Category: Uncategorized

Ok, Being reborn into this blogging thing with WordPress… I need a comprehensive guide to what in the world a Ping and Trackback is, how to use them, what they are used for, etc.

Anyone care to help?

The Seattle Times: Personal Technology: OS X users could face Web-browsing ambushes

Mac Folks! – Upgrade or be vulnerable… More proof that even though Mac Os X is based on FreeBSD and *nix, it still is vulnerable and has holes.

It may not be as big a target as Microsoft, but Apple has many holes, hopefully they will be found and fixed, but in the mean time, let this serve as a warning to Mac users (myself included) stay up with the updates, run software update often, and don’t even click a site or attachment you don’t know!

Link: The Laporte Report: Last Call

Call For Help is done. TechTV was bought by G4. Although I’ll probably enjoy the change… Call For Help was a great show targetted to the newbies of computing.

So many people could have and have, benefitted from a show like this. It’s simple no nonsense approache to answering computer basic questions was perfect.

Hopefully another channel will pick up the program and Leo. It’s a great model, easy to sell advertising, easy to get people to call in, and also a great resource. Maybe that’s the problem, no sex, and no violence, how did it survive for 6 long years 🙂

NBA.com: O’Neal, Fisher Help Lakers Steal Home-Court Edge

My Timberwolves lost their first game against the former Minnesota, now Los Angeles Lakers.

Hopefully, Sunday they can come back from the 0-1 defecit and tie the series. Otherwise it will be tough to win in Los Angeles. The Timberwolves have proven they can beat Los Angeles, however, the Lakers seemed destined to win another championship.

It’s David vs Goliath, K.G. vs Coby and Shaq… No matter what the outcome, it will be a great series…

I’ve decided to participate in the “blogging” world…

However, here are some rules…

Comments will be moderated, and I will choose which ones will show up and which ones don’t.

If you spam, you will be banned…

If you comment on my site, please post your URI so I can view your site. If I like it, I’ll add it to my Blog Roll, hope you do the same.

If you don’t like what I say, great, tell me why?

And Lastly,

I will be posting more, and probably upsetting a few. I am a highly opinionated person with strong belief’s and convictions. However I am opened minded, middle of the road, conservative…

Before US invtervention in Iraq, in prisons like Abu Ghraib prison were the sites of Saddam’s most brutal treatment of prisoners. He would cut hands off, feed people to wood chippers feet first, practice horrible torture and abuse.

What a few ( soldiers did, however horrible it is, doesn’t even compare to what Saddam did as well as what that culture understands as abuse and torture.

Do they deserve compensation? Hell no, an apology from our government, sure, already done… We hold ourselves to a much higher moral standard then the rest of the world, and when a few soldiers don’t uphold that high moral standard, which still remained much higher then some parts of the world including Iraq, then its a scandal? That makes no sense… We are the ones defining the rules, and when those that break those rules, ie the soldiers involved, are dealt with accordingly. What they did was wrong, but it was isolated and paled in comparision to what the Iraqis under Saddam did to prisioners.

We are one of only a few countries that systematically upholds at every level in our military the Geneva Convention. We are leaders when it comes to protecting human rights, and yet the media makes it look like we are the bad guys once again. Take a look at what other countries are doing to their prisoners and their methods of interegation / torture. It makes what a few soldiers did, look like a ride at Disney!

My sister, over at her site, HideawayForums.com asked this question and here is my response:

Actually, statistically speaking, we are better off.

For example, crime and violence in schools is down 40% compared to 10 years ago.

Crime rates are down. Murder rates are down. Unemployment nationally is at 5.1% and here in Minnesota its at 4.1%.

650,000 new jobs were created last month in the USA.

We pay less taxes then ever before.

We no longer have a draft for the Military, its an all volanteer Military.

However, we have a media that has become less of the 4th estate and more about ratings and advertising dollars.

The reality is, we are much better off from a statistical standpoint in almost every category even when you factor in population changes over the last 10, 20, 50 and even 100 years.

Murder rates are down, across all ages. Including kids who commit murder. The news reports are up, the actual events are down. This is also true about kidnappings… One major sideeffect of the amber alert is we know every time a child is kidnapped. However, statistically, its considerably down, proving that maybe it does work… But that’s another topic.

Again, the problem, which probably contributes to the lack of “punishment” and/or concequences of actions today, is squarely the media’s glorification and attention to such crimes.

Frankly, I think the media, news, etc should be subject to the same ratings systems that Video Games and Movies/TV Shows are. Those V chips would block virtually every news channel and nightly news shows.

Sometimes I’d rather have my 3 year old watch The Sopranos then the Nightly News, because at least with The Sopranos, I can explain to her it’s acting and a story, but with the news, it’s so hard explaining to her that is real. It’s a bit hard explaining to her that the news is all about ratings and they are competing with The Sopranos, for example, to capture the audience and sell commercials.

Frankly, that’s all the news is there for now adays, is to fill space between commercials.

My frame of reference is US, but if you want to discuss the rest of the world, show me a spot in the world that is worse off now then they were historically… It’s hard to find, Soviet Union collapsed = Freedom, in your next of the woods, East Germany fell, resulting in a free and unified Germany, no major world war in Europe since 1954, think that’s better off…

Sure there are problems, but my point is, the problems haven’t gotten worse, just the media has gotten better at showing the problems and making them into something bigger then they really are. The REALITY is the world is a safer and better place now then it ever has been. There are always exceptions to this, but on the whole, it is better…

I figured I’d start a list of “Toys” I can’t live without…

Tops on the List is my iPod from Apple. I simply love my iPod and use it daily. Bought tons of music from iTunes Music Store and use iTunes to share my music throughout the house. Get yourself an iPod today. I have the 30 gig 3rd generation version, but that mini-iPod looks cool! Saw one today at the Apple Store.

My next, can’t live without “Toy” is my T-Mobile Blackberry 7230. Instant email just simply rocks. How many times have you sat around the office or computer waiting for that email. With the 7230’s instant email option you can go anywhere, and get that email. Top it off with a solid cell phone, internet access and calendar / contact sync with Outlook, its the best. I can even blog from it 🙂

My DirectTivo system from DirectTV is a must have “Toy” as well. I’ve upgraded the internal hard drive to 107 hours of recording via Weaknees.com

Lastly would be my Laptops. I have a Apple mac powerbook g4 15.2 inch titanium and a Gateway 450 PC laptop. Both these I carry around with me for work and I get the power of both a mac and a pc and they both fit into one bag! I saw the mac 12″ new powerbook today at the Apple Store and am seriously debating on that size / form factor… So small, yet so powerful.

Future desires is an upgrade to the digital camera… Currently I have a 3.2 megapixel Sony. Today I saw the new Sony DSC-P1 (I think) which is 5 megapixels and absolutely tiny. The Canon SD10 is smaller, and cheaper but only has 4 megapixels. If I go based on size, it’ll be either of these, if I go for features, I’ll get the Canon EOS Rebel digital…

What are your “Toys”?

As you are probably seeing, I’ve signed up for Google Adsense to provide ad links to my site.

I make no money off this site, I do accept donations, but never gotten a single one… The Google ad’s are very non-intrusive and given the traffic to this site, might just help offset the cost of hosting my site.

Anyway, the cool thing about Google Adsense is it learns your site and tries to post relevant ad’s to what’s on the site.

I also added back the Paypal Donate button on the left, just in case someone feels like donating something 🙂

So, let me know what you think…

I added a cool function to the header. If you notice the image at the top… It’s an image, but really its made from a php script and a ttf font. I got the original script from the WordPress Support Forums and made some code cleanup changes and improved it so you can set all the parameters along with setting the size of the box dynamically based on the size of font and length of text.

You can view the source and sample code by downloading this file.