I found two conflicting white board quips in my quip database. (Seriously, I am that much of a geek. I really have a database set up for my white board quips.) Since I couldn’t really decide which one I liked better, I decided to use them both. I’ll let the commenters decide which is more correct.

Quip A:

Celibacy is not hereditary.

Quip B:

Childbirth is hereditary. If your parents don’t have any kids, neither will you.

…and she thinks she’s my wife!!

What do you know! She is my wife!!

A few recent events that have gone thus far unblogged made me realize I don’t talk enough about Tammy. She is, after all, the most important human in my life and, probably, the most influential. So let me tell you a little bit about my wife.

Tammy grew up in Amarillo, Texas (as did I). Her formative years were not kind. She was never considered attractive by her peers and having a lazy eye didn’t help. She was tormented and rejected all the way through elementary and high school. In college, even after having her eye fixed, the effects of her poor treatment kept her from making many friends, although she did make a few. I was not one of them.

Unbeknownst to me, I had befriended a guy from her high school and church who she associated with her torment. So, she also associated me with her torment and every time she saw me at the Amarillo College Baptist Student Union, she’d hit me in the stomach… hard. Still, through a long and unbelievable series of events, she decided I was an OK guy. Later, when I moved to Colorado to finish school, she followed me. We were married soon after.

While we where dating, we both fell in love with rock climbing. The move to Colorado fed this and by the time we got married we were both climbing indoors at least once a week and performing well in amateur climbing competitions. Four months after our wedding, we were climbing in the Garden of the Gods, when Tammy took a fluke fall and hit her head. She was in a coma for about a week and (as is usual with head injuries) she came out of the coma with a major attitude change. She went from being the Tammy the meek doormat, to Tammy the don’t-tell-me-what-I-can’t-do tiger. The good part of this attitude change was that she was driven prove the doctors wrong. The bad part was that we fought… a lot.

Through the years, she’s gotten much better at controlling her emotions but she’s kept the drive. Tammy is a tough girl by any standard. She grew up yelling at the TV when the Cowboys were playing. Now she yells at the TV when Jeff Gordon is losing. She’s no red-neck (She’s still into figure skating and gymnastics), but it sure is cool to have a wife who knows sports as well or better than I do. It’s cool to have a wife that loves camping, four-wheeling, and is working on her confidence and skill at mountain biking. We still climb, though not as much, and it’s cool to have a wife who is a lot stronger than she looks.

That brings me to one of the stories I should have blogged but didn’t. (Now being rectified.)

Our pastor was teaching on the cord of three strands. To illustrate this, he had some small branches, maybe a half inch in diameter. It was supposed to go like this:

“Here is a single branch, see how easily it breaks.” *snap* “But when we but three branches together, they’re very hard to break.” He hands three branches to someone in the front row. They try and try but can’t break the three branches together. “The three branches support each other and are much stronger when they work together.”

Unfortunately, he picked Tammy as the audience volunteer. So it went more like this:

“They’re very hard to break.” He hands the three branches to Tammy. *Snap Crackle Pop* Tammy hands back three broken branches. Everyone laughs. He toss them over his shoulder and says, “So much for that illustration.”

True story.

Oh, by the way, in case you hadn’t figured it out, Tammy is no longer the unattractive outcast. She’s a total hottie!

Can you believe the elections are still 17 months away?! The way things are going in Washington, you’d think they were next week.

Last I heard the Alien Amnesty bill is dead… for now. The senate rules require 60 votes to bring a bill up for consideration in the full senate and it only got 45. This thing has been so mutilated in committees that some even those who where all gung-ho about it voted to kill it.

The bigger story here is the impact that this bill has had on the GOP. Some have said that John McCain has destroyed his chances for President by getting in bed with Ted Kennedy on this bill. Others say that the divisions among republicans brought to light by the immigration debate have split the party so badly that the democrats have a slam dunk for president in ’08.

The Dems were very successful in 2006, some say, because of their “We hate Bush” platform. Don’t be surprised if Republican White House contenders take up a similar rallying cry to try and salvage their bids for the office.

Speaking of the ’06 Democrats, Pelosi’s posse has discovered that running on a campaign against Bush and Republican corruption was the easy part. Now the proverbial other shoe has dropped and America has noticed that all that promised reform and house cleaning has not been done. Lo and behold, the Democrats are as (or more) corrupt than the Republicans they were supposed to be cleaning out. Pelosi’s congress now has an even lower approval rating that the previous congress. In fact, Pelosi’s congress has a lower approval rating that Bush!! The latest numbers proport that as few as 29% of Americans are happy with this congress. “We hate Bush, but we hate Pelosi more!”

Despite this, the Dems in congress are forging ahead with that left-wing agenda. This week they are pushing through a bill to spend tax dollars on embryonic stem cell development regardless of the fact that private industry is strongly supporting stem cell research and is finding more and more that embryonic stem cells are not helpful. Adult stem cells (donated from the patients themselves rather than harvested by destroying a human life) have proven far more effective. Just last week a study was released in which a team at MIT said they were able to produce useful stem cells with the attractive qualities of embryonic cells by using adult cells.

The push for embryonic stem cell research in the congress is not inspired by science. It is nothing more than an attempt to codify the idea that humans are expendable until their mother hears them cry. The abortion industry needs bills like this to strengthen their position because with conservatives on the Supreme Court, it may soon get much harder to make money killing babies.

This week’s white board quip is influenced by the fact that I attended a middle school youth pool party this weekend. I didn’t bring a swim suit and had not planned to partake eye-burning goodness, but who was I kidding. Thankfully, we have good kids and they took off my shoes before they threw me in.

Swim in the lovely pool while you drink it all in.
– Hotel Ad

In June of 2004, I spent a week in a Microsoft training class being bored to tears. During breaks, and sometimes during the actual sessions, I read through every page of Cockeyed.com, the closest thing to a blog that I’d read to that point. I’d heard of blogs and the whole notion sounded pretty stupid. Who wants to read every joe-schmoe’s on-line diary. But after spending several days taking in the wit and creativity of Rob Cockerham, I thought it might be a cool creative outlet.

On June 9th, 2004, I created an account on BlogSpot. My first post was titled “Surely you’re not serious” because for so long I had bemoaned the blog concept. The name stuck and so did the blog.

Happy birthday, SYNS! Three years and counting.

For my readers with lower than average GQ, allow me to explain the significance of this movie. George Lucas (the guy that created Star Wars) did a short film in college called THX1138. Later, after he achieved some professional fame (but before he started filming Star Wars), he stretched it into a full length movie. The real significance to a geek like me is that THX1138 influenced much of Lucas’ later work. He hid* “1138” throughout the Star Wars movies. Also, “THX” is the name Lucas gave to the surround sound system his team developed. These days it’s pretty ubiquitous with theater surround sound.

I was pretty excited to find THX on Netflix. Here was a chance to see into the past; to see into the mind that created Star Wars; to see where Star Wars was born. I watched the DVD extras first (cuz I’m geek like that) and most of it talked about the experimental nature of the sound effects. Some of the sound effects were recognizable from Star Wars (the squawky nature of the ship-to-ship radio). Others were created with techniques that were similar, but less mature than when Star Wars was filmed (The light saber sound grew out of the sound effect for “shock sticks”, futuristic tasers).

Now, enough about the geekness. How was the movie? Well, to put it gently, it sucked. It sucked hard. It feels exactly like a film school short stretched to feature length. There’s about 15 minutes worth of story and about 60 minutes worth of brooding, 1984, Brave New World, thought police, big brother, ooh-scary-too-perfect-future. Blah blah blah. There was absolutely nothing creative about it. The acting was sub-par considering the talent (Robert Duvall, for crying out loud!). The effects and cinematography had that funky, 70’s, experimental feel, but it wasn’t enough to carry the horrid script.

The longer Lucas has dragged out the Star Wars franchise, the more I’ve come to realize that he’s really not that creative. Star Wars will always be a classic, but it’s turning Lucas into a one-hit-wonder in my mind. Yeah, you had a great idea, but come on, man. It’s been over 30 years since that idea struck. How about trying something new? I know, I know. Indiana Jones, American Graffiti, whatever. Lucas has been riding the Skywalker wave too long and it’s ruined my opinion of him.

As for THX, unless you are a hard-core, Star Wars geek, don’t bother. One grin for you, Mr. Lucas.

* “Hid” may not be the best term here. 1138 is plastered all over the Star Wars movies.

I know that most of my readers are pretty tech-savvy and this will be old news to them, but phishing has become such a big problem that I felt this was still a worth-while public service.

It’s common knowledge that identity theft is a major problem in this digital age. We’re all taking extra care about our personal information even if our main motivation is to avoid spam, junk mail, and unsolicited phone calls. But ID theft is very real and being aware of what the bad guys are up to can eliminate 90% of the risk.

Wikipedia has a pretty good description of phishing. I even did some artwork for a phishing t-shirt for my buddy Dave. Phishing is broadly defined as deceptively gathering personal information. Almost all of the phishing attempts you will see will come to you via unsolicited emails.

I advise every internet user to set up a “spam” email account. Mine is on hotmail. Hotmail allows you to set up your account so that all messages that arrive are put into a “junk mail” folder unless I have expressly added the sender to a safe list. (So if you send an email to darkmanwork@hotmail.com, there’s a good chance I won’t see it for a few days because it’s sitting in a junk folder.) Any time a web site asks for your email address (more common now than ever), use this spam address. That way if the web site turns out to be crooked and sells your address to spammers, you won’t be affected.

Even if you’ve never gotten a single piece of spam email, you should always be suspect of emails you are not expecting. This one hit my hotmail account over the weekend.

Now, this looks like most every e-card notice I’ve ever received with one exception. Where’s my name? If I recall, when I get a notice from Hallmark.com, they put my name in the salutation. Hmm.

If you don’t have the status bar visible on your browser, make it so! (Usually, it’s in the “View” menu.) The status bar is the gray bar across the bottom of the browser window. When you mouse over a link, the URL of that link should appear in the status bar.

I moused over all the links in the Hallmark email and all of them went to Hallmark.com with one exception. The link to view the card (“To see it, click here.”). The “here” link looked like this in my status bar.

That is not a link to Hallmark.com! That is a link to some mysterious IP address that is certainly some villainous spammer or worse. This particular villain was not even smart enough to cover up the fact that he’s linking you to an executable file, which would most likely install spy-ware or some other kind of virus.

PayPal and eBay are the most common targets for this kind of identity theft. You get an email asking you to log in to you account for some reason or other and they provide a link to do so. The web site that the phishing email links to looks exactly like the real PayPal web site. It might even have some dummied up pages so you can click around and it looks like you’re really on PayPal’s site. But you’re not. Look at the URL. If it’s not paypal.com, you’re being phished. As soon as you “log in”, you will notice something wrong. You won’t be taken to your account. By then it’s too late. They have your PayPal login info. They can log in as you and access your bank info and start making fraudulent purchases using your PayPal account. (This is how my mom got phished. Later she received dozens of Dell credit cards in the mail. Fortunately the guys who phished her were pretty stupid and didn’t change the mailing address before they applied for the cards.)

If you find yourself in this situation, don’t panic. Go immediately to the real site; be it PayPal, your bank, or whatever; and change your password. Then check your account for any activity. It would not be a bad idea to notify the organization that you got a phishing email and that your account may have been compromised. It’s better to go through the hassle of getting a new credit card number than to go through the hassle of dealing with fraudulent charges to said card.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle! (YO! JOE!)

I referenced the Republican National Committee’s phone center shake up in a previous post. It just so happens that blog-buddy Ghosty works in that field and his company absorbed some of the staff that the RNC let go. He has some inside scoop on that story on his blog, Agent’s Don’t Do Housework.

Thanks, Ghosty!

One more story kids, and then it’s off to bed! I mean it!

Okay, so most of the time I get a little sadistic tickle when I read a negative story about Wal-Mart. (Like this one. Tee hee! That tickles.) But this story is just too dumb to qualify.

An Iowa woman is suing Wal-Mart for negligence because she slipped in a puddle of puke and hurt her back. The suit does not explain how the blue giant was negligent and no word yet on whether she’ll also sue the in-store McDonald’s for selling the dangerous happy meal in which she stepped*. Some people really make me want to throw up.

Hey lady! Here’s a tip. If there’s puke on the floor, don’t step in it. Mmkay?

* There is no evidence linking any McDonald’s Happy Meal™ with this story. It was just an attempt at humor by recalling several law suits filed against bars from which drunk drivers received their bedrunkedness. Also it was a little jab at my other least favorite American staple.

Read the whole story.

You heard it here first, people! (Unless you saw the link on Drudge… or read it in any number of AP printings. But let’s not split hairs.) Breaking news from Iraq (and I’m really not making this up).

Early reports state that U.S. military commanders in Iraq have authorized cease fire talks with several militant groups. Now, hold your jeers and spoiled vegetables. I’m not saying the war is over, but it’s worth some attention. I’m curious to see how this plays out, not only in the media, but also on the ground.

We all know how well cease-fires work with Islamic terrorists. Just ask Israel, Chechnya, Lebanon, etc. But if nothing else, this makes me wonder if the U.S. leadership in Iraq is opening up to other methods. Were a cease fire to be signed, I would not expect ticker-tape parades and our boys coming home. On the contrary, I’d be looking for the proverbial other shoe to drop. Still, I think this could possibly signal some good news from the war front. Maybe our guys are starting to think of something other than, “Let’s put our boys in humvee‘s with big bull’s eyes on the sides and we’ll kill the first guys to shoot at them.”