Wesley Howe

Their latest tune? Money.

In the State of the Union speech last night, political rhetoric would be expected. The President, as winner-in-chief, is the nominal head of his party, although the dogs are always nipping at his heels. But his public excoriation of a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States (on political funding) during a joint session is nothing but a scrap of raw meat to try to rally the more determined left half of his party.

This was no different politically than Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro blaming social problems on the United States. In this case, he is an elected, term-limited leader who rhetorically is challenging the judgment of a group of unelected, life-tenured judges, who we depend on to referee the important issues for us. Not everybody likes a call that goes against your team, but it is unsportsmanlike to try to dump on the referee, and that  is exactly what he is doing.

This country managed to support two vastly different political parties, with peaceful transitions of power for two centuries without the limits the McCain-Feingold act imposed. But you would think the sky is falling to listen to some of the people that disagree with the ruling, including Mr. Obama.

At the heart of this is the recognition that after the loss in Massachusetts, something has to be done to retain the interest of (and contributions from) the party faithful, by creating a caricature of a new enemy lurking amongst us. The tactic is not new, and not left-wing, other examples include the Roe v. Wade decision (which has raised countless funds for both sides of the argument).

Well, so much for post-partisan politics. It’s like 1977 all over again.

The press is full of reports and opinions regarding attacks on Google from China. while I am no security expert, I have my own email server, and I have seen a huge increase in phishing attempts in the last month.

Like Google claims, these are targeted emails. Some are pretty good, especially the Facebook ones, where they copied the graphics and layout well. Unlike the sad attempts from Nigeria, the English used is generally flawless… business impersonal, but with proper grammar and spelling, and definitely American English, none of the British spellings and phrases.

So while I can do nothing but watch Google and the other security experts, I can be careful about the emails. The Facebook ones were coming even though I didn’t have a Facebook account until a few days ago, and others I have been getting claim that new security measures require me to update my email account. That fails big time here because I administer the email accounts on my server, and the accounts are limited to Kay and myself.

But I don’t doubt that they are catching quite a few phish this way, so don’t click on that link.

I tried this. It works very well, at least for now. Time will tell if they keep up with the demand.

I have a wireless internet service that worked pretty well, although it was a lot of grief getting to that point. But by pointing my DNS at Google, instead of the DNS servers provided by my ISP (the “automatic” ones) things have improved markedly.

Besides a generally “snappier” response to clicks, which may or may not be a quantifiable improvement, there are two places where the improvement is quite solid. The first is problems accessing sites on the first click. I would guess that the ISP DNS server is holding recently accessed addresses in a cache, because the first time each day that I tried to access some of my favorite (but smaller) forum sites I would get a site not found error. Repeating the access attempts a second time usually brings it right up. This happened on enough different sites enough times that I can only assume it is designed with some sort of cache, and is too slow on some network accesses to get the address before a timeout occurs. I suppose a longer timeout value would also fix the errors, too, but who wants the World Wide Wait back?

The other very noticeable improvement I see is playing videos, at least those that are streamed, such as the ones at YouTube. I used to just avoid a lot of them because they would stutter and stop waiting for some more data. It really detracts from the enjoyment of a story when you have to wait for them to finish a sentence a half-dozen times in a 3 minute video. With the DNS changed to Google, the data stream is pretty consistent… an occasional short glitch happens, but videos play well.

I am, for now, pleased. I know some people have some worries about Google maintaining data on them, but all the ISP providers do this, so the question really is about who, not if. I don’t have much private or pirate stuff I am involved with, so I never worry about this (except online commerce, I make sure the site I am using uses HTTPS instead of plain HTTP).

I saw this little item on a large newspaper article:

“The White House said Friday that the $787-billion stimulus package had created or saved about 1 million jobs so far…”

Some people are questioning the accuracy of the 1 million claim. I am not, I concede the estimate is the best that can be made given that it is impossible to actually know what would have happened if the stimulus had not been enacted into law.

Except that $787 Billion divided by 1 Million is $787, 000, over 3/4 of a million dollars spent or committed to be spent for each of these jobs. What a country!

After ragging on some of the deficiencies and bad policies of certain software companies, I would like to tell a story that came out right. I suspect a virus infection had slipped past my McAfee virus protection. Reinstallation failed, error messages popped out, and I was concerned.

I signed up for their paid virus removal assistance, and after a moderate wait a technician appeared in a chat client, and soon asked me to approve his looking at my screen and controlling my keyboard and mouse. After a little while of windows popping open and closed, all happening from the remote center, the McAfee technician concluded the issue was actually in the “McAfee Server”… I suppose a case of software gone bad.

Dig this part… because it was their problem, they refunded the service fee. Now, I know and you know that is the right thing to do, what is surprising is that they did it, and without me demanding it.

As promised, they got the issue resolved and my protection status back to operational within a few hours. These guys have had some aw-shits in the past, but they scored this time my doing the right thing for the customer.

I just hope it is the start of a trend.

I haven’t had very many new topics I wanted to talk about here for a while, not that I have no opinions, but I have little to add to the political debate in the U.S.

I was prompted to my thoughts today by reading a news article discussing how the iPod will be redesigned in the E.U. to have a lower default volume. It appears that new rules specify a safe maximum volume, aimed at avoiding hearing loss, and that the new standard requires companies to limit the default volume in order to have the presumption of providing a safe product, in lieu of specific tests.

I don’t have any problem with guidelines, but it is part of a pattern of growth in government regulation using safety and welfare. One bit at a time, the regulations become more detailed and cover ever so smaller risks. Many of these ideas are in themselves good, commonsense solutions, but what ever happened to personal choice?

What, you say, people can choose for themselves? Pete Townshend (of the Who) has admitted to having hearing loss, and it is believed to be associated with his being the guitarist in what was one of the loudest bands of its time.

Well, neither he nor Roger Daltry died before they got old (although their bandmates did), but what kind of generation would they have been without big amplifiers and even bigger speaker cabinets to destroy?

Now, all we have left is bureaucrats gone wild…

A story ran in the news today of a dog badly mauled by a mountain lion while defending its owners, triggering some thought from me.

No greater honorable deed is recognized among humans than that accorded someone who gave their life while protecting others. While this happens in war, and occasionally elsewhere, it is standard operating procedure for a dog.

I have a sort of chow/lab crossbreed black dog we call “Shadow” (he was small, black, and always right behind you). He is 10 now, and still in good shape, if a little slower. He should be a boy scout, obedient, friendly, kind…

About three years ago, I took him with me when I went to feed the cattle. I ride around the ranch in a two-passenger vehicle that is sort of like a gas-powered golf cart, but with ATV tires and engine. Shadow sits up right beside you when travelling, as comfortable and attentive as any person. When I got down to the feeding spot, I parked the vehicle, got out the buckets and told him to stay.

We had an agressive Longhorn-cross cow we named Alice that always wanted her food Right Now. I generally always had to shoo at her to make her step back far enough for me to pour the feed into the trough. That day was not different, I took off my hat and flapped it at her, and poured the feed.

As I turned to go to the next trough, I saw Shadow sailing in a low arc through the air, landing some 15 feet away. Alice had tossed him with her horns. I was sure the dog was dead (and mortified with the idea of ’splaining that to Kay). I got over there, and he was lying still, but alive.

I gingerly checked him for broken bones and gaping wounds, but he was only shook up, and maybe bruised a little. He had not been gored, just picked up and tossed like a stuffed toy.

Shadow had seen me fussing with this cow, and thought I was being attacked by a large, dangerous animal. He had jumped out of the buggy, ran under the fence and proceeded to attack the cow he thought was trying to kill me. This cow weighted about 1,000 pounds, Shadow about 35. It would be hard to think of any greater mismatch, but Shadow did not think of his security, only of mine.

Had he been gored, or landed differently, he could have died. But regardless of the odds, he did the only thing that he saw the situation demanded, save me (luckily I was in no real danger from the cow).

So remember, to a dog you are important enough to die for. The next time he barks at something and annoys you, remember he is protecting you from a perceived threat. All in a day’s work for a dog.

I got a copy of a document that was prepared by out U.S. Homeland Security, a “lexicon” of “extremists”. I will also refer to the fact that Michael Savage, a talk radio show personality, was banned from travel to the U.K. for his positions. Certainly, if you believe that freedom of speech and association are Constitutional rights, think of ideas being defined as indicators of  suspicious activity.

This is not a healthy trend. People that belong to groups that have done nothing wrong will get lumped together with genuine extremists in a guilt-by-association. You could find your travel restricted, be wiretapped and have your movements secretly tracked (by electronic or physical surveillance).

While the general theme is to prevent violence from extremists, the scope of what they are on the alert for is wide-ranging. Some of the parts of the document I find unnerving classify people for being having such views as:

“They believe animals are sentient creatures that experience emotional, physical, and mental awareness and deserve many of the same rights as human beings; Read the rest of this entry »

Among my cattle are some Texas Longhorns. While not a grand commercial success compared to other breeds, they are gentle and curious (do not mistake my description of gentle as an invitation for inexperienced people to wander about in a pen full of them, they have huge horns and can hurt you by accident).

I was in a pasture among my herd working on some brush clearing, a nearly continuous need here. I had a pile of branches I had pushed over some long while before that I was moving over to combine with some newer I had just removed. In this brush pile a mother rabbit had parked one of her babies, who was now out in the open by himself, and knew not what to do.

 One heifer, whom I call Blanco (she is white, another imaginative name) saw this small bunny and came over to sniff at it to figure out what it was. Cattle are exclusively vegetarians, so she wasn’t looking for a meal. The poor bunny was frozen in place, and finally as the young cow got close she hopped a few feet away.

Undetered, Blanco moved closer to sniff… the bunny hopped. The cycle repeated down the hill until the bunny got close enough to the edge of the  pasture that it saw where some more brush was, and it scurried into the brush. While the young rabbit was undoubtedly terribly frightened at being chased by a huge animal many times its size, the look of puzzlement on the cow as this thing hopped away again and again was amusing.

I run a ranch here, and I like my animals and pets. Observing animal behavior is a part of understanding them, and some of the things I have observed are worth talking about.

Today brought an event of interest, revealing how animals project their own standards on other animals. I have a small dachshund-cross dog, Ludwig (another abandoned animal rescue) that I am just getting house broken. Because Ludwig likes to run off, and there are dangers to a small dog as him on the loose, I walk him on a leash to do his “business”.

This afternoon, the cattle were all up behind the house at the pens when we walked. Included in the herd is a lone female donkey named (imaginatively) Jenny. Ludwig and Jenny have been curious about each other, but wary of getting too close. This afternoon, they were within a foot of each other, across the fence. Jenny reached out and ate some grass from a tuft next to a fence pole. Ludwig saw this, and wanted to eat some of whatever Jenny was having. However, he would not get any closer than about a foot away, and he kept snatching at a few sprigs of grass and pulling back.

I took him for a walk later on this evening, and he dragged me over to the very same spot he was at previously, and I watched him sniff and explore through the fence the spot that Jenny was eating from. Of course, he found nothing but more grass there, but it is obvious that he thought that the donkey would have tastes parallel to his own, and thus whatever it was eating would be something he, too, would like.

Probably Ludwig still believes that, and just regards not finding anything as being caused by Jenny consuming all that was available, not because she was eating ordinary grass. Who would eat grass in preference to meat and bugs?

Later, I will write my story about the Longhorn cow and the baby rabbit.