Wow, the Bush Twins hit the stage at the RNC and were terrible. If they think it is a good idea to trot out the first twins to introduce their father, so he can introduce their mother, then maybe they should go out of their way to have them practice the speech ahead of time. Because the fact that they had never even read this tandem speech before, let alone practiced aloud, was evident by their lack of timing on many bad jokes and obvious general disinterest in the content. Anyway, these conventions are all pretty stupid, the only thing that passes for content is restating of what the polls tell them everyone thinks the problems are.

By the way, anyone know where I can find the democratic 2004 platform? I found the republican’s after a little hunting, but can’t find anything other than the democrats 2000 platform. Come on guys, get your act together, there are only a couple months left. I should have no problem finding these things. Of course there was no shortage of worthless publicity shots and bashing the other party. Yeah I get it, you are both smarter than each other. Now where are your plans?

Update: found the democrats platform. Yeah, yeah, right under my nose.

I have begun the process of moving all of my stuff to a new web hosting provider. To ease the transition, I decided to also switch from MovableType to WordPress. Installing wordpress was easy, and importing my entries was easy. The hard part will be trying to make it so my old broken permalinks are still valid here, and I may simply have to give up on that. But hopefully the flexible format for the permalinks I have used here will allow me to make it last. Next I need to get my gallery and email moved.

Wanna track all the daily deals in your favorite news aggregator? Well get on over to Roosster and add a couple feeds so when you finally do crack open that wallet to buy crap you will have some money left over to put your McDonald’s coupons to use.

Some other good resources for the more thrifty among us are freecycle and craigslist. Freecycle: I was able to get a “new” color printer for my brother, I think the Wookie secured a chest freezer to store dead things in, and there were another couple near misses. Plus once I start filling up on extra junk I will be more than happy to give back.

And check out your local craigslist, which is basically a high signal to noise classifieds section. I think they charge for job postings to support themselves, but otherwise anyone can post. And they wisely have RSS feeds for most of their stuff too.

A few posts ago I mentioned in passing that a great firefox plugin would provide the ability to sync up bookmarks over the internet. Well I shouldn’t have rhetorically asked myself and the 3 people who read this thing, I should have asked google. So I did. And someone has written the greatest plugin for firefox ever: Bookmarks Synchronizer.

You just need access to an FTP or WebDAV server to upload. But now finally after many years of using web browsers is the bookmark function actually useful and makes it worthwhile to maintain some level of bookmark organization. And if you don’t currently use firefox, maybe you should.

truancy: n. pl. truancies The act or condition of being absent without permission.

Madden 2005 is due out soon. Pick a reason.

In a few hours my brother should be rolling into Iowa after his 24 hour stint of driving a 14 foot box truck with 92 Honda Civic in tow. Well he has two friends helping out, Thanks Pat and Ian. I would have liked to go out there for a few days and help him get settled, but since I got the kid on the way around Christmas, I am hoarding vacation days and money.

Since he hasn’t chosen an ISP yet he probably won’t be seeing this for a while, but good luck, Tom. You will be missed around here while you are learnin’ how to write all fancy at the fancy writin’ school.

PS: don’t ever rent a UHaul using the internet, it is nothing but trouble, they haven’t figured out how to coordinate the reservations and they always end up screwing it up in some manner, hell, they won’t even tell you where or when you will be getting the truck until the day before. You are much better served paging through the phone book and calling your local UHaul locations. They know their own inventory and schedule and will hold the truck for you. They will even attempt to service special requests. The experience may be different for Ryder or Budget, but I had that experience renting a truck three years ago, and my brother and brother-in-law both had similar troubles this year.

Woah, I must not have been paying attention. I never really noticed before how often people resort to a false dilemma to try and prove their point. This is especially prevalent in this presidential election year, everyone is choosing up sides and if you are not wholly with us you must be against us.

I have been paying particular attention to people’s rhetoric and reasoning for a couple years now having read up on the more common logical fallacies and having read most of Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking. And while it is true that personal attacks and made-up statistics constitute 65% of all of these flawed arguments out there, it appears that creating a false dichotomy is gaining steam.

These false dichotomies are easily found in the suprisingly prevalent and terrible argument which states, if you question or denigrate the government at such a crucial time then you are a traitor. However, it is no limited to this arena. I have noticed that often if you even call up for debate a person’s conclusion immediately the response turns to, you must be one of THEM! While I understand that when the fruits of your brain sweat are questioned it is easy to get defensive but if you are really interested in convincing the person of the validity of your viewpoint calling them a communist isn’t going to get it done.

This came to mind when I was reading through Declan McCullah’s article John Kerry’s real tech agenda where Declan calls into question some of Kerry’s voting record when it comes to tecnology. I glanced at the bottom of the page and noticed the comments section, which was full of venom toward Declan and his article. There was not much in the way of correcting him on any errors in his reporting, but the false dichotomy, that if you question anything John Kerry every did you must be a George Bush supporter, is so omnipresent that the commenters immediately broke it down into an opportunity to call each other right wing nut jobs and liberal wieners. It occurs to me that the point of the article is not to support Bush vs. Kerry rather it is to state that electing Kerry is not some panacea for all the political wrangling in the technology sector.

I guess the trend in popular culture is to separate winners from losers, and there is only one winner. We learn that from all types of popular entertainment, be it reality television, the National Footbal League or Highlander. However, I think the zero sum games that we are bombarded with constantly are poor representatives of our lives. Rarely do we have clear cut winners and losers in our every day dealings. So maybe spending a little introspective thought, before responding to what you perceive to be an attack on your ideology, is warranted. Anyway the point here is fight nice kids.