Month: November 2011

Calling Bullshit on This One

According to TechCrunch, retail spending is up over last year.

Thanksgiving brought record online retail sales for the holiday, with spending up 39.3 percent over Thanksgiving 2010. And today, IBM Coremetrics data shows a 24.3 percent growth in online sales on Black Friday compared to the same period last year.

Yeah. I don’t think so and here is why.

1. Unemployment has been steady at around 9%. That means that every week 9% more Americans are out of jobs. The numbers aren’t getting any better.

2. Food versus Retail purchases. I’m pretty sure that the massively unemployed are concentrating on buying food rather than anything else. Keeping their homes, cars, and the electricity on are going to win out over the black friday shopping craze.

3. Common sense. Common sense should tell you that retail sales HAVE to be down. Stores are going out of business at a record pace. Companies that are still keeping their heads above water are not hiring.

All the signs and environmental conditions point to a retail sales season that might make it out of the red and into the purple but certainly not the black.

Global Warming Just a Bunch of Hot Air?

I’d write more about this but I can’t stop laughing.

The hottest hoax around

via The Register…

Climate scientists funded by the US government have announced new research in which they have established that the various doomsday global warming scenarios are in fact extremely unlikely to occur, and that the scenarios considered likeliest – and used for planning by the world’s governments – are overly pessimistic.

Hmm. At what point do we begin to sue people like Al Gore for perpetrating and forcing a known fraud on the American people? Charges of exploitation, theft by deception, perpetrating a hoax for the purpose of personal financial gain, and I could go on and on.

Scare of the Month

I drink coffee so much that we had to get a Commercial grade Keurig that is tapped directly into our water system so that we don’t have to worry about “filling up” the coffee maker with water.
 
It’s great. Insert a K-Cup with whatever flavor of coffee, tea, apple cider, or hot cocoa you happen to fancy at that moment and in a minute or so, you have a fresh brewed cup.
 
I made a cup of my favorite (Chocolate Glazed Donut Coffee) this morning and after my cup was finished brewing, I couldn’t help but notice that the pump stopped working. The pot wasn’t bringing any more water into the water collection thingy (that IS a technical term).
 
Of course, my mind started racing. I have a guest coming. She’ll be here for 5 days. How will we make it without a coffee pot? Someone must be called, but who? What is my backup plan? What will I drink for 5 days?
 
I turned the pot off and stewed for a few hours.
 
I went downstairs and turned the pot back on. It worked just fine.
 
Panic attack was not completely avoided but the coffee pot lives.
 
Isn’t that all that matters?

Earth Day

I wrote the following paragraph about Earth Day back in April. It was a part of a much larger article that I never released. Not sure why I didn’t release it. This was good stuff. 

 
Earth Day. You may celebrate Earth Day and celebrate mother Earth but I can assure you that Mother Earth will not hold a “Human Day” for you. In fact, at the pleasure of Mother Earth we will suffer plenty of death and destruction in the upcoming year. She doesn’t care about you. So, hug as many trees as you like. I doubt they will come to save you when the tornado sucks you out of your house in the middle of the night and deposits you into a neon sign on Borneo Blvd. Pretty sure she won’t give a rat’s ass about the iPod in your back pocket either. 
 
Every once in a while I must bow to my occasional misplaced brilliance.

Not Blogsy’s Fault

I recently blamed Blogsy for completely destroying the formatting on a post I wrote about internet radio. I jumped the gun and in the end, it wasn’t Blogsy’s fault after all. It was my website provider for stuckatmydesk.com. ALL of my other sites are on a different server that I have complete control over. My personal website was hosted somewhere else and I didn’t have total control over it.
 
I have since changed that. I’ve moved the site back to MY servers and Blogsy is working just fine.
 
I must apologize to Blogsy. Sure, you make me angry in other areas but you DO fundamentally work well on the iPad 2 so I actually have very little to complain about.
 
The Actual Issue
 
I believe the problem was with the server configuration itself. I reinstalled WordPress both automatically through the administration panel and then manually using FTP and neither one of those solutions worked or made a difference.
 
I changed the DNS servers and tried posting something and it worked just fine.
 
Combined with the extremely slow loading times I got last night around 8:00 pm, the decision to move things off of that provider’s servers became even more of an imperitive.
 
Blogsy is highly recommended and you can get all of the latest news at blogsyapp.com