Obama recently went off on McCain for his lack of technical prowess.  Meanwhile, Obama has “his people” set up a blog, a twitter, a MySpace, and bunch of other Web 2.0 garbage that I am 100% certain he has no idea how to use, himself.  And it really ticks me off, because it is then used to harass and annoy people who don’t want it.

     And this right here is where’s it’s an issue.  Obama keeps going off that McCain is “out of a touch” with technology and living in a world of twenty-there years ago, and yet Obama is out of touch with the very laws he’s being paid to help to shape and mould — and even then, doesn’t show up for work most of the time.

     Federal Statutes have declared that Campaign E-mails soliciting for donations fall under the category of “Commercial E-Mail.”  I have received no less than three of these e-mails per day for the last month — all from Barak Obama.  Despite my having opted out.  Multiple times.  To no avail.

     Here’s the basis of the Federal CAN-SPAM Law:

• It bans false or misleading header information.
• It prohibits deceptive subject lines.
• It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method.
• It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address.

     And it appears that there’s only one of those items the Obama campaign hasn’t broken!

     Oh, and it carries with it fines of up to $11,000 per violation, raking in a conservative estimate of nearly ten million dollars that Barak Obama owes in fines, plus State Recompense and the FTC-Imposed Civil Fees, which means that Barack Obama owes me $45,900.

     So McCain is out of touch with Technology … Obama is out of touch with Law, and the spirit of it.

     Which one’s the bigger sin?

     No way in Hell will I vote for someone who’s as notorious as Sanford “Spamford” Wallace.

     So seriously, Mr. Ospama, stop adding me to MySpace!  Don’t follow me on Twitter!  And first and foremost, quit sending me these damn e-mails!  And get out that check book — I could really use it right now, so I’ll settle for an even $45,000.

     One of the things you learn to stop doing when you move to another country is bitching about politics.  You’re an immigrant, an outsider, and in most cases, you can’t hope to understand the nuances of another country’s politics.

     Unless you’re an extremely astute bastard, like Craig Ferguson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdRVQ4xwwmQ

     He also re-iterates a point I’ve made a billion and a half times: if you didn’t excercise your Right to vote, then you Lost your Right to Bitch.  e.g. if you didn’t vote in the last election, no one cares about your disdain and comdemnation — STFU!

     Plain and simple.

     Oh … And if you’re a Senator who didn’t even bother to show up and vote on all the Resolutions you were supposed to vote on because you’re too busy blazing a campaign trail, you’re a total Asshat!  Not only do these Senators have a responsibility to vote on these issues, it’s their duty and their job to do it — especially when it’s a bill that’s at the heart of their campaign promises.
     And it’s interesting to note, when you go down the Voting Records to see that the Head of one of our two major political parties pretty much hasn’t voted on anything in like … eight years?  Apparently, the Jackass that represents him is a little more personal…

Tip: The astute voter and Patriot, Mushy, at The Silverbacks

     And the winner is… New Zealand!  

     After all, how can you trust a country which touts the “largest inland lake in the world, mate?”  “The deepest trench in the Earth, and the only place you can find glow worms, bro?”

     Yes, I’m serious … They actually believe that crap.

     Of course, you will be chastised by most any Kiwi for pointing out any larger lakes in the United States or a gigantic one in the Baltic region, the Marianas Trench or firefly larvae.

     Even though New Zealand did tie with Denmark and Sweden, I’m proud to have done my part…

     For whatever reason, the house I’m in now has some pretty bad wiring.  It’s a relatively new house — built in the 70’s, perhaps early 80’s — and shouldn’t have the problems it does. 
     Unfortunately, that’s one of the things you’ll always get into when you own a home.  There are quirky things about most every house.  In this one, the fuse box may even be a bit overloaded…

     Last Friday night, I had an overwhelming sense of dread.  I felt like someone close to me was in trouble, and there was nothing I could do.  I was distraught, and I couldn’t shake that feeling.  My car had messed up the night before, and just everything seemed to be going the wrong way.  And what should happen but every time I came into the room and sat down on the bed, the ceiling fan would begin this eerie whining, and shake violently back and forth.
     But it only happened when I came back into the room and sat down on the bed…

     I tested that theory seven or eight times, and finally decided to pull out the voice recorder and leave it running in the otherwise silent room for a few minutes… I mean, a little EVP never hurt anyone, right?

     And so, two things became obvious:

1. Those weren’t ghosts.  They were telephone signals.  There’s obviously a massive amount of Extremely Low Frequency radiation pointed at this upstairs room from “somewhere,” and somehow, it’s bleeding through.  Perhaps it’s the fault of bad grounding in this house’s wiring, or perhaps having a telecommunications transmitter inadvertently pointed directly at this room is the whole problem with the wiring.
2. The ceiling fan was never mounted straight, and it was extremely loose.  I opened and closed the door each time I moved from the bed, walking into the hallway, and just that amount of air pressure was enough to make the ceiling fan go crazy.  A few twists of the screwdriver fixed the problem, however, it’s still off balance… just not so much that the door makes it appear to be a murder weapon from the afterlife.

     This really made me give a lot more thought to the whole EVP phenomenon.

     Sure, you can make recordings in silence, and end up with all sorts of noises.  Ambient and background noises, wind and air pressure changes and other miscellaneous sounds that you wouldn’t normally notice become amplified.  Since the dynamic range of most microphones is significantly wider than that of the human ear, and the fact that the final recording becomes compressed to fit into an audible bandwidth — not to mention the problems of noise from the internal mechanism on tape recorders and sounds created by digital processing on voice recorders — you end up hearing all sorts of noises that can sound rather ghastly.  It’s the perfect illustration of the old saying, “ghost in the machine.”

     You simply have to take a scientific approach to this sort of thing, otherwise, you’ll end up convincing yourself of all sorts of crazy stuff.  As another old saying goes, “Enough research will tend to support your theory.”

     Inspired by movies like Stir of Echoes, Sixth Sense and White Noise, and entertainment television shows like Ghost Hunters, I know too many people who run around recording EVP.  Most of them are convinced that Ghost Hunters is real, as they’re unable to distinguish the difference between science, pseudoscience and entertainment. 
     These types also totally buy into most of the crazy conspiracy theories going around.

     But, like they’d assuredly tell me … I’m just too cynical… *rolls eyes*

     As for that “feeling of dread” I had Friday night (and through the weekend), I was more than right — in fact, I was dead on, right down to times.  As cynical as I might be, there’s still the fact that I perceive things that I shouldn’t be able to.
     You either get used to that or you don’t.

     If you’re using Pyzor to help you block spam (a lot of people use it alongside SpamAssassin), then you’ve probably run into these nasty “pyzor: check failed: internal error” messages in your maillog since July 21st.
     After digging into on my own a bit, I found two things.  The first was the “InternalError” was being caused by a corrupt “servers” file that contained nothing but “File Not Found” information.  The second was that the “discover” command line was returning:

downloading servers from http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/inform-servers-0-3-x
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File “/usr/bin/pyzor”, line 4, in ?
    pyzor.client.run()
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 991, in run
    ExecCall().run()
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 185, in run
    self.servers  = self.get_servers(servers_fn)
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 410, in get_servers
    servers.read(open(servers_fn))
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/client.py”, line 119, in read
    self.append(pyzor.Address.from_str(line))
  File “/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pyzor/__init__.py”, line 458, in from_str
    fields[1] = int(fields[1])
IndexError: list index out of range 

     Obviously, linking to non-existent files, especially in the /cgi-bin/ directory, is a bad thing.

     As a temporary measure, simply disable your “pyzor discover” cron job, and manually add “82.94.255.100:24441” into your “servers” file (wherever it may be with your configuration).