Obama on the Daily Show Freakout
I could not stomach watching Obama’s self-admitted infomercial. I did watch the Daily Show, which had him as a “Very special guest.” uhh!
I kind of like the Daily Show, but they do lean to the left. My Mom watches it, and she got me into it, but sometimes its left-leaning tendencies do get on my nerves, especially tonight. They just treated everything like a big joke ha ha. Socialism? Marxism? Haha! Only a few Sean Hanity fans say that. The establishment has used the two-party duopoly to marginalize thee threat. Now I understand why everyone just laughs when some people rightfully in my opinion call Obama a socialist. They laugh because the stupid TEEVEE tells them too! OBAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaama! “He’s the next Abe Lincoln!” “I’m adoring you for no good reason!”
After that freakout, I watched a little of the Colbert Report. This show tries to have a conservative appeal, but it still enslaves people to the left, again through marginalization. I see McCain as a dead horse, his campaign the manager of a tired old fighter taking a dive in the fifth. Hold your nose! These Obama thugs will drown a dissident in their own toilet without question.
How ’bout those Phillies!
I live in Philadelphia, and the Phillies just won the World Series in game five.
And this matters why? I DO NOT CARE! It affects nothing! Bread and circus! Yeehaw! Who cares! Wwwwwwwwwwwooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Go Phillies! I only care because now they will stop preempting the Simpsons. I guess it does the city some good to win it, and I hope people feel good, but…….. IT DOES NOT MATTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We have an election in less than a week. Does that matter as little, thanks to electronic voting? Has everything become reduced to a sporting event to pacify the commoners? I hope not! Go Phillies!
By the way, I turned on the radio, and the Mayor announced that they will have a Parade on Friday, and have a Press Conference about that Tomorrow! Wooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! So so important. I need a woman.
Obama Nonsense
I saw (or should I say heard) an Obama commercial. It showed a website that would show you how much money you would supposedly save with Obama’s tax plan over McCain’s. Of course, they did not verbally say the URL. Little things like this really get me, and I can’t help but extrapolate a pattern.
It reminds me of my all-time favorite accessibility story. I went to visit a friend and to go to a Reverse Speech convention in San Diego. The convention took place at a hotel in a nearby city, so we journeyed there with his Dad. When we arrived on the floor with our room, my friend noticed brailled signs by each room. “Look at this.” he said excitedly, and put my hand on one. He assumed, as did I, that the sign would say the room number. I read the sign, and it took a moment to fully register. Then, I started cracking up! “What? What does the sign say?” my friend asked. It said: NO SMOKING! I said: “Well, I don’t know where we are, but I know we can’t smoke!” which of course we wanted to do at the earliest opportunity. We went down the hall and sure enough, on every door: NO SMOKING!
To understand the real humor of this, you have to know braille, specifically Grade II Braille. Braille has cells, and each cell has a character. Each character can have a letter, or a special character such as a numbersign or contraction. To capitalize a word, you put a cell with a single dot in the sixth position before the first character. This just capitalizes the first character, suitable for literary works. To make a word completely capitalized, you put two dot sixes before it, using two cells. In other words, for the first word “NO” you first have two cells each with a dot six before it, making the whole word four cells, doubling its length. You get another dot six for the S in Smoking, and the exclamation point at the end takes another cell. You can use the -ing contraction for “Smoking!” making the word seven cells. This wastes four cells in total. A braille reader would write it as “no smoking” using eight characters as opposed to twelve.
Such mindlessness immediately calls to mind the mindlessness of bureaucracy, and why socialism ultimately fails. Don’t buy in to the hype! Obama, when asked about the flat tax, said he’d like to see around forty percent. His Father apparently said a hundred percent. We have a week until the election. May Goddess protect us!
Why I wrote in Ron Paul
I filled out my absentee ballot, and wrote in Ron Paul. Friends have had mixed reactions, and I have had mixed feelings as well, but what has happened has happened.
I began campaigning for Ron Paul in May when I joined the Philly Meetup. On July Fourth, I met someone and we started Ron Paul Radio. The campaign took all of us through ups and downs. When I could not even vote for Ron Paul in the primaries because the computer had me listed as a registered democrat, I felt so enraged. You can search for my article on that here. I did so much, gave so much time and emotion, so it just felt like the right thing to do. I had not read of Ron Paul’s endorsement of Chuck Baldwin, nor had I seen Chuck Baldwin in the third party debate. If I had, he may have very well gotten my vote.
Of course, the fact that Pennsylvania uses fraudulent electronic voting machines sort of makes the whole thing up in the air.
The FiOS Chronicles
I will chronicle my experience with FiOS. I just got it installed yesterday. Verizon FiOS provides a fiber optic line right to the house. The technology has moved a rung down the social ladder. As a kid, I remember long distance telephone companies advertising that they now use whisper-quiet fiber optic lines, and now the end user has this technology.
I can’t believe I’ve gone to Verizon for my Internet, but there you go. A guy called and told me I could get 20mbps down, and 5 mbps up, upgradable to 20 mpbs up. That sounded great, plus telephone and television would all come on one bill. I love Speakeasy, but they have a nightmare accounting department, and I just can’t battle with them every month. Mom got FiOS and loves it, though of course we have very different computer usage patterns. I held my nose and entered the labyrinth of Verizon FiOS!
I wanted a static IP of course, since I actually do things. I also didn’t want any port restrictions, which a tech support person confirmed exist – port 80 outgoing and port 25 incoming. Nice. So beware: if you actually use your Internet connection for servers, you’ll want the business FiOS Internet, as opposed to the residential FiOS Internet. You will still want residential television and telephone services, however. This makes things nice and confusing. Originally, the guy pitching the promotion told me I could get all three for $145 or so. I asked about getting a static IP and he said I just had to call ahead of time. Wrong’o! I called over the weekend before the installation date, and they told me that I needed the business Internet. They had to cancel my original order, then make separate business and residential orders, then join them together on the same day, moving it back to the morning. So now with the services as described I pay around $200 for all three.
I feel amazed at the Internet speeds. The business connection gives a guaranteed speed, and it appears to deliver on that. The telephone sounds great. I worried that they’d just use some crappy Vo/IP, but they assured me that they use real fiber optics, suitable for data use even. I do feel worried that it has a battery backup, giving me eight hours of talk time. If the world comes to an end I won’t have telephone. It sounds great, noticeably better than copper. The same applies to the television, going from old-style Comcast crappy cable to fiber offers a vast improvement in audio. I don’t care about picture. I don’t care about HD! I feel absolutely overwhelmed with the television channels and can actually use the DVR to at least pause and rewind shows in real-time. This takes the stress away of missing your favorite show. Too bad as a blind user I can’t access the nifty neato functions which require using a menu. Come on, guys!
I do have to bring up another issue for tech savvy folk: the moronic router they tell you that you have to use. Don’t you believe it, though I still do as I write this, that may soon change. Sure it works, but I have already started getting errors going to one of my machines. I also had some trouble changing the initial admin password, which annoyed me, so we had to reset it, then reenter in everything, which necessitated a call to tech support. We had to enter in the info in the Ethernet as opposed to the Coax network, if that saves someone out there some trouble. I also felt confused by the port forwarding setup. Protocols have rules, and you have to configure it from the point of view of the router, i.e. you want to configure the incoming ports for most services. You then have to go and apply the rules, the protocol, then go back and select your protocol in the forwarding rule, then apply that and then apply your changes to the application which you have just applied. It always bothers me when designers
try to make something for advanced users so simple that a fool can use it, but obfuscate it so those of us who know what we want to do and how we want it done can’t. Give me some textfiles and a simple console interface any day!
Despite all this router monkey business, I definitely love the speeds I have started getting. I started downloading a 10GB torrent at around 1500KBPS at its peak! wow! amazing! I remember getting DSL for the first time, and a friend downloading music with Napster, and us feeling amazed that we’d get speeds around 100K. Now it has moved to the next level. Just watch that router, and to quote Hunter THompson: “Don’t take any gup from those swine!”