Thoughts Aloud

Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

Yeah, you are where you thought you were going. I was becoming depressed watching this (so far) bloodless coup the Progressives are so rapidly perpetrating on our country. As a distraction, I decided to try designing my own theme for my blog. I enjoy such creative endeavors, and it has been a welcome break from politics. I am sure I will be tweaking it forever now that I can; but I have been wanting to widen the article column for quite some time, and so far I am pleased with the results. Critical comments welcome. ◄Dave►

My cyber-buddy Troy has started a new forum that I have agreed to help him with. We spent an enjoyable year together on a forum with a small group of other rational thinkers, before we burned out and broke up to start our blogs. Some of our old friends dislike the blog format for discussion and debate, so Troy has started one of the Ning.com social networking sites at:

berational.ning.com

I hope many of the regular commenters here will check us out and join in our discussions there. Any other readers who might be interested in reasonable discourse are invited as well. If you already have a Ning.com identity, you can just log in using the same user name and password. If not, you will need to register with them first. Once registered as a member of the Be Rational site, you will have your own home page and blog and have access to the common BBS type forum, where most of the debate will happen. I hope to see you there. ◄Dave►

OK, I have been poking and tweaking the back end of this thing today. I have enabled gravatars now, so those with a global gravatar at WordPress.com or Gravatar.com et al ,should have it show up here on your comments. If you do not have one uploaded there, it generates a pattern that is unique for you. If you look at one of my comments, it will be obvious that I created my own gravatar and uploaded it as a picture file to the WordPress site.

I also enabled a spam checking plug-in that is supposed to catch most of the robotic spam. I made a test comment and it was just as fast as usual, so I hope it doesn’t slow down the commenting process appreciably. I will be more dilligent at looking in the moderation cue to make sure it didn’t trap a legitimate comment. ◄Dave►

Bloggers are starting to post their life’s job history, and some of them are interesting. I first encountered it at American Digest, and traced the meme back to one called Stageleft:

The most interesting things about blogging is the bloggers. I’ve only ever met four of you out there in the real world, but in some ways I think of many of you as friends.

But I don’t know very much about anyone. And it’s been a long time since we had a new meme. So here’s one.

It’s simple. Just list all the jobs you’ve had in your life, in order. Don’t bust your brain: no durations or details are necessary, and feel free to omit anything that you feel might tend to incriminate you. I’m just curious. And when you’re done, tag another five bloggers you’re curious about.

Serendipitously, I mentioned in a comment just a couple of days ago that I have had a lot of interesting life experiences; but still hadn’t decided what I am going to be when I grow up. I’ll play. So far, I have tried:

• Lawn Mower
• Fishing Worm Breeder/Wholesaler
• Snow Shoveler
• Paper Boy
• Pig Farmer
• Pine Cone Gatherer
• Chicken Farmer
• Car Wash Attendant
• Farm Laborer
• Fruit Picker
• Almond Knocker (hardest job ever)
• Grease Monkey
• Grocery Box Boy
• Busboy
• Ice Cream Dipper (Thrifty Drugstore)
• Sales Clerk
• Radio/TV Repair
• Grocery Clerk
• U.S. Army Soldier
• Microwave Radio Repair
• Morse Code/RTTY Operator
• Waiter
• Bartender
• Bouncer
• Policeman
• Electronic Test Equipment Repair /Calibration
• Satellite Tracking Station Telemetry Technician
• Computer Engineer
• Computer Programmer
• Computer Designer
• Electrical Contractor
• Burglar Alarm Business (Seychelles Islands)
• Farm Manager (Rhodesia)
• 2-Way Radio Repair (Rhodesia)
• Quasi-mercenary (Rhodesia)
• Solar Energy Contractor
• Solar Collector Manufacturer
• Solar Collector Traveling Salesman
• Charter Boat Deckhand
• Commercial Fisherman (California)
• Newspaper Columnist
• Yacht Captain (Mexico)
• Tuna Boat Captain (Hawaii)
• Marine Electronics Business
• Fishing Magazine Columnist
• 2-Way Radio Business
• Cell Phone/Fax Machine Retailer
• PC Clone Manufacturer
• Computer Consultant
• FM Radio Station Engineer
• Cattle Rancher
• Retirement Care Facility for the Elderly
• Montessori Preschool
• Business Consultant
• Webmaster
• Ghost Writer

Many were entrepreneurial pursuits rather than jobs, so I just listed all the different ways in which I have earned money. I have lived in eight countries and sixteen States, so home is where my bunk is at any particular time. Several were repeated in new locales; but the list was already long enough, so I didn’t repeat the duplicates. I suspect I may have left a few out.

I tag all the other few bloggers who happen to read this. You know who you are, and I would be interested in reading your background. ◄Dave►

Well, I didn’t know what it was either, until I read this post from Hugh Hewitt. After following a few links there, including the one to get the Twitter 101 beginner’s guide, which explains how useful it could be, I signed up for an account.

My Twitter URL is simply twitter.com/thoughtsaloud and now I need some associates to “follow” and “tweet” to. So, if you Twitter send me a tweet and I will add you to my list. I suppose I will tweet every time I add a post or comment here, and perhaps make quick comments on things I surf across that do not merit a post here.

If you do not currently Twitter, it is probably because you are a fossil like me. Lets give the kids a run for their money and join in their new paradigm for staying connected. Sign up and reply to one of my tweets and I will reply to yours. Good grief, this sounds silly; but I think there is perhaps some utility to it, if for no other reason than to expand our horizons and perhaps attract more commenters to our blogs. ◄Dave►

As a followup to my Child Wind post below, here is another example on Michelle Malkin’s website:

Jeffrey Rosen’s piece there is rather interesting.◄Dave►

This story at Atlas Shrugs bothers me – a lot! I first encountered it last night as I was making the rounds of the key players in the Obama Birth Certificate saga. I figured there was some reasonable explanation, and that Pamela was just becoming paranoid. Now, 24 hours later, there are more damning updates to it, and Google seems to be avoiding dealing with it.

If it really is what it increasingly appears to be, I feel a chill wind blowing across our internet. Say it ain’t so… please! Else, what is the next best search engine? Google just got really sour for me. ◄Dave►

I saw this “badge” on another blog and decided to check it out.  When I entered the URL for this blog it returned the code to embed here to produce this:

I found that encouraging, because I have often been criticized for my verbosity and penchant for fifty-cent words. It seemed implausible, however, and I noticed that my last entry was the simple one regarding my new hardware; so I tried it again using the URL for my “About Thoughts Aloud” page. This returned:

Come on… OK, how about my serious essay on Sovereign Rights? This returned:

Ouch! I guess I wasted my time with that one! How many geniuses am I going to entice to read it? I tried several more and a few of the longer posts I have made. They all came out as Jr. High School, High School, or:

Finally, I retested a few of them to confirm that it is consistent, and not just generating a random output. If this thing has any validity, I am pleased; for that means my writing is readable by most nominally educated folks, even if they occasionally need to use a dictionary.

You can try out your own blog, or just about any webpage, by clicking on any of the above images; they all take you to the same test. ◄Dave►

Phil, you may be the only one still following this blog who will find this interesting; but I’ll make the report anyway.  I am located too far from town to get cable or DSL service, so I have had a Hughes Satellite system for several years. When not throttled back because I have exceeded my daily limit, it provides download speeds approaching 100 KB/s.

I have also had a Cingular (now ATT) aircard for a couple of years for my laptop, which got me speeds in the 25 KBS range on their Edge Network anywhere my cellphone would work.  Recently, I noticed that my cellphone was indicating that the new 3G network was available at my home location.  Yesterday, I purchased one of ATT’s new “Mercury” USB adapters that you see the guy plug into his laptop in weird locations in current TV commercials.

The device is a marvel of technology.  The installation software is built into it, so all one need do is plug it in to any computer and run the painless install program.  It even has a slot for a micro-SD memory card, so that it can also be used as a portable flash drive. I bought it at Radio Shack, and a 2GB memory card only cost $ 13 (I still can’t get used to how small and cheap memory is now).

The performance is even more amazing. The response time to a request is noticably faster than dealing with the latency of the trip up and back through the satellite and Hughes Network Center.  More importantly, it is approximately twice as fast on the download speed.  I reach speeds over 300 KB/s with it, although it averages less… probably 150 KB/s, which is still half again Hughes best speed, and I would have been tickled with a 75 KB/s average on that network.

So far, I couldn’t be happier with my purchase, and will probably now cancel my Hughes account.  It is like I just got a turbo system.  Not only is it nice to be able to watch videos uninterrupted because they load faster than they play, I can download an hour-long podcast in a couple of minutes, and fast servers like the Drudge Report load and refresh snappier; but as far as I know there is no FAP (fair access policy) to throttle me back for transferring too many MB of data in too short a period. ◄Dave►

This is a test post to try the “Blog Post” feature in MS Word 2007. This is a really nice feature that allows one to use the word processer to make a post to a blog without even having a browser open, much less the blog. While the internal WordPress editor works fine, I am quite impressed with the utility of ScribeFire for making a quick post in response to something while surfing without having to open the blog; but for essay type posts, this feature of Word is awesome. It even automatically went out and imported the “Category” list so one can categorize the post as it is made. Sweet.

By some estimates, one trillion dollars was lost in the stock market yesterday. Where did it go? The same place the “value” in our homes went in the past year? The same place the new $650 bn of credit came from that the FED made available to the financial markets yesterday, perhaps? This demonstrates how worthless our currency actually is. 34,722 Tons of gold didn’t just disappear at the Wall Street casino yesterday. Nor did 22,569 Tons of the stuff suddenly materialize over at the FED. No wonder it seems like every other commercial one hears on radio and TV these days is for some gold trading company. (I miss my forum emoticons… eyes should be rolling here.)

The thing to notice is that the value of individual savings denominated in U.S. Dollars took yet another enormous hit yesterday. Those invested in the stock market took a double hit. On average, their stocks, mutual funds, and retirement accounts lost 7% of their value in a single day. Then, the buying power of what is left was diluted by the introduction of another $650 bn of brand new funny money, representing nothing but thin air, by the FED. One way to understand the effect of that mindboggling figure is that it is the equivalent of adding another 21,666,667 welfare families to our population overnight. Then giving them each an unearned $30K tax-free income for a year, to compete with us in the marketplace for exactly the same amount of goods and services that existed yesterday, none of which they helped produce. The market is rational, even if the government is not. Supply and Demand are always balanced by Price. In a free marketplace, it could not be otherwise. Is there any question that prices will soon increase accordingly?

That is why, when I could not buy silver with it, I went and bought another $1K worth of coffee, tobacco, and beans. It is interesting to note that back when I was earning that money just a few years ago, a three-pound package of Jose’s Columbia Supremo coffee beans at COSTCO was under $7. I buy some every trip I make there and have watched the price steadily climb the past couple of years. I had to pay almost $11 a bag for the two cases I bought yesterday; but I have no reason to think it will ever be cheaper. As an imported commodity, assuming that COSTCO survives, it will be interesting to see how much it costs a year from now. If they don’t, it may be more valuable than gold.

Today, I am thinking of going to buy some more ammunition. Not that I need it; but since I can’t find any silver, it will undoubtedly conserve the value of my ready cash better than all these worthless green pictures of Franklin. Besides, if we do spiral into unfettered hyperinflation, bullets could come in handy for bartering. ◄Dave►