Interesting . . .

Hat tip: Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin.

From National Review Online - Charles Krauthammer’s take on the Postal Service:

I’m kind of old-school. I like the delivery. I like the snow and sleet and time of day and all of that.

Look, it’s very obvious that you can’t privatize this. Three studies have looked at the postal service. Because of the new technology there is no entrepreneur in his right mind who would purchase it. So it’s going to be on the government dole forever.

The question is, is it completely obsolete? Look, it has one mandate which other private services don’t have. It has to reach every tiny hamlet everywhere in the country no matter what. It’s got to be universal. So that’s a slight handicap that the private companies don’t have.

Its main handicap, of course, is the crushing labor union contracts and the new technology, especially e-mail, which makes most of what it does obsolete. So that’s why it runs a huge deficit.

But, look, anything that is in Article 1 Section 8 of our constitution, anything that Madison had waxed enthusiastic about it in Federalist 42 — the postal roads that have kept us together — as an old-school guy, I don’t want to see it die.

As a conservative who believes in the market, it ought to die, but as a conservative that believes in tradition and stuff that really holds us together, I would subsidize until it dies a natural death in the next generation. But for old guys like me, keep it going for a while. …

[As for] the hard-hearted younger generation — well, if you ever got a sweet-smelling love letter at 17, you’d feel otherwise. Of course, I never did, but somebody did.

You can’t smell your e-mail.

I have programmed several favorite websites (other than the blogs) that I like to visit daily. One of those is the NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) website.

A favorite feature of mine, is the Very Latest SOHO Images page. On this page, I can see the solar disc in four different Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) wavelengths of light, two images (Continuum and Magnetogram) from the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI), and two fields of view from the Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO).

The Latest Images page is where I can see what’s happening on and around the Sun in near real time. Today’s EIT images tell me that there are active regions on both the left and right sides of the disc. The active region on the right will be rotating out of view soon, while the one on the left will move toward the center of the disc. The MDI images reveal no large sunspots - the remnants of sunspot 1035 are just coming into view in the upper left. The LASCOs reveal a couple of interesting things - there are Coronal Mass Ejections associated with both active regions seen in the EIT images and the planet Mercury passed in front of and below the Sun a few days ago.

On the way to the range today, we heard the train coming down the track, so we decided to stop for the photo op. Damsel took some stills and I made a movie.

I have always been fascinated by trains, especially old steamers, but I like ‘em all. In the summer of 2005, Damsel and I rode the Alaskan RR from Anchorage through Denali and on to Fairbanks. Seeing any trains always brings out a little wanderlust in me.

Pardon the crappy bandwidth compression. One of these days I’m going to upgrade the website for streaming video. I kept telling myself that I would do it when I get the time - well now that I’m retired, I no longer have much of an excuse. I’ll get on it real soon now, just as soon as I do a few chores and we make an out of towner or two . . .

We’re currently backing up the website files and database. When that is concluded, we’re going to be off line for a while while our Internet Services Provider (ISP) moves us to a bigger and faster server. Hang in there if things aren’t working since there will be an IP address change that will result in the Domain Name Servers having to re-associate the IP with the URL. We might be gone for several hours while that is happening.

The statistics counter on the Never Forget Tribute should roll past 50,000,000 later this evening. Each time the graphic is served up on web pages that embed the tribute, the hit counter advances by one. Damsel and I thank those of you who have taken the time to embed the tribute on your websites. It’s people like you who know that America, and the World, can Never Forget. We are grateful that so many of you care.

The animation was originally inspired by an anonymously-produced PowerPoint slideshow making the rounds on the Internet and via emails after 9/11. I gathered some of the graphics and produced the prototype of the graphic to display on my personal website. After refinements and improvements suggested by Damsel and others, it appears as it does today. This is the graphic seen in the right sidebar depicting the attacks on America by terrorists. Recently, I added the U.S.S. Cole attacks in tribute to the 17 Sailors murdered by terrorists.

In August of 2005, I made the animation available to anyone. The offer was only taken by a few sites at first, but since then, many more have begun displaying the animation. As of December 2005, there were over 200 sites linking to it, and that number has been growing since. Sites in the US, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Italy and several other countries, display the tribute on their pages.

Now that we’ve had a taste of vacationing in a motorhome, we’re anxious to try it again. This spring, we’re going to head down to Phoenix to attend the Second Amendment Blog Bash and the NRA Convention. On the way, we plan to camp at a couple of scenic places.

While we enjoyed our winter cruise, we had a bottleneck of sorts with computer access. At home, we’re used to each having a computer connected to our local network with internet access. On the road, we had to share our one laptop. Neither of us had enough time to do our usual ‘thing’ - blogging and reading the other blogs.

So, to correct that, we ordered a new Dell Mini 9 for me to use - both on the road, and when we’re on the patio swing when the weather is nice. I look forward to getting the new toy!

Oh! Did I mention it’s PINK!

A colleague sent me this email today:

As you move your cursor you can see the whole cockpit from top to bottom. You can even zoom on the dash [sic - instrument panel is the term]. Most panoramas are of landscapes. This 360-degree panorama is unlike any other - It’s a picture of an Airbus A380’s cockpit. Be sure to go to full screen.

CLICK HERE >> INSIDE THE COCKPIT OF THE AIRBUS A380

Panorama photographs are becoming increasingly popular on the Net. That’s because software is making it easier than ever to create them. The Airbus A380 is the largest passenger airliner in the world. It can seat more than 850 people. Only a couple of the
planes are in service. So, you’ll probably have to wait for your first ride. Until then, check out its state-of-the-art controls, top, bottom and all around.

After a quick look, I had to force myself to go back to work and defer the frustrated ex-pilot geekery until this evening.

Click in the link or the screenshot above to go to the website.

It’s with sadness that we re-post this piece we did in December 2005 - the great George Putnam passed away over the weekend. Even late in his life, he was busy writing his unique “One Reporter’s Opinion” columns at NewsMax. We will miss George Putnam.

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No one who lived in the Los Angeles area between the fifties and the seventies, will forget the iconic television newsman, George Putnam. One of the regular features on his newscast was “One Reporter’s Opinion,” during which he would editorialize on a topical issue. I enjoyed watching Putnam’s newscast, primarily because of his conservative point-of-view in spite of the liberal Times-Mirror’s ownership of the television station, KTTV.

Well, I’m happy to report that George Putnam’s “One Reporter’s Opinion” feature is alive and well at NewsMax on line. Better yet, his politics are still in line with reality:

One Reporter’s Opinion - Americanism Left ‘Cold in the Night’

It is this reporter’s opinion that the very heart of America is under attack. There are those, foreign and domestic, who actually HATE this great nation and all it stands for. Led by atheists and the ACLU, there are groups who would love to destroy the promises on which our nation was founded - our very way of life.

Aided and abetted by strange court decisions and oddball judges, each day brings a new shocker. We find federal judges ruling against the Pledge of Allegiance as unconstitutional, finding that “one nation under God” violates schoolchildren’s right “to be free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.”

The latest target of the atheists is to remove “in God we trust” from our currency, claiming that this phrase violates the so-called separation of church and state.

Continue reading George Putnam’s article on NewsMax: One Reporter’s Opinion - Americanism Left ‘Cold in the Night’

Users of Internet Explorer may have had difficulty gaining access to sites that use the SiteMeter utility counter. The problem has been reported but not resolved as of this time. We have temporarily disabled Sitemeter pending their resolution of the problem.

Update: SiteMeter’s news page is silent on the issue, but they seem to have resolved the problem.

UpdateII: Sitemeter answered the feedback I left them:

Dear Captain Bob,

We apologize for the problem this has caused on your websites. We became aware of a compatibility issue with our SiteMeter tracking code and IE 7 (possibly IE 6) browsers that started last night.

The problem was related to some work we were doing on the backend system for our upcoming website launch.

We’ve identified and resolved two separate but related issues -

1 - IE Users viewing pages - There was a problem with users who placed their SiteMeter tracking code outside of their HTML Body Tag. Because of the changes we made this created a failure for visitors viewing sites using Internet Explorer 7.

2 - Accessing SiteMeter and Stats - Individuals trying to access or view their SiteMeter stats by clicking on their SiteMeter logo/icons were unable to gain access. This again appears to have affected only individuals using IE7.

At this time both problems have been fixed and our services are fully operational.

If you have any additional questions please let me know.

Sincerely,
Andy
SiteMeter Support

I knew it would be just a matter of time until somebody would do this.

Gunpedia is a wiki that was created in January 2006. A wiki is a website that anyone can edit and improve, sort of like Wikipedia, only this is more specific - it’s for the documentation of just about anything about guns. Right now, you can edit 347 different articles about this subject, and can create many, many more.

On the front page there is a section for:

• Monthly Featured Article
• Monthly Featured Image
• User of the Month
• Newest Pages

Also featured is an alphanumeric index to specific firearms pages. If you don’t see your favorite weapon there, you can add it yourself! I looked at the index, and it appears that there will be a lot of work to do.

There are many special-interest wikis in cyberspace, not the least of which is the IMFDB or Internet Movie Firearms Database, another very interesting wiki.

If you tried to comment here and got a weird message about “Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity,” please disregard the message.

We were using a plug-in called “Bad Behavior” which was supposed to protect us from spam bots and the like. Well, apparently the plug-in was compromised and started living up to it’s name by sending that message whenever any management functions were invoked, including comments and even posting blogs or managing the links list.

Quite frustrating until I found out what was causing it. The plug-in has been removed and all should be OK now. We also upgraded to the latest WordPress version.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Update: John A. reported more about the problem on Steve McIntyre’s Climate Report Blog:

All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.

Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.