Monthly Archives: February 2006

AFTER the State of the Union Speech

Posted on by
Reply

…all the really interesting news items begin to appear.

BBC NEWS | Americas | US military plans for ‘long war’

The US Defence Department has released a long-awaited report on how the US military will organise and equip itself in the face of “new and elusive foes”.
The quadrennial defence review will be presented to the US Congress next week.

The document opens with the words: “The United States is engaged in what will be a long war.”

It describes what the US military must do to defeat current and future enemies – flagged as “rogue powers, terrorist networks and non-state threats”.

Of course. Ooh, what are “non-state threats?” Grieving mothers in T-shirts?

Woo! Holy Moly, We’re In Teh News!

Posted on by
4

Yahooo! the published the article about Holy Moly today! They were really interested in the blog part of the site. I told him that it was really just because I couldn’t stand to work with Front Page for another moment, and switched the church site over to static pages, while leaving the blog piece working.

I’m so happy! I hope the work is finally paying off. Will try to ping AKMA about this.

H0tLinkerz Pwned!

Posted on by
1

Previously, I mentioned how irritated I was with who images from my site because they can’t be bothered to simply copy them and upload them to their own server. This can include images I made myself, and images I copied from somewhere else to illustrate something.

Well, the first iteration of .htaccess needed some tweaking, and the original image was too small. After checking my stats tonight, I decided it was time to configure .htaccess to allow “trusted” hotlinks and then pull the trigger on the more obnoxious of the two images.

hotlinkedthis.jpg

I did discover one very cool hotlinking site that pulls random images from Google Image and associates them with words, so I allowed that. It’s a neat idea and the site gives credit back to the original location of the image. I’d have given permission on that, no question.

However, another image-searching site is totally PWNED!1!! because I suspect that’s where a lot of the original hotlinkers found my images. Type in “blogula rasa” in the image search box, and see if my friend shows up 9 times (why only 9?).

If anyone shows up to complain that my little demonstration messed up their layout, sorry about that, but hotlinking is not a good idea. You could have asked my permission to copy images; it’ll be freely given if only you ask and I’ll be flattered and link to your site.

Besides which, a lot of the news images hotlinked from here were swiped from somewhere else… ironic, that.

Anyway, here are a few people on Mindsay whose profiles are pwned, or whose friends’ comments in the profiles are pwned.

m0rning (scroll down to see what happens when Chrismahanukwanzakuh is over)
And a Merrie Chrismahanukwanzukuh to you too, merrie!
And to Abdon as well! It’s like Festivus, except with cookies!
And purplediamondzz had a merrie one too, but it scrolled off her profile. Still, the excessive number of “Photobucket Bandwidth Exceeded” images is worth it.

However, the girl that posted “Kwanzuh” all over MySpace is her friend. HER profile is set to private, so I can’t see how messed up it is… I bet it’s really cool now.

neli315 (scroll down in her profile for her important thoughts about freedom)
ill_be_burning_star4 (scroll down in comments to celebrate cellular Easter)
Somebody at UCLA is doing a research project (sent him a courtesy email)
The Hotlink Checker returns much joy…
A French fangirl forum full of very hot hotlinked images (My rearrangement of the incredibly handsome features of Carter Oosterhouse caught ’em twice…)
Commented to another Oosterhouse fan, as Jenn has good taste in Blogger templates 😉

That seems to be it for now. Last time was funnier, because the one girl“>one girl had used one of my Arches pictures for, like, the entire background image of her entire blog. I was hoping for a similar coup this time, but no joy.

And the nice thing is that I couldn’t find any newer images at all, so maybe with this bigger one a few more people will cut their hotlinks. We’ll see. They probably won’t even notice, since they’re probably buried deep in their comments.

As I said before – I’m not looking to declare war here, I just don’t want to provide free image hosting to lamers who can’t be bothered to learn how to use a free image hosting service like Image Shack, Photo Bucket, or Flickr themselves.

Terrocracies and Commocracies and Clownocracies, Oh My!

Posted on by
Reply

Comedian and crackerjack political commentator sets the record straight:

Fanatical Apathy – Corrections

Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror.

The President meant that democracies that do not elect terrorists will join the fight against terror. Those other nations are actually “terrocracies,” and shouldn’t be confused with actual “democracies.” This is also true of so-called democracies who elect dictators, which are actually “dictocracies,” or so-called democracies who elect communists (”commocracies”), anti-American governments (”asshocracies”) and circus clowns (”clownocracies”).
What the President really meant here was to point out that the Dow is approaching 11,000 and that the new season of “American Idol” looks to be the best yet.

Okay, this actually makes sense. Good thing I’ve still got some political beers in the fridge.

I’d actually be okay if we were living in a clownocracy.

In Which I Gently Correct Dorothea

Posted on by
2

Caveat Lector ? Dramarama

I am in contact with New Librarian’s parents, who are afraid to lay the appropriate smackdown because New Librarian “shuts down” when they try, since she “is threatened by them” and (eye-rolling alert, folks) “her self-esteem is shattered.” I shall endeavor to convince them that some tough love is in order.

You spelled “uhhsteeem” wrong. 😉

But good luck with setting them straight. It sounds like you’ll need it. As you explained, the apple didn’t fall far from that tree.

Boehner? Boehner? Anyone Else? Boehner?

Posted on by
Reply

Boehner, the guy who handed out checks on the House floor from tobacco concerns, has just been elected Majority Leader. A fair chunk of his change was raised from Abramoff-linked Indian tribes. Not that it’s wrong that they’re Indians, it’s that they were working with Abramoff.

“We will want people who are clean running the House,” said Rep. Melissa Hart (R-Pa.), a Boehner supporter.

So do we, Melissa. So we’ll just have to elect them.

Do these people not get it? Do they not realize that the lobbying scandal taints everyone in their leadership? I guess this is actually good news for the Dems in Congress, who must be gathered somewhere giggling about how the mean old Rethugnicans screwed up again.

They used to be ruthlessly efficient. Now they’re just fanatically devoted to the .

Human-Animal Hybrids

Posted on by
Reply

You now, I heard Our Leader say this the other night, but due to an unfortunate overenthusiasm for Adam Felber’s , it just skidded on by:

“Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator — and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.”

Guess there’s no tax credit for hybrid humans, only hybrid cars. Damn.

Of course, someone has created an excellent T-shirt, so head on over to CafePress and get yourself kitted out in your very own T-shirt.

via

Headscratching Time Again At Chez Gique

Posted on by
Reply

Okay, things done:

  • Removed cruft from side columns
  • Signed up for del.icio.us
  • Signed up for Feedburner
  • Created new feed, David redirected old feeds
  • Tinkered with Quicklinks, got MTAmazon partly working
  • Tinkered with stylesheet, fiddled with tags/categories footer

Things left undone:

  • Get MTAmazon fully working in Quickbooks
  • Add del.icio.us links on right column
  • Look for more old cruft to delete
  • Update “About” page
  • Go through Bookqueue, cycle books around
  • Learn more about adding music links via del.icio.us

iTunes:

  • Would like to blog playlists
  • Find more Hawaiian slack-key for iPod
  • Start using the rating system more

Tasks:

  • Pet-related chores >^t^
  • Try to get contacts/new glasses sorted
  • Beat the bushes for Bishop’s Committee reports

Resolved:

  • Try to write an actual, reality-based blog post daily
  • Take more photographs
  • Call friends and family more often
  • Find health club membership card 😉