Ethics - Snapshot Chronicles

Respect. Honesty. Tolerance. These are the building blocks of integrity.

And somewhere along the way, a large portion of this country has lost sight of its integrity, and that makes me sad.

Even sadder is that our moral meltdown is playing out on the public stage of Facebook and Twitter in ever uglier ways.

I’d love to think — I want to believe — that teenagers who make racist remarks about our President on Twitter and young women who post disrespectful photos taken at our National Cemetery on Facebook just aren’t thinking clearly about the ramifications of their stupid and offensive actions. And of course, they are not, and on some level, we need to forgive them their youthful stupidity and move on. Maybe they are racist. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe they have no respect for our veterans. Maybe they do. At the moment, they are simply the latest icons for the pervasiveness of social media, and a timely reminder that once it is online, it’s out there forever. No do-overs.

But the sad sad reality is that their flagrant disrespect is simply reflective of what they see around them.

When a candidate for president can dismiss half the population as ne’er do wells …

When candidates for national office think it’s okay to redefine rape …

When conservative commentators think it’s okay to call the President a “retard” and then compound the nastiness to say it just means “loser” …

I think it is pretty clear — when it comes to integrity, we’ve lost the plot. How can we really be that surprised when our youth behaves so badly when so many putative role models clearly have ZERO respect and tolerance for others? Quite frankly, I think they lie too, but that’s not my main point here.

There’s some good news — respect and tolerance prevailed on November 6th. I am most definitely giving thanks that “That Happened:”

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But we cannot be complacent in our lingering election euphoria. I fear that the ugliness is still simmering under the current veneer of cooperation and retrenchment on the right.

So, while I am thankful that women will still retain their reproductive rights in this country, and that more and more of our citizens are free to marry whomever they choose (although I never plan to do THAT again personally), and that the middle class won’t get totally squeezed as the 1% gets another tax cut, and that math prevailed over mumbo jumbo, and that there are outstanding young men like John Franklin Stephens, I am also thinking long and hard about integrity today.

And what we as a nation need to do to get it back.

While I don’t plan to write product reviews on this blog — not my thing at all — we use a variety of equipment here in Geek Central and now is as good a time as any to give you the current equipment list. Everything on our list (located at the end of post) has been purchased at retail, except for one printer which I acquired in a charity auction. When we add gear to our inventory, I’ll update this post, and indicate whether it was purchased or donated.

Apart from the fact that I really don’t like writing product reviews, a major reason why I will not do them here is that I occasionally do projects for HP. While I expect I will mention the company and its products on this blog, for me to write detailed reviews of their gear, or anyone else’s, would be a conflict of interest. Ain’t gonna happen here, folks.

I will however be using all sorts of hardware, software and “consumable” products in the course of writing this blog, including things from HP. I’ll always clearly state if something I am writing about is related to my professional work, and you, dear readers, can evaluate my words accordingly.

My brother, who is even more of a gear head than I am, has expressed some interest in writing the occasional post for Snapshot Chronicles. His posts will be more about features and functions than mine will ever be, but on the lines of buying advice — what features you should look for in a camera or software if you wish to do certain things — than comparative product reviews. There are tons of other places you can go for those, and we’ll have some in the blogroll eventually.

The Gear List, July 4, 2007

Printers: HP LaserJet 4ML (this baby’s almost an antique), HP Photosmart 375 compact photo printer (from charity auction, autographed by actor Alan Cumming), HP Color LaserJet 2550n and an HP Photosmart C6180 All-In-One. We’ve had other printers, and they just don’t hold up the way the HP ones do. I think I bought the original LaserJet in 1993, and the thing is still chugging away. To put it in perspective, I had a Mac SE or Mac II when I first bought the printer, and have since burned through those machines, plus maybe another Mac and at least two Windows machines. The computers couldn’t keep up but damn, the printer can.

Computers: Three Sony Vaio Laptops of various sizes and configurations and a Compaq Presario tower.

Cameras: Susan, a Canon SD450 Digital Elph; Douglas, a Nikon CoolPix 775 (David’s old camera); David, a Sony CyberShot 5.0.

Update, July 13, 2007

Thanks to the fine folks at HP, one of my clients, we are messing around with an HP Photosmart A716 compact photo printer, an HP Photosmart Pro B9100 printer and a Photosmart R837 digital camera that has in-camera red and blue eye removal. And Douglas has his own M537 digital camera, which looks a lot simpler and easier for him to use than the hand-me-down Nikon from his Dad.

We’ll see if we can get some pictures of the dogs that don’t look like they are possessed 🙂

Reflections on respect and other matters

Gearheads Are Us