CBS News: "No Fat Chicks!"

A recent post on "The Raw Feed" linking to a New York Post story reveals that CBS news is ashamed to have the plumper anchor woman Katie Couric appear in it's marketing publications so they had here slimmed down ala-photoshop. Personally, I prefer the fuller figure, but with diets, and eating disorders all the rage in hollywood these days, how can you blame them. You can't market your news anchor as a plus-size, when you have to report on Lindsey Lohan and Niclole Richie all day long. As you can see in the before-after photo, Catie is pulls a Star Jones transformation but without the gastric bi-pass. When asked to comment she had this to say:

Cheers, Air, & Art

Emily and Stephanie were showing off thier cheerleading skills at the Albany Art & Air Festival today. They performed with their Ultimate Cheer All-Star team and I took some photos of the action. Although I am not the biggest cheerleading fan, some of you might enjoy them so I decided to share.

Cheer Air & Art

Aug 26, 2006 - 57 Photos

Emily is a "base" and catches the "flyers" who they toss in the air. Stephanie is also a base for the younger team. It may be hard to pick them out individually, but some of there teamates do some inpressive stunts with their help.

Teenagers! Give me a break!

Every generation must endure the trials and tribulation of raising kids. What makes me curious, is what were the privilages our parent's-parent's denied when they misbehaved? Were kids just all beaten into submission?

Today teenagers seem to assume a bill of rights far beyond what I learned was in our constitution.

Here is my understanding of the current rights provided to the average teenager these days:

• Parents should make no law establishing chores
  
• A well connected group of friends must communicate, therefore the right to bear cellphones must be protected.
  
• No teenager, in a time of summer vacation, should be expected to clean thier room
• Parents should make no attempt to violate a teenagers right to privacy, including notes, emails, instant messaging, internet histories, and cell phone conversations.
• No teen should be expected to answer to any actions without probable argument, denial, defiance, yelling, kicking, screaming, and slamming of doors.
• In all prosecutions, teenagers reserve the right to second opinions from the opposing parent, step parent, grand parent, or anyone with a supporting view.
• Any penalty should never exceed one week of allowance, one day of cellphone OR MySpace privilages. Groundings must never include restriction from school activites included but not limited to dances, football games, parties, birthday celebrations, or the mall.
• No teen should be denied the free exersize of personal expression, including hoochie outfits, piercings, tatoos, or other body modifications.
• Parents must provide equal opportunity to socialize with all other teenagers without discrimination based on social status, body modifications, criminal records, personal hygene, appearance, or addictive or hazardous activities.
• Curfews, when imposed, must never be earlier than the latest curfew of the other teenagers currently participating in the evenings activites, or the ability to "spend the night" must be allowed in case of conflict.

Fortunately, my house is a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Leap of Faith

Isaiah takes a leap of faith off the swingset at the Mollala city park. 

Face Plant 101

My brother and I have been watersking for years. We have learned to ride a skurfer, wakeboard, kneeboard, and even have conquered the barefoot boom, and long rope barefoot sking. I have never attempted to combine slalom and barefoot however.
Now I know why.

Posting Pictures

I just learned that my photos in my web albums can be embeded onto my blog, or on my MySpace pages. Frequently people ask me how to add photos to blog posts and although with Picasa Web Albums you still need to upload them to the service, doing so I found to be more simplistic with Picasa.

Swinging

Jul 27, 2006 - 15 Photos

Afraid to Fly?

You should be. Today Judge Jihad ruled the wiretapping of international phone calls to US phone numbers or vice versa, to be halted. You can be certin now the FBI, and NSA have another hand tied behind thier backs while they try and fight to protect you and I from being the participant in someones martyrdom.

Palm Bay FL Get's It.

The Palm Bay Florida City Council is poised to vote for an ordinace that will impose fines on businesses that employ ILLEGAL immigrants. Finally somebody gets it! The only problem is the ACLU and several activists threaten to sue the city into bankrupcy for what they want to call a potential for discrimination.


Yeah, let's just sue everytime the law is actually enforced. With hundrends of miles of border, land and sea, there is no reasonable way we can seal the entire perimeter, but by simply making the american dream only availible to those who come here ligitimately and legally, we would remove the beacon that continually attracts the mosqitos.

Make no mistake, the ACLU has no interest in any American's civil liberties.

Redneck VS Yuppie

This video was posted on AllDumb.com today, but I edited it down as it was much longer, and it still runs a bit long, so I added a soundtrack to pass the time.

Warning, the language might be too strong for young fuckers.

The Post I Thought I Posted

Originally my goal for this blog was to have a place where I save my tech tips, advice, photos, and rants so when I wanted to refer to them I could email someone a link.. One such opportunity arose, and I searched unsucessfully for my TOP 10 things I need on my computer. As it turns out, I think I have emailed it before but never posted it here. Without further delay, here it is:

Ben's TOP 10 PC Must Haves

10 - Deep Burner

A free CD/DVD writing utility that makes creating data CD's really quick and easy. Just drag, drop, click burn, and your done. Most PC's these days come with this type of sofware but DeepBurner leaves out all the fancy stuff and will help you just Git-R-Done.

9 - Froogle

Ever wonder what the going price is of something you want? Just Froogle it, yes Froogle, not Google. Froogle is googles search engine for everthing that is for sale, so you can get a listing of what, where, and how much.

8 - Google Earth & Google Maps

Like most of my favorite Google goodies, google mapping makes finding places quick, easy, and without all the banner ads or pop-ups. For just quick online mapping or simple directions use Google Maps, but for a really cool experience, install Google Earth, and tour the globe in style. Really get some use, and lookup some Google Earth Keyhole Files, (KML) and you can get live content like weather maps, or WiFi hotspots right on your maps so you know where the next coffee stop should be on your road trip. It takes some reading to figure it out but you can get a wealth of info from the Google Earth Community

7 - Google Personalized Desktop

Making my hompage more useful by placing live content, email notification, and a calendar is helpful, but having it all work so well with my other Google Goodies made this an easy choice. Since the Google Personalized Desktop can read RSS news feeds, my home page is always fresh with the latest news and information I am interested in. You can even add a feed from a blog like Ben's Viewpoint if you want by using the atom XML feed on the lower right of this page.

6 - SpyBot Search & Destroy

To eliminate potential spyware threats, download, update, and run SpyBot regularly. Enough Said.

5 - Firefox Mozilla Browser

The best thing I have done to keep my home computer free of problems was stop using Internet Explorer to surf the web, and install Firefox. Firefox introduced Tabbed browsing to me, and it makes great sense when you need to multi-task. For example posting this I had to open new tabs so I could visit the sites I am linking to and cut/past the links from them. Then I just click back on the tab I need and get back to what I was doing. Ever since installing Firefox my scans for spyware have been clean or nearly clean every time. The only drawback is some websites don't work properly so I still need to use Internet Explorer on occaision, but that is the exception and well outweighs the benefits I get, especially when all my kids share one computer.

4 - MusicMatch Jukebox

For organizing my huge music collection, MusicMatch has been on my computer for years. Although there might be better solutions out there, for me, MusicMatch helps me sort, search, copy from CD, Create CD's, and organize my over 6000 song music collection. This is one of the few software items that I have paid for the premium edition license and felt like I really got my moneys worth. My only complaint is it does not work well with the Ipods, other Mp3 players seem to work great by the Ipod Nano we have I ended up using Itunes.

3 - AVG Free Edition Anti-Virus

When you are as cheap as me, you can't get any better than FREE. Get it while it lasts, as long as it is just for personal use, you can download a well respected and reliable computer virus protection program that will update all by it's self and keep your computer running smooth. Did I mention it is FREE! AVG Antivirus by Grisoft

2 - GMAIL Google's Free Email

I am still loving GMail! I can quickly search my email, never have to delete anything cause I get loads of free storage space, it interacts flawlessly with all of my other goodies, has built in chat, contacts, tagging, filtering, and best of all, I rarely get spam! When I do.. I click the Report Spam button and never see that message again! On the downside, does anyone know where I can find male enhancement products?

1 - Picasa

Yeah, you guessed it.. If you read my posts, you already know how in love I am with Picasa. It is always open on my PC, and whenever a coworker askes if I have a picture of something, they now expect me to deliver in under 30 seconds. Now even better, I can upload my albums to the new Google Web Albums, and share all the stuff I have on my Picasa with you.

Just-A-Swinging

My kids are living near Mollala oregon, at neat place where they have a big barn converted to recreation room, a chicken coup converted to a playhouse, and a couple rope swings from an old oak tree. Pictured here Isaiah is enjoying a good push from Dad.

Verizon Wireless - Are your friends and Family IN?

Verizon Wireless - Are your friends and Family IN?:

My mobile service plan with Verizon Wireless includes unlimited "IN-Calling" so I can talk to other Verizon users as long as I want. The only problem is, without asking, I am not always sure what contacts of mine I can have motor mouth with, and those I need to fake a dropped call, as to avoid overages on my monthly bill. Verizon provides a lookup online to check a phone number to see if it is "IN", although I can't think of a single person who I want to talk to long enough to care.

Should we talk in?

Culturally Sensitive Banking was the title of a previous post that I ranted on about having to choose between English or Spanish before proceeding to enter my pin number and use the ATMs. Rather than eliminate this nusance my bank, Washington Mutual, now has added two more choices. Yippee, if only I knew what those charicters on the bottom mean, I've seen them on pokemon cards but I have no idea what it says. What really has me curious, is WAMU's policy embrases what it calls Diversity and Inclusion, and markets bilingually. What they don't provide is bank statements printed in Spanish or Russian, so while they advertise in a native tounge, good luck reading your account statement once they have your money. And as I mentioned in the prior post, if they would just ask me my preferred language and had that as part of my account information, they could just display my language when I stick my card in the slot. Isn't that what technology is supposed to do? I already know the reason why they don't include this. It would appear to be an intrusion of privacy, and might hint of racial tracking, they could get sued by the ACLU for having a database of what languages thier customers speak. When I visit a website, it might ask me to if I would like it to recall certain preferences like my zip code, couldn't the ATM just ask me once, and recall my choice the next time.

Super Dog

My vacation last week included a vacation from blogging. While reviewing my photos from our visit to the coast, I thought it was time to share some more photos with anyone whe still checks up on this blog. Here Daisy is taking off from the beach on a full speed run.