Heard from a seven year old (actually he'll be 8 years old in a week):
"If we vote for Hillary Clinton, we don't what she is going to do."
Huh? What do you mean?
"She might mess up everything. Like the tax thing. She might make everything worse."
Explain yourself.
"Let me make myself very clear mom, so you can understand, mom."
Out of the mouth of babes...
Just completed a comparison table that tries to match up the issue summaries of the different presidential candidates. The table clearly shows the issues that are unique to the different candidates, and the different ways they have of framing similar issues.
But I wonder how much I will like McCain if I take a closer look at him.
Let's take a closer look at one of the entries: "John McCain Addresses the Housing Crisis"
- John McCain Addresses the Orange County Hispanic Small Business Roundtable - March 25, 2008
- Thank you for joining me here today. I just returned from a trip overseas that included assessing the state of affairs in Iraq, the Middle East, and Europe. I will have more to say on those important issues in the days and weeks to come.
Did we hear about this in the news? According to Michael Savage, Obama told foreign press (French news) that one of the first things he wants to do after becoming president is to meet with the leaders of Muslim countries and ask them why they don't like this, and what can we do so they will like us better....
- While I was traveling overseas, our financial markets experienced another round of upheaval. This market turmoil leaves many Americans feeling both concerned and angry. People see the value of their homes fall at the same time that the price of gasoline and food is rising. Already tight household budgets are getting tighter. A lot of Americans read the headlines about credit crunches and liquidity crises and ask: "How did we get here?" In the end, the motivation and behaviors that caused the current crisis are not terribly complicated, even though the alphabet soup of financial instruments is complex. The past decade witnessed the largest increase in home ownership in the past 50 years. Home ownership is part of the American dream, and we want as many Americans as possible to be able to afford their own home. But in the process of a huge, and largely positive, upturn in home construction and ownership, a housing bubble was created.
OK, so far, a realistic assessment. Wonder if he was like many intelligent people in California prior to 2006 that were claiming "there is no housing bubble".
- A bubble occurs when prices are driven up too quickly, speculators move into markets, and these players begin to suspend the normal rules of risk and assume that prices can only move up - but never down. We've seen this kind of bubble before – in the late 1990s, we had the technology bubble, when money poured into technology stocks and people assumed that those stock values would rise indefinitely. Between 2001 and 2006, housing prices rose by nearly 15 percent every year. The normal market forces of people buying and selling their homes were overwhelmed by rampant speculation. Our system of market checks and balances did not correct this until the bubble burst.
OK, that's a good definition of bubble. Sadly, renters are paying the price for the speculation of their landlords.
John does a good job of defining the problem. But I found the rest of his message to be a lot weaker. More
It didn't seem to have much about dealing with securing the borders. At first I wondered if he is counting on me considering Hillary Barack Rodham Hussein Clinton Obama such an unpalatable choice, he doesn't need to deal with our borders.
Oh wait, found an article from March, let me take a close look at John McCain - On Immigration, Washington is Failing The American People
More posts tonight:
- Comparison of Presidential Candidate Positions
- John McCain - On Immigration, Washington is Failing The American People
- How is McCain doing on his fundraising?
- Did you know that political candidates want to report to the government who you are working for if you send them money?
- CNN acts like John McCain is as forgotten as Ross Perot
- Blog - Close look at John McCain on the Housing Crisis
Just to double check, I visited http://www.johnmccain.com to make sure John McCain is still in the race.
Let's see.. His website has a cool video showing, "The American President that Americans Have Been Waiting For".... Hmmm, no nastiness.
What's he been doing? 6 news articles for today:
- 04.23 It's Time For Action Tour: Day Three
- 04.23 Remarks By John McCain On Day Three Of The It's Time For Action Tour
- 04.23 What They're Saying About The "It's Time For Action Tour" Day Two
- 04.23 McCain Makes Three Stops In Youngstown
- 04.23 McCain Makes Inroads In Rust Belt
- 04.23 Statement By John McCain On The 100th Anniversary Of The U.S. Army Reserve
Upcoming events calendar:
- 04/24/2008 - April 24 - It's Time For Action Tour, New Orleans - Ninth Ward, New Orleans, LA
- 04/25/2008 - Oklahoma City Finance Reception - Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- 04/27/2008 - Miami Finance Reception - Miami, Florida
- 04/29/2008 - Tampa Finance Luncheon - Tampa, Florida
- 04/30/2008 - Lehigh Valley Finance Luncheon - Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
John McCain isn't kicking back. Seems like a lot of newsworthy stuff.
But CNN sure doesn't have any time for any of it.
For the privacy minded, McCain's website has an interesting statement on it, one I didn't notice on Hillary's site:
- Federal law requires us to report the name, address, occupation, and employer of any contributor who gives more than $200 in an election cycle.
Doesn't that suck! It's one thing to report who I am as part of his campaign contribution accounting, but to also report my occupation, and employer? Where is the privacy? Do I have to sign the pledge under penalty of perjury? What are they going to do with that extra information?
Going to have to think about how much I want to contribute, whether my desire to see him succeed exceeds my desire for privacy of information....
Here's the California related news for John McCain:
- Boston Globe: McCain Counsels Cooperation in the World
- Washington Post: McCain Details His Foreign Policy
- San Diego Union-Tribune: McCain Makes Visit to County
- John McCain Addresses the Housing Crisis
- San Diego Union-Tribune: McCain Swings through San Diego County
- Media Advisory: John McCain Returns To California
If it wasn't so funny to see the media so focused on Obama/Clinton, it would have been nauseating.
But I wonder how much I will like McCain if I take a closer look at him.
Let's take a closer look at one of the entries: "John McCain Addresses the Housing Crisis"
More posts tonight:
- Comparison of Presidential Candidate Positions
- John McCain - On Immigration, Washington is Failing The American People
- How is McCain doing on his fundraising?
- Did you know that political candidates want to report to the government who you are working for if you send them money?
- CNN acts like John McCain is as forgotten as Ross Perot
- Blog - Close look at John McCain on the Housing Crisis
Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have some interesting disclaimers on their campaign contribution websites.
I had a kick a while back at this commentary on the terms and conditions on Hillary Clinton's contribution website.
- ... By submitting your contribution, you agree that (you are an idiot, and) the first $2,300 of your contribution is designated for the primary, and any additional amount up to $2,300 is designated for the general election. (Please give us a chunk of money all in one go right now, even if Hillary doesn't make it to the general election.) ... individuals are strictly prohibited from reimbursing another person for making a contribution to Hillary Clinton for President. (Unless your name is Ed Jew, or any number of other people creating scandals by reimbursing previous contributions to Hillary.)_
For the privacy minded, McCain's website has an interesting statement on it, one I didn't notice on Hillary's site:
- Federal law requires us to report the name, address, occupation, and employer of any contributor who gives more than $200 in an election cycle.
I wonder about the privacy implications of that. I wonder why that disclaimer isn't on Hillary's website.... Is she just going to violate your privacy by not telling you what information she is passing along about you? Is McCain just more honest than Hillary? Does McCain care more about following the campaign finance laws than Hillary Clinton?
------
More posts tonight:
- Comparison of Presidential Candidate Positions
- John McCain - On Immigration, Washington is Failing The American People
- How is McCain doing on his fundraising?
- Did you know that political candidates want to report to the government who you are working for if you send them money?
- CNN acts like John McCain is as forgotten as Ross Perot
- Blog - Close look at John McCain on the Housing Crisis
I was having trouble figuring out what to title this blog post until just a couple of minutes ago.
For the longest time, all the political news has been Obama... Hillary... Hillary.... Obama... Hillary... Obamma... Obama.... Obama....
On and on. Seems to me like the democrats have an interesting strategy going to keep up this fight as long as possible so as to monopolize all the media attention. If it takes 45 minutes of the news hour to cover all the comments about their shennanigans, there is no time left to cover anything about John McCain.
So I decided to see if my theory was correct. I went to dinner at 7pm, and I spent an hour watching Anderson Cooper's 360 whatever on CNN. During that time, sure enough, I heard more "Obama this", and "Hillary that", than anyone should have to go through during their dinner hour.
McCain's name was mentioned just twice, and as quickly as possible. It was mentioned that a poll said if Hillary wins the nomination, then 25% of democrats will vote for McCain, and just 53% of democrats will vote for Hillary. The "senior political consultant" (they were all of at least that rank it seemed) was aghast, and moved on as quickly as possible from that bar chart.
More posts tonight:
- Comparison of Presidential Candidate Positions
- John McCain - On Immigration, Washington is Failing The American People
- How is McCain doing on his fundraising?
- Did you know that political candidates want to report to the government who you are working for if you send them money?
- CNN acts like John McCain is as forgotten as Ross Perot
- Blog - Close look at John McCain on the Housing Crisis
Went to see the movie "21". It's about a really bright M.I.T. student named Ben Campbell (real life name 'James Ma') who wants to get into Harvard Medical school, but can't afford it. Kevin Spacey plays an M.I.T. mathematics professor who notices that Ben is a really bright student, and invites him to an after school black jack card counting club. Eventually Ben agrees to join the team, and although at first he says he is only in the game long enough to earn the $300,000 he needs for Harvard, he gets hooked on the lifestyle. Later he loses his cool, makes an emotional play that loses $200,000 and he lands on Spacey's bad side.
The movie realistically describes what card counters must learn to play. This particular group plays by having spotters at several tables always making minimum bets and counting cards until the table goes hot.
Also in the movie is a couple of guys working in "Loss Prevention", one of whom owned a big casino that had been taken years ago for "seven figures" by Spacey, and caused the guy now doing loss prevention to lose his casino. He's waiting for the chance to meet up again with Spacey, who had never been seen again since that night. The loss prevention guy plays just as much of a villain as Spacey, and is lamenting with his partner how they are being replaced by the casinos going to "facial recognition" software.
I had thought that the movie would be based on the book "Million Dollar Blackjack" by Ken Uston. Ken Uston (January 12, 1935 - September 19, 1987) was a famous blackjack player, strategist, and author, credited with popularizing the concept of team play. In his book he talks about how he and a group of other M.I.T. students took the casinos for large sums of money. They even pioneered things like shoe based computers that would calculate the odds.
I think a movie based on the team's actual events could have been even more interesting.
Went to see this movie last night. It's a very interesting documentary by Ben "Clear Eyes" Stein about how dissent and discussion is being squashed in the scientific community when it comes to the debate about Intelligent Design vs. Evolution. He interviews a number of scientists who have been fired, black-listed, denied tenure, and discriminated against for any involved with Intelligent Design, no matter how slight. He interviews scientists on both sides of the debate, such as Richard Dawkins who brags about how science ruined his faith in God, and now he's going to make sure he ruins the faith of everyone else. He talks to some very thoughtful scientists who talk about the problems with Darwin's evolution theory being stretched from being a "theory of how species adapt" to a "theory of how all species came from a common ancestor". Ben Stein then tours the German concentration camps, and shows the how the Nazi's took Darwin's theories and applied them to human populations, the survival of the fittest, and the elimination of whoever they deemed to be "unfit".
He talks about eugenics and how Planned Parenthood continues to promote these ideas. He uses the metaphor of the Berlin Wall, and lots of old time video footage, to illustrate the idea of the wall that has been put up in science where scientists aren't allowed to mention Intelligent Design, or how it guides their research, without risking their careers. We're only supposed to look at the "man's reason, and blind chance, are supreme" side of the wall. Well worth seeing.
Filled up my friend's BMW R1150RT motorcycle yesterday. Here's how much it cost to fill up a motorcycle in the San Francisco Bay Area:
| Total distance traveled on a tank of gas | 192 miles |
| Gallons of Gasoline | 5.088g |
| Price per gallon | $3.939 |
| Fill up total | $20.04 |
| Gasoline Type | Unleaded - Regular |
| Gas Station | 76 station |
| Miles per gallon | 37.7 MPG |
That driving was mostly highway driving around the bay area highways. It inclluded driving over the Bonny Doon mountain roads in San Lorenzo valley in Santa Cruz, California.
Maybe I could improve my gas mileage by slowing down: The extra cost of gasoline for driving fast
Questions answered:
- How many miles per gallon does a motorcycle get?
- How many MPG does a BMW motorcycle get?
- How many MPG does a large touring motorcycle get?
Check out http://neospeech.com/Default.aspx and you can sound like the new Stephen Hawkins! They give you a choice of mens and womens voices in English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The voices will read English text with varying amounts of a native accent.
| English | Kate | Paul |
| Korean | Yumi | Junwoo |
| Japanese | Misaki | Show |
| Chinese | Lilly | Wang |
It's pretty funny.... Just so people might guess it is a computer, I put some stuttering in the voice with the following message:
 | Thank you for calling me. Please leave your naaaame and telephone number after the tone. If you know my email address, trying sending me an email. Hope to talk to you soon soon soon soon soon |
You can forward the wave file player a little bit to get past some introductory text that is added to the front of the message.....
You might have to try a couple of times to get the recording to sound good on your telephone. Try different distances from your speakers.
Sprint PCS Voicemail allows you to record a main message, and also a vacation greeting message. So you can have two variations to switch between.
I always wanted to try using Microsoft Anna to record my outgoing voice mail message. I had a little fun giving her a max headroom like stutter:
Thankssssss for calling mee-ee-ee-ee Please lee-ee-eeve your naaaame and yourrr phooooooone numbererer at the tone-own-own. If you know my email addresssssss, try sending me an email-ale-ale-ale-ale. Hope to talk to you soooooooon-oooooon-oooon.
It's a pretty cool effect, especially when slowed down to half speed. Sounds like the phone company is having problems with their voicemail system.
I wish I could find some different voices for microsoft Text To Speech other than Microsoft Anna. Does anyone where where I can find them?
Wonder if the Illinois earthquake is anywhere near Metropolis, the home of Superman! I'd hate to think what the toy museums in that town would look like if all the super man toys you could ever imagine were dumped off the shelves.
A friend back there thought that I must feel earthquakes all the time in California.
I haven't felt but more than 1 or 2 slight tremors in the last couple of years at least..... But I was here for the big quake in '89 that happened in the middle of a televised baseball game in San Fran. That one was at least 100 times as strong as the Illinois quake. San Francisco is about 60 miles away, and was shook up pretty good. I was actually only 10 miles or less from the center, and the office building I was in had cracks in giant laminated wood cross beams. Santa Cruz had a lot of buckled roads afterwards. Everything on the shelves in my house was dumped on the floor.
A friend lamented about his high school alumni website
| Good luck trying to get the Alumni Association to pony up for any software. They can't even get their mailing list in a database. Their website looks like hell, too. It never changes and there's little or no functionality or content that would bring anybody back. |
That's probably typical of a lot of alumni organizations! For most high schools, it's just a link from the main page of the high school website to a couple of pages about alumni. If you are really lucky, there will be a few issues of an alumni newsletter online. And some information about the next reunion dinner.
Certainly a lot more is possible. Of course, as Mr. Wiki, I'd recommend it be a wiki so all the alumni could help contribute to the site.
Maybe the real way to make an alumni type website popular would be to include documentation about what is happening with the school sports teams. Sports generates a lot more interest than old geezers planning reunion dinners. Especially if one could get the kids from the teams involved in helping to update the site..... Maybe someone in the English department would grace the site with some regular writing or poetry or something.... "What are our teachers doing now?" features... Old science teachers talking about their favorite science lab accidents....
Yes, if there could be a salacious angle, that would help too.....
This afternoon I decided to take the Cabrillo Highway, otherwise known as Highway 1, or the Pacific Coast Highway, from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. I started in San Jose at about 3:30pm. I went over Highway 17. I must be getting more used to my BMW R1150RT, since I was able to go the speedlimit, or maybe 5 or 10 over the speedlimit in places without feeling an adrenaline rush. I kept it easy though, most of the time going right about the speed limit anyhow. The last time on that road, I was kind of anxious, since it had been several years since I had a big bike to ride.
Instead of going into Felton, I decided to get off Hwy 17 at Scotts Valley, and go Mount Hermon road into Felton. I spent some time roaming around Felton, and seeing if any houses were for sale. There really wasn't much near the main roads. More...
I also discovered a new Orthodox church in the heart of Felton! They have converted the old auction hall barn into an orthodox church. Apparently they also have a school on the property. I didn't get to go inside the auction barn, but I will have to make a point to go back for their services to check it out.
I drove over the hill to Bonny Doon. Looks like the airport at the top of Bonny Doon has become a private residence. All kinds of "Keep out - Private Property" signs were posted around it. What a shame, wonder why the change was made. The houses I saw for sale in Bonny Doon were in the million dollar range, and 3500 square feet. $300K would buy an empty, flat, one acre lot!
I stopped at the Pigeon Point lighthouse. There is a hostel there, that offers accomodations right on the coast for just $20 or so a night. It is apparently very popular for school groups. More
I then went on up the coast to San Francisco. Along the way I saw the new bridge they are making to bypass Devil's Slide on Highway 1. It's quite a production they have going on there, a lot of equipment and workers, lots of cranes, etc.
Then I stopped at my Russian iconographer's house, Alexandr Kharon. We went for a nice 40 block walk to the beach, then had a very simple meal of boiled potatoes, a cucumber, tomatos, and some dense whole grain bread, and plenty of olive oil. Very delicious.
Hmmm.... Friends from Purcell Marian High School want to know what I have been doing in recent years.... A 25th reunion is a nice time to sit and think a bit about what adventures one has had.... I responded with just a brief list of adventures in recent years, in no particular order:
Selling a website for enough money to be semi-retired for a few years, doing investigation and technical analysis for high-tech dot.com class action law cases against Google, Yahoo, Palm, and others, spending a summer doing literature evangelism at a San Francisco street market, collecting 10's of thousands of old books and digitizing hundreds of them, learning glass blowing / lampworking / bead & marble making, spending a year living in Bulgaria, nearly getting arrested in Istanbul for selling too cheap websites to merchants in the Grand Bazaar, getting stopped on the California Pacific Coast Hwy 1 up the doing 109 on my BMW motorcycle and walking away with a ticket for only 75mph, surveying pirate software and videos in several countries, hanging out at Russian Orthodox churches and monasteries and visiting the catacombs beneath the churches at Lavra in Kyev Ukraine, visiting cemetaries in the Ukraine and the museum of minatures (how about a rose inside of a human hair, or a flea with golden shoes), raising a litter of kittens in a small apartment in Bulgaria and getting one of them a passport to come back to the U.S., nursing a friend's cat back to health after it ate a lot of string and had to have major surgery, being amazed at Bulgarian veterinarian visits that only cost $1.50, debating theology with Russian priests, attracting too much attention at a Vegas casino for blackjack card counting and paying for three modest Lake Tahoe vacations using card counting, taking several hour walks through the non-tourist sections of Munich, Bangkok, Sofia, & Kuala Lumpur guided only by a GPS with no maps, breaking the law by giving Malaysian Muslims books about Jesus and Biblical health principles, driving a small one man hard bottom Zodiac boat from Tiburon around Angel Island over to San Francisco then out under the Golden Gate bridge over to Sausilito and coming back to find our friend's very angry boat captain worried at how long we had the boat out, finding ways to let the internet make me $500 a day automatically while I was wandering around foreign countries, then watching the income plummet in two days to $2 a day when google&yahoo changed their algorithms, riding double decker buses and wandering the streets of Hong Kong, and then going to several banks to get enough cash advances to buy the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (Toshiba Libretto 50), spending the night detained in a military compound by Turkish Jandarma because someone on the same bus had the great idea to try to smuggle home made vodka into Turkey, receiving a congratulatory letter from a priest at the Vatican for an internet research site I posted about the Shroud of Turin, spending New Years with a family living in the jungles of Sarawak where there is no internet or cell phones, photo documenting two Malaysian Navy seals taking all day to butcher a jungle pig for the New Years feast, getting five figure checks from Amazon.com (not counting after the decimal point!), being in charge of the radio communications for a Civil Air Patrol search for a downed aircraft where I had to track seven airplanes and four ground search crews, providing Amateur Radio Emergency Services communications for a Red Cross shelter during a California weather disaster, getting a Bulgarian resident passport, talking to people in 50 countries over Amateur Radio, packing my motorcycle to go on campouts, being awestruck by the gothic cathedral that towers over Strausberg France, taking 20,000 photos in foreign countries in one year, taking flying lessons in a four seater Cessna, getting a secret night time tour of a public mental asylum in the Ukraine, caring for a friend with liver failure, driving an Orthodox priest friend to and from L.A. and discussing church writings about the location of paradise, narrowly avoiding arrest for taking too many pictures of the railroad operations at a border crossing in Romania, buying a plate of great Russian pasta for only a $1 at a train station from women making their living this way, being the guest of honor at a feast at the apartment of some common people in Kyev and being congratulated that I could drink their home made vodka just like a Russian (quite an accomplishment for someone who never drinks!), giving the toast at many Indian weddings with hundreds of guests each, visiting the apartment of a former KGB agent and spending hours talking with him eventhough he speaks no English and I speak almost no Russian, preaching with an interpreter at a Tamil speaking Pentecostal church in Malaysia on how to study the Bible, having a $38 root canal in Bulgaria, being a named inventor on some patents, visiting Metropolis Illinois, the Home of Superman, touring the Louisville Glassworks, and the new Creation Science museum in Kentucky...
Well ok, a couple of things at the end are since getting a real job, and a few items are from the 1900's, but now you know why I had to get a real job again. Being semi-retired was a lot of work!
We used to always joke about making an IDE for TASM... "Here little kid, here is a loaded gun, now go play with it on the center line of the highway!"
I started at Borland right around Turbo C 2.0, so I predated the OOP versions. I worked with early versions of Turbo Basic. I contributed to the design of the VMT tables for the first version of Turbo Pascal With Objects... And, did you notice the OOP support even in TASM? I did a lot of design work on that, probably the only assembler to have OOP... Back then the piece of software I really wanted to have was the PLINK overlay linker... Every now and then I think about writing some assembly, but then decide that doing CGI scripts in assembly language is probably not a real effective use of anyone's time!
Back in the days of the Borland DOS UI's, every major version of the Borland products had a different color scheme. You could tell at a distance what someone was running.... Each new major version, we'd have to decide on the new color scheme, we called that decision group the "Helen Keller Committee". That's pretty much the limit of my graphic design credentials!
However, if you ever have the desire to breadboard something and do something low level, like I do occasionally, check out the Propeller chip http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx and the Hydra Game Development Kit I picked one up at Frys a while back. It's pretty amazing, no CRT controller, no sound controller, it's all handled in software from different cores of the 8 core (cog) microprocessor. The book gives examples of how to do various kinds of simple classic arcade games. The processor directly understands a high level Basic like language as well as an odd assembly language, with some unique bank switching and memory access sharing by the cogs.
- Garnet