f1rststory

we're not kathlick...

2010-12-27T09:27:00.001-05:00

Three little boys couldn't get anyone to play with them and they decided it was because they hadn’t been baptized. So they went to the nearest church, but only the janitor was there. "We need to be baptized because no one will come out and play with us. Can you do it?" the boys asked. “Sure," said the janitor. He took them into the bathroom and dunked their heads in the toilet, and said, "You are now baptized!"

Outside, they asked each other, "'What religion are we?" One said, "We're not Kathlick, because they pour water on you. We're not Babits, because they dunk all of you in the water. We're not Methdiss, because they just sprinkle water on you."
The littlest one said, "Didn't you smell that water?"

They all joined in asking, “Yeah what does that mean?”

"I think it means we're Pisskopailians!"

RockYou Top 20 Used Passwords...is yours here?

2010-11-10T08:27:00.001-05:00

So I thought I would post up the RockYou 20 most common passwords used in their accounts (and other areas like facebook) in order to ensure that you

A - aren't using one of these, and if you are, to change it.
B - see how easy it can be to get into someone's account/computer (because not many people use strong passwords).
C - learn about tools to help you generate passwords that are very hard to crack.

20 Most Common Passwords (source: Imperva's Consumer Password Worst Practices report on passwords disclosed in RockYou Media breach, via informationweek)

123456
12345
123456789
password
iloveyou
princess
rockyou
1234567
12345678
abc123
Nicole
Daniel
babygirl
monkey
Jessica
lovely
Michael
Ashley
654321
qwerty

Now for 3 tools/links to use that helps you generate strong passwords

Wired.com, MAPLight.org Launch Political-Influence Tracker | Threat Level | Wired.com

2010-10-27T11:02:00.000-04:00

Wired.com, MAPLight.org Launch Political-Influence Tracker | Threat Level | Wired.com

Watch This Voting Machine Change Someone's Vote

2010-10-22T09:53:00.000-04:00

Watch This Voting Machine Change Someone's Vote

Desktop Linux: The Dream Is Dead - PCWorld Business Center

2010-10-18T15:36:00.000-04:00

Desktop Linux: The Dream Is Dead - PCWorld Business Center

Check it out...

2010-08-27T09:20:00.002-04:00

Chelsea Clinton's Wedding Pictures Pictures - CBS News

2010-08-02T13:50:00.000-04:00

Chelsea Clinton's Wedding Pictures Pictures - CBS News

Bunker-busting ATM attacks show security holes - Yahoo! Finance

2010-07-29T09:49:00.000-04:00

Bunker-busting ATM attacks show security holes - Yahoo! Finance

How the Anchoring Effect Messes Up Your Purchases and Estimates

2010-07-28T10:18:00.000-04:00

How the Anchoring Effect Messes Up Your Purchases and Estimates

An Unfortunate Child? | Business Pundit

2010-07-12T13:25:00.000-04:00

An Unfortunate Child? | Business Pundit

Flights diverted, delayed as UFO detected hovering - People's Daily Online

2010-07-09T11:54:00.000-04:00

Flights diverted, delayed as UFO detected hovering - People's Daily Online

Prince: the internet's completely over - Telegraph

2010-07-06T10:32:00.000-04:00

Prince: the internet's completely over - Telegraph

Interesting Wal-Mart Facts

2010-07-02T11:42:00.000-04:00

Via: Home Loans

Kung Fu Hillbilly - Training Video

2010-06-29T12:49:00.000-04:00

Band of Skulls - Light of the Morning - 98 Rock Baltimore Video - 98 Rock Baltimore

2010-06-28T16:03:00.001-04:00

For all those who love the new Mustang commercial, and for those who ask me if I know who the band is...

Band of Skulls - Light of the Morning - 98 Rock Baltimore Video - 98 Rock Baltimore

BBC News - Users report 'fault' on iPhone 4

2010-06-24T13:25:00.000-04:00

BBC News - Users report 'fault' on iPhone 4

Real to Reel going to $3 ticket prices starting April 16th 2010

2010-04-06T14:14:00.002-04:00

ABOUT TIME and I am pumped! Starting April 16th, Real to Reel theaters will no longer be a "first-run" theater and will be a sub-run/second-run theater...which basically means cheaper ticket prices and cheaper concessions!! Wohoo! I DO NOT mind waiting 3 - 4 weeks after the initial release of a movie in order to save tons of money and still see it in a theater. Heck, most of the time, i don't even get around to seeing a show until it's been out for a month or so anyway. Nice. Yep not even sure how public this is yet...but it is going to happen. :)

Coolest Music Video Ever - OK Go - This Too Shall Pass

2010-03-02T09:20:00.002-05:00

Wow! You must watch this!!

Could this be you? If so, contact me - ASAP!

2010-02-10T11:10:00.000-05:00

PHP Developer - MSSQL Developer - Web Developer

PHP Programmer with strong backend development skills Needed for Internet Driven Company! This is a growing Internet company located in East Tennessee and is actively seeking a mid to senior level PHP Programmer/Software Engineer with Web Development experience.

Minimum Required Skills:
PHP Developer, MSSQL Database Developer, JavaScript, HTML, CSS

What you need:

- 3+ years of experience
- OO PHP (v 5+)
- MSSQL development (Replication strongly desired)
- MS IIS
- HTML, JavaScript, CSS
- Ajax
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Masters preferred or significant work experience
- Windows networking and Sys Admin experience a plus
- Java development a plus
- SEO experience preferred and a plus
- Strong verbal & written communication skills
- Excellent problem-solving skills

Must be able to gather requirements, design, code and test independently as well as work jointly with the team.

What you'll be doing:

- Instrumental in developing functional retail and market performing web sites
- Involved in full life cycle development process
- Investigating and monitoring trends in SEO and developing toward the leading trends
- Interface with marketing personnel, gather requirements, coding and development, support and maintenance

What's in it for you?

- Work with cutting edge technology
- Work in a casual, low stress, yet fast paced environment
- Competitive base salary
- 401K, employer paid insurance

About Us

We are a 22 year old company and we are the second largest wholesale marketing entity in the automotive aftermarket performance parts and accessories marketplace. We are an industry leader in ecommerce and are continually striving to be the number one choice of our target consumers on the web.

TI stuffs WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and FM radios on a single chip, UWB and LTE are like 'hello?' -- Engadget

2010-02-09T11:06:00.000-05:00

TI stuffs WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and FM radios on a single chip, UWB and LTE are like 'hello?' -- Engadget

Server For Sale - Specs - Brand New

2010-02-05T14:40:00.004-05:00

24GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
Dual Intel XEON Quad Core E5504 (2GHz) Processors
(5) 500GB SATA 7200rpm HDDs
22x DVDRW
USB keyboard & mouse
850 watt Power Supply
SuperMicro X8DTL-I board
5yr warranty

$3000

IRON MAN 2 - AC/DC - SHOOT TO THRILL

2010-01-26T16:56:00.002-05:00

New video for the new movie...filmed live last month in Buenos Aires during their Black Ice World Tour.

too cool.

Cell Carriers Quick Reference Numbers - Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile

2010-01-18T16:43:00.003-05:00

So I saw this and thought it was kind of handy to have around...It's the quick dial numbers for carrier help/info etc on your cell phone. Verizon wireless, AT&T, T-mobile and Sprint. Enjoy

Sprint Help Numbers
-Sprint billing summary: dial *4
-Customer service: call 1-800-Sprint1

AT&T Help Numbers
-Number Porting: 1-888-898-7685
-Customer Support: 1-800-331-0500
-General Billing: 1-800-222-0300

T-Mobile Help Numbers
-Account Balance: dial #225#
-Minutes Used: dial #646#
-Texts Used: dial #674#
-Customer Service: dial *611 or 1-800-937-8997

Verizon Help Numbers
-Account Balance: dial #225
-Minutes Used: dial #646
-Make a Payment: dial #768
-Customer Service: dial *611 or 1-800-922-0204

The house that blew up in Knoxville Tennessee

2009-12-15T11:55:00.003-05:00

So a friend/co-worker of mine sent this to me and it's insane...

Apparently, this was near one of our coworkers in West Knoxville and this is what is left from an ~ $1,000,000 6,00 sq ft house. There was a natural gas leak inside at the fireplace and it exploded. The parents were actually blown out of the house and survived with some minor injuries, but their 18 year old son was asleep in the basement and was killed. Tragic.

Check your gas stuff if you have it...

Knowing when an Egg is Rotten - Rotten Egg test

2009-11-20T09:04:00.001-05:00

Can you eat that egg?

If not sure you ought-ter,
then place it in water.
If it lies on its side,
then it's fresh; eat with pride.

After three or four days,
at an angle it lays.
But, it still is a treat,
so go on and eat.

Ten days, stands on end,
in your baking 'twill blend.
'Cause it's definitely edible,
in your baking, incredible.

But, if it floats on the surface,
that egg serves no purpose.
'Cause a floater's a stinker!
Out the back door best fling 'er!

SENA Show Pics...(pre) Day 1...PICS

2009-11-02T18:09:00.002-05:00

On my way to the online marketing conference at SEMA (which has been awesome so far), I've ran across a few vehicles, that are pretty sweet! More to come this week... Check em out...

Best Weblinks of the morning

2009-10-30T09:13:00.002-04:00

So browsing around the net today, here are some of the links that interested me the most...

SNL Obama Skit - too funny!

2009-10-08T16:07:00.000-04:00

Toyota Recall

2009-09-30T08:20:00.000-04:00

Toyota says it will recall 3.8 million vehicles in the United States to address problems with a removable floor mat that could interfere with the vehicle's accelerator and cause a crash.

The company says it will be the largest recall in its history. Owners could learn about the safety campaign as early as next week.

Toyota and the government warned owners of Toyota and Lexus vehicles about safety problems tied to the removable floor mats. They say the mats could interfere with the vehicle's accelerator and cause a crash.

The recall will affect 2007-2010 model year Toyota Camry, 2005-2010 Toyota Avalon, 2004-2009 Toyota Prius, 2005-2010 Tacoma, 2007-2010 Toyota Tundra, 2007-2010 Lexus ES350 and 2006-2010 Lexus IS250 and IS350.

Owners should take out the floor mats on the driver's side and not replace them.

Grammar

2009-07-06T08:54:00.003-04:00

Got to thank my dad (who is part Indian) for this one...

On his 60th birthday, he received a gift certificate from his wife. The certificate paid for a visit to a medicine man living on a nearby Indian reservation who was rumored to have a wonderful cure for erectile dysfunction. After being persuaded, he drove to the reservation, handed his certificate to the medicine man and wondered what would happen next.

The old man slowly and methodically produced a potion, handed it to him, and with a grip on his shoulder, warned, "This is powerful medicine and it must be respected. You take only one teaspoonful and then say '1-2-3..' When you do that, you will become more manly than you have ever been in your life, and you can perform as long as you want."

He was encouraged. As he walked away, he turned and asked, "How do I stop the action of the medicine?"

"Your partner must say '1-2-3-4,'" he responded. "But when she does, the medicine will not work again until the next full moon."

He was very eager to see if it worked so he went home, showered, shaved, combed his hair, put on lots of cologne, took a spoonful of the medicine, and then invited his wife to join him in the bedroom. When she came in, he took off his clothes and said, "1-2-3!"

Immediately, the glory of his manhood filled the room.. His wife was so excited that she began ripping off her clothes. And then she asked, "By the way, Honey, what was the 1-2-3 for?"

And that, boys and girls, is why we should never end our sentences with a preposition!

Otherwise you will end up with a dangling participle...heh.

Direct to God....

2009-06-02T12:07:00.002-04:00

A man in Topeka, Kansas decided to write a book about churches around the country. He started by flying to San Francisco and started working east from there.

Going to a very large church, he began taking photographs and making notes.

He spotted a golden telephone on the vestibule wall and was intrigued with a sign, which read 'Calls: $10,000 a minute.' Seeking out the pastor, he asked about the phone and the sign.

The pastor answered that this golden phone is, in fact, a direct line to heaven and if he pays the price he can talk directly to God.

The man thanked the pastor and continued on his way. As he continued to visit churches in Seattle, Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and around the United States, he found more phones, with the same sign, and the same answer from each pastor.

Finally, he arrived in Georgia, upon entering a church in Alma, Georgia which is only about 30 miles from Waycross ....behold - he saw the usual golden telephone. But THIS time, the sign read 'Calls: 35 cents.'

Fascinated, he asked to talk to the pastor, 'Reverend, I have been in cities all across the country and in each church I have found this golden Telephone and have been told it is a direct line to Heaven and that I could talk to GOD, but in the other churches the cost was $10,000 a minute. Your sign reads only 35 cents a call. Why?'

The pastor, smiling benignly, replied,

'Son, you're in the South now, God's Country....It's a local call.'

American by Birth - Southern by the Grace of God.

heh

IBM masters teleportation like in Star Trek, kind of.

2009-05-11T11:34:00.004-04:00

OK, so i figured that since the new Star Trek movie is out and doing well, I'd share a little info i had found a while back on teleportation from IBM. It's an interesting (ahem, boring) article that states it is possible and has been done and is coming soon to home (or tele-lab) near you!

Or does it? I guess you'll have to read it for yourself to see...

Quantum Teleportation

Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when the original and teleported versions of the same person meet; but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original, functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect replicator of souls and bodies.

In 1993 an international group of six scientists, including IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett, confirmed the intuitions of the majority of science fiction writers by showing that perfect teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the original is destroyed. In subsequent years, other scientists have demonstrated teleportation experimentally in a variety of systems, including single photons, coherent light fields, nuclear spins, and trapped ions. Teleportation promises to be quite useful as an information processing primitive, facilitating long range quantum communication (perhaps unltimately leading to a "quantum internet"), and making it much easier to build a working quantum computer. But science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so.

In the past, the idea of teleportation was not taken very seriously by scientists, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which forbids any measuring or scanning process from extracting all the information in an atom or other object. According to the uncertainty principle, the more accurately an object is scanned, the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until one reaches a point where the object's original state has been completely disrupted, still without having extracted enough information to make a perfect replica. This sounds like a solid argument against teleportation: if one cannot extract enough information from an object to make a perfect copy, it would seem that a perfect copy cannot be made. But the six scientists found a way to make an end run around this logic, using a celebrated and paradoxical feature of quantum mechanics known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect. In brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object C which has never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been achieved is teleportation, not replication.

As the figure to the left suggests, the unscanned part of the information is conveyed from A to C by an intermediary object B, which interacts first with C and then with A. What? Can it really be correct to say "first with C and then with A"? Surely, in order to convey something from A to C, the delivery vehicle must visit A before C, not the other way around. But there is a subtle, unscannable kind of information that, unlike any material cargo, and even unlike ordinary information, can indeed be delivered in such a backward fashion. This subtle kind of information, also called "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlation" or "entanglement", has been at least partly understood since the 1930s when it was discussed in a famous paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. In the 1960s John Bell showed that a pair of entangled particles, which were once in contact but later move too far apart to interact directly, can exhibit individually random behavior that is too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics. Experiments on photons and other particles have repeatedly confirmed these correlations, thereby providing strong evidence for the validity of quantum mechanics, which neatly explains them. Another well-known fact about EPR correlations is that they cannot by themselves deliver a meaningful and controllable message. It was thought that their only usefulness was in proving the validity of quantum mechanics. But now it is known that, through the phenomenon of quantum teleportation, they can deliver exactly that part of the information in an object which is too delicate to be scanned out and delivered by conventional methods.

This figure compares conventional facsimile transmission with quantum teleportation (see above). In conventional facsimile transmission the original is scanned, extracting partial information about it, but remains more or less intact after the scanning process. The scanned information is sent to the receiving station, where it is imprinted on some raw material (eg paper) to produce an approximate copy of the original. By contrast, in quantum teleportation, two objects B and C are first brought into contact and then separated. Object B is taken to the sending station, while object C is taken to the receiving station. At the sending station object B is scanned together with the original object A which one wishes to teleport, yielding some information and totally disrupting the state of A and B. The scanned information is sent to the receiving station, where it is used to select one of several treatments to be applied to object C, thereby putting C into an exact replica of the former state of A.

To learn more about quantum teleportation, see the following articles and links:

C.H. Bennett, G. Brassard, C. Crepeau, R. Jozsa, A. Peres, and W. Wootters, "Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and EPR Channels", Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 70, pp 1895-1899 (1993)
Tony Sudbury, "Instant Teleportation", Nature .362, 586-587 (1993) (a semipopular account).
Ivars Peterson, Science News, April 10, 1993, p. 229. (another semipopular account).
Samuel Braunstein, A fun talk on teleportation
Q&A on Teleportation by BBC News Online science editor David Whitehouse
Wikipedia article
Experimental Articles

D. Bouwmeester et al. Nature 390, 575-9 (1997) (photons)
D. Boschi et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 1121-1125 (1998) (photons)
A. Furusawa et al. Science 282, 706-709 (1998) (coherent light field)
M.A. Nielsen et al. Nature 396, 52-55 (1998) (nuclear magnetic resonance)
I. Marcikic et al. Nature 421, 509-513 (2003) (photons, long distance)
M. Riebe et al. Nature 429, 734-737 (2004) (trapped calcium ions)
M.D. Barret et al. Nature 429, 737-739 (2004) (trapped beryllium ions)
R. Ursin et al. Nature 430, 849 (2004) (photons, long distance)

Theoretical Articles

G. Brassard Physica D 120 43-47 (1998) Teleportation as a quantum computation
Gottesman and I Chuang Nature 402 390-393 (1999), teleportation as a computational primitive
X. Zhou, D. Leung, I. Chuang Quantum gate constructions from teleportation-like primiitve
L. Vaidman quant-ph/0111124 Using teleportation to measure nonlocal variables

For recent experimental and theoretical articles, do a title search on "teleportation" in the ArXiv E-print Archive

http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation/

If you like baseball, you ain't seen nothing yet!

2009-05-08T10:19:00.002-04:00

I came across this article on espn.com about a guy who is a switch pitcher! Yes, you heard me right (and left). He throws both ways! You have to read this article...very cool. There's a picture there you have to see...

How do you beat a guy who throws righty and lefty? You don't.

You'll probably never witness an unassisted triple play in your lifetime, right? (There have been only 14.) Or see an intentional walk with the bases loaded. (Six.) Or watch one player hit two grand slams in an inning. (Once.)

But you can see something right now that hasn't been around in baseball since the late 1800s: a switch-pitcher.

His name is Pat Venditte, he's 23, and he's pro baseball's only ambidextrous pitcher. This living piece of history is more than a YouTube star; he's throwing almost daily for the Charleston RiverDogs, the Yankees' Single-A club. And he's not just throwing: He's blowing through hitters like a Cub Scout through Skittles. At one point in April, the closer's ERA was 0.00 in 6 1/3 innings, and he hadn't blown a save in five games.

Last season, he had 23 saves for the Staten Island Yankees, with a 0.83 ERA. And best of all, the kid can relieve himself!

He wears a specially made six-fingered Mizuno glove with two thumbs. (His Dominican teammates call him Pulpo, Spanish for "octopus.") When he warms up, he throws four pitches righty and four lefty. You should see the opposition when he does it. It's as if they had seen a ghost. Wait—did you just see that? If a righty is up, he throws righty, and vice versa. Whenever Venditte switches sides, everybody in the Charleston ballpark is encouraged to switch seats.

"I've got to remember to tell people which way he's throwing," says RiverDogs radio play-by-play man Danny Reed. "Never had to do that before."

There are a lot of "never befores" with Venditte. The pitching coach has to file two reports: Venditte the lefty and Venditte the righty. And he should; they're two different pitchers. The righty has a 90 mph fastball, a curve and a nice change. The lefty comes sidearm and has a murderous slider and a change. He's a five-pitch pitcher! Once, in Little League, the other team's coach came up to Pat Sr. and said, "Your twins pitched a heck of a game."

His college pitching coach called him Dexter, and opposing managers call him an ulcer. What's the point of saving your righthanded pinch-hitter for the ninth if Venditte is just going to switch to righty? Strategy is futile. Remember in The Princess Bride when, halfway through the sword fight, Inigo Montoya suddenly says, "I know something you don't know: I am not lefthanded!"?

All this was Pat Sr.'s idea. When his son was 3, Dad noticed Pat threw balls with both hands. So he fed it. He had him throw footballs both ways, punt both ways, kick field goals both ways. Pat was homeschooled by his mom, Jan, who had him write both ways and eat both ways.

We might be looking at the future here, people. "I get calls and letters from people wanting to know how they can do it with their kids," says Jan. "But you have to do it when they're very young. If you try it at 9, they won't listen."

For Pat Jr., it's meant a way to chase his dream of playing in the Show someday. "I know I wouldn't be this far without it," he says. "I don't have dominating stuff from one side or the other. I need both."

Not that it doesn't cause problems. If he walks a hitter, fans will start hollering, "Try the other side!" People want him to sign autographs with both hands. And switch-hitters will switch batter's boxes, making Venditte switch the glove, starting a cat-and-mouse game that can go on for 10 minutes. Minor league umps now have the Venditte Rule: At the start of an at-bat, the pitcher must declare his throwing arm, then the hitter can pick his side, with each man able to switch once. Phew.

There's been only one other such pitcher in the past century: Greg Harris, who threw one scoreless inning for the Expos, in 1995. More than 120 years ago, three guys are believed to have done it occasionally. The best was Tony Mullane, who stood on the mound with no glove and the ball cradled in both hands so nobody would know which way he was going to pitch until his windup. I've had bosses like that.

But Venditte, a four-year letterman at Creighton, has a chance to be the best. If the Yankees bring him up—and at this pace it could happen within three years—they won't need a pitch count. Venditte can throw every day! And when manager Joe Girardi needs to call the bullpen, he can say, "Okay, get a righty and lefty throwing. In other words, get Pat." Of course, how would Girardi signal the bullpen? Touch both arms? Either way, it's a steal for the Yankees. As one scout says, "This could be an economical two-for-one." (Hey, Pat, ask for two salaries.)

-Rick Reilly, espn.com

So over the not quite complete first 100 days...

2009-04-28T09:32:00.003-04:00

OK - I am so over a bunch of crap. 1st I am still in shock that America voted in one of the most incompetent people to serve as President in recent memory. The first 100 days is almost up and most people I know who voted for him (including lots of things I see and read), wish they would not have voted for him. I mean really, who brags about being gifted in speaking but has to always read a teleprompter. He has no gift...he is a stooge that simply stands up and talks. I can't believe there is going to be 4 years of this....and when his teleprompter stops - so does he...and tells people to fix it...why can't he just keep speaking? Really, is he not intelligent enough to continue to inform people about 'his' policies and ideas? And to allow people to fly Air Force One to NYC for a photo op at Ground Zero...? I mean, really? And why are certain people still in Congress? I think there are more and more stupid people out there in the world who don't pay attention to politics or government affairs who shouldn't be allowed to vote. I think everyone should pass a test to demonstrate their knowledge of an ability to understand just how our country's government works, how we got here, and what makes this country the one country that everyone wants to come to.

I hope that in the next election in a couple of years that there is a big turnaround or this country is heading for a nose dive. Oh and another thing...read this article...even Democrats think this is wrong...

I'm so frustrated i can't even type anymore...

VP Joe "The Joke" Biden

2009-04-17T10:11:00.001-04:00

read this link - enough said:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/17/bidens-list-political-blunders/

More Proof of my Chinese Takeover Theory...

2009-04-11T21:31:00.002-04:00

So, for those of you who haven't heard about my theory on the Chinese's subtle attempt at taking over the US in an interesting and very possible way through Chinese foods and various other outlets, see my previous post dated Aug 7, 2007. Of course when I typed that I had no idea Obama would become President and that our country as a whole would fall into this whole socialist/communist mess, but my theory is still holding up and proving very plausible....even if it was initially a joke, or should I say genius?. ;)

Anyway, unless you've been under a rock, I'm sure you've heard of the huge [Chinese] GhostNet cyber-ring bust the super sly Canadians (who knew? eh?) found out about a few days ago. [[ see this and that...]] One thing that's interesting is that China does use "the web" as part of its military strategy... But let me get back to my main point back in 2007. I just saw another article today that falls right in line with the whole "chinese sell stuff to us to get us sick and then take over theory". Only this article is not about food...ummmm, it's about the house you or your loved ones are living in... enjoy.

Chinese Drywall Poses Potential Risks to American Homeowners, Apartment Dwellers

At the height of the U.S. housing boom, when building materials were in short supply, American construction companies used millions of pounds of Chinese-made drywall because it was abundant and cheap.

Now that decision is haunting hundreds of homeowners and apartment dwellers who are concerned that the wallboard gives off fumes that can corrode copper pipes, blacken jewelry and silverware, and possibly sicken people. --------->>>read it all....

Google's new Autopilot for email is pretty nifty. You have to check this out!

2009-04-01T09:01:00.002-04:00

So, this is some cool stuff...

Imagine getting some emails from people and you're away from the computer and they are answered for you by the computer in a natural language response... how awesome is that? You don't even have to be there...

Check this stuff out!

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/landing/cadie/

Oh yeah, today is April 1st...I'm sure that has nothing to do with this... heh.

nice.

Beyonce fans 'among least intelligent but Beethoven fans are cleverest' - How dumb are you?

2009-03-18T19:35:00.004-04:00

This is GREAT! I ran across this article reading the news (as I tend to do) and went and checked out the site/charts/graphics. It is really funny and cool. Think of your friends and what they listen to and how smart you think they are...this is really good. It has totally pegged people...hahahaha

Beyonce fans 'among least intelligent but Beethoven fans are cleverest'

the article

Could one's musical tastes say something about intelligence? How about SAT scores?
http://musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr/
the site

check it out...

Secret Message Found In Lincoln Pocket Watch

2009-03-11T12:05:00.004-04:00

Now this is too cool. Something straight out of National Treasure...but without all the whizbang blow up romance stuff...hahahaha

from FoxNews

WASHINGTON — For nearly 150 years, a story has circulated about a hidden Civil War message engraved inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch. On Tuesday, museum curators confirmed it was true. A watchmaker used tiny tools to carefully pry open the antique watch at the National Museum of American History, and a descendant of the engraver read aloud the message from a metal plate underneath the watch face.

"Jonathan Dillon April 13 - 1861," part of the inscription reads, "Fort Sumpter (sic) was attacked by the rebels on the above date." Another part reads, "Thank God we have a government."

The words were etched in tiny cursive handwriting and filled the the space between tiny screws and gears that jutted through the metal plate. A magnifying glass was required to read them.

Jonathan Dillon, then a watchmaker on Pennsylvania Avenue, had Lincoln's watch in his hands when he heard the first shots of the Civil War had been fired in South Carolina. The Irish immigrant later recalled being the only Union sympathizer working at the shop in a divided Washington.

Dillon's story was passed down among his family and friends, eventually reaching a New York Times reporter. In a 1906 article in the paper, an 84-year-old Dillon said no one, including Lincoln, ever saw the inscription as far as he knew.

Dillon had a fuzzy recollection of what he had engraved. He told the newspaper he had written: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a president who at least will try."

For years the story went unconfirmed.

The watchmaker's great-great grandson, Doug Stiles, first heard the tale of the engraving from his great uncle decades ago. He said the story had reached extended family as far away as Ireland.

A few months ago, he used Google to find the New York Times story, and last month he passed the information along to Smithsonian curators, who knew nothing about the engraving.

On Tuesday, watchmaker George Thomas, who volunteers at the museum, spent several minutes carefully opening the watch as an audience of reporters and museum workers watched on a video monitor.

"The moment of truth has come. Is there or is there not an inscription?" Thomas said, teasing the audience, which gasped when he confirmed it was there. He called Stiles up to read his ancestor's words, drawing smiles and a few sighs of relief.

"Like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, this was the reaction he had (to the Civil War,)" Stiles said of the inscription.

Later, Stiles said he felt closer to the 16th president.

"My gosh, that was Lincoln's watch," he said, "and my ancestor put graffiti on it!"

Lincoln's family kept the watch until it was donated to the museum in 1958. It was Lincoln's everyday pocket watch, one of the president's only valuable possessions he brought with him to the White House from Springfield, Ill., said Harry Rubenstein, curator of the museum's politics and reform division.

"I think it just captures a bit of history that can transform you to another time and place," he said. "It captures the excitement, the hope of a watchmaker in Washington."

The watch will go back on display at the museum by Wednesday as part of the exhibit, "Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life." It will have a new label to tell Dillon's story and a photo of the inscription.

I must be part Japanese...hahaha b/c I think the iPhone is junk too.

2009-02-28T12:02:00.004-05:00

Well, I get it now!! I have not gotten an iPhone, I've not really thought they were that super cool and have been in the minority with most phone people because I don't think they are all people crack them up to be...guess it must be because I'm either a) part Japanese or b) technically ahead of my time. hahaha

This also explains why my newest phone I have (LG) does mutlimedia texting, takes awesome pictures, makes movies and yes I can watch TV (live TV!) on it (and do email, games, blah blah blah all the other basic stuff)...all that plus I bought it off ebay without having a contract...wow. Oh yeah, and I can do it all with only one hand...heh.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/why-the-iphone.html

The article above is awesome! Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone...

My favorite quotes from the article:

"Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner."

"So that would suggest that in Japan, carrying around an iPhone — an outdated handset compared to Japanese cellphones — could make you look pretty lame."

hahaha
sayonara

Parents Magazine...too funny.

2009-02-11T21:46:00.001-05:00

I ran across this and just had to share it...classic.

Great Quote from John Adams

2009-01-26T14:33:00.000-05:00

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
- John Adams

The all-encompassing power of facebook.

2009-01-15T14:38:00.002-05:00

I continue to be amazed at how facebook works. Here is the latest, fairly humorous, thing I have observed. First, let me state that this actually happened to me...not some random story from somewhere on the web.

Everybody is on facebook and everybody has friends on facebook and most people have friends that are shared with other friends, etc...blah blah blah. Well, I posted a status update that was seen by friends and got a couple of comments. One from a friend who I haven't seen since elementary school, who is a host/reporter for a certain radio station in a college town and the other friend of mine I met through a statewide leadership program who is a media relations coordinator for a university. I'm sure you can figure out what happened...

Well, here are the comments...

is scientifical...yeah, that's right. Scientifical. 11:08am - Comment

at 11:11am January 14

Really, now...

at 11:17am January 14

If that's the case then being a science writer makes me super-scientifical. Or even... scienterrific? I'm stopping now.

at 11:51am January 14

Scientifilicious.

at 11:57am January 14

Are you the same ***** who works one floor above me in the communications building at **? Because if so, Facebook has officially made the world more ridiculously small. And that would indeed be Scientifficacious.

at 4:35am January 15

I am the same. Crazy Facebook...
How do you know ***?
(He and I went to the same elementary school ...)

at 2:37pm January 15

SO...I'm not sure which is crazier...the fact that you two actually know each other or the fact that you two are communicating with each other through comments on my status...hahahaha ;)

at 2:42pm January 15

Oh, we've now opened up our own line of communication... we've left you in the dust, I fear.

Just another day in the life of facebooking...hahaha

I'm glad I could "re-introduce" you two...hahaha

Even Microsoft Uses Apple Products

2009-01-13T17:03:00.002-05:00

I came across this picture while being amused at other failures just like it...too funny! Check out the site when you get a chance...

Fastest gun in the west...make that world!

2009-01-09T20:26:00.005-05:00

I was stumbling through the internet and happened to run into, what may be, the coolest video I have ever seen. I wish I could find the whole show, but this segment is pretty darn good. You have to watch it all...you get past the guy's cockiness really quick when you see him back it up. Insane!!

Remembering Goody's Family Clothing

2009-01-07T09:49:00.002-05:00

S0, I heard this story today on the radio as I was heading into work and it made me a little sad. Especially since Goody's is HQ'd in Knoxville TN (go vols). They carried decent stuff fairly cheap, but the sad thing is, I remember getting an AWESOME KICK-ASS Sweater Vest from there one year (well, maybe not kick-ass or awesome, but I thought I was cool) way back in the day. I guess since people aren't buying that many sweater vests anymore, the company just couldn't hold up. I knew I shouldn't have stopped shopping there...

Goody's Family Clothing to liquidate stores

Tue Jan 6, 2009 12:12pm EST

]

By Chelsea Emery

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goody's Family Clothing, a privately held apparel retail chain which emerged from bankruptcy in October, plans to liquidate its remaining stores as the U.S. economic recession has undermined its ability to continue operating.

"The company is in the processes of obtaining bids to liquidate substantially all collateral and inventory," said Cathy Hershcopf, a bankruptcy partner at law firm Cooley Godward Kronish LLP. "The retail environment is very difficult and they did not have sufficient capital to weather the bad times."

The law firm is acting as a liaison between Goody's vendors and the company and Prentice Capital Management. PGDYS Lending LLC is Goody's parent company, and Prentice is the manager of PGDYS.

Bob Carbonell, chief credit officer for retail credit rating service Bernard Sands, confirmed that the company plans to liquidate.

Going-out-of-business sales will begin as early as Friday, said Hershcopf.

When the company emerged from bankruptcy, it operated 287 stores in 20 states.

The Knoxville, Tennessee-based retailer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 9, hurt by high gasoline and food prices that have forced consumers to cut back on nonessential purchases. It emerged from bankruptcy protection in October after cutting operating costs and closing at least 69 underperforming stores.

(Reporting by Chelsea Emery, editing by Matthew Lewis)

Super Mario Game 4

2009-01-05T14:45:00.001-05:00

Super Mario Gamegreat free widgetsWidgetbox

2008-12-29T07:59:00.000-05:00

I found this online and thought, how neat...but how relevant?

Writerisms and other Sins: A Writer's Shortcut to Stronger Writing

Copyright © 1995 by C.J. Cherryh

Copy and pass "Writerisms and other Sins" around to your heart's content, but always post my Copyright notice at the top, correctly, thank you, as both a courtesy and a legal necessity to protect any writer.

Writerisms: overused and misused language. In more direct words: find 'em, root 'em out, and look at your prose without the underbrush.

am, is, are, was, were, being, be, been … combined with "by" or with "by … someone" implied but not stated. Such structures are passives. In general, limit passive verb use to one or two per book. The word "by" followed by a person is an easy flag for passives.
am, is, are, was, were, being, be, been … combined with an adjective. "He was sad as he walked about the apartment." "He moped about the apartment." A single colorful verb is stronger than any was + adjective; but don't slide to the polar opposite and overuse colorful verbs. There are writers that vastly overuse the "be" verb; if you are one, fix it. If you aren't one---don't, because overfixing it will commit the next error.
florid verbs. "The car grumbled its way to the curb" is on the verge of being so colorful it's distracting. {Florid fr. Lat. floreo, to flower.}

If a manuscript looks as if it's sprouted leaves and branches, if every verb is "unusual," if the vocabulary is more interesting than the story … fix it by going to more ordinary verbs. There are vocabulary-addicts who will praise your prose for this but not many who can simultaneously admire your verbs as verbs and follow your story, especially if it has content. The car is not a main actor and not one you necessarily need to make into a character. If its action should be more ordinary and transparent, don't use an odd expression. This is prose.

This statement also goes for unusual descriptions and odd adjectives, nouns, and adverbs.
odd connectives. Some writers overuse "as" and "then" in an attempt to avoid "and" or "but," which themselves can become a tic. But "as" is only for truly simultaneous action. The common deck of conjunctions available is:
- when (temporal)
- if (conditional)
- since (ambiguous between temporal and causal)
- although (concessive)
- because (causal)
- and (connective)
- but (contrasting)
- as (contemporaneous action or sub for "because") while (roughly equal to "as")
These are the ones I can think of. If you use some too much and others practically never, be more even-handed. Then, BTW, is originally more of an adverb than a proper conjunction, although it seems to be drifting toward use as a conjunction. However is really a peculiar conjunction, demanding in most finicky usage to be placed *after* the subject of the clause.

Don't forget the correlatives, either … or, neither … nor, and "not only … but also."

And "so that," "in order that," and the far shorter and occasionally merciful infinitive: "to … {verb}something."
Descriptive writerisms.

Things that have become "conventions of prose" that personally stop me cold in text.
- "framed by" followed by hair, tresses, curls, or most anything cute.
- "swelling bosom"
- "heart-shaped face"
- "set off by": see "framed by"
- "revealed" or "revealed by": see "framed by." Too precious for words when followed by a fashion statement.
- Mirrors … avoid mirrors, as a basic rule of your life. You get to use them once during your writing career. Save them for more experience. But it doesn't count if they don't reflect … by which I mean see the list above. If you haven't read enough unpublished fiction to have met the infamous mirror scenes in which Our Hero admires his steely blue eyes and manly chin, you can scarcely imagine how bad they can get.
- limpid pools and farm ponds: I don't care what it is, if it reflects your hero and occasions a description of his manly dimple, it's a mirror.
  
  As a general rule … your viewpoint characters should have less, rather than more, description than anyone else: a reader of different skin or hair color ought to be able to sink into this persona without being continually jolted by contrary information.
  
  Stick to what your observer can observe. One's own blushes can be felt, but not seen, unless one is facing … .a mirror. See above.
- "as he turned, then stepped aside from the descending blow … " First of all, it takes longer to read than to happen: pacing fault. Second, the "then" places action #2 sequentially after #1, which makes the whole evasion sequence a 1-2 which won't work. This guy is dead or the opponent was telegraphing his moves in a panel-by-panel comic book style which won't do for regular prose. Clunky. Slow. Fatally slow.
- "Again" or worse "once again." Established writers don't tend to overuse this one: it seems like a neo fault, possibly a mental writerly stammer---lacking a next thing to do, our hero does it "again" or "once again" or "even yet." Toss "still" and "yet" onto the pile and use them sparingly.
Dead verbs. Colorless verbs.
- walked
- turned
- crossed
- run, ran
- go, went, gone
- leave, left
- have, had
- get, got
You can add your own often used colorless verbs: these are verbs that convey an action but don't add any other information. A verb you've had to modify (change) with an adverb is likely inadequate to the job you assigned it to do.
Colorless verb with inadequate adverb: "He walked slowly across the room."

More informative verb with no adverb: "He trudged across the room," "He paced across the room," "He stalked across the room," each one a different meaning, different situation. But please see problem 3, above, and don't go overboard.
Themely English

With apologies to hard-working English teachers, school English is not fiction English.

Understand that the meticulous English style you labored over in school, including the use of complete sentences and the structure of classic theme-sentence paragraphs, was directed toward the production of non-fiction reports, resumes, and other non-fiction applications.

The first thing you have to do to write fiction? Suspect all the English style you learned in school and violate rules at need. Many of those rules will turn out to apply; many won't.

{Be ready to defend your choices. If you are lucky, you will be copyedited. Occasionally the copyeditor will be technically right but fictionally wrong and you will have to tell your editor why you want that particular expression left alone.}
Scaffolding and spaghetti. Words the sole function of which is to hold up other words. For application only if you are floundering in too many "which" clauses. Do not carry this or any other advice to extremes.

"What it was upon close examination was a mass the center of which was suffused with a glow which appeared rubescent to the observers who were amazed and confounded by this untoward manifestation." Flowery and overstructured. "What they found was a mass, the center of which glowed faintly red. They'd never seen anything like it." The second isn't great lit, but it gets the job done: the first drowns in "which" and "who" clauses.

In other words---be suspicious any time you have to support one needed word (rubescent) with a creaking framework of "which" and "what" and "who." Dump the "which-what-who" and take the single descriptive word. Plant it as an adjective in the main sentence.
A short cut to "who" and "whom."
- Nominative: who
- Possessive: whose
- Objective: whom
The rule:
1. treat the "who-clause" as a mini-sentence.
  
  If you could substitute "he" for the who-whom, it's a "who." If you could substitute "him" for the who-whom it's a "whom."
  
  The trick is where ellipsis has occurred … or where parentheticals have been inserted … and the number of people in important and memorable places who get it wrong. "Who … do I see?" Wrong: I see he? No. I see "him." Whom do I see?
2. "Who" never changes case to match an antecedent. (word to which it refers)
  - I blame them who made the unjust law. CORRECT.
  - It is she whom they blame. CORRECT: The who-clause is WHOM THEY BLAME.
  - They blame HER=him, =whom.
  - I am the one WHO is at fault. CORRECT.
  - I am the one WHOM they blame. CORRECT.
  - They took him WHOM they blamed. CORRECT---but not because WHOM matches HIM: that doesn't matter: correct because "they" is the subject of "blamed" and "whom" is the object.
  - I am he WHOM THEY BLAME. CORRECT. Whom is the "object" of "they blame."
  Back to rule one: "who" clauses are completely independent in case from the rest of the sentence. The case of "who" in its clause changes by the internal logic of the clause and by NO influence outside the clause. Repeat to yourself: there is no connection, there is no connection 3 x and you will never mistake for whom the bell tolls.
The examples above probably grate over your nerves. That's why "that" is gaining in popularity in the vernacular and why a lot of copyeditors will correct you incorrectly on this point. I'm beginning to believe that nine tenths of the English-speaking universe can't handle these little clauses.
-ing.

"Shouldering his pack and setting forth, he crossed the river … "

No, he didn't. Not unless his pack was in the river. Implies simultaneity. The participles are just like any other verbal form. They aren't a substitute legal everywhere, or a quick fix for a complex sequence of motions. Write them on the fly if you like, but once imbedded in text they're hard to search out when you want to get rid of their repetitive cadence, because -ing is part of so many fully constructed verbs {am going, etc.}
-ness

A substitute for thinking of the right word. "Darkness," "unhappiness," and such come of tacking -ness (or occasionally - ion) onto words. There's often a better answer. Use it as needed.

As a general rule, use a major or stand-out vocabulary word only once a paragraph, maybe twice a page, and if truly outre, only once per book. Parallels are clear and proper exceptions to this, and don't vary your word choice to the point of silliness: see error 3.

CHERRYH'S LAW: NO RULE SHOULD BE FOLLOWED OFF A CLIFF.

Looking Around - Best News Day in a While

2008-12-22T14:45:00.002-05:00

So, while looking around and coming up with all that junk in my previous post, I also ran across some interesting news items i thought I'd share:

The U.S. government's bailout of the American International Group is helping promote Shariah law, a lawsuit filed in federal court in Michigan alleges.

Merry Christmas! Buffet at Health Department Party Sickens 42 (sad, but oh, so funny...)

'Sex chip' will have us wired, Oxford University researcher Morten Kringelbach says

Laguna Beach, The Hills & The City

2008-12-22T14:23:00.002-05:00

LOS ANGELES — Let’s face it "The Hills" wasn’t exactly a real reality show, but it is already starting to look as though Whitney Port’s spin-off "The City" is even more err, scripted.

Port and co-star Olivia Palermo both attended Grey Goose’s Ball for Charity in New York last week where they filmed the highly anticipated MTV show. According to our inside source, every moment the girls weren’t repeating the same scene over and over (which went on for more than two hours) they excitedly stood behind the lens and chatted happily like close friend, despire the fact that they’re portrayed as enemies on the show.

So, I read this online from, fox news of all places...hahaha and knew that those shows are all scripted, but have never really see anything be so blatant about it. Well that got me to thinking about finding info on the MTV show(s) which state it's either fake or real...

The Debate on Laguna... most agree it's fake.

Ummm, this guy thinks it's real, but I'll give him the benefit of doubt b/c this was written in 2004...hahaha

An authority I guess? It's fake.

The Hills...most agree it's scripted too...except Lauren (LC). And yeah, this is a post about something with the script...

The City...OK, by now I'm sick of looking all this stuff up...I stopped here. It's just too much for me to handle...I know it'll be fake too...

The Ultimate Rejection Letter

2008-12-12T07:41:00.004-05:00

Times are hard and the economy is bad. I thought I'd help out those of you who are looking for a job and feel you have been given the shaft by many potential employers. I found this copy of the ultimate rejection letter and and wanted to share. I hope it's beneficial to you. haha

The Ultimate Rejection Letter

Herbert A. Millington
Chair - Search Committee
412A Clarkson Hall, Whitson University
College Hill, MA  34109

Dear Professor Millington,

Thank you for your letter of March 16.  After careful consideration, I
regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me
an assistant professor position in your department. 

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually
large number of rejection letters.  With such a varied and promising field
of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals. 

Despite Whitson's outstanding qualifications and previous experience in
rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at
this time.  Therefore, I will assume the position of assistant professor
in your department this August.  I look forward to seeing you then. 

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,
Chris L. Jensen (of this is made up and you can put your name here)

Love that chili...

2008-12-05T11:22:00.001-05:00

A young cowboy walks into a seedy cafe in Prescott, Az.

He sits at the counter and notices an old cowboy with his arms folded
staring blankly at a full bowl of chili.

After fifteen minutes of just sitting there staring at it, the young
cowboy bravely asks the old cowpoke, "If you ain't
gonna eat that, mind if I do?"

The older cowboy slowly turns his head toward the young wrangler and in
his best cowboy manner says, "Nah, you go ahead."

Eagerly, the young cowboy reaches over and slides the bowl over to his
place and starts spooning it in with delight. He
gets nearly down to the bottom and notices a dead mouse in the chili.

The sight was shocking and he immediately barfs up the chili into the
bowl.

The old cowboy quietly says, "Yep, that's as far as I got, too."

Election Results

2008-11-24T08:29:00.002-05:00

So I got this picture and thought it was very interesting how the country is laid out. Obviously the most populated areas/states are what determined the final results. But it is curious as to how the country, by county, voted. See for yourself...

Michael Crichton has died

2008-11-05T13:04:00.002-05:00

Sad Day... The author of some of my favorite books (Jurassic Park, The 13th Warrior, Prey & Timeline) has died suddenly.

Read more here.

His Web Site

Obama fact check from the debate

2008-10-08T09:10:00.002-04:00

OBAMA: "I believe this is a final verdict on the failed economic policies of the last eight years, strongly promoted by President Bush and supported by Senator McCain, that essentially said that we should strip away regulations, consumer protections, let the market run wild, and prosperity would rain down on all of us. It hasn't worked out that way. And so now we've got to take some decisive action."

THE FACTS: McCain has indeed favored less regulation over the years but supported tighter rules and accountability on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years before the start of a financial crisis prompted in part by those giant mortgage underwriters. Obama was not a leader in that unsuccessful effort. Some of the current problems can be traced to legislation passed in 1999 that lifted many regulations over the financial industry. That deregulation was championed by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, a McCain supporter, but also by President Clinton, who signed the legislation, and by former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now a top Obama economic adviser.

McCAIN: In a jab at Obama, McCain said that the last president to raise taxes during difficult economic times was Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.

THE FACTS: While the recession of the early 1990s didn't compare to the Great Depression, Bill Clinton raised taxes.
— NBC News' blog First Read

OBAMA: Said McCain's proposal to give people a tax credit in exchange for treating employers' health insurance contributions as taxable wages amounts to "what one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away."

THE FACTS: Obama's suggestion that McCain's health care plan is a wash for families is misleading. McCain offers families a $5,000 tax credit to help them buy health insurance. The corresponding increase in taxable wages would result in a much smaller cost than the value of the tax credit, at least at first. Over time, the value of the tax credit may diminish as premiums rise. However, the Tax Policy Center estimates that McCain's plan would increase the federal deficit by $1.3 trillion over 10 years — mainly because it would lead to less tax revenue coming in, meaning it is a true tax break overall.
— The Associated Press

OBAMA: "Actually I'm cutting more than I'm spending so that it will be a net spending cut."

THE FACTS: Obama has many ambitious plans to spend more taxpayer dollars on a variety of federal programs, including clean energy technologies and job training. He's said he'll cut pork-barrel programs and the costs of the war in Iraq to pay for it — as well as raise taxes on the wealthy — but the specifics of his new spending plans greatly outweigh the few spending cuts he's identified.
— The Associated Press

OBAMA: "We're spending $10 billion dollars a month in Iraq, at a time when the Iraqis have a $79 billion dollar surplus — $79 billion dollars."

Well, not quite. As Factcheck.org put it, "The country was once projected to have as much as a $79 billion surplus, but no more. The Iraqis have $29 billion in the bank, and could have $47 billion to $59 billion by the end of the year."
— NBC News' blog First Read

obama and his terrorists buddies

2008-10-07T10:23:00.001-04:00

Sol Stern
The Bomber as School Reformer http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon1006ss.html
Voters—and debate moderators—shouldn’t let Bill Ayers and Barack Obama off the hook.
6 October 2008

Back in the early eighties, in an interview with David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Bill Ayers remembered his reaction upon learning that he would not be prosecuted by the government for his bombing spree as a member of the Weather Underground. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted. Ayers is now a university professor, but he must have been exulting all over again after reading Saturday’s front-page story in the New York Times.

The article explored the putative relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama during the time they worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a five-year philanthropic venture that, starting in 1995, distributed over $160 million in school-improvement grants to the Windy City’s public schools. Ayers wrote the grant proposal that secured seed money for the schools and ran the implementation arm of the project; Obama became chairman of the board that distributed the grants. Not only did the Times exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate of having anything like a “close” relationship with Ayers—their paths merely “crossed” while working on the Challenge, the paper said—but it also bestowed the honorific of “school reformer” on the ex-bomber. “Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform,” the article maintained. On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Tom Brokaw—who will be moderating tomorrow’s debate between the presidential candidates—picked up this now conventional wisdom and described Ayers as “a school reformer.”

Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”

As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers.

Despite the Times story, American voters still don’t have an accurate picture of the relationship between Obama and Ayers during their work on the Annenberg Challenge. The paper’s account quoted several people who worked on the project as saying that they didn’t think Ayers had any role in selecting Obama for his position as chairman. But we haven’t heard a word about the subject from the two principals. For the first time in his life, Ayers seems to be observing Democratic Party discipline and won’t be talking until after November 4. Meanwhile, in one of the Democratic primary debates, Obama said that Ayers was just “a guy I know in the neighborhood”—which certainly qualifies as one of the biggest fibs told by any of the candidates so far.

Is it too much to hope that one of the moderators of the two remaining debates will press Obama for a fuller accounting of his work with Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and also ask Obama what he thinks of Ayers’s views on school reform? If the mainstream media deem it important that voters know which newspapers one of the vice presidential candidates reads, they certainly ought to be demanding more information from a presidential candidate about whom he collaborated with in distributing $160 million to the public schools. How about it, Tom Brokaw?

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

Joe Biden Gone?

2008-09-24T22:05:00.006-04:00

First, read my previous post about Joe Biden being replaced by Hillary Clinton...that's what this is all about...now this comes out today referring to the same thing I posted a few days ago...I find it very funny. :)

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/24/biden-dropping-out-rumor-thrives-on-internet/

Biden Dropping Out? Rumor Thrives on Internet

It’s almost certainly just a case of the telephone game gone high-tech, but there’s an Internet rumor surging through inboxes and discussion boards that Joe Biden will drop out as Barack Obama’s running mate after his Oct. 2 debate with Sarah Palin — and that he’ll be replaced by Hillary Clinton on the Democratic presidential ticket.

The story line goes as follows: John McCain’s selection of Palin has generated so much interest in the Republican ticket that Obama needs to make a radical move to regain momentum. So in the days after the vice presidential candidates debate in Missouri, Biden will bow out, citing “health problems” (Biden underwent surgery in 1988 to repair two brain aneurysms). Enter Clinton.

Furthermore, the story goes, any damage the gaffe-prone Biden does during the debate will be erased by his abrupt exit.

It sounds like a job for Fight the Smears, the Web site the Obama campaign set up to quash damaging Internet rumors. But Fight the Smears hasn’t touched this one, perhaps out of fear that it would only further a wild rumor. The Obama campaign has not commented on it, other than to say that Biden’s medical records will be released soon.

Snopes.com, a site devoted to picking apart online rumors and urban legends, has labeled the status of the claim “undetermined.” Several online discussion boards have been loaded up with denials.

Biden has caused a few hiccups for the Obama campaign. On Monday, he had to issue a clarification after he called one of his own campaign ads “terrible” in an interview with CBS News. He also faced a rebuke from Obama after he spoke out against the government bailout of American International Group last week before Obama was ready to take a position.

On Tuesday, he said that President Franklin Roosevelt had gone on television in 1929 to discuss the Wall Street crash (Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and the TV hadn’t been invented yet).

At one point, he even said Hillary Clinton might have been a better pick for Obama’s No. 2.

The Republican National Committee has gleefully set up a Biden “gaffe clock” to monitor his rhetorical flubs on the campaign trail.

Nonetheless, Democratic supporters dismiss outright any speculation that he might be dropped from the ticket.

“It’s crazy. … It’s just not gonna happen,” Democratic strategist Bob Beckel said.

Dropping Biden from the ticket would be a throwback to George McGovern’s shocker in 1972, when he replaced running mate Thomas Eagleton after it was learned that Eagleton had undergone electro-shock therapy for depression.

McGovern lost to President Nixon in a landslide, suggesting that seventh-inning lineup changes are not the best strategy for presidential candidates who want to shake things up.

Speaking hypothetically, Beckel said that, if it were to happen, the Democratic National Committee could feasibly call a mini-convention of sorts to confirm a new running mate. He also said “it would be so disruptive” that it would make no sense for Obama to pursue such a change.

Deadlines have passed in some states to send absentee ballots to military personnel and civilian voters overseas — meaning they would have received a ballot already with Biden (and Palin) on their parties’ tickets.

“I doubt it,” said Christopher Hull, presidential scholar and adjunct government professor at Georgetown University, when told of the Biden rumor. “Joe Biden is not that big a liability. Joe Biden was arguably the most experienced candidate in the [Democratic primary] race.”

“Joe Biden, of course, has shot off his mouth and gotten himself in trouble,” he added. “It’s Joe Biden we’re talking about.”

Though Obama lost ground in the polls after McCain tapped Palin to be his running mate, he has recently regained some of that footing. The FOX News Opinion Dynamics Poll on Wednesday gave Obama a 6-point lead, and a Washington Post-ABC News poll put his lead at 9 points. The Gallup daily tracking poll gave the Democrat a 3-point lead.

Hull said he would understand the desire to put Clinton on the ticket if Obama were persistently trailing in the polls.

A recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll showed former Clinton backers are still reluctant to support Obama. The survey showed just 58 percent of them back him - unchanged since a similar poll in June.

But Hull said he doesn’t sense panic in the Obama ranks.

“I don’t think the Obama campaign was panicking even when the rest of the Democrats were panicking,” he said.

Obama, meanwhile, is standing by his man.

“Joe Biden is also an outstanding public servant and I am very proud of the choice that I made,” he told NBC’s “Today Show” in an interview that aired Tuesday. He said he’s a “great admirer of Senator Clinton’s” and he hopes she remains a “close adviser.”

And Biden is dutifully living up to his role as attack dog.

“Time and again, on the most critical national security issues of our time, John McCain’s judgment has simply been wrong,” the Delaware senator said Wednesday in Cincinnati.

Biden has campaigned all over the country for Obama, hitting long-shot states like Montana as well as key battlegrounds like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. He’s largely hitting working-class towns, especially in the Midwest.

Though Snopes.com ruled the validity of the dropout rumor was “undetermined,” the write-up did cast serious doubt on the idea that Obama would dump the Senate veteran who seemed to fill in Obama’s perceived foreign policy gap.

“It’s difficult to definitely prove a negative, but rumors of Biden’s replacement as a VP candidate seem to be nothing more than e-mail chatter at this point,” the site said. “Whatever boost Barack Obama’s campaign might conceivably gain by swapping Joe Biden for Hillary Clinton just a month before the general election might also be more than offset by criticism that such a last-minute switch demonstrated poor decision-making ability and was indicative of a weak and vacillating presidential candidate.”

~FoxNews.com, by Judson Berger

Replacing Joe Biden

2008-09-21T09:05:00.003-04:00

haha i got this email and figured...what the heck, I'll post it... ;)

The 'DEMS' know they're in big trouble since Sarah Palin and I've heard, from other sources, this is what they are planning to do about it. J.M.

...from excellent sources within the DNC:
On or about October 5th, Biden will excuse himself from the ticket, citing health problems, and he will be replaced by Hillary. This is timed to occur after the VP debate on 10/2.

I have already seen a few short blurbs about this - the 'health problem' cited in those articles was aneurysm. probably many of you have heard the same rumblings. However, at this point, with this inside info from the DNC, it looks like this Obama strategy will be a go. Therefore, it seems that the best strategy is to get out in front of this obama maneuver, spell it out in detail, and thereby expose it for the grand manipulation that it is.

So, let's start mixing this one up and cut the obamites off at the pass - send this info out to as many people as you can - post about it on websites and blogs - etc etc

obama's mama...

2008-09-19T09:05:00.004-04:00

so a friend sent me this link for this video. I think the guy's serious, but I kept cracking up at the way he said things... If this stuff is true, not sure why a preacher would spend so much time on it. Oh well, it is entertaining...

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Obama is an Idiot

2008-09-02T13:50:00.002-04:00

This is too funny for several reasons.

1 - Obama comparing himself to a VP candidate. I mean, isn't he running for Pres. of the US? Not VP...
2 - He says he has more executive experience than a Governor just because he has a large campaign...
3 - His numbers for comparison are ludicrous. I mean, does he think she was a mayor, not a governor?

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/02/obama-i-have-more-executive-experience-than-palin/

Son of Hamas Leader Turns Back on Islam and Embraces Christianity

2008-08-13T15:18:00.002-04:00

wow...this is an interesting interview... I took it from FoxNews.com - An interview with Mosab Hassan Yousef by Jonathan Hunt

Mosab Hassan Yousef is an extraordinary young man with an extraordinary story. He was born the son of one of the most influential leaders of the militant Hamas organization in the West Bank and grew up in a strict Islamic family.

Now, at 30 years old, he attends an evangelical Christian church, Barabbas Road in San Diego, Calif. He renounced his Muslim faith, left his family behind in Ramallah and is seeking asylum in the United States.

The story of how his life unfolded is truly amazing, whether you agree or disagree with his views. Below is a transcript on an exclusive FOX News interview with Hassan as he tells firsthand how a West Bank Muslim became a West Coast Christian.

JONATHAN HUNT: Why, after 25 years, did you change?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: I believe that all those walls that Islam built for the last 1,400 years are not existing (sic) anymore. They don't recognize this. They built those walls and made people ignorant because they're afraid. They didn't want people to discuss anything about the reality of Islam, about the big questions of Islam and they asked their followers, the Muslims, 'Don't ask about those certain questions.'

But now, people have media. If the father closes the door for his daughter not to leave the house, she's going to go behind her computer and travel the world. So people easily can get information, knowledge, searching (sic) engines, so it's very, very available for everybody to study about Islam, about other religions. Not from the Islam point of view, but from other points of view.

So for the next 25 years this is for sure going to make huge change in the Muslim and the Arab world.

JONATHAN HUNT: You speak from a unique perspective, a man who grew up not just in an Islamic family but as part of an organization seen by many people around the world as an extreme force in Islam: Hamas. What is the reality of Islam? You say people don't see the reality; What is the reality of Islam?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: There are two facts that Muslims don't understand ... I'd say about more than 95 percent of Muslims don't understand their own religion. It came with a much stronger language than the language that they speak so they don't understand it ... they rely only on religious people to get their knowledge about this religion.

Second, they don't understand anything about other religions. Christian communities live between Muslims and they're minority and they (would) rather not to go speak out and tell people about Jesus because it's dangerous for them.

So, all their ideas about other religions on earth are from Islamic perspectives. So those two realities, most people don't understand.

If people, if Muslims, start to understand their religion — first of all, their religion — and see how awful stuff is in there, they'll start to figure out, this can't (be) ... because most religious people focus on certain points of Islam. They have many points that they are very embarrassed to talk about.

JONATHAN HUNT: Such as?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Such as Muhammad's wives. You will never go to a mosque and hear about anyone talking about Muhammad's wives, which is like more than 50 wives — and nobody knows (this), by the way. If you ask the majority of Muslims, they will not know this fact.

So they're embarrassed to talk about this, but they talk about the glory of Islam, they talk about the victory, the victories that Muhammad made. So, when people just like look at themselves and see they're defeated, they have ignorance, they're not educated, they're not leading the world as they're expected to do. They’re think they want to get back to that victory by doing the same, what Muhammad did, but disregarding (sic) the timing. They forget that this happened 1,400 years ago and it's not going to happen again.

JONATHAN HUNT: Do they want to destroy Christianity?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Islam destroyed Christianity from the beginning and Muslims don't recognize that they stabbed Christianity (in) its heart when they said that Jesus wasn't killed on the cross. They think that they honor him in this way.

Basically, any Christians understand that this way, (but Muslims) tell Jesus, okay, we don't care, you didn't die for us. Someone sacrificed his life for you, (but) you tell him, okay, you didn't do it!

This is what Muslims are doing basically. But they don't understand that this is the most important part of Christianity: the cross!

So, they are ignorant, they don't know what they are doing and it explains what an evil idea it is behind this Islam.

JONATHAN HUNT: What specific event or events began to change your mind about Islam?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Since I was a child I started to ask very difficult questions, even my family was telling me all the time, 'You're a very difficult person and we were having trouble answering your questions. Why are you asking so many questions?' This was from the beginning, to be honest with you.

But I felt that everybody — and my father was a good example for me because he was a very honest, humble person, very nice to my mother, to us, and raised us on the principle of forgiveness, okay? I thought that everybody in Islam was like this.

When I was 18 years old, and I was arrested by the Israelis and was in an Israeli jail under the Israeli administration, Hamas had control of its members inside the jail and I saw their torture; (they were) torturing people in a very, very bad way.

JONATHAN HUNT: Hamas members torturing other Hamas members?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Hamas leaders! Hamas leaders that we see on TV now, and big leaders, responsible for torturing their own members. They didn't torture me, but that was a shock for me, to see them torturing people: putting needles under their nails, burning their bodies. And they killed lots of them.

JONATHAN HUNT: Why were they torturing people?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Because they suspected that they had relations with the Israelis and (were) co-operating with the Israeli occupation against Hamas ... So hundreds of people were victims for this, and I was a witness for about a year for this torture. So that was a huge change in my life. I started to open my (eyes), but, the point (is) that I got that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. Good Muslims, such as my father, and bad Muslims, like those Hamas members in the jail torturing people.

So that was the beginning of opening my eyes wide.

JONATHAN HUNT: You talk about the good Muslims, like your father, yet you still now renounce the faith of your father. Could you have not been a good Muslim?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Now, here's the reality: after I studied Christianity — which I had a big misunderstanding about, because I studied about Christianity from Islam, which is, there is nothing true about Christianity when you study it from Islam, and that was the only source.

When I studied the Bible carefully verse by verse, I made sure that that was the book of God, the word of God for sure, so I started to see things in a different way, which was difficult for me, to say Islam is wrong.

Islam is my father. I grew up for (one) father — 22 years for that father — and another father came to me and told me, 'I'm sorry, I'm your father.' And I was like, 'What are you talking about? Like, I have my own father, and it's Islam!' And the father of Christianity told me, 'No, I'm your father. I was in jail, and this (Islam) is not your father.'

So basically this is what happened. It's not easy to believe this (Islam) is not your father anymore. So I had to study Islam again from a different point of view to figure out all the mistakes, the huge mistakes and its effects, not only on Muslims — (of) which I hated the values ... I didn't like all those traditions that make people's lives more difficult — but its effects also on humanity. On humanity! People killing each other (in) the name of God.

So definitely I started to figure out the problem is Islam, not the Muslims and those people — I can't hate them because God loved them from the beginning. And God doesn't create junk. God created good people that he loved, but they're sick, they have the wrong idea. I don't hate those people anymore but I feel very sorry for them and the only way for them to be changed (is) by knowing the word of God and the real way to him.

JONATHAN HUNT: Does it worry you that in saying these things — and given your background and your words carrying extra weight — there is a danger that you will increase the difficulties, the hatred between Christians and Muslims in the world right now?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: This could happen if a Christian person will go talk to them about the reality of Islam. They put Christians on the enemy list anyway, before you talk to them about Islam. So if you go to them and tell them, as a Christian, they will be offended immediately and they will hate you and this will definitely increase the vacuum between both religions — but what made someone like me change?

Years ago, years ago, when I was there, God opened my eyes, my mind also, and I became a completely different person. So now, I can do this duty, while you as Christians can help me do it, but maybe you wouldn't be able to. (Muslims) have no excuse now.

JONATHAN HUNT: How difficult a process has this been for you to effectively walk away from your family, leave your home behind? How difficult is that?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Taking your skin off your bones, that's what happened. I love my family, they love me. And my little brothers, they’re like my sons. I raised them. Basically, it was the biggest decision in my life.

I left everything behind me, not only family. When you decide to convert to Christianity or any other religion from Islam, it's not (enough) to just say goodbye and leave, you know? It's not like that. You're saying goodbye to culture, civilization, traditions, society, family, religion, God — what you thought was God for so many years! So it's not easy. It's very complicated. People think it's that easy, like it doesn't matter. Now I'm here in the U.S. and I got my freedom and it's great, but at the same time, nothing is like family, you know. To lose your family —

JONATHAN HUNT: Have you lost your family?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: My family is educated and it was very difficult for them. They asked me many times, especially for the first two days, to keep my faith to myself and not go to the media and announce it.

But for me it was a duty from God to announce his name and praise him (around) the world because my reward is going to be that he's going to do the same for me. So I did it, basically, as a duty. I (wonder) how many people can do what I can do today? I didn't find any.

So, I had to be strong about that. That was very challenging. That was the most difficult decision in my life and I didn't do it for fun. I didn't do it for anything from this world. I did it only for one reason: I believed in it. People are suffering every day because of wrong ideas. I can help them get out of this endless circle ... the track the devil (laid) for them.

JONATHAN HUNT: Have you spoken to your father recently?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: There is no chance to communicate with my father because he's in jail now and there is (sic) no phones in the jail to communicate with him.

JONATHAN HUNT: Have other members of your family told you how he's reacted?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: They've visited him from time to time. Till this moment, I don't know his reaction exactly but I'm sure he's very sad (over) a decision like this. But at the same time, he's going to understand, because he knows me and he knows that I don't make any decisions without (believing strongly in them).

JONATHAN HUNT: Is it making his life more difficult among fellow Hamas members?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Definitely. My family, including my father, had to carry this cross with me. It wasn't their choice. It was my choice, but they had to carry this cross with me and I ask God — I pray for (my father), all my brothers and my sisters here in this church, praying all the time for them — 'God, open their eyes, their minds, to come to Christ. And bless them because they had to carry this cross with me.'

JONATHAN HUNT: Tell me about Hamas and the way it works. Is Hamas a purely Islamic religious organization as you see it, and that's where, in your eyes, its faults lie, or are there other parts of it which are a problem for you? Or is Hamas a good organization? What is Hamas to you?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: If we talk about people, there are good people everywhere. Everywhere. I mean, good people that God created.

Do they do their own things? Yes, they do their own things. I know people who support Hamas but they never got involved in terrorist attacks, for example ... They follow Hamas because they love God and they think that Hamas represents God. They don’t have knowledge, they don't know the real God and they never studied Christianity. But Hamas, as representative for Islam, it's a big problem.

The problem is not Hamas, the problem is not people. The root of the problem is Islam itself as an idea, as an idea. And about Hamas as an organization, of course, the Hamas leadership, including my father, they're responsible; they're responsible for all the violence that happened from the organization. I know they describe it as reaction to Israeli aggression, but still, they are part of it and they had to make decisions in those operations against Israel, (for) which there was the killing of many civilians.

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you believe Israel blameless in the conflict?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Occupation is bad. I can't say Israel — I'm not against any nation. We can't say Israelis, we can't say Palestinians, we're talking about ideas. Israel has the right to defend itself, nobody can (argue) against this. But sometimes they use (too much) aggression against civilians. Sometimes many civilians were killed because those soldiers weren't responsible enough, how they treat people at the checkpoints.

My message even to the Israeli soldiers: at least treat people in a good way at the checkpoints. You don't have to look really bad and it's not about nations, it's about just wrong ideas on both sides and the only way for two nations really to get out of the endless circle is to know the principles that Jesus brought to this earth: grace, love, forgiveness. Without this, they will never be able to move on, or break this endless circle.

JONATHAN HUNT: You've seen your father jailed, you've been in prison yourself. You've seen Hamas carry out acts of terror against Israelis, and yet you say everybody needs to rise above that?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Definitely. This is the only choice. Nobody has magic power to do something for the Middle East. No one. You can ask any politician here in the U.S., you can ask any Palestinian politician or Arab politician, Israeli leaders; no one, no one can do anything. Even if they believe in peace now: they're part of the game.

They're part of the trick. They can't, even if you find a brave person, like Rabin, who was called by an Israeli to make peace with the Palestinians and give them a state, no one, even if you find a strong leader, they can't do this. You can't force an independent country to give another country independence. (Especially when) the other country wants to destroy it.

Everybody is hurt. Israeli soldiers, they lost their friends. Palestinians, they lost their children, their fathers. (There are) many people in prison still, and many people were killed. Thousands. So everybody will never forget this. If they want to keep looking to the past, they will never get out of this circle. The only way to start (is just by) moving on. They were born under the occupation as Palestinians.

The last two generations, it's not their choice. The new generations from Israel — if we say disregarding the existence of Israel is right or wrong, what's the guilt of those people who were born in Israel and they have no other country to go to? It's their country now, that's how they see it. And they are going to keep their resistance and defense against whomever. (They will) say, 'Get out of this land!' So the only way is for both nations to start to understand the grace, love and forgiveness of God, to be able to get out of this.

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you believe that Israel can ever strike a peace deal with Hamas?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: There is no chance. Is there any chance for fire to co-exist with the water? There is no chance. Hamas can play politics for 10 years, 15 years; but ask any one of Hamas' leaders, 'Okay, what's going to happen after that? Are you just going to live and co-exist with Israel forever?' The answer is going to be no ... unless they want to do something against the Koran. But it's their ideology and they can't just say 'We're not going to do it.' So there is no chance. It's not about Israel, it's not about Hamas: it's about both ideologies. There is no chance.

JONATHAN HUNT: Aren't you terrified that somebody is going to try to kill you for saying these things — which would be approved of according to parts of the Koran?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: They got to kill my ideas first, (and) that's it, they're already out. So how are they going to kill my idea? How are they going to kill the opinions that I have? ... They can kill my body, but they can't kill my soul.

JONATHAN HUNT: You're not afraid?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: As a human, you know, I can be very brave now, I'm not thinking about it at this moment and I feel that God is on my side. But if this will be the challenge, I ask God to give me enough strength.

JONATHAN HUNT: Have you been threatened?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: No, not really. Honestly, most Muslims and Muslim leaders here in the U.S. community, European communities, they are trying to get ahold of me. They are calling my famiily, my mother, and asking for my contacts. They are telling her, 'We want to help him.'

JONATHAN HUNT: They think you need help?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Yeah, they think that Christians took advantage of me, and this is completely wrong. I've been a Christian for a long time before they knew, or anyone knew. I love Jesus, I followed him for many years now. It wasn't a secret for most of the time, and this time I just did it to glorify the name of God and praise him.

They're not dealing with a regular Muslim. They know that I'm educated, they know that I studied, they know that I studied Islam and Christianity. When I made my decision, I didn't make it because someone did magic on me or convinced me. It was completely my decision.

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you miss Ramallah?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: Definitely. You've been there and you know how a wonderful country (it is). Very, very beautiful. It's a very small spot and it has everything — this is why people are fighting for that piece of land. I definitely miss Ramallah. Jereusalem. The Old City.

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you believe you will ever be able to go back?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: I think I belong to that land, and sooner or later I'm going to go back, no matter what. If they want to kill me, they (will) do whatever they want to do. I have a family there, they love me, they completely support me now with my decisions. Maybe they don't want me to talk to the media but they believe that I made a decision that I completely believe in. So they support me, so I love my family. I'm going to go back there again one day. I love my town.

JONATHAN HUNT: Do you think you'll ever go back to a Middle East living in peace?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: There will be a 100-person peace when Jesus comes back, when he judges everybody. His kingdom's going to be 1,000 years and it's going to be completely peaceful and it's going to be the kingdom of God.

JONATHAN HUNT: What is your basic message to any Muslim listening to this right now?

MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: My message to them is, first of all, to open their minds. They were born to Muslim families — this is how they got Islam and this is just like ... any other religion, like growing up (in) a Christian family, or growing up (in) a Jewish family.

So my point is that I want those people to open their eyes, their minds, to start to understand and imagine that they weren't born for a Muslim famiily. And use their minds.

Why did God give them minds? Open their hearts. Read the Bible. Study their religion. I want to open the gate for them, I want them to be free. They will find a good life on earth just by following God — and they're also going to guarantee the other life.

Some cool survival information for you...or maybe more of cool general information for you

2008-08-06T21:49:00.002-04:00

So, I was browsing around the web today, as I like to do every once in a while, and found some cool information. Neat survival type stuff - actually just interesting, handy stuff. I thought I'd share with you...enjoy.

How to Tell Time Without a Clock
Find True North Without a Compass
Predicting the Weather
Calculating the Distance of Lightning

Anyway, some cool stuff...and there's a lot more on that site...

cuil.com....ummmmm

2008-07-28T11:06:00.003-04:00

OK, so I've been messing around with cuil.com for a little bit, or at least trying to. Cuil is the supposed google killer (it isn't/won't be) and got a chunk of change ($33M) to start up. At least I think those facts are right...doesn't really matter, because it doesn't work. Actually I'm really hoping the problems I am having with it are because everyone in the world is using it...not because it sucks. It does look cool, however, when I searched for something simple like "blackberry bold" (which is the new RIM phone coming out that everyone wants and really should be the iPhone killer - again, lots of hype) i get squat...

Oh well, I would think since it's public now, cuil would be able to find anything and everything. Maybe there is still a little room on their new indexing model. I guess I'll attempt using it a couple more days and if no improvements, then I'll just have to keep googling everything...instead of cuiling it. Gosh it's getting hot in here...

Obama

2008-06-26T09:48:00.002-04:00

interesting articles about one of the guys running for President of the US.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121443823260805375.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121435112024101581.html?mod=fpa_mostpop

The Obama We Don't Know

2008-06-04T09:31:00.002-04:00

I read this on the wall street journal and found it to be an interesting perspective...Now that Obama has won the nomination, it will be interesting to see how he campaigns for the country (being one of the most liberal senators in the senate). Just thought I'd share...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121254834844844045.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Obama We Don't Know
June 4, 2008; Page A20

With Barack Obama clinching the Democratic Party nomination, it is worth noting what an extraordinary moment this is. Democrats are nominating a freshman Senator barely three years out of the Illinois legislature whom most of America still hardly knows. The polls say he is the odds-on favorite to become our next President.

Think about this in historical context. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were relatively unknown, but both had at least been prominent Governors. John Kerry, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and even George McGovern were all long-time Washington figures. Republican nominees tend to be even more familiar, for better or worse. In Mr. Obama, Democrats are taking a leap of faith that is daring even by their risky standards.
[The Obama We Don't Know]
AP

No doubt this is part of his enormous appeal. Amid public anger over politics as usual, the Illinois Senator is unhaunted by Beltway experience. His personal story – of mixed race, and up from nowhere through Harvard – resonates in an America where the two most popular cultural icons are Tiger Woods and Oprah. His political gifts are formidable, especially his ability to connect with audiences from the platform.

Above all, Mr. Obama has fashioned a message that fits the political moment and the public's desire for "change." At his best, he offers Americans tired of war and political rancor the promise of fresh national unity and purpose. Young people in particular are taken by it. But more than a few Republicans are also drawn to this "postpartisan" vision.

Mr. Obama has also shown great skill in running his campaign. No one – including us – gave him much chance of defeating the Clinton machine. No doubt he benefited from the desire of even many Democrats to impeach the polarizing Clinton era. But he also beat Hillary and Bill at their own game. He raised more money, and he outworked them in the small-state caucuses that provided him with his narrow delegate margin. Even now, he is far better organized in swing states than is John McCain's campaign. All of this speaks well of his preparation for November, and perhaps for his potential to govern.

Yet govern how and to what end? This is the Obama Americans don't know. For all of his inspiring rhetoric about bipartisanship, his voting record is among the most partisan in the Senate. His policy agenda is conventionally liberal across the board – more so than Hillary Clinton's, and more so than that of any Democratic nominee since 1968.

We can't find a single issue on which Mr. Obama has broken with his party's left-wing interest groups. Early on he gave a bow to merit pay for teachers, but that quickly sank beneath the waves of new money he wants to spend on the same broken public schools. He takes the Teamsters line against free trade, to the point of unilaterally rewriting Nafta. He wants to raise taxes even above the levels of the Clinton era, including a huge increase in the payroll tax. Perhaps now Mr. Obama will tack to the center, but somehow he will have to explain why the "change" he's proposing isn't merely more of the same, circa 1965.

There is also the matter of judgment, and the roots of his political character. We were among those inclined at first to downplay his association with the Trinity United Church. But Mr. Obama's handling of the episode has raised doubts about his candor and convictions. He has by stages moved from denying that his 20-year attendance was an issue at all; to denying he'd heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary remarks; to criticizing certain of those remarks while praising Rev. Wright himself; to repudiating the words and the reverend; and finally this weekend to leaving the church.

Most disingenuously, he said on Saturday that the entire issue caught him by surprise. Yet he was aware enough of the political risk that he kept Rev. Wright off the stage during his announcement speech more than a year ago.

A 2004 Chicago Sun-Times interview with Mr. Obama mentioned three men as his religious guides. One was Rev. Wright. Another was Father Michael Pfleger, the Louis Farrakhan ally whose recent remarks caused Mr. Obama to resign from Trinity, but for whose Chicago church Mr. Obama channeled at least $225,000 in grants as a state senator. Until recently, the priest was connected to the campaign, which flew him to Iowa to host an interfaith forum. Father Pfleger's testimony for the candidate has since been scrubbed from Mr. Obama's campaign Web site. A third mentor was Illinois state Senator James Meeks, another Chicago pastor who has generated controversy for mixing pulpit and politics.

The point is not that Mr. Obama now shares the radical views of these men. The concern is that by the Senator's own admission they have been major moral influences, and their views are starkly at odds with the candidate's vision as a transracial peacemaker. Their patronage was also useful as Mr. Obama was making his way in Chicago politics. But only now, in the glare of a national campaign, is he distancing himself from them. The question is what in fact Mr. Obama does believe.

The young Senator has been a supernova exploding into our politics, more phenomenon than conventional candidate. His achievement in winning the Democratic nomination has been impressive. Now comes a harder audience. The presidency has to be earned, and Americans have a right to know much more about the gifted man who is the least tested and experienced major party nominee in modern times.

The Top 10 Microsoft YouTube Videos

2008-06-01T20:56:00.002-04:00

These are hilarious!!! Especially the last one...

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20555?nwwpkg=microsoft?ap1=rcb

Scratched CD or DVD? No Problem

2008-05-26T21:37:00.001-04:00

I found this video on popular science...very cool info and it works! :) enjoy...

Flying Fish

2008-05-20T11:07:00.002-04:00

How cool is this..??? A video of a flying fish that stayed above water for 45 seconds....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7410421.stm

sign me up...

2008-04-07T10:46:00.000-04:00

wow....

the grid

Maybe dad's right...

2008-03-31T10:59:00.002-04:00

So, somking really isn't such a big deal. Compared to using cell phones. Read this hahaha.

Pretty soon, the truth websites will have to start doing commercials against calling your friends...so, instead of carrying my BlackBerry around, I guess I should trade it in for some Camel Lights. Actually, I think I'll just carry both around....maybe they'll counteract each other...hahahah

Now this is sirius news...

2008-03-24T15:49:00.000-04:00

yay! check it out...

this just made my FJ even more valuable...hahahaha

i bet this report about barnacle penises makes your day...

2008-02-07T15:41:00.000-05:00

so reading through foxnews, i come across a story on the main page...about barnacles. And their penises.

This, on a day that Mitt Romney bows out of the Presidential race, Hillary & Obama each raise $3M in 24 hours, a crazy man shoots his wife at school in front of everyone then goes home and kills himself, a boy found in a field from a tornado & a girl who was shot trying to help her mom leaves the hospital and is ok.

Seriously, why would barnacle penises make the main headlines. I mean, why wouldn't they also put on the main page something goofy like "Tom Jones insures his chest hairs."

Oh wait...they did...video no less.

chuck and huck

2008-02-04T16:02:00.000-05:00

well today was fun...some of us from the office went and saw mike huckabee and chuck norris...!!! check out the pics and vote for huck!!! see more pics on my facebook...

I'm sure you know of this by now...hopefully...

2008-01-25T15:13:00.000-05:00

that several Scientology docs are available for a good read (chuckle chuckle) due to their servers being hacked. If you haven't heard of this...well, read these links... and d/L the docs...

Hackers Declare War on Scientology

Holy Xenu! Scientology documents hacked and released to the public! Download them now!

Scientology hacked by /i/, documents leaked

...

You know it's a slow newsday when...

2008-01-23T19:03:00.000-05:00

these are the leading headlines...

NASA Photo Shows Humanoid Figure on Mars

Mystery May Be Solved for Texas Town Abuzz Over UFO Sightings

Oh and let's not miss this one...

Virgin Galactic Unveils Spaceship Design

Hmmmm....I wonder if Virgin Galactic caused all this to get more people interested in space travel...

hahahaha

A New Sport...

2008-01-18T09:36:00.000-05:00

I can't wait for spring to try this out!!!

This is too funny!

2008-01-09T17:20:00.000-05:00

Here's how the joke starts -

So, a polish man walks into a brothel and decides to have sex with a woman there who looks just like his wife.

Here's how it ends -

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080109/od_nm/brothel_dc_1

WOW - SCARY

2008-01-03T14:08:00.000-05:00

http://www.dnaancestryproject.com/

Singlehandedly the scariest thing I have seen in quite a while. You get to pay $100-$200 to give all your DNA information to a company to keep on file to tell you your ancestry. So, if this doesn't scare you, fine...but I know I'm not going to do it...

The new ModBook...Tablet Mac now shipping!

2008-01-02T16:09:00.000-05:00

How cool is this? Now shipping...the Modbook.

Seven Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe

2007-12-24T22:37:00.000-05:00

ok, so I totally stole this off of FoxNews.com, but it is pretty cool...I totally knew the last one b/c I do it all the time...hahahah

Reading in dim light won't damage your eyes, you don't need eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy and shaving your legs won't make the hair grow back faster.

These well-worn theories are among seven "medical myths" exposed in a paper published in the British Medical Journal, which traditionally carries light-hearted features in its Christmas edition.

The research was conducted by Aaron Carroll, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Regenstrief Institute, Indianapolis, and Rachel Vreeman, fellow in children's health services research at Indiana University School of Medicine.

They took seven common beliefs and searched the archives for evidence to support them.

Despite frequent mentions in the popular press of the need to drink eight glasses of water, they found no scientific basis for the claim.

The complete lack of evidence has been recorded in a study published the American Journal of Psychology, they said.

The other six "myths" are:

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight

The majority of eye experts believed it was unlikely to do any permanent damage, but it might make you squint, blink more and have trouble focusing, the researchers said.

Shaving makes hair grow back faster or coarser

It has no effect on the thickness or rate of hair regrowth, studies say. But stubble lacks the finer taper of unshaven hair, giving the impression of coarseness.

Eating turkey makes you drowsy

It does contain an amino acid called tryptophan that is involved in sleep and mood control.

But turkey has no more of the acid than chicken or minced beef. Eating lots of food and drink at Christmas are probably the real cause of sleepiness.

We use only 10 percent of our brains

This myth arose as early as 1907 but imaging shows no area of the brain is silent or completely inactive.

Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death

This idea may stem from ghoulish novels. The researchers said the skin dries out and retracts after death, giving the appearance of longer hair or nails.

Cell phones are dangerous in hospitals

Despite widespread concerns, studies have found minimal interference with medical equipment.

Duke Nukem Forever

2007-12-19T20:03:00.000-05:00

So, I've waited years for this! The only video game I have ever really loved may be coming out with a sequel, finally...7 years after it was announced...awesome! heh heh

best political video ever...chuck norris and mike huckabee

2007-12-18T21:46:00.001-05:00

best ever....

the iPhone

2007-12-16T12:18:00.000-05:00

People keep asking me if/when I'm going to get an iPhone and they are shocked when I tell them I don't plan on it. As for me and my company, we've been using BlackBerry's for a while and love them! We never have problems with them and they work flawlessly. I found this article from CIO mag, which sums up a lot of the reasons why I don't want an iPhone...especially the lack of keyboard part.

It's really funny to watch someone use an iPhone to try to type stuff and have to keep retyping over and over. Recently a friend of mine and I decided to enter the same data into our calendar and txt a message to each other. Using my BlackBerry, not only did I get the calendar entry in first, but also sent them my txt before their calendar entry was finished...

Vanity is expensive... hahahah

The following article is republished from CIO.com. For more of CIO.com’s iPhone coverage, click here.

The Apple iPhone took the consumer mobile space by storm when it was released last June and quickly became one of the most popular smartphones available. Since then, business users who’ve purchased the device for their personal use have been requesting that their corporate IT departments support it.

Whether the iPhone proves to be a valuable business tool or a non-issue for CIOs remains to be seen, but a new report from Forrester Research suggests that the iPhone may never get a chance to succeed in business. Forrester says IT departments should refuse to support the devices—at least for now—for the following 10 reasons.

1) The iPhone Doesn’t Allow Data on the Device to be Encrypted

There’s currently no way for enterprises to secure sensitive data on iPhones through file or disk encryption, according to Forrester. There’s also no way for IT to enforce password policies since the decision to use a password (and when to change it) is up to the user.

2) The iPhone Does Not Natively Support “Push” Corporate E-mail or Wireless Calendar Syncing

Push e-mail (e-mail that is delivered to handhelds immediately upon receipt in a user’s mailbox) is an essential feature for a business device because of the productivity such a feature enables, according to Forrester. If users need to physically retrieve messages—as opposed to having those messages pushed directly to them—they won’t get them as quickly as possible and they’ll waste time in the process. The iPhone can sync with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes over IMAP and SMTP, Forrester says, but IT infrastructure must be tweaked accordingly or a separate gateway product must be purchased and even then mail is delivered only every 15 minutes.

Apple’s device also doesn’t wirelessly sync with PCs, which means users must have access to the company’s proprietary USB sync cable to retrieve calendar updates or contact changes, according to Forrester. If a meeting plan or location has been changed at the last minute, an iPhone user on the go could easily not get the notification in time.

3) The iPhone Does Not Run Third-Party Applications Without Voiding Its Warranty

Though Apple has promised a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone so that external developers and businesses can create their own applications to run on the device, the iPhone does not currently support such applications—unless certain device components are hacked, which voids the phone’s warranty. Companies that deploy, for example, sales force automation apps on mobile devices won’t be able to port those applications to the iPhone until this issue is resolved.

4) The iPhone Cannot be Locked or Wiped Remotely

Forrester says the single most important feature of mobile device management offerings is remote lock and data wipe functionality, both of which the iPhone lacks. Apple doesn’t currently offer any mobile device management software that’s anything like the many offerings available for BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile or Symbian devices. Forrester doesn’t anticipate any vendors offering such a product before mid-to-late 2008.

5) The iPhone Lacks a Physical Keyboard

The iPhone’s touch screen interface and virtual keyboard may be cool, but it is not ideal for power users who e-mail and text message very frequently. The problem with the touch screen is that it doesn’t provide tactile feedback, which makes it difficult to type without paying attention to every single key you hit. The faster you can type, the faster your messages get sent out and the more work you can do in a shorter amount of time. That’s not necessarily the case with the iPhone.

6) The iPhone Only Functions in Very Specific Geographic Locations and It’s Locked Into Carriers

The iPhone is currently only available through exclusive carriers in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and it’s locked to those specific carriers. That means that business users who travel internationally can’t use iPhones in any other countries, even if those countries offer networks that are technologically compatible.

7) The iPhone is (Very) Expensive

The iPhone sells for double what the average BlackBerry or Treo costs. At $400, plus voice and data charges, Apple’s smartphone is one of the priciest such devices on the market, even after a $200 price cut last fall. Corporations seeking mobile devices often consider price a selling point, especially since many device makers or carriers offer business discounts and service plans. Apple and AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier, don’t offer any such discounts for business use.

8) The iPhone Is a First-Generation Device

No mobile device is perfect when it’s initially released. In order for handset makers to refine their products, they often rely on their masses of users to highlight their weaknesses. Some of the iPhone’s weaknesses are, according to Forrester:
# It can be difficult to activate quickly.
# Battery life is weak/short.
# Sound quality is less than impressive.
# It’s currently only a 2.5 generation device, which means that data transfer speeds aren’t as fast as they could be.

The next iteration of the iPhone will likely address these issues. In fact, AT&T’s CEO recently said a 3G iPhone is due in 2008.

9) Apple Doesn’t Offer Replacement Batteries for the iPhone

Apple doesn’t currently offer battery replacements for the iPhone, so users cannot carry backups to ensure that they never lose power. Forrester says that third-party vendors will likely begin to offer replacements in the near future, but because the device needs to be disassembled in order to remove a battery and insert another, the replacement process may not be simple enough for less tech-savvy users.

10) There’s No Proof That iPhones Are Suitable Business Devices

The only large enterprise that is known to fully support iPhones is—surprise, surprise—Apple, according to Forrester. And it hasn’t published any case studies or other support materials. Enterprises often make mobile device purchasing decisions based on the experience of their peers or industry analysts’ recommendations, but with such information lacking about the iPhone, Forrester says it won’t likely be making its way into many businesses anytime soon.

Additional information on Forrester’s The iPhone is Not Meant for Enterprises report is available on the company’s website.

dinosaur jr

2007-12-09T20:59:00.000-05:00

for those of you who weren't able to enjoy the concert...here is a sampling of what it was like. This wasn't the one I was at but it sounds and feels the same. ;) You just have to get past the initial interview part...

buy buy buy

2007-12-08T13:50:00.000-05:00

one of my favorites...

2007-12-07T13:26:00.000-05:00

this is too funny!

2007-11-27T10:30:00.000-05:00

now they've banned fat people, maybe stupid people are next...

2007-11-17T13:26:00.000-05:00

you have to read this...

British woman banned from entering New Zealand because she is too fat

the biz

2007-11-13T11:34:00.000-05:00

OK, so I'm back in the "beat box" phase, but more particularly back to the roots... here is the man, biz markie, from i don't know when, but I love it...especially when he goes into "la de dah de, we like to party..." awesome!

Riding bikes and previewing BMW's

2007-10-17T09:29:00.001-04:00

OK - so yesterday was a blast. Me and some friends (JT, Trigg, Beck & Silas) went for a bike ride along the Blue Ridge Parkway (I believe some pics will be on Facebook soon). We went from 4000ish feet up to 6000 feet in a 20 mile ride and then 20 back. It was awesome! Best bike ride I've ever done (given I've only done like 5 since I've had my bike...hahaha). But I'm going to tell you what really made the day...

BMW. Yep, they were out test-driving a new model on the Parkway yesterday - and do they look cool! I'm ready to trade my FJ in on one now. Too bad it'll be a couple years before they're out. They were all taped up like in the magazines and they were only driving black and dark gray ones. I even got to talk to one of the guys for a little bit (helped me brush up on my German, he wouldn't talk to me in English). Super fun. He wouldn't tell me the model name/number, but it was funny because he was so startled by the fact that I spoke German his demeanor changed immediately. It cracked me up...as I think it did some of the guys riding bikes.

Oh well, look for a super cool BMW car/SUV thing with a steep sloped back/hatch, coming soon to a road near you!. ;) heh heh

Breaking Records...

2007-10-06T22:04:00.000-04:00

ok - so people have been asking me..."Hey I heard you broke some Guinness World Records. Is it true? What were they?" etc etc etc

Well, I'm here to set the record straight (JT, you can't roll your eyes until the end...ok?) about the records for all of you to enjoy.

First, let's list them:

1. Blowing the most bubbles at one time.
2. Throwing the most Frisbees at one time.
3. Breaking the most bubbles with the most Frisbees at one time.
4. Breaking the most records at one time.

Wow! You are saying to yourself...That's amazing! Is all that really possible?

Well, yes. It is. With the help of 12,000 people at a little shindig called Catalyst in Atlanta GA. Every year at this conference they set out to break some world record. Year's past have been largest pillow fight and most whoopee cushions going off at once. Now this is a leadership conference (which is pretty amazing, btw) that you should look into attending with lots of value. But I was completely fascinated with the records breaking...such a super cool concept for a conference.

Anyway, I thought it was cool and I'd just share since people are asking about it...

And JT, fyi...breaking the most records at once was 45's (old school music). Have you ever even seen one of those? I had to break a classic Kenny Rogers tune in half...I almost cried.

FedEx. When it positively, absolutely has to get there NEVER!

2007-10-02T17:09:00.000-04:00

I am so ticked at FedEx right now. THEY SUCK. We were supposed to get a package today for the office that was a pretty big deal and as of 5:05p EDT we still don't have it. Well, track it, you say. Heh, we did. And guess what? It was supposed to be here at noon. Driver put, could not locate address. Talk about an idiot. We are only the biggest building in the whole freakin' area we are in. I mean, did they not even come here to see? It's not like they couldn't find us...if they just pulled their head out of their a$$. Oh and yeah, they've delivered stuff here before. Oh and yeah, we even have a corp account with them. Idiots. And I called in to complain and find out where our shipment was...I got a call back saying the driver looked for us and couldn't find us... the conversation went a bit like this (only slightly exaggerated)...

"Hello, Thank you for calling FedEx. My name is Stupid, how can I help you?"

"Um, yeah, hi. I was wondering about a shipment we were supposed to get today. I tracked it online and it was supposed to be here but shows it wasn't delivered due to 'sheer stupidity'. I was wondering what that was all about."

"Oh. Yes, sir, I'm sorry sir... 'sheer stupidity' refers to the fact that we hire incompetent people who can't tell their right from their left. Or their head from their a$$ for that matter. Would you like me to help you solve the problem?"

"Hmmm. ok. I hadn't seen that reason on the site before, that must be a new one...I mean we do ship and receive 100's of boxes a month with you guys. But, yes, I'd love for you to help me."

"OK sir. One moment please. [click, click, click] Ahhh, yes. I see the problem here sir. It seems the driver says your building doesn't exist. Ummm, yes...let's see...driver's comments are 'simply vanished out of thin air while I was smoking crack on my mandated 15 minute crack break.' Sir, it seems that your building doesn't exist anymore. Is that right?"

"No, I'm sorry, but that's not correct. As a matter of fact, I am sitting in my office on the phone with you right now. And there wasn't a problem in getting a package out Friday that we sent. Picked right up, just fine."

"OK sir. I see this is a slight problem. And you're sure your building hasn't vanished into thin air? Am I right in that assessment?"

"Yes you are."

"OK then, let me attempt to call the driver and see what they have to say about this."

"Ummmm. OK? Are you going to call me back?"

"Yes sir. I will call you back once I speak to the driver and inform them that your building has not vanished into thin air...or rather that it has reappeared."

"OK."

[click]

20 minutes later...

ring

"Hello?"

"Yes. Hi, this is Stupid from FedEx. I just spoke to the driver about your delivery and they insist that your building doesn't exist anymore."

"Whiskey Foxtrot Tango! What are you talking about?"

"Well, sir, it seems you are calling from an imaginary location that only exists in your (and and all your employee's) imagination."

"HUH?!?!"

"Yes, sir, I know that can come as quite a shock to you as you may live in a bubble, but our world doesn't acknowledge your existence anymore."

"You're kidding, right?"

"No sir. I wish I were. This happens quite frequently since our 15 minute mandated crack breaks were instituted. However, we can work miracles here at FedEx, just as sure as my name is Stupid!"

"????"

"Yes, sir. I can make your building reappear in the mind of our driver so that they can 'enter' your world and bring you a box. How does that sound? Aren't I wonderful?"

"Ummmm...yeah...sure...whatever..."

"OK. We're so glad you chose to use FedEx. We know you could pick from any other carrier out there who is superior and we are humbled by your choice. Your package will either be delivered by 7pm tonight or first thing in the morning. Is that alright?"

"Well, no, quite frankly it's not. It's cost me a lot of money waiting for this thing today to get to a client. I need it by 7pm."

"Alright sir. I'm glad I could help..."

"Ummm...you're not helping. You're just..."

"Yes, sir. Since I've helped you, would you like to take a customer satisfaction survey to tell my bosses how freakin' awesome I am?"

"No. Because you're not. I just want my box."

"Yes, sir...I know. I know. You'll get it soon. If it turns out that you won't we will call you back and let you know. Thank you for using FedEx. Goodbye."

"Wait..."

Yep, convo over. Anyway, I urge you to start using DHL or UPS from now on. ;)

i just think these are funny...

2007-09-23T15:17:00.000-04:00

some of my favorite funny quotes. Just thought I'd share.

I think the worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades...or a game of fake heart attack.
-- Demetri Martin

Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There's nothing like having a midget for a butler.
-- WC Fields

Yes, madam, I am drunk. But in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
-- Winston Churchill (replying to Lady Astor's comment 'Sir, you're drunk!')

I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.
-- Rodney Dangerfield

My experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has damned few virtues.
-- Abraham Lincoln

Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!
-- Steve Martin

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
-- Yogi Berra

While playing golf today I hit two good balls. I stepped on a rake.
-- Henry Youngman

I frankly felt like the reception we received on the way in from the airport was very warm and hospitable. And I want to thank the Canadian people who came out to wave -- with all five fingers -- for their hospitality.
-- George W. Bush

People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good looks, his sex appeal, and his great hair. I say to them, 'How do you think I got the job?
-- Dick Cheney

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
-- Douglas Adams

I can resist everything except temptation.
-- Oscar Wilde

goodbye MX days...

2007-09-14T10:30:00.001-04:00

ok - so the picture is a little blurry, but I had to post it for good times sake. This bike has been through a lot and was (really still is) super fast and could jump super high...but alas, I sold it last night. At least my cousin bought it so if I ever want it back I can probably get it easily...hahahaha. I doubt I will though. Anyway, time to shop for a new one....hahahahaha - jk.

i was right...

2007-09-06T11:26:00.000-04:00

well, i hate to say i told you so, but...

when i wrote about the iPhone dropping in price $200 for waiting another month...I had no idea it would actually come true.

Hmmmmm...so now I'm going to let you in on the fact that if you send me $5 you will indeed become a millionaire. Yes, that's right. Send me $5 and you will amass a fortune of Biblical proportions...

heh

Nod Your Head...

2007-09-01T21:44:00.000-04:00

I think I'll shake mine side to side instead. Just when I thought there are enough musicians out there who suck, it's finally time to add Paul McCartney to the list. One who I once thought to be untouchable...now officially sucks. I wondered when I heard his new cd, which pretty much sucked except for the last song...but now I know he's gone...juice all used up. This stupid 'Nod Your Head' song sucks...and the video is worse. I mean, I could've easily written this song...and made the video at home. In fact I did make one like it about 10 years ago. Homemade. Looks he might have stolen some of it and used it...anyway... /barf/

/barf/
/barf/

/delete "Nod Your Head"
/delete "Nod Your Head video"

mmmmm....I feel much better now.

talk like a pirate day

2007-08-26T13:36:00.000-04:00

So, I just found out that Sept. 19th is International "Talk like a Pirate" day. Well, that's pretty darn cool. However, most people just aren't cool enough to be able to talk like a pirate...as much as you don't want to believe it, it is true. SO...being the cool guy that I am, I am here to give you a little help on talking like a pirate, so when Sept 19th rolls around, you won't look like an idiot trying to talk like a pirate but sounding like crocodile dundee (if you even know who that is...).

Let's begin.

1 - This site gives you some basics on talking like a pirate along with some pickup lines and even so pirate speak in other languages...

2 - This site (my fav) not only provides an "English to Pirate" Translator, but if you have OSX, you can download the widget and always have it with you...like me. ;) heh heh

Now...translated...

So, I jus' found out that Sept. 19th be International "Talk like a Pirate" day. Well, that's pretty darn cool. However, most scallywags jus' aren't cool enough t' be able t' natter like a pirate...as much as ye don't wants t' believe it, 'tis true. SO...bein' th' cool scallywag that I be, I be here t' give ye a little help on natterin' like a pirate, so when Sept 19th furls around, ye won't look like an idiot tryin' t' natter like a pirate but soundin' like crocodile dundee (if ye even know who that be...).

Let's begin.

1 - This site gives ye some basics on natterin' like a pirate along wit' some pickup lines 'n even so pirate speak in other languages...

2 - This site (me fav) nah only provides an "English t' Pirate" Translator, but if ye 'ave OSX, ye can loot th' widget 'n always 'ave it wit' ye...like me. ;) heh heh

OK - so I hope ye enjoy...ye've got a month t' practice...so get t' it.

See how fun?

you get to see it first...

2007-08-24T11:45:00.000-04:00

new promo teaser for a regional sized airport...

my ears are abot to fall off...

2007-08-23T22:47:00.000-04:00

so ryan seacrest played britney spear's new single today. Well, I listened and almost died. It sucks.

i had no idea...

2007-08-23T11:52:00.000-04:00

So I just saw where Apple is selling refurbished iPhones. So that makes me think about a couple of things...

A - Out of the phones they sold, were there really that many that were bad that needed to be fixed? I wonder if the smudges are off the screens...

B - If you could wait a month you save $100 off an iPhone. If you wait another month will it be $200 off?

C - Will Apple come out with an upgrade or new version later this year or early next year?

Oh well, I don't have one and until they get on Verizon's network I won't get one. I'm so stubborn...Year's ago I swore off BellSouth, which became Cingular, which became AT&T. They made me so mad on a billing issue I dropped them cold Turkey. Of course I swore off SprintPCS as well (I used them for 6 months, no coverage), which means I won't ever use Nextel. Everyone knows they suck anyway. What else have I swore off? hmmmm. I swore off Honda. My Passport was a piece of junk and I got rid of it swearing off Honda's to never buy one again. And I won't. I swore off Microsoft Windows after using a Mac. Once you go Mac, you never go back. I do feel very sorry for those of you out there who still have to use a Microsoft OS. Bummer. Go to an Apple store, play around, you'll see what I mean... I swore off Schwinn. Their bikes suck. Wow...that was back in the 8th grade too. Oh well, not missed them. Gosh I could go on and on...but I won't bore you.

Now that I think of it...I did have a Honda after I swore them off...however it was given to me, but it was a fine car, a Prelude. I do have a Windows PC at home still, even though that's on my list. But I didn't buy it. I guess I would use an iPhone if somebody paid for the service for me...

any takers? I'll call you on it... heh