More American Than You

I feel that I must make a comment on the growing xenophobic trend in the US that is being fueled by bandwagon jumping politicians and the media. In commenting on this, I am first going to evoke my middle name, Ross. Yes Ross; the same line of Ross that can trace back to the first husband of Betsy Ross, the lady who designed our first flag. I am also going to evoke my last name, Keesey which can be traced back as far as 17th century colonial America and includes veterans of the American Revolution. Point being, my family has been here a long fucking time.

I find it ironic when I see media interviews of participants of the “Minute Man” project or other anti-immigration groups that sometimes have clearly Italian, German, Irish or even Latino names. To these anti-immigration proponents of clearly more recently immigrated stock than myself, I am afraid that I will need to see the proof that their families entered the country legally through the proper channels during the 19th century flood of Irish, German and Italian immigration. If not, as an American of a Blue-blooded Revolutionary line I must kindly ask that they return, along with their entire families to the country of family origin without amnesty.

I can feel my ancestors rolling in their graves as the US continues moving towards a state of xenophobia and anti-immigrant policy as bad if not worse than that of France…G_d forbid.

Despair.com

Check out these hilarious video podcasts that parody the motivational industry on despair.com. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find them.
http://www.despair.com/spin.html

How the hell am I going to do this...

I am about to start the prep work part of painting my house. Why paint my own house you ask? Because I painted for years during my time as a "professional musician" and am relatively quick at it. I also like the idea of not having to spend thousands on a housepainter that probably won't take the care that I will.

Here is my issue. I have electrical wires on the one side of the house that come in at a terrible angle. I haven't tried placing a ladder yet but at first eyeball, I just don't see a good ladder angle going under the wires or over them. Under the wires is too steep and over is not steep enough. In either option, I'm not pumped with how close I need to get to the wires to get up above the second floor windows. Tough time following? See the following diagram to understand my dilemma.



I am using a fiberglass ladder but I still don't like the idea of having my back stroked by power lines.

HACKED!

Yes, that's right. The index page to keeseys.com was compromised. I noticed yesterday afternoon that the alignment of the graphics on the page was off by one pixel. I went into the code to find a random iframe place at the very top of the page sourcing out to a remote script on a server in Europe. I looked into the script and found that it was a Trojan Horse titled "Download.Trojan"

Initially I suspected this was a random hack via use of a password auto generation tool. Upon further investigation, this might be more of an iPower web issue. Apparently, this same virus/infection or related ones are occuring on sites all over iPower hosted servers, always implemented the same way and always on the index pages. That seems more automated and widespread to me than some random breech of an FTP password on an individual site. Still, I know better than to even waste my time with iPower techs. They will give the standard response: "You need a stronger password", and I will have to wait 40 minutes on hold to hear that.

I am going to appraoch this by going after their bottom line. iPowerweb packages come with complemetary $50 Yahoo Marketing Credit and $25 Google Adwords Credit. Using these credits, I am going to create campaigns containing the keyword "iPowerweb" that will drive click-throughs to this and subsequent entries on the disaster that has become iPower Web. I would encourage others to do the same.

Web 2.0 Resources

I think there might be one other reader of this blog (and you know who you are) who will find this as interesting as I do... Richard MacManus's definitive list of web 2.0 companies and resources. Check out the museum of modern betas. Cool.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/list_of_web_20.php

Damn Birds

I’ve been ensconced in a running battle with a bird for property rights to my front porch. For several weeks now the same bird has repeatedly attempted to construct a nest in the hanging plants on the front porch. I like birds and all and think nests are cool but would prefer that they are in the trees as opposed to right up on the front porch in the plants. Everytime the bird has started a nest, I remove its work hoping that eventually the bird will get the picture that this is a futile exercise. No dice.

After forgetting to check the plant for days I found yesterday that the plant had blown off of its hook and fallen. Due to the fall, the pot had broken. While inspecting the broken pot and plant I noticed that not only had the bird accomplished a full finished nest but it had also laid an egg. I removed the nest and placed it in a shrub nearby in the yard and took the plant and placed it in a new pot.

This morning I woke up to birds literally flipping out. One tried to fly into my head while it was frantically flying all around the porch looking for the nest. This made Ingrid get all sappy being an expecting mom herself and demanded that I return the nest into a plant and hang it back in the location where the bird had left it. I did so and sure enough, the bird instantly returned to the nest and the bird flip-out stopped.

It was still a rather tense environment out on the porch as other birds were clearly looking at me differently and I could swear that they were taunting me and conspiring against me. The birds win.

Alot getting done here today...

This is Funny:

http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/

This Rocks. Go to "explore" and get lost in the photography and video:

http://www.ashesandsnow.org/


More to come...

Improv Everywhere

What a hilarious concept this is. I've only seen the Best Buy mission so far. Can't wait to watch some more:

http://www.improveverywhere.com