Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts

Sunday, September 14, 2014

The World Isn't Black and White

After 34 years living on this planet and revolving around the Sun, I've come to a realization.  The world, as in our civilization, is not black and white.  Although somethings might have a right and wrong answer like the world is definitely not flat, most things are not as easy as we would like them to be.

Many issues today are polarized between two camps such as pro-life vs. pro-choice, Republican vs Democrat, and Mac vs PC.  Ok so some are more important than others, but the idea is the same  Both camps dig in with their ideology and tune out anything supporting common ground or the other side.

The more I experience, the more I find that most solutions end up in the middle somewhere.  For example, as I get older, I'm finding myself gravitating more and more towards more Libertarian views on topics.  This has led to a "liberalization" of my social ideas while I stick to my conservative ideas about the scope of government and how to manage the economy. 

Likewise with the Pro-life/Pro-Choice debate I have changed my stance over time.  When I was younger, I followed the straight ideology from the Roman Catholic Church.  Life is life and under no circumstance should any human take that away.  I still fully agree with this when it comes to abortion and embryonic research, but capital punishment is a little less black and white for me.  In most cases, I think that life in prison is probably enough, but for some people, I am ok with the death penalty.  Osama Bin Laden... yes, Saddam Hussein... yes, some random kid that got mixed up with a gang... probably not.

So what I'm trying to say with my rambling is that we need to take a closer look at a lot of issues in our world.  It's time to come to the middle and learn about the other side.  We might just find out that there's a bit of truth in the middle.  And who knows, maybe we can take our energy and use it for something else like helping to feed the hungry or curing the sick.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Please Please Please Backup Before you Upgrade

This rant/warning is aimed at the masses that are currently upgrading their iPhones to iOS 7.0 and to anyone before they upgrade anything else.  Please backup your device before you upgrade.  Software upgrades don't always go smoothly and the data on your phone will suddenly become more valuable than gold when it disappears.  For my iPhone friends, it's easy, just plug your phone into iTunes and don't upgrade when prompted.  Go to the iPhone view and click on backup.  Then once you're backup is done, click upgrade and enjoy.

Another thing to consider is to use the free iCloud service to backup your contacts, bookmarks and other settings on your iPhone.  You can also backup photos, but storage beyond the initial freebie is a pay service.  Myself I backup my photos to Dropbox automatically when I plug my phone into my computer.

Help us geeks help you, backup so we can recover your data after we fix the problem. :)