Linkfests – Page 12 – third world county

February 19, 2008

I’m not Madeline Kahn…

…but if my voice weren’t in the crapper right noe (and if I had the energy), I’d sing a verse or so of “I’m Tired” just to clue you in on why the posting’s so sparse at twc recently. (The link’s for those who didn’t get the reference. :-)) Of course, I’m tired for reasons other than those sung av=bout by “Lily von Stupp”. *heh*

While I’m under the weather, go to Freedom Folks for some timely info on guarding our borders.

And of course, you knew it was in the works: House Democratic Leaders Proposing Secret Backroom Amnesty Deal! Just up Juan MexiCain’s alley… CLICK the link to send a fax to your congresscritter.

Then drop by Stop the ACLU for this small piece of good news in the GWOT (for readers not yet clued in, that’s “Global War on TerrorISM” at twc, cos I view terror as a very, very useful emotion… in ones enemies *heh*). Who’d-a thunk it? The Supreme Commies rule something sensibly? Even a blind pig and all that…

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February 15, 2008February 18, 2008

Real Estate Bust? yawn

I’ve been avoiding “issues blogging” for the most part for the past week. (the choice in presidential candidates winnowing down to Hildebeast-ObamaWinfrey-MexiCain can do that to a guy), but one “issue” still turns my crank a bit: the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind’s rampup of economic woes with the mortgage crisis/real estate bust as its poster child.

As a poster child for economic woes, the mortgage crisis/real estate bust has all the appeal of a broken-down whore with leprosy. Firstly, the folks hardest hit by the mortgage crisis/real estate bust are those who went into debt over their heads to buy houses they couldn’t afford. Here are my most sincere crocodile tears for such idiots:

*Boo-freakin’-hoo–yawn*

To all such folks: you reaping what you’ve sown? Good.

Next hardest hit (sorta), the mortgage lenders who shouldn’t have loaned the money to begin with. Again,

*Boo-freakin’-hoo–yawn*

My Wonder Woman asked me what I though the impact would be on our home value. My answer? Who cares? Are we thinking of selling? (Yeh, we still owe a measly couple of grand on the place. Made a 25% down on it and got reasonable rates on a 15-year mortgage–thanks to my Wonder Woman’s money management skillset.)

Rabbit trail:

OTOH, our execrably bad “neighbors” who moved in less than eighteen months ago have their place listed for sale (Yipee and Whooray!). I asked my Wonder Woman how badly I could junk up the outside of our house to drive their selling price down on ’em… *heh* Hmmm… maybe I could buy a couple of junkers from the salvage yard and have ’em dropped in our front yard, ya think? It’d be a few months before the city would ask me to remove ’em, maybe long enough to drive thr price of our “neighbors'” seller down quite a bit…

Nah. Better just to get ’em gone.

But there’s a side to the housing market/mortgage crisis/real estate bust that is getting little play in the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind (and what play it does get is buried on inside pages or whatnot): “Some Cities Are Spared the Slide in Housing”–and this in the Neoo York Slimes, no less! Who’d-a thunk it?

In figures released on Thursday covering 150 metropolitan areas, the National Association of Realtors said that median home prices were falling in 77 markets — but rising in 73.

Real estate statistics must be interpreted with caution, especially when sales volumes are declining, as they are all over the country. But an analysis by The New York Times of three distinct data sets — mortgage data from the government, sales figures from the Realtors’ group and courthouse records from a company called DataQuick — produced a list of 17 metropolitan areas where all three sources of information agree that prices were still rising as of late last year, the most recent figures available.

For another 43 cities, two data sets, from the Realtors and the government, suggested that prices were still rising late in the year. DataQuick could provide no information on those cities.

Of course, since the article is in the Neoo York Slimes, the ariter spends quite some time making sure the reader doesn’t interpret these rosy facts positively. *heh* Still, facts are facts, and the housing market (and mortgage market) in my part of the country, for example, is strong to super-strong right now. Because of strong economic growth in other sectors, of course. Heck, it’s stating to get so built up in America’s Third World County that I might just have to answer my own question to my Wonder Woman (“Are we thinking of selling?”) with a “I want to live somewhere quieter. Wanna sell and move out into the piney woods?”

*heh*

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February 13, 2008

Compy Fun

(Y’all may have noticed I’m mostly avoiding politics/current events for the last few days? Good reasons, among them my disgust with the electorate for being stupid enough to validate the current crop of presidential candidates with their votes.)

Well, it had to happen eventually. The ten-year-old computer (ten years old? Yep) I had running the most stable windows OS in the house finally started developing some… glitches. Yeh, it started out as a Win98 comp, but Win2KPro was soo appealing (for a Windows OS. I had retired WINNT 4.0 off an earlier computer gladly; Win2KPro–WinNT 5.0–proved to be a bird of a different feather) I switched the OSes out fairly early on in the computer’s life.

Anywho, last week, Win2K began complaining the MOBO on which it had happily resided for no few years was not fully ACPI compliant and told me to update the BIOS. OK. Found an updated BIOS and attempted the install. Oops. My German isn’t that good. *heh* Back to the drawing board.

I may just decide to retire the comp… or convert it to Ubuntu or PCBSD. Probably the former for the old guy. I do need to maintain one Win98 computer for my fav music transcription software, but it dowsn’t have to be on that comp.

Or maybe I’ll find another BIOS update elsewhere.

Still, a 10-year-old MOBO (with a slightly newer processor, granted) still doing credible work on things that don’t require much processor-intensive stuff (web, email, word processing, etc.) tickles my tightwad side. It’s not like I don’t have more “modern” comps with other OSes (like the one I’m writing this post with) to handle other tasks.

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February 11, 2008

“Snow” Day Again

Late start today. Not that the whole county shut down, but since my Wonder Woman had a “snow” day, I’ve kept things close in and we’ve worked on a little advance Spring Cleaning. I’ve been in storage areas of my office that haven’t seen the light of day for years. Two whole drawersfull of stuff I simply dumped in a box for later sorting (and yes, I will do that!) and labeled, “Junk from 2 drawers”–*heh*

Once whole LARGE file cabinet drawerfull of ancient floppies. Need to sort through them all, archive (and enter into database that’s stored in the same place!) all the data I should/want to keep and burn to multiple CDRs or a couple of (duplicate) DVDs for archiving, then format or toss (or even archive, sorted and labeled) the floppies in a more easily accessible fashion.

To give you an idea: I have 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppies going back through all the DOSes to about DOS 3, back further to TRSDOS floppies–and even some Mac software/archives.

That stuff really needed sorting out!

(My paper files were mostly sorted some weeks ago.)

Then, there’s the “surface” storage… shelves and such like. Most of the old music, language, history, etc., books have already been boxed (and labeled and etc.), but there’re still five very, very full shelves of books n such that need sorting out.

Then, of course, I need to clean and sort out the bookshelves in the living room for refiling with previously boxed books…

This Spring cleaning thing is pretty heavy stuff (book boxes, get it? :-))!

Oh, well, at least I had some “deck beer” to lighten the load. (“Deck beer”–over-sugared some beer for bottle conditioning. Temnps outside have been mostly below freezing for a while… so, placed a bunch of bottles of this beer outside for conditioning after only 3 days. It’s all turned out very, very good. Whatta save!)

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February 8, 2008

Hobson’s Choice

“A Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered, and one may refuse to take that option. The choice is therefore between taking the option or not taking it. The phrase is said to originate from Thomas Hobson (1544–1630), a livery stable owner at Cambridge, England who, in order to rotate the use of his horses, offered customers the choice of either taking the horse in the stall nearest the door—or taking none at all. It is analagous to the expression ‘my way or the highway’.”¹

Well, the presidential field is narrowed even further, it seems. Now, we have a choice between candidates who want to drive the country off a cliff to its doom at 120mph and candidates who want to drive the country off a cliff at a sedate 75mph…

Not really much of a choice.

Makes the case for striving to see congresscritters, state and local pols elected who give a damn about more than just their own personal power and their “Surrender, America!” ideologies. (And if you think for one minute Juan McCain’s “surrender America’s sovereignty at the borders” position isn’t fundamentally the same as the other candidates’ “Surrender America” positions then you are sadly deluded.)

Look closely at candidates for Congress, for state and local offices. Vote “Hell no!” against those whose positions fail to defend the U.S., your State or locality against the evils of alien invasion and… invasive government. Vote for people with the [intestinal fortitude] to tell “Surrender America!” judges, executives and bureaucrats to take a quick ride on the express train to hell.

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February 5, 2008

“Super” (disgusting) Tuesday

Well, I’ll cast my vote a little later today in my state’s participation in the “Super” (disgusting) Tuesday event. Don’t worry about my vote; I’ll find some way to cast it for “None of the above”…

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February 4, 2008February 4, 2008

“One CLICK to rule them all… “

…and in the shadows bind them…

I recently recieved feedback on an email where I’d referred the readers to a page and included download instructions (for a book on intelligence). Part of the instructions were “Right-Click on the link… ” The feedback I recieved? From a Mac user, paraphrased, “Right-click? What’s that?”

Well, obviously that was from a traditional Mac user. Contemporary Intel Macs often come with multi-button/multi-function mice that do not require keyboard-one-button mouse combos to emulate the functionality Windows and Linux users have long enjoyed. Traditional one-button Mac mice were apparently based on the Apple assumption (or perhaps it was solid research into the Mac user base) that MAc users couldn’t handle anything as complex as two-button mice, either because of the extreme mental effort required to manage such a large number (2) or because of poor physical coordination.

Regardless, it seem that in order to attract more users, Apple has had to adopt more and more features from the PC side of the divide (along with th hardware it has been adopting for years until now it simply sells PCs with the Mac OS tacked on), and true multi-function mice are now available for Mac users as well as the rest of the world, which has had them for many years.

Now, that’s “innovation” eh?

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February 2, 2008February 2, 2008

NASA/USAF Poo the Scrooch

*heh*

USAF/NASA Red Tape Cancels Launch of Model Rockets

“The planned launch of 50 Juno I model rockets from Cape Canaveral to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Explorer I launch has now been cancelled by the station’s wing commander. Although the CCAFS has no qua[l]ms about launching Deltas, Atlas and other massive rockets, they go into a complete tither when it comes down to launching a 12 inch long model rocket made of balsa wood and paper weighing just under 2 oz…

“…Thus, all over America on January 31, 2008 school kids and adults will celebrate the the day that the US Army launched Explorer I into space by launching model rockets. In spite of the winter conditions, the launches will take place in parks and school yards and back yards all over the United States- every place EXCEPT for Cape Canaveral.

“In 1958, the US Army restored the nation’s pride following Sputnik, but it seems that in 2008, the Air Force and NASA cannot even get out of their own red taped way to launch a simple rocket made of balsa wood and paper.”

A bit more at the link.

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January 30, 2008January 30, 2008

“I mock you with my monkey pants”

(Thanks for the post title, Oz)

One of my favorite times of the year is here. For the next month or so, I get to mock all the illiterati, lazy bums and idiots who can’t pronounce February correctly. Happy-happy-joy-joy for a curmudgeon! *heh* Heck, I’ve gotten an early start, as I’ve listened to professional babblers mispronounce it as Feb-YOU-ary for the last week or so. Idiots. Lazy bums. Illiterati. Happy-happy-joy-joy. 🙂

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January 29, 2008January 29, 2008

It’s a rope, maybe a tree, perhaps a kazoo…

Ever listen to a politician *spit*, Mass Media Podperson, or Academia Nut Fruitcake a talk about a “problem” (usually caused by their interference)? They all seem to sound like the proverbial blind men attempting to describe an elephant. Nothing they say seems to have anything but the slightest, almost fantastical relation to the actual facts, but they are rock solid certain (or rock solid liars pretending to be rock solid certain) that what they describe is real, real I tell you!

*sigh*

The sad thing is that so many self-made idiot sheeple stupidly nod their heads, “Baaah, baaah, baaah,” in agreement with these talking heads of cabbage.

And that, my friends, is why we have both the Dhimmicrappic and Republican’t parties acting together as the Uniparty, fighting over how quickly to tear this country down and salt the earth it sprang from.

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