Half-baked opinions, served lukewarm.
I’ve relaxed restrictions on avatars to accept 110×110 .jpg or .gif images. Uploaded a pic of Sam as a demo.
Go wild.
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I’ve relaxed restrictions on avatars to accept 110×110 .jpg or .gif images. Uploaded a pic of Sam as a demo.
Go wild.
This space intentionally left blank.
There is an irony to being an adult, firmly placed in the late twenties – early thirties category. On one hand, you can afford almost any toy you would have wanted as a kid (Playstation, DVDs, Home Theatres), you can go anywhere you please, and you can stay up as late as you want!!
The irony is that you don’t have time to play with your toys, you don’t have time to go anywhere at all, and you end up going to bed earlier than High School because you are desperate for sleep almost all the time..
Let me know, AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO FEELS LIKE THIS??
As you know, I have been particularly absent from our little gang of late. I now spend most of my time in my car, driving between home, work, school, and a play that opens on thursday. While at home, I spend my time scheduling my work days, doing homework, and studying lines… its awful!!
There is an irony to being an adult, firmly placed in the late twenties – early thirties category. On one hand, you can afford almost any toy you would have wanted as a kid (Playstation, DVDs, Home Theatres), you can go anywhere you please, and you can stay up as late as you want!!
The irony is that you don’t have time to play with your toys, you don’t have time to go anywhere at all, and you end up going to bed earlier than High School because you are desperate for sleep almost all the time..
Let me know, AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO FEELS LIKE THIS??
As you know, I have been particularly absent from our little gang of late. I now spend most of my time in my car, driving between home, work, school, and a play that opens on thursday. While at home, I spend my time scheduling my work days, doing homework, and studying lines… its awful!!
The irony is that I have just added a cool new Cable system and a Playstation 2 to my home theatre.. and I played about 30 minutes of a game that I really want to play more.. and every day i say I’m going to take some time to do it… but every day, I just sink into the couch at the end of the night with my wife, we watch a rerun of “Highlander” and go to sleep.
So, today, once again, I am planning to spend some time playin with my wonderful toys.. and once again, I have already booked the whole day up until 11 tonight.
Grr.. Why do wish our whole lives to be adults, only to become adults and wish we were Kids?
I finally uploaded The Floogie. Mucho thanks to Justin and Teresa for resurrecting this old dog, and sending me an mp3 of this first Wayward Sun tune.
You can also stream the song using this link. Requires WinAmp or (for UNIX-like platforms), XMMS, and a high-bandwidth connection, because the song’s encoded at 160kbits/sec (a little fast for some streaming connections).
I apologize for the bad chunks of the song… it was on a well-worn tape.
Oh, Justin also threw me an original demo of us singing the Wayward Sun Theme Song; you can stream Wayward Sun’s theme song.
I finally uploaded The Floogie. Mucho thanks to Justin and Teresa for resurrecting this old dog, and sending me an mp3 of this first Wayward Sun tune.
You can also stream the song using this link. Requires WinAmp or (for UNIX-like platforms), XMMS, and a high-bandwidth connection, because the song’s encoded at 160kbits/sec (a little fast for some streaming connections).
I apologize for the bad chunks of the song… it was on a well-worn tape.
Oh, Justin also threw me an original demo of us singing the Wayward Sun Theme Song; you can stream Wayward Sun’s theme song.
Here’s the story from KSL TV:
Doctors warned a woman to have a caesarian section to save her baby, she refused, the baby died, and now the mother is charged with murder. It’s a case that’s already making national headlines and sparking a heated debate over ethics, fairness and the right to life.
Here’s the story from KSL TV:
Doctors warned a woman to have a caesarian section to save her baby, she refused, the baby died, and now the mother is charged with murder. It’s a case that’s already making national headlines and sparking a heated debate over ethics, fairness and the right to life.
We’ve heard cases before where an expectant mother has been putting her fetus at risk by drinking, or using drugs, or other dangerous behavior. This one has a different twist– it wasn’t what she was doing, it was what she didn’t do.
In custody tonight, charged with murder, is 29-year old Melissa Ann Rowland. She was arrested nearly two months after the stillborn death of her child.
It’s a complicated story involving several local hospitals, doctors and nurses who continually advised that Rowland needed medical attention in order to save her baby’s life. The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s office says Rowland’s lack of action violates the law.
Kent Morgan, District Attorney’s Office: “…the conduct was that she omitted her duty to take care of her child and get affirmative treatment. That’s what makes this case so egregious.”
It started on Christmas Day at LDS hospital.
Rowland — carrying twins — told a nurse that she hadn’t felt them move. The nurse advised her to go to either Jordan Valley or Pioneer Valley Hospital. According to the charging documents, Rowland replied: “she’d rather have both her babies die before she’d go to those hospitals…”
January 2nd, she saw a doctor at LDS Hospital.
Kent Morgan, District Attorney’s Office: “She went and saw a doctor and he indicated that there were very severe medical problems at that time, and that she should immediately have a cesaerian section.”
According to the charges, the doctor told police: “She refused to have the c-section and left.” This despite being warned that lack of treatment could result in the death or severe injury of her babies.
A few blocks away she told a nurse at Salt Lake Regional Hospital that a doctor wanted to cut her “from breast bone to pubic bone”, and that would “ruin her life”. The nurse says Rowland made a comment to the effect that she’d rather “lose one of the babies than be cut like that.”
January 9th, Rowland went to Pioneer Valley Hospital to verify that her babies were still alive. Once again she left and refused treatment after warnings that her babies are in danger.
January 13th she went back to Pioneer Valley and delivered her twins. One was dead; the autopsy shows the boy had died two days earlier.
Kent Morgan, District Attorney’s Office: “There wasn’t a lack of resources. Any one of these hospitals could have taken care of the needs and saved this child.”
Rowland is charged with murder and bail is set at $250,000. We’re told that she has other children and is married. She’ll make her first court appearance in the next day or two.
I listened to “Family Values Talk Radio”, 570 KNRS on the way home. Bob Lonsberry, ultra-conservative, was hosting the show. His opinion? That she deserves the murder charge, and one to fifteen years in prison. The vast majority of callers agreed with his assessment, though several thought she was guilty of stupidity, and not murder.
Is failing to have a medical procedure a crime? Is choosing to give birth vaginally tantamount to murder? Are we now a community that incarcerates nursing mothers because they chose to disregard their doctor’s advice?
Some few callers into Lonsberry’s show attempted to turn this around to the abortion debate: we (society at large) have a (debatable, but) definite point at which we consider a baby to be viable human life. If I recall correctly, that point is somewhere around 27 weeks (correct me if I’m wrong). Could this be considered a late-term abortion on her part? What if she was not insured, and the cost of a C-section was prohibitive? Is lack of funds, and a desire to avoid bankruptcy, a defense for allowing an unborn fetus to die?
I’m not sure about all the rationales going on, but in my mind, one thing is certain: sending a mother to jail for up to fifteen years because one of her unborn twins was born stillborn is just plain stupid. It just serves no purpose. With that in mind, the murder charge itself appears ridiculous on the face of it — yet, one person, through her inaction, allowed another human being, albeit a small one, to die.
It got me thinking about the purpose of incarceration. What’s the reason we send someone to jail, anyway? Is it to “rehabilitate” them, in hopes of preventing them from making similar mistakes? Is it to punish them by depriving them of freedom for a while? Is it to protect society from their evil by preventing them from having the choice available to hurt other people?
Perhaps the time has come for us to make certain “unusual” punishments for unusual crimes. If she’s guilty of negligent homicide, incarcerating her in this circumstance seems to serve absolutely no purpose except to perpetrate the revenge of an outraged community.
What if, for reproductive stupidity, we (society) simply removed reproductive capacity? For men, a simple surgical procedure, and they are sterile (reversibly so). For women, an Intra-Uterine device prevents pregnancy for up to a decade, and is also surgically removable.
But then we’re back into state-mandated surgical procedures, which started this whole rant of mine. If successful, I wonder what kind of barrel of monkeys this prosecution will open up?
Realize I’m just kind of writing aloud at the moment; I haven’t fully decided what to think of this yet. But it’s definitely another “fuzzy gray area” of the law that will almost certainly have major consequences on the state of judicial legislation if allowed to proceed.
As a side note, did the police beat her up on the way in or something? She looks completely miserable in the photo.
Last aside, I promise: I feel for the people of Spain today. At least 192 dead and thousands injured in a terrorist attack on trains around Madrid. I’m appalled at news coverage, however: had this happened in the U.S., a disaster like this, with more wounded than the Oklahoma City bombing, would have massive coverage. Not a single talk radio station was even discussing it today, other than a brief blurb in the on-the-hour news from most stations. I guess it’s not a big deal because it’s in Europe or something. Grr.
Go to Starsky & Hutch 2004 reviewed. You know, when I read this review, I’m forcibly reminded that, sans a few details, this particular style of review could be the review for any of a number of action movies…
My favorite lines:
Go to Starsky & Hutch 2004 reviewed. You know, when I read this review, I’m forcibly reminded that, sans a few details, this particular style of review could be the review for any of a number of action movies…
My favorite lines:
“A man shoots at two police officers, they shoot back, and he races away in a car.” Hmm, sounds like Beverly Hills Cop. No, wait, no, umm, that one with Jackie Chan and Chris Farrell. Or, wait…
“Two men in a car race off the end of a pier hoping to land on a yacht but crash into the water.” FREAKING SPOILER!!! AUUUGGGHHH!!!
“Cheerleaders dance with suggestive moves, and they’re wearing tiny outfits that reveal cleavage, bare abdomens, bare thighs and parts of their bare buttocks as two men look on with interest.” Sounds like I’m back in high school. Oh, wait, I was the cheerleader.
So at my company of about 100 people, we implemented a new anti-SPAM email policy today. Basically, we created a whitelist of people allowed to email us. If you’re not on the whitelist, you get a notification directing you to a web page where you can add yourself to the whitelist.
The whitelist is working fine, but the president of our company got confused, received an email with a virus attachment, thought the attachment was another email message, and opened it.
Now my phone is ringing off the hook because everyone is getting emails with viruses attached to them. I go to the pres’ office, kill the virus process, run the removal tool, check everything out, and it’s all good.
So at my company of about 100 people, we implemented a new anti-SPAM email policy today. Basically, we created a whitelist of people allowed to email us. If you’re not on the whitelist, you get a notification directing you to a web page where you can add yourself to the whitelist.
The whitelist is working fine, but the president of our company got confused, received an email with a virus attachment, thought the attachment was another email message, and opened it.
Now my phone is ringing off the hook because everyone is getting emails with viruses attached to them. I go to the pres’ office, kill the virus process, run the removal tool, check everything out, and it’s all good.
My boss asks me why we don’t just strip out executable attachments in emails anyway. We tell him we were going to implement that with the whitelist, but he pulled us off before we could to work on a urgent-need project. He says, “Oh”
So then, I get an email from a guy at one of our remote offices stating that he received an email from another employee that has a .pif attachment, but he couldn’t get the attachment, so could I help him get the attachment? This is after I’ve sent a gazillion emails about how spammers can spoof the From: address, so you never know who it’s really from. And I’ve sent a gazillion and one emails about never opening .pif, .scr, .exe, .vbs., .com, etc files because they’re executables and can harm your system.
And you know what’s wierd…99% of the viruses out there are relatively harmless. They may clog up email, but they don’t do any real damage. You know how easy it would be to write a virus that really messes up a computer? Not hard at all. And that’s the scary thing…
It is amazing to me that each of our children has such different personalities. For example, our 3rd child will turn two this Friday. Matt and I were discussing little Elijah’s habits just yesterday and came to the conclusion that he is obsessive compulsive. After he leaves his bedroom, he shuts his door. Then he shuts my door on his way past it. Any bag near the exit of our home, must be hung on the doorknob. If I move it again, he will rehang it as soon as he notices. He loves to wash his hands.
Okay, so this is fine, but the obsessive part is more an obsession of water. Despite that he likes things neat and organized, he loves the sound of water hitting the floor. Luckily this means he’s in the kitchen or a bathroom for most of his water time. When the water faucet comes on in the bathroom, we run to see if it’s Eli, or an older child. If there’s a cup left sitting around, he will pour it.
It is amazing to me that each of our children has such different personalities. For example, our 3rd child will turn two this Friday. Matt and I were discussing little Elijah’s habits just yesterday and came to the conclusion that he is obsessive compulsive. After he leaves his bedroom, he shuts his door. Then he shuts my door on his way past it. Any bag near the exit of our home, must be hung on the doorknob. If I move it again, he will rehang it as soon as he notices. He loves to wash his hands.
Okay, so this is fine, but the obsessive part is more an obsession of water. Despite that he likes things neat and organized, he loves the sound of water hitting the floor. Luckily this means he’s in the kitchen or a bathroom for most of his water time. When the water faucet comes on in the bathroom, we run to see if it’s Eli, or an older child. If there’s a cup left sitting around, he will pour it.
So we have a two gallon water filter in the kitchen sitting on the counter available for us to drink freely. It has helped me not to have to help the older kids get a drink every time they’re thirsty. They can help themselves. Well, Eli grew two weeks ago and can now reach the spout. So we pushed the filter to the back of the counter. He will open the dishwasher, and push the spout down. Or he’ll move a chair to get to it. It doesn’t matter that he’s already been swatted on the bum twice and put in time out both times today, he wants to hear the sound of water hitting the floor.
Just when I think it’s safe and everything is out of reach of our little long arms of the west, he finds a squirt bottle.
So the terrible two’s have officially begun…….
From time to time, I do a little shopping online. I actually prefer to purchase my consumer electronics this way, because I’ve generally found the price and selection far superior to what I can get at my local CompUSA. Then again, return policies are often a pain when hunting online for stuff (but, apparently, CompUSA has problems with returns as well.).
Anyway, while rummaging around the gigantic dustbin that is eBay looking at G4 iBooks and PowerBooks, I ran across a listing of “Powerbook for $150”. I thought that looked intriguing, until I read it and realized it was the same scam all over again:
THIS AUCTION IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY NOT THE ACTUAL COMPUTER!!!
This auction is for a link to a website where Apple Powerbook G4 are offered for the incredible price of $150.00. The items are brand new, never used, not refurbished or anything like that. All it takes is a little patience.
From time to time, I do a little shopping online. I actually prefer to purchase my consumer electronics this way, because I’ve generally found the price and selection far superior to what I can get at my local CompUSA. Then again, return policies are often a pain when hunting online for stuff (but, apparently, CompUSA has problems with returns as well.).
Anyway, while rummaging around the gigantic dustbin that is eBay looking at G4 iBooks and PowerBooks, I ran across a listing of “Powerbook for $150”. I thought that looked intriguing, until I read it and realized it was the same scam all over again:
THIS AUCTION IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY NOT THE ACTUAL COMPUTER!!!
This auction is for a link to a website where Apple Powerbook G4 are offered for the incredible price of $150.00. The items are brand new, never used, not refurbished or anything like that. All it takes is a little patience.
I finally decided over this weekend to get to the bottom of these “info” eBay postings. After too much research, time spent online, time spent verifying stories, I can boil down the reality for you in three words:
It’s a scam.
OK, yeah, wiser heads than me could have figured out right from the get-go that you’re not going to get a $1500 computer for $150. But I finally figured out how this scam works — and the people get you both coming and going on this one. You pay them X dollars for “information” on how to get a free PowerBook. Then they rope you into the “program”.
What’s the “program”? Well, they’ll call it “network marketing”, or “matrixing”, or “the grid”, or any of a number of terms to make you think it’s anything but what it actually is.
The scheme goes something like this: For $150, you buy yourself a “position” in “the matrix”. You sign up X number of people under you, and they sign up X number of people under them, and if you’re patient and work at building a downline, eventually you’ll be shipped a brand-new Apple PowerBook. Seems like a sweet deal, doesn’t it?
Well, unfortunately, these schemes are only quasi-legal, and normally cease to exist the moment there’s a lawsuit. And, as millions of Amway (*cough*, ahem, excuse me, “Quixtar”, billing itself as an “e-commerce company”) former resellers can attest, such schemes are the road to ruin for most of their proponents.
I got sicker and sicker the more I realized that I’d heard this same story over and over again. I respect “direct sales”-oriented MLM’s. The Pampered Chef. Home Interiors. Even, (ahem: link for adult couples only) Slumber Party. These are companies with some network marketing aspect, but the main goal is that you make your money selling the product. I can respect that. But organizations where the main goal is to recruit more people is just abusive. And they contaminate the relationships people value most: friends, colleagues, people at church.
In my opinion, the only ones getting the “free Powerbooks” from eBay “Info” postings are the con artists doing the postings, who are also probably using it to fill their downline. And the average person gets sidelined by these rapscallions, buying into a “something-for-nothing” dream… and gets the shaft.
Friends don’t let friends drive pyramid schemes.
Writing today on Saturday because I will be indisposed for the next couple days.. and because I just couldn’t sit on this another day.
As a Christian and an American, I would like to distance myself from the likes of the FCC this last month or two.. specifically as pertaining to Radio.
Writing today on Saturday because I will be indisposed for the next couple days.. and because I just couldn’t sit on this another day.
As a Christian and an American, I would like to distance myself from the likes of the FCC this last month or two.. specifically as pertaining to Radio.
What exactly do I mean? Well, Howard Stern said this week that after 20 years, he is going to be forced from the air in the next week or two.. and he outlined a group of Senators, all who live together in a faith based housing project, who are strongarming Infinity broadcasting to get Howard off the air.
Now, many of you don’t like Howard.. and I understand why.. he’s crass, he’s often sexist, he can be gross, and when he is, I turn him off.. but isn’t that my right?
Somewhere, this needs to stop.
EDIT by matthew: Check out the follow-up to this story, by Sammy G.
“I love you,” I said to him. He climbed into my lap, took my face in his soft hands and he whispered, “I love you, too.” Then he leaned in and kissed me softly on the lips. What a romantic he’ll be. A heart breaker, too.
And to think, he’s not yet two.
It just goes to show how much kids learn by example. Each day when my dear Matt comes home from work, he carresses me in his arms and gives me a tender kiss. Little Eli is always right there waiting for his turn to get a hug from his daddy and sees that his daddy loves his mommy.
Thanks honey, for all your love.
“I love you,” I said to him. He climbed into my lap, took my face in his soft hands and he whispered, “I love you, too.” Then he leaned in and kissed me softly on the lips. What a romantic he’ll be. A heart breaker, too. And to think, he’s not yet two.
It just goes to show how much kids learn by example. Each day when my dear Matt comes home from work, he carresses me in his arms and gives me a tender kiss. Little Eli is always right there waiting for his turn to get a hug from his daddy and sees that his daddy loves his mommy.
Thanks honey, for all your love.