Yearly Archives: 2005

Weekend Update 2005-07-11

We received a company e-mail this morning to tell us that one of our company’s employees from their London offices has been missing since Thursday’s attack. That’s very distressing news. I was discussing in an e-mail with my sister, who lives with her husband in a town outside London, the terrorist’s choice of targets. They’re incensed at the attack on the double-decker bus because it’s such an iconic symbol of London. Which made me think about the World Trade Center — they wanted that target so badly, they attacked it twice; once from below and once from above. If they were truly trying to attack our freedom, they would have blown up the Statue of Liberty, but they went after the twin towers. I’ll bet money Bush has never really sat down and thought about that, and why. Because I think it says a lot about what bin Laden is really after.
Stephanie and I went to Kathy’s softball game on Friday. Saturday we did some reading (we’re both re-reading the current Harry Potter books) and some work around both our houses. I had two birds in the house on Saturday morning, which was fun for the three cats, but not so much for me. I think they came in through a hole in a screen in the spare bedroom, so I fixed the screen.
On Sunday, Kathy came over and started breaking down the concrete stairs beside my house. I worked on replacing the burner and igniter for my gas grill, and on painting the lawn furniture that Amy gave me. I also talked to a gutter guy about giving me estimates on getting my gutters fixed on the front corner of my house above the front door. I’ll have to see how much they are.

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Long-delayed t-shirt blogging

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  • Post category:Life Hacks

I started out with such great intentions. I was so determined. I as going to take a picture every day, and blog it right away. How quickly I got sidetracked. Curse you, real life! How dare you get in the way of my silly website projects?

Well, anyway, here’s the catch-up… see the main photo page for all my shirts in context.

[edit needed: update photos]

June 28, 2005 – One of my three Curious George shirts. Sleeves are too long, but I love it.

June 28, 2005 – fun grey shirt; this looks good on me.

June 30, 2005 – I have six white shirts exactly like this, and a grey, blue and black. I’ll have to try on another to see how they all look.

July 1, 2005 – Beaver Mountain. Hee hee.

July 2, 2005 – Darn it, I need someone else to take pictures.

July 3, 2005 – I love this shirt, but it’s too big, and is getting old. It’s definitely a wear-around-the-house shirt.

July 4, 2005 – One of my standard Old Navy ringer shirts. They look alright.

July 4, 2005 – Another Old Navy. I spilled on the other one, and had to change.

July 5, 2005 – Inexpensive Fruit of the Look I bought for $3 several years ago. This looks okay.

July 6, 2005 – Cool “year of the rooster” shirt I got several years ago. They didn’t have the “year of the monkey, or I would have it instead. Sleeves are too long.

July 7, 2005 – Standard Old Navy ringer shirts.

July 8, 2005 – I’m blogging this! I got this at thinkgeek.com
Okay! Now I’m all caught up.

Continue ReadingLong-delayed t-shirt blogging

National Guard?

Call me crazy, but I’d feel more secure if our national guard were actually here, guarding our nation, and not in some other country fighting people who had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda who are obviously active and busy.
And as several security agents pointed out this morning on TV, these attacks had to have been planned before the location of the G8 summit was announced, so it’s likely they’re not related.

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The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza

By Billy Reisinger, The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza is a great tutorial on doing it yourself, and although I made pizza from scratch for years in my mother’s kitchen, this is an excellent refresher course and covers detail (such as moisture levels in cheese) I’d never thought of before.

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Roomba News

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  • Post category:Art

A couple links for my girlfriend, who has one of these clever little vacuums.
New Roomba Scheduler lets you upgrade your current Roomba! The iRobot Scheduler is a complete scheduling system that can be used with any of our current Roomba productsProgram the days and times and Roomba will clean when you’re not at home, at night, once a week or anytime you want.
Roomba Hacking: Ever wish you could dispatch a robot to grab you a beer? That day might soon be here, thanks to an as-yet-unannounced decision by iRobot. In early July the company will post instructions for controlling its Roomba vacuum cleaner via the built-in serial port, so programmers can modify it however they want – from equipping it with a camera to, yes, adding an arm and training it to retrieve brewskis. iRobot hopes the move will foster the development of Roomba accessories – like the ecosystem of add-ons that has sprung up around the iPod – thus driving sales.

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Gap Clothes and Saipan Slave Labor, courtesy of Tom Delay

The island of Saipan is part of a U.S. Commonwealth, located in the Pacific, near Guam and the Philipines. Because of this, clothes made there can carry the “Made in the U.S.A” label, although that’s just a technicality. These clothes can also come into the U.S. tariff-free and quota-free, to highly profitable U.S. markets. What Saipan doesn’t have, though, is coverage by U.S. labor laws, or U.S. immigration laws (you can contact the Family Law Firm in Fresno to resolve any of your immigration or visa issues), which makes this something like heaven to the garment industry, who have set up massive sweatshops and reaped huge profits. For immigration related enquries, people can check https://colavecchiolaw.com/about-us/ this link and learn more! Clothes made there include Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap (which includes Old Navy and Banana Republic), Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne.

Here’s what’s going on in the sweatshops; women are recruited into them from China and the Philipines. The women pay their life savings to get into them, thinking that they are going to the United States. Instead they’re taken to Saipan, where the make less than half the U.S. minimum wage. As minimum wage for any employment is mandatory sometimes employees may sue employer for giving less wages in such cases employer has rights to consult attorneys to defend against wage garnishment .Many of them have to “pay off” their entrance fee but can never earn enough to pay their “debt” so they are basically indentured servants, or slave labor. There is evidence that some of the women are forced to participate in sex rings. The ABC undercover reports on this identified one 14 year-old girl who was forced to dance nude on stage and perform sex acts. Women who get pregnant are forced to have abortions. (Culture of life, indeed.)

Here’s where Tom DeLay comes in. When he was House Republican Whip, he prevented legislation to reform the labor laws of Saipan, although that legislation has already passed the Senate. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff paid for DeLay to go on a golfing trip to the U.S. commonwealth (that’s illegal, BTW) where DeLay said in an address to the sweatshop owners: “You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system.”

Now I’m suddenly really uncomfortable in all my Gap and Old Navy clothes. These are the kind of sleepless nights that the “Made in the U.S.A.” label is supposed to prevent.

Continue ReadingGap Clothes and Saipan Slave Labor, courtesy of Tom Delay

Happy 4th of July!!!

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  • Post category:Politics

“You can support the troops but not the president”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
“[The] President…is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”
-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)
“American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”
-Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W. Bush
“Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years”
-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)
“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?”
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99
“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”
-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)
“Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly.”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
These were, of course, all spewed out in 1999, leveled at the NATO campaign in Kosovo against the human rights atrocities by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (not a fake search for WMDs) – which was under Clinton’s watch.

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Vivid Dreams

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  • Post category:Dreams

The first dream I had was about a house that I owned with my brothers. We were renting it out to a friend of mine, and I found out that he had a dog, which was okay, but he was keeping it in the crawlspace beneath the house, which was not okay. So the whole dream was about going to rescue the dog and explain why it’s not good to keep it in a crawlspace. For some reason I was being really polite to this friend, instead of being pissy and indignant, like I would be in real life.

The second dream I had was about a video copying place. I went with one of my co-workers to get a home-made video copied onto DVD, and while we were wandering around in the store, we discovered that they also printed books, too — our books, it turned out. They were making pirate copies of books from the company I work at. We started to snoop around a little more, and we stumbled across an executive from our company in a back room; he was startled to see us as much as we were to see him, and it became obvious that he was running this company. So we tried to sneak out the back door, and the mafia showed up in cadillacs. Then I woke up. Writing about it now, this dream makes no sense for a variety of different reasons, but it seemed to while I was dreaming it.

In the third dream I had, Stephanie and I drove up to Valparaiso to meet a friend of hers that I had never met before. I don’t remember of the name of the woman in the dream, and it certainly isn’t an actual friend of Stephanie’s. Anyway, the woman was older and had three or four kids and drove around in a mini-van. Stephanie left me alone with the woman and the kids (which I thought was highly weird) and we ended up going to her house to work on a craft project with all the kids, involving making a full-sized grandfather clock out of clay. (I honestly don’t know why that would be in my head). Suddenly, the woman started hitting on me, in front of the kids. I was really freaked out, and she ended up telling me that Stephanie had encouraged her to do so because Stephanie didn’t like me anymore, and wanted to set me up with someone else so I wouldn’t be heartbroken when she dumped me. And I got really upset and woke up. 🙂

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