The-Asterisk

I was reading E.J. Dionne Jr's latest piece in the Washington Post called Violent talk blocks sane gun laws . He even coins (or popularizes) a new term, militarized rhetoric , which is always followed by the words "from the right". I will not debate the one-sidedness of that statement. He mentions that we cannot have a sane debate about reducing the number of rounds you can legally carry in a gun clip (or more correctly, a magazine.) It is reported that Jared Loughner had a Glock-19 9mm handgun with a high-capacity 33 round magazine. Supposedly it jammed which is how bystanders were able to subdue the gunman and keep him from emptying the gun on more people. Let's be honest, even if magazines of more than 5 rounds were made retroactivelly illegal, the millions in circulation would always exist. What came to mind when I was thinking about this subject was that Congress doesn't know how to pass a clean bill. The first thing out of the mouth of the Democrat minority ...

I have tweeted, read and listened to the echo chamber since word came out early Saturday of the tragedy in Tucson. It was no time before Paul Krugman hit the keys, blaming right wingers and Tea Party members for the vitriol and toxic atmosphere. Paul, stick to economics . At least there is no right or wrong with economics, just guesses and opinions, plus... no one cares what you think about economics. What I want to see is how much money it costs to prosecute the shooter and how long it will take to make the case against him. The feds have already appointed a lawyer, Judy Clarke ( she is a spitting image of Paul McCartney ) who has defended the Unabomber, Zacharias Moussaoui (the 20th 9/11 hijacker), serial bomber Eric Rudolph, Susan Smith (the 'mom' who drowned her kids by driving her car into a lake), Saddam Hussein and Benito Mussolini. Well, I made the last two up, but it could have happened if they had been in the US... In about 12 seconds this nutbag detoured our national...

I just had to make a quick comment about the strange kabuki dance that has gone on between Apple, Verizon and the press/rumorsphere. It has been common knowledge for several months that Verizon would be carrying the Apple iPhone on its CDMA network, especially in light of the fact that they are currently carrying the iPad. It is kinda cute in a way, isn't it? Keeping a secret like that. I had a Verizon rep tell me on Monday that the rumors were false. Really! Like the small town couple who got engaged, bought a ring at a local jewelry store, visited the town hall for their marriage license, rented the church and arranged for all of the flowers and food, but tried to keep it 'hush-hush' and then got a little angry when they found out that everyone already knew when they announced it. Sheesh...

I watched Steve Ballmer's keynote address at CES last night via live stream. I say keynote, but it was more like a tag-team infomercial, but whatever... that is what CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) is really all about. Back in the day, CES was where TVs, audio equipment, radar detectors, electronic toys, video games and such were shown in January after Comdex (the Computer Dealers Exposition) had taken place in November. Both were humongous shows, both were held in Las Vegas and both attracted upwards of 200,000 attendees. I regularly attended Comdex from 1984 until its demise in 2004. Now, CES has become the premier stage for new product introductions. Back to the subject at hand... Those that have read my blogs or may have tripped over some of my 'guest' posts on other's blogs know that I am passionate about the fusion of new technology with our pedestrian computer needs. I have long advocated for interfacing touch screen technology with portable handheld units an...

Something has been bothering me for the past several weeks as the lame duck session of Congress played out. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I was watching some of the Sunday morning interview shows. As the pundits were punditing about gridlock and conflict, the guests from the left blamed the right for blocking everything with threats of filibusters and the guests from the right accused the left of ramming legislation through the process without any input or consideration of their point of view. You know what? They were all correct! But why? And why now? That's what had been bugging me, then the answer hit me like a two ton heavy thing . It is the stakes... they are too high. Most of what Congress has been/is still fighting about during the 111th is very substantial and will have a big impact on the future. Plus, the number of dollars in play is mind boggling and there is little hope of abatement in the near term. On Meet The Press was Cory Booker , mayor of Newark...

The-Asterisk note: This was a draft posting that got lost somehow when BlogSpot got hung up, so if I get a chance I will come back and expound on why Trickle Down economics works if it is not all spent on food and shelter.

My Thanksgiving thoughts (with apologies to Tom Peters .) Buy One, Get One Free. Frequent Flyer Miles. College education. New job. Trade in a four year old car. Lottery tickets. Different job. Movie and sports package rather than Basic cable. First Class instead of Coach. Whatever it is, we humans are always looking for an upgrade. What does this have to do with Thanksgiving? As a native born, plain-vanilla American, I was born in the right place at the right time. At least that is my opinion and I am sticking with it. As anyone that reads this blog can attest, I might seem a bit cranky at times, but it is because I am always seeking... looking for... pursuing... something, but what? Perfection? Nirvana? Excellence? WOW? While I was pondering this salient point this morning, it occurred to me that most of us are pursuing an upgrade . Aren't we all just looking for something better? When a university trained engineer from Iraq, or a medical doctor from Mali, or a school teacher from...

Wow, the spewing forth that is going on in the blogosphere and in the media about Bristol Palin winning not getting the boot on Dancing With The Stars last Tuesday night is actually quite amazing. If we could all show this much concern about the North Koreans building a new nuclear material enrichment facility, we might have a better situation right now. (Ooops, sorry, The Situation got booted a few weeks ago.) Anyway, my point for this abbreviated version of The-Asterisk is that many of the left wing "spewers" have mentioned that Sarah Palin is a know-nothing, obnoxious, attention-grabbing, right wing nutbag that wants to be President of these United States. So? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton thought they had a shot at it. So did Dennis Kusinich, Pat Robertson and Al Gore. And speaking of glow-in-the-dark intelligence driving great job performance, how is Barack Obama doing on the foreign policy stage lately? Yeah, lighting up the G20, eh? Sometimes I think that having a hu...

As I sit in the terminal at JFK Airport in New York awaiting the final flight of my trip from Los Angeles' LAX, airport security is at the top of my mind. To the best of my knowledge, today poses no bigger threat to national security than yesterday did. Yet as I proceeded on a shuttle bus from the off-site car rental facility to the Delta terminal, traffic was piled up near the big, white L A X letters announcing the entrance to the airport. As we crept to the turn-in, there were several tent-like structures composing a security checkpoint with uniformed police somehow choosing which vehicles would pass and which would be stopped for inspection. We were waved through Checkpoint Charlie. As the bus pulled up in front of the terminal, there were several TSA personnel milling about outside. I went in and retrieved my boarding pass from the convenient self-service kiosk. Proceeding on, there were only three people ahead of me in the security line. As the initial TSA person tried using ...

Every time I pass through an American airport, I think to myself "The terrorists have won." This has been my opinion for the past eight years or so. I don't think these prehistoric goons with a modern education ever imagined that they would or could collapse not one but BOTH of the World Trade Center towers. Given the heinous-ness of that action, there is NO WAY that they could have predicted how easily the US Government, both Republican and Democrat, would allow them to irreversibly change the way every traveller is affected every day. But once they saw how easily we were manipulated, I DO think that they took thier most hapless stooges, sent them off on a 'mission' to blow up a plane, knowing that they would get caught, but realizing that with each of their Keystone Kops mis-adventures, they were throwing yet another bag of sand in the gears of commerce. And THAT is really their goal. To scare us back to the Stone Age. Not bomb us back to the Stone Age (yeah...

I will keep this concise. I am a 30 year veteran of the US Navy and Naval Reserve. I joined when I was 17 in order to get an education and get going in life. Well, I certainly accomplished that goal! During my 11 years of active duty I lived in two foreign countries for over 5 years and had several stateside duty stations in addition to about two years of electronics and specialized training. While I was building my business (started it with another Navy vet) I spent 20 years in the reserves. During this time I met a HUGE number of people in the military, some of whom are lifelong friends, a few I never want to see again, plus a lot of people that I enjoyed growing up and working around. The military gave me an opportunity to mix and mingle with a spectrum of people both in and out of the service that I would probably never have had otherwise. I found out about how people actually live in other countries (as opposed to dropping in for a one day visit on a tour bus.) What really sticks ...

As I have stated elsewhere, with the Republican victories yesterday we got the CHANGE, now we move into the HOPE phase. Hope that the Class of 2010 can put the cart back on the road, regardless of which ditch it is in and who put it there. Charles Krauthammer made a poignant observation last night on Fox News. He said that the Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006 and the Obama election of 2008 were anomalies on the political landscape. That they were upheavals based on huge external forces on the body politic... the Iraq War in 2006 and the Grand Depression of 2008 and that now, 2010 brings us back in line close to the status quo in the US... older people voting, youngsters and the poor staying home. Staying home and not voting is fine with me. Those that scream "Vote or Die" are nuts. The last thing I want is an enfranchised Zombie voting for whomever is on the blue slip they are handed as they trudge into the polling place. If you cannot press, click or punch for whomever...

First let me clarify. I own a technology company that provides IT support services to a lot of small and medium sized businesses. As you well know, supporting anything that has to do with computers is a huge undertaking and what you need to know to make it through one day is completely different than what you needed to know the day before. Several months back, we took on the support of a decent-sized company. Their data center was, shall we say, a mess. Well, I looked at their existing servers and decided that we could re-use two of them. They were built from Intel parts, with a 2U rack mount case, 4 active removable drive bays and an Intel S5000VSA motherboard. This motherboard supports RAID but the existing RAID drives were degraded (NICE!!!) We finally got the opportunity to pull one of the servers out for refurbishment. I brought it back to the shop and ran Sysinternal's DISK2VHD on the server. Next, I removed the old drives, well... removed the old drive and set it aside as ...

All this talk about price increases with your current health insurance and how much it will cost to pay for Obamacare got me to thinking... Health insurance is a lot like the Soda Pop industry, isn't it? Take a walk through the refreshment aisle of your local supermarket and just look around. You will see Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke, Diet Cherry Coke, Coke in 8 oz. glass bottles, 16 oz. and 24 oz. plastic bottles, 12 oz cans in 12 packs and 24 packs, one liter bottles and two liter bottles. And lets not forget those awkward 8 oz. cans. Have you ever noticed how the smaller the container, the more expensive the product seems to be? And I haven't even talked about Pepsi, Mountain Dew (regular, diet and EXTREME), RC and Diet Rite, plus the ubiquitous 3 liter barrel of house brand soda for 89 cents per bottle. Next, check out 7-Eleven. There you will find an endcap display of Coke products for $1.89 per 2 liter bottle right next to a Pepsi display for 99 cents per bott...

I have always been a proponent of transparency in government. I even crafted an elaborate scheme about 10 years where each political ad would have a 6 digit tag line for radio and TV or a code at the bottom of each printed piece. You could then go to www.fec.gov/open , type in that number and find out who or what paid for the ad. If there were other entities involved, you could drill down until you found the true source. I sent this suggestion to all of my federal, state and local representatives. I got NO response from any of them. So what changed my mind about disclosure? Militant liberals, that's what. In case after case, left wing loons (I love calling them the same thing that they call us) in California have used the state's FOIA law to find out who is contributing to political races. A prominent businessperson could donate $5,000 to a candidate for Attorney General because he agrees with the candidate's stance on business and regulation. An abortion rights fringe gro...

I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday describing how lawyers "concerned about consumer protection" are scouring the shelves and racks of retailers looking for expired patent numbers printed or embossed into products. If the attorneys find an expired patent number, they are filing suit against these companies in the name of the federal government for violating a law that until recently was seen as about as serious as jaywalking. A recent ruling, however, stated that they could sue for a $500 fine for each violation and each violation could be interpreted as every box, package or item with the bad number. Additionally, the interesting part is that the lawyers split the spoils with the government, so there is no impetus for the feds to pull back on this extortion. Is this all that these scumbags have to do? Read the article and see the self-aggrandizement dripping from these attorney's statements. To me this law breaking is about as serious as a company ha...

I am having a debate with a new found friend on Twitter @REcrab . We met through @tom_peters , who really knows how to spark debate. Earlier today I tweeted: " If the Gov't investigates BP 2 the Nth degree 'to make sure it doesn't happen again', when can we do the same to Congress abt fin. meltdown?" Tyler tweets back " Congress caused the meltdown?Thought we did not like regs. You got what you get with no regs. " and off to the races we went. My contention is that Congress' intention to create 'affordable' housing for all Americans basically unlocked the bank vaults and left the doors unattended. Everyone wants to prosecute the bankers and brokers but the politicians and policy makers get away scott free and NO ONE in Washington loses their job. Let me make myself very clear! I have virtually NO respect for bankers. Absolutely NO respect for credit card companies and the same goes for brokers and mortgage sharks. These guys are respons...

From Bloomberg Businessweek Senate Clears Way for $30 Billion Small Business Fund So let me get this straight. Let's say I have a small business, I am in dire straights, cashflow-wise, and I need money. My credit cards are maxed, uncashed paychecks sit in my safe and my three employees leave early on payday to make sure their check gets in the bank that day. I am going to go down to my local hometown bank, sit down in front of the friendly loan officer and say "Hi. I would like to borrow $100,000 dollars from that cool $30,000,000,000 fund that the government has set up for small businesses that need funding." How is that conversation going to go? I have a house that is still 20 years from being paid off and it has a second mortgage based on its inflated valuation in 2007, so I have -$45,000 in equity. I am the guy that needs the money. Anybody out there think I am going to get it? Especially if I am a healthy white male? (No, not a white whale... a white male .) Memo to...

First it was Robert Scoble late last week announcing an earth shattering product that will change the way social media and the internet were viewed (but he was under NDA so he couldn't elucidate). Then the tweets started rolling around 8pm on Tuesday about this new thing called Flipboard. I googled flipboard and found numerous references to a prop for skatr boyz and a link or two about the real company, flipboard.com . Here is the first video that most of us saw on the product: The problem was, it would not be released until midnight California time. I am on the east coast and I wasn't about to wait until 3am to download a cool program, so off to bed I went. By 7am the next morning, the internets were all a-twitter (yes, pun was severely intended.) I found a few posts about @flipboard so I clicked on over and followed them. I was #105. Cool. I then went to iTunes and loaded the app on my iPad. Cooler. Then I tried to set up my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Not so cool. Seems...

VDI, for those of you who don't know, is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Generally speaking, VDI is the technology where you set up multiple virtual PCs on a host computer. What you end up with is a server running VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, or some other hypervisor with a number of PC images running on top of the hypervisor. Each image is then controlled by a client device, be it a thin client, re-purposed PC running special software, or some other equipment. Contrast this with Terminal Services (now called Remote Desktop Services) which is where a server multitasks and allows multiple users to share the same server simultaneously. VDI hosts multiple instances (Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Linux, Windows 98) running at the same time whereas RDS allows Windows Server 2008R2 to be run by 20-30 or more users at the same time. Now that we have all of that established, there are a bunch of cool technologies out, or coming out that support VDI in a variety of ways. T...