Day: March 2, 2006

Just talking with Lovely Daughter on the phone. We came up with my dream job.

Getting paid to irritate people.

*sigh*

Alas! there are no job openings at the DMV…

UPDATE: Thanks to a perspicacious suggestion in comments by LomaAlta, I have decided that an IT position with the Post Office would afford me the best opportunity to irritate the gratest number of people. I shall therefore endeavor to obtain such a position. The only fly in the ointment is that I fear the very position I seek has already been filled by someone with greeater talent irritating people than I possess…

Looking for help from a Higher Life Form at Ferdy’s place while checking for runoff at Mental Rhinorrhea where—BE WARNED—unless you wanna be struck blind you’d best not look at the picture of BB…

Yeh, I’m a sucker. Everybody knows they can tag me with these faux “memes” (what I like to call blogosphere meme pool games) that’re really just a way of showing that this blogging thing is really a game for networking and gettin’ to know one another. As I always say, folks who take themselves too seriously to play these things are probably just too dull for words.

Even a curmudgeon like me will play the things.

(OK, I’ll admit it: some folks really do have more important things to do. But they are few and far between.)

Here’s the deal Random Yak tagged me with, the big ox:

Name the book or books you are currently reading or about to start, by title and genre.

Gee… I usually have at least one or two that I have to take in small bites and digest and zip through a few lighter things on the side–usually novels of various genres.

The Founders Constitution. Politics/history. No surprise to anyone who’s been around here regularly in the last month or so. I find I have to stop, look up ancilliary resources and chase down historical rabbit trails quite often. I expect this one to take a while, cos I also keep going back and reviewing previous sections in light of later portions. Interesting read.

Improbable Light semi-sci-fi/sorta thriller/action that plays with Heisenberg, quantum theory, Budhism and a lot of semi-mystical nonsense, but has to be far better fiction than the silly Butterfly Effect had to have been (I refuse to watch a film with Ashton Kucher in a lead role) by at least a couple of orders of magnitude. Still, someone needs to explain to the author that people who’ve just busted their kneecap don’t go running around the countryside on makeshift splints… (serious suspension of disbelief issue there)

The Psalms. Yup, those. Written by folks who know what it’s like to struggle with one’s place in the world.

A Man of Means DeLIGHTful fiction. Six stories by P.G. Wodehouse. Who? Oh, the finest novelist of the twentieth century. Seriously. He wrote stories. The heart of a goof, but when he wrote of “bumblebees fooling about in the flowerbed” as a little toss-off in an already brilliant descriptive narative, he hooked me for life. Farcical and convoluted plots, memorable characters (who, having once met him, could forget Psmith?), sparkling dialog: all combine with Wodehouse’s descriptive narative to make absolutely delightful wastes of time that… turn out not to be wastes after all, because he lifts the spirit and leaves ones loads lighter after a good dose of his prose.

Nothing much else right now except for some technical junk that I need to wade through.

Now, who to tag… who to tag… Yak didn’t say what number should be tagged, so I’m going to tag a few and then send off a coupla emails to folks. I’ll follow up with “formal” tags as an update here…

Tagged Angel over at Woman Honor Thyself and she’s already responded with TaG!..Yikes I wasn’t fast enuf.

(THanks, iHillary, for the graphic.)

That the ACLU has not strayed from its communist roots nor surrendered its fundamental goal of overthrowing the United States is arguable only by those who don’t care for facts. Stop the ACLU and other organizations, along with many private citizens, have awakened to the facts and are doing everything within their power to legally and ethically Stop the ACLU from further weakening the fabric of American society.

Continue reading “Taking a stand for freedom”

Anyone who’s read this blog for long, either here or in its former incarnation as a blogspot blog, knows I don’t usually quote articles from elsewhere at great length… unless there’s little way to extract the meat from the nut in shorter excerpts.

Walter Williams has a recent article that is far richer than the lengthy quote below, and I urge you to read the whole thing. Nevertheless, here’s a good mouthful of a highly “nutritious” article:

The way our Constitution’s framers used the term, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people and imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech, or freedom to travel, is something we all simultaneously possess. My right to free speech or freedom to travel imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference. In other words, my exercising my right to speech or travel requires absolutely nothing from you and in no way diminishes any of your rights.

Contrast that vision of a right to so-called rights to medical care, food or decent housing, independent of whether a person can pay. Those are not rights in the sense that free speech and freedom of travel are rights. If it is said that a person has rights to medical care, food and housing, and has no means of paying, how does he enjoy them? There’s no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy who provides them. You say, “The Congress provides for those rights.” Not quite. Congress does not have any resources of its very own. The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American. So-called rights to medical care, food and decent housing impose an obligation on some other American who, through the tax code, must be denied his right to his earnings. In other words, when Congress gives one American a right to something he didn’t earn, it takes away the right of another American to something he did earn.

I hope that whetted your appetite for more. Please do go read the whole thing.

Served up at CustomerServant and Blue Star Chronicles.

Every few months I’ve posted briefly about my browser preference. I don’t do so in order to rub Internet Exploder users’ faces in the mess IE makes of their everyday browsing (whether they know it’s doing so or not) or in any expectation of “converting” users to a more sane browser than Internet Exploder or the much better, though still kludgy, Firefox. No, I do it because something someone said in comments or email spurs me to simply let folks know that there is a better way.

Yesterday, I sent someone an swf file as an email attachment. They couldn’t play it with their default image/media file viewer and tried viewing it in Firefox.

No go there, either.

Strange. Opened just fine in Opera. I haven’t looked into it any further than to try to replicate the problem in Firefox. Yup. And when it fails to play the file, it doesn’t even suggest downloading and installing an “extension” to do so. Bad form, that.

So that got me thinking again about why I appreciate Opera browser. Here are my top three reasons, based on what I do every day on the internet.

It just works as a browser. CLeanly, efficiently, quickly. tabbed browsing is much easier than with Firefox, and mouse gestures and zooming work better and don’t need extensions to just work right.
It’s a great email client. That’s right. I don’t have to have a separate email client loaded to handle all my email needs. I can open and close my email window with a keystroke or mouse click/gesture. Right inside my browser. Check all my email accounts with a keyboard combo–without leaving the window I’m browsing. Built into the browser.
Opera is also my full text RSS reader. Just CLICK on the lil RSS button in the addressbar of a site I wanna subscribe to, accept the subscription and I’m done. Unlike the limited ability of Firefox, Opera’s RSS reader really works–easily, and displays the full text of the feeds by default (I could limit it to headline displays, but why?).

Media files, graphics, whatever. It Just Works. Without a lotta hoohaw.

For Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, heck, for your phone. Opera’s just a better browser.

Experiencing the internet in the fast lane and thumbing my nose at the slow drivers while driving by TMH’s Bacon Bits (sorry about that, TMH… sorta :-)).

As much effect in Wales as Patrick in Ireland, perhaps more, for Patrick is, of course, “honored” more in the breach than in fact today.

I speak, of course, of Saint Nun (or Nonna, Nonnita), the mother of St David, who is honored the day after St David’s Day, that is, today.

Happy St Nun’s Day!

(No snarky comments. I’ll have…. um, none of that.)

Look out for tomorrow: yet another Christian pioneer with strong ties to David of Wales.

(Who needs St Patrick with all the Welsh pioneers honored in March?)