I plan on writing more for the 2 people who actually read this.

So my dog was rooting around in the yard and uncovered a rabbit’s nest.
There are 6 baby rabbits in a nest in my yard.
I surrounded their nest with some garden fencing and covered the top with some old plywood.
I was worried that their momma might abandon them, but when I took the dog out back this morning (on her leash), I spotted the momma feeding them.
Here’s a pic:

I bought a house last year. My house is now assessed about 30% higher than last year. This means my real estate taxes will go up.
Will someone please explain to me what the net is of my house being worth more, unless I’m selling it?

I thought that semantics were Bill Clinton’s forte?

 http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101906L.shtml

Man, that habeas corpus was pesky huh?
Total bullshit.

Huge favor, don’t vote for anyone who voted for this.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2006/09/onlyamatteroftime.html

I think I just had a near death experience.

I was driving back to work from eating lunch at home. It’s raining outside.

In my peripheral vision, to my left, I hear “bzzzt” and see something blowing up in an electrical fireball.

I swear I could taste it. It was like that feeling you get when you lick a nine-volt battery to test it, only in my whole mouth.

I could feel the heat too.

Yeesh.

Lately, all I’ve been reading is dystopian literature. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it seems that life imitates art? Who knows.

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/living/religion/15195224.htm

Hi, I’m freedom of religion, you might remember me from such documents as the Constitution.

All your Coca-Cola and shampoo are belong to us!

http://robstercraws.org/webcam.jpg

http://www.shipbrook.com/onnotice/

Here’s two of mine.

 http://robstercraws.org/hockey.jpg

 http://robstercraws.org/onnotice.jpg 

The second one is meant to be inane.

So I rescued a dog from the SPCA.

http://robstercraws.org/lil.jpg

http://robstercraws.org/lil1.jpg

Her name is Liliah, and she’s about 9 months old.

Isn’t she adorable?

YA RLY!

Right here.

No I’m not dead, the job and the house thing have me super busy.

I’m looking for stuff to talk about.

Bush and Brown’s Conference
Mike Brown fights back
It’s just the latest disingenuous lie.

Anyone who disagrees is a defeatist and hates America now, and I’m sick of it.

I hate how a benchmark of success in our perceptions of other countries seems to be artificial benchmarks of capitalism, Wal-marts and McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc.
It’s like we’re homogenising the world and stripping out the culture and soul of everything.
Maybe people in the middle East don’t want to have to be clean shaven, wear a tie, work at a cubicle, drive a saturn to a job they hate, be a replaceable cog in a faceless machine that doesn’t give a damn about them. We’re stealing their culture and replacing it with what we think is right.
This is exactly what got us in this predicament.
Well that and ALLEGEDLY sponsoring death squads.
Central and South America should be really pissed off at us right now.
Sorry for the ‘80s guys.
This makes no sense, but I’m tired and it’s super late at night.
I might clean up this post later.

I got pre-approved for a mortgage loan.
W00t!

I just applied for a home mortgage loan.

American dream FTW.

The webcam to the right is not real time.
I’ll just update it as my ego desires.

With the US and Canada being both knocked out of olympic medal contention, I’m struck with an odd sense of deja vu. This just happened in another major sport that North America is supposed to dominate a few years back, basketball.
I think it’s a good thing for there to be more competition in international sporting events, it keeps things interesting. It just goes to show you how much the rest of the world is catching up in various ways.

LINK

Even though we just spent the better part of 5 years getting whipped up into an orgasmic paranoid frenzy, we don’t need to worry about outsourcing our security.

I find this hard to believe.
Why is this deal being fast-tracked?
Why is W threatening to use the first veto of his tenure to defeat any measure meant to scrutinise this deal?

They should be unobtrusive and unannoying.

This isn’t about what you think. I might have written about this before, if so, oops.

According to various sources within the government, the most dangerous domestic terror organisations are the vegans and the environmentalists.

Who have never killed anyone.

Not the abortion protestors, who have killed people.

This has absolutely nothing to do with politics I’m sure.

/sarcasm

I got contact lenses today, I’ve never worn them before, and I was just sick of glasses.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.

It’s an effing nightmare.
I wouldn’t even bother with anything other than Knoppmyth anymore.
I think I have it working.
I’ll write up something of a tutorial later today.
http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html

I’m back.
I went https.
Try it out.
Just throw an “s” after http in the address bar.
Although clicking a link sends you to a regular page.
I think it’s an all or nothing deal with wordpress.

It just writes itself.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/cheneyhuntingaccident

So I’m in Charleston, moving our offices down here, getting the T-1 hookup and all that.
It’s installed 1-31 supposed to be turned up 2-2.
I call on the second just to ensure this.
No record.
The person I was working with left the company and their backup is on leave.
.....
Needless to say, the T-1 is only half installed, they finish it up.
More bad news.
Their routing is FUBAR, ETR COB Monday.
......
To be fair, once the provisioning engineer figured out that the original person we worked with basically screwed us, she was more than helpful, even though it’s not her department.
I’ll buy her some flowers.

http://buffalobeast.com/91/50.htm

I’m stuck in Charleston, SC through Monday.

I don’t know if I’ve ever posted something like this, forgive me if I have.
American politics are horribly fucked, IMHO.
Both major parties. My solution? Get the money out of it. The problem is this, corporations, in addition to being all corporationy, have lots of money. John Q. Public does not. Money suddenly raises the volume of your voice immensely. The only time the public gets their voice heard is when they kick up a complete shitstorm regarding some wholesale sale of their rights to the lowest non-bidder. How do you get the money out of it? I have no idea, I think McCain-Feingold only opened more loopholes. I wish people would pay attention to the independent parties. America was not always a 2 party country, most other countries have more than 2 parties as well.
We’re supposed to be the best nation in the world, surely we can do better.

So the White House spokesman called the lawsuits about illegal wiretaps frivolous.
I thought you couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation?
As John Stewart said last night, this puts the lawsuit below “man glues ass to toilet seat at Home Depot”.
Classy.
I have to sneeze, hold on.
/me grabs constitution
It might as well serve some purpose.

This is the funniest flash animation I have ever seen.

This is a really cool bit of javascript trickery that will overlay a linked jpg over the current webpage when clicked.

Apparently it’s now illegal to flame without using your real name.
What constitutes the “intent to annoy”?
Questioning leadership.
We would stop comparing you to 1984 if you’d stop acting so much like it.

Check out the new theme, I like it.
I’m going to translate it to English later.
Then I might just release it, with the original editor’s permission.
I’m going to leave it like this until I can translate it all.
The theme creator’s website

If there was any doubt before.
Advocating assassination, hoping a town gets flooded, now this.
Religion of peace my ass.

Systems critical, cute core meltdown 5…4…3.
Cute overload
Pandafix

This story on NPR has me on a quest.
We have tongue twisters and word games to help us with our grammar and speech. Of course, this means other languages have their own unique mnemonic constructs.
Russian has “Shla Sasha po shosse i sosala sushku” which means “Sasha was walking down the highway sucking a donut”. It just helps you with your sounds and such. I’m in search of more from other languages. Here are some more.

I consider myself a very tech-savvy person, but I’m not really enthused about everything going “digital”.
For example, I just bought a hockey almanac. I’m sure hockeydb or wikipedia could provide all the information within, but you just can’t beat the cross-referencing you can do with physical media.
Want to know how many points your latest free-agent signing had in 2001 in the Swedish league?
Look it up in the player section.
The idea might sound trite, but I think a newspaper that was digital instead of printed on dead tree would be super. I know it’s been tried and they’re working on the bendable LCD technology now.
I would envision an RSS style newspaper, where you decide what news you give two craps about, and then only get that. This would solve two problems, staying current, and still being 3-d and physical.
I sound like Timothy Leary right now.

This is the best outcome I could have thought of for the prarie dog debacle. The two camps are/were “they’re hibernating” and “they’re dead”.
I’d rather have disturbed their sleep than left them for dead.
Nothing like an uplifting $holiday story.

This article on NPR’s website gives immunity a whole new meaning.
What’s the point of a free market if there is no liability? Yeah, the consumer votes with their wallet, but not if they’re dead. This really annoys me. You don’t have any rights or the ear of anyone in power unless your last name is Inc.

Check out this article on k5.
I’ll post my own nominees later.

I think that I, along with the rest of the world, am hooked on Sudoku.
It’s a numbers game that doesn’t require math to play.

We had a president, not a king.
The gist I get from this is “if you don’t give up your rights, you hate freedom.”
What a crock of shit.
I can’t believe 60 million people lap this up.
Why bother having the legislative and judicial branches of government?
How much longer until they declare martial law?
Right before the next “election”?
LINK.

I normally don’t watch television, but I caught The Colbert Report on Comedy Central tonight.
I dare say it’s funnier than the Daily Show.
LE GASP!

Is there anything better than homemade peanut butter cookies with the fork marks?

As cool as it is to bash google lately, I have my own gripe.
Not with them per se.
Here goes.
Who among us has not asked a question on the internet, and been told to “just f’ing google it”?
How long until there is no new information, because we assume it’s already been answered or researched?
Just one of my odd conspiracy theories.

There seems to be a practice, mostly by US entertainment companies, to block non-US IP addresses from accessing their websites.
Could someone please explain to me the rationale behind this?
The rest of the world eats up our entertainment like hotcakes.
Blocking them is just asinine.
It’s not quite as reprehensible as US companies helping China censor the internet from their own people.

I’m pretty sure that Diary of a Madman is the best literary depiction of schizophrenia ever.

Roses are reddish,
violets are bluish,
if it weren’t for the pope,
we’d all be Jewish.

So my iPod battery has been flaky lately. What, you ask, did I do to solve this issue?
Sue?
No effing way.
I went to iPodjuice.com and got a new one.
$34 later my new bigger beefier battery is charging.
The included full colour instructions are a snap, the hardest part is reconnecting the hard drive.
I’ll report my findings on battery life when it is fully charged.

Papers please.

If you disagree with the administration, you will be smeared.
Even if you were tortured, a la John McCain.
Lost three limbs in war, a la Max Cleland.
Or if you were a Marine and think this war is stupid, a la John Murtha.
It seems to be that the only veterans that matter are the frothing rabid warmongers.
Why should torture be a question?
Not only does it go against everything we believe in, we’re using the exact same defence that the Vietnamese used.
That we were pirates conducting an illegal war, so they could treat us however they felt.
Our national hubris is getting out of control
Kyoto, Geneva Conventions, UN Convention Against Torture.
What’s next? Gravity?

Isn’t it pretty?
That’s a Newton’s Cradle, by the way.

LINK
I don’t understand what makes a company think that it’s okay to have something install itself on your computer that leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of security threats, then releases an even worse program to remove that.
This show you how few rights the consumer has in this day and age.
I’m glad I use a mac and didn’t get affected by this.
I think Sony is in deep, deep shit in this one. From the Feds, M$, the music companies, artists, etc.

I got a stripe on my white belt in Brasilian Jiu Jitsu.
I’m certainly excited.
Now I’ll take a few days to let the bruises heal.

So I was bored the other day, driving home from work.
I cycle through the channels, and I hear Donald Rumsfeld on Hannity.
Hannity was kissing his butt so hard.
It just felt like propaganda to me.
I mean ‘freedom journalism’.

I’m no ornithologist, but I’ve noticed a rather peculiar thing about the birds in my city. They tend to congregate on traffic singal wires, and perch themselves inside the light hood, standing on top of the hood below.
Every red and yellow light I’ve seen for the last few days has had a little black bird standing in it.
Are they doing this for warmth?
Respite from the wind?
It’s comedic, really.

Today over at my gallery, I was a bit hasty in activating a new user, and accidentally double-clicked the ‘activate’ button.
Holy crap was I in for a shitstorm.
I found out it’s a bug in the gallery 2 software and I reported it to them.
Long story short, when I double-clicked the user, the program went ape trying to figure out who owned a basically orphaned album, when I tried to display the page containing the first created album, it would crap the bed. Even if I went in to a shell and removed the album directory, it still did this.
I had to go in and threaten to delete an album, then check the albums I wanted to get rid of.
Here’s the thread I created on gallery’s support forums.
And no, not this buggery.

There’s a case that’s troubling to me, and I’m sure others who feel the same way I do. A couple from Nebraska moved to Kansas to get married when it was learned that the female half of the relationship was pregnant. Why is this news? He was 22, she was 13. Nebraska has now filed charges against him for statutory rape, since obviously they did ‘the deed’, so to speak. If it is okay in one state to get married, why can another state not recognize that marriage without interfering? Yes, I know it’s illegal for someone that old and someone that young to “be together”, and I’m not sure if she has the emotional intelligence to know what she was doing or is getting into, but I think that’s up to the courts and shrinks to decide. With all the talk lately about the sanctity of marriage, I’d like to see some substance before style. The bride’s mother consented to the marriage. Yes, they messed up, but, they’re trying to provide a two-parent household to a child to give it a fighting chance. The father can’t much do that from behind bars.
Government, stop breaking up families, please. Put your money where your mouth is.

So apparently, you’re only allowed to have religion if you’re a homophobic warmonger.
Long story short, a church in California is in danger of losing its tax-exempt status for having an antiwar sermon. Isn’t there some sort of rule about killing people? I don’t see where they endorsed a candidate or a party. Why do these agencies target liberals so much? You knew it was only a matter of time until the dissenters became a target. I’m surprised they weren’t the target of a NSL.
This always happens, some outlaws will do something bad, which leads to more laws being enacted that are a huge pain in law abiding citizen’s collective asses. Guess what, they were breaking laws in the first place, what makes you think more laws will stop it in the future?

Thank you for not electing Mr. Garrison, Virginia.
Thank you.
Election results here.
We finally got 1 new electronic voting machine at my precinct. It is one of those famous Diebold election stealer 6000 models.
I used it, but I’m not so sure how the usual voting crowd will take to it, since I’m a huge nerd and deal with computers all day, so it took me roughly 6 seconds to vote.

The only races I actually cared about were Governor, which Tim Kaine aka “I’m against the death penalty but I would carry out sentences handed down be the court” won by about 6%. That makes me happy. I’m pretty sure the Hitler ads contributed to Kilgore losing, as well as Warner’s huge surplus and bringing us from the brink of bankruptcy.

The other race I care about is Attorney General which, as of this writing, has no winner declared. Bob McDonnell just rubs me the wrong way.
He proposed ridiculous sentences for “possessing methamphetamine making materials with the intent to produce”. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re all potential felons.
All your toilet duck are belong to us.

Due to the current tone in Virginia politics, I will feel just fine walking in to the voting booth and casting my vote for anyone with a D or an I by their name. I think the “Kaine wouldn’t fry Hitler” ads put that final nail in that coffin for me. Let me get this straight, Kaine’s religion is a liability, and we weren’t supposed to ask about John Roberts’ faith, and Harriet Miers faith is a plus?
Makes no sense to me.
Plus, Jerry Kilgore sounds like Mr(s). Garrison from South Park.

I don’t what the problem is, but it seems to me like the entertainment industry keeps going back to the well when it comes to new fare. Every new game or movie seems to be a remake or a sequel. Then only industry putting out something semi-original is the music industry, mostly the independent houses. Is it a fear of risk? Risk is what drives our economy, no risk, no reward. How long can you take the safe bet? Where are the pioneers? Everything seems to be about the corporate bottom line. Look at EA. Their Madden football franchis has been great for years, then last year, they bought the exclusive rights to make games based on the NFL license, how much innovation do you think you’re really going to see out of them until that deal runs out? Zero.
The NFL took the easy money, rather than letting the games compete and increasing the overall quality of all the games. Competition drives innovation. You see it in even such industries as sports entertainment, after the WWE (nee WWF) purchased rival promotion WCW, the overall quality of the product has declined, as have salaries for the talent. A monoculture is bad. Look at operating systems, 90% of people run some form of Microsoft Windows, how much pressure is there for them to go above and beyond expectations? It’s up the Apples of the world to give users what they want.

Nerdy stuff, and political humour.
Here they are, together.

Lovely.

It sucks, don’t go see it.

What does the far right know that we don’t?
Why are they so happy about Mr. Alito being nominated to the Supreme Court?
Certainly intriguing, to say the least.

Apple Mac OS X Tiger update 10.4.3 is out, I installed it and am having no issues.
There’s a bunch of fixes in it, read more here.

My new Technorati Profile.

I added some photos to my gallery. I took these at a seminar I recently attended with Professor Pedro Sauer.
LINKY

Normally the President ignores this region, since it always goes the Republican’s way.
Is this a sign of something? Maybe wavering support? Who knows.
All I know is most people are just going to be pissed that it’ll make them late to work. Well, those of us who still have jobs, anyway.
LINK

I wonder if they’re profiteering at all? My solution? Stop driving land yachts that you don’t need. Not only is it making prices go up due to consumption, but it’s polluting the earth. Just stop. I can understand the few instances where you need a giant vehicle (hauling stuff….hauling…heavier stuff, ferrying people).
LINK

I’m not all that surprised that Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States. She didn’t sit right with either party. I just hope they don’t nominate someone worse, like Ashcroft or Gonzalez.

I’m absolutely shocked about this.
/sarcasm

Pork has made an appearance in the “war on terror”.
LINK

Where a pharmacist can refuse to fill a prescription just because they feel like it. First intelligent design, and now this?
The flying spaghetti monster is looking down on this and shedding a marinara tear.
And if “all life is sacred”, explain hunting, antifungals, antibacterials, antivirals, war, and the death penalty to me.

A true pioneer in the Civil Rights movement, Rosa Parks died today at the age of 92. Some people say she planned the whole thing to work out how it did.
In the end, does it matter? A lot of good came from her act. American businesses and governments were shown that discrimination would not be tolerated.
We need more Rosa Parks in the world.

I have a seminar with this guy tomorrow. I’m incredibly nervous.

I fixed my Mt. Trashmore Gallery as well.
I’m just on a roll, eh?
By the way, Mt. Trashmore is….a pile of garbage and soil, covered with grass.
I feel so podunk with that in my town.

I fixed my National Zoo Gallery too.
I love subethaedit’s find and replace features.

I fixed my Virginia Aquarium (caution, lame embedded music) gallery.

Here it is.

LINK

If you’re a fan of literature at all, and don’t feel like reading, then I would suggest getting the seanachai podcast. If you don’t know what a podcast is, then you’ve been living under a rock, obviously.

My gallery is open for registrations!
Give it a whirl.
No pr0n, 2257 and all.
CLICK HERE!

Apple announced a few updated products this past Wednesday. Full disclosure, I have and love a 12” 1ghz Powerbook G4. They bumped up the bus speeds, video cards, and pixel depth on their powerbook models, that’s probably the last bit of life that can be squeezed out of the G4, topping out at 1.5ghz, I’m not that impressed. What I’m really geeked for are the new G5 dual core processor Powermacs. For the uninformed, a dual core processor is basically like taking two processor’s brains, and sticking them on one chip, you can throttle the processing power, play solitaire on one while converting a video on the other, etc. Then I saw the dual dual-core 2.7ghz G5 Powermac. My jaw nearly hit the floor, that’s over 10ghz of processing power for around $3,000. I’m not sure about the video iPod, time will tell, but it’s Apple, so never count them out.
Aperture is not a photoshop killer, they can and should co-exist, it’s been a while since Adobe has had some real competition in the photo editing market, ever since they bought Macromedia.
My name is Rob, and I’m an Apple nerd.

Doesn’t he take the cutest mug shots?
But seriously, I don’t really think the charges can stick, they’re reaching for straws.
As left as I lean from time to time, I just can’t see myself fervently behind throwing him in jail for something that a couple of people working for him did. I don’t agree with a conspiracy charge, I think it’s a BS catch-all charge for when the powers that be have nothing concrete(think Martha Stewart).
He may be hypocritical and narcicisstic, but I don’t think he had anything to do with this.

Many great (and not so great) works of Literature are available online, via the Gutenberg project.
It saved me from buying a Pushkin compilation just for Pikavaya Dama.
If you have a PDA, you’ll especially want some of these for long commutes.

I’ll admit it, I used to think that people who played fantasy sports were mouthbreathing dullards.
This year, I decided to give it a shot.
It’s a geeks dream, you get to sit and look at numbers and compare and contrast, it’s great.
Plus you get to talk to people. You know, those pink, brown, yellow, red, etc, bags of flesh you see walking around, about yay tall?

San Diego Zoo Panda Cam.
I take no responsibility for any cuteness-induced vomiting.

I have no idea what it is, but glass bottles of Coca-Cola taste the best to me.

I have loved computers most of my life, starting with the Commodore 64.
They should be useful resources for the user, not crashy and insecure.
They are increasingly not depended on, and expected to fail.
I switched from Windows to Apple for this very reason. Things just work.
I am a Windows network administrator, and every day I grow more weary.
It seems every PC owner is inundated with spam, viruses, spyware, search toolbars, pop-up advertisements, etc.
When did this become the norm and accepted?
Why is such inferior, insecure technology allowed to thrive?
You would think that in our capitalist, free-market economy that an inferior product would be overlooked in favour of something better, but that has not been the case. More people are complaining, yet these are the same people who keep buying that same technology.
Actions speak louder than words. Don’t use Windows, switch to Linux or Apple. A monoculture is a very dangerous thing.
And how come it’s never called an “Internet Explorer bug” or a “Windows Vulnerability”, but “computer viruses” and “software vulnerabilities” and “Internet browser flaw”?

I have a flickr photo webpage, I’ve uploaded my (IMHO) best photographic work to it.
The link is over on the right, in my blogroll.
I’ll implement a gallery on this site shortly.