Read this interesting article published by the World Security Network talking about a plan for peace in the Middle East.

This is a pretty intelligent and thought out plan for Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine to come to a peaceful resolution. The short story:

• Common values for all sides need to be established. i.e economic interdependence
• Israel, USA, and EU need to implement a policy of reconciliation in addition to power politics
• For instance, rebuilding the damaged infrastructure in Lebanon.
• Through compassion and interdependence, the pools of hatred and terrorism from which groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Fatah draw their power will dry up.
• Syria will be isolated from its neighbors as the only terror-sponsoring dictatorship and will have to transform itself in order to survive, probably changing into a democracy of some sort.
• Palestine needs a new pragmatic leadership to step up and make decisions that enable the state to have a purpose other then the destruction of Israel.

Anyway, and interesting article I thought. I did not know that Israel's attacks on Lebanon were actually done with the blessing of the UN - Resolution 1559 apparently allows another nation to come in and open up a can of whoopass on possible terrorist threats. Hmm sounds familiar... US is to Iraq as Israel is to Lebanon? Of course without the reconstruction, occupation, and endless world policing.

Source: World Security Network Newsletter

Click here to see my very first geocache hidden - called 'Junk in the Trunk'. I hid it sunday, and it was posted late yesterday. Within 37 minutes, the cache had already been found by 'HiDude_98' :) These guys are surgically fast - 2 other folks found it within the first 2 hours...

So I did this pretty unusual geocaching 'series' yesterday. What is a series? A set of small caches that were designed to be found one after another. I started at Quick Sax #1 and found 10 caches in a row. They were really quick and easy to find - and all hidden in the same type of place. Anyway, I couldn't figure out why it was called 'quick sax'. But looking at the google earth map (shown to the left) made it pretty apparent :)

Hexar is buying some tickets to this sweet Tool Concert at the SBC Center in San Antonio on Sept 12th. If anyone else is interested, let me know and maybe you can get in on this sweet concert. I have a new tool t-shirt that is dying to be broken in by actually seeing the band while wearing it. That was superb English.

Tickets go on sale at 9:50am tomorrow morning (July 22nd)

OMG the lamest jumphook.com feature to date. To celebrate the event, the vacation counter is back up and running!

The stupid javascript errors you get when loading the page in Internet Explorer are finally gone. Two fixes were needed - first the blosxom spam plugin I have is so cryptically giving an error that I just put a try-catch block around it. The second thing was that my method of accessing things in the HTML DOM was bad - I switched to using something called CBObject() that was written by someone who knows javascript better than me. That seemed to fix the errors! sweeeeeeeeeet.

Jumphook Trips A really cool new jumphook.com innovation is ready for some face time. I've been experimenting with tagging my blog entries with GPS coordinates in order to bring you these cool thing to look at:

• Google Map Triplogue:
• Click here to view the Yucatan trip in Google Maps
• Google Earth Triplogue:
• Click here to view the Yucatan trip in Google Earth

How was this all done? Well I created 2 new plugins to my blosxom blogging software and also a new 'KML' based flavor that will allow all my blog entries to be viewed in Google's map language - KML. Pretty neat I think, please leave me some feedback!

New Photo Album Posted

Another 4th of July outside of the USA? Sure, why not? Check out these great pics from the latest adventure w/ my Austin peeps to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Along for the ride - Claudia, Justin, Caroline, Wendy and Hexar. Between the white sand beaches of Tulum and driving a mini-van thru the tropical jungle, another great trip! I call Scooby-doo for the next trip though :)

I'm a freakin total idiot. I was trying to add some cool GPS tagging business to my blog, and I completely erased all my blog entries and replace them with 'test!'. I'm doing my best to put a backup I had made a few months ago up to restore some of the stuff. But I'm afraid that a good portion of the last 2 months blog data is completely gone. whoops.

I was just learning about this new technology called GeoURLs. It's pretty neat, you put some special tags in the header of your blog/website:




and then there's a directory at geoURL.org that lets you look at your real nieghbors' webpages.

Pretty cool, well if you're into GPS anyway...

OK, I've tried yet another method for preventing comment spam on my blog. Now I have a sweet 'word verification' check akin to what ticket master does. The hole in my new security method? Well, the word doesn't change! I made the jpg in paint and the password is hardcoded. Good times. Anyway, click the 'add a comment' link on this entry and try it out :)

I encourage you all to give this a quick read for some 'common myths' regarding immigration

http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Documents/CommonMyths-Immigrants-FINAL.pdf

And a personal anecdote -

My girlfriend right now is Colombian, currently involved in a legal immigration process to get her greencard. She owns a house, holds a job, and pays the same taxes everyone else does. She is applying for legal 'US Residency' which you think would be easy for an educated electrical engineer.

Well here are some things you may not know about the legal prcoess of being allowed to live in the USA as a non-citizen (as a worker, not a college student):

* she has to work for a company willing to sponsor her H1-B VISA. It costs her employer $3000 to sponsor the VISA, and it will cost her $3000 more in the end to foot the bill for the immigration lawyers. I have a hard time picturing a job for an immigrant w/out a college education finding someone to pay $3000 for someone to start working for them, or to have the other 3 grand on hand to pay 'the man'.

* if she gets fired or quits, she has to leave the USA in 30 days. Imagine if someone told you that by law you had to sell your house and leave all your friends/other immigrant family members in the US within 30 days due to problems at work. Imagine having to stick w/ your job even if it is not what you want to do, just because you want to live in this country.

* if she gets into any legal trouble, it means exportation. The same offense that would land a frat-boy a $200 fine and a slap on the wrist for possession of marjiuana or the like would kick my giflreind out of the country!

anyway, i'm only writing this because i think that it is worth cutting the illegals a little bit of slack - they are doing jobs that most americans don't want to do, and they're paying taxes just like the rest of us. In reality, this helps both sides: US economy benfits because outsiders help the economy keep going, and the international person gets to live in a country that offers higher quliaty of life.

anyway, please leave comments about this if you feel compelled...

Well, unfortunately, there was one tragedy on the Yucatán trip - namely my camera took a dip in the ocean while Claudia and I were swimming to the Tulum ruins. Anyway, the cameara is toast - and I have replaced it w/ the newer model of camera:

The specs on this camera look pretty sweet, and I'm exicted to take it out in the wild. New improvements are - more megapixels, audio+video on the video capture, smaller and slimmer, bigger LCD, and 'digital image stabilization' which will help steady my caffeniated shaky hands when taking pictures.

I got to experience the joys of a non-US-Citizen girlfriend when coming back thru passport control before taking the 3 hour drive back to Austin and heading to work... Another great trip!

After a 4:30am wake up, we returned the van and caught our 7:20am flight back to Houston

Hexar went diving in the morning, and saw a bunch of really cool fish. The rest of us, soaked up the beach for a little while longer, before retreating to the Tulum city to grab some eats and watch the Germany/Italy World Cup game. After that, we started on the 3-4 hour drive back to Mérida which left us just enough time to see the Zócalo there and then retire to the El Espanol which had A/C.

We decided on Monday that we would stay another night at the Paraiso, so that we could spend all day chilling on the beach. Hexar tried to go scuba diving but they said that the ocean was too choppy for it. Ah well. We spent all day on the beach swimming, tanning, drinking, etc. It was great. We went out again, but this time Claudia and Darin went to an Argentinian restaurant while the rest of us went to a local Mexican place.

After Coba, we found a nice place called Paraiso on the Tulum beach. We got all set up and then ate at this really delicious place called 100% Natural in Tulum, and then we were tired and went to bed.

On Sunday we visited a couple of Cenotes near Vallodolid, which are basically big cavern pools which form underground. And they are very popular swimming holes, so we swam in them. They were really really amazing, one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Just a big cave room with a bright light shining down from where the rain falls in. Hard to explain without a picture. Anyway we got lunch and headed east towards Tulum, and ended up at the Mayan ruins at Coba. Coba was really cool because they have the 2nd tallest Mayan pyramid, and they still let people climb to the top! The view was awesome.

The next day, Saturday I suppose, we drove down to Chicen Itza to see some Mayan ruins. There was a huge temple, a ball court, and a ton of other cool stuff. We spent most of the day there, and then drove to Valladolid for dinner and to check into the next hotel, El Meson del Marques. Dinner was a little disappointing but the hotel was really nice, with A/C and a tv and everything.