I’m So sick and tired of this idea that this country was founded on some Christian establishment or ideal. Its so far from wrong it astounds me. Up until the 1950’s, the national moto was E Pluribus Unum, (”from many, one”) , and In God We Trust was not added until an Act of Congress in 1956. I know our school systems are bad, but since I wasn’t there THAT long ago, I know they are not teaching this. So where does this non-sense come from? The Media? ie: Fox News? or what? It’s absurd and I can’t take it anymore. I will call anyone out on this anytime I hear it… and this reason alone, I will NOT vote for McCain.
Since getting the MacBook Pro from my boss, I’ve had some time to play with it. As it turns out, I still only like to use it as much as I like to use my wife’s laptop, mostly just for checking email and web browsing. It just seems slower than my Lenovo, even with its faster procs and same amount of ram… to test I got it dual booting Ubuntu, but even that seems slow. All that I could deal with, however, I really don’t like the keyboard. Or rather the lack of an insert, and a delete and back space keys. Page Up and Page Down also seem to be missing. These keys I use alot, and they’re all very accessible on my Lenovo. So, I’ve decided, I won’t be fully switching from my Lenovo as much as my boss wants me to. The biggest reason so far that I could have used the mac was more for the 1Gb nic it has in it. At work I’ve had to do some testing of the network and I have some scripts and other applications that can fully maximize the throughput of the network, and my current hardware peaks at 100Mbit so, I didn’t see some problems that others in the building were experiencing because of it.
I had the choice to buy a laptop with a 1Gb nic in it when I bought this, it would have cost me more, but to be honest, it was a laptop, when would I EVER actually be able to utilize a gigabit nic. Well… saving to or reading from the hard drive its impossible… but reading and writing straight from ram, you can actually get around to filling a gigabit pipe.
So, I have a reason to switch, I just don’t think I will be. If anything it will give me a reason to buy a new Thinkpad T61
I can tell you I’m overjoyed at the news of this. It happened while I was getting my surgery and I can tell you its great news to my ears…. And If you disagree with me, you really should listen to the words he uses to the reasons hes dropping out. He says that if you vote for the Democrats your a terrorist… Jon Stewart explains exactly how I’m feeling…
I’m also glad Jon pointed out exactly how hypocritical Romney is, with this Religion thing. Our country was founded on the principals of religious freedom, because the founders disliked how the countries they were leaving were run by religion. They wanted to worship who and what they pleased. He also said to extended our freedoms, yet at the same time said he wanted to legislate to protect marriage, which would actually decrease freedom as it would be the first thing in our constitution forbidding something… Its beyond me how people can’t see the problems with all of this… I’m not saying you have to like it, I’m just saying *YOU DONT HAVE THE RIGHT* to forbid these actions and then maintain your own religious guilt trips.
I’ve been using wordpress now for a couple years, and while I don’t have any major complaints against it… I think I’d just like “more”. Or… maybe I just need to take advantage of the features it has… however… the whole slashdot/digg effect flooding out wordpress servers… not that I think I’ll ever get slash dotted, but… what can I say… i’m a geek and I like to tinker occasionally. Currently my biggest reason for not doing anything, is I’d have to rewrite a whole new theme… I spent a good couple hours doing the one I have and I just don’t know where I’d find the time to do it again…
So… I guess I wouldn’t expect it any time soon.. however i may get bored or suddenly have an urge and alot of time on my hands so you never know… I did come home with a new car last week…
I watch a lot of documentaries, and read new and such all the time… and the more I do… the more depressed I get. Truth be told, I don’t like religion for much the same reasons as it depresses me. No matter how hard I work at life, no matter how successful I become, it just seems that the man is holding me back. Health Insurance costs are rising 2 to 3 times the rate of inflation (which is also rising faster now than any other time in history), we have a war that seems to be never ending and the popular presidential candidates on both the republican and democratic sides don’t seem to care about stopping it(I’m for Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, which I know they’re polar opposites in every way, except they both want to reverse this war we are in, and I believe we could use anyone who would actually follow the constitution).
Anyway, I was just writing this down, because its what I’m feeling at the moment… More later…
Sorry, but I had to. I know not all of you that may look at/read my website would agree with me on my own opinions, but I’ve grown really tired for the religiously motivated Neo-Cons in this country and I like to point out their own hypocrisy whenever I can.
I’ve never really liked word processors. It was always the “thing” to use for reports and such. But as far as trying to organize something like a resume? I find its horrible, frustrating and never does what it should. My new solution? I’m not sure, I’ve heard good things about LaTeX but I’m not entirely sure thats what I want. And I’ll probably end up falling back and just writing it in HTML+CSS. That always does what I want… The only problem will be getting that into word format, or PDF. Worst case I can always print to PDF from a web browser, and probably open the file in Open Office to save it to word. I’d prefer a script I could run that converts it to both formats, but thats something I’ll have to look into..
In case your wondering, I just like to keep my resume up to date and with my recent job change, it needs some updating. I used a template I liked from MS Office from way back and has worked well for me over the years, but I’m ready for a new one. This time around I’m seeing the benefits of having it in pure HTML form, who knows I might even keep it online and just drop out my address and phone number…
My brother came home last week from his LDS mission in South Africa, and he would continually remark that we(being people living in the US) don’t know how well we have it. Which to some degree I agree with him. However, not everyone in this country would agree. I’m not trying to downplay the situations that people live in in South Africa, or any other 3rd world country for that matter. I’m sure its not something I would like to live with either, and I am grateful for the thing with which I am privileged to. This however does not mean I should just take what I have and be “happy”. Wanting more, wanting things to be better is a very worthwhile cause. My brother had made the claim that I shouldn’t be so hard and critical of our government and our current leadership, because I don’t have to put bars on my windows and worry about someone shooting through my windows. I *very* much disagree. As I said, yes I understand that South Africa, in most parts, is very much a 3rd world country, and here I am “living the dream” in the U.S. of A.. The current self proclaimed leader in this world of ours. Heres where I’m comming from, comparing the US, to South Africa is like comparing apples and oranges, they are NOT the same thing. Because of the history surrounding each country and the forms of government in place and the like… the two countries are *VERY* different. In order to make any kind of fair comparisons, you need to look at countries where there are more things that are alike than are different. The so called “1st world countries”. This is how they gain these labels in the first place. And when ranking 1st world countries, guess where the US falls, in all the areas that should matter? Dead LAST. Sure, we still top the charts in military power and expertise, but this is also coming into question and China is the up and coming star in this arena. But we are still the only 1st world nation that does not give Health Care to every citizen of this country. Our public education system is failing miserably and lieing about it to cover up this fact. And something I’m more inclined to follow, we are also falling way behind in Broadband connections for our citizens as well. America isn’t much for being the land of the free like it used to be. No instead we want to keep people from entering this country, we want to hold people indefinitely and without charging them with any crime, and then torture them so we can charge them with a crime. We want to award multi-billion dollar government contracts to companies that our Vice President has a stock in. We want to have wiretaps and listen in on phone calls without warrants. All of this is *against our constitution*. The foundation of this country! And the american people just blindly accept this, because we feel we need protection… from what? Yes, 9/11 was a tragedy. It resulted from what I can tell, was our leadership asleep at the helm. Now, they’re asking us to give up our freedoms that this country was founded on, for some pseudo safety. Our elected officials are running away with billions and our freedoms, and all the American people seem to care about is who’s the real father of Anna Nicole’s baby! *WTF!*
Look, I’m not a fan of the government (just read my blog), and I’m definitely not a fan of more Government Regulation. However, Net Neutrality *IS* a good thing. Its purpose is to force the monopolistic powers that be, to play fair with their smaller and more innovative and dynamic competitors. Republicans are dead against it, (and why wouldn’t they be, the lobbyists that give them money/perks tell them to be) and then the far left Liberals are against it because they can’t see past this being more unnecessary government regulation. However, what they can’t seem to really understand is that the bill (S. 215) Internet Freedom Preservation Act doesn’t change much over what is currently going on (far as we/I know anyway). It calls for packets to be equally prioritized regardless of their destination. The exact verbage from the bill goes like this:
`(4) enable any content, application, or service made available via the Internet to be offered, provided, or posted on a basis that–
`(A) is reasonable and nondiscriminatory, including with respect to quality of service, access, speed, and bandwidth;
`(B) is at least equivalent to the access, speed, quality of service, and bandwidth that such broadband service provider offers to affiliated content, applications, or services made available via the public Internet into the network of such broadband service provider; and
`(C) does not impose a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available via the Internet into the network of such broadband service provider;
Now, I’m not a Lawyer (INAL), but this is saying that if an Internat/Broadband Service Provider(ISP) were to also have a VoIP service (Like my provider, Comcast). This forbids them from giving their VoIP service preferential treatment to the VoIP service that could be offered by others (eg: Vonage[my provider], Packet8 and many others). This *DOES NOT* forbid them from performing Quality of Service (QoS) on VoIP traffic, but it *does forbid them from only performing QoS on their own VoIP service*. Now, this is exactly the type of agreement we can live with, as it treats all VoIP providers fairly. I also understand that ISP’s have been doing some forms of QoS on bittorrent traffic, as they say it would keep normal users from doing normal things if they didn’t. This is allowed under the proposed bill, as long as *ALL* bittorrent traffic is treated the same. However, I do believe these types of issues will become more important as time moves on. It will eventually become a selling point (or maybe a reason not to buy from one provider over another) depending on what type of traffic is or isn’t prioritized.
If anything this bill didn’t quite go far enough as I feel that ISP’s should have to properly and accurately make available to the public at large what type of prioritization they are doing. As then consumers could be fully informed as to what is going on behind the curtain and make their purchasing choices based on that. Not that they have alot of choices at the moment, but thats a whole other entry…. (see Utopia)
I came across a speech done by the Author Michael Crichton about global warming, its called “Our environmental future”. I must admit that I personally haven’t done much really looking into things with regard to global warming. However, I did read his speech and I must say he says what I’ve been thinking for a while. I am now, more than ever, along the lines of getting rid of our fossil fuel dependence and developing alternative renewable energy sources. I will be buying a bunch of LED light bulb replacements(I honestly can’t stand florescent, they give me a headache) as the ones that came with our house burn out. My choice of vehicles has always leaned toward gas efficiency and will continue. If only Lotus would release their prototype electric I think I’d convert completely. I’m also hopeful solar panels will come down in price as right now they just don’t make economic sense(I’m not rich after all). As I would love to be able to cut my electric bill at least in half.
