Why is it that people fail to see that stars, celebrities, and government figures are all people too? Beneath their public facade, they are just like us. They have their own problems, they deal with their families, and have to deal with everyday stuff just like you and I. Why then, do people fail to forgive some public figures, while they won't forgive others? Oh no big deal...Murtha was just going to accept bribes. We can forgive that. Oh...OJ killed Nicole...who cares, he says he didn't, and even though the evidence says otherwise, we'll forgive him... Where does this logic come from? I honestly can't see where.
While the public will forgive Murtha and OJ, they don't forgive Mel Gibson or Micheal Richards for verbal mistakes. It is a known fact among writers that the written word is set in stone, but spoken word is retractable. Therefore, when these two men apologize for their actions, regardless of the cause, they should be unconditionally forgiven. Would you forgive your child/husband/significant person in your life if they went on a mad rage, and shouted racial slurs? Most people would.
I know that Mel Gibson was influenced by the alcohol. That was his excuse. Michael Richards was ticked off by some black audience members, who, had likely surpassed the two drink minimum at the comedy club. Both, whether directly or indirectly, were influenced by alcohol. I know that whenever someone is drunk, people don't heed what they say because they know it isn't truly the person talking, but the alcohol. The same goes for both Gibson, and the audience members. While Gibson has slightly more of a leg to stand on, since he was inebriated, Richards still has a valid excuse by blaming his rage at the drunk audience members.
The point? We , as a public need to get our standards straight. We need to see that there is a difference between doing something wrong verbally, and doing something that is against the law. The public should forgive verbal grievances, and realistically should see that public figures are just like them... The public should also see how badly alcohol, when overused, can cause serious problems.
I want to hear what you think about all of this. If you don't have a user account set up, use this link, and then proceed here to discuss this article.
Have you ever been in a multilevel building, riding the elevator, late to a meeting, and been late because the elevator stops on every single floor? Have you ever had the elevator all to yourself and not wanted others to join you inside? If so, read on...
Elevators are great when they don't stop anywhere except on the floor you want. In cases other than that, it is maddening in a 10+ story building to have to stop on every floor. There is an easy way around this. Once inside, select your floor. When the doors close, hold down the "close doors" button. The elevator should go up or down without stopping, ignoring all of the button pushes on other floors...this sometimes doesn't work, but I have found that it actually works the majority of the time.
Give it a shot! If nothing else, its another cool bit of info for later (emergency?) use.
MAJOR UPDATE! -This is a file used to find "vulnerable" site using Google. Coincidentally, it contains strings that you should block in your .htaccess file.
It seems that many hackers (mostly Turkish, according to my server logs) have been attempting to break into Joomla and Mambo based sites. They usually attack just by requesting a URL that at the same time would be able to change your CMS settings if you aren't up to date, and hardened. Some of these URLs include the following:
Note that the one in bold is the one that I see attempted the most. I suggest you upgrade to the latest stable version of Mambo or Joomla, and implement .htaccess blocks to redirect people going to these addresses to a noindex.html page (don't click, mine loops in infiinite redirects to itself...I need to get it to make a popup of itself onload at some point too, to make life even harder for the would-be hacker)...
I wrote this little puppy to wake me up if I'm asleep and the Bag of Crap comes up during a Wootoff (like the one going on now) at Woot. It's simple to use, it keeps looping, just outputting the current item. Feel free to mod it as you wish...I've really been meaning to make it look nice with color, but I figured it would'nt matter anyway.
That being the case, you can grab the tarball below. Otherwise, the source is below that. Just make sure to have an alarm.mp3 in the same directory as the script before your run it.
Source:
#!/bin/bash
#Wootwatch Alarm
#Written by Matt Parnell/ilikenwf http://www.mattparnell.com
#This is totally free, take it and mod it however you wish, under the GNU.
#This script goes every 5 sec to woot and checks for a bag of crap. If found, it sounds an alarm.
if echo $ITEM | grep "Crap"; then
play -q alarm.mp3 &
echo ""
echo "BOC FOUND after $r runs." else
echo "No BOC found yet..." echo ""
echo "Current item: "
echo $ITEM
echo ""
echo "This script has run $r Times." sleep 3 && clear
fi
