9. August 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

A friend of mine sent me a really neat plug-in for just about all of the main browsers.

It’s called PicLens. What it does, is take images and videos on the web, puts them into categories.  Allows you to search for videos and images. Allows shopping products from Amazon. Keeps you up to date on the news. It does all of this, by putting your screen in a 3D mode, or the appearance of 3d. It may not help you do a lot of work, but it sure does look nice and it’s a pretty neat program to have.

Best part about it, is it’s free.

Download here  http://www.piclens.com/

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4. August 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

If they were every going to get serious about saving gas, it would start with the Federal employees. Not all federal employees can take mass transit, in the area I live in few do outside of D.C. It gets used but only by those who have to use it. Drive in would be to long, or they live right on one of the lines.

What the Feds could do is start working 4 10 hour days. Of course this could not be everyone, and some people would get mad, have to work Friday or Monday while most of the other folks are off. However tough luck. Most of of the office’s could do this. From the FBI to Congress. Now I am not saying take the police or the agents off, since they are more then likely working more the 10 hours a day now. I am talking about the staff. Instead of having 300 people on the phones for the IRS 5 days a week, lets cut down to 200 a day. If each person could have one day off during the week. That would cut 300 trips to work each week. Before I forget, I am not talking about shutting down offices or services. They would still be open 5 days a week or whatever their normal work days are now.Take 4 days and work 10 hours on those days.

Lets make the math simple. Since there are a ton of variables, let just say the average car gets 20 mpg. Since a lot these trips you are stuck in traffic. Round trip to work and home is 100 miles, you get 20 mpg and work 5 days a week. 500 miles each week. That’s 25 gallons a week. Lets say gas cost $4 even, means you spend $100 on gas.
Now take my plan ( I am sure some one much smarter then me has thought of this) Now you are driving 400 miles a week. Cost of fuel $80 each week. Doing this way save you $20 per week, or $ 1040 per year.

Now that’s not bad an extra grand each year, but wait I have not shown you the big picture yet. You now have an office that was burning 390,000 gallons of gas each year down to 312,000 gallons a year. Saving 78000 gallons per year. Now this is only one office. I also left those that could work from home 4 days a week and only go into the office one day a week, off of this. Like I said earlier there are so many variables
Someone much smarter then me should do the math, since its 5:30 am here, and I have been up since 2 am.
This plan IMO is much better then to just go on vacations which is what congress did. House side at least, the Senate is playing games so they open up, sort of every 3 days.

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28. June 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

I am sitting inside a dealer having  some work done on my
car, (yes I know dealers cost more but it’s a hybrid) On the news they are
talking oil prices, and one of the other people in here, said “that the oil  prices would not go down if we started to drill offshore”to me this is nuts, now the reason the guy said what he said was he is an Obama supporter. Of course Obama is against anything that would get him in trouble with the far left. Having been watching the market and seeing how the slightest thing can set oil prices rising, allowing us to start drilling off shore would lower the prices. Of course this is all done by the speculators. Supply and demand play a big part, however it’s the speculator that are driving the price up.

Most Americans do not have time to follow the news and research what the news they do see say. Since most “news” stations put a slant on what they report, be it left or right. So without researching they are making their decisions based on which news station they are watching.

Oil will go up or down depending on what the market dictates, when I say market I mean both supply and demand as well as what the speculators do.

If you’re waiting on the Federal government to fix or lower the prices you’re in for a long wait. At best they will help increase the price, since just about anything the Federal government gets involved in gets screwed up worse than it was before they stuck their hands in. Don’t believe me? Just look at Social Security.

Best thing for the World would be for all the governments to stay out of the free market.

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25. June 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Reading through today’s headlines,sadly nothing shocks me anymore; Bomb kills 51, Iran has sentenced 177 people under the age of 18 to death over the past decade, Pakistan: Gunmen kill 4 Shiite Muslims. These are just a few from today. What happened to the World? Why does everyone just gloss over these issues? Granted we are getting so used to these type of headlines, it’s almost that anything good that happens does not get reported, since we all know blood sells. Those are just a few.

What scares me the most is we are all getting so used to it, that it seldom bothers us anymore.

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12. June 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

The folks over at Mozilla just came out with a release date for FireFox 3,  it will be Tuesday June 17th.  For those of you who do not know what Firefox is, my question to you is have you been living in a cave?  Firefox IMO is the best browser around. Plus it’s free and has so many free plug-ins.

Download date is June 17th.

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31. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

This is posted with the permission of SGM Gibeau

His post was in response to people getting up on their high horses about actions that some member’s of the Service have done or are alleged to  have done.

I share his views, and am a strong supporter of our Military. I feel that they are under paid and over worked, the job they do is no job at all, it’s a duty that they felt called too. I will always back our Armed Forces 110%. I wish every time someone reads, that the people in Washington are about to cut funding for the Military, they would get mad enough to write their elected officials and let them know they disapprove of these actions. Without People like SGM Gibeau this Country would not exist.

The next time you see a person in uniform, thank them for all that you have. Here is another idea, ask them how they are, what they need, how you can help them when they have to deploy, how our Country can help them.

Just thoughts.

I am a Sergeant Major in the United States Army. I have read alot of the things written here about this young man, about his freedom of religion, how he should be jailed, how he should walk, etc etc.

NONE of you are correct. First, NO soldier has the freedom of religion. No soldier has the protection of the US Constitution. Soldiers (I say soldiers, and mean this to include the Air Force, the Navy The Coast Guard and the Marines.) All soldier have the freedom to worship any way they please, up to but not including the infringement of the rights and beliefs of anothers religion. They are protected by one book, and one book only. UCMJ, or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. We are held to a much higher standard than civilians. We are expected to conduct ourselves in a manner that sets us above and apart from civilians. We are expected to have a much higher sense of honor and a much greater sense of dignity and integrity than civilians. Whether or not we believe in this war is irrelevant. We all signed up for a minimum of eight years, and MOST of us have been here (The military) longer than that. Regardless of what the media says, most of us believe in what we are doing here, because we see things that the rest of you do not and will not ever see.

I fought in the first Gulf War, in 90-91. I fought here again in 1998 when President Clinton was trying to turn attention away from his impeachment. I then fought here in this war, as well as Afghanistan. (I have actually fought in every conflict the US has been in since Panama, just to demonstrate that this is not my first rodeo…)

What the “sniper” (I doubt he actually carried the Tango identifier in his MOS, since no Military Sniper School I know of allows someone with that level of emotion and obvious rage slip through the psych evaluation…) did, according to these people was unconscionable. Legally, it falls under the guise of “action unbecoming” and that is punishable. We are not here to feel as they feel, we are here to help rebuild, maintain the peace, and assist in enforcing the law, and help the rule of law take hold. Their laws will not necessarily mirror ours. Defilement of their holiest scripture is a crime here. Therefore, the soldier will be punished. When a Foreigner goes to America, if he breaks the law there, he is punished. It is no different for us as Americans in other countries, especially for our soldiers. That is the long and short of it.

I get real sick sometimes of the things that people say and do on these forums. I read them on ocassion to get an idea of how the mood is back home. Some of you **bleep** need to crawl back under your rock, work on your manners, learn to be a real warrior, and not a keyboard warrior, pick up a rifle, a shovel, or a pen, and do some good rather than lamenting all you see wrong.

SGM Gibeau

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28. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Seems everyone wants to play the blame game about the cost of gas, the Left blame the right, saying its Bush’s fault, the right point back to Bill Clinton vetoing the law to allow us to explore and drill in parts of the USA. Then we have those who blame congress since the Left took over. Seems gas prices have gone up 67% since they took control of congress. What most people fail to understand is that Both China and India have increased their consumption of oil, so with the increase from both of those countries combined with the silly regulations that our own Government (USA) puts out, it makes it even harder to figure out who to blame. Since the Petroleum refiners in the US must meet the EPA’s federal fuex oxygenate requirement from Title ll of the Clean Act Amendments of 1990, add that with the law that refiners are required to drain all winter fuel from their tanks before replacing it with summer fuel, and this must be done by April 1^st. Now before I started reading this I had no idea there was a difference in winter/summer fuel. Now that’s just the Feds, then the states get to add their own formulas, so we have in the US more the 40 different types of fuel requirements depending on which state you happen to live in. I sit here shaking my head about this.

Now we get to the not in my backyard, most folks do not want a refinery built around them, nor do they wish to have storage tanks or tank farms as they are called built near them. So we have another strike against the cost of gas.

Now back in 2004 there were some changes made that lawmaker new was going to drive the cost of gas up, now I am no expert on this, but it has something to do with lowering the sulfuric content which cost companies more money to refine the product, which mean the price at the pump was going to go up. Add that to the fact the oil companies are going to spend more on having to meet this demand from the Feds which will mean less output from the refineries here in the states.

Now we could lay the blame on the green people, saying it’s all their fault, however that would be wrong as well.

Let’s look at the Country of Brazil, they buy flex cars, which means it can run on gas or alcohol, which is ethanol that is produced from sugar, this can been done with corn, or beets as well. So they have a choice on how they fuel their vehicles. As of 2005 in the US there were only 4 million flex cars on the road. Not sure how many we have now, but am guessing a few more.

There are more ways to produce ethanol; wood is a prime example, while its being turned into paper there is another substance that it has which is called xylan. Xylan can be fermented to produce ethanol.

So here is the question, why with just these few ways to reduce the USA dependence on oil have we not embraced these alternative fuels?

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26. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

It is the
VETERAN,
not the preacher,
who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the
VETERAN,
not the reporter,
who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the
VETERAN,
not the poet,
who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the
VETERAN,
not the campus organizer,
who has given us freedom to assemble.

It is the
VETERAN,
not the lawyer,
who has given us the right to a fair trial.


It is the
VETERAN,
not the politician,
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the
Veteran
who serves
under the Flag,

ETERNAL
REST GRANT THEM O LORD, AND LET PERPETUAL LIGHT SHINE UPON
THEM.

While I wish I could take credit for writing this, or even thinking of something that touched me, A friend  emailed me this today.

His name is Ralph, while I do not know if he got this as a forward, it was not forward to me.

God Bless all those who have and are serving

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22. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.

Are we Americans as dumb as we appear — or — is it that we just do not think?
While the Chinese, knowingly and intentionally, export inferior and even toxic products and dangerous toys and goods to be sold in American markets, the media wrings its hands and criticizes the Bush Administration for perceived errors.
Yet 70% of Americans believe that the trading privileges afforded to the Chinese should be suspended.
Well, duh..why do you need the government to suspend trading privileges?

SIMPLY DO IT YOURSELF, AMERICA!!

Simply look on the bottom of every product you buy, and if it says ‘Made in China’ or ‘PRC’ (and that now includes Hong Kong), simply choose another product, or none at all. You will be amazed at how dependent you are on Chinese products, and you will be equally amazed at what you can do without. Who needs plastic eggs to celebrate Easter?

If you must have eggs, use real ones and benefit some American farmer. Easter is just an example, the point is.. do not wait for the government to act.

Just go ahead and assume control on your own.
THINK ABOUT THIS If 200 million Americans refuse to buy just $20 each of Chinese goods, that’s a billion dollar trade imbalance resolved in our favor…fast!!
The downside? Some American businesses will feel a temporary pinch from having foreign stockpiles of inventory. Wahhhhhhhhhhhh
The solution ?

Let’s give them fair warning and send our own message. Most of the people who have been reading about this matter are planning on implementing this on June 4, and continue it until July 4.
That is only one month of trading losses, but it will hit the Chinese for 1/12th of the total, or 8%, of their American exports. Then they will at least have to ask themselves if the benefits of their arrogance and lawlessness were worth it.

Remember, June 4 to July 4.
EVEN BETTER. . . START NOW.

Show them we are Americans and NOBODY can take us for granted.

If we can’t live without cheap Chinese goods for one month out of our lives, WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET!

I got this emailed to me, while I am not sure of the facts or the author, it does make some sense to me. Why not give it a try?Can’t hurt. Also with the economy being tight why not just hold off on buying anything made in China till after he 4th of July.

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2. May 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

Just a quick intro, I wanted a place to share some of the neat apps, news, OS, and general crap I find on the net and in life.

Some days will be all about the PC, others will be about life, at least till I find my way. Stay tuned.

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