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Monday, February 9, 2009

History and Me and Education

I've started reading "The Columbia History of the World".

Durango the Misplaced Washingtonian had some mean things to say.

All but one of my history teachers in Junior High and High School was "a football coach forced to teach History" in order to get through some kind of governmental red educational tape. We had to have coaches so our football teams could excel. Education be damned.

Ray Evans was the only history teacher that ever taught history. And, looking back on it, I remember his class more than any other in that era. His son later taught a damn good English class as well . I remember learning about poetry via Bob Dylan.

I'm enjoying my current history book. Unfortunately, Durango the Misplaced Washingtonian thought that it would help me change topics (I spend a lot of time rambling about religion). The latest chapter I read was about early India. Yes, I'm into the beginning of civilizations. It starts out with the beginning of the Universe, then the beginning of Earth, then the beginning of life, then the beginning of man, and then civilization.

Civilization starts out with Sumeria, then Egypt, and then India. They kind of go in order from which earliest evidence has been discovered particularly with regards to "written" evidence. People have been writing for a long time.

But, back to my topic. All these civilizations practiced religion in one form or another. It was a little early for the Bible. The intelligent and powerful men became leaders. They used religion to unite and sometimes frighten the sheeple. When a new leader took over Egypt, he'd say that his battle power was because of his dedication to the "sun god" and he'd give the sun god a name. Then, he'd have his writers write stories about the sun god and what would happen if you didn't offer him proper respect. Not very many people could read and write back then so writers were hard to come by. Only the rich and powerful could afford them. Soon the legend of the sun god would be true and all would fear and worship him.

This is why, I think, I don't do well in history. I read all of this stuff and my mind begins to wonder or wander. Egypt was a hard country to invade because of the geography of the area. All of their gods seems to deal with agriculture and war and power. You worshiped their gods and offered up sacrifices in order for something that this particular god offered.

India was different. India is in a bad location. It was invaded all the time. There was constant conflict. Eventually, the powerful rulers that survived more then 50 years started preaching tranquility. Thus, the birth of Buddhism and other religions of that nature. The smart rulers realized that if they used the sun god from Egypt it would cause strife. You need your people to be peaceful so that they can be ruled. Of course, this peaceful stuff only worked until the Huns discovered your peaceful little asses.

It got me to thinking how important religion is to all this empire building and tranquility. The most powerful nation to date was founded upon the principle of "freedom of religion". I may be overstepping things a bit there for dramatic purposes. Did the powerful and intelligent back then see that freedom of religion was the way to go in order to have an empire that would last? Or did they realize that having freedom of religion would attract the most intelligent from around the world? History is a lot of theories, but they don't really know exactly why someone did what they did. This kind of thing is almost never written down. They write the consequences, but never the why unless the why is obvious. You can't go back and read Napoleon's thoughts.

USA is predominantly Christian. It makes me wonder where that catch phrase comes from, "the meek shall inherit the earth". That little ditty right there promotes an empire with people that are humble and non rebellious. A world without religion might just be a scary place.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Only In The Belt Buckle


A local news anchor for a program called "Good Day" was semi-forced to apologize for this dress. It showed off too much cleavage.

Thus, the title. I've got nothing else to say. Go Megan!

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Alliterator Animal Sh*t List: The Letter 'I'

I almost forgot the letter I. I bet some of you wish I had, but I did not.

For the I's have it.

There is a lacking of disgust that starts with the letter I so it's a bit disappointing.

Icky Iguana Intestinal Ice

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Government Jobs


Today, I've decided that I want to work for the government.

So that I can increase my credentials and maybe get Obama's attention, I have decided to stop paying my taxes. Maybe he'll give me a cabinet position!

I Love All Aquarius

I have a funky history concerning astrology. For some reason, it's quite entertaining to me. I think it's one of my eccentric Aquarius quirks.

Anyway, today on the radio, they said that Dick Cheney had a birthday last Friday. I didn't know he was an Aquarius. Suddenly his stubborn insanity makes sense. I attributed it to being socially inept and perhaps a bit under qualified for his job. But now I know he was just an Aquarius.

We experiment. We play games (but only games that we understand and are willing participants). Sometimes I'll be at the airport and a couple will walk by having a heated discussion. I'll be sitting by myself and giggling because I've created a story (my game) about their discussion in my own little head and have made it quite entertaining.

Sometimes, I experiment with people. I'll say stuff that is random, but sentimental to see how they react. I'll say mean things to see how they react. Everything is doused with a bit of sarcasm because in my stubborn Aquarius mind, people that don't get sarcasm are not intelligent. You can't argue with me. I'm always right. I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.

Now I know that Dick shot that guy while hunting as an experiment. He was already being blasted by the media so he thought, "how low can I go?" I'll keep doing things and saying things just to see how much I can get the media to despise me. Is it possible that I am so powerful that no one will suspect me? It's all an experiment. Now that I understand Mr. Cheney, I love Mr. Cheney. He should have advertised earlier that he was an Aquarius.

Heating Up The Earth

I recently blogged about Al Gore and the fact that he might actually be a doofus.

I didn't get too many people agreeing with me. Someone who I love and adore politely corrected me.

So, I'm going to re-evaluate my position. Yes, we are adding to global warming. It wouldn't hurt anything to cut back. Al Gore still irritates me with his over dramatic political rhetoric that he spreads whilst flying around in his jet.

But, that's not why I'm here. I was presented an interesting article that talked about global warming in a fairly polite form. It's here. Part of it talked about new gases that could and probably will pose more of a threat to the climate than CO2. You should probably read it.

One of the new gases that they are saying they have seen is methane, but they don't know where it comes from. Therefore, I find this article rather amusing.

But my favorite article about man's impact on the climate is from a Time article written in 1974. I know that if you've gotten this far, you are probably tired of reading articles, but the 1974 article is the best. It goes to prove that the media is out to make things sound more severe than they are in order to sell papers. If you get the public all up in arms about something, then the papers that talk about that "something" will fly off the shelves. Or maybe we really are going to freeze to death.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Spyware and Malware and Viruses, Oh My!

I couple of years ago I built a computer for my daughter.

Last weekend she brought it back because, "it was running slow".

Those have become my least favorite words: "it's running slow". I have several computers at the house. None of them are technically slow. My oldest daughter complains that her computer is slow when www.myspace.com is slow. I gave up trying to explain that it's the website, not the computer.

But, my youngest daughter's computer was running slow. It was infested. I'm still not entirely sure what all infested it and I'm not sure I killed it all. I gave her one of my other computers to use and I'll re-install this one from scratch.

But as a warning to my multitude of happy readers I am here to tell you not to download stuff off the Internet. I've said this before. Only download it if you trust the site you are downloading from. This malware infestation is coming because kids think they can get stuff for free. My daughter, just the other day, was wanting to watch Twilight. The Twilight movie is not out on DVD. It used to be at the theaters, but it has recently been pulled. It's in that "in between" stage. It's not showing at the regular theaters, it's not yet at the dollar theaters and so it's not on DVD. But, she wanted to watch it. So, she searched for it on the Internet. This is where the majority of people go wrong. There are good bargains and good deals on the Internet, but if it's not right, don't download it unless you really know what you are doing. "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

As an experiment, go to www.google.com and do a search for Twilight or something to do with Twilight Movie and watching online. I guarantee you'll get some promising results. And when you go to the site, they'll say something like, "Watch the high definition version of Twilight now for free! All you have to do is install our extra special viewing software!". Then, if you are obsessed like my daughter was, you'll be clicking on "Download", "Install", "Run", "OK", "OK", "OK", and before you know it, your computer too will be "running slow".

I've got this computer at home that I'm about to install Windows 7 on. I downloaded the Beta yesterday and will probably install it today. But, just as an experiment and to learn some things, I decided to try and get all the Spyware, Malware and Viruses off the computer mentioned above.

It's not easy. I'm not convinced I was successful. The first think I noticed was the pop-ups. No matter which browser I used, I was getting popups. That was insane. I also noticed that XP Service Pack 3 had not been installed. I know when I built the computer, I had enabled "Automatic Updates". The Automatic Update feature had been turned off. I turned it back on. As soon as I turned it back on, something turned it back off.

I know a bit about computers so I went and looked at the registry. In the RUN entry there were some dll's getting loaded using rundll32. This is dangerous. Plus that were named odd things like, neguzon.dll or some such thing. There were at least 3 entries. I wrote them down. Then I looked at it again and one of the entries had changed. Apparently they had a random name generator that was generating random names and renaming or copying the dll and editing the registry entry. This was some pretty fancy stuff. So I downloaded "Spyware Terminator" from Snapfiles. I download all my stuff from snapfiles. They haven't infested any of my computers yet.

I downloaded Spyware Terminator because it had the best rating from Snapfiles. I was impressed with it. It immediately verified what I had already found. It has a real time scan that warned me when things were getting added to the registry without my permission and allowed me to block them. Unfortunately, after messing with it for about an hour, the only thing I can say for sure, is that it gave me lots and lots of information. When I asked it to quarantine or fix the stuff, it seemed to suffer defeat.

So, I downloaded the one a friend of mine at work talks fondly about. It's called Spybot Search and Destroy. I don't think it comes with a real time monitor. At least not in the free version. However, doing the system scan revealed all the bad stuff. When I told it to remove the bad stuff it said, "300 entries removed. 221 unable to remove. Can I remove on reboot". That's not the exact phraseology, but it's close. I told it that it could do whatever it needed to do.

What it does it put a bunch of commands in the RUNEX portion of the registry. The best that I can tell, these things get run before anything else. So it added 221 commands to the registry to get executed upon reboot. When I rebooted, it did its thing, but not without some funkiness. Some of the commands didn't work for some reason so I ended up having to push "OK" to the windows error message about 100 times.

When it was done, I tried the Automatic Updates again. It got further, but it was still being disabled. I don't know why. I tried to install the SP3 that I had downloaded earlier. Previously, it would try to install, but then give me some strange error about 1 megabyte of hard drive space and bail. After running the Spybot Search and Destroy I was able to install SP3. I'm still not sure all the bad stuff is gone, but it doesn't matter. Next is a grand erasing of the hard disk during the install of Windows 7. The beta expires sometime in August, but it'll be interesting.