Documentaries

Frustrating because it confirmed my own experience with my fellow human’s acceptance of new facts that violate their ready-made conceptions – namely none, zero, nada, zilch.

But I never heard such honest statements as “No, I don’t change my mind – whatever the evidence might be!” What I personally get most of the time is rejection or attempts to question the validity of evidence or fact.

Over the last years it has become quite evident to me that the root of all evil is government. For the simple fact that they claim for themselves to be above and beyond any morality. We teach our kids that taking things away from other kids is stealing and we should not do that. Yet when the tax collector calls it tax and does the same thing – it somehow is something other than stealing – but it’s not!

This is such an obvious truth but try to explain this to somebody who has paid taxes for all of his life and could not admit that this is morally wrong – simply because he would have to admit that he was wrong for all of his life.

It appears that to admit being mistaken is very difficult for many and it is easier to insist to have been right all along.

Nicola Tesla

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Fascinating stuff – and I wonder if there really is a secret archive of Tesla’s discoveries somewhere in vaults of the US government.

What strikes me as very intriguing is that he might have distributed his findings to several governments in order to get them to work together – and they just did not.

Living Differently

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Recently – or actually not that recently – I have started questioning the idea of having a big space to live in. Sure, if it’s cold outside and you have to be inside for months on end, it is nice to move around in a heated space. But for many years now I am actually in an area where there is not that much of a winter and where that argument is not really valid.

I watched a video of a couple that changed from a big apartment to one of the typical tiny houses of hundred-twenty square foot. She had the obvious idea of simply going outside when she wanted space.

These very tiny houses might be a bit too small for me, but something like this looks very appealing to me.

Female Beauty

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A photo essay from http://imgur.com/a/HfFQq#OsjcN

Your’s Truly – Sponsor of the Rose Parade

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Happy to announce that I am a proud sponsor of the world-famous Rose Parade 2014 in Pasadena, California.

I admit that I was not involved to getting the nobility back that this country thought to have left behind some 200 years ago, but I guess some people just need to have somebody to worship – here is the new queen and her royal court

royal-court

But let me tell you how I became a sponsor of the Rose Parade.

A few years ago our federal government convinced me to make a considerable donation to their treasury in the amount of sixty kilo dollars. At that time they convinced me to make this donation otherwise they would, sadly, have to take our house.

And the reason they really needed that money was that they had to give it to Wells Fargo – and a few other banks. Now Wells Fargo turned around and used my money to pay for the opening act of the Rose Parade – so there you go – my first part of the sponsorship.

But no, I did not spend it all on that! The other half went to the outfitting of a marching band with active members of our armed forces. The announcer of the parade told the TV viewers that this band – or at least a part of if – had been on a tour in Iraq where they also had made this happy music that got out boys in the right mood to kill some people – I mean they were quite a few civilians amongst those ending up dead but they were not our boys, so who cares, right?

When I saw this marching band parading down Colorado Boulevard I was so proud that I was allowed to help them bring this nice and snappy music to the world.

To my shame I have to admit that after that I turned off the life feed from KTLA – I did not really wanted to get too mad – simple because I did not have enough money to also sponsor our brave police officers driving figure eights on their motor cycles. I am so happy that they could have a bit of fun there because the rest of the week they will have to do all those nasty privacy and liberty violations those bad politicians tell them to commit – – – and what can they do, right?

They are just doing their job!

Two Versions of “The Split” (updated to Three)

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Impressive and impressive crack-up…

The original

and the other one

Update: There is yet another split that deserves a place here:

What did you learn in school today?

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That’s one answer down my alley…

And for all of you who want to sing along with this song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” by Tom Paxton – here you go…

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie.
I learned that soldiers seldom die.
I learned that everybody’s free.
And that’s what the teacher said to me.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes.
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It’s always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that war is not so bad.
I learned of the great ones we have had.
We fought in Germany and in France.
And some day I might get my chance.
That’s what I learned in school today.
That’s what I learned in school.

Gibberish Last Names Clogging up Subscriptions

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I had been annoyed recently by an increasing number of SPAM subscriptions on my Thaidye.com web site. The script behind the form for these subscriptions and requests for rebate immediate send out a confirmation email to the address entered (as well as to the admin of the site) and add the visitor to a database.

Initially there were a few of those spam entries and I could easily go into the database and manually remove them. But they became more and more numerous, so the first step was to add a link to the email the admin received which allowed for an easy removal of that spam entry.

But finally it got so annoying and time-consuming that I tried to think of a more automated way to handle the spam entries. What they all had in common was

a good first name
a gibberish last name like NLMAkPJpIVyqCkCeuEh, YijhgzswktJTVWqXhmA or MPSVPkfXInMzFYhEOpp
and a good email

The email was probably a good one because there were hardly any bounces for the automatic confirmation emails. That actually bothered me also because these poor recipients got some SPAM apparently coming from me.

Now the quest for me was to find something that all these spam entries had in common so that I could filter them somehow. Unfortunately php does not have a ‘gibberish’ function, so I had to come up with one of my own. Meditating over these entries I finally saw that these spam names often have longer sequences of consonants than would occur in valid names.

With a little bit of help from my friends at Google I came up with the following. With the hope that it might help somebody bothered by the same spammers, here the code snippet to filter those entries:

$first = $_REQUEST[first];
$last = $_REQUEST[last];
$gibberish = preg_match('/[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz]{4,}/i', $first)
          || preg_match('/[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz]{4,}/i', $last);
if (! $gibberish) {
    //do the regular processing
    }
else {
    // pretend every thing went find for the spammer
    // but don't really do anything
    }

Will see how many will slip through – gibberish with less than 4 consonants in a row.

What I am still curious about is ‘WHY’? What the spammer intends with these spam entries. I don’t see any way that could be beneficial to him/her. Discrediting me because the site sents out spam? But why then use gibberish in the last name? I am really curious.

Paperless Living

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I am getting better at living a life without paper.

A few weeks ago I have started again to read a pulp science fiction series that I started to enjoy when I was at the tender age of 16. It is still available in print but hard (speak expensive) for me to come by. So, I found a real application for my tablet and am reading these novellas now on a screen.

But beside the entertainment part of my life, I have also started to get rid of any receipt and other need-to-keep papers. There is a short decision when something comes across my desk if I will ever have to look at or refer to this piece again. If so, it get’s scanned and the hard copy goes in the trash – or shredder.

This is also true for manuals. Fortunately most devices already come with electronic manuals or you can find them online. But unfortunately not always. Today I looked for the manual of the thermostat at our new house. There was one tucked right behind the wall unit, but obviously I will not leave it there. But I also did not want to start a new shoe box with manuals of things we have around the house, so the decision was made to scan it. But wait, maybe somebody else did this already and I can save the work.

Somebody did, but it was hidden behind having to jump through who knows how many hoops to get it free. Create a free account first. I still did that, but when I then was asked to try this subscription or sign for a trial membership on that other thing, I canceled out of that and did the scanning myself.

Hopefully Google will properly make it known that I did that, so, in case you need that particular manual you don’t have to sign up for any stinking free account – instead you get it right here…