You’ve got to be kidding, right? Which law maker would take time from their busy day and the real problems of the country to propose a bill to outlaw these harmless (and tasteless) decorations?

Republican Sen. Cary Baker, a gun shop owner from Eustis, Florida, called the adornments offensive and proposed the ban. Motorists would be fined $60 for displaying the novelty items, which are known by brand names like “Truck Nutz” and resemble the south end of a bull moving north.

Before the great road trip of fall, 2006, my former leadership team at Sun made sure I was fully prepared and the Truck Nutz were the center piece of the day. Anywhoo, I guess that let’s the Florida citizens know where their law makers are spending their time…Perhaps banning such items will help curtail politician’s desire for extra-curricular activities.

Well, the power surge of 2008 has resulted in a full-scale appliance massacre at our house. Apparently, the combination of high winds and ocean air resulted in the corrosion of the neutral wire on the feed to our house. That was coupled with a break in the insulation of the positive and when the wind blew one time too many, the positive and neutral made contact and surged 240VAC through one leg of the circuit frying appliances attached to that leg.

The refrigerator, oven, microwave, and dryer are all dead. A visit from the local Sears appliance guy yielded a $1,500 part order (for just the fridge and dryer) and a scheduled return visit when the parts arrive. To add insult to injury, all of the appliances but the dryer are “built-in” – which will necessitate removing them to service them. Thus a separate diagnosis will happen for the oven/microwave group since the guy couldn’t get access to the problem areas.

The initial call to PG&E yielded an unacceptable response of “this is your problem” – that is, until we heard from our neighbors who share the same supply pole/line combo and had the exact same problem (they lost a bunch of video/audio equipment along with a couple of appliances and have some resulting issue in their junction/breaker box.)

Since we’re now looking at a week or so, I made the trip to buy a small interim fridge at least. We’ll see how this all plays out, but not a fun time so far…

Attribution: Unknown
I saw this image and thought I’d share it. Don’t know what to say other than that, it’s striking and disturbing at the same time. Perhaps we should have a caption contest?

HT: George

Sure, it’s convenient to think that there is some all powerful being behind the universe, but it’s even more convenient to observe, note differences, and form hypothesis (predictions.) The thing that is interesting about this video is that you can see the relationship between the observation, prediction, and the ultimate proof of the prediction.

HT: Rondam’s Ramblings

Both candidates have now been subjected to hacks with the latest example being a POST request to the Vote Hillary website and injects an iframe, causing the site to display the contents of Barack Obama’s website. Prior attacks have simply redirected the user’s browser to the other candidates website – this one is a little more insidious as it leaves the original URL in the client’s browser.

Coming on the heels of Hillary’s $10M donation day, this sort of activity could mean real trouble for candidates if one of their primary communication and fund raising methods is decommissioned.

HT: NetCraft.com