This is hysterical.

Don’t miss this latest Mitt Romney campaign video (not really), it’s moving.

Oh, those brave, brave boys!

I was watching the Sunday news programs yesterday, and on This Week, both David Brooks and George Will used the term “Middle-Class Entitlement Programs” to describe the problems with our budget. What they were referring to is the SCHIP program, with it’s ability to reach kids whose parents make as much as $80,000 a year. Both conceded that Bush’s threat to veto the bill was tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot, but they both insisted that such programs (and without naming them directly, they were referring to Social Security and Medicare, also) were ruining our nation’s balance sheets unnecessarily. Because, of course, the middle class can handle it on their own.

This is the classic case of the Republican Welfare State, a self-fulfilling prophesy and a recursive logical argument which is their party’s platform. » Continue Reading…

My storage hard drive just decided to retire on me, I think.  No, I don’t have backups of a lot of things.

It seems that, as I move forward with the new version of DragonFlyEye.Net - due out next weekend - fate and the forces of nature conspire to close the door behind me.  I’m working on recovering data now, but don’t hold much hope.  I’ve lost a significant number of graphic design projects, templates and stock images that were used to create the old version of the site, and those few graphic design projects I used to create the new one.

So, I stand at the threshold of what I hope is a better blogging tomorrow, oddly naked and hopefully shriven.  I don’t suppose many people appreciate what it’s like to have lost so much stuff that isn’t really “stuff” so much as it is ephemeral electrical data.  I’ve always been paranoid about something like this happening, and now it has.  I’m sure I could probably go back through all the backup disks I have and reassemble much of what I’ve lost, and I may do that in time.

But for now, I begin to think that losing all that stuff might have been a good thing.  They say that anything you can’t throw away is a prison.  I guess that I’m just going to need to look at this as a new beginning.

But I’m still buying myself a DVD burner, ASAP.

It had stood silently for, . . oh, say eighty years or close to it. Trees don’t count, and we here in Rochester will probably never know. In eight long decades, it had provided branches on which birds might nest, nuts upon which squirrels might make their winter rations and roots that tilled the earth.

Wonder what you see when you stand in one place for that long? Countless generations of countless animals, including year after year of new children in the school that ringed ’round that old tree. Children that were there a few years, moved on, and came back a few years later with more kids. » Continue Reading…

OK, guys and girls in the blogging community, lend me your ears and shit.

There seems to be a new scam in town, of which I am hot on the trail. I’m asking those of you who blog to pay particular attention to this one, because it affects your blog and is the kind of thing you could potentially be held liable for. I was browsing through my moderation queue and found this one, so have a look at yours, eh?

» Continue Reading…

An amusing article from the D&C.  A convention at the Doubletree Hotel in Henrietta, dubbed “Hackerfest,” was held today.  It’s focus is security technology, from software to hardware.  But what I find amusing is the sense the author gives of a room full of people dying to make networks more secure:

Computer technology focus of Hackerfest || Democrat & Chronicle: Business

This morning, scores of the people whose job it is to make sure that network is secure and and functional crowded into the Doubletree Hotel in Henrietta for Hackerfest 2007. The annual event, put on by Rochester tech firm Dox Electronics Inc., saw vendors pitching everything from spam filters to backup generators and potential customers looking for the best and new technology for their employers’ information technology systems.

Look, in order to know how to secure a system, you first need to know how to hack a system.  Not to alarm you, or anything, but “security experts” are the most potently dangerous hackers on the planet, and you can’t be a good tech without analyzing every single tool for it’s weaknesses.  That’s just part and parcel of what security gearheads are all about.

Not that everyone at the convention was looking to hack into the latest and greatest system.  Of course not.  But to say a convention like this is exclusively for those “whose job it is to make sure that network is secure” is like saying that those cool water pipes at Skye High are for tobacco use only.

Technorati Tags: Hackerfest, Hackers, Security

Those clever little devils over there at Ratheon have cooked up a brand new crowd-control device that’s sweeping the defense industry circles.  They’re calling this new technology “Directed Energy Solutions,” and the idea is to develop weapons that can cause the subject to flee without killing them:

Run away the ray-gun is coming : We test US army’s new secret weapon | the Daily Mail

A square transmitter as big as a plasma TV screen is mounted on the back of a Jeep. When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

» Continue Reading…

This is really disgusting.  A University of Florida student attempted to ask Senator John Kerry a few questions about his concession of the 2004 election and also about impeaching the Bush White House before they decided to attack Iran.  These seem like fair questions.

But not, apparently, to Florida State Police, who in a clear act of censorship, removed the student from the podium, attempted to handcuff him, and when he did not respond, tazered him.  Crooks and Liars picks up the story with the highly-circulated YouTube.com video here:

Crooks and Liars » University Of Florida Student Arrested, Tasered During Kerry Speech

U.S. Sen. John Kerry’s speech at the University of Florida came to a dramatic close Monday, shortly after a vocal audience member was hauled off by police and shot with a Taser gun. The audience member was preliminarily identified by UF officials as Andrew Meyer, a UF student in the College of Journalism and Communications.

And just in case you were afraid the mainstream media would cover this objectively, breath a sigh of relief:

Political Radar: Kerry Condemns Heckler Arrest

Videos show Meyer being pulled away from the microphone after as he sought to ask Kerry, D-Mass., a rambling series of questions that touch on allegations of voting improprieties in the 2004 election, possible impeachment of President Bush, Iran, and Kerry’s membership in Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society.

Watch the video. Does this man really seem to be “rambling” to you?  He doesn’t to me.  He sounds like a man who wants to get his point across before he’s taken away in handcuffs by the Florida State goon squad.  John Kerry could also have done a lot more to defend a fellow activist than just trying to droll on like nothing happened.  You can hear him doing just that in the background as the student repeatedly asks why he is being arrested and receives no answer.

What a country we’ve become.  This man John Kerry is a leader?

Technorati Tags: John Kerry, Protest, Florida, Election Fraud

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Readers of this blog who are also wine drinkers will no doubt already be aware of the love affair my wife and I have with Montezuma Winery.  In a region dripping with wines - and good ones, too - Montezuma steps outside the norm to offer fruit wines and blends that really please the palette.  Among my favourites is their Golden Delicious apple wine, “a few” bottles of which we picked up this summer, and one of which we opened this evening.

Mmm. . .  Well, it’s delicious. » Continue Reading…

. . .  and indeed, if there is any reason that the D&C continues to *decrease* in significance, it is because of such over-obvious statements happening years after they were really relevant and long after they’ve already been discussed to death on the “newly-emerging” Interweb.

I couldn’t help pointing out this bit of drivel in the D&C.  I’d hoped to find an interesting discussion of the effects Internet media and marketing are having on business, perhaps with a bit of local experience and some businesses making a go of it.  Instead, it’s just an article that marvels at the fact that the Internet exists and that anyone takes it seriously:

Social media network growing in significance || Democrat & Chronicle: Business Columns

Earlier this year, I joined the social media network and became a blogger. My background is in promotional marketing so my blog, Donna’s Promo Talk, is targeted to marketing professionals. I first did what the experts recommend, which is to browse, read and comment on other people’s blogs before starting your own. This helps to find your “voice” as well to create relationships with other bloggers in your field.

Hey, if new people want to jump onboard and start blogging, I’m all for it.  We all win.  But this is a lot of space on the D&C to talk about stuff that’s years old, and it seems incongruous in the business section, doesn’t it?  This could have easily and perhaps more appropriately been in the living section.

Technorati Tags: Rochester, Journalism, Web, Internet

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