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Monthly Archives: July 2012

SSCC Honorable Mention–Australia

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So this one came from Sean and hails from the land down under*.

A former Victoria Police officer charged with child sex offences allegedly held a gun to the heads of victims and gave Kit-Kat chocolate bars to another after abusing him.

Yeah, it’s just as bad as it sounds.

The man, who now lives in New South Wales, faces 39 charges including several counts of rape, indecent assault and gross indecency. The charges relate to nine girls and boys aged between five and 14.

The real icing on the cake is that some of the incidents occurred while he was on duty.  State side many monsters have gone in to law enforcement to allow them to hide in plain sight.  Since this was outside the states, I’m hesitant to give him a number though I really want to.  I run the count to predominantly show corruption in the American system, if I included foreign governments I could just call it a day with Iran, China, and North Korea.

The fact this is an honorable mention has nothing to do with the incident itself, but merely the fact it occurred outside the US.  There have been other’s that have made the count in similar circumstances and this man deserves as much scorn as his countrymen can throw at him.

International State Sponsored Criminal: John Doe**

Because being a cop means that you have a huge amount of trust merely by having a badge.

*I had to put something in there to cheer me up because this sucker is just depressing. 

**As always if you get his name, please let me know.

Quote of the Day–King Fergus(7/8/2012)

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Princess or not. Learning to fight is essential!

King Fergus – Brave

[The wife and I went to see Brave last night.  Fergus and I would get along quite well.  I was glad to see Disney break the traditional mold for their princesses.  The line above combined with the following absolutely made me fall in love with this movie:

But I thought princesses shouldn’t have weapons? – Princess Mérida

Which in context was down right awesome and hilarious!  But you’ll have to go see it.  It’s definitely worth it, you’re either laughing, going “look at them, they’re so cute”, or going where did that damn dust come from.

Seriously I don’t know what some of these critics are smoking.  My suspicion is they prefer pop culture for their girls instead of geek culture… and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me educate you in graphical form.

pop-vs-geek1

Yeah, that about sums it up. –B]

CloudFlare Review

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So a friend of mine ended up having his site offline last night after a DoS attack took his web hosting offline.

About 3 months ago I decided to give CloudFlare a shot.  After 3 months I thought I would give a quick overview of how it went and what differences I have actually seen.

Page load speeds, there was a noticeable difference when I migrated the site.  I left a archived version of the site available for tracking down broken links and the like.  So this was equivalent of me flipping the off switch.  Using the archived site is unbelievably slower than what it was prior to migration to Word Press.

Bandwidth usage proves this.

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I did the change over in the beginning of April.  Sitemeter and Google Analytics both have shown at least a steady and slightly increasing traffic over those months, with January being the largest.  So I could say that effectively CloudFlare has cut my bandwidth down by 1/3.  CloudFlare’s analytics are accurate as well and provide some extra differentiation.

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One downside though is as you can see above, AWstats is no longer accurate.  You can see the number of Unique visitors is no longer accurate, however you can see that the number of visits does reflect that number.

When I first did the change over I did have some weirdness and problems.  Mainly that my hosting provider was reacting to CloudFlare like it was a DoS attack.  The majority of the requests are forwarded through their network for speed reasons.  So the number of high hits from their services made them look suspect.  I got the issues straightened out and things have been much more stable since.

When my hosting provider did have a hiccup, the site content remained available.  While I couldn’t post new content, I wasn’t loosing viewership which was a huge plus.

There are also numerous apps that can be installed with CloudFlare to aid in thinks like link tracking and malware detection.  There is also a service to help monitor for people scraping content, including people hot linking images.

Overall I have found the service worth the setup time which actually was amazingly simple.  I’m not quite big enough to find their pro services worth it, however I do see how they might be beneficial if I had considerably more traffic.

The only setup required is to point your root DNS entry to CloudFlare and enter your DNS info that your hosting provider has into CloudFlare.  If you have a full website and you’ve had downtime from service issues, CloudFlare can help mitigate that.

Five Years Ago

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I married my best friend.  He is the love of my life and I am happy and proud to be called his wife.  Even though the last few years have had ups and downs, I wouldn’t change a thing. The various trials and tribulations ha ve made us stronger individually and as a couple.  I love you TMM now and forever. Happy Anniversary!

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July 7, 2007

Quote of the Day – Caleb Giddings (7/6/2012)

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I’m not saying that we should sit back and rest on our laurels or anything, because we need to keep fighting for the 2nd Amendment. But when you look at where we are now in terms of where we were in the late 90s, it’s no wonder we have all this free time to get riled up open carry or Kel-Tecs.

Caleb Giddings – Why so serious?

July 6th, 2012

[Honestly, that’s the way I like it.  I like the fact we’re winning, however there are two things that concern me.  Complacency and ignorance of history.  As Caleb points out, a lot of kids going to buy the latest weapon in CoD probably don’t remember the Assault Weapons Ban, the effect it had, and how easily that switch can be flipped off.  They will never really understand, they can’t.

Places like Massachusetts and California the youth still are dealing with the pain of stupid legislation.  Overall we’re still fighting those battles, but now momentum is helping carry us forward.  That momentum is allowing us to have other conversations, some good, others not so much.  Frankly though, I like being here because it’s a lot better future than what we were predicting in the 90’s.

Frankly, if we were to have a problem, I think this is a good one to have.  -B]

SSCC #363 – Upper Moreland

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I applaud those who went out to hassle the petty tyrants.  Honestly those who take part in those road blocks are some of the most despicable people in the world.  Seriously, anyone who would willfully violate their fellow citizens like that are no better than the TSA.

State Sponsored Criminal #363: Upper Moreland PD

Because the idea that you can catch a drunk driver by harassing the rest of the populace totally self-justifies.  Never mind that you will violate many more than you will actually catch.  Never mind the law exists to protect the innocent from abuse.

Independence Day 2012 Part II

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So Sebastian said the following on Monday.

I think it’s the right of every American to celebrate our nation’s independence by blowing up a small chunk of it.

At which point I started laughing because honestly not everyone can effectively blow up a chunk of America.  The good news is, I am capable and have resources to do exactly that.  Not only do I have resources though, but the method of detonation provides a method of celebration endorsed by John Adams himself.

However, it must be said, please do not attempt to recreate any of this.  I am trained and experienced in mixing and handling explosives.  Just watch Caleb’s PSA.  Where ever he says “Gun”, replace it with “Guns or Explosives”.  

So without further ado, I give you the 4th of July, Boomershoot style.

I’m sure Mr. Adams would have approved.

As a note, it seems Sebastian knows this, but I still think my graphical display helps spread the joy.

*Sorry for the delayed post, Murphy hates me.  YouTube was constantly quitting mid-download.  I finally achieved success using IE.  I left to go to a BBQ and my computer went to sleep.  Thus it finally went up a day late.

Independence Day (2012)

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Every year for the past couple years I have done a decent Independence day post.  It was never really intended to be an ongoing theme.  I will say that I love this day, mainly because I love the fact we sent a formalized letter to Bastard King George saying we can, and have the right to tell him to go screw himself.

As a quick rundown, here’s the posts I’ve done on independence and liberty over the past couple years.

I love this day, more specifically I love the history of it and the significance of it.  When else in history did someone formalize a letter like that telling them, and rightfully so, to go piss up a rope.  There are a lot of people who attempt to trivialize or even discredit both the people who achieved independence as well as the history surrounding it.

There were a lot of things that happened just right, and even more importantly many of the right people with the right attitudes were in a position to make things happen.

So today, celebrate the fact that a bunch of men took a risk upon themselves, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to give you the opportunities you have today.  Many probably wouldn’t be interested in spending the time learning the details surrounding it.  My wife used to be one of those, however I have converted her to enjoying history instead of hating and despising it.  I love learning history much the same as I love learning about anything.  I’m glad I’m not the only one with that view of learning.

I don’t feel like giving a history lesson today.  Instead all I ask is at some point if you haven’t watched it before, watch the John Adams miniseries.  It provides a good window for those who aren’t as apt to pick up a book or just generally enjoy history.

So a thank you to the obnoxious and disliked Mr. Adams.

Look forward to Part II later today.