Yesterday I came across an article about how the topic of illegal immigration, which had initially been projected to be one of the central discussions of the 2008 elections, was fading from importance.  Most of the comments were from the anti-immigrant camp, which is very vocal in Texas.  However, almost all of those comments were poorly worded, ungrammatical to some extent or other, and often misspelled.  The only comments that were written as though they came from smart, educated people were on the pro-immigrant side of the debate.

Now, in general I think I'm pretty moderate on the immigration debate.  I think if people are here illegally, and are caught, they should be deported, but I don't think spending a ton of money on a border fence that will probably be ineffective is a good use of national assets with all the other things we've got on our plate.  I think that cries of "border security is part of the war on terror" are just a cover-up for anti-Latino prejudices since nobody's talking about building a fence along the U.S.-Canadian border.  While I'm made uncomfortable by the statements of some of the more radical leaders in the Hispanic community that this is all part of their taking back what the white people stole from them in the first place, I think that we should allow a path to legal immigration for people who want to come here and work.  If they end up sending all their money back over the border, is that any worse then when I buy gas made from oil that came from Saudi Arabia or clothing that came from Thailand or a car that came from Japan?

To get back to the point, while I found myself agreeing at least partially with the points being made by the anti-illegal crowd, their complete inability to construct a moderately-well-written paragraph made me not want to associate with them at ALL.  I want to hang out with cool, smart people, not dumb rednecks.  How many of my political "beliefs" are shaped by wanting to be friends with certain people?

Long story short, learn to write, n00b.

I had a good weekend; the St. Matthew Passion is shaping up nicely, although rehearsing at 10:00am is hard for a tenor.  Instead of going to bed early on Saturday to compensate for the time change I instead stayed up way too late, but for a good cause (dinner, movie, and lots of philosophical discussion).

I spent most of Friday and Monday at work hunting down memory leaks, and then fixing the fixes.  I had lunch on Friday with Mrs. Teh Y and a co-worker of hers, who, when I explained what kind of development I did, said "ew...unmanaged code!"  Now, while Microsoft has actually started talking about doing CLR in the kernel, which makes me shudder, for the time being if you're writing a Windows filesystem you're doing it in C.  I think the biggest long-term advantage of garbage collection isn't actually the garbage collection (PoolTag makes finding leaks easy) or the bugs in managing the memory (again, obvious and fairly manageable).  The biggest advantage would be in code readability.  God help the next person who has to look at this stuff.  Eventually you learn to see past the "unimportant" code to get to the meat of things, but that takes a while.

Yesterday I took a screenshot of my Google Calendar for next week (National Give Back to Musicians Week), for a laugh.  Unfortunately I can't put it up here because if it was large enough to read it would widen the page by a considerable amount.  Suffice it to say I have something singing-wise scheduled every day between this Saturday and next Sunday.

See you later.