WTF? Jerry Seinfeld - Bill Gates Ad

I'm not sure if this is a generic ad for Microsoft or for a shoe store chain called Shoe Circus. Honestly, I'm hoping it's a celebrity ad for Shoe Circus otherwise I think someone just wasted a LOT of money.

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Microsoft, Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld, TV Ads

Top 100 Tools: Second Life Ranks at #41

Linden Lab's Second Life jumped from last year's position at 101 to 41 in this year's survey of the top 100 learning tools "for creating, delivering and managing learning and performance support solutions" and "for personal learning and productivity, for sharing resources, as well as group collaboration (also includes some enterprise tools)". The directory created by the survey contains over 2,400 freeware/open source and commercial tools.

What is most interesting about these results is that Second Life is pretty much there alone amongst tools like Microsoft Office, Google Earth, the iPod, social bookmarking sites and Firefox.

Top 100 Tools: Second Life: "TOP TOOLS
Second Life

Second Life is a virtual world - a highly imaginative, creative world.  Create an avatar and explore this second world.  It is not a game; in fact there are all kinds of opportunities here - for learning, gaming and training"

(Via Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.)

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Education, Second Life

Hitting Close to Home?

If you remember the headlines, Barack Obama declared Sarah Palin's family off limits in the campaign. The press and Obama supporters have been making a big issue of Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter being pregnant and unmarried. Rather than respecting the privacy of Mrs. Palin's, I suspect that Obama's decree was because it hit too close to home.

After all, it's entirely possible that Obama's own mother was pregnant and unmarried at 18.

Stanley Ann Dunham (Obama's mother) was born in November, 1942.

At the qge of 17, she started her freshman year at the University of Hawaii

A few months later, she met and fell in love with Barack Obama, Sr.

Four months after turning 18, she married Barack Obama, Sr. about February of 1961

Six months later, at the age of 18, she gave birth to Barack Obama, Jr. in August of 1961.

Now just because she'd only been married six months when little Barack was born, doesn't mean that she was pregnant before getting married. Junior might have been three months premature. After all, the old saying goes "The first baby can come at any time after the wedding, the rest all take nine months."

It would be a huge stretch to insinuate that Stanley Ann got pregnant on her 18th birthday right after meeting the father of her baby and had to get married.

However, I still think that the press furor over Mrs. Palin's 17 year old unmarried daughter hit Mr. Obama just a little too close to home.

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Politics, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama

Only 48% of California high schools meet federal standards, even with easier measure

Only 48% of California high schools meet federal standards, even with easier measure: "Results released this morning show that about 500 high schools reported meeting federal goals only because their passing marks were based on much higher exit exam scores.

At least 500 California high schools met this year's federal academic targets that were released this morning only because the state uses easier standards for high schools than for elementary and middle schools, a Times analysis has found."

(Via Los Angeles Times - Top News.)

Shouldn't we expect more from the state who is one of the most populous, taxing and controlling in the Union?

Nevertheless, I'm not surprised. The failure of our school systems is a prime example of the "Dumbing down of America".

Not that this has anything to do with our government (or whoever is running the country) *COUGH* *COUGH* but let's stop and look at what is traditionally the biggest threat to a tyrannical government.

The biggest threat is:

"An educated, armed and mobile populace."

An educated populace is harder to fool or be distracted with smoke and mirrors. A dumb populace can be kept down. Year after year, our students fair worse in comparison to students from many other countries. Year after year we produce high school graduates who are close to being functionally illiterate, suitable only for a job where they ask "Would you like fries with that?" Moreover, where they can only operate a cash register by having the keys labeled with pictures of the food items.

By Federal decree, all children must undergo twelve years of "education" at Youth Indoctrination Facilities. (Elementary, Middle and High Schools.) This was literally enforced at gun point originally. Most any child can learn the three Rs in three to six years. So why twelve? Because we/they were/are being trained to be good little consumers and to blindly follow our government.

An armed populace has an increased ability to remove a tyrannical government. If you go back and study the period of the American Revolution and the founding of this nation as a Republic, you'll see that having just used arms to overthrow the tyrannical government of King George, our founding fathers wanted to ensure that the citizens could repeat that in the future. So they gave us two methods in the U.S. Constitution: Via our elected representatives and separation of powers, and via armed action (the 2nd Amendment.)

The first thing a tyrant does (read up on Hitler and Nazi Germany for instance) is to remove firearms from the populace.

For almost 100 years, the Federal Government has imposed more and more restrictions on the private ownership of firearms. Starting with the exorbitant Federal tax on full automatic weapons and short barreled shotguns in 1934 through the Gun Control act of 1968 to the Brady Bill and "Assault Weapons Ban" of 1994, our Federal Government has continued to infringe on the 2nd Amendment rights of our citizens.

"The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

And finally, a mobile populace is much harder to control. When the citizens have free movement between cities, states and nations, they have the ultimate in liberty. This mobile population is what also spread new ideas (that might not be popular at the government level) prior to the Internet Age.

Our mobility has been increasingly limited over the years, especially in recent ones. Currently, thousands of law abiding U.S. Citizens are forbidden from traveling via commercial airline because they (or someone with a name similar to theirs) has been placed on a secret watch list.

Hillary Clinton had a "great" idea right after she moved into the White House. She wanted to make it a felony to travel to another state if you owed child support. Oh yes... protect the children, down with deadbeat dads, etc. Forget that perhaps the parent is unemployed and might have a job offer in another state as just one possible reason this is "A bad thing". To enforce this, she wanted state border crossings to have inspection stations similar to the ones that California and some other states use for agriculture. Want to drive from L.A. to Las Vegas for the weekend? Stop at the border station first and get permission.

Combine that with the watch lists and you can see where suddenly you couldn't travel at all because someone's similar name was on the list.

Affecting even more people is the price of fuel. No matter who is at the root of the cause, with the soaring cost of fuel, more and more people are staying close to home.

Whether our government is really doing the above isn't debatable, they are.

Whether they are doing it as a concerted effort to keep us "scared, broke and working" as the phrase in business goes is up in the air. This might just all be a coincidence and stupidity on the part of the Federal government that we're increasingly becoming good, little, defenseless consumer sheep.

However, the result is that America is rapidly becoming more uneducated, unarmed and less mobile making us much less of a threat to the Federal Government.

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Politics, 2nd Amendment, Education, Gas Prices

Cheerleader and Marching Band Oopsies

On a lighter note, as a marching band member (trombone) in Junior and High School I REALLY enjoyed this You Tube video from last year.

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Humor, Funny, Cheerleaders, Marching Bands

Warming boosts strongest storms according to Global Warming Advocates

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Warming boosts strongest storms: "Analysis of satellite data shows that in the last 25 years, strong cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons have become more frequent in most of the tropics."

Well, warmer waters affecting them makes sense. OTOH, prior research shows again that it isn't "Global Warming" causing it.

In an article published in the journal Science back in the summer of 2001, a team of meteorologists predicted increased North Atlantic hurricane activity for at least 10 to 40 more years. Other scientists referred to this as a 50 year cycle that allowed Florida to flourish as a vacation spot and land boom, but that had enter a 50 year cycle of increased hurricane activity.

Meanwhile, two more meteorologists and oceanographers found even more cycles were involved.

"Those NC State meteorologists and oceanographers, Dr. Lian Xie and Dr. Leonard Pietrafesa, have used a recently developed mathematical technique to analyze patterns relating to the tropical cyclones that made landfall along the East Coast between 1887 and 1999.

Their findings: The number of hurricanes making landfall in a given year is controlled not only by the long-term, multi-decade trend described in the Science article, but by three shorter-term cycles as well. These four distinct "temporal modes" - each probably the result of a different atmospheric and oceanic phenomenon - combine to determine the number of tropical storms that make landfall each year, Xie and Pietrafesa explain."

Isn't a shame when hard facts and science shatters the world of Global
Warming and "Global Climate Change"? Doesn't matter though... crap about Global Warming will continued to be spewed by those who embody the "Don't confuse me with the facts" crowd.

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Global Warming, Climate Change, Weather, Hurricanes

Linden Lab Builds Bridge Between Second Life and Real World

Linden Lab Builds Bridge Between Second Life and Real World With New Voice-Driven Instant Messaging Client: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Linden Lab®, creator of 3D virtual world Second Life® (www.secondlife.com), has announced a new voice and instant messaging client that will enable Second Life Residents to connect and communicate with their Second Life contacts whether or not they are actually inworld. The thin client, called SLim™, provided by Vivox (www.vivox.com) in partnership with Linden Lab, enables Residents to conduct voice or text conversations with members of their Second Life Friends list in and out of the virtual world."

So after at least two dedicated third party Second Life IM clients were released and used, Linden Labs has decided to get in on the act.

Nice. Let's see, last year I used to use a program I bought in Second Life called SLimChat (notice the similar name?) It was a GREAT program, much like the early ICQ client and had basic in world functionality as well.

SLimChat worked by using the libsecondlife library and logging you into the Second Life world. You could do most anything you could do while logged in with the official client, but in text only. I.E., you could "hear" and type to people in chat range, send and receive IMs, pay and receive money, interact in a limited basis with objects around you (like sitting on a chair), receive group notices and more.

SLimChat was ideal for those of us who needed or wanted to stay in touch with Second Life while at work.

Sadly, the creator of the program died before it could ever make it out of beta and no new non-expiring versions were released.

So along came SLeek by Delta Czukor. Same general idea with a little more involved interface. Lacks the group notices I think though. Great program for the same uses as the ill-fated SLimChat.

SLeek requires the Microsoft .NET library so run only under Microsoft Windows. Delta plans a complete rewrite in .NET 3.5 and will release it as open source once the renamed and rewritten project reaches a stable state. Sadly, the use of .NET 3.5 means that SLeek will only be available for Windows, not for OS X or Linux.

Perhaps the new official IM client from Linden Labs will be available for Mac and Linux giving us at least the barest minimum of SLeek's functionality.

Given the choice though, if I'm going to have to run yet ANOTHER IM client, I'd prefer to have the features of SLimChat and SLeek.

You can find SLeek at http://delta.slinked.net.

Technorati Tags:
Computers, Games, Linux, Open Source, OS X, Second Life, Software, Windows

Grasping at Straws

Here it is, just three days after John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate and the Democrats haven't spent Labor Day Weekend at a picnic. They've been hard at work trying to dig up any dirt on Mrs. Palin that they can.

First, In tabloid tradition, it was spread all over the Internet that her 17 years-old unmarried daughter was pregnant and that Mrs. Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover for her daughter. That the baby with Downs Syndrome is really Mrs. Palin's grandchild.

Turns out that the daughter was indeed and still is pregnant, the wedding date has been set for her to marry the father and that it isn't a big secret.

Then the Dems made a big deal out of an Ethics committee investigation into Mrs. Palin back in Alaska. This is investigation was instigated by the Democrats at the state level. (Remember Mrs. Palin is a Republican who defeated both the current governor and a prior one, both of whom were "Good Ol' Boys")

The truth as usual turns out be a whole lot less interesting. When she took office, she started cleaning house, rescinding job appointments and getting rid of graft and corruption from the old regimes.

One of the people she wanted fired is a brother-in-law of the ex-Governor and was being protected by the State Public Safety Commissioner. When the Commissioner refused to fire the guy, Mrs. Palin fired him. Good on her!

So the good ol' boys take her to task by investigating her for abuse of power. Gotta protect their own.

Well, since none of that is all that damaging, the Dems have drug up two more charges against her character.

Seems that as much as 15 years ago, she was a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party for two years. Oooh! Run Away! The supposedly "bad" part is that the party has pushed for Alaskan independence several times.

Now I don't know about the rest of you. But I've changed registered parties from time to time when there was someone in the primaries that I REALLY wanted to get my vote. In the states I've lived in, I can only vote for candidates from my registered party, so I have to change parties to vote for the person I think will do best. It doesn't mean that I believe or support everything that party stands for.

The final charge (so far) is that 22 years ago, Mrs. Palin was... wait for it... ARRESTED! For DUI.

Let's see, she's 44 years old now, so that'd make her 22 when it happened. Young and stupid. The fact that she hasn't been caught DUI since means that she probably grew up and learned her lesson.

Trust me, I'm more against DUI than most people as a drunk killed my baby brother years ago. A drunk with multiple DUI convictions!

But being caught once and staying clean for more than 20 years since does not make you or Sarah Palin a bad person.

Both parties of plenty of work to do and more important things to deal with than trying to dig up whatever dirt they can on another candidate. Perhaps there's trouble in Obamanation and things aren't as good as they claim?

Technorati Tags:
Politics, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Republican, Democrat