Author: darthjedi

An Epic Adventure from the dark side back

over the last two weeks, I have been on vacation.  Over the last two weeks, I have been too sick to do much outside of the house.  One thing, however, we have done, is we have watched the Star Wars movies from beginning to end (most of my children and myself).  I have always wanted to do that – but have never really had the time.

It was a great opportunity to spend a little quiet time with my children, for the oldest, it also provided some prompts for him to ask some of those more basic questions of life.

I haven’t watched Star Wars in a long, long time; and for one, I am so glad that the first three were made, as they provide so much important insight.  It always felt like the last three were not complete.  Who was Darth Vader, what happened to him, why had he turned to the dark side.

As we sat and watched the movie together, the feelings it stirred up had quite an impact on me.  I could totally see what happened to Anakin, I could even, in my own mind experience it.  I have had things in this life that were so precious to me that I would do anything to keep them, anything.  As Yoda said however, greed leads to fear, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side of the force.

Anakin was so wrapped up in what he wanted, that he didn’t take the time to experience what he had.  He was so consumed that it blinded him, and eventually, he himself caused what he was trying so hard to prevent – and then, he lost hope. 

“But”, Donovan said to me, “It’s never too late to change”.  Unfortunately, it’s much easier to see that from the outside looking in.  However, Anakin took his path from innocence, to evil, and in the end, through acts of selflessness by someone else who cared enough for him to give up their own life; he was redeemed. 

How much that touches on my heart, as I have experienced that; in fact, I experience that almost every day – it’s like a mini-journey.  My children will too.

To often my heart can grow hard, and calloused, and there are things I want, and I’ll work for them at any cost, all the while neglecting those things that are most precious to me.  And then, to gain those things most precious to me back, often takes more than I can muster in my own strength.

I am so thankful for the reminder that in the end, there is someone that is willing to help us, and with that help, we are then enabled to choose the good side of the force, to throw off the bondage of the dark side, and to seek redemption.

It was like watching a movie about my own life, just as my namesake – Darth Jedi – a precarious balance between the good side and the dark side.  How Epic!

A reminder about Credit Card Companies

Not that I should expect anything different, but it’s funny, when you have plenty of money to spare, the credit card companies are like leeches, everyone is sending you offers and trying to woo you into a relationship.

When they start seeing that money drying up (the 2010 expenses have been unbelievable after depleting storage of excess for the adoptions) – they are like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

Over the last two months we’ve had credit card companies close accounts and reduce balances all without prior-notification – to the point of causing me to have to make unexpected $500-600 payments on a single card as it’s available balance was reduced by a couple hundred dollars.

With other cards, now that we have balances for the first time, they are sending us balance transfer offers with very fine print stating that you will start paying off your lower interest balances first before your higher interest balances.  So they are throwing out offers of lower interest so-as to get us to pile on lower interest loans onto higher interest loans; so they can compound interest.  The most obvious is when you have credit cards from the same company, same credit line, etc. and they give you low interest balance transfers for the accounts that carry a balance but not for accounts that do not carry a balance.  Worst part is, most people don’t realize this is what they’re doing.  Sleeze balls!

Little do they know that this is one of the ways I weed out the good card companies from the bad… that in a few months I will pay off and close the accounts that tried to screw me over, and no longer feed them the excessive amounts of money with each swipe at the gas station or the grocery store. 

However, it’s always nice to remember that credit card companies are the equivalent of bottom feeding, blood sucking leeches & rats. They should come with a warning label (Note: we will be here for your convenience, but don’t turn your back as we’ll take every opportunity to try and screw you if it looks like we can).

C’est la vie!

My Complaints about Thanksgiving!

 

Thanks for all the Hardships

 

Today, I was awoken by my children,

Screaming, yelling and hitting each other.

But far too many children have been silenced,

Far too many parents wake up to the nightmare of longing for

What was lost.

Today, I winced as I climbed out of bed.

My back was sore and my head stuffed with a cold of pure agony.

But reading the prayer requests from church,

there are far too many people who likely wake up and long for

my aches and pains.

Today, we had to go grab groceries (again).

I realized that the dwindling money and rising bills cannot be escaped.

But I remembered bringing turkeys to the food banks yesterday.

There are far too many families who can’t

Go and get groceries.

Today, the calendar glared at me relentlessly.

I know that my vacation was over before it even started, and work comes in three days.

But millions of people have no jobs,

While some might be lazy, or unskilled, or uncaring, too many

Are just like me.

Today, I am thankful for all I have, and all I have been given,

The aches, and pains, and worries, and problems, and suffering and sadness

Because I can’t truly see what I have to be thankful for

Until I have experienced life face-to-face: Nor can you.

Not until we have faces.

 

© 2010 Jediah Logiodice

To Express Anger for Ignorance

In regards to HR5283, just so we understand the expectations here:  These children WILL become citizens whether or not the law passes.  The law on the floor will just make it so they don’t have to wait the 2 years to become a citizen, due to the way they came into the country to complete their adoption. 

It means that if their parents were to die, they would be treated like their siblings in guardianship transferring to those named in a will, rather than immediately becoming wards of the state.  It just means that they can travel freely in and out of the country without fear of harassment, and that they will be treated with the same respect and value and dignity that we, as American citizens, often give to no others, unless they are "Americans".  I’m all for becoming a citizen legally, and if we have to wait, we have to wait.

However, as a family that adopted children from another country, I can’t tell you how surprising it is when we hear people express anger or consternation at us or towards us for helping people in another country instead of helping people here at home.

Little do they know that our family is very active in doing both, as are most every family that has opened up to a foreign adoption.  And, more than that, I guarantee, GUARANTEE, that probably 90% of the people that make statements in anger over people helping people in other countries, first, live such sheltered lives, that they truly speak only out of ignorance, and second, are likely to be doing nothing to help anybody, but themselves. 

When people start to become in tune with the destitution of their own community and country, it’s a natural progression of maturity to begin to see past borders, past gender, past race and color.

AVG – Are they untrustworthy?

 

This afternoon I updated to AVG Free 2011, and a short while later, I was presented with this popup to scan my system with the PC Analyzer.  I figured, what the heck.  When the scanning was complete, I noticed that it said my hard drive was 52% fragmented… and if I wanted to fix it “once” i could do so for free, or buy a 12 month subscription.

Well, being the savvy user that I am (and also concerned at how my hard drive could become so fragmented) – I grabbed windows Disk Defragmenter tool and checked my hard drive.  Windows reports that I’m 1% fragmented, and AVG reports that I’m 52% fragmented.

Now, AVG has always seemed to be an excellent tool, and I have recently stopped using Trend Micro and Norton (both of which I used to pay for) for the simple and seemingly solid protection of AVG.

However, I have to ask – is their Fragmentation engine just that buggy, or are they being dishonest and unethical by representing a level of PC Problems that do not actually exist, thinking that most users will just run out and buy their additional software…

 

image

 

Either way, I wasn’t so impressed with AVG’s PC Analyzer Product.

Satan is on my friends list?

I’m pretty sure I have blogged about the perils of social networking to personal information a few months ago.  Interesting in a recent University course, we had a gentlemen, who was a VP in an organization, state that he didn’t want to disclose the name of the organization in which he worked.  Which of course, for me, was all the more reason to find out the company he worked for.  🙂

No doubt, it only took combining a few pieces of publically known information about this fellow, and after a couple of minutes I knew more than one would want or need to know about him (unless you had some unethical purpose in your mind).

As a result, I wrote him a quick note back, here is the note, only slightly modified for contextualization purposes:

 

Name Omitted –

The Internet is your worst enemy when anonymity is desired, but the second worst enemy is saying "I’d rather not say" [when someone asks you about a piece of information that is probably publically available, but you’d rather not disclose], as this brings a whole lot more probability to the fact that people are going to search for you!  🙂

Which is one reason I am almost positive that the Pentagon intentionally purchased and burned the first printed copies of Operating Dark Heart: to drum up more exposure for the book – then the next real question is "Why".  =P

I love the aptly titled Defcon 16/Back Hat presentation: Satan is on my friends list.  Anonymity is nearly impossible in today’s connected world!

It’s funny because I have a brother who has tried his hardest to keep all his personal information off of the internet; and no matter what he does, or how hard he tries, Googling his name will bring up information that no one has any idea how it got there.  🙂

 

r/Darth Jedi

Should you move to electronic books?

Yesterday I heard that eBook sales have increased by 150% over this year.  While I have purchased quite a few eBooks, I still have a significant investment and ownership in hard copy books; books you can share, loan, and resell.

 

As the Kindle is the largest seller, I would also advise to be careful not to be sucked into Amazon’s web of control. DRM is unconstitutional, and unless you have the knowledge and capability (and desire) to break the law to support your constitutional rights, then it’s not a great idea to buy into the DRM cartel.

On top of that Amazon has continued to show that they care very little about their customers, as they continue to give precedence to the publishers as could be seen by their attempt to steal (and in many cases a successful one) of Orwell books, by crippling features of the device due to publisher pressure, by allowing publishers to charge only a few dollars less for a few bits that are crippled through DRM as compared to a hard copy, by creating new versions of their kindle every six months to ensure that old versions do not keep their value, and users continue to buy new ones.
Add on top of that, the fact that you loose your right of first sale (a right protected by U.S. copyright but trumped by the DMCA) in the fact that you cannot resell your kindle books.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have 2 kindles, and spend a significant amount of money on books every year at Amazon (I am an avid reader), and many of those books are kindle books. But unless the book I want is one that I can use the "read to me" function while traveling, I usually opt for the paper books – or, sometimes, both (used hard copy and kindle copy).

What is the real problem behind the “bullying”

Ok – I try not to blog on negative things (too often); and there is a lot of Facebook that I ignore (in fact, most chain posts I ignore); but I really had to comment on the whole “cyber bullying” and the “bullying” conversations that have been very prevalent over the last couple weeks.

Let me start by saying that when I was 10 years old we moved to a new school system and a new town.  First, I was the new kid at an age that is very sensitive to cliques, second I was a nerd (very smart, but a big dork, horrible sense of humor – that I still have to this day and LOVE!), third, we were pretty poor, so my clothes were never stylish, were often worn or second-hand, and if they were ruined (like a pair of shoes I tried to dry in the dryer once) – I had to wear them anyway.

So I was teased, I was bullied, I was made fun of – I was miserable.  I had no friends. I was bored to death at the monotony and foolishness of the public school system.  I was held back, and rarely encouraged.  I was always in trouble due to my boredom and lack of coping mechanisms.  I came home every day and ate handfuls of devil dogs and Twinkies and tons of other junk that we got from a friend that drove a truck for Little Debbie (once the junk was past the sell-by date, they would just give it away).

So, on top of everything else; i got fat, fast!  Once I was fat, there was even more to torment me about.  My blubber, my girl boobs. My lack of skill in sports, on top of that, my asthma meant I didn’t have a chance to ever be considered “cool enough to hang out with”.  It didn’t get any better either – I wasn’t even invited to a graduation party my eighth grade year.  It was a rainy, dreary afternoon, and I came home and cried – because I had no friends.  I hated school, I was miserable and depressed.

Listen, bullying is not new, it has been around since the world began to turn.  The popular or strong pick on the weak or meek.  You know what I did?  The same thing my father did when he was bullied growing up.  I changed my life in my decisions and in my actions; I worked to change everything about my life that I possibly had control over.  I got a full time job at 14 to help buy my own clothes, I started lifting and lost almost 50 pounds, I found a hobby that would interest me despite having no friends; and in the rare instances where the bullying just would not stop: I took care of the problem myself.  You see – I am no stranger to bullying.

There are two types of people in this world:  the people that feel sorry for themselves and do nothing about it, and the people that get up and work to change their circumstances or their own disposition. 

Now, I completely understand the whole conversation about the immature reasoning skills of these young children, and how they are making tragic choices, and in some cases there may also be a clinical side of the issue as well; and trust me, I have a son who has been miserable since the day he was born, and I worry a lot about him, and we work very hard to make sure he is receiving the help and attention and foundation that he needs, and hope by the grace of God, that he will always temper his choices based on the self-worth we have instilled in him. 

But why all of a sudden do we find so many more young people taking their own lives, Why?  Has bullying become worse now than it was in the past?  Absolutely not!  So what has changed? 

Let’s look at the foundation that builds maturity in our children:  their home.  The family is being destroyed from the outside in, and the inside out.

In the family, the divorce rate that continues to rise, the prevalence and increase of pornography, which destroys the bond between husband and wife.  We have families coming apart at the seams all around the country.  Husbands and wives that are so worried and so pressed on all sides for financial needs that both parents are leaving the home, stressing and struggling to continue to uphold the wealth that they have amassed or want to keep or want to gain.  Children are growing up without the foundation of a healthy family, and the pressures, as they have always been, are still there.

If the pressures inside were not bad enough, the family unit is continuously barraged from the outside as well, as things like homosexuality and the challenge of marriage as it was intended from the beginning of humanity are gaining wide spread acceptance and being forced into the minds and hearts of our country.  The immorality and unfaithfulness, the anger and hatred continues to rise in the home as it is pulled apart.

So what are we to do?  Instead of trying to pass laws against bullying (I mean, how stupid can we get!), instead of trying to build martyrs of these children that have made very poor decisions, how about we, as parents become more in tune with our own children, and more in tune with our own families.  The children that are bullying, likely have deep rooted problems that come from the breakdown in their own home.  The children that are being bullied, need to have a strong family foundation for their growth, coping skills and maturation.  So let’s look to make our homes a place where our children can feel comfortable in their growth and finding themselves.

Outside of the home, why don’t we vote for government officials, and laws that will support real family values and help cultivate the integrity and foundation that children need inside of their families, rather than tear them down and destroy them. 

For the children, let’s stop trying to define them by their faults:  If they are liars, or perpetually stealing, or being spiteful, hateful, or desiring (or struggling with) homosexuality, if they think they are fat, or “ugly”, or “slow”, if the family unit is poor; these things provide all the more reason for children to receive our love and support as they work through them in their childhood. 

Please understand too, that parents should not just be about “letting their kids be who they want to be” – It is possible to direct and steer our children towards healthy lifestyles and choices, but still love them and value them in their humanity.   

In the end, If these children have a solid family foundation, if they know they are loved and appreciated and valued by their family, if they receive careful and dedicated medical help when it is required, no matter their lot in life, no matter how miserable they are in the way they are treated, they will feel comfortable in talking with their parents, and seeking parental advice; and parents who are active and engaged can be there for them to help them work through the hardships of their growing years.

I will not boast or brag about how my situation growing up has positively shaped where I am today, but I can tell you that the bullying that I had to endure made me tougher, more resilient and prepared me for the life that was out there beyond the walls of the school.  I can’t say that I would love to relive it over again, but at this point, I can say: “Thanks for making me who I am today!” and to my parents, who instilled in my the understanding of the value of human life (including my own), “Thanks”, and to the Lighthouse that stands on the hill that has continued to guide me every step of the way – Maranatha!

r/Darth Jedi