Jeremy's Blog

In case anyone was wondering what those tiny entries with no titles and such are, I stole Seth’s idea for “asides” which are essentially “mini entries” … I’ll use these to maybe just mention something off-hand, link to something that doesn’t merit further discussion but I want to have greater visibility than del.icio.us, or maybe just to put in a small thought that I want to have more “permanence” and greater visibility than twitter.

In any case, these are included in the RSS Feed as well as imported into my Facebook profile. I’m just styling them different in the theme’s templates.

For some reason my theme keeps reverting to the default. It’s really starting to get annoying. If anyone has any idea why this is happening and what I could do to fix it, please let me know.

I know, another post on Politics. I’m writing this on the 26th but scheduled it to be made public later so they don’t all hit at the same time.

At the beginning of this month, Dutch posted a link to an article that mentioned that Senator John McCain did not participate in the extremely common act of political “Pork-Barrel Spending” or “Earmarks” … For the confused, in a nutshell, this is where politicians request federal funding for projects. I promise, I wasn’t ignoring you Dutch, I just sorta forgot about the comment and lost track of it in everything else that was going on.

Anyway, the point of this entry is to point out that Obama does participate in this practice. It’s also to point out that he made his earmarks for 2008 public to improve government transparency. I was poking around earlier trying to find this particular list and noted that it was a little tough to find unless you were actually looking for it. Since I already did the leg work, I thought I would share the information with everyone.

Obama’s 2008 Federal Funding Requests

Read through a bunch of entries on that list. I believe the sum total of funding requests that he made came up to around $300 million, but specifically note the type of requests that were made. I read through most of the list before my eyes got tired, so I did note a few questionable ones, but I did note a lot of places where some federal money could go to some extremely good use.

I don’t necessarily agree with pork spending, especially in excess. Although, if it’s gonna be done, I like the way he does it. Not only is he honest (his list is public), but a lot of the projects he would see the funding invested in are (what I would consider) noble efforts.

To hit the point of economic policy, because Dutch also brought up policies that McCain supported, I’m just going to post a link to Obama’s Economic Plan. I think it sums things up far better than I could.

Obama’s Economic Plan

xkcd is awesome.

If you’ve been keeping up with me like the good stalkers that you are, you’ll notice that I’ve been using Twitter, lately. (You can follow me, if you’re not already.) I didn’t buy into the whole Twitter thing at first, but it is sort of nice to be able to send a text message from my phone to a service that actually updates information in three separate places at once. Don’t follow me on Twitter? That’s fine, you can keep up with my status updates on Facebook. Even if you don’t use Facebook, you can see all of my updates on the widget on the left side of my blog.

What I think is absolutely fascinating (and maybe really, really stupid) is the fact that Twitter is receiving Venture Capital … (continue reading…)

Heck yeah. That article could not be more true.

Was sitting in the living room of the apartment a couple days ago and somehow the subject of politics came up in conversation. The air in the room immediately got tense enough to cut it with a knife. As most of you know, I’m not a big fan of the uninformed, and it became quickly apparent that one person in the room didn’t have a clue what he was talking about (he supports Hillary Clinton, blech).

In any case, since he obviously didn’t know what Barack Obama’s position on Iraq was before we went in, I’m posting a link here to the full-text of his speech in 2002. As a bonus, you also get the link to the full-text of Ron Paul’s speech on Iraq from the same year. His is particularly important because it hits the points of Iraq’s military capabilities, their “acts of aggression” against the United States (everyone please remember the Persian Gulf War — also keep in mind that the U.S. has still been bombing Iraq since well before September 11th), Iraq’s sponsorship of terrorism, the attempted assassination of George Bush, Sr. (note that gives Jr. a personal reason for attacking Iraq and we all know what happens to judgement in those types of circumstances), the Weapons of Mass Destruction, and more.

First of all, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad Saddam Hussein is gone just as much as the next guy. Even more so, now that I’ve had a chance to read some of Ruzena’s father’s book. What peeves me to no end is that we have no established “goal” for this war and it’s becoming another Vietnam. If our goal would’ve been to get in, take out Saddam, and get out, not only would this have been over a long time ago, but I think the American people would’ve supported it more, even today. Instead, September 11th was used as a cover for political motives, throwing us into an undeclared war that has no end in sight.

Anyway, for those of you who are still confused about Obama’s position on the Iraq War before it started, read on. As for Ron Paul’s speech, you can read and decide for yourself. Think I’m wrong? I want to hear about it. Post a comment and let me know why.

Barack Obama’s Iraq Speech
Ron Paul’s Iraq Speech

It’s been a while since I’ve actually posted an update, so I thought it was about time to, since there’s a lull in the chaos here at Planet.

I’m currently half moved in to my cousin’s place, now. I’ll be sharing an apartment with him and his girlfriend for the next year. I love my parents, but I really don’t feel right living at home after being on my own for so long. Once everything gets settled and I can get my desk and stuff up there in my own room, it’ll be a lot better.

I’ve been working at Planet AT&T as a Sales Rep for almost two months, now. Using it as supplementary income to allow me to cut back on consulting work at OV while other projects are in development. It’s a brain-numbingly easy job, but now that I’m living in Jacksonville it’s a bit of a chore to come in to Gadsden to work. Not to mention with gas prices rapidly increasing, it’s starting to get to the point where I don’t make enough to justify the expense of coming here. After my hourly pay goes away in the next week, it’ll get even worse. The job is entirely hit-or-miss commission, and we don’t make a dime off of 95% of the business we do here, bill payments and pre-paid cards. Chances are, I’ll quit soon after the hourly runs out. I found out they use PHP on their intranet, though. I may take a stab at getting a job there doing PHP stuff. We’ll see.

In other news, I’ll be visiting Ruzena in June, so I’m excited about that. By then, it’ll be six months since the last time I’ve seen her, so I’m really looking forward to seeing her again. I’ve missed her a lot. Six months is really too long to go without seeing each other. Hopefully, I can get things together so I’ll be able to move up to that area, within the next couple years. It’ll be nice when I can just go see her whenever I want, instead of having to plan out trips, make sure they’re okay, spend money on tickets, and only get to see her for a week at a time.

As for Omega Vortex, things are moving along steadily. We’re about to start a plan of expansion over the coming months that includes hiring new developers, unveiling new services, and announcing key partnerships and acquisitions. We’ll be announcing and releasing a new product soon, making some changes to our OmegaFlash solution to bring it back under the umbrella and prepare it for Omega Matrix integration, as well as prepare integration points for the rest of our upcoming Educational Suite.

Well, that’s a pretty cumulative update for what’s been going on lately.

I’m curious as to why everytime I submit a change to … well, just about anything on my blog, the theme reverts back to the default WordPress theme. Is there something wrong that anyone can tell me about, or is WordPress just got retarded theme support?

Well, Ruzena wanted her own blog that she could girlify up and such as much as she wanted to. Plus, her readers were primarily her family and such, so my technical posts were confusing people. After a good amount of time blogging together, we decided to split the blogs apart and each have our own place.

My blog remains here. You can view her blog at http://www.ruzenathibault.com and if you would like to keep reading the entries in a combined form, you can use http://www.jeremyandruzena.com … It isn’t completely setup yet, and if anyone knows a Planet-type software built in PHP or a plugin for WordPress that will make it behave like a Planet-type software, that would be great.

Anyway, maybe we’ll both blog more.