I will be the first to admit that this isn't too well thought out at the moment. But... I've been thinking about why the United States is so fractured politically right now. A lot of people on both sides put up a good talk about wanting to work together in non-partisan fashion, but it never really seems to work out either due to incompetence or corruption. While thinking about some of this I realized that what people in the United States really need is to define hard and fast goals that t

Am I just completely nuts, or has the world gone crazy? Read this then, tell me how someone who makes $110,000 a year (not me) could possibly afford a home that is $400,000+? How do people live these days? I have no problem revealing my stats because I don't particularly care. But... I make about $55,000 a year before taxes and I am just pushing the edge of my financial limits with a house that cost $137,00

Up front appy polly loggies: If you are offended by my miniscule trifles, sorry. BUt these really AREN'T any big deal at all.

Music playing in my head right now:
Dannii Minogue - Vibe On

(Chorus)
Plug it in give me my vibe on.
Give me vibrations.
That's what gets my ride on,
gotta have vibrations.
Jump on top it, sit right on it
Plug it in give me my vibe on,
gotta have viberations

Weather in my head:
65F/18C
Partly cloudy

This has to be the worst presidential campaign year I've witnessed to date. People are so heavily polarized that it ensures that no third party has a prayer of winning. The two candidates are complete jackasses. Bush will surely lead us further down the wrong path. Kerry will probably just be ineffective. It's a complete travesty. What to do, what to do?

Contrary to my earlier JE, I've decided that it is in the better interests of all considered that I change my SIG. I have put up a new SIG that better expresses reality than my old one. Go check it out...

Although I don't think Pudge is responsible for my bans as he can't possibly be THAT stupid. He isn't being straightforward either. Sure the post was "off topic", but how else am I supposed to find out what's going on with my account if no one's home at moderation@slashdot.org?

The SIG isn't going to change until operations in Iraq have reached the point where Iraqis can walk down the street to the local McDonald's and buy a McLis-san el Qathi with a stable currency and everyone can surf the web at typical DSL speeds in Iraq. Or... until I can be free to voice an anti-Republican stance without getting banned for it... Just put that in your pipe and smoke it.

There are also days that will live in infamy. First and foremost, there's Pearl Harbor. ;| Then there is the start of my IP bans from the bitches at Slashdot.

Anyway... my SIG is mostly in response to the atrocious bumper sticker that says, "If you love your freedoms, thank a Republican". Anyone with that on their car needs a bitchslap. All politicians on both sides are scumbags who should be tortured painfully. Especially Bush. In my opinion.

It appears that the powers that be at Slashdot have decided to let the ban on my subnet end. Let's see how soon my ban is re-instated after I change my sig back to:

"If you like dead soldiers, thank a Republican"

I'm starting to think that was the cause of the ban. Hehehe.. idiots.

I was raised in a fairly unusual way spiritually speaking. My mom was catholic and my dad was raised catholic but converted to the protestant faith in his 20s. I was sent to a catholic school, but my dad made sure we went to a First Assemblies of God protestant church (F.A.G. from here on out) on Sundays. My mom's sister was a Jehova's Witnesses member. She was "in the truth" unlike the rest of us "worldly" people. My aunt and my dad used to have long debates about why their chosen faith

This morning, while reading a comment in the Firefox hits 1,000,000 downloads thread, I was frustrated by the fact that the poster seemed to laud the concept of marketing as a tool for Firefox's success. Now I won't say that marketing doesn't play a part in moving product on a day to day basis, but marketing abuse is enormously distressing to me. From my perspective, marketing has been abused for a long time and it continues to get more and more onerous in it's approaches. With that said,

I think the time has come for reasonable, rational people who support a woman's choice to procreate (both birth control and termination) to deny loon-a-whack doctors and pharmacists with an anti-abortion stance access to our business on the grounds that we don't believe in withholding personal choice. *credit goes to wheany for first posting this story in his Journal.

If you are lucky enough to have an ssh shell account that is not in a banned subnet and the ssh server has tcp forwarding enabled, follow these simple steps to walk around the Slashdot subnet bans. This tutorial assumes that you are using openssh client on *nix:

1. Edit your /etc/hosts file and put:

127.0.0.1 slashdot.org
127.0.0.1 www.slashdot.org

First thought at the moment: my karma is going down, down, down... I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening just before the election season. I have a feeling that any right-wingers or people sympathetic to the current administration on /. are using their mod points in heavily political fashion right about now. Mostly in an attempt to silence the opposition. But take heart my friends, there are many more of us than there are them both here and in the r