Archive for October, 2008
It is hard to imagine the situation with gas and the price at the pump getting any better. This is a “golden era” as far as I am concerned.
At the same gas station…
…a drop of $1.51 in six weeks.
Not sure if I am the only one, but I am finding it increasingly hard to be motivated and do things this fall. Â The weather, on the whole, has been fine, , a cold front moved in early this week. Â The morning have, for the first time this fall, required a coat on the way to work, not much gloom with rain, etc.
I am not sure if it is the pending election, and the exhaustion resulting from the build-up, or some other factor, but I am in a funk. Â Work just plugs along, not much intensity or stress. Â Family life is quiet and good but I just feel so sapped of energy and vigor lately.
November looks exciting, next Tuesday we vote, a week after that the Wrath of the Lich King comes out for Warcraft (very pumped for this)… then we have Thanksgiving and our traditional driving trip to see family in Ohio, followed by Christmas a few weeks after that. Â Perhaps October has only been the quiet before the storm and the lull before an exciting Winter. Â Still can’t shake this rain cloud however…
When is enough, enough? This is getting ridiculous. The amount of money in contemporary politics sickens me, churns my stomach. What is the cost to our republic of enormous sums of cash floating around? The Pide Piper will come knocking to the Good Senator on January 21st, asking for things. What kinds of I.O.Us will either candidate be on the hook for?
As I mentioned the other day, I am back on the fence in this election. Previously I was firm in my support for Senator McCain, but in recent weeks the campaign’s negativity and attacks, combined with some insane comments from Governnor Palin, turned me off. I sit on the fence, undecided in Virginia, but growing more upset with each passing day with both camps.
Having hauled in a record $208,333 every hour of every day last month — $150 million in all — plus a few more unreported millions so far this month, Barack Obama is worried that he might come up short in the political money war with the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket.Just to relieve himself of that $150 million before the polls open, Obama will have to spend $12.5 million a day.
Not sure if I should be more concerned by the insane “activist” of Code Pink who tried to “arrest” Karl Rove for “treason” or the comments of the equally insane commentators on Fox News. Both side of the spectrum have lost their minds and all sense of perspective.
From the AP:
“An anti-war protester confronted former Bush administration aide Karl Rove while he spoke at a San Francisco mortgage bankers’ meeting. A statement by the group Code Pink identified the woman as 58-year-old Janine Boneparth, who tried to handcuff Rove in what she called a citizen’s arrest for “treason.”"
Is it just me, or does Cindy seem very paranoid? Read the full post for some interesting anecdotes.
Starting with the necessity of “changing a light bulb” (bugging my phone) in my hotel phone at the DNC (brought to you by AT&T) while I was out of the room, Cindy for Congress has had an increasing number of attacks. Two weeks ago, we were begged by organizers of a “radical” music festival called “We the People(Sheeple)” forbade me from speaking after having begged me to be there. An article in LA Beat said that the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigoso was involved in the decision to silence my voice.
No question the adoption of Vista has been slow since it shipped to the public in January, 2007. I got curious today and took a look at the data gathered from the college website by our analytics provider. For the past 30 days of website traffic, Windows Vista activity on TNCC.edu was only 21%, compared to Windows XP’s 71%.
To be fair some website access comes from on-campus computers, yet not enough to tremendously skew the numbers in my opinion. Approximately 12% of all activity on the college website comes from on-campus IP addresses. Currently less than 6% of our 1,600 machines are Vista boxes, we have XP across the board with Macs making up a further 12%
| 1. | Windows XP | 70.90% |
| 2. | Windows Vista | 21.70% |
| 3. | Macintosh | 3.61% |
| 4. | Windows 2000 | 2.70% |
| 5. | Other | 0.26% |
| 6. | Windows 98 | 0.20% |
I love Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. David Matthew loves Live and playing Team Fortress 2 against people around the world. I have blogged that he is spooky good at this first person shooter, beyond the skills I would expect a seven year old to possess.
What Rhonda and I don’t care for is the foul, very foul language you can hear on Xbox Live from time to time. Some games gather more jerks and testosterone-fueled tirades (*cough* Halo) than others. Interesting to see the news on a new Microsoft patent this morning. I remain skeptical as real-time voice filtering strikes me as highly ambitious and error-prone, but I wish them the best of luck. As a parent who wishes to embrace video games and sharing them with my son, rather than reject them, I welcome things like this.
An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.
Xbox Live: Microsoft Patents Real-Time Audio Censorsing
This story re-affirmed my confidence in the American legal system. There appears to be some, however slight, common sense left in America. I wonder if the plaintiff will re-file the suit?
You can’t sue God if you can’t serve the papers on him, a Douglas County District Court judge ruled in Omaha Tuesday.
Judge Marlon Polk threw out Nebraska Sen. Ernie Chambers’ lawsuit against the Almighty, saying there was no evidence that the defendant had been served. What’s more, Polk found “there can never be service effectuated on the named defendant.”
Chambers’ suit against God tossed out: Omaha.com
