My view of the world

My diabetes is acting up so for the moment I’m not allowed to even look at pictures of sweets. Banana and chocolate. –Maybe just a taste?

Chocolate Banana Bread Recipe.

I found this while researching Comcast:
Comcast adds a $1.99 to your bill for a change of service if you ask them to quit sending you junk mail.

From the article:
I noticed a $1.99 “change of service” charge on my most recent Comcast bill. During an online chat, a Comcast rep explained the source of the fee:

“It looks like on 2/5/08 you contacted us and requested to have all direct mailers stopped on your account. There is a one time “Change of service” fee associated with making that change on the account.”

Now we know where they get the money to pay people to pack the hall in order to keep opponents out….. Speaking of things that could potentially come back to bite you in the ass.

Didn’t anyone think this through? ….Ah, well. Such is the price of arrogance. —-Or perhaps just good old fashioned stupidity.

I don’t have a MySpace or Facebook account, for the same reason I got out of ham radio. I have too many things going on to spend a lot of time chatting with or messaging people I have almost nothing in common with.
Besides which, a friend who’s just a few years older than I am, has a MySpace account and the picture of his gray, balding head looks rather incongruous in amongst those teenagers and twenty-somethings. (Incongruous.. Ain’t that a nice way of saying “just plain silly?”)

I recently discovered Digg and I can’t tell you what the attraction is.

The premise is simple. You find a site or article that you think others might find interesting and you digg it. If it’s found to be original you get to submit it. The people can digg or bury it. The more diggs you get the more popular you are and the more weight your vote carries. Sort of like DMOZ.
I know why the owners of these site do it. To sell advertising. The more traffic you get the more ads you can sell.

In fact it’s so lucrative that Yahoo has created Buzz. If you want to digg an article on Yahoo News you have to do it entirely by hand. All Yahoo offers is Buzz.

Google is trying to do something similar with their personalized web searches.

Ok I see what’s in it for them. But why did I decide to try it?…. Probably because it’s social networking without so much of the “social” part. (It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that I don’t like most people.)

Mean while back at the ranch:
Here’s a link to a great page about Digg popular.

As long as I’m on a Russian kick this was discovered in the NYT:

Kremlin Rules
Putin’s Iron Grip on Russia Suffocates His Opponents
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: February 24, 2008
A new autocracy now governs Russia. Behind a facade of democracy lies a centralized authority that is not reluctant to swat down those who challenge the ruling party.

Mr. Putin’s Russia is not the Soviet Union. For most Russians, life is freer now than it was in the old days. Criticism of the Kremlin is tolerated, as long as it is not done in any broadly organized way, and access to the Internet is unfettered. The economy, with its abundance of consumer goods and heady rate of growth, bears little resemblance to the one under Communism.

Still, as was made plain in dozens of interviews with political leaders, officials and residents of Nizhny Novgorod over several weeks, a new autocracy now governs Russia. Behind a facade of democracy lies a centralized authority that has deployed a nationwide cadre of loyalists that is not reluctant to swat down those who challenge the ruling party. Fearing such retribution, many of the people interviewed for this article asked not to be identified.

The basic problem with Russia is that the people had so little for so long that they will tolerate almost anything if it keeps goods on the shelves, food on the table and something approaching stability in government.

I’m afraid that Putin is less like Yeltsin and a great deal more like Stalin.

Still his taking away rights and attacking any opposition is nothing more than what our own administration has been trying to do.

A Russian vodka ad. –Not for children.

Perfect diamond to be auctioned - Pravda.Ru
A member of staff displays a rare 101.27 carat diamond, the largest colorless diamond to appear at auction in nearly 20 years, at an auction house in London

——J-Lo’s next engagement ring.

This beer commercial shows how people in Sweden see Russia and its people and their beer.

H1:
In 1992, AM General began selling a civilian version of the M998 High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV or Hum-Vee) vehicle to the public under the brand name “Hummer”.
They revamped the vehicle with a more powerful engine and new tranny in 2006. That same year GM pulled support for the H1. Either they thought it would interfere with their emissions numbers or would cut into the sales of the new H2/H3s.

This is a new H3.

It’s pretty, but it still only gets about 13mpg if you drop it off a cliff and in spite of the ads, I doubt that one of these will go the kinds of places the old H1 would go.

The H3 is built in Shreveport, LA alongside the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon pickups. –Unlike the H1, which is a true off-road vehicle the H2 and H3 are just SUVs.

After the first major improvements to the H1, GM discontinued a functional, street legal, off road vehicle, and turned their attention to building a Yuppiemobile.

There are about a billion SUVs out there, but nothing that can compete with the original Hummer. So logically, GM discontinued support for a potential money maker and moved in to an overcrowded and dwindling market.

But what do I know?
Anybody who can afford to lose the kind of money GM is losing has to be way smarter than I am.

Please read this blog and then click on this link, https://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks.org_under_injunction..

Odd, on Friday the 15th, February 2008, in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”, the Wikileaks.org press was shutdown:

A swiss bank that was accused of lax counter-money laundering by a whistleblower on the site Wikileaks.org has sued and managed to get the site shut down.
============================================================
ORDER GRANTING
PERMANENT INJUNCTION

BANK JULIUS BAER & CO. LTD, a
Swiss entity; and JULIUS BAER BANK
AND TRUST CO. LTD, a Cayman Island
entity

WIKILEAKS, an entity of unknown form;
WIKILEAKS.ORG, an entity of unknown
form; DYNADOT, LLC, a California
limited liability company; and DOES 1
through 10, inclusive,

Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting
records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the
domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or
any other website or server other than a blank park page,
until further order of this Court.
============================================================
The Wikileaks.org injunction is ex-parte, engages in prior restraint and is clearly unconstitutional. It was granted on Thursday afternoon by California district court judge White, Bush appointee and former prosecutor.
The order was written by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by judge White without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus.

The Cayman Islands is located between Cuba and Honduras. In July 2000, the United States Department of the Treasure Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an advisory states stating that there were “serious deficiencies in the counter-money laundering systems of the Cayman Islands”, “Cayman Islands law makes it impossible for the supervisory and regulatory authority to obtain information held by financial institutions regarding their client’s identity”, “Failure of financial institutions in the Cayman Islands to report suspicious transactions is not subject to penalty” and that “These deficiencies, among others, have caused the Cayman Islands to be identified by the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (The ‘FATF’) as non-cooperative in the fight against money laundering”. As of 2006 the U.S. State Department listed the Cayman Islands in its money laundering “Countries of Primary Concern”.

Another Cayman Island bank, BCCI (Bank of Crooks and Criminals International) was featured on the front page of the Times as the “Sleaziest bank in the world” some years back

I found this on gizmodo.com:
How Grandma sees the Remote:

Especially when the manual was obviously translated by someone using a dictionary.