Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I think I've finally found a Presidential candidate that I can totally support.

LMFAO - after only 10,604 viewings, you-suck-my-tube has now decided to "reject" the "Barack Obama:He Completes Us" video that someone named "RugbyHoe" formerly posted at www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJEGmBlOTZY (but is curiously still currently available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E8DLooMxTU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3JR_Fvpy9o)

The good new is, "RugbyHoe" still has the orignal video and has consented to re-post it for you here (along with the email comments it recieved before the u2b gestapo yanked it) for your continued entertainment (note: requires Windows Media Player):

I know this copy of the video is of REALLY poor quality, but since I host my own website I need to keep my bandwidth levels fairly lean lest I piss off my Comcraptic ISP. That said, if you'd like the original high resolution version (~70 MB), feel free to download it from Obama Completes Us by right-clicking the link and selecting "Save Target As..."

The following are the comments this video received before it got deleted by the youtube_smokers:

The Daily Show strikes again!

Update: The tube smokers at youtube pulled the public posting, but guess what? You can still find it if you look over here

Thank God the Democrat National Convention is over. I only hope Mr. "my ego is too huge to fit in the Pepsi Center so let's go ahead and close the only north/south interstate highway in Colorado during rush-hour in Denver so I can give my acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium (which, technically speaking, no longer exists and is now a parking lot (that no one could actually use during the speech) at Invesco (which also no longer exists) Field)" and company dropped a ton of money in our local economy while they were here.

Good riddance...

Gotta love The Daily Show!

It seems our fair city is absolutely crawling with democrats. Anyone know a good pest removal service? This town needs a good fumigating.

I've never been a big fan of sports games on the XBox, but the cover of the newest edition of Madden Football releasing today made me laugh.

Oops. Maybe they'll send everyone that registers their game a little stick-on Jets uniform.

So it's what, day 5 of the Olympics? Here's my take so far:

• The US is apparently really good at swimming
• We suck at air pistol marksmanship (but do not underestimate the accuracy of, and willingness to use, our gun-powdered and rocket-propelled versions anywhere in the world)
• We can arbitrarily exceed or fail to meet expectations at gymnastics, inspecific of gender (but if those Chinese gals met the minimum 16 yr old age criteria I'll move to California and vote the Obama Bin Laden/Clinton ticket - I'm calling bullshit on that one)
• Synchronized diving is not a prime-time sporting event (supposedly this is also a gender specific event, but I got a very strong feeling that all parties involved were definitely in touch with their female sides and they should probably just do this one as a unisex thing, like wrestling)
• We whooped China's ass at hoops in front of over 1 billion viewers in their own hizzouse

and last, but certainly not least:

• Never. Ever. Give a sabre to a US woman.

I'm already pretty bored with the whole thing. And the fact that the Chinks hope all this brouhaha will help ease our concern over their behavior in places like Tibet and Darfur nauseates me. You could just as easily argue that Georgia (not the one by Alabama) and Russia are really the same thing.

Oh?

Wait.

Nevermind...

Please bear with me as I work on rolling out the new and improved home of Hopelessly Aporetic (lots of new geeky goodness here). There are still quite a few bugs to iron out so it's likely to be a little unsettled around here for a bit. I'll do my best to get stuff calmed down as soon as I can, but until then I am still pretty happy to have something running other than the IIS 7 default page...

[Update 1] - Finally got permalinks and comments working (I hope). A bit of a PITA trying to get this new dasBlog version working on IIS 7. First off there was no <modules> section under <System.webServer> in the web.config file, and then something called the "blowery.Web.HttpCompress.HttpModule" would throw an exception if you didn't end the url with a trailing "/" character (helloooo?), so I commented it out and so far so good (I hope). Next up, try to import all of my old content...

[Update 2] - W00T! (as in I am happy, not the recent and totally lame 2 day woot-off! that just ended with no 'banjo of consternation' being offered). The content import seems to have worked with nothing more than a couple of quick cut and paste operations from the old site. Next on tap will be some skinning love (obviously this plain vanilla wrapper just won't do, now will it?)...

So yesterday the Dumbocrats in the US House of Representatives proposed that the government should nationalize US oil refineries in order to "better control the flow of the oil supply."

This is such an obviously bad idea that it really doesn't merit further criticism from me. Perhaps we should let the Amish control the gas supplies instead...

So. I was just wondering how all the V1 iPhony owners are feeling about the latest news from [Cr]Apple?

Let's see, the V2 iPhone offers 3x better internet speeds and worldwide coverage via AT&Ts' 3G wireless service, opens up the OS for 3rd party apps (finally!), doubles the storage capacity (woohoo - 8 whole gigs, WTF? Why not 32 or 64? Is [Cr]Apple flash memory that special?), and it finally adds MS Exchange synchronization (the lack thereof was definitely one of the biggest show stoppers with V1 for me).

The best part? You'll be able get all this for about one-third of the $599 price tag that the original 4GB iPhone sported (of course, you'll eventually have to pay all of that discount and then some back to AT&T since their 3G data plan is $10 more per month than the EDGE plan - since you will get locked into a two-year plan, add $240 to the new lower price, and more if you want to add text messaging to your AT&T data plan).

I'll wager that all the early adopter fanboys are feeling really good about that decision to camp out at the [Cr]Apple store to snatch up one of those crippled, obsolete, V1 phones right about now. But at least it looks like they can get a firmware upgrade, which just shocks the hell out of me given [Cr]Apple's history of leaving users to swim in their own misery when it comes to OS upgrades - who knew?

Kind of ironic that their stock dropped 4% after the announcement too. I guess even the AAPL shareholders seem to be tiring of the way that bunch in Cupertino treats their loyal users. Can't say I didn't warn you though...

PS - and no, you won't find me queuing up with the rest of the rabble at the [Cr]Apple store on July 11.

The Colorado State High School Rugby Championships are being held tomorrow at the "First Municipal Rugby Stadium in the U.S.," and, since I've never been to Infinity Park Stadium before, I headed over to the online home of the Glendale Raptors to see if I could find a map. I found the map fine, but what stuck out the most on their website was this little chunk of the right-hand section of the home page.

Good Lord that's one ugly chick (probably of East German descent). If all the Glendale Womens' Raptors look like this they should probably win the Women's National Championship without any problems whatsoever...

The fine folks over at Microsoft Research have just opened up a way-too-cool new public beta for all of us astronomy geeks. It's called the WorldWide Telescope (or WWT for short).

Just WTF is WWT, you might ask? The answer to this question and many more can be found in the overview, but I've included a quick shot of the general description to get you started:

Long Zheng over at http://www.istartedsomething.com/ has already created a very nice tutorial that shows you how to do screen captures with WWT so you can create your own out-of-this-world desktop wallpapers.

Very cool stuff, I must say. Go download it now - you know you want to.

And no, Mac-boy, you can't play with it...

OK, I'll confess that I like the Justin Long "Get a Mac" ads as much as the next guy. I think some of them are actually pretty humorous - but I have to say that I am starting to get a little weary of them constantly bashing Vista's reliability in the latest round of ads to hit the tube. I realize that [cr]apple is doing anything they can to gain some traction in their hopeless war for market share with Microsoft, but I think some of the tactics they are using in their current ads are simply ridiculous. Either that, or I must be the only person in the world that is not having any problems with Vista, especially when it comes to reliability (as measured by continuous uptime in my geeky little mind).

Here is a screen clipping from my "daily-driver" PC at the office:

This screenshot was taken this morning after I installed the "Patch Tuesday" updates that downloaded overnight. No reboot necessary. This machine has been running without a reboot for close to 35 days and counting. The last time I had to reboot was on April 9th, and that was because I accidentally allowed Windows Update to apply a security patch for Office while I still had Outlook running - but that was my bad and not a "Vista reliability problem." Prior to that, the last time it was rebooted was when I installed Vista Service Pack 1 on February 21st. Before that, the last time I had to reboot this PC was when I needed to power it down to replace a failed graphics card back in mid-January - but once again, this was not due to a "Vista reliability problem," it was due to a hardware failure (so it would be more accurate to say this was a Diamond/ATI reliability problem). 

In the interest of full disclosure I do have to admit that this machine was suffering daily blue-screen crashes there for a while in early January. But those were being caused by the failing graphics adapter, and this behavior ceased when I disabled that device until I got a replacement (this PC has 2 graphics cards so it can run 3 or 4 monitors, and suffering with only 2 displays for a week was really painful). Vista reliability problem? Nope.

I realize there are folks out there that do have issues with Vista, and I do feel sorry for them. But part of me thinks that a lot of these problems are probably self-inflicted as well. Feel free to go get yourself a Mac if you think it will solve your problems with Vista (and you can afford one and don't mind never being able to upgrade the hardware). Just don't go quoting "Vista's reliability problems" as your excuse, it won't fly with me.

Performing "Sweet Home Alabama" with backup vocals by the Red Army Choir (yes that Red Army).

You just can't make this stuff up folks. Nikita Khrushchev is probably rolling over in his grave (not to mention poor Ronnie Van Zant).

Gotta love that hair too...

Meh, it's raining here today. Yes, it does actually rain in Colorado occassionally, but I can take some comfort in the fact that I know it is snowing in the foothills and mountains at elevations above 6,000 feet (or about 500 feet higher than my house). I actually like rain every now and again, but I am more of a thunder-boomer fan and this constant gloomy cold drizzly stuff we have been getting since last night is just downright unpleasant.

When we get thunderstorms, it usually rains like hell for a half hour or so, you get some wind (tornadoes are rare), a good light show, some big ka-booms, and then everything calms down again and the sun comes back out while the rainbows put on their finest colors. Generally this is not a problem (unless hail is involved or the power goes out). But when it rains slowly and constantly like today, it saturates the ground - and when the ground gets saturated in my yard, it decides to pool in one of my basement window wells. If it rains long enough, eventually the water will build up to the point that it will start to leak in from around the window sill. Not good, but it could be worse (there are 3 other wells that will stay dry, I just have the one trouble-maker).  

This is not entirely unexpected because it has occured about once or twice a year since I bought this house (and May is our rainiest month). My usual remediation plan is to use my shop-vac's pump feature to suck the water out before it gets high enough to infiltrate around the window, but I do have to keep vigilant when it starts happening because the well will refill to the fail-safe point about once an hour once it starts going. This routine usually works pretty well since it does not happen all that frequently, but it can definitely get old when I am still doing it at 1 or 2 in the morning. Plus the shop-vac is cumbersome, noisy, and bit of a pain to get setup for pump duty. Meh, again.

So when I woke up this morning and checked our "well," I was not terribly surprised to find that the water level had risen to about 1" below the bottom of the window. Having just suffered a major pain in my patoot with a broken drain line that flooded the basement floor a couple of months ago, I was not at all amused at the potential for more water down there today. Nor was I all that thrilled at the idea of having to possibly endure another marathon session with the shop-vac. Triple-meh.

So this time I decided to do something different and headed off to the Home Depot at 7:45 this morning (did you know that it is not very crowded there at all at this hour on a Tuesday? It was actually quite a pleasant experience - no parking hassles, now crowded aisles, no lines - just me and the contractors). There I plunked down $150 for a small submersible pump with a built-in sensor that automatically starts the pump-motor when water is detected, and shuts itself off once it has sucked it back down to a depth of about 1/4 inch.

All I had to do was connect it to a garden hose, place it in the window-well, plug it in, and watch it do its thing for a couple of run/stop/restart cycles to make sure that it was actually working as advertised. The well has already been sucked dry and seems to be staying that way. I can hear the pump cycle every 10 minutes or so, run for about 5 seconds, and then it goes back to sleep - with zero interaction on my part. I now have enough confidence in it that I could probably get by just forgetting about it until the weather passes (but since I'm so paranoid about water + basement combinations now, I'll still be checking on it every now and again just to keep my comfort level as high as possible - wouldn't want to get complacent now would I?).

Total time invested in my latest "water event"? A couple of hours, max. Not quite what I had in mind for spending some of that "economic stimulus" tax-rebate money we got last week, but it did buy me some precious peace of mind. And at this rate, I figure that the somewhat pricey little pump will have actually paid for itself in the form of "my-time-saved" by the end of the day (or at least by 1 or 2 tomorrow morning when I am not having to babysit the shop-vac).

I am thinking the next house I buy will be on stilts though. I've had it with "water features" in basements...

Want to get some fresh rock for your Zen or Zune (or God forbid, an iPod), for the price of just a little bandwidth?

Nine Inch Nails is following the precedent set by Radiohead and is offering up their new album, "The Slip," as a free download. You can choose to directly download an 87 Meg zipfile containing the album as high-bitrate MP3s, or you can use your favorite BitTorrent client to grab the tunes in CD quality FLAC or Apple