Category: Uncategorized

No lie – This is cool

Google has introduced a new customized home page.
You can add their content from a number of outlets, or select customized sections and add news about whatever your heart desires.
Once you pick your content, you can drag and drop the boxes all over the page to organize them how you want them.
I think I’ll set mine to my browser home for a while and see how I like it.
Normally I have mine set to a customized news page. But this other option looks like it could be the best of both worlds.
Google continues to amaze with their ways to organize information.

Facebook is not just an addiction–it’s a disease

While trying to figure out what all the fuss about facebook.com was, I found this news story linked to on their site. It’s interesting because to me, it’s knockin’ the service, but I guess even bad publicity can still be good publicity.

So here is what I say to you all of you who sit at your computers and check away messages and stalk the guy you saw at Hokie Grill once — stop living like this. I’m convinced that we could fritter our whole lives sitting in front of the computer screen. What we need to do is ask ourselves this question: “What will happen when all of my buddies are away, or when the Internet connection cuts short.” We need to face it and realize that life doesn’t happen on a computer screen, that having 202 friends on Facebook doesn’t make you cool.

BTW: I’ll give a better update on this weekend probably sometime on Monday (during normal daylight hours).
I’m pretty pooped and just wanted to check email and a couple blogs before heading to bed.
So now that that’s done – I’m off to bed.
[]Deace

Hokey Pokey

I just wanted to let you all know:

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment,
it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person which
almost went unnoticed last week.

Larry La Prise, the man who wrote “The Hokey Pokey” died peacefully at
age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into
the coffin. They put his left leg in, and then the trouble started.”

You know it’s funny.

From Canada, with love

George Bush, the man
David Warren
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, September 11, 2005
There’s plenty wrong with America, since you asked. I’m tempted to say that the only difference from Canada is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course — I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.
But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn’t even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being that, when you’re in real trouble, that’s where the adults live.
And that isn’t an exaggeration. Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard. Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt.-Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.
We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another that has cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don’t have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.
From Democrats and the American Left — the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada — we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed that a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.
This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing and receive food stamps, prescription medicine and government support through many other programs. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, without input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses that could have driven them out of town parked in rows, to be lost in the flood.
Yes, that was insensitive. But it is also the truth; and sooner or later we must acknowledge that welfare dependency creates exactly the sort of haplessness and social degeneration we saw on display, as the floodwaters rose. Many suffered terribly, and many died, and one’s heart goes out. But already the survivors are being put up in new accommodations, and their various entitlements have been directed to new locations.
The scale of private charity has also been unprecedented. There are yet no statistics, but I’ll wager the most generous state in the union will prove to have been arch-Republican Texas and that, nationally, contributions in cash and kind are coming disproportionately from people who vote Republican. For the world divides into “the mouths” and “the wallets.”
The Bush-bashing, both down there and up here, has so far lost touch with reality, as to raise questions about the bashers’ state of mind.
Consult any authoritative source on how government works in the United States and you will learn that the U.S. federal government’s legal, constitutional, and institutional responsibility for first response to Katrina, as to any natural disaster, was zero.
Notwithstanding, President Bush took the prescient step of declaring a disaster, in order to begin deploying FEMA and other federal assets, two full days in advance of the stormfall. In the little time since, he has managed to co-ordinate an immense recovery operation — the largest in human history — without invoking martial powers. He has been sufficiently presidential to respond, not even once, to the extraordinarily mendacious and childish blame-throwing.
One thinks of Kipling’s poem If, which I learned to recite as a lad, and mention now in the full knowledge that it drives postmodern leftoids and gliberals to apoplexy — as anything that is good, beautiful, or true:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise…
Unlike his critics, Bush is a man, in the full sense presented by these verses. A fallible man, like all the rest, but a man.