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User Journal

Journal Journal: Thoughts for the Day... 11

Jeb Bush is the candidate for Republican Primary Voters who want to vote for a less masculine version of Hillary Clinton.

Speaking of Hillary... KFC has a new "Ready For Hillary For Lunch!" promo - you get a box containing two huge thighs, two small breasts, and a left wing. You have to bring your own server though.

Barack Obama completed his NCAA bracket. Joe Biden completed the NIT bracket. In it, he has the Dallas Cowboys beating Manchester United in the Final game.
User Journal

Journal Journal: This one's for the Protestants here... 11

As many of you know, I'm an avid reader - books, blogs, even the cesspool that is comments on news stories.

One thing that I've seen a lot of lately is the typical canard that "the Spirit of God left the Catholic Church centuries ago".

If that were true, my dear protestant brethren (and I'm not being sarcastic, you guys are dear to me, I just want you to come home to the Catholic Church), then please explain to me how:

The Episcopal Church, The Anglican Church, and now the Presbyterian USA church, along with some Lutheran Churches and some Methodist churches are coming out and blessing same sex "marriage".

This completely flies against Scripture.

It's a little ironic to me that the "Sola Scriptura" crowd is ignoring wholesale chunks of Scripture to be politically correct.

The Great Apostasy has begun.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Web Dev on the Mac 1

I've been working on a little side project. I would like to have an app where people can read updates that I send out. It seemed like a fun way to learn more about programming mobile apps and it's something I could actually use if I can get it to a decent state.
 
I'm keeping it simple. I decided the app would just be an rss feed reader. And that meant I need a feed. I want it to be very specific to my app so I decided the way to go would be to just create my own back end for creating the feed. I decided to use php and I wrote a simple set up using the codeigniter framework. That gave me a quick way to set up authorization and it was easy to tie in styling from bootstrap so that things can look decent without any effort.
 
I've been doing all the work at my office, on my desktop running Fedora. I have two nice big lcd monitors and developing on Linux is just so easy. I had the environment up and running in no time.
 
Then this week my son got sick. Nothing serious - but enough for him to stay home from school for a few days. I worked from home to keep an eye on him. I've been putting off getting my Macbook set up to do this kind of stuff but now I really needed to tackle it. Ugh - what a pain. The machine itself has grown on me. The hardware is decent and works pretty well. The software isn't horrible. But oh my word - when I want to do anything 'out of the ordinary' and by that I mean any kind of meaningful work with the system, it is pretty bad. I know lots of professional developers use Macs but I'm stunned at what a pain it is to do things that are trivially easy in Linux.
 
Getting Mysql installed and running with Apache was a lot more work. Getting PHP working the way I want took more time than it ever has before. Things are far from ideal even now, but I've got it to a point where it works.
 
And now I have my code in 3 places. So I'll be using github to keep code in sync between them. It's a little more of a challenge because I have the production environment set up a little differently than the dev environment. But not so differently that it is a huge deal. I have ssh access to my hosting environment (Bluehost) so that makes it pretty easy. - Oh and that is the one thing that saves the mac - having bash. If it didn't I'd have given up on it long ago.

User Journal

Journal Journal: The Climate Change Myth is starting to unravel... 5

I don't agree with the hyperbole, but it's the biggest Science Scandal of the last 30 years or so.

Someday, my children will mock the Climate Change Chicken Littles much the same way I mock the "Today is just a space between ice ages" Global Cooling morons of the 1970s.

Even then, the arguments were largely the same.

"Even if we're wrong, it's too big to risk. Shouldn't we do SOMETHING? After all, IT'S FOR THE CHILDREN."

... and the "solution" then is the same as it is now -- more State control of individual lives.

No thanks, count me out.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Catch 22 6

I got a thing from the IRS and they want me to fill out an on-line form.

To successfully complete the form I have to enter my filing address and it has to match my return. The form fields don't allow me to correctly enter the address.

So the address has to match for the form to validate, but the form wont allow me to enter the address correctly. It's beautiful. There's an email address to send information about the process and it says below the address that you can send an email but they wont respond. Super.

So I go to the page with a phone number to call. It says "You can call between 7 am and 7 pm your local time." I'd wager not.

I've never had a problem with the IRS or filing until this year. Something has put me onto some list with them, which they wont tell me about other than in a general way and now everything is exponentially more difficult. Fantastic.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Youtube Video Editor 2

The video editor built into youtube is surprisingly decent. It lets you cut videos up, add transitions, add photos, add text, put in music, all kinds of stuff.
 
With it running on their side I was able to edit up a bunch of separate videos, and then leave them processing while I did other stuff. It made it possible to do a lot of videos in parallel and not have my machine bogged down with it. Not bad.
 
It's not the greatest but for simple stuff that you just want to get up - it is pretty awesome. And it's really easy to get authenticated (or authorized or whatever) to load longer content than the default. I've been putting up stuff that is over an hour long without any problems.

User Journal

Journal Journal: The 2016 Field So Far... 25

Jeb Bush

Jeb supports amnesty for illegals, supports Common Core, and will likely raise taxes. Jeb is also a believer in the mythical deity sometimes called "Global Warming" or "Climate Change" (or "manbearpig", junior Al Gorean!).

Nope.

If the GOP is dumb enough to nominate Jeb, they will convince me to finally leave the Republican Party. I suspect they'll convince a number of other Tea Partiers to leave as well.

If Jeb is the nominee, I will vote for either the Constitution Party Candidate or write myself in.

Go ahead and tell me that not voting for the GOP is a vote for the Democrat -- I don't care. If the nominee is Jeb, who could tell the difference anyway?

Ben Carson

Not my first choice, as Mr. Carson has said before that he's not sure anyone needs a semi-automatic rifle in the suburbs. He's since walked that one back, but regaining my trust is something he'll have to do.

If Dr. Carson is the GOP nominee, I would vote for him, but I probably won't vote for him in the Primary.

It might be fun to accuse people who don't support Carson of being racist, but I already know how the left will spin that one -- that Dr. Carson is not a "real" African-American since he's off the liberal plantation.

Chris Christie

No. See Jeb Bush, as Christie is cut from the same amnesty / common core / manbearpig cloth. If it's Christie, I vote 3rd Party.

Ted Cruz

He hasn't announced, though if the Primary were held tomorrow and he was running, he'd (as of right now, but things can change) would get my vote.

Carly Fiorina

I will never vote for a Pro-Infanticide candidate. Abortion is evil, period. If the GOP Nominee is Fiorina, I vote third party.

Mike Huckabee

Forgetting that Huckabee

+ isn't very intelligent
+ raised taxes in Arkansas
+ furloughed a criminal who claimed to "find Jesus" who later killed 4 police officers

No, Actually, I can't forget that. Add Suckabee to the list with Jeb and Fiorina.

Sarah Palin

Realistically, she has no chance as the liberal hate machine has done a lot of damage to her. However, I'd vote for her. I don't, however, believe she's running.

Rand Paul

I wanted to like this guy... but he's inherited some of his father's crazy. I like that he's anti-drone in US skies.. and there's other things I like about him, but his foreign policy is a deal killer for me to support him in the Primary.

However, Rand Paul would get my vote over the Democrat in a General Election.

Rick Perry

The only knocks I have against Perry are that he supported in-state tuition for illegals and had 12 years to secure the border and didn't. He's soft on amnesty for illegals.

Yes, he's currently indicted, but that's a complete joke and he'll be found not guilty. The Governor has the (state) constitutional right to threaten a veto. The liberal hate machine will use this to try and torpedo him, but considering he's selling T-Shirts with his mugshot on them, using it as a way to promote the fact that the unhinged left (though is there really any other kind of lefty?) hates him, so I don't think it'll sink his bid.

Perry's my #2 choice behind Cruz right now, and realistically he'd be my first choice since I don't think Cruz is running for President, and I think Perry is.

Too bad it's not Greg Abbott, the current TX Gov. Abbott is terrific.

Marco Rubio

Marco claims to be against illegal immigration, but then casts votes for amnesty. Get lost, Rubio.

However, since he doesn't (to my knowledge) support the abomination that is Common Core, Rubio's nomination would not cause the GOP to lose my vote.

Rick Santorum

Santorum is as big of a nanny-state supporter as Michael Bloomberg. Go away, Rick.

Still, if Santorum is the nod, I don't hate him enough to vote third party.

Scott Walker

Scott Walker is soft on amnesty, and has been dialing back his opposition to Common Core. Find a spine, Walker. Walker at this point would be my number 3 choice, if he's the nominee, I could live with it. I'd rather have Cruz or Perry.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Tesco Home Delivery 5

We did our first home delivery from Tesco yesterday. My wife ordered on-line and they brought our stuff inside the window we were given for the delivery. The fee for delivery was 299 HUF which is about $1.10 right now.
 
It was a pretty awesome deal. The guy brought everything right in. There was a slight mix up - but that's because when people use GPS to come to our house it always takes them to my neighbor a little down the street. I don't know how it works in other parts of Europe, but in Hungary they seem to change the numbering of streets at a higher frequency than the U.S. So my house number is 6 but that use to be my neighbor Zsolt's house number and a lot of systems still think it is.
 
So the guy called me and after a moment or two of me fumbling around for the right Hungarian words, I realized he was 'here' and went outside to bring him in. A few minutes later we'd checked everything over, paid and we were all set. With gas going for around 400 HUF a liter, I doubt we could drive to the store and get it for less than we paid to have it delivered. On top of that the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes at most. If I go get it all myself I'm gone for over an hour. So we'll be using it again.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Lollipop on 2012 Nexus 7 Wi-fi 4

I got a message that the OTA update to Lollipop was available for my Nexus 7 so I installed it.

It made the tablet unusable. Performance was atrocious, battery life could dropped to a couple hours. It couldn't play music. Doing anything took so long (if it worked at all) that it was really not worth it.

I googled around. One suggestion was to clear the cache. I tried to do that but when I tried to boot into recovery that always failed with an error about "No command found."

So finally I just flashed it back to Kit Kat.

I'm wrapping that up now. Google backup is reinstalling my apps and such. Hopefully things will improve. I know it's 3 years old but I really like it and I don't think it's too much to ask for it to still run well.

My son updated his too (he has the 2013 model) and he's been complaining. So this was a good run through if he wants me to do the same for his. I don't think the impact on his was as bad. He may just not like how lollipop looks. I'll talk to him about it this week-end and see what he wants to do.

Fun times.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Compile FFMPEG 1

To get the most out of ffmpeg on Fedora - as far as I can tell - it needs to be compiled, not installed from a package manager. This is the only way I could find to get it with libfdk_aac support. I tried other stuff and then just went ahead and followed the very thorough guide on installing from source, right here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Centos

Though there was one thing I needed that they didn't have in the dependencies - libtool. That was quickly rectified. So if you do this - might as well add that on the front end. I noticed the need when there was an error with autoconf for one of the parts.

User Journal

Journal Journal: College Football Rants and Open Letters...

To Nick Saban:
You can tell your team all you want that they "don't need a trophy to know they're the best" -- your team isn't the best. You got beat by a better team 42-35.

To the SEC Fans:
Your "the SEC is invincible" narrative, primary fed to you by the talking heads on ESPN (which owns the SEC Network), has been shattered. Your top teams all LOST. The so-called mini-NFL, the SEC West, was 2-5 in Bowl Season.

Ohio State beat Alabama, Wisconsin beat Auburn, TCU beat Ole Miss, Georgia Tech whipped Mississippi State, and NOTRE DAME beat LSU. That's right, LSU lost to Notre freaking Dame. You know, SEC, when your signature bowl win is against Louisville, you need to drink a nice, tall glass of warm STFU.

To Mark May of ESPN: Mark, I saw you on TV still not admitting that Ohio State deserved to be in the National Title tournament even after they handed Alabama their asses. Still think the 2014 National Champions didn't belong there?

And who was that asswipe on Fox Sports who stupidly claimed that if Ohio State played Alabama next week that OSU would lose? Butthurt much? Who's to say Alabama would even beat Wisconsin or Sparty next week much less the 2014 National Champions?

Besides, Alabama had their shot at Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl.

Ohio State 42, Alabama 35

To the fans of TCU, who thought they should have been in over Ohio State or Florida State: Dude, seriously? Win that piece of shit overrated conference you call the Big 12, then maybe we'll talk. Besides, the team that had a better argument (not a good argument, just a better one than yours) was your conference Champions, which leads me to...

To the Fans Baylor of who thought they should have been in over Ohio State or Florida State: You lost to Sparty at the Cotton Bowl, a stadium that's about 90 minutes from your home field. Any team that plays in a shitty conference that loses essentially at home TO MICHIGAN STATE has no business trying to claim that they deserve to be in the National Championship Tournament. Yeah, you were a 1 loss team who won a conference that was marginally better than the MAC this year. Big f'n deal. Seriously Baylor, the Toledo Rockets would give you all you wanted in a Bowl Game. The Big 12 completely sucked this year, and went 2-4 in bowl games thanks to TCU drumming an overrated SEC team and Oklahoma State beating Washington, a Pac-12 patsy team. Big Whoop.

Finally...

To the Big 10 Haters:
2014 National Champion Ohio State 42, Oregon 20
Ohio State 42, Alabama 35
Michigan State 42, Baylor 41
Wisconsin 34, Auburn 31
User Journal

Journal Journal: I logged in. 2

I was doing some research for a project and happened back here. Hello slashdot.

Find me on Twitter, or put dot com after my user name.

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