Month: October 2010

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About That Halloween Thing…

Our children never really did much Halloween stuff. Our choice, but they didn’t suffer for it, as we made sure they had other opportunities to wear fun costumes, go to parties and gorge on candy. And we made sure, when they were older and not engaged in other parties/gorging on Halloween, that we had plenty of candy available to give out to the greedy lil waifs who came to our door, until…

Our final participation in the annual shakedown was when kids became coming by and demanding their extortion candy so rudely that we simply rebelled at supporting such barbaric behavior any more. “Give it to me!” delivered rudely by a little “girl” (apprentice Dhimmicrap, more like) in a princess outfit wasn’t the last straw, but it was one of the more memorable ones.

Nope. Not going there again. They can find someone(s) else to give them sugar highs and expand their parents’ dental bills.

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Old News from Afghanistan?

Well, maybe time-lagged information, another confirmation, but scarcely “news” for those of us who’ve been paying attention to Dhimmicrappic treatment of Islamic savages. From this article,

“One video, captured recently by the thermal-imagery technology housed in a sniper rifle, shows two Talibs in southern Afghanistan engaged in intimate relations with a donkey.”

I didn’t know the Democratic Leadership had taken a tour of Afghanistan, until now…

Of course, the following sentence confirmed that one leading Dhimmicrap–Nancy Pelosi, from the sound of it–was there:

“Similar videos abound, including ground-surveillance footage that records a Talib fighter gratifying himself with a cow.”

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Submitted for Your Approval

The president has a “theme song”–“Hail to the Chief” (ironically appropriate for our Kenyan (?) ‘p-resident’)–but what to play when The Zero, Nazi Pelosi and Not-So-Hairy Reid appear together? Allow me to suggest,

[audio:Three-Stooges-Theme.mp3]

But enough of this serious commentary. I now return twc to our irregularly unscheduled curmudgeonry.

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A Trifling Tidbit

…if that’s not entirely redundant. 😉

For a long time now, I’ve chosen passwords based on a topic-subtopic-specific, misspelled and then with added characters and numerals and upper/lowercase letters interspersed to make a word (preferably longer than 12 letters) or phrase sort-of-halfway-kinda resemble the original word or phrase in a manner that’s memorable to me.

Recently, though, somehow my gmail account became vulnerable despite what several online password checkers from reputable companies thought was a “strong password” so…

I’ve begun changing my passwords again, this time using lyrics to songs I know–some that are even “semi-unpublished” *heh*

Here’s the trick:

Write out (if you’re a little unsure of the lyrics) the lyrics to a song–the older and less likely to be common knowledge among the illiterati the better. Now, select the first letter of each word of the first (or second or third… ) verse. Assemble those into your “rough sketch” for a password. Now, in some way that makes sense to you–all the letters from the first half of the alphabet, all vowels, all “voiced” consonants, etc.–capitalize some of the letters. Substitute numbers for other letters. Add characters like “@!%#” at places within the string of letters in ways that make some loose sense to you.

I recently changed out my first (of more than a few) email passwords with a 40-character password devised this way. Yes, I have my passwords saved on hardcopy in place that’s accessible to family only, and yes I have them saved in an encrypted, password-protected zipped text file.

It’s not all that hard, and it beats putting your birth date or wedding anniversary on a sticky note slapped on your monitor… *heh* By quite a lil bit.

Oh, my computers’ passwords are considerably less complex, because

  1. They’re in a fairly secure environment and
  2. Anyone wanting to crack ’em can probably do so with Ophcrack or other tools, anyway.
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More Evidence Suggesting That Even Reading News Can Make One Stupid

From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article in 2009 that I ran across looking for something else,

“Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because it can manifest itself in a victim for decades without showing any symptoms, hepatitis C has become better known publicly in recent years.”

Oh, really?

man·i·fest
[man-uh-fest]
–adjective
1. readily perceived by the eye or the understanding; evident; obvious; apparent; plain: a manifest error. . .

–verb (used with object)
3. to make clear or evident to the eye or the understanding; show plainly: He manifested his approval with a hearty laugh.
4. to prove; put beyond doubt or question: The evidence manifests the guilt of the defendant. . .

—Synonyms
1. clear, distinct, unmistakable, patent, open, palpable, visible, conspicuous. 3. reveal, disclose, evince, evidence, demonstrate, declare, express. See display.

—Antonyms
1. obscure. 3. conceal.

A thing cannot be “manifest” while not “showing any symptoms”. It’s just not possible. What the idiot who wrote the sentence above apparently meant was something like, “Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because it can remain hidden in a victim for decades without showing any symptoms,” but that’s an unnecessarily cumbersome and excessively wordy way of saying simply, “Sometimes called the ‘silent epidemic’ because those infected often show no symptoms for decades. . .”

But, of course, the subliterate idiot who wrote the article (and his editor) apparently don’t know the meanings of the words they use, so they “misunderedumacate” their (also likely subliterate) readers.

And no, it’s not comforting to know that major newsrags are populated with “reporters” who are no more literate than those who write for America’s Third World County’s weekly birdcage liner.

With crooks like this (yeh, taking pay as a wordsmith for subliterate screeds is theft, IMO) populating so-called journalism–and they’re prevalent in all the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind–such crap polluting public discourse seems designed to bring literacy down to the lowest common denominator. And that feeds right in to my blog’s header quote…

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The Brightest, Most Intelligent President Evah #1

I know this has been beat to death, but it needs to be used to beat something else to political death.

Barack Obama: “I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go?”

Yeh, yeh, I’ve heard all the excuses about this “mis-speaking” but none of them wash. It doesn’t matter HOW tired or pressured this asshole was, “57” (with one left to go–and specifically excepting Alaska and Hawaii, since he was referring to the contiguous states) is simply not the kind of thing that any American who’s marginally literate would even mistakenly say, because the 48 contiguous States would have been drilled into his unconscious.

No, this “intelligent” Hahvahd-edumacated idiot has only a surface, semi-, transient connection to anything approaching a knowledge of American history and geography, and he’s ruling by fiat from the White House along with fellow Dhimmicrappic conspirators against the Constitution in Congress who are afraid Guam will capsize because of over-population and that “every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs.” (Total US population is somewhere a tad north of 300 Million, even counting children, illegals, retirees and welfare slugs.)

Hmmm, seems innumeracy is rampant in the “Party of Smart People” eh?

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I Really Don’t Get It

Whoopee! Not.

So, “Apple Unveils 11.6-Inch MacBook Air, New 13.3-Inch Model”–this is big news? The 11.6″, 1.4-GHz Core 2 Duo model with a meager 64GB of storage (granted, SSD, but still… only 64 GB?) supposedly has a “full size keyboard” (how, with such a small form factor? I suspect “full size keyboard” is Applespeak for, “DEFINITELY NOT full-size keyboard” *heh*), this miniature computer starts at… $999.

*feh*

The lil toy computer I’m writing this on has a 15.6″ screen, running a dual core Intel 2.2Ghz processor with a reasonable 320GB of storage and a real keyboard, including a number keypad, for… $500. And it’s a brand with just about the lowest incidence of notebook failure among PCs, easily as low as or lower than Macbook failure rates.

So, why the buzz about this miniature, underpowered toy Apple notebook? Why, it’s an Apple, of course. And yes, at significantly less capability (and strapped into the Mac OSX straitjacket *feh*), it does have the virtue of weighing 1/2 what my lil toy Asus does. That’s for weenies who can’t handle carrying more than the 2.3 pounds the lil underpowered toy weighs. Anyone who has trouble carrying a 5-6 pound notebook (or having it on their lap for a few hours’ time, if that’s all the “desk” they have) deserves an Apple straitjacket. Weenies.