He obviously hasn’t endorsed Hillary, or for that matter McCain, but in watching him continuously harm the Obama campaign with every new word he utters, one has to wonder what his true motivation is. Or, more likely, I’m looking for deeper meaning out of someone simply attempting to stretch out their 15 minutes.
A tie or a loss for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania this past Tuesday would have more or less forced her out of the race, allowing Barack Obama to finally mount a national campaign, with the support of the DNC and other pro-Democratic groups, against John McCain and the Republican Party. Alas, this did not happen. Everyone (even the media!) knows that Barack Obama is going to walk out of the convention with his name on the ticket. He has won more states, he has more of the popular vote, he is leading her in pledged delegates, and none of the remaining primaries are going to change that. By winning Pennsylvania with a 10 point lead, Clinton has gotten the ego boost that she so desperately needed to convince herself and her supporters that it is worthwhile to stay in the race through the convention. No one quite knows what this will mean, as there hasn’t been a brokered democratic convention since the 50s, so this should be interesting.
I forsee an Obama/Clinton ticket to reunite an increasingly divided party and defeat McCain.
If you drink red wine, you probably know that it will always taste better, have a better aroma, and have better mouthfeel if it is given the chance to breathe before being consumed. This, however, takes time. There are plenty of tschotschkes available for wine drinkers which promise to aerate the wine more rapidly, but if you read the various reviews of these around the Internet you’ll discover quickly that they don’t exactly work well, if at all.
In comes the Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator. I was skeptical, but I used it with a decent bottle of red wine a few months ago and it works great. I smelled it and took a sip without having used it, then poured a glass through the Vinturi and did the same. The difference was noticeable, even to someone who isn’t overly familiar with wine. Using what I can best describe as magic, it instantly aerates the wine by pulling air in and mixing it with the wine as it funnels through the Vinturi. You simply hold it over the glass, pour the wine in to it, and watch in amazement as it instantly mixes the right amount of air in to your wine. It tastes better, smells better, and feels smoother. I highly recommend that anyone from the true connoisseur to someone who just enjoys a bottle now and then invest in one of these. You will not regret it.
I decided that I needed to geek out a bit this weekend and called Time Warner Cable to upgrade our standard 7 Mbps (512 Mbps upload) cable Internet access to Road Runner Turbo, which is instead capped at 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Sure, there’s plenty of stuff that this will have absolutely no impact on, but I noticed an immediate difference in online gaming as well as certain mainstream websites which I frequent. Uploading to the ftp servers for the websites I run has also doubled in speed, which is great. On top of those reasons there is, of course, always the geek bragging rights associated with having the fastest available Internet access available in Wisconsin and among the fastest in the country.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting today that a local synagogue, Congregation Bnai Zedek Chabad in Kenosha, had its two Torah scrolls stolen. The article states that the Torahs had a value of forty to fifty thousand dollars, but the true value of a Torah to any synagogue goes far beyond any monetary value. It has a strong spiritual and sentimental value that far outweigh any price tag. Who in their right mind would break in to a religious institution (of any kind) and steal what is essentially the most religiously, spiritually, and historically important item. It is absolutely disgusting that someone would do this and I hope that the person or people who stole these Torahs is caught and feels the full force of the law. My hopes and prayers go out to the members of this synagogue and I sincerely hope that they are able to get their Torahs returned to them with no harm done to the scrolls.
For more information on the Synagogue, the stolen Torahs, and to donate to help them raise the funds for a new Torah, visit Chabad of Kenosha.
At first it was all over the news that some company in Miami named “Psystar” is selling Mac clones. Compatible PC hardware hacked to run Mac OS X. The term Hackintosh made its way in to mainstream media for the first time since the mid-90s when Mac clones were actually licensed. The Mac community has been in an uproar wondering about legal actions, EULAs, and all sorts of other boring things. Then, looking past the initial buzz, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur dug a little deeper and discovers that the company itself may just be a fraud. No one seems to be talking, there’s no actual support or sales team, they aren’t responding to emails, they company never seemed to exist prior to last week (even though they domain name has been around since 2000), and best of all, the address that was supplied on their website up until a day or so ago showed a generic suburban house in Miami.
The only name that has ever even been given to the media is Robert. No last name given, just Robert. No one really knows who “Robert” is, but with the new information of how new and unestablished the company is, he’s probably the owner and only employee. Well, I’ve got a last name for you. It you dig a little bit on Archive.org, you’ll see that the snapshot of the site that was taken in September, 2001 shows a different domain name: razorfx.com. The site is currently just a placeholder (although it shares a favicon with psystar.com and is hosted on the same host). So visiting razorfx.com didn’t help in it’s current state, but what if you use the Wayback Machine again and see how razorfx.com looked in November, 2002. Now we’re getting somewhere! Razofx.com was the online portfolio of Robert Pedraza.
Wanna make a bet as to if that’s the same Robert running things at Psystar?
Firefox is easily the best web browser available today, but part of what makes it great is the expandability that it offers its users in the form of add-on extensions. So, without further ado, here are some of my favorite add-ons in no particular order.
Jessie made a comment the other night while I was watching UFO Hunters on the History Channel that got me thinking: Why do they still call it the History Channel. Sure, they still air plenty of historical shows and documentaries, but all of their “prime time” shows have just about nothing to do with history. I think the best way for the network to handle this is to split off in to two separate stations. Similarly to how Cartoon Network didn’t have enough time in the day to air both classic and modern cartoons, so they split off the classic cartoons in to the Boomerang channel. Keep the History Channel for shows that actually involve, well, history, and create a new channel for all of their “hit” shows that have absolutely nothing to do with history. The types of shows that they’ve been airing (UFO Hunters, Monsterquest, Cities of the Underworld, Ax Men, et al.), all seem like they would fit great in a network called something along the lines of “The Discovery Channel”. Alas, I did a little bit of research and learned that the discovery channel is already taken. To the best of my knowledge, the History and Discovery channels are in no way affiliated, so the History Channel will have to do better than “Discovery 2″ as a name for my proposed spin-off channel. Something along the lines of “[H] Explore” might work well, as they can keep the their logo for brand recognition, while better identifying the content that they air.
It’s all over the news that Mark Penn has resigned (been forced out? fired?) as Chief Strategist for Hillary Clinton’s campaign because of his professional ties supporting a Columbian trade deal that Hillary opposes. Basically, her campaign differed in position from his real job as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, a Public Relations firm. Well, they fired him, he’s no longer involved in the campaign, so the conflict of interest is over, right? Wrong.
What else could you expect from a campaign strategist who specializes in spin, than more spin. Sure, he’s no longer the “Chief Campaign Strategist”, but he is still one of her top advisers and his company, Burson-Marsteller, is still doing the polling for the Clinton campaign. I could be wrong, but that sure doesn’t sound like getting fired. It sounds to me like he just had to step back in to the shadows a bit for fear of hurting the campaign that he has orchestrated. This fact seems to be something that mainstream media has been leaving out and instead going forward with the “he’s fired, lets move on” story. For lack of a better term, that’s complete bullshit. If you’re going to fire someone for a conflict of interest, fire someone for a conflict on interest. Don’t keep them on the payroll in a similar capacity and change their title to look less important.
If we’ve learned anything from Karl Rove and George W. Bush, it’s that sleazy campaign tactics do, in fact, get you elected. I just hope that it is too little too late for Hillary to sleaze her way in to the Whitehouse.
The weather here in Milwaukee is finally to the point where I am ready to head outside, light up some charcoal, and grill up some meat on my Weber One-Touch Gold
