teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

Today we had an interesting discussion about abortion in my Honors Colloquium. Every time I hear these debates, I just become more Pro-choice.

Let me first say, that I would never tell a woman to get an abortion. That would just be wrong to tell her what she should do since I have no medical training. On the flip side… I would never tell a woman to NOT have an abortion. That would be wrong because I am not in her shoes (neither physically nor metaphorically) and I have no medical training. This is an individual choice the woman has to make. And since the government has no medical training and they do not know every case personally… they can not make a blanket law completely banning the procedure. It’s as simple as that.

Another thing that came up in this discussion was Obama’s stance on late-term abortion. Most people cite how gruesome the procedure is. Why does that change anything? I’d be willing to be the average person would consider ANY surgical procedure gruesome, but since they don’t know the details of digging around inside a human body, they remain ignorant to those details. Sometimes it is medical relevant to have a late term abortion. Sometimes it is a choice between saving the mother or the baby. And to mandat that the baby gets all priority in these decisions is so wrong. If the mother chooses to die for her baby to live, then ok. If she decides that she does not want to trade her life for a baby, then ok. There should be zero judgment on her choice because it is to be a personal choice. And individuals with a medical training (aka the doctors involved) are the ones that can make the best recommendation on the situation… NOT the government.

This is why laws against abortion are fundamentally wrong. Sure, people have opinions… but these opinions are just that. The fact is that you do not know all situations, therefore you can not just say one way or the other.

I’m working on giving back the the people by providing an easy, free over-the-air host for blackberry apps.

The site is http://www.otadrop.com

So far, I don’t have much there, but with time I will. I am currently working on the back-end. It’s going to be all database driven, so it’ll be nice and dynamic. If I have the time, I will also make it so you have to login and such to drop an OTA package.

In the mean time, if you need an OTA package hosted… just let me know. I’ll be glad to host it until I get the site up and running.

http://www.macworld.com/article/139333/2009/03/ipod_shuffle_design.html

Apple definitely went to far with this revision of the iPod shuffle. The thing has no buttons at all. They are built into the headphones. So when you loose the headphones, you have to buy special headphones with the controls built in (I’m assuming other companies will develop headphones with controls built in… and charge a premium for them). But the part that will surprise people… is that Apple will still sell the darned thing better than any other companies’ superior MP3 player just because it has the name Apple on it.

Terrible, Apple. Terrible. But please… keep it up. Without Steve around you’re bound to fail anyways.

One thing that seriously annoys me, more than someone that is so hardcore about their religion that they feel everyone has to hear the word of [deity], are people that thank [deity] for their accomplishments. Or on the other side of the spectrum… people that blame [deity] for their lack of accomplishment (and either become to hate [deity] or just brush it off as some master plan).

Do people have no value in themselves or the work that they did to reach a set goal? Do they honestly think that they couldn’t have done it without a character from a book?

It annoys me because it is, in a way, taking any credit you take for an accomplishment (such as winning an Oscar) and making an attempt to shift it to someone else– no mater who that someone else is. It’s analogous to giving credit to your parents every time you make it to class on time, even if there has been no contact with them for several days. I do not go around thanking the sun every time I make it to class on time, nor do I blame the laws of physics when I get a poor grade on a writing assignment. I take full responsibility for my accomplishments or lack there of. I would feel like a jerk if I said “Oh, it wasn’t my doing… it was [deity]’s plan that let me do this.” But when people do thank [deity] for what they do… that is really what I hear. And then I can’t help but think that maybe we should skip the middle man and just go strait to [deity] with any credit we were going to give this person. If don’t feel that it was anything that you did to achieve some recognition for an accomplishment… then you don’t deserve the recognition.

Keep thy religion to thyself. You go and personally thank [deity] on your own time. Thanks.