This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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Well, as devastated as I am by the loss of about 2000 emails I hadn’t yet responded to (and a few I hadn’t even read), I have this fact to brighten my day:
While my main inbox was essentially wiped, I *have* been able to salvage and restore approximately 20,000 saved spam emails that had been automatically routed to a different folder that did not have time to syncronize before I shut my mail program down to stop the syncing.
TWENTY THOUSAND EMAILS (well, OK, spam) SAVED!!!
Woo!
More seriously, I can look at this and say that this is probably one of the worst things that have happened to me in at least five years, if not more. And then I can look at this and say *THIS* is one of the worst things that have happened to me in about five years. Wow. I am very lucky and very fortunate. In the grand scheme of things, as much as this kind of thing upsets me, this little incident is almost irrelevant.
Emails that I save compulsively were lost, but hey, most people just delete theirs anyway. We went through hurricanes but still have a place to live and didn’t lose much. I got laid off but within months (and before the money ran out) had a new and better job. I had to move almost 1000 miles, further away from family and friends than ever before, but I found Brandy and Amy and they wanted to go with me, and I am not alone.
No, I have it pretty damn good.
And last night, when I was having my obsessive compulsive fit and was freaking out and breaking down and showing my depression, Brandy pulled out what was supposed to be a Christmas present, and to cheer me up gave it to me early. A white labcoat with “Abulsme Noibatno Itramne” embroidered onto it in the area where the name goes. A prefect mad-scientist labcoat! Through everything else that was going on, it made me smile.
Can it get any better than that?
Hello everybody! If you’ve sent me email recently and haven’t gotten a response… I’m sorry, see below!
Due to a server meltdown, I lost all email sent to me from about September 15th to the present… and because I was way behind on email due to having a slow internet connection at the moment, plus having had several hurricanes to worry about, plus being busy with the family and new job, I was way behind on answering or sometimes even reading those emails… anyway, about 2000 emails were wiped out without a trace… (I had a local copy of all of them on my own computer, but as soon as it tried to syncronize with the melted down server, all the emails were lost, something I had not anticipated, and so hadn’t made provisions for.)
So if you sent me any emails in that time and have not yet gotten a response, my apologies. It is my fault for taking so long to respond to begin with, but now I don’t even have the email to respond to, and don’t know for sure who all emailed me at the time…
Anyway, point is, if you sent me any emails during that time period and still have a copy of them in your sent mail folders or anything like that, please forward them back to me and I will respond as quickly as I can, and I apologize greatly for not having responded earlier….
(I’d also like to reconstitute as much as my mail archive as possible, so if you have copies of other emails from other people that I was cc’d on please send me those too, so I can answer them as well! Or emails you sent and don’t actually want answers to as well. And while I would love NEW emails too, if you do have a copy of whatever you sent before, that would be MUCH APPRECIATED.)
Thanks everybody. I’ll be very grateful for any emails you are able to forward back to me! (For those familiar with my monthly email contests, emails forwarded back to me from the time period mentioned WILL be counted toward that…)
And for that matter, just to talk to some of you again! It has been awhile for some of you!
(Oh yeah, the abulsme@abulsme.com address will be back soon, but for the moment, please use this abulsme@mac.com address. Thanks.)
Talk to you all soon!
The tests on our phone line are done. We passed. Which hopefully means we will have DSL “soon” and will be able to stop using this frustratingly slow dialup.
In any case, abulsme.com is back up. Normal posting will resume shortly.
Some tests need to be run on the phone line that abulsme.com is currently using for its slow 56K connection to the internet. This is in preparation for activating DSL on the line. For this, the line must not be busy. So sometime in the next hour, I’ll be shutting down abulsme.com again. Don’t know exactly when they will do the tests. But I’ll basically stay dark until they are done, unless I get an email saying they won’t do the tests until some date X in the future, in which case I may turn it back on again until a little before then. But for now, I’ll be shutting down again. Hope to be back soon… although still on dialup.
But then hopefully, within a week or two… if all goes well… the site will be back on something better than a modem powered by hamsters.
Today’s update at electoral-vote.com has a bunch of polls that have now been taken SINCE the first Bush/Kerry debate last week. The lead has shifted. Bush had been in the lead basically since the Republican convention. Not any more.
Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004
There are 48 new polls today in a total of 25 states. The bottom line is that Kerry is continuing to surge. He now has more than the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to be elected president. However, his margin is razor thin in many states. Still, this is a remarkable comeback. From the electoral college graph you can see how steep his rise has been. All of this gain is undoubtedly due to the first debate. Needless to say, tonight’s debate will be extremely important for both candidates.
Most of the other EV tracking sites update less often, but the debate effect should start showing up on them fully with their next updates soon too. (Most had the totals already starting to shift as the first few polls in critical states started coming in, but now enough time has elapsed that there are lots more state by state post-debate polls available.)
This whole thing is still VERY close. How they do on the next two debates will be critical. Along with news events between now and the election. Every little thing makes a difference with margins this small.
I was going to post my thoughts on the Presidential debate from last week and the VP debate from earlier this week, but at this point I think I’ll wait until I’ve watched tonight’s too.
So, unless we get hit by another one, here is the roundup of hurricane damage to the house we are renting. Brandy put this list together yesterday:
Charlie:
- Power out for 15 hours, no other damage
Francis:
- Big palm tree out front fell into the driveway.
- Bush by Colony Dr. property line knocked over.
Jeanne:
- Tree is far left corner of yard snapped in many places.
- Tree by back door of Florida Room suspected to be an issue in the future, removed.
- Many shingles missing from roof.
- Some tar paper missing on edges.
- Roofing materials on edges lifting from roof in wind.
- Aluminum roof edging damaged and missing in many areas.
- Much siding on underside of roof over porch missing.
- Front gutter completely gone, other areas damaged.
- Leak in Florida room warping panels on ceiling (about 3×3 ft area on back edge)
- Leak in hallway area through second and third bedroom door jams, back room air vent, around edges of attic access and through fixture for fire alarm.
- Leak through front storm door.
- Possible carpet damage due to leaks
- Power out for 6 days
As for the leaks: It has been suggested that they may have been caused by almost horizontally falling rain through the vent in the roof, though there has not been another significant rain with which to test this theory. The leak through the storm door was certainly caused by the angle of the rain.
The carpets are a concern due to the possibility of mold. They smelled badly, and took a long time to dry because there was no power to run a dehumidifier. The rooms affected were the center hall, living room, and second and third bedrooms. The one bedroom room just has carpet laid over glued tile. It was damaged before when the AC system drain was clogged right before Frances. A secondary concern would be the integrity of the glue on the tiles (they
tend to lift when having been wet).
We’re working with the owners (Ivan’s family) to determine how all that will be dealt with.
Meanwhile, the house we are trying to buy was damaged more extensively. It needs a whole new roof, a new pool enclosure, and some interior ceilings need replacing as well. We don’t know all the details since it is still not ours. The current plan is for the owners to fix it, then we will proceed. The question becomes can they do it in time before our interest rate lock expires and such. Last update we had is they still expect to be able to complete repairs by mid-November, which would let us close in December as planned. (Well, originally we were thinking October, but according to the revised plan.)
Anyway, we’ll just have to see how that plays out.
As many people have told me “Welcome to Florida!”
OK, it has been awhile, so time one again for the SelectSmart Presidential Candidate Selector. This time around my results were:
63% Match: Badnarik, Michael – Libertarian
46% Match: Kerry, Senator John, MA – Democrat
46% Match: Cobb, David – Green Party
46% Match: Nader, Ralph – Independent
43% Match: Bush, President George W. – Republican
36% Match: Brown, Walt – Socialist Party
26% Match: Peroutka, Michael – Constitution Party
Now, this puts me in a pickle. Normally I’d be happy to go ahead and vote for the Libertarian. They usually match my views best (although less so than in previous years, my views are evolving on some issues). And Badnarik is the only candidate with more than a 50% match on the quiz. (Which also jives with my gut feelings issues wise listening to and reading about the positions… I would never base anything on this quiz alone, as fun as it is.)
But… unlike the Libertarian candidates in the last three elections, who while clearly with no chance to win and with a few views that were “out there” even beyond my own, basically shared my philosophy and seemed like decent people. Idealistic, unrealistic perhaps, but basically sane even if a bit eccentric. Not so this year. Badnarik is a complete nutcase.
Dark Horse on the Third Ballot
(R. W. Bradford, Liberty)
Badnarik believes that the federal income tax has no legal authority and that people are justified in refusing to file a tax return until such time as the IRS provides them with an explanation of its authority to collect the tax. He hadn’t filed income tax returns for several years. He moved from California to Texas because of Texas’ more liberal gun laws, but he refused to obtain a Texas driver’s license because the state requires drivers to provide their fingerprints and Social Security numbers. He has been ticketed several times for driving without a license; sometimes he has gotten off for various technical legal reasons, but on three occasions he has been convicted and paid a fine. He also refused to use postal ZIP codes, seeing them as “federal territories.”
He has written a book on the Constitution for students in his one-day, $50 seminar on the Constitution, but it is available elsewhere, including on Amazon.com. It features an introduction by Congressman Ron Paul and Badnarik’s theory about taxes. His campaign website included a potpourri of right-wing constitutional positions, as well as some very unorthodox views on various issues. He proposed that convicted felons serve the first month of their sentence in bed so that their muscles would atrophy and they’d be less trouble for prison guards and to blow up the U.N. building on the eighth day of his administration, after giving the building’s occupants a chance to evacuate. In one especially picturesque proposal, he wrote:
“I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped.”
One assumes, although one cannot prove, that none of this is an exercise in irony. At any rate, these opinions were removed from the website shortly after he won the nomination, and they didn’t come up when he visited state party conventions. Nor did his refusal to file tax returns, thereby risking federal indictment and felony arrest. While many of his closest supporters were aware of these issues, they were unknown to most LP members.
At the time of the Libertarian convention back when my blog was dark, there were a number of articles in main stream media echoing and confirming some of the goofyness and the basic information, but this article is the most detailed I have found regarding both this guys unorthodox opinions as well as the crazy politics that led to him getting the nomination over two other candidates that while not ideal either, were at least not this bad. There is no way I can possibly cast a vote for Badnarik.
Which puts me in a dilemma. None of the others appeal to me in the slightest either. At this point I have a pretty strong aversion to W. I think he has made just about every wrong choice possible since he has been in office, and ESPECIALLY in the last two years or so when he was able to use 9/11 as an excuse for just about everything.
I don’t have that same viceral feeling about Kerry, but on the other hand I know from some of the things he says that I will be pulling my hair out about many things he would advocate and the directions he would take on many issues if he won. But, the question becomes, are the things I would be upset with Kerry about less important than the things I would be upset with W about?? Quite possibly. I will have to think about that.
Meanwhile, of the other 46% candidates (although it galls me to even consider anybody under 50%) Nadar is out. Every time I see him interviewed the more my opinion of him drops. I find very little I can agree with him on, and from a character and personality point of view I just can’t see him as president.
Which leaves David Cobb. I know almost nothing about him. I will definately spend a bit more time researching him before the election. (Assuming he is on the Florida ballot, I’ll have to confirm that.) Just glancing at his issues summary on the SelectSmart site though I immediately see several things I could not support. Urgh.
I don’t really want to do a write in, and I will definately vote. Will I actually be forced to vote for Kerry? Yuck. Maybe it will have to be a write in. Dunno. :-(
It would be really nice if at least once, there was a candidate with a chance of winning that came even close to my views on at least, say 60% of the things I care about? But no, doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon…
Oh well.
As a quick explaination of the last three posts… I was actually just testing some formatting stuff to help Rebecca out on something which may hit her motel sometime in the future. Those wacky poets and their formatting!
The poems were just random words to fill the space in order to test the formatting, not deepfelt expressions of my innermost heart and hours of effort put into the poetic artistry…. yeah… thats it… that’s the ticket!
Starting out small, constrained, in the start of things.
Extending slowly into the sun, frightened by the light, but moving ever forward to the burning.
Exploding out of control into the vastness of nothingness of largeness uncontrolled without limits.
Until it squishes us and constrains us and pushes us slowly, cramping us into less and less.
Until at last pounded into a dot.
The red robin was in the house abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
it tried to eat the yellow mouse. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
But in its excited haste abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
it only ate the yellow paste. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
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