Tim Boudreau's Blog

The NetBeans Mobile is half way across the U.S.

I bought some Gatorade and nuts at the truck stop yesterday (the dinner of champions!). Two guys wearing turbans entered the store at about the time I brought my items to the counter. The woman selling me the things said, "You know it still scares me when I see people who look like that. And I'm not a racist person". I said "Well, I suppose we have the news to blame for that". I mean, what do you say? There are no racist people. There are people who have learned to fear something. That can happen through first-hand experience, or through the media, or through any variety of indoctrination. But the bottom line is, I can meet the person whose grandfather killed my grandfather, and I will never know that fact unless somebody told me it - and if they told me it, it was probably them looking out for their personal gain via what I might do because I knew that "fact". There are no age-old conflicts. There are no "These people have been fighting for 6000 years, it's unstoppable" conflicts. That's a lie. All of that is just manipulation - people turning easily available knobs on other people. This is basic: There are no 6000 year conflicts because there is nobody who has been alive for 6000 years. Period. These conflicts need to be refreshed and renewed with each generation, and the appalling thing is that there are people who have no reservations about doing that. Slobodan Milosevich exploded the Balkans into a war with the phrase "No one will beat you again." As a species, as a whole, we need to get more media-savvy fast. This stuff is not going to slow down.

Human beings are a product of biology. We are vulnerable. The environment we were built for is not the one we are in. The essence of evil is exploiting those vulnerabilities for gain without regard for the multitude of consequences.

Anyway, this is a longer and less focused blog than I'd planned writing. The NetBeans Mobile is doing well, and I'm looking forward to meeting the Java Users Group in Madison, Wisconsin on Tuesday, and the folks in Milwaukee on Wednesday.

And I'm a little creeped out by people thinking I must be a skinhead. I'm just going bald in a big way and every other alternative I've seen looked pretty embarrassing.
-Tim

Comments

• good post Tim !!!
  and good luck with your netbeans mobile tour !!

  Posted by: aleixmr on September 11, 2007 at 05:10 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.