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The Torgo Forums
While trying to find a nice poll script the other day, I ended up stumbling some forum/bbs scripts, so I decided to try to implement one. I ended up going with CuteCast, as it's free and it runs well on my web server (which has an older version of perl). While it's not officially open, it is fully functional... I'm thinking very few people will ever use it, but we'll see how it goes. At any rate, feel free to take a look around, and if you feel so inclined, setup an account!
I was listening to Rush Limbaugh while driving to lunch today, as I often do, and there was an interesting caller.
Apparently Rush was asking for someone supporting Kerry to give good, strong reasons they support him. He managed to get a caller, who had given a couple reasons by the time I started my car. I was able to get the gist of reasons. The ones I heard were: So, basically he gave what he felt was solid reasoning not to support Bush, but quite literally didn't give a single reason as to why Kerry was the one he supported. I think there is a vast majority of people out there who support Kerry under the same pretense... To boil it down, if Charlie Manson was the only person running against Bush, the liberals would support him... To put it another way, the main reason Kerry got the nomination instead of Howard Dean was because Kerry didn't yelp. Now I'm wondering how many people will vote for Kerry without knowing anything he plans on doing if he's elected... [EDIT] I'm adding this because I found confirmation in the public media that in fact indicates the backing behind Kerry is solely due to the fact that: ...at least he's not George W. Bush. So if you thought everything I said above the [EDIT] was wrong, here is direct evedence from the media... People support Kerry solely because he's not Bush... So the issue of who Kerry is or what he stands for, and what he'll do takes a back seat to this one point...
Most of you out there are familiar with Howard Dean's infamous scream. The one that is believed to have cost him the democratic nomination. The time it occured was shortly after Apple's release of Garage Band, and it was likely the main reason for a huge boom in Dean Remixes.
At any rate I took a stab at a remix of my own back then. I don't know if anybody ever actually listened to it or not. Being I found out I left it online the other day, I figured I'd link it from my blog (since I don't believe I ever did). It's a little outdated at this point, but what the heck, you know... This was my first, and so far only, released track. It's not great, but being I have absolutely NO music experience, not too bad... Mad How.mp3 (1.6 MB)
Tempest in a Specialty IPod Case
This is something I've been familiar with for some time, and wanted to give a little input. The first case I got for my origional iPod was an iSkin. I mainly liked the plastic cover with the loop for a wrist strap. Later on, however, iSkin released it's cases without a wrist strap loop. Instead, they expected users to put a metal belt clip on the back of the case to attach a strap. My problem with this is that I had no intetion of adding a big hunking metal strip just to add a strap. I emailed iSkin commenting about this, and they NEVER responded (this was a couple years ago at this point). I then found Xskn. In the beginning I did get confused due to the 2 companies using the same names for their cases. After some time reading about them, I now understand what's going on. I did buy an Xskn, since it had everything I was looking for (everything = wrist strap loop on side of case). Also there was one other neat feature: Since the 3G (Third Generation) iPod has all touch sensitive surfaces, the Xskn case has a covering completely over all the buttons & scroll wheel. This is kind of neat, because the buttons are fully protected, yet they still are touch sensitive... iSkin recently released a new line of iSkins called Evo. And while the material used to make them is nice, they still expect you to use the big metal clip to use a wrist strap. I still don't understand the theory behind this. If I use a wrist strap, why would I need a belt clip? If I use a belt clip, why would I need a strap??? That would be like someone writing the combination to a pad lock on the pad lock so they can be sure they don't forget it... They also don't protect the touch responsive surfaces like the Xskn does... The case I got is the Xskn 3. It's made of a very thin plastic material. I want to order an Xskn 2 to replace it, however, because they are much thicker. It will protect the iPod better than the Xskn 3. The Xskn 3 retails at around $10, which is less than half the price of the Xskn 2's, and the iSkins... However, for now I think I'll just stick with my Xskn 3... It does it's job very well...
This is old, but I just ran across it today...
I couldn't stop laughing. Either this photographer is the dumbest, or the smartest in the world. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040703/photos_ts/mdf617846
I think Teresa Heinz Kerry's words make a great slogan for the Kerry campaign...
Kerry/Edwards: Shove It!
I've had several people emailing me & posting here for invites. Please note: I HAVE NO MORE!!!
If I did I would continue to give them out the way I did... EMailing me asking for an invite will not get you one, regardless... But again, I have no more and believe I won't be getting any more, so I cannot send any to anyone anyway...
FOXNews.com - Views - Tongue Tied - Very Bad Hair Day, Condi's Cartoon...
What is this??? Sen. Sheila Kuehl said it was 'painful to hear the governor resort to such blatant homophobia.' How is this blatant homophobia? I really don't see a connection here... As a matter of fact, the ONLY connection appears to be that the democrats have somehow equated the phrase to homosexuals. So who are the real homophobes I ask???
Island airport wants its share of John Kerry catering bill
This is kind of interesting... Apparently John Kerry believes he's above almost everybody who's ever visited Cape Cod... "Apparently they don't feel like he needs to pay fees to the airport," Peterson said. "I gather the senator objects to that because his aide quoted him as saying that he already pays taxes on the island." I never realized before just how high up Kerry & his own staff feel Kerry is... So much for Kerry understanding average Americans...
Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
Of corse it is The title & first sentence of this article says it all... I've nothing to add...
Heinz Kerry to Reporter: 'Shove It'
This is interesting... "We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics." Don't you love when someone speaking says something, then moments later denies it, then tells that person to Shove it!? I always find it amusing when they are quoted, yet deny that's what they say... It's one thing to just deny you said something you did (many of us will say things and not remember our exact words). But then telling someone to Shove it afterwards is just icing on the cake...
If you've visited this blog in the past, or if you've navigated through my archives, you may have run across my picture of Ronald Reagan's Hurst, from when he was being taken back to The Reagan Library in Simi Valley for his sunset funeral service.
This is an update of sorts to that. I'm posting that picture in higher resolution, and along with it I'm including a picture of myself, taken by a friend from my Career Fellowship group. The run in with him was purely coincedental. He also got a video with is camera, that I've edited in iMovie. I've titled it "Reagan's Last Journey To Simi Valley". It's encoded in RealVideo... It's my first creal creation with iMovie, and I believe it's not half bad. Twards the end of the motorcade, there was a second hurst, which you can clearly see in the video. You can actually hear me and a couple other people talking about it, wondering which one was the one with Reagan. I made the comment that the first hurst had American flags. The people talking said they didn't see flags. You can clearly see from the picture I took, and in the video, that I was right... Though it has nothing to do with the timing, this post is coinciding with the date of the return of the USS Ronald Reagan. 
Reagans Last Journey.rm (6.5 MB)
I finished something today that I've been meaning to do for some time. I went though all my older posts & added a Title to them. I had done almost half before, but finally went though and did the rest... If you happend to link to any of them, you may need to re-link now...
I also removed 5 or so older posts. I kind of argued with myself but it was easier to remove them they trying to make them fit in. However if for some reason you have an urge to see them, you can probably find a copy of most/all of my older posts on Archive.org. That's the only hint I'm giving...
What right does anybody to have to protect a peoples civil rights at the cost of other civilians lives???
I can't believe I'm even feeling compelled to write about this. There is a controversy in California (my home state) about the Govinator's use of the term "Girly Men" in referring to democrats holding out for special interests. Mainly in that they are being weak in not telling the people that the only thing they are holding out for is special interests, not "the little guy"...
And the fact that the term means weak was not something cooked up by Arnold, for those of you who haven't been around so long, it came from a Saturday Night Live skit featuring "Hans & Frans" who were "Austrian body builders". The thing was a spoof of Arnold Schwarzenegger. His use of the term was in direct reference to this spoof (spoof the spoof). He would have NEVER used this term if it didn't come directly from the reference. It was directly from here, and if the "Hans and Frans" bit were spoofing someone other than Arnold, he wouldn't have used it... One amazing thing pointed out on The O'Reilly Factor, NONE of these complaining Democrats said anything about Whoopi Goldberg's little "Bush" rant at the Kerry fund-raiser... Basically this outburst is yet another partisan attack put forth by the Democrats...
I went to get lunch today at the Panda Express near my work. There were 3 guys in front of me ordering food "to go"... As I was waiting in line, the line was growing fairly rapidly...
I asked for the items & got my plate, I then stood looking at the 3 guys in front of me floating all over the place, standing in nothing resembling a line, looking like they were waiting for an item to be finished (like they ordered egg rolls, but there were none left so they had to wait for them to finish making them). There was one person at the register, and they were being handed their change at the time I looked over... I made the assumption that these 3 were obviously not waiting to pay, because of the meandering formation they were standing in. So I then traversed the 3 person obstacle coarse, and proceeded to move behind the person who was paying. The guy standing back against the wall then walked up, and said "we're in line"... The only problem is that the one thing each of these guys was not, was in a line... There is a reason it's called a "line". This guy talked to me like I was rude to "walk in front of him" (which I shouldn't have been able to do if he was in fact standing in the line). I don't even think these guys realized that they were the rude ones, there were at least 10 people behind me by the time I got to the register, and half of those people would have been given their food and would have been ready to pay if these 3 guys weren't taking up so much room standing in their idea of a "line"... Just a hint guys: If you're next in line, try standing in the line at that point to make it obvious. Being you weren't wearing name tags, or identifying T-Shirts, I didn't realize you were in fact the founding members of The "What Line?" Idiots...
Restore Honesty
This is rather interesting. Joe Wilson stated that Bush's statement in the State of the Union address about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium was a lie. He stated his own investigations proved it... This web site, which you can clearly see at the bottom of the page is "Paid for by John Kerry for President, Inc." in fact does many things, however Restoring Honesty is NOT one of them. In fact, the claims by Joe Wilson have been proven to be untrue, and directly contradicted by his own words... Joe Wilson claimed his own investigations proved that there was no attempt by Iraq to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger. However some of his own reports directly contradict this. The Bipartisan committee found that there is in fact evidence to support the clam. Briton is releasing a report of their own confirming Iraq's attempt to obtain the uranium is fully backed up by the evidence... What's even more interesting however, is the fact that several links on the "Restore Honesty" web site, which originally redirect to pages on JohnKerry.com, now link to nothing. For instance, the link for "What I Didn't Find in Africa - By Joe Wilson (The New York Times)" redirects to a page which is basically a 404 error: You have requested a page that has a broken link or is not on the site... Basically Kerry is now distancing himself from Joe Wilson. However, being that the Restore Honesty web site is directly funded by Kerry's election campaign, I think he's got a difficult time ahead of him... However, the liberally biased media will probably greatly help him in his quest...
I just wanted to put a post about my trials of spam blocking.
For the last several months I had used a service called MessageFire, which costs around $5 a month. This service adds a header tag to my email containing JUNK for spam, and MAIL for non-spam. The header tag is also followed by a link which will allow me to re-categorize the email if it was tagged incorrectly. For a very long time, the service worked relatively well, however over the past few months I've noticed a growing number of messages sneaking though... Interestingly enough, the service was taken over by a new company a couple months ago, called MessageGate. I *think* they dropped individual accounts when they did this, though they allowed those that do subscribe to continue their accounts. With the number of spam messages that sneak through getting larger, I decided it was time to find a new service. I ran across SpamCop, for around $20-$30ish a month. It uses 2 services, both SpamCop's black list of sending domains, and SpamAssassin, a highly praised baysen [sp?] filter. When I started using SpamCop, I set my MessageFire account to disabled. After a day, I was finding somewhere near 40-50 messages a day getting though!!! I couldn't believe it. My only option would have been to turn down the reliability of SpamAssassin. I did NOT want to do this, however, due to the fact that when I emailed myself, each email had a rating of 5, the minimum I had SpamAssassin set to... So I tried something drastic. I re-enabled MessageFire, and began using both MessageFire and SpamCop (with SpamAssassin) at the same time. Since, I've been quite amazed by the accuracy. I'm averaging 1-5 spam messages getting though, though my level of non-spam being marked has gone up from 0 to 0-1 a day... I really don't like using 2 services (of which I both have to pay for), however, as of now it's my most reliable option... If anybody out there has any suggestions outside of MessageFire, SpamCop, and SpamAssassin (without the use of an external program or plug in), PLEASE let me know about it!!!
Check it out, Communist Party USA backs Kerry...
CPUSA Online Commies for Kerry does sound about right... Maybe he should start using the slogan...
Canadian Health Care: Dear America...
Last week John Kerry called for a national healthcare system in the U.S., like the one in Canada. If you Americans are planning to institute a national universal healthcare system similar to ours, you might want to look somewhere other than Canada for the ideal model... Having personally required much medical care, I can tell you many of these scenarios are terrifing... I had private insurnace to cover many of my procedures, but my most recent battle with a severe infection in the hospital (so severe in fact that my family was told I was going to die, and the doctors litarally did nothing the first several days I was there) occured under a different plan, where my coverage was no where near as good as before... I am currently working on paying off what wasn't covered by the insurance, and will probably continue for quite some time... Had the situation been such that nobody could attend to me, I very likely wouldn't be here today. While I'm struggling to pay off thoes medical procedures now, in the grand scheme it seems like a small price to pay...
These pictures were from a couple days ago. I took them during my lunch break. This was a Sig Alert that was right next to my work on the 101 freeway. From what I can tell, a moving type truck (smaller than a full sized big rig) fell over the center divider. I got the first picture from behind it, and the second was literally on the complete opposite end. I think you can even see where I was standing when I took the first picture in the second... The second is very blurry, however, due to me trying my cameras digital zoom. Note to self: Never use my camera's digital zoom, it sucks...
My main reason for posting these is a new photo service I'm trying. Please let me know if the images appear broken or anything...
iMac 3rd Quarter Conference Call
Being an owner of one share of Apple Stock, I do like to get an idea of how the company is doing. Of coarse my devotion & fondness of Apple products probably plays a role in this too... There is an interesting tidbit that came out of it, however... Shipments of G5-based Power Macs were very constrainted due to CPU supply problems from IBM. Apple said the same constraints were the major factor in the forthcoming G5-based iMac... So, the new iMac that has been rumored about all over the place (mainly due to Apple cutting off shipment of current model iMacs, a very predictable indication that something is coming), and later confirmed by Apple (with absolutely no details, however) is waiting on more G5 chips to begin shipping... I'm actually very amazed, I think this is the quickest turn around between new chip release and iMac inclusion... Of coarse taken in to the fact that there have only been 2 previous chips ever in an iMac, it's not like the opportunity comes around very often...
This is a reply to a comment to another post. It was posted anonymously, however based on the wording I do have a guess as to who posted it... It's either someone I know very well, or it's just some anonymous web surfer (who needs to work on their english)...
HELLO....... JUST WONDERING AROUND YOUR WEBSITE. I've had my website (torgo.org) for many years at this point (I think since 1998)... I've always seen web design as kind of a hobby (thought it's also now what I do for a living). My bigest problem on my site is my tendency to go so long without updating it... My blog was actually derived from my old "What's New?" page. You can see a REALLY old version of it on archive.org: http://www.torgo.org/new.html [I just read this and realize just *how* old this is. This is right after I started my new job. This is the company I'm still working for, only I'm doing intranet stuff now (so I am doing web development)...] Anyway, I used blogger a year or two ago & set it's layout to be identical to the one shown on the "What's New" page. Starting a couple months ago, I finally decided to make my page full fledged blog... I tried to look at common layouts for blogs and worked off of them. I acutally did not base my blog on any layout, and pretty much started hammering the code out myself... I've been fairly constantly looking for features & stuff I could add... I'm also trying not to add way too much at the same time... I have a couple features that I have added the Code/HTML for, but commented out (hid) them in the code. The only one I can think of right now is the code to translate the page into other languages using Babelfish... Eventually I should get bored with updating the layout, or simply run out of things to change, at which point the layout will pretty much become permanent...
I've added a Shoutbox to the side bar of my Blogger Main Page. You can now post general comments, questions, insults (please don't be overly rude), or anything else you would like!!! Comments to posts should go with posts (as this keeps everything easier to reference). It's only on the bar when on the main blogger page due to limited space in the sidebar on individual blogs & archives...
Well, there are no more GMail account invites left...
The one I had left was given to a friend... If I get any more I will post them here, but I don't know how likely I will be to get anymore... Sorry...
FOXNews.com - Foxlife - 'Outfoxed' Attempts to Show FOX News' Bias
"What we found is not that FOX is a conservative network, but that it's a network that follows the party line of the Bush administration" Really? Hmmm, wonder what would happen if a conservative were to make the same type of video about MSNBC or CNN...
I ment to get to this sooner, but here it is never the less...
Account Taken! Again, the ONLY thing I ask in return is a reply to this post from whoever gets the invite. You can post anonymously (and everybody to date has). Again, I will get a confirmation when you activate the account with your email address included, so you can't get the invite & completely hide your identity from me!!! The link to reply to this topic is direclty below my name under the post. It takes all of 2 seconds to do, so I don't think it's asking too much...
I saw this in the store the other day and started cracking up... I almost bought it... He's always made me laugh for some reason, but then again, I'm not the only one... http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/
Please take part in my poll poll!!!
I have 2 more invetations to give out, comming to this blog very soon!! Keep you eyes peeled!!!
I've cleaned up my layout a little more. The main change is, if you look, there is now empty space beneth the sidebar. This little mod acutally solved a few problems for my layout... Namely there's a nice dashed line beneth the main date title... Also smilies now properly line up at the end of lines on Apple's Safari browser...
I want to find some nice manner of displaying the date down the side of posts, but weather I'll do that or not, I don't really know... I also feel I want to use up all that empty space below the sidebar, but I havn't quite come up with a what or how... Though I'm kinda leaning twards adds at this very moment (the idea just jumped in my head)...
FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - U.N. Court: Israel Should Stop Building Barrier
The highest U.N. court ruled Friday that Israel's planned 425-mile-long barrier in the West Bank violates international law... But apparently homicide bombing is OK I guess...
FT.com / World
This was something I thought people should read. Wonder if this will ever make it into main stream media... A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger. Basically the article says that there is in fact solid evidence to support the claim made in Bush's State of the Union speech was in fact truthful. It said that though the quote was primarily derived from forged documents: The UK government has remained adamant that negotiations over sales did take place and that the fake documents were not part of the intelligence material it had gathered to underpin its claim. For quite some time the statement in Bush's speech was basis for claims that The President Lied, and that This claim was a major selling point for the war. What will these claims mean if in fact this evidence does support this (and the story quite conclusively states this fact)?
Yahoo! News - Apple hits back at Sony's 'misleading' Walkman marketing
I thought this was rather interesting. I hadn't been paying any attention to Sony's player (after all, I am an iPod owner, and the one I have now is my second iPod). When I read the first few lines of this story, I was full of ridicule for Sony's tactic... To put it simply, Sony has stated their new 20 GB "MP3" Player (MP3 is in quotes, because this is not the format used on the player, but puts the concept into perspective) is capable of holding 13,000 songs. This, they say, beats the iPod, which currently advertisers holding up to 10,000 songs (on Apple's 40GB iPod). This would set their 20 GB player at holding 5,000 songs. So basically Sony is saying their 13,000 song player trumps Apple's 10,000 song iPod... To clarify how encoding works, I will use a reference many are familiar with. If you recall recording TV shows using a VCR, you probably remember that there are usually 3 settings of recording quality. The high quality gives better picture & sound, however it only allows a total of 2 hours per video tape. The low quality setting allows 6 hours to be recorded on the tape, however the picture is blurry and the sound is staticy. The same type of thing happens with MP3... At high quality the music is much clearer, but the file itself is much larger. At a lower setting the file is smaller, but the song sounds worse. So if you encode an MP3 at a high rate, say 340Kbps, the MP3 file's size would be at around 7MB. Take that same song and encode it at around 128Kbps, and the MP3 is now only 4MB in size, but the sound quality isn't as good. So basically there is a trade off between file size and sound quality... So, what's happening is this: Apple says their 40GB iPod will hold 10,000 songs. This is assuming all the songs are encoded with AAC (a format like MP3) at 128Kbps. This rate is a good trade off between size & quality. All my songs are encoded at this level, and they all sound fine to me. This is also the rate that all the songs on the iTunes Music Store are encoded at. Sony, on the other hand, is measuring the size of their player using their proprietary encodes of ATRAC3 (another format similar to MP3) of a rate of 48Kbps. In this manner the songs are much smaller, however, the sound quality is terrible!!! There is probably nobody who uses Sony's player and encodes at this level... This level is the lowest possible setting, and is around 1/3 the default setting Sony uses!!! Using the same tactic, you could argue the 40GB iPod holds around 80,000 songs!!! This would be done by setting iTunes to encode at Apple's lowest possible setting of 16Kbps. The end result, however, would sound worse than music on an AM radio!!! I can't believe Sony is doing this... Next they're going to say the player last 5 times longer than the iPod on a single battery charge, if you keep the volume completely off!!!
I woke up early on the morning of Saturday, July 3rd '04 with information that "something had happened to my car".
I walked out to look at my car and saw the following: 
If you can't clearly see everything, there are 3 main things on my car... The white lines are shaving cream, there is dark blue halloween makeup type stuff along the driver side window, and there is red hair powder spray... I was fortunate that nothing on the car did any damage. A kid from a few doors down said the police were in my neighborhood and had found the kids who had done this & much more... I quickly learned they had done this to around 7 cars or so, and had gone much further with other cars. This includes (to my understanding) keying some cars & even popping some tires... The kids came & washed my car, they were in the 12 years old range. I didn't really feel mad, but I don't know if it would have been any different if they had actually done some damage. It's also my understanding that they did get into a lot of trouble for what damage they did to other's cars...
Yes, here is yet another account! I have two more besides this one currently, and currently no friends to give them to... So they *may* end up here as well!
Again all I ask for giving whom ever gets this account is a comment to this post (there's an Add Comment link right below my signature on this post) letting me know you got the account. And again, the post can be completely anonymous (every other person who got an account has posted anonymously). And also, again, I will know your email address when you sign up, so you can't exactly hide from me completely... Account Taken! |
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