Ping.fm and the WordPress plugin will enable me to keep all my blog and social posts in one location. Now if I can only figure out how to post to multiple ping.fm groups at one time.
Social networking is killing my blog.
So many posts on facebook and a few on twitter. No entries in the ‘ol blog for over a month.
I think I’m being socialed out. My new word…”socialed”. Facebook is where all the photos live and an occasional rant. The blog was once a place for me to vent frustrations. Now it’s just a lonely space that few visit except for updates on tired, old issues that aren’t going anywhere.
Work is outrageously busy. Amy inherited a little money from her Grandmother who passed away on Nov. 21, 2010. We’re trying to sit on. Possibly some home improvements. I bought a Lieca D-LUX 5 camera (I might return) and Amy got a new phone. We all got a new TV for the living room. Other than that we’re trying to stay humble. Going to invest and save most of it. A few home renovations are definitely in order.
Connor learned to ride his bike and tie his shoes during Christmas break and Logan has started preschool. Zach is a full blown toddler now. He’s a walker and cute as can be.
Scary words from Wendell Potter, health insurance whistle blower.
We are in a period of time when I think this puts our democracy in jeopardy. We are seeing newsrooms having smaller staffs. Mainstream media is diminishing and along with that, investigative reporting is diminishing. So, there are fewer watchdogs, journalism watchdogs, than there used to be. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite anymore. People can self select. They can go to Fox News if they’re conservative and have their world view reinforced, or MSNBC on the other side of the political-ideological spectrum. So you don’t have as much of a middle as you used to. At the same time as you’re seeing newsrooms shrink, you’re seeing corporate power increase. You see a lot of reporters who used to work for newspapers go into PR. I did that several years ago. There are far, far, far more PR in America than there are newspaper reporters or reporters of any kind. So, you’re seeing a shift that troubles me. You’re seeing a rise of corporate power when there are far fewer watchdogs watching over what’s going on. – The Hartford Courant
Wendell Potter was a top PR rep for the Cigna and Humana insurance companies until he realized the error of his ways.
Brought to you by the United Corporations of America: Of the money, by the money, for the money.
Republicans are Protectionists
Protect the status quot…protect the wealth. That is pretty much the mantra of the real Republican party. They are being challenged on the premise of “core Republican values” by the Teabaggers. From what I can tell the Teabaggers and lock-step Republicans disagree on what those values are.
Teabaggers want to “control fiscal spending” to “reduce the deficit” and claim ending entitlements and lower taxes will achieve this goal. Aside from the Dept. of Education I’ve never heard of another entitlement program they would move to end. Instead their answer is a politically vague end to “government waste”. Then they go on to use some comically undereducated talking points such as running the government like a responsible household budget. I thank a Teabagger’s God my family budget isn’t as complicated as the federal governments.
A real lock-step Republican knows only one thing: protect the wealth. This doesn’t mean tax increases or decreases specifically. It means using any legislative method available to undermine and remove regulations on business and industry, including the banking industry.
Real Republicans like having the fox watch the hen house. Their rallying point is limited government and big business. The argument Americans are having right now is over who they want in charge of the country: the US Government or multinational corporations.
I like to believe that an honest government should incur responsible costs while they work to protect Americans from all threats, including those posed by industries chasing profit at any cost, even if the price is human life. That ideal vision of America may be gone soon if it’s not already. Corporate America has purchased the US political system. If lock-step Republicans take control of the executive and legislative branches the poor will be slaves to the 21st century Robber Barons. The middle class will simply be gone. So the question Republican, industry supporters need to ask themselves is: can America survive without a middle class?
RTPinbox.com
I’ve got this domain, rtpinbox.com and I really want to do something with it but I haven’t figured out what. I was thinking of a technology project blog but don’t know if I have time to post about a lot of things I’m working on. Web based mail is already available from gmail…. I really don’t have any ideas but open to suggestions.
NC State Fair Time
It will cost about $50 in advanced ride coupons, $16 in advanced admission tickets and $60 for games and food. So I’m projecting $126 this year for the NC State Fair. It will be amazing if that works out.
I think we’re going to catch the CAT bus at the intersection of Six Forks and Wake Forest Rd. and get dropped off at the main gate. It would probably save on parking. If not I’m going to try to get into Chuck Booth and Mike Franklin’s lot where Stay-Right Tank company used to be. I don’t want to pay and walk forever. If I pay to park I want to be close.
Pensions are vile.
Pensioner = Entitlement Receiver
Yet astoundingly these older, mostly white men and women who worked in various levels of government tend to back Republicans and even Teabaggers who scream against entitlements with every breath. Let’s remove the hypocritical pensioners, Medicaid recipients and those receiving unemployment benefits from the ranks of those who support the conservative call to end entitlement programs and see how much support remains.
Pensions are draining this country on every level of municipal, state and federal government. Even when former elected representatives are convicted of committing fraud against their constituency we continue to shell over their pension money without legal recourse. The funny thing is that to change this the legislators, elected representatives themselves, must vote to forgo their promise land pension if they commit fraud or a felony. Another clear case of the fox watching the hen house. I believe any representative who would vote against such a bill is one who questions his or her ability to remain clean. It could also be claimed they’re already corrupt and don’t want to lose their pension if caught.
America is grid locked until we give up the pipe dream that legislative officials will police themselves with morality and diligence. Much the same way we are doomed if we do not remove the misconception that corporations will police themselves in the best interest of consumers over shareholder returns.
$2.99/mo. hosting at WebFusion
On Sept. 13, 2010 my e-machine web server died after 7 years of service and it was a solid death. The motherboard fried. I was real busy and didn’t have time to make an emergency out of getting this site back on-line. I did my homework for web hosts supporting WordPress, MySQL with phpmyadmin and found webfusion.com. They provided all the components to host this site for $2.99 per month. Deal.
Now I don’t have to support a system at home running Apache, MySQL etc. I created a new WordPress blog at Webfusion, exported my database using phpmyadmin and imported it to the new database at Webfusion. Then all I had to do was replace the WordPress files via FTP and change a few config files for database locations and passwords. Hopefully the 99.9% uptime claimed by Webfusion is accurate. This site has been down a lot because I have servers I’m paid to attend. I really don’t want to work to keep this site up on a DSL line and 7 year old PC anymore.
Back on-line…
Whew! Last month I had a catastrophe befall the server that hosted this site for almost seven years. I had to recover the data from the hard drive, mount it to a new PC, load MySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin and then export the blog’s MySQL database for import to a Webfusion hosted database.
It was a painfully long recovery made much worse by my being lazy. I am happier than hell now that this blog is hosted somewhere other than my own machine. Uptime will no longer be a problem and the kids can destroy and computer they see fit to lay hands on without interrupting my damn blog!
This downtime cost me some serious search engine rankings. No worries though. If blogging stops being more than just fun I better be making some serious money off it.
Will it post in Chrome?
I’m giving Google Chrome another try. Seems to be some improvements in the last few months. At least this form is working in WordPress. We’ll see how this post works out with regards to formatting.