Joy, as defined by my theological upbringing is different than happiness. Happiness is based on what happens. Happiness is like rain. Joy comes from the inside like a never ending spring. The Bible talks about joy unspeakable and full of glory. I remember that, but I don’t have it anymore.

From time to time, I use my Twitter account like normal people use a therapist. I did that last night to let go of a personal hero, Leo Laporte. I’ll apologize to Leo some day for that, but I also know it helped. Catharsis is important and Twitter is an effective, albeit novel, way to achieve that.

I’m a broken Christian. I love Jesus as much as I ever have, but I don’t identify with the Christians I see on TV who seem to base their faith on dissapproval of gay people and abortion. When those two issues became so important at church, I left and I haven’t gone back. That’s when my heart broke and I can’t figure out how to unbreak it.

I have a wonderful life. I love the nicest girl in the world and she loves me back. I have all that I need except for that broken part of my heart. I sometimes doubt it is possible to ever get that back, but I try from time to time.

There are a few different ways people live on the Internet, and I think they’re generational to some extent. Older people are guarded in the way they share their lives. Younger people seem to share everything. I guess I’m at the upper range of the younger people age group because I share a lot. I talk about my pain. I show my flaws. I express my frustrations. One of the reasons I do that is because the Bible does. The Bible is filled with stories of flawed people who loved God. The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat their flaws and that’s the way I’ve always believed Christians should live. I don’t want anyone to make a hero out of me, but I would like to be unbroken if it’s possible.

My Sunday afternoon project was to re-design the appearance of my desktop and I made three changes:

1. Created a new Wallpaper.
2. Changed icons.
3. Increased the size of the icons on the desktop.

This is the result (click to see a full-sized screen capture):

I like the end-result so I’m sharing the wallpaper. The icons are from Apple’s download page. I used some from two sets because I wanted to distinguish between folders on the Mac network and folders on the HP MediaSmart Server. The feed reader at the top is an Adobe Air app called Snackr. Here are the links:

Darkhand Wallpaper by Neal
Glass Folder Icons 1.0
Eclipse Icon Set 1.0
Snackr

We booked a hotel room and we’ll be in San Francisco from January 4th - 10th. Capturing video is easy. Post-production isn’t hard but it’s a massive time suck. Our goal is to get help with editing and segment planning.

Some shows use volunteers. We’ll need that, but I wouldn’t feel great about using voluteer editors. We have a lot of planning to do.

Someone tweeted Cali to ask if we would be interested in shooting, and Cali’s first response was to ask for proof that it was a smart home. Last year’s “House of the Future” was a mobile home of last Thursday. It looks like this one might be legit.

Typically, Smart Homes are just glorified showcases put together by huge brands. Don’t get me wrong. The HP Smart Home would be an awesome place to live (if I could bring my Macs), but to me, more diverse technology makes a smart home smarter.

Details about the meetup are here on this post at GeekBrief.TV.

Really great design inspires other ideas. Imagine this room with an electronic movie screen that would drop down to black out the window. It would instantly transform a bright room with a beautiful view into a home theater. I want this room!

via the cool hunter

My political conversation is going to be at NealPolitik.com. There, I will be raw, truthful and fully focused on blogging on behalf of individual liberty.

I know her enemies want to paint her as a radical, but no one is THAT radical. Here’s the stuff they’d like us to be influenced by:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/source_sex_assault_program_cit.php

Twitter serves as an amazing pressure valve, but it’s much less satisfying that I would like because someone might follow my tweets because of what we do professionally and have no interest in my late night ranting. This morning I woke up with a great idea. I created a different twitter account for “Neal After Dark.” The new Twitter account is where I’ll stand on the porch yelling at the kids to get off my proverbial lawn.

The idea of having place to blow off political steam, where people know what they’re getting if they follow that account seems kind of liberating.

The “After Dark” account is Twitter.com/lateniteneal. Follow at your own risk.

I’m a Christian who loves science. In school, one of the things that drew me to science was the scientific attitude of skepticism. My teachers taught me there are very few irrefutable laws in science and it’s the job of a scientist to continual test what we know what we don’t know. I LOVE that! Skepticism is the guide. Since my university was a Christian university, it wasn’t all that difficult to keep matters of faith and science separated.

The science I fell in love with in school was never self-assured. It is a constant quest of discovery because the moment a scientist becomes sure, the motivation to keep searching begins to die.

From my perspective conservatives separate faith and science well, because faith in God does nothing to squelch the desire to learn why and what this world and beyond is all about. Progressives seem to take scientific ideas and turn them into absolutes. They take it for granted that evolution is a fact and global warming is caused by human activity and then adopt an air of superiority that says, “anyone who disagrees with evolution or global warming is a backward idiot.” If you’re on the left and you want to understand why we love Sarah Palin, this is exactly the reason. We’re tired of our opinions being dismissed by the media when they determine our positions to be inferior.

Charles Gibson interviewed Sarah Palin with such an overwhelming air of superiority that I want to slap the man. He asked questions with a tone that said, “You don’t really believe that …” or “You can’t possibly think that …” and “Are you sure you want to answer this way?” Sarah, for the most part, stood up to him, but the reason Gibson infuriates me is that he asked questions with the implication that conservatism is an invalid foundation for political discussion. Conservatives have no responsibility to answer to a media who hates them and I think they should stop trying.

Normally I cope with politics through distance. I can listen to NPR and rarely get upset (the exception is commentary from Dan Shore), and I can listen to Rush Limbaugh (but when Rush ends and Hannity starts, I can’t turn the radio off fast enough). Distancing myself keeps my blood pressure in check. I focus on technology and I’m happy.

This year is different because I’m emotionally investing my heart in the success of Sarah Palin because she echos the Reagan idea that government isn’t the solution. Government is the problem and the best thing government can do for people is get out of our way. Her record in Alaska is one of slashing and killing wasteful government programs that don’t work or don’t matter, and I trust her to do the same on the national stage. There’s precedent for that type of vice-presidential role, too. Love him or hate him, that’s what Al Gore did as vice-president. Clinton gave him the task finding and exposing government waste. I want John McCain to give Sarah the same task. I want her to dress Washington waste like one of those moose (mooses? meese?) she hunts.

This year is different also because I’m reading a ton of left-wing blogs, which oddly enough, I find more comforting than infuriating. It’s Big Media that frustrates me because they claim non-bias. The left-wing bloggers see Big Media as biased in a completely different direction than I see it and I find that heartening.

Here’s my question to anyone nice enough to stop by my psychology experiment of a blog… How do you cope with politics? I hate it because it separates people? I hate it because it puts me in a mental state where I feel out of control. I hate it because it raises my blood pressure. Whether you’re a conservative, a liberal or a crazy mixed-message Libertarian like me, how the heck to you cope?

In just over two weeks, I’ve gone from being a non-registered, non-voter with a 90% laissez faire attitude about what government does to being all-in for a person I want to see become president.

Being disaffected by politics didn’t mean I was without strong political beliefs. It meant I was without hope that anyone strong enough to articulate and push a strong Libertarian message would ever be motivated enough to run for office. My political foundation has been shaped by the speeches of Ronald Reagan and the writing of Libertarians like William F. Buckly and Camille Paglia. I believe God created us as vessels of free-will. We can do good. We can do bad or we can do nothing. I believe in freedom of choice across the board because that’s the system illustrated in the Garden of Eden.

Coming out of school, the Republicans held sway with me because their rhetoric was closer to Libertarianism. The Contract with America gave me great hope that I could see wasteful government spending come to an end. When that didn’t happen. I gave up and dropped out. If the political system’s intention was to screw itself, I wasn’t going to hang around and watch.

I had a little (unfounded) hope that Democrats would learn from Clinton’s Republican-Congress-Assisted fiscal restraint. As my fellow Christians seemed to grow more and more enamored with political power, I hoped for a new kind of Democrat party … one that was socially liberal and fiscally conservative. That hope was very short lived. It’s clear that the roots of socialism are too well established in the Democrat party.

I didn’t plan to vote this year, like I haven’t voted for the past several years, and then along came Palin.

It starts with the fact that she’s a woman and I’m a feminist. I don’t have much respect for men in general so men have to prove themselves in my life, but I’m likely to give a woman the benefit of the doubt. Margaret Thatcher said, “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.” Oh Man! I can’t tell you how much I believe that, but for me, it goes beyond politics. I’d rather follow a woman than a man in almost any circumstance.

Beyond being a woman, Sarah Palin is a strong communicator who warmly and smoothly articulates her message in a way that attracts even people who disagree with her. It isn’t a quality that can easily be faked. She comes across as a politician who is genuine and I trust her. That never happens with me so I’ve been reading every blog post and news story about her. Memeorandum has overtaken Techmeme as my favorite Web site.

What I’ve learned about her, is that her enemies fear her because she is so damn effective. Lies about her record in Alaska are jumping up like popcorn, but they don’t stick because all they are just popcorn. She’s slashed government spending on things that don’t work or don’t matter in Alaska. That’s something I’ve always longed to see a politician do. She stood against and exposed corruption in the good-ol-boy networks and I don’t even want to get started on what I think about good-ol-boys. She learned from mistakes. Yes she originally supported the Bridge to Nowhere, but realized it was wrong and killed it. The Alaskan Democrat Party Web site credited her with killing the Bridge to Nowhere (and then took down the page after her nomination).

Camille Paglia is a lesbian, feminist, pro-abortion writer who supports Obama. She writes more eloquently than I ever could about why my friends on the social left don’t have a legitimate reason to fear Sarah (based on her record) and why feminists in particular shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss her.

I want to see someone go to Washington and kill programs that don’t work or don’t matter. Sarah Palin is the first person I’ve seen who just might do it.

This year I’m going to vote for John McCain, but I’m really voting for a future Sarah Palin presidency. I want to have a daughter one day and I prefer a woman in the White House when my girl (or boy) is growing up.