2 posts tagged “politics”

In case you haven't heard, some time back, our Congress passed a bill making Daylight Savings Time a few weeks earlier. Of course, in the tech world, everybody LOSES THEIR MIND because everything seems to automatically update for DST. There is a patch for Windows XP, which, isn't a big deal, it only fixes the clock. I could do that myself.

However, the reason I needed to go to Microsoft for their patch is my copy of Office 2007. I used Office 2007 religiously. I use Outlook, not for the shotty e-mail app, but instead, the calender. (I use Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail, if Outlook's calender saved all appointments in a single format, it would be possible to import them to a open-source application, but there isn't, so I'm stuck).

Outlook supposedly will be DEVASTATED when this new DST hits. Apparently, it is so screwy, that it will shift all appointments in some kind of odd fashion.

So, I go to Microsoft.com. Click the link about daylight savings day. Pick my OS. It tells me to download an installer, then continue. (Even though I patch my Service Pack 2 machine every patch tuesday, its got an installer for me).

I start the installer. The Firefox Download Manager says it'll take 10 minutes (I have a 1.5 Mb/s connection). I assume its a big file. I do other "important" stuff, and come back, still only at 6%. I look at the file size, its ONLY 500 KILOBITES!

So, I suppose, that every single other Windows XP Home SP2 user is also updating their machine for DST right now, so I'll have to wait for this tiny 500kb file. Hmmm, stupid DST.

Well, in case you don't live in the United States, or live in a hole, the past few weeks the news has been covering the recent wave of school shootings. One of them has been in my home state of Wisconsin, and in fact, at the two other high schools in my city, there was a bomb threat, and a kid threatened to kill the varsity football team.

Basically, our school has become like Fort Knox. Almost all the doors are now locked, and teachers have to wearing their ID badges all the time in the open. All visitors have to have a visitor pass. When the Coke man came to refill the vending machines, the vice prinicipal went up to him and gave him a hard time. The same guy has came to our school to give us our sugar water goodness for all three years I've been going to this school, and the VP still had to go give him a hard time.

And its effected my daily routine, too. Usually after lunch, I walked out the doors and walked around the outside of the school, since going through the maze of corridors was slower, but now that they've locked all (but a few) of the doors, I've got to go through the mess of lockers to get to my next class.

They've even told us that if you are outside and knock on the door for somebody else to get in, you'll be arrested for trying to 'break' into the school, which is kind of bullshit. If you open the door to let somebody else in, you will get in serious trouble (not arrested, though).

Do I feel safer? Did I feel unsafe in the first place? No. The fact of the matter is, if somebody wanted to go into the school and kill us all, they could. They could shoot out the glass panels of the doors and get in, they could drive a truck through the doors if they really wanted to. They could place a bomb and blow up the doors. So, we really aren't perfectly safe. Now, I guess you could argue that locking the doors would slow down any possible attackers, and I suppose that is a vaild point... but still I think its worthless.

Now, did I feel unsafe in the first place? Not from possible 'shooters'. If they wanted to make school a safe place, why don't they do more to stop the bullying that goes on in the hallways? Why don't they stop the harrsement of kids? In my English class on Thursday, a student called another student "gay" loudly in front of the whole class. The teacher was sitting at her computer (probably surfing her Yahoo! e-mail) and all she did was say "Hey guys, cut it out." Yeah, ok. The kids continued badgering each other and the teacher continued checking to see if her S.O. had replied to their date on Friday (ok, a bit of extrapolation there).

So, even though I think locking the doors is a dumb idea, it is one of the few things they can do to make the school seem safer. I mean, what CAN you do to protect from a possible 'shooter'? A school in Texas is training the kids to attack any possible 'shooters' and while it seems outrageous, it is may be the ONLY way to proactively stop such a thing.

But still, the possibility of a school shooter is very unlikely, I've never worried about it, and never will.

Before I let you go, there is one more thing I'd like to address... blaming violent video games. Now, I'm a big video game player, and I am strongly against blaming video games. I know the Columbine... perps played Doom and even made videos talking about it ("This shotgun is straight outta Doom!" comes to mind), but this is my opinion on it. A psycopath will go crazy no matter what. We don't need to ban video games, or heavy metal music. Will playing Half-Life 2 make him go over the edge and finally decide to bring that gun to school? No, not really in my humble opinion.

Well, this has been a long read, and I'll let you rest for a bit. :) I was going to talk aobut the movie Elephant, which is about school shootings and was HBO last night. I could go for another 4 paragraphs about THAT but I'll save that for another time. :)