Craig's Blog

Facists are running our schools

Another rant folks. I came across this story via a woman's blog who has an 8 year old son who got suspended from school for changing the pledge of allegiance to me more Star Trek centric. Very cool on the 8 year olds part, very uncool on the Nazi principal who sent the kid home and made him write the correct pledge 50 times. What a crock a shit. What should have been done is the principal should be made to write out “I am educator, I will create an environment that allows children to be creative. I understand that imagination is a powerful tool for a young mind that needs to encouraged. I will no longer indoctrinate my views on to the students of this school and I humbly apologize for my mistake” 50 times and then be forced to wear a tshirt that bears the kid's version of the pledge of allegiance for an entire day.

Supreme robbery

Last week the Supreme Court handed down a decision that allows goverments to claim eminent domain rights over any property if the tax revenue from the proposed development of the property exceeds the current tax revenue. Now if that doesn't smack of giving legal rights to King George taking anything he wants then I don't know what does. Isn't this one of the reason why we wanted independence because the goverment of England did not respect landowners rights? This is dangerous waters that we are now treading in folks, your property rights have just been forfitted in the name of taxes. The court case centered around several older homes in the northeast that were built along the ocean coast. The county goverment there wanted to claim eminent domain so they could have Pfizer pharmaceutical build a plant there and allow a home builder to build a row of mansions. The goverment won and now these people have to vacate their homes and go live someplace else that won't cost the goverment money in “tax losses”. This is totally wrong. The goverment, whether local, state or federal, exists for the people and by the people, it is not a third party operation. If the goverment feels it can better support itself by forcing people to relocate it needs to stop and rethink why it needs to make more money. If it can't pay it's bills it needs to remove it's overhead, cut back on non-essential services and ask itself, meaning the people, should it collect more taxes to continue at the current level of service. A proper response to this decision is for people to organize and go to these homes about to be bulldozed and stand there in the thousands and hold up signs to the world news cameras saying “Don't tread on me”. Civil disobedience is necessary in this case or we are looking at a slow decline for this country. Liberty be damned, profit motive rules this country. The sad thing is that it wasn't the conservative judges who voted for this, it was the liberal ones. In any case we are all sheep, we bitch and moan but in the end we always take up the tailpipe. Lately we've been reamed so many times we're use to it. And that's what they've wanting all along...

Spamalot III

Annette and I have booked a trip to New York City the weekend of Sept.30 - Oct.1. In my travelling years as an engineer I never cared to go to NYC, in fact I'd route my flights around LaGuardia and JFK to stay out of the city. Now I've gained more appreciation of the city, it's architecture, it's people, history, many cultures. I'll admit part of the interest has come through watching tv shows like Seinfeld and Sex and the City. Woody Allen films too. I'm a big fan of old architecture especially the art deco period during the roaring 20's and 1930's. NYC was a mecca for this style of architecture during that period, the first skyscrapers went up then. The Chrysler building is probably the most noticeable building like this. Of course there's the Empire State Building and Grand Central Station too. So there's several things that I'd like to see in addition to the architecture such as; Central Park, Times Square, Wall Street, Ellis Island to name a few. But I never cared to see a Broadway play or visit an art museum. That was until....da da da daaaaa... Spamalot! It's the Monty Python's Holy Grail done for stage that won a Tony award this year, is of course playing in NYC this year. $200 a ticket..hmmm.. I've heard you can go to the theater and try and buy up turned in tickets. I might play it by ear, depends on how I feel. I'd love to see the play but it's not a must see thing. If it made it to Chicago it might be a good excuse to make a weekend trip up there.

Visual Studio 2005 announced

For us dotnetters, the big announcement came this week that the next version of Visual Studio 2005 will be release on November 7. Cool beans, I've a lot of good stuff about it and .Net 2.0 framework.

On a VS 2003 note I'm going to include this in my blog for future reference. When you are using VS 2003 and VSS with web projects you can get hosed up easily. Lets say you either remove a web project from your solution or have a new one and want to add it into your current solution file. Naturally you would select File - > Add Project -> Existing Project From Web...  and then add the web address where you project file is located and then another dialog box opens that tells you to locate your project file. Then you get the famous error - “The project you are trying to open is a web project, you need to open it by specifying its url path”. Clicking Help button says something to the effect that there is no information on this error. Typical. This is what you do to get this to work right. Go to you wwwroot folder and delete your web project (make sure it's in sourcesafe first!). Then go to Visual Studio and select Source Control -> Open From Source Control... In this next dialog box find the sourcesafe folder is located and press OK. A warning will popup saying do you want to overwrite your files. Choose Overwrite. All this does is sourcesafe writes over it's own vss files on your hard drive. It's rewiring itself, not effecting your code files at all. Voila, you're web projects are now added to the solution file.

Spamalot II

Ok I've implemented a captcha control with my blog. There is no time out issues with this and only requires one character to type in. Simple to use and hopefully will get rid of all the comment spam I've been getting.

Spamalot

So the Monty Python spoof on their movie Holy Grail, Spamalot won the Tony for best musical. How does that happen? Wow. In any case it'll never make it to St.Louis I'm sure. Would be fun to go see in any case.

Charlie Jade

At the recommendation of Chris I decided to go ahead and add another tv series to my growing list. This one is called Charlie Jade and runs on the Canadian version of the SciFi channel. Very good so far, I love the film noir quality, awesome. Gritty, rainy, shadows, dark rooms, very Blade Runner like. Another thumbs up goes out to Chris for recommending that I use my lunch time to watch the show. So I decided to copy a show on to my thumb drive and watch it at work while I have lunch. Great idea!