Author Archives: scottsoapbox

Seattle: Ban Beach Bonfires Due To Global Warming

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Seriously, this is for real:

Park department staff is recommending reducing bonfires at the two beaches this summer and possibly banning them altogether next year.

The park board will hear the recommendation Thursday, and the city plans to run public-service announcements and hand out brochures later this month about the effects of bonfires on global warming.

According to a memo to the park board from the staff released Thursday, “The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon … emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.”

Under the proposal, the department in July would reduce the number of fire rings at Alki from six currently to three and at Golden Gardens from 12 to seven.

Then later this year, the department would consider banning bonfires or requiring fees and permits to reduce the number of bonfires next year.

Now if you’re not either screaming at the computer screen or laughing hysterically right now, you have no idea what is going on.  First the laughing: a bonfire has about the the global environmental impact of a butterfly fart.  I’m sorry but this really needs to be put into perspective for those of you that didn’t pay attention in science class.  If small fires could wipe out the climate on this planet – we wouldn’t have even made it to the industrial revolution.  (wow think of the eco-sins we could have avoided then!)  Also all of the bonfires in the entire state of Washington over the last 20 years combined into one Texas A&M style bonfire it would still be insignificant compared to a single forest fire.

The screaming: this is not an honest attempt to stop the hoax of global warming! This is an attack on personal freedom.  Anyone with actual scientific knowledge would concede the fact that a bonfire is near the bottom of any list of polluters.  A bomb delivered to a single factory in China would offset the carbon emissions of all the bonfires in America for the next 100 years or so.  Its not about pollution its about control.

Also of note: the Park Service is taking no steps to ban wild fires in the area.  But since that neither grows government power nor chips away at personal rights – no ban was really expected.

Presidential Stupidity

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I know that the ability to articulate is not a true indicator of intelligence but communication mastery -or lack there of- can certainly create an image of intelligence (or lack there of).  For instance, is this really the leader of the free world speaking?

What they’ll say is, “Well it costs too much money,” but you know what? It would cost, about… It — it — it would cost about the same as what we would spend… It… Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would costs us… (nervous laugh) All right. Okay. We’re going to… It… It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about — hold on one second. I can’t hear myself. But I’m glad you’re fired up, though. I’m glad.

Yup, it is. Or will be. That was our savior of change, presumptive Presidential candidate, Obama – off teleprompter.  Which begs the question: Can we elect his speech writer instead?  He goes on in the same meeting to talk about breathalyzers & “InHALators” for asthma patients.

Here’s the YouTube link in case you doubt the transcript:

OggSync 4.0h Crap

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In my quest to slowly remove Billy from my life (as much as possible in this MS Windows dominated world), I have grown tired of moving my giant email archives every time I have to reinstall windows to make it happy again. I had moved over my main acct to Gmail last year but my Windows Mobile phone syncs up with Outlook (only).  So I set out to find a way to replace this function with google (the next world dominator).

There are serveral programs that will sync your WM calendar with your google one from your device (google has something that can connect from your computers outlook and sync), but only one that claims to sync your contacts as well. That is OggSync 4.07.  Here’s how it went….

The calendar syncs are a tad slow even on my EV connection and for some reason it had to put my mom’s birthday on a totally seperate google calendar (shrug).  Other than that oddity it seem fine.  However the contact syncing was much worse.  The fastest way to sum it up is from my emails to support [notes added]:

ME:

Syncing my contacts A) took way too long [MUCH longer than the calendar sync we’re talking over an hour] B) made duplicates of many of my contacts on my device… not cool. C) I had to go and resetup my speed dial list

It defeats the purpose of a direct sync from my device to gmail if I have to then use a sync to outlook to clean up the mess OggSync made.

SUPPORT:

Sorry you are unhappy.  You can undo the sync by unchecking the “enable sync” and syncing again.  It will put the device back into the state it was before you started.

It is best if you start with a clean device to begin with. [this was not mentioned anywhere on the site, in the setup process, etc]

ME:

Ok, since I could “undo” the changes I figured I would give it another try.  I deleted some of the duplicate contacts on the google side and then tried syncing again.

This attempt was worse than the first.  It still believed that every contact didn’t match and therefore “updated/changed” every single contact even though were only 2-3 new contacts. It created even more duplicates & removed all my speed dial associations from my Sprint Touch.

Thus over this useless software, I tried your “unchecking” method.  After FOUR HOURS of “deleting contact xxx” (which i assumed was removing all the duplicates) it finally finished.  So I went to my contacts to see how the process worked.  My contacts list was EMPTY!  Trying to remain calm, I rebooted my phone hoping that would help: it did. My contacts were mostly back but in an EVEN WORSE state than before.

“Undoing” the sync created even more duplicates — we’re up to 4 copies of many contacts now and for some reason 8 of others and while others only 1.  Not only that anything that had been on my speed dial list was completely deleted.  That’s right the people I call the most, now I can’t call at all.

And to go one step further the FONT on my phone screen changed with the “undo” process so it doesn’t all fit on the screen!  I am now going to have to hard reset and re-install everything on my phone just to get it working properly again.

A refund was given.

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