O'DonnellWeb Monthly Archives

Rank the Amendments

NZ Bear has posted his interpertation of the order of importance of the Bill of Rights.

Never one to miss a meme, here is mine.

Amendment II: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Quite simply, and an armed population is the last defense againt tyranny. The second amendment is the glue that holds the Bill of Rights together. Without it, I suspect our rights would have been trampled into oblivion years ago.

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It makes this blog possible, and that's damn important!

Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people

It was suppossed to limit the power and growth of a federal government. But alas, our founding fathers underestimated the greed and corruption that drives men to seek power.

Amendment V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Probably the most abused of the amendments in recent times.

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Hmm, I don't see any exception for wars on terror in here....

I'm stopping here. The rest of the amendments are obviously important, consider them all in a tie for 6th on my list.

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New Fan Mail

From: CMM037@aol.com | This is Spam | Add to Address Book
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 16:56:31 EST
Subject: (no subject)
To: chrisodva@yahoo.com

hi chris,
hi i'm 13 years old. I just wanna say that your a great actor. i know you hear this everyday so your probably use to it. i was on a website i don't know if you wrote it but it has messages like everyday. Just wanna know if u wrote it. you probabbly won't but if you could e-mail me or something that would be nice. I'm home alone until 8. Maybe you can send me a autograph (if you want to.) it would be nice. you probably won't even read this letter. So if our a fake chris o'donnell then you better stop cause I can hack your computer. If your not fake then please e-mail me at cmm037@aol.com or Tookoolmonkey@aol.com. Can you please. Please

I got two emails last week from this brain surgeon asking for help with her school report on Chris O'Donnell. Now she? is threatening to hack me. I'm real scared, cause you know, all the real hackers hang out on AOL.

I fear for the future of our country...

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November 21, 2002

Everything I need to know I learned from John Cusack

Hey, it's from The Purdue Exponent, I HAD to blog it!

Hat Tip to Dodd

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Amazon Bad, UPS Good

A known bug in Amazon's system caused them to ship an order to my old address in Leesburg. Michelle, being the only person on that planet that actually reads her Amazon order confirmations, caught the screw up 5 minutes after she submitted the order but was unable to change the address. Amazon claimed there was nothing they could do except ship it and wait for the return from the wrong address. 3 or 4 rounds of email could not convince the idiots at Amazon that the people now living in our old house would be under no obligation to return the package. They could keep it, throw it in the garbage, whatever.

In summary:

1. Amazon admits it is a software bug that caused the incorrect shipment.
2. They refused to do anything to stop the shipment, even though Michelle caught their error 5 minutes after she submitted the order.
3. Further, they refused to reship the product to the correct address at their expense, and they refused to refund the cost of the order. She used a gift certificate to pay for about 1/2 of it, so reversing the charges on the credit card would only be partially effective. They said they would refund our money when the product was returned. (most likely never.) We even made a point of telling them to check my account to see how many thousands of dollars I have spent there over the last few years. They didn't care.

So, we went to plan B. After it shipped and we had a UPS tracking number, we called UPS. They told us to watch the progress and call them back as soon as we saw that the package had hit the Dulles distribution center. We did that, the package was already on the delivery van in Leesburg. They radioed the delivery driver and told him to return the package to the distribution center. It is due to be deliver here today.

Thank you UPS. FU Amazon. Hello BN.com!

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November 19, 2002

WWHS, reason 1,764, 578

Fun political shenanigans at Santa Monica High School

And no, we are not homeschooling to shield our kids from a liberal point of view. We are homeschooling them so they will actually be intelligent enough to make an informed decision about what the believe, without being force fed the party line from the National Education Association.

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8 glasses of water every day

We've all heard the maxim that we must all drink 64 ounces of water every day, else we'll all die a horrible, dehydrated death. I've actually tried. However, between trips to the kitchen to refill my water bottle and trips to the restroom, it killed my productivity!

A Dartmouth professor who is a noted expert on kidneys has done an exhaustive search of medical literature, and can find no basis for the claim. It's an urban legend. In fact, he lists several way it could be harmful. Even better, beer, coffee, and tea all count towards you water intake. Woo hoo!

Now I don't have to feel guilty about not drowning myself daily.

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Leonids Report

I got up at 5:10 AM and headed out to check out the sky. The moon was so bright shining through the window in our bedroom that I could see as though a light were on. I went out into the front yard as the moon was setting behind the house so the house blocked its glare. Still, the Western sky below 45 degrees was a washout. Visible meteor activity was minimal right up to 5:30, when it exploded for about 5 minutes. I was seeing 8-10 meteors a minute, with a couple each minute that were large enough to show fairly impressive trails for a few seconds. That lasted 4 or 5 minutes and then is slowed dramatically. At that point I went in and crawled back into bed.

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November 18, 2002

Playing Tag deemed unsafe

The money quote from this article about NJ schools banning tag and dodge ball:

"The idea of loosely running around and chasing each other is not safe," Long Hill Superintendent Arthur DiBenedetto told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Monday's editions.

From the National Safety Council:

Odds of dying from tripping or slipping on level ground: 1 in 446,000
Odds of dying as passenger in a motor vehicle accident: 1 in 18,000

Obviously, the kids would be much safer homeschooling and playing tag in the yard, versus being dropped off at school by Mom.

Another thought - I guess Smear the Queer is out of the question :)

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November 17, 2002

CD Catalog Software

Does anybody have any experience with shareware CD cataloging software? I want to spend an evening feeding my CD collection into my PC one at a time as the software hits CDDB and builds me a comprehensive database of my music collection. There are a bunch of packages available, and the going price for registration is about $25. Which is fine. However, I don't want to spend a lot of time trying them out if somebody can recommend one that works really well. And if you know of an open source solution that will be free (as in beer), that is even better!

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November 16, 2002

New Photo Gallery Up

I've got some cool open source photo gallery software working at on the site. The software is Photoframe. It was super easy to configure and get running. Check it out if you're looking for a photo gallery solution.

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November 15, 2002

Blacks taking to homeschooling

I've been predicting this for years, and now its on the front page of the Richmond VA newspaper! Overall, a very positive account of homeschooling, focused on the black community. The obligatory dissenting opinion really pissed me off though.

Pratt also worries that home-schooling may promote societal racism, even as it leaves black home-schoolers less prepared to deal with it.

"Oftentimes, racially exclusive environments breed hate," he said. "Children must understand at an early age that there are other people who don't look like them."

I got news for Professor Pratt. Kids are born understanding that others look different. 3 year olds don't care about about race. Racism is a learned behavior, and racist parents are going to pass that on regardless of where the child is educated. However, the public school system is the prime breeding ground for just about every "ism" out there. I'm willing to bet homeschooled black kids will not be shunned by their peers because their test scores are too "white."

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November 14, 2002

Site Updates

I did some long overdue link updating this evening. Take a look to your right, some new links in all categories, and a few that had not updated in months were removed.

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November 12, 2002

Further Proof that the recording industry sucks

It's bad enough that they are busy suing their customers, threatening universities, corporations, and ISP's with legal action if they don't invade our privacy and wwatch every file we transfer, and lobbying Congress to make all recording of all media illegal while gaining the right to hack our personal computers to enforce the law, but how the hell do you not sell 10,000,000 copies of Hey! Album by Marvelous 3.?

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November 11, 2002

Never Forget

34 odd years ago my now deceased father was a scared 19 year old kid with an infant son and a wife back in the states. He was a radar technician in the Air Force, stationed at Ramstein AFB in Germany. He was flown in to what he thought was Vietnam, choppered into a radar site to do repair work on a radar installation that had taken a shell. It got late and dark so he was stuck there for the night.

19 year old radar techs weren't even issued firearms.

The Viet Cong started shelling the site. He dived into a foxhole with a Green Beret. The Green Beret handed him an automatic weapon, pointed him in the right direction, and told him to shoot anything that moved.

Later, my father learned that the incident never happened. His guess is that he was really in Cambodia, although of course there weren't any Americans on that side of the border in 1968. That was his only time on the ground in a warzone. He did spend a lot of time in the air working the boom on a KC-135 Stratotanker. When I'm home for Thanksgiving I hope to get my hands on some really cool pictures he took looking down the boom and the fighters jets refueling below.

Interestingly, my father's Veteran of Foreign War designation is based on his time spent in occupied Berlin, which of course was not particularly dangerous in the 1970's.

To all the Vet's out there, thank you.

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"...but I would rather be a slut than be fat or ugly."

In her new book "Girl Culture," Photographer Lauren Greenfield warns that there is simply "no escape from girl culture." She's wrong.

The pettiness, the overemphasis on popularity and looks, or the rush to grow up and make adult mistakes in the process, are not genetic traits of girls. They are side effects of parents with no control over the inputs into their daughters lives. I would also argue that they are symptoms of a failing educational system, since a common trait among all these girls is that they spend their day institutionalized in our education system.

My sample size is admittedly small, but I have yet to meet a homeschooled teenager anywhere near as obnoxious as your average 14 year old Britney Spears wanna-be. It's to the point that we won't even consider a teenager for a babysitter unless she is homeschooled.

And now that I've managed to find a way to get the words Britney Spears and naked (see my tagline) on my webpage - watch my traffic skyrocket. Woo Hoo!!

Reblogged from Izzy at The Homeschool Revolution

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November 08, 2002

10 games in a classic Atari joystick

I have no idea why Avon is the source for this, but it's way cool. A classic atari style joystick that plugs right into your TV and plays 10 Atari 2600 games, including Adventure, Missile Command, and Centipede.

Update 11/11: The Avon link is now dead and google was unable to turn up another source. I have no idea...

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Light Show in the sky

The Leonids Meteor shower could be a real doozy this year. They are predicting up to 10 per minute at the peak around 530 AM on Nov 19. I just moved out to the country, there are no streetlights in my neighborhood, and the trees to the West might block out the moon for the peak. It could be quite an entertaining show from my deck. All of this, of course, depends on my ability to actually drag my ass out of bed at 430 AM.

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November 05, 2002

From the "glad we moved" department

Police activity report from Leesburg VA

Date: 10/29/2002 Time: 1730 Location: Residence
600 block of Nathan Place NE Incident: Fraud Credit Card/Automated Teller Machines
Several fraudulent credit card transactions were reported to police. Case status is pending.

Police Activity Summary
Dates: October 29 - November 5 Date: 11/4/2002 Time: 0213 Location: Residence
600 block of Nathan Place NE Incident: Family Offenses, Nonviolent
Police responded to the scene of a verbal domestic dispute. No charges were placed.

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A very appropriate quiz for election day

This seems about right for me.

Which Founding Father Are You?

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November 02, 2002

Disc Golf

I haven't played disc golf since 1998. Yesterday, while I'Ming with a friend about making plans for golf, I joked that we could play disc golf instead as its free and the course is about 5 minutes from my house. (We were having a hard time finding a course in our budget - nobody is on winter rates yet.) It turns out he is a big fan of disc golf, so off we went this morning to Loriella Park. I shot 25 over par, my friend shot par, and another guy with us shot 26 over par. I had forgotten just how much fun it is to chase a frisbee through the woods. It's quiet, no kids are screaming, no wife is bugging me to do something unfun. It's just a great 90 minute mental break from the real world. Plus, you walk at least a couple of miles over hilly terrain, so it burns a few calories too.

Rediscovering a hobby is cool.

I'll bet you didn't know that there is a Professional Disc Golf Association.

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November 01, 2002

Kids & Guns

Interesting article from Eric Raymond, noted open source and gun right advocate, about the moral imperative of teaching youngsters to handle firearms. Quite timely for me too, as I've been thinking that Santa might need to bring a BB Gun for my son this year. Eight seems about the right age to start learning to respect real guns.

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Halloween 2002

We went trick or treating in a friend's neighborhood, after a halloween party at their house. Our friends daughter warned the other kids to avoid one particular house that gives out bibles for Halloween.

Obviously, I don't have any thing against the bible. However, I do have a huge problem with people using a children's holiday to proselytize their particular point of view. These people don't let their children celebrate Halloween, yet they put out a Jack-O-Latern in what seemed to be an attempt to lure kids to the door. I don't know exactly where the "line" is, but pretending to celebrate Halloween, just to lure kids to the door to introduce your faith to them, definately crosses it by a country mile. I don't think us Christians would be too happy if a Muslim dressed up as Santa Claus walked through our neighborhood in December handing out the Koran.

In a related thought, have you noticed how many houses don't participate any trick or treating? It seemed like close to 1/2 the houses last night were dark and unwelcoming to the kids. When I was kid I remember maybe one or two houses not participating. They were usually covered in raw eggs and toilet paper before the evening was done, as "encourgement" to be more community minded the next year :)

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