True Price of Freedom

Freedom is an interesting thing. Considered one of the precious ideals of life, yet how many of us reflect on the cost of that freedom. Freedom isn't a right, nor a given in life, it's something that is bought and paid for, and ultimately in blood.

Having grown up in the US, and not a first generation free man, the price of that freedom isn't nearly remembered as vividly as I supposed those who are first generation free men. In fact I think it's often just expected to be there like air is. Not remembering and not taking into consideration what freedom cost one's country is probably the biggest disservice you can undertake in life, as for bearers decided to lay down their lives that the future inhabitants of the land may be truly free.

Yet I think the freedom we have today is often twisted and used as an excuse to do what ever we wish irregardless of thought or consideration. Just because we can doesn't necessarily mean we should.

Years past, men fought and died for that great prize in the land that is now called the United States of America. Today the landscape of Freedom in the US is different. Lawmakers take away personal freedoms, under the guise of "National Security". Fear and panic run rampant with impending doom from the "evil ones". Common Sense is tossed aside with careless abandon.
I urge you to consider the cost of your freedom and treasure it, it's one of life's greatest joys. Fight to hold on to it.

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny”

“A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither”

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

Thomas Jefferson

S

Have I been targeted for a plot?

A while back I posted a "theory" that one day we could experience DNA assassination by nanobots.

Lately I've been battling bronchitis, which it's my first case of (that I can remember at least), and I have to question.. Has the TSA sought me out for my posts about ridiculous no fly rules .

With our visit to the US coming up later this year, do I need to worry? Should I plan ahead and store large amounts of food/clothing/ammo under the house for the impending invasion of my abode?

Who would be my enemies, my friends? Would you come to my aid and airlift me to safety?

Would the TSA target me, the lowly American living in New Zealand, who's two years late on filing his Federal US income taxes (even though I don't owe a penny)?

Cleanup from moving my blog

Now that I've moved my blog to blogger, I quickly noticed that I needed to solve a few issues. Since I worked so hard at trying to get the #1 spot in Google, Yahoo, MSN (it actually wasn't much work), I wanted to keep the flow going for those visitors that may find the old urls in the Search Engine indexes. So to solve this issue I .

1. There wasn't an easy way to manage my redirects from the old URL scheme to the new one. Luckily for me Blogger allows you to have a "Fallback host" when ever it encounters a Page not found.
2. Setup a fallback website that redirects the existing urls to the new ones (there may be some missing but time will tell). Thanks to RewriteRules and Regular Expressions (gotta love em).

In the back of my mind, when starting this move I had a feeling this issue would bite me, but turns out the Blogger folks had already set that up.

2nd issue was to get my Jquery Countdown Timer (Most referred page.. heh) working as I needed to have Jquery running on this site for it to work. Luckily enough a quick view source of JQuery Website helped me sort that. Quickly.

And yes, Today was my 31st Birthday and a decent one at that.. Now I must be off to bed, someone scheduled a job interview at 7am!!!

Why so few posts?

This question I'm sure plagues all bloggers from time to time, what to write about.
Today I noticed while I was moving my posts to Blogger that there are a number of my posts which are quite short and don't contain much information about anything. They would almost suffice as Twitter posts.
I'm hoping to change this fact and start to create some more detailed blog posts. We'll see how this goes, at least it's a noble endeavor I suspect.
I've also realized that the topics I do post about have become more outspoken in nature, whether it be the TSA detaining 5 year old kids under the guise of communisim er I mean National Security or the Choice of a president in South Africa.
On a different note, I've been spending some of my spare time (when I feel motivated) on a few game related hobbies, in particular attempting to write a small game, because I've always considered it a challenge that I would like to accomplish and it's just plain fun (and frustrating). Lucky for me I have a good friend I can pick the brain of (which he still owes me an email reponse!).
Anyway, I hope to increase the length and content of my posts as well as vary the topics a bit more. It's a goal, need to have one.

Time to move hosts

Well, I've enjoyed the time at SimpleHost.co.nz but I've felt it's time for me to move on. I wasn't using my hosting to it's full ability and couldn't justify the yearly cost as currently I'm on a kick to save as much money as I possibly can and this is one area I couldn't justify the cost, as I have a heap of free hosting options all around me, I figure I'd take one that I have enjoyed using in the past. The drawbacks are of course having to move the site, it's data, the RSS feeds, the layout as well as the now hassle of URL redirects (though I'll get them moved over.) Do let me know if you come across any issues.

Oh internet, oh internet I need thy advice.

I'm working on a project

This project , in it's current form, requires that I spend some time screen scraping another website for the listings they have (not for a spam reason, in fact it's for a very good reason). I've tried to contact the website and I haven't heard anything back from them, in fact not even an automated response and that was months ago.

I know of some sites that I suspect take part in screen scraping, for awesome reasons , such as EveryBlock . The project I am working on has similar goals in mind, to be able to provide the information for people to use in a much better manner than where the information currently resides.

I'm torn on the issue, because part of me wants to dive in and make the site happen and the other part feels I should respect the current site, regardless if I think it's not good enough or not.

My question is, what do you think of screen scraping ?

And people say Bush is an idiot?

And people say Bush is an idiot What strikes me as even more bizarre is that 400 people voted him in, 400 people who should know better. Then again, I'm not a South African, so I don't know the culture. Guess I should walk a mile in their shoes before I judge.

Give me a break!

Common sense 0, US Government 500000 Crazy story Lightning does strike twice

How long before you can assassinate someone using their DNA?

I just read an article Washington Post about how the FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to create the database of Biometric Information. This kind of a project should set the base for such things as occured in the Terminator, Brave New World, 1984, Minority Report and a host of other books and movies.

Going a step futher, having this sort of information could easily (using nano technology) lead to nanobots that target the destruction of a particular DNA. Forget cruise missles, covert ops, James Bond and the like, cellular level machines bent on destruction of bone marrow or heart tissue.

Alot of personal freedom is being tossed aside under the guise of National Security. They are taking pictures of people and scanning their fingerprints and the iris of the eyes. Yet if you accidently take a photo of another child when your kid is playing a sport, which is becoming illegal. Pretty soon Skynet will take over, we'll be labeled Alpha or Beta and some of us will disappear in the middle of the night as a government sanctioned organization will follow up on the labels, and the undesierables will be tossed aside. Freedom of speech will fall by the way side , fear will stir up madness, truth won't be sought, instead mere panic and here-say will take it's place as protecting the institution at the cost of freedom is far more important.

"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." Theodore Roosevelt, Abilene , Kansas. May 2, 1903.

I am getting old

So tonight, I decided to try and look some old friends on Facebook. After having a conversation with Zane (who listened intently as dogs usually do), about how it shouldnt' really be this hard to find old mates (yeah Kiwi terms come out of me now and then. I changed my "Friend finding tactics" a bit, and started looking based on their groups, networks, locations etc.

After about an hour , scouring the electrons of facebook for some once very close friends of mine and coming up with a billion matches of people with the same name but born two decades later. Maybe to find your old friends (who based on the ages that came up can't really be very old friendships, then again 4 years is alot when you're 16) you have to not be able to remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, when the Berlin Wall fell or the Collapse of the Soviet Union.

Well it's time for me to head off to bed, though I suspect I should stop by Nathan's room as he's fussing.. Tis gonna be a long nite.