Beregond's Bar

Moving to WordPress

2010-06-17T04:42:00.002-04:00

Time to see if I can use a blogging system that the Big Boys use. I'm moving to a WordPress site. This site will remain for awhile as beregondsbar.blogspot.com, but beregondsbar.com is what I will be updating after I manage to export things from this site.

If you're one of the few subscribers, please check out the new site, which will have feed options installed shortly. If you're one of the family members who have had posts inflicted on them via e-mail, that should continue once I have things set up.

Thanks to everyone who has read me here, and I hope that you'll follow me to the new site (and bookmark it!) at http://www.beregondsbar.com.

Tea Party Protesters Attacked in North Carolina

2010-06-11T00:33:00.003-04:00

A peaceful Tea Party protest in Greensboro, NC (about 70 miles from here) was protesting over potential BP bailouts and the new Durbin Amendment to the finance reform bill that will increase fees for debit card use and pass those fees on to the biggest retailers. That's right, if you use a debit card instead of cash or a credit card it will cost you more, and the store gets it. In other words yet another bailout, this one of the largest stores.

A passing motorist stopped his car, got out and started yelling at the group, repeating the same old tired lies that it's all Bush's fault. (That's not to say that Bush doesn't deserve some of the blame but after 3.5 years of both houses of congress, and 1.5 years controlling the White House maybe it's time the D's started accepting a LITTLE bit of the responsibility.)

The erstwhile motorist then shoved a guy who had been doing a video, then shoved his wife three times. Naturally enough, he defended his wife by pushing the criminal Democrat who had just assaulted his wife away from her. This seemed so outrageous to the Democrat that he sucker puched the camera man. Most of this, including the sucker punch, was caught on video by another protester. When told the police wanted to talk to him, the criminal drove off.

There was a YouTube video up showing all of the details. By the time I went to post about it, the video was gone. It vanished down the memory hole, with a posted claim about a terms of use violation. Fortunately, someone uploaded it to EyeBlast.TV, and I've embedded it below.

You can read more about the incident at BigGovernment.com.

D Day

2010-06-07T02:46:00.004-04:00

Sunday, June 6 2010 was the 66th anniversary of D Day, as the landing at Normandy during WWII has come to be known. ("D Day" was originally a generic term for the day of a landing. While there were only a few in the Atlantic theater, there were literally dozens of D Days in the Pacific.)

President Obama wasn't somewhere making a speech to commemorate the occasion because he was working without stopping on the gulf oil spill, right? Not exactly. He was at his second party within a week.

Doug Powers, who is guest blogging for Michelle Malkin, linked to this oldie but goodie- A video look at how D Day might have been reported if it had happened in 2007.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up...

2010-06-07T02:17:00.002-04:00

Since almost all of our politicians are cowards who are unwilling to make the hard and unpopular choices that we elect them to make, President Obama created a presidential commission on how to reduce the budget deficit.

Here's a shocker. The retired politicians and bureaucrats who make up the commission think they need more money and more staff. That's right, Taxprof Blog reports that 4 full time salaries and $500,000 (so in other words, around a million dollars) isn't enough to produce a report in 130 work days (six and a half months.)

That the first major request from the deficit reduction commission is for more money should tell everyone all they know about how serious an effort this is.

The "Peace Activists" Were Mercenaries

2010-06-04T17:31:00.003-04:00

Confederate Yankee links to this story which demonstrates that the "Peace Activists" on board the Turkish ferry boat Mavi Marmara were organized into squads who communicated via radio to coordinate the attacks. (Almost passed over is the fact that there were only 15 members of the IDF aboard, while there were at least 60 terrorists.)

Based on preliminary results of its investigation into the navy’s takeover of the Mavi Marmara, which ended with nine dead passengers and more than 30 wounded, the IDF said on Thursday that the commandos were attacked by a well-trained group of mercenaries, most of whom were found without IDs but with thousands of dollars in their pockets.

The group was well trained and was split into a number of squads of about 20mercenaries each distributed throughout the upper deck, the IDF said. All of themercenaries wore gas masks and ceramic bulletproof vests and were armed with either bats, slingshots, metal bars, knives or stun grenades.

The IDF’s understanding is that the mercenaries mainly chose dual-purpose items of this sort rather than guns, since opening fire would have made it blatantly clear that they were terrorists and not so-called peace activists.

And just in case that wasn't enough, it appears that the terrorists... Er, "Peace Activists" had firearms of their own. The only firearms the IDF had were 9mm Glock pistols. But shell casings were found that were not 9mm, indicating that there were other guns fired. (Usually a military organization buys their ammo in huge lots from a supplier so that the remaining shell casings. Thus when evaluating a battle scene you can often tell which shell casing came from who, even if they are of the same caliber.) Further, I own three 9mm pistols. One stock Glock 17 (that belonged to my late wife,) one custom Glock 17, and a Beretta 92F. The striker on the custom Glock was replaced as part of the custom work, and the markings on the shell casings are different even with a simple pocket magnifier- And the Beretta's shell casings have different markings.

The Turkish captain of the Mavi Marmara told of seeing guns thrown overboard by the terrorists.

Israel turned everyone loose, even those who had shot and stabbed members of their military. It's a pity we'll never find out where they were trained and who paid them.

Vaccines and Autism

2010-06-04T16:44:00.002-04:00

For years I've laughed at people like Jenny McCarthy and her claims that vaccines were responsible for autism. It looked like bad psuedoscience, particularly since several studies had cleared thimerosal (and the mercury it contains,) which McCarthy thought was the culprit.

Nevertheless it can't be denied that autism went from 1 in 10,000 live births to 1 in 150. Something had to have changed. Now it looks like McCarthy and company were right all along that vaccines were involved, they just blamed the wrong ingredient.

Pro-life blogger Jill Stanek has suggested in the past that residual DNA from aborted fetuses might be to blame. Truth be told, I thought she was riding a hobby horse just as much as Jenny McCarthy. But today we learn of a new study presented at the International Society for Autism Research The abstract of the study is rather dense, but what it amounts to is that it appears that there is a correlation in autism increases at the time that US and UK vaccines stopped using animal sources and began to use human sources.

The study is explained in plainer language at LifeSiteNews.com.:

The use of such cells means that the vaccine might contain residual human DNA fragments. Dr. Deisher told LSN that "short fragments of human DNA residuals in vaccines present two well-documented potential physiological dangers" and "the possibility for auto-immune reactions." While the immune system recognizes the DNA as foreign, its similarity to an individual’s own DNA can cause the immune system to attack parts of the individual's own body.
Another danger springs from the length of the DNA fragments. Residual DNA fragments consisting of less than 250 base pairs (bp) have been shown to have a higher probability of entering the nucleus of human cells. Once inside the nucleus, short DNA fragments can integrate with the genome of the cell. The probability of integration is 1 billion times greater with DNA from the same species than with DNA from another species, according to the abstract.

The study explained that, as the average human DNA fragment length in the rubella vaccine is 220bp, it would be especially likely to enter the nucleus of a cell. Moreover, 25 of the "recombination hotspots" where the DNA fragment could likely combine are located in some of the autism-associated genes (AAG). Thus, such recombination could be one of the causes of autism.

More details and links can be found at Jill Stanek's blog.

Flotilla Choir presents: We Con the World

2010-06-04T06:16:00.008-04:00

UPDATE 06/14/2010

The spoof heard around the world: We Con the World, The Turkish 'Aid to Gaza' Song. Launched on YouTube and then banned by YouTube. Watch We Con The World on PJTV: http://pjtv.com/v/3750

Copyright law permits parodies as an exception. Not only did the creators of this video consult lawyers before they released it, but the new host of the video, PJTV, was founded in part by Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, a regular contributer and a law professor. You can read the shameful story of YouTube's ignoring the law in a blatant double standard here.

full text:

There comes a time
When we need to make a show
For the world, the Web and CNN
There's no people dying,
so the best that we can do
Is create the greatest bluff of all

We must go on pretending day by day
That in Gaza, there's crisis, hunger and plague
Coz the billion bucks in aid won't buy their basic needs
Like some cheese and missiles for the kids

We'll make the world
Abandon reason
We'll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travelers
With guns and our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV

Ooooh, we'll stab them at heart
They are soldiers, no one cares
We are small, and we took some pictures with doves
As Allah showed us, for facts there's no demand
So we will always gain the upper hand

We'll make the world
Abandon reason
We'll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travelers
we're waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV

If Islam and terror brighten up your mood
But you worry that it may not look so good
Well well well well don't you realize
You just gotta call yourself
An activist for peace and human aid

We'll make the world
Abandon reason
We'll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travelers
We're waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV

We con the world
We con the people
We'll make them all believe the IDF is Jack the Ripper
We are peaceful travelers
We're waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV
We con the world (Bruce: we con the world...)
We con the people (Bruce: we con the people...)
We'll make them all believe the IDF is Jack the Ripper
We are peaceful travelers
We're waving our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV
The truth will never find its way to your TV

Blood Libel

2010-06-04T05:15:00.004-04:00

We're watching another blood libel take shape in the media. Like the "massacre" at Jenin, which never happened, a credulous international press is repeating any assertion made by a gang of thugs with terrorist links because they call themselves "Peace Activists." In reality many of them were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sure, there was a Catholic Bishop on board- One who had been convicted of smuggling weapons to the PLO in the 70's and was set free at the request of the Vatican.

The "peace activists" who shot videos of themselves preparing for a martyrdom operation, who had smuggled, knives (some of them darn near short sword size) metal pipes, concussion grenades, fire boms and other weapons on board the Turkish ferry boat have scored a big PR hit. Nobody cares that one of the Flotilla 13 sailors (like US Navy Seals) was beaten and dumped over a rail to land on a steel deck 30 feet below. So what if he has extensive injury and suffered massive brain damage? He's just a Jew anyway.

Not that the nation of Israel acted intelligently. While there is no doubt that a nation in a state of war can set up a naval and air blockade (like JFK did around Cuba and we have done for as much as a decade at a time around various middle eastern entities) showing up to a gunfight with a paint ball gun was NOT a good option. Sure, most of the ships surrendered- But from the time they turned the fire hoses on the boarding party and threw concussion grenades into the boat the gloves should have come off. Yes, a paint ball gun stings but if someone is inclined to resist they can ignore that. So one by one the sailors from Flotilla 13 roped to the deck to be beaten with pipes, stabbed, have their (real) pistols stolen and used to shoot them (along with at least one rifleman who hid below decks.) Stupid.

Clearly the IDF had no option but to defend itself. After failing to subdue the crew members who were beating them with metal rods, stabbing them, and beating them with chairs with just their paint ball guns, eventually permission to fire the pistols was given. For some, as we have seen, it came too late.

Lots of international outrage. Al Jazeera TV, who had a crew on board, claimed that at least 20 were killed. We now know that as usual with Al Jazeera, the number of casualties was inflated. The invaluable MEMRI (Middle Eastern Media Research Institute) that provides English translations of things that even the Al Jazeera English Service is too shy to admit in public, documents some of the "Peace Activists" chanting

"Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return."

(Khaybar was a 7th century battle where most of the Jews at an oasis were killed, and the remainder allowed to remain for a few years, on the condition that the survivors of the massacre pay the Moslems 50% of their produce.)

and a "Peace Activist" who says on camera:

"We are now waiting for one of two good things – either to achieve martyrdom, or to reach Gaza."

But cause for suspicion goes back even before the flotilla sailed. A prominent Egyptian specialist in International Law said this on TV on May 18th:

Dr. Hassan Ahmad Omar: "The siege that Israel is imposing... It is necessary to provide Gaza not only with food, water, and building supplies, but also with weapons. Weapons must be provided, because these are weapons of revolutionaries, and aid must be provided to the Gaza Strip.
"It is necessary [to help] the refugees return to the Gaza Strip, as well as to the Acre region, because according to the partition plan, it belongs to the Arab state of Palestine.
[...]
"The various countries have an obligation to provide these weapons and food to Gaza, and [to enable] the return of the refugees.
"Turkey could revive the commission consisting of Turkey, France, and the US, which was mentioned in Resolution 194 regarding the return of the refugees, thus facilitating the return of the refugees to Acre – at least the half million refugees from Lebanon – in accordance with article 6 of Security Council Resolution 1559.
"These aid campaigns should not be restricted to food and water. The [ships] could also include returning refugees and weapons for the Palestinian revolutionaries.

The MEMRI material, including more of the above interview, can be found at http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4249.htm

Lastly, we're supposed to shed lots of tears because one of the terrorists who died in the flotilla was an American. My buddy Duane Lester did a bit of research. Furkan Dogan was indeed born in the US when his family briefly lived here. When he was 2 years old his family returned to Turkey with him, and there is no evidence he has been here since. When his body was sent home for burial, it was sent to Turkey. What we actually had was a Turk who had dual citizenship because his mother downloaded him in the US.

I've gone a bit long so I shan't get into the demonstrations of support all over the world. I'll just say that it was convenient that mobs with signs in English were ready all over the world to appear on short notice.

The media should be doing their job and investigating, not serving as a transcriptionist as the Muslim world perpetuates another blood libel.

Enemies of Free Speech

2010-05-03T19:04:00.004-04:00

Some folks are only in favor of free speech as long as they agree with the content of that speech. If popular speech was all we worried about there would have been no need for the First Amendment. But government censorship is not all that we need to fear.

Last Wednesday ftrradio.com was subject to a Denial of Service attack. Hundreds of simultaneous connections were made from the same IP address. Each connection would drop after 62 seconds and then reconnect. The effect was to tie up all of the ports on our Internet radio station so that nobody could connect and hear our programming. Ironically the attack came from the network of the Random House publishing empire. Random House has yet to respond to a complaint sent to their abuse and hostmaster e-mail addresses.

Today the forces of tolerance struck again. ftrradio.com had put up a site called RespectTheGreatGame.com. We wanted to know why Major League Baseball, who have had a policy against hate speech since at least the era of Marge Schott, had a virulent hate monger like Keith Olbermann as one of their official bloggers. We put up a video with some of Olby's nastiness, links to other examples, and a petition. We weren't calling for a boycott of MSNBC or Major League Baseball, we just wanted to ask why MLB thinks this purveyor of hate speech was an acceptable spokesman.

14 hours after the site went live and we announced it with a press release and assorted tweets on Twitter, the site was hacked and the data base corrupted. Right now we just have the skeleton of the site restored, and the original Olbermann video montage. But if you want to understand why the site was put up in the first place, please read this eloquent piece from our friends at Liberty Pundits.

The RespectTheGreatGame.com site will be back. Olbermann may be able to get people from his own network pulled off the air for not kissing his, er, feet, but this is still America.

Insulin From Flowers

2010-04-16T05:26:00.003-04:00

Type I diabetics require insulin. Many type II diabetics require insulin. Depending on how and where you shop for things, insulin is either the most expensive or the second most expensive regular expense of diabetes. (The most expensive for many, including me, are the test strips. It should be noted this post ignores the cost of complications from diabetes.)

For a long time insulin came from cows and pigs. Later it was found that the effect of insulin lasted longer if it was mixed with the semen of river trout. (I wish I was making that up.) This made it somewhat rare and expensive, and there were sometimes immune reactions. Then came gene splicing.

Though the package insert delicately says "recombinant DNA origin" it skips over just what is going on. In point of fact human genes are inserted into E. coli bacteria. My brain is fine with that, but occasionally if I think about E. coli too long my stomach feels a bit uneasy. Not logical, but real.

Now comes word of "Prairie Insulin," using genetically engineered safflowers.

But scientists at the University of Calgary are now working to change that. They have figured out a way to genetically manipulate safflower flowers to produce insulin. By inserting a human insulin gene into the plant, the safflowers become little insulin factories. Their seeds are then ground, the oil extracted, and the insulin harvested.

It's passed phase 2 tests, showing it is safe, and now will begin phase III tests to insure that it is effective. If it works the price of insulin could drop dramatically in a few years.

Each acre of safflower flowers could produce more than one kilogram of insulin, which could treat 2,500 diabetic patients for one year. That means just 16,000 acres of safflowers could meet the world's total demand each year.

Now if someone would just come up with genetically engineered test strips.

(Via PopSci.com)

The Poor vs the Tax Burden

2010-04-14T21:01:00.002-04:00

Last night I made and then deleted a post that linked to this image from Doctor Jerry Pournelle's blog. I deleted the post because I was having formatting problems with the image on the main page. It was too wide for the column and about 40% was cut off. However the post didn't go entirely unnoticed because my posts go to a few people who are close to me via e-mail as soon as they are posted.

One person seemed to think that I was attacking the poor. I started on an e-mail reply, but as it grew it seemed like it would make a better blog post. And since the person I started writing it for gets the posts via e-mail that person will still get their very own e-mail message with my reply.

The cartoon (with live figures) is not about poverty, unless you believe that 50% of the people in the United States live in poverty.

Because 50% of the country doesn't pay any net Federal income tax.

The official definition of living in poverty is being in the bottom 20% of income. This definition means that there will always be someone "in poverty" and thus protects the jobs of the government workers who exist to fight poverty.

Divide the $6 trillion (rounded off, but a real figure) spent on fighting poverty since 1965 into the number of people who have been in poverty in that time and they'd all be millionaires- Except they aren't. Someone absorbed it along the way, and used it in part to build the giant Federal empire that is the Department of Health and Human Services.

But that's a side issue. Half of the people are being taxed to buy the votes of the other half. Both major parties do it. They just argue over how far to go. It's an unstable situation that would be more or less tolerable if we were headed in the direction of a balanced budget, and if the Social Security "Trust Fund" hadn't been looted so that it exists entirely of filing cabinets full of Government IOUs. But Social Security WAS looted (again by politicians from BOTH major parties) and we're spending $5 for each $3 we take in. And half the people don't care because THEY aren't being taxed to make up the difference.

It's a cynical game that both sides play. George W. Bush, in his tax cut "for the wealthy" actually adjusted the tax brackets for everyone and removed more people from the list of people who pay net taxes than anyone in the history of the US. Bush and the Republicans in congress were the ones who moved the line from just under 42% to a bit over 49%.

To most politicians the poor mean 2 things:

A voting block that can be bought by promising more goodies, or by saying the other side is trying to take away the existing goodies.
A way to tug on the heart strings of good people who want to help the less fortunate.

George Bernard Shaw, who was hardly a raving conservative, famously said "A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." Our country needs to find a way to stop robbing Peter without being beaten to death with the specter of starving Paul. Nobody wants to do that; it's a straw man created by politicians to keep us from uniting against them.

What Have I Been Up To?

2010-04-13T06:07:00.004-04:00

While trying to get up the gumption to post more on my blog, a friend on Twitter told me about a new Internet radio station for conservatives. This was RFC Radio, Radio for Conservatives. I became first a fan, and then was invited to become part of the technical staff. I worked to fix things that broke on a day to day basis, and then to improve the overall stability of the station.

Unfortunately, the primary founder treated it more like his toy that he sometimes let his friends play with than a business. This not only frustrated us as we tried to grow, but repeatedly caused the volunteer staff to have to drop everything for a day or two in order to deal with the latest crisis created because someone felt like making a change RIGHT NOW.

A month ago ago six of us who did the day to day work that kept the station operating and grew the talent pool and traffic to the web site reached a point where we could no longer go on with the situation as it existed. Three weeks ago we reached a point where we could not reach an agreement with the founder of RFC on how to reorganize in order to move forward.

The upshot was that we left RFC Radio, and began our own station, From The Right Radio.

In under a week the people who understand things like HTML and CSS (notice that this is still on Blogger; I am not one of them) had a web site live. In another week we had a server configured, patched, an ftp server set up for hosts to upload their podcasts to, and all of the software installed and configured to operate an Internet radio station. There was much creating of special scripts to automate the operation of the station, testing, swearing, fixing, testing, swearing, fixing, etc. That was my part of the job. Meanwhile the folks who work directly with the talent and show producers were talking to people we had worked with in the past. Over 90% of the hosts who had worked with us at RFC joined us at FTR Radio.

Meanwhile the founder of RFC had ceased operations and sold the assets of RFC Radio to a podcast producer we had worked with in the past, Take That! Media. The folks at Take That! decided that they didn't want to operate a streaming internet radio station at this time, so they sold the assets of RFC Radio to FTR Radio.

FTR Radio is conservative talk radio. You won't hear talk radio hosts who are famous yet. FTR Radio is a grass roots organization. We don't have a sugar daddy; no astroturf for us. We're running it out of our own pockets and in what is laughingly referred to as our "free time." We're building a reliable platform, a stable of talented but so far little known hosts, and working hard to build a loyal audience. We aren't doing this to become rich, but we ARE capitalists and this is not a non-profit corporation. If we can advance the conservative cause and become prosperous too that's a Good Thing- But first we advance the cause.

You can find From The Right Radio at http://www.ftrradio.com/

FTR Radio Facebook fan page

FTR Radio's Twitter feed

My list of Twitter feeds for people associated with FTR Radio

Twitter Screws the Pooch

2009-05-12T23:44:00.007-04:00

Twitter today with no notice made the optional mandatory.

For one refresh cycle of my Twitter web home page there was a one line notice that a change had been made to settings. It included a link to the Twitter blog for details, but there was no post yet.

The post is up now.

The "Notices" tab under "Settings" no longer lets you configure how you get @replies aimed at people that you don't follow. Twitter unilaterally decided that us seeing @replies to someone we don't follow is a Bad Thing.

Probably half the people I follow I discovered because someone I already followed said something to someone I wasn't following yet. I wondered "What made them say THAT?" and took a peek. I'd be missing a lot of good Twitter friends right now if this had been the only option up till now.

Sure it can be confusing and undesirable to see half of a conversation while on mobile. There used to be a simple cure for that. Even if you forgot to change the setting before going mobile you could change it via the web browser on your mobile. For that matter, it was right there on the settings if you didn't want half conversations on the web or in your desktop client.

The Powers That Be at Twitter apparently believe that there is only one correct way to use Twitter. I disagree, I believe that there are almost as many ways to use Twitter as there are people actively using Twitter. A few celebrities who can't be bothered to get an assistant to change the settings for them shouldn't lead Twitter to rob the rest of us of options that we value.

UPDATE: Some people are working around the issue by putting text in front of the name of the person they are replying to. While this works, it forces everyone following you to see all of your @replies whether they want to or not. Thus, by removing the choice Twitter has potentially made the situation worse.

UPDATE 2: If you visit the original post on the Twitter Blog, you'll see that over 75 blogs in multiple languages have responded to the change..

UPDATE 3: Biz Stone, one of Twitter's founders, has made a new post on the Twitter Blog responding to the objections. It's short enough that I'm going to just include 95% of it below:

We're getting a ton of extremely useful feedback about yesterday's update to Settings. The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever. Nevertheless, it's amazing to wake up and see all the tweets about this change.

We're hearing your feedback and reading through it all. One of the strongest signals is that folks were using this setting to discover and follow new and interesting accounts—this is something we absolutely want to support. Our product, design, user experience, and technical teams have started brainstorming a way to surface a new, scalable way to address this need.

Having been on the wrong end of scaling problems a couple of times in the past I understand that sometimes you have to take a step backwards before you can move forward. I hope Twitter will make this a priority.

Suicidal People in the Online World

2009-04-21T05:08:00.005-04:00

A few weeks ago on Twitter a celebrity reportedly saved the life of another member who was threatening suicide. I mention this because a suicide or attempted suicide that you read about has different effects on different people. Some start thinking of suicide as a possible way out. Some become very sensitive about the subject and begin trying to save anyone who is even slightly depressed. And some see the fuss, and see a way to gain attention for themselves.

Monday night/Tuesday morning (depending on your time zone) there were a couple of people I know of who talked on Twitter about killing themselves. I'm not going to use any names here. If you think you know who I'm talking about you may be wrong. I only see the tweets of a couple of thousand people, there could easily have been more talking about the subject.

In the more than twenty years that I have been online, using a variety of services, I have known exactly one successful suicide. Call him "Xavier." It wasn't his name, or his nickname, or his online handle. "Xavier" had nothing to do with him, it's just a convenient way to refer to him.

Xavier didn't come into a chat room or a discussion forum and post that life sucked and he wanted to end it all. Oh, with 20/20 hindsight we were able to see a trail of breadcrumbs leading up to it. But we were ordinary folks, not psychological professionals. It didn't scream "Suicide warning!" at us. One night Xavier simply posted a chilling poem entitled "My Final Friend" on a message board in a poetry forum describing what he was going to do, then immediately went out and did it.

Xavier had already been dead at least a couple of hours before anyone who knew him read the post. That person thought Xavier was upset about something and wanted to see what was wrong. Nobody in chat had seen him that evening. Was the poem something to worry about? Not seeing him in chat was odd, but it was Saturday night, after all. Yes, the poem was dark and powerful, but he'd written powerful poetry before. We were still dithering when his ex-wife's roomie signed on and told us the police were there, and Xavier was dead.

Over the next few days we talked a lot about Xavier. We went back to the poetry forum message boards and reread all of his poems. Someone collected them and posted them consecutively as a memorial. Reading them all together, and talking about seemingly casual remarks he'd made in chat we reconstructed a trail that we thought should have told us what was happening. How the hell could we have been so blind? By the time we had beaten ourselves into emotional wrecks I'm sure we were seeing signs that weren't really there.

Fast forward maybe a month. I'm off in a far corner of the same online service reading message boards and explaining on those same boards why those who didn't agree with me were idiots. That system's equivalent of an Instant Message arrives. The conversation went something like this:

Is El Cajon, CA anywhere near San Diego, CA?
Maybe half an hour east of here, why?
Get your ass up here to [chat room name]! We've got someone talking about killing herself and you're the only person in that area we know right now!
On my way!

Call her "CryingBaby." Again, not her name, nor her nickname, nor the handle she used on line. Just a way to refer to her here. She was a Navy wife in her mid 20s. She was alone with her baby in a cheap apartment. Her husband was on an extended cruise and had never even seen their baby. She knew very few people in the area, and her life was an endless succession of bills and dirty diapers. She was lonely and depressed, and remarks wondering if it all was worth it had fallen on the virtual ears of a crowd of walking wounded who were determined that history would NOT repeat itself if we could help it.

I entered chat and introduced myself to CryingBaby. Fate was kind in one thing, I was a Navy Brat. I'd grown up seeing and hearing about the things, good and bad, that women with husbands gone for up to a year and a half did. We had an insider's lingo that made her more willing to talk. First an hour or so typing in chat, then she gave me her phone number. (During the time we were in chat anxious friends kept sending me messages that said things like "Don't let this one get away!")

Did I save a life? I don't think so in this case. CryingBaby was stressed, lonely, and depressed when I met her, but having a friend was all she needed. She got more friends, virtual ones, as I introduced her to people online. A couple of them were Navy wives who had been in her shoes, others were just folks to chat with. CryingBaby didn't want to die, she wanted not to be alone. The fact that Xavier had killed himself just a few weeks before had made us oversensitive, and we had gone into a panic without cause.

If you're still reading I'll talk about one more. We'll call him "Billy." Same disclaimers. Billy was 14. His mother was dying. His father was abusive. His sister slept around. Bullies beat him up. Billy told us he wanted to die.

We'd gone from the low of Xavier's suicide to the high of believing we had saved CryingBaby. Hey, we were Hot Stuff, we could help anybody now! Yeah, right. We were chumps just waiting for Billy's mind games.

Bear in mind this was before Google, Wikipedia, or any of the other multitude of online references that we now take for granted. So when Billy told us his mom was suffering from Something Awful we didn't have any quick and easy way of fact checking. This enabled Billy to lead us on for nearly a month. Ultimately his lies got too complex and someone caught on. We didn't want to believe, but we couldn't just write off our friend who thought Billy was a liar. In an effort to show that our friend was mistaken some of us made trips to our local libraries. Billy was indeed a liar.

Billy's mom was fine, she just worked a lot. Dad worked a lot, drank a lot, watched TV a lot. He didn't have a sister. Billy was lonely and wanted attention. He wanted that attention badly enough that he didn't care what he was doing to us. It was a kind of emotional rape that still burns more than twenty years later.

Xavier, CryingBaby, and Billy were all part of the process of forming rules that I try very hard to stick with. These may sound harsh, but they will go a long way towards ensuring your peace of mind in the long run.

If you don't already know the person, either online or offline, don't get directly involved. If someone asks for help and you know how to do research that might lead to their identity, address, or phone, fine- But let someone who knows them, or at least has already made an emotional commitment to the situation deal with it.
If you don't know the person well, you can say supportive things. You can even tell their friends that you're worried. Once you've done that, stick with Rule 1.
You are not a psychological professional. Even if you are one there are barriers in online communication that may cause you to miss an important clue. If at all possible get the person in touch with someone they know offline.

If you still want to go forward do it with your eyes and your heart open. You can't help unless you're ready to give.

Barriers to Communication

2009-03-29T20:27:00.002-04:00

I met my late wife online back in the Dark Ages, using a Commodore 64 and a 300 bps modem. By the time I married her, I had graduated to 1200 bps. (That’s “Bits Per Second. For contrast, a 56k modem moves at up to 56,000 bps and a cable modem might go a million bits per second or faster.) While a lot of things have changed since then, some things remain the same. I’d like to talk about a couple of them.

It’s easy to misunderstand people in the online world. There is no tone of voice, no inflection, no raised eyebrow, no gestures. This means that to a certain extent the people we meet online exist in our minds. We supply any missing elements, and that means that anything that you say online is going to be seen through the filter of what the other person brings to the table. All of the hints about what you really mean that we take for granted out in the Big Blue Room are missing.

On the surface, this lowers the first barriers to talking. But it can often be a barrier to communication. You have to say more, create more context, and be more ready to explain what you really meant. But it also means that the other person has to be willing to listen. Every listener in the online world needs to understand the limitations, and be open to listening as the person they are conversing with expands, clarifies, and even corrects what he was saying. Both sides have to make a genuine effort or there is no communication.

All of this brings me back to where I started. I met my wife online. The details are a story for another day, but we misunderstood each other fairly often. In fact until we established a common framework of shared references and knowledge about each other it often seemed that the more we talked the more we misunderstood each other. The misunderstandings didn’t stop when we met in person, they just changed their nature. We misunderstood each other through 19.5 years of marriage, and still managed to make a go of it because we cared.

One other thing I’ve learned, both from my own marriage and from watching others try online relationships, then try to turn them into 3D relationships is that if you think maybe there’s a romantic feeling there it is VITAL to meet each other in person ASAP. Remember, you’re talking online to someone you’ve built in your mind. In your mind you might not see the faults. He won’t leave the toilet seat up. She won’t try to strangle me by hanging pantyhose in the shower. Eventually you make up an ideal person that no mere flesh and blood person can live up to, and meeting in person is a disappointment. Meeting in person early in the relationship can prevent this.

People drop bits and pieces of who they really are in the online world all the time. It might be a reference to an expiring car lease and what the replacement will be, or it might be a reference to going over to a daughter’s apartment to have dinner or the desire for a Sonic Cherry Limeade slushy.

These little hints add up over time to a more complete mental picture of the real living, breathing person on the other end. But to gather these pieces you have to pay attention. That means you have to give a damn about the person you are listening to. If you don’t make the effort, you miss the best part of being online.

The Internet Ruined Their Marriage

2009-03-29T02:39:00.003-04:00

Ever met someone who swears that the Internet ruined his or her marriage?

Yup, that's right. That Eeeeevil Internet snatched away what had been a perfectly happy spouse, broke up a happy home, and caused no end of grief. Chat with enough people long enough, and you'll find one. If you're lucky you'll only find one. If you're smart you'll learn to recognize the symptoms after that and run like hell. Not being so smart, and being curious about how they thought a computer had ruined a marriage I've spoken with a few over the years.

I've also seen the supposedly happy spouse who left. They came online for a variety of reasons, but once they arrived they found they could play, or they could "talk" with people who actually listened to what they said. They found people who would laugh at their jokes, and snark back at them in the same vein. They found interesting people who knew interesting things and were interested in them. So what was it that they found online? They found people who didn't take them for granted.

Whether they were a news junkie, or a gamer, or someone researching genealogy or any of a thousand other hobbies that might have been the original reason for getting online, they found something they lacked. It might be that they had adjusted to that lack, and so outwardly looked contented with their lot, but they were missing something.

(You get a pass if that husband or wife is one of the people you regularly talk with online because you're both hopeless geeks. I have to give you a pass, I used to send an IM to ask my late wife for a can of soda, and she'd send me an IM to remind me to take out the trash.)

Here's where the blame part comes in. Their husband or wife (though usually it seems to be a husband) didn't have a clue that their spouse was missing something, that there was discontent on one side of the equation. He (or sometimes she) thought everything was fine, and on the surface it might have been. Then that Internet thing came along and screwed up everything.

News Flash: YOUR life may have been perfect. The life of your husband or wife wasn't.

In almost 25 years of online life I have never seen a healthy marriage ruined by the Internet or online services. I have seen it, both online and in person, become the breaking point for a marriage that was already strained. But the problem was not the Internet. It wasn't the online service. It wasn't some heart breaker or home wrecker online. It was the marriage itself.

A relationship, online or off, is something you have to work at. If you're talking more to people online than to your husband or wife, take a look at your relationship. Fix it now. Because if it isn't the Internet, something else will surely come along.

No Substitute for Talent

2009-03-27T01:18:00.003-04:00

You'll have noticed by now that this is a rather basic blog layout, picked from what Blogger supplies. There is a reason for that. When it comes to things like drawing, design, and layout I have absolutely no talent.

Geek stuff I can do, or I can learn. In the case of HTML it's partly relearn and partly learn the things that have changed since I last did a web site more than a decade ago. It was an incredibly ugly internal corporate site for a group I worked in, mostly a convenient place to hold documentation for various networks we supported.

Hardly a day goes by that someone doesn't invite the Twitterverse to look at a new web page they did and comment. Even when it isn't quite right I despair because I know that it's better than anything I could do.

At one time I thought that computers were the answer to my problem. I spent hundreds of dollars on various painting, drawing, and animation programs, first for my Amiga 500 and later for a PC. Each time I thought "THIS will be the tool that will reveal the hidden genius!" Each time I finally had to admit that this was not the tool to reveal my hidden genius.

Eventually I had to admit the truth: I have no hidden artistic genius. I have not even a smidgen of talent in that direction. Artistic power tools on a computer just help me make a mess much faster. There is no substitute for talent.

Manual Dial Modem

2009-03-19T12:17:00.008-04:00

This is a tale from ancient times, when I had to push data uphill both ways in the snow.

When I first got online I was using a Commodore SX-64 with a 300 baud HES II modem. By today's standards that's REALLY slow but it seemed a miracle at the time. An ordinary guy like me could not only have his own computer, but could connect it to others and communicate with people.

Another time I'll talk about how slow 300 baud is compared to the speeds of DSL and cable modems. The HES II was a manual dial modem, so today I want to describe the process of getting connected.

1. Set your telephone and modem side by side. This will be important later when speed is essential.

2. Boot the computer and load your terminal program.

3a. If your terminal program recognizes that manual dial modems exist, set it for manual dial, then select the system you are connecting to from the menu. The number to dial will display on your screen.

3b. If your terminal program removed the manual dial feature because you only have 64k of memory and the space was needed for other features then pick the system you want from the dialing directory. If you're using a program like this have the phone already in your hand as the program will expect you to dial as fast as it does.

4. Dial the access number. Yes, I mean "dial." With a rotary phone.

4a. Get a busy signal. If your terminal program supports manual dial, hang up and dial again. Repeat as needed till you get a modem tone, or till you're foaming at the mouth.

4b. Get a busy signal. If your terminal program doesn't support manual dial, watch the time out message appear on your screen. Hang up, go back to the dialing directory, reselect the system to connect to. Dial the phone number again. Repeat as needed till you get a modem tone, or till you're foaming at the mouth.

4c. Give up on calling that system for now and try another. Go back to step 3.

5. If you don't get a busy signal (or the voice of someone you woke at 3 am because you misdialed) then after the phone rings a few times you hear a modem tone.

6. REALLY fast reach behind the phone and unplug the cord. Plug the phone cord into the back of the modem.

7. Go to the front of the modem and flip the switch to the "Off Hook" position. (This switch tells the modem whether to be connected or not. It's a subject for another time when we discuss the joys of trying to get a friend to dial into your computer.)

8. Press the RETURN key.

If you've done everything fast enough you are now connected to the system you were trying to reach. (You can put down the phone, it's not connected to anything.)

If not:

9. Hang up the phone.

10. Flip the switch on the front of the modem to "On Hook."

11. Unplug the phone line from the modem and plug it back into the phone.

12. Go back to step 3.

The process got a bit easier when I found a "Y" connector for a phone line at my local Radio Shack. This meant I could drop steps 6 and 11.

iPhone 3.0 OS Guide

2009-03-17T18:53:00.003-04:00

Unlike a lot of geeks, I don’t own an iPhone, nor even a Blackberry. I’m still holding on to my Palm Centro and waiting anxiously for the new Palm Pre. But the big news in the smart phone world today is the new release of the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Gizmodo brings us iPhone 3.0 OS Guide: Everything You Need to Know.

Death of the Internet

2009-03-17T05:24:00.001-04:00

Every couple of years we hear about The Impending Death Of The Internet. The latest death of the Internet meme is that we’re running out of IP address space, the numeric addresses that lie behind the “friendly” addresses made of words. We remember words more easily, but computers work better with numbers. We’re running out of those numbers.

One of the more interesting articles about the problem is this one, because it suggests a solution to the problem. Let the people who have excess IP addresses sell them. Renumbering a network takes time and money and can disrupt the operations of an organization, so this makes sense to me.

The first time I heard of The Impending Death Of The Internet was in the early 1990s. The number of routes that the routers that direct traffic in the core of the Internet was growing rapidly and the existing routers soon wouldn’t have enough memory to handle the load. Obviously we survived it, as routers with more memory and more powerful processors came on the market. We also survived various shortcomings of various routing protocols as they were adapted, updated, or abandoned over time. This isn’t even the first time we’ve been on the verge of running out of IP addresses.

We’ll survive this particular threat too, whether it’s by selling IP addresses, using some form of coercion to make organizations give back addresses without compensation, or by getting the really big service providers to convert to IPv6 on their backbones and give up the IPv4 addresses they currently use for the backbone. (The problem is already critical in Asia, who came late to the table when IP address space was handed out. I have worked with companies in India that exist behind four layers of NAT (Network Address Translation.)

This doesn’t mean that there is no problem. There is a problem, and the technical community has to solve it, and convince those who pay the bills for tech to pay for the next solution. But the ordinary user doesn’t need to get in a lather. The sky is not falling.

First Post

2009-03-16T23:18:00.002-04:00

First Post

Welcome to Beregond’s Bar. This is where I plan to ruminate on things about life, mainly online life. I’ve been living in the online world since 1985. At one point in my life I had an offline job in telecommunications, an online job, and various online activities I pursued as a hobby. I didn’t think of it as a job, another job, and a hobby. It was more like an obsession that expressed itself in different ways at different times.

I’ve always been fascinated by what people do online and why, and by the stuff behind the scenes that makes it possible. I’ve been taken to task more than once for thinking about stuff way above my pay grade. I keep doing it though, hence this blog.

I expect to avoid politics on this blog, except as it directly affects the online world. I’m planning on a blog to talk about politics but it doesn’t exist yet. I’ll put up a link once it does.