This Blog Is Full Of Crap

This is a test of MT 3.1.5

Well, it looks like the backups of the old database weren't working, and my archives aren't exactly up to snuff.

Oh well. Time to start jury-rigging and duct-taping the old content and the new content together in MT 3.1.5.

Besides, it was about time I gave a contribution to the MT folks.

Just in case you're interested, backupyourwebsitesdumbass.com is still available.

Well, now that I'm barely back up and running, I guess I can take time to let y'all know that Carnival of the Cats was at Flying Space Monkey for its 48th installment.

Yeah, I'm tired from all the typing too, Nardo.

Time for bed. We'll post more pictures of Edloe in the Irish hat tomorrow.

For all those of you who kept calling me the Hunter S. Thompson of the Blogopshere, does this mean that I have to blow my brains out now?

Watch the kittycats.

If you see this:

Hide your Lucky Charms. And pretty much every other foodstuff.

UPDATE:
Why do my cats look like chumpchange compared to these two fluffballs? Is it the professional grooming? Is it the investment in photo-finishing software and a decent camera?

Bah. I'll just blame my cats.

In between commercials for vision-clearing supplements and beds that you dial up sleepnumbers on, Paul Harvey said something about a 500-man militia volunteering to partol the border in Arizona.

RTW, obviously affected by the traffic fumes, mumbled something about it being pathetic.

I think it's a start, although people might have a hard time if signs start cropping up with "This mile of America is patroled by the American Nazi Party" or "This mile of America is patroled by the KKK." (Besides the wetbacks who can't habla Ingles, of course.)

But, hey... that would keep them too busy to hold parades in dirt-poor villages and towns, and it keeps them the heck out of Jasper and Vidor, right?

A guy with a chronic login problem sent in a ticket and whined in email that he had a problem. Thankfully, I grabbed up the ticket before someone else began to work on the problem at the same time I was.

When people double-dip like this, it really pisses me off. How about sending in a livechat request, too? Oh, and call us on the phone while you're doing that. Be sure to send us a Fedex with an audio tape of your problems, and don't forget the smoke signals while the telegraph operator is clacking away.

When people double- or triple-dip, multiple technicians sometimes end up jumping on the issue. One will use one technique while another tries something else... services go up and down, something gets corrupted, and too many cooks end up scalding the diner with boiling hot poison soup.

Server Soup. It's Mmmmm mmmmm fucked!

So I look at the issue and the guy's history. The guy's got a chronic problem with permissions coming up every week or so that would be easily solved by moving his site off of the dying server it's on to a newer server.

So does he let us?

Nope.

Ah, all the more room for the others to stretch their legs on this nice lifeboat. Have fun on the bottom of the ocean, buddy. I hear Davy Jones' locker combination is 34, 20, and get fucked.

"You can't spell 'Scrappleface' without 'crap.'"

I was waiting for my salad at McDonalds when I noticed the Minute Maid Lemonade Drink spigot at the self-serve counter for soda.

It had three lemons in the logo, right above the text "0% Real Juice."

That's right. No juice at all. But three lemons right under the "Minute Maid" on the label.

Why not put three truck tires, or three hamsters, or even three sofas?

How about three test tubes or vials full of powdery compounds?

One things that I'm trying to change since my Bleeding Ass Incident is to eat a healthy breakfast on a regular basis.

The fridge is now stocked with a week's supply of yogurt and orange juice, and there's a big box of Corn Flakes on the pantry shelves.

I used to be a Raisin Bran and Honey Nut Cheerios kind of guy, but I need variety in cereals. When I actually buy cereal, I rotate through a constellation of cereal from one brand to the next, eventually returning to the beginning of the Cereal Wheel.

For now, it's Corn Flakes with a few raisins or bits of banana.

That's the other part of the equation - fruit and vegetable snack foods. Gotta eat those more often. Maybe a banana while I head out through the parking lot to meet RTW, or an orange when I get home.

I used to snack on celery at work until all foods were forbidden on the tech floor.

What kind of asshole forbids celery? You'd think that would be some kind of Mortal Sin.

The potshot is taking potshots at the potshooters?

Excuse me while I take a potshit.

Why is it that every new or reloaded blog has a block of test posts of features-testing posts?

I feel like a cat, sniffing at the doorway and wondering if it's safe to nudge the door open with my paw.

After posting a comment here, alternative lyrics to the folksong "If I Had A Hammer" came to mind.

How exactly does one penis out a warning and danger?

Some reports are coming out that Hunter S. Thompson hadn't recovered from a broken leg and hip, causing him great pain that reduced his mobility, kept him out of his favorite tavern, kept him from traveling, and causing him a lot of pain. The depression from being almost a phone-dependent shut-in combined with the pain may have been what convinced him to blow his brains out.

Take that as a lesson, kids. The more drugs you do now, the bigger the tolerance you'll build to them and the less effective they'll be when you really need them.

Second place.
Second place.

AAAARRRRGGGHHHHHHH!

This is what the kitty-faced doormat used to look like:

This is what it looks like now:

Those damned weeds get into everything.

The proper way to hug a cat is to pick the cat up, hold it over an arm facing away from you, and squeeze it gently...

Do not hold the cat with the pointy-ends facing you. That can hurt.

Also do not squeeze the cat too hard. Squeaks, growls, and wild thrashing may result.

Piper's purple paw-print collar is getting a bit frayed from her constant grooming and scratching. I think she needs a more durable leather collar to resist her wickedly sharp back claws.

I was trying to figure out a good way to let the Dead Pool co-authors know that the reason why they can't log in is because of the loss of the authors table in MT over the weekend, but posting an entry to the weblog doesn't catch everyone.

I mean, come on. They're going to read the weblog? Ha ha ha. Right.

So, I shelled into the server, dropped into the tmpl/cms directory, and vi'ed login.tmpl for a few announcements.

Now I'm tempted to make more customizations to the point of breaking this thing.

Heh.

I remember listening to the BBC Radio serial "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" during a horrible week at Cape Cod a long time ago. When I got back home, I listened to the show on a cracked plastic AM radio that needed a screwdriver jammed in the power switch to work. (By comparison, my brother had the family's old full-sized stereo system in his room)

Using just the rich BBC effects and voice chacracterizations matched with Douglas Adams' descriptions, I imagined what Marvin looked like. I imagined what Arthur Dent looked like. I imgained what the Vogons looked like. I even imagined what Zaphod Beeblebrox looked like.

Then, the first mini-series came out, and the cheap effects and props wiped my imagination clean to establish what these characters looked like. Instantly, my imagination's images were burned out and these new ones took their place.

I had a nightmare last night where the Blog Ecosystem was under attack from Blog Fundamentalists demanding that NZ Bear create a Blogcreationist version of the Ecosystem, complete with calculations proving "intelligent design" of the entire structure by an unseen, benevelent consciousness.

*sigh* I used to dream of baking talking cookies. Sure, most of them spoke Polish, but they talked.

I'd like to see Zathras from Babylon 5 show up in every one of the Prime Time series on network television. He shows up, he gets the job done in his usual sad and dedicated way, and then he dies.

Just try to imagine him on CSI: Miami...

KANE: "How are those DNA assays going, Zathras?"
ZATHRAS: "Zathras nearly finished. Finished with DNA, finished with Zathras. All crimes end in sadness."
KANE: "Excellent work."

It think it would work. And it would certainly help Zathras better character recognition, maybe even his own series.

Just in case you're interested, allhailzathras.com is still available.

The next Bonfire of the Vanities is going to be here.

Entries are due by 20:00 Central Time tonight. Send your entries to bonfire (at) wizbangblog.com.

Show everyone your worst of the week and you'll feel much, much better.

I've gotten a dozen or so entries so far, so I'm bumping this post up to pretend that it will generate more of a response.

Terry Schiavo is about to lose her feeding tube.

I think that Milton Bradley needs to come out with a Terry Schiavo version of Operation.

"Take out her feeding tube for $500."
*ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT*
"Too slow! The Second District Court just stopped you!"
"Butterfingers!"

All together now... YEEEEEAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!

If you think the guy was shocked, you should have seen the look on the Ty-D-Bowl Man's face when he saw that sucker rush past his boat.

Customer writes to whine that they've set up a bunch of e-mail accounts in their office, but they aren't getting e-mail. They've bought a domain, so when is the mail going to start?

"What account is your webhosting under?" I ask.
"Webhosting?" They say.
"Well, you need a mail server for the mail to go so you can pick it up from there, right?" I ask.
"The salesperson said I wouldn't need one," they say.

Oh really?

I wonder what their office is like. Especially the bathroom. It must be nice to work somewhere magical that you can just put a toilet on the tile and then flush all the crap away while the bowl refills with water without having to hook it up to the sewer and water lines.

Or maybe... just maybe... they have someone hook it up for them correctly? And plan it out when they lay the office out? Or arrange to have that as part of their office leasing or building project?

Apparently, people have enough sense to know that toilets don't work as instant-on, throw-it-down-and-get-crapping devices. There's a bit of installation and preparation before you can send yesterday's lunch back to the ecosystem. So why are they completely clueless as to how such a basic thing as e-mail functions? Espeically whatever salesperson that sold them the domain without an email server to route email outbound and inbound through.

I think that the Richard Scarry people need to draw up a rock-bottom, retard-friendly basic set of picture books demonstrating basics like mail, webserving, DNS, and such. Or perhaps David Macauley can reduce it all down to the comings and goings and antics of various configurations of wooly mammoths.

Way too many ignorant people too ashamed of their ignorance to hire someone to do it for them, or maybe they're just so cheap and lazy that they don't want to hire anyone or learn how it works.

Whatever. Feel free to sit on your magical disconnected toilet and see how far it gets you.

Oh, and watch out for the smell.

The United Nations has a weblog now.

No word yet whether it will be followed by a Pay Per View Congolese Rape-Cam, but I'm sure that Kofi's son knows a few web designers and European ISPs who can help him get that established for a million or so in commissions.

Need a "date" in your peacekeeping mission's area? Just fill out our handy form and we'll round up a a few refugees and detainees for you to pick from.

I can't wait for them to groupblog with a few nutbags from the UNRWA, too. Welcome to Qassams-for-Kids.org

UPDATE:
I would like to correct my post. Any allegations that just the Congolese peacekeeping forces were rapists were totally out of line.

You see, in addition to Thugs Gone Wild in the Congo, the Pakistanis are having a rape-tastic time in Haiti.

So, when will Kerry's pet bloggers-turned-UNbloggers cover that story, or are they waiting for the vicious sexual assault stories in Cyprus and Liberia to hit the wires?

Here is a map of a cat's brain in fine detail.

They have brains?

Normally, Camera #3 on the catcams page looks like this:

It looks like this right now:

If you're thinking about buying a Creative Labs NX webcam because it's so cheap, just remember that the connection to its cheap plastic stand is a pop-in type of a dimension not supported by the industry-standard threaded screw camera tripod. Unless you duct-tape it into place, cats leaping on to your side table may just knock it over.

THE CHALLENGE: take the scant 18 submissions for The Bonfire of the Vanities in order and compose a short narrative.
MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT: Green Day's "86"
BEVERAGE: Water

"Panties!" shouteth the preacher, wild-eyed and bloody from his fight with the punk kicker. "Terry Schiavo's panties are worth a fortune among drunkards!"

Evil takes many forms, some of them women, or men posting as them. Check their grocer club card to be sure of their gender.and political extremism. The Cat Witness Protection Program is your only refuge from these crockpot-bearing menaces.

"Greeting cards are Satan's passport to your kitchen!" continueth the peacher, composing a tune in a flash of brilliance. He fancied it an anthem for moonbats of future generations to smuggle smuggle butcher knives to.

Transcribed on kangaroo crap paper, it can be found in a museum outside of Indianapolis today.

The next Bonfire of the Vanities will be at The Zero Boss on March 1st.

I don't breadblog much anymore. I have settled into a routine of recipes, rarely experimenting ot delving into my bread baking tomes anymore.

However, due to a recent need for fiber-rich breads of the wheat variety, I've dug out the old grimoires and pored through them once more.

This one combined instant potato flakes, wheat flour, a bit of bread flour, and the usual basics of salt, yeast, sugar, and water. I think there's four tablespoons of butter in there as well.

Nothing fancy, but very functional. I think I'll get a little wild when I'm done with this loaf and need something a bit more savory to consume during my re-introduction to wheat breads.

Now that there's a Carnival of the Jews, how long before we see a Carnival of the Jewish Cats?

Nardo checks out a sleeping Frisky...

Frisky hates Nardo. He really hates Nardo.

But with me sitting behind Nardo, Nardo wasn't about to try anything funny or mean with Frisky. Nardo prefers an awake and fearful Frisky to harass instead of a sleeping Frisky.

No cats were harmed in the production of this photograph.

Finally, inspiration for Ted Rall's latest:

Damn those evil Right-Wing Bloggers for knowing an obvious PhotoShop when they see it! Curses! Foiled again!

(Feel free to browse the entire gallery of Ted Rall Parodies.)

UPDATE:
Captain Ed smacks Rall down, and Chris Muir of Day By Day finally swats the dubious doodlings of Columbia's least-talented holder of a History degree.

I've been using Thunderbird at work for e-mail, and it's really nice. So nice, I use it at home.

Problem is, the e-mail server at work is so out of date, Thunderbird has a hard time syncing up the Sent Folder in IMAP to the one on the server. There's some sort of Big Brother archiving and statistics script to watch over the responses e-mail techs give to customers.

Sylpheed is screwed up enough to handle the crappy mail server properly, so I'm back to Sylpheed again. And it sucks. Even though I can monitor three accounts over IMAP at the same time, I can't send out via my isfullofcrap.com domain properly. And there's a bug in the install that prevents me from permanently engaging the Reply To field.

Never mind the fact that now and then, Sylpheed just stalls and goes off into the ozone when I try to send a reply to a customer. I restart the program, and my response of three or four paragraphs has gone POOF!

I have this quote on a slip of paper that I read from time to time: "When work provides you shitty tools, just mention it once and then shrug it off when you do a shitty job with them." Yes, the poor craftsman blames his tools, but there's times when even the best of craftsmen stand up and say "Hey, pal. These tools are what you'd get if a Playskool doll could take a shit."

And if they have a problem with it, well, I just say "I already told you that the tools aren't working. Why are you surprised that they're producing lousy results?"

*sigh* Something for nothing? Not in this universe.

UPDATE:
Now it's refusing to acknowledge copy-pastes. Lovely. Half of my job is copy-pasting canned responses I've written, or copying over information from a ticket and vice-versa.

What a fucking piece of shit. Back to Thunderbird until I can read up on how to neuter the lower brain misfunctions of Sylpheed. If they lose an archive or two, so be it. They won't have anything to archive if I keep using that awful mail-mangler.

A little bird told me to look for the orange "XML" bug on the front page of the Houston Chronicle website.

I think I owe that little bird a Cabo's frozen or the first round at Kennealy's.

This means that I can finally add Dwight's Techblog to my Bloglines. It always drives me nuts when I want to keep track of a weblog and it doesn't have all of the components needed for my reader-of-choice. Yeah yeah yeah, there's kludges, but I don't feel like kludging. I'm too old to kludge. My doctor warned me about kludging on an empty stomach.

Kludges out, standards in. (Now what are those standards again?)

As for this feed, well, I'm sure there's some gluttons for punishment out there.

Now that I'm on MT 3.1.5, I'm catching Comment Spam, but Trackback Spam is starting to sneak in.

Time to get MT-BlackList going.

UPDATE:
Installed. If your comment or trackback gets eaten, whine at the robot because the hand isn't listening.

You know, it would be evil for someone to build a script that just walks through every MT site and hits mt-bl-load.cgi and mt-load.cgi, just to see if any busy newbies out there didn't delete those files.

I finally focused the middle catcam when I got home. I even made a whiteout mark on the focus ring and the camera so I can just line them up and be assured that it's in focus for the leather chair.

Nardo looks much more impressive in focus than he does out of focus. Sure, I'm the kind of guy who likes the "fuzzy donkey" goofs from the Shrek Extras on the DVD, but a "fuzzy Nardo" just doesn't do his swirly stripes justice.

I also added a weather section to the Catcams Page so people will know why the cameras might be dark or the cats are hiding. The heavier the storm, the more likely the cats will flee to the closets or under the bed.

The latest advertiser for the IFOC sites is Ferdy the Conservative Cat.

It's good to know that if a cat has politics, they're conservative.

Could you imagine what a liberal cat would be like?

Three cams, three cats!

Lucky times indeed. Make a wish, people.

Testing the future post feature again...

Just in case you're curious, sourceskilledbyeasonjordan.com is still available.

(Refresh my memory... didn't Eason Jordan order a CNN bureau chief based in Baghdad to burn a confidential Iraqi source and hand them over to Saddam for what was practically a death sentence for the source?)

HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Rash of anti-Semitic vandalism and threats seen across Houston area

Repeat after me: "Your Second Amendment Rights are there to protect you when people try to kill you for using your First Amendment Rights."

First person that tries a hate crime on me does their next hajj in a doggie bag.

Frank asks, I answer:

All bow before Queen Edloe!

My wife calls Edloe a princess, but Edloe's grouchy and bossy side suggests she's more of a queen.

I bought the tiara along with the two plastic Irish hats. There's a pull-tab to get the light blinking, which I'll do when I have the time to pose Edloe for a movie and after she's zonked out from a snack.

Remember that Carnival of the Cats is going to be at Mind of Mog this weekend. Also, Friday Ark is at The Modulator, and I've laid down a Dogs vs. Cats Challenge... sorta.

Finally, if you don't like the new Carnival of the Cats linkback button, feel free to send me your version of it via e-mail and I'll add it to what I hope will be a growing archive of linkback buttons available for people to use.

I think that AMD ought to make their own commercials with three guys wearing black jumpsuits and blue paint on their heads. Except these guys would be a cheap knock-off of the Blue Man Group, sitting around and smoking cigarettes or shooting dice for thirty seconds.

Oh, and every now and then, one of them catches fire for no apparent reason. You know, just bursts into flames.

Air my commercial, AMD, and people would be lined up around the block with their computers, demanding that their Intel chips be ripped out and superior AMD chips installed.

What have you got to lose?

My wife brought a wind-up baby chick home. It's a simple toy. You wind it up, put it down, and it hops around for about ten seconds.

If you overwind it, it spazzes for a bit before keeling over and fluttering its feet in the air before stopping.

It took me a while, but I got Frisky interested in it. He watched it, waited until it stopped, and then batted the hell out of it around the kitchen floor. However, every time I got the camera ready for a movie clip, he just stared or wandered back to the feeding area where he demanded a pat of butter on his plate.

I cleaned the thing off and put it on the coffee table for a few good rounds of wind-up and hop. Edloe, the ever-observant watchcat, followed it from the couch, where she lay on her side wide-eyed and occasionally flumped her tail in delight.

When the chick fell off the table, she peered over the edge of the couch. She even dangled a paw over, despite it being well out of range for grabbing.

And then went back to sleep.

Rodeo Cookoff begins today, and here comes the rain.

It's always fun to take the Chronicle's radar and play with the resize attributes for an inlined image.

No word yet whether employees will be allowed in the tent the company set up this year. In fact, I don't even know if there's a tent this year. Last year, it was limos ferrying people back and forth, and that was cool, but cool never lasts.

I might go Friday or Saturday to see a friend play in a band at some other tent, but I'm really not up for catered BBQ (our company tent) or ever-decreasing quality BBQ (Don Nelson's tent).

Most tents, it's all you can drink (within reason). Well, my heavy drinking days are over. And very few places do anything more interesting than pull a tab and pass you a can in a koozie.

Nobody ever has BBQ grilled corn. I'd pass up a heap of fatty brisket smeared in sauce for corn.

UPDATE:
"The power you feel is LIGHTNING!"

UPDATE 2:
Blew it off.

Guy writes to say that his reseller has vanished and he wants contact information for that reseller.

I tell him we have a privacy policy that says we don't give out information. I'm about to tell him to do a whois on the domain, but I do a whois on it myself and it shows that the guy's using a privacy service.

He responds, begging for a tidbit... a scrap... a morsel of information.

Dude, should have had that stuff before you signed a contract with them. Better Business Bureau is going to make you their poster child over this one, eh.

It takes a special kind of clever thinking to do business with a company that hides its own contact information and doesn't give it out. Might as well just throw your money in the fireplace and roast marshmallows on it.

Morons.

Ted Rall's got a new piece of crap telling people that they're too stupid to manage their own finances. Apparently, he thinks that the Federal Government is the right agent to do all that heavy thinking for you.

I guess Ted doesn't read his own material, because all that money in the trust fund gets borrowed against now and then for all the stuff he bitches about in every one of his other cartoons. You know, all those illegal wars, Halliburton contracts, subsidies for Zionazis, baby-killing bombs, and so on.

What a twit.

Anyway, I'm just catching up, so here's my thoughts on one of his recent pieces of crap:

Howard Stern has nothing to fear. Heck, Al Franken has nothing to fear.

Except for George Soros' sons taking the checkbook away from their dad and telling him not to play politics with their inheritance, that is.

UPDATE:
Now that I think of it, should I rebuild tedrall.isfullofcrap.com?

Anybody else out there willing to be a contributing author on it? Part of the reason why I sunk it was that it really didn't attract that much collaboration despite the potential... folks bore and tire of Ted's pathetic antics pretty quickly.

Well, that and the fact that Ted was posting long, rambling comments under an assumed name there. If he wants to run a comment system with back-and-forth debate, let him run and manage comments on his own site. (It was kinda fun changing his URL from johnkerry.com to the Amazon listing ofor Art Spiegelman's books).

If I were to rebuild it, I figure that a daily roundup, a running Technorati search to Ted's crap, and a MEOW-plugin with news alerts of Ted's getting mentioned in the headlines might be useful features.

Oh, and links to Art Spiegelman's books on Amazon. Gotta have those.

Keep an eye on the catcams. Edloe's asleep on the floor while Nardo's asleep on the chair.

I'm assuming that Piper got scared by the storm and that she's hiding in the closet.

When Piper comes out of the closet and heads for the rocking chair, it'll be a festive occasion.

SCORE IT!

BY THE WAY:
If you really want a fourth cam for Frisky, I can always set up a wireless cam by the front door by Frisky's spot. Since I don't want to run a bunch of wire under the carpet, all I need is a wireless cam, of course...

Anyone know of a good wireless cam with decent IR/low-light imaging that can FTP up to a server? Toshiba looks good, but it seems to be just video clips. I want a wireless camera that can snap still images at low light and FTP them up to the server every thirty seconds. No need for pan-and-tilt.

Oh, and while you're at it, anyone want to contribute towards it?

UPDATE:
I think I will call it The FriskyCam Fundraising CAMpaign.

Nice name, right?

Frank has got me pondering. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Other times, that's a bad thing.

Do I swear too much?

Does the presence of the word "crap" in the domain name put you off, regardless of the content?

If I were to change from isfullofcrap.com to isfullofshit.com, would that put you off more?

What about isfullofpoopoo.com?

Perhaps it's the dot-com... do I need to change to isfullofcrap.gov instead? Perhaps IFOC University at isfullofcrap.edu?

Now that I think about it, I really don't care what y'all think about the swearing or the domain name.

Forget I ever mentioned it.

Just in case you're interested, isfullofshit.com is still available.

I figure I'll save the six bucks instead of mucking with Plesk's Frame-Forwarding.

It always amuses me when someone sets their contact address to an address on their server.

"Isn't the system supposed to e-mail me when there's an update to my trouble ticket?" they'll whine.

Um... your contact address is on your server. Your server is down. Are you expecting the e-mail to miracle its way to your Outlook Express inbox?

And then there are those who set up a Yahoo or MSN or GMail account and never check it. Add to those people the ones who change addresses and don't tell us.

"Didn't you see my e-mail bouncing?" they whine. "Why didn't you call me?"

The filters wipe a few thousand bounced messages a day, whether it's a full mailbox on a server or Yuri Spankov's broken the string between his two tin cans. Doesn't matter... bounces get File13'ed.

As for hunting down the correct addresses, um... no. Why? Because it states clearly in the contract that it's up to you to keep your contact information up-to-date. We're not a detective agency, tracking down bad addresses. We'd need to hire half of the population of India to accomplish that.

Unless your credit card is declined, of course. Then you could be on the Space Station and you'll hear someone knocking at the airlock with a PAST DUE invoice.

Even though the tale of lemmings reacting to overpopulation by throwing themselves suicidally into the sea is just an old wives' tale, it turns out that overpopulation among the youth may actually result in waves upon waves of suicides

Just look to Saudi Arabia where like much the Arab World, there's a huge bubble of young-adult-or-youngers without job opportunities, advanced education, X-Boxes, or any semblance of sanity between their fucking ears.

Now, Saudi youths who want to go to Iraq are recruited secretly. The government is closely watching preachers and has banned post-prayer meetings in mosques — once a recruiting haven.

These days, neighbors, friends and relatives meeting at weekly gatherings or on trips to the desert will sit and discuss politics, said al-Thaydi.

"Someone may say, 'Look at what the Americans are doing in Iraq. Shouldn't we be doing something?'" he said. "That would trigger a discussion in which the reaction of youths is carefully monitored."

Those who express the most zeal are surreptitiously observed by recruiters, and the anti-U.S. message is built up "in concentrated doses," said Mohsen al-Awajy, a lawyer familiar with the thinking of extremists.

"Like vaccines, messages in such doses are effective for a long time," he said.

Repeat after me: Fifteen out of Nineteen.

So, what should we call this phenomenon of suicidal nutbags flinging themselves over the brink for an ideology they don't understand beyond pulling the ripcorn and yelling Allahu Akbhar? Islammings? Islemmings? Moslemmings?

By the way, one of Spain's terror detainees was found hanged in his cell.

If he did it himself, that's a suicide I agree with. If he didn't, pin a medal on the guard who wrapped the guy's turban around his neck and hauled him to the ceiling, and then send him to Gitmo for consultations.

HOUSTON CHRONICLE: Customers are finding 911 void with Internet telephone service

For about $32 a month, the John family can make an unlimited number of local and long-distance calls under the plan provided by Vonage.

But unless they sign up for service that routes calls to emergency dispatchers, the family cannot contact the local 911 network.

John said he did not know he needed to sign up for the service, which is explained on the phone company's Web site.

Who put his life and his wife's life in danger?

1. The people who shot them.
2. The 911 dispatch people for taking so long to locate him.
3. His daughter for freaking out instead of remaining calm.
4. Vonage for not providing the service for free and forcing people to opt-out.
5. Male Arab Muslims between the ages of 18 and 40.

For once in this blog's history, it's not #5. Praise Allah! Peace be upon him!

Feh.

It's not #4. Vonage provides a service, and it's up to prospective customers to read the offer thoroughly and know what they're getting into. It like someone buying a car without side-curtain airbags and getting smacked from the side, breaking their arm because they didn't have side-curtain airbags. Research the product.

If they have any questions, there's this really cool thing called a Question Mark they can evision and stick on the end of a sentence. Once that sentence is formed, they can then flap their lips and exhaust air from their lungs to vibrate a set of fleshy flaps in their throat to elocute their concerns.

I haven't researched Vonage, so I don't know how small the small print is, or if they push hard on customers to opt in to this feature. Also, I don't know whether they tell people "If you don't buy this feature, you won't be able to just hit 911 and have instant response." if they don't buy the feature. Or if they offer it and then force people to opt out of it.

Making it an opt-out feature should be the way things work, just so that Vonage has a record of that cheapass customer opting out of the 911 connect in case

From the way the Chronicle slugs this story and lets the 911 representative run roughshod over the VOIP folks, you'd think that it was technically impossible to hook the two together. However, it appears that the Chronicle is trying to make Vonage look like the bad guys when they actually provide an interconnect service which, due to Daddy's being penny-wise-pound-foolish, wasn't purchased.

Think of a number. A big number. How much you want to bet that this cheapass, who couldn't be bothered to read the contract or pay the fee to interconnect with the 911 system, will sue Vonage for that amount?

He won't pay a few bucks a month to hook into the 911 system, but he'll be more than happy to pay some lawyer 35% of a propsective settlement. Because that's how people think these days... it's NEVER THEIR FAULT.

If that happens, I hope whomever roughed him up the first time ends up finishing him off for Karma's sake. Hell, let them finish off their parasite lawyer as well.

UPDATE:
Sharp as a Marble offers up the following screen capture.

Gee, look at that. Not only does that text make sense, but it's circled in red. Looks important to me. Does it look important to you?

Not to Peter John, and he and his wife ended up staining his carpet red as a result.

Since it's Sweeps Month, I'm sure we're going to be seeing lots of YOUR INTERNET PHONE CAN KILL YOU! scare-pieces in newscasts because of this. Hopefully, they'll go through the signup process instead of gulping down whatever John Melcher shovels into their mouths.

From the Land Of Fake Indians Calling WTC Victims Little Eichmans, we get this gem:

At the time this was written Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, still hadn't forthrightly apologized for warning a colleague Tuesday on the floor of the House, "If you try that again, I'll ram my fist up your ass."

Well, it finally looks like we've found a Republican that Andrew Sullivan can get behind.

Or in front of. Bent over.

This looked interesting...

It's a Logitech Cordless Camera. Nice and cheap. But the reviews don't pain a rosy picture when it comes to white balance or image quality. Also, it would eat up a valuable USB port.

The research continues.

I sent out a bunch of e-mails to various companies with wireless webcam solutions. Most cameras have the FTP upload sequence tied to motion-sensors and not a schedule.

After doing some Amazon and Froogle searches, I found:

Hawking Technology. It's been a while since I've heard that name.

The documentation for the HNC320W is online, and about thirty pages in it looks like their on-camera configuration applet has exactly what I'm looking for. And no fancy features like tilt-and-pan or microphone on it that I have no use for.

Now to find out if it can handle a low-light situation like the corner Frisky sleeps in.