Bouncing Hedgehog

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Those of you who know me will know that I am a movie fan. I picked up a dvd a while back – The Tripper -  and finally got around to watching it. I liked the movie. It was a fun little comic horror effort that appealed to my somewhat warped sense of humor.  The movie had quite a strong political theme in some ways and definitely had a bone to pick with some of the “sacred cows” of American history. But what really got my attention though were the credits believe it or not. Usually the credits roll to music but not this time. They rolled to a speech. And it floored me. I am not used to American politicians telling it like it is rather than what they want you to think it is. It took a while to find the speech. It was given by Robert F. Kennedy Jr and although I had to find a transcript to see the complete speech (it was longer than the credits rolled for) it was well worth the effort. It deserves to be read, understood and listened to by all.

The speech…

I have been an environmental advocate for twenty years, and I’ve been disciplined during that period about being nonpartisan in my approach to this issue. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party. Most of the environmental leaders in our country agree with me. Five years ago, if you asked the leaders of the major environmental groups in America, What’s the gravest threat to the global environment?, they would have given you a range of answers: overpopulation, habitat destruction, global warming. Today, they will all tell you one thing: it’s George W. Bush. This is the worst environmental president that we have ever had. You simply cannot speak honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically about this president. If you go to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s web site you will see over 400 major environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration over the last three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth attack, one that’s been hidden from the public. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many people back in December we got hit by a snowstorm which (at least in Clendenin, West Virginia) practically sent us back to the stone age. Just before midnight on Friday December 18 the cable went out. No biggie – the TV schedule sucked anyway. Within the hour the power and the phone followed suit. And that’s where the real fun began.

Fortunately for us we have a log fire and a reasonable supply of logs which meant that we weren’t totally without heat. It wasn’t great – we could get the den up to about 62F – but it was certainly better than the rest of the house which very quickly dropped to 40F. We always have food and water on hand for emergencies and thanks to a camping gas stove we could at least cook after a fashion.

We also have a small radio (also for emergencies) and so we tuned in to try and find out what was happening. There’s half a dozen local stations so we didn’t think that would be too hard. Boy, were we ever wrong. What we needed to know were details of the power outages (and what steps were being taken to repair the downed lines) and whether our area had even been reported as out and of course what Verizon were up to as regards downed phone lines. With the phone out we couldn’t report the power out. Cellphone coverage where we live (a whole 25 miles from the state capital) is non-existent. Read the rest of this entry »

Those of you that know me well know that I love auctions. And I have certainly had some good deals and yesterday was no exception. Being English and living in the US I can’t begin to even get across to my American friends just how much I miss the quality of British TV (one of the main reasons I joined Netflix who have a really good selection) and consequently I am always on the lookout for British TV dvds.

The complete set of Inspector Morse mysteries was up for grabs at my local auctioneers (www.mountaineerauctions.com) yesterday. Now this is a 35 disc boxed set issued in the US by PBS. It wasn’t individually listed on their web site so I hadn’t done any research beforehand but I reasoned a set with that many discs had to be at least $150 and so I was prepared to bid accordingly.

To cut a long story short I got the set (in perfect condition by the way) for a paltry $45! I took a quick look online today and it goes for $430.

60 hours of quality viewing and I don’t have to put up with a gung-ho swat team. Marvellous!

I’m just curious to know if anybody out there has actually had any success in dealing with spam from companies like Keen (www.keen.com)? The reason I ask is that my other half is a Keen member and started receiving unsolicited e-mails from a Keen member well over a year ago now.

That Keen member is called Astrodaija.

The e-mail unsubscribe button doesn’t seem to work – she’s unsubscribed 11 times now.

Reporting the member to Keen doesn’t work – that’s been done 3 times. They still let Astrodaija’s unwanted mail spam her.

As for the much vaunted CAN-SPAM legislation I wonder if that’s worth the paper it’s written on as reporting Astrodaija there 3 times hasn’t had any effect either.

Keen’s service provider doesn’t seem interested. Despite their “we don’t tolerate spam” spoutings they haven’t even had the courtesy to reply.

So… just what do we have to do to get this damn spammer off our backs?

It’s been a little while, so my apologies for that. I’ve been playing with a new pet project. For those of you who know me, you will not be surprised to learn that I now have a quotes web site (www.quoteyquotes.com), which I have been building over the last few weeks.

Why a quotes site? Well, I have always been interested in pertinent quotes and have been collecting them for years. And there are a few web sites out there already which aren’t too bad. But they all have their flaws. I’m very particular about the way quotes are categorized. It always ticks me off when I go to a section and find quotes in there that really don’t belong. I also dislike sloppy punctuation and spelling. You’d be surprised how many of these sites must simply copy and paste each other’s content. So many have the same spelling mistake(s)! Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it’s definitely been a while since I’ve managed to get here and actually write something useful. Not that this post is necessarily useful. Since I last wrote I have converted one of my other web sites from a table based to a CSS based design. And as that site had1200 pages at the last count it took a little while. Anyway, the new version is pure CSS based – though I found that some pages benefited from still having a table for content. So all the die-hard CSS purists out they can go @$^& themselves. Tabular data works really well in tables – it sucks trying to do it in CSS. Read the rest of this entry »