I've had a rough time lately and the old blog has been neglected but I think I'm back to the point that I can focus on it. I'd rather not go into personal specifics and all that stuff here on the Interwebs, but I can say I have a good story if you catch me at FlashForward or some other conference and ask me about it..

Oh, and I am planning on being at FlashForward.
It's been a while since I had a breather and had time to go to a conference so I'm looking forward to it.

I've been working in Flex some.. wow. I tinkered with it way, way back but stuck with AS2 for work so didn't want to dive in and muddy the waters in my noggin. So it's fun to get back to it and start working with it. I keep wishing for a "groundhog day" so I can spend a year or two doing nothing but learning Flex and other things that I need to catch up on. Ah well.

I had a hard drive on my mac pro get wiped out. Totally. It was my "data" drive. The sad thing is, it was because I was setting up backup software (Chronosync) and configured it in such a way that it decided to totally erase the drive before my first little test of backing up my iTunes files on it with no warnings. Nice. I sent an e-mail to their support folks and after clarification of exactly how I set it up and what it did I got this response:

Ouch. We should get rid of Delete immediately or make it harder to use.
The Targets don't copy over otherwise you would end up with something like a
Documents folder inside a Documents folder. Which does not make sense. But I
can see where initially you would miss that.

Our next version does have stronger warnings about using the Archive.
Sorry for the mess.

Ahh.. ok. Good thing I had a somewhat recent backup and was able to recover the few other files I missed. In their defense it was kind of a crazy setup I tried, but if it'd given me a big warning (dude! you're about to wipe out data!) I would have changed course. As it was I lost some hours restoring my files and getting things set back up. The other irony is I'm normally super paranoid about data backup and back things up to 3 or 4 places and had my "data" drive set up as a mirrored raid array in case of hardware failure between backups... well.. before this little incident I'd been having some apps crash and other weirdness.. once I pulled that raid array out all the weirdness went away. I checked the drives and one was bad. I hadn't gotten a warning about it, but it was failing.

I ended up setting Chronosync up and have it doing all kinds of synchronizing and backing up fun. It's actually a nice app and easy to use. Eventually I'll upgrade to Leopard and use that nifty Time Machine thing, but in the meantime Chronosync will do fine as long as I'm careful.

I've been sitting on the sidelines of the democratic process in the US for oh.. about 20 years. I've voted, but I've never donated to a campaign, never put a bumper sticker on, never really gotten involved in it. I've always voted for the lesser of two evils and had just written the whole 2008 election off. I figured the Democrats would win this election (the online gambling sites and polls agree). However, this election I see something very, very different happening and it's actually scaring the crap out of me.

What I see happening is a clear, blatant, and successful attempt by the media and the GOP to sway Republican voters away from a a Republican candidate. There were weeks where I never heard his name on CNN, but heard the other candidates hundreds if not thousands of times. In hour and a half debates he might get 6 minutes of time. When cornered on the issue they point to low numbers in the polls. You don't get high numbers in the polls unless people see you on TV a lot first. I'm not alone in seeing this bias in action, as others are noticing it.

I'm not quite sure what we as citizens can do about it at this point and that's what frightens me. You see Dr. Ron Paul has the most support by far of the Republican candidates (and by support I mean people who are willing to do more than just walk in and vote like they've been told to). His grassroots volunteer support is the top at fundraising, the top at getting signs out, the top of going around knocking on doors and talking to people, the top of gathering and waving signs on street corners, the top of commenting on anything that moves on the web, the top of actually going and voting in online polls, and on and on.. and yet they can't come close to countering the effect of the "old" media. If his 200,000+ rabid supporters can't overcome the bias of the media, then heaven help us.

Enough about my fears of the menace of the media - here's some info on Ron Paul since you probably haven't heard too much about him other than the false memes presented by the media.

He:
- received more donations from active and retired military personnel than ANY candidate (Dem or Rep) and more donations than ALL other Republican candidates combined during the 4th quarter of 2007. Think about that next time you hear one of the candidates say they have the "support of the troops" or that the troops "want us to stay to finish the job with honor".
- has come in second (above McCain, Romney, and Huckabee) in two states (LA and NV) and may have won the most state delegates in Maine (the final vote isn't in yet).
- raised more money from individuals than any other Republican candidate in the 4th quarter.
- is a ten-term Texas congressman
- is a practicing OB/GYN doctor and has delivered over 4,000 babies (yes, he's pro-life but doesn't want the federal government overseeing that)
- voted against the Iraq War but is not opposed to war for defensive purposes (rather than preemptive war).
- is against NAFTA and steps we are taking towards a "North American Union"
- voted against the Patriot Act
- voted against the Real ID Act
- voted against internet regulation
- voted against those acts last year that stripped Habeas Corpus and Posse Commitatis
- voted against this week's Democrat sponsored Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (a precursor to internet filtering and University monitoring by the Department of Homeland Security).
- has written several books (he currently has one on the Amazon best seller list) on economics and unlike other candidates has put his economic plan out for us to see. See how McCain reacts when Paul asked a simple question about the "Working Group on Financial Markets" during one of the debates (McCain doesn't know the answer and just name drops).

He beat McCain in Maine, and is rumored to be set up to do well in at least 4 states tomorrow.

Now.. I don't know about you, but he seems like a viable candidate. Especially when the majority of the people in the US (and the world for that matter) want the US out of Iraq. So why would the GOP sit back and allow the media to force a pro-war candidate to be their nominee? Maybe they don't want to win this next election?... because they'll have to deal with this:


The value of your dollar:




The US national debt:



It's a mystery to me.

This is interesting too.. NC is currently considering not having him on the ballot (um.. he finished second in two states recently..maybe three of them when all the dust settles) and take a look at this:

Here's part of how NC determines who should be on the ballot:

"The list must be compromised of candidates whose candidacy is generally advocated and recognized in the news media throughout the United States or in North Carolina, .."

Yep, that's right. The media picks who goes on the ballot. Ugh.

Am I hoping people will vote for him based on this little blog post? Nope. I think the media has done it's job well of spreading the "long shot" and "McCain vs Romney" memes and there are very, very few people who will ignore what the talking heads on TV tell them. I'm hoping that as people come to this post they might read it, and then the next time they're watching CNN or reading a paper maybe a light bulb will come on when they realize that the media is choosing our candidates for us and democracy has lost.

(updated to add.. just to clarify.. I was aware of the media manipulating voters before, but what has shocked me this go-round is that it's much more evident. We now have YouTube to instantly share every instance of abuse, we have volunteers who put together sites like this one to track the media.. it's so obvious now, and yet it's still so widespread and it's not merely bias - it's censorship and blatant misinformation. The media is incredibly brazen with their attempts to sway the election.. as if they are above the people, above the government, and above the law. It's scary.).

The table below is from Journalism.orgs analysis of January 21 - 27, 2008 .. now you can't possibly tell me that the media gave equal time to the candidates. Bias is somewhat ok, but this is far, far beyond that. Bill freaking Clinton got almost three times as much coverage as Huckabee and more than ALL of the Republican candidates for crying out loud and Bill isn't even running for office.. well.. ahem.

So we were in Atlanta recently and stopped in the Ikea there and loaded up the pickup. One of the things we bought was some new flatware (spoons, forks, you know). We realized when we got home that we really should have bought another set or two, but no problem. Just go online and order some more. Wrong.

I went on their site and it said the items were in stock so I placed an order... I got an e-mail that said "--The order has no expected delivery date...--"

Then.. 3 days later I get an e-mail with this..
"Thank you for placing your recent IKEA order on our website. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties with our ordering system, we were unable to process it."
The only solution they gave was a 1-800 number.. after 20 minutes I got through.. get this.. 2 sets of flatware.. $18 for shipping and handling and won't be to my door for _20_ days (and they're _in_stock_.. )

Which brought me to notice that there's kind of a cottage industry on eBay of people who buy things from the Ikea stores and then sell them on eBay for MORE than the items sell for in the store. Even if the items are listed on the Ikea online store. And the stuff sells. Amazing. Here's what I'm talking about

But hey, Ikea has some very cool Flash bits on their site..

Oddhammer.com has been online since Feb of 2001 and so it seems that the 5 year anniversary is as good a time as any to do some much needed maintenance.

Let’s see what the site’s been through.. hmmm..

Back in ‘01 it was running on an old PIII 450Mhz machine and running Windows 2000 Server.  I was teaching security classes and server admin classes at the time and used it as my test rig.  I had a lot of fun with it and had it to a super reliable point where the thing would run for months without reboot (only had to reboot it to apply those darned Windows patches).  At the time I used the site just to put info I found the hard way, and didn’t have a blog (who had a blog in ‘01?).  I added the blog sometime in ‘02 (the earliest post in the archives is from Dec of ‘02 but I think I deleted some earlier posts.. ) to make it easier to post stuff.  I haven’t been consistent about the blogging at all, ah well.

Then sometime in ‘04 there was this thing called Flex that I got into ..  I was hot onto it..  coolest stuff I’d seen in a long time..  but the old PIII 450 was on the bottom end of the system requirements, if not below (I actually had Flex server running on it for a while during beta, sorta).  So I moved it to a Fedora setup running on a fine P4 3Ghz machine.  It was fast, but damn it made a lot of noise with the fans.  I had planned to move it to a co-location site not far from here, but things just kept getting in the way.  I couldn’t spend the time I knew needed to be spent on maintenance and security.. so..
The site was moved from a “cable modem” to a hosting service last month (phase one of the renovation.. hehe..) and so the uptime should be a bit better since it’s not dependent on my local cable company.  I went with a hosted solution so I wouldn’t have to worry with maintaining the O/S and all that.. I don’t have time for that anymore.. that and the traffic was probably starting to be a problem.

You see the old oddhammer which used to get oh 4 or 5 visitors per day was well over a thou (unique) visitors per day..  I’ve been pushing 10+ gigs of traffic per month.  I don’t have any plans for it other than just what it’s been, but figured with that amount of interest I needed to make some changes. 

I was talking to a web developer a year or two ago who didn’t know me but already knew my site… she said I really needed to work on the design, especially since my background is in art and all that.  She reasoned that it should always look great because it would be good for job hunting, and I never knew when an opportunity might present itself.  (*bitch.. telling me my site sucked*..  when it did.. I knew that.. lol).  Well, what she didn’t know was I’ve pretty much had the dream job.  Spiffing my site up to fluff my portfolio was a crock.  I had work to do.  So the site just kept sucking… broken links, bad design, sucky tables for layout, and kept getting more google rank.  kind of scary.

So what’s in store for the hammer?  I don’t know really..  another 5 years?  I’ve moved from pMachine to Expression Engine for the blog (w00t!) and that’s a good start.

Why do I do it?  Offers like this that I got a week or so ago “you absolute star! if ever you pass through sydney or london - a beer of your choice is yours.” from Dave C. are priceless.  I couldn’t do my job if it weren’t for the willingness of others in the Flash community to share knowledge.. and so I do my part even if I probably will never get to collect that beer.