Phil801 - Geek Blog

There was a time, once long ago in our history, that being a United States Senator was a dignified position of respect.  Now with witless morons like Barbara Boxer stating that she has to “work so hard” to get a title of Senator running as a socialist in California.  (seriously, does she have ANY idea what it takes to become a General!?!?!) Then we have our local idiot Senator’s Bennett and Hatch.  Not to mention Senator Harry the traitor Reid from Nevada.  Being a Senator is becoming more and more about …. I don’t even know what, but it’s NOT about being a Statesman!

And now, to cap it all off - the town fool, the idiot of idiots, the biggest moron in showbiz - Al Franken gets elected as a Senator!?!  Seriously???  Where the hec am I!  THIS is the best you’ve got Minnesota???  How could you vote for a man like this??? Who in the world voted for this LOON?  Oh wait.  Maybe I get it.

Minnesota’s State Bird is the Loon.   Apparently the voters of Minnesota, who also can’t figure out how to fill in the little circle properly on their electoral ballots, MUST have thought they were voting for their State Bird!  It’s really the only logical explanation I can come up with.  Unless the citizens of Loon-ville decidedto play a big practical joke on the country.  Or, maybe it was all Franken’s platitudes of “I’m smart enough, I’m good enough, and doggonit people like me!”.

Whatever it is, nice move Minnesota.  This jacked up idiot is gonna get in the Senate just in time to vote YES on the Cap and Trade bill - the biggest tax hike in our country’s history.

Seriously?  You still read my blog?  Shocking.  I’m just writing cause I want to vent.

This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast which is a breakfast meeting of a great group of techies.  I haven’t been in a while -I haven’t done much of anything public lately, except blogging on Utah Preppers, and I was pretty surprised by what went on.  This tweet from Phil Windley kind of summarizes it:

Big topics of discussion at #ctobreakfast: calendaring and syncing contacts.  Funny how these are still broken for most people.

Here’s the thing - they’re not broken for me, haven’t been for YEARS.  The only people they’re broken for are those with so much Microsoft hate that they refuse to use their software.  I’m blown away that so many of the techies at that meeting are having problems with this!  There is a very simple and elegant fix - it’s called Microsoft Exchange.  Here are the complaints from the meeting:

• My calendar doesn’t sync to my phone (in real time)
• My contacts don’t sync to my phone (from mail clients etc)
• My Email doesn’t sync to my phone (using gmail)
• When someone updates their contact info, I don’t receive it (and Plaxo tastes bad because of a mistake 3 years ago)
• gmail and google apps uptime isn’t that great

Seriously????  Really??  All these great techies and you’re all living like this?   I can’t believe that you haven’t heard of this hot new crazy named web 2.0 super awesome web service called Exchange!  Yeah, it’s actually been around for years - which is how long I’ve had all of the above issues resolved on my phone.

But it seems that the hot sexy thing is to use fragmented half-built “web services” that aren’t compatible with each other and don’t work but HEY!  THEY’RE FREE!   ….. Well, hope you’re enjoying what you pay for.

Oh yeah, then there’s the stupid iPhone - the over-hyped piece of garbage that can’t do half of what my NonIphone  can do.

Here’s what I do:

•  I use a Windows Mobile phone
• I use Outlook Mobile on my phone
• I use Plaxo with a LOT of my contacts
• I use a hosted Exchange Service for 10 bucks a month
• I use Outlook on my desktop and my laptop

What does this give me, all for 10 bucks a month?

Any time I add or change a contact on my phone, laptop, desktop or web outlook - the change automatically and instantly shows up on my phone, laptop, desktop and web outlook.  Any time I read an email on any of the previously mentioned devices - it automatically and instantly shows up on all the other devices as read.  Any time I schedule an appointment on ……. you get it?  It shows up.

Uptime has never been a problem for me actually - my email has NEVER gone down in the years that I’ve been using 4Smartphone.  It’s professionally managed and when everyone’s hollering about gmail being dead, I’m happily sending email.

Sharing calendars was brought up - everyone uses google calendars for that.  Yeah, me too.  But there’s also an Outlook sync that google provides so any changes that someone makes to my public google calendar …… automatically and almost instantly shows up on my phone, lap……

Tethering to your laptop for an internet connection was also brought up - you have to hack your stupid iPhone to get that to work - I use AT&T too iPhone people.  My phone natively tethers to my laptop - always has.  My phone has interactive gps with google maps too - I believe you finally sort of got that with the latest iPhone - hurry up and spend $400 bucks on the newest one!!!

By using Plaxo, many of my contacts are automatically updated in Outlook when they change their personal settings (like phone number) in Plaxo.   And guess where that goes?  To my phone of course.  So to recap that - if Johnny changes his phone number in Plaxo it automatically changes it in ALL my contact lists so next time I call Johnny I’m calling his new number without even realizing it.

So Phil, Sam, et al - syncing isn’t broke and waiting for a fix - it’s been available for a LONG time, it’s just not available to you because you hate Microsoft.  Hec, Outlook even works on a worthless Mac.

UPDATE:  My friend, Jesse Stay, has written a great tutorial in response to this post showing how to connect your iPhone with Exchange.  Check it out if you’re interested!

I am SO BLOODY SICK of our Politicians!  What a bunch of bamboozling morons!  I’m sick of the Partisanship, I’m fed up with the Republicans and I’m tired of the Democrats.  I’m SICK of IDIOTS on the Hill that display absolutely ZERO common sense!

Who in their right mind would think that you should “Bailout” a bunch of stupid companies that screwed everything up so badly that they are running BILLIONS of dollars in the red?  Every American knows that if you run out of money, YOU NEED TO STOP SPENDING IT!  Handing multi-billion dollar ‘bailouts’ to these companies is so asinine it’s almost incomprehensible!

LET THEM FAIL!  YES WE CAN.

They should have done it from the beginning but their personal visions of themselves as genius leaders on their white horses led these STUPID politicians to IGNORE  the people they are supposed to REPRESENT and vote for this stupid bailout plan.  I was repulsed as I watched on CSPAN when they were debating the first TARP bailout.  Several Congressmen and Senators got up and SAID “My constituents have told me to vote NO on this, but but - we HAVE to do something!  So I’m voting Yes”.  IDIOTS!  We didn’t elect you to think you were smarter than us, we elected you to be our cronie stooge in Washington that does what we tell you to!

Damn Fool Morons.  You have put this country on the path of destruction with your reckless spending.  NO company NO Industry NO Person is TOO BIG TO FAIL!  You arrogant idiots with your assumptions that Capitalism doesn’t work.  You Foolish Sheep who think that because one person starts hollering “WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING” that you have to do what they say.  Just cause Bush said and now Obama says we have to bail these idiotic companies out does NOT excuse you from listening to your constituents!!!

I have not met ONE regular citizen who thinks this is a good idea.  Every level-headed person, no matter what their political affiliation, that I have talked to about this does NOT think that we should be bailing out fat cat corporate morons who ran their companies into the ground.

LET THEM FAIL!  YES WE CAN.

If you politicians had just kept your meddling good for nothing fingers out of it, these stupid companies would have failed and guess what?  Another company (that hadn’t bankrupted itself) would have stepped up, bought the assets and CAPITALISM and FREE MARKETS would have taken over and REBOOTED the market.  Sure, it would have hurt a bit.  Sure, we as a country would have struggled for a bit.  But look where we are now!  How in the WORLD are you going to cover the TRILLIONS of dollars that you’ve pissed away into these worthless companies?!?!  You want to tax me to death to cover your arrogant ignorance.  I didn’t ask for this, none of your constituents that I’ve heard from have asked for this, in fact we told you resoundingly NO!!!

America, PLEASE!  This is OUR fault!  We are the ones that elected these morons to office - over and over and over again.  They are convinced that they don’t need to pay attention to us.  They know that most of you either don’t vote or just go vote a stupid party line.  You vote for the same diptard over and over cause “well, he’s already there”.  This is our fault entirely.  We don’t make our politicians accountable for their actions.  We don’t make them worry about what we’ll do if they keep up with their ridiculous behaviors.   We allow them to think that they are an elite society - well guess what - they are OUR SERVANTS!  They answer to US.  It is time to make them accountable.

VOTE THEM OUT, ALL OF THEM.  YES WE CAN.

Please, Americans, SWEAR to yourself that you will not vote for an incumbent!  Vote for someone new, don’t vote party lines, that’s just lazy and ridiculous.  Take 10 minutes and read what the candidates stand for.  At this point ANYONE is better than putting these morons back in office.  NO INCUMBENTS!  Then, once we get all these old timers replaced, keep an eye on what they are doing - and if they don’t do what they say they will or they ignore the People - vote them out again.

Please, contact your local representatives via email, mail, fax, phone, whatever.  Tell them you don’t want them voting to bail out anymore companies!  Tell them to let the companies fail.  Tell them that they ignore yours and others pleas at their own peril.  That you will not be voting for them again if they don’t comply with the wishes of the people they are supposed to REPRESENT.

TAKE AMERICA BACK!  YES WE CAN.

 VOTE FOR CHANGE!  CHANGE OUT ALL THE INCUMBENTS!  YES WE CAN.

This is OUR Country.  The old issues need to be on the back burner.  The ONLY thing that is of importance right now is stopping these insane bailouts.  We HAVE to take our Country BACK from the marauders.

May all you politicians who voted for the bailouts, the stimulus packages, the enabling of the President to steal our countries wealth go down in flames.  I’m sick of you and I’ve had it with you.  You have ignored those who sent you there long enough.  I hope Americans will get off their butts and show you the door.

• Where the stimulus money is going
• More on where the ridiculous “stimulus” money is going
• Voting record for the “stimulus”
• The new bailout they’re talking about - 2 Trillion!
• Who received government bailout money (some of it)
• What $315 billion looks like
• Graphic showing Market Caps of many banks, 2007 vs. 2009 - mind blowing!
• Details of all the bailouts - totaling $7.8 TRILLION (from CNN)

Do you think I’m over-reacting?  Do you think things will be “just fine”?  You’re wrong - this video with NO WORDS will show you why.

UPDATE: One of my friends, @cboyack, pointed me to this clip - I’d never seen it before.  THIS is what I’m TALKING ABOUT!  GET MAD AS HELL!  Please!!!

I’ve been blogging like crazy over on Utah Preppers and completely ignoring this one.  My passions and interests have shifted in the last year, quite a bit.  I’m not sure what’s coming down the road and I hope and pray that it’s not as bad as my imagination thinks it might be.  But, I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be pretty bad.  I’ve spent a lot of my life learning preparation and survival skills and the Utah Preppers blog gives me a way to share that knowledge with others - hopefully my blogging there will help others.

There are several things I want to update on.

The Juice Diet

My last couple posts were about me being on a juice diet - planned for 40 days.  When I started it I promised that if it compromised my health at all I would immediately stop it.  Well, five days into it I started passing blood - and stopped the diet.  After I stopped I didn’t have any more problems.  Something wonderful happened from it though!  I’ve been lactose intollerant for many years now, something in the juice diet changed that.  Since I spent 5 days only drinking pure juice I’ve been able to consume dairy products without ANY side effects!  I also felt pretty great and very energetic after the five days.  I plan to do a 5 day fast about once every couple months from now on.  It was a nice reboot.

Work

I recently took a full time position with a startup called LaneLinks.  We’re a backhaul management company for private fleets.  I’m the Director of Technology and while it’s been a tough adjustment to go back to a ‘real job’ it’s been very nice  to have a regular, reliable paycheck.  We’re building some very cool software that will change an industry that is stuck in the dark ages.

This Blog

I’m not sure where I want to go with this blog.  I’ve changed a lot in the last year.  Major trials tend to do that I hear.  I’m no longer interested in trying to stay on the bleeding edge of technology.  Web 2.0 has almost completely waned as an interest for me.  Some friends have said that they miss my tech posts and my views on emerging tech.  I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that anymore, maybe sometime down the road though, you never know.  I’ve tried to stay away from politics on this blog but lately politics have been really frustrating me and I’ll probably vent about them on here.  As I mentioned, preparedness is what has really flared up as a passion for me lately but I’ll keep most of that on a different blog.  Politics leads to preparedness and being a technologist means I’m looking at preparedness from that perspective a lot.  There are several technological things I’ve been working with in prepping and I’ll probably talk about that here.

People that know me know I’m an avid outdoorsman - that hasn’t changed a bit.  I’ve tried to keep my outdoor activities off this blog in the past but I’m thinking I may change that, although I may start using my personal blog for that (I haven’t blogged on that for years).  So, we’ll see where this goes.

Family

My family has been through a lot of trials in the last year.  I’m planning on writing a post about that soon.  My daughter Serenity, who has Leukemia, is doing fairly well right now.  She hasn’t had to be admitted to the hospital for several weeks so that is great!  Serenity was recently the recipient of the money raised at a charity tweetup at Sundance.  I’ll blog more on that later too but we’re very grateful for the communities continued concern and support for our daughter.

Other Activities

I plan to start doing a lot with The Serenity Foundation sometime in March (we are expecting to finish our software project at LaneLinks in Feb).  I plan on putting on more blood drives and doing several other things with the foundation.  Some people have asked me to put on more of my version of the Utah Geek Dinners - big with presenters, etc.  I may do some of that after March as well.  Some time ago I talked about doing a wellness bash for Serenity once she was stabilized a bit.  Her birthday is in May and spring will be here so I’m thinking of throwing her a community party sometime around then.

I’ve been thinking about putting on another conference.  This one would be Prepper and Technology based.  It will probably be in late summer or fall of 2009 if I decide to do it.  I think it would be a lot of fun.

I think that’s about it, that’s pretty much what’s going on in my life right now.  Thanks for still reading my blog after all this time.  Hopefully it’s still a little bit interesting.

Yesterday was my 2nd day of Juice Fasting and my first day of doing it at work.  I am used to drinking around 8 - 10 cans of Mountain Dew each day and hadn’t had one since Saturday night, I had a killer headache.  Since I needed to be able to function at work, I had one can of Mt. Dew in the mid-morning - that killed my headache.

Throughout the day I had 3 quarts of juice, 1 each of carrot, orange and apple.  Several times throughout the day I had hunger pains and a little bit of light headedness, but nothing too major.

The killer part was at night, we had a big family Christmas dinner last night with tons of my favorite food, it sucked!  I stood around watching everyone eat while I drank a gallon of apple juice.  Then, the desserts came out.  My brother and I went in a different room and talked some things over for a while and when we came back, they were cleaning up thank goodness!  I managed to make it through the whole day without eating but man, it was tough!  Several times I started talking myself into eating, even going so far as to tell Adria maybe I should do it another time.  She pointed out that there would never be a ‘good time’ and that if I was going to do it, I should just Man Up and Shut Up and get it done.  Well, she didn’t say it quite like that

In the comments on yesterday’s post, Gary asks if a juice fast is a healthy thing to do, here’s my answer.  I was drinking almost a 12 pack of Mt. Dew a day and usually consuming a very large lunch, often fast food, often greasy and I was eating a large dinner with lots of snacks and junk in between.  THAT is clearly not a healthy way to live.  I’m not a health nut or anything, and I don’t intend to become one, I’m just recognizing that to be healthy I need to basically let my body ‘reboot’.

When I say reboot, I mean let it clear EVERYTHING out - that includes dumping all the stored toxins and junk in my organs and everywhere else.  It means letting my digestive system shutdown, letting my stomach shrink dramatically and getting over all my addictions.  Will going on a Juice Fast make me un-healthy?  Well, like I said I certainly wasn’t eating healthy before.  Now I’m drinking only vegetable and fruit juices, I’m loading my body with vitamins and minerals - TONS more than I used to.  Sure, it’s different and my body is reacting to it, but it’s healthy.

Here are a couple links that talk about Juice Fasting, the authors of these sites talk about reasons and benefits for it that are beyond what I’m after and that I think are a bit weird.  I’m linking to these because they also have a lot of research and personal stories and background that cover what I’m doing.

AllergyScape

JuiceFasting.org

Tonight I’m going to try a juice that I’ve never had but is supposed to be and sounds very good - Cantaloupe juice.

I’m also going to try out this juice recipe (Jordy, who commented that he too likes celery juice, ought to like this one):

Cucumber~Celery Cooler

1 apple, sliced
4 medium carrots, greens removed
1 stalk celery
1/2 lemon, peeled (optional)
1/4 medium cucumber, peeled

Yesterday I started a 40 day Juice Fast.  I’m putting myself through this suffering for a couple reasons.  1) To reset my metabolism, I plan to lose 30 pounds in the next 3 months (that’ll put me at 199) and this will not only put me on a diet but will help me burn calories better.  2) To get healthier - cleansing helps your body dump loads of toxins and gives the digestive system a chance to shut down and repair itself.  It also allows your body to go into an extensive repair mode while it’s not dedicating resources to digestion.  3) To end several addictions i.e. Soda, caffeine, sugar, etc.  By sending my body into a food shock, it will be much easier to drop these things.  By cleansing toxins and yeast from my body, most of the stimulus for those drugs will be removed.  4) To prove I have the will power to do it :)  This is going to be tough, getting through it will be a major accomplishment.  Here’s to not dropping out!

I’m doing a slightly modified plan.  For the first 20 days I’ll consume nothing but pulpless juice and water.  For the following 20 days, I’ll consume whole, raw vegetables and fruites and brown rice.  After 40 days I’ll begin introducing other foods.

Go ahead and tell me I’m crazy - I know this is a nutty thing to do I’ve always thought that about people doing this.  But, the more I looked into it and read about it, the more it made sense.  I’ll be journaling the process here daily.  I guess number 5 is that it gives me something to blog about everyday

Yesterday was pretty easy, until night time.  I drank only juice all day but at night I started having major blood sugar levels.  In order to keep myself from passing out, I had a plain baked potato (insides only) - that settled things down with my blood sugar.  I sampled lots of different juices yesterday and found a few I liked, carrot juice, celery juice and cucumber juice are pretty good.  Mixed together they taste like crap though

So Serenity ended up spending 24 hours in the hospital, now she is home on IV meds. Here’s the interesting thing, we’re basically being her primary care providers - that’s how much training and experience we’ve gained in medicine this year.

Chicken Pox is a potentially deadly combination with Leukemia, but only if there is a severe reaction. So the Oncologist had her check in to the ICS ward at Primary Children’s Hospital so they could observe her reaction. 24 hours later she still wasn’t running a fever and was doing quite well, except for the sheer boredom! She has pox all over her body but it’s a mild case, the biggst concern is if they get in her mouth and respiratory tract. We are monitoring her temperature and her breakout, if they accelerate she’ll be back in the hospital, otherwise she’ll work through them here.

She is on a broad spectrum antibiotic (Acyclovir), taking 70 mls every 8 hours. She takes them through an IV pump which feeds into her port. This means we are performing nurse duties of managing sterile environments to hookup her IV to her port, monitoring the drip, etc.

I know there is a lot more to medicine than this, but sometimes it feels like we just need 10 more credits to be a full blown nurse.

Here’s a few pictures from this hospital visit:

The whole family hanging out

She’s pretty sure that she’s at her cutest with her tongue sticking out!

See what I mean? She’s holding her horse, he’s her ‘proxy patient’ - he gets most of her procedures done to him before she does. Her other animal is her monkey because my nickname for her is “Monkey Butt” - I have no idea why!

#serenleuk

 I swore I would be better about blogging Serenity’s hospital/leukemia journey than I have been lately - unfortunately, now is my chance to make good on that.

 Serenity (my youngest daughter who has leukemia) has just been diagnosed with Chickenpox, one of the more dangerous things that could happen for her right now.  Adria is currently taking her to Primary Childrens Hospital to be admitted where they’ll pump her full of antibiotics again and try to fight off the infection.  Adria says she (Serenity) is MAD and is chanting “I DON’T WANT DINNER IN THE HOSPITAL!”.  She is tired of being stuck in a hospital bed and the worst part is, because she has chickenpox she will be isolated in her room and not allowed out to play. 

 And of course, we’re as sick as she is of being stuck there.  No idea how long this one will last, I’ll post updates as we get them.

#SerenLeuk