Despite unprecedented calls for quick action, the White House’s $700 billion plan to rescue the financial industry appeared to fall apart late Thursday, less than 12 hours after a market-soothing deal seemed likely. A convergence of financial concerns, presidential politics and partisan rancor created an unexpected Washington drama with the nation’s economic future hanging in the balance. more… 

Apparently Republicans and Democrats had a meeting last night to negotiate the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout package. But they were too busy shouting and screaming at each other to actually get anything done. After the meeting things have regressed instead of progressed and we don’t know exactly when this will happen.

I am so sick of politics and the antics of a bipartisan government, neither republicans nor democrats care about this country or about the people. All they seem to care about are their stupid arrogant political views and their egos. This country’s economy has gone to the crapper, because of bad decisions made by companies and because we are spending billions of dollars a day fighting a pointless war. The only semi-intelligent idea the government  had in years was this “Bail Out Package” and they can’t even come to agreement on that.

How are we, “The American people” supposed to trust out government, when they act less mature than my little baby boy.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain issued a statement acknowledging that a bipartisan White House meeting he appeared to have sought to help showcase his leadership skills on the economy had devolved into a “contentious shouting match.”

I cannot for the life of me understand why we would ever allow people like them to run our country. I don’t care about parties or political views. All I care about is the fact that many of my friends and family cannot afford the basic necessities of life. So how about you ASSES stop yelling at each other like little school girls and get something done!

Man alive! I didn’t think that construction work was a piece of cake, but I didn’t realize exactly how much strength, stamina and experience you need in order to accomplish even the smallest things. We built a new room by enclosing the car port. We put up the walls from the ground up, insulation, roof, elctrical, plumming and everything in-between. As a whole I am very proud of what we accomplished, we spent quite a bit of money but by moving in together we basically cut our household spending in half. I am so happy that we are all together and that we no longer have to worry about anybody being hurt or bothered. Now everyday when I come home I am received by my little boy raising his arms to be picked up and hugged. It is the most amazing feeling in the world!

Throughout the project I learned a lot about construction, but it also taught me a lot about people. Supposedly I have a ton of friends, but when I really needed help no one but one or two offered it or even called to find out how I was doing. And the few that I did call for help where always to busy or had more important things to do. I still love each and everyone of them but I have learned that you can’t count on anyone but yourself and your family.

However there where a few friends that did lend a helping hand and I am very grateful for all of you specially Dirk, Aaron, Christian and Renee! We could not have done it without you guys! Hopefully one day we’ll be able to pay you back.

 

“Philadelphia, PA - July 28, 2008
Comcast, the nation’s leading residential broadband Internet provider, and video game pioneer, Nintendo, have teamed up to offer an exclusive deal available to new Comcast Triple Play customers. From today until August 17, 2008, those who sign up for Comcast Preferred Plus or Premier Triple Play package* will receive a complimentary Wii™ system, merging together the joy of a super-fun video gaming experience with the power of super-fast Internet speed.” Read More

Apparently those who sign up for Comcast Triple Play (Preferred Plus or Premier) will receive a WII. I have been after a WII for quite a while now and although it is the least expensive of the consoles out there, it is very hard to find.

After reading the Press Release I called Comcast and tried to upgrade. Apparently the complementary WII is only available for “New Customers”. I have read the press release up and down and nowhere did it say you hadto be a “New Customer” it just a new Triple Play customer. I don’t have Triple Play so then by getting the upgrade it makes me a new Triple Play customer. After more than one hour on the phone with the “Customer Service Specialist” he told me there was nothing that could be done and I should email Comcast at ecare@comcast.com.

I have just finished writing them a very nice email explaining my point of view and letting them know that if this offer is not extended to current customers they are going to lose a lot of business (including mine). I already pay close to $150 worth of Comcast services. It is only fair that I get to reap the benefits.

Isn’t treating customer’s differently illegal? I mean, are they allowed to give some “special” to some customers and screw the rest of us over?

As you have probably noticed I have a feed on my right menu with technology news from Google. This feed comes in as an XML file and I parse it to look like my menu. Apparently the XML parser I used was not efficient enough because it brought the server to it’s knees when 30, 000 people hit. After many failed attempts to regain control of my server I was able to modify the code in order to remain stable.

However I could never anticipate what followed. In my review, I criticized Google for allowing pornographic material to live inside lively (no pun intended). This caused tremendous rage amongst slash-doters and an avalanche of personal attacks against me. The thing that bothered me the most is that they started attacking my beliefs and my religion. They send me thousands of insulting messages in reference to Christians and Christianity as a whole. They called me all sort of names and made fun of me. 

I learned two things from this experience.

1. If you get slash-doted make sure your server and your code can handle the load.
2. Persecution of Christians does exists in the US, it may not be in the form of physical harm but I can tell you that those comments hurt a lot emotionally.

For all of those that commented and were offensive I have only one thing to say. I hope that one day you can find the joy and the love of Jesus in your life.

At first glance the website Lively.com is not appealing, it’s got a mediocre layout and if it wasn’t for the logo at the top left you wouldn’t even know it was owned and operated by Google. The page is bland with no much color or style. Nothing explains what Lively is; only a download link at the top seems important.

Once you download the app the adventure beings. You sign in using your faithful Google account and then you are given a chance to select your avatar. This is perhaps the first disappointing aspect of Lively. There are only 10 styles of avatar to choose from and 3 of them are animals; you get a small selection of clothing and apparel to the “dress” your avatar with but not nearly enough for the thousands of users that will be using this application in the near future. If they don’t provide more options for avatars soon, it will be hard to distinguish different users. After a few seconds of searching and sorting I finished Jose.Gomez.

After you have created your avatar you can venture into the many pre-created rooms or create your own. For the purpose of this review I decided to join a pre-existing room (I am still trying to do just that). All joking aside, the servers seems to be bogged down to the max, there are almost no rooms with enough space for you to join and if you create your own room then nobody comes. Finally after much poking around I was able to join a room with 2 or 3 people in it. It took me about 20 minutes to master how to interact with this application. It has a horrible interface and no keyboard support. You must move by dragging your avatar around and by combining the horrible neck breaking camera angle functionality common in most games these days. However no w a s d or arrow keys do anything for you. It is 100% centered on the mouse; this for me is a horrible defect that must be solved immediately. There are many people out there including me that would much rather work with the keyboard

There is nothing particularly interesting to do in these rooms, you can chat  with other avatars (Yeah REAL Ground Breaking Stuff) and you can perform certain actions like, hug, kiss, kick, punch etc. There were a few things I was impressed by.

1. In the TV sets inside the rooms you can stream videos from youtube
2. In the Picture Frames inside the rooms you can place your own pictures
3. Lively will automatically recognize many of the common Internet lingo and will do an action based on it. For example LoL will make the avatar Laugh and slap his/her knees.

Besides the above mentioned “perks” Lively is nothing but a time waster. It’s a bad copy of second life or any of the other “social networking tools” in 3D. It needs to be developed much more in order for it to become a hit. Although being a product from Google I do not doubt that sometime soon they will do something awesome like integrate it with Google earth and then you can live in your own house in Google earth and stuff like that. For now it is just another application bugging down the Internet.

On a side note I was VERY disappointed when I found several Sex oriented rooms. Google has always been very good at protecting their users in youtube, picasa, and any other service they provide. This time they let the ball drop.

But perhaps the most impressive thing that happened yesterday is exemplified by the picture on the left. Ingrid a presidential nominee and the entire armed forces of Colombia along with very high ranking officials of the government knelt down and prayed in front of international cameras to thank God for what had happened. When Ingrid took the stage the first words out of her mouth were “First and for most I will like to thank God, my God” and she went on from there.

What an amazing show of faith; wouldn’t it be great if out country was like that? Why is that we have so many problems with God these days why do we get him out of our pledge of Allegiance and our schools and any public places? Why can a third world country like Colombia stand up or rather kneel down proud and praise God all mighty in front of everyone without fear. But in our country, “the land of liberty” we shall dare not do something like that. Specially if you are a high ranking official in the government. I personally believe that if the Christians of this country had 1/2 of the faith the Colombian Catholics have then things would be much better. I believe this is an example of what the bible says in Luke 17:5-6

“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied. ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”

Because the people of Colombia had faith and because they prayed earnestly they pulled off this amazing miracle. And yes it was a miracle because how else would you explain 2 white helicopters flying into a deadly combat zone and successfully extracting prisoners from the enemy without a single shot or anyone being hurt.

Ring… Ring… Ring…
Hello you have reached Jose Gomez I am not available right now, leave a message after the beep.
Beep…..

Now a days you spend more time figuring out what the machine wants than you spend actually leaving a message. No wonder almost everyone that calls stops short of leaving a message. I think the most absurd “feature” of today’s answering machine is that it gives you the message multiple times. It goes something like this

Ring… Ring .. Ring…
Machine:<random elevator music>Call transferred to Voicemail Please Wait….
Message: Hi you have reached <Name of Person> I am not available right now leave a message after the beep.
Machine: To leave a message press one
User: 1
Machine: Please leave a message after the tone when you are finished press #
Beep…
User: <Leaves Message> #
Machine: To listen to your message press 1,to mark message as urgent press 2 now, for more options press *, to end the call press 3
User: 3
Machine: Good Bye

I mean can someone explain to me what was wrong with the old style. I don’t know about you but I get so angry with this things at times; and I am not even going to mention the “voice activated ones” who told anyone that pushing a button was a problem and they should write this absolutely horrible system so that I could try to talk to it? Its a machine, it is not supposed to understand English!

The funny thing is that the annoyance happens to both the person leaving a message and the person receiving the message. The person that receives the message has to navigate trough  similar menus pushing buttons or talking to the machine until finally you hear something like this

Machine: Message 1 from phone number 123-333-3333 received at 12:00 AM to listen to the message press 1
User: 1
Machine: First message <noise of a phone being slammed>
Machine: End of message, to repeat press 1, for more options press 2
User: 2
Machine: Message options, to call back press 1, to listen to message press 2, to listen to message details press 3, to delete press 7
User: 7
Machine: To confirm delete press #
User: #
Machine: Message deleted to un-delete press * 3, for more options press # to end call please hang up or press 9 now.
User: 9
Machine: Good Bye

I am going to check and see if I still have my old cassette player answering machine laying around, I bet that would make people happy… Oh wait, it won’t make a difference because the machines now come embedded in my really expensive phone system… Does anyone have an old rotary phone laying around? I need it for my answering machine to work.