President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama forces striking Philadelphia Transit Workers Back to Work. While he didn't go so far as to fire them, he did break up the strike for at least the next 1-4 months.

...

...

I forgot it was silly season. Mind you, it is the off-year one, the Winter Olympics to Superbowl Tuesday's buffet of awesomeness, so one really cares, including me.

Still, though, props to Brat for achieving trivia question notoriety. It's almost a shame his votes (should he actually make it to Congress) will be in line with his party waaaaaaaaaaay more often than not.

And congrats to the Democrats as well. Always nice when the other team commits an unforced error.

As the two people exited the elevator, they started to talk about kids and graduation, who was in college and who in high school, one mentioned that she still had a son in high school (iirc): "Why did i space out the kids like that? If i only knew then what i know now."

I was listening to LoTR in the car while going around town, and made some progress during a Sunday drive to Cleveland. Moving along, i finally finished, with just the Appendix left.

With the ring destroyed, the cheap mp3 player died, having served its purpose for less than five bucks, who can complain? But now i want more. I want to listen to more books in the car.

MP3 players abound and so do FM transmitters of varying quality. Some MP3 players are also FM transmitters (or is that the other way around?), but none seem to include the simple feature of remembering playback position automatically. Finding that in MP3 players alone seems to be hard enough.

So, it seemed to me i should purchase the mp3 player and transmitter separately. After some searching, i found the Sandisk Sansa Clip+ amongst their other players which has this sought after feature, and includes a nifty speed option. That can be gotten for $30 or so, especially if going refurbished (and not for the plus?), but then there's the transmitter cost and quality.

Some more searching found someone recommending to simply install a receiver to play MP3s, if the need is just for the car. Good idea. Amazon has a cheap player (or another) in which the comments express its cheapness but usefulness as an mp3 player. Some questions and comments mentioned the need of a harness. Another pointed to a cheap one on ebay.

And that is where i am right now. I wonder how hard is it to install a receiver and if this is a good idea.

Slashdot has become almost a go-to for finding new anti-government conspiracy theories. Yet only yesterday I heard for the first time that there are Sandy Hook Truthers who believe that the 2012 massacre never actually happened. Really, this conspiracy theory isn't any more crazy than some of the ones that are popular here, and it connects just as well to the POTUS.

Thinking about jumping ship from my cheap but reliable 3GS into the android pool. I'm assuming it's all about the hardware, right? Apart from the Samsung offerings, which everybody raves about (yet I'm not a huge fan of the form factor), has anyone got any recommendations?

A single DNA tweak leads to blond hair. Talk about dumb ideas. Maybe i can forget that, sort of.

I see someone just found my comments which were foolishly mod-bombed. They then moderated them "funny". I suspect whoever did that knew that a "funny" mod does not move karma.

What they might have not realized, though, was that the mod bomber didn't move my karma either.

If people want to waste their mod points on my comments, they can certainly do so. If they think that it will change my karma here, they are sadly mistaken.

At least people are paying a little bit of attention to this case of an 18 month old boy killed by an unsecured gun. Unfortunately there is no indication that the irresponsible idiot who owned the gun will face any consequences for his stupidity.

Apparently, in Arizona, the right to carry weapons wherever one pleases is more important than the right to not be senselessly killed at a young age as a result of some shithead's inability to keep their weapon secured.

... some mod bombers never learn. To my mod bomber, just consider this. If I cared enough to report your mod-bombing, you wouldn't have mod points anymore. You might get your jollies off of seeing me mock you publicly, but you aren't accomplishing anything more than that.

Courtesy of just one slashdot conservative:

Liberals need to prove innocence when accused of wrongdoing

Senate Democrats voted on a letter asking for the Washington Redskins to change their name. This is, of course, a total waste of time as the team can do whatever they want and the Senate doesn't have any way to change that.

Is this a total waste of time? Of course. Is it a bigger waste of time than launching yet another investigation into Benghazi? Not even remotely. It also costs nowhere near as much money as what republicans have already spent drumming up support for their silly witch hunt.

Hence, if the Senate Democrats want to learn how to waste American time and money on the pursuit of meaningless political points, they need to look across the hall.

Any reasonable person knows that there is no good reason from this point for the GOP to push the Benghazi conspiracy any further. They have assembled another committee in the house to investigate the attack. However, if impeachment is their goal - and it certainly appears to be - then they have basically zero chance to achieve that. The reason I say that is because the time has already run out for that to lead to a successful impeachment of President Obama before his presidency ends in 2017. There is no chance that the committee could come up with sufficient charges in time for the pre-trial and trial to happen before then.

This means that in the most favorable - by which I mean most damning possible conclusions from the house committee - situation, the GOP will still be wasting taxpayer time and money when the 2016 election happens. In the - more likely based on what previous investigations have shown - scenario where the committee does not produce something worthy of an impeachment hearing, the GOP will have to face the fact that they wasted millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars and a great amount of time on what is clearly a political witch hunt.

Similarly, while conservatives are almost uniformly (and mostly alone) convinced that Obama himself somehow caused the Benghazi attack (presumably as part of his NWO aspirations, by use of his time machine and weather control technology), they also seem convinced of one other thing - that Hillary Clinton will be the democratic nominee for POTUS in 2016. Frankly I am not convinced that she will win the nomination, but that is a different matter. More so I am left to wonder if the GOP fears Clinton so much that they have actually decided to throw the 2016 election in the interest of trying to start framing a better 2020 campaign now.

I see the "Linux Sucks" video made the front page (a few days late) here on slashdot today. Along with many others, I chimed in that the trend of videos instead of text is fucking stupid (and honestly an insult to our intelligence). I was happy to see that many others made similar complaints over the matter.

Not that I expect it to make a difference, as people still seem to get jollies posting videos of themselves saying crap on youtube regardless, but it is good to see that I'm not alone on the matter. I'm just waiting now to see if this hack is running for office and got the shitty idea that way.

A good umbrella is always appreciated. I've gone through a few, and lately purchased my second Shedrain umbrella from Amazon to replace the first that i had lost.

Somehow, this one managed to break before i could lose it. It worked perhaps once, but then would no close properly and was broken on one part. So, i sent an email to Shedrain asking for help:

I bought item 2052-CHAR on 3/19/14. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007NDTFGM/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i01)

Starting with the second use, one of the metal joints that extend the canopy detached from the rest and the umbrella no longer open or closes properly. ( i apologize for the poor explanation, i do not know how to explain it.) I can send a picture if you would like,

Is there a way to fix something like that? I would like my umbrella to work again. It's a pretty neat umbrella.

That same day, i received a reply:

Hello,

Please send a few pictures and I will see how we can help.

Thank you,

I responded with

Sure, attached are pictures taken from my phone.

And here's a video on Youtube: http://youtu.be/Ll96m4v99ng

I love my mac. :)

If you want any other images, just ask.

And attached 7 images. To which he responded:

Hello,

Thank you for the pictures. I do not think you would be able to repair the umbrella. Please send it to the address below and we will repair/replace it and ship it back to you.

ShedRain Corp
Attn: Dept W
8303 NE Killingsworth
Portland, OR 97220

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you,

I sent it in a little bit later and received back a fixed umbrella. Not only was the broken part fixed, they added a number of hooks between the two coverings. So far, it is working nicely. My only cost was the price of shipping it to them.

It seems they gave back the same umbrella because my name, address, and phone number were still on the handle (taped on sheet of paper).

--

When i post the emails i send, i am "afraid" that i sent something silly, or feel apprehensive about sharing the personality i add to my emails, which can change by whom i am sending it to or simply the mood i am in. I know it's not a problem (until someone proves me wrong in the comments :) ).

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Unrelated side note Started Book 5, Chapter 9 in LoTR.