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Let me preface EVERYTHING I’m about to say with the following disclaimer: I AM NOT RACIST!
So I signed into MSN Messenger today and found a headline that read “Oldest man in America dies at 112″. I thought that was pretty amazing that he lived so long, so I clicked on it. I was greeted with this wonderful story about how this man lived through “three centuries”, part of the 19th, all of the 20th, and part of the 21st. I continued reading this man’s story and was very impressed at his longevity.
Then it got into politics. This 112 year old man actually got out and voted; major kudos for having the drive to do so in the condition he was in–a wheelchair. He went on to say that he voted for Obama and when he found out he won the election he “felt like jumping up and down.” His words were “He is going to give black men a break in the world, and give them a better opportunity to live and make more money”.
Here is my response to this 112 year old man, may he rest in peace: With all due respect, the races have been pretty damn equal for the last few decades. I’m not sure when he watched the news last, but as it turns out whites and blacks DO get along after all! It is comments like that which keep fueling racial tensions; in fact, it infuriates me when black people try to play the slavery card. It would be a completely different story if they themselves were enslaved and people of this current generation were the ones enslaving them. But this is not the case anymore. Yes race was in issue well into the 60′s and 70′s but it began to decline in the 80′s and (dare I say) is nearly gone in this day and age. There are still some white “extremists” yes, but even white people think they’re crazy. It isn’t a matter of race anymore, it is a matter being open minded and looking at people in the human sense, not the color sense.
A black man gets a job because he has the skills to get the job done. He is denied a job because he does not have the skills to get the job done; same as white people. Now, this is not without exception, I understand that there are some smaller companies who fly just under the radar of needing to comply with equal opportunity and affirmative action laws. But seriously, have you seen the workforce lately? It’s a pretty darn good mix of folks.
Now, as far as this “break” and “making more money” goes. I don’t think this guy has heard of 50 cent, or his song “I Get Money”:
I mean c’mon. He’s just as rich as the next white pompous jackass so let’s stop bickering about “how the white man holds the black man down” and how Obama is going to save the black race. The fact of life is, public schools are available for everyone, and colleges are all over the place. Find a skill, get good at something, and kick the white man’s ass at his own game if you feel you have to, fair and square. Don’t pull out the slavery or Obama trump cards. They’re worthless. I never heard a white person say “Gee, I’m glad Bush was in office. He’s going to keep the white man richer than everyone else.” That is completely not the case. Obama is still a politician, the president at that. Presidents are largely controlled by their cabinets, and he still has to abide by the separation of powers that the US government has in place to keep the president from going nuts and ordering tax breaks for everybody to the point where the government can’t fund itself anymore.
Wake up people… this was just another election with a different face. As far as the race issues go, the president can’t fix that, even overnight. It took 143 years after slavery was “abolished” to get to the point where we’re at today. Do you think it will be truly abolished in the 8 maximum years Obama has in office? I doubt it. And I’m not being negative, I’m being realistic. Race will always be an issue so long as there are people around the US claiming the color of their skin is what cost them their job or why they can’t get into school. Again, I’m not saying this was NEVER the case, I’m just saying that now, in this day and age, that is getting increasingly harder to claim. White people aren’t perfect either, we complain just as much about things that “aren’t our fault”. It’s human nature to protect one’s self and one’s dignity. Sometimes people can’t face that they’ve simply made bad decisions which cost them their luxuries. IE: The high school diploma that led to the college degree which led to the good paying job.
I spoke to a friend of mine yesterday about an old mutual friend of ours who recently dropped out of college because she got pregnant. I can expect that she’ll blame her lack of a college education on her kid. The reality of the situation is SHE dropped out of college, her kid didn’t make her. Yes, pregnancy is tough, I can understand that. But don’t drop out, seriously. Take fewer classes, go part time, or even take a break to resume the education later. There are even government grants for single mothers to go school, there’s a ridiculous amount of help for stuff like that. Saying “My kid is the reason I didn’t go to college” is a terrible excuse. It is basically the same as saying “The color of my skin is what cost me my job or why I don’t make any money.” If you’re skilled at a task that I cannot do myself, I’ll hire you regardless of what color your skin is. Most white people don’t care anymore! Maybe the reason that a black person isn’t getting a job is because they never finished high school? Or how about not having the experience required? The same shit happens to white people to, but we call it what it is: lack of education or skill, not color of our skin. When a black man shoots a white man in the street for something, we call it a murder. When a white man shoots a black man in the street is all of the sudden becomes a “racially motivated crime”. Why is that? Do you think it is white people saying that specific crime is racially motivated? No. It would be a different story if the suspect was associated with the KKK or Neo-Nazi parties, then we just put two and two together and come to the same conclusion that black people did: race, because it is evident.
Maybe I am naive, but I’m reflecting on my observations while living here in the US. I really don’t believe that whites are fueling any sort of race war anymore. Like I said, there are some extremists, but they represent such a tiny, minuscule portion of the white population. Thus their stance on race is not representative of the white population as a whole. And the same may be true for blacks, but because racial topics are fairly taboo in this country, I find it hard to have a true racial conversation with a black person without one of us feeling very uncomfortable. Perhaps the Jesse Jackson’s and Rodney King’s of the black population represents a small portion of how blacks really feel about race and should also be disregarded as it is a tiny portion of the black population.
Bottom line, if you want to stop the race war, stop pulling out the race card when it isn’t necessary and take responsibility for your own missed car payments, lost jobs, foreclosed homes, lack of money, etc. because it happens to everybody and not because of the color of their skin.
Again, I’ll close with the following disclaimer: I AM NOT RACIST!
I’m not allowing comments to this, because I can guarantee I will be called a racist even though people who actually know me know that I am not.
So, I spent all day yesterday and already a little bit this morning working on Angel. Angel went from a service-only proof-of-concept to a server and client proof of concept in just under 12 hours. I’ve been stress-testing it a little bit this morning and it ran 10,000 “AddUser” commands in just under 3 minutes. Sounds slow? Well, let me explain everything that goes on in a single “AddUser” command (subject to change):
Now do that 10,000 times.
This is my first time building a C++ SOAP client and I must say, with the help of gSOAP, it works great. It is the first time I’ve gotten a C# web service and a C++ client to play nicely together. We initially tried this with raw sockets, but it proved to be WAY too much of a hassle and there’s too much that could go wrong. This has worked 1000% more reliably than anything else I’ve tried. I’ve sort of been having that “mad scientist” feel about me the last few days since I’ve gotten this work–talking to myself, mumbling, swearing at my code, and then screaming “IT’S ALIVE!!!!!” when it finally worked.
Ok, so even though I didn’t get ALL of the bugs hammered out in KnowIT, I released a preliminary version of it over at Google Code. It hasn’t been reviewed yet by anybody, and I even have yet to install it from the installers I built, so I’m honestly not even sure if it will work. But regardless, I’ve tagged it as a release in SVN and I’ll probably be continuing to make improvements and modifications to it here and there. I just wanted it to get out the door so I could stop having that monkey on my back. Monkeys get heavy after a while.
So I haven’t posted in a while. I have a good reason though. Since aroung Thanksgiving time, I’ve been sinking a lot of time into a company I started, Venom Game Labs, LLC. It is basically a company who’s entire goal is to take all the mod makers and indie developers that I can find who are willing to work for free (temporarily) to create a marketable project and sell it. Its pretty cool, I suggest you check it out.
A second note, that actually just caught my attention was the fact that Eric Smith (one of the former programmers, and original creators of the Firearms Half-Life mod) created a website http://www.firearmsgame.com. It is a simple, short, and sweet website that basically sums up all of the rumors flying around about the Firearms: Source versus Firearms 2 fiasco. On that site, he talks about siding with FA2 because they “rescued” the mod. Now, my opinion is that he is correct. The FA2 team, which I was a member of for quite some time, did indeed rescue Firearms. The reason I say this is because I know first-hand, as do many others, what the original Firearms team (myself included) intended to do with the mod after the release of Half-Life 2. The intention was to leave it alone, for good, let it die. I wasn’t happy about doing this, but at the time I no longer had the time to keep plugging away at it. So I also had to let it fall by the way-side. Then a few years later, I had found out that a new Firearms mod was starting for the Source Engine–Firearms 2. Naturally I wanted in on it, I loved working on the first version. So I joined up and started working for a while, then got busy with real-life slapping me in the face and had to go on hiatus for a while.
Once I returned to working on FA2 I found out that Firearms: Source had started up and had been spreading a lot of nasty rumors about how the entire Firearms 2 team are a bunch of theives, etc. Which to me, was a complete lie. Nobody stole anything. We simply went through slightly drastic measures to revive the interest in the game. Keep in mind, this happened well before Firearms: Source even existed. So now this mod, coming out of nowhere, claims they’re the “official sequel” to Firearms because the original creators condoned it. Well, last I checked, the “original” creators left it to die and now just want a peice of the pie once they’ve discovered Firearms 2′s existence. In fact, the REAL creator of Firearms was Eric Smith, and it is his words of approval that are reassuring to us over at the Firearms 2 team.
Now, here’s the kicker, and this has nothing to do with Eric’s talent as a programmer, and his status as the original creator of Firearms. My problem with his statements is that he’s claiming to OWN the “intellectual property” of Firearms. He also claims he can prove this–he has “documentation” supporting this claim. Now, yes its widely accepted that he’s the creator, but when he tries to play the “ip infringement card” on people who want to take the game public and market it, it appears as if he is simply trying to ride the coat-tails of the Firearms name. When he infact, did NOTHING to the new contributions of the game. He has been asked by various members of the community to provide these documents, but they are never produced.
I have a problem with that. If you’re going to make such a bold statement such as “I OWN <xyz> intellectual property” then you better be able to back it up and not simply threaten law suit on someone who supposedly “infringes” upon it. So, I challenge you, Eric Smith, to prove this to everyone. Prove that you actually OWN the Firearms property, and show me the laws that state that Firearms 2, or even Firearms: Source, cannot continue without your consent. I’ve looked for trademarks and copyrights in the US patent and copyright office for anything containing your name. Do you know what I’ve found? Nothing. Yes, nothing. So where is your documentation? Why don’t you just send it over to me in an email. When you send it, I’ll provide it to the nay-sayers and you can indeed claim your place as the “owner of Firearms”.