Al's Blog-o-Sphere

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.

[dewplayer:http://gritzmacher.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/i-can-lick-any-sonofabitch-in-the-house-live-at-dantes-05-westboro-baptist-church.mp3]
[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…