Feb 19

Much to be expected, over at the Naperville Sun’s Potluck “blog”, a debate is raging over the knee-jerk reaction of anti-gun legislation following the NIU shootings. My two cents-

Groups like the NRA have way too many members with far too much money for there to ever be any kind of successful gun control movement, regardless of how strong the knee jerk reaction is whenever there is any type of shooting incident.

Either way, guns are not the problem, it’s homicidal maniacs who will do anything they can to kill as many people as possible before offing themselves. If someone is dead set on mowing down their classmates, does anyone really believe gun control laws will do anything to stop that? We’ve had strict anti-drug legislation on the books forever, but has that ever removed people’s access to drugs? When I went to high school and college parties it sure didn’t seem like people who were in to drugs had any problem acquiring anything they wanted, regardless of legality.

Why wouldn’t guns be the same way? Even IF through some type of wizard’s magic guns were entirely removed from our country, what is stopping violent people to come up with new and exciting ways to kill people?

From Chris Magee’s earlier post-

“But by removing the devices of efficient mass-murder, fewer bystanders are hurt and tragedies like these mass shootings are much harder to pull off.”

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people using nothing more than fertilizer and racing fuel. The Unabomber sent out 16 packages crafted of things you can pick up from the hardware store. The main ingredient that those responsible for the 2005 London bombings used in their explosives was hydrogen peroxide. The attacks on September 11th were carried out with nothing more than box cutters and plastic knives. The components of the explosives that suicide bombers in the middle east use can be purchased at a grocery store. The list goes on and on.

Insane people intent on killing others will do it by any means necessary. It’s impossible to remove all devices of mass murder because deadly explosions capable of killing far more people than a pair of pistols and a shotgun can be created by anyone with time/desire to research the chemistry on the internet with common household products which would be silly to legislate or restrict.

All anti-gun legislation is going to do is cause is an increase in business in the already seemingly thriving black market for guns and/or force these maniacs to get creative. I’d almost rather these nut-jobs stick to guns. At least then they are limited by the amount of ammo they’re able to carry. Bombs, even those made with components under your kitchen sink, seem to be far more lethal.

Guns are just the tools used, they are by no means the cause of incidents like the shootings at NIU. By removing the tool without addressing the cause, people set on killing others will just use a different tool.

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Feb 12

In the wake of the world-wide Scientology protest this past Sunday, some really well edited videos and photographs are hitting the internet.

 scientlogy_protest.jpg

 It’s pretty amazing to me what what originally started as a 4chan troll to get on a local FOX news affiliate has turned in to a worldwide movement. The following video sums it up really well-

 

 Anonymous has gone from trolling the media (and even getting someone’s Mom involved in the troll!) feeding them fake information regarding “underground hacker sites” and other bait that no FOX news affiliate could pass up-

 

 To this:

 

 Should be interesting to see what happens on 3/15.

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Dec 17

I’ve spent the last week or so waging war microbial baddies who have set up camp somewhere in my inner ear. While launching antibiotic salvos in to their front lines, I find myself completely unmotivated to do anything but sit while I spend my time head cocked to the right and a grimace on my face anxiously awaiting the battle’s conclusion. What goes better with a complete lack of motivation to do anything but sit than video games? I spent the last weekend playing through Bioshock for the XBOX 360, a first person shooter by 2K games set in an alternate reality of the 1960’s in the underwater objectivist dystopian city of Rapture which now lays in near ruin and is inhabited by highly genetically modified mutants and other nasty things. I could spend hours describing it, instead, watch the trailer-

Aside from strangely out of place American Dollars, resources in the game are ADAM and EVE. ADAM is gathered in two ways which I’ll get to later, and EVE serves as your mana for casting spells… Only in Bioshock you’re not casting spells, you’re using Plasmids, or genetic enhancements to shock, burn, or even dispatch swarms of angry bees at your opponents. Overall, the game is really great. All of its downfalls can be easily overlooked when you first set eyes on how stunningly beautiful the game is. The ambiance and overall atmosphere are literally second to none. Despite the inevitable rant which will follow, if you have a PC capable of playing Bioshock or a video game system it is available on, rent/purchase ASAP.

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Oct 31

Happy Halloween.

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Oct 31

Uprgrading to Apple’s OSX 10.5 Leopard operating system has mostly been pretty awesome. Safari 3 is great for just about everything except browsing web sites which use those nasty flash-launched pop-unders that its popup blocker doesn’t catch. Usually I browse ad-ridden sites like the Naperville Potluck in FireFox with an onslaught of ad-blocking plugins. This morning, while working on Old Man Hodapp I loaded said site up in Safari to not lose my FireBug selection.

 Ugh. The only thing worse than obtrusive web advertising is web advertising that exploits browser popup loopholes and proceeds to spawn flash ads on every page load.

Actually, I take that back. They could have sound

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Oct 31

I’m about 95% completed with my newest online project: Old Man Hodapp’s Worldly Treasures.

 Old Man Hodapphttp://oldmanhodapp.com/

 I’ve toyed around with the idea of setting up an online store to sell all the things my family and I sell at various festivals, flea markets, pow wows, shin digs, swap meets, and box socials across the United States. Traditionally we’ve catered to the new age and Native American enthusiasts, but I think I can attract a much larger customer base online by creating what amounts to a J. Peterman catalog.

Dealing with the different e-commerce “solutions” (if you could even call them that) has been interesting- to say the least.  There are quite a few e-commerce hosting providers from Yahoo to Shopify, all of which charge a silly monthly fee, offer almost no storage, and a cut of your overall sales. I wasn’t happy with giving someone money for doing something that I can do myself, being a big-wig on the Internet and all.

So with that, without even testing the water with my toe, I jumped in head first in to the world of terrible open source and commercial PHP applications.

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Oct 26

…I’d have lots and lots and lots of dollars. My video is mentioned on the Digg front page again as well as in a video on the front page of Break.com-


We Didnt Start The Viral - Watch more free videos

 ”Subliminal Iron Chef” is at about 1:40 in to the video. I had no idea that video would go “viral”, or ever be compared along side LonelyGirl15 and Tay Zonday. That’s pretty huge. Unfortunately I don’t think “responsible for amazingly popular viral video” is something I can put on my resume.

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Oct 22

If you’re unfamiliar with the downtown Naperville Metra station, there are two lanes. One for bus traffic, and another for regular old drop-off traffic.

bus_lane.jpg

Regardless of the fact that the bus lane is clearly marked with several signs, nearly every morning I am at the train station some idiot is holding up traffic in the bus lane. The bus drivers’ response to this is usually to lay on the horn until the SUV piloting house wife gets the drift that she’s not supposed to be there. (But more often than not the prolonged honking just adds to their confusion and instead of moving they look around to see who is getting honked at.)

This morning, half a dozen or so of Naperville’s finest were out writing tickets to everyone who even entered the bus lane.

I hope the courts force the morons receiving these tickets to attend a basic six week seminar on how to read  and/or be aware of your surroundings.

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