Text Based Page

As can be seen from the dates of the past four articles I have written, I have been away from this site for some time. In the past four years there has been many changes in my life which I will go into a little later. But first, I am back and I will be posting on a regular schedule, this is something I've been wanting to do for some time. My online articles will cover many of the technical (computer stuff) I am doing, online technology I have experience with, corporate software I use, and business issues, business intelligence, business tools, etc.

I haven't been very active since 2005, at that time my children were 10 and 5, they took up much of my time both with homework, and just being a good Dad. They are now 14 and 11, they do not need me as much and this will leave time for my online writing. I have been promoted twice in the past four years. The second promotion required a family move from South Carolina to Georgia. We settled into our much larger and newer home last August and my family is just now starting to feel at home in a new location. As my son started High School this year, I have committed to no more family moves while either of them are in High School, this means I'll be in Georgia for at least seven years getting them both through High School.

Will I commit to staying here after the youngest graduates from High School? I can't say at the moment, my second career is on solid ground and I can go anywhere I want, so with seven years to position myself for the next big thing, I'll really have to play it by ear between now and June of 2017 (when my daughter graduates).

I'll be playing around with the design of this site over then next few weeks, adding bits and pieces as I go along. I'll be adding my favorite links, but I will not be adding comments or forums. Unfortunately, I've had my fill of combating SPAM and its just too time consuming to be worrying about it in the future. I will post e-mails I get from readers, but the ones I post will have to be on-point, bringing added value to the article, or pertinent to what this site is and will become.

I will be adding a Creative Commons copyright to everything, and this will be posted soon. I have a companion site, which isn't up yet, but will be as soon as I get the current hand coded HTML files imported into CityDesk. The reason for these changes is I am on a lifetime plan with Textdrive, they sold the company to Joyent, so I am being moved from the old BSD based servers to new Solaris based servers. This post is the first on a Joyent Accelerator.

As it is getting close to the time for me to sign-off for the evening, I'll say good-night, I should have everything sorted out by the first of the new year. So come on back and see how we can grow.

When I started writing online in the late 90's, it was about the opportunity to say something. To express myself to a wider audience than my local newspaper, I've done the "letter to the editor" thing many times and while it was nice to see something I had written in print, it just didn't give me the satisfaction I get from an exchange of ideas in a forum or at a public gathering of concerned friends and neighbors.

So when the Internet thing came along, I thought this would be an ideal medium for reaching a much wider audience than what I could in my little circle of friends or the city newspaper. And for the most part, this has been true. If I hadn't changed my publishing system, you would be able to find a few hundred comments to articles I have written which are well thought out and reasoned. I have enjoyed the opportunity to respond in the comment sections and this has been real satisfying for me. Then about a year or so ago, the detritus of the Internet decided to start polluting the sites of decent, hard working people by posting garbage to the comment sections of their online weblogs or blogs (depending on which term you like to use). These were often advertisements or links to gambling, prescription drug, or pornographic sites. While on a little read site this doesn't seem like a big thing, let's remember there is a role played by search engines in this story.

Search engines are applications which follow links from one page to another. When they reach a page they index all of the content (words) on the page and then with some voodoo math and obscure equations come up with a scoring mechanism for returning links to the pages they have indexed as search results when you go looking for information on the marvelous world wide web. So let's say you are having a problem with little Johnny eating his peas. You go to Google, or Yahoo and search for "children eating vegetables". Along with the usual commercial sites with lots of targeted advertising you find a few sites run by pediatricians (kid doctors) and decide to click the link to their solution to your problem (Johnny eating peas), the article is right on and interesting, at the bottom you find there are comments by other parents with information providing feedback to the author about what worked, what didn't, a few thank-you's and such. While reading the articles you run into a few comments loaded with 10 or so links to Texas poker, golden casino, viagra 4 less, and many other unsavory links. This is not what you wanted, and is certainly not what the kid doctor wants on their site. But guess what, I said their was a role search engines play here, the more links from unaffiliated sites which point to another site, raises the score of the linked to site in the mathematical wizardry of the search engine. This means, if I can get my "Drugs for Less" site into the comment sections of a few thousand non-pharmaceutical sites, then my ranking gets closer and closer to number 1 when someone searches for something that is related to my site. Therefore as a publisher of content which allows the leaving of comments or trackbacks, it becomes a major task to keep the comments and trackbacks cleaned of the unwanted "free" advertising for unsavory sites.

I decided to jump out of that game. Some mornings I would be greeted by more than 200 unwanted comments which had no relation to anything I had written. I installed plugins, upgrades and even changed backend systems. While the fixes worked for a little while, the unsavory characters always found a new trick to get their filth onto my pages. I was so disgusted with this blatant unscrupulous behavior I even contemplated removing myself from the Internet entirely. And for a while I did. But the urge to write returned with a vengeance, not to stand in the way of this urge, I have returned to the world of online publishing, but no longer accept comments, trackbacks or feedback from others. Of course, one could drop me a personal e-mail and if I were to find it worthy, I would post it at the bottom of the appropriate article. And then again, I have provided a link on every page to my simple, yet elegant online forum. I do invite comments, I just don't invite them easily.

Which brings me to the second major issue I have with content producers, that being the one of advertising. Many weblogs, blogs, what have you, are now sporting the Google Adsense advertisements. While some have put them in a tasteful position in a sidebar or at the bottom of a page, many are putting them into the middle of pages and in places guaranteed to be the most disruptive to reading. Others are just posting snippets from news sites with links to those news sites. Not really saying anything or providing any benefit to the seeker of knowledge or entertainment, they are just trying to be magnets for search engines and are trying any manipulative trick they can devise to get their search engine (SE) rankings near the top of the heap, in an effort to have their advertisements displayed and generate revenue (the long green) for themselves. About.com is a good example of this, while they do have good content, the pop-up ads, banner ads, and javscript sliding ads just drive me crazy! I no longer follow any links from search engines to an about.com site.

If you've read down this far, here's my advertisement! No! Just joking, I will never have any advertising on my site! I've stopped accepting comments and trackbacks in an effort to prevent others from using my resources to promote their whatever's, if my simple yet elegant forum starts getting abused, I'll kill it also. If you wish to comment on anything I've written about or alluded too, feel free to send me an e-mail. I do have excellent SPAM protection and I do know how to use the "delete" key!

Recently I have found myself trying to explain to my son why good penmanship was important. I used all of the regular arguments like, handwritten letters are more personal, they show you care. Handwritten letters are becoming rare in today's world. When you handwrite a letter it carries more importance than an e-mail or computer generated letter, etc..

I think I started to get through to him, until he pointed out my own shortcomings in penmanship! I realized my past 8 years working in the computer industry has really impacted my own ability to write with clear, easy to read, cursive writing. This really opened my eyes, I realized I needed to "walk the walk". To this end I started to research for better methods to assist my son in learning to write in cursive. My research on the Internet led me to many interesting sites, many of them had examples of cursive writing from the early to late 1800's. I quickly found the method of cursive writing was very different from what I was taught in the 3rd grade (1965). I was taught the "Palmer" method which was officially adopted in the late 1920's as the official method of teaching cursive writing.

A site with letters written by and to Edgar Allen Poe was my first examples of mid-1800 cursive writing. With a little careful searching I came across these letters from and to Thomas Jefferson. As you can see, the cursive writing displayed in these letters is of a better quality and adds much to the aesthetic appeal of the written words. A similar method of cursive writing is found in the Spencerian method. This was a method of cursive writing popular from 1850-1925 before the Palmer method became the official method adopted for use in public education.

It was often said in those times, that to be successful in business, one had to write well in an expressive hand. The Spencerian period of writing has been considered by many to be "America's Golden Age of Writing". I have resolved myself to learn the Spencerian method during 2006. Many of the old school books for learning this method can be found at Barnes and Noble online bookstore. Search for Spencerian from the Barnes and Noble homepage.

The major differences of these 2 methods lies in the use of the whole arm versus the hand and wrist when writing. Spencer taught writing started at the shoulder and brought the whole arm into the act of writing. Palmer didn't subscribe to this method and developed his own method where the arm is relatively at rest while all the action is carried out by the wrist and hand. The primary difference is apparent in the flowing beautiful curves and loops obtained with a whole arm movement versus the tight ovals and slanting curves found in the relaxed arm.

But I did mention the founding fathers didn't I? My research in letters as an example of cursive script, led me to many writing examples of the founding fathers and to the Declaration of Independence. A fantastic example of early American writing. When discussing my plans with a co-worker, he suggested I read "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen Ambrose. My local library has it as an audio book on CD's so I am now listening to it in the car on the way to and from work. President Jefferson plays such a major role in sending Lewis and Clark on their historic journey, I also checked out the book "American Sphinx" by Joseph J. Ellis, in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the times in which I find the writing style so appealing. This book has really put American history into perspective for me.

I have read nothing new about these times or events in American history, but I never put them together in the right chronological order before. I hadn't realized Jefferson was the Ambassador to France during the drafting of the American Constitution and the outbreak of the French Revolution. I didn't know the first foreign loan America received was from the Dutch and that floating bond rates and variable interest schemes were a concern in the late 1700's. It just goes to show you that what we think are inventions of the 20th Century have been around for a lot longer...

Another interesting fact I came across was while Jefferson was the Ambassador to France, America and other European nations were being plagued by pirates from the Barbary states (Several Muslim countries along the north African coast). The pirates would capture trading ships in the Atlantic ocean and western Mediterranean, they then held the ship and crew for ransom from the parent country. Jefferson had occasion to speak to the Ambassador from Tripoli about how they could possible justify these "outrageous acts". "The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in the Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners..." (Jefferson and John Adams to American Commissioners, March 28, 1786. Boyd, IX, 357-59) So even today we see these same beliefs being claimed and violent acts being carried out against Americans "wherever they can be found".

And to think, if it wasn't for my son's complaining about learning cursive writing I would not have learned of everything I discovered in the past few months. The learning of the Spencerian method fits well with my new approach to data permanence while opening up a new area of knowledge for me to pursue in the coming months and years.

So, while I have found a new interest in writing, early American history and fountain pens, oh I haven't said anything about fountain pens, have I? As we are rapidly approaching my self imposed limit of 1000 words, I'll have to save that for another article in the near future. But suffice it to say, I really enjoy writing with a fountain pen!

Recently I have been called upon to help 3 co-workers with their new computer purchases. Since these co-workers are not what I would call as "computer professionals", I was more than happy to help them. Listed below is the process I follow when setting up a new computer prior to turning the user loose in the wild world of the Internet.

Note: At the end of the article I will have links to applications which I have used personally and fully endorse as of their current versions available on 1 December 2005.

In first preparing someone's system for first time use, I like to conduct a short interview to find out how the prospective user plan to uses the system. Here is my short list of questions:

How are you going to be using this system? Is it for Internet browsing, email, online purchases? Is this to be used predominately for writing, personal finances, or is the use geared to an artistic use? Digital photo's, music, or scientific uses? Programming or mathmatical pursuits? Does it need to be portable? Roadwarrior or family entertainment? Answers to these questions will certainly dictate the types of processors, amount of RAM and other hardware needs for the system.

Do you have any software you want installed onto this system? Will there be any software purchases? Do you have the software you need to accomplish your needs or wants? Do you require compatibility with currently owned software?

How do you plan to protect your system from the bad things from the Internet? Preferences for anti-virus applications? What anti-spyware protection do you want? What about personal firewalls?

Do you want to add any additional hardware or devices to the system? Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), scanners, printers, or digital cameras?

There is alot to consider when setting up a new system, you must know what the intended use is going to be, how the system may need to be extended or augmented to really become a tool rather than a system which is more of an anchor. In today's world, a laptop is often a better choice for most people than a large clunky desktop or mid/mini-tower.

The next step is to remove un-needed or unwanted applications. This includes free trials of antivirus applications, Internet service providers (AOL, Netzero etc.), and utilities. Once these are removed, I then remove the unwanted free applications which many new computers are shipped with, many of these applications are crippled or SE (Special Editions) or limited time trials.

As a last step in initial preparation, I apply all known operating system patches or updates. Many of these are necessary security updates and should be applied to all systems whether new or not.

The first additions I apply are the antivirus application, anti-spyware applications and other non-specific security applications requested by the new system user. For antivirus I use either PC-Cillin by Trend Micro or the free Clam Win. When it comes to anti-spyware I fully believe in defense in depth, while I like the new Microsoft Antispyware, I am leery of anything coming from Microsoft. I feel they may allow some questionable applications from Microsoft to be installed without warning so I also install the free Spybot Search and Destroy. I also install Adaware and highly recommend their Pro version for full protection. (I have used all three for a while and occasionally one or the other finds something which would have gotten past the other 2.) I finish up the security upgrades by installing Firefox and Thunderbird.

Hardware upgrades are next, I often install additional RAM and a second hard drive. Of course there are the printer drivers, PDA's and other software or drivers needed to support the many electronic devices people are now carrying around on their persons.

After the system is secured for use, I then install the users software. I recommend they upgrade to the latest versions, but if they are unwilling, I install and check for compatibility with other applications and full functionality with the installed operating system. Occasionally I have to uninstall something and let the user know they will have to find an alternative or upgrade their application.

Once I have completed the installations, upgrades and general overall check, I start the education. We discuss everything from Internet safety to keeping the system updated with patches and fixes. I also cover general connectivity troubleshooting, what to do if the printer doesn't print, and what to do if the user suspects a virus or spyware has infected their system. I also provide them with my card which has my e-mail and cell phone number on it.

You can not be to careful with the system which will be the repository or tool you use for accessing the Internet, conduct your personal banking with, or using for online purchases. While the Internet is a fantastic tool in the right hands, it can quickly become your worse nightmare if you don't adequately protect your system and browse safely.

In the recent few months I have been asking myself some tough questions. Many of the answers have been less than stellar and I have been making changes as a result. The re-targeting of this site is the first of these many changes.

If you have been reading my site for the past few weeks, you know I've become concerned recently about "data permanence". What this refers to is how permanent is the data I put online or keep on my hard drive? To tell the truth, while it seems like it will always be there, I must be realistic. All my data is subject to the failure of the hardware, obsolescence of the applications which created it, or my inability to find it at sometime in the future. So let's look at these 3 issues separately and then try to determine a safe course of action to resolve the issues in as painless and expeditious manner as possible.

While modern hardware is very resilient, it nonetheless sometimes fails. These failures can often be a power supply to the server where I host/store my files to the workstation(s) where I create my files. It can be a hard drive failure, network failure to my broadband connection, or internal component failure of my router, wiring or power to my house. These failures are often impossible to anticipate, and timely or costly to resolve.

In the past 1999, I signed up for the Time Warner Roadrunner service. This was the first broadband service available to me in Lexington, South Carolina. Since then I have been without service for about 5 weekends. While this seems really reliable, I do host my own web and e-mail server. In the past 4 years I have agreed to host 2 commercial web sites for which I do all the development and deployment. While I'm not really concerned if my wonderful prose is missing from the 'net for a few days, I am concerned about 2 businesses being offline.

I have never suffered a power-supply or hard drive failure, but my hardware isn't being replaced on any life cycle and is getting older every day. I have had numerous power outages due to weather (ice storms), sometimes the power company cuts it when they are making changes to the electrical grid or replacing my meter with a "new technology" one. The outages are usually short duration, but have lasted from 3 to 9 hours, 3 or 4 times in the past 10 years.

My part of the United States is prone to tornadoes, hurricanes, and lightening strikes. All of which can cause total loss to my data as well as my home.

While this doesn't seem to be that big a deal, I mean an .html file is an .html file, and these can be edited with any old text editor, I do create spreadsheets, databases, and formatted word documents on a fairly consistent basis. In my garage, in boxes in a corner somewhere are a large collection of 5.25 inch disks filled with volumes of information created 12 to 15 years ago in MultiMate, Lotus 123 and Dbase III. These are part of my military history and all totally useless to me today. I don't have a 5.25 inch disk drive, and I certainly don't have any of the applications used to create the files. So what about my current files? I have been using MS Word since version 4.2, anybody remember Office 4.2? Okay, we know template files created in Office 95 are not compatible with Office 2000, but everything is now guaranteed to be backward compatible to Office 2000 right? Think again, it would be bad planning to think a Word document from 2006 will be readable by the computers we use in 2018 or later.

What about the web? Are PHP/Ruby/Perl/Python/TCL still going to be current scripting languages in 2018? I don't know and that's the rub. With all of this uncertainty, can I really count on technology to free my creativity and expect my children or their grandchildren to enjoy the fruits of my labor on their computers of the future?

Not only can I find the files I store on my workstation. But what about the files I store in the server? How many copies of the same file do I have scattered between my workstation and backup systems. How many copies are really necessary? Currently, I'm pretty good at making backups of my entire hard-drive, individual work folders etc.. to backup media. The backup media I use is pretty standard fare. I have an external 250GB hard-drive for backup of my server, a 120GB external drive for my workstation and an 80GB external hard-drive for my laptop. I backup current working files to one of 3 or 4 USB "thumb" drives and weekly copy the files on them to my server. Sounds good? Well, it has been up till now. Recently I noticed I had the same file, different versions in 14 different locations on the external server backup drive. This file was also in 4 different locations on my laptop and in 7 locations on the workstation. Do I really need 20 copies of an excel spreadsheet, saved at various times with different data? All but the current one on the laptop and it's copy on the "thumb" drive are obsolete.

Publishing my data on the Internet back in 1999 seemed like a really good idea. In fact I was quite the happy writer during the 2000 Presidential election. Putting my thoughts and opinions about the events leading up to the election and then joyfully offering my opinions on the aftermath. Interspersed in all of this I published bits and pieces of information gleaned and collated to bring a historical perspective on the events from a constitutional view along with interesting bits about past elections going back to the very early ones in our nation's history. Sounds like fun? It was, but as those events slowly passed into history, and my interests changed, I changed my publishing system. With the change in system came the realization I would have to convert nearly 500 entries by copying and pasting the text into the new system, add a title, publish date and category. Guess what? I kept only the 80 to 100 best entries and let the rest disappear. Over the next few months I noticed those old, no longer to be found entries were getting a lot of traffic to my site. The visitors were getting the ole 404 (file not found) error from my server. In fact for close to 8 months, the 404 page was the most request page on my site. Search engines are truly the work of the devil! It's great to see them driving visitors to your site for current pages, but painful when visitors are being served the ole 404!

So now that I have laid out my most pressing issues of the day, how am I going to resolve them? Glad you asked, while I don't have answers to all of them, I do have a strategy for getting to where I want to be in the near term.

Hardware Issues: I have subscribed to an online provider for running my web content! So my files will reside locally and be "published" when changed to an off-site service which has a much better history of staying online and accessible than my home server. So online content is now safe. My online provider has redundant network connections, daily backup of all servers, and emergency power. None of which exist in my home.

I have also subscribed to an online storage service. Currently I have 4GB of online space to store the really important files. This also facilitates my accessing certain files from any web browser anywhere in the world. So if there are any files I might need while on vacation, I bundle them up into a .zip file and put them in online storage. I also copy the .zip to a "thumb" drive and make sure my laptop is one of the first things I pack. This solution also allows me a method of working on files from locations outside of my home, saving them to online storage and then retrieving them for further work at home from my workstation.

Obsolete Applications: No immediate resolution really, but I am considering using XML more along with more reliance on purely text based solutions whenever possible. Less reliance on proprietary applications and systems and more on open-source software. While I must admit, the majority of my work is with proprietary applications, the resultant file is easily translated and/or imported into open-source solutions. I might not be able to work with the source document (propriety database-backed application), but I can import and work with the final draft of a document (published open-source format).

Finding Files and Published Data: Here's the rub, once the files are created or applications saved, where do I go to find the latest version of a file or application. In the past I've devised many schemes to try and organize my files and folders. For some reason, laziness or lack of attention, these plans or schemes always fail. The same thing with finding information on the Internet, I find a page with just the answer I'm looking for, save it to my favorites and in 6 or so months, when I go back the data is no longer available or moved. My "favorite" links become outdated or the list gets so long with so many sub-folders for organization I spend too much time looking for the applicable link or information. I'm sure you know what I am talking about. So once again I am devising a system for keeping track of my important data. Only this time I am trying to be disciplined enough to stick to the plan. A future article here will look back at the changes I am making and measure their success.

Web based information is another story altogether, I'm still struggling with deciding on my final publishing system. I've used and enjoyed so many in the past 4 to 5 years. Of particular note are MovableType, OpenACS, CityDesk, TextPattern and Wordpress. While all are or do the things they are designed to do very well, I'm torn between the flexibility of some, and the ease of use of others. I've tried and become familiar with many more, and the five mentioned here are the ones I find the most useful with the largest online communities. So currently, I am using CityDesk to publish this site. But have a desire to return to MovableType and as always I keep my eye on OpenACS.

You might question my choice of CityDesk, but the choice is really rather academic at the moment. With my move of my primary publishing to an established provider, I really don't need to have a "system" installed any longer. On my personal server running from my home, I used MovableType and OpenACS the most with an occasional foray into the world of ExpressionEngine, Drupal and others. But having an off-site provider has led me to publishing predominately static pages with CityDesk. While the application is a client-side based one, CityDesk publishes my files to the off-site provider in static html. This gives my pages a smaller size, and corresponding faster load times.

What am I really talking about here? I'm talking about a fundamental new view of computers and the role they play in my life. Rather than being the object to master, they are now the tool to facilitate my memory, the sharing of my thoughts and ideas and at the most basic level nothing more than a tool to get things done. I'm starting to use them to enhance my other life systems, not only as something to use for e-mail, word processing or balancing my checkbook.

Over the next few months I will be writing a short series of articles explaining how I am using computers, networks, and the Internet to keep track of those things they are best suited to keep track of, and how I go about protecting my data and systems from loss and failure.

As many of you know, my day job is with a Federal Agency and I make it a practice not to talk about what I do or don't do there, but my other job is helping the typical computer user do things they don't know how to do on their own. In the past few months I've seen a great need for spyware removal and preventive education. I have cleaned no less than 4 computers in the past 8 weeks.

The common thread among the users is, they are not computer professionals (they do not make a living in the IT industry). They share their systems with their children and they know their computer isn't running right, but can't explain what is wrong with the system. On one system with multiple user profiles in WinXp, one of the profiles would start popping up advertising IE windows as soon as the profile was launched. The only way to stop it was to do the old 3 finger salute and shutdown the system. The user thought this was strange, but didn't see anything seriously wrong with it, after I slowly and laboriously cleaned out all 4 profiles, he admitted it does run much better now and those annoying pop-ups are gone!

Maybe I'll hang a shingle and start cleaning systems on the side, of the 4 machines, all were infected with the same series of advertising Trojans, spybots, and viruses. After cleaning the first one, the rest were easy and only had slight variations on the theme. I can only say all 4 users were happy after I returned their machines. Along with the cleaning, I gave them a short lesson on ensuring periodic updates to the operating system, how to use the freeware applications I installed for their protection and made them promise to call someone else in the future!

Last week I was asked to help with a machine one of my co-workers feared was virus infected. He said his McAfee had reported a virus after opening an e-mail (not addressed to him!) and recommended a complete scan. He okayed the scan but aborted it after 30 minutes so he could shut down the machine before leaving on vacation. When we returned from vacation and attempted to start the machine, he got the ole "No Boot Devices" error. Of course he brought it in to me, and I started working on it. While the bios detected the hard drive on boot from a floppy disk, MS-Dos FDisk could not detect the drive. I searched Google and tried the usual recommended fixes for boot sector corruption to no avail. Eventually I had the user buy a new hard drive and prepared him for the worst. After installing the new hardrive, I installed an operating system and configured this drive with a reliable anti-virus application w/firewall, anti-spyware and other protective measures. I then received permission from the user to employ more rigorous file recovery procedures. Since I had already prepared him for a total loss of data, he was very surprised when I was able to recover all of his missing files. These included past years tax records, current online banking information, work product, family photos and videos, etc... Now I wonder how much this kind of service would go for? I've heard of others paying upwards of $700 to $1500 to recover files from a 20gb hard drive, but really hadn't considered this as a career opportunity. This is the second time I've performed file recovery in the past 3 years.

While all of this sounds like a money making venture, I don't know if I really want to fill my free hours trying to make a few more dollars on the side. But as I often do, I tend to overestimate the skills of others around me, since I use these tools and skills everyday, it just seems natural to me that everyone else can do what I do. While this may seem simplistic, it does make it difficult to charge other people for what I do. Then comes the question of pricing, while I get paid a decent salary for what I do, how do I break out charges for specific task I perform for someone off the job? Well, anyway, I will resolve this in some manner or other over the next few weeks, I wouldn't mind building up a small consulting business on the side, I just don't want the side job to take over my day job (security, benefits, challenging).

Halloween is a success, the candy lasted well beyond the last Trick or Treater stopped by the front door. But then we live in a very small neighborhood and the numbers of children stopping by has declined steadily over the past 5 years. Seems the boon in new house construction is affecting our Halloween turnout. In the past 3 years 4 new sub-divisions have been built within 1 mile of my house. Each sub-division has 2 to 3 times the number of homes found in our little '70's era neighborhood. So I guess the kids are getting their fill in a smaller area thus maximizing their return on the distance walked.

Recently I came across the "The New Companion" web site owned and operated by Peter Riis, a Chicago resident. While I am always rambling around the Internet on slow TV days, I was pleasantly surprised to find a well written site offering entries of interest to me. I was especially intrigued by his entries dealing with manuscripts and the permanence of writing from long ago. This is in line with my own view in which sometimes a computer and the Internet are not the best medium for publishing. He actually led me to a site which has copies of letters written by Edgar Allen Poe , while this may not seem all that fascinating, I found my self studying the style of penmanship used by Mr. Poe in both his informal and formal writing. We Americans truly had much better penmanship in the 1800's than today.

While I knew Mr. Poe was a washout from West Point, having been booted out for dereliction of duty after only 2 months in 1830, I didn't know young Mr. Poe was already in the Army in 1828 on a 5 year enlistment, and was trying to gain an early discharge. After gaining help from the man who had raised him in terminating the enlistment early, I guess he thought being an Officer in the Army was a pretty easy way to earn a living, but after 2 months at West Point he found a quick way out. With all he accomplished in his short 40 years of life, I often wonder what wondrous tales he would have written if he had lived out a full life. (1809 - 1849)

If you get a chance, stop by and consider the collection of his written letters. I found the reading a little difficult at first but quickly grew accustomed to the style of cursive writing the more I read. Word choice of the times and the general structure of sentences are fascinating in their simplicity and expressiveness.

Welcome to my new home. Over the next few weeks, I'll be moving all of the domains I have been hosting from my home based server to this one. If you aren't aware of it, this site is resting on one of Textdrive's servers. While this IS costing me a few more pennies, at least my site's will no longer be at the mercy of the occasional outage which seems to occur once or twice a year on a broadband home based server.

Additionally I have the benefit of Textdrive's backup plan, network redundancy etc., I no longer have to worry about whether I'm going to have a power outage during an ice storm or when someone takes out the Time Warner Cable box at the intersection around from our neighborhood (this has happend 8 times in the past 3 years!).

So please feel welcome at this new site, take advantage of my minimal forum, and I hope to see you in the future...

I occasionally become stressed with conditions at work, home and in my community. I often get frustrated with how slow people are in the checkout line at the grocery store, department store or gas station. I'm often enraged at the obvious stupidity of people in online forums or blog postings. Sometimes I think no one has a clue except for me!

But then again, maybe my reality isn't shared by others? What is real to me, in my face every day, isn't even a fleeting thought to a used car salesman on the other end of the United States. My reality and my perception of what is important is rather limited in its impact on others. Sometimes I wonder how really big my circle of influence is, I mean I know it swings a wide path with my immediate family. Of much less concern to my brother in Boise, ID. But I do have some influence with him! I've got influence with my co-workers, but only in the work environment.

My neighbors don't really know I exist, except when I let the lawn go for a few weeks without mowing. The Government only feel my impact when I have to pay taxes or drive a little too fast. Otherwise I'm just another number to them. I am taken seriously or at least known throughout the Government Agency I work for in the context of the national workgroups I participate on, and the position I hold as a National Point of Contact (POC). But otherwise my path is really rather narrow and extends to very small circle of people.

I guess the mark of a great man, is the number of lives he touches, the number of people he influences with his words and deeds. Obviously Abraham Lincoln influenced and impacted many more people than I ever will. The same can be said for pretty much every American President. Others while impacting a much smaller set of people, do so without realizing the decisions they are making is affecting the livelihood and happiness of those who find themselves farther down the corporate food chain.

I once heard it said, when we are babies, the world happens to us and we soak it up. As we age we start to realize we can want things and spend years trying to gain influence and gain control of our immediate world. We see everything with ourselves in the center. Then finally we see ourselves as part of a greater whole, It's in this latter part I now find myself. I am seeing myself, not at the center of my universe, but rather at the edges of those I come in contact with, my children have a whole other circle of things influencing them at school and each other. Where I am now is trying to do things for others which will either help them to help others or at least lead them to think of others.

I am no longer finding myself in the center of the universe, I now know and am trying to come to grips with my position as one small blip on the greater world stage.

While this may sound foolish or demented, give it some thought. Do your troubles or concerns impact me in any way? Would I know about the thing that worries you the most when and if we ever meet on the street, in a store, at a party or at church? Will you have any impact on me at all, ever?

See what I mean, I am now trying to become something more, someone who is a positive influence on others, someone who sets a good example of what's right and just in this world. I am trying to take and interest in other people, getting to know my neighbors, volunteering to help out in the neighborhood, at church, with my co-workers.

I have finally realized, it's not about me or what I want. It's about how many people I can help, how many people I can influence to help others. It's about caring for others and the things which bother them, it's about listening first, talking only when necessary and letting my actions speak much louder than my words.

It's about getting real after 48 years of feeling like it's all happening to me...

It really wasn't that long ago when the Internet was the playground of Universities and the Government, and mere mortals like us were using Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Our on-line world was limited to the number of BBS phone numbers we had, many times the good ones were a long distance call. Using ANSI screens, mostly DOS based, the better systems were the Wildcat and TBBS systems. You could download files, read and post messages, real time chat with the SYSOP (System Operator). Then came the day when I wanted to run my own BBS. I bought a 4 port Wildcat system and went "on-line"...

In the early days, I quickly tied in with the FIDO system, this was a pull email distribution system. My system would dial-up an upstream post-office and download packets destined for my system, my system would then upload packets, for distribution throughout the FIDO system. This was a crude USENET system. I was fairly content running my own system, designing menu systems, creating ANSI art to go with the basic Wildcat menu screens. Working with users to tweak modem configuration strings to optimize modem upload and download speeds. Yes those were the days...

But in 1993 things started to change, Internet service was starting to be available to the general public. I went on-line and knew my little local BBS was going to be short lived. The future was obviously the Internet. But little did I know how the removal of the commercial ban in 1998 was going to effect this wonderous tool. It was the opening up of the Internet to commercial ventures which exploded the Internet and led to the wide usage seen today. Along with the good, obviously comes the bad with Viruses, Spyware, Trojan Applications, SPAM and real world scams twisted to work in an on-line world. And it was into this world I found my chance to reach more people, to share my knowledge of things I have learned along the way. But obviously with this unrestricted ability to publish and share without editorial oversight, or management focus, I sometime lose my way and the site takes off in directions I have never intended it to go...

It's while on these tangents I occasionally feel as if I'm not accomplishing anything and often think of chucking everything and withdrawing all together. Such is the recent 2 or 3 months between posts from April till earlier this week. I was going to take my server down, move the 2 sites I host over to other services and slowly withdraw...

But after 2 months of no posting, I took a long and hard look at what I was wanting to accomplish. I've decided to keep up with the web, keep my site populated and keep posting. I am changing the focus a bit, fewer posts about family and more about technical issues along with the frequent opinion or editorial entry. I'll also be posting more about my personal history as I believe everyone if given the chance has interesting details in their lives. I often find it very interesting to see the route someone takes to get from leaving home to where they are today. Mine is by no means unique, but it is a bit unusual and I'll be posting more on this later.

My goals for the foreseeable future are to post at least weekly, these should be substantial posts, not regurgitation of posts from other blogs or events in the news. If I do post about a newsworthy item, it will include my thoughts and opinions on the issues...

I'm also looking to start posting a series of technical PDF articles/papers. These will be a little less frequent, probably one every month or two. So if this seems appealing to you, stop by every now and then, I'm always updating...

I am 48 years old and my children are 9 and 6. If you do a little math, you'll quickly see I will be 64 when the youngest is 22 and finishing up her college years. Considering my father died of a heart attack after many years of daily insulin injections at the age of 59, I am starting to feel the need to record my "history" somewhere.

The somewhere is the thing, I've thought about creating a private website, but when my children are ready to read it, will the technology to "read it" still be current? Will my files be as easy to read as the Multimate or Appleworks files I created in 91 to 94. While I may have the old 5.25 inch disks, I no longer have the software, the hardware (5.25 in drive) or any other way of reading files which are only 11 to 14 years old. It really is hard to believe the technology of the web and personal computing have come so far in so short a time.

So I guess you are starting to see why I am concerned. Will the CD-Rom I write today, still be usable in another 12 years? When I was saving files to a 5.25 inch disk, I never thought about their eventual obsolesce. I still have cassette tapes, but no cassette player. I have old record albums, but the turntable is still packed in boxes in the garage.

But I have books from the early 1900's, one from 1917 which I can still read if I want too. I do have to be careful with it, as the pages are brittle and hard, but the book is readable. So you can see where I am going here, I'm starting to write my life story in a Journal. Now I am on a quest to find the right Journal. It must be acid free, and of generous size to allow for a lot of writing, remember I'm 48 and therefore have many years to write about.

Currently I am leaning toward this journal in the 11x8.5 size. I learned about this journal and others from this article by Mike Shea.

With the journal in hand, now to find time to write, attempt to improve my penmanship so my children will be able to read it and then "just do it".

As I progress in this project I will post future articles about my progress and the things I learn about the materials used and the process I follow in getting "my humble story" written.

I was thinking the other day about my personal writing ability, no not the wordsmithing, I'm not talking about writing on a computer, but rather the old fashioned pen to paper type of writing. I have noticed I tend to get cramping fingers and hands when taking notes during long meetings or classes. But I wasn't really giving this much thought until my son started complaining that cursive writing was hurting his hand!

In an attempt to assist him with learning to write (he's in the fourth grade) I started looking for references online and found I wasn't the only one with this problem. In fact only a few states now require a minimum acceptable standard of penmanship for school work. Many find it totally acceptable for students to complete some or all of their school work on a computer. Needless to say I was a little shocked and dismayed to read this, and am resolving today to start improving my penmanship and to pass along all I know about writing to my son.

This issue of writing also led me down the path of data permanence. You know, how long will my written words remain available for review and reading. As little as 11 years ago, while I was in the Army, the standard applications we used were Multimate for word processing and Lotus 123 for a spreadsheet. DBase was our database application and we didn't use the Internet for anything. We did have e-mail via dial-up and with convoluted and difficult gateways to the Arpanet for moving e-mail back and forth between military installations.

I bring this up because I have some 5.25 inch disks with copies of documents I created in the early 90's. I came across these the other day and realized I don't have Multimate, Lotus 123 or DBase to recall the files, in fact I don't have either a 286 or 386 system running DOS 3.1 in which these applications ran. If that was just 11 to 13 years ago, how are things going to be in the next 11 to 13 years? Will these web pages be readable, how about the hundreds of family photos which only exist as graphic images on CD-Roms, will we be using CD's or will these be replaced by high-capacity USB sticks?

See where I am going? It's the permanence of the written word on paper which stands the test of time. I have books in my collection which are older than I am, I have family photos from the 50's and 60's? Will my digital files still be accessible in 50 or 60 years?

I really don't know and that is why I am returning to pen and paper for much of my writing, I know I gain a much larger audience on the Internet in this medium, but my important work will be written first on paper, then on computer. And it is this practice I want to pass along to my son.

How are you dealing with the issue of permanence, and the larger issue of data security?

Sometimes your chosen server cannot boot from a CD-ROM drive, if that is the case, then follow these simple instructions for creating a floppy boot disk.

The following steps will provide you with a 3.5" disk for booting your computer to the RedHat Linux setup on your Red Hat CD Disk#1.

6. At the question about the image file to use, enter D:\images\boot.img, substitue your CD-Rom drive letter for the "D".

7. At the question about the target drive, enter drive letter for floppy, this will probably be your A: drive.

8. Once rawrite has finished transferring the boot.img to your floppy, you can close your DOS window and use the 3.5" disk for booting your intended Linux box.

I really wish the Demorats and Nancy Pelosi in particular would just get off their high and mighty mountains of self adoration and talk with the common men and women around the nation.

Yet in the end, Pelosi said, she is confident that the failures in Iraq, as well as discontent over domestic issues, will defeat Bush in November.

Can you believe this liberal Demorat from San Francisco has the gall to say Bush is incompetent as President? What leadership and experience does the Queen Nancy bring to the table? What would be her plan for fighting the "War on Terrorism"? How would she protect Americans at home and abroad? How would she do anything differently and still provide for the security of the nation against all enemies foreign and domestic? Did she actually take the "Oath of Office" seriously when she was sworn in as a member of the Senate?

Obviously from a review of this oath, which they all take, the Demorats for the most part think this oath means nothing for them. But did you know this is the same Oath all soldiers and Federal employees take? I can guarantee you this Oath MEANS something to the soldiers and career employees. You don't get rich in the military or government employment. But you do get rich as an elected representative.

Maybe it time for our elected leaders to start taking their oaths and commitments to the voters who put them in office seriously. Maybe it's time for them to put petty partisanship behind them and renew their committment to do the peoples business. They should not see their terms in office as a means to enrich themselves with the unfair advantage their positions give them, maybe they need to stop buying votes with the tax payers dollars. Maybe they should be rallying behind the President while troops are deployed into harms way.

If they really don't like what is happening, they really need to stop whining and start bringing their own ideas and solutions to the table. It's too easy to sit back and with the liberal press's assistance, engage in name calling and partisan politics, through stonewalling and obstruction of getting the peoples business done.

This issue will not go away until we, as the electorate, take back control of our elected officials and remind them who they really work for, it's not those with the big bucks to hire lobbyists or pad the pockets of politicians.

Nancy Pelosi, if you don't have anything constructive to say, just shut your mouth and go away! Grrrrrr...

Grrrrrrr, Beheadings? What next?

Have you ever had a "perfect moment"? You know what I mean, those moments in our life, maybe a day, an hour, an afternoon where everything seems right with the world, everything perfect. We often find ourselves totally immersed in the moment and don't realize until days, or years later that it was a "perfect moment". Maybe it's my age, or maybe I've just grown more observant over the years, I am now looking for those perfect moments so that I may extend them for as long as I can. One of my recent moments happened in 1997, my family traveled to Wyoming to visit my sister before she died from Cancer. My son and I were sitting in the grass of the front lawn with the late October sun streaming down on us through a large tree. I remember the day was warm and my son was about 18 months old and starting to talk.

We were sitting on the grass and I was taking some close up pictures of him while we talked and enjoyed just being in the moment - one on one. Believe me, getting a toddler to sit still and for any length of time is very unusual, but sit still he did and our "perfect moment" lasted for about an hour. I often think back to this time and realize how happy I was in that moment. How much joy I felt just talking and being with my son.

Recently I had an opportunity to spend some quality time with my daughter and son at a local park. Again the sun was streaming through the pine trees and the temperatures were an unseasonable 70+F in December (just before Christmas). Watching them play and have fun, I was totally mesmerized by the joy and happiness that only the very young exhibit in their innocence.

Yes these "perfect moments" are few and fleeting, but recognizing them when they occur can bring extra joy and understanding to the moment. Digital cameras are getting cheaper and even many cell phone have integrated cameras, if you recognize one of these moments, snap a few photos, write a blog entry, keep a journal/diary or whatever, life affords us so few "perfect moments" that we must capture and record them to allow us to remember the moments in later years.

I find these moments allow me to get through rough points in my life, when I'm having difficulty, looking through pictures or reading journal entries from these perfect little moments in time allow me to reset my thinking and realize there are many more "perfect moments" ahead.

I don't really know if it's the attitude of the drivers or the SUV's themselves. Could it just be a general loss of common courtesy of the average citizen in America? I'm really at a loss to explain the general disregard a large number of SUV driver's have for the other driver's on the hiways and byways of America as well as a general disregard for the rules and laws of the road.

Common courtesy has gone by the wayside when someone sits behind the wheel of an SUV. I can't count the number of times I have been in a left turn lane at the clearly marked stop line when a SUV pulls up on the right and stops 3 feet further into the intersection completely blocking my view of oncoming traffic to the right. Most SUV's have a clear shot over my roof of traffic on the left, why do they insist on blocking my view to the right?

It seems there is a direct coorelation between size and bullying on the roadway. The larger the SUV the quicker to take the right of way whether they legally have the right or not. Kind of like a big bully on the playground, he get's what he wants until someone bigger comes along who takes it from him. SUV's have a bad habit of going first at a four way stop, when they clearly arrived last and are not the first vehicle on the right.

Then there is the confusion most SUV drivers have with the size of their vehicle. They tend to conduct lane changes like they are driving a sub-compact or sports car when they are in fact driving a Suburban or Excursion! They think nothing of parking on or over the white line of marked parking spaces in parking lots making everyone else search further out for a space.

I'm not even going to get into the issue of low fuel economy, high centers of gravity or any of the other many ecological or safety issues of SUV's. Suffice it to say there is no love lost between me and SUV drivers.

Don't get me wrong, my family car is a 1994 Crown Victoria, I do drive a large car, but I do think about the guy in the left turn lane, I do know that when he goes, I can safely turn right. I am very careful to be centered in my parking spaces and it doesn't bother me to walk a little further to avoid parking in a tight space.

In my own defense I have been considering a Suburban or Excursion, better yet, I think I'll start looking at F-250's or 350's with King cabs and extended beds. A dual tire job might just be the ticket, heh maybe that's what I need to do.

The recent flack for the child credit increase for taxpayers on their 2002 taxes has got me into a minor rage. Seems the Democrats are upset because the checks being sent out to those "taxpayers" who had children to claim on their 2002 taxes, aren't being sent to those people whose income was too low for them to pay taxes in the first place.

The argument that they do pay taxes in other formes, gas taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes etc. just doesn't hold water. These checks aren't being sent out as a cut in those taxes, but as an increase in a dedutible allowance against income taxes. If your income is too low to pay taxes, then there is no issue here, you don't get any money back because you never paid any money into the system.

I can't remember where I read it, but this thought has always stuck with me, "Democracies fail when the governed learn how to vote themselves money from the treasury". Increasingly the Democratic party advocates more spending for individual segments of our population in order to win elections and further their quest for power and influence.

Every election cycle I see people asking candidates, "If I vote for you, what's in it for me? What are you going to do for me?" It's not about the good of the country, it's not about what furthers American ideals and goals, it's become "If I help you get into a position of power an influence, what are you going to do for me?"

It is a sad state of affairs when our hospitals and medical practices are suffering because of cutbacks in Federal Medicaid payments. How did these supposedly smart doctors and administrators allow themselves to hang their hat on Government social program spending?

Defense companies are hurting when the Defense Department spending is cut, some of these companies were profitable in other lines of business in the 50's and 60's but have now grown to be wholly dependent on Defense contracts.

Too many people and companies rely on Government spending for their very exisitance. I have a neighbor down the street. He is a low wage earner. He does not pay Federal or State income taxes. He only pays 1/2 of his home rent, the State pays the other 50%, he gets 400 dollars worth of food stamps a month, his church gives him a frozen turkey at Thanksgiving and a ham at Christmas along with enough other food to make up a complete holiday meal for his family of five. The local fire department drops off a couple of toys for each child at Christmas, gathered from local toy drives, and he's bitching about not getting a check from the Government like I am getting.

I paid $13,835 dollars in Federal income taxes for 2002! No one pays my bills for me, no one helps me out around the holidays, forgive me for sounding hard, while I could survive without the check, I am going to gladly receive it, take the family out to dinner and finally buy some paint for the peeling shutters on my home.

Get real, if the Government didn't return the money to taxpayes when it is freed up through tax cuts, then the Democrats would surely find a way to spend it with new programs or increased spending on old failing programs. Which in turn would lead to more tax increases as these new "entitlement programs" become more expensive to maintain.

Being conservative at heart, I am glad President Bush is wanting to reduce the size of Government. But, I wish it was really a true reduction in size. Being employed by Government for the past 7 years I know what the reduction means; contracting out! I've come to the conclusion that Government will never really be smaller, it'll just be more contractors to Government emplyees. The number of bodies doing the job won't be any less, in fact the total bodies may actually be more, but the full time Government workforce will be reduced.

The advantages are there will be fewer employees to worry about retirement programs, 401k matching, health care, etc... But the budget of the agencies which convert positions to contract will not be reduced, no the budgets will continue to grow and to what effect will the agency benefit from its new contractors? For one thing, the contract workers will not provide any services beyond what is contracted for, whereas the full time Government worker provides many services beyond their position descriptions. Innovation and imagination provided by the full time Government employee are provided to the Agency free of charge, the same fresh ideas and new ways from contractors come at a hefty premium. As the years go by it is not long till the contract employee becomes expensive and burdensome, full time Government employees will slowly and eventually make their way back into the Government positions replacing the contractor's who by their very nature are limiting and unresponsive to the daily changing needs of federal Agencies today.

If you want to know how contrating out services is working, just ask any TSA manager how he likes his IT support. Their contract with Unisys does not put an IT employee into every facility. As a result, TSA managers are still connecting to their networks at Headquarters via dialup modems to pass email and files. LANs (Local Area Networks) are non-exisitant in many facilities and employees are saving files to 3.5" floppies and carrying them to a computer with a printer attached to print hard copies. Computers in facilites are all stand-a-lone and unable to share files without either dialing into their Headquarters network and attaching them to e-mail or doing the floppy shuffle and this after the TSA was formed over 12 months ago.

No contracting out is not the answer! Elimination of Agencies which serve no usefull purpose is the answer. The are many of these with the Rural Electric Administration, Helium Reserves, and Department of Education being just a few of these. Elimination of these Agencies will make a difference in both the size of Government as well as result in a reduction of the budget needed toi support them. Consolidation of redundent functions amoung many similar agencies will also reduce the size of the federal workforce and actually contribute to the reduction in size of the budget needed to support the Government.

Of course this is all predicated on tax reductions to the citizenry for the realized savings and not a shifting of the savings to other federal spending or entitlement programs.

Note: I am a federal IT person who stands a chance of having my position contracted out in the near term. While nothing has been said about my job being subject to A-76 review, I can read the writing on the wall!

As promised, I wanted to remark a little on memories. Why do some events mark themselves so indelibly in our minds while others are totally forgotten? Some of my oldest memories are:

My memories start to come back strongly after the age of 6 or so. The more I dwell on a certain age after 6 the more I remember from those times. Some of the dredged up memories spark others from earlier times that I thought were already forgotten.

Maybe we only have a limited number of memories allowed by the pathways we have developed in our brains. Forgetfulness may just be our bodies way of making room for new memories. I don't know and this subject is getting a little deep for 10:54 pm.

Guess I should post a little bit about myself, seems people are always interested in knowing a little about the person behind the site, as well as how we got to this place in our lives.

I started my unique existance on February 10, 1957, in a Catholic Hospital in Bend, Oregon. Let's see, that makes me 46 years old and getting older by the minute. I was born the son of Ronald Henderson Price of Seven Springs, North Carolina and Mary Jane Nelson of Mount Shasta, California.

My birth found my mother separated from my father who was then stationed with the Air Force in Japan. My mother was too close to my birth for the doctor's to let her take such a long trip with me. So, we were in Bend cooling our heels at my Grandmother's farm waiting for my eventual entry into the world. Funny, when I visited Bend, Oregon in 1995 just before my retirement from the Army, I found my Grandmother's farmhouse has been replaced by an Albertson's Grocery Store parking lot. Everything changes and nothing ever remains the same.

In mid-April we eventually joined my father in Japan, and the rest is history, as they say.

I only know about my time in Japan from the stories my father and mother told me years later, but it seems my first spoken words are a toss up between English and Japanese. Back in those days my parents hired a live in houskeeper-babysitter and of course she was speaking to me in her native Japanese while my parents were striving to teach me English. My father told me he would have to stop me in mid-sentence and tell me to speak English. So I guess my earliest years were bi-lingual. We left Japan around 59' or 60' and I have not spoken Japanese since!

It's really amazing what we learn and then forget through misuse, my high school years are full of learning things that I've forgotten now. To bad all people aren't born with instant recall of all learning experiences. To this day my wife is fond of asking me if I remember certain things during our last 16 years and seems to take delight in the dumfounded look I give her in reponse. But, then I plumb the depths of my memory and find that two can play that game :-) .

My early life is really sketchy as I guess is most adults. I have vague memories of certain events and experiences that made some sort of impression on me, and then occasionally something in my daily life springs another memory. Strange thing, human memory!

This subject always comes up when discussing a design for a prospective launch of a new web-site. I'm often asked "Will this site look and perform the same in all browsers?" Obviously the questioner has no idea how many browsers there are "out" there. Or what capabilities each has, I'm not going to compare browsers here, I just wanted to share my philosophy about browser support.

Full cross browser support is the political correctness issue of the Internet world. Many heated arguments are conducted in public, on newsgroups, in bulletin boards, and through private e-mail.

The fact of the matter is that a browser is usually a personal choice of the user. Most users understand the limitations of the browser they choose to use. All browsers have some common capabilities, all browsers are equal in the html standards they support, some browsers are more equal than others.

Many prospective web site owners want the latest features of HTML and CSS with a liberl sprinkling of Flash, Java, and other multi-media file types thrown in for good measure. All want their sites accessible by everyone who comes. The question is, at what price to support the masses.

Most people choose to use Netscape 4.7, Opera, Konquerer, Galeon or something even less mainstream for a number of reasons. They may dislike anything that comes from Microsoft, they may be locked into a particular operating system that leaves them with little choice, they may be cantankerous old farts that just won't change!

I choose to support only the more widely used browsers in the wild. I will attempt (barely) to support Netscape 4.7, but I won't guarantee full NS 4.7 compatibility. I do support the current IE 5/6 series, NS 6/7 and any other browser that may be equal to these, anything else is just not worth it.

Now to be fair, all the sites I work on are either Intranet applications that have a corporate standard browser defined, or are personal sites that I build for myself or friends at nominal cost. The nominal cost has a built in predispositon for current browsers. I feel that browsers like computers should be upgrade occasionally to support the latest HTML and CSS standards. I also tend to minimize the use of gimmicks like Flash or Java script. I don't want a user to have to download plug-ins to use one of my sites.

The web building tools I use are the latest on the market, as such they require alot of work to work backwards to ensure old browser support. For this, I double my standard fees and double my time to market. The overhead to maintain multiple workstations with every browser imaginable is a burden in itself. If a client wants full cross-browser support, he is asking for considerable testing time and tweaking of pages in the site, for this he must be prepared to pay.

I remember a time, not so long ago when NS 3.0 was the hottest browser out there, and Microsoft's 2.7 was a buggy half-wit. But with the self-destruction of Netscape in removing itself from the market to re-write all of it's code, it gave up the role of standard setter to Microsoft. Through anti-competitive practices Microsoft became the defacto standard. To this day Internet Explorer is in greater use than any other browser available. Until this changes, Microsoft will continue to dictate the standard for browsers and the others must follow or soon be gone from the face of the earth, except for a few old farts that keep them in use and argue till the cows come home for cross browser compatibility.

Well, I'm not politically correct, I support the standards of HTML and CSS. I'm a member of the HTML Writer's Guild and will support only mainstream browsers and standards. I don't necessarily write to the latest standards, but I won't be restricted from doing so, just to insure someone with a Netscape 4.7 browser can view a page equally as well as someone using Internet Explorer 6 or Netscape 7.

I have just completed upgrading my home network and thought it might be beneficial to share my experience. You see, I have a cable modem and have been sharing the connection between 3 PC's and a laptop for the past 3 years or so. I made the decision to drop my traditional Internet Service Provider (ISP) when the local cable television company rolled out the cable modems in my neighborhood.

It didn't take long for me to realize the flexibility the cable modem provides and I quickly added a Linksys BEFSR41 4-Port Router to my network. The router connects directly to the cable modem and has 4 ports for connecting PC's via Ethernet cable. For the majority of the past 3 years this has been quite satisfactory. I use one PC for my Windows 2000 Pro development/personal machine, the second PC is an older HP dual-pentium Kayak I use as a web and mail server, and the third PC is a 1.3ghz Athelon I use as a developmental web server. I occasionally connect a laptop through the 4th port on the router.

Recently, I have been considering an expansion of my network to include computers located in my son and daughter's room. The options are somewhat limited, I could add a small workgroup hub (Linksys has an 8-port hub that works wonderfully) to one of the ports in my router, run the necessary CAT-5 cable, install wall jacks and plates, or I could add a wireless network to the system. WIRELESS, hmmm...

Initially, as I have had excellent luck with Linksys, I was looking at a 4-port Linksys wireless router. This seemed to be the perfect answer with the wireless part for my children's computers and my laptop, and the 4-port for the current 3 PC's connect via Cat-5. But in reading the reviews of this router at Amazon I found others had expressed concerns and problems, while the Netgear MR814 garnered rave reviews. After a little research I bought one and added 2 of the MA401 netcards for my 2 laptops. I've also ordered 3 MA101 wireless USB adapters, one each for my son and daughter's systems, the third for future use. The USB adapters haven't arrived yet, when they do I'll add a paragraph about them at the bottom of this article.

Yesterday I swapped out the Linksys router for the Netgear router. Setup was straight forward and I was off-line for only about 20 minutes. The only major complaint I have/had was the lack of an intellegent loop-back system in the Netgear router. What I am referring too, is the ability to connect to a local web server using it's FQDN (http://www.it-firm.com), the Linksys has this ability and since I have 7 virtual domains running on the web server I have gotten use to just typing in the FQDN and then going to the applicable web site on my local web server. To get to the web-server I had to type in the local IP address. What this gets you is the "default" domain, and since the CSS is shared amoung multiple sites it's a http:// link that doesn't work correctly with an IP address.

Thinking that just maybe Netgear might have a fix for this, I went and searched their web site; 30 minutes and I found a comment in the small print that loopback won't work and you must us the IP address to connect to a server behind the router. So, I tried an email using their online form hoping for a firmware upgrade. While waiting for their reply (could be up to 24 hours), I decided to enter the IP and FQDN's into my workstation's hosts file. Knowing how computers perform name resolution, I knew this would work and indeed it does.

Thank you for contacting Netgear Support. My name is Shahnawaz & I will be handling your enquiry.

The router does not support loop back i.e if you want to access your web server from inside your LAN, you will have to use the LAN ip of the machine that is hosting the web server. If you use the WAN ip, it will bring up the router configuration page.

I replaced a Linksys BEFSR41 with the MR814. With the Linksys I was able to access my local webserver and all of the virtual domains by typing the URL into the browser. With the MR814 I get an error page. Using the IP address of the server I get the default domain with a raw html page, no CSS read by the browser.

I read in the tech docs that it was not possible to access the local web server by URL, but Linksys does this and I really need this to work with the MR814 also.

Otherwise, the MR814 is working great. But, for me, this isn't just a minor inconvenience, I host 7 domains and use a web based email client for all my emailing needs and this now does not work.

Any configuration changes/tweaks or patches you may have to enable this functionality will be greatly appreciated.

http://www.opedworld.com
http://www.myorgbook.com
http://www.it-firm.com
Thanks for any help you can provide....

Sorry to have bothered you, I corrected the issue and am now operating as before. You are correct there is no way to do this through the router, but you are incorrect in there is no work around.

I'm using Windows 2000 Pro to access a Linux 7.3 server. By adding the necessary domains to the hosts file all previous access is regained. For virtual domains on one server, this works:

My Windows 2000 Pro workstation is at x.x.x.8
Netgear Router at x.x.x.2
Linux Server at x.x.x.7

127.0.0.1 localhost
x.x.x.7 www.domain1.com
x.x.x.7 mail.domain1.com
x.x.x.7 www.domain2.com
x.x.x.7 www.domain3.net
x.x.x.7 www.domain4.net
etc....
The hosts file is located in my case - c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc

This is a viable workaround and should be posted to your website and in the documentation. I wasted just over 3 hours trying different configurations on the router. A little knowledge of windows name resolution goes a long way.

We thank you for the for information that you provided regarding the hosts file. If you need more assistance please do let us know.

So, will they offer the hosts file work around to their tech support web site for others to use? I doubt it, will they include the hosts file information in their technical documents? I seriously doubt it, see they and many others assume the people who purchase their products are complete idiots when it comes to anything beyond turning the computer on. I guess in many cases this is true, but tech support needs to acknowledge, there are a few computer professionals that do try to enlighten and share information and solutions.

WIRELESS IS GREAT! All the problems above not withstanding, it's great being able to have the laptop on the couch and write this article. It's great to be able to carry the laptop while still on and wirelessly connected into the kitchen, put popcorn on the stove and sit at the kitchen table, continueing this article without missing a stroke. I love my WIRELESS.

As I said before, I'll be adding more wireless information as soon as the MA101's arrive. I'll also be adding some direct reviews of the hardware I am using. I also just ordered a Wireless Access Point device for using my wireless technology at work. The WAP was 99.00 from Office Depot and should be here at the end of the week. As my home network is configured the same as the one at work, same IP addresses, subnet masks, router IP address etc, I should be able to use my laptop here or there without "plugging it in" to a hard port.

In the next few weeks I'll provide more information about wireless networks in general and my specific hardware in particular!

Guess if I'm going to talk about doing a restore, I should mention doing a backup! These are the steps I follow before completing an upgrade or major modification:

This completes my pre-upgrade sequence. I then copy the latest tarball over my current web root, restart the server and go to the package manager to perform upgrades to any packages that have changed. If everything has worked out well, I then copy my master templates and index.adp into the /www root folder. Check all the packages and fix the few small glitches that appear. Soon, I will be adding CVS to my process, this should keep me from having to go to each module and editing individual files AFTER the upgrade. All the edits can be performed on the upgrade versions before the overwrite of the /web root folder.

Listening to the radio the other day, I was struck by the number of stupid callers into the local afternoon talk show. So many of them were portraying President Bush's Tax Reduction plan as a means of rewarding those fat cat's who helped him get into office.

Let's not forget, there are fat cat's in both parties that give very generously to their preferred candidate. Bill Clinton is one of the top political fundraiser's of all time!

So many are calling the President's proposals as a way to give money to the wealthy, while giving nothing back to the middle class or poor. I'm sorry, but in this world, tax reductions go to those who pay the taxes. If the poor don't pay taxes, hey they're poor, then they are not entitled to a reduction in their taxes - they didn't pay any! The middle class, on the other hand, have paid taxes, and the reduction in taxes will benefit them to the percentage of the whole in which they contributed. The rich pay more takes, they get more back in a reduction.

But, that's not what I wanted to talk about - what I really wanted to share was something Glenn Beck related on his show a few weeks ago -

1) To provide a stimulus to the economy. No one disagrees the President's proposals will stimulate the economy. It's just a matter of how much stimulus the Congress will allow in the final figures.

2) To change the economic structure of the United States. This is the proposed elimination of double taxation or just tax on dividends. This has two effects. The first is to protect investments of individuals in the financial markets. Dividends effect everyone from those saving for children's college funds, for retirement, corporate 401k programs, mutual funds, and so on.

The money that get's invested into these markets has already had tax paid on it when it was earned in the first place. The money that is paid out by corporations as a divided has already had taxes paid out when IT was earned as sales income. So, the tax on dividends is an income tax on money that has already had taxes paid on it once before.

The average corporation, to avoid this double taxation limits the amount of it's dividends, if it pays one at all (Microsoft doesn't pay dividends) to protect the investor (shareholder). This held money builds up in corporate treasuries and allows these companies to grow larger as a result. These corporations then invest in research and development, which is a good thing, but they also buy other companies and expand. This growth through aquisition isn't so good as they buy up the smaller businesses and consolidate the markets into just a few companies. This is what Microsoft has been doing with it's huge cash reserves.

By, eliminating the taxation on dividends, the excess cash is paid out to shareholders (investors, retirement funds, speculators, and scoundrels) thus limiting the growth of these corporations and greatly reducing the liklihood of companies growing to become monopolies. Without the monopolies, more small businesses get started in an environment that allows them to grow and prosper. It is the small companies that employ the greatest number of citizens in the US.

Also the dividend flow into the financial markets get's reinvested into other stocks allowing for the expansion of the markets and more money for funding the startup of other small businesses. The dividends which are taken out of the market to buy goods and services provides a boost in sales to the companies who are paying out dividends in the first place, providing more jobs for everyone.

So, rather than putting more money into the pockets of the rich, the elimination of dividends is actually a restructuring of the financial markets and thus the economy of the US.

3) To change the size of the Federal Government. President Bush has made it plain he is for a smaller government. By this we can assume he wants agencies to reduce the size of their workforces and ultimately their huge budgets. If agencies will not reduce voluntarily, then a reduction in the total revenue taken in by the government should accomplish the same thing but in a more draconian way. Less money coming in (from a tax break to all tax payers) then less money for the running of the government, and smaller budgets to all the agencies.

In theory this is a good thing, but recently the Democrats are talking about raising the debt ceiling. This is not so good, reductions in government spending and across the board budget cuts need to be taken while at the same time reducing the debt ceiling. This will result in a smaller government and improving the fiscal health of the US, thus ensuring a strong dollar here and overseas.

1) The program is still doing what it was initally intended to accomplish. The strategic helium reserves, and the REA come to mind here.

2) Entitlement programs need to be overhauled to allow for their eventual elimination from the government budget.

So, we see, the President's tax cut proposal is a lot more than just giving money back to the wealthy. It's not really as simple or as bad as the Democrats would have you think. This is really a good thing which in the end will improve the health of the US economy as well as return the money no longer needed to fund current government programs back to those who earned it in the first place.

Democratic proposals would suck up the money to fund new and ever expanding social programs that end up costing us more and more every year to maintain. Remember, Congress derives it's greatest power through the Federal Budget, when it really comes down to it, it's ALL about the money!

Anyone an expert on SPAMmers and their tools and techniques? I'm looking to educate myself. I've been getting a lot of e-mail bounces returned to me lately from AOL for e-mail I didn't send! Seems Spammers have a new method of sending their garbage. They put someone elses e-mail address in the From: and Reply To: fields, then send the SPAM to a third party with 3 CC: addresses.

So what happens is I get the bounces for any address that is no longer valid. The SPAM in this particular instance has the following headers:

Received: from rly-yb04.mx.aol.com (rly-yb04.mail.aol.com [172.18.146.4])

by str-m03.mail.aol.com (v92.16) with ESMTP id RELAYIN8-93ec42b532a9; Thu, 15 May 2003 20:05:39 -0400 Received: from sc.rr.com ([61.171.56.88]) by rly-yb04.mx.aol.com (v93.12) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINYB410-19a3ec42b391df; Thu, 15 May 2003 20:05:19 -0400 Received: from relay.2yahoo.com ([138.44.247.90]) by smtp-server1.cfdenselr.com with SMTP; Thu, 15 May 2003 15:07:25 +1200

As you can see, the mail originates at :smtp-server1.cfdenselr.com, this is a non-existant domain, and is relayed through relay.2yahoo.com. While I am in no danger of having my mail server blacklisted, I am concerned with my e-mail address be used as the sender and reply-to addresses. This can lead to confusion as most people would not know to look at the e-mail message headers, let alone what a header is. Once I finish putting together a SPAM disclaimer, I'll post it here for all to see, also in my fight to combat SPAM, I'm going to have to add TMDA to my arsenal. For a short article on modern con men, I found this one to be enlightening: http://members.aol.com/phillylawyer13/conmen.pdf

Seems there's a good chance of gang violence occuring in my area on the last day of school (Columbia, SC). The Bloods gang is rumoured to be planning retribution for the killing of one of their members last March. The Richland County Sheriff's department has put an additional 50 deputies on patrol around the counties high schools. Local residents are talking about keeping their children out of school for these last 3 days...

If this isn't terrorism, I don't know what is. These gangs have risen to a level that I believe it is no longer a local law enforcement issue. These gangs cross state lines, and range from coast to coast. The Federal Government should be turning a portion of it's assets from the "War on Terrorism" to the destruction of these gangs. The violence dispensed by these gangs on our neighborhoods, on our neighbors, and communities must be stopped. Parents should not be afraid to send their children to school. Community residents should not be afraid to visit the local mall at night or to walk down the streets of their neighborhoods.

Gang terrorism needs to be stopped now, the Feds need to get actively involved and root out the central core of these gangs, just as they are currently rooting out the roots of Islamic terrorism in the United States. These gang terrorists need to be charged and held in prison under the same laws that are fighting international terrorism.

Citizens need to get involved in their Neighborhood Watch programs and assist local law enforcement in intelligence gathering and reporting of suspicious activities by known or suspected gang members. The public must get involved! You must let your local law enforcement know you are serious about stopping gang activity in your neighborhoods. You must call on your elected representatives and demand action at the state and federal level to erradicate these gang terrorist groups.

Oh, and before you start all that liberal bleeding heart stuff about poor children from broken homes and the growth of gang culture as a substitute family, I don't buy it! Too many underprivledged children grow up and pull themselves out of the inner cities and trailer parks of the poor in America. While my history doesn't place me in true poverty, I can tell you I lived in plenty of trailer parks while I was growing up, well at least until I was 7 or 8 years old.

Pull out your phone book, call your city police, country sheriff, local legislators, and state representatives. Write letters, contact your neighbors and share information, get your neighbors to make calls and write letters, get the "War on Terrorism" focused onto the terrorists in our neighborhoods!

Being a basically conservative guy, I was once in favor of the death penalty! But a while back I happened to take a college class titled "American Society in the 20th Century". Obviously this class was pre-2000. For my term paper I chose the issue of the death penalty. I found out it was more expensive to the tax-payer to put a man to death than it was to imprison him for life. I also found out the last public execution was conducted in 1936, since then crimes punishable by the death penalty have risen dramatically!

How have my views changed? If the purpose of the death penalty is to exact punishment on the guilty, then putting the guilty to death just lessens the punishment to the time from conviction to the carrying out of the penalty. But life in prison ensures the guilty is punished every day of his natural life. If the purpose of the death penalty is to be a deterrence to violent crime, then making executions private have nullified the deterrence public executions once had. As a side note; the abolishment of the chain gang and work farms has also had a negative impact on the crime rates in all states that once used them. I remember when I was 6 years old (1963 in SC) visiting my grandmother, the chain gang came down the road cleaning out the ditches on both sides of the road. The sight of 20 men in each team, chained at the ankles, down in the ditches while prison guards rode horses with shotguns drawn filled my little brain with a new found determination to do good, and formed in me a fear of the consequences from commiting a crime that has lasted a lifetime!

I don't want to debate the moral virtues of the death penalty or the implications of the death penalty within our fallible system of justice. I just want to state my opinion of the deterrence value. To truely deter violent offenders, the death penalty if used, must be public and swift. In Saudi Arabia, public justice (beheadings, hand removals, stonings, etc.) is carried out on Friday mornings in the town square with camel auctions following in the afternoon. The crime rate in Saudi Arabia is virtually non-existant! So, in closing, let's bring back public executions, or do away with them all together!

Upgrading and the upgrade failed? What do you do? If you're following the installation documents for Openacs, then you've got a backup of your database. Although recovery isn't exactly intuitive, you can do the following:

Having used all three products, I think it's a good time for posting my current impressions. I have been using them for:

It must be remembered that all three products are really targeted to 3 different levels of users. Contribute is targeted to content providers that are only adding static text to web pages. In a private/personal web site with static pages this works very well. Contribute requires very little knowledge of HTML and provides a clean WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface. Buttons for adding tables and horizontal rules are clear and understandable for what they are, additionally Contribute allows for dragging and dropping a Word or Excel file into a web page. In the corporate environment the templates created by the designers in Dreamweaver can be used by Contribute to add the text based content. This is easy and prevents the content providers from changing or altering the corporate templates.

CityDesk also provides a WYSIWYG interface for adding content. CityDesk has more power under the hood than Contribute, allowing for the creation of entire web sites, templates, and the use of cityscript to add dynamic functionality. Citydesk has been used successfully with .php, jave, .asp, and just about any scripting languages you want to use. The one drawback to CityDesk that I can see is that all elements of a CityDesk site are stored in a Microsoft Jet database. CityDesk is a true web publishing system. This metaphore is carried out from pages being referred to as "articles" with the optional attributes of Headline, Author, File Date, Never Publish Before, Never Publish After, Keywords, Audience, and Template for each article/page that is created. Additioanlly you can assign a teaser, sidebar, about the author, and 2 additional extra text items to each article. Once the site or article is the way you want it, you "publish" the site to the web server.

OpenACS offers a total open-source solution for building Community based web services. Where the Arsdigita ACS required Oracle for the backend, OpenACS is ACS ported to Postgresql while maintaining support for Oracle. OpenACS is the most powerful of the three tools and is best used by organizations where the developer is actively involved in content management and web site maintenance. Of the three, OpenACS offers the greatest flexibility for the mobile content provider. Included are many features found in other CMS applications/frameworks but OpenACS is going much farther than the compitition with new concepts on the board and in development. OpenACS is being modified to support targeted industry groups. Currently MIT/Sloan School of Business is using a modified version of OpenACS called dotLRN. This project spawned another project which is currently in development called dotWRK. This will be enhanced for the corporate workforce with an emphasis on Project Management. I'll be writing more about OpenACS in coming weeks...

I like all three products. I'm using Contribute for building small, rapidly changing static web sites. One example of this is my "Intranet Server Project". I need to build this site quickly, no scripting needed, content is totally static, and I do all the work from one location.

I'm using CityDesk at my day job to provide easy content management with integration to .php and MySQL for a commenting system on the "articles" and "blog" entries. I'm also using php with CityDesk to manage e-mail notifications of new articles and changing content. Again all content is added from one location.

I'm using OpenACS for my home system. I need to know basic HTML for page layout, in fact I am using many HTML tags in this entry for formatting. The power of OpenACS is in the UI (user interface), while still crude, I can add content from any browser on any computer. While you could compare OpenACS with one of the many *nuke.php applications or Plone, or any of the other "Content Management Systems" and find it lacking, I keep coming back to OpenACS for the active developer community, instant and friendly support, and constantly improving system. The majority of this site is running under OpenACS.

So in conclusion, all tools are good. All are imperfect, all have a place in my toolkit.

Macromedia's Contribute is a great tool for anyone wanting to publish static pages to the Inter/Intranet without having to learn the Hyper-Text Markup Language! I am using it to create content for my "Intranet Server Project".

This tool works well and doesn't require files to be kept locally. You browse to the page you want to edit, then click the edit button at the top of the page, edit the content or add content, and then click the publish button to make the change live. You can store previous versions of the page and have the ability to rollback to a previous version. In the default installation, 3 previous versions are saved, more or less can be configured.

Setting up a site only requires either FTP or file/network access to the web directory that stores the content. Once the connection is set up, then it is point and click, WYSIWYG editor, publish content. Contribute works well with Dreamweaver, so you can do page layout in Dreamweaver, and content addition or editing in Contribute. This greatly simplifies the web designers job, create the custom templates and let regular content providers add the "magnet" content to the site with out ever having to futz around with the templates.

I am impressed with the product, and am building a business case for deploying it within my day-job organization for content providers on our Intranet.

As I said previously, I'll be moving my site over to another server in the coming months. The actual date of the move hasn't been determined yet, but all the content from here needs to be migrated. This will entail some testing and planning.

In the meantime, I've been thinking alot about my content. There is some that needs a database on the backend to provide necessary services. There is other content (magnet content?) that could reside in static files of one sort or another. Mostly How-To's, general information articles and what not. The only problem is in the generation of this content. Currently, the OpenACS framework allows me to add all the content dynamically from any web browser. Adding static content from a remote location would require me to open up ssh or ftp or on and on. I know there are many ways to do this, but I really don't want to open holes in my firewall.

I'm going to try using the CityDesk application. I purchased this previously when I was floundering around for the best way to manage my content. CityDesk is powerful and makes sense for a smaller site with only one (or maybe a few) content provider(s).

Interestingly enough, OpenACS has a neat way of managing static content. It reads it into the backend database, surrounds it with templates if you wish for it to be templated, adds commenting on the pages and well, just makes it easy to have around.

I'll post more about my trials, but if your looking for a good tool for managing and building a website, definately give CityDesk a good once over, it will be worth your consideration.

Up until recently I had 7 different domains pointed to one of 2 servers I run for pretty much building experience in developing online Internet applications.

After getting tired trying to keep content targeted to each one, I finally combined everything down to one server. Since one of my domains is home to a popular open-source php application I was getting alot of traffic through this site. But as I was running a production level server on older versions of software, I wasn't able to upgrade the server and therefore improve the open-source project.

So, I moved the open-source project to Sourceforge and didn't get the domain repointed to Sourceforge for a couple of months. While comments on my articles here aren't burning up the wires, I was getting some thoughtful and enlightening comments, these comments allowed me to flesh out my opinions clearly and were fun to respond too.

Two weeks ago I completed getting the open-source domain repointed to the Sourceforge site. Since then I have not had one comment left on this server.

So, I guess the moral to this story is without magnet content and widespread links to my project bringing the masses here, I'm not getting any feedback any longer.

Over the next couple of months I will be upgrading this system and redesigning the content and pages. While I am in the process I will be considering ways to market this site and try to get a core group of 20 or 30 people together for interesting and insightful conversations.

I may start offering blogspace and e-mail accounts for those who prove fruitful.

On this 12th day of April, we are seeing amazing events in Iraq. President Bush has been vindicated in his decision to go forward with a forcable regime change in Iraq, and the nations who were looking to profit by obstructing what needed to be done are starting to feel the cold of being left out.

These same nations are now crying for a major role in the profitable reconstruction of Iraq, they claim the UN needs to control the country of Iraq until free elections are held by the people of Iraq. I wonder if they are proposing the free election process they presided over in Cambodia or Haiti? Or the move to free elections they are still trying to get to in Kosovo? No, I don't think we want to turn over the future of the Iraqi people to the UN and the EU, we can guess where that will lead.

While our track record is spotty, it is a darn site better than anything the UN has been involved in. The UN tends to put the country they are helping into a shark tank and then lets the sharks of the UN play games and profit from the process while never getting to the resolution which improves the lives of the people in these countries.

Then there is the issue of the ex-patriots returning to Iraq, seems they feel they need to run things and the US owes them an opportunity to be placed into power. They feel they are better able than the citizens who have been suffering while they lived the free life in the US or England. No, I feel they are better served as advisors, as examples and teachers, but the new governement needs to be made up of the citizens inside of Iraq, made up of different tribal groups, religious sects, ethnic sectors, etc... all the people need to be represented. Whether it's a government patterned after the US example or the British parlimentary procedure, or some other democratic process, I don't care, but the PEOPLE NEED TO HAVE A VOICE!

No, the fat lady isn't singing yet, but the US is returning naval carriers to US waters. Combat forces are being reduced and replaced with medical, public affairs and law enforcement forces, stability and freedom are being introduced into Iraq.

Judical and police advisors are on their way to Iraq, as well as aid workers and humaitarian supplies. Yes, a new day in freedom and liberty is dawning over Iraq.

In the meantime, I am amazed at the amount of ammunition and arms cached around the city. Hidden in schools, medical facilities, and in underground bunkers. Too bad the Iraqi military had no stomach to fight for a repressive regime. I guess patriotism can't be instilled through fear and intimidation.

I was shocked this morning to hear about the loss of David Bloom. I will greatly miss him on the weekend's "Today Show", his humor, his love for his children and his professionalism were a joy to watch and an inspiration for me in my own affairs.

I really don't know much about David Bloom, but I can tell you, he was the only reason for me to watch the "Today Show" on the weekends. Since he has been in Iraq, I have not watched the "Today Show", I have been keeping to my usual FoxNews channel with occasional forays to MSNBC News to catch David's reports from Iraq.

It's hard to write about someone you don't really know, but I just wanted to express a few words about a man I perceived to be special in a field of television journalists. While the politics of many tend to cloud their objectivity, David Bloom was very much above all of that, he was objective and fair in all of the interviews I saw him conduct.

This was a courageous man, his reporting from the front lines of the 3rd Infantry Division, both informative and objective, put a face to the term one hears often these past few weeks "the soldiers in harms way". Being a former Infantryman, I know well the hardships suffered by these soldiers and also to David Bloom as he accompanied them on their attack into Iraq at the "tip of the spear".

But as great as the loss, I am grateful that he didn't suffer as a result of military action. He didn't deserve to be killed by an Iraqi soldier, but rather, while sad, a pulomunary embolism which is almost always sudden and almost always fatal was the enemy which struck David down at 39 years of age. David Bloom didn't suffer much and he was doing what he wanted to do, what else can a man ask.

David Bloom with the 3rd ID, got it right, I know he will be deeply missed by many more people than me, but I just wanted to say something.

My heartfelt condolances go out to David's wife and 3 daughters, I know they will miss "Dad"...

It's now "Day 8" in the war to liberate Iraq from the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein! Anyone who has been watching the news or talk shows must realize by now that we are doing what is necessary for the greater good.

Too many bleeding heart liberals are showing their ignorance and lack of knowledge in world affairs with their demonstrations. Many are demonstrating for an ideal view of the world or more accuratley against a generic view of the use of force. These same people would be demonstrating against the use of force if an enemy was on US shores and threatening their very existance. They have no idea who the real backers of their protest marches are, nor where the money comes from to organize and conduct their unpopular marches.

The great State of Oregon has it right, protestor's engaging in violent acts are nothing more than terrorists and need to be prosecuted as such. I have no problems with free speech, and one's right to assemble peaceably to protest. But this right is being abused when protest marches are being conducted to disrupt city services, especially emergency services. The potential for violence is greatly taxing the already meager resources to protect vital public utilities and private citizens from the real possibility of catastrophic terrorist acts committed against US infrastructure and the citizens of this great nation.

I have heard comparisons made between Hitler and Saddam, but my research has shown that Saddam is much worse than Hitler. Hitler as evil as he was, Hitler was a babe in diapers compared to Saddam. If we had done nothing, if we had just stood by and allowed the French to successfully campaign the UN for the dropping of all sanctions against Iraq, we would have incurred the wrath of the free nations in 10 or 12 more years as Saddam unleashed his unique brand of terror and brutality on his neighbors. Not to mention the free distribution of weapons of mass destruction within and to the rank and file of extreemist terrorist organizations.

I'm sorry, but I believe, as a great Democrat once said, "And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

As these words show, our cause has been the same from the beginning, it's not about oil, it's not about pride, it's not about colonialism, it's not about the upcoming 2004 election. It's about the birth of our nation, it's about our constant quest for freedom and the right of everyone on this earth to live in freedom, about our obligation to spread liberty and freedom around the globe.

Once the people of Iraq are free, once liberty has achieved a foothold in Iraq, we will let them choose their path in this world.

We have heard inspirational speeches before, the movies are littered with them, as well as speeches prepared by professional speech writers for politicians and Presidents. But in my 46 years of life, I have often found the most moving, the most meaningful, and inspirational to have been given by Commanders before their troops entered onto the field of battle. This speech rates as one of the best, not for its effect on me, a retired soldier, but for it's effect on the men entering combat on the day it was given.

The pride in these men was obvious and their admiration and respect for their Commander who uttered these words was evident in the straightening of their shoulders, the glint in their eyes, and in the renewed sense of quiet professionalism that exhuded from the soldiers after they listened to their Commander utter these words from his heart...

A battlefield speech given by Lt. Col. Tim Collins, a 42-year-old commander of the Royal Irish battle group. Just hours before his troops went into battle, Col. Collins said this:

"The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of Hell for Saddam. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity. But those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world."

"We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Don't treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country."

"I know men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. They live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law, and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please. If there are casualties of war, then remember, when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly, and mark their graves."

"You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood, and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality, even though they have nothing... "

"There may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow. Let's leave Iraq a better place for us having been there. Our business now, is north."

With Gulf War II running into it's second day, I thought it appropriate to link to the web site of Salam Pax. This is the site of an Iraqi citizen living in Baghdad. Reading his posts reminds me of the feelings I had when I was serving my country in the Army.

This needs to be remembered, as I have said in other posts and in my responses to comments of others, we are not at war with the people of Iraq. War and the use of the military is a tool of governments and is usually the tool of last resort. The use of combat is only employed when all other forms of diplomacy have failed.

Saddam and Iraq knew that force was coming. It has been promised for 12 years. For 12 years the Iraqi government has had the choice to disarm and avoid combat, or not.

Salam's site is interesting to me because it is easy to get caught up in the affairs of government and forget the citizens of the other country. The people of the other country have the same hopes and fears that we do, they are trying to do their best and raise their families, do their jobs well, and live a clean and decent life. It is the affairs of governments that land them in harms way being brought by a country that would never touch their lives negatively if thier own government had honored it's commitments to the international community of the UN.

I fear he will lose contact as the bombing intensifies, but I for one will be checking his site 2 or 3 times a day. Good luck Salam and I hope you make it through. If it was up to me, I would be more than happy to have you and your family over for a while until the current situation in your country stabilizes...

This evening, President Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam and his top aides. Leave Iraq within 48 hours! Tick, tick, tick, the clock is steadily advancing. Time is passing, time is running out...

I for one, am pleased this soap opera known as the "Disarming of Iraq" is finally coming to a close. Having served in Desert Shield/Storm, I think it is gratifying that we now have a President willing to enforce the cease fire agreement from 1991.

I for one am concerned that the UN Security Council was unwilling to back up it's words with it's promises of force. If the UN is afraid to act, then brave nations must. I am sad that the loss of 3,000 lives is not enough to persuade our allies to see beyond their own self interests. Hitler in Germany started out as a crackpot that motivated a nation through force and intimidation to start a global conquest. If only he had been put out of business after his invasion of Poland. The millions of Jewish lives lost, the takeover of vast parts of Europe by the Communist Soviets, the start of the Cold War. All could have been avoided...The waste...

Tick, tick, tick, time is moving on, sand through the hour-glass, 12 years of messing around half heartedly playing politics with other nations, Saddam rearming, rebuilding, getting bolder, defying the world, Saddam's time is drawing near, tick, tick, tick...

It really amazes me that a small county can split the industrialized nations so profoundly. The new world order is being devided between the French, Germans, Russians, and Syrians on one side and the US, UK, Spain, Australia, and finally Turkey on the other. Why isn't Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, or UAE speaking out in support of Saddam? Tick, tick, tick, time is drawing near...

With the latest contoversies surrounding impending actions in Iraq, I just can't stand around and not comment on the usefullness and leadership being shown by the United Nations. I, for the life of me can't believe the UN is more afraid of America's leadership role in the disarming of Iraq than they are of a petty dictator leading them around by a nose.

I am still firmly of the belief that the nations which are currently trying to block us, France, Germany, and Soviet Union are more afraid of what we will find in Iraq than they are in what Saddam will do with the weapons he currently has or will soon develop. These countries have been secretly selling prohibited items to Iraq and I think they are afraid they will be caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

Let's consider the UN as an authority in world affairs. What is the role of the UN and what should it be doing? While it has been a long time since I was in a high school history class, I do remember the UN was established after World War II in an effort to promote world peace and to prevent another Hitler from exercising his will on other Nations. But what has the UN done since it was established?

The only UN efforts to perform under it's mandates have been the Korean War, the Gulf War and the latest war in Afghanistan. Did the UN step in and call nations together to perform in these actions? No! Each time the USA called on the UN to take action! France and the Soviet Union have engaged in military wars since WWII, did they seek UN approval for their actions? No! They have never sought UN approval or intervention in any of their military actions. So who are they to stand in the way of disarming a petty dictator who has continuously thumbed his nose at UN authority. The current attitude being shown by France, Germany and Russia remind me of the attitude that other nations had when Hitler invaded Poland and started on his dream of world wide domination and murdered millions of Jews in his ethnic purity progroms.

Where was the UN in Ruwanda, the Balkans, and Kosovo? No where! The UN avoids acting, hopes someone else will step in and foot the bill. The UN is a Gentlemans Club that pays good salaries, employs many people and passes out other peoples money to poor nations, when it comes to enforcing the rule of law on rogue nations, the UN is paralized and unable to act.

It is time for the UN to close it's doors, send everyone home, and sell it's property. It is time for the USA to build a coalition with like minded nations who really want to make a difference, who want to do good for the world and aren't afraid to make the tough choices. It is time for all rogue nations to be put on notice, it is time to play nice with your neighbors, it is time to turn out all terrorists, it is time to denounce terrorism in all of it's forms, it is time to destroy all chemical and biological weapons, time to get rid of the nukes. Now, I'm not stupid, I know the US has all of these weapons of mass destruction also, but as a nation with a lot to lose, we must defend ourselves and our allies. This neccesitates keeping these weapons to offset those of China and Russia. But, in the words of another great America, I have a dream, one day all weapons of mass destruction will be gone with no nations having chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

It is time for the American people to recognize the leadership role, they as members of the greatest nation on Earth must now play. It is time to put petty political differences away and to recognize the threat rogue nations pose, it is time to remove rogue dictators and spread the wonders of democracy, rule by the people, of the people to those oppressed by dictators and idiots.

Sorry it's been so long since my last entry, but I have just returned from ten days in Oklahoma City attending a course in System's Administration. Overall a good course, excellent opportunity to network with others from all across the nation and England.

While the course wasn't really challenging, it was nice having a refresher and finding out how others coordinated and performed the usual administrative tasks in their offices. I picked up a few good tips, made some friends and that makes the 10 days in Oklahoma City worth the time away from my family.

On another note, the actions of our "allies" when it comes to the impending action in Iraq concerns me. My first impulse is for the US to pull completely out of Turkey and Europe. Close all of our bases, stop paying dues to NATO, and put all of those foreigners we employ on our bases out of work.

But after listening to President Bush tonight, I must agree with him, while we may be disappointed in their public actions up to now, we must trust them to do the right thing when the bell tolls. Even if we can't agree on Iraq, there are many other areas we do agree on and do have a positive influence in America's interests.

The war in Iraq, well you all know I am a conservative at heart, I do believe it is in our defense that we disarm Iraq and remove Saddam. As a retired Army Warrant Officer who served in Desert Shield/Storm, I don't like seeing American soldiers being put into harm's way, but that is exactly what the military trains for and I firmly believe they are the best fighting force on the face of the Earth today. If history is any indication, the Iraqi's will be surrendering in mass if we go into Iraq. Today's Iraqi Army is 1/3 the size it was during 1991.

I feel France and Germany fear we may find their fingerprints all over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WOMD) when we go in, therefore they are trying to delay the inevitable. I firmly believe they have been violating the UN sanctions and profiting from a brisk and illegal trade in goods prohibited by the UN after the 1991 Gulf War. Russia is afraid of losing out on the $40,000,000,000 trade deal they have made with Iraq that carries a personal guarantee from Saddam. No Saddam, no guarantee for the trade agreement. What in the hell were they doing negotiating a trade agreement with Iraq, while Iraq was under major UN trade sanctions? Take a chance and you know what happens when events don't break your way.

Quick, a shift to the left - can you believe the recent February 28th decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (Federal) not to rehear the case Newdow vs. U.S.Congress? Don't know what I'm talking about? Remember that case in California where a doctor (Newdow) brought a case to the most liberal Federal Appeals Court in the land and won a judgement from a three judge panel stating the "Pledge of Allegiance" was unconstitutional because of the words "under God" are in it? A request to have the full Appeals court to rehear the case was denied, the actual decision is located at: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/1AC18E7FEB98DB6D88256CDB000AFCF4/$file/0016423.pdf?openelement.

Red Skelton many years ago had a few words on this subject and I have included them here for review, seems this is a battle which has been going on for a long time and I'm sure we haven't seen the end of it yet.

While this is not "humor" in the sense that it is a joke, it is something which I feel needs to be shared. Red Skelton was one of the greatest comedians I can remember. He was funny without being smutty. He also made some profound statements. The words were meaningful many years ago when they were spoken by Mr. Skelton. They are just as meaningful today.

The following words were spoken by the late Red Skelton on his television program as he related the story of his teacher, Mr. Laswell, who felt his students had come to think of the Pledge of Allegiance as merely something to recite in class each day.

"I've been listening to you boys and girls recite the Pledge of Allegiance all semester and it seems as though it is becoming monotonous to you. If I may, may I recite it and try to explain to you the meaning of each word?"

TO THE FLAG -- our standard, Old Glory, a symbol of freedom. Wherever she waves, there's respect because your loyalty has given her a dignity that shouts freedom is everybody's job!

STATES -- individual communities that have united into 48 great states. Forty-eight individual communities with pride and dignity and purpose; all divided with imaginary boundaries, yet united to a common purpose, and that's love for country.

AND TO THE REPUBLIC -- a state in which sovereign power is invested in representatives chosen by the people to govern. And government is the people and it's from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people.

WITH LIBERTY -- which is freedom -- the right of power to live one's own life without threats, fear or some sort of retaliation.

FOR ALL -- which means, boys and girls, it's as much your country as it is mine.

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Since I was a small boy, two states have been added to our country and two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance...

Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that would be eliminated from schools too?

Once upon a time, it was generally believed that while the car dealerships of the major auto makers were expensive, you got treated right and the job got done correctly. You could trust the dealer to tell it to you straight and do only what was needed. This was worth the added labor expenses to not being taken for a ride.

Took my car into the Ford Dealer last week, I also found out why they are often referred to as Stealers rather than Dealers. Anyway, I've got a 94' Ford Crown Victoria, I've owned this car since new in 94'. Started burning a quart of oil every thousand miles or so. Online research revealed this was a typical problem in pre 96 or so Crown Vics, the valve stem seals harden and crack allowing oil to enter the cylinders and get burned and vented out the exhaust. Knowing this I took it into a local dealer to have the valve stem seals replaced.

I drop it off at 7:30am and tell them to change the valve stem seals. They call me at 11:00am and tell me they have not started yet, because they removed the EGR valve and there is oil smoke coming out and I have "blowby". "Blowby" is a term used when oil from the crankcase is blowing by the piston rings and entering the combustion chamber and getting burned there, indicating bad rings on the pistons; they recommended replacing the engine based on the blowby condition, yea right! Not being born last night, I reminded the "service advisor" that I suspected the valve stem seals were bad, and that this is where the oil was getting into the combustion chamber. (Coming in from the top rather than the bottom.) Okay, they now started the job and let me know they wouldn't be finished until the next day. More problems to come...

The phone rings again at 3:30pm and now they tell me there is galling on the cam. They really need to replace the engine, this is indicative of major problems. Also the engine has substantial varnishing and sludge. Oh, I should mention this is an engine with 102,000 miles on it and most of it city miles. The varnishing and sludge is not totally unexpected, and right now I'm starting to figure the service advisor may be right, but the quote of $5,000 for a remanufactured engine is just way out considering the blue book for this car on trade-in is $1,500. So, I tell them to just do what I told them to do and to call me when they are done.

The next day at 2pm I give them a call and they are test driving the car. I pick it up at 4pm and there is a high pitched noise coming from it that I assume is the cam rubbing on a cam guide because of the galling and it being disturbed during the valve stem replacement. But, to my happy satisfaction the clouds of blue smoke coming from the exhaust are gone when I rev the engine. The valve stem seal replacement is a success. But there is still the issue of blowby to consider. On the way home, the "check engine" light comes on after about 15 minutes. I check the fluids and all is well.

Yesterday I take it into a local garage and have them run a full electronic diagnostic and to pull the codes. Seems there is no noticable blowby, all cylinders are balanced, iow, compression on all the cylinders is in normal range indicating no problem with rings. Furthermore the odd sound is coming from the fuel pump area. The codes for the check engine light indicate both sides of the engine are running rich because the oxygen sensors are not indicating anything to the computer. So right now I need to replace 2 oxygen sensors and a fuel pump. During this ordeal I noticed exhaust was leaking from a few holes in the muffler, got to replace that also.

Interesting news while getting the codes pulled. Seems the Ford dealer I was going to, has recently cut the paid vacation for all of it's employees from 3 to 2 weeks. They've also stopped matching contributions into the employees 401k's. No wonder they were hard selling an engine I didn't need. I'm glad I took the time to do my research before taking it in to the shop. All indications now are that while I do have some minor problems, the car is safe to drive. I'll be changing the oil every 1,000 miles or so, this should slowly clean out the engine as the detergents in the oil are only effective for the first 1,000 miles or so, I'll need to get it out on the highway once a week or so and really get it warmed up, this will help with the oil slowly cleaning out the sludge. Maybe one of those new high tech engine flushes later this summer...

I don't know why I didn't post this earlier, but I took the car to a small independent auto repair shop to have a once over. Seems the high-pitched whine and rich burning condition are caused by a pinched return fuel line. Conceivably this was done when the valve cover was removed, but I wouldn't put it past the dealership to do this intentionally to get me to swap the engine for $5k after spending $740 for the valve stem work. In case your wondering about the return fuel line. Well in 95 or 96, Ford put a fuel pressure regulator on the fuel rail that feeds the injectors. So when the pressure is right in the fuel rail, the sensor stops the flow of fuel from the fuel tank, one fuel line from tank to engine. In my car, this is handled by a constant pressure fuel pump, fuel flows from the gas tank pump to the engine, around the fuel rail and back to the pump and into the tank. The high pitched whine was the fuel pump sucking fuel, but none coming. So the fuel pressure in the fuel rail was receiving an increase with no way to regulate the pressure resulting in an overpressure of fuel in the rail. When the injectors opened to allow fuel into the cylinder, the pressure being well above normal allowed too much fuel into the cylender resulting in a rich burning condition. So for an additional $330 dollars, I had 2 hours of diagnostics, and a fuel rail replaced. The end of the saga, the car is running great, no oil is being burned.

There was once upon a time in this country a saying that "A Man's Home is his Castle". While this is still true to a certain extent, one of the true virtues of having your own home was the notion of leaving the outside world at the door, entering a world of one's own making and enjoying the privacy of one's own domain.

The only intrusions into this world of comfort was the newspaper, the TV or radio when we chose to let them intrude. We chose when to listen to the radio, when to watch TV or to read the newspaper. Telemarketers crash into our world when they choose too, we have no control of when they will interrupt our dinner with the sound of a ringing telephone begging to be answered. Who knows, the call could be from a relative who is injured or dying, could be from the boss with an emergency that affects our job security, could be from one of our children stranded at the mall or on the roadside with mechanical problems, or it could be from someone who we have never met, trying to sell us something we do not want and who seems to know far too much about our affairs.

Telemarketers are a devious lot. They pretend to be our best buddy to close the sale, they don't care if we were in the middle of helping our child with their homework, or were giving the baby a bath, or changing a diaper or heaven forbid, sitting on the toilet ourselves. They intrude with all the grace of an elephant chasing a bull in a china shop. They never apologize for the interruption, often they are so bored, you have to say hello twice before they respond to your answering the phone. Feel like giving the telemarketer on the phone a piece of your mind? Don't bother, they are the bottom of the barrel, they are the minimum wage folks being paid to make the sales and take the abuse, they've heard it all, they are immune.

I fell into the trap a number of years ago, I used to be nice, heard them out, then I'd politley declined, say good-bye and wait for the next call. I was getting calls 2 or 3 times a night from different people, selling anything from cemetary plots to magazines, vacations, services, and even devices to combat telemarketers. Well, I've come up with a few of my own methods to combat these intrusions and I'm willing to share them with you.

This is just a few of the things I do to combat the assaults into my personal life. I have resorted to managing my own e-mail server to combat SPAM, but that is an issue for another day...

Final thought - The telemarketing industry must be making alot of money. It is a huge industry spending alot of money to mount these assaults into our homes. But enough is enough, it is time for our elected government to pass legislation enacting a national opt-out registry and force the telemarketing industry to pay heavy fines for each violation of a citizens descision to opt-out of being subjected to these obnoxious phone calls into our Castles!

Once upon a time in America, there was a very patriotic population of people who believed what was right for Americans was right for America. Where "America first" was as patriotic as baseball and mom's apple pie. A time when America was accused of being isolationist in a world where intolerable dictators were plotting world domination. These dictators may very well have succeeded except for American involvement in their defeat.

Twice American's have risen to the challenge of defeating tyranny that threatened global stability. During WWII the Americans fought in Europe and the Pacific, accomplishing what no other nation on earth has ever done or hopes to do. We have left the blood of Americans on battlefields throughout Europe and Asia, the Governments of many modern countries owe their very existence today to the determination of the American people.

I for one, am getting sick and tired of hearing "It's America's fault...". It's time we as a nation re-assess our role in global politics. Our involvement in Viet Nam in the late 50 through early 70's was an ill fated attempt to stop the spread of Communism through out the world's "ricebowl". This failure should have shown us that our resources are better spent on American's and American interests. We must STOP spending resources entrusted to the Government by loyal taxpayers. We must not give aid or money to countries that do not measurably contribute to the interests of America.

It is time to revoke the lease on the United Nations and let them find a home somewhere else. Everything the United Nations gets involved in, costs the American taxpayer dearly. I am getting tired of sending American soldiers to parts of the world to fight battles in countries that do not contribute to American interests. Don't get me wrong, current actions in Afghanistan are justified as are the continuing actions in the Philippines, and Georgia. I am thinking about Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and the Sinai. Lately I have been starting to doubt the need and cost for NATO.

This discussion leads me to another peeve, FREE TRADE. What has the doctrine of free trade actually gotten for us? In the early 1900's the United States enacted as a Constitutional Amendment, the Income Tax. Why did we need a constitutional amendment for an income tax? Because the Constitution enacted by our Nation's founders funded the Government through trade duties and tariffs. The original government was meant to be a fraction of what it is now. The government of 1910 was very different than the one we find ourselves burdened by now. Along with the passage of the Income Tax Amendment we now find career politicians. Prior to the amendment, there was no guaranteed income flowing into the federal government. Politicians did not have the power of the budget to gain influence or power. But with a greatly expanding budget, the power to dispense the funds has flowed to the people who are responsible for the dispensing of the funds and the passage of laws that have funds attached to them. Senators and Representatives are now courted like royalty by those wanting to dip their fingers into the US treasury.

Now mix Liberal extremists into the pot and we have a steady flow of money from the treasury to foreign governments for programs to foster "good will". Many of these countries do not contribute in any measurable way to America's interests. It is time to look at each dollar that is to be spent by the Government, determine if the spending of this dollar IS in the interest of American's and if so, what is the tangible result. Intangible results should not be funded!

America, as the strongest nation on Earth needs to start flexing it's muscle and do the job the American people expect and want. Public opinion be damned! Who cares what anyone in the Middle East thinks about us? I don't care! If we had an effective energy policy, if we poured the money we wasted for non-tangible returns into alternate energy sources, nuclear power plants, US oil sources etc...we would not be dependent on the Middle East for one drop of oil. But weak policies, cheap oil, and strong oil companies have kept us dependent on foreign oil.

It is NOT the fault of the United States or the American people for the ills of the World. It is not the fault of the United States or the American people for the oppression of people in third world countries. It is not the fault of the United States or the American people for hunger in Africa. It is not the fault of the United States or the American people for the ill feeelings of the Arab countries against us.

It is the fault of the United States and the American people for hunger in America. It is the fault of the United States and the American people for illiteracy in America. It is the fault of the United States and the American people for the condition of our schools in America. It is the fault of the United States and the American people for sending career politicians to run our government. It is the fault of the United States and the American people for not being involved in National politics and letting the Government create more entitlements that we as citizens must pay.

America First! It must be good for American's first, or America stops paying! Free Trade be damned! Eliminate the Income Tax, return to duties and tariffs for funding government!

This is the first in a series titled "An American Disgrace". In this article I ponder the society that has produced someone known as "Jihad Johnny" or the "American Taliban". Further we will ponder his current treatment and what his possible future may or shouldbe...

I am saddened by the speculation in the press that seems to support or condone the behavior of John Walker. The actions of his father and legal team is understandable. One witnessed the miracle of his birth, the innocence of his youth, the tumultuous relationship brought about by puberty, and the sadness brought on by his son's disgrace. The team is paid for their support.

What brought this American boy to the door of the Moslem faith? What was his father thinking when he supported his son's decision to travel half-way around the world to attend school in Yemen then Pakistan?

I often wonder what it would be like to be raised in another culture, another country. I have read books and performed some research on life in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I lived in Panama for two years in 1976-1978, General Trujillo was in power, and the United States signed an agreement to return the Panama Canal to the government of Panama. I lived in South Korea from 1983-1985, and Germany from 1989-1992. I experience 6 months in the Arabian Peninsula during 1991-1992 and can say for certain that life in the United States far surpasses what I have found elsewhere.

So obviously it wasn't the living conditions that drew John to the Middle East. Somewhere, this spoiled upper class kid felt adrift from his parents. Somewhere, somehow they failed him. John turned to religion, and not a traditional religion at that. What is it about Islam that seems to draw so many converts? I don't pretend to know, suffice it to say, I am tolerant of any religion until that religion starts to negatively impact my life or family. In the case of John Walker, or John Lindh his religious choice and subsequent choices led to a negative impact on my American family. No matter how confused, how influenced he may have been by his Islamic brothers in Yemen and Pakistan, John Walker himself made the choice to enter Afghanistan and undergo training at a terrorist training camp. He later made the choice to pick-up a weapon against the United States military, John Walker has no one to blame but himself for the position he finds himself.

It's easy to fall into the media trap of here is a misunderstood youth, he deserves a second chance, boo-hoo. There are some things that are just beyond a second chance! If it was the discipline of Islam, the excitement of the Al Queda training camps, and the comraderie of fellow brothers, then John Walker would have been a natural for the U.S. military. He would have had all the benefits of the route he chose with the added benefit of remaining a loyal citizen rather than becoming the traiterous rat he did become.

Rumor has it there are 2 more U.S. citizens still in Afghanistan hiding in the hills with the remnants of the Taliban. Let's hope if they escape from Afghanistan that they find a hole in some backwater place and remain there for the rest of their natural lives.

Do the Stars in Hollywood really think we care about their political views? I may find their views interesting, insightful, stupid, delusioned, or just plain dumb. I for one don't care, I usually hear the remark and then quickly forget it, the problem when a Star makes a negative political impression on me is that I will no longer contribute any of my hard earned dollars to advance their wealth. This is the case with Jessica Lange, her remarks below were so at odds with my fantasy of her from the roles she has portrayed, that I can no longer watch her in good faith.

On September 25, actress Jessica Lange weighed in forcefully against the American government and its plans for Iraq. Lange was in Spain to receive the Donostia Award for career achievement at the San Sebastian film festival. The following is a translation from the Spanish press of her comments originally made in English.

"As far as the political situation in the US is concerned, we are facing a dangerous and extremely unfortunate administration. The way I see it, the presidential election was stolen by George W. Bush and ever since we have all been suffering the consequences. I think that the most recent thing with Iraq is absolute insanity, and I cannot believe that there is not opposition to it on a more global scale and that there is not more opposition in the country on the part of the sane people, including politicians, but also students and artists.

"There has to be a movement to really oppose what Bush is proposing, because it is unconstitutional, immoral and basically illegal. I find it particularly reprehensible the way he acts like he was in a western, intimidating the rest of the world. What can I say? I hate Bush; I despise him and his entire administration, everything he represents and everything he has tried to do, not only internationally, which is horrific, but domestically as well.

"In my country the atmosphere is poisoned. Unbreathable for those of us who are not on the right. So thank you for inviting me to this festival and allowing me to leave there for a few days."

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jessica Lange had no business making this statement, I just don't think it should have been made in Spain at an award ceremony while the President is waiting for action from the Congress and UN.

Why do the Stars persist in foisting their political views on the public. I foist my views on everyone I come into contact with in my personal life, but I don't do it when I'm speaking before a group during a ceremony or when conducting training.

Ever since the Democrats in Washington started going to Hollywood to fill their campaign coffers, the Stars have started to believe their opinions mean something. As far as I am concerned, their opinions and views carry the same weight as mine, one vote.

Of course, I guess this article falls under the ole saw about not discussing politics or religion in polite company. These two subjects are sure to get a lively discussion going...

So what's up with U.S. citizens fighting with the Taliban? Seems there are now three U.S citizens trying to claim they are entitled to special treatment under the U.S. Constitution and requesting their immediate return to the States for trial under American laws in a civilian court. They think as citizens of the country they took up arms against, they are now entitled to special treatment as US citizens.

This is going to be a slippery slope for our military and legal system to deal with, some are saying they gave up their citizenship when they joined the Taliban. But does being in the employ of a non-US entity cause you to lose your citizenship? Do foreign nationals who serve in our armed forces become US citizens by virtue of their military service? Let's look at a few examples and see if we can clarify these muddy waters a little bit...

In the early 90's when Australia was purchasing large quantities of the Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopter for their military, they were offering US Army Warrant Officers a Captaincy in their military if they were Blackhawk qualified. The only catch, their laws require all members of the Australian military to be Australian citizens. Our laws in the US do not have this requirement. So while it is not common, there are many non-US citizens serving in the US military. In my 20 years of Army life, I was privledged to serve with 1 British citizen, 3 others from Canada, 2 from S. Korea, and probably a half dozen from various S. American and African countires. So I guess you can say, serving in the US military does NOT make you a US citizen.

We know that if you work for BMW (a German company) in the US, you don't give up your citizenship, and you don't become a German citizen. But what if BMW transfers you to their Stuttgart plant? Now you are going to be moving to Germany and working for a German company. Do you lose your citizenship? Again the answer is NO. In fact this is rather a good position to be in, the US lets you exclude the first seventy plus thousand dollars in income because you are living abroad and working for a foreign company. And, since you are not a German citizen, you are not subject to the Germans 40% income tax. Now you might understand why foreign jobs are popular for people who want to travel and don't mind living outside the US.

So if serving/working for a foreign entity doesn't immediatly cause you to loose your citizenship, and if the Taliban doesn't require converting to an Afghanie to serve/help them. Then I guess you are still a US citizen. Now, if a US citizen, will these guys fall under the new requirements of our new terrorism legislation? I guess they do, and since they are US citizens, they should be brought back to the US and charged as criminals/terrorists under the new laws. But here's the catch, our new laws require the terrorist act to be witnessed by two people. Are we going to be able to find two people willing to testify against these three? I guess you could charge them with treason. Wait a minute, does treason fit?

Sec. 2381. Treason:
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

Well as we see in "Section 2381 of Chapter 114 (Treason, Sedition, and Subversive Activities) of Title 18 Crimes and Criminal Procedures" of the US Code, it does fit. In fact the punishment is very possibly much greater for the US citizens (death) than it is for the foreign nationals serving with the Taliban. Most of whom will go free or be returned to their countries of origin.

When was the last time you got that ole familiar feeling that your shoe was sticking to the pavement with each step? Or that soft sliding feeling as you stepped down with a sharp unpleaseant odor of dog poop?

What's with people? Why can't they show a little common decency and either throw their gum into the trash or clean up after their dog? I am convinced that only inconsiderate dog owners spit their gum onto the pavement!

What are people thinking when they put that piece of gum into their mouths? They know they aren't going to swallow it: "Don't swallow that gum, it'll ball up in your stomach and twist your insides up, you'll end up in a world of hurt!" our mothers used to tell us. Kind of like always having clean underware on when we leave the house in case we end up in an accident and the doctors see our underware! But seriously, gum chewers know they are going to be spitting the gum out, so why not think ahead and have a plan.

I see this as a general overall breakdown in common courtesy that is found in our present society. Common decency while still found in the majority, is lacking in a suprisingly large number of people! This may just be a result of the larger population in the world, or it could be influenced by the crime and violence beamed into our family rooms by the network news agencies, primetime TV shows, and large movie studios. A symptom of this lack of common decency can be found in declining church memberships, increasing school violence, and a general total disregard for our fellow man.

I don't have a solution for this sad state of affairs, but I just want you to think about it, look around, observe and see what you think. Let me know...

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to America? What has happened to the values, safety, and stability of the America I knew in my youth. For those who are wondering, I came into this world in 1957 - so that makes me.....what? 45! I know for a fact that the world seemed far safer in the 60's and 70's. I had much more freedom growing up than my children will ever know. So what did happened?

This erosion may have started under the social reforms of Roosevelt, accelerating under Johnson's "Great Society", infused by student activisim during the Vietnam war, and finally expanded by the recent Clinton scandals. Or is technology the reason?

I certainly do not know all of the answers, but I can sure take a stab at a few of them:

Going back to the United States Constitution I find certain rights handed down to me from a courageous band of citizens. They risked their own lives to write and publish the "Declaration of Independence" from England. After the revolutionary war, they worked with the new States to write the "Constitution of the United States".

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say anything about the Governemnt passing out money for social programs. Nor does it mention health care payments or coverage. Retirement programs won't be found anywhere in the Constitution. IOW, Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and any other programs that encourage people not to save their money, not to plan for retirement, or not to plan for difficut times were not contemplated by the founding fathers or provided for in our Constitution. The collection of Income Taxes is not in the original Constitution. How did the Government raise money for it's operations in the early years? Import taxes and duties paid for all of the Governments spending until the early 1900's when the Income Tax ammendment was passed. The Income Tax ammendment has led us into a whole new can of worms, and many of our problems today can be traced directly back to this fundamental shift in the way we fund our Government (but that's for another day).

Creation of these programs, always to get our nation through a tough periods in history or as social experiements, [the depression, Johnson's Great Society] have left large numbers of Americans with no incentive to work, to save, or to plan for the future. This over the past 60 years has led to a society that demands in ever increasing numbers for the Government to provide services to them for free. They want the Government to pay their medical bills, to give them unemployment when they are out of work, to pay them welfare when they don't want to work, and they have no real idea where this money to pay for these things comes from.

Those that do work, do plan, do pay taxes, are tired of doing so for those who "ride" the system. We see it in the voting patterns around the United States, the population centers always vote for the Liberal Democratic party, while the rest of the United States votes overwhelmingly for the Conservative Republican party.

What does this have to do with the lack of freedom my children enjoy? When I was a child I was able to freely roam my neighborhood at the age of 5, I was roaming outside my neighborhood at 7, and staying out in the yard after dark at 12. Will my children be able to do this? NO.

I used to blame technology, I used to say it was because all the bad things that happen are on the nightly news every evening. I used to say my childeren were too occupied with TV or game consoles or their computers to want to go out and explore. But, I've come to a different conclusion in the last few months, while technology makes the parent imposed imprisonment easier on the child, it is because of the loss of our moral center, our great values as Americans that are the reason my children will not have the freedom I had as a child.

Society as a whole has gotten more dangerous. Those with out jobs, or the desire to work are preying in increasing numbers on those who do work to provide for their families. Criminals now blame their upbringing, or societies indifference for the crimes they commit, embolding them to commit more crimes. No one want's to accept responsibility for where they are in life. They want to blame someone else.

You see it in the lawsuits that result in multi-million dollar settlements. People are so afraid of liability, they are afraid of getting involved for fear of being sued. They are leaving jobs that carry a high risk of being sued. They don't help those in need for fear their hand will be bitten off.

No, our representative in the Government continue to advocate new programs to encourage more dependence on Federal Programs. These programs are paid for by the hard work of the citizens of the United States. Increasing, every year - fewer are paying for more.

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A Great Man Died Today - Ronald Reagan

Grrrrrrr, Beheadings? What next?