Phil801 – Geek Blog

Senator Rand Paul and Senator Roger Wicker will sponsor the “Life at Conception Act” this week which declares that the unborn are persons.

Well, Duh!

The only people who disagree that the unborn are people are those who are Morally Corrupt,  Intellectually Dishonest and Selfishly Motivated.

So-called “Pro-Choice” ‘people’ who argue that abortion should be legal to allow a woman to have a “choice” over what happens to her body are both Morally Corrupt and Intellectually Dishonest.  The CHOICE that a woman has is actually whether to have sex or not.  An unwanted pregnancy is what we honest people call a CONSEQUENCE.  Yet, in our completely corrupted society that seeks to relieve itself of any actual consequences – the live free, party hard, ignore the effects philosophy of Liberalism – we would rather justify making it legal to MURDER a defenseless child than actually call upon people to make MORAL choices or take on any responsibility for their actions.

There is a precedence for this – generations ago, we classified slaves as NON-PEOPLE to assuage our guilt and moral deficiency in treating fellow humans inhumanely.  Now, generations after slaves were freed and reclassified as people, we still feel the effects of it throughout our society.  It is the very same mentality that seeks to find justification for legalizing the murder of a human for the convenience of someone unwilling to accept the consequences of their actions.

Rand Paul’s legislation is trying to put a stop to this pitiful circumstance of our irresponsible society  by declaring that a person is a person at conception – THAT is when life begins.  The 14th Amendment protects that life:

“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

It is pathetic and a clear statement of the corruption of our Nation that such a definition has to be made.

… Que the Morally Corrupt and Intellectually Dishonest “Pro-Choice”rs to hold up straw man arguments by “science” to try to assuage their conscience while they try to justify their stance for murdering defenseless humans so we can live life without consequence.

For most of my life paying close attention to LDS General Conference has been primarily an exercise in sleeping.  It’s not just conference, but anytime I stop moving and stare at a tv – it just puts me to sleep.  With modern technology though, Conference can and has, for me, become a much more interactive and participative experience.  In this post I would like to share some things you can do on the internet to participate in Conference.  If I’ve missed something, please list it in the comments – I’d like to find out more ways to participate.

1. The first thing to do is to actually listen to or watch conference via the internet.  This isn’t a requirement at all, but something I do because I don’t have the ability to watch TV.  It also makes it easier to have multiple screens going that focus on Conference.   You can watch Conference live on the internet, streamed through the LDS.org website.
2. Follow Twitter posts about conference, and post your thoughts on talks to Twitter.  The hashtag (a way of categorizing tweets) for Conference is #LDSConf using this in your tweets makes it easy for everyone to notice your tweets about conference.  There are several ways to follow #LDSConf – my preferred method is via Google’s live updates.  Another way is through “What the Hashtag” but I’m not too fond of their interface.  During Conference today (1st & 2nd sessions on Saturday) there were over 10,000 tweets about conference.  What this ends up doing is really highlighting which parts of talks are really standing out to people – as there will easily be over 100 tweets about a single important quote 2 seconds after the quote is uttered.
3. If you are Facebook friends with several other LDS people, your facebook homepage is probably really active with conference discussion (mine is at least).  This is a good place to discuss talks as they are going on.
4. Internet resources in general.  Often times talks refer to other talks or to other important things that can be found on the internet.  A wealth of links flow through the #LDSConf tweet feed and will likely be available on your facebook wall.  This group research effect will help you quickly identify resources to bookmark for future reference.
5. LDS centric bulletin boards.  If you are a member of any LDS Centric boards, they might be very lively with live discussion of Conference.  This can be a good place to post your thoughts and to read the thoughts of others while Conference is going on.

These are the things *I* find most useful.  I know there are many others out there, please share them – especially if they’re really good.  The key idea here is to make Conference more participative, to stay awake and to get more out of it.  You can always go back tomorrow and re-watch a particular talk (via lds.org or youtube) or read it next month.  The key thing I’m looking for is to be able to really pull the nuggets out of conference.  It’s also really nice to see literally hundreds of people discussing something so important.

For the last several weeks we’ve (Adria and I) been working on a new business plan. It won’t make us any money. It will hopefully raise at least 10 million dollars for Cancer Research and Family Support though, it’s called Run for Leukemia.

To raise such a significant amount of money, Run for Leukemia will have to do something completely over the top, seemingly impossible and possibly insane.

Here’s the gist of the plan:

Run for Leukemia will start at Disney Land and run across the country to Vermont. Then we’ll run down the Eastern seaboard to Disney World.

Yes, Run.

I’ll be doing the running – 20 miles a day, 5 days a week for one year to be exact.

Over the past two years, while Serenity has been dealing with Leukemia, we’ve been itching to be able to do something significant to support Leukemia research and to help support the non-profits who provide help to Cancer Families. Running across the country to raise money for charity has been before, but we think that by treating it as a business we’ve figured out how to raise a significant amount of money while doing it.

The key is in the organization. We will have about 20 paid staffers who’s job is specifically to setup, organize and fully prepare fundraising events with local schools as we move across the country. They will work several months ahead of us contacting schools and working with them to do a fundraiser, once the schools have agreed, they’ll work with the local community to put on a big event and invite local fire departments, police departments, city and state dignitaries, hospitals, athletic team members and local celebrities. Most importantly, they’ll work with local media to have the events heavily covered.

The event highlight will consist of the school kids talking about how much they were able to raise and having them present the funds to local Cancer Families and Run for Leukemia. To be successful at raising $10 million, Run for Leukemia will need to put on 200 of these events across the country that raise $50,000 each. We plan to put on 250. The bulk of that $50k will be raised by selling local businesses sponsorship banners that the event will take place in front of. There are several other things we’ll be doing along the way to raise money and national media attention as well.

The entire family will be with me on the road for the year along with several paid staff members. We’ll be caravaning with 3 travel trailers and 5 trucks with campers. All of them will be wrapped with ads, essentially creating a group of moving billboards that will slowly move across and down the country for a year and will be the backdrop of all the events and interviews we do along the way. We plan to finance the trip by selling ad space on those vehicles.

We’ll be raising money for the following organizations: CureSearch (they fund research for children’s leukemia), Make A Wish Foundation, HopeKids and the Christmas for Children with Cancer Foundation. All of these organizations have had a significant impact on our lives and in supporting Serenity through her treatment.

I’m really excited about this! It will be a tough, grueling year but it’ll be totally worth it!

This is just a summary of a large business plan we’ve put together, we’re at the stage of beginning to execute on that plan by looking for advertisers who are interested in having a cross country billboard for a year. If you know of any companies that might be interested, please let us know!

We’ve just started a Facebook page, there’s not much there yet but we’re working on it. If you like this idea, please click the like button below!

This might be a regular feature, or it might just be hit and miss.  What it will be though is mostly quick quips on news items.  Some will be political, some tech, some other junk.  It’ll mostly just be stuff I found interesting, funny, stupid or worth noting.

Yahoo Inc. CEO Carol Bartz received a $47.2 million compensation package during her first year on the job as the Internet company tried to motivate her to engineer a turnaround.

Seriously?  47.2 million to try to motivate her to do her job?  I’d be motivated to do her job for a tenth of that – and given her results I bet I could do better.  Wait, is Yahoo still on the web?

Facebook’s new social plugins have been installed on 50,000 websites in one week.

Honestly, I figured it would be more than that but that is IMPRESSIVE!  I love the new social plugins and the open graph stuff they rolled out.  It’s VERY reminicent of the social network system I designed about 2 years ago.  Hey all you investors that told me it was a stupid idea – what do you think NOW????  Yeah, you’re pretty smart about this stuff, aren’t you.

Twitter is, in many, ways a network with only five degrees of separation.

I’m growing out of love with Twitter for the third time.  If you read this story it makes it sound like you can connect to anyone in the world with 5 steps – but don’t miss this story: Only 7% of Americans actually use Twitter while 41% have a facebook profile.  So basically, it takes you 5 steps to reach 7% of Americans.  That doesn’t really sound so good.  I personally find that I get about 400% more interaction off of facebook than I do off of twitter when I tweet something and it pushes to facebook.  Twitter interactions are becoming few and far between.

The person who found and sold an Apple iPhone prototype says he regrets not doing more to return the device to its owner

What a load of legal positioning, pr CRAP!  This dude found the iphone prototype and knew he had hit the big time!  He sold it as fast as he possibly could.  I would bet my wife’s iPhone that “returning it to the owner” never ONCE entered his mind!  He had the scoop of the year and he knew it!  I still think it’s insane the way the California Police responded to it.  SAVE APPLE!  Get their phone back!  Maybe the idiot from Apple that took a prototype phone to a bar should be held responsible for leaving it there – assuming it wasn’t all a PR stunt in the first place.

More than three-quarters of Americans have heard about the state of Arizona’s new immigration law, and of these, 51% say they favor it and 39% oppose it.

First of all, I think this move by Arizona is brilliant and about two decades late.  Second of all, Arizona is a soveriegn state, who gives a crap what the rest of the country thinks about it, or what the Federal Government thinks about it.  This hoopla about “racial profiling” in the new law cracks me up!  Of COURSE it’s racial profiling!  They’re trying to keep all the illegal MEXICANS from streaming in!  They’re aren’t worried about illegal Irish or Germans coming in by the thousands.  Good Grief!  Since when did “racial profiling” become illegal?  It’s just not ‘politically correct’. Maybe the Federal Government should stay out of things it doesn’t have a constitutional right to touch and instead worry about what it is constitutionally bound to protect, now there’s an idea!

The United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

Wow, I don’t think I need to say anything here.  Not sure I could – I’m laughing too hard!  The UN continues to prove just how stupid and ineffectual they are.  Putting Iran in charge of women’s rights is kinda like putting the head of the KKK in charge of the NAACP.

“I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money. But, you know, part of the American way is, you know, you can just keep on making it if you’re providing a good product or providing good service. We don’t want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy.“ – Barack Obama

So, the Obama’s adjusted gross income for 2009 was $5.5 million.  I wonder if he thinks he’s “made enough money”.

Former Vice President Al Gore have added a Montecito-area property to their real estate holdings.  The couple spent $8,875,000 on an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, a real estate source familiar with the deal confirms. The Italian-style house has six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

OK, Al can make and spend as much money as he wants.  But when his latest money making is off the global warming farce, and then he does this – it’s just STUPID.  When will people quit listening to this idiot?

A Pentagon report presented a sobering new assessment Wednesday of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, saying that its abilities are expanding and its operations are increasing in sophistication, despite recent major offensives by U.S. forces in the militants’ heartland.

My Grand-daddy used to say “if you’re gonna fight a war, fight it to win it.” Ok, that’s not true but the point is.  If we’re going to fight this stupid war (as far as I’m concerned we should be out of there) we dang well better fight it to win it!  It’s stupid that we are making a half-hearted effort over there.  If we’re staying can we PLEASE do the job right?!?!

Serenity is almost to her second anniversary of having Leukemia.  The doctors are currently telling us that she'll be 'cured' and be able to go off treatment in July.  Being cured means that she has successfully gone through the treatment protocols and if she doesn't relapse for 5 years she'll be considered medically cured.  Relapse is the big scary monster, it's really bad.  She'll likely die as a result of either Leukemia, a second cancer or from the 'cure' – but hopefully not for a long time.  She should have died 2 years ago, we're extremely grateful for having the last 2 years and anything more we get is purely a gift!

In 2008 & 2009 I was working for a 3PL company called Lanelinks.  In November of last year the company succomed to the economy and went under.  We thought that we could make the company work so some of us continued working without pay for a couple months.  Eventually we gave in and I was 'unemployed'.  We had burned through a lot of our reserves but the big eye opener for me was realizing that I didn't have anything set up that would bring me residual income or provide a buffer.  I realized that I had spent my whole career helping companies set up their internet systems to make money but had failed to do so for myself.  I vowed to change that and make sure that I always had revenue coming in from the internet that I could step to anytime I needed to.  I spent the next two months analyzing several possibilities and building out a business plan that I believed would be successful, be interesting and be something I could step away from once it was established without it dying. 

For the following several months I worked on my plan with a couple partners, doing some contracting work along the way.  After working on things since November of last year, here are some of the things that we've accomplished.  We've established and built up a preparedness community (forum), established and refined a preparedness store, have several other stores in the works and nearly ready to launch and built the beginings of an online Survival Training Center.  There are still some other things that are included in the plan that we're working on.  The main point of all these sites is to build a turn-key system for providing preparedness/survival information, supplies and training via the internet in a way that hasn't been done before.  By the time we're done it will be pretty cool – and not require much work at all. 

Over the last couple years I've become really interested in physical security, primarily in lock picking and other work.  I've become enough of an expert at it that on a recent trip to New Jersey, we were hanging out with Deviant (from Toool/DefCon) and Dr. Tran – both recognized lock experts – and devised a way to pick handcuffs they had deemed un-pickable.  When they pulled them out I jumped at the challenge and went to work, it took me about 20 minutes to devise a method to successfully pick them, with paperclips.  Deviant posted this video about it:

So I haven't written for almost a year. Before that, it was really sporadic. Before that I often wrote more than once a day. So what happened? That's what I've been wondering tonight. Here are a couple thoughts.

• My life and my objectives completely changed after Serenity was diagnosed with Leukemia.  Blogging anything that wasn't about her seemed a waste of time.
• My interest in being very public with my life and my thoughts waned.  A lot of the things that happened that year were too personal to talk about and they were the dominating factor in my life.
• Blogging itself got old.  I fail to see the point any longer in being the 'first one' to talk about a tech item.  Especially because there are a lot of shills out there that do just fine covering that. 
• My interests have really changed.  I still stay on top of tech news but it's not the dominating factor in my life anymore.  I've been looking for ways to change course with my career towards things I'm more interested in – tech combined with other things like security, survival and prepping.
• Most recently I've been more into talking about things on Facebook.  Micro-blogging became more interesting to me than writing big long articles. 
• This blog was always about building my "brand" as a bleeding edge tech guy.  My brand is diversifying a lot lately but this will still be about my "brand"
• Honestly, blogging became boring after several years. 

So here's what I'm thinking about doing.  I'm going to resurrect my blog and just write about the stuff I'm interested in, stuff I'm doing and stuff I'm thinking about.  A lot of times that will have to do with technology, a lot of times it won't.  Most of the posts will probably be short and simple.  Since this blog pushes to my twitter and facebook account I'll probably use it for micro-blogging to some extent.  Basically, my blog is going to be about me and what I'm doing, not so much about technology and tech news.  If you're still subscribing to me, cool – but you may not be as interested in my posts anymore. 

I may just get bored with it and not really post much. 

Seriously?  You still read my blog?  Shocking.  I’m just writing cause I want to vent.

This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast which is a breakfast meeting of a great group of techies.  I haven’t been in a while -I haven’t done much of anything public lately, except blogging on Utah Preppers, and I was pretty surprised by what went on.  This tweet from Phil Windley kind of summarizes it:

Big topics of discussion at #ctobreakfast: calendaring and syncing contacts.  Funny how these are still broken for most people.

Here’s the thing – they’re not broken for me, haven’t been for YEARS.  The only people they’re broken for are those with so much Microsoft hate that they refuse to use their software.  I’m blown away that so many of the techies at that meeting are having problems with this!  There is a very simple and elegant fix – it’s called Microsoft Exchange.  Here are the complaints from the meeting:

• My calendar doesn’t sync to my phone (in real time)
• My contacts don’t sync to my phone (from mail clients etc)
• My Email doesn’t sync to my phone (using gmail)
• When someone updates their contact info, I don’t receive it (and Plaxo tastes bad because of a mistake 3 years ago)
• gmail and google apps uptime isn’t that great

Seriously????  Really??  All these great techies and you’re all living like this?   I can’t believe that you haven’t heard of this hot new crazy named web 2.0 super awesome web service called Exchange!  Yeah, it’s actually been around for years – which is how long I’ve had all of the above issues resolved on my phone.

But it seems that the hot sexy thing is to use fragmented half-built “web services” that aren’t compatible with each other and don’t work but HEY!  THEY’RE FREE!   ….. Well, hope you’re enjoying what you pay for.

Oh yeah, then there’s the stupid iPhone – the over-hyped piece of garbage that can’t do half of what my NonIphone  can do.

Here’s what I do:

•  I use a Windows Mobile phone
• I use Outlook Mobile on my phone
• I use Plaxo with a LOT of my contacts
• I use a hosted Exchange Service for 10 bucks a month
• I use Outlook on my desktop and my laptop

What does this give me, all for 10 bucks a month?

Any time I add or change a contact on my phone, laptop, desktop or web outlook – the change automatically and instantly shows up on my phone, laptop, desktop and web outlook.  Any time I read an email on any of the previously mentioned devices – it automatically and instantly shows up on all the other devices as read.  Any time I schedule an appointment on ……. you get it?  It shows up.

Uptime has never been a problem for me actually – my email has NEVER gone down in the years that I’ve been using 4Smartphone.  It’s professionally managed and when everyone’s hollering about gmail being dead, I’m happily sending email.

Sharing calendars was brought up – everyone uses google calendars for that.  Yeah, me too.  But there’s also an Outlook sync that google provides so any changes that someone makes to my public google calendar …… automatically and almost instantly shows up on my phone, lap……

Tethering to your laptop for an internet connection was also brought up – you have to hack your stupid iPhone to get that to work – I use AT&T too iPhone people.  My phone natively tethers to my laptop – always has.  My phone has interactive gps with google maps too – I believe you finally sort of got that with the latest iPhone – hurry up and spend $400 bucks on the newest one!!!

By using Plaxo, many of my contacts are automatically updated in Outlook when they change their personal settings (like phone number) in Plaxo.   And guess where that goes?  To my phone of course.  So to recap that – if Johnny changes his phone number in Plaxo it automatically changes it in ALL my contact lists so next time I call Johnny I’m calling his new number without even realizing it.

So Phil, Sam, et al – syncing isn’t broke and waiting for a fix – it’s been available for a LONG time, it’s just not available to you because you hate Microsoft.  Hec, Outlook even works on a worthless Mac.

UPDATE:  My friend, Jesse Stay, has written a great tutorial in response to this post showing how to connect your iPhone with Exchange.  Check it out if you’re interested!

I’ve been blogging like crazy over on Utah Preppers and completely ignoring this one.  My passions and interests have shifted in the last year, quite a bit.  I’m not sure what’s coming down the road and I hope and pray that it’s not as bad as my imagination thinks it might be.  But, I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be pretty bad.  I’ve spent a lot of my life learning preparation and survival skills and the Utah Preppers blog gives me a way to share that knowledge with others – hopefully my blogging there will help others.

There are several things I want to update on.

The Juice Diet

My last couple posts were about me being on a juice diet – planned for 40 days.  When I started it I promised that if it compromised my health at all I would immediately stop it.  Well, five days into it I started passing blood – and stopped the diet.  After I stopped I didn’t have any more problems.  Something wonderful happened from it though!  I’ve been lactose intollerant for many years now, something in the juice diet changed that.  Since I spent 5 days only drinking pure juice I’ve been able to consume dairy products without ANY side effects!  I also felt pretty great and very energetic after the five days.  I plan to do a 5 day fast about once every couple months from now on.  It was a nice reboot.

Work

I recently took a full time position with a startup called LaneLinks.  We’re a backhaul management company for private fleets.  I’m the Director of Technology and while it’s been a tough adjustment to go back to a ‘real job’ it’s been very nice  to have a regular, reliable paycheck.  We’re building some very cool software that will change an industry that is stuck in the dark ages.

This Blog

I’m not sure where I want to go with this blog.  I’ve changed a lot in the last year.  Major trials tend to do that I hear.  I’m no longer interested in trying to stay on the bleeding edge of technology.  Web 2.0 has almost completely waned as an interest for me.  Some friends have said that they miss my tech posts and my views on emerging tech.  I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that anymore, maybe sometime down the road though, you never know.  I’ve tried to stay away from politics on this blog but lately politics have been really frustrating me and I’ll probably vent about them on here.  As I mentioned, preparedness is what has really flared up as a passion for me lately but I’ll keep most of that on a different blog.  Politics leads to preparedness and being a technologist means I’m looking at preparedness from that perspective a lot.  There are several technological things I’ve been working with in prepping and I’ll probably talk about that here.

People that know me know I’m an avid outdoorsman – that hasn’t changed a bit.  I’ve tried to keep my outdoor activities off this blog in the past but I’m thinking I may change that, although I may start using my personal blog for that (I haven’t blogged on that for years).  So, we’ll see where this goes.

Family

My family has been through a lot of trials in the last year.  I’m planning on writing a post about that soon.  My daughter Serenity, who has Leukemia, is doing fairly well right now.  She hasn’t had to be admitted to the hospital for several weeks so that is great!  Serenity was recently the recipient of the money raised at a charity tweetup at Sundance.  I’ll blog more on that later too but we’re very grateful for the communities continued concern and support for our daughter.

Other Activities

I plan to start doing a lot with The Serenity Foundation sometime in March (we are expecting to finish our software project at LaneLinks in Feb).  I plan on putting on more blood drives and doing several other things with the foundation.  Some people have asked me to put on more of my version of the Utah Geek Dinners – big with presenters, etc.  I may do some of that after March as well.  Some time ago I talked about doing a wellness bash for Serenity once she was stabilized a bit.  Her birthday is in May and spring will be here so I’m thinking of throwing her a community party sometime around then.

I’ve been thinking about putting on another conference.  This one would be Prepper and Technology based.  It will probably be in late summer or fall of 2009 if I decide to do it.  I think it would be a lot of fun.

I think that’s about it, that’s pretty much what’s going on in my life right now.  Thanks for still reading my blog after all this time.  Hopefully it’s still a little bit interesting.