January 09, 2006
Posting
Two reasons my posting has been somewhat sporadic the last few days is that I've just bought a house and have been addressing a barrage of moving and logistics issues, and the loss of posts when trying to publish via the less-than-adequate access provider outsourced by the hotel I've been staying in for the last month while finding, buying and equipping the house.
There's a long way to go before all my plans for making it a home reach fruition and today is going to be a busy one as well, but the satellite broadband is up and I'm moving in today, so by tonight or tomorrow I should be back to posting.
In the meantime, I will leave you with an enlightened and encouraging analysis of the year ahead for Iraq by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad.
Posted by Seth at 07:28 AM | Comments (4) |
December 11, 2005
Technical Difficulties
The hotel I am presently staying at in Charlotte, NC is having a "jump" problem with their ISP, and having just lost a lengthy post as a result, I will be temporarily refraining from blogging while Level 2 technicians at the outsourced(as usual) Internet service company attempt to correct the problem.
Posted by Seth at 11:06 AM | Comments (4) |
September 30, 2005
Lack of Posting{Again}
The past week, I've been staying at the Doubletree Suites Times Square in New York, where just because they say they feature high speed Internet doesn't make it altogether so.
To be fair, they do have wired Internet, as most large hotels through an outside firm. Theirs, however, was a complete nightmare -- nearly everything I tried to do encountered "Cannot find page," or "Page unavailable," even such mundane tasks as deleting an email, commenting at another blog, opening an email, replying to an email or accessing my gmail.
I attempted to post several times and the posts were lost as soon as I tried to publish them.
I finally reached the boiling point and got things moving here between the outside company's tech support and the hotel's engineering department, and it turned out that there was some intense technical problem in the hotel's server that involved bandwidth and some other factors well above my own IT knowledge base.
They seem to have done something, what I don't know, that makes the system here work better, though not enough so to throw a major party over, as much as I'd like to just for partying's sake. There are still significant problems.
But then, for those of you who are planning to come to New York and are looking for a hotel, I can't say I'd recommend Doubletree Suites. This is my second time dealing with this chain, the first being about two and a half weeks ago when I attended a conference in Orlando and upon arriving at a Doubletree there, found that they'd screwed up my reservation -- this time was different. They had the accommodation I'd requested, but...
Unlike in other large hotels I've stayed at, these folks have too many employees who don't speak sufficient English in positions where they should, given the fact that this is the U.S. of A., where English is coin-of-the-realm. On too many occasions, orders I put in or things I requested were interpreted quite differently than what I had asked for.
Earlier today, I received a call from the front desk telling me the debit card I'm using here had been declined and they needed a second form of payment. This was impossible, trust me, and I called my bank and was reassured that they had not declined anything. So I called the desk back and had a short conversation with them, and it turned out that they had screwed up by trying to use an approval code a second time, and that never works. The desk manager straightened that out in a hurry.
There were a few other screwups I won't bother getting into.
One of my other gripes has been the fact that for a shameless $2.50 per cup, they serve some cheap, cardboardy canned coffee that prompted me to go out and buy a pound of Starbucks for use in the in-room coffee maker. At $379.00 a night, you'd think they could at least spring for some decent coffee, but these folks are too cheap and greedy for that. I've had better coffee than theirs at greasy spoons in poor, sleazy neighborhoods.
The employees in this hotel are friendly and outgoing and attempt to be as helpful as you could want, but the organization here is a complete goatfuck and they can only work with what they have.
To their credit, they did back out the charges for the lame Internet access, which comes out to $10.00 a day.
For all I know, this post may not make it to the Web. If it does, great.
In short, this is the last time I will ever stay at a Doubletree and I'll most definitely tell friends about the mistake it would be if they did.
Tomorrow, I'll be heading up to Boston for three days, to a great hotel that promises first class Wi-Fi.
I will continue posting from there.
Posted by Seth at 05:48 PM | Comments (2) |
September 22, 2005
Crow, As A Delicacy
On the 19th, I posted a forward titled Did You Know? without examining all the facts. Remember the adage that "assume makes an ass out of ume?"
I was instantly called on it by fellow blogger Pat'sRick in my comment section, and he added a couple of solid links to back him up.
In the forward I posted, the author defined many of the friezes and other symbols as connoting religious reference. In addition to Pat'sRick's links, I did some further research and while Moses holding two tablets of stone does appear, the Ten Commandments are not engraved in the tablets.
So, I offer both my thanks to Pat'sRick and my apologies to any readers who might not have been as well informed as my fellow blogger from Alabama.
Blogger Dan Trabue, of A Payne Hollow Visit, who disagrees with me on everything no matter what but is well intentioned and well reasoned on his own side of things, commented that:
Did you know that James Madison also said:
"What has been the fruits of Christianity? ...Superstition, bigotry and persecution."
Did you know that John Adams said:
"This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it."
I'm in the 86% and yet I don't want the Ten Commandments of my God taken in vain by a secular society. So, maybe throw me over with the 14%?
And, who knows? By the time you throw in the separation of church and state fans like Baptists, Anabaptists, some Methodists, Unitarians, and other various members of the 86%, you'll have a much larger group who don't want the Ten Commandments co-opted by The Empire?
And my reply was:
Dan--
I believe that the Bible{both Testaments} played a very large role in shaping both the society and laws that resulted in the founding of this nation, hence a lot of references to God in our original institutions.
I won't argue that there has not been abuse in the form of harsh excesses along the way by governments using religion to shape policy(look at the Church of England, early Catholicism, fundamentalist Islam in all its 'peaceful' glory), but on the whole, particularly in the west, our society has evolved in its benevolent form because of the values taught in the Bible.
I do not see Biblical references, which promote decency, by our government as the merging of church and state. While The Ten Commandments
promote God{I am the lord thy God, Thou shalt have no other gods before me, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain}, they do not tell you which religion you must specifically pursue to worship Him, and the commandments that do not make reference to God promote living as what common sense would define as leading an honest, decent life.
Prayer in public schools, at least from my experience as a young'n, never involved the advocacy of any particular religion, nor was praying even mandatory; There was simply a moment of silence in the classroom.
Today, those same atheists who ban western religion in any form from schools make Koran studies mandatory in many schools. Why is that okay?
Personally, I believe this entire issue of "seperation of church & state" has been blown up to the point of paranoid overreaction by people whose agendas go further than just that issue. The last time religion was ripped away from a society that society became communist, and the countries that followed it down that road did the same, because there is no room for God, Whose existence might share loyalty with govt, in a totalitarian regime. Communism is an extreme form of socialism, and those same people who are waging war on God, in a manner of speaking, are liberals who are fighting tooth and nail to transform the great system of govt we enjoy in America into a socialist one.
And yeah, even though the forward I posted may well turn out, according to PatsRick's comment above, to feature several inaccuracies(which I will address in another post, and put them right where indicated), the majority of Americans believe in including references to God in our national institutions.
That does not mean the govt is being run by a church, it simply confirms that America believes in God. If a minority does not, well, in an environment of democracy, the majority rules.
FYI, I am Jewish. I don't practice as devoutly as I might, though I try to live as I was brought up to live. My point here is that unlike other Jews who are liberals, I fully support the idea of America as a Judeo-Christian society.
Basically, the author of the forward in question was trying to make the point that I made in my reply to Dan's comment, that America was founded on religious principles. Whom do you suppose the pilgrims were thanking on that first Thanksgiving? Hint, a three letter name, and the same entity we've thanked every Thanksgiving since. One of the things I thanked Him profusely for was my grandmother's awesome chestnut stuffing. :)
I'm fanatical about looking at potential coincidences, and here's something I've noticed: Ever since the atheists won their battle to take God out of our public schools, there has been serious deterioration in a vast number of children's respect for authority figures, parents and one another as well as a massive increase in violence among young people. Are these issues related, or coincidental?
Posted by Seth at 05:38 AM | Comments (9) |
August 30, 2005
Lack Of Posting
I haven't posted the last few days due to a mad scramble to get my affairs in order as I'm leaving on a lengthy, multistate trip tomorrow morning, my itinerary including, among other places, Washington DC, 6 - 9 September, to support Judge Roberts at a rally/counter rally(left wingnuts and other undesirables vs Right Thinkers).
Here's how we handle these things on the right: 
The left, however, is more inclined to do battle thus: 
Anyone wanting to know details about the rally should go to http://rightmarch.com/
I'll be posting again as of tomorrow night or the following morning from Chicago.
Posted by Seth at 06:35 PM | Comments (9) |
