Honk For Peace

The New Yorker posted a coversation between adults as imagined by children but even funnier was the bottom part titled How College Kids Imagine the United States Government.

It got me thinking about a protest group I saw yesterday. Somewhere on Woodward and 9mile was a group of people all holding signs that said stuff like “Honk for peace” or “Honk to impeach Bush.”

While I like that they’re trying to encourage peace (to avoid a political debate, we’ll avoid my feelings on impeaching Bush), I had to question what good they were doing by standing there with their signs.

If you want peace, do something about it. You’re on the right track, but making me honk my horn isn’t going to make any difference in the world whatsoever. Most Americans already want peace – why wouldn’t they? The problem is, what can we do about it?

If you want to make a difference in the world don’t just stand on a street corner, do something about it. Go down to your local soup kitchen and volunteer, get involved with habitat for humanity or UNICEF.

Plant a tree, feed a homeless person, donate money, mentor a child, coach a team, help out at your church, launch a free web service, or if you want to voice your opinion write an editorial for your local newspaper.

I appreciate where you’re coming from, you have the right mindest – but I think you can better apply yourself to reach your goal.

There are plenty of ways to get involved and actually make a difference in this world; standing on the corner and asking me to honk my horn isn’t one of them.

3 comments March 20th, 2007

Is Cable Internet Too Much Like Cable?

I’ve been having a weird problem with a particular DSL connection lately. It would seem that I can’t access certain websites hosted in the Dallas area. The bigger problem is that these are MY websites!!

At first I thought they were down, but not according to my live 3rd party web stats (and thankfully my Adsense earnings are still growing too.) It seems other people can access the server as well, just not me.

So I used a proxy site (looks like I finally found a use afterall eh?) and the sites load fine.

Next step: tracert. That’s where things got interesting. From my computer, all but 2 hops before the timeout are sbcglobal hops. From everybody else’s, the route varies sometimes.

This leads me to believe that our DSL is using static routing. That is to say, similiar to a cable or phone line there is only 1 path from computer a to computer b. It’s not even trying to route around the downed sbcglobal server in the path. When thinking about making a change, read this post about the benefits of business broadband.

It seems to me that this is contrary to how the internet was designed. Has anybody else seen this problem before?

March 20th, 2007