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Well, for those of that dont know, Jake, our horse, passed away back in September.  We had to put him down after he had been very ill for about six weeks.  We took him to a vet to try and figure out why he wouldnt eat, and it ended up being stomach cancer.

Cancer is unheard of in a 9 year old quarter horse.  He just wasnt old, he was just getting into life.  We had him for just under a year, but were and still are very attached.

He was a great horse.  He would go out in the pasture and run and run with me, come back and be calm enough for Illianna to ride by herself without even a lead.  He loved the girls, would protect Jessica, and tried to get in my lap once when I sat down out in the pasture.  He was very convinced he was was a 1500 lbs puppy dog.  He would always come up to you in the pasture, and give all he had when you had him under saddle.  He was the type of horse that would make anyone think they were amazing with horses since he just knew it all, with very little teaching.  He wanted to please which made it so easy and wonderful to be around him.

We have put up all the pictures we have of him at his picture gallery.  If you look at the one picture of him being led by Illianna, you can see how much weight he lost.  That was taken the day before we found out about his cancer and put him down.  He was our first horse, won’t be our last, and taught us that even though he didn’t live with us, he was a huge part of our life and has changed our family forever.  Jake, you are remembered, and will always be loved.

There are a lot of amateur web designers out there.  They post on forums, and advertise freakishly cheap prices, like $150 for a website.  The differences between them and those of us that do this professionally are too many to be named.  Obviously the pricing is a huge difference, they charge for an entire website what my hourly rate is.  But then again, I don’t really make just the brochure 4 page websites, we actually write custom applications that do very complex things ranging from e-commerce to mission critical business processes.

Another huge difference is the professionals actually stick to standards and try to keep up with trends and new technology, unlike the 15 year old designers working from mom’s house.  I found out recently about this “company” (LR Web Design).  First, they call HTML “coding” which is a complete misnomer.  And then talked down Dreamweaver, and yet their “code” is at least 10 years out of date.  No CSS, inline font tags, UPPERCASE tags, image maps for menus, and tables for very basic positioning.  Here is another one of their websites: http://knbcolo.webs.com/ .  They don’t even use a true host, but a free website company.  Let me fill you in, none of this is what you want your company to have on its website.  It is unprofessional and doesn’t really put your best foot forward.  But if you want a slow loading website on a free host with no custom anything, by all means go with one of these people.  Otherwise, go with someone with training, experience, and credentials, as well as a portfolio with real clients you have heard of.

Like wine & cars, you get what you pay for with websites.  I wouldn’t want my company looking cheap.

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I have been wandering around some of the freelancer websites looking for some programming/project management gigs to keep me busy, and I ran across this one on Freelancer.com:

“Want to make a website which features a different picture of a babe everyday.

Successful candidate:

• Must create and design the website
• Logo creation
• Provide 3000 original large, high quality photos with my watermarked logo
• These photos must be legal
• All copyright will belong to me
• Photos must automatically change as of 12:00 PM MST
• Must be able to and will be responsible for setting up the website with advertising program to ensure money is made from visitors”

The poster gave a max budget of $250….

Really!!!???

Let me make sure I understand…You want me to develop the software to power the site (admittedly very simple), design the look and feel of the site, create a logo, and come up with 3000 original photos of “babes” and then sign it all over to you, all for $250?  Then you want me to market it and advertise it?  What the heck do I need you for?  Let’s face it, you cant get 3000 images, even non-original ones for that price, but I have no idea what the photo shoots required would cost…maybe $25000?  For that many images there are going to be a lot of different girls, doing a lot of different things, in a lot of different places.  $25000 may be extremely cheap I don’t know.

I do know the person that posted this is delusional.  He/She wants to pay a paltry sum for someone to do ALL the work.  Usually clients have ideas, content, and know how to market their own stuff, but not in this case.  Maybe this person works in politics and thinks this is how the real work actually operates.

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Obama is out on the campaign trail trying to help the Dems keep Congress blue.  One of the things that appears to be creating a little backlash for the president, is that his reforms are not nearly as popular as he thought they would be.

When asked about that, the president responded, “We had to move so fast, we were in such emergency mode, that it was very difficult for us to spend time a lot doing victory laps and advertising exactly what we were doing because we had to move onto the next thing, …I take some responsibility for that,” said the president.

Obama, you douche, you are the leader of the nation, you get to take ALL responsibility for that.  First rule of leadership, “Everything is YOUR fault.” (source)  Do you honestly think the CEO of BP had anything directly to do with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?  No, of course not.  But is he responsible?  YES!

And here we are at the usual problem I have with a lot of the government programs, especially those pandered by the Democrats (but let’s face it, you Republicans are not innocent of this either):  Personal responsibility for your actions and the actions of your subordinates should be a foreign concept.  In a country where school teachers are trying to be parents, even dictate what medications the children should be on, is it really shocking the liberal president tries to dodge some blame?  Don’t worry about  doubling the national debt either, Mr. President, that is someone else’s fault too.

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If you work in the US, you get these letters every so often from the Social Security Administration to let you know what your benefits will be, or would be, based on wages, taxes paid, etc.  They are just depressing, since in my tax bracket, I actually put more money into SS than I will get back if I die before the age of 132.

Yes, that is right, I will never get back all that I put into SS.  Nevermind the fact I should be paid interest on my contributions.  Why was privatizing such a bad idea?

Anyways, I received one of these letters, and it had a section in it entitled “Will Social Security still be around when I retire?“.  Look to the right, there is a scan of this image.

I love how it says “Yes.” at the very begining and then goes on to try and quantify that answer with the basic assumtion you, the reader, didnt pass 2nd grade math.

So, according to this, the money will be gone in 2037.  I hate to point out the fact I dont reach age rull retirement age (67) until 2044.  Not inspiring a lot of trust with already failing in the numbers department.

Then it goes on to say that if nothing is done, in 2037, they should be able to pay about 76% of the benefits to which I am entitiled.  WHAT?!

So just to clarify, Social Security will run out of money ~7 years before I am at full retirement age, AND will only be able to pay 76% of the benefits scheduled, which already are only about 80% of what I paid in, with no interest.

How was the answer “Yes.” to the question “Will Social Security still be around when I retire?“?  You just said we will run out of money years before I am elegible to retire, and even then I wont recieve all that I should.

What have we learned?  First and foremost, like healthcare, the goverment has great ideas, really, they are good ideas, they just have no fricking clue on how to execute it.  None!

Secondly, the correct answer to the question “Will Social Security still be around when I retire?“, is “No.  Not really.”

If you want, contact your folks in Congress, let them know this is a bunch of crap, and now is the time to start fixing it, not 2037, or 2044, or whenever it is you will retire, or (God forbid), need disability.  And if you think you don’t need to save for retirement, go take a 2×4, hit yourself in the head, and start drawing disability now.  Learning to live on that income is the ONLY way you will not need your own retirement setup.

To everyone out there that thinks it is “cool” or “neat” to put music on your website, do the rest of us a favor, and don’t.  While I understand the aesthetic nature of some sound,  for the most part it is just annoying.  When online, I usually listen to iTunes, and the last thing I want is some hideously encoded streaming .wav file repeating the same 6 seconds of music over and over again.  Unless I really need to be on your website, I hit back on my mouse and try to immediately start repressing the memory that is your website.

At the end of the day, music requires a lot of bandwidth for those of you hosting the music files, a lot more than even a complex page (assuming your images are optimized, but don’t get me started on that today).  And for every Pro:fx out there, there are a 100 Hampsterdance websites.

If you aren’t an amazing DJ, or awesome Flash/Shockwave/Silverlight developer, do us all a favor, and leave the music off your website.  I like my thousands of MP3‘s, and I don’t force you to listen to them.

I admit, I like to find gigs on Craigslist.  There are horrible things on there, and some stupid requests (“I need a PMP certified Project Manager with 12 years industry experience that can start today for $12/hr.”), but every now and then, something decent appears.

I was browsing, wondering about competition and stumbled on this website : LeoScorp, LLC .  What a bad name for a company, but when you first look at the site, you are amazed they claim to be in the website building business.  Bad use of colors, background image is distracting, and let’s face it, picking something like Astrology to base your company name/theme/logo on could actually turn people off, especially down here in the Bible Belt.

Assuming you make it past all that, check out their About Us.  Does anyone care they swam together at a public pool?  Does that make them better developers/designers?  If this was their homepage, sure knock yourself out, but on a business site, keep it professional.

Then go to the Services page, where they have a stupid little computer extremely slowing typing out the content.  First, it is slow, I type much faster than that and read WAY faster.  Let’s go already.  I don’t have time to sit there and be annoyed at a little graphic you thought was cute.  Furthermore, doing that stuff isn’t even close to SEO helpful, so maybe it is a good thing you are on Craigslist looking for jobs since Google just isn’t working out for you.

But let’s face it, no matter how bad a site is, it could always be worse.

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If you, like us, spend any time driving in rural parts of Texas and New Mexico, you have seen the deluge of Pro-Life billboards and parenting ads.  I assume that out in the sticks there isn’t anything else for the teenagers to do but make babies, so the prevalence is a lot higher out there.

On our recent vacation I saw one that said “God is Pro-Life”, and man did that annoy me.  Is God Pro-Life?  If you are answering unequivocally “yes”, how the heck do you know?  Did you ask him?  Did he blog it?  Did you get the memo?  Last I looked we, humans, were given free choice by God, so the facts would tend to lead to the conclusion he is Pro-Choice.

For those of you that don’t know, I am Pro-Choice.  I don’t see it as my place to tell others what to do in their relationship, with their bodies, or with their lives.  That is a decision everyone should make on their own, and the consequences, one way or another, are between you and God.  No one else.  That same outlook also makes me for Gay Marriage, since again, who am I to condemn someone’s way of life.  If they are happy and not making me or mine unhappy, I don’t care who or what they do.

I am also pretty damn sure the Bible said do not judge people, love everyone, and treat everyone (and by extension their beliefs) with respect and generosity.

So to those of you running around all pissed at me now for saying God is actually Pro-Choice…why do you care?  Are you, personally, going to adopt each possible abortion?  If not, you don’t have a pony in the race and should sit down.

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Ok, starting this off, I probably have to preface my rant.  I am not saying Christian Science is full of crap, just that they have an aspect that just really annoys and pisses me off.  I am not saying I have all the answers or advocating one religion over another or downing any of them, except perhaps Islam since it is just retarded you cant draw a picture of Muhammad.

For those of you that do not know, my wife is Christian Science, and I of course love her.  I am really ok with CS, but this one thing just irks me.

At the beginning of each CS service, they set up what CS is, which is a good thing since it is a less traditional take on the Protestant movement.  Part of that little spiel is they explain that there is no pastor, just the Bible and their “textbook”: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. That book was written back in the late 19th century by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of CS.  They then explain that the reason for not having a pastor is “un-divorced from truth, uncontaminated and unfettered by human hypotheses and divinely authorized”.  Um…so you don’t want a pastor, because you don’t want your message contaminated by humans, and yet you read from a book that a human wrote that is admittedly not the Bible?  WTF?  Really?  Do you even bother to listen to yourself?

Just to reiterate, pastors are bad because they speak what they think with the Bible as a guide, fettering the message if you will, so instead we read only from two books, one of which a mortal non-divine woman wrote about 120 years ago.  If you have never read the CS book, you should.  It is basically her responses to the scriptures.  For example…

Bible
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. – Matthew 5:5

CS Textbook
Whatever text the “Mother Church” in Boston decides will be the response.  A few weeks ago it something to do with authority which didn’t make any sense to me, since it just didn’t seem relevant.

So yes, they do “fetter” the Bible, and God’s word, which I am honestly OK with since I go to church.  Let’s just not start off every single sermon message thing with a hypocritical statement.  There is enough of that to go around in organized religion as it is.

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Ok, Jess and I watched Twilight New Moon the other night and I am still in a ball in the corner trying to understand if there was a point to those 2+ hours that I just missed.  I have finally come to the conclusion that no, there is no point.  The entire movie could have been made into about 12 minutes, because the rest of the time all we got to watch was one character or another staring off into the distance.  For the record, if it was even a slight surprise to you that Jacob was a werewolf, you are a mental defective and should stick to watching Dora the Explorer that way the plot is linear enough for you to follow.

Let’s go through a checklist of what it takes to make a Twilight movie:

Acting?  Nope.
Plot?  Nope.
Anything surprising at all?  Nope.
Wasting lots of time with montages as if that makes a movie?  Check.
Lots of staring into the distance?  Check.
Vocalizing the obvious?  Check.
Taking a 2×4 to your head to make sure you have a low enough IQ to enjoy Twilight?  Check.

The moral to the story is, if you drool on yourself, you will enjoy the movie.  Otherwise….have some dignity and watch Battlefield Earth instead.

The only way I may watch another one would be if it was like this: