• Blogging (in)Fame(y)

    30Sep
    Categories: Blogosphere, Personal Comments: 0

    Tom was walking the halls of SMBI after his “preaching” and someone he entirely did not know recognized him from reading his blog:

    I heard a man shout “Troyer!” I whirled around to see who it was and I didn’t know the guy. He said, “Are you Mr. Iced Tea?”

    He’s now addicted and is asking for more:

    If you ever run into me and I don’t know you but you think I might be Mr. Iced Tea Forever, please be sure to introduce yourself!

    I have had a bunch of times where after I say my name, people will say, “Oh. You’re the guy with the blog.” One time someone at a college graduation asked my Mom how the contruction at our house was going. Another time someone asked my Dad out of the blue whether he liked our closet better now that it was cleaned up.

  • Dolphin Assassins and Phantom Police add to New Orleans’ woes

    30Sep
    Categories: General, Humor, Political Comments: 8

    The Guardian, a UK newspaper, has reported that killer dolphin assassins trained by the U.S. Navy and equipped with toxic dart guns have escaped in Katrina’s aftermath. Apparently, they are currently roaming the Gulf of Mexico looking for hapless victims. They were trained to patrol around ships looking for terrorists like the ones that attacked the U.S.S. Cole. The Guardian reports:

    It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

    Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

    Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

    Remember all those NO police that deserted? Well it looks like the reason it seemed that a bunch of them had deserted was because they didn’t exist! They were payroll phantoms with paychecks going to various people. HolyCoast.com prints an excerpt from the subscription only Political Diary:

    Leaving the city of New Orleans even less of a leg to stand on was the performance of its police force, much of which disintegrated during Katrina. Yesterday, police Superintendent Eddie Compass suddenly resigned even as his department was preparing to hold disciplinary hearings for 259 police officers who had left their posts without permission during the storm. Originally, over 500 officers were said to have been deserters, but the FBI is discovering that many of them fact didn’t shirk their duty — because they didn’t exist. An investigation is uncovering evidence that many were “ghost” employees put on the payroll by others who pocketed their paychecks.

    None of this surprises New Orleans residents, who have seen more than 50 police officers go to prison in the last dozen years, two of them to death row. When one police district was caught altering its crime data last year, the now-departed Chief Compass said: “I don’t need an outside agency coming in. I think we have proven that we are capable of taking care of our own house.” Clearly that’s not the case. Here’s hoping the federal aid flowing into the city includes some requirements that the local police force be rebuilt from the ground up.

    This once again highlights the deep corruption in the City of New Orleans’ government and illuminates why the response of the CoNO was so pathetic.

    Oh, and sorry to spoil the excitement of the first half of this post, but MSNBC is saying that the dolphins that did escape weren’t the Navy’s dolphins.

  • “I think I fell off the roof…”

    29Sep
    Categories: Humor, Personal Comments: 4

    A life-long friend of mine, Andrew S., (he graduated one year after I did) was up on a roof power washing. The power washer ran out of gas, so he went to get more gas. That’s the last thing he remembers. When he came to, he was walking around on the ground and his shoulder hurt. He couldn’t remember where he was, why he was there, or what had happened. He was terrified that he had amnesia. He finally remembered his girlfriend, Cassie, so he figured he was in good shape. ;)

    He went home and told his Mom, “I think I fell off the roof…”

    It turns out he fell 30-40 feet and separated his shoulder. There was a porch roof about 10 feet off the ground. He has no idea whether he bounced off the porch roof or whether he fell straight down.

    Update: Andrew writes on his blog about it.

  • Quote of the Day

    29Sep
    Categories: Christianity, Humor, Quote of the Day Comments: 0

    Are the [Amish-Mennonite covering] strings perhaps a way for the girls’ daddies to turn their heads away from those liberal Mennonite boys? ;)

    -blancopantera (blog); on MennoDiscuss.com discussing covering (reference) strings

    Update: The above is a joke and is no negative reflection on liberal Mennonites or on conservative Mennonites.

    Update #2: The views of those that post on the forum are not necessarily held by me.

  • Quote of the Day

    27Sep
    Categories: Christianity, Political, Quote of the Day Comments: 0

    9-11, an event caused by man, turned people’s focus toward God. Katrina, an event outside the control of man, caused people to blame other people (Bush and Brownie).

    -Dave_B (blog); posted on MennoDiscuss.com

  • Socialism Rejected Not Once, but Twice!

    26Sep
    Categories: Political Comments: 5

    Today voters in Poland resoundingly rejected the ruling socialist Democratic Left Alliance (DLA). The Polish can thank their socialist buddies for the highest European unemployment rate which stands at 17.8%. Two center right parties got a combined 54.6% of the vote, while the previously ruling DLA got a mere 11.1%. These two winning parties have run on a platform of free-market economics. One of the winning parties is in favor of a 15% flat tax. (Way to go!) While the old socialist government was planning to pull out of Iraq, the government says they would reconsider if offered “a new contract” with the U.S. Sounds like aid bribes to me…

    An interesting twist to this plot is that the conservative who will be the new Prime Minister is a twin brother to the leading candidate for the Presidential elections in a few months.

    I mentioned a while ago that it looked like Germany was going to do the same thing: kick out the liberals with their massive entitlement programs, massive unemployment, and massive government. It turns out the pundits were right. They kicked ‘em out. However, even though they (the liberals) lost, they are insisting that they really didn’t lose and are trying to cling to power. (Hmm, does that sound familiar or what?) This “regime change” in Germany looks to brings some great Conservative reform to their bloated, protectionist system.

    My sources for the first paragraph are all drawn from a WaPo article. The WaPo site is down for maintenance, so I can’t provide a link.

  • Why the Dems keep losing

    22Sep
    Categories: Political Comments: 2

    To get an excellent idea of why the Dems keep losing elections, look at the results of this 2008 Presidential Straw Poll. Dean is getting 38% of the vote from a field of 5 candidates that includes Clinton, Clark, Edwards, et al.

    Some things Dean has said:

    “YEEEEAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH!”

    “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for”

    “Republicans… have never made an honest living in their lives.”

    “The Republicans are… a pretty monolithic party… they all behave the same, they all look the same. It’s pretty much a white Christian party.

    “Democrats abduct everybody you can think of.”

    “Barry Goldwater once said, ‘I’d rather be right than president.’ I can’t tell you how much I disagree with that Barry Goldwater.”

    So in other words, Dean would rather be President than right. Yep, he’s quite the illustrious guy and full of articulate, moving arguments, as you can tell.

  • How to Speak Southern

    22Sep
    Categories: How to Speak Southern Comments: 0

    Part of the continuing series from the book How to Speak Southern:

    Bobbycue: A delectable Southern sandwich that is prepared properly only in certain parts of North Carolina. It consists of chopped pork, cole slaw and a fiery sauce made chiefly of vinegar, red pepper and ketchup. “Four bobbycues to go, please.”

  • How to Speak Southern

    21Sep
    Categories: How to Speak Southern Comments: 3

    Part of the continuing series from the book How to Speak Southern:

    Bobbuh: One who cuts hair. “Ah wish you’d go to a different bobbuh.”

  • Mennonite Discussion forum

    21Sep
    Categories: Christianity, Tech Comments: 103

    I am pleased to announce the launch of a Mennonite Discussion forum.

    This was inspired mostly by the huge discussion that we had recently in the comments section of this blog. I enjoyed it immensely, but it was really horridly off-topic relative to the post that the discussion took place on. It was also inspired in part by Arthur Kauffman (aka, “Art”, “AKauffman”, “A.K.”) who suggested that I start an email discussion list. I took his suggestion a step further to a bulletin board/forum/message board (which I had been thinking about before he mentioned something).

    The purpose of MennoDiscuss.com is to provide a place where Mennonnites can come together and discuss local events, theology, politics (if we’re allowed to; we’re still working on that one *grin*), books, music, life, make suggestions, give tips, help each other, meet new people, ask questions, answer questions and about anything in between and beyond.

    It’s really going to be a community run site. If it gets any volume of users, I will want to select moderators to help run it. These moderators will be chosen from the most active and knowledgeable members. (Work hard and you may be asked to be one!)

    This is a very new site, so suggestions are more than welcome: forum structure, notices posted at the head of each forum, design, etc

    Please help spread the word! If you are a Mennonite or conservative christian and have a blog or a Xanga, please do a post telling your readers about it. If you have a friend who has a blog, let them know. Let your friends know about this.

    The more people that know about MennoDiscuss.com and participate the more valuable the forum will be for you and everyone.

  • Open Source Software Reference

    21Sep
    Categories: Tech Comments: 7

    I have been meaning to do this post for some time, but was spurred to action by A.R. This post will basically consist of a reference of world-class open source (for the end-user, open source means several things: It’s free. It’s has tons of programmers all over the world working on it, donating their time to do so. Its bugs are fixed quickly. It’s open, which means that any programmer can go in and change how the application behaves through valuable extensions or changing the code.) software that is valuable for people to have.

    Firefox - a great, world-class browser which is highly acclaimed by, among others, The New York Times and Forbes. (In ascending order of credibility with each at the polar opposite ends of the credibility spectrum.)

    Thunderbird - Firefox’s companion email program. It also has a built-in RSS feed reader for reading blogs or any other websites with RSS feeds.

    OpenOffice - a Microsoft Office replacement that deals with MS Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) and provides a great interface that is similiar to the $400 Microsoft Office Professional.

    The GIMP - world class photo manipulation software. Does everything the $556 Adobe Photoshop CS2 does. GIMP stands for GNU (it’s kinda complicated what GNU stands for (let’s not get into self-recursive acronyms and acronyms within acronyms) but it’s basically a name for Linux) Image Manipulation Program.

    Audacity - full featured audio editor

    Gaim - multi-protocol instant messaging client that works with the AIM/AOL, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, IRC, Napster, Gadu-Gadu, Zephyr, and SILC networks.

    7zip - an compression program that more than takes the place of the $29 WinZip. It supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats.

    CDex - a program to copy CDs to your computer

    VLC Media Player - a media player that can do everything a media player needs to do, plus some.

    RealVNC - a server/client for remote access. If you have a computer that is connected via broadband to the internet, you can set up a RealVNC server on your computer and operate your computer remotely from any broadband internet connected computer. You can also use this program across your local area network. (Yeah, I’m talking to you, Tom.)

    Azureus - bit-torrent for all your (legal, of course!) P2P downloads

    eMule - another P2P client for (legal!) downloads

    DOSBox - an emulator that allows you to run old DOS programs on your modern OS.

    Ethereal - a network packet capture program. You won’t need this unless you are a network admin. It’s really invaluable for diagnosing complex networking problems.

    EasyPHP - a distribution that packages Apache web server, PHP, and MySQL into one point-and-click, easy to install package. This is invaluable for web developers and web server admins. Manually patching together LAMP (or even AMP) can be a long arduous process which is, at times, necessary, but if you can avoid it at all, do so and use EasyPHP.

    I’m sure there is software in my repertoire that I have missed. Feel free to ask a question about a specific application that you need or problem you have and I’ll (along with the other, smarter, techies that frequent this blog) do my best to answer it. Also, please mention in the comments any great open source programs that I have missed. If I agree with you, I’ll stick it up here in the post.

    Update: Reader Jeff points out Linux. I feel really stupid. Here I did a post on Open Source Software and I forgot to mention *the definitive piece* of Open Source Software: Linux. Linux is the piece of software that really launched the FOSS movement. It’s is an Operating System that replaces (or dual-boots with) Windows.

  • How to Speak Southern

    20Sep
    Categories: How to Speak Southern Comments: 4

    Part of the continuing series from the book How to Speak Southern:

    Bleeve: A statement of intent or faith. “Ah bleeve we ought to go to church this Sunday.

  • Firefox

    20Sep
    Categories: Tech Comments: 10

    I have some jumbled thoughts on Firefox that I’ll try to express in a half-way orderly fashion.

    I was talking last Sunday afternoon with my blog reader and techie from SC and he said that he doesn’t really like Firefox. He said he never installs it on his customers’ machines. He said the primary reason is because of performance. He has found that Firefox itself as an application takes a long time to load. (I solve this problem by having Firefox open all the time, many times 48-168 hours on end. I then have tons of tabs open.) He has also found performance issues with the rendering (converting HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc (the page’s coding) to the visual represenation that you see) of Firefox.

    Then reader Jake dropped me an email about half an hour ago mentioning this ZDNet blog post entitled Is the Firefox Honeymoon over? It basically talks about how Firefox wasn’t really more secure than Internet Explorer. The reason that Firefox seemed more secure is because fewer people used it and it wasn’t worthwhile for hackers to figure out security holes in it.

    I just downloaded the new Firefox 1.5 Beta (not recommended for use by non-techies). They dub it the “next generation Firefox browser”. The most useful feature that I have found so far is the tab dragging and dropping. You can now reorder your tabs by dragging and dropping them. Very cool. This will make for an even more efficient web browsing experience.

    The other change, that will be a plus, is the improvements to the popup blocking mechanisms. As I’m sure any of you folks with popup blocking can attest, the popup blockers worked great for a while, but then advertisers found ways to get around them. Firefox fires a salvo back with this release. I can testify that it is an improvement. My first test site was Drudge Report which has some very irritating popups and which was one of the first to circumvent popup blockers. The new blocker stopped them cold.

    The rest of the changes seem to be mostly under the hood (which as indicated by SC techie, is a good thing). It includes, most importantly, faster browser navigation. It also includes support for DHTML accessibility, MS Windows-Eyes screen reading software for the blind people, SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6. You can read a list of What’s New here.

    Overall, I believe some of the issues about Firefox that have been raised are legit. However, I believe Mozilla is moving quickly to address these issues. Some of the great advantages for Firefox in it’s development process are: It doesn’t have to be tightly integrated into Windows and thus changes don’t have to be routed through a dozen other dev teams before being approved. It has thousands of programmers out there working for it for free. It can evolve quickly. It doesn’t have (as many) business politics and business profit type concerns to worry about in its feature/bug fix development.

    I have great faith in the Open Source community and believe that we can come together to fix the problems that exist and continue to turn out a better and better browser. Go Firefox!

    Update: What I said about Microsoft’s development process was a bit off the cuff without any real backing. It came from years of following the company and hearing people talk about MS. What I said is validated in the latest edition (which isn’t online yet) of Forbes:

    Microsoft… has grown musclebound and bureaucratic. Some current and former employees describe a stultifying world of 14-hour strategy sessions, endless business reviews and a preoccupation with PowerPoint slides; of laborious job evaluations, hundreds of e-mails a day and infighting among divisions so fierce that it hobbles design and delays product releases. In short, they describe precisely the behavior that humbled another tech giant: International Bussiness Machines in the late 1980s.

    “Microsoft,” Benioff says, “still wishes the Internet hadn’t been invented.” “Microsoft has become what it used to mock,” says Gabe Newell, a developer on the first three versions of Windows. At late-night rounds of poker with “Bill and Steve” in the mid-1980s he says, “We laughed at IBM. They had all this process for monitoring productivity, and yet we knew they had spectacularly bad productivity. That’s Microsoft now.” Jeff B. Erwin, who quit in December after five years there, adds: “Microsoft has some of the smartest people in the world, but they are just crushing them. You have a largely unhappy population.”

    With accountability, though, comes competition for resources. The seven divisions act as rival fiefs pursuing overlapping technologies and warring over whose code will prevail in the spaves where different divisions products interact. “Windows and Office would never let MSN have more budget or more control,” says Mark Jen, who quit Microsoft eight months ago. “MSN e-mail should talk to Office Calendar contacts and share appointments from Office with friends and family on the Web. But then MSN could cannibalize Office.”

    The squabbling is delaying the release of the next version of Windows, called Vista. In 2001 Microsoft promised that Vista would be ready in 2003; by mid-2003 it cited 2005. Now Vista is set for year-end 2006, the company vows; some analysts say early 2007 is more likely.

    Some employees complain that they spend hours tracking down collaborators in far-flung groups instead of talking to customers and taking products to market. Working on a huge project requires checking in with management constantly. “Instead of promoting the product to customers, I’d get stuck in the office until midnight preparing slides for my monthly product review,” says David Ryan, 33, a marketer for Windows XP. He has just been freed up to pursue an incubation project in the server group, where he is happily exempt from most reviews. At Microsoft a “review” is often a progress report illustrated with 15 PowerPoint slides.

    Other staffers say almost every move requires a lawyer’s signature and that even routine approvals can take weeks. Recently an employee waited a month while a $10,000 purchase order for outside development work was held up by legal. By the time the lawyers were done, the budget for the deal had evaporated.

    In 2000 he worked on new storage software for Exchange, a server program that works with Microsoft Outlook e-mail, but the Outlook team, without admitting so, didn’t want it. “They sent me a 200-page document that said out technology had to be 100% better than the current stuff. Then it failed, of course, so they did it themselves.”

    More recently programmers at the MSN online service were ready to release a search tool letting users sift through their own PCs, but the research lab and the Windows division were working on similiar efforts. Some argued that any new tool should wait to be bundled into Vista. Yusuf Mehdi, a top MSN executive, had to dicker inside the company for a month before striking a compromise that let MSN’s and Vista’s search tools both go ahead.

  • Investments Update

    19Sep
    Categories: General Comments: 3

    Earlier I told y’all about the investments I made in mutual funds. I think it’s time for an update, to let you know how the portfolio is coming (fund, percent of investment put into fund, percent return since purchase):

    • FIDELITY CAPITAL APPRECIATION, 13.6%, +4.87%
    • FIDELITY DIVIDEND GROWTH, 13.6%, +1.06%
    • FIDELITY CHINA REGION, 11.3%, +3.29%
    • FIDELITY JAPAN SMALLER COMPANIES, 13.6%, +7.81%
    • FIDELITY LATIN AMERICA, 13.6%, +22.88%
    • FIDELITY SELECT ENERGY, 13.6%, +10.47%
    • FIDELITY SELECT ENERGY SERVICE, 20.5%, +20.99%

    The total gains are 11.2% since purchase.

    Another way to invest in your future is to support dumping the awful system that is Social Security. Social Security should be reformed (visit FixOurFuture.com to learn more about Social Security reform) into a market based system that invests Social Security in the stock market. It’s simple money management. The returns are way better with the stock/mutual fund market.

    Investing the U.S.’s retirement accounts in government bonds is bad for a number of reasons:
    #1 The returns are low
    #2 It raises the incentive for congresspeople to spend, spend, spend increasing the deficit because all that demand for owning debt lowers the cost of borrowing.
    #3 It also raises the incentive for congresspeople to spend, spend, spend because they justify it as merely shuffling funds from one account to another. They also try to have it both ways by claiming that “SS is protected” and that the General Fund will pay it back.

    Raising investing in the stock market will give a boost to the economy. It will also make so that all Americans will own a part of big business. This basically is a hedge* against “exploitation” by big business because any profits gained by big corporations flow back into the pockets of every American. It also makes them an important part of the economy which is a good thing as it would probably tend to attenuate conspiracy theories.

    * For instance: I own a bunch of oil stocks through my Fidelity energy and energy services funds. This acts as a hedge against rising fuel prices because as fuel goes up, so do my oil stocks.

    Now to be honest, this doesn’t hedge against increased cost of getting oil from the ground. It just hedges against squeezes in the supply and an increase in demand which drives prices and profit margins up. If profit margins were to stay the same and prices would rise in tandem with costs, it obviously would help me none.

    The price increases we have seen lately have been a result of supply and demand and thus my oil stocks do serve as a hedge against price increases.

    I would also like to reiterate my encouragement for you to invest at as young an age as possible.

    Update: I have had these funds for about 3 months now.

  • How to Speak Southern

    19Sep
    Categories: How to Speak Southern Comments: 0

    Part of the continuing series from the book How to Speak Southern:

    Bawl: What water does at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. “That gal can’t even bawl water without burnin’ it.”

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