Brent’s Thoughts

Continuing with my tradition of posting really important things with mundane titles, I figure Maxx will love this one.

That is right, Pauline and I went to the doctor today for the start of appointments for our first child. She had taken several over the counter pregnancy tests about a month ago and passed them, but we were still a little cautious that it might not be. She took one at the doctor today and passed it without even studying so we are calling it official.

They marked her as 10 weeks into the pregnancy and that her due date is set for June 24th right now. Apparently, it is a 40 week process. All of that was based on a little fuzzy remembering and no tests, so I don’t know how accurate it can be considered. Since she is supposedly 10 weeks in, they scheduled an appointment next week to see if they could find a heartbeat. I am a little worried that they aren’t going to be able to find one, because I am not really sure that she is really 10 weeks along, but they are the people that do this all the time so I am going to stick with their judgement.

We don’t know if it is a boy or a girl yet, but I am officially opening the doors for name suggestions.

And no maxx I have already tried Maxx and Christopher, and I don’t think either are going to get by the mother’s power of veto.

Well that is about all that I know right now. They took blood for lab work and such, but obviously none of that is back yet, so I can’t really tell you any of the results of that.

I stumbled across this on Snopes.com while I was looking something else up.

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/carrots.asp

In summary the reason the myth about carrots being good for your eyes was started was as a way to hide the British development of RADAR. They instead told everyone that they could spot the Nazi planes so far out because their gunners were eating lots of carrots.

That is perhaps one of the coolest stories behind an urban legend I have ever heard.

Well maxx has finally decided to call it quits on his webhosting company. That means I had to spend some time looking for a new host. I had already looked at Dreamhost.com a few times so I picked up an account with them. Everything works great and while I mourn the loss of my free hosting with maxx the change will allow a few things to happen around here that I have been putting off.

The system that Dreamhost provides is great and even with the low level hosting plan that I took, I have all the features that I had on maxx’s servers, including shell access. I moved my blog by just using mysqldump on maxx’s machine and then running the resulting sql file on my new account on Dreamhost after I scp’ed it to the machine. Worked great.

If you would like to sign up with them and help me out a little you can do it with this link: Dreamhost.com

I also had to move Coachpowell.com over there too.

Before you go and vote today it might worth your time to watch this show from HBO. It is scary how easy it is for people to screw with these computer machines. It is also scary how in bed these companies seem to be with the republican parties.

There is seriously no way I would vote on either a touch screen machine OR a optical scanner machine. They all suffer the same problems and have the same companies behind them changing the votes.

This is one of several situations that computers are not the answer. People need to look at the votes. They need to be counted out in the open.

FOR GODS SAKE THE TOTALS ARE STORED IN AN ACCESS DATABASE IN PLAIN TEXT. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS OPEN THE DB FILE AND CHANGE THEM!!!

It is truly unbelievable. I mean just unbelievable.

*EDIT*
HBO just put the show up on Google Video

and I found this on the blackboxvoting.org site:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/44856.html?1162662053
I thought this was pretty interesting too:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/44990.html?1162860096

*EDIT*
Found this on MSNBC : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15590530/

there is a really interesting paragraph in there:

Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts there. County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the machines were programmed incorrectly.

Those cards are the same cards that they show being modified in the Documentary and changing the election results.

*EDIT*
Wow. Now there is video of them putting these cards in people’s personal laptops and such:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/44859.html?1162945709

On a lark, I did a search for “Adaptec 1420sa” the other day and was surprised when I found that my post on the Adaptec 1420sa is the number two hit right under Adaptec’s own site.

That is pretty cool and maybe, just maybe, it might effect them a little, but I doubt it.