Four words that are commonly heard whenever someone is either required to give an oath, or voluntarily gives one. “So help me God,” is part prayer, and part affirmation. How much more convincing could an oath be than one made in the name of God? It’s at least twice as powerful as “on my mother’s grave.” When someone adds “so help me God” to the end of their oath, it indicates how serious they take the pledge. So what’s wrong with that?

Well, it depends. In many cases there’s nothing wrong with it. Faith and religion are incredibly personal, and the Bill of Rights gives us all the right to worship, or not worship, as we choose. It’s one of our most important rights, and goes hand-in-hand with freedom speech, its First Amendment brother. Swearing an oath to your god is every American’s right, including Barack Obama.

The problem is that when Obama was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, the phrase was added to the oath of office. If Obama had simply added the phrase on his own, it would be slightly less upsetting. However, Roberts recited the phrase for Obama to repeat, thereby making it a part of the oath itself. There was fervor over the placement of the word “faithfully” in the oath the first time around, yet I’ve heard virtually nothing about this.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The constitutionality of Roberts and Obama using the phrase “so help me God” in the oath is somewhat open to interpretation. Technically the First Amendment only prohibits Congress from establishing religion, though it was clear that most of the founders, Jefferson in particular, were against any establishment of religion by any branch of the government.

The history of the oath shows that virtually all of our past presidents have invoked their god while affirming their oath, and given our country’s Christian majority, I sincerely doubt anything will come of this, or Michael Newdow’s lawsuit. However, with the current political climate, and many of our “enemies” being religious fundamentalists themselves, I would have hoped that Obama would see the error of our highest leader so openly endorsing Christianity as the one, true religion.

I don’t have near as much faith in Obama as many of my friends do, and this is one of the reasons. Our last president was a deeply, and openly, religious man who claimed that God talked to him, and look how that turned out. I just wish that we could finally get a president who recognized not only the cultural diversity of our country, but our religious diversity as well, and respect the non-Christians enough to not openly endorse Christianity as a form of public policy. Well, there’s always 2012.

Lisa Miller of Newsweek has some pretty good thoughts on the subject as well. I recommend anyone interested in this read her thoughts.

Edit: Extremely temporary. Already taken down and work is beginning on a new version. I’ll keep this version for now as it seems to work.

Well, I kind of finished the new design. I sort of gave up and rushed it out the door there at the end, just to see if my mind changes once I see it live. It hasn’t. I’m still not really a fan, but I’ll leave it up for a week or so just to make sure.

As of right now it works, but barely. My Ma.Gnolia links aren’t working properly, the year doesn’t show up properly in the date box, the comments aren’t styled, the header doesn’t have any links, the footer is nowhere near where I wanted it to be, and there’s no real archive. Other than that though, it’s functional.

I’d have to say that my biggest dissapointment is that it turned out incredibly similar to my Photoshop mockup. So, it’s not so much the site that I don’t like, it’s the overall design. Which is odd because I did like it in Photoshop. There’s a very good possibility that I’m just not a very good designer. In fact, I’d have to say that’s definitely my issue. I tried to design a site that had all sorts of design elements that I simply don’t understand, or can’t properly convey.

There is a bright side to this redesign failure though, and that’s that I learned a few more things about working with Wordpress. I had to modify some of the functions that Wordpress uses to get some of the desired results. They were incredibly minor, but it just goes to show how useful a working knowledge of PHP is when working with this beast.

Oh well. I guess it’s back to the drawing board. I think I’ll stick with something incredibly minimalist next time. Maybe that won’t require as much “talent.”

A few months back I had developed a renewed enthusiasm for my blog. I posted a couple of meaningless thoughts, and began the process of creating a new Wordpress template to spice up the joint. Fast forward about 5 months, and not much has been done. I’ve completed around 80% of the index page template, and about 20% of all the other pages. And since I didn’t really want to create any new blog posts until the new template was up, I haven’t written any. The site has basically died.

Lucky for me, I have exactly 0 regular readers. However, the occasional readers that may have popped by have seen nothing worth sticking around for. And that’s completely uncool. What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t blog? It’s like having a pool table and never using it (another thing on my list to start using more).

I plan to work on the site this long weekend, and have the new design up by Monday night. If I can stay away from my XBOX 360 long enough, and find some time between celebrating my beautiful wife’s birthday, I think I can do it.

Ok, so these past few blog posts have really opened up my eyes to how bad my design for this site is. Something about the look, just screams “ewww.” Not exactly sure what it is, but it’s certainly visible. I’ve never been very good at design, but this is simply… boring. Not what I intended.

When I started this current version, I was really enamored with Dan Cederholm and Jason Santa Maria’s web pages. And you can certainly see inspiration from both of those sites in my version. The Georgia font and sidebar titles are almost direct replicas of Jason’s prior version. The header is a sad knock off of Dan’s Simplebits. The problem though, is that both of those guys are talented. They’re spectacular designers. So when I try to emulate them without blatantly stealing (which I kind of did), it looks horrible. Also, it’s darker than I wanted.

Since Ficlets is down, I decided to go ahead and start looking at the design of my blog again. I hit up Khoi Vin’s blog because I know he has a cool link section to a ton of great designer’s pages and started looking around for inspiration. I visit many of the sites he links to every once in a while, just to see what sort of cool stuff talented folks are up to, so I’ve seen much of the design that’s out there. But a few guys have gone through changes recently, like Jason Santa Maria (whose new design is very sweet) and Shaun Inman. And while those sites are cool, I’m looking for something with a little more… color, I guess.

I happened upon Dan Rubin’s SuperfluousBanter, which I had seen before, but really inspired me to go for something different. You can see how colorful it is, without being gaudy. I think that’s an incredible feat. I really like his use of color in the sidebar links, and the way he sticks to a single base color and gets so much out of it. It’s really quite nice looking.

Now, I’m not going to rip his site exactly, but I think he’s helped push me in a new direction, away from the monotone white, grey, and black of this site. Sure there’s a little red and blue thrown in, but it’s not quite enough. So, as of tonight, I’m going to start on a new WordPress template for the site, and I’m hoping that I can accomplish what I want using WordPress without having to resort to coding the whole thing in django or Ruby on Rails considering I don’t know either of those languages. I’m fairly proficient in PHP, so sticking with WP is really in my best interest at this point.

For the next week or so, you may the template for this page switch over to Kubrick or an in-progress version of MutedSound 2.0. And yes, I do realize that I’m talking to myself as there’s not many people who actually come here (none on a daily basis). Though, a couple friends from Ficlets do seem to stop by on occasion (Kwatz even added me to his blogroll, how awesome is that?).

Given how much I enjoyed Dr. Horrible, and the resounding praise I usually hear for Firefly, I decided to give it a shot. I remember seeing the previews for the show when it first came out, and was somewhat intrigued, but I never got around to watching it. I think I saw a few minutes of it once, but it just didn’t grab me. Something about the “sci-fi western” just didn’t click, and I missed out on the original airings.

Overall, I’ve had fairly limited experience with Joss Whedon’s work. I never got into Buffy, and while I enjoyed Angel, it wasn’t something I really took the time to watch regularly (if I had Tivo back then, maybe things would have been different). So Dr. Horrible is really my first, real entry into the world of Whedon. And considering how incredibly enamored I am of the little web show, I started to do some research on the creator. I learned, among other things, that he is a fellow atheist, which automatically makes me like him even more. His response to the Onion’s AV Club question, “Is There a God?” put a smile on my face:

The Onion: Is there a God?

Joss Whedon: No.

O: That’s it, end of story, no?

JW: Absolutely not. That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.

So, given how much good will Whedon gained through Dr. Horrible and his atheism, I decided to give Firefly a shot. I noticed that Hulu hosted the Dr. Horrible series, so I had a sneaking suspicion that some of Whedon’s other work might be available there as well. Ran a search, and the entire series (all 14 episodes) are available for viewing online for free. This turned out to be a perfect test of both Hulu and Firefly.

The Hulu interface is pretty sweet, I must say. The “dim the lights” feature is really a nice touch. It basically puts a dark grey tint over the entire browser window, save for the video which stays bright and clear (well, as bright as the director intended anywho). Vidoes are shown at 360p by default, but you can bump that up to 480p with no visible loss in streaming stability. An ad, between 15 and 30 seconds long, shows up at the appropriate commercial breaks that you must sit through, but this is an incredibly fair trade off in my opinion. Everything moves very smoothly, and the picture and sound are quite good. Overall, I’m very impressed with the service, and will most definitely be using it again.

So far I’ve seen 9 episodes of Firefly, and I must say, I really enjoy it. The bits of humor are mixed in very well with the action and dramatic elements. Well drawn-out characters that are very enjoyable to watch. Some of them remind me of David Milch characters for some reason, but that’s a good thing (I’m still upset about John From Cincinnati being canceled, but that’s another story). I’ve never been a huge fan of either Sci-Fi or Westerns, but this mix really seems to work. It’s a different take on both genres that works well together. I have to give Joss Whedon some credit here, for scribing an enjoyable show.

I’m actually quite bummed that the series only lasted 14 episodes, especially as I get closer to that final episode (though I still have the movie to look forward to, which sadly isn’t available on Hulu). However I can see why Fox canceled the series. Given how horrendous most of the successful shows on TV are, it does not surprise me that a little gem like this didn’t reach the masses. Witty dialog, interesting characters, and a few subtle messages about consumerism just doesn’t resonate with the crowd that enjoys American Idol and CSI: Miami. Given what looks to be a large production budget with the amount of location shoots and special effects, I believe Fox needed this show to be a hit. A cult hit and critical darling, simply doesn’t bring in the ad revenue required to support a show these days. It needs to hit huge numbers right out of the gate, or the network will cancel. So, while I’m sad that it was canceled before it really had time to grow, I can absolutely see why Fox decided to cancel it.

If you have a spare 43 minutes or so, and have not seen Firefly before, I highly suggest you head over to Hulu and give it a chance. Even if you end up not liking Firefly, I’m certain that you will find something over there to tickle your fancy (that’s not a real phrase, is it?). I mean, they have full episodes of Doogie Howser, M.D. online. That’s simply… wait for it… awesome!