Hillary

Paperless

Citi planted a tree on my behalf. How special. I didn't know that was part of the deal until after I signed up. My motivation was to eliminate my credit card number from my mailbox. I get a copy of my statements online anyway and I pay by bank transfer so there was no function that the paper copy served anyway.

Video of the Year

Video of the Year
Hamnation: Sopranos DC Edition

If you've never seen the Sopranos this won't make a lot of sense. I've seen every episode on DVD through season 5 twice over. I'm currently watching the final season and I have just 5 episodes left. I figure I've seen the intro about a hundred times. The recreation in the hamnation video is excellent. I found the real Sopranos intro on YouTube for comparison's sake.

McRib is back!

I just had 2 of these McRib sandwiches for dinner tonight. I got the combo meal and an extra sandwich. I thought I remembered McRibs being better than the ones I ate tonight. I thought these were rather bland. I got them plain without the onions and pickles which is the way I've always had them. Maybe if I wouldn't have skipped the onions that would have given them more of a flavor.

My cashier at McDonald's wasn't too bright. My total was $6.39 so I handed over a 20 dollar bill and 2 singles. She looked at it for a moment and then gave me the 2 singles back as if I had made some mistake. Then she gave me $13.61 in change.

Hillary "Exhibit A" Follow Up

It's looking like this is getting a good amount of attention. It's campaign advertisement material already. This ad is from John Edwards. I love the split screens. Nicely done.

I saw Dick Morris on Fox the other night and he put it well when he said something to the effect that, "Hillary can't say what she really believes because if she does then no one would ever vote for her". I'm paraphrasing that.
I saw this clip from MSNBC on townhall.com (5 minutes)

A couple of outrageous moments...

1:35 - "Digging into the far right playbook..." Huh?

2:00 - Huffington Post loony Taylor Marsh claims it wasn't a "yes/no" question

Is this the whole segment? Townhall.com's Amanda Carpenter gets to speak for all of about 10 seconds and she had to interrupt just to get that much in. At least the host challenges the position Taylor Marsh takes. If you break it down her position is basically that the problem was the questions and not Hillary. The debate moderators' questions were sexist and out of line and it's not fair. Cry me a river. You don't get to pick your own questions at a debate. Deal with it. I think that when your positions are dictated by the polls any question where your response will reveal an unpopular position is going to be a difficult question to answer directly.

In the days following the debate Hillary should have been out there clarifying her position instead of taking issue with the debate questions. In my view she shows that she doesn't have any respect for the debate platform or the American people who follow the process. The American people deserve to know who their candidates are and where they stand. I do think it's legitimate to make certain judgments about the performance of the moderators but I also think any clear thinking individual could see that the question she got was fair. I hope that after this fiasco people will start to see exactly who Hillary Clinton is. Her popularity is mind boggling.

More directly with regard to the issue of giving licenses to illegal immigrants, an idea which Hillary apparently supports. Democrats will never admit to this but they support this idea primarily because many places require an ID to register to vote and all it takes is a drivers license. If illegals can register to vote Democrats stand to gain the most votes. Democrats seem to have no limit to what they'll do to obtain power. Even if it is supporting a hair brained idea like this that puts America's security at risk.

But now back to the topic of debate questions...

Is there life in outer space? That sounds like a good idea for a future post for me on this blog. Here's Guliani fielding a similar question from a youngster. He clearly wasn't prepared to be asked about this.

Wolff-Parkinson White

I happened to see this news article today. It's about a guy who collapsed 5 1/2 miles into a marathon race for the Olympic trials and then later died at the hospital. I suppose it's true that there are different ways to push your body to it's limits. Some people eat a lot like this guy while other people exercise. I imagine collapsing and dieing of heart failure during exercise is pretty rare for someone his age. This is an example of, "anything can happen". Everyone should realize by now that one of the risks of leading a sedentary lifestyle and having a poor diet is heart failure. What this story reminds me of is that even if you eat right and exercise you can still die of heart failure. We're all gonna eventually die no matter what we do.

I don't worry about it because it's not a serious heart condition but I found out when I was still in high school that I have Wolff-Parkinson White Syndrome. It sounds serious when you put "syndrome" at the end but it's not, and it's not all that uncommon. It's easily under control in my instance with a 50mg tablet of a beta blocker every day. The iVillage site and Wikipedia have pretty in-depth descriptions of WPW but basically it's this...there is an extra electrical pathway in my heart which at times can bypass the normal one and can cause my heart to beat at an abnormally high rate. A high rate for me would be maybe 120 or so but it's noticeable because it occurs in the absence of any physical activity. It has never happened to me, but heart rates can go up much higher and people can even pass out or get dizzy spells from this.

I can pretty much take a pill everyday for the rest of my life or they can open up my chest and go in there and fry out this extra electrical pathway. My doc says it's not really worth all that trouble as long as the medication keeps my heart rate under control, which it has.

I found this video showing the electrical pathway of the heart. The extra pathway I have they call the bundles of Kent which I think has a nice ring to it.
According to Wikipedia Meat Loaf, Marilyn Manson, LaMarcus Aldridge from the NBA (article here) and some other WWE wrestler I never heard of also have this WPW Syndrome.

Happy Halloween!

Tonight I went to the book store at the mall. After that I went over to the food court. My treat to myself was Rocky Rococco's pizza and a cinnabun. My cashier at Cinnabun was wearing a bee costume. I think I saw a spider too but spiders don't have wings so I'm really not sure what I saw.

Yes or No

This is all over the blogs aready but I just couldn't pass up posting about this myself anyway.

I didn't watch the entire debate but just by chance I happened to tune it in just at this was happening. I thought that was awesome that Tim Russert threw her a tough question. As you can see here she simply would not answer it directly, instead choosing to throw in a slam on the current administration and dance around the issue on both sides. The last 45 seconds are golden. I was yelling at my TV, "It's a yes or no question!"

I can't help but smile inside when I see stuff like this. Hillary's out of her element if she's not taking softball questions from those that don't or won't ever challenge her answers. Put her on her heals and you end up with results like these. If a candidate can't answer tough questions and take a clear position how are we to support that candidate? Tim Russert tried to pin her down to a position. She clearly resisted being pinned down.

I've often thought that too much is made of candidates who change their positions. The so called flip-flop. Certainly I agree that a person can change their opinions and positions over time. I know I have held to positions in the past which I no longer agree with. What I can't understand is taking opposing positions within weeks or months of each other or expressing different opinions depending upon who the audience is or what the polls are saying. That either means your pandering or it means you don't have a core value system with which you base your beliefs upon. In either instance it's not a characteristic of a leader. While some issues can be nuanced, this issue of giving licenses to illegal aliens is anything but. The answer to the question as it was presented was "yes or no", not "yes and no".

Hotair calls this Exhibit A in the case against Hillary for President.

Can I Afford It?

A while back I was surfing channels and I got sucked into watching part of a Suze Orman show. Ordinarily I cruise right on by when I see her annoying presence on television but I stopped anyway. In the same way I can't stand Keith Olberman on MSNBC I still can't help but stop at it now and then. Maybe to remind myself how repugnant he is I don't know. Anyhow as annoying as Suze Orman can be (and mind you it's not anywhere near being in the same league or flavor as Olberman) I got sucked into it watching this segment called "Can I Afford it?". It was actually rather interesting because people call in with all these ideas in mind for things that they want to buy. Then they say what their income is, what their savings are, and how much debt they have if any. Suze then reviews the situation and gives them her approval or a denial. Most of the time she denies people and most of the time it's pretty obvious why. I felt better about my financial position in life after I watched this. A lot of people out there have a lot of debt and not enough savings. This one guy wanted to buy a horse for 6 grand I think and she denied him. If I remember all this right I think he was 58, he had 7K/mos income and debt-wise I think a mortgage. Then he says that he has $2000 in stocks and didn't mention any retirement savings. What the heck? Your 58 dude! Your in serious trouble if you want to retire anytime soon and now you want to buy a horse that cost more money than you have saved?

In don't need Suze Orman to tell me if I can afford stuff or not. I could buy everything on my wish list tomorrow if I wanted to but it wouldn't be a very responsible thing to do. I labeled it "materialistic" for a reason. I'm going to buy the stuff I can afford and save for the rest or maybe just forget about buying those items altogether in the short term. It's called priorities and thankfully I have mine straight.

Materialistic wish list

#1 Cell phone - I sometimes think I'm the last person in America that doesn't own a cell phone. My plan right now is to get rid of my land line and use only a cell phone with hopefully an inexpensive service plan.

#2 Bike - I don't really NEED a new bike but I can easily see that the bike I have isn't particularly suited to the longer distance rides I've been doing. This one and #1 will be knocked off the wish list first as they are both long overdue purchases.

#3 ipod - I'll probably get just this basic ipod shuffle. I use headphones at the gym all the time and my current one is sooooooo 20th century. I mean I actually have to put the mp3 files onto a CD and carry the bulky thing around with me. With one of these I could just load it up and all I have to do is clip the thing onto my clothes or slip it in my pocket.
#4 Mattress - When I went to Disney this last January I slept on the most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on in my entire life. The tag said Sealy Posturpedic Encore 720 Plush. I've done some research and that specific model name is only distributed to hotels but equivalent models are sold all over the place. I'd like to get a new bed frame and a queen size mattress. I really don't need the queen size but one never knows what the future holds. #5 LCD television - along with a new entertainment center to put it in. My folks just got a new 32" Samsung and it looks great. Darn if I don't want one of those High Def TVs too. This one is a bit further out of reach when I consider what I allow myself to spend with respect to my disposable income. #6 Laptop - I really could use one when I travel. I like to write down my thoughts in a notebook whenever I travel and keep track of everything I did and where I went and all of that. I think a laptop would be more convenient and on top of that I could access the Internet and keep up with email and the news and my portfolio and so on. Plus I could also unload all of my photos onto it and look at them in full size at the end of the day rather than on that tiny screen on my camera. I take a lot of pictures when I travel. The only thing is I only travel about once a year so for 50 weeks out of the year it would probably sit around and collect dust. #7 CD player for my car - I only drive my car 5 months out of the year and during that time I have it out of storage I drive it maybe 25% of the time I go anywhere. My Trans Am is a luxury of sorts already but I only have a cassette deck in it. I put it in there when the factory stereo quit. It was at a time before CDs were something you could burn at home. I used to dub mix tapes for myself from my CDs so it was logical at the time to get a just a cassette deck. Now things are different and I'm stuck listening to tapes whenever I drive my car. I always seem to have the same couple of tapes and I'm getting real sick of them.

Easy Money

Nothing like makin money without lifting a finger. A bit of research is necessary but a stock like FCX which has clearly been a winner for me wasn't that hard to find. Sunpower I can't claim as my own find, but it has been totally rockin just the same.

My cost basis in Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold is $71.82. The resistance point on this stock is around $120 now. This one's going even higher short and long term. I have no doubt about it.

My cost basis in SPWR is $38.18 and it has recently been on a breakout up over $100. It could easily pull back a bit and even when it does, the stock has still more than doubled for me since I bought last November anyway. Sweet!

So what's the plan? As long as I continue to have stocks like this...and believe me they aren't all this great...to counterbalance some of the not so hot ones I'll retire from work as early as possible. I'll do some traveling and I'll drink wine and eat steaks and shrimp, chocolate cake and ice cream until my arteries can't take it anymore and I die of heart failure.

Or maybe not exactly that but I'm sure I'll come up with something good to do. Right now I'm spending more time learing the ropes of investing than I am planning out an endgame. The name of the game now is invest, reinvest the gains, then reinvest those gains and so on.

Huh?

Buckethead

No comments just great music.

Mary Katherine Ham

Where has this woman been all my life? She has an open invitation to dinner anytime. Smart, attractive, and conservative. I don't really know what collards are or why I should eat them on New Years but she looks great in this video making them and going on about politics the whole time. Now that's my kind of woman for sure.


I think I first saw her on Glenn Beck's show but now I see her more on the O'reilly Factor. There a segment on there maybe once a week called "Policing the Net". I don't know if it's on the same day every week or what but I should try to figure that out.

Totally free Saturday

I have a totally free Saturday with absolutely no plans. I didn't go to the gym today but I did have some great sandwiches for lunch. Among other things I'm gonna catch up on some posts since I've been posting here relatively infrequently lately. Most of the things I've been thinking about lately are just trivial. Most of the other things I've been thinking about for posts are just the same political things already posted about all over the internet anyway. I think a lot more about politics than is reflected in my postings here. I highly recommend the checking out the "other blogs" listed on the right of my page. For now it's a short list but I should expand it to include other blogs I visit. There are a lot of good ones out there. Whether I need it or not my almost daily visits to them remind me how messed up liberals are. Jessica McBride's blog has a more local flavor but I like to keep track of both local and national politics.

On television I generally watch bits here and there of The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and Glenn Beck. Mainly because the channel MSNBC is on is between Fox and Headline Prime where Beck is I sometimes run into Keith Olberman or Chris Matthews. That Olberman guy is completely unhinged. I just can't put to words how over the top that show is. It's an hour of completely unfettered and unchallenged far far left liberal views. And how may times is he going to give Bill O'Reilly his "worst person in the world" title? I think O'Reilly can be a bit of a windbag sometimes too but on balance he's a fair guy. I somewhat prefer watching Glenn Beck though. He's more entertaining. It's rather alarming sometimes to watch and learn what's going on in the world and what it is that the enemies of the US are up to and what they are saying openly. Things that aren't on your local or network news channels. A lot of it is what liberals would rather minimize, deny, cover up, or just label those that don't as fear mongers.

Here's Glenn Beck video from a while back (10 minutes).


Thankfully the universal health care package he's talking about in the last 5 minutes of the video was dropped from the WI state budget thanks to Republicans. Unfortunately I live in a blue state where this type of nonsense is proposed and would become reality if it weren't for Republicans. Gov. Doyle and state Democrats should suck rotten eggs for proposing a pork laden state budget that increased fees and taxes by 1.7 billion dollars. The one that passed isn't great either but at least it only increases taxes by a few hundred million (I don't seem to be able to find the exact number at the moment). My personal assesment is that the Republicans gave in to too many of the new taxes/fees just to get a budget passed. They were getting pretty handily slammed in the press which as usual distorted the facts. The truth of the matter is that the previous budget could have remained in effect indefinitely until a new one was passed. Nothing would've shut down (govt agencies, state schools etc) as the Democrats and the press would have had you believe. I think I would have preferred to keep the previous budget to this one.



Now on to things a little more cheery...

Stupid Stats

I keep all my biking stats in an excel file on my computer. After each outing I take down all the numbers from the computer on my bike (distance, ave speed, time, max speed and cumulative miles) and enter them into a spreadsheet. At the end of the season I make up tables with relevant stats to see what I've done over the year. This year I pretty much blew away anything I've ever done before. I wasn't that far from tripling last years total mileage but I ran out of warm weather before I got that far. This chart shows my cumulative miles for each of the past 3 years.

There's a long flat, inactive period of about 2 weeks in August. I was out of town during the first week and when I got back it was raining for an entire week after that. I remember at the time I left for my trip thinking that I had already beaten my total 2005 mileage even though it was only the middle of August. After I got back and after the rain finally ended I made up for the downtime. According to my file I did about 275 miles in the 2 weeks that followed.

Additional stupid stats...

Out of 47 total outings my average ride was 26.32 miles. My shortest was 8.75 miles and my longest was 52.38 miles.

• 0-9 miles: 2
• 10-19 miles: 10
• 20-29 miles: 19
• 30-39 miles: 11
• 40-49 miles: 2
• 50+ miles: 3

My total riding time was 77 hours, 51 minutes, and 26 seconds. That's about 3.25 days. That only includes time I was actually in motion, not the time waiting at street lights or any rest stops.

Overall I think I did pretty good. I could've been in better shape to start the year. I was a bit on the heavy end of my range in the spring. I lost around 8-10 lbs over the summer but I could stand to loose another 5-10 before I'm in my ideal range. Maybe next year I'll finally get myself a new bike. My current bike is heavier and has much fatter tires than are necessary for the type of riding I'm doing. I can't remember how many times this year I thought about how much the charactaristics of my bike were holding me back.

Looking forward to next year it's hard to predict if I'll beat this or not. A lot will depend on what shape I'm in next spring, the weather, and if I get a new bike. It also turns out that 1200+ miles is a huge time commitment. I don't really have anything else planned. I enjoy the challenges and this keeps me in good shape. I don't have any regrets about having spent my time this way this year but on the other hand there are a few projects that I did not get at over the summer.

My Past DVD Rentals

Since I can never seem to remember the movies I rent I started keeping my Blockbuster receipts. This is a chronological list of all the movies I've rented since July of 2005 with IMDB links. There are a lot of good movies I haven't seen yet and looking back over this list, a lot of garbage that I have. My standards for judging a movie's worth aren't very high. If it holds my attention and is at least somewhat entertaining for the 90 minute or so duration that's enough for me. That said there are a few on this list that don't meet that standard. I watched them and by the time the end credits rolled or even before I wished that I hadn't. Those movies are marked with a *.

Pathfinder
Crank *
The Hills Have Eyes
Children of Men
Smokin' Aces *
Turistas
The Descent
The Protector
Saw 3
Slither
Star Wars Ep. III
Wedding Crashers
Lucky Number Slevin
Rest Stop
Hulk
The Sentinel
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
The Matador
Super Size Me
Underworld Evolution
Running Scared *
Underworld
Blade: Trinity
Hostel
National Treasure
The Bourne Supremacy

Seems like a short list...maybe I lost some of the receipts or something. Unfortunately every one of these was rented from Blockbuster. They have a monopoly on DVD rentals where I live. As far as I know there isn't another video store within 20 miles that isn't a Blockbuster. There was one independent store for a while but the guy closed up 3 or 4 years ago now. I boycotted Blockbuster as long as it was possible. I did that because every time I went in they claimed I owed late fees which I know were bogus. I guess now that late fees are non-existent I won't have that problem anymore. I've considered using Netflix but usually renting movies is a spontaneous event. I don't know if I want to have to plan this stuff ahead of time and get my DVD's in the mail and all that. Maybe I'll try it and see if I like it. I still feel the less business I give Blockbuster the better.

Maywood 2007

Yesterday was the annual Maywood Earth Ride. I couldn't be less committed to the cause really. The earth? The Ellwood H. May Environmental Park? I don't care about that at all, I just like doing the bike ride. This year I did the 50 mile route again. They have 12, 25, 50, 65, and 100 mile routes. Some year I plan on doing the 65 but it wasn't this year. They call that 65 mile route a metric century. This year again it was windy as usual. The wind was primarily from the NNW and I'd say somewhere in the 10-15 mph range. Most of the first part of the route goes to the North and West. On top of that it was much colder this year than all 3 previous years that I've done this ride. I think I overheard someone at the start say that it was 45 degrees. I'm not usually out there biking in anything less than 60 degrees but I wasn't about to skip this just because it was cooler out. The last two weekends I've done some longer routes to test myself. Last weekend I did a 40 mile route on Saturday and a 50 mile route on Sunday just to see what it felt like. It felt pretty good. Saturday's route in Sheboygan has much more difficult hills than my 50 route but the wind was comparable. My average speed was 14.6 mph across 50 miles yesterday and a full 1.4 mph slower when compared with my 50 mile route from last Sunday. I felt at times like I was crawling along at 10 or 11 mph up some of those hills. Still I was smoking a lot of other riders. I got to one rest stop and wondered where everyone was. Then within a couple minutes the rest area was flooded with other bikers. I'm sort of left with the feeling that I could have gone further or taken a quicker pace. I could've done better. On the other hand if I compare myself with others I'm near the front of the pack. Someday when I get a lighter bike with thinner tires I'm really going to be out in front and kicking butt. Although I expect that if I move up to that 65 mile route I'll be with another class of bikers altogether.

DJ Sara

Does this kid do birthday parties? I got a birthday comin up in October.

The War on Zombies

Slowpoke Rodriguez

Occasionally my blog will be informative. Today's bit of knowledge that I am choosing to highlight is that the popular Speedy Gonzales Loony Tunes character has a cousin known as Slowpoke Rodriguez.
If what I read is accurate Slowpoke and his cousin Speedy are not shown on the Cartoon Network because the characters were deemed to be "offensive ethnic stereotypes". Well what is Elmer Fudd then?

Here is a Slowpoke clip from YouTube.

And here is a Speedy clip from YouTube.

Bobblehead #2

I got my second bobblehead of the year Friday. This time I got the more common pinstriped home uniform and not the powder blue visitor uniform like I did last time. The left fielder Ben Oglivie was the 9th of 13 bobbleheads given out throughout the year at Friday games.

We tailgated before the game and then sat in $7 nosebleed seats that were 8 rows from the very top. I thought it was actually pretty cool to be up that high. You can't exactly see the seams on the baseball or the laces on the player shoes but do you really need to to enjoy a game? I don't think so. Brewers won 2-1 and the hot dog won the sausage race. It was a good time.

Flavored Bread

This better not be from the Home Pride factory.


Home Pride is my bread of choice. Butter Top Wheat just like in this image. Just one mouse and that would be it. That would be enough for me to switch brands forever. My mom found a fly at the bottom of her coffee cup at a KFC somewhere down south once. Now she won't ever go to any KFC anywhere ever again. It's irrational. I could see if it was a beak, some feet, or an entire chicken head maybe, but a fly at the bottom of a coffee cup could happen anywhere. I'm not sure even if I found a McNoggin in my McNuggets that I'd stop eating at McDonalds. I'd at least make sure I got some sort of golden pass or something that allowed me to eat free at any McDonalds worldwide for the rest of my life.

Jogger's Nipple

I haven't posted my cumulative miles cycling this year yet, but without doing that now I'll just say that I'm really outdoing myself this year.

One side effect of that I'm experiencing is nipple soreness. I've noticed this before after some of my longer Saturday workouts I do during the winter at the gym on the cross trainer. I just shrugged it off and figured it was because my shirt rubbed. I never knew this had an official name until I recently looked it up on the internet. They call it jogger's nipple. It happens to marathon runners and joggers mostly but I guess anyone else really that's doing something athletic that would cause their clothes to rub. Even if the movement of my shirt across my chest is slight I can attest to the fact that it's enough after an hour and half or two on a bike that it gets to be irritating. I'm not bleeding like the dude in this picture but it's no picnic either. I'd call it relatively low intensity pain...maybe 1 or 2 on a 10 scale unless I forget about it and rub my towel across my chest after my shower. Then it's more like...I don't know...a 5 on a scale of 10.

The guy in this picture switched to NipGuards and I'll bet he's glad he did. I think I'm going to give the petroleum jelly method a try. I don't like the idea of slapping an adhesive anything to that part of my body.

Photo Dump

Since my last post didn't have any photos I decided I should throw up a post with a few.

This is Manuel Uribe. I think this is a "before" photo when he weighed 1234 lbs. I've seen this guy on TV on Sunday night on The Learning Channel a couple times. There's an entire one hour show about when he went on the Zone Diet and lost 440 lbs. I wonder what effects all that fat has had on his skeletal structure. From what I've seen on TV it appears that the way he sits is like doing the splits. His exercise is rolling around on his bed. Toward the end of the show he goes outside for he first time in years. A friend gets his bed up on a flatbed with a forklift and they go cruising around in his tiny little Mexican town. It's a big party.

It's amazing to me that this guy is still alive while at the same time there are sometimes athletes out there that die from heart defects that go undiscovered until it's too late.

This photo gives new meaning to the old adage, "You mess with the bull you get the horns". You can see the horn in there clear up to his knee. Once the adrenaline wore off that must've hurt like mad. Remind me never to go running with the bulls.

This is a wet cat. I don't have much to say about this other than I think that it's hilarious. I recommend a visit to to Google's image search page and conducting a search for, "wet cat".

Dark Stain

So from a post about a professor I never had, but maybe wish that I had, to a post about a professor I consider a dark stain on my experience at UW-Whitewater. I've always been a believer that your education is, in large part, what you make of it. Talented, knowledgeable, and respectable professors are good things but I think it's possible to come away with something from a course even if the professor sucked.

Doug Eamon is a dark stain on UW-Whitewater. This guy was the least objective professor I ever had. I first had him for a statistics course which I bombed. I wasn't able to overcome his crappy teaching. I later retook the course with another professor and had no problems at all with the material. I think about a year later I had professor Eamon again for a course they called "Experimental Psychology". The course was about conducting experiments, using statistical methods, and writing up papers with the results. It was a 5 credit course rather than the usual 3 credits. We had lab hours to conduct our experiments in addition to the lecture hours. During the 16 week semester we had 3 experiments to run and 3 papers to write about them. This course was essentially the "big one" that all psych majors needed to complete in order to graduate as a psych major. It must've been that he was the only professor that taught this or I'm sure I would have scheduled it some other way.

At the start of the semester he gave a real serious speech about cheating. He said he was going to do everything in his power to get anyone he perceived to be cheating expelled from the University. So this is where my story begins. About midway through the semester I got my second paper back and it didn't have a grade on it. I think it said "see me" on the second page somewhere and it had a big line on it. So I went to his office and he asked me where I got a portion of my paper from. He was accusing me of plagiarizing the entire introduction page of my paper. Since I couldn't give him an answer to his satisfaction he requested copies of all of my sources with highlighting on the areas that were pertinent.

His logic, as he explained it to me, was that my writing style was different than that of my first paper that I had turned in for his course. So my question was always this then....how did he know that I wrote my first paper? Of course neither of them were plagiarized, but I was learning first hand that logic wasn't one of professor Eamon's strengths. The fact of the matter was I had written my paper over a matter of weeks and the intro was one of the first items I had written. My writing process went from the beginning of the paper to its'end, and each day as I progressed I began by tweaking the wording around for everything I had previously written. By the time my paper was done I was very much satisfied with the beginning portions. I considered them to be very clear and concise. I had spent a great deal more time on this paper than I had my first. I agreed that they didn't have the same style. But why did that equate with being written by a different person in my professor's mind? Nevermind that he had never read any other papers of mine. Two writing samples was enough for him to come to the conclusion he had.

After I turned over all of my sources and explained how each of them did or did not relate to our experiment and what informational aspects of them ended up in my paper he still was not convinced. He continued to attempt to pressure me to confess to something I could not. At one point he said something to me like, "So I guess we've reached an impasse".

I spent some time familiarizing myself with the procedure that was undertaken when a student is accused of misconduct. I don't recall the details of it now anymore, but it involved the department head of psychology, a student representative...some sort of panel and so on. It never did get that far. Perhaps he got a second opinion and was laughed at. There was no way on earth he ever would have prevailed in such a setting. His position wasn't based on facts and since evidence simply couldn't exist, he would've had to fall back on this foggy logic about 2 papers that didn't seem to have the same writing style...and therefore must not have been written by the same person. I looked forward to the panel and to humiliating him but alas I was denied the opportunity.

Sometime before my third paper was due I requested feedback from him on my second paper so that I could proceed in proper form for my third paper. Eventually as the semester end was coming up he gave me a grade on my paper. There was something illegible written on the side near the beginning of the paper. If I had to guess what it read it may have been, "mistake". I think he said he graded my paper without regard to the portion of it he viewed as questionable. If I recall correctly he gave me a B or a B-.

I've discovered in recent years that the staff at UW-Whitewater can post webpages which I presume are hosted on University servers. The content of most of the pages relates directly to courses taught by the professors....course materials, the syllabus, etc. Some pages go further. One look at Prof. Eamon's page and it is apparent where he stands in the political spectrum. To the left would be an understatement. I shouldn't be surprised. To my recollection this was never apparent in the classroom, but then again that would have been back in 1995...smack in the middle of the Clinton era and long before Haliburton was a household name. I wonder where he stood when Ward Churchill came to speak at the Whitewater campus a few years back. Was he aware of the academic misconduct his ideological co-hort was involved in? Misconduct which ironically includes plagiarism. Only it's the real kind with evidence and everything.

Paula (P.B.) Poorman

I read in the paper recently that a psychology professor from UW-Whitewater was killed in a car accident. I was immediately drawn to read on since I am a UW-Whitewater alumni and I was a psych major. Turns out I never knew this professor but that would make sense since I graduated in '96 and I think the article I read said she'd been at the University for 10 years.

She was hit by 19 year old woman who was drunk, high on cocaine, and traveling at 120 mph. Her car was hit from behind and sent spinning out of control and rolling over into the oncoming lane. That's grim for sure.

http://www.nbc15.com/home/headlines/8215087.html

https://guestbook.uww.edu/

http://www.legacy.com/StarTribune/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=89877312

I failed

I went to my emission test last week for my truck. I passed the first part fine but I failed the gas cap test. Now I have to get a new gas cap and drive back to retake the test. Apparently my original cap doesn't form a good enough seal or whatever. I've been unknowingly allowing gas fumes to escape into our atmosphere. Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC's) they are according to what I read. I should send Ford the bill for putting such a crappy one on in the first place.

My car passed the test earlier this year. I got photos off of my computer again. I bring up the website on my computer before I leave and then when I get back I sort thru the cached internet files and pull out the images for the time period while I was in line. Shows here I was first in line for nearly 15 minutes while 5 other cars in the '96 or newer lane got to pass through. Maybe next time if it looks like I'm going to have to wait a while I'll get out and sit on my hood or do a little dance in that open middle lane like Napoleon in Napoleon Dynamite.

$$$ Money $$$

Lately it feels like I've been spending money faster than I can make it. After my new computer, a brake job on my truck, and an auto insurance bill all at the same time, I don't seem to hear anything jingling in my pockets. I've done some re-evaluating and I've concluded that all of this is in my head. I'm good at planning out my finances and I really can't complain about my position.

My assets that I have invested in the stock market are doing better than ever even after recent market declines. I have 2 accounts, one that my broker handles and another that I handle on my own. I pretty much let my broker buy and sell whenever and whatever he recommends. My account that is more under my direct control, I have with OptionsXpress. In the past my broker has burned me on a few stocks...Worldcom comes to mind, but we've made progress on a few others. I've burned myself on a few stocks too but I've made up the difference and more. These charts show 2 of my recent successes, Sunpower and Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold. I like to stare at them sometimes. (Click on them for the full-size chart.)

Sunpower was my broker's idea. This one wasn't on my radar at all. I got in at 38.18 last November so that puts me up almost 30 points if I sell it now.

Freeport McMoran was my idea. I found this one using my online stockpicking tool. I got in at 68.51 and in again at 75.12 on a little pullback this June.

Although it is very tempting, I don't spend any of my gains I just reinvest them. Yesterday was a real sweet market day for my stocks. I made more money in my OptionsXpress portofolio than I do in 8 hours of work. I wish that happened everyday.

I've heard Jim Cramer pushing FCX which can't hurt either. I watch his show on CNBC sometimes. He's more entertaining than anything else. I get some ideas on stocks from the show. Some investments he recommends I wouldn't touch, while others are genuinely good buys. I think the intro and bumper music for the TV show sounds a lot like a riff from the Led Zeppelin song, "How Many More Times". It's not exactly the same but there's a few bars in common in there. It's not as close to the same as Queen's, "Under Pressure" and Vanilla Ice's, "Ice, Ice Baby", but it's not so dissimilar that it wouldn't be noticeable to anyone familiar with the first Led Zeppelin album. There's a good chance too that it was someone else's riff before Led Zeppelin used in on that album. At the moment, Cramer likes Haliburton. I don't own it but I've been looking at it. I'm leaning more toward XTO which I've owned in the past.

Build1

This is my first post from my new computer. I built it myself. This was one item on my list of summer projects. My old computer seemed to be getting slower and slower for some reason. I didn't use a book or instructions from anywhere on how to build a computer I just figured that since I'm familiar with the various components inside a computer, how hard could it be? It wasn't really that hard at all. The only thing I did wrong was I didn't reset the bios to the defaults after I flashed to the most recent version. I just flashed the bios and then installed Windows. The only effect that it had was that my onboard audio didn't work. I was going mad trying to figure that one out. Windows just said that there was no audio device detected. I had all the bios setting correct and I checked and rechecked them. I thought at first I had gotten a defective motherboard but when I finally decided to reset the bios to the defaults and reinstall Windows everything worked out after that. Windows found the onboard audio before I got as far as the reinstall and it's been smooth sailing ever since. It doesn't say anywhere in the motherboard manual that you should reset the bios to defaults after you flash them. That seems sort of strange since I never changed any of the settings in the original bios to being with. Whatever. Rookie mistake I guess. I don't really feel bad that I didn't know that. Build #2 should be even easier now....whenever that is.

I gotta say this new computer really rocks. I don't wait for anything. Programs and documents load in an instant. Mainly I got this going because of another project I have in mind which is to transfer some videotapes to DVD. My grandfather used to shoot a lot of home movies with a film camera. This was before the days of regular VHS video cameras. When I was little we used to watch a lot of them on a projector screen when we got together on Sunday evenings. He had film of vacations my grandparents took and a lot of other family get togethers. All that sort of stuff that people take with video cameras now, only then it was film. Sometime in the early 90's he transferred a lot of what he had to VHS. Some of his films were getting old and deteriorating. He had this done at a camera shop and he did like a commentary track over it. We have 10 videos altogether of family history going back as far as 1938. I thought it would be an interesting idea to play around with transferring some of this stuff to DVD but my older computer just doesn't have the processing power to do that very efficiently. One time I authored a DVD out of a couple of movie trailers I ripped from some DVD's and it took several hours. I tried that same thing with my new computer recently and it took maybe a minute.

build1 details:
Case: Ultra Grid ATX, clear side
Motherboard: EVGA nForce 680i SLI; socket 775
Video Card: EVGA GeForce 7900 GS KO; 256MB PCIe w/Dual DVI
CPU: Intel Core2Duo E6420; 2.13Ghz
CPU fan: Zerotherm
Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR2; 2GB
Drives: Seagate 80GB and
HP 16X SATA DVD+/-RW with LiteScribe
Power: Ultra X-finity 600W
OS: Windows XP Pro
Monitor: 22" LCD Samsung SynchMaster 226BW
Mouse: Logitech MX Revolution
Keyboard: none yet; using borrowed Dell keyboard from work.
Speakers: Altec Lansing VS4121

I shopped at Dell first to customize a computer system to see what one might cost these days. I put together a pretty decent system and noted the dollar amount. Then I went shopping for parts and did the same thing. I decided to spend around the same as I would have on the Dell only I got a lot more computer for my dollar. Yeah it took some doing, getting it all together with unboxing everything and putting it all together getting up and running and all that, but for what I spent I think I did pretty good. On top of all that, now I have a feel for what I'm doing and knowing what I know now, I probably won't buy a prebuilt computer system ever again.

TigerDirect deserves some credit. They have great pricing, fast shipping, and the product reviews on the site were helpful when I was choosing components. They are worthy of a new link on the right side of my blog.

Happy Birthday U.S.A.!

You type. She speaks.

Link here. I had her say, "Eat cake!". Then she called me a stud. I don't remember typing that.

Similar thing here only without the visual.

Rena Sofer

I didn't know who Rena Sofer was until I looked it up. I was watching Heroes that I taped from TV a while back when I realized that flying man Nathan Patrelli's wife is the same person as Marilyn Bauer on 24. I watched 24 at 8:00 on Mondays, but in order to watch Heroes too I had to videotape it because it was on at the same time. If that's not a sign I watched too much TV over winter I don't know what is. So anyway, I'm watching Heroes from my videotape and I came to the realization that the same actress is on both Heroes and on 24. It took me until around the final 2 episodes of these shows to figure this out. That can't be all that common for an actor or actress to be on different shows at the same time that air at the same time on 2 different network TV stations. Technically neither role was a main character but still it can't be that common I wouldn't think.

I was completely wrong about Jack being dead at the end of 24. He's still alive but at a crossroads or something. The last 15 minutes of the finale was pretty lame. It was supposed to be all dramatic or something but instead it was really just boring and disappointing. Kind of a lame season of a good show. That's my opinion. Now it's over and so are most of the other TV shows I watched over winter. All of them except for The Shield and The Riches from FX which I think end next week. Then I can officially get off the couch and on with my summer and a bunch of projects I have lined up for myself.

Jessica McBride Fired

Jessica McBride was fired by WTMJ. I fixed my link to her blog on the right side of my page back to the link to her original blog from before it moved to the TMJ site. Her firing had something do to with a segment from her WTMJ evening radio show. She had invited Journal-Sentinal liberal columnist Eugene Kane to discuss the murder of a 4 year old girl in the inner city. He wouldn't come on her show so instead she did a fake interview where she asked the questions anyway but in the place of Eugene Kane's responses she played the sound of a chicken clucking.

24 Season 6 finale prediction

I'm predicting that Jack will die at the end of this season. The preview shows some kind of explosion. If it's not apparent that he dies I think his fate at the end of the finale will be ambiguous. In my opinion this season didn't measure up to the level of other seasons of 24. I still think the show is better than most of the rest of TV though and this season did have a few great moments. I'm still in shock that Milo got shot 2 weeks ago. That was a stunner...proving once again CTU headquarters is not a safe place to work.

I had a dream last night a Chinese man died right in front of me. It was at some kind of park like one of the Disney parts and I was there with some friends. I recognized him as a bad guy who had some connection with nukes and terrorism. It wasn't part of my dream but now that I'm awake I think it was probably Cheng from this and last season of 24. In my dream he melted to death like the wicked witch only it was much more graphic. The best way I can describe it is that his blood turned acidic and ate away all his flesh and bones. It was frothy and everything until there was nothing left but a puddle of blood trickling into a sewer drain. Everyone present was real shocked but relieved. I somehow doubt that's how Cheng will die in tonight's finale but I'm predicting he'll die tonight also. Perhaps in that same explosion as Jack they show in the preview.

My Bucket

Club on the Club

My dad and I went to the Brewers game on Friday compliments of ABF. I haven't been to a Brewer's game in like forever. I think I went the first year the new stadium was open but that's the only time I've been to Miller Park for a game so far. The Club on the Club area that we had our tickets for was first class. It's new at Miller Park this year. I've never been in one of those luxury boxes which is what I originally thought we were going to be in. This was similar to that only there was no glass. It's all open. It's more like an outdoor cafe overlooking a ball field. In addition to the usual ballgame food (brats, nachos, burgers, etc.) they had tons of other good food...a couple of buffet tables full. The food and 2 drinks were free and after that you paid for just the drinks. Two drinks were plenty for me but ABF had a tab going even if it wasn't. We have a new rep now so maybe we'll get to do this more often. I'm really hoping so.
Friday at the game they gave away bobble heads of Cecil Cooper. The Brewers are giving away bobble heads of the 1982 Brewers team as a promotion this year. The box it came in says there are 13 all together but I think that means 13 players. I think it's really 26 total because each player will have a bobble head with both a home and an away uniform. My dad and I both got away uniforms on our Coopers. This is picture I took of mine.

I just found this on the Brewer's web site:

All fans in attendance will receive a collectible 5 inch Brewers bobble head doll, featuring former Brewers player Cecil Cooper. 5,000 of the dolls will feature Cooper in the powder blue uniform, and the rest of the dolls will showcase the pinstripe uniform. This is the second in a series of 13 collectible bobbles featuring former Brewers players from the 1982 team.

No wonder I saw that guy on the way out looking for a trade if only 5000 out of the 50,000 or so they had were the powder blue uniform. I'm sort of glad I didn't make that trade. It would be cool if I could collect all of these but that probably won't happen. The Brewer's in '82 will be something I'll never forget. I was 9 and it was the first time in my life I was learning to follow baseball and to top it all off the Brewers went to the series that year. I can still remember all the regular players and their position on the field but the batting lineup is a little foggy now after 25 years.