Land of the Lemmings, v2

After punching “Fleming vs Nestor” into google (from the Republican talking point doc linked at TPM), I found something odd.
Uncle Scam
Do you believe everything you read on the web? I’m not going to say this is true or this is false, but it’s interesting reading either way.

The Club for Growth (a conservative 527 org) has a blog for dispersing “information” on Social Security reform and I found an entry with an interesting quote:

It has long been one of my primary examples when advising my clients, readers and audiences of why it is extremely dangerous to trust our financial future to our rulers in DC. What sound like great tax and retirement savings plans today, such as Roth IRAs, can be changed at any time by our rulers and they are rarely, if ever, taken to task for their violations of such agreements.

So, essentially, whatever you may or may not have doesn’t really matter, because when the Social Security Trust Fund goes belly up (because the US Treasury decided to default on its’ bonds), the rulers in power at the time are just going to change the law and start taxing all these things that were promised to be “tax-free” or “tax-deferred”? If that’s the case, why on earth would we want to start to contribute to private retirement accounts that the government is just going to change the rules on later? Shouldn’t you be advising clients to keep cash under the mattress and stockpile gold bars?

Not to mention the fact that no one has come forth with anything even remotely resembling an actual plan or even details.

And, why does every debate have to have someone that tries to play the race card?

Once again, I’m comforted to learn that IT struggles are the same at other workplaces.

…but the point is that this is being run by an IT group—it should set a standard of how something should be done. Yes, instead of taking 13 seconds to implement, it’s going to take 20 minutes to think out the problem, provide a clean implementation, test it, and try to break it.

Why do I feel like I’m on a playground at recess with a group of second graders? “Spongebob is gay! Spongebob is gay!”

Now, Dr. Dobson said, SpongeBob’s creators had enlisted him in a “pro-homosexual video,” in which he appeared alongside children’s television colleagues like Barney and Jimmy Neutron, among many others. The makers of the video, he said, planned to mail it to thousands of elementary schools to promote a “tolerance pledge” that includes tolerance for differences of “sexual identity.”

(Use this Google link to get the article without registering)

Update: And the BBC has picked up the story as well.
Update (1/21): CNN is on the bandwagon too.

Article in the New York Times magazine, very long and pretty good. (Via TPM)

Every year for Christmas gifts from Alisha’s grandparents we get a puzzle or two. For some reason, they never seem to be easy ones. This year was no different. I didn’t get a good picture of the first one, but this is probably the best one. Not too tough, but not easy. The second one was much worse. I’m not sure how much time Alisha spent on it, but quite a bit more than I did.

This weekend I helped Jim pick up a nearly brand new 42U Dell server rack for the school district. We don’t really have a place to put it right now, but it was such a good deal we couldn’t pass it up.

More pictures of puzzles and the rack.

And, when I got back to the house today, the garage door wouldn’t open. I assumed it was frozen down, but it wasn’t. I came inside and the light on the wall switch was blinking continously. It would open using the wall switch, but not the remote or the HomeLink transmitter in my truck. I don’t think we have a manual for it anywhere, so I went searching the web. I found a discussion area talking about Craftsman door openers with someone else describing the exact same symptoms. The reply was to press and hold the lock button for 3 seconds, the constant blink means the opener is in lock mode. I never even knew what the lock button was for. I guess you learn something every day.

Trying to turn on Google Safe Search for all of your clients behind your Squid+squidGuard server? Well, you aren’t the first and probably won’t be the last, but it’s not that hard, once you find the right words to plug in to Google.

You need a little patch that Eric Harrison (of MESD fame) wrote. If you are already using his recent RPMs, you already have the patch. If you are compiling from source, you’ll need to grab the source RPM from his testing area and extract the squidguard-sed.patch file. Once you’ve applied that patch to the squidGuard 1.2.0 source and recompiled, you should be able to use the following code snippets in squidGuard.conf to append “safe=strict” to all google urls:
rewrite google {
s@(google.com/search.*q=.*)@1&safe=strict@i
s@(google.com/images.*q=.*)@1&safe=strict@i
s@(google.com/groups.*q=.*)@1&safe=strict@i
s@(google.com/news.*q=.*)@1&safe=strict@i
# log google
}

and in your acl section add:
default {
# for google to be in "safe mode"
rewrite google


Then, there are fewer inappropriate pictures available via google.

Thanks to Eric’s post to K12OSN and a Louisiana library page with a full squidGuard.conf linked for examples.