Subtle Rantings

This is a great video from the Nuge. I echo his sentiments completely.

Then this is just a funny video and has some 2A tie-ins.

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The author of this letter, Lou Pritchett, is a well-known public speaker who retired after a successful 36-year career as the VP World Sales for Proctor and Gamble. I’d love to hear the counter arguments to the points made below.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because:

• after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.
• I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.
• you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.
• you have never run a company or met a payroll.
• you have never had military experience, thus don’t understand it at its core.
• you lack humility and ‘class’, always blaming others.
• for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.
• You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the ‘blame America ‘ crowd and deliver this message abroad.
• you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.
• you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.
• you prefer ‘wind mills’ to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.
• you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.
• you have begun to use ‘extortion’ tactics against certain banks and corporations.
• your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.
• you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.
• you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.
• the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.
• you demonize and want to silence the Limbaughs, Hannitys, O’Relllys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.
• you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett

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I am currently on contract with a large financial institution as a IT Security Engineer. One of the benefits of this contract is that I am allowed to work from home at least 4 days a week, if not all week. For the first 2 years of working there, I was bringing home my laptop from the office and then hauling it back to the office on the one or two days I actually went in.

This was fine and a small annoyance to have to deal with, after all, I was getting to work from home all the time. However, late last year my client added a new feature to their existing remote access solution that allows me to leave my laptop at the office, and connect to it using Window’s RDP over an SSL VPN. So now, I never have to bring my laptop home. Enter one major caveat.

Obviously since this is a laptop and this is a major financial institution with sensitive information on said laptop, full disk encryption is utilized. Therefore, if a reboot is performed on the laptop while I’m not physically there, I can’t get back into the machine due to the computer needing a password to boot up and decrypt the hard drive. So, I don’t like to reboot my laptop unless I’ll actually be in the office.

Now, just recently, I was logged into my laptop remotely and I started typing. I hit the ‘M’ key and my windows were minimized and I was shown the Desktop. Hrm, that’s weird. I started typing again and hit the ‘L’ key. The laptop “locked” itself. I typed in my password then hit the ‘E’ key. Sure enough, a Windows Explorer window opened up. If you haven’t caught on yet, these keys I was hitting are short cut keys that are activated when you hold down the “Windows” key. For a full list of shortcuts, check out this link here.

So it appeared my Windows key was stuck in the “down” position, although I wasn’t pressing it. That’s not good, I’m sure a reboot will fix it, but that normally meant a trip into the office. That is, until today. I actually google’d my problem and came up with this wonderful, yet simple solution here @ a blog untitled Bunker Hollow.

It seems that pressing Windows-U will pop up the Accessibility menu where you can pull up the On-Screen Keyboard and toggle the Windows key off and on again until it eventually unsticks. As far as I can tell, there’s no real scientific method to unsticking it, you’ll just have to try it out.

So if you’re Windows XP or Vista RDP (Remote Desktop Connection) session starts displaying that erratic behavior that I just described, check out Matt Williamson’s Bunker Hollow for a fix. Thanks Matt, that was a lifesaver!

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“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” - Mark Twain

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The foresight seen in this 50 year old cartoon is startling. We’ve already started down the path depicted in this video.

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“The world is filled with violence. Because criminals carry guns, we decent law-abiding citizens should also have guns. Otherwise they will win and the decent people will lose.” - James Earl Jones

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Listen up all you DC/VA residents! Don’t panic if you see planes flying over head on May 15th and 19th.

No. 039-09 May 13, 2009

NORAD Flight Exercise Planned for Washington, D.C.             The North American Aerospace Defense Command and its geographical component, the Continental United States NORAD Region, will conduct exercise Falcon Virgo 09-07, on May 15 and 19 between midnight and 6:00 a.m. in the National Capital Region (NCR), Washington, D.C.               The exercise comprises a series of training flights held in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Capital Region Command Center, the Joint Air Defense Operations Center, the Continental U.S. NORAD Region (CONR), Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Coast  Guard and CONR’s Western Air Defense Sector.               Exercise Falcon Virgo is designed to hone NORAD’s intercept and identification operations, as well as procedural tests of the NCR Visual Warning System. Two Civil Air Patrol Cessna aircraft, two Air Force F-16s and one Coast Guard HH-65 Dolphin helicopter will participate in the exercise.  Residents may see these aircraft approaching and flying in the vicinity of the Washington D.C. area as part of this exercise during the late night and early morning hours from midnight through 6:00 a.m. on May 15th and the 19th .

U.S. Department of Defense

Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs)

On the Web: http://www.defenselink.mil/Advisories/

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They told me if I voted for McCain, the nation’s “Hope” would deteriorate, and sure enough there has been a 20 point drop in the Consumer Confidence Index since the election, reaching a lower point than any time during the Bush administration.

They told me if I voted for McCain, the US would become more deeply embroiled in the Middle East, and sure enough tens of thousands of additional troops are scheduled to be deployed into Afghanistan.

They told me if I voted for McCain, that the economy would get worse and sure enough unemployment is approaching 8.9% and the new stimulus packages implemented recently have sent the stock market lower than at any time since 1995.

They told me if I voted for McCain, we would see more “crooks” in high ranking positions in Federal government and sure enough, several recent cabinet nominees and Senate appointments revealed resumes of bribery and tax fraud, and two senior democrat congressmen were responsible for much of the economic collapse.

Well I ignored my Democrat friends in November and voted for McCain. Boy, was that a mistake! Because they were right… all of their predictions have come true!

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