Coffee, Code and Candor

This morning I read an enlightening essay on Thanksgiving Day written by Pastor Tim Boffey of the Cincinnati Church.  Rather than attempt to summarize, I have reprinted the article below with permission.
Thanksgiving Day
by Pastor Tim Boffey
On the fourth Thursday of November, America takes time off from its ordinary pursuits to observe the civic holiday of […]

John McCain Pro Life? What A Joke!
By Chuck Baldwin
August 22, 2008
This column is archived at
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/c2008/cbarchive_20080822.html
Once again, “pro-life” Christians are doing back flips to try and justify
their compromise of the life issue by trying to convince everyone (including
themselves) that John McCain is truly pro-life. However, these same people
know in their hearts that John McCain shares no […]

It’s obviously been a while since I’ve posted, so I wanted to provide an updated. I’ve been inured with too many things that have distracted me from my Rails project for a time, though I hope to return to it soon as I hope it will be profitable for me in more ways than […]

Rails by default uses a system-generated primary key called “id” for all persisted objects. I personally like this (for the very reasons Dave Thomas outlines in the Rails book on pp. 286-287), but if you don’t, you can change it. Like Dave, I don’t recommend it, but here’s how if you must.
class Friend […]

Dean Foods Co. of Dallas is responding to consumers and customers who do not want milk and other dairy products from cloned animals, saying they will not use cloned animals.  Smaller companies like Ben & Jerry’s and Organic Valley have already taken this stand.
There’s some question about whether offspring of cloned animals will be used.  […]

After a few days off due to other priorities I’m back at the TiVo restoration again. Since last time the computer I was using would simply not boot the InstantCake CD I thought perhaps it was the computer itself (as I tried booting various other bootable CDs to no avail). This time I’ve taken […]

When I checked it today the green screen was still there so I eventually shut it off (well after 12 hours had lapsed). After waiting a few minutes I powered it back on and this time sent it into the Panic mode and gave it the 52 sequence to perform a complete reinstall of […]

I did some further reading on the TiVoCommunity.com forum thread I mentioned in my last post and found a post that indicated that the problem (for this fella) was the IDE drive cable.  So I decided to check out the cable installed in the replacement unit TiVo sent me.  It’s a 40-wire cable.  I checked […]

My TiVo died recently — a couple weeks ago. It was working fine until one day I flipped on the TV and saw nothing but a black screen. I figured it was a fluke, turned it off and went to bed. Turned it on the next day and it was still black. […]

Two days ago I wrote about multinational corporations lobbying the government to influence laws and policy. I stated that we know there are billions of dollars spent lobbying the government every year. Today I will provide evidence of that statement.
The Lobbying Spending Database contains statistics on the dollars spent yearly lobbying Congress and […]