Blog of a crazy man

I think China hates me. I’m not joking either. They must really hate me.

Why?

Try searching for me on Yahoo! China. I’m not there. This website doesn’t show up. My old blog locations don’t show up. Even profiles I have on other sites under the name “jmweirick” don’t show up. The only thing that shows up is Jerome’s Keywords because I left a comment on the plugin page.

Search for me on Yahoo! America and you find 983 results. I used both “jmweirick” and “jmweirick.weblogs.us” as my search terms. Each time, I showed up several times on Yahoo! America, but nothing on Yahoo! China.

So I find my self asking, am I that political to warrant censorship?

I usually don’t write allegories. I really don’t like alegories to begin with, but when I read Pilgrim’s Progress I was inspired to write an allegory of my own. I’m not going to tell you what the allegory represents, but I have left clues in accompanying meta information :).

The villain sat in darkness clothed with the blood of past victims. Content with his previous victories the villain lurked in his newly won darkness.

The villain’s critics said that he would never be able to win. They said that he was too old, that he had lost touch with reality, and most grievous of all, that the light would prevail.

He had showed them. He fought his enemy in bloody combat, but his victory was swift. No sooner had his enemy fallen then he turned his attention to the candles. With maniacal glee he smothered the candles, one by one.

As the darkness grew and spread throughout the room, so did the villain’s power. Drunk with power the villain dispatched a few lesser enemies with barely a notice.

As time grew on, the villain’s enemies began to back down without a fight, and the villain became confident in his darkness. No longer did he watch for enemies because to him they posed no threat.

The villain made no notice when the hero humbly entered. The villain slept as the hero lit a candle. No protest was made to his action, and the villain didn’t even stir. So the hero lit another and with the light from two, he lit a thousand more. Soon the flames formed an inferno and began to lite the others without the hero’s help.

The villain awoke to find his world ablaze. The light from the flames burned his eyes. In a state of confusion he attempted to attack the hero but charged headlong into the burning inferno. He died in a puff of smoke.

Thus the hero defeated the villain without a battle and brought light back to the world.

This isn’t the sort of thing that I normally post about. But I promised a post this weekend, and this was the only post idea that was anywhere near complete enough to put on the site. So, without further delay, I give you the post:

The big rumor going around today is if Google, the internet search giant, will create its own operating system (OS) to compete with Windows. Some have speculated that they will, and some even say that it will happen by the end of 2006. Although I like Google and would most likely use a Google OS, if they made one, the truth is that they probably won’t.

While an OS would give Google the ability to further increase the number of times and places where Google could show its ads, an OS has too many troubles. One trouble is that a Google OS would have to compete with Windows. Switching an OS is more work than most people are willing to put forward. Linux and Macintosh have already proved that making people switch operating systems much harder than, say, making them switch an email program. Not only does it require that a person know a lot about his computer, but it often requires he switch an entire set of programs, because the programs that he normally uses work only on one OS.

Aside from not getting users to switch, Google would have to maintain an entire operating system code base. Even with Google operating dozens of web services, the amount of manpower that they consume is far less than what maintaining an operating system requires. The added Ad-sense revenue would not be enough to justify the added expense.

Google could always just use Linux and other open source software and piggyback on the efforts of others and, therefore, not have to employ as many people to maintain the project, but that still leaves one question. Why would a full blown OS be better than an application suite? Google already offers a range of online and offline services and software. They would be better off maintaining and expanding these tools than they would be by offering a full blown OS. They would have fewer programmers, less overhead, and only marginally less Ad-sense revenue.

I apologize for being absent for an excessively long time. Tomorrow is the last day of finals week. As most of you know, finals week is a pain. Amount of school work goes up, and free time that would normally go to my blog goes down. (I’m taking a break from a rather large Spanish assignment to write this.) I’m going to have a few new posts up on the weekend. Maybe an essay, or maybe not.

While I’m posting I might should mention that Digg is new to the blogroll. Digg is a social news website where stories are voted on by members of the website. The stories with the most votes make the homepage. Here’s my profile if you want to see what posts I’ve dugg so far.

Welcome to 2006!

I could give a list of resolutions, but let’s face it, everybody does that. I could give a mushy review of last year, but let’s face it, everybody does that too. When I started Blog of a crazy man, I decided that I wouldn’t be like other blogs. I would focus on doing things and making posts that were about things that you couldn’t just hop on over to any other blog and get. I haven’t been completely true to that, but I try.

That said. For my New Year’s Day post, I say simply: