The words of Cardinal Joseph Bernadin, of Chicago:
“If one contends, as we do, that the right of every fetus to be born should be protected by civil consensus, then our moral, political, and economic responsibilities do not stop at the moment of birth. Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker. Such a quality-of-life posture translates into specific political and economic positions on tax policy, employment generation, welfare policy, nutrition and feeding programs, and health care. Consistency means we cannot have it both ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fibre of the society or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility.”
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Travelling is my time to do things I wouldn’t normally do, like drink a lot of soda, or today, watch some Fox News, to hear what’s going on in the mind of “Red America.” What is going on, apparently, is a whole lot of whining. They are running the country, the economy is doing well, and Iraq seems like it just might work out, and they are whining in outrage about the evils of the world. (more…)
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If you’re frustrated with the American government, then you may enjoy reading, hearing, or seeing George Galloway, a British MP falsely accused of oil profiteering, call our government for what it is, a pack of fabricating, war-lusting, profiteering liars: (more…)
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Good news from Chicago:
On May 17, 2005, at 11:45 a.m., the presidents of S. Rosen’s, produced by Alpha Baking Co. and Vienna Beef, will convene at the James R. Thompson Center at 100 W. Randolph St. in Chicago, for the formal signing of a “piece” treaty promising to forever more package their hot dogs and buns in the same quantity: eight!
Man, ever since we moved to California we’ve been eating fewer hotdogs and more Asian food. It is good to hear of progress being made in the encased meats industry of my homeland. Can anyone recommend a vendor in the Bay Area who sells Vienna Beef hotdogs?
(I guess I can give the Stadium Pub another try sometime. They are only a few blocks from my house . . .)
(Thanks for the tip, Dave, and bon appetit.)
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So . . . this is an old rant.
I was working on a project to multi-home our upstream Internet connectivity. When I started, I was inheriting something where the telco providing us with the new circuit would also give us a router, and configure it, and take care of all the BGP configuration, and we wouldn’t have to renumber. (more…)
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On Saturday we went to see the San Francisco Giants play at SBC Park. The Muni disrupted itself so we walked from the BART Embarcadero station. I am not a baseball fan, you could say, so I brought some books along. But we had some suprisingly nice seats where you could actually see what was going on, and when we got there, in the third inning, the score was 0-0 and the Nationals were walking Giants to fill the bases. Then J.T. Snow and Moises ALOU, whom I know primarily as a popular filler in crossword puzzles, went and scored a bunch of runs. (more…)
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When I began attending grammar school, I learned that I was the weird kid. In the first environment in which we keep score, I stood out as a failure. Sure, my grades were okay, but where it supposedly mattered – the esteem of my colleagues – I was outside. Once the weird kid works out some detente with the bullies, and settles down with the fact that people generally don’t care what you do, you can find some non-social activities that interest you and coast through your days as a slacker.
In time it was revealed to me that my failure was a consequence of my intelligence. I was eventually transferred to the gifted school, but I was still a weird kid, who had had trouble socializing, and even at the gifted school I remained weird. That I was weird because I was allegedly smart, yet even among the smart kids I was weird, taught me skepticism. Maybe I wasn’t really that smart, or maybe smart had nothing to do with it.
Being weird isn’t all that bad, as long as you have somewhere else to spend your attention. For me, where other kids had friends and a social life, I had books and model trains and video games. Throughout my life I have tended toward words and hobbies and puzzles while others spend their time calling friends, planning parties, and following gossip. (more…)
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Last week, some of my users stopped receiving e-mail on their cell phones.
We had the aliases set up for:
<ten digits>@mobile.att.net
mobile.att.net no longer exists.
So, after some research, I got an answer from USENET:
<ten digits>@mmode.com
This is also accepting messages:
<ten digits>@mobile.mycingular.com
(But they do not seem to be delivered. Except to one user who recently switched phones.)
A very smart person reports that if your mobile is GSM you might want:
<ten digits>@cingularme.com
Update–July, 2007: For John and Bertrand, who is on Cingular’s “Pay as You Go” plan:
<ten digits>@txt.att.net
I did this to my aliases file:
:%s/mobile.att.net/mmode.com/
(I only bother to blog about this because simply typing my problem in to Google got me nada.)
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This haiku I wrote
Is awful, it’s terrible
Why do you read it?
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Now, I don’t believe the words “awesome” and “blog” should ever go together, but sometimes you have to make an exception. Maciej Ceglowski takes the time to write some truly enjoyable prose, putting weird and other pleasantly engaging images in my head. I enjoy reading every word, and you might as well. From his recent survey of New York Pizzas:
Back in the heady post-Soviet days, it used to be possible to get really bad pizza in Warsaw. Vendors in the little plastic booths on every corner would sell you a hot dog bun spread with tomato paste and pressed ham for about ten American cents. Then the Vietnamese showed up, with their cut-rate lunch specials and even smaller booths, and the Warsaw pizza market was no more. Finally the Health Department got funding, shut everyone down, deported the Vietnamese, and now the nation’s capital is a desolation of McDonald’s and hipster cafés.
If “The Unbearable Thinness of Crust” gives you a clue as to what may inspire Maciej’s writing, then that may help you determine if you will enjoy reading “Idle Minds” as I do.
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On Sunday, Yayoi and I made it to the Cherry Blossom Festival, which was fun. Yayoi had some takoyaki, but it was made with ground beef! (Tako means octopus, and she was impressed that she could get such inexpensive takoyaki, until the awful truth dawned upon her …)
Well, we took a lot of pictures. My favorite is of this older guy dressed up as a samurai, giving me a friendly wave.
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Increasingly, prospective and existing customers are interacting with corporations electronically, both for research and purchasing purposes. Those that ignore online inquiries are alienating consumers–especially young “affluents,” the 24- to 33-year-olds earning $75,000 or above who are the heaviest Internet users (and most likely to be asking the questions). In fact, our research indicates that 70 percent of consumers go to a competitor’s site if they don’t receive a timely response to an online inquiry. And losing those customers is a faux pas few companies can afford.
I don’t really need to read the rest of this CNET article because I already know all I need. Companies, fear my “affluent” wrath!! MUHAHAHA!!
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