Month: June 2002

the pledge

The Pledge of Allegiance – A Short History


[The] original Pledge read as follows: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to*) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ He considered placing the word, ‘equality,’ in his Pledge, but knew that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans. [ * ‘to’ added in October, 1892. ]

Dr. Mortimer Adler, American philosopher and last living founder of the Great Books program at Saint John’s College, has analyzed these ideas in his book, The Six Great Ideas. He argues that the three great ideas of the American political tradition are ‘equality, liberty and justice for all.’ ‘Justice’ mediates between the often conflicting goals of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’

In 1923 and 1924 the National Flag Conference, under the ‘leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the Pledge’s words, ‘my Flag,’ to ‘the Flag of the United States of America.’ Bellamy disliked this change, but his protest was ignored.

In 1954, Congress after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, added the words, ‘under God,’ to the Pledge. The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer.

It’s not like those words were always there. Just as the state of Georgia added the Stars and Bars to its state flag as a comment on desegragation, so too were these words added to the pledge. Both are relics of another time and just as Georgia outgrew its repugnant flag, the pledge can be returned to its inclusive and secular glory.

back to school

University of Washington Home Page

I’ll be taking a course through the UW on software design and C++ this summer. I took it last fall but was doing so badly at the end, I withdrew. This time I am taking it as a distance learning class: this means I don’t to try and stay awake during yawn-inducing lectures and slide shows from 6 to 9 PM.

look ma, no film

From Saturday’s videotaping extravaganza (oh, how much I have to learn about videography) to this afternoon, I have been able to create a CD with a video on it, suitable for sharing.

I did end up with a couple of coasters as I experimented with mkisofs(8) and it’s options. It was easy to create a disk image that could be loaded on a Mac as a disk, but counter-intuitively, that’s not what you want to burn to a CD.

I took what I learned and put it in a shell script for safekeeping. Variable $1 is the image file to be created and $2 is the directory tree that will be on the CD.
mkhybrid -R -J -hfs -l -o $1 $2

If I was to do one of these again, I’d do a few things differently:


  • go to the dress rehearsal and tape it, end to end, to see how long everything will be and get some cues
  • set up so you can see everything without being a distraction. I used a tripod but because I didn’t keep my face in the eyepiece, folks assumed I wasn’t shooting and walked across the frame. A step ladder (how geeky is that?) would have been a good idea, with a good clamp. The camera had a rotating LCD panel and a remote: I could have shot from across the room.
  • the camera has a still frame function: that would have been useful for head shots

If you believe that no experience is valuable unless you learn from it, I had a fine weekend.

I can certainly see the appeal for this kind of work.

fun with iMovie

The most succinct result I can give is: horsepower helps. It’s amazingly simple to do stuff like titles, music tracks, transitions, but boy, is it CPU-intensive. I am doing all this on a 500 MHz iMac DV, and I have run into multi-hour render and export jobs. Rendering titles is very well-done: the renderer takes a long time but it doesn’t bog down the machine at all. Exporting is just brutal. I am pulling a load of 6-8, with no other processes running.

The only feature I can think of to add is an estimate of disk space as well as of time to complete. If you’re trying to scale something to fit on a CD, it would help.

For example, I have a 19 minute project that takes about 140 minutes to export as a quicktime movie: it would help to know how big it will be so I can see if I’m wasting my time or not. If it’s too big for a single CD, I’ll need to work on it some more.

Update: The movie came in at 460 Mb or so, so it was fine for a CD.

The camera worked fine, though I think it came with a flaky firewire cable: I swapped one of my own in and it seemed to work better. The symptom was dropouts and extra clips: I had to extract the video a couple of times and would get different numbers of clips.

Firewire itself is very nice: I love a standard that more than one company supports. You drive the camera from the computer as soon as it’s detected, so you never need to touch it after that.

it can happen anywhere

We were just thinking of bringing the kids in for dinner when the neighbor popped her head in the back door to say the police were on the street looking a man with a gas mask and a large knife.

Sure enough, there were two cruisers two houses down, and a deputation of neighbors giving an officer some details. I secured our perimeter and am keeping an ear out.

faith restored

When I went to rent the video camera yesterday, I couldn’t find my driver’s license. It turns out I have been without it for a a few weeks.

Two things I learned from that:


  • Hans Eric, who rented me the camera, is a trusting soul to let me walk off with a $2000 video camera on the strength of my signature (no check, no credit card, nothing).
  • I don’t need a picture ID all that often.

A lot of people who try out bikes at Recycled Cycles and use their licenses as security forget to ask for them back. Do we all just dream of never needing a car again? If it were just me, I would suspect early onset of senility, but that can’t be that common.

freebsd issues resolved

I solved my problems with sound by installing the xmms-arts plugin for xmms: this allows xmms to use the KDE sound subsystem instead of talking to the sound device itself. Of course, I lost one of my favorite stations today, so this is less valuable than it was.

And I can suspend and resume the laptop by simply shutting down the network interface and closing the lid. Open the lid, type ‘ifconfig an0 up’ and we’re off to the races. Instantly.