Various Rants and Such

12/30/00 - WE HAVE SNOW! After the last couple years of getting nothing, we are finally getting snow here in CT. Where I live we are close to the ocean so we miss alot of snow that they get further north so when we get snow like this, it's great. Were only supposed to get between 6-12 inches but it's windy so we might get some killer snow drifts and those are cool! Christmas this year was fantastic! Jessika was able to fly in and be with me for the holiday and stay for a couple days. Although she got sick and I got sick afterward, it was worth it. She fly in the night of the 22nd and I left extra early to pick her up thinking I would hit traffic on the way. I didn't hit any traffic until I got into the airport then it was slow going. But, I got there on time, picked her up and it was all good times from there, except the getting sick part but I was able to take care of her and that was cool. Jeff, Andrea, and Anna were all down and got to visit, I wasted no time getting my precious Anna-Time and was able to keep her smiling every time I saw her. A quick raspberry and she was smiling! God, I love kids.....maybe it's because I still think like one that I get along so well with them, who knows. Jess and I then got to met Sarah's new boyfriend and hang out for the night, it was cool. Not much else going on, news is dull, Bush is picking his cabinet, Israel and the Palestinians are still fighting, bombs were blown up in some south Pacific nation....yada yada yada. Well, thats it for me, later.

11/25/00 - I have finally discovered one of the greatest programs in the history of mankind! It's a program called Web Washer. This program works in conjunction with your web browser, be it IE, Netscape, or the greatest of all, Opera, and makes it so banners and "pop up" windows don't work! I have a 56K modem in my computer but because of the crappy phone line, it only connects at about 28.8 and it can get kind tiring to wait for the page to load with all the banners and junk. For now, I'm not looking into a cable modem because I don't see the need to shell out the money for it. So, my brother mentioned to me about a program he found that makes it so banners don't load and I thought that would be great. While surfing today, I found this program and it's AWESOME. I highly recommend anyone who is having slow connections or just a slow computer, to get this and use it religiously!

11/11/00 - Four days after Election day and still no President E-Lect! Well, this is just f***ing great! It's no wonder I didn't vote for either one of them, and no I didn't vote for Buchanan either. The problem is mainly in Florida although some other states may want to recount their votes as well cause it was "so-close" and there may have been irregularities. Then there is Palm Beach County in FL that had a so-called "confusing" ballot that people may have voted wrong. Well, did they LOOK at it, did they STUDY it before voting to make sure it was right? NO and now they want a REVOTE!!!!! NO WAY! I made mistakes on tests in High School but that doesn't mean that after the fact I can say so and do it over! This is like a kid on a school playground screaming "DO OVER" because he didn't like the outcome. They have counted and recounted and Bush comes out on top each time. Now lawyers and stepping in and threating lawsuits. I must quote the Simpsons here "I've said it before and I'll say it again, Democracy simply doesn't work."

11/11/00 - I got a nice surprise when I went into work this Friday morning. The drain outside the building was clogged and with all the rain that had accumulated from that night made a huge puddle out front. This lead to water seeping down the foundation and leaking into the basement. Yarn was soaked, the carpet was soaked, water was dripping from the ceiling over the power, phone, and data lines, it was a mess basically. Thanks to action by a number of employees, including a new one who was just into his second day, we got it cleaned up and the DOT came out and fixed the drain so it would stop leaking. It's kind of scary to think what might have happened if water got into certain power lines and shorted something thus starting a fire. We have sprinklers downstairs but still, it's a scary thought.

11/11/00 - Just some other tidbits. The Russian and Norwegian divers have called off the search for any more Kursk bodies. The conditions are too dangerous so they left. Now the ship has large holes in it and it's just sitting there, anyone can potentially go into it, unless it's being watched which I hope it is. I started Xmas shopping early this year at the encouragement of Jess, and I can't wait to finish. It will be nice for once not to have to wait till the very end. Another footnote about work and computers, well, longer than a footnote. We currently use a Pentium 100Mhz computer as our UPS station, where we process shipments to customers. A week or 2 ago, we received a upgrade to the UPS program and I tried to install it since I am the computer guy there at the moment. After fighting with it and the computer for about 20 minutes, the computer stopped booting up! I WAS PISSED! I discovered that when I ran a Scandisk during some troubleshooting, it had moved files indiscrimanently into folders and mixed them all into a mess. I have no idea why to this day it decided to self destruct itself. Long story short, I got UPS back up and we are now in the process of getting 2 new computers. One for UPS, and new one for Bud, and his old one, a Pentium II I believe will become a dedicated Internet work station! I'm excited because that will make it easier for me and him to work at the same time. Now as it is, he has to work some where else, which he is fine with, so I can work on the website. But a dedicated station will mean I can spread things out and keep better organized with what I am doing!

10/27/00 - Wow, it has been a while since I updated this! Well, I have been busy with work and stuff plus I haven't been in a ranting mood. I'm not in much of one now either, but here it goes. The Presidential Election is almost upon us......whoopee. I'm tempted to either not vote at this point or vote for Nader, I just don't care anymore. Bush, I think, is the lesser of 2 evils, but whatever he says now won't matter once he moves in to the White House. Then he can do what he wants, They began pulling bodies out of the Kursk the other day, finally. They have pulled out 5 that I know of. One of them had a letter that said that at least 23 survived the initial explosion or problem and survived long enough to write the letter before dying. Thats not what the Russians had thought but I think they probably wish it had now that they have to say that the sailors suffered a slow and probably agonizing death. My niece Anna turned one this month, I can't believe it's been a year already....good god. It feels like last week that I was driving up there to see her for the first time. My Great Uncle Mike passed away after a long illness. That was very sad but it was really a matter of time. He will be missed. I bought a book online that was written by a relative and it's about my Dad's Mothers family line. It's very fascinating. I'm discovering my relatives in different wars, 2 being killed by lightning, etc. It's very interesting. When I get around to adding all the names to my Family Tree, I'll upload them to this site. Well, thats it I guess.

08/19/2000 - About one week ago today, the Russian Nuclear submarine Kursk, a Oscar Class Sub, sinks in the Barent Sea in the Arctic Circle, North of Russia in about 350 feet of water. It was on a training exercise and not loaded with any nuclear weapons, thank goodness, but did have torpedo's. The sub is about the length of a football field. Hoping people were still alive, the Russian Navy jumped into action to try and rescue the crew that may be alive. There was a explosion that was measured on the Richter Scale at a 3.5 when the sub went down. May different speculations abound about the cause. Some say a W.W.II mine hit it, some say the sub hit another ship or sub, maybe a torpedo exploded inside the ship, etc. The video taken of the sub underwater shows heavy damage to the front of it, a gaping hole so you can see inside a bit. They think half the ship is flooded, and the rest of the people, in the other part of the ship, are dead. After the disaster, some tapping could be heard, but that has stopped. Both hatches are too mangled to gain access to the inside. The Russian President, Putin, was on vacation when this happened and stayed on vacation for about 3-4 days after the news. Now, granted, he really can't do anything anyway, but the people were looking for answers and he was away. Not good publicity. By now, they figure everyone is dead, it's sad. I feel sorry for them and their families.

08/19/2000 - Joseph Leiberman, a Senator from CT, was chosen by Al Gore to be his running mate for the White House. Almost as soon as this news was official, the press jumped on the fact that he was Jewish and thats all that was said for days. "Is America Ready For A Jewish Vice-President?" OF COURSE IT IS! This is the 21st Century (20th actually for all those purist like my brother) were ready for alot of things, we just need to give the man a chance! I want to know where he stands on the issues, not what religion he is! I DON'T CARE! Some people do I guess but it makes no sense. If a woman were to run and she made me feel she was the right choice I would vote for her! If a black man or woman ran, I would vote for them too! It's all about the issues when you run, not what religion you are. Of course, this argument can't be held up for other things, if he did bad things before he was president that I feel would make him a bad president, I wouldn't vote for him at all. David Duke, a ex KKK Grand Wizard is a good example. I would never have voted for him cause I think he did a bad thing joining them in the first place.

08/19/2000 - Why am I classified as White and not European American? Years ago, I'm not sure when, it became "Politically Correct"(God I hate using that term!) to call Black people African Americans. Now, thats all fine and good, but who is to say that all the "African American" people actually had relatives who came from Africa? You want me to believe that early on Africa was the only continent in the world with Blacks? I don't think so! Now, we also have Spanish Americans, Mexican Americans, etc. but I am still just White! My ancestors all came over from European countries, I have the records to prove most did anyway so, in my mind, I'm a European American! If a black person can call himself African American because his great great great great great great relative came here from Africa, one way or another, then I can call myself European American for the same reason! From now on, when it asks for denomination, if it doesn't say European American, I'm choosing Other!

08/02/2000 - It's time I weighed in on the whole Napster debate and bought something else to light. Napster is under fire from bands like Metallica because there service allows people to swap songs back and forth over the computer without people paying for the music. This is totally ILLEGAL! The snot nosed, geeky, internet brats who use this service say that they should have to pay for the music because they only want "one song" and shouldn't have to buy a CD for that. Well, thats not for them to decide! This is how the bands make their money for god sake! If I wrote a book that had diagrams, I would be pissed if someone took the book, scanned the diagrams, and gave them away to anyone who wanted them and said, well, it's not up to you to decide if I should buy the whole book........your wrong, it IS for me to decide, I wrote the book! I'm sure you don't work for free and neither do I. This brings me to my next subject, knitting patterns. I work in a needlecraft store and we carry a good deal of patterns. The other day, a article appeared in the LA Times about groups of woman on the Internet who are swapping patterns back and worth. They scan the pattern and make it available to anyone who wants it. This is also ILLEGAL and it's called stealing. The designer who made the pattern makes a living off it's sale, now that these penny pinching, holier than thou housewives are making companies go under cause they don't feel they should have to pay the measly $5-7 for a pattern! They may say $5-7 dollars doesn't add up but it has cost one company that I know of about $200,000 in ONE YEAR! Thats enormous! Ya know, if trends like this continue, maybe I'll walk into a car dealership and drive out with a new Dodge Viper and leave behind the passenger seat, explaining that I shouldn't have to pay for the car because I only wanted it with one seat! These people are nothing but common thieves and should be dealt with accordingly!

07/29/00 - I have decided there is just about no way in hell I will vote for Al Gore this election year on the sole basis of his tax cut plan and nothing else. I know that may sound stupid, but hear me out. I was flipping through the Wall Street Journal the other day and came across a article comparing Gore and Bush on issues like Taxes, Abortion, Gun Control, Defense, etc. The taxes are what could my attention, cause frankly, abortion does not effect me directly. Thats for woman to decide, not men. Would we sit by while woman decided if all men should have circumcisions or no? Anyway, Bush's tax cut plan basically calls for a across the board cut on alot of taxes and things that all effect the middle income families, like mine. They also explained Social Securities and Senior Citizen stuff, but it gave me a headache to read and I had no clue what they were talking about. Gore's plan also calls for a tax cut, but not like Bush's. His will give breaks for those who do what the government decides is best for them! Like College and things of that nature. Now, College may be the way to go for some, but I don't want Washington deciding if I am fitting into there mold of good and bad and not giving me a break because in their eye's I am doing bad! It's not their place to decide what is best for me, I know what I want to do and how I want to do it, usually. Of course, if history has taught us anything, it's that even if Bush gets into the Whitehouse, there is little to no chance we will see a substantial break. it will probably slowly come over a period of like 10 years, by then, he's out and we see nothing but higher prices and the "tax break" did squat.

07/18/00 - While in Carlisle, I finally got to see The Blair Witch Project. For those who have been stuck in a cave, this was a movie that came out last year and was supposed to be really scary. There is a legend about this witch who haunts these woods in MD I think and 3 college kids decided to go camping in the woods, tramps around the area, and find out what was going on. Supposedly, they get spooked during the time by all these strange noises and goings on in the woods and one of them vanishes in the night. The 2 remaining kids go to find him and find a house where they can hear him screaming for help, or something. At the end, they go down to the basement and they drop the camera to the sounds of their screams. Now, I had heard from when the movie first came out, it was all a lie, what they labeled a "mockumentary" and the kids didn't die or get hurt, it was just the producers screwing with them. Now, they didn't know until afterward that it was the producers as to keep the fear real I suppose. I watched this movie, knowing it was fake but expecting to be scared anyway...it didn't happen. All the scary scenes were shown during previews for the movie and they weren't even that scary. If you watch the movie, there is even a point in it that you can tell it's fake, although this was probably just editing afterwards. I watched the whole movie straight faced and laughed more than I was scared. I guess since I'm used to films like Hellraiser and Nightmare on Elm Street, I expect a little more. Oh well.

07/18/00 - I recently returned from my annual trip to Carlisle, PA for the Mopar show and I had a blast! Not only was the show great, but I met up with Jess and we got to be together for almost 4 whole days, all alone. It is hard to maintain a relationship when your 600 miles apart, but we love each other so much, we just deal with the distance the best we can and cherish the time we get. It is becoming harder to say goodbye at the end of the time we have, but I figure it will pay off in the end. The car show was awesome, saw lots of awesome cars, bought some roller tipped rocker arms for the Charger and also got to look over the PT Cruiser. Since it came out, car magazines have been saying how great it is and I have heard nothing but rave reviews on how it looks, but I never saw it myself, until now........and it is UGLY! I saw them from far away and up close and I can't see why people like them, it's so bulbous, even more so than most cars today, it has no definition, and the inside it trying so hard to be retro and failing miserably! Man what a waste of good metal that could go toward making a Viper or something better!

07/04/00 - Today being the 4th of July, I decided to waste the day and watch TV. I watched a series called The Civil War, it was made for PBS by Ken Burns and chronicles the American Civil War from cause to result. While watching, I realized something, since it's conception, the Confederacy was a oxymoron! The way I understand it, basically, the Confederacy was formed so that each state would have the right to decide how to run their own state and not be controlled by a central government in some other, far away state. BUT, when it began in 1861, one of the first things it did was to break this by electing Jefferson Davis as President over them and setting up a capitol in Richmond, VA.! This in and of itself breaks with the very foundation upon which they were going to war over. They wanted each state to, basically, have it's own government and stuff. Like, in Europe, you have Spain, Portugal, France, etc. all grouped together but ruled by different governments, police systems, militaries, etc. and this is what the south wanted, from what I understand. By breaking away then deciding to have one government control them, they threw the whole argument for states rights out the door. It really doesn't matter much anymore since it never came to be, but it just seems hypocritical to me.

06/24/00 - I recently purchased a book from Amazon.com called the Visual Quickstart Guide to HTML 4 for the World Wide Web. I highly recommend it as it is very easy to follow, especially for me who is a very visual person. Anyway, in this book, they talked about a style of programming for web pages known as Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. With CSS you can set parameters for things such as font size, style, height, etc. for a certain item on a web page or for all the fonts on all the pages. I read about it and thought, WOW, this is great, maybe I can use this for my pages! I bought a book called Core CSS, which is also a fine book, to learn more and possibly how to implement it. The problem with CSS is that it is not completely accepted by the browsers, Netscape and IE. One will accept most of the parameters fine but not others, and visa versa! This is because they are always competing, trying to out do the other, of the 2, IE5 supports the most, but still falls short. Opera, as mentioned in the previous rant, supports the most right now. I made a style sheet and implemented it to a page or two of mine and got varying results that were not pleasing. I want my pages to be the same for anyone who see's them, no matter what browser. I was thinking of maybe using this at work on our site, but not with these results. Maybe some years down the road, when it is more widely accepted, until then, I'm gonna rip into Java and learn that!

06/16/00 - They found the hard drives that contained the Nuclear data........behind a copy machine in a secure area! So, now the question is, how did they get there and were they compromised at all....they were missing for like a month! On another note, I downloaded and am playing with a amazing web browser that has been around for a couple years and is not well known, like IE or Netscape. It's called Opera and it's a cool program. It's small (about 1.7 meg to download!) and fast, supports 128 bit security, Java, some CSS and lots more! I downloaded the Version 4 Beta and I'm loving it alot! It took some time, naturally, to get used to how it was configured and set it the way I liked it, but now that it is setup, I use it all the time. Since it's so small, it doesn't take up much space and starts up fast! You should go try it!

06/14/00 - The FTC is launching a anti trust investigation into weather or not AOL and Time Warner merging is OK or not. This makes sense to me. What doesn't make sense is that there is a huge battle raging over the Instant Messaging. AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM, along with ICQ are the 2 most popular programs and both owned by AOL. Microsoft recently came out with it's own called Messenger Service or something dumb like that. When it came out, then had a feature that allowed people to communicate with people on AIM. Well, AOL didn't like that and blocked them. Microsoft broke past that and AOL blocked them again. This went on for awhile with Microsoft complaining that they should have access to AIM so that it's customers can talk to each other. Now this is going to COURT! What the fu** is going on? If some company were to come along and hack Microsoft Word so that it did something that Microsoft didn't want, then Microsoft would sue them for all kinds of reasons. Microsoft is a company who knows that it's product is sacred, along with the code that makes it. If someone went to Microsoft and said, "We need the code for Windows so we can make a product for it", Microsoft would laugh in their face and toss them out on their asses. AOL's program shouldn't have to allow people who use a competing program to access the database and talk to people! If AIM was a OS like Windows, it would have to allow others to make programs for it, but this is a totally different issue that make absolutely no sense to me. BTW, I hope Microsoft is broken up.......it will not only make the company more money, but it will allow companies like LINUX a chance in the OS market. Gates says it will slow innovation, thats ego for ya, I guess all the other companies are sleeping while Microsoft works! OTHER COMPANIES WILL INNOVATE DAMMIT, MICROSOFT YOU'RE NOT THE ONLY ONES IN THE MARKET!

06/14/00 - Around May 16 or so, scientist at the Los Alamos lab notice that 2 hard drives containing TOP SECRET NUCLEAR data are missing. Not one decides to report it to the State Department until June 1, I guess they were looking for it all that time, which is fine. But, here it is, June 14, and the drives are still missing, and no one can find them yet. They are stored in a huge "safe" vault which certain people have access too. Now, it may have been misplaced, but if this is how our government keeps track of it's top secret data, then who needs enemies, we can't keep our own sh** together! Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who is in charge of things like this, is doing a investigation, along with other agencies, and the President is not even going to fire him! I can recall a recent Surgeon General who was fired because she said that condoms should be distributed freely to prevent the spread of STD's and promote safe sex! But a guy can't get fired when 2 hard drives with top secret data go missing under his watch? What kind of lop sided bull sh** is that!

06/09/00 - Technology is the most amazing thing! I work for a company that sells products online, as well as in our store, and we have been looking for ways to get more people to visit our site. One of the owners nephews sent him 2 books on promoting web sites and I saw alot of good ideas that I'm going to work on implementing. Some being a site index, a whats new page, signatures for our e-mail, and so on. The most amazing thing I found was a section about tracking people who visit your site. There are some REALLY expensive programs available that can do just that. When the program is on and tracking, it can record such normal things as how many people visited the site, what time and day were the most active on the site, how much time was spent on the site on average, etc. But, the most amazing stuff is that it can also keep track of which country people are logging in from, what OS they use, what browser they are using, what page is accessed the most, how they got to the site, what search engine they used along with what keyword they used to find the page, etc. I looked at a report he had from 1998 from when he first had it activated, but later turned off, and it was 35 pages long and PACKED with valuable data. I told him this could be very useful so it's back on now. Now I realize how companies are able to market certain items in certain areas with their web sites if they are using this software. We'll be able to tell what is most popular and then trim the site in some areas and add more in others. BTW, I work at the Hook 'n Needle. I do shipping and receiving along with maintaining and updating the web site.

06/03/00 - Here's poetic justice for ya all! I tried to cut the lawn a week or so ago and the mower wouldn't start and when my Dad tried, the string broke! I fought with it for like a half hour and it didn't start at all! So, the grass got nice and tall while I had to order a new starter and I also cleaned out the carb. Today, the starter arrived and when I pulled it......the thing started right up! ON ONE PULL! Now, it's done that before, but after what I had gone through, I would have felt better if it put up a little fight! Then, it took forever to cut the lawn cause it was so tall! I went over it once with out the catcher bag on (it's a mulching mower) and it was SLOW going! Then, I put the bag on and went back over it, had to empty the bag like 10 times! Then when that was done, I had to rake the rest of the grass up, then do the back yard, which, luckily, is very small, so it wasn't bad. Then had to use the Weed Whacker and now it's all good!

05/24/00 - Boy, it's been a while since I updated this page. I've been busy with work, family stuff, and that can cause the time to fly! Well, I don't have too much on my mind, news has been dominated by the stock market basically and not much else. NASDAQ went down for like 4 days straight and now it's coming back up. I tried to cut the lawn today and the stupid lawnmower wouldn't start. It worked fine last time now it's being a pain in my ass! Dad will try it tomorrow, otherwise I'll have to wait till Monday cause I'm going to VT this weekend for my cousins wedding. Well, guess thats it.

04/28/00 - I went for a physical today and everything checked out just fine. I was in and out pretty fast, which was cool. So, the DOJ has just presented it's proposal to the judge to break up Microsoft. After listening to the proposal and hearing Bill Gates whine and say it will be bad.....I think it would actually be a great step for them. Microsoft said that it would hurt Windows to lose the other applications. See, the proposal is to split the company in 2...one with the OS, the other with everything else and the two couldn't team up but would be forced to compete. Now, if you think about it, this could actually bring in alot of money for Microsoft. If instead of just having, say Office, for Windows and the Mac, they could now make it for Linux, Unix, and every other OS on the planet and make money off it. This also applies to all their other software, think of the possibilities! The Windows OS would be slow to come out with improvements because of the break up but once other companies come out with ideas, the market will flourish, costs of the product will go down, and life will be good. Now, the only thing I don't like about it, is that Microsoft, as part of this, would have to give up most of the code to the Windows OS. Now, this, of course, has been secret for years and should stay that way, programmers work long and hard on that. That step should not be taken or enforced, but the breakup could be a great move all around.

04/21/00 - Well, it's Friday night, thunder and lightning outside, home all alone, and listening to Weird Al........life rocks, just wish my g/f was here. Oh well, can't get it all. After years of bad reception, we finally got our cable fixed, it's so cool to watch clear TV again after getting used to static....it was the cable from the house to the pole, it was bad. The stock market is up and down again, god how I love it so. Ya know, if there was a breaking news story right now, and it said someone just shot Elian Gonzales in the head, I would have a party. I'm not the violent type, I'm just so sick of this story and that kid, I want to puke. Keep him here, send him to Cuba, hell, exile him to Siberia, I DON'T CARE ANYMORE! I have better things in life to concentrate on, let the family fight it out alone, the government shouldn't bother, Janet Reno can go deal with something else, maybe something IMPORTANT! Last week my Mom gave me some newspaper clipping that were very interesting. See, I'm trying to organize and keep track of our family papers and history. She gave me a clipping of my grandmother......but it was her announcement that she was getting engaged to some other guy, before she met my grandpa........I was shocked! I learn more and more every day how I knew absolutely nothing about my family, and it's kinda sad. But, I hope to change that over time. Some one has to, and I need to know. Well, guess thats it. I keep trying to get more pictures up here, maybe more soon!

04/09/00 - Life has been a bit hectic for ol' Keith A these days. My sister moved out last weekend and I was able to take over the two rooms she has occupied upstairs. It was a bit crazy moving everything since I had alot of small things and some big furniture to move. I have a large entertainment center that I had to take apart and move up in pieces since it won't fit out of my room in one piece and is heavy as all hell. Work has been good, doing alot of internet stuff and all with the bosses on vacation. Well, thats about it, news has been boring dominated by Elian and that junk. The stock market is calming down a bit, but who knows what the future holds.....YAAAHOOOOOOO!

04/04/00 - The stock market ROCKS. I began investing in January and since then have been watching with quite a keen eye. I am mainly invested in Sun Microsystems (SUNW). When I started investing, it was valued at about 75 and has so far gone as high as 105. With the news on Microsoft's ruling, people, mostly idiots, have been freaking out and selling tech stocks, forcing the NASDAQ to plunge. Yesterday it was down about 350, today it ended dawn about 90 or so, not too bad. I looked at Sun today and saw something awesome, during the day, in which it started at about 90, it plunged down to 71 and then came all the way back to end up about 1. People automatically think that the computer market is doomed on the news of Microsoft's ruling and they sell it off. Thus, driving down the price, making people buy into it when the price is low. This is great, I can't wait for more ups and downs, it's all good.

03/30/00 - In Uganda, they are finding hundreds and hundred of dead bodies from a group that believed the end of the world was coming in the beginning of 2000. Basically, the leader of this group convinced people of this and told them to sell their possessions and give him their money since they wouldn't need it. When the new year came and went and nothing happened, they probably got pissed. So, he set about killing them, burning them up, etc. and took off. Makes ya wonder about people these days, lots of sickos.

03/28/00 - I have absolutely no clue what is going on in the news anymore. Clinton in India, the Pope in Jerusalem, Elian Gonzalez still in Miami while the government wants him back in Cuba, Putin in power in Russia and already under scrutiny, etc. It all seems to blend together after awhile, or maybe I just don't care about it all. I seem to go in and out of moods with the news. Either I can't stand to miss it or I can't stand to watch it. The only thing I pay attention to is my stocks and even then, I just let it ride, so if I didn't watch it for like 4 years, I doubt it would matter, I just might have more money is all. Why is it that couples who are unmarried decide to have children then think about getting married? Do they think that if the kid splits them up then it wasn't a waste or if they do decide to get married it's because the kid proved they love each other? It makes me sick! The child will grow up probably really only knowing one parent and not feeling the same amount of love that a child in a married couple would feel. Now, I'm not saying anything about gay or lesbian couples, cause I don't know any, but some of my friend, younger than I and not married, are having or already have kids. Maybe they are more mature, maybe they think they are ready, maybe they are to scared after has happened to stop it, who knows? Wow, guess I had some things on my mind huh?

03/09/00 - Well, I'm a little behind in the news rants but what are ya gonna do. So, Agusto Pinochet (I can't spell) is now a free man after being let free because he was "too sick" to stand trial. Yeah he is too sick, he ran Chile with a iron fist for like 20 years and tons of people got killed and vanished while he was in control. He's a sick and evil man who is now free because he's now old.......I just don't understand this type of law. I hope that if I ever decide to run a country, kill millions of my country men, and then leave office, I'll make sure I'm old and start to act weird so I can walk free. Viva life!

03/01/00 - Jess left me a book while she was here and it is really cool. It's called "An Underground Education: The unauthorized and outrageous supplement to everything you thought you knew about art, sex, business, crime, science, medicine, and other fields of human knowledge". By Richard Zacks. In the Religion section, there is a story about Moses and how when he was in command of a Army. One part of the story is talking about how during some of the attacks on towns, they would take virgins and kill everyone else. After listing some of the spoils from a attack, he writes this "Of course, applying modern standards to Moses isn't fair (although it is apparently okay to apply biblical standards to us today)". This is amazingly true. Why is it that in the Bible, it's alright for Moses, this highly held messenger of God, to lead Armies to attack and kill people but save the virgins and it is okay for him to do that because it was expectable back then. Today, we still follow some of the teachings of the bible although to apply them to todays standards makes absolutely no sense. God help us!

02/24/200 - I finally got around to flipping this list around so the new stuff is on top, makes more sense now.

02/24/2000 - This rant is probably a little off base, but thats ok cause it's MINE. I was watching some news cast the other night and George W. Bush was on giving some speech and something stuck out. He mentioned that only the people in Michigan know what Michigan needs. Now, this may be true, but if he is elected to office and puts states rights into effect, then the Civil War, which killed almost 900,000 people, may as well never have happened. Now, the war was fought for a number of reasons, including slavery which it did help eliminate, kind of, but states rights was a big factor since most of the South didn't care about African Americans and didn't want to fight for them or to free them since most had slaves of their own. Anyway, this just kinda stuck to me and it bugged me, maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, who knows.

01/30/2000 - I found out the web site that awarded my car site a award is now gone! They disowned the site and now the guy who owns the site is only using it for web rings so I took off the award. It's really not that big of a deal but it is annoying.

01/24/2000 - Ok, I need to say something about this Elian Gonzalese case that has been going on since Thanksgiving. His Mother took him from Cuba and died trying to bring him to freedom in the US where he is now. But, the government wants to send him back since his father is still in Cuba. Janet Reno, I think, went and talked to him in Cuba and agreed that he should have his son back. Now, when Elian first got here, the father said he should stay here, then he wants his son back and all of Cuba, including Castro wants him back, for some odd reason. BUT, the father won't come and get him..........whats the hell is THAT? If my son was in another country and I wanted him back, I would go get him, but no, Cuba sends his two grandmothers to met with him and possibly get him back. This whole case is stupid, Castro is probably telling the father what to say and telling him if he doesn't cooperate, he'll kill him or something. Let the kid stay and live a free life. We let normal immigrants who make it to shore stay, why not let him, he is with family in FL and is safe, leave the kid here and get on with life. Why don't we find out why Russia won't get it's pieces of the ISS together!

01/02/2000 - So, here we are in 2000 now....Y2K come and gone with no major problems. Because of that some people seem to think it was all just a hoax that Y2K didn't even exist and that computers would have had no trouble. Thats partially true. I seriously doubt that computers would have stopped working because the year was wrong, but it would have caused major problems with accounting and financing programs which are very much needed these days. I did notice something unexpected though, which was cool. On some web sites, instead of the date showing 1900, when it changed, it showed 19100. Pretty cool. Also, Yeltsin resigned from office on News Years, it's about god damn time. He's gonna keel over soon and it's better not to do it in office, but then I heard he was granted immunity form something for some reason. Boy, if this is how politics works, get into office, commit illegal acts, make a deal with the new guy, resign, and get immunity, then maybe I should run for office. It just doesn't make any sense.