Our first task is to attend the Facebook Developer Garage – Dallas, which is being held in fairly-central Dallas. This will be exciting, as it might be the first developer gathering for a platform I already develop on. There seems to be two tracks, technical and marketing, and I’ll be in the tech track. The business side of Facebook development seems straightforward enough, but technology can usually use additional explanation.Another fun aspect of this event will be getting a chance to see central Dallas. The DFW metro area is pretty spread out and nothing else on this trip will be eve slightly central, so spending some time near downtown should be worthwhile.

On Saturday and Sunday, we’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas 2009 at UT-Dallas. Obviously, Wordpress is a platform I use, but I’m not really doing any development with it. Hopefully, this event will help me move from user to developer, even if all I manage to do is tweak a theme or something similar. Also, it seems like there are few, if any, WordCamps in Austin, so I’m hoping this event will pull in more Austin Wordpressers than Kari and I. When we get back, I hope to attend some more Wordpress events here in Austin and I hope to have met a few people involved in the Wordpress meetups around here.

On Sunday night, as we leave Dallas, we’re going to see the Texas Rangers host the San Diego Padres in Arlington, TX. We’ve never been to this ballpark, and it is a minor obsession of ours to visit new ballparks (we’ve only visited one this season, and it was Tulsa’s minor league team’s stadium)[update: Kari pointed out to me after this was posted that we also visited the Portland, OR minor league ballpark this summer], so this is a great way to finish up the trip. This last stop, I guess, isn’t very nerdy, but at least we approach it in a very nerdy way.

Making things simple is the second biggest task in a project. The first is having a good idea.

Hecuba “Suffering” [Official Video] HD from Hecuba on Vimeo.

We saw Hecuba open for Bat For Lashes in Portland a few days ago. They’re a two person band, and the lady-half of the band is hardly even in this song or video (you can see her wiggle a little sitting on a car in the second half of the video). This is possibly the least representative song of their actual sound, but it’s an awesome video and song anyway.

Letters To Cleo live at The Parish in Austin

After about 14 years since the last time I saw them, I got to see Letters To Cleo last Friday. That’s almost half my lifetime, which has got to be a record for time between shows for me, probably never to be broken. I’m hoping they head out on more frequent reunion tours for the next few decades, as I’d be happy to see them every few years for the rest of my life.

We also got a great picture with Kay Hanley and a signed poster for the show. I feel like every show we see in Austin is better than the last, and Letters was no exception.

Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary, if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

John Adams in a letter to Charles Cushing, mid-1750s. Quoted in John Adams By David McCullough

• When it’s cold, it’s still pretty warm and when it’s hot, it’s awfully hot.
• We bought a smaller house than our last one, but we think we could easily go even smaller in the future.
• Living on a smaller lot, in tighter quarters, around more people can actually result in more, and more practical, personal freedom than living in the burbs or in the country.
• The faster your internet connection, the more of your life it swallows up. My job, my tv, my movies, my books, my magazines, my software…they all either live on the net or come to me from it.
• Central Austin is very different from outer Austin. Outer Austin is very different from the suburbs. Lord knows what it’s like after that. I saw too many anti-abortion billboards on the drive here to want to go back too often.

Life in Texas is good and getting better.

Fiasco is a history of the first year or so of the Iraq War, with a focus on the US military. Over and over, it shows how ineptly the Iraq occupation was planned and executed. I supported the war until some point after the 2004 elections, but that support was based in ignorance. If I had understood that the war could not possibly have possibly been liberating due to the complete incompetence of it, I would not have wanted it. I now doubt that any war could be one of liberation, but I am certain that the Republican party of today can not manage military affairs with any effectiveness.

The Dark Side is the story of what might be called a Bush shadow government, made up of mid-level appointees and bureaucrats, who undercut higher level government officials to create laws, regulations, and processes to increase executive power in particular, and state power in general, in almost every way. They systematically deceived other parts of government, and even other parts of the executive branch, in order to weaken traditional rights and privileges of American citizens and even non-Americans. While Bush campaigned as a conservative, he conserved almost nothing and had his underlings shred the fabric of American government. It’s not entirely clear who should be held responsible for all this (Bush or Cheney or Who Knows?), but one thing is certain: if the Republicans win in 2008, they will draw from the same groups of people to staff a new administration. McCain may diverge from some parts of the GOP, but the republican candidate for president can be only so independent from his party.

In my opinion, McCain would not fix the problems Bush caused. I’m not sure he knows what the problems are and I have a feeling he might not consider them problems at all. McCain seems like a centralizer at heart, a military-style command and control guy. But, at the same time, he also seems to frequently not bother to either command or control his own campaign, with which he frequently publicly disagrees. Which sounds like exactly the same leadership style that resulted in the problems discussed in the two books.

McCain, I think, is not a source of any hope. He would not improve anything as president. Obama, in my opinion, would probably not fix anything either. He would probably worsen many of America’s problems. But, at least Obama would be a slight repudiation of the Bush years, which I think we’ll rue for the rest of our lives.

While the very act of voting presents certain problems for liberty, I voted for Barr this year. I can’t think of any candidate or party for which a vote is a more complete repudiation of Bush. If there is anything that America needs, I think it is to put these last two presidential terms behind us.

In the case of egoism, the arguments against it typically try to imagine some sort of scenario where failing to follow non-egoist principles results in some sort of morally disgusting result. This type of argument is fairly common in ethical reasoning, as well as any other field where you’re prefer to not reason from first principles. But it’s a type of arguments that, by its design, fails to even notice that there may be some positive argument for the principle in question. In fact, the argument type I mention really just results in begging the question, as the “morally disgusting result” is typically evaluable as morally disgusting from non-egoist principles. One rarely comes across an anti-egoism argument that actually engages the egoist argument on egoist terms. Anti-egoists, like anti-Darwinian, prefer to stay within their own premises and then show that, by golly, you can’t be both a creationist and a Darwinian, so Darwinism must go (you can’t be both an anti-egoist and an egoist, so egoism must go).

As it turns out, there isn’t a coherent alternative to either neo-darwinism or ethical egoism. Additionally, neither evolution or ethical egoism result in morally disgusting situations. Evolution, so far, results in humanity, among other things. Ethical egoism, as I live it, is full of creativity, co-operation, compassion, and love.

I suppose that if it were true that ethical egoism required me to violently subjugate every person I encountered and that I could only feel true happiness when sunbathing by the side of a river of human blood…well, I would probably reconsider ethical egoism. In this vein, if everyone shit ice cream, then restrooms would be restaurants. But, as things actually stand, ethical egoism has made me a decent person and nobody is eating out of their toilet.