Al Gritzmacher's Blogosphere

I began to touch on this in a previous post Cheap Computer Set Up, so I thought it was worth a post of it’s own.

I’ve got a sort-of standard set of plug-ins, or as Firefox calls them, add-ons, that I like to use. The basic Firefox is by todays standards a plain browser. Maybe that’s because it’s set the standard we all expect, by comparison to older browsers, say IE 5, it’s pretty fancy on it’s own. But adding these extensions to the basic interface can make it a program that does everything you need. Continue Reading…

A friend sent me this. I couldn’t keep it to myself!

[Thanks to the Buffalo News for the video]

Representatives of the radical religous group, Westboro Baptist Church [Wikipedia link, I won't give them the honor of a link to thier own website.] came to the area to protest the memorials of the victims of the Flight 3407 crash. When they arrived, all three of them, they were shown for what they were, a fringe minority.

They were greeted with WNY hospitality, a non-violent presence where local activists just overwhelmed them with a larger, more respectful group.

I guess the WBC people just gave up and went away after they didn’t get all the attention, like they wanted. Y’all don’t come back now, hear?

A while back, I saw a group called I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch In The House and they played this song, which expresses what I think is a suitable sentiment for these so-called-religious zealots.

[Caution: audio not suitable for children or an office environment, or if your Mother is listening.]

Sometimes, you just have to balance one kind of hate with another…

A while back I mentioned that I had bought a new netbook computer. It was a replacement for my main laptop while I had to send it out to be repaired.

I ordered it and received it while on the road, so I didn’t have my whole library of software at my fingertips. But I needed to get it set up to do the things I needed to do with nothing but software that I could quickly download.

Now, I don’t like to spend hundreds of dollars on software anyway. I’m not a business. I don’t make my livelyhood with a computer, so I really can’t justify spending several hundred dollars on software. If I had to buy the operating system, I’d probably have used Linux, but since Windows XP came on the Acer Aspire One Netbook, I was happy to work with that.

But that was the theme for the rest of the software setup. Everything I put on it was Open Source or Freeware. Here’s what I used and why: Continue Reading…

And fees.

It seems like every time I turn on the TV or radio, I hear about a new tax proposed by New York Governor David Patterson. We’ve had taxes promised on almost every little thing that Mr. Patterson thinks is a luxury or vice.

He’s promised new taxes on soda, beer, wine, cigars, movie tickets, taxi rides, electronic music and movie downloads, clothing and shoes and now lift tickets at ski areas.

Many of these ‘new’ taxes are just extending sales tax to things that previously were exempt from sales tax, but where do you stop? Pretty soon, everything will be taxed. A sales tax makes no sense if everything you can spend a dime on is taxed. You might as well just make things simple and collect it off the top as income tax. Continue Reading…

Sometimes, I get frustrated by the local paper. I’ve been known to rag on their errors – typos, misspellings, and technical errors – but by and large, they are like most businesses that are trying to survive on a small local scale against the mega-conglomerate competition. The fact that they continue to try, day after day, in this heroic struggle, is often under-appreciated and taken for granted by us, who see only the flaws.

Scott Leffler, local talk-show host and former US&J reporter, has been putting the thumbnail-sized images of all the local papers on his blog on a daily basis. It’s interesting to see the similarities and differences between them as they often cover the same stories.

It’s especially interesting when you consider that three of the papers, the Lockport paper, the Niagara Gazette and the Tonawanda News all are owned by the same company and share much of the same staff and infrastructure. They often carry the same stories by the same reporter, but the placement on the page is interesting to note. Top of the front page in Lockport might be a sidebar in the Tonawandas… Continue Reading…

I stopped at the local taco shop for some fast food tonight. I had just gotten done at the High School where I was working with the robotics team. It was about 7pm and I just didn’t feel like cooking.

I’ve always been a Mighty Taco fan. They’re a local institution known since the ’70s for their funky commercials and cartoonish artwork in their ads.

I’ve always liked them better than say, Taco Bell, because they were a.) locally owned, b.) had decent portions and c.) had really cool advertising. Besides, they’ve given thousands of high school kids part-time jobs over the years. If you live in WNY, you probably know someone who once worked at one. Continue Reading…