Month: January 2006

bookmark_borderDonations Accepted

Posted on by PaulaO

There is a conference coming up in June that I want to go to – The Golden Crown Literary Society’s 2006 Literary Convention in Atlanta.

BUT, the hotel is $129 a night. The conf. runs from Thursday thru Sunday which means I need to be there Wed and leave Monday. So that is (counting on fingers) 5 nights. That’s $645. The registration is $155. That’s $800!!! It includes some meals, but not all. Atlanta is close, but not close enough to drive it every day.

Now, normally, with this far ahead a notice, we could swing it by saving and cutting back. But, with the new chair coming (hopefully), we need to put a $2500 lift in the truck, after paying $400 to have the truck bed sprayed/lined. So…

Donations accepted!

bookmark_borderGoogle vs Shrub

Posted on by PaulaO

ZDNet News has a fantastic article on the Justice Department’s suponea that Google is resisting.

FAQ: What does the Google subpoena mean?
By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: January 20, 2006, 4:00 AM PT

Preparing to defend a controversial Internet pornography law in court, the Justice Department has demanded search logs from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online.

The department asked the search giants to hand over millions of records involving what search terms people have used on the sites and what Web sites are accessible via the search engines.

On one level, the situation involves a straightforward question of whether the department’s demands are too onerous and therefore not permitted under federal law. On another, the dispute raises novel questions about search engines’ privacy protections and the relationship that four tech giants have with the federal government.

What does it all mean, and what happens next? Read on.

(full article)

Cookies, and not the good kind.

If you have them, delete them. Unless it is to a trusted site (such as your blog), delete them.

Here is my example: I have 435 sites that have placed cookies in my computer. Each site has at least one cookie, some have as many as 12. Of those sites, 51 were from “trusted” sites. I deleted the others. Of those 51, I could delete all but 5 of. Sure, I’d have to re-enter passwords here and there.

What do sites use cookies for? Lots of stuff. Like, when you were there last and how long you have been there this time. What you like to buy or not buy. Settings such as forum views. Etc. Etc.

Make it a habit to clear them out on a regular basis. If you notice some odd ones, add them to the Exceptions list and block them from being put there again.

bookmark_borderWiretapping is not a Constitutional Right

Posted on by PaulaO

From MoveOn.org’s website as an email suggestion:

Subject: The President Broke the Law

Hi,

President Bush admitted to personally authorizing thousands of allegedly illegal wiretaps, and he doesn’t plan to stop. Circumventing the Constitution is serious business.

This is a big moment. People from across the political spectrum are standing together to protect the rule of law and the principles that are core to our identity as Americans.

Can you sign this petition to show Congress that Americans want a thorough investigation of the president’s secret wiretapping program?

http://political.moveon.org/ruleoflaw/

Thanks!

I signed the petition, adding the following as my comments:

When Clinton lied, nobody died.

Bush lies, and over 2000 have died, the Constitution is being shredded and yet he sits un-charged, un-challenged, and un-impeached.

bookmark_borderGadgets

Posted on by PaulaO

From Wired News:

Screening the Latest Bestseller
By Dylan Tweney

Electronic books have traditionally gone straight from the manufacturer to the remainders bin — but the market has never gone away entirely, despite years of tepid sales and failed predictions.

Now a new device from Sony is generating buzz worthy of a Stephen King novel. Some people are even wondering whether the Sony Reader might be just the ticket to kick the e-book market into high gear.

Scheduled to go on sale this spring for between $300 and $400, the Reader is a compact slab about the size of a small paperback book (5-by-7 inches, and a half-inch thick). But it’s the 3.5-by-4.8-inch display that made it the buzz of the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month in Las Vegas.

The screen uses E Ink technology developed by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. It consists of 480,000 tiny “microcapsules,” each of which contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When current is applied to electrodes underneath these capsules, they turn black or white, depending on the polarity of the current.

The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There’s no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be “refreshed” 60 times per second or more).

The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is used only when pixels need to change their color — between virtual page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all. Its batteries will last for about 7,500 pages, according to Sony.

(full story)

bookmark_borderRites of Passage

Posted on by PaulaO

I believe I am now officially Middle Age.

I had my first mammagram today.

You’d think that meant I got a bouquet or something but nooooo. I got my boobs squished.

It was not as bad as I thought but not as easy as I’d hoped. The woman doing the test was great. Gentle and joking yet still professional. We had a good laugh over gravity not always helping with her job.

I got big boobs. And while I’ve had them with me for the past 40 years (granted, in various sizes) I hadn’t a clue they could be squished that flat. Nor did I realize just how much there is there. Mammary tissue is also along the side, under and/or close to the arm pit. Especially so for big breasted women.

The good thing is since she had so much to work with, it was easier for her to get the material (for lack of a more civil word) up onto the platform. The process itself took perhaps 10 minutes, most likely less. However, I had a 1.5 hr wait. I hoofed it too and I am paying for that tonight. I’d not ‘warned’ them ahead of time so it is my fault. Anyway, she hefted the right one up on this small platform, had me twist and shift about, then she lowered this plastic piece that pressed down on the breast. She turned this little knob to tighten it. After that one, the machine was tilted at an angle and the booblet done again, this time however there was no platform to hold it up. This is when we had a good laugh. After yet more twisting and shifting about, we then repeated the process with the left breast.

So, women, if you are over 40, get one now. You need a baseline for later. It is not as bad as I thought. Lorna, who has smaller breasts, was the opposite from me and experienced pain. But they were looking for something and worked hard to make sure they had all of her ‘material’ in the picture.

If your insurance won’t cover one, check around your area. There will most certainly be some organization that offers free ones or lower cost ones.

bookmark_borderFallen Soldier

Posted on by PaulaO

Services For Local Soldier
Funeral services will be held this weekend for a local soldier killed in Iraq.

Chief Warrant Officer Mitch Carver died last week when enemy fire brought down the helicopter he was piloting near Mosul. Carver graduated from Erwin High School in 1992. His family will receive friends Friday from 5:00pm to 8:00pm at Newfound Baptist Church. Funeral services will be held Saturday at 2:00pm at Trinity Baptist Church. Then on Monday, Mitch Carver will be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

(from WLOS)

I don’t know the guy but our local community is all upset. Newfound Baptist Church is just down the road from us.

What a waste of a young, vibrant life.

bookmark_borderU.S. Constitution? Whazzat?

Posted on by PaulaO

Might as well chuck it whilst Shrub is in office.

From ZDNet News:

Federal prosecutors preparing to defend a controversial Internet pornography law in court have asked Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online to hand over millions of search records–a request that Google is adamantly denying.

In court documents filed Wednesday, the Bush administration asked a federal judge in San Jose, Calif., to force Google to comply with a subpoena for the information, which would reveal the search terms of a broad swath of the search engine’s visitors.

Prosecutors are requesting a “random sampling” of 1 million Internet addresses accessible through Google’s popular search engine, and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to Google over a one-week period.

Google said in a statement sent to CNET News.com on Thursday that it will resist the request “vigorously.”

The Bush administration’s request, first reported by The San Jose Mercury News, is part of its attempts to defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which is being challenged in court in Philadelphia by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU says Web sites cannot realistically comply with COPA and that the law violates the right to freedom of speech mandated by the First Amendment.

(full story)

Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL were handed subpoenas but it depends on who you talk to as to who complied and how much.

Any idiot knows that if someone is serious about child porn, they won’t be traceable through a simple search. If they want statistics, now that might be different. But email addresses? Forget it.

What we ought to do is spend a week running searches on “Presidential Impeachment” and the like then let that be the week Google submits random samples from.

bookmark_borderSite Visitors

Posted on by PaulaO

I am waiting until 1:30pm to make a phone call so I am putzing on the ‘net.

I was checking out my visitor stats and I a must say I am flattered! I get an average of 66 – 100 unique visitors a day. (unique means that if one visits the site twice in one day, they are only counted once). Different visitor trackers get different numbers.

For example:
Blog Flux says on 1/5/06 I had 132 visitors
SiteMeter says I had 95

Either way, that’s a lot. (personally, I like Blog Flux’s data and they way they present it)

For some reason, there are a lot of folks from Europe and Asia who come to this site from a Google search for “bdsm”. Now, sure, I’ve mentioned it a few times but…. I did a Google search for it and got to page 7 without seeing my site listed. Maybe there is a Europe Google?? At any rate, Blog Flux says at least 493 of you got to this site with that search. That’s about 23%!

53% of you insist on using IE as your browser. But that means 47% of you used something else! The Revolution is still strong!

Google by far is the top search engine. (89%)

In the past 30 days, 47 of you have searched (using the search form on this page) for the word ‘editorium’. I haven’t a clue what that word means so as a result, 47 of you got no results.

The other top words are ‘battles’ and ‘david foster wallace’. Why?

And yeah, NOW you’ll get a result at last.

Interesting way to spend my time. And now I am late. Arrgh!

bookmark_borderWriting Today

Posted on by PaulaO

I actually got some writing done today, over 1500 words to be exact. I did editing too, but that is so hard to quantify. I worked on SS6b. I need to set myself a deadline for myself.

Updates:
Only two more weeks until I should start looking for a response from the publisher.

I submitted a short story to a contest a few months ago and their response time is rather vague. “After the first of the year” it says. Heck, December is after the first of the year! At any rate, if my piece doesn’t win, no bigs (sniff). I have another place to send it off to.

A non-fiction piece of mine may be in a book!! Now, the piece has been accepted but the book itself is still in the works. So, nothing is officially official yet.

I finally got OpenOffice.org loaded into my laptop’s new hard drive. I also had to load M$ Word since that is the digital format publishers want. I figured it would be a good idea to see what they would see. OpenOffice.org saves in the .doc format, but since Word is so weird….

I also got Zoo Tycoon 2 and the Expansion Pack installed. Awesome game!

Active Projects:

    BG1 – submitted
    BG2 – in rewrite/restart/re-whatever
    BG3 – in progress
    BG4 – rough outline
    SS6b – in rewrite