May 2006 – third world county

May 31, 2006

The ongoing battle for truth, justice and the American Way

My grandfather had a favorite saying about rights and priviledges. Well, one of many.

“My rights end where your nose begins.”

More and more, folks today don’t seem to recognize their responsibility to consider the effects of their behavior on others. All most folks care about is their attachment to fake “rights” (while letting the important ones slide and ignoring the fact that rights have responsibilities attached). Heck, some folks view licenses to do things as rights. And others (particularly politicians) view rights as something to be controlled, limited and licensed (making “priviledges granted by the political elite” out of “rights” *sigh*)

OK, here are a couple of examples of one small aspect of this complex issue:

1.) This page (and the attendant video) about an SUV driver (could have been an “anything” driverâ€”nothing special about SUVs, I suppose) whose irresponsible behavior was just flat-out dangerous. Driving is a priviledge, licensed based on a certain very limited skill, knowledge of the ruling statutes concerning driving behavior and subsequent behavior. It is not a right, but it does carry an enormous weight of responsibility. Watch the video. I’ve been in situations like the one depicted. It’s not safe, and the driver was NOT acting responsibly (yeh, and I have theâ€”healedâ€”broken bones to back up my assertion).

But. From the camera angle and what’s actually shown in the view filmed, the biker was riding too far to the left, as well. More than one person was pushing their license to use the highways past the edge of responsible behavior. Yeh, I know the page asserts “a little left of the fog line” but that “little left” looks to be about 2 feet, to me. Too far left for riding in traffic.

But I could be wrong.

Still, from Chapter 8, page 5 of the Missouri Drivers License Guide

“There is only one reason to use your horn: to warn other drivers.”

And,

Other equipment of motor vehicles–violations, penalty.

307.170. 1. Signaling devices: Every motor vehicle shall be equipped with a horn, directed forward, or whistle in good working order, capable of emitting a sound adequate in quantity and volume to give warning of the approach of such vehicle to other users of the highway and to pedestrians. Such signaling device shall be used for warning purposes only and shall not be used for making any unnecessary noise, and no other sound-producing signaling device shall be used at any time.

Which brings up

2.) Our new “trailer park trash” neighbors.

*sigh*

If I had wanted to live around loud, drunken parties (in their front yard, no less), people honking horns outside our bedroom window at all hours of the day and night (darned near every time folks drive up there, it seems they have to honk their horns, whether there’s anyone else at the house or not*), driven-to-distortion bass booms coming from front-yard-parked trucks, easily felt as well as heard inside on the other side of our house, and all kinds of other “trailer park trash” behavior, then that’s where I’d live.

I’m putting the local cop (well, there are more than one, but there’s only one at a time on duty) on speed dial. 911 would be overkill. No more gentle warnings or remonstrations.

But why can’t folks simply stop and think: hey! There’s no one home. I don’t need to honk my horn!

Or whatever might move them to think, “My rights end where someone else’s nose begins.”

*No one home and honking the horn? I’ve had folks ask me if my new neighbors are cooking meth, suggesting perhaps it’s an “all clear” signal to someone inside. I don’t know. Sure, we get toxic fumes drifting this way from over there from time to time, but that could just be trailer park trash cuisine… *heh*

May 31, 2006May 31, 2006

Not quite ready for prime time

I do these silly things so you don’t have to. (Yeh, I stole Jerry Pournelle’s motto. Well, borrowed it.)

So, Microsoft has decided to try offering an online security and tune-up scanner. Interesting, thought I, when I first heard of it. But I skipped the earliest beta testing round, since I don’t have any computers I want messed up that badly. Bad enough installing Microsoft’s “shrink-wrap beta” thought I…

But. Well, you knew I’d have to test it out eventually, didn’t you?

So, I selected a machine running windows 2000 Pro, 384MB of memory and 60BG of storage. Logged on to the site (and no, I’m not linking to it for reasons that will become obvious in just a bit). Loaded the scanner engine and fired it up.

32 hours later, it was still scanning for viruses and spyware. 61% finished with that task.

*sigh*

Oh, but it had found 3 viruses and eight spyware threats.

Riiiiight.

Two of the viruses were trojans recieved as email attachments and cleaned by my regular anti-virus. The scanner found them in my anti-virus software’s “virus vault”. No threat. The third false positive was just that: a perfectly legitimate, uninfected (according to three other anti-virus softwares) and very useful piece of software.

Oh, the eight spyware security threats it had found in its 32 hours’ scanning? Bogus or negligible. Cookies, one and all. And three of the cookies were for navigating a site I want cookies from. Two were for cookies from Microsoft sites, for heaven’s sake! (Now, those were a concern, cos the only time I use Internet Exploder is when I visit a Microsoft site, and Internet Exploder doesn’t throw cookies away automatically on exit. No, it doesn’t.) Ah, but that’s been a consistent problem with Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware Beta (Giant Antispyware). Lots of false positives.

I’ll let it continue to run, just to see if it does eventually turn up anything useful, but so far on a scale of 1-100 (with 100 being perfect and 1 being “stinks to high heaven”) M$’s onloine scanner has scored a -253. The score has to run to heavy negative numbers because of its lethargic performance.

I’ll revisit this sometime next week, if it’s finished scanning by then.

May 30, 2006June 1, 2006

Over a cliff…

This is Tuesday’s Open Trackbacks post. Link to this post in one of your own you want featured, then trackback to this post. More below.

If nothing else, the past few weeks have conclusively proven that the majority of party leaders in both parties have no respect for the laws they pass for the rest of us to live under.

(Click on the pic above for a better view)

Congressman William Jefferson, D-LA, found succor from the outlaws’ favorite law enforcement officer, “King” George W. “Vicente Fox’s lapdog” Bush, when Bush put a 45-day hold on materials seized under duly excercised, legal warrants pursuant to an FBI investigation that already has Jefferson caught accepting nearly $100,000 in dirty money.

And sure, enough, party leaders from both partiesâ€”the Senators fresh from a round of “screw the American electorate, screw American sovereignty, screw the rule of law” session approving a bill offering a “get outa jail free” card and hot cocoa by the fire to between 11 million and 20 million felons (depending on who’s doing the estimates)â€”rallied around the “Warrants: too good for American citizens; not good enough for congresscritters” meme and have been squawking about their special priviledges.

I’ve said for years that the Democrats are determined to drive the country off a cliff at 70 (the 80, then 90, now approaching 100) mph, but that the Republicans only wanted to drive a more stately 45 mph… off the same cliff. Now, it’s as though the Republican leadership is racing the Democrats to see who can drive the country off a cliff first.

*sigh*

Picture this: America personified, driving a car down a steep incline toward a cliff. The caption reads, “FROOMB!”

“Fluid’s running out of my brakes!”

This is indeed an open trackbacks post. Link to this post and trackback.

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

The “Warrants” graphic above shamelessly stolen from Neal Boortz’ site.

May 28, 2006May 28, 2006

Memorial Day 2006

This weekend, culminating in Memorial Day tomorrow, we honor servicemen (and women) who have paid for our freedoms with their lives.

We Shall Keep the Faith

by Moina Michael, November 1918

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead
.Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

Today, large numbers of Americans hold such sacrifice in disdain. Indeed, in recent years, many have attended and participated in “demonstrations” that have celebrated the terrorist savages who seek to kill not only American servicemen and women but civilian non-combatans as well.

Moina Michael’s poem was instrumental in establishing “Decoration Day” (now Memorial Day) and in establishing the (apparently dying) tradition of wearing a poppy in honor of our fallen military. That the more well-known “In Flanders Fields” (John McCrae, May 1915) is “better” art, I’ll not dispute. But Moina Michael’s poem has a heart that’s sadly missing in all too many Americans today who cannot comprehend, let alone echo these lines:

We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies

Would that we too teach our children well, that duty and honor and sacrifice are due our deepest respect and support.

One last note: In order to maintain some sense of connection with my curmudgeonly side, I’ll not explain the significance of the phrase “Flanders field”. For those who read this who either had competent history teachers in grade school or who have taught themselves from readily available history texts, it’d be superfluous. For those who don’t know the significance of the phrase when they read it here, well, they have computers and an internet connection. I’ll not be their crutch. One word: Google. Folks who are too lazy to type a search into a Google search box are just hopeless.

Noted at Woman Honor Thyself.

May 26, 2006May 29, 2006

Summer’s coming/OTA Weekend

Yep. Friday/Weekend Open Trackback Alliance open trackbacks post. Link to this post in some posts I need to read and then track me back, eh? More below the post body.

The Median Sib posted her Thursday Thirteen this week (TT is a blogosphere meme pool game I haven’t been hooked by before, though I’ve seen it around) as Thursday Thirteen â€“ Summer Goals, and since ~~I’m about to go out in a bit here and swelter in the humidity and rather sudden onset of heat to accomplish one minor part of a minor goal~~ I went out already to start one project and am back now, I thought I’d semi-play along.

Sorta.

Kinda.

Not quite.

So, here’s a list of summer goals tailored for non-work-related third world county-specific aspirations.

Finish up some minor mods to the yard–landscaping a tad, back deck mods, taking my yard outa the running for the title of Best Third World County Tick Farm, etc.
Since I’ve been blogging for about 1.5 years now, I want to figure out what I’m doing with this blogging thing sometime this summer. Anyone wanna pitch their two cents in the hat?
Finish the living room redecos (well, for the most part*), includingâ€”finally!â€”a new floor (and on down the hallway with that puppy).
Pull carpet and redo floors in the finished basement (OK, just 2-3 rooms, for now) Easy-peasy? Son & Heir discovered some very (really very) nice vinyl tile (old style glue-down) under the carpet in his room. Taking my “permission” to remove the old carpet and clean up the floor to heart. Easy room #1 downstairs. Will follow it with some appropriate rugs.
Finish Blogmom Diane’s Special Sooper Dooper Manhattan Project-Secret Project BEFORE the official start of Summer. (“Manhattan Project”? Yeh, if it works right, it could blow some folks away. That’s a clue, Diane. :-))
Hold a SUPER garage sale by Summer’s end. We could use some space now used as storage for other things. Really.
Finish a coupla books. No, not just cracking good stories. Found some more nonfiction I’d like to work through. Reports later.
Learn to sleep. Well. *heh*
Reorganize the kitchen. Yeh, I do most of the cooking, so I periodically feel the need to revamp the flow.
Rebuild our home network. I like what it’s like now, but I think we’ll add a different computer for my Wonder Woman this summer and add a wireless node back in. May as well just build it from the bottom up again. Should be fun and instructive. The notebook computers we’re looking at for her (for her grad classes, of course! :-)) will just about require I build a new router/firewall, so I have that fun to look forward to.
Locate the wall wart for my lil midi controller or just break down and get a new one so I can get back to writing/arranging some new stuff.
While I’m at it, clean out my office (remember alla that storage space I plan to clean out? I have a couple of walls of computer gear to reorganize and store there).
Have some fun doing alla the above.

So, what’s your summer looking like?

As I said, this is an open trackbacks post. Link to this post and trackback.

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

Throwing this one in the blogosphere meme pool at Conservative Cat and TMH’s Bacon Bits and Sed Vitae.

*The “for the most part”? Kinda depends on if I get real handy with the routerâ€”woodworking kind this timeâ€”and make the molding I want.

N.B. Yeh, I edited this post after I had a coupla cupsa joe. Eyes open I could see the typos and the incomplete sentences (that I wanted made complete), etc. Good luck finding the less grammatical, typo-filled post…

Mini-update: Relenquishing the Third World County Tick Farm title, now. Had to wait a day, cos of some light showers yesterday, but the yard is well and truly poison to every lil creepy-crawly insectoid critter. Had to keep The Boys out of the yeard and otherwise occupied while spraying and until it dried, but using the most potent stuff I could get without a License to Kill from the CIA or whomever, may do the trick. Spraying with malthion used to do the trick, but that stuff’s darned near impossible to come by. I used up the the last of my stash killing ticks and fleas last year (worked like a charm: the boys went all summer with no problems), so I just had to go by the feed store recommendation… We’ll see.

Further update; the bird bath for the front “mint bed” is coming along fairly well. Dry-stacking rock i gathered six years ago around an old sink I engineered with a stand. When done, nothing but the rocks and the tip of the sink will show, looked at flat on. It’s not plumbed, but what kinda trouble is it to pop the stopper and drain, then fill with a gallon of water?