Monthly Archives: September 2008

Vote for the RIGHT reason

Over the past few months I’ve heard lots of stories on the radio about the election and how people are going to vote.   I’ve got to tell you … there are some people that are just so incredibly stupid about how they make their voting decisions it just makes my blood boil.

Please, people, vote for the RIGHT reason … for instance:

  • Don’t vote for McCain BECAUSE he’s a veteran … vote for his position on veterans affairs.
  • Don’t vote for Obama BECAUSE he’s a African American … vote for his position on minority rights.

The worst example was from a story on NPR’s All Things Considered … during the primary they interviewed some women about Hillary Clinton running for the Democratic ticket … and one woman said that she thought it was admirable that Clinton was running … but it just wasn’t appropriate for her to be president because woman should be subservient to men.   To be fair, they were interviewing people at a conservative church gathering) … but still …   GAAHHHH!!!   What a stupid person.   People like that should have their voters registration cards revoked.

Of course, this raises one of my other pet questions … what’s worse … not voting or making an uninformed vote?

WordPress XML-RPC error

I’ve encountered a weird error in WordPress … for some reason, when a post is submitted using the XML-RPC api (which is used by the WordPress iPhone app), any leading ‘<‘ symbols on the HTML is being stripped out.

Ginny noticed this a few days ago and I just confirmed it on a test blog.

The content that is posted looks something like this …

p>a href="http://beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-
640-480-2fd9116d-5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg">img src="http://
beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-640-480-2fd9116d
--5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg" alt="" width="225" height="300"
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-364" />/a>/p>

I’ll have to do some digging to find if this has already been logged or not.

I wish I was more skilled at PHP … I’m sure it’s someething I could sink my teeth into.

Update: FWIW I’ve opened ticket 7771 on the WordPress tracking system on this issue.

No Priuses Allowed

In an effort to criticize John McCain’s economic policies and his apparent unwillingness to support “buy American” restrictions including Harley-Davidson motorcycles for the Secret Service, a group of American-made hybrid car owners and Harley riders rolled into downtown Grand Rapids, MI on Tuesday to support Barack Obama. The only stipulation for participation? Hybrids had to be American made, meaning no Priuses allowed.

No Priuses Allowed at Hybrids & Harleys for Obama Rally

Darn, wish I had known about this before … would have been cool to roll along with in my Ford Escape Hybrid (built in Kansas City, MO).

Bad Video Card

My poor little Laptop … something’s gone wrong with it’s video card.

A few days ago I was watching a video on the laptop and something went horribly wrong … the video got completely corrupted.   Even rebooting the system didn’t help.   My initial thought was that my external monitor had gone casters up, so I undocked the system and booted it up.   Video on the laptops display was corrupted too.

Got on another PC and started a chat with Dell hardware support … I was quite surprised that the tech I chatted with quickly picked up on the fact that I was technically competent and didn’t waste my time with each individual mouse click and key press.   He simply said “OK, let’s delete the video adapter from the device manager”.

After we deleted the video adapter and reinstalled the video drivers, the problem seemed to go away.   The tech had me run a few video intensive programs to see if the failure came back.   It didn’t.

Yesterday, however, the problem came back.

Continue reading

Freedom of Expression?

We’re watching TV right now and, as a bit of an anomaly, we’re actually watching a commercial … the commercial has a woman discussing that she loves “Freedom of Expression” … and then goes on to describe how she talked to her doctor about Botox treatment.

Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Botox actually paralyze the muscles in your face … thus freezing your expression?   It’s more like “Freedom FROM Expression”.

Regardless, shouldn’t any ‘cosmetic’ with the word “Toxin” in the official name raise just a tad bit of worry?

Testing the sump pump

Considering the weather today, it seems to be a fine time to test the Aquanot backup sump pump.

It’s taking quite a while for the water level to go high enough in the pit. I’m a bit worried that the float on the pump is too high.

Problem here is that once the water goes over the input from the drain tiles, the flow slows down.

Of course, I suspect the fact that the ejector pit is taking on ground water isn’t helping this test. Yet another item to be added to the repair list. This one, however, is pretty pricy … As the utility room floor will have to be broken up in order to put a new pit liner in.

<time passes>

Well, the sump pump never did turn on. Rather frustrating. I did a bit more research and figured out that the float was not set right. It needs to have some play so it will turn the pump on and settle a bit before turning the pump off. Unfortunately, the primary pump interferes with the floats range of motion.

I’ll gave to call Permaseal about getting it reconfigured so it works properly.   Having a emergency backup sump pump doesn’t help if it doesn’t turn on in an emergency.