“If you can sit, you can be fit, with the Hawaii chair!” With a jingle like that, combined with this bullet proof product, I can’t imagine what could go wrong. I mean, it’s even acceptable seating for work. Who wouldn’t love trying to type or use a mouse while your entire torso spins like you’re on the mechanical bull at a run down sports bar? Hell, sign me up! “Thanks, Erin Lee!”
In a little less than 8 hours, the Indianapolis Colts face off against the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami, Florida. Both teams went undefeated deep into the season and played at a high level all season, the Colts winning all the games they wanted to and the Saints losing a few close ones.
So who’s going to win you ask? Simple answer, the Colts will win this game. Guess I’m done with my post…thanks and enjoy the game.
(Wait, not enough info? Okay, give me a moment to collect my thoughts.)
Peyton Manning will not allow the Colts to lose. Plain and simple. Manning has become a cross of his Airness, Brady during the 2007 season, and Larry Legend. Look, I’m not a Colts fan and believe in Belichick and Brady, but you cannot deny Peyton has reached the zenith that only true champions attain, the ability to win any game, anywhere, anytime, and by whatever means necessary. 
Watching him break the back of the Jets team in the final 1 and half minutes of the first half was breathtaking. All the momentum was on the side of the Jets and they were ready to go in at half time up two scores and getting the ball back in the second half. Their defense was fired up as they’d made Peyton look uncomfortable from the first snap of the game. And what did Manning do?
Drove the Colts on a 80 yard drive in four plays for a touchdown…without even breaking a sweat. When he jogged into the locker room at half, I (who’d picked the Jets) said, “Game is done, Colts will win.” And verily, that came true.
He’s lead the Colts on so many of those drives that anyone who doubted him (Me included) is a doofus. And if you still doubt him, watch that first half again and then watch the Jets opening drive in the second half. That team was beaten the second Manning threw that TD to Austin Collie with 1:13 left in the second quarter. The Jets didn’t stand a chance against the new Manning and neither do the Saints.
Peyton won’t say it but he’s furious over the Colts deciding not to go for the Perfect Season. He knows that only by winning the Super Bowl will he quiet the critics and the naysayers. And he will with a stellar performance that will net him another Super Bowl MVP. Colts 30-24.
(My heart is cheering for the Saints but my head knows the truth.)
I remember being a 9 or 10 year old when the whole “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” thing made the news. It was a high velocity buzz word or catch phrase that I didn’t quite “get” so I of course asked my dad about it.
“Dad, what’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?’
I could tell from my father’s consternation that he was trying hard not to tell me how he REALLY FELT, as he was aware he was talking to his impressionable son.
“Well, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ means that if you’re a gay person and you’re in the military, people can’t ‘ask’ if you’re gay, to try to throw you out, and you can’t ‘tell’ people you’re gay if you want to keep your job.” Which was probably the clearest way to explain that to a ten year old.
“That’s stupid, what does being gay have to do with being in the Army?” I said. Really. I really said that.
So fast forward about twenty years and here we are again, with DADT a hot button issue. President Obama’s latest attempt to solidify his presidency involves revoking DADT and allowing gays and lesbians (as well as all all the bisexual, transgendered folk of course) to serve openly in the United States military.
If you’re just joining us, he’s receiving twice as much opposition to this idea than he did with government-sponsored health care.
I’ve been hearing a lot of debate on this on all the media outlets and I’m just stunned that in 2010 people (Republicans mostly) think that being gay and serving in the military is going to be a “distraction.”
On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation”, some congressman who was against the DADT repeal came on and said something to the effect that “gays would cause a distraction” and he backed that up by saying he had done two tours in the Middle East and knew the stressors of combat. Having gays out in the open would defeat the morale of soldiers.
Which is all well and good I guess, because I know morale is so high in Iraq and Afghanistan for our fighting soldiers. “Hey gang, we got us another ping-pong table!”
Look, I can’t go into details, but let me assure you that I have first hand knowledge of military life. I’ve known dudes who were as gay as the day is long and did their jobs admirably while serving. Sure, once they got out they came out of the closet, but it wasn’t like anyone was surprised by this.
“Dude, did you know Mark was gay?”
“….You didn’t?!”
Whether you’re gay or not, the only thing that should matter in the military world is your work ethic. No one is going to get trapped in a foxhole and end up getting raped by a gay dude; there’s too much other shit going on for that to go down.
There’s also the risk that gays would be targeted for hazing by hetro members of the military. Knowing what I know about the military and it’s junior enlisted members (not to say senior members wouldn’t be swept up in this type of behavior too, possibly, but face facts, it’s always the idiot 18-21 year olds that fuck up in such a massive way) this is a high risk for openly gay members. As hard as each branch tries, acts of hazing/pranks still run rampant in units. I can see this, coupled with the fact that members are allowed to be openly gay, being a huge problem.
I can see DADT being repealed and no one coming out.
But not repealing this archaic policy is problematic as well; do we want to tell our grandkids we’ve gone so long without allowing gays to serve their country because we were afraid of getting raped, or ourselves being turned gay? We were scared of gays? We might as sleep with the lights on too, for fear the boogie monster might be in our closets.
Our military goes into the most dangerous places on earth and fights hand to hand with the nastiest, craziest, suicidal people in the world, and we’re afraid of letting Todd the Hairdresser work behind a desk and order blue pens for the Army? We can’t have Lucy the Construction Worker working on trucks in the Motor Pool?
Again, take it from me: military life consists of 10% if what you actually signed up to do, and 90% cleaning shit, paper work, or smoking cigarettes. We’re not constantly under sniper fire or blowing shit up.
There’s literally no reason not to allow ANYONE who’s physically able to do the job into the military - regardless how they spend their weekend.
Last Friday, on January 29th, Google made an announcement that could possibly change the landscape of web browsers. They declared, that as of March 1st, the year of our lord, 2010, they will no longer provide support for Internet Explorer 6. Halle-freakin’-lujah!
Let me be the first to acknowledge the fact that this won’t kill IE6 entirely. I realize this. For as long as large corporations are running expensive, legacy software developed for IE6, there will be corporate employees browsing the internet with the browser, which is two full versions behind.
According to w3schools.com, roughly 10.9% of users on the internet are still using IE6. Why I think Google’s announcement is so very awesome, is that it will help force a good amount of the non-corporate IE6 users to finally upgrade to IE8, or at the very least IE7.
Google is citing the fact that support for IE6 has finally dragged their web application’s technical progress down far enough. From the post:
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. [...]
2010 is going to be a great year for Google Apps and we want to ensure that everyone can make the most of what we are developing. Please take the time to switch your organization to the most up-to-date browsers available.
While I don’t disagree that IE6 is a hindrance to app development, I find it very intriguing that this announcement comes seventeen days after Google announced that their servers had experienced cyber attacks originating from China. The data the hackers obtained were GMail messages from the accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Whether this impacts your life or moral compass doesn’t change the fact that these e-mails were in fact taken from Google’s corporate infastructure.
Immediately after the news was released, internet security sites confirmed that the attack was done through a flaw in, you guessed it, Internet Explorer 6. While Google’s announcement to end support for IE6 may have already been planned for March 1st long before the cyber attacks, I would have to believe there is some connection between the two.
This very informative and thought provoking video was sent to me via Boing Boing. It shows Clay Shirky expounding on the thought, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure”. For those of you who claim a lack of productivity or general annoyance with the amount of ‘things’ that bombard your senses daily, I’d highly recommend watching the entirety of this clip. Interesting stuff indeed…
This gem was sent to me by a female reader of IRdC, so don’t get all worked up about the second infomercial filled with gratuitous cleavage. I had seen this one a while back, but I figured I’d share since not everyone spends 40+ hours a week on the internets. Well, anyway, enjoy this awesomely supportive video…
@badorg NO Camera big deal? YES big deal … Imagine video chatting off it on the go!
That’s what I was staring at when I checked my Twitter feed yesterday afternoon.
Let me give you a quick backstory: A few days ago, Apple announced the new ‘iPad’, their tablet-PC which looks like an iPod Touch, if the Touch were Barry Bonds in 1988 and the iPad were Barry Bonds right this second.
I’ve found that in the tech world that there are either Haters or Gushers. Haters are self-explanatory; you know what a Hater is. I bet, even as you’re reading this, you’re probably within slapping distance of a Hater.
I know I am.
Either way, Gushers are the exact opposite of Haters: They love everything about a certain subject. If I were to put it on a hierarchical scale, it would look like this: Fans, Enthusiasts, Fanboys, Fetishists, Geeks and then Gushers.
You can’t talk to either party without a truckload of bias coming out of their mouths about any given topic they’re passionate about. They have zero credibility and are usually apt to dismiss or accept anything they hear, read or see that affirms their own pre-conditioned beliefs.
How this relates to the anus in the above mentioned Tweet:
This guy, and seemingly a third of the population on Twitter (porn bots excluded) are hardcore Apple Haters. They cannot be pleased by anything Apple Computers CEO Steve Jobs does, including if Mr. Jobs dropped by their homes and painted their kitchens.
I originally Tweeted something about the iPad to the effect of “Who cares if it doesn’t have a camera, will it run 3rd party browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc)” which I still think is a valid question (it won’t as of now). I don’t mind using Safari but I like Chrome better.
This dude was wrapped up on a fucking camera.
Before I absolutely crush this guy’s opinion, let me point out some specs on the iPad in case you haven’t yet seen them: It’s like ten inches long, five or six wide. It’s a half inch thick. It weighs just over a pound. Why on Earth would you put a camera on something shaped like that?
Obviously, from his tweet, he wants “sweet video conferencing” which I think is creepy craigslist speak for sexual webcam action. Seriously, go check this dude out if you have a Twitter account (@jodykinser) and look at who he follows, who he sends messages @ and his homepage (hint, it’s a myspace page). All signs point to one thing:
Gross dude who touches himself in public places. Confirmed.
So, the sheer size of the thing alone kinda excludes it from having a camera. It’d be like hoisting one of those digital frames you got your mom for Mother’s Day that one year and using that to snap pictures or … video conference with.
Because I want your Skype session with your therapist to be a part of my bus commute home every day….
And on top of that, dude, EVERYTHING electronic now-a-days has a fucking camera attached to it. Since 9/11 there’s a camera on EVERYTHING. I can’t take a shit at the mall without it being on CCTV. I’m actually kinda warm and fuzzy that the iPad DOESN’T have a damn camera on it. Jesus.
There’s been a bunch of other trash talking too from the Haters: It doesn’t support Flash (a web tool used to look at certain web pages), it doesn’t do this, it looks like that, blah blah blah.
Flash, from what I understand, takes up a lot of CPU to run. It’s a ten inch touch screen computer for under 900 dollars, SORRY!
Even worse though are the fucking Gushers, these people who bow down and worship the dick and balls of Steve Jobs whenever he leans over and farts out another iPod.
Listen carefully, I’m an Apple fanboy, admittedly. I own shares of their stock (almost double in digits…) and if you were to walk around my wife and I’s apartment, you’d be bombarded with Apple products: iPods, iPhones, iMacs, MacBooks, … there’s a portrait of Steve Jobs shagging fly balls for Jesus in my study (joke, but if someone did have something like that… lemme know…). Yeah we’re fans because I dig the products and philosophy of the company since Mr. Jobs took it back over at the beginning of the century. And you know what, as of right now, I’m on Team iPad, despite its ridiculous, menstruation-image-conjuring name.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t keep a skeptical mind about new products either. When Snow Leopard (basically an upgrade for the Mac X OS) was released I read all the product info out there. I listened to what all the pros had to say. From there, I made my decision to upgrade based off of that information and the fact that our computers are less than a year old and should be running on the latest software.
I didn’t go out and pre-order the fucking software, like some people did. People who blindly follow what they’re told from their personal god, Steve Jobs.
Hey, remember LISA? What about that ancient Palm Pilot-looking thing? How about that hockey puck mouse? Apple can put some stinkers out there, believe me (iTunes 9?).
The iPad isn’t the greatest thing out there, nor does it suck. Bottom line, it won’t be released for like, 90 something days, so no one (unless you’re a tester and got a BETA version of the product) has a fucking clue on how it really works. In less words: shut the fuck up already! You. Don’t. Know.
You don’t.
Maybe putting a camera on it would make the thing twice as expensive and not work nearly as well. Maybe not putting a camera on it will be a negative selling point, no one knows for sure. We just have to wait for all the cool kids to camp out in line for three days before it’s released and have them tell us all about it once it’s in their grubby, pasty, dirt-under-fingernail hands.
Until then, calm down.