Just for my readers who don’t know, I’m a white chick. I come from a long line of white people, and my long line of white people have mostly been poor farmers. They fought on both sides of the civil war. They fought in the American Revolution. They fought in Vietnam and in every war that America has engaged in since the dawn of this nation. My family has always been intensely proud of that heritage. My cousin has served in Iraq and we are all very proud of him for choosing the military life as an homage to my grandfather, who was an MP during World War II.
This is a rather lengthy bit of background to get to my point, but it is important because the point I have to make is about the changing of minds and attitudes between the generations. Admittedly, I did not vote for Obama, but I didn’t vote for him out of self-preservation reasons, more than anything else. Obama intends to make some changes that will hurt my family financially, not because I dislike the man, or think that he won’t necessarily make a good president. My grandfather, however, would have voted for his first Republican, ever.. this year and his reasons would have been much less personally motivated.
These sorts of things are disconcerting, especially since AVG is in one of my top free software picks for windows based machines. If this sort of behavior keeps up, I might have to start shuttling folks toward Anti-Vir. Which is annoying because it is ad-supported, but I see the capitalistic advantage in ad-supported utilities and am willing to do my bit for king and capitalism if AVG manages to work an epic fail.
Of course, since I don’t use XP currently, it will be sort of hard for them to get a failing grade from me, but there are XP machines in the house so we’ll have to see how far this goes.
This is something that had never occurred to me. The president of the United States cannot communicate via email. I’m sure that I knew that somewhere deep down, but I was sure exceptions were made for family. I was positive that it was always possible for George Bush to email pictures of his wife and pets to his parents as they enjoy their retirement, but the New York Times pointed out that Barack Obama is expecting to be told by the secret service to give up his blackberry.
People that know me in real life know that it is nearly impossible to separate me from my iPhone. I am practically attached to the thing, and when I broke my first gen iPhone earlier this week I was so upset that I wrote a scathing blog post about the 3g that I had replaced the phone with. Of course… now I don’t want to give the 3g up because it’s my NEW iPhone and is my NEW appendage… and it’s shiny too.
I am not sure that I would ever be able to bring myself to hand it over. Not even if I had been elected ruler of the free world.
President-elect Obama, I already admire you for being willing to hand over your crackberry to the secret service. If you manage to bring yourself to do it without saying, “Screw you! I’m not taking this tin pot job!” you, Sir… are a far better person than I.
Okay… this is just great. I know I’ve been quiet other than sharing news about my car, and my escapades with my car, but really… this had to be shared.
I’m all for good political humor… but this image that my son showed me earlier today, while cheesy, made my whole day. I’m posting it in an external link because I don’t believe in hotlinking and I’ve been too lazy to fix the flickr plug-in on my blog.
Amen to this guy, who explains the science behind why it is that pizza on the west coast cannot ever approach the goodness that is true New York pizza. Apparently the secret is in 90 year old brick ovens, and the tap water. Amazing, no?
I’ve always wondered about that pizza thing. I mean, I like pizza enough to eat it, regardless of its origins, but there still is very little that competes with slices of New York style pies. Personally, I preferred my uncle’s rendition of pizza to everything else. My uncle is Sicilian and learned to make this wicked amazing pizza, which he then passed down to my father, who also makes this wicked amazing pizza, but it’s not quite as good as my uncle’s for some reason. Perhaps this exercise in scientific explanation makes sense, and can help humanity truly understand what goes in to making the best pizza in the world.
It’s particularly topical because of all the news stories that have been surrounding the FLDS ranch in Texas, and all of the comparisons that I have seen made to this facility and Waco, with the most interesting quotes being from the Texas officials who desperately wish to avoid a repeat of the Waco tragedy. Of course, I do not mean to imply that those living on the FLDS ranch are cult members and personally, as far as that whole scene goes, I just want them to get through the evaluations of those children and let those kids go home. I am sure that maybe 5% of the families on that ranch have not been as responsible toward their children as they should have been, but the other 95% deserve to return to their loving homes. But the whole situation does bring Waco back to my mind, and thankfully, this time no children have died… at least, not so far.
Today I was digging through digg. This rarely turns up anything useful, but there is the occasional link to an article on kotaku that doesn’t completely suck. Of course, the primary reason why this article doesn’t completely suck is because it’s not an article at all, it’s a video clip. The video clip isn’t even produced by kotaku, but was, in fact, aired on G4. News that comes from G4 is often interesting because it paints a picture on the video gaming industry and market that you do not see in the mainstream media. This clip is precisely one of these.
In this clip, Adam Sessler of XPlay interviews the authors of this book called “Grand Theft Childhood” in which they posit the theory that children who do not play video games are at a greater risk of being socially ostracized and of becoming more physically violent than their gamer peers.
Hello!? How can you possibly hop on the internet and not realize that people do this? There’s a very simple solution to this problem. It’s called “Network Filtering”. I’m not the huge network geek that my husband and friends are, but Network Filtering is really easy to do and from what I’ve seen, any wireless router has this feature available in its setup.
What you do is tell the wireless router to only accept connections from the mac addresses that belong to individual machines in your house (or your Nintendo DS, or your PSP… or your iPhone.) You do have to enter in new mac addresses when you replace old machines or devices, but it takes maybe ten minutes and is a great precaution against unwanted intruders on your home network. Not to mention, it’s just plain smart. Who knows what leechers are doing while pretending to look like you?
So this morning, I’m reading the news and I stumble upon this little tidbit. Yes ladies and gentlemen, that is right! A club known for exotic dancing hosted church services on Easter Sunday!
The only reason this is relevant is because Tim Wilson predicted it many moons ago.
Wierdness Du Jour | Random Gemini | 
November 17, 2008 12:55 pm | 
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