Photos for June 29, 2006
June 29, 2006
Today started off like any other, in that I woke up tired. I know, I know. I probably wouldn’t be so tired in the mornings if I went to bed at a reasonable hour. After only getting about 3 hours of sleep, I made the drive from Draper, Utah to Sunnyvale, California. I kid you not when I say it took me forever. I stopped and took a couple of pictures out at the Bonneville Salt Flats at Interstate 80 Exit 4. It’s somewhat ridiculous how much “nothing” is out there. I stopped in Reno and took a few photos of the temple there. It turns out that my mission president, President Foote, was the first temple president there. This is the same mission president who surprised me by showing up at my wedding nearly 10 years ago. I remember being thrilled when I walked into the sealing room and saw President and Sister Foote there.
Anyways, I after the photos in Reno, I stopped at Donner Lake (which is very beautiful, I might add) and snapped some pictures from the north side of the lake, near the boat launch. I think I need to schedule some sort of vacation there with Melanie and the kids.
I hopped back on the freeway and started heading down to the Sacramento area when I decided to detour toward where the Sacramento Temple is being built. The open house begins in less than a month and I’m planning on going to it with a friend (you know who you are!). The timing of my arrival at the Sacramento couldn’t have been better. The sky was just starting to pink up, and the lighting that was being cast on the temple was spectacular. Due to the construction going on, and the locations of the fences that surround the jobsite, I had to be creative in my framing of the photos. Let’s just say I’m pretty happy with the results, and I can’t wait for all of the landscaping, etc., to be completed.
I ended up getting in to the San Jose area at about 12:30 am on Friday the 30th. What an exhausting day it was. I drove a total of 813 miles, which isn’t too long of a drive for me normally. The only problem was the number and length of the stops that I made. There were two things in particular that made the last leg of the drive so horrible, too. First things first is the drivers that kept flying by me at just below mach speed. I was going the speed limit (70 MPH) and was feeling very unsafe doing that, as the roads are in such a horrid state of disrepair. My truck normally rides really well and all, but on that road, it felt like I needed a completely new suspension.
The other problem was the route that my GPS picked for me. Uh, I don’t know WHAT happened, but I think it directed me to go the wrong way. You see, when you are in the Bay Area, you should pretty much be able to go wherever you want to go and do it all via a freeway. Well, I ended up having a stretch of non-freeway mixed in there. In fact, I went right through downtown Livermore, and over a mountain via a windy two lane road. Here’s the route I should have driven:
Here’s the route I took:
These two routes are VEEEERY different. If I had had a clue where I was going (I’d never taken that route from Sacrament to San Jose before) I could have caught it ahead of time. But, oh, no. I had to trust what the little thing on the dashboard told me. Surely it must know better than a lost guy in the middle of the night, right?
Anyways, I got to my destination late, and very tired. I even slept in this morning until almost 7:45. Wow, I’m a wild man.
Older and wiser?
June 23, 2006
Today is my 32nd birthday. Man, I’m getting old.
Summer Arrival
June 21, 2006
Summer is finally here. One of the things that I don’t like about Bend is that it seems to take summer a little too long to arrive, and then it ends too quickly. I’m not looking for an eternal summer like Phoenix, or anything like that. I’m just looking for a little more time during the year when it’s not friggin’ freezing outside. Is that too much to ask!?
On the bright side, it doesn’t get unbearably HOT during the summer.
Sand Trap
June 17, 2006
Some guy got buried up to his waist in sand, and had to call 911 to get out. That would be a sucky way to die.
Whining Criminals
June 10, 2006
Some guy was trying to rob a store when the store employees fought back. Now, the robber is suing the store and the employees for inflicting emotional distress. This is one of the most ridiculous lawsuits of which I have ever heard.
The Zarqawi Legacy
June 8, 2006
Human Events Online has a write-up about the final atrocities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the latest big-name terrorist to meet his maker at the hands of the United States Armed Forces.
If you are looking for the legacy of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, do not look in the concrete rubble of so-called safe house in Baqubah that became his final resting place. Instead, look less than 10 miles to the west, on the side of the road in the desert town of Hadid, for a pile of cardboard banana boxes.
Some of the heads still had their blindfolds on. Iraqi police are still attempting to identify the murdered men.
Critics of President Bush and U.S. foreign policy say that the world isn’t a safer place with Zarqawi dead. I say, “It may not be, but it sure is a better place.”
Cheating
June 7, 2006
Here’s a great article by a University professor titled, “How to Cheat Good.”
I just submitted my last set of grades for the semester. This is always a big weight off my shoulders, but since it will be the last set of grades I ever submit at the University at Buffalo, it is an even greater relief. And so I think it’s time for me to “give back” as the kids say.
I had a 24 hour take home (distance course, so “keep home”?) final exam. Students had to submit it in text and most submitted it in Word. In the exam, I noted that “I expect everyone to behave honorably,” and noted that receiving assistance from others or plagiarizing work was a bad idea.
I would prefer that students don’t cheat. Yes, they really are mostly cheating themselves, so fine. But it also reflects poorly on the community. Rationally or not, what particularly irks me is that it is disrespectful: of me, of their fellow students, of the university, of the institution of learning, and of themselves. And, did I mention, of me? It is particularly irksome when their cheating implies (reminds?) that I am a fool.
So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience:
Click here to get the tips.
Bush’s Historical Perspective
June 5, 2006
President Bush knows his history.
Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.
George W. Bush has a better sense of history.
On Iran and Uranium
June 3, 2006
The New York Times is running a story about President Bush and Secretary of State Rice and how they are dealing with Iran’s enrichment of Uranium. It’s actually quite interesting.
On a Tuesday afternoon two months ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down to a small lunch in President Bush’s private dining room behind the Oval Office and delivered grim news to her boss: Their coalition against Iran was at risk of falling apart.
A meeting she had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide said, “with a look that said, ‘O.K., team, what’s the answer?’ ”
That question touched off a closely held two-month effort to reach a drastically different strategy, one articulated in a single sentence that Ms. Rice wrote in a private memo to the president. It broached the idea that the United States end its nearly three-decade-long policy against negotiating directly with Iran.
As much as the media makes President Bush out to be either stupid or evil (and sometimes both), one needs to admit that being the president of the United States is certainly not an easy job. Sometimes, one needs to change path in midstride. The problem is that, no matter what President Bush does, he’s going to lose the media war.
On Mormons and Republicanism
June 3, 2006
The New York Times also has a story on how much support President Bush has in the state of Utah.
Here in what may be the reddest city in the reddest of states, where Democrats sometimes gather like lost souls at the one Starbucks, most people are standing by President Bush.
When he gives a speech that angers voters or brings ridicule from other parts of the country, people here pick up different messages. They might break with Mr. Bush on the war in Iraq or on illegal immigration, but not with the man himself.
Basically, if a Republican president can’t keep his support strong in Utah, he’s in for a LOT of trouble nationally. Utah is the only state in the nation in which Bush won every county in each of his two elections. I think that says a lot about how red the red state is.
