The Binary Circumstance

I uploaded some pictures from my trip to Vancouver, BC. It was a great trip and I’ll write more about it soon.

For now, enjoy the pictures.

It’s a beautiful city.

I’m currently in Vancouver, BC and enjoying enjoying a welcome change from the Seattle area.

The weather both in Seattle and Vancouver was spectacular yesterday and the day before. It’s going to beautiful and much warmer today and tomorrow.

I last visited Vancouver about nine years ago and it looks like a completely different city than I remembered it. There seem to be a lot more apartment and office towers and there is a major expansion of the Convention Center downtown taking place.

Gays are a much more prominent fixture in the city. I don’t remember noticing them a lot when I was here last but they seem very present today in a broader section of the city. There’s also a large Asian presence here.

The people are very friendly and out hotel room is on a corner with great views to the southeast and northeast. They also have free broadband Internet access.

The last time I was here, the weather was overcast and I never saw the mountains. But they are in full view on this visit. It’s a really beautiful city.

I was doing some research on the weather here and in Seattle because the friend who I am travelling with is considering a move from San Francisco to the Pacific northwest. He saw Seattle on a extraordinary, sunny day and is now seeing Vancouver in the bright sunlight. I keep telling him he’s getting distorted view of the weather up here.

I found a website that gives the number of hours of sunlight per year by city. It helps to understand just how much less light we get in the Pacific Northwest compared to San Francisco.

Hours of Sunlight Per Year:
San Francisco: 2906
Portland: 2155
Seattle: 2049
Vancouver: 1919

The pattern is very clear. The further north you go, the less sun you’ll see. Is it any wonder that so many people gravitate toward the equator?

I’ve written about Pat Tillman’s death before. (Here and here.)

Now his parents have expressed their rage about the government’s efforts to cover up the fact that he was killed by his own men.

“Pat had high ideals about the country; that’s why he did what he did,” Mary Tillman said in her first lengthy interview since her son’s death. “The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting.”

[...]
Patrick Tillman Sr., a San Jose lawyer, said he is furious about what he found in the volumes of witness statements and investigative documents the Army has given to the family. He decried what he calls a “botched homicide investigation” and blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting “outright lies” to the family and to the public.

“After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this,” Patrick Tillman said. “They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”
[...]
‘You can never put it to rest’Mary Tillman keeps her son’s wedding album in the living room of the house where he grew up, and his Arizona State University football jersey, still dirty from the 1997 Rose Bowl game, hangs in a nearby closet. With each new version of events, her mind swirls with new theories about what really happened and why. She questions how an elite Army unit could gun down its most recognizable member at such close range. She dwells on distances and boulders and piles of documents and the words of frenzied men.

“It makes you feel like you’re losing your mind in a way,” she said. “You imagine things. When you don’t know the truth, certain details can be blown out of proportion. The truth may be painful, but it’s the truth. You start to contrive all these scenarios that could have taken place because they just kept lying. If you feel you’re being lied to, you can never put it to rest.”

Patrick Tillman Sr. believes he will never get the truth, and he says he is resigned to that now. But he wants everyone in the chain of command, from Tillman’s direct supervisors to the one-star general who conducted the latest investigation, to face discipline for “dishonorable acts.” He also said the soldiers who killed his son have not been adequately punished.

“Maybe lying’s not a big deal anymore,” he said. “Pat’s dead, and this isn’t going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has.”

Not just any soldier
That their son was famous opened up the situation to problems, the Tillmans say, in part because of the devastating public relations loss his death represented for the military. Mary Tillman says the government used her son for weeks after his death, perpetuating an untrue story to capitalize on his altruism — just as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was erupting publicly. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall. She again felt as though her son was being used, something he never would have wanted.
How right the are.

Keeping “altruism” and self-sacrifice alive are essential for the propagation of wars.

See also Ayn Rand: The Roots of War.

I’ve got company coming for most of this week so blogging will probably be light.

After having all the problems with Musicmatch Jukebox 10 yesterday, things turned out OK. Version 9.0 is working great and the RCA Lyra has been loaded up with 24 songs. I also found my Musicmatch Jukebox upgrade key so I can still use the special features like printing covers for CD jewel cases and Super-tagging. I also upgraded the firmware in the Lyra yesterday so it has some updated features also.

I got the RCA Lyra about 18 months ago as a Christmas gift and I haven’t used it. It wasn’t even opened until yesterday. I was going to sell it on eBay but when I saw that it would only sell for about $25, I decided to open it and try it out.

It only has 64MB of memory (because it was purchased more than a year ago) which is why it doesn’t hold many songs, unlike those iPods that hold hundreds of songs but also cost hundreds of dollars.

The RCA Lyra does have a slot for an SD memory card. I checked them out at Best Buy yesterday and a 512MB card cost about $69 plus tax. I found a whole lot of them on eBay and bought the same thing for $38 plus $5 S&H. Perhaps I should have bought a 1G, which were selling for about half of what they cost at Best Buy, but I really don’t expect to use the RCA Lyra much, and don’t feel a need to have hundreds of songs permanently loaded. Depending on what sampling speed I choose when I load the mp3 files on the Lyra, I’ll be able to have about 60-120 songs which is more than enough for a portable device.

I’m impressed with the sound quality of the Lyra. It came with an armband and nice padded clip-on headphones. It also came with Musicmatch software, which I already had, and the documentation says I can download 100 free songs from another music site. I haven’t tried that yet, so I’m not sure how that works. 100 free songs are worth about $100, so I’m inclined to think there’s a catch.