guapacha.com

Random thoughts of a Brit living in the Imperial Valley of California

Archive for January, 2007

Rant of the Week

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CNN this morning had a story about Muslim cab drivers in MN who refuse to carry passengers who have alcohol on their possession. At first I thought they meant beer-swilling louts but they are in fact referring to things like a bottle of whiskey wrapped in a box inside a duty free bag. The cab drivers say its about freedom of religion, its against their beliefs to carry alcohol.

What a load of crap. No one is forcing these people to drive cabs. If a pacifist went to work for th DoD and refused to write bomb-making software he’d be laughed at – why choose a job which you know may offend you? The cab drivers should stop whining and either avoid their eyes from that poorly packaged Jack Daniels or sod off and do something else. It makes me mad!

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January 26th, 2007 at 7:25 am

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A New Server

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Moved all my sites to a new hosting plan at site5.com, everything appears to be working surprisingly well except for some formatting on this page [now fixed]. I did not move the gallery as I want to find a new solution for how to display the pictures. Watch this space, as they say.

If you find any other problems, please leave me a comment or send me an email.

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January 18th, 2007 at 9:46 pm

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A Proposal for the Courts

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Watching some (alleged) child-kidnapper get arraigned this morning on TV I had the following thought. We all know that everyone is allowed their day in court no matter their innocence or guilt. But I think people should be made to be more upfront when they plead not guilty. We already have ‘not guilty by virtue of insanity’ so how about ‘not guilty by virtue of wasting the court time to see if you guys can make a case, yeah I done did it but can you prove it’. Standing up and saying ‘not guilty’ when you were caught in the act annoys the heck out of me.

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January 18th, 2007 at 9:15 am

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Still Cold

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The freeze continues… mid-20s overnight at the weekend, and still just under or at freezing point since then. We’ve lost a few plants to the cold, including some shrubs that we really liked. Our trees in front of the house look dead as well but I am hopeful they will recover once the temps get back up. Of course this is nothing compared to the huge losses in the citrus and other crops in California. A head of lettuce could soon get expensive.

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January 17th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

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There Must Be Some Toros in the Atmosphere

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Mother Nature was having some fun with us yesterday. In the afternoon we had a series of a 10 or so little tremors, nothing really worth talking about, biggest was a 2.7. Then overnight the temperature got down to at least 25F – isn’t this supposed to be the desert?! Back up to 60F right now, though. Looks like we are going to have sub-zero temps overnight for much of this week.

[25F is -4C for those lucky readers using a metric system]

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January 14th, 2007 at 11:34 am

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Proud To Be An Ugly American!

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No, not me, not yet anyways…. but our good friend Eric Galvan from the local rag. Its Friday so it must be rant ‘o’ the week time and Mr G doesn’t disappoint. If you want to read it, go ahead and take a look after the jump. Of course he’s trying to be provocative but I don’t think he has the intelligence to pull it off without looking like an angry jerk. I’d say but at least it sells news papers except that I don’t know anyone who admits to reading what he writes.

Read the rest of this entry »

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January 13th, 2007 at 8:11 am

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Someone Else Thinks Eric Galvan is an Idiot

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A small discussion has started on this site. Other than one of the posters thinking Mexico is going to win the World Cup in 2010, we’re all on the same page.

I have sent a response to the newspaper and we’ll see if they print it. I kinda don’t care if they don’t as I am sure Galvan will just write more crap in response, he doesn’t strike me as someone who has a clue when they should just shut up and be quiet.

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January 10th, 2007 at 9:15 am

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American Football – A Retort

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I knew that my joke letter about American football would likely get a response but I hadn’t expected it to take the form of a full-blown editorial by the newspaper’s sports staff. The article is funny in its outright stupidity (billions, billions I tell ya, watch American football don’t ya know) and sad in the display of the American stereotype of everyone else being stupid for not being us.

The article is too long to put on this page so you’ll have to read it after the jump.

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January 7th, 2007 at 10:18 am

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Letter to the Editor

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Last week someone wrote a letter to the local paper complaining that it seemed ok to fly Canadian flags in the Valley, but not Mexican ones. Completely unrelated to his point in the letter, the writer had a go at football saying he preferred the kind of football where games didn’t end scoreless or in a riot. I put pen to paper and and my response appeared in Monday’s edition.

Voice: American football puts you to sleep

I write in response to the statement from Wednesday’s PROBE writer that he prefers his football with scoring and no riots.

I put it to the correspondent that the reason no riots occur in American football is that the crowd is fast asleep long before the game is finished.

PAUL SANDERS
Brawley

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January 3rd, 2007 at 3:47 pm

So Much for Web 2.0

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I’m redesigning the flying blog, and one thing I want in the sidebar is a list of the latest posts from the blogs I read. This is 2007 and Web2.0 so it’s easy right? I imported my feedlist into GoogleReader, tagged the flying blogs and made them public, got me a nice little URL.

The K2 theme comes with an RSS module, there are 10’s of WordPress plugins to display RSS (I know, I tried them all) but not one of them will display the feed properly. A little searching around suggests that it is a combination of Google’s XML and lazy coding in the plugins that is the problem. Google has two title tags in the XML per entry and that is confusing everyone. So, unless I move my feed list to a different service (any suggestions as to who?) I just have to wait. Oh, or write my own?

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January 3rd, 2007 at 8:06 am

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