To Catch Up...

I can't believe I didn't blog something for my 1 year anniversary at the new job! 14 months, now. Time really flies.

In more recent event, my girlfriend and I went to a Campaign for Liberty seminar, last weekend. It was very interesting. It was supposed to be Friday night - Sunday morning, but we only went for the Saturday session. It was all day.

We learned some tools and methods that I believe will be useful. I really wish we could have been there for the Sunday session. They pushed some of the stuff I wanted to learn on Saturday to Sunday, or at least that's the way I understood it.

In depressing news, Selma is getting cameras to go everywhere. We're gonna be a surveillance city. Very unhappy turn of events. Very anti-liberty. It's a willful attack on Selma's liberty in the name of safety. I call BS.

Ayway, the seminar had a great turnout. They had only planned for 50 people, but there were considerably more than that. We broke up into groups of about 7. Amy and I got into a group of 5 with some other people from around Central Alabama. All the groups were given the same scenario to handle. Kirk Shelley, the instructor, selected our group as the winner.

Touchscreen Madness

Touchscreen devices are all over the 'net, lately. Multi-touch is new, but it's not THAT revolutionary. I'm really not impressed with all the touchscreen madness. In my humble opinion, I see it as regression.

Touch screens aren't new. I recall seeing them at a visitor information center while on a vacation back in 1984 or 5. The screen was part of a kiosk, which, being the little nerd/hacker I was even back then, I opened to reveal the Apple IIe plugged up to the monitor. There was a dot matrix printer, an Applewriter if memory serves, which would print out the information you selected with the touch screen and eject it through a slot in the kiosk. High tech for the time, I thought.

Honestly, I don't want to touch my screen. A mouse or pointing device is fine with me. I'd rather have something that allows me to not touch anything. Putting skin oils on a screen that I'm going to have to look at just doesn't turn me on. When it's cold, nobody's gonna take their gloves off to touch the screen, anyway. A widely-circulated story showed asians using sausages to touch their screen to avoid taking their gloves off. Tell me THAT'S sanitary.

Put multitouch on a touchpad. Invent wireless fingerpads. Use motion sensing. Touching a screen for a pointer just seems to be going the wrong direction.

Writing on the screen, a feature available for years as well, is a different story. I can see where that would be far more useful for the tablet style PC. I can also see where you'd want to have the ability to tap areas while writing. Again, though, this is nothing new.

UPDATE!!!

It's been a while since I've blogged. Over a month. The reason? Well, the Monday after the Tea Party, I was informed that there would be 'changes'. They had a meeting that Friday, and, for no reason I could ascertain, I was asked to leave the office I've worked in for the last 10 years. I still have to do the work I was doing in my office, but I'm now expected to do several other jobs on the floor.

I don't think it was a politically motivated move, or, if it was, I don't think it's overt enough to be actionable. The recent economy has forced the company to which my company contracts to cut back. As a result, my company's presence in the building was cut from 8 people to 4. I suppose it's good to be one of the four.

Of course, it's hard to do my job from the floor. Exhaust fans blowing makes it really hard to hear people on the phone. Doing the other taks takes up so much time, I've fallen behind on my job, a bit. The constant interruptions are annoying, as well, but, still, I feel good that I was one of the 4 people kept.

I'm so tired in the evenings, I rarely think about doing the blogging or keeping up the Selma Intelligencer. I stopped updating the Intelligencer after New Year's, when we cut back 2 people where I work, and my job got a little more busy.

My tractor recently broke down. I should have blogged it's repair. It was squealing when I put the clutch in, and wouldn't crank after that. We broke the tractor in half, but there was nothing wrong with the clutch. The flywheel wouldn't turn, so we thought the motor was shot. Then, Amy's dad looked behing the flywheel with a flashlight and said he saw a bolt rubbing the flywheel.

That's exactly what it was. We took off the flywheel, tightened the bolts under it, and it was fine. I was going to put a new clutch in while it was broken in half, but I wound up just putting it back together because I needed to cut grass, and didn't want to spend the money for new clutch parts.

I had it in half for several weeks. I really should have taken pictures and blogged it.

Amy's house had a plumbing problem that flooded 90 per cent of their house in a few hours. They're getting their floors replaced. Thankfully, their insurance covered it.

That's all I can think of, right now.

New Face

The blog was looking a little too dark and busy, so I blanked it out a little. Let me know what you think...

Dumped by Townhall?

For those of you who've noticed my Tonewah's Politics blog on Townhall.com isn't coming up, I wish I could tell you why. For the last few days, I've been attempting to access it, to no avail. I've been able to log into Townhall, but my blog just won't appear.

I haven't been notified by Townhall, or anyone for that matter, of any terms of service violations, and am unaware of anything I've published that could be considered such. I haven't been informed by anyone why my blog on Townhall is no longer accessable. I won't go as far as to accuse Townhall of censorship, but it IS curious.

(as of 6am, Friday morning, the blog is back up at Townhall)

Nix the Politics (at least on Tonewah.com)

My little web log has begun to look like a political blog. That's not what it was intended to be, and I've taken measures to remedy this. I support Ron Paul vehemently, and will continue to blog about him. I just won't be doing it at www.tonewah.com, anymore.

From now on, my political blogs will be at either:

http://my.ronpaulspace.com/tonewah/

or

http://tonewah.townhall.com

Addicted?

87%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Old Xanga

I was perusing the ole' net, earlier, and found my old Xanga webjournal! It was bittersweet because I accidentally deleted it back in 2004. Over 3 years of stuff, gone. Still, it was neat to see. Luckily, blogger hasn't gone pay, or deleted stuff for no reason like my two previous webjournal sites, Stories.com and Xanga. I lost a total of about 8 years of webjournal entries because of those two sites.

BLOCKED!

If you're reading this in China... well, you can't be reading this from China! China has BLOCKED www.tonewah.com!!! I found THIS SITE on the Presurfer. It allows you to test websites to see if they're blocked out by China's firewall. I'm honored to be blocked out. lol.

Blog Year

I've had a little under 3000 unique visitors to the blog in the last year. I logged visits from almost every country in Europe, a few dozen from countries in Africa, almost every nation in Asia, as well as all the american countries (south and north!) I know a few thousand isn't many, but the diversity is what's cool to me.

Many IPs were repeat visitors, but not most. Most visitors were one timers. I guess that doesn't say much for my blog, but the fact that there WERE a dozen or so multiple entry IPs shows it had a readership, once. That was back when I used to post a lot of external links w/pics. I might need to go back to that.