Month: March 2007

More later, as time permits, but for now…

---

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

Computer talk. If you want something else, read on down the page.

---

When it comes to computer displays, beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. I prefer CRTs over LCD screens for many reasons. Sure, I hate their bulk and weight and power requirements, but I’ve yet to see a LCD computer display that can give the kind of clear, crisp display of even low end CRTs. I set my refresh rates higher than their usual defaults (but still well within the monitor’s specs) and eliminate darned near all flicker, adjust color temps, keystoning, etc., and am pretty darned happy with the way my monitors treat my eyes.

So, when I was “bequeathed” a monitor recently (from a retired system) that was much larger than I usually use on my desk (real, physical) desktop, of course I plugged the sucker in to give it a whirl.

Nice–really nice–display, but I noticed something right away that gives me pause. My other monitors are “flat” CRT monitors. The actual screens are as flat as LCD screens, and the wonky curving and bending of straight lines that were the bane of older CRTs for years were never evident. This one, while yielding a lovely display, beautiful color values, great range of resolutions, has the older curved screen and no amount of tweaking and adjusting will eliminate the curves showing up, if only in the corners of the screen.

*sigh*

Oh, well, for all the other nice things (including letting me re-use a high-end BNC-connector cable I kept off a flat-screen IBM/NEC CRT that died), I guess I will live with it for a while on this computer. But I may well move it over to a fake Mac I want to “build” using Intel hardware and PC-BSD (well, the Mac OS X is just BSD with the Apple GUI front end), which has a really, really slick GUI and the best package installation process I’ve seen in an alternate OS. Besides, using a PC-BSD will give me what’s arguably the best of both PC and Mac worlds, and I can say to friends with their iMacs, “Oh, you’re using that proprietary straightjacket version of BSD?” *LOL*

Meanwhile, this monitor produces some of the crispest text I’ve seen, especially when I magnify a web page. Wow! Nice! Yeh, I guess now I can bump monitors down the line for a while.

Combatting false religions is a tricky task, but one false religion is both an easy target… and devilishly difficult to combat. One the one hand, it’s a phenominally easy target, because all its tenets are based on easily falsifiable lies. On the other hand, it is fiendishly hard to combat, because the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind is its most ardent “believer” and because politicians *spit* are prime examples–as a class–of self-lobotomized idiots.

Of the many rational voices–and there are many–of people attempting to combat the evil (yes, “evil”–because its architects and chief priests and accolytes all know it is a lie, and the useful idiots who preach its teachings are all self-made idiots, wittingly turning a blind eye to the truth, even openly persecuting those who wish simply to discuss the facts) religion of Anthropocentric Global Warming, Orson Scott Card has done Truth a great service by succinctly summing up the case against AGW in All in a Good Cause

What matters right here and now is that it is time for the world’s scientists to apostatize from the Church of Global Warming. It is a false religion. It is based on lies, and its leading prophets know that it is because they’re the ones faking the data or stretching it to ridiculous lengths to pretend that the real world hasn’t already ruled against their claims.

Of course, real scientists are already doing all they can to right the lies of the Church of Anthropocentric Global warming, but because the reins of grant monies and publication are, for the most part, held by the cultists, real scientists are excoriated as heretics and shut out. what is needed is for those who are faking their data and cooking the books with their “experimental” procedures to repent their scientific sins and come clean with their colleagues and the world at large.

But I see a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening any time soon.

But, barring the unlikiely event of the chief priests and accolytes of the Church of Anthropocentric Global Warming repenting their many sins, it is left to those of us who see their evil for what it is to, like Card, speak the truth at every turn, to every person we can, hoping to stem their attempt to hasten the fall of night.

One problem I have skimming comment/trackback SPAM that really slows things down: I have to doublecheck all those SPAMa referring to “brutal rape sex” because it’s concievable that one could be a legitimate post about the life of Mohammed.

Seriously.

Oh. Well. I think I’ll just delete them all anyway. I already know too much about that lying brutal savage murdering rapist and pedophile, Mohammed.

Example:

From the Hadith:

Book 008, Number 3311:

‘A’isha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Allah’s Apostle (may peace be upon him) married her when she was seven years old, and she was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her; and when he (the Holy Prophet) died she was eighteen years old.

So, as The Sex Life of the Prophet puts it,

The girl took her dolls with her to Muhammad’s house (something to play with when the “prophet” was not having sex with her).

TMI.

---

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, sissunchi, Faultline USA, Woman Honor Thyself, 123beta, The World According to Carl, basil’s blog, Shadowscope, LaTogaStrappata®, The Pink Flamingo, Phastidio.net, CORSARI D’ITALIA, , and LaTogaStrappata®, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Mohammed, Islam

Folks who’ve recieved email from me recently have seen this post’s title in my sigfile. Naturally, it refers to Opera. Opera 10 is apparently on the way, if the slew of recent “weekly releases” are any indication. But here’s something cool: I checked in at the Opera Desktop Team Blog yesterday (cos I had forgotten to check in last Friday–when the “weekly releases are usually posted) and saw that a weekly had been posted a day early–yesterday.

OK, downloaded it and intended to install and try it out. Time pressed in (and on) and I haven’t yet installed that weekly for trial, but tonight I was taking my Wonder Woman on a brief tour of the PC-BSD site and saw that the current distro is supposed to have Opera included with the default install. Cool. That led me back to the Opera Desktop Team Blog to check on the current ‘nix release and…

…Hmmm, another weekly released today to fix a few bugs introduced in yesterday’s weekly relase. Fast bug stomping. (OK, one was for a Solaris platform bug, and of the other three only the right-click bug was anything that’d bother me). But quick response to bug reports from the user community.

Another thing I really like about this small Norwegian company.

Oh, and their browser really kicks you-know-what.*heh*

No, really, a dream. In this dream, all the hyphenated Americans were barking and snarling and having a big old dog fight. You know, kind of multiculturalism writ plainly.

“Dalmation Pride!”

“Jack Russell Terrior Pride”

“German Shepherd Pride”

yadyadayada

On the periphery, jackals from the ‘”muslim pride” were picking off strays and Chihuahuas (those long-legged rats originally–I kid you not–bred for the stewpot) were eating all the hyphenated dogs’ food… Yeh, politicians *spit*

Mutts with no pretensions to being purebred were looking on and thinking all those phony purebreds (so-called) were forgetting that they were all just dogs and were getting picked off by the jackals and stolen blind by the fake dogs (the Chihuahuas) with tiny minds who’d never done a lick of honest work in their lives.

Disjointed, chaotic, all too real? Well, it was just a dream, wasn’t it?

---

Yep, THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.

---

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Right Pundits, The Virtuous Republic, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Random Yak, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, sissunchi, Allie Is Wired, , stikNstein… has no mercy, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

A quick “Thirteen Things in My Front yard That Have Decided It’s Spring Already”

1. Dafodills

2. Clover

3. Volunteer Elms (RIGHT where I can’t have ’em)

4. 2 lil maple trees

5. Roses (well, the bushes, at least)

6. Mint

7. Two “Bald” Cypresses

8. An unidentified tree my Wonder Woman brought home from an Arbor Day thing a few years ago. I dunno what it is, but it’s purty.

9. Volunteer garlic

10. Wild onion.

11. Some weird viny plant (it makes decent ground cover in some shade)

12. The “possum” grape that’s sneaking around the side to the front

(Haven’t seen grass mentioned yet, have you? That’s cos our bermuda mix greens up late every year–and I don’t care, cos that’s just later for me to have to start mowing–*heh*)

And, although they’re not at their glorious “walk down the runway to wild applause” stage yet,

13. Dandelions! *Yipee!*

Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub

oxymoron: “a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in ‘cruel kindness’ or ‘to make haste slowly.'”

A few favs:

Congressional ethics (this needs a comment?)

And two related oxymorons: Democratic Party and Republican Party. The Democratic Party is no more democratic than the Republican Party is republican.

Journalistic standards (As in “CBS: all bullshit all the time” or Al Reuters, etc.)

Moderate Mohammedism (used in the sense of “non-violent Islam”–another oxymoron, since anyone genuinely giving honor to Mohammed by following his words and deeds must be a murdering, pedophilic, thieving, lying sociopath, by definition. Anything else is, appropriately enough, a lie.)

“Proud Mexican” (when said by/referring to someone who will pay any price, subvert any law to escape Mexico to live in America. Now, what kind of pride is that?).

Federal Justice System/Law Enforcement (Scotter *sigh*, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, Ramos and Campeon, Waco, Ruby Ridge… and the list goes on and on and on… Many different acts with many different levels of anarcho-tyranny, but the message is the same: anyone and everyone can be targetted and made a “criminal” if someone in the system wants it–heck, I’m just waiting for the jackbooted thugs to knock on my door to convict me of exercising my First Amendment rights.)

Anthropogenic Global Warming Scientists (No such critters. The only “scientists” pushing that particular political agenda are dogmatists in the Church of AGW.)

Like I said, a few favs…

by loboinok

CitizenLink.com

Officials in Thomasville, N.C., voted 6-1 Monday to ignore threats from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and allow prayer at city-council meetings.

Mike Johnson, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), provided the council with a proposed policy in compliance with the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s amazing that, in a country founded on religious liberty, the right to open a public meeting with a prayer would be under attack," he said. "But that is exactly what the ACLU has been doing the past several months – using its familiar tactics of fear, intimidation and disinformation to force municipalities into passive compliance with its agenda to eliminate our First Liberty, religious freedom.”

Councilman Dwight Cornelius said he hopes other municipalities will stand up to the ACLU.

“This is a freedom of speech issue, pure and simple,” he said.

ADF offers assistance to any municipality that’s under attack for “simply continuing a practice that the Supreme Court knows is 'deeply embedded in the history and tradition of our country,” Johnson added.

Nothing would please me more than to be able to post articles like this one, every day.

Warning: those of y’all dropping in for another of my rants about society, politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople, et al, just shuffle on down the page; there’ll be some of that somewhere there. This is a compgeeky post.

---

It’s so obvious. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for several years, but just never got A Round To It. *sigh*

Little things can make a whale of a difference when having to work on computers. Besides just having a wealth of knowledge (and knowing where to get more :-)) and a minimal talent for working one’s way through puzzles, the right tools (hardware and software) are critical to doing things well and quickly (and easily).

So, what’s the tool I’ve meant to get for some time but just (for no good reason at all) hadn’t before? This:

There’s more to it than that–a power supply and a couple more cables to allow it to work with SATA drives–but being able to just slap that lil puppy onto a bare drive (OK, pulled from a problem computer) and plug the thing into any USB 2.0 port and just whale away at it with diag tools is a BIG plus, as opposed to slapping it physically into a test system or attempting to work on the drive while it’s in the dead/troubled computer.

Bang on easy. And it’s so cheap, I have no excuse for not buying the thing a long time ago.

Right now, I’m using it to wipe a drive of ALL data (35 passes of semi-randon 0s and 1s over each and every part of the drive) for reuse in another system. Connected to THIS computer, while I continue to just go about my normal affairs. *heh* Didn’t even have to fire up a “bench” comp just for the gig.

So, while I’m kicking myself for not picking one of these lil tools up before, I’m glad I finally did. MUCh better (for me) even than having a portable USB-enabled case to plop drives into. This I can just place a drive on (the inside of an opened) ESD case, plug it in and take off.

I found mine here (and no, I’m not an “affiliate” nor do I get any kinda rake off; it’s just where I bought mine). Neat lil toy tool.