• Thunderstorms and Flooding

    28Jun
    Categories: General, Personal, Work Comments: 3

    We have been having an incredible amount of rain in the form of constant and violent thunderstorms ever since Thursday night (when we went camping; go figure). Monday alone we had six inches. One of those inches came in an hour and 15 minutes. Some nights it’s been like having a gratis vibrator/massager built-into our beds. Especially me with my bed right
    beside a second story window. We’ve been having some flooding from all this rain. The Golden Rule (where I work) parking lot was under 2-3 ft of water and I had to take off my socks and sandals and roll up my pants to wade through it. Here are some pictures that my brother Benji took:

    Some of our neighbors have been having even more exciting times (BugMeNot).

  • New Photoblog

    26Jun
    Categories: General, Personal, Picture of the Day Comments: 0

    Check out my brother Benji’s new photoblog. He is a wonderful photographer and it seems he is always shooting. He has some amazing pictures!

  • Quote of the Day

    24Jun
    Categories: Political, Quote of the Day Comments: 4

    For the first time in a very long time, [Ronald Reagan] made core conservative values - which he knew were shared by the majority of the American people - the foundation of government policy. I think all Reagan Republicans would describe the core values of a conservative as support for a strong national defense; respect for the rights reserved to the states and the values of local communities; confidence in the wonders of free markets; support for lower taxes and opposition to unnecessary government regulation; and lastly, and very importantly, belief that the government that governs best governs least. I don’t think any Reagan Republican would disagree that fiscal restraint and small government are bedrock principles of conservatives.

    So why has our party, the party of small government, lately adopted the practices of our opponents who believe the bigger the government the better? I’m afraid it because at times we value our incumbency more than our principles. We came to office to reduce the size of government. Lately, we have increased the size of government in order to stay in office. And soon, soon, if we don’t remember what we were elected to do, we will lose both our principles and our office, and we will leave as part of our legacy a mountain of debt and bankrupt entitlement programs that our children’s grandchildren will be suffering from long after we have departed this earth.

    I know you’re all aware of the various scandals concerning the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, his abuse of his clients’ trust and his relationships with members of Congress and their staffs. I won’t dwell on it today other than to note that one welcome consequence of this discouraging story is that it has forced more of us to re-examine the way we do business in Washington. Various reforms affecting the relationship between members of Congress and lobbyists have been discussed and advocated, although, I’m sorry to say, Congress has not yet done enough to address the problem in a very significant way. Unless we reform the way Congress spends your money — a system that practically invites abuse, while injecting steroids into the growth of government and ballooning our debt — whatever other reforms are adopted to prevent some future Abramoff scandal will, in the end, like all reforms that address the symptoms and not the cause of a problem, lose their effectiveness. My friends, the best and only lasting answer to the problem of political corruption is a smaller government.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with lobbying or with government officials meeting with lobbyists to consider their concerns as we make policies that affect the interests they represent. Americans, represented individually or by trade associations, social organizations, or labor unions have a right to petition their government. Where corruption can easily occur is when a lobbyist, knowing the rules of the game, receives special treatment for his or her client, irrespective of the public interest, simply by enjoying a relationship with a member of Congress who can, by the process we call earmarking, provide their clients a benefit that is seldom scrutinized by Congress as a whole.

    Let me use last year’s highway bill to illustrate how the practice of earmarking has grown and become such a tempting target for abuse. In 1987, President Reagan vetoed a highway bill because it was ten billion dollars over his budget, and contained over a hundred earmarks. He remarked at the time of his veto that he hadn’t seen that much pork since he had “handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair.” The highway bill we passed last year, and which the President signed into law, was twelve billion dollars over his request, and contained 6,731 earmarks, which included the now infamous “bridge to nowhere.” That’s quite an explosion in the growth of earmarks, which you have the privilege of paying for with your gas taxes. And it represents 6,371 separate opportunities for a lobbyist to ask a single member of Congress for a favor that the rest of Congress won’t vote on and most members won’t even notice.

    The total number of earmarks in spending bills has grown from 4,126 in 1994, the last year of Democratic control, to 14,404 in 2004. That’s a 240 percent increase in ten years time. In dollars, the cost borne by taxpayers for earmarks has nearly doubled. My friends, that’s not a record Ronald Reagan would have been proud of. And it’s not a record Reagan Republicans should be proud of today. We need to stop this . . . now, and remember, as Ronald Reagan always remembered, that we were sent to Washington because of the principles we pledged to defend, not because our constituents thought we needed a change of address.

    -Senator John McCain, in remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

  • Effective Anti-Spam for b2evolution

    18Jun
    Categories: Blogosphere, Tech Comments: 10

    I disabled trackbacks and added two lines of code and totally cut off my daily stream of comment and trackback spam that sometimes ran into the thousands per day. My emails which are unread which contain the comment/trackback notifications, went from 42,000 to 6000 after I deleted all the spam notifications. I need to run some massive MySQL queries to clear the spam comments out of my blog, but that should be rather simple.

    I’d like to share these two homebrew, but very effective, lines of code with you. Basically what it does is ask each blog commenter for my (blog author’s) first name. If they don’t supply it, the comment doesn’t post.

    The first was put into the “/skins/_feedback.php” file.

    I inserted this:

    form_text( 'antispam', $antispam, 40, T_('Anti-Spam'), T_('Enter the first name of this blog\'s author.'), 4, 'bComment' );

    right after this line of code:

    form_text( 'url', '', 40, T_('Site/Url'), T_('Your URL will be displayed.'), 100, 'bComment' );

    and got this:

    else
    { // User is not loggued in:
    form_text( 'author', $comment_author, 40, T_('Name'), '', 100, 'bComment' );
    form_text( 'email', $comment_author_email, 40, T_('Email'), T_('Your email address will not be displayed on this site.’), 100, ‘bComment’ );
    form_text( ‘url’, ”, 40, T_(’Site/Url’), T_(’Your URL will be displayed.’), 100, ‘bComment’ );
    form_text( ‘antispam’, $antispam, 40, T_(’Anti-Spam’), T_(’Enter the first name of this blog\’s author.’), 40, ‘bComment’ );
    }

    The second modification was in “/htsrv/comment_post.php”. I added this line:

    if( strtolower($antispam) != 'hans' ) errors_add( T_('Please fill in the Anti-Spam field with the first name of the blog author! Sorry, but I had to do this to put a halt to the 30,000+ comment spams I got in a 3 month period.') );

    Right after this line:

    if( empty($email) ) errors_add( T_('Please fill in the email field') );

    And ended up with this:

    if ($require_name_email)
    { // Blog wants Name and EMail with comments
    if( empty($author) ) errors_add( T_('Please fill in the name field') );
    if( empty($email) ) errors_add( T_('Please fill in the email field') );
    if( strtolower($antispam) != 'hans' ) errors_add( T_('Please fill in the Anti-Spam field with the first name of the blog author! Sorry, but I had to do this to put a halt to the 30,000+ comment spams I got in a 3 month period.') );
    }

  • Quote of the Day - A Preview of a Democrat Congress

    12Jun
    Categories: Political, Quote of the Day Comments: 4

    “When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I’m going to earmark the [expletive] out of it.”
    -Rep. James Moran (D-VA), the Democrat who is in line to become the committee chair should the Dems regain the House this November

    Earmarks are the primary vehicle for pork. Earmarks are almost exclusively used for pork. Is this what we want for our Congress? We now know, straight from the horse’s mouth, what will happen if we vote Democrat this November.

    Source: Scott McCaffrey, “Moran: Democratic Majority Means More Money For 8th District,” [Arlington, VA] Sun Gazette, 6/10/06

  • 6/6/06

    06Jun
    Categories: Christianity Comments: 7

    Many have been agitating about today and a portion of verse in Revelation:

    the number of the beast… His number is 666.
    Revelation 13:18b

    The unfortunate thing is that they are ignoring the first part of the verse. The whole verse:

    This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.
    Revelation 13:18

    There are a lot of people without insight and wisdom today, methinks.

    There is no indication that this is referring to a date. Furthermore, even if it was, you would have to deal with the disparity of 2-8 years between our current B.C. system and the actual date of Jesus’ birth. But beyond that, most of the other dates and times in the New Testament are according to the Jewish calendar and time system, not the Julian or Gregorian calendars. Furthermore, even if it would have been referring to the Julian calendar, which was in use by the Romans at the time of John, the world moved to the Gregorian calendar in 1582. There is a discrepancy in days between the the Julian and Gregorian calenders due to some astronomical errors inherent in the Julian calendar system.

    I don’t claim to have the requisite wisdom to figure out how the 666 of the beast will manifest itself. It is my opinion that prophecy is not meant to be used to figure out exactly what will happen in the future, but rather to show us, as we look back on history and see fulfilled prophecy, the faithfulness of God. Also, I believe some prophecy is to provide us warning and instruction on how to respond to certain endtime events.

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