Saturday, October 25, 2008

Why is "When He Cheats" so good?

OK, she looks good in leathers and a baseball bat. If a guy destroys the girl's car, he would be a childish creep needing therapy. When the girl destroys a guy's truck, she's strong and catty. Sorry, I just don't buy it. I hear the song and think "Boy is she a baby".

I am so glad that that song is mostly gone....

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Vote the lot out -- except 1

Sorry for the light postings. My employer sent us to test our Disaster Recovery plan, and I'm still not fully caught up from the time off.

I have decided how I'm going to vote in all of the races open to me: the incumbent must go. All except one: Ben Chandler's race for the House. In general, I am not a Chandler fan. He is a "light socialist", and he votes with Pelosi and crew way too much for my tastes. Nonetheless, he voted against the bailout both times, and I have to reward that. I have no confidence his opponent is a small-government Republican, mainly because I haven't heard one word out of his opponent....

I am going to cover my reasoning for the other major candidates, including Obama/McCain, in future posts.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Joe the Plumber for President

To quote Bill Bennett, this is the most people have talked about plumbers since Nixon....

I thought Bob should leave and bring Joe onto the stage. He was the real third man on the stage.

I'm not impressed with the Socialists (aka the Republicans)

Work has had my nose to the grindstone (more as I can talk about it), so I've been ignoring the financial news as much as possible. Even so, the concept that the Fed is buying preferred stock in banks, even if they don't want it, is too much. Are these people really reading straight from the Communist Manifesto.

Furrfu, people! The Great Depression isn't a how-to guide! Let's see, prop up banks: check. Talk about protectionism, check.

What scares me is that it's the Republicans doing all this socialism, not the Democrats.

The whole world is turned upside down. It's a good thing I trust the Lord, because I sure don't trust my leaders.

I'm impressed with the Brick

I love the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. Apple has a video about how they mill the case for the MacBook (and by extension, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air). You have to recycle about a half to two-thirds of the aluminum you have in the original block of aluminum, but you have a case that can then be built by any metal working factory in the world (even the US!), and is a lot greener than a slab of plastic.

I'd want one, but work lets me use a year-old MacBook Pro, and that's as much as I need. The family and I might squeeze enough out to buy a MacBook for Christmas next year for homeschool.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Let me get this straight

While the rest of us are watching  our 401ks, the legislators in Alaska have enough time on their hands to put out a report that's all things to all people. When you can't even get a single talking head on Anderson Cooper to think it's a serious issue, it's time to go back to the well.

As best I can tell, Palin's brother-in-law is a dangerous, somewhat unstable fellow. Mr. Palin likes her family, and saw an opportunity to try to help them out. The Public Service Commissioner was from another branch of the Republican party, didn't like Mrs. Palin, and saw an opportunity to tweak her "for free". That put him on her bad list. Then, \ she and the Public Service Commissioner butted heads again over hiring troopers. Maybe he thought too much of himself, maybe he just couldn't hire more troopers no matter what. Either way, he's on the list so it's time to go.

Sounds like office politics, not "high crimes and misdemeanors". To quote Carville, this dog doesn't hunt.

Saturday, October 4, 2008

The office is quiet


For the first time in a decade, I am serverless at home.

A couple of weeks ago, we went over the budget, to see what we could cut. We're going to start looking at fluorescent PAR-30 lights for the downstairs, and we thought about turning off the phone and DSL to switch to cable. The one problem with this was that I had all my mail, this blog, etc. going to a server plugged in under my desk. A server that desperately needed both software and hardware upgrades (it is 4+ years old and was running a beta version of NetBSD). As best I could tell, I was spending almost $20 a month just powering the big rack-mount server.

That's when The Plan™ came together. I would move all of the home services to Google Apps. This blog moved to Blogger, mail went over to Gmail, and the web sites moved to Google Sites. Why should I spend valuable home time maintaining web pages when Google is happy to do so for free, or for $50 a year per mailbox if I end up needing more space.

We ended up keeping the phone line because the Cable Modem + Dish* isn't that much cheaper than Phone + DSL + ISP + Dish. Turning off the unneeded PCs will pay for that difference.

Now, I just have to get off Yahoo Domains. They've raised my domain costs to $35/year. Anyone know a decent cheap domain registrar (and no, I won't use GoDaddy. They're notorious for kidnapping domains for the flimsiest of excuses).


*For the channels we like, Dish's 250 channel plan (with Windstream discounts) is much cheaper than Insight's equivalent services.

Friday, October 3, 2008

They've passed the abomination

Of course Dub will sign it too.

I would spout some more, but I'm just too mad. I'll start cussing.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

More insanity for the bailout

From CNNMoney's report on the Senate version of the bailout:
The bill adds provisions to the House version - including temporarily raising the FDIC insurance cap to $250,000 from $100,000. It says the FDIC may not charge member banks more to cover the increase.... Instead, the bill allows the FDIC to borrow from the Treasury to cover any losses that might occur as a result of the higher insurance limit.


The Fed's already going to print 700B to cover the bailout, why not print a few billion more....

I think Congress has lost their minds.