Third party candidates are never given the chance

I am sick of the blatant exclusion of third party candidates in this country. It really angers me that candidates that get the necessary votes to appear on the ballets cannot manage to partake in the debates.

This is Freaking America! We are supposed to be the land of opportunity, instead we are shutting the doors on these people. Why? Because the Commission on Presidential Debates controls all three debates this year. And to make matters worse, they are run by the democratic and republican party.

Ralph Nader is currently running at 6% nationwide in the most recent CNN poll. This is no small feat considering he is not getting any stories in the news, not allowed to participate in debates and most polls do not even ask if he is one of the candidates. Yet he is going to be on the ballet in 45 states! Other candidates like Ron Paul could stand a chance to if they were just given a chance at this point in the race.

I hope that people feel that Nader spoiled the election for the democrats again. Maybe some of the dumb-asses that feel that if he wasn't there, they would win, should take a good hard look at what is going on. The democrats and republicans are loosing people to these third parties. People are no longer feeling like they shouldn't vote with their heart and mind. People should stand up and vote for whom ever they want without fear that they will "spoil" someone else's candidate.

Skydiving!

I finally went skydiving yesterday. I went Static Line, which means you complete a course and go up by yourself and then a cord that is attached to the plane pulls your shoot for you upon exiting the plane. It was freaking awesome! I have never had such a rush. I only free-fell for about 5 seconds before the shoot came out but that was enough to make me realize how boring most of the things I do on a daily basis are.

I can now say that the exact moment where I realized that I did indeed have a parachute, was one moment I will never forget. It was a huge relief and all my worries disappeared in an instant. Then navigating down to the airport at 3k feet was fun as well. It wasn't just because you are gliding through the air, it was more of a sense of accomplishment when you realize you are doing something that most people talk about and will never do.

Now that I have done it once, I can definitely say I will do it again, hopefully enough so that I can get certified to go by myself at higher altitudes.

For anyone looking at possibly doing this, I would recommend it. It isn't nearly as scary as it seems. The adrenaline is huge. The reward is worth it. Besides, what else are you going to do?

FYI: You don't just jump out of the plane like I thought, you have to climb out on the wing and hold on at 80mph at 3500 feet! How fucking cool does that sound.

When a good site turns to crap

I am sad to say that sometime a good site gets greedy and turns into crap. This often happens with smaller sites where they place way more advertisements and pop-ups than they should to pay the bills. Other sites that don't plan on your repeat business do this a lot as well.

One site that doesn't need to do this, but they insist on doing it is askmen.com. They have oversized ads on every page, they break their articles up into obscene amounts of pages to increase page loads and they have interstitial ads all the time. Interstitial ad are the annoying ones that say "to skip this ad click here". Usually if a site uses these type of ads they limit them to one view per day, but I just saw 4 of them on askmen.com in a matter of a minute!

It is bad enough that to see the top 100 women I have to click 100 times, but when you have a 4 paragraph article and you spread it out over two pages that is where I draw the line. Askmen is the worst site I have ever been on when it comes to this behavior.

To make things worse, they have almost impenitrable content. On a single page in the "Dating & Sex" section there were links to over 90 articles seperated in 15 different areas on the site. What the f#$k. Who designed this crap.

I am glad that not every website is this bad and this greedy.

An Unreasonable man (2.5/4 stars)

It isn't the most exciting or creatively done documentary, but pretty interesting if you are into American politics from the last 40 years. I only knew the Nader from the year 2000 on, and aside from reading about his accomplishments I never knew how mainstream he was. I had no idea that he was one of the most influential people in politics in the 70's and was on the cover of almost all major magazines at one point. It made me wish we had a fresh advocate like him for my generation. We have plenty of advocates, but none that are selfless, relentless and willing to risk everything for what they believe. Instead we have advocates that are relentless and willing to risk nothing of their own including their reputation.

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Shameful self promotion

People use some pretty extreme ways to promote themselves and their businesses and make money. From selling the rights to their babies name, appearing in porn movies, making tee-shirts, and being a d-bag (Dustin Diamond is a tool), tattoos, and even a man getting breast implants.

Yes, money drives everything. Subsequently the man who got breast implants decided to keep them after the bet was over. Kinda odd, but whatever floats your boat.

But one of the things that frustrates me the most is spam. Who really reads emails named: "I have kidnapped your baby child" and wants you to visit a site for the pictures? Or anything having the word Viagra in it? Are people still dumb enough to be opening them to the point where it is worth the effort to make these emails and try to come up with ways of avoiding spam filters? Even if someone opens it, that doesn't mean they will click on a link. I have a hard time thinking that all of these people are there for malicious non-monitary means. So how are they all making money off of this? What dumb people are still out there sharing their credit card numbers with strange sites that tell them they will an Ipod if they give their bank account information?

That is my rant. Here is my shameful plug for my sites :P

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Chrome vs. FireFox 3.0

Alright, I will admit it I am a FireFox fan, but I decided to give Google's new Chrome a shot. I expected something a bit more "new" but what I saw was an application that reminded me a lot of Safari, which is also a good browser.

Immediately I liked the layout of their tabs, it looked a bit cleaner and less blocky. I found that the "out of the box" settings are a big dumb. For instance, when you open a new tab it takes you to a page that shows you recent history instead of opening a page that you designate. If I wanted to view my recent history I would go to my history page or a bookmark, usually I want to see my iGoogle page.

I also like the "incognito mode" that keeps your browsing history private. The thing about this mode is the fact that Google has been under fire for how much information they normally track, so to me if I have to use their browser I am skeptical on how much more info they are tracking outside of this new "porn mode".

The one big flaw I saw was with it's url bar. FireFox 3.0's Awesome Bar is far superior. It does contextual searches for page titles and urls instead of just page titles. When I visited Filmcrave and then went to type in the url again. I typed in "crave" and it highligted crave.com -- I never even visited that site! I didn't like that at all. If I type in crave into Firefox 3.0, I get all sorts of Filmcrave related pages. Much nicer.

The final thing I looked at was memory consumption. Chrome appears to use less, but it is a bit deceiving because it opens up each tab as a new process while in the meantime the main process grows in size each time as well. From a fresh reboot I opened the same 4 websites. FireFox used 77mb total and Chrome used 91mb (all the processes combined). I am sure as you close your websites and it releases all of the memory that Chrome ends up using less on average, but overall it isn't that special.

In the end I was expecting Chrome to be something substantially different, and I found that it was basically a cross between Safari and IE8 due to be out this spring. Until then I am sticking with FireFox, which ironically is being funded by Google until 2011.