Rorschach.net

Adam & Abigayle on the birth of your baby boy Nicholas Rolf Tobia. We’re so happy for you and can’t wait to see you all in June. Much love!

P.S. to All Friends & Family – See the cute baby pics Adam posted in the gallery.

We took a nifty hard-drive based digital camera / camcorder to Italy with us. We’ve got about 115 mintues of raw video and over 860 pictures for a total of 10,263MB of data. With that amount of pictures and video you can expect we’ll be editing a lot of it. We’ll keep the good stuff and publish it on our gallery. (LJ friends go to the site for the link.)

Make sure you click on the “Show a Google Map” link in the left sidebar to see exactly where the pictures were taken from. I suggest using the hybrid mode to see the street names and the surrounding terrain. It makes for a nifty virtual tour where you can view pictures grouped together in physcial location instead of the time we took them.

Had a wonderful time. I think we spent 16 hours just walking around Rome. Learned a bit of the language and really got a sense of history and a different culture from that we know here in the US.

But we’re back in San Diego trying to adjust once again to real life in real time. We’ve got 890 pictures and over an hour of video to sort through. It will be busy day tomorrow – but first, sleep. We spent the last 24 hours on the road and only 2 hours napping. It would be horrible if I weren’t so happy from our wonderful, amazing trip.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. - Benjamin Franklin in 1755

None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead. – U.S. Senator John Coryn in 2006

Here’s a great step-by-step guide on what to do if you’re the subject of identity theft.

What follows is a summary of the events happening in the spam community over the past few weeks. It’s an interesting story with some revelations, some hope and some despair about spamming and the Internet.

It all centers around a company called Blue Security. Based in Israel, Blue Security had the controversial idea of automating spam complaints. A provision of the CAN-SPAM act is to allow consumers to send a “opt-out” message to any spammer and they are required to comply. Continue Reading »

I am big on birthdays. I believe it is truly better to have a birthday than to not; the alternate choice being the result of not being either born or alive, celebrating is required. Even as I’ve developed a few – gasp – tiny lines signifying increased wisdom around my eyes and silver strand necessitating increased visits to the salon, I still look forward to birthdays. It’s not just the presents. It’s the milestone of another year lived – and another to look forward to. It’s an excuse to throw a party. It’s an excuse to shower those you care about with attention and show that you’re are glad they are part of your life.
Continue Reading »

Happy birthday to the love of my life. You deserve all the happiness in the world. Thank you for sharing your life with me.

Oh, I don’t need to worry about the wiretapping of international calls since I don’t call terrorists. Well now the records of every phone call you’ve made the last few years is stored and being analyzed by the federal government. Pretty much everyone but Qwest fell over themselves to give the NSA all the phone records of calls inside the U.S. Can you assume that the cell phone companies were not asked?

You cannot ignore the gradual erosion of our consitiutional rights. The idea that the executive branch now has the power to investigate, incarcerate, and punish anyone without the oversight of the legislative and judicial branches of government is absurd. The idea that the executive branch can run secret programs that have no legislative oversight let alone the possibility that those programs violate of the law of the land is insane.

Finally there’s the idea that this information is vital to the “war on terror” and it is only being used for that purpose. How do you know that? You don’t because it’s a secret project and your duly elected representatives and the stewards of the law (judges) have no oversight to the program or it’s uses. You may have some idea that the government is the big thing out there that keeps you safe from harm but the reality is that the government is made up of people and people are petty, vindictive, and malicious unless there’s someone looking over their shoulder to report on their actions so the larger society can inflict consequences.

 There’s a way to do this. It was written by the founders of this country. For right or for wrong, for better or for worse, it’s the way this whole thing was designed, and no one gets to change the rules unless you go through the process to change the rules in front of me and everyone else who is a citizen. Stop it. Stop it right now and do the right thing no matter how many supposed ends justify your means.