Ryan's Journal

To continue the saga, the trackball button on my BlackBerry has stopped acting as a button. This keeps me from using my normal GPS tracking software, which is mostly bad programming (the native OS provides about three ways to click a dialog button, this software only uses the trackball), but really, a button's not supposed to go bad after only five months of being pushed. It's a two-year contract, I'm not looking to replace the phone at all in that time frame.

And it's something of a rip-off now, because I really should have just gotten a refurbished phone at the outset for free. Warrantied replacement phones? Refurbished.

I've now gone through four in five months. Along with the user experience of being a bad flashback to pre-Mac days, the hardware coming out of RIM seems pretty unreliable.

Thanks to another party, I am using a Mac-friendly Sony Ericsson Z750 as a 3G modem. With no hard data in hand, the speeds via USB cable seem to approximate what I expect from most domestic wifi, minus a little bit. The only drawbacks are a tendency to not charge while plugged in, sometimes running the battery to empty, and a lack of 3G coverage in the rural west. Signal's sparse out there anyways. A few days without Internet didn't kill me. Yet.

Find wide-open spaces without speed limits and/or mountains where you can drive up slowly and drive back down without touching the gas. Max efficiency achieved: nearly 38MPG. In Wyoming, Idaho, and eastern Oregon, up until I hit the city of Eugene, my mileage was above 33MPG on a car that's normally sees less than 31MPG on highways.

Now to take this radical discovery and make it practical for the rest of this trip.

Tuberculosis is a horrible disease. Multi-Drug Resistant TB is worse and substantially more expensive to treat. Extremely Drug Resistant TB, a recent classification from the WHO, appears to be to MDR-TB what MDR-TB is to TB. The virulent strains are mutations from base TB, cultivated in hosts where drug courses aren't properly followed and spread through all manner of vectors found in unsanitary conditions; think antibiotics and the creation of superbugs. These are real superbugs in real places. Most people in the affluent west don't pay attention to the scourge of TB because it doesn't directly affect us the way, say, cancer or AIDS does (though TB can make an AIDS infection even more horrific). A very small percentage of Americans contract TB annually. But we've heard about XDR-TB before: witness last summer's breaking news story about the patient who flew commercial flights and circumvented border patrol while potentially spreading his MDR-TB cargo (he apparently didn't). The world's a community, and we miss the plight of its poorest members at their and our own peril.

There are some NGOs like Partners in Health and the Eugene Bell Foundation that take the fight for alleviating TB to the policy level and to the ground in impoverished corners of the world, like Haiti and North Korea. Leaving it to the dedicated isn't enough. Via photojournalist James Nachtwey's work in covering XDR-TB, see what else can be done at home. (Well, try, at least; I'm having trouble with the Flash. For something this important and that amounts to mostly a collection of text and links, could we please just use common standards? Sign the letter link.)

I was going to let my termination of Vonage services this past spring pass without comment since the web has ample description of how unpleasant an experience that can be, but things just got worse with them. Of course, they simply would not allow me to leave, wasting a good long time attempting to re-sign me with "incentives," asking personal questions I wasn't about to answer. I probably could have ended all discussion by telling them I had no internet service in my car, but that's not something I felt like sharing with whatever remote Indian call center Vonage uses (to be clear, the woman I was speaking with had an Indian name and accent). How many times do you have to say "no" until the script lets you go on? Too many.

That alone isn't worth mentioning considering all that's out there concerning the baseness of Vonage's service and retention department, but what pushes my disdain over the edge into post-worthy territory is how they appear to have sold their customer list to spammers. For a long time I used to use per-site email addresses to find out and cut off whoever was sending spam. Since Bayesian filtering came along, I've mostly stopped doing that. But my Vonage registration was a Vonage-only address. And that address has, this year to date, received 2325 of ~58,000 pieces of spam. I'll be shutting that address down.

VoIP is great, but Vonage's business practices leaves much to be desired. I won't be giving my money to scummy friends of spammers again. Let's get someone with more integrity started in the field.

For the first couple decades of my life, I would have proudly identified myself as a conservative, faith-based Republican. As things turned out, I've since decided labels are a detrimental thing to bring into conversations about the state of the union and world. It would be pretty far from reality to say anything about conservatism and Republicanism and me in the same breath. Still, I want to have a nuanced, unsimplified view of what I was more or less blindly following in my youth (as young people are wont to do, in any arena) instead of the common caricatures embedded in our wider social conventions. As I don't wish to bring my own labels to the table, I definitely don't want to pigeonhole others based on their own self-identification or what I may dangerously simplify them into based on meager data. Which, again, I think we are wont to do, if only to make it easier for ourselves to comprehend our world. Relationships are rarely easy, though, and "oversimplify" is dangerously close to "dehumanize."

My travels across the country this summer and fall have brought me through the bluest of blue and the reddest of red states, that colorful simplification for electoral voting that masks so much else. I have talked to and hung out with people holding unlikely but not inconsistent combinations of views and policies; shades of opinions versus the black and white (or red and blue) of our current American political world.

I don't want to be able to describe where I am with one overloaded word, I don't want to easily pin down someone else. There's too much going on to be dismissive of The Other, too much that needs to get better than can be pulled off by just one select people grouping.

Only I don't know where to start. Because the one thing that strikes me as a large obstacle in this quest to understand the self-labeled right wing is that conservatism strives for simplification. All too often I've heard someone with some type of self-described conservative stance claim that nuance was not their strong point. I think I need to start digging there. Why are nuance and shades of gray seemingly inconsistent with a conservative outlook? I am more than willing to have this voiced and explained or even to have my framing questioned; I'm looking for a way into comprehension.

Also, can anybody recommend online communities for conservatives or liberals (or, dare I hope, for something less rigidly defined) that don't rely on phrases like "drinking the Kool-Aid" or behave as if their opinions are impregnable and true to all but the moronic? I've looked, but I've not found, and that makes me a bit sad. It would be nice to talk about issues without devolving into schoolyard alliances and rote party lines.

Related but not directly so, an out of context snippet from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses: "Come, my friends, / 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."