God's Politics

Picked up an interesting book tonight at Powell's called God's Politics, by Jim Wallis. The basic premise of the book is that American politicians, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, are missing the point of religious issues by either perverting religious beliefs and focusing on key issues to pursue their agenda (such as focusing on abortion without tackling AIDS or people dying from the war in Iraq, as the "religious Right" are), or ignoring religious beliefs altogether and not allowing the various faiths of most Americans to play a role in politics at all (as the "secular left" are).

Very interesting read so far, the author is an editor for Sojourners magazine and apparently quite active both in evangelical Christianity and politics. He also comments every once in a while on the polarization of religion/secularism that mainstream media performs, something which I personally hate to see. Just tonight the local news, KGW, had a story about a group of "Christians" from a church in Kansas came all the way to Beaverton to protest Southridge High School's debate over the play The Laramie Project. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the article, but here's a related article from when the whole issue began [Edit: here's the article]. Now why did they have to go to all the trouble to label them Christians? Why not a more appropriate label, like "self-righteous judgmental compassionless bigots", who rather than showing anger at the fact that a human being who was created in the image of God was murdered, instead chose to focus on the fact that he was gay.

The introduction to God's Politics talks about Sojourners' campaign before the 2004 elections calling for people to realize that "God Is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat." Their campaign led to an ad that was published in more than 50 newspapers across the country. Here's a link to the ad itself [PDF].

This book has stirred up strange emotions in me so far. More than anything, it makes me wish that I was more active, more civic, more vocal about what I truly believe, what Jesus actually teaches us in the Bible, rather than what I have learned to associate with Christianity through the media and through popular beliefs. Christianity is NOT the same as being an American! While both are perhaps good in concept, we as a country are not following either ideology.

Kernel Hacker

Today I became an elite Linux Kernel hacker.

Okay, maybe not. But I did get my first patch accepted into the mainline Linux kernel, trivial though it may be. Today I spent a bunch more time learning about various parts of the Linux kernel, including learning more about the kernel and userspace implementations of raw sockets, since I'm interested in extending bonding to have an ICMP (ping) monitoring mechanism. But enough of that jargon.

No luck so far on the job hunt, I try to spend at least an hour every day searching, though it tends to get boring very quickly since the jobs all start sounding the same.

Hurricane Katrina Blog

Jess and I have been following a blog from a friend of hers living in New Orleans: Hurricane Katrina Evacuation. It is strange hearing the accounts from a friend, since we're so far away and disconnected from the events.

Saddle Mountain

Here's a nice panorama from the top of Saddle Mountain in the coastal range of Oregon. I took this using our FujiFilm FinePix 3800 (PDF) and a tripod and then stitching it together with AutoStitch and some massaging from the Gimp.

Freedom... kinda

Well, it's my first day as an unemployed netizen :-) I suppose it's a bit of a mixed blessing, since I have the freedom to do whatever I want, and yet I know I need to find a job soon. Weird. And what better to do on your first day of unemployment than BLOG!

Yesterday was strange, it was my last day at Intel, and right then on my last day I got an invitation to meet with the manager of the development group I've been testing for all along. Apparently they're looking to fill a couple positions and I got rave reviews from the developers I've been working with, but he wasn't sure I was a good fit for now. I guess it can't be all that bad since it never hurts to have a face-to-face with another manager! I just wish it was a little more clear what I should be doing.

In the mean time I'm continuing to try to learn more about the Linux kernel and try to demonstrate some of my development abilities since that's what I want to do. Right now I'm looking at adding functionality to the Channel Bonding driver, since that's what I worked on the most while at Intel, so I'm picking my way through the Linux TCP/IP stack.

My old computer has been resurrected from the dead after removing a bad memory stick (down to 384MB of memory from 512MB) and a dead hard drive (the 250GB drive died, so I had to swap my 40GB drive back in). I'll have to see if the dead drive is still under warranty, since it's a shame to lose a fairly new 250GB drive.