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I’m going to step out on a new limb. The unspoken internet code is to leave politics and religion out. However, this is my web site and I’m thinking this would be a decent outlet for some political thought and, you can see in previous posts, I do not ignore my faith. This may be a one off post or the first in a new topic. We’ll see how this goes.

A friend sent me this email:

What a Ron Paul presidency would look like, according to Ron Paul:

http://www.yaliberty.org/yar/plan-for-a-freedom-president

Based on this information, I cannot vote for Ron Paul unless he truly is the lesser of all evils. Why? you may ask. Here’s a quote:

… we should not seek to abolish the social safety net overnight because that would harm those who have grown dependent on government-provided welfare. Instead, we would want to give individuals who have come to rely on the state time to prepare for the day when responsibility for providing aide is returned to those organizations best able to administer compassionate and effective help—churches and private charities.

The above sounds great. Just what a compassionate constitutionalist should say. In fact, the above line had me thinking Ron Paul would be a good candidate. If you continue to read the article, you would see that he understands the political process quite well and he appears very level headed and doesn’t seem to over promise.

Then, I read this:

Now, this need for a transition period does not apply to all types of welfare. For example, I would have no problem defunding corporate welfare programs, such as the Export-Import Bank or the TARP bank bailouts, right away. I find it difficult to muster much sympathy for the CEO’s of Lockheed Martin and Goldman Sachs.

While I too find it difficult to fund failures as has been done in the past, what sticks out to me is his mention of Lockheed Martin. To my knowledge, Lockheed Martin is a major defense contractor. Now, if we are going to transition people, cutting off corporate America is not going to make such a transition very easy. Why? Because when you cut off Lockheed and they decide to lay off the engineers who are working on the contracts that are no longer funded, they will find themselves, for a period, possibly depending on the very individual welfare programs Rep. Paul is suggesting are unconstitutional.

See, either way you look at it, change can potentially have a detrimental affect on the people it is intended to help. Would I like a smaller national government? Would I like to see the national debt eliminated? YES! YES! However, in the process of achieving that goal, lets be honest about the potential side effects. Doing something that causes harm to a big business can potentially cause harm to a lot of Americans. That’s why this process is so hard. That’s why the two parties fight until they can’t extend deadlines any further.

The problem is that the US government has become huge. I can talk about the idea of shutting down an department or de-funding a contract with out thinking about the people that will affect. We talk everyday, somewhat flippantly about “shrinking” the government. We cannot forget the names and faces that are part of the government we want to shrink. Sadly, we as a people have to make those choices. So what do we do?

We must not throw our hands into the air and ignore the situation. I can think of another choice. It’s a choice I don’t want to choose. We can raise taxes. I really don’t like that idea because it does not stop the growth. In fact, I’d argue it encourages the growth of the government. So again, what to do?

I think we all must sacrifice. I think that means a combination of tax increases, government job layoffs and a reduction or elimination of social security and similar programs for my generation. We need to act soon. We cannot continue to push these problems down the road and under the rug.

One of the many things that can cause problems to a laptop is the power cord. With a two year old in the house, it’s inevitable that the power cord connection would be damaged. Our power connecter was pushed inside the laptop to the point that we could no longer attach the power cord.

To fix this problem I decided it was time to open the computer and find a way to rig the connector back to the proper location. I started to take out screws. I thought I had every necessary screw removed but I still couldn’t open up the laptop. So, I searched and found this web page: http://www.irisvista.com/tech/laptops/Toshiba-Satellite-A505/removing-optical-drive-1.htm. The instructions there are fairly accurate. However, I’m going to point out a few key differences. Perhaps Toshiba made some changes between the version torn down there and mine.

1) If you are just removing the optical drive, you need to remove on screw on the bottom cover. Unfortunately, I did this last night and don’t recall which screw it was, the screw is about six inches in from the side of the computer. There’s two screws about an inch and a half from each other, removing one of those screws will allow the optical drive to be removed.

2) To remove the top cover, you will have to remove the optical drive first. With the bottom cover up, you will find 3 holes on the left side of the cover with the optical drive removed you will find 3 screws, remove those screws.

3) After removing the keyboard, there are 3 other cables you need to remove, one of them is the touch pad cable, to remove this cable, flip the black bar up to the right. Then pull the cable by the blue tab.

Once you have everything disconnected you should be able to remove the top cover.

I found that the power connecter was somewhat thought out. They did not solder the connecter directly to a circuit board. This is good because that means you will not need to replace a circuit board and probably don’t need to solder anything. They also left some space directly behind the connecter so when it gets pushed back, it does not damage anything. It was easy for me to put the connecter back where it belongs. Thankfully, none of the plastic that holds it in place was severely damaged.

Finally, I put everything back together and began putting the 20 screws back into the bottom of the laptop. After figuring out how the touch pad connecter works, I was able to fire up the laptop and everything worked as expected.

The men’s group at the church I attend is doing a Bible study called: Into the Wild. This study is based on John Elderedge’s Wild at Heart. I have read Wild at Heart while in college and even attempted to lead a Bible study using it as the source material. What follows are some of my current thoughts on the first chapter.

Elderedge uses the first chapter to setup the premise of the book. What I understand that to be, is: We as men have stopped longing for the desires of our heart and have instead attempted to mold ourselves into what “the world” thinks men should be. “The world” would be the society around us, including the Church.

Elderedege proposes that men need three things: A battle to fight, An adventure to live and A beauty to rescue. He seems to think that the only way one can find their spirit of adventure is to journey into the wilderness. While, I do enjoy vacationing in the mountains, I’m not 100% sure this idea applies to all men. In fact, the undertone of this big adventure in the wilderness gets quite tiring and I haven’t even finished the first chapter.

Skipping back to the battle to fight… Elderedge asks us to think back to our childhood days and remember the games we’d play and how they revolved around themes of war, cops and robbers, Coyboys and Indians and so on. Honestly, as a young boy, I enjoyed the swing set and the sand box. I’m not sure what kind of battle a bulldozer, a dump truck and a cement mixer can have. Sure, we had water guns and water balloons but, we mostly just ran around an squirted each other. Having said all of that, deep down, there is a part of me that wants to “fight for the little man” and I often find myself rooting for the underdog.

The beauty to rescue. Elderege hasn’t really gone into a lot of detail about this topic just yet. He does talk about how every great story has a beauty to rescue (Like a prince rescuing a princess). I can never recall not aspiring to one day have a wife. However, I have never really given much thought to rescuing a woman to be my wife until I read this book. I have since found my beautiful wife and am eager to learn or relearn how to edify her.

Some other thoughts… To truely appreciate this book you have to be familiar with certain movies. So far, this seems to be: The Gladiator and Braveheart.

Over the past couple months, as I have been determining how to revive this little blog, I moved my web sites to another host. I thought moving could be a good topic to restart this little blog.

Much like you don’t just pack your belongings and move out of your house, you don’t just decide to pack up your belongings and move your web site. The first thing I needed to figure out why I was moving. Did I need place with a fancy kitchen and extra bathrooms or was I looking to move to something more affordable in the ‘burbs. The two main things I was looking for was the ability to host more than one domain on the same account and a bit more hard drive space. Like all moves, there’s a budget involved. My goal was to find the above without adding to my annual costs. My former host cost me about $50 per year.

So let the house hunting begin. Unlike the search for real estate, you don’t need a broker. However, much like real estate, there are many options. So, how do you find the right host? I honestly don’t know. What I did was look at a fairly popular dreamy host. Their plan looked good, but many of the sites I have visited seemed a bit slow. So, I started looking for hosting reviews. What I found is that many of the review web sites seemed overly positive but, now I at least had a list of potential hosts. I thought I had narrowed my choice down to a farm animal then, I looked at the terms of service.

So, I have some observations. Anything unlimited is not really unlimited. Sure, you can be offered unlimited storage and transfer, but don’t use too much memory or too many CPU cycles. If a host seems sketchy, it is. If a host has public support forms, take a look at them. Those forums can usually tell you at least three things: how often services malfunction, what the technical support staff are like and what your neighbors are up to. Just like you might not want neighbors who are loud, in realm of shared hosting don’t want to have neighbors running services that are going to demand a lot of resources and slow you web site down.

You know what they say… Good fences make good neighbors. The same applies in shared hosting. I considered two flavors of shared hosting: VPS which stands for virtual private server and traditional shared. Shared hosting is when you share one server with many other users, the provider typically manages the operating system, software and services. A VPS host is still shared, you are renting space and resources on a physical server, but you manage the operating system, software and services. A VPS is more fenced in. You should always have the amount of memory, CPU and storage space specified by your host provider.

I chose to stay with a traditional shared host. My budget for hosting doesn’t allow me to “move up” to a VPS. I found a provider who has been in business for 5 years. That’s probably a little on the short side but, everyone has to start somewhere. So far I have not had any problems with my new hosting provider.

It has been a while since I have posted. I have been searching for a job. I had a consulting assignment at UPS but that ended in July and I went back the first week of September to perform some maintenance. I liked things better the second time I was there. I did not feel nearly as pressured to match any of the previous numbers as they have finally agreed that was nearly impossible without the regional office telling me how they got the regional numbers.

This week UCF is hosting a job fair. I’m hoping to make some good contacts there as several larger companies should be present. Tomorrow I should be attending several workshops about how to work a job fair and resume preparation. Hopefully, I will be ready to hit the ground running at the job fair the following day.

I’m also looking at companies that are located outside my home area. I’m a little hesitant with this notion because I would have to make new friends when I move and I’m a generally shy person. I also have not visited very many cities. I’ve been to Atlanta for a week after Christmas and have determined I could live there. I just don’t know where else I would enjoy living.

Seems like it’s time for an update.

Well, I just noticed under my last entry, it seems I still get comment spam. I’ll have to figure out what the deal is with that so if anyone actually reads this they don’t get confused. I also need to work on getting my photo gallery linked to the main web site. Hopefully I will be able to make some time to update my web site.

Work has been really busy. We’ve been working on a new project that allows attorneys to update their cases remotely. The project has been really interesting. I like working on it because it has a couple different parts that are like mini projects. Once I get a little thing finished for one part of the project, I can move on to something else. I also like that the other developer and myself are able to make most of the decisions on how to implement minor and not quite major aspects of the project.

We also have a video archive project coming up. A lot of our code from the previous project can be reused but it will have some of its own hurdles. I’m thinking about dedicating some time and space here to explain how to do some of the more interesting parts of the project.

In my spare time I’ve taken up coaching T-Ball again. This year I’m the assistant coach for a K-1 team, the Pirates. Hopefully practice will start next week once I attend a short class required by the church.

This weekend I will be going to the men’s retreat with the church. I’m hoping to get some spiritual nurishment along with meeting other men in the church. We are staying at the Wyndham Palace Resort and watching some basket ball friday night.

I’ve also started looking into the possibility of buying a townhome or a condo. Orlando is a pretty “hot” market right now so prices are a lot higher than I had expected them to be. I’d really like to find a townhome with a garage. I’d rather not buy a house because I do not want to deal with the outdoor maintenance. It seems the best option to get exactly what I want is to buy something that is being built, so I keep driving around looking for construction sites for townhomes.

It has been a while since the IDIDARIDE. I entered a 6 hr. solo race the following weekend. Due to problems with my knee I only did 4 laps. The following weekend’s ride at Croom was also ruled out. My knee has gotten better, but it is not perfect. I should probably see a doctor about it, but have not been able to take the time to get all of that set up.

Since I didn’t go on the Croom ride, I went to see Tony play some songs at “Austin Film and Coffee.” After we finished there, we went back to Matt, Jeremy, Josh and Justin’s and watched Achorman. On Saturday I went bowling and on Sunday I went to watch the Super Bowl with my Sunday school class. Then a long week of work began and the following weekend was welcomed.

This past weekend I went to see a comedian at church and celebrate my friend Laura’s birthday at Downtown Disney. Then on Saturday there was the men’s bar-b-que. That brings us to today. After work I went over to my friend Kristy’s for dinner with Matt, Jeremy and Kirsten. Kristy and Kirsten cooked up some meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans. The dinner was very good and satisfying. After dinner we had desert provided by Jeremy and Kirsten, which was two flavors of ice cream and cookies. All the food was delicious and a great time was had by all.

This past Sunday I watched Napolean Dynamite. This was a very monotone movie, there was not much action and was really anti-climatic. I thought the movie was humorous, but it was not the funniest movie I had ever seen. Anyways, below is the results of a quiz that a friend posted in his journal.

Kip Dynamite

Which Napoleon Dynamite character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Happy New Year!