The Bush Rally Photos

Here are the promised photos from yesterday's event. I had hoped to post a bit more about the event, but time got away from me. Tomorrow, hopefully…

For now, just enjoy the photo tour. The 38 photos I've posted are the best of the bunch I got. I also recorded most of the speech using my camera's video recording functionality, but I doubt the campaign would want me to post that (copyright issues and the like).

Wow.

I went to the rally for President Bush today. It was amazing. I have lots of photos, I'll post some tomorrow.

Moving Forward with the War Against SPAM

I posted the following to CS-FSLUG and CMUG and I thought asisaid readers might be interested as well. Help me out in the war against SPAM by responding in the comments! Also, please consider posting a link to this on your blog — if the news spreads, maybe we can get more support for this project.

Hi everyone, I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but I've found a really troubling occurrence over the past year. Christians [are] using spam as a medium for advertising. And, I'm not talking about variations of the Nigerian scam.

For instance, I've been signed up for several “Christian” newsletters that appear to be genuine, and even one from a well known Christian publisher, without my consent. One sends me three copies of each issue of the newsletter.

I could just unsubscribe, but I think that — in the long run, anyway — fails to accomplish anything. These organizations are still using very disturbing means to get out their message. Thus I got an idea: a blacklist of Christian Spammers. I'll create a list of all of the organizations who seem to be doing this and place them on them on the web. The page will encourage Christians to avoid these organizations, or at least their e-mail services, until such time as they “repent” of this. I will then contact them and provide them with a simple way to be removed: delete any and all subscribers they have added through means other than legitimate opt-in sign ups.

Obviously, they could lie and fail to delete all of the subscribers, but there is a simple way to test this: I will contact them using an address other than one that they presently have. Thus, the only way they can remove me (and thus convince me that they have “done the right thing”) is to remove all unsolicited subscribers (well, there are other means, but at least I won't make it easy). [Likewise, if others provide me with reports, they can let me know if the company quits spamming them after I contact them.]

The reason I'm posting this is that I'm hoping to get some more reports of Christian spammers. Especially ones who repeatedly send spam out — the kind that perhaps spam you every week or every day (as some do to me). It is my hope that when they are publicly confronted about this, they will relent (my attempts at private correspondence have failed to get the desired results).

There are two reasons I see for doing this: (1) I just really despise spam. I get so much of it, my mailbox would be useless if not for client side spam filtering and SpamAssassin on the server. (2) I don't want non-Christians to be getting spammed by Christian organizations and thus start grouping Christians with the less tasteful groups that usually spam. I'm sure some mean well by this, but its wrong all the same, and I think it would be good to put a stop to it before it gets any worse.

So, what do you say? Would you send those spammers' organizational web sites, e-mail addresses, etc. my way?

-Tim

If you prefer to send reports by private e-mail to me, that is fine as well. I will not share your name with spammers either way.

Sunday Brunch on Monday

1.  Do you or should you wear glasses or contact lenses?
No. I should wear sun glasses, but I don't do that either.

2.  What is your favorite type of footwear?
Birkenstock sandals… I love 'em. I have two standard, brown pairs of sandals, plus I recently added a pair of “Birki's” made with a rubber footbed — perfect for when you think it might rain. I've found that my legs will become sore even when wearing good sneakers, but rarely ever hurt at all when wearing Birkenstocks, thanks to their famous footbed's amazing support.

When inside, I prefer to be barefoot.

3.  What is your worst habit?
Worrying. I'm very bad about second guessing myself, worrying about the best way to say something to someone, and so on. I am also a worrier on things like whether meat has been cooked enough at a restaurant. My worrying when around less-than-well-done meat as well as individuals who are sick can cause me to do a good job of “getting” a psychosomatic case of something.

I'm worried I might be forgetting something I should say here.

(The bad habits Christopher mentions also apply to me.)

4.  Are you an average, so-so or very good cook?
I think I'm between average and good. Like Christopher, clean up is a lot of what keeps me from doing it more often.

5. Do you spend more time watching television, listening to music or surfing the internet?
Surfing the internet. I spend far too much time reading blogs, news and other things. Of course, much of my work involves the internet too, so I spend a lot of time on here.

I generally watch television for 30 minutes a day, usually to see something I'm time shifting off of TV Land or some other cable station (I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, Green Acres or The Beverly Hillbillies [on WGN] usually). Sometimes, I'll also watch CNN or the Weather Channel (I actually find the latter relaxing, but I don't watch it all that often).

I rip my CD's into XMMS (on GNU/Linux) and iTunes (on Mac OS X), so music goes along with the Internet. I'm currently enjoying Steven Curtis Chapman's CD Declaration.

Politics by the Numbers

The political compass divides views into a four way map with coordinates rather than just a two way spectrum in the following manner.

My “score” is:
Economic Left/Right: 1.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.97

That makes me just slightly below the middle on the up/down social scale between Libertarian and Authoritarian views and just a bit more skewed from center to the right on the economic scale. I guess that makes me a “compassionate conservative.”

Okay, one more way to look at this, courtesy of Christopher:

“32 percent liberal, 68 percent conservative - compared to 73 percent liberal, 27 percent conservative” You can click the link to view my full results and take the quiz for yourself. (The comparison part is based on the poll's ability to compare your views with someone else's. I chose to enter my father's views, as best I understand them, as the second person.)

Interesting. So I took three polls. The first puts me far the right, the second puts me just right of center and the third puts me somewhat in the middle of the right (half way between ultra-conservative and centrist). The latter two are closer together and I think they my corroborate what I generally held to be true: I'm a conservative, but not an ultra-conservative. Furthermore, I generally am slightly more liberal economically than socially (mostly due to less conviction about the issues there, I suspect), although I lean to the right on both.

Finally, the last quiz also includes a personality segment:
There has been much research on how people describe others, and five major dimensions of human personality have been found. They are often referred to as the OCEAN model of personality, because of the acronym from the names of the five dimensions. Your specific personality indicates that the following attributes will most likely describe you well:
You enjoy having novel experiences and seeing things in new ways.
You are neither organized or disorganized.
You tend to shy away from social situations.
You tend to consider the feelings of others.
You are generally relaxed.

Predestined Not to Comment?

Well, after reading Christopher's interesting post on election (as he guest blogged on another blog through BlogSwap), I wrote up a post on my thoughts on the subject, including some concerns about what the doctrine of election means to other parts of the Bible. Unfortunately, the post disappeared. I guess I must have closed the web browser window it was in (I had several tabs opened, maybe I switched tabs and then closed the whole thing) or something, because it is gone now.

Oh well. Maybe I'll write something up again another day.

President Comes to Town

I was in downtown St. Charles, a quaint little area of historic buildings along our river front, this afternoon, when I noticed something unusual: a bunch of “Bush-Cheney” signs on the street. I decided to investigate and noticed underneath it said “Tickets” with an arrow pointing up the street. Following the arrows to the side a building, I found a door with another campaign sign on it. By this time, I was intrigued, so I went inside.

As it turned out, this was the Bush-Cheney campaign office for the area and they were giving away tickets to go see the President at the nearby Family Arena on Tuesday. Needless to say, I jumped on the offer and got a ticket. I was at the family arena four years ago when the then-governor of Texas came into town just a few days before the election. This time, I get to see the President of the United States. Pretty exciting!

I guess it pays to look at signs… you just never know what surprise might arise from them.

Lapbert Has Problems

My trusty old Dell laptop (“Lapbert”) seems to have problems. It's PC Card network card can't establish a connection. Worse, I didn't realize that until I entered all this month's invoicing data so that it would be ready for printing and e-mailing. So I now have to redo it all. By hand. Soon.

After I get done with that, I need to figure out how serious the problem is. I hope it isn't too bad.

Mac Woes

I did some work for a friend of mine, the church's choir director, today. I worked on her home wireless network. It would have been fairly simple: wireless router on first floor to iMac with Airport on second floor. Except that her grandson disconnected the cable modem to router connection and hooked it indirectly through another router so that he could get online without waiting for me to finish. I didn't realize it — since the cable modem is actually another floor down and linked by a long ethernet cable — until I had spent probably an hour pulling my hair out.

The grandson had important things to do. Like downloading pirated copies of Zone Alarm Pro, Office and Fahrenheit 9/11 off the new cable connection. sigh

Then Airport wasn't working. Turned out the grandson, who hates Macs, had installed it. He forgot to hook up the internal iMac antennae to the Airport card. I only caught that when I had to remove the card to get the S/N for AppleCare support. I think the technician was glad to see she didn't have to solve the problem for me.

Then the cable modem lost its signal again, thanks to a weak signal. Charter said they'd send out a tech on Friday.

Interspersed there was a lot of time locating and downloading updates — when things were working — onto my PowerBook and then burning them and putting them on the iMac. If Airport had just been installed correctly things would have been way easier: just launch Software Update and get the new Airport and Mac OS updates. But, in the end the computer moved up to OS 9.2 from 9.0 and I convinced my friend that despite the fact that her grandchildren were nagging her to get a PC and that the church office is standardized on XP, that she really wasn't foolish for wanting to stay on Macs.

Now if only the church office would find a budget for a new PowerBook for her…

Plumb Out of Ideas

Well, I was busy all day and then tonight I got to fight with plumbing problems (sewer backing up). It was a real mess, although fortunately it didn't ruin anything, just took awhile to clean up and figure out what was wrong (hopefully). I guess you will just have to wait another painstaking day for my next “real” post.

Sorry to disappoint again!