Digital Diary: Travel, Photography, Music, Politics, Humor and General Life around me
South Pass, Louisiana (USA). May 17th, 2010.
Greenpeace oil spill specialist Paul Horsman holds a BP sign up in a mass of oil sludge from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead as it reaches the coast of Louisiana in the South Pass area near the mouth of the Mississippi River on May 17, 2010.
Photo by © Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace
I realize it’s been about a month since I posted. Mostly that’s because between March 15th and April 1st I was extensively interviewing for a new job. With much of my time torn between understanding companies and their core products, and enjoying any amount of free time outside the apartment I could knowing that when the right job presented itself, I wouldn’t be tasting that freedom for a long time.
Such is the truth. I started April 5th with a new company and quickly got caught up in 10-12 hour days, training, learning the processes and “coming up to speed” as the managers like to say. I haven’t missed the corporate jargon hunt. “Drinking from the fire-hose”, “core values” and “touchpoints”.
Then on April 17th, av.com was hacked when an unauthorized user installed redirection iframes on my site to another webpage that was hosting malware. I didn’t discover it until the 23rd but didn’t get the clean up done until tonight. As far as I can tell the redirect wasn’t installed properly and all is clear; although I’m still going through a complete reinstall on my test server. What a pain this all is but since I have only a handful of page hits in the last few weeks I don’t expect too much exposure.
If you did click through to my site since the 17th, make sure you run full scans of your virus software. Always important to keep up-to-date on your desktop filters and make regular scans even when you think it’s working. I found cached trojans on a mail server drive that hadn’t been used in some time.
I have a few queued up posts I’ll fill back in and then hope to get back to a regular schedule including adding many of the photos I’ve taken over the last month.
Good to be back to work and back online. Cheers
Bad Religion – Infected
[audio:https://austinvegas.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/BR_Infected.mp3]
And so it begins…. GOP.com is now redirecting to this:
Are there any constructive ideas coming from today’s GOP party? Any? Are there any alternative proposals? Is there anything that the GOP is offering to do for the people other than spit on the opposition, spread hate, vandalize Democratic representative offices and spout general bull shit lies?
Let’s all step back and look at this from 10, 20 or even 50 years out…
Whether you are D, R, I, G, or whatever political party, Obama has sealed his legacy as a President of importance to the nation of Americans. He’s brought back the economy from the brink of collapse, started to wind down 2 wars, returned international respect by the rest of the world powers and has now passed historic legislation to improve the health and financial well being of millions of Americans. Historians will not care how the legislation was passed but that the Democrats and Obama were able to do it for the people in the year 2010. Whether it stays intact, remains to be scene but this is a historic positive to be attributed to a president.
However, the questions still remain. Does anyone really know what was passed or needs to be reconciled? No, of course not – who has time to actually read sources; certainly not politicians, bloggers, Fox or protesters. I found a very good breakdown from the NY Times on each step that’s being proposed. I’ve read through most of this and even I can say I’m not satisfied with all the proposals (mandates, taxes, and how will the insurance firms respond to the increases they’ll have to pay are some of them) but I’m happy to see something come to resolution. Ted Kennedy is proud.
Maybe the people we hired to run our government (all the GOP and those Dems that voted NO) can CONTINUE to turn inward and throw up a big enough mirror to the GOP to show that their efforts are not contributing to a better society. The GOP is in fact creating this:
Is this the type of leadership they would like us all to believe they stand for? I surely hope not.