Category Archives: inthenews

Roland Burris, (D – Ill?)

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The Illinois Governor accused of wanting sizable favors/bribes in return for appointment to the US Senate, Bolgojevic, has just announced an appointment of Ronald Burris to that position.

The president elect and the Senate are on vacation, as is most of the political media between Christmas and New Year.

I just saw Mr. Burris on the December 30th Rachel Maddow show (iTunes) and I am always bewildered when anyone running for or in public office, especially someone with so much experience, doesn’t have a good answer for the obvious question.

Why did you accept this, obviously tainted, appointment?

Mr. Burris stammered on trying to defend the appointment. Don’t defend the appointment! Defend the acceptance of it!

The correct answer: Governor Blogo seemed hell bent to defy the mainstream wishes that he not appoint someone. He felt the need to prove his is still relevant, and it didn’t seem I could disuade him of this action. Given that, and my lifelong desire to be a servant to the citizens of this state, I thing I can be a great voice for them in the Senate. Were I to pass up this appointment, I don’t know what other person he might choose.

It continues to amaze me how candidates and spokes persons continually don’t provide what seems to me to be the obvious answer. Often Ego is the problem; practicing humility will help.

Prop 8 – The Musical

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There was a lot of play in various news sources last week about Prop 8 – The Musical.  So, from the Sacramento Community College Players to you (via YouTube)…

For those of you who weren’t paying attention, California barely passed a proposition to amend their state constitution to ban gay marriage. There was a lot of money from conservative religious groups from outside the state poured into advertising to scare the voting public.

Markets Burning

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The markets are in a free fall. Friday the Dow swung 1000 points. (18% down for the week) At the end of the day, it rallied to only be 150 down. Hoping positive thoughts for the G7 Financial Ministers meeting this weekend.

They think they’re going to get seven pre-eminent economists to agree on a future course of action and all act on it. I think there’s a very small chance of that so more Down on Monday.

I was also humored that there was no talk of the “G8” since we’re talking about actual economics and Russia’s economy is a rounding error compared to the other seven. They are only ever included for political reasons.

This is the most important point in the last eight years for this country to have a Leader, easily more important than 9/11. So much of the market is reacting emotionally, and without any leadership there have been dozens of voices for the fearful and angry to listen to, only magnifying their negative emotions.

And, oh, by the way, we’re four weeks away from a presidential election.

Twitter and Trees Felled in the Woods

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There have been several stories in the news about companies “listening in” on the Twitter feed for people struggling with their products, and providing personal support.

A reactive Squeaky Wheel policy that can preempt possible public bad mouthing before it happens. (Or truncate it soon after it begins.)

Since those examples, I’ve made a point of mentioning the products and services i’ve had issues with. On Wednesday I got a hit.

In the morning I whined about a Web 2.0 word that annoys me:

“webinar” – i wish I knew who coined that term, so I could make them my arch enemy, and dedicate my existence to their desctruction *pow* 10 am

About an hour later I mentioned the Internet broadcast lecture I was about to start watching.

attending a webinar by MyEclipse on Maven – i.e. i’m sitting at my desk 11 am

In the afternoon, just after 2pm, I received notice that myeclipseide had begun to follow me, in apparent response to my explicit “MyEclipse” reference.

The notice was shunted to my not-so-important folder, and I didn’t see it until later that evening. In the mean time, I had complained about one issue, without mentioning MyEclipse explicitly though.

does the Eclipse java debugger have a data watch/breakpoint? or are you going to make me revert to 1970s techniques to find this bug? 3pm

There was no response from the twitter account (which would of course only confirm the limitation of the debugger).

As an explanation to the unaware who have made it this far, Eclipse is an open source IDE that is practically infinitely extensible. MyEclipse is a configured, supported version of the IDE provided for sale by a company. (IDE is an acronym for Integrated Development Environment)

Another thing of interest is that the MyEclipseIDE account is only two weeks old, with 8 of their 9 posts coming in the last 3 days. Currently they have 15 followers and 36 followees.

The Maven presentation was informative, but I suspect they don’t have the development moxie to be modifying the java debugger to support data watch points. Thus the non-response, if they even noticed it.

The Five Mascots of the Apocalypse

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fivethings.jpg

What are these things?

The short answer is they are the cute salable mascots for the 2008 Summer Beijing Olympic Games.

The longer answer is they represent The Olympic Flame, The Giant Panda, The Tibetan Antelope, The Shayan Kite, and The Chinese Sturgeon.

The most recent answer is that they are The Bearer of Incendiary Strife, The Lord of Angry Earth, The Creature of Righteous Unrest, The Bearer of Unfortunate Wind, and The Bringer of Torrent and Flood.

Those are much more fun, don’t you think!

It seems the more superstitious of the Chinese suspect that these mascots are the causes of recent strife in China, respectively, the most problematic and protested olympic torch relay in history, the Sichuan earthquake, Tibetan protests, a train crash, and widespread flooding.

I am sympathetic, to these natural and man-influenced disasters, but I am quite humored that these cute, neo-corporate, marketing tools may be at the root cause of it all.

Somehow life is easier to bear for humans when there is some supernatural power causing all the problems.

To Be Free Requires Diligence

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The Declaration of Independence is one of the most profound documents in human history. Today is the anniversary of it’s adoption by the American states.

Despite it’s prominence in our history, it has no hold in our law.

Everyone knows the the main phrase from the Declaration

All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And yet we, as a country, claim rights for our citizenry that we deny to others. We make excuses for how we allow ourselves to treat humans being we hold in our custody.

The only right an American should have over any other human on American soil is to stay on American soil.

Whether it’s extreme rendition, or lack of habeus corpus rights of foreign nationals we detain, our freedom has become one of the King citizens, by the King citizens, and for the King citizens.

Not unlike the King whose shackles we sought to throw off, we have long forgotten that we used to believe of all men. We used to “assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.

If we want all men to be equal, we should treat them all equally.

Edit: If you missed the news this week, and I did, it was revealed that our “coercive management techniques” chart used at Guantánamo Bay (and presumably elsewhere) came verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Communist Chinese torture techniques used to illicit mostly false confessions. Are we outraged yet?