mattwaterman.net2010-03-10T04:20:59ZMatt WatermanCopyright 2010, Matt WatermanSPHPBLOGNot much blogginghttp://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry100302-0811392010-03-02T00:00:00Z2010-03-02T00:00:00ZDefermenthttp://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry080417-0705412008-04-17T00:00:00Z2008-04-17T00:00:00ZShootinghttp://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry080214-1648352008-02-14T00:00:00Z2008-02-14T00:00:00ZCandidate Stuff Hopefully we can elect a president who at least sort of mirrors the values expressed by the hundreds of thousands who submitted their preferences.
Anyway, the whole candidate thing was fun. There are links to it everywhere and it has popped up in articles all over--one of which even said I had been called up to active duty because I hadn't updated my blog in months. Nice. Should have e-mailed me first! Oh yeah, then there was the live radio interview with Boston City College ("Voice of Dissent" or something), but they only talked to me for a minute or so and could have asked more relevant questions.
I whipped the site together definitely not expecting it to be such a huge hit. If I had, I would have spent some time making it look a little less basic and refining the minor bugs. Probably would have registered a domain name, too. ]]>http://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry080211-1632012008-02-11T00:00:00Z2008-02-11T00:00:00ZOrdershttp://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry080211-1625312008-02-11T00:00:00Z2008-02-11T00:00:00ZFerrets
We checked the place out a few months ago and I was "approved" for adoption, so all we had to do this time was pick some out, sign some papers, and take them home. We had decided previously that we wanted two girls and when we got there, we were quite taken with Pansy and Petunia.
All of the ferrets are caged together in groups and we didn't want to break any up. One little girl just had her cagemate die or something and had just been placed with Pansy and Petunia, so we didn't feel *too* bad about breaking them up. Pansy and Petunia are both about 3-4 years old and had been in the shelter for over two years. Poor things. Here they are on the way home:
It has been a few weeks now and they've settled-in pretty well. They're very sweet, but they certainly get into trouble and we're very happy we got them. ]]>http://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry080211-1608142008-02-11T00:00:00Z2008-02-11T00:00:00ZSuper-K First thing. Stats aren't being updated at the moment and the reason behind this is very simple. When I wrote the script that parses the stats, I didn't expect there to be more than a few hundred records--ever. Now there are lots and lots of records and the log file is huge and my code just isn't efficient at parsing it. This has been creating issues with the server and I disabled it for now. It wouldn't be a huge ordeal to fix it so that it'll be efficient, but I just don't have the time right now. Things are really really busy right now for me. I'll try to get to it as soon as possible, though.
Okay, second thing. Lots of people like to send me messages and leave comments because I said that Kucinich doesn't have a chance. I'd like to say that I think otherwise, but eh, I honestly don't think I can. I support Dennis and think he'd be a great president and I even plan to vote for him in the primaries. But I like to think I'm a realistic person and I'm not optimistic enough to think that enough americans will unbury their heads from the sand to realize Dennis is the best candidate. Still, I will continue to do what I can for Kucinich and I encourage everyone else who thinks Kuncinich is the best but has no chance to also vote for him when the time comes. Maybe something magical will happen, but I'm not counting on it.
Now because I've said that, I should clarify, in case anyone wonders, that I did not program the candidate picker to help the guy out. He wasn't really on my radar until AFTER I made it. See the entry below about that if you want clarification.
]]>http://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry070924-0629302007-09-24T00:00:00Z2007-09-24T00:00:00ZDerailed Well. Bad news! Only about 2-3 weeks after I got back, my parents called to tell me they received a letter from the marines saying that I was being considered for involuntary mobilization. Great. I always knew this was a possibility, but the marines hadn't been mobilizing people from the IRR and even when they started doing it last year, it wasn't very many. So my chances were slim. I figured I would be mobilized if we went to war with North Korea or something, but eh, that might be interesting. Going back to Iraq is not something I am really interested in, to say the least. I really want to get school done with. I really want to get on with my life and do big things, etc, etc.
This all makes me think of the last day that I was at Cherry Point, when my shop gathered around and everyone wished me off. I gave a little speech and was pretty excited about it. I said a lot of things, but towards the end of my speech I turned towards the new marines which had arrived in the 3 or so months since we had returned from Iraq. I reminded them of something you hear pretty often in the marines. It goes like this: "what is the quickest way out of the marine corps? Do your four years and get the fuck out." I told them that early on, it was very clear to me that the marine corps was not for me and that this would become something that applied directly to me. I continued, though, "but there is more to it than that," I told them that it's even easier if you spend the four years doing your best. If you do a good job, it's easier and it goes more quickly, and you get more out of it. You might as well do your best and make the most of it. And that's what I did.
A lot of the time, I hated it with a passion. I felt so phony every day I went to work and had to pretend like I cared about things I didn't. I don't care if people put their hands in their pockets or smoke while walking. And I certainly don't think pull-ups help me do my job any better. But whatever. I did what I was supposed to and I acted the part. Most marines, honestly, are pretty phony. There are very few who actually internalize all of the crazy values. It's like christianity, really. You've got the christians who go to church every sunday and REALLY believe everything. The fundamentalists, I guess. Then you've got the christmas-easter ones. Anyway, in the marines you have to be a fundamentalist. I'm not one. I didn't like pretending. It's not for me. But! I did my four years, I pretended (mostly), I got what I could out of it and tried to be the best leader I could to those under me and I got (the fuck) out.
But now it all comes back. Why am I being recalled? What were the criteria that put me on the list? Is it because I did a good job? Would I be in this situation if I had sandbagged my way through the four years, not really caring, not really trying? Heh. Makes me wonder! I guess my advice was bunk, because if you do a good job, you might get out, but you might end up right back in. Great.
I'm going to request an exemption because of school and because, well, I just got back from a deployment. I'm pretty sure they won't see my time as a contractor as such. Many active duty people look down on contractors. Partly because they have more privileges (but they don't, really) and mostly because they are paid more. That's stupid. For every contractor, that's a service member (or often times, two or three or more) that don't have to deploy. And the pay? Well, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to support one person in the middle east. I mean, it can cost upwards of $20 a day just for water per day. Food PER DAY can be in the hundreds. Showers? How about electricity? In the grand scheme of things, the contractors don't cost more than military folks. In many cases, it's cheaper. That's why they use them. Duh.
Anyway, off-track. So I'm requesting an exemption because of school and because I've spent so much time there. I'm not really sure what I'll do if they don't grant me an exemption. I'll probably go crazy because I really don't think I can handle this anymore. I've always done a good job and I've always been a rule-follower and all that. But I don't know. I really don't know how I can possibly deal with this. And that's just on a personal level. What about my Jessica? My house? My mortgage? School? Everything. God. They have no idea how much they can knock someone's life out of orbit with this crap. Thanks, George, for authorizing this. Thanks, Marines, for not being able to handle this crap. I see you're not missing recruiting goals. Maybe if you didn't make life so goddamn shitty for young marines, you'd have more people reenlist? Life in the marines was fine for me as an NCO, but before that? Come on. Oh well.
Heh, battery is about to die. Better post this.]]>http://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry070917-0904152007-09-17T00:00:00Z2007-09-17T00:00:00ZGoing Home Whenever I have mentioned that I'm leaving in x days, people always have some desire to ask why. As though they're trying to determine if I couldn't handle it or something. Yes, I can't handle being paid tons of money to sit at a desk for 10 hours every night and do almost nothing. I meant that as sarcasm, but it's actually, basically, true. No, honestly, I could probably do this for years without being phased--but I don't want to. I didn't come out here to stay for years. I came out here to stay for one year, save up some money, and move on to better things.
Remember that movie, Paycheck? That's sort of what it's like. This year is basically an empty hole in my life. The whole night shift thing didn't help as far as that goes, but eh, it was easy and I had plenty of time to do my own stuff. Now I can go and do stuff that's more meaningful to me. And I can do it without sharing a toilet with hundreds of people. It will also be nice to have more bandwidth to my house than the whole of this base gets for private internet access.
So yep, that's it. ]]>http://www.mattwaterman.net/index.php?entry=entry070807-1348452007-08-07T00:00:00Z2007-08-07T00:00:00ZCandidates Candidates Candidates So, every day I look through the links at reddit so as not to die of boredom (typically at work). I saw a link to this site that has picked out some issues that are of concern in the current US presidential race. They list the top twenty or so candidates and their views on a couple dozen issues in a nice table so you can compare.
Looks great, although it's somewhat hard to process all the information in that form and I think, well, wouldn't it be great if you can just tell them what YOU think about each issue and then it does the eyeballing for you? Surely. I was not the only person on the vastness of the internet to think this, although I was, it would appear, the first to implement it.
I saved the HTML from the 2decide site onto my computer and then wrote a little script to parse the HTML tables and print out all of the data in some quick-and-easy PHP arrays like so:
Actually, first I tried looking at the chart and typing it in manually, but after about half an hour of doing that (and getting through, like, 4 candidates), my brain exploded. Plus, I was sure that I would end up making mistakes at various points. So I spent only a few minutes to write the script that parsed the HTML outright. Phew.
Before long I had a working script. Here is a transcript of an amusing conversation I had directly following that:
me: did you see http://www.2decide.com/table.htm ? e: no e: what they should add is some way for you to input what you care about so it highlights how close each candidate gets to your ideal me: something like this www.dehp.net/candidate e: aw e: how cute
Yes, how cute. Then I posted it to reddit and bam, lots and lots of hits. I had written it so that it logs the data that people submit and I quickly saw that the majority of people were getting Kucinich as their top pic. I had heard of Kucinich (well, mostly just of his hot wife) before, but didn't really know anything about him. Nice, apparently he has some pretty likable views on a lot of issues that are important to me and to, apparently, a lot of other people.
I wanted other people to see what the records look like, so I whipped up a script to parse the log into easy to use stats (although the stats page now has much more information than when I originally put it up). Look at the stats:
At this point, I'm not sure if I'm a Kucinich supporter, as I still don't know *that* much about him. Seems worthy of my support, although it would also seem to be a pointless endeavor to support him. Of the 3 viable (democratic) candidates, Edwards was at the top for me--and he's the least viable of those 3. Nice. At least Obama isn't too far down the list. Not perfect, but I could vote for him.
Okay, last bit. Kucinich has a web site. The design is first-rate and it features on online community that basically mimics myspace (we should call it kspace). Here's my profile:
