The Sinister Moose

So, it seems as though Toyota has teamed up with Subaru to design a car that is both pointless and a little silly. We start with the drivetrain, which seems to be derived from Subaru's parts bin. I have a great deal of respect for boxer engines. They're flat offering a low profile so the front hood of the car can be very low. That is unless, you pile a mountain of crap on top of the engine making it as tall as an inline four cylinder. Subaru used to place the spare tire over the engine, because there was so much room under the hood of their cars, even with the engine in place.

Aparently Subaru will be relasing it's own version of this same car, and in their STi trim, it should be an all wheel drive powerful monster to contend with the Mitsubishi Evolution, however I'm fairly confident Subaru will withhold all of the go-fast parts from their new partners at Toyota, and Toyota themselves will no doubt geld the potent little boxer engine because they're ecomentalists.

My OSX86 Project:

My initial goal was to simply update my perfectly happy Dell Precision 690, which was running OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, to the newer Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

The Leopard install was accomplished by using the iPC Leopard installer DVD, I downloaded. It was a very easy install, and I could have ran the machine happily for a very long time, until some of the software I needed to run, would only run on 10.6 or better.

I'm fairly certain that if you and I sat down while enjoying a tasty beverage, we could identify most of the problems plaguing the United States. Our concerns would probably be echos of the concerns of our parents, only changed ever so slightly to prevent being accused, of being our parents.

We would probably point the blame at one political faction or another, and say if it weren't for "so-and-so", this country wouldn't be in this mess. Chances are we would both be right without regard to which political faction we accused. I could say red, you could say blue or vise-versa and in the end the general consensus would be that there is a problem even if it's really purple's fault.

Most people, except for the very wealthy have thought about it; "What would I do if I won the lottery? What would be the first thing I would buy?"

To be honest, I'm one of those people. In fact I have a list. I rarely play the lottery so my odds of winning are not very good, but the difference between my odds of winning and the odds of someone that plays regularly are roughly the same, so I keep my money in my pocket and consider myself lucky to walk away without a powerball ticket. I'm a little more pragmatic than most people, but I still think about winning and what I would do with a large pile of money.

So here's the list, sort of...

Did we learn nothing from the break-up of Bell Telephone? Forcing the monopolizing Bell telephone company to break into smaller, more regionalized telephone service providers was a good idea for competition, but today we seem to be allowing that company to reform and again start it's monopolistic business practices.

My recent experience with Bell South (the largest telecommunications provider in my area) has made me start wishing for another monopoly busting campaign.

 

I have, for many years now, been an active web designer and hosting provider for about 250 to 300 websites. I have been concentrating mostly on Joomla, the system this website runs, and many other PHP Content Management Systems.

One of my clients who we'll call Bob's House of Beef, has recently decided to move to another website designer because they are unhappy with their google search rankings. However, there is a twist with this problem, that I, as an ethical white hat wearing designer and host, cannot let pass with out ranting a little about it.

Bob's House of Beef, sells beef as one might expect, and if you search for Beef and Bob, they are ranked #1 across all the websites. However, they are not happy about this. They effectively want to be ranked #1 if someone searches for pork, poultry, and used tires.

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth record...s were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

"The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered." -- Thomas Jefferson