Last night I watched a moving and exceptionally well made film, Paradise Now. It’s the story of two young Palestinian men who are chosen to carry out a suicide bombing against Israel. The film does a reasonably good job of showing arguments both for and against armed resistance while giving us a unique view into the lives and struggles of the Palestinian people.

The movie also gives a rarely seen view into how Hamas and other organizations recruit, organize and carry out such missions. One striking part of the operation involves an Israeli helping to smuggle the young Palestinians into Israel. I was shocked to realize this, but even in polarized conflicts there are those who are willing to help the other side in exchange for money. The film has a great ending that keeps you on the edge of your seat until the second the credits roll. I won’t ruin it, but this film is worth checking out.

Oh, and a surprise treat on the DVD was a trailer for Everything is Illuminated, which looks pretty good. It was a Warner Independent picture that not surprisingly didn’t get much promotion or distribution.

Back when I used to own a TV and one of the best commercial zapping DVRs around, I would record Frontline eposides on PBS. I usually would save them until I was feeling intellectual enough to watch. I would then be thankful for forcing myself to watching something intellectually stimulating as this is one of the best shows on TV.

Now that I don’t have a TV, I remembered, thanks to a recent WSJ article on good video watching on the web, that PBS lets you watch many of the Frontline episodes online for free.

The New York Post ran an article on Friday about a man who spent two years and $10,000 of his own money to defeat a $65 parking ticket. The man, Stanford Young, is a lawyer and was irked that he got the ticket for parking at 6:59 in a no parking from 4-7pm zone. Young stated that he made sure he parked after 7. The case made it all the way to Manhattan Supreme Court. An excerpt:

Lawyer Sanford Young spent two years and almost $10,000, but finally beat the $65 ticket he fought all the way to Manhattan Supreme Court.

“I feel great,” Young said yesterday after learning that Manhattan Justice Emily Jane Goodman had ordered the Parking Violations Bureau to pay his money back on the 2005 ticket.

“It’s a good feeling to fight the system and right a wrong.”

The lawyer estimated that his $9,935 loss was well worth it. “I figured I’m sick and tired and I’m not going to take it anymore,” he said.

While creating this blog, I couldn’t help but wonder what impact this would have on my name presence in search engines. Currently, my site www.blakeperdue.com ranks 1st on Google, 7th on Yahoo and somewhere in the ether on MSN for the keywords “Blake Perdue.” My LinkedIn profile, which I created less than a year ago, outranks my site on both Yahoo and MSN despite my site having been around for 8 or 9 years.

Perhaps it’s because my site has been mostly Flash in the past. Still, I include search engine friendly pages and tags to make sure they can read my site and determine what it contains. I think this blog will help boost my ranking on Yahoo and MSN, and to help it along I’ve peppered this blog with the keywords “Blake Perdue” — hence, the alt text on the nav saying “Blake Perdue blog archive”, etc. This should do the trick, but only time will tell.

Well, after years of sitting by and watching others blog, and after years of reading those blogs, I’m finally entering the fray. I thought a blog would help me connect with some of the community here in my new hometown of Atlanta. It will also be a good outlet for me to share my thoughts, interesting links, etc and help my friends from NYC and my family keep tabs on me.

So, after deciding to create a blog, I next had to figure out which blog software to use. At my previous job we had used Blogger.com to support numerous (20+) blogs. We continually had uptime problems with their software so I could easily eliminate them. Next I looked for some free PHP blogging software.

BBlog looked promising but lacked some of the plugins and functionality I wanted. Through my current job, I was exposed to Typepad, which is a good blog platform for beginners but didn’t have the advanced flexibility I needed. So, I settled on Wordpress and I must say I am quite happy.

The software was a breeze to install and only took a few hours to build the custom theme templates. The one problem I have with Wordpress, and some may see this as an advantage, is that it doesn’t actually generate HTML pages. It uses PHP scripts to build the pages on-demand. This is normally fine, but as those familiar with the Digg effect know, when your blog gets lots of traffic, the added weight the PHP scripts puts on your server can crash your blog. But, I won’t be having that kind of traffic anytime soon, so I’m fine with this.