I’m generally not surprised how casual some people are when it comes to abortion (some even late term abortion)… but I was shocked to hear British television pundit Virginia Ironside on a BBC Sunday talk program saying she would suffocate a child with a pillow to end its suffering. Ms. Ironside was equally as “loving” stating that abortion can be a “moral and unselfish act” –obviously she knows best. [sarcasm]
Miss Ironside said: ‘If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother.’
She added: ‘If I were the mother of a suffering child – I mean a deeply suffering child – I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face… If it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would.’
I’ve tracked nearly 200 fuel fill-ups while driving a 2006 Honda Pilot 4WD and have been wondering if the new tires have impacted my efficiency. I do know that the new Michelins have significantly better wet traction than the long lasting Goodyear Integrity tires that came on the SUV. In creating a quick chart, after downloading the raw data from Fuelly, it is difficult to see a noticeable trend.
The low dip in the middle of the chart was due to pulling a trailer.
The slightly more aggressively treaded Michelin LTX MX2 tires may have slightly lowered my 20.6 lifetime MPG. In comparing the high points on the right side of the chart, it does look as if MPG may have dropped a little more than 1 per gallon, at least for highway driving. Overall though, I’m happy with the higher priced LTX MX2 tires as the ride is smooth and quiet yet is offering better wet traction – we’ll soon see how they perform in winter weather.
Major League Baseball has announced its schedule for the first four days of division series. The Reds will play the Phillies for game one late on October 6th (5:07 PM EST) – it’s going to be a challenging match-up. Game two will be early on Friday evening – 6:07 PM EST.
Sunday afternoon for me was spent painting and frustrated after watching the Bengals lose to the Cleveland Brown, 20-23. Although I’m still a Browns fans (13 years in Cleveland) my loyalties are with the Bengals nowadays.
Brenda and I enjoyed visiting our son on Saturday for Family Weekend at Miami University. Although we didn’t spend the entire day with all the planned activities, we did enjoy a brunch with his professors and department head. It was nice to be in a small group talking with them about internships and future options for graduates with geography, urban planning and GIS degrees. It was great to hear Taylor talking confidently about his classes and thinking about his future. Thanks for the hospitality.
This afternoon I stopped to pick up some paint for the new garage door and was shocked to see what Lowe’s already had on display – do they know we’re still 3 months from Christmas?
It’s been on the list of things to do, but since my personal blog isn’t necessarily a ‘must read’ for people, I’ve been slow to adopt a better commenting methods or in this case “discussion” method — Disqus = dis·cuss • d?-sk?s’.
After reviewing and listening to the opinions of tech savvy friends, I’ve opted to use Disqus. It is a robust system that integrates well with WordPress and supports a variety of connection profile options … Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Open ID, Yahoo, etc. So far so good with setting things up with the Disqus Comment System plug-in, but using it should eventually be less painful for those wanting to see their comments show up quickly and less of a headache for me in managing spam. It has been a challenge for my part over the years in coming up with a way to sift through the roughly 500 comments (almost all are spam) per day that get shoveled at my blog. I’ve lost track of just how many total comments have been be tossed over the years, but of the nearly 10,000 valid ones, there must have been at least 100 times that in spam – yes it is a problem. (FYI, for most part, adding Akismetback in 2006 made the job of spam-moderation bearable)
While stopping for lunch today I shared some sailing highlights from the MedCup in September 2010 with my son who loves extreme ‘go-fast’ sailing. Although my interest in ‘racing’ wind powered machines has dimmed as technology plays a significantly larger role in decisionmaking aboard very today’s sophisticated boats, I’m still intrigued with those who do race at this level. For me, I’ll think I’ll stick with heavy, slow and a bit more laid back sailboat cruising.
Thanks to a season long team effort and last night’s ninth inning homerun from Jay Bruce, the Cincinnati Reds clinched a playoff berth for 2010 post season baseball … next goal, home field advantage.
The excitement happened late on Tuesday night in a dramatic fashion, when Bruce blasted a walk-off home run for a 3-2 in their game against the Astros. The celebration was great for baseball lovers in Cincinnati (truly a “baseball” town) and long overdue – the last time the Reds won the National League Central was in 1995.
With 5 games to go, the Cincinnati Reds currently sit with an 88 –69 win – lost record. The next few games are crucial in determining who and where they will play … winning continues to be important.
The Phillies have already clinched home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, so the playoff team with the worst record will be faced with the unfortunate task of opening the postseason in Philadelphia. If the Braves hold on to their lead in the NL Wild Card race, the Reds could host Atlanta … IF they finish ahead of the NL West champion.
There are two opposing mindsets when dealing America’s deficit and correcting America’s struggling economy; it is pretty black and white when it comes to opinions. There’s the liberal Democrats position, expressed by the Nobel Prize winning New York Times columnistPaul Krugman, who recommends dealing with our deficit by raising taxes and continuing to increase in public spending in order to re-kindle the sputtering economy. The opposing position expressed by conservatives like Republican congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) believes raising taxes will slow the economy further while public spending digs a deeper hole. His answer is to lower taxes (proposing a two tier flat tax), cut spending and reduce the size of the federal government while reforming Social Security for those under 54 years of age. I suspect that if we are serious about saving the economy and preventing an economic collapse, we’ll need to meet somewhere in the middle … I only hope it will not be too late.
CNBC’s Becky Quick shared some numbers about a week ago which should concern all of us: “From 1948 to 2008, the federal government spent about 19.6% of our gross domestic product, while taking in tax revenues of about 17.9%. But now we are spending 25% of GDP and taking in closer to 15% in revenue. That gap has to be narrowed.” David Walker, comptroller for the United States under President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, has been expressing deep concern that we’re not moving fast enough to correct this growing deficit and that our real debt is already worst than Spain, Britain and Ireland. He says the numbers we’ve all seen, $13 trillion and growing debt is not telling the truth and that the numbers are too low. That should frightened both liberal progressives and fiscal conservatives considering that we don’t even include the extra $4 trillion we owe to Social Security and the deficits facing states, municipalities and some public pension funds.
So how long do we have to get our house in order? What would you say to Walker’s warning … “we are within three years of becoming the next Greece.”
So far I’m not convinced drivers are big fans of the new complex intersections being constructed on many of today roads and highways – referred to as Superstreets. The handful of completed projects that I’ve traveled on recently seem overly complex and tailored to create accidents. A couple of examples that come to mind would be the new intersection at Monroe Ohio’s I-75/Route 63 and new junction at Austin Pike and Route 741 near Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport (MGY) in Springboro. If you’ve driven on them, imagine navigating for the first time on a dark, rainy night with headlights glaring in every direction – and an out of date GPS to mix things up even more.
Today while in Fairfield Ohio the Route 4 Bypass was under full construction. The clearing for all phase of the widening project have added significant width to the highway. When checking as to why so large, the comment I heard was that it was going to be a ‘Superstreet’ project requiring added width. Is it really going to make traffic better?
How do you keep all of your online passwords safe and secure? I’ll admit, I wasn’t all that smart about managing mine.
About a month or so ago, a technology friend of mine shared his method of using the stand alone KeyPass Password Safe on his PC and explained how he then plop the encrypted file into his Dropbox account so he could access across multiple PCs. Hmm, this looked interesting, but required me to manually enter all my passwords or create new ones then enter them into the KeyPass software application on my PC … but the real glitch was that there wasn’t a version for the Mac.
Thankfully there is LastPass: I gave the free version of LastPass a try and have been using it for a couple of weeks now and been pretty satisfied. I liked the random strong password generation, encrypted form fill and ability to add secure and encrypted notes often required for person to person customer service phone conversations. It was easy to set up and because the files are encrypted before saving them off-site, it offers a doubly good way to archive all of your web passwords. LastPass now remembers passwords each time I visit a site no matter how complex and it can create even more random strong passwords for me. It can even import all of my existing browser based passwords that may have been saved in Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome browsers and works great on the MacOS too.
Give it a try if you are still looking for a better way to incorporate more secure passwords and then remember them without the risk of leaving them in an unencrypted database or address book.
