The Ottermanempire.com

That does it. One more crashed out post. I’m through with Scribefire.

11 years into the mass adoption of the Internet and we still can’t get the basics rights. You know not losing data:(

The post I lost. Bike review, My newest malady ( Gout) and a suggestion to go watch Garagenight.tv which is a Vlog about the art of motorcycle maintenance, zen may be optional since it comes from my homeland. Still I have always found most American media on motorcycles to be lacking. Way too many nice reviews and seems to not reflect the kind of high jinks that Performance Bikes in the UK gets up to. E.g if the bike is dangerous piece of crap it’s called such. The same bike in the USA is of course just fine.

Greetings.

Happy new year, at least one of  the many calenders that are out there. I prefer the dragons and fireworks
myself to  the irony of the “timeless”  Dick Clark looking like didn’t go down
to Georgia, but over to Switzerland instead and lost a watch building contest
with “Old Harry”, but I digress. Let’s start out 2008 with a positive message. 

I am positive that elections are a great excuse to get more people blog, vlog
, ne demagogue  this upcoming  election with a torrent of user generated content
seeded by MSM sources ( Oh dear I’ve gone negative early… )

After seeing two very different movies on the effect of wishing the world was other than it is,  both had the same tragic ending, dead kids I was quite down,  people often say it’s unimaginable to think about their offspring dying but sadly I have a very good imagination  and  damn I’m down this week.

 I had at work today re what I enjoy about blogging it turns out it’s the headlines  nearly all the puns and jokes I’m proud of are  stuck in the titles which suggests that most of the time I’d be better off twittering a link.

That’s not going to happen there’s still the mediocre part of me that will keep on doing this till every copy of “the cult of the amateur” ends up in a Fahrenheit 451 scenario and   the personification of the book immolated while bagpipe music  is heard nearby.

Little angry there:) Then  these gems come up so it’s back to my vigil in a wilderness of mirrors and another misguided attempt by the lawn arm of the law…

Daily Herald - Orem woman arrested, injured in lawn dispute

Perry said she learned a lesson as well.

“Be kinder. Be gentler. If the policeman tells you to stand on your head, do it,” she said.

What a nice lesson.  Actually it’s sadly a necessary and sane lesson , one that my lawyer friend is very keen on people following.  Being right , and  injured, isn’t much good and the time to address such ass hattery is after the fact. Challenging a law enforcement officer is  akin to coating your private parts in honey and wandering into a Bear’s den  shouting HONEY! I’m home   it’s not going to turn out well.

Taser’s aren’t just for Xmas they’re  for  8-80   and while I’ve changed my mind on the devices considerably I’m still worried about the operators behind them than the relative risks of being shot. Phoenix New times which is about the only investigative writing I’ve seen worth a crap in the Valley has a good series on them  and  like most technology there are good and bad uses for it. When it goes bad… it’s   “Why the fuck aren’t people out in the streets bad?”  then I look out our County sherrif ( Joe  Arpaio ) and realized that  if the FCC allowed it   we’d have prisoner’s being  abused for entertainment  on our local news channel. Ok  let me get this in proportion it’s not the one  cop that held the taser down for 84 seconds is nowhere near as scary as the support system that claimed that he was not wrong  in doing so.

A frustrating time migrating a blog from my old host ICD soft to Godaddy.com was had by all, ok was had by me:) Since the max fileupload  in the php.ini  is 2mb and the DB max upload is 2mb from the same limitation  I had the split Wordpress’ backup into pieces and then load them independently . In short 2005 will be back soon:)

Meantime the odd missing link/ image is being chased down but I have work to do getting another blog out the door rather than this one..

Campus killer’s purchases apparently within gun laws

Source: Campus killer’s purchases apparently within gun laws - CNN.com

I’ve written CNN many times over the years re their disregard for facts when it comes to the legal carrying, description and misuse of firearms they consistently  get it wrong to the point that  it’s not an accident.   Here’s a post   and comment series that’s quite interesting. Firstly  it’s a crime to lie on the form 4473 which you must fill out when buying a firearm , new or used, from a licensed dealer.   Then again so is homicide,  see just how useful our paper tigers are?  

 I think we’ve created so much  “crime” in the US that doesn’t rely on the need for there to be a  victim, or damages incurred that   resources are expended on controlling those that ordinarily would be of no inconvenience to the general population but are used to  demonstrate who’s in charge”   A good post on this  can be found here .  As much as I like annoying objectivists   the originator  Rand had some  great things to say on this subject  one of the most famous from  Atlas Shrugged being,

“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?”, said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against — then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power that any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

Put it this way  the local  Sheriff charges  about $70 to  book and  $130 a day to house  those arrested by other departments  for most crimes that result in  fines or action that cost way less than  the  system to arrest, process , try , pay for juries / judges  and the people then enforce the judgements.  The above quote seems rather ominous now?

I’m not sure I’m getting value for money  when there’s no one aggrieved. I don’t buy that  a victimless crime is a precursor to  serious crimes either.  Everyone at some time has HAD to speed  or was caught unaware  by a change in conditions yet we can avoid shoplifting, assault and fraud since  it’s in most people’s interests to not harm others , who wants to live in a world where you have to guard your  family , food, water  etc every minute of every day ?  ( You still should be ready to   but it’s thankfully not needed in most countries that have reached the Civ stage of telephone system:) note I don’t include  guarding against the state that’s another thing altogether )  

 Ok so it may be a departure to comment on this from work ( Yes I actually crossposted this for a change) but when it directly wanders into the area I have a great deal of interesting in  Vlogging and Social media  the asinine statements by the talking heads ( they may ask  themselves  how did we get here? )  to camera commenting on the generation and presentation of  media  was some of the most unintentionally hilarious TV I have seen in a long time.   Questions like,  who worked the camera   were asked even though   it’s obvious that  a shelf, a tripod and  wait a minute the clue that he leans to the camera to stop recording MAY just indicate what’s going on.  Don’t even get me started on what they are getting wrong re firearms and the surrounding laws. 

Ok leaving MSM and wandering back to the MSB ( main stream blogosphere) I’ve seen a few entries, best summed up by this one, that  such a link is even considered between a technology and this event seems to be clutching at straws or

I said we hadn’t foreseen this use of the technology because, as utopians, we tend to look for the good stuff. I liked to think I had a balanced view, and could see where bloggers weren’t doing good, but I hadn’t seriously considered our tools used to further such a bad cause. 

What’s next? Isn’t it obvious — the latest and greatest stuff, Ustream, Twitter and mass murder. When you see a suicide bomber with a camera strapped to his or her head, you’ll know that the bad has caught up with the good.  

Source: Cho-TV, day 2 (Scripting News)

I can’t think that this would ever be a reasonable way to think and live your life trying to work out .  What cause is being advanced here that   couldn’t be leveled at the station  covering Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby?  Maybe Zapruder was a nascent vlogger ?   Could  bic  and moleskine  wouldn’t be complicit in had  he been more into  good penmanship?  Were the murderers of Daniel Pearl vlogging?   Hopefully my argument ad absurdum is bugging you as much as it did for me to type it.

 I don’t buy this red herring  which is  reflected in my title   which ,I hope ,shows that   way too many groups are taking the foreground events and contextualizing , ne compositing it,  to fit  their own interests, agendas or regular subject matter. ( like I’m doing )  

To date  it doesn’t appear that  the murderer posted it to the myriad of  video sites,  blogs, a personal webpage of did anything other than use OLD methods  ( relatively in the case of Quicktime)   to MAIL  material.  Gee   let’s go after Franklin now for touting the post office not knowing the evil it could be used for….   His methods were akin to a PR agency which  may tell Bill Hicks fans more than they need to know

Well I have been trying to find a site that lets me post to my main blog all the items that are interesting to me yet I’m not going to post fully on, it’s my web Me too Oh look what I found filter.

Normal service will resume soon.,

New feed time

This is a list of all the items that are interesting but for lack of time, and in many cases understanding I’d prefer to just make you aware of them. It’s also the list I will  be using to justify my ”I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe”   comments

 Libertarians in Australia are about as weird as those here. Ok we’re weird we just  want to Garbo our lives  and  socialism is way way more entrenched mentally over there than here ( oh we have it, just don’t admit it, they   love it .. )  Anyway  it’s worth reading the whole thing as it gets across practical ideas without the usual crap about roads appearing;) 

You’ll have to mind your own damned business and take responsibility for your own actions. If the guy next door to you is a polygamist transsexual drug addict with a collection of .44 magnums who makes porno movies featuring donkeys, there’s nothing you can do about it.

You’re gonna learn to live your own life, without the government’s tongue permanently shoved up your arsehole.

Source: Did you bring the pre-whacked snakes?

Just making sure it’s all going well. I messed up version one, thought I’d be clever..
Finally got the CZ75 sp01 downrange today, 2 x 18 rd mags, pretty visible sites, annoyingly gritty decocker and the trigger is not yet as good as my compact, but it takes time to wear them into something happy. All in all I like it Dobh was happier,Erin was crankier, even though she was shooting well and Oh and we came up with a wonderful spoof on the I’m a mac , and I’m a pc commercials:D More on that soon but I have a good idea who I want to play the PC ( irony is they have a mac:)

Social Media Release » Blog Archive » The Social Media Release is about getting the facts right

Ah I presaged the joy of this debate a few posts back, and indeed a couple of weeks back on my work blog but it looks like people that have the ability to gather some attention ( Oh we’re very “the Island” in a Huxley sense over here) have weighed in with a more weighty assessment on what was my visceral reaction to being sold on being sold to. One of the proponents of the SMR Chris Heuer appears to be having an interesting time rebutting these including this interesting reference to something that derails the Cluetrain so many of the SM group seem to be waving their ticket stubs in the air to show we’re all on the same track, that we are, sadly I don’t think we’re going in the same direction though:)

as a result, here comes the pile-on, where all bloggers are going to attack the PR industry - without knowing all the facts, giving more credence to that stupid “Attack of the Bloggers” article from last year.

Is this saying that bloggers are the coolest when their interpretation dovetails with our purpose of communication but otherwise are just not playing fair? Maybe, just maybe we see through PR and the idea that we need these modern day shapers to translate from the ‘king boardroom to the buyer is soon to be lost in the mists of time?
Grendel…. supper’s ready.

Found on Samizdata.net  Today’s most interesting headline. No it doesn’t take place in Russia which until now I thought had lead the world in tractor humour. 

New Zealand’s Timaru District Court has heard how a prostitute tried to get her own back on Christopher Malcolm Duane Muir, a farmhand on the country’s South Island, who didn’t pay after using her services.

Link to Sex dispute ends in tractor rampage - World - theage.com.au

mystic bourgeoisie: de-meaning

Chris Locke has an interesting psychic test which I am sure most of you can pass. You have to come up with your own title and lineage of super psychic authenticity ,probably print your own certificate too.   Anyway I think of my ex writing that book …

I am a little late to this party  but   even near death ( er we all are some just have more immediate evidence)  he’s posting in a manner I am I can come close to should the chance arise.

Anway ..   St Bob   is still in …

I make the mistake of assuming that those of us that toil primarily online have seen just about any amusing video / graphic/ meme  that’s been around a few weeks.  Well I was remiss in this so I am going to add a sidebar with the last 10 amusing things.

First up.  Jesus in music video.  I will survive.   

Spiders on drugs  expands on an experiment.