time.
POSTED BY THE EDITOR AT 11:08 PM
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Friday, 14 March 2008
I don't know if it is because of some natural disposition, or because I was
raised in a family of five boys, but when I was a young fellow, I found girls
to be extraordinarily intimidating. I remember the feeling, for instance,
of my cheeks burning when Renee or Mandy talked to me in first grade. I
had a particular sense at that age that girls were something altogether
different -- something of a preeminent, if slightly indefinable, value.
Day after day and year after year of school only served to further demarcate
what was different -- and what was valuable -- about femininity. At the
same time, I got a creeping sense from the culture about me that it wasn't
polite to notice or acknowledge any difference between the sexes. I had a
strong belief, for example, that I should open the door for a lady who was
going through just before or behind me. But there is a sense in which I
felt guilty when I acted on my natural inclination, believing somehow that such
actions would offend someone.
Now that I am an adult, I no longer find feminity intimidating, and that is the
natural progression of things. However, I still have a feeling that women
are little bit different, a little bit more special, than I am. However,
when I
read, for example, that 20% of teenagers have had sex before they are
15 years old, or when I hear about the
recent study which indicated that 1 in 5 teenage girls has an STD, I
wonder if it wouldn't behoove more young men to feel a little bit more
intimidated by the young ladies around them. There really is something
special about girls, and I believe that it's time that we started to
acknowledge that fact.
POSTED BY THE EDITOR AT 12:06 AM
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Thursday, 17 January 2008
Neither Scotch nor Bourbon
is "relevenent to the mission of our company", in the strictest sense. In
distilling whiskey and developing technology there is very little common cause,
for example, in that whiskey is crafted by a master distiller in
a decidedly artistic exercise. And yet one must assume that there is
leeway in a blog, given that it is the product of a single mind in an informal
setting, to explore topics of some small import to the blog's author, in the
hopes of eliciting either the approprobation or the interest of his
audience. And it is in that spirit that I offer the following
explanation.
Some time early last year, it ocurred to me that a gentleman ought to be able to
sip something with a straight face and serious demeanour, to compliment the
cigar that he smokes when he is discussing the meaning of life and the solution
to the world's problems. It what can only be described as fortuitous,
right about that time I was on a business trip, reading a complimentary copy of
The American Way, when I came across an excellent article on
the resugence of Bourbon as a sipping beverage. And among Bourbons
worthy of note, one Maker's Mark was particularly highly
recommended. This recommendation was the very thing that I was looking
for, and so naturally the first thing I did when I got home was to buy a
bottle. The second thing I did was to invite my brothers over for a cigar
and a snifter of bourbon.
None of my four brothers was a drinker of wiskey at that time, to my knowlege,
but they thought it advisable to give it a shot, so to speak. And in
addition to my widom, they added the insight that Sir Winston Churchill
preferred Scotch wiskey, particularly of the single malt variety,
and rightly considered that reason enough to add Scotch to the
mix.
Being of a generally political constitution, one of my brothers suggested that
we shouldn't just smoke cigars and drink whiskey, but that we should smoke
cigars and drink whiskey under the auspices of some grander calling.
After a good deal of deliberation, we decided on the name The Sovereign
Gentlemen's Scotch Club, to emphasize (among other things) the
fact that we relish the freedom afforded us in this great land. Our
Scotch club is off to a pretty good start, and we are starting to believe that
whiskey is the White Zinfandel for a new era. Or to put it another way,
what's old, we believe will be new again.
POSTED BY THE EDITOR AT 10:40 PM
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Saturday, 12 January 2008
When I was in school, I learned that the first step in writing a research paper
was to go to the school library and research. And research at the library
in the early nineties meant walking to the reference section and pulling down a
couple volumes of Encyclopedia Britanica and one or two other tomes
that contained the abreviated history of the knowlege of mankind.
Given the distance to the library, and the necessity of providing research
material for her five kids, it became apparent to my mom that she needed
to acquire some set of reference works at home. So she concientiously
acquired an entire set of
Funk & Wagnall's Standard Encyclopedia, by purchasing one
volume each week from the only grocery store in our tiny Arizona town.
Since I was a bookish type, this acquisition was a boon to me, and I derived no
small pleasure from paging through each volume as it would join our growing
library.
Today, Funk and Wagnall's is out of the encylopedia business.
Almost everyone is out of the encyclopedia business, because the internet
is absolutely awash with the knowlege of mankind, in as abreviated or
thorough a form as you could wish to find it. And if you want the
overview, there's always Wikipedia, which is today as indespensible as Funk and
Wagnalls was to my high school experience. All in all, I'll take
Wikipedia, and Google, and the untold number of other options that the internet
provides.
As a college student, the internet saved me a tremendous number of trips to the
library; today, I generally only venture into those hallowed halls of learning
to find Good Night Moon or some other book that my kids pick
out. But as I watch the education process progress in my childrens'
lives, the dark nature of the internet causes me great concern. The
internet is very much like the Wild West, with all of its pulsating energy,
excitement, and lawlessness. But it's the Wild West pumped into almost
every home in America. It's the Wild West that we can't live
without. As I said before, I'll take the internet and take it
greatfully. But I'll also take the precautions necessary to make
sure it's more like the John Wayne version of the Wild West. And
providing my family and yours with the means to do that is why I started
this company.
POSTED BY THE EDITOR AT 11:40 PM
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Friday, 11 January 2008
If you're at all like me, you worry about how the early and constant exposure
of an entire generation to pornography will affect society. Already it's
sobering to see the unravelling of the social fabric, particularly as it
pertains to courtship, marriage, and the family. The shockingly early age
at which kids are encouraged to start dating, for example, is especially
puzzling given the trend to marry later and later in life. It is almost
as if the opinion makers of our time want marriage and family
stability to be undermined.
With this in mind, the policy of this country respecting internet pornography is
truly breath-taking. In 1998, Congress passed legislation (via the
Child Online Protection Act ) requiring age verification
before an internet user could access adult content. I think that to any
reasonable person, which is to say almost everybody in America, that seems like
a prudent and reasonable measure. We have, after all, accomodated
ourselves to paying for pornography if we want to rent a DVD, or want to watch
it via our cable provider, and I don't believe either of these inconveniences
precipitated a constitutional crisis of any sort. And yet the Supreme
Court didn't see it that way, and struck down the law.
The question I have is, am I the only one who sees that the only inviolable
"right" in our jurisprudence today is the right to be a pervert? In this
case as well as a host of others, the most absurd solicitude imaginable is
is afforded the right of adults to indulge in their, um, peculiarities. A
similar zeal is conspicuously lacking when it comes to the minutia of the
polity, such as the right to life, the freedom of religion, and other similarly
awkward topics.
So what's the answer to internet porn? It's simple -- block it by default,
and by legislative mandate, at the ISP level, and make a subscriber pay extra
if he wants to access it. That kind of obvious solution is illegal these
days though. But if that were ever to change, here's one company that
would be happy to find a new niche.
POSTED BY THE EDITOR AT 6:52 AM
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Thursday, 10 January 2008
A couple of years ago I grew frustrated by the internet filtering options that
were available for home users. I had downloaded and installed several
trial offers, and I discovered that the installation and configuration process
was onerous. I was also skeptical about software being installed into my
system that fundamentally changed my computer's operation. And since I am
a software engineer, I often have my computer booted up in Linux, and of course
there are no filtering options available for that operating system.
Meanwhile, at the defense contractor where I worked, when I tried to visit
myspace or some similar site, I got an error message. I thought to
myself, "why can't my home network filter be this easy? I didn't install
or configure anything..."
That's when I got the idea to develop a little box that I could plug into my
network, very much like the filter that my company used, but which didn't
require an IT department to maintain. I thought, I can't be the only one
out there who is frustrated by the filtering options, but most people aren't
computer engineers, and so they can't do anything about it. It was at
that moment that the idea for the aXessController was born.
The point of this post though is that I didn't realize how relevant this filter
would become to my own family. When I started the company, my oldest
daughter was only 2, and so of course she never used the computer.
However, now she's 7, and my next oldest is 5, and they got a very clever
present for Christmas called Webkinz. All of the sudden they were
addicted to using the internet. At first, I was extremely reticent to let
them use it, because I know (like almost anyone who uses the internet at all)
that one or two wrong mouse clicks could destroy my kids' innocence
forever. My company had just finished developing its filter though, and I
brought one home and pluged it in. The peace of mind that I feel with the
filter connected to our network is hard to imagine if you don't have little
kids who use the computer.
When I started this company, the need for an internet filter was in a certain
sense theoretic. It's not theoretic any more, and the idea that
germinated several years ago is now relevent to me and my family in a way that
I never could have appreciated back then.
POSTED BY THE EDITOR AT 11:52 PM
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The
Last Time
How to
Treat A Lady
The
Sovereign Gentlemen's Scotch Club
The
March of Progress