This is so cool! Schlock Mercenary is probably the best comic strip on the web. I've had a link to it on my comic page ( http://www.richardbush.net/comics/comics.htm ) for a long time now. Now Howard Taylor has released a script so I can put the strip right on my comic page. I'm happy and grateful to now have his fine strip on my own website. I left the link to his website on the page, because, it's just so cool and Howard's website is worth the visit for more than just the comic strip.
Check it out! I'll post it below just once so you can see the current strip.



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Labels: comics, commentary

  ¶ 8:37 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Quite by chance found this parody of the "I'm in love with Obama video." Unfortunately it's not as well done as the original but it is funny just the same!



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Labels: commentary, political

  ¶ 8:41 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  The biotic (fossil) versus abiotic oil rages. On the one side the peak oil crowd argue that since we find microscopic bits of animals and plant in the oil then oil is biotic and thus a limited resource. They argue that if it seems capped wells are refilling it is just residual seepage from the surrounding rock. They further argue that if there is abiotic oil (thus giving support to the abiotic theory!) it’s way too deep for us to get at! They even admit that Russia is pulling oil out of the ground that has no sign of biological organisms at all. You can see the true agenda of some of these groups when you discover that they are alarmed at the abiotic theory because if the oil doesn’t run out soon, the earth will die faster! Here’s the quote:

If it's true that there's plenty more oil, it just changes the character of the coming crash -- it will be through toxicity or ecological catastrophe instead of lack of energy, it will take longer, and the earth is a lot more likely to die. Here's an excerpt from William Kötke's summary of the 1972 "Limits to Growth" study:

You notice the reference to the “Limits to Growth study” that has been wrong in almost all its predictions of disaster so far.
More of these arguments can be found here: http://www.rense.com/general58/biot.htm

The abiotic theorists point out that never has a fossil been found below 18,000 feet but we regularly find oil below 30,000 and that we’ve already used more oil than could have come from plant remnants deposited in some ancient ocean.

This abiotic theory just received an enormous amount of support with the find of hydrocarbons on Titan: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/titans-organic.html and http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47675

A good overview of the abiotic theory can be found here: http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1130.html and a good list of links and articles can be found here: http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Theory/SustainableOil/

An interesting commentary that I’m taking with a large grain of salt can be found here: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html The grain of salt is because of his claim that oil companies and Dick Cheney conspire to hide the abiotic oil origins. Yeah, sure they do…

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Labels: commentary, global warming, science

  ¶ 1:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Okay, I've got the 2007-2008 student pictures up at Winkflash. I had so much trouble with the site I might stop using them entirely. I was using Dot Photo but they didn't allow right clicking, which is stupid. Anyway, they are up here at rabush.winkflash.com. I hope the link works. I can't get it to show the latest year without using Internet Explorer. Firefox will only show the 2006-2007 pictures. if that link doesn't work there is a link on each of my other webpages that does try here and look for the link under pictures on the right. That link works but it's hard to type.

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Labels: commentary

  ¶ 12:33 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Okay I haven't published the 2007-2008 student pictures yet., but I have done a redesign of the site layout. I saved the other home page here and put the blog up as the new home page.

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Labels: commentary

  ¶ 11:58 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Ann Coulter has nailed it with another great column. She says, I think correctly, that George Bush will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents. She says, "Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I'll consider downgrading Bush from 'Great' to 'Really Good.'" She goes on to point out that Al Quaida is nearly defeated and that our fine troops have killed nearly 20,000 of them in Iraq. A fine accomplishment, I think.

You can read Ann's column here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26979




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Labels: commentary, political

  ¶ 7:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

 

I'm glad that more and more music services are moving to DRM (Digital Rights Management) free music, but the change is slow in coming.

I subscribe to Rhapsody Music Service and have for years. Rhapsody is a streaming service. For a monthly fee I can stream nearly anything I like. If I want to own it I can download it for $0.89. This is 10 cents cheaper than Amazon and iTunes, two other services I use. Those two are strictly download services, though you can listen to a sample.

I’ve just started using Amazon, having just discovered it because of Pepsi points. All their music is DRM free and in MP3 format. Even at $0.99 I often download from them because Rhapsody does not have all its titles in DRM free MP3 format, though more and more of their music is. The music that isn’t is in RAX format.

In order to get it as an MP3 I have to burn it to CD and then rip it. This works but it takes a lot of work for Windows Media Player to recognize it and download the album art. Then it thinks it’s smarter than me so it tries to name the song using the album name. It’s a pain. If it’s in RAX I don’t buy there anymore.

iTunes also uses its own format. Usually all I get from them is their free songs of the week, since I mostly use the service with my iPod Shuffle (screen? I don’t need no stinking screen!). When I want to turn one of theirs to an MP3 it’s easy to burn it to CD and turn around and rip it to MP3 and iTunes remembers what it is—200% better than Windows Media Player!

So why download from Rhapsody at all? Coke points! I use my Coke points to download Rhapsody music that’s in MP3 and I use Pepsi points at Amazon for everything else. As you can see from above, a lot of my music is free. I love free, don’t you? I know, I know, I’m cheap.

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Labels: commentary

  ¶ 2:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I've mentioned before in this blog that I'm searching for the perfect phone. I've related my problems with the Palm Treo and with my current phone. Out of all the phones out there, my son's LG EnV remains the best all around phone. Good music player, stereo BlueTooth support, decent camera, and a QWERTY keyboard. It also supports custom ringtones, wallpaper, etc.

Well LG has just announced the LG EnV2! It has all the above in a smaller package! "Great," I said. There's just one problem, they took out the flash!. What's the point in having a camera if there's no flash? Thus they took a great phone, made it better, then blew the whole thing by taking out the flash.

Why can't I have the phone I want? Music with stereo BlueTooth, ringtones, wallpaper, camera (with flash!), QWERTY keyboard, (and no, I seldom text, but a QWERTY keyboard is still nice when you're entering addresses and so forth) removable memory card, and a calendar that supports weekly, biweekly, and triweekly appointments? (And no, the EnV doesn't have that either, (Apparently that's a Palm thing) but it should!)

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Labels: cell phones, commentary

  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  We had a huge windstorm on Wednesday. I was in the cellar when the power went out. I felt my way out (not thinking about the cell phone I was carrying that could have lit my way!) and went towards the garage where I knew there was a flashlight. Something huge swept past me and there was a huge crash. I decided to go in the house to get a flashlight instead. The flashlight told me I was probably lucky I wasn't killed or injured, since it was a huge chunk of my garage's roof!

Though it's not obvious, that's four pieces of roof steel in the picture. That's heavy gauge steel and the sheets are 13 feet long. It came off as one piece then the wood holding it all together splintered so the pieces separated. I had to replace many of the wood runners before I could reattach the steel sheets. This time I bolted them down instead of just screwing them into the runners. The photo shows the roof with some of the runners already replaced.

I started yesterday afternoon and got up early this morning and worked all day. I'm pretty much done except for the cap at the peak. I'll have to go to the city to get that.

The roof steel must have been accordioned in because the roof is now two inches shorter than before. If I had noticed earlier I could have stretched it but it was already attached except the last piece, so it'll have to do.


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Labels: commentary

  ¶ 8:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I put a funny greeting on our voice mail, but my wife said that she'd like something that identifies us. So I played with Audacity a bit and inserted a little clip identifying the Bush house which then leads into the funny greeting. Audacity is a powerful audio editing program. I'm still learning its features though. The voice mail supports appending to the message, so I could have recorded it that way, but Audacity was a more elegant a solution.

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Labels: commentary

  ¶ 11:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I've made the decision to retire my ancient answering machine. It was a great answering machine, a PhoneMate 4300, and I've never found anything that I liked as well. The problem was that the tapes were wearing out. Now I could have replaced the message tape, but the continuous loop greeting tape is impossible to find. Although mini-tapes are still available if you look hard enough, my machine used full sized tapes.

What finally made me make the switch was the phone company began offering packages of features that gave me more for less money. Who can resist that, right? Even more irresistable was the 50% increase in my broadband speed. Another part of the package was voice mail. I decided to try it and found to my delight that my Uniden phones (TCX 805's) have a blinking light when there's a message waiting. If I glance at any phone I can see that there's a message. Really cool!

Of course what I need to do now is to record one of my pre-recorded gag messages onto my voice mail. The one on my answering machine went like this: "Hello, I am a digitally enhanced answering unit. Who are you? Please leave a message after my obligatory tone and we will respond as soon as humanly possible. Chou baby."

Yeah, I've got to have that back!

Richard's main page

Labels: commentary

  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  When are they going to stop selling crappy cell phones?

I’ve been kicking myself ever since I bought a Samsung SCH-U740. The QWERTY keyboard and the music player appealed to me, and the dual flip was just too cool! It might be one of the smallest phones on the market with a full QWERTY keyboard. At first, the phone appears to be well designed and have all the right features, but soon the critical flaws show up.

Why so many of the Samsung phones do not have a standard 2.5 mm headphone jack I will never know. When I got the phone, I went out and bought a nicer set of headphones than those that came with the music kit. Unfortunately, soon after trying to listen to music and work around the yard, I found that the adapter would slip out of the non-standard jack. After just a few attempts to work and listen to music, I switched to an IPod Shuffle. I’ve never had the wire slip out unless I caught it on something and really yanked it. Another problem for middle aged eyes is the small keys make it hard to see, but I could have lived with that if not for the other problems.

Since it’s impossible to use the phone to listen to music this way then you’d think that stereo Bluetooth would be the answer, right? Nope. The phone doesn’t support it.

Since the phone isn’t working for me and I use a Palm Pilot, I thought I’d try to replace it with a Treo 700P. I spent several days bidding on EBay and finally won a phone at a good price. The 700P has a standard headphone jack and even supports stereo Bluetooth (with third party software).When it came though, it was a 700W (The P stands for Palm OS, the W for Windows OS, get it?) making it incompatible with my current Palm Pilot data files. Wow, I got to box it up and ship it back (after multiple emails to the vender).

Once again I spent several days bidding and won another phone—from the same vendor. This time when it came it was the right one. But it was not in as good a shape as the first and the headphone jack didn’t work in stereo. The right side headphone wouldn’t work. Once again—emails to the vendor and I got to box it up and will ship it back tomorrow. This time I noticed what I failed to notice with the 700W, it uses only midi ring tones and I can’t find a way to add my own. Plus the camera has no flash, which is strange. I’ve never seen a camera phone with no flash before! So I think I’m glad this one was broken. It would have been nice to consolidate my phone with my Palm but, basically Palm took a Palm Pilot and added a poor phone to it. It’s a shame, since it could have been a great product.

I’ve been looking around for a phone that offers a QWERTY keyboard, a great music player with a standard headphone jack, stereo Bluetooth headphone music capability, a decent camera, and of course, the other goodies--ring tones, speakerphone, etc. I couldn’t find anything better than my son’s LG enV! The only thing it doesn’t have, that it should, is the ability to multi-task (play music while doing other things with the phone) but that’s apparently a brand new feature so I’ll have to wait for the successor to the enV. I can’t get another phone through Verizon for another year anyway (and I’m not finding affordable enV’s on EBay). There will probably be better phones by then. Maybe an IPhone style phone without all the mistakes Apple made with theirs. You know, like no stereo Bluetooth capability!

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Labels: commentary

  ¶ 10:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post