SeanK

Old Version

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

Moral of the Story

Be responsible for yourself!

New Version

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. All the networks show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on a talk show with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

A political activist stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” He then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake.

Politicians exclaim in an interview on a different talk show that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.

A senator gets their old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that the President appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients.

The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

Moral of the Story

Be careful how you vote.

I saw this sign at work and didn’t give it to much thought.

Then I saw this, almost identical poster, on the opposite wall. What is going on?

The guys over at Websurity present you with Uncomfortable Questions: Was The Death Star Attack An Inside Job? There isn’t a better way to communicate to the Entertainment Generation just how absurd the conspiracies surrounding 9/11 are than this.

Is this a cool company, or what? Ever since we shipped Windows Vista, these logoed cans of Talking Rain have been in the soda frig.

FYI - I just installed the Postie plugin for Wordpress and created the above post from my RAZR as an MMS message!! This should make it real easy for me to start putting pictures of the kids and stuff up on a more regular basis

I saw this picture and it made me think of friends who heat with wood, especially since it is getting really cold early this year.

Today is Primary Election Day in Redmond, Washington and there is a new kind of Democracy at work. A Democracy where only the technologically savvy are allowed to vote. And the best part is that we have managed to keep the plebs out surreptitiously rather than using any high profile methods that might attract attention to this new world order that is under construction.

Back when I was a kid growing up in suburban San Diego, California, I would often confuse Election Day with Flag day because you would see homes, churches, schools, or libraries absolutely littered with flags and signs that read “Vote Here.” It was exciting, and you could hardly miss it. All you had to do was stop by the Polling place nearest your home and vote, or register to do so in the future. Any old 18 year old, no matter how bright, could easily get involved in the democratic process.

Here is a picture of my polling place today taken from my cellphone across the street.

No flags, no signs, no nothing! Here is a picture standing right in front of the main entrance.

The only hint is a tiny litte sign on the inner left pillar that says Vote and then something asian underneath it. To find this polling place I had to search Google for this website and find the link that says “King County polling places” where I could download a PDF that you must be fairly proficient with Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader to read since the font is microscopic. The PDF contains the locations in order by district. (a 6 digit number with a hyphen between the second and third digit) You can decode this number from the mailing address label on your voters pamphlet if you were luck enough to have kept it.

Isn’t that sneaky? If they had instead asked people to complete a computing and internet competency test before allowing them to vote, there would be a riot. But not this way, no one will ever suspect. I fgiure this makes my vote count more since untold numbers of potential voters will never know or suspect that this day was any different from any other Tuesday.

I read a lot! I started reading (for pleasure) in College when I had a job working in a gas station booth on the swing shift during the summer with no good Calculus homework to occupy my time. I picked up one of Issac Asimov’s Foundation books to keep from going bonkers. Ever since, you can usually catch me half way through several different books. I’m reading about 5 right now. Consequently, my kids having acquired a love of books and can often be found throughout the house buried in some book. 

Anyway, I just finished reading a really good book. So good that I wanted to recommend it to others. David Bodanis, has written an awesome book titled, Electric Universe - The Shocking True Story of Electricity. David has selected some key discoveries (certainly not all) that have formed what we have come to know about electricity and how to harness it. Then drawing on the research he has done on the details of the people and places behind the events, David presents an extemely engaging narrative that draws you in as the story unfolds. David does a great job of describing the electronic processes involved in simple approachable terms that makes it an easy read for someone who is not an electrical engineer.

Anyway, I went ahead and subscribed to the Amazon Associate program to create the link on the sidebar so you can check it out if want. If enough of you buy it through the link I’ll get a gift certificate from Amazon to help feed my habit.

Whilst perusing my favorite homepage I came across 2 stories that are really interesting. I feel the ich to post something today, probably because it’is sunny in Seattle and I am trying to avoid work.

First, scientist believe they have discovered the oldest astronomy computer. How cool is that. I’ve often wondered how different life would be for me if I had be born out of time. Would I have been a mediocre farmer with an incredible untapped talent? It’s reassuring to know that computers, in one form or another, have been around for a long, long time.

Second, a different set of scientists believe figs were likely humans’ first crop. Now fig newtons have always been one of my favorite kinds of cookies so this doesn’t really surprise me. However, the article stated:

“These figs, however, do not produce seeds and can’t reproduce on their own. Reproduction can occur only if humans plant shoots. Thus, the existence of the figs means that husbandry was taking place.”

What I really wanted to know was how a plant that can only reproduce with human intervention can exist billions and billions of years while humans evolve to the point of being able assist them in reproducing. Does anyone else worry about these kinds of things?

Welcome to the new digs. Stretching myself to learn new things, I’ve changed over from managing my website with my own custom written ASP code against an Access MDB backend to using WordPress’ solution written in PHP against a MySQL backend. So far so good.