Patrick’s Rants

John McCain is starting to run ads with women claiming to be Hillary supporters who have decided to vote McCain due to experience. Do not be fooled. John McCain is out of touch. Experience? Puhlease! McCain has supported Bush 90 - 95% of the time. Only Congress (as a whole) has a lower approval rating than the President.
McCain wants to drill for more oil. That’s only part of the answer. Build energy independence by supporting solar and wind power and more infrastructure to support electricity transmission. Investments in solar and wind are just that - investments. Putting money into more drilling is an expense; one with diminishing returns. Off shore drilling has been banned in so many areas because of the damage it does to coastlines, the damage it does to tourism and fishing due to spills. Off shore drilling is unreliable and as we have seen in recent years is extremely susceptible to hurricane damage. With some predicting higher numbers of hurricanes due to increased water temperature due to increased CO2 outputs one can only question the intelligence of someone who wants to pump more oil that will pump more CO2 into the atmosphere. Sure Limpbaugh will tell you that global warming isn’t real. Like the lunatics who say the holocaust was made up, he must be ignored when he says global warming is made up. As Obama said in his speech, the jobs constructing, installing, running and monitoring solar, wind and infrastructure can never be shipped off shore.

McCain - out of touch or a liar? He doesn’t know how many homes he (along with his wife) owns? When people are struggling to keep their only home, McCain forgets how many homes he really owns. McCain has said the middle class includes anyone under $5 million, $5 million in annual income. Where do I even start with this? $5 million annual income is wealthy. Middle class, working class, doesn’t extend much above $200,000 annual income. Of course if middle class is up to $5 million per year then McCain can say he’s one of us, the middle class. He may or may not know how much his wife makes or is worth - heck he doesn’t even remember that they have more that one home - since they keep their money and income separate. My Friends, only the wealthy file separate tax returns. Only the wealthy, who started out that way, keep their financial affairs separate. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being wealthy in and of itself. Don’t get me wrong, I would like to count myself in that group someday. But McCain didn’t know the price of gasoline, something you don’t have to worry about once you rise out of the middle class. He cannot possibly understand the energy problems (the only “crisis” was created by Enron and Bush’s buddies in order to make more money) when he doesn’t even know the price of a gallon of gas. It doesn’t affect him.

McCain wants to put judges on the Supreme Court who will strip the rights that Roe v Wade granted. “If I can’t vote for Hillary, I’m voting for McCain.” Don’t forget that “conservative judges” will take away a woman’s right to choose*. As my wife says, “I don’t want the government in my vagina.” What other rights would the courts strip away? Anything that has been fought for. Anything that is not explicitly written in the Constitution? A court that interprets anything the President does during a “time of war” to be legal? A court that is not a check against rampant abuse by the Executive branch but is a rubber stamp? An unbalanced court is indeed a scary thought. Don’t be fooled.

Obama wants to redeploy our troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. McCain is ready to stay for a hundred years. The Iraqi government wants a deadline for withdrawal. McCain wants to stay for a hundred years. Obama wants to put our forces to work against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As he stated in his speech, “John McCain says he’ll follow Osama to the gates of hell. He won’t even follow him to the cave he lives in!”

A vote for McCain is a vote to strip away rights fought so hard for over the last 232 years. It’s a vote to allow the government to listen into any phone conversation that you have. It’s a vote to throw the Constitution aside, to outsource the very funding of the government.

Don’t be fooled. That woman was never going to vote for Hillary. She was following Limpbaugh who gleefully urged his listeners to vote for Hillary in the primaries because he believed that McCain could beat her in November.

As Obama said, “eight is enough.” Go Obama.

*On “Last Comic Standing” a comedian says that he went to get new license plates and was offered the “Pro-Life” plate by the woman at the counter for $20.00 more. She told him it was an optional tag. He says he then asked, “you mean I have a choice?”

As a security conscious geek I use Firefox with NoScript. I have become increasingly frustrated by web sites, damn near every one of them anymore, that think they need to use JavaScript for everything from drop down menus to layout. Yes layout. Some web sites will not even have proper layout (www.northgateminerals.com) if scripting is disabled for that site. Does anyone not know how to use css or even, FSM forbid, tables? Using JS for everything is lazy and in my opinion incompetent. I’m not talking about a single popup window, although there is no reason to require JS, but rather the idea that html must be down within the JavaScript container. I hate to use a car analogy, but if JavaScript were power steering the way it’s being used is like removing the steering wheel if you don’t have it enabled.

Here’s a few hints:

• JavaScript should not be the only site navigation tool.
• JavaScript should not be used as a layout tool.
• If you are going to use JavaScript, make sure that it adds functionality to a well designed page not turn your site into something that looks like my six year old cut up a magazine and glued the results wherever she felt like when I turn off JavaScript. More and more pages look like a collage without JS.
• Stop, Stop, STOP assuming what I have on my computer. If you want to run scripts beef up your server and run a server side language (PHP, PERL, whatever)
• Last, although maybe this should have been first, code to web standards - then, and only then extend your page by adding JS

My wife and I recently talked to some people about our prospects for home ownership - it’s more of a pre-qualification type review. They look over our credit reports and get an idea of our debt to income and all that fun stuff. It turns out that the credit pull seems to have been more of a hard pull than a soft pull (we were told they did soft pulls, but I haven’t looked at a follow up report yet to see if it shows or not) and we got a phone call from “Home Loan Executives” who do something called “trigger leads”. I’m guessing the trigger lead is like pre-screened credit offers, but these guys are looking for people pulling credit reports for a home loan and then calling them about it… as this article says, creepy.

I use Firefox all the time these days as does somewhere around 20% of all internet users. I noticed that Bank of America decided to support my browser of choice: Bank of America Firefox support. Now, if they would only show your account balance on the payment page. There is just a selection for the minimum payment and a blank box for a different amount you have to remember your balance if you want to pay the whole thing unlike the other cards I have that show three choices: the minimum payment, the statement balance, and a blank box for other. So I either missed it on BofA or they choose not to show you your balance on the payment page which is a little weird. At least they officially support Firefox.

I haven’t posted much about #2 in a while. Frankly, she was invited to apply somewhere else (your contact will not be renewed) and I haven’t had much to say about her. She’s not there. But an article on email snooping has made it onto my radar. Sometime in March or April my boss called me into his office. First let me say that I have a hard time covering my disdain or dislike for someone. I tend to talk to people I don’t like in an abbreviated manner - I’m just not a chatty guy with people I don’t like I suppose and there was always a serious amount of tension in the dispatch office. I was shown a letter that essentially boils down to a written reprimand over my “treatment” of #2; I wasn’t “getting along”.
In the course of discussing the letter and all that it contained my boss told me that a copy of my IM log had been given to him. While not directly mentioning anyone’s name I casually (I thought) queried about ebay being blocked while craigslist was not with a member of the Tech Services department. The following day craigslist was blocked and then it opened back up a few days later. Although it could have been something that hit the front page of craigslist that got caught in the filter it was implied that I was the one that caused this one web site to get placed in the filter.
Reading the linked to article causes me to wonder if #2 didn’t violate the law when she reviewed my logs and even went as far as to print them out for the boss (and probably keep a copy for herself) This wasn’t her conversation after all. The potential loophole for her is that we use the same login. Oh well, I’m glad she’s not there anymore.