Tuesday, December 19, 2006

How Hail Storms Effect Planes

Ouch.

Kim Jong Il’s Private Hell

Secretly taped footage from North Korea, showing what a hell hole it is. Thank you, Communism. 

Pelosi vs Free Speech

First you have John McCain trying to shut down bloggers using a “child porn” scare tactic. Now you have Nancy Pelosi going after “grass roots” movements. How liberal of her. Isn’t it nice to know the Dems care so much about the people?

House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) has pledged to take up a lobbying reform proposal that would impose new regulations on speech by grassroots organizations, while providing a loophole in the rules for large corporations and labor unions.

The legislation would make changes to the legal definition of “grassroots lobbying” and require any organization that encourages 500 or more members of the general public to contact their elected representatives to file a report with detailed information about their organization to the government on a quarterly basis.

The report would include identifying the organization’s expenditures, the issues focused on and the members of Congress and other federal officials who are the subject of the advocacy efforts. A separate report would be required for each policy issue the group is active on.

“Right now, grassroots groups don’t have to report at all if they are communicating with the public,” said Dick Dingman of the Free Speech Coalition, Inc. “This is an effort that would become a major attack on the 1st Amendment.”

The Democrats are no more the friends of free speech than the Republicans, but they are in some ways worse. And here’s a classic example. For all the screeching and hollering about Bush trying to take away our rights, the very people Democrats and lefties turned to may turn out to be much worse. 

I Sure Hope So

If you’re looking for articles before today, they still haven’t been restored. Hopefully that’ll be today.

Needless to say, I am not amused. I saved the database on Friday, but because it was so big, the file was corrupted in the middle. So it’s not usable. They have yet to provide a backup from their tapes. But I am hoping that will be in the morning sometime.

I will probably stick with this look, but I will be modifying it some more. 

Crime of the Century

Archie Comics is dropping their trademark Dan DeCarlo art style for this pseudo-realistic crap. Not that it’s terrible art, but it’s completely unexceptional and generic. The original Archie style was instantly recognizable. What the hell is this supposed to be?

I’m sure they want to modernize their books hoping to gain new readers. But they would be better served by drawing the characters Anime style than this stuff. 

I’ve Been Saying this for Years

The insanely inflated real estate market is unsustainable. Now the bubble is bursting. And it’s probably going to get a lot worse.

Then, those of us who can, can get houses for a lot less than they cost now. But a lot of people are going to get seriously burned.

I saw it happen with the comics industry and the dot com business in the early 2000s. Rampant speculation leads to a crash. And crashes are extremely painful. I had the misfortune of having two happen to me in a 5 year period. Not fun.

If you have an ARM mortage, get out while you still can. 

Monday, December 18, 2006

More Worst Album Covers

There’s a whole bunch I haven’t seen here.

What the Hell?

Yes, I’m still waiting to get my files restored. But I decided I might as well do a redesign. I didn’t like the old layout, so I will probably be tinkering with the look for a week or two in my spare time.

Should be back Monday

The hosting company says I can get everything restored tomorrow. What a headache. 

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Sorry for the Mess

This is a sample entry. You can delete it from your Control Panel.

Sorry for the Mess

I had to move to a new server this weekend.

Either I was a victim of my own success and the blog bandwidth was bombing the server, or something else was going on, but I upgraded to a better server and plan and am busy restoring everything. We should be back to normal Sunday night sometime. The DNS hasn’t replicated yet, so you may not even see this message.

UPDATE: It gets better, the backup I did of the database is corrupted. I was in San Diego this weekend and just got back, so I was going to fix everything from the backup I did. Oops.

We’ll see if my host has a save. I won’t know until tomorrow.