Speaking of MM

There’s a little spat going on between Michelle Malkin and leftie blog Wonkette (and friends).

And yet … there appears to be a picture of Malkin doing the “Girls Gone Wild” semi-boob flash, while cavorting about in a string bikini like a common hussy, from 1992!

The picture on that page is clearly a result of some creative work with Photoshop. Even the first person to comment on Wonkette said so. That hasn’t stopped people from running with it. There’s even talk (from others) that Michelle should sue.

I had to laugh when I read this comment, though:

From Steve:

My eye has been honed by decades of girl-watching and my professional opinion on this bikini girl is that:

1) Her head is too small for her body.

2) Her body is too fleshy to be mistaken for you. You are a skinny little bone. Bikni Girl has chowed down a few extra pork chops.

3) That's one ugly bikini.

Anyway, it's an insult that they are passing off as you a girl who hasn't skipped any desserts. The only way to put this controversy to rest is for you to post your own photo of yourself in a bikini, circa 1992, so that we, your loyal legion of fans, can compare and contrast the Real Michelle and the Bogus Michelle, point out all the discrepancies between the two, and demonstrate the superiority of Our Michelle to Their Michelle. It's the only way to be sure. Accept No Substitutes!

In fact, to stop this kind of lefty outrage in the future, we probably should have bikini shots on file for all conservative commentators such as yourself, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Page Hopkins, et cetera, so that we conservative males can instantly rebut small-minded slurs against the honor of our womenfolk. No need to thank us. We're happy to do it as a favor to you.

Uh, no thanks!

Reminds me of this picture I found on the web yesterday. Makes you grateful to be a Republican, don’t it?

Matters bloggitarious

Nothing earth-shaking, just need to empty a few blogging tidbits out of my brain.

• I’m seriously looking at eliminating the “email subscription” many people have to this blog, for a variety of technical and non-technical reasons. Thunderbird has a nice RSS reader, and is available for all platforms. The link to subscribe using RSS is on the web.
• People who read my blog on the web using any browser except Internet Explorer don’t see that annoying “this message was sent using vzwpix...”. IE doesn’t follow the CSS rule all the other browsers support, so I’m not able to hide it. Sorry.
• The tool I’ve been experimenting with is called RocketPost. It has a free version that works only with Blogger.com (and its flavors), or $39 for more features and multiple blogs. The WYSIWIG editor is nice, and it’s great for composing, but I’ve had trouble applying my typical styles in a consistent way or saving any kind of template. I’d give it about a B-, but then most tools earn a D, so I’ll probably keep using it.
• I may be looking for a new web host soon. If anyone has tips on good Apache hosting on the cheap, I’d like to know about it. I’m thinking about self-hosting my email, since that seems to be the hardest part of finding a host that can do everything I do now. Before I do, I need to read over my Terms of Service one more time.
• I’ve found two blogs in the last few weeks that really strike a chord with me. Interocitor doesn’t post often (less than I do, even), but his comments are always thoughtful and focussed. If you’ve been reading along, you also know Patterico, with daily or better posts. It’s hard not to add a “me too!” to most of his topics. I still subscribe to Powerline and Michelle Malkin, but they’re both such high volume I’ve given up on keeping up.
• If I didn’t advertise it enough before, check out Tricia’s blog too.

Related post: Hi, my name is Dopey

Woo hoo!

Now that's the kind of gas price I can live with.

This message was sent using PIX-FLIX Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getpix. To learn how you can record videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getflix. To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime® 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime® Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.

A great choice for President

Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, held a press conference at the White House with President Bush today. Quite a few blogs are picking up on his responses to a line of questioning by a notoriously left-leaning AP reporter (but I repeat myself).

Before watching the video, here’s the question asked by Jennifer Loven:

Even after hearing that one of the major conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate in April was that the Iraq war has fueled terror growth around the world, why have you continued to say that the Iraq war has made this country safer?

Now watch the video. Karzai’s answer is the last segment.

Wow. Afghanistan is fortunate to have this man not only leading but speaking on behalf of his country internationally. If only our President could be this forthcoming and direct when put on the spot. President Bush has done a good job in many situations (standing on the wreckage of the WTC right after 9/11, for instance), but he often seems to overthink his words, to get cute, or gets flustered, as shown in even this video.

In this age of instant news, communication is the cornerstone of any mission: military, political campaign, or running the country.

[via Michelle Malkin]

Related post: On chickens and roosts

Future customer service?

This message was sent using PIX-FLIX Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getpix. To learn how you can record videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getflix. To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime® 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime® Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.

On chickens and roosts

It’s some small comfort to find that there is a point so far to the left that even Nancy Pelosi will stand on the side of the President. That point apparently includes Hugo Chavez calling him “el Diablo”. However, it’s a little unbelievable in context.

The Anchoress has done an excellent job of putting into words what is on my mind.

But maybe some on the left finally understand that while they’ve been having fun and laughing while calling President Bush every manner of ugly name and insult, dangerous people have been watching. And they have made a calculation: We can disrespect Bush and America will laugh with us. Bush is weak. America is once again the appeasing “weak horse” it was throughout the 1990’s and even before…when we could attack anything and be accountable to no one.

And now, these tyrants and madmen sound eerily like the Democrats and the press and the left.I’m sure Hugo, once he left the guffawing chamber of hyenas at the UN, was shocked to discover that most Americans were not laughing, that even some Democrats were not.

And I’m sure some Democrats were shocked to see just how ugly their words sounded, when coming out of the mouth of someone else, someone with “no right,” to spew hate for political expediency.

...

If tinpot tyrants and madmen now come to the United Nations and believe they can say anything they wish about The American President, it is because - as some of us have been warning, for some time - while all manner or irresponsible nonsense and hate has been directed at this president…the world has been watching.

And now, these tyrants and madmen sound eerily like the Democrats and the press and the left. One ideology, the world over, had completely lost its bearings, its self-control and its manners concerning one man who has never - not once -repaid them back in kind. Not in speeches. Not to the press. Not to “friendly audiences.” He came to town talking about “changing the tone,” and that’s what happened, in a perverse way. One side’s tone went rabid, the other side went nearly-silent, but this one man…kept his tone.

As the saying goes, “read the whole thing”. It gets juicier.

[via Patterico and Powerline]

Related posts: Too much truth in one place, Foley, A great choice for President

Hi, my name is Dopey

As part of trying out this new Blog tool, I had to change the default page of the blog. Used to be bw.html was my main page, but this tool (and many others, perhaps) expect the site to be published to a directory, and for index.html to be the main page. So, I changed that in Blogger, republished, and the new tool was happy. Problem was, the “static” site, managed by FrontPage, was still directing to bw.html. This had to be changed in the navigation, which FrontPage merges into every page of the site. The easiest way to make a change like this is to republish the site.

I tried to do this at work one day, not looking too hard at the questions it asked. One question was “Some files on the server have been updated more recently than the local copy. Are you sure you want to update?” I have made various minor tweaks to the files over time, so this was no surprise. I answered “Yes to all” and went on to other stuff while it worked.

Turns out, answering “yes to all” gives FrontPage permission to make all the changes necessary to make the server look exactly like the local copy, including deleting files and directories not under FrontPage’s control. Since FrontPage had no knowledge of anything in the /blog/ directory (and a few other things), it erased the whole thing. The blog itself was completely gone.

My first reaction was, “OK, no problem, I’ll just tell Blogger.com to republish the whole blog.” I did and it did, but Blogger doesn’t keep copies of the images - I upload those directly before publishing each post. Having just days before published my 2996 tribute, which hadn’t yet been direct-linked from the project, I quickly re-uploaded those pictures at least, plus the ones used for general page construction, and set up a quick and dirty redirect from bw.html to index.html.

Just today Moonwick managed to restore a two-month-old backup of the site, which brought back most of the images. I’m going to have to hunt down any image links from more recently and re-upload them. Quite a few came through mobile blogging, so I don’t even know if I still have them.

Anyway, if you find any broken images in my posts since mid-June, please be patient while I try to find the time to relocate and re-upload them.

And remember: friends don’t let friends use FrontPage.

Armed and Dangerous

No, not Ethan. This is serious. This guy needs to be found.

Adnan el Shukrijumah

Aliases: Adnan G. El Shukri Jumah, Abu Arif, Ja’far Al-Tayar, Jaffar Al-Tayyar, Jafar Tayar, Jaafar Al-Tayyar
Date of Birth Used: August 4, 1975
Hair: Black
Place of Birth: Saudi Arabia
Eyes: Black
Height: 5'3" to 5'6" Sex: Male
Weight: 132 pounds
Complexion: Dark, Mediterranean
Build: Average
Remarks: El Shukrijumah occasionally wears a beard. He has a pronounced nose and is asthmatic. El Shukrijumah speaks English and carries a Guyanese passport, but may attempt to enter the United States with a Saudi, Canadian, or Trinidadian passport.

Adnan G. El Shukrijumah is wanted in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States.

Exactly what kind of terror threats? The FBI doesn't indicate on the page linked above, but yesterday the following was posted on Canada Free Press and Northeast Intelligence Network, apparently from an interview with the head of al Qaeda. I don't know these news organizations, so I can't speak to the authenticity of the report. Perhaps later I'll repost the interview (their terms permitting). For now, here is the summary:

Urgent news from Abu Dawood, the newly appointed commander of the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan:

• Final preparations have been made for the American Hiroshima, a major attack on the U.S.
• Muslims living in the United States should leave the country without further warning.
• The attack will be commandeered by Adnan el Shukrijumah (“Jaffer Tayyer” or “Jafer the Pilot”), a naturalized American citizen, who was raised in Brooklyn and educated in southern Florida.
• The al Qaeda operatives who will launch this attack are awaiting final orders. They remain in place in cities throughout the country. Many are masquerading as Christians and have adopted Christian names.
• Al Qaeda and the Taliban will also launch a major strike (known as the “Badar offensive” against the coalition forces in Afghanistan during the holy month of Ramadan.
• The American people will be treated to a final audio message from Osama bin Laden which will be aired within the next two weeks.

[via chez Diva]

\on-uh-mat-uh-pee-uh\ part 1

Onomatopoeia \on-uh-mat-uh-PEE-uh\ - noun

1. the formation of a word, as cuckoo or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with its referent
2. a word so formed
3. Rhetoric. the use of imitative and naturally suggestive words for rhetorical effect.

Excoriate \ek-SKOR-ee-ayt\, - transitive verb:

1. To express strong disapproval of; to denounce.
2. To tear or wear off the skin of.

Meld the two definitions, and you get a fine term for describing someone getting chewed out you can use in polite company.

I think excoriate qualifies as Onomatopoeia. It means rip the skin off, it sounds like a violent action, and it even sounds like a word you might say while chewing them out.

Not sure why this came to mind today. Maybe because I just had to excoriate Ethan. Maybe because I might get excoriated for posting this blog just now.

The war drags on

The war on spam, that is.

As an interesting experiment, I stopped compulsively deleting my junk mail folder, and instead set that folder to delete old items automatically after 48 hours (yay, Thunderbird). This has given me new insight into how much spam I get, and where it is coming from.

Before making any adjustments, I was getting about 110 pieces of spam a day. 90% of these were automatically detected as spam (yay, Thunderbird).

I found a certain number of email addresses that I had never used anywhere, but which were frequent guesses by spammers. admin, help, accounting. I've blackholed these, which has started to help.

Quite a few come from email addresses I have incautiously included on my website. I’m thinking I will remove these from the web, but not black-hole them yet to see if the tide shrinks on its own.

My previous post about email seems to have produced a few as well. The email address I used as an example, devnull@toomuchblue.com, (look, there it is again!) has started receiving a lot of spam. If it’s blackholed, how do I know this? Because spammers, in an apparent effort to conserve bandwidth, have sent email to multiple toomuchblue addresses at once. When I receive email for a different address, if devnull@toomuchblue.com (oh, look, again!) is in the list of recipients I can be certain it’s spam. This gives me a new easy junk-mail rule (yay, Thunderbird). It’s kind of an email honeypot.

Far and away, the most spam I get is from an email address I use to communicate with the bugzilla project. The very day I was assigned a bug in their bug tracking software, I received 16 new pieces of spam to that address, and I currently receive about 40 pieces a day, mostly in Chinese. Fortunately, these are pretty easy to filter out. The only email I want would be email coming from that project’s own server.

A Far and away, the most spam I get is from an email address I use to communicate with the bugzilla project.more surprising source of spam was a vendor I recently did business with.

I bought flowers from ProFlowers.com for Mothers Day, using a brand new email address. Since then, I’ve had a smattering of emails from them, but nothing burdensome. They had told me up front they would send me offers, so I didn’t consider this spam.

I also started getting messages from some new vendors - fruit baskets, teddy bears, quite a variety. Each time, they explained how they got my name, and said I could safely unsubscribe, which I did each time. I also went back to the ProFlowers.com website and verified my privacy settings. Apparently, there was a separate option for “partner email”, which was automatically checked when I accepted Offers email. OK, fine, my fault. Uncheck the box.

Ever since that, I haven’t had any “partner” email, but I have started receiving about 4-5 pieces of spam for that email address a day. This tells me one of three things is happening:

• ProFlowers.com or one of their partners has had a security breach and emails have been harvested.
• ProFlowers.com or one of their partners has shared email addresses with an organization which does not follow the safe-unsubscribe policies of ProFlowers.com.
• ProFlowers.com or one of their partners has vindictively subscribed me to spam in retaliation for unsubscribing.

I’ve contacted the business who referred me to ProFlowers.com to let them know about this. In the mean time, I don’t recommend them. My first order with them didn’t go all that smoothly, anyway. Anybody can have a bad day, especially a florist around Mothers Day, but with the spam involved, it’s just safer to stay away. It looks like I’ll be blackholing this email address soon as well.

I do consider this a great argument for throw-away email addresses, however. Most ISP’s allow you to create additional email addresses whenever you want. I know Comcast allows up to about 10, and they can automatically forward to another account. It’s very easy to create an email address for a particular transaction, wait until everything has shipped or resolved, then discard the address again.

P.S. This post is an experiment using a new blogging tool. I’ll have to see how this looks on the web before making a decision.

In memory of Elvin Santiago Romero

I am honored to be able to remember Elvin Santiago Romero, who was one of the first victims of 9/11/2001.

Elvin was a vice president of international equities at the trading and securities firm of Cantor and Fitzgerald, which occupied floors 101-105 of "Tower 1", the north tower of the World Trade Center. The first airplane entered floors 95-103 at 8:46 am that day. Cantor and Fitzgerald lost about 700 people that day.

At that moment, Elvin was not talking about his work, or driving the Corvette he'd worked all his life for, or preparing for a meeting, but talking with his wife, Diane. Their daughter Gabriella, then 5, had recently begun Kindergarten. Brother Alexander was 2. That day, Gabriella had gone to school without crying. Elvin's last words before the call was cut off were "It looks like we're going to have a great day." Elvin was 34.

The above can be read many places around the web. Much of it came originally from a memorial in the New York Times. There are also several websites where family, friends and coworkers have made their tributes. (Cantor Families, September 11 Victims, CNN, legacy.com)

What makes this especially meaningful to me, though, is the similarities to my own life. I can't think about how to give a proper tribute to Elvin without thinking about my own life.

Do I call my wife enough? Do my kids know I love them? If they do believe I love them, do my actions show them what "love" really means, or am I teaching them that love is something meaningless and shallow?

I wonder what Alexander remembers of his dad. When the Times wrote their story, Alexander was too young to understand his Dad would never come back. After five years without him, what can Alexander remember of the two years with his dad? Is it what Elvin would have wanted him to remember? Gabriella is now 10. Soon after her Dad's death, she wanted to learn everything she could about him. Does he still hold such an important place in her heart? Are her memories of him starting to fade?

What would I want my kids to remember? Even if I'm not killed by terrorists, will they remember that I loved them, that I was their biggest fan, that I wanted the best for them, or that I spent too much time at work, or playing with computers?

Elvin's life ended five years ago in a senseless display of violence, aimed not at him personally but at our way of life. While we cannot bring Elvin back, cannot undo what they have done to him, we can strike back at his attackers. We must make sure our way of life continues, by standing up for our country and protecting ourselves and our children and what we hold dear.

Otherwise, we really have lost. And have lost far more than 2996 individual lives.

Watch this space

Tomorrow, I will be posting a very special tribute to Elvin Santiago Romero, one of the 2996 victims killed in the terrorist attacks 9/11/2001.

I have volunteered to this as part of the 2996 Project, in which 2996 bloggers will each write a tribute to one randomly selected 9/11 victim.

This process has already been humbling. Just the thought of how to write something meaningful has made it hard to get started.

Whatever else you have planned for Monday, make sure you take some time to commemorate 9/11 in your own way.

Non-church church picnic

Joined some friends for a barbecue with a bunch of people from the church we don't go to anymore. Kinda strange. Nice to see old friends and see how big everyone's kids are, but still kinda wierd. Trish looked nice with her Grand Canyon jewelry, though.

This message was sent using PIX-FLIX Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getpix. To learn how you can record videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/getitnow/getflix. To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime® 6.5 or higher is required. Visit www.apple.com/quicktime/download to download the free player or upgrade your existing QuickTime® Player. Note: During the download process when asked to choose an installation type (Minimum, Recommended or Custom), select Minimum for faster download.

Baby steps

Tricia (erm, uh, "Daisy Rose") has started her own blog. It's linked from my newly-updated Blogroll, and she's got her first post. Since she now has a blogger account, I've added her as a Contributor here, which means she can post here too.

We'll have to see what develops.