Category: Side Notes

Dead and Back

Good news ladies and gentlemen I’m finally back. Thursday my little friend the mystery disease decided to push and I finally called for a doctor’s appointment. What the doctor told me was basically it was not pneumonia… unless it was. It was almost certainly a bacterial infection… unless it was viral. Basically he had no fucking clue what it was and didn’t want to admit it. Luckily he prescribed me azithromycin, an amazing antibiotic from Croatia (I had to look it up). Within several hours of taking the first dose I started feeling more human and things improved quickly leading me to believe whatever I had was bacterial.

With that said I’ll stop my whining and start posting things that are at least of interest to the rest of the world.

Back in Limited Capacity

I’m still feeling like death rolled over me but I’m going to try to get some things posted on here for you guys to read. First let me talk about my wonderful cold. I’m an idiot you see, when I’m told to try something I always research it instead of just doing it. This means I lose out on the placebo effect. You know what a common remedy for the cold is that hasn’t been shown to actually work? Vitamin C.

My friend send me an interesting link through that talks about the link between vitamin D and influenza (and general repository infections). Vitamin D is produced when we expose ourselves to sunlight which explains the seasonal rise and fall of influenza cases (less exposure to sunlight in the winter lowers vitamin D levels and all that).

AT&T Unlimited Mobile to Mobile Calling

For those of you on AT&T, on one of their nationwide calling plans, and have the unlimited messaging plan you can get free mobile to mobile calling to any cell phone (regardless of carrier) starting today. Basically you replace your unlimited messaging plan with the unlimited with mobile to any mobile calling plan which are the exact same price.

Sprint has this feature which I really enjoy since almost all my calls are to other mobile numbers and thus I never actually use any minutes.

It seems AT&T is feeling a bit of pressure after losing the exclusive rights to the iPhone. Competition is good, although I’m unsure of why AT&T couldn’t just toss this upgrade on automatically instead of making you manually switch it (and not apparently advertising it to any great extent).

Since the Cat is Out of the Bag

My interest in Palm’s WebOS should be well known to anybody who’s read this site for a while. Although I’ve had a lot of interest and did eventually get a used Palm Pre I never ended us using a new Palm device as my primary phone. The main reason was the fact their hardware was woefully behind once I finally decided to upgrade form my Palm Treo 755p.

Palm (well technically now HP but I like calling them Palm better) has been running a discount program form developers. If you’re a developer Palm will give you $200.00 off of an unlock Pre 2. It’s a pretty sweet deal when you consider it’s an unlocked phone that gives you access to WebOS 2.0. A couple of weeks ago I inquired with Palm about this program and they sent me back a couple of e-mails asking about the applications I was planning on writing. This was basically a quick screening process to ensure I wasn’t just trying to get a cheap unlocked phone, but instead actually planning on developing for the platform.

After a couple of e-mails they offered me a free Pre 2 for development purposes. I figured that was a pretty good deal and took them up on the offer. I’m not exactly sure when the phone will arrive but I was told it could arrive as early as this week (although being Palm is having their big event tomorrow I was told that was no guarantee).

Either way I didn’t say anything as I was unsure if this was something Palm was doing but wanted to keep if to developers expressing interest in the discount program. Well it seems that’s not the case and Palm has 100 99 Pre 2 phones they’re planning on giving out to developers free of charge. So if you’re a developer and have interest in WebOS you could get a hold of Palm via the Pre 2 discount program. It’s likely you can nab yourself free reference hardware (that will function properly on either T-Mobile or AT&T but will only have 3G speeds on AT&T).

How Would You Feel if Somebody Tried to Take Your Stuff

Anti-gunners constantly talk about compromise. They want us in the pro-gun community to compromise with them on gun laws. When we refuse they get upset and make claims that we must hate children or some other such emotion stirring argument. It becomes impossible for them to wrap their heads around why we’re so steadfast against them. You know why we’re so steadfast against them? Because they’re trying to steal our shit, plain and simple.

It’s not just anit-gunners of course. Laws have been passed to take away our incandescent light bulbs, our salt, our gas guzzling trucks, basically people all around are trying to use the law to steal other peoples’ shit. I mentioned yesterday that this week was the World Week for the Abolition of Meat and I wanted to setup a lunch at Fogo de Chao. I wasn’t kidding, I setup the lunch with a couple of my friends. Why? It’s not because I hate vegans, what you chose to eat is your own business. I set it up because I’m sick of the militant animal rights groups such a PETA trying to take my meat away from me.

When you try to steal somebody’s shit they are going to push back, plain and simple. When you try to steal somebody’s shit for reasons that make no sense you’re going to get an argument. How would you feel if I decided that cell phones cause cancer and successfully lobbied for a law banning the transfer of cell phones to private citizens? You probably wouldn’t be very happy would you?

For you anti-gunners who can’t wrap your head around any reason why we’re fighting to hard against you it’s because you’re trying to take our shit. You’re not trying to take it to make society safer (we’ve demonstrated time and time against that removing firearms from society just disarms the lawful while making society no safer), you’re trying to take it to make yourselves feel safer. You’re trying to take out shit for no good reason, that’s why we’re pushing so hard against you.

You don’t have a right to feel safe but we do have a right to defend our lives. Likewise it’s not legal to steal another persons’ possessions but it’s legal to own possessions.

What the Hell Have You Done

It’s probably no surprise to anybody that I don’t like things that work changed. Usually I don’t bring it up because it’s pointless but today when I opened up my browser for my hourly dose of Slashdot I saw this. Yes they completely changed the site overnight.

And I only bring it up because it’s actually… better. Facebook could learn something from Slashdot when it comes to site redesigns (i.e. make the new site more useful to users).

Amazingly Accurate Observation

Linoge has made a great observation of hypocrisy. You know all those people currently bitching about women being subjugated at the SHOT Show because they’re employed as “booth babes?” That’s kind of a double standard considering nobody says a word when automobile manufacturers do exactly the same thing though their women are generally more scantily clad.

If you’re going to bitch about something at least don’t be a hypocrite, be consistent.