Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Merry Christmas!

Posted

As you are no-doubt aware, Christians worldwide celebrate Christmas tomorrow (December 25). Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, who has had more impact on humanity over the last ~2,000 years than all other men, governments, and movements combined. This is not a time for mindless consumerism. Christmas is when we should spend time with our families, spend time in worship, and celebrate the momentous arrival of the Son of God.

It is important that Christians reclaim this holiday from the secularized monstrosity it has become.

Later today, Melissa and I will be traveling to visit our family in southern Virginia for Christmas, and as we celebrate this holiday I will likely be a bit lax in posting on the site but will be back in time to ring in the new year. I wish all of you safe travels, and a Merry Christmas (or, for my Jewish friends, an ongoing Happy Hanukkah). God bless you, and please remember what we’re celebrating!

Heck of a Water Main Break

Posted

So the DC Metro Area woke up this morning to news of a water main break. That’s not big news; they happen all the time, especially when there are big temperature swings (and we dipped into the teens last night). This one, however, was one heck of a water main break. Big enough that it’s making national news.

A 66″ water main under River Road in Bethesda, Maryland, has burst, turning River Road into a literal river itself. Several commuters were trapped in their vehicles. Rescues are underway, with authorities using helicopters to airlift people out of their vehicles.

With this, and yesterday’s rush hour shootings in Dallas, I’m thinking that it’s  not a good week to be trying to drive to work in America.

An Eee Upgrade

Posted

Kitka 3I’ve been mulling for some time an upgrade to my little Asus Eee PC 4G Surf that I bought back in March. That Eee is a wonderful little ‘netbook’, as they are now called, which is a super-small, low-powered, inexpensive laptop mainly designed for portability at the expense of power. The main problem was the screen. It had a tiny 7″ display with a piddly resolution of 800×480. This required a number of minor sacrifices—shrunken font sizes, compressed interfaces, and lots of scrolling around on web sites.

Well, a lot more netbooks are available now than back in March and most have higher screen resolutions (though the computers overall are roughly the same size). I’ve had my eye out for an upgrade, especially since the old Eee still sells on eBay for just under $200. Well, Best Buy is selling the Asus Eee PC 900A for $279, so that seemed like a great deal and I braved the crowds to pick one up yesterday. I figure, after selling my old Eee in the next couple of weeks, my total cost for the upgrade will only be about $100. (And yes, in light of my post about buying American, I did look at the Dell Inpiron Mini 9. It’s a good machine and was in the running, until I found out they moved the apostrophe key [!?!?]. Way to ruin a great machine with one dumb, little move Dell. I don’t care about the missing function keys, but the main letters and punctuation keys must be in their standard locations for me to seriously consider any machine.)

The 900A has a 9″ display with 1024×600 resolution (much better for web surfing), an Intel Atom processor at 1.6ghz, 1gb of RAM (twice as much as the old Eee), and a 4GB on-board solid-state hard drive. It’s physically only very, very slightly larger than my old Eee and the keyboard is, as far as I can tell, identical. It ships with a mediocre Asus-customized version of Xandros Linux, but with some due diligence it can be upgraded to a standard Ubuntu Linux install or (if you really want) Windows XP. There are tons of guides on how to do these things over at EeeUser.com. It took me a chunk of yesterday afternoon to get Ubuntu installed and get everything configured the way I want, but now I’m good-to-go (and writing this entry on it).

I don’t know what people are going on about with the economy; if you’re in the market to buy things (like gas, Eee PCs, or houses) the economy is going great. Prices are low, and businesses are generally very happy to sell things to you ;-).

Cat ON a Plaid Igloo

Posted

Cat ON a Plaid IglooBack in August, I posted a couple photos of our cat Mei Mei sitting in her new plaid igloo. A month later we somehow ended up with a second cat, and both of them trade off ‘ownership’ of the igloo (sometimes through violent coup-d’états).

But something curious happened along the way. They don’t like sitting IN the igloo anymore, they prefer to sit ON the igloo. At first I thought this was a fluke—it had gotten crushed in during one of their battles, and they couldn’t figure out how to open it up again and made-do on top. But no, it wasn’t that logical. I’ve opened it back up for them many times, and inevitably I come back an hour later to find one or the other of them sitting on top again.

Go figure.

Auto Bailout Good News/Bad News

Posted

Well, the bad news is that the ‘big three’ U.S. auto makers—Ford, General Motors (GM), and Chrysler—are being offered a $13.4 billion bailout by President George W. Bush (R). These loans would supposedly have to be paid back to the government, however I strongly suspect that will never happen since the companies liable to take this money (Chrysler and probably GM as well) are unlikely to survive until the due date of March 31. Congress never approved an auto bailout, so—in a real head-scratcher—Bush and his lackeys are taking this money out of the previously approved $700B financial bailout money. Apparently, once the Bush administration gets the money, they can do whatever they want with it regardless of what the bill approved by Congress actually said had to be done with it.

Using the $700B for what Congress approved it for would have been unconstitutional, but I’m not sure what Bush unilaterally deciding to use it for something else is. Do two unconstitutional acts make a constitutional one? Either way, I’m sure the founders are rolling in their graves over the last few months.

Regardless, there is a small silver lining. Congress already approved the waste of this money. The recipients might be new and unexpected, but there’s been no additional funds put toward socialist bailouts. In other words, we already knew this money was going to go to waste. I guess I don’t really care if it goes to waste on financial firms or auto firms, since they’re both equally undeserving. I’ve given up on trying to understand the constitutional basis for any of these bailouts, course changes, and outright lies perpetrated by Bush with the sign-off of a Democratic Congress. There isn’t any. They’re not even pretending to be bound by the Constitution’s limitations on government and separation of powers anymore.

I weep for the Republic.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.