Louis Voyer stops by very briefly
News, Technical ·Wednesday April 30, 2008 @ 19:50 EDT (link)
Louis Voyer
20080426: Lou Dobbs (we were watching to see if they'd published Honey's letter) covered some of the North American summit in New Orleans: Mexican President Felipe Calderón spoke about his illegal relatives, how he wanted amnesty for his illegal friends, and blathered about how wherever there are Mexicans there is the backing of the Mexican government (right next to our gutless wonder of a President), but oh no, he would never interfere with the sovereignty of the United States. Basically he admitted his country couldn't support its own people, and had to depend on the Great White Father for survival.
In a similar vein: Legislators from Mexican State [are] Angry at [the] Influx of... Mexicans, probably due to recent crackdowns, that is, enforcement of the law, in Oklahoma, Arizona (go go Sheriff Joe!), etc. And finally, Colerado Congressman Tancredo's take on Calderon's comments when he was here in February. Excerpt:
President Calderón, you are insulting the American people when you tell us that fifteen to twenty million illegal aliens in our country bring only benefits and no costs. I challenge you to give one concrete example of how the enforcement of our existing immigration laws violates anyoneÂs human rights. The people of Oklahoma are not anti-Mexican for passing laws to require verification of employment eligibility. The people of Indiana are not anti-immigrant for passing laws to require photo identification for voting. The people of California are not anti-Mexican for denying driverÂs licenses to illegal aliens. The people of Arizona are not anti-immigrant for passing laws that deny welfare benefits to people who are in that state unlawfully.
20080426: New project! Scanning owned and read books into a database, with the help of someone who's done it before (but they have clumsy command-line scripts in Python, and comma-separated value files, I'll integrate it all into my database and internal mod_perl web site) and the multi-facted WWW::Scraper::ISBN, with drivers for Amazon, ISBNdb.com, the Library of Congress and many other ISBN data sources.
20080427: Added "DVDs finished" to log entries: DVDs in the watch table between the current and next journal entry date (except the very newest entry), joining on the DVD table to get titles. Will be doing the same for books. Rolled up my sleeves, got out my axe and shovel, and pulled the rest of the main clump of bamboo out from the bed near the back right (from back) of the house; may put in flowers of some kind (something that can resist any attempts of the bamboo to resurface, perhaps; fortunately it hasn't been trying yet).
20080428: Went shooting at Wade's after work (first time firing the new gun), cleaned my gun for the third time after I got home; easier this time, last time I worked on the barrel more than necessary.
Our TV died (32" Sony Trinitron that I bought in 2002 shortly after I arrived in Memphis) during the day.
20080429: In the early morning, I re-patched the Myth box to make links to recorded programs be UNC paths (file://///MACHINE/path/file (yes, /////), and Firefox needs special security settings). God smite Windows, "UNC" (Universal, my butt), and Firefox too. Broke down and ordered a Toshiba 47" HDTV TV from Costco, $300 off, got decent reviews around the 'Net. Should work fine with the Myth box, although I'll need to use HDMI since it doesn't have S-Video input. We can return it up to 90 days, which I'll do if there are any issues (e.g. some say video games do poorly on LCD; we'll see if that's still true). I found my old TV's manual: it weights 163 lbs.; the LCD TV weighs about half that. I think the TV is the only thing we have that we can't move lift the two of us; I may ask a neighbor for help taking it to the car to dump it.
20080430: The AR-15 (M-16) is a pretty gun, especially the A3 version (expensive, too; the linked rifle is $1699). When I looked at shotguns I was surprised they were (on average) cheaper than handguns, but rifles more than make up for it. I suppose it's precision that's expensive, which shotguns aren't known for. The Mossberg 500sp looks like a nice home defense weapon ("Guard dogs have to be fed, walked
groomed, trained. These you just oil.").
Louis Voyer arrived around 2000, and we sat and talked for a couple of hours. He was a day ahead so only stayed with us one night instead of the two planned; he left around 0800 in the morning; Honey and I got up to see him off, and then I went to work, even though it was early ("There's a 6 in the morning too?"); I didn't feel like going back to sleep. His accent wasn't as thick as I'd been led to believe; only a few words (e.g. "tru" for "through") gave him away as French-Canadian.
DVDs finished: 300.
