The "good old boy" system never dies...

The numbers just get bigger.

A big "thank you" to Senator Feinstein (office phone: 202-224-3841) for taking money, at gun point, from the taxpayers, and channeling it to her husband's investments.

Oh, did I mention that she wants Attorney General Gonzoles FIRED because he was in on the firing of 8 federal attorneys that can be fired FOR ANY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT DESIRES?

The money quote:

Now he's saying he doesn't know. I think the day of the dual-hatted Attorney General should be over. Attorney General Gonzales has had the view that he serves two masters, that he serves the President and that he serves as the chief law enforcement officer.

He serves one master, and that's the people of this country – in being straightforward, in following the law.

You do know that farming public work out to private companies that you have a personal stake in is at best shady, and at worst, misuse of TAXPAYER DOLLARS, right? It gets even more unethical if you do the above with NO BID PROCESS.

Senator Feinstein, do you have something you want to tell the taxpayers?

Un-friggin-believable.

Thank you Tony Blair

I don't have a citation for this, but I agree with the sentiment:

In case you find ourselves starting to believe all the anti-American sentiment and negativity you we should remember England 's Prime Minister Tony Blair's words during a recent interview. When asked by one of his Parliament members why he believes so much in America , he said:

"A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in ... And how many want out." and ...

"Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you: 1. Jesus Christ 2. The American G. I. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom."

Although this could be another political rant...

With a big thank you going out to our elected officials of the 110th House of Representatives for attempting to pass pork and defeat along with the Iraq defense spending bill (link), I found something fun. The site is in German, but the video content speaks for itself.

Concerning the latest stunt by "our Representatives" in the House: If you're not angry, you're not paying enough attention. A short list:
A minimum wage increase
Asbestos abatement in the Capitol Power plant, $50,000,000
Power subsidies for the poor, $200,000,000
Flu outbreak and subsidies for vaccination, $969,650,000
Fish research, $60,400,000
And finally, my favorites, Spinach farmers bailout, $25,000,000
Dairy farmers bailout, $283,000,000
Peanut farmers storage cost offsets (read: bailout), $74,000,000
and lastly, A fish farming bailout of $5,000,000.

Just those totals alone are by my calculations, $1,405,850,000. Out tax dollars being taken by the federal government and spent on private entities. And that was just 10 minutes of digging through this gargantuan bill with over *7000* sections. How things get done in Washington is completely beyond me. Perhaps this is why the government is the way it is now. I digress, however.

Whatever side of the fence you're on, NONE of this $1.4 BILLION dollars is going to finance *ANYTHING* to do with the war, or the fallout thereof. If that's the case, why the hell is this bill (HR1591) called The "U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health, and Iraq Accountability Act, 2007"

Guess it turned into a political post after all. This stuff just makes me fume.

edit: They freaking don't have static links to any of the bill stuff. Thanks a lot.

I would like to thank my district rep

Steve Oelrich for attempting to make the cost of post primary education go up in Florida. It's not enough that the state university system gets over $1.7 BILLION of tax revenue (from my state sales tax, thank you, NOT including cash from the state's lottery fund), they now want an extra $1000 per-student, per-year to have access to the state's university system.

Now, I'll give you "it's just $20 per week". That's as far as I go with it.

Statements like the following are what anger me:

[Representative Oelrich] said 95 percent of UF's in-state students receive Bright Future scholarships to further offset the relatively low tuition of $3,300 annually for residents. And he said the median family income of students is $100,000.

My rebuttal to that would be "so what". Lemme rephrase that statement into what I read there:

"A lot of rich people send their kids to our university, so let's get more money from them."

Thanks for playing.

Besides that, while there may be a group of students whose families have a medical doctor/surgeon/whatnot in the family, the majority of prospective students in the area don't have that kind of fiscal backing.

The surrounding counties' primary economic systems are agriculture based. Between that, and the skewed population size (year 2000 Census data) vs student count (UFL.edu fact page) in Gainesville, getting a decent paying job (Gaineville, Florida's Wikipedia entry supports this statement.) around here requires basically being in the medical field. Which requires a degree. Which Rep. Oelrich is trying to make more difficult to get for the very people who support and work at this particular university.

I wouldn't gripe about this so much if it wasn't for the sheer audacity of the statement above. It just reeks of class warfare to me. *Another* tax, except this time only on university students.

How about this, Rep. Olerich: You show me that you and the universities are working as hard as you can to cut the fat out of the university budgets, and then we'll talk about it. For now, I'll call it what it is: A TAX on STUDENTS who are trying to get a piece of paper to make more money. While we're talking about budgets, how about more work on smaller government?

These kind of things just chap my ass...

Apparently, destroying property is now an acceptable form of political protest:
WXYZ, Detroit (ABC affiliate)

Also, apparently, it's now the US armed forces at fault for the trouble in Iraq, and anti-semitism is back in vogue:
Little Green Footballs

Note that none of these assholes have the nuts to do this without their identity being concealed.

If I were less of a man, I'd say it's tire slashing time.

Thing is, I'm better than any of these people. I'll just show their disrespect for property and our hard working troops to my small audience with a statement that "the vandals need to be arrested, and the other guys are just twits".

Random snippets

Watched Invincible this weekend. Good sports movie that has all of the typical feel-good elements that a sports movie has. I believe that it was well executed. If you like this kind of movie, you won't be disappointed.

Since I don't have any sort of entertainment connection aside from my DSL connection, I am often behind the times when it comes to the stuff I'm interested in. The British car show Top Gear did a segment on the Bugatti Veyron, arguably one of the fastest production cars ever. They've had 2 segments concerning this vehicle, the first a courier race between the aforementioned car and a private aircraft delivering a package from Alba, Italy to London, UK. My understanding is that the man driving the Veyron won handily.

The second, and much more interesting (in my opinion) segment that they did was testing the claimed top speed of the vehicle. Sucessfully. Roughly 250 miles per hour. Faster than most purpose built racing vehicles. The video above is a copy of that segment. It's rather impressive.

I caught this from Stumble Upon, which is one of the most informative time-wasters on the net, second only to Wikipedia. I've found more interesting car wallpaper and tech data that's good for my current job with StumbleUpon than I have with any other tool. It's available for IE and Firefox, so there's really no excuse to not at least try it.

I finally had to replace the mainboard on my game rig, as it had succumbed to the failing caps that it was using. I had played around with doing a full system upgrade, but decided that I need to replace my daily driver before I do that, (I'm looking for a Miata BTW. Closest thing you can get to a rear drive sports car that's affordable and fun to drive, in my opinion. The Mustang is a Pony car, and it's solid rear axle, while charming, moves it out of the sports car category. Ditto the Camero. But I digress...) as it is the second tool in my toolkit for work, the first being my brain. I managed to find a derivative board of the original for $90 delivered. Kind of expensive, considering that it's still a Socket A mainboard, with AGP video bus, but I suspect it will be as reliable as it's predecessor. Hopefully, moreso if the capacitor problem has been worked out.

The Maxima is doing allright, considering. It's getting time to replace a bunch of stuff on it, tho. The outer CV joints on both axles are shot. The only thing holding up the right front corner is the spring, as the strut is toast. These are just the pressing issues that need to be resolved, not including the rest of the work (AC, power seat belt motor intermittent, power steering, oil and transmission leaks... the list goes on) that it would take to make it a nice vehicle to drive again. My boss questions my sanity in driving it as a daily, but doesn't give me too much static about it. He did volunteer his wife's car for me to drive on a south Florida run because of the car, tho.

His wife drives a 2006 Mini Cooper S convertible. Shortly, it's a mixed bag. I don't think I could justify spending the coin on it, but the experience might be different with the hard top version.

The S motor is fairly potent. Coupled with the 6 speed auto, it's enough for you to know that it has the muscle to push the "little" (in parentheses due to it's curb weight of over 3000 pounds) car around with authority, even if it does have the 4 cylinder whine behind it.

The transmission has nice close ratios, and the bump-shift option makes an acceptable substitute for a clutch. I still think that a real clutch would make the vehicle launch much better.

The convertible top up makes it nearly impossible to see anything on the right side of the vehicle, even with mirrors adjusted. I lost a vehicle in that corner while passing it on the interstate. It has the usual complaints about convertibles (loud while the top's up, wind noise, blah blah blah), and I suppose the massive blind spot comes with the territory, but it's an awful price to pay in my opinion. The blind spot problem goes away with the top down, and the rest just fades, as you get the idea behind a convertible, but using it for a daily... I think I'd go mad. If it was a weekend car, or something that I just tracked with the top down, I think I'd overlook all of these problems. It's just too expensive to have as a "fun" car, tho.

I do like the cheeky sticker that's on the convertible top's button guard. I need to take a photo of it, but it says something to the effect of "Is it necessary to put the top up? Be honest." I felt that it was hilarious, if incongruous (It is made by BMW, after all) statement that was in the car.

Not that I was considering this as a replacement vehicle anyway, but it was just something that crossed my mind while I was typing here... So sue me, I'm a stream-of-consciousness writer.

I certanly hope that Microsoft is listening:

http://docs.google.com
If I recall correctly, "Groove", which is a part of the Office 2007 suite supports this kind of functionality, but I *LIKE* the idea of not being dependent on the machine for my documents. All I need is one of the two major web browsers( it appears that Opera is not supported yet) and an internet connection. Log on, create a document, when you're done, save it to local storage if you choose (in a variety of formats), print, or just leave on the server for later editing and log out.
Collaboration, revision history, spell checking, simple to moderate formatting (including image insertion), it's all there. Everything that 90% of the userbase of Word uses. Free. At least currently it's free. Google has the right to change that policy at a whim, but for now, it's a great FREE product, with Google's "don't be evil" motto and technology backing it up.
To put a twist on a famous advert:
Audience: Google is listening

How to defend your liberty, in four easy steps:

Use the following four boxes, in this order, starting now:

• Soap
  
• Ballot
  
• Jury
  
• Ammo
  

'nuff said.

Because I'm a WeirdAl fan...

Weird Al has a new album coming out at the end of September. Straight out of Lynwood promises to be more of the same from Weird Al: Witty, if sometimes juvenile, lyrics on top of music that's straight off of the charts.

I find that the more I listen to Weird Al, the more I appreciate his talent. He's a lyrical genius, *and* has his finger on the pulse of pop music. He can pull off *any* style seemingly effortlessly, and sometimes improve upon the original music. The group of musicians that surround him are all great studio guys.

The link above has a small sample of stuff that's going to be on the upcoming album. Have fun.

My life is what it is...

Nothing really new of note, aside from the fact that we're moving around the corner to a new apartment in 2 weeks. More space, better kitchen, add dishwasher, clothes washer/drier in unit, minus stairs. The extra coin is a bummer, but the nice extras far outweigh the burden of higher rent. Pics when we get moved.