Surviving the Circus

Half of CNN's readers do NOT shop on Black Friday I was checking the news on CNN.com and saw the top 10 deals for Black Friday. I don't shop on Black Friday, and haven't done so in over 15 years. They also have a poll asking how much people will spend on black Friday, with the lowest dollar amount being $0. Amazingly, 52% of CNN's readers (online) will not spend one red cent the day after Thanksgiving, which begs the question, who does choose this day to shop? What type of people are willing to literally fight for a spot in the checkout line to save a few bucks? I'm a thrifty shopper, but the idea of being in a mob does not entice me, even if they're giving merchandise away. By the way, if you are shopping tomorrow, Target has a great deal on an LCD 32 inch HDTV for only $246, which is half price. Be safe shoppers!

One of my favorite quotes by Galileo is... I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. In ancient times, parts of bodies were kept as relics and were believed to hold special powers, especially those of the martyred saints. This is how Galileo's fingers came to be amputated after his death.  The fingers were cut off 300 years ago, and disappeared over 100 years ago. They were the fingers that would have held his pen. Galileo's fingers have been missing for many years, but suddenly showed up at an auction and now will be in a museum in Florence, Italy, according to museum director Paolo Galluzzi. There is also some DNA testing that will be done. "(Galileo) was persecuted by the Catholic Church for advocating the theory that the earth circles the sun, rather than the other way around. The Inquisition forced him to recant, and jailed him in 1634." There truly is nothin...

Journalism we can trust, does it still exist? How do we know if we can trust a reporter? Simple. If you can tell how the reporter "feels" about something, then he/she has failed to be a true reporter, which is an objective reporter, and therefore you can't trust them. Journalism once was about reporting "just the facts, ma'am." Sadly, no matter which television news channel you support by your viewing minutes or hours, none of them can be trusted all of the time. Most of the reporters are entertainers, not journalists. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glen Beck are all being paid to stir up controversy, not report on the news. Same thing goes for the people over at the other news channels, but I don't know their names, so obviously they are not as good at it as the ones I've mentioned. The only reporters I follow with any sense of the possibility of true reporting are John King and Anderson Cooper at CNN. I also enjoy Charlie Gibson ...

Twitter premium services which may be offered before this year ends, will in no way affect the average twitter user. The discussed fees that will be coming in the near future are specifically for tracking and analyzing success at Twitter. So, if you aren't trying to sell something, or trying to recruit people into something, you should have no need of this new feature. However, if you're one of the big dogs currently promoting on Twitter, these premium services will help gage your marketing efforts. Twitter Here's the full story.

Someone much older and wiser than myself asked this question today, "Why must we have war?" My immediate response was, "How can we not?" If you were raised on the Bible, you know that strife and murder entered into the picture with Cain and Abel. That was a very long time ago. What was the cause? Jealousy. Or power. I call it pure envy. We must have war to protect the freedom of the people inhabiting the world. If we, as a nation, decided to stop participating in wars for, let's say, 10 years, what would happen? Suppose that no matter what, we would flat out refuse to fight or take police or military action outside of our homeland for the next ten years. What would have happened if we had not joined the fight against Hitler? It is my belief that if America refuses to "get involved," then we are literally opening the door for future dictators, tyrants and maniacs to "spread their wings." Eventually, they would become so powerfu...

As a web designer and hosting provider, I have often "tried" to explain where a website and other online date is stored and how it is accessed. Rarely have I been able to convey the concept properly. It was simple enough to explain a domain name by comparing it to a street address. Explaining exactly where the website data is stored and how it is accessed is quite another thing altogether. Once, I was wrongly accused of all kinds of fraudulent activity, simply because my client was able to look up the information on their domain at another domain registrar's website. I was never able to make them understand that anyone can look up who owns a domain name - and so I lost the client. No problem. Good riddance. Today I read an excellent article at CNN.com by John D. Rudder, explaining the "Online Cloud." I highly recommend it if you've ever wondered about this stuff. Here's the link: A trip into the secret, online 'cloud'