Apollo Group Profiting from Bankruptcy

In an article in Yahoo! Finance I noticed that the Apollo Group is behind 3 of the significant bankruptcies mentioned.

Are they bad at business or do they know what they're doing? I don't know enough about business to say how one might go about sinking a business and profiting from it, but I'm sure it can be done.

tracing Israel controls stupid Americans article

My normally pleasant morning cruise through the intertubes was disrupted by a disturbing feature on Truthed. I don't know much about the site. I'd never been there before. I'd only happened upon it because a Twitter friend posted a link from Truthed to a video of a woman who was beaten by a police officer. I clicked to the home page and was immediately irked by the first image of their feature marquee (or whatever it's called). It showed an Israeli flag and said, "Israeli Spokesman Says We Control Stupid Americans".

The image linked to a forum post by one of the forum moderators. The post was a quote of an article from a site called Pakistan Daily. As it appeared this morning, Thursday, February 5, at around 6:30 AM Central time, the article's byline says "WRITTEN BY WWW.DAILY.PK". It's dated Sunday, 01 February 2009. In the article, it says:

You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize Israel.

There's no context for the quote. Was it from a press conference? An interview? The source is someone named Tzipora Menache, allegedly an "Israeli spokeswoman". We'll see what we can find out about her later.

My first thought, after being disgusted, was wondering what the Twitterverse had to say about the article. I did a Twitter search and found that the article was older than claimed on Pakistan Daily. The Twitter search led me to a post on Uruknet.info, which is subtitled "information from occupied iraq". That article was very similar to the one on Pakistan Daily. In fact, the only difference is that some of the paragraphs were shuffled. The article on Uruknet.info clearly links to the original at thepeoplesvoice.org. The original article is titled "How to Kill a Palestinian" and is written by Dr. Elias Akleh.

My point here isn't about whether Israel's Gaza attacks are right and wrong. My main beef is with Truthed.com. Their post is followed by a post from the Truthed administrator which attempts to disclaims the anti-Israel, the Jews control stupid Americans article by stating:

Pakistan Daily, so take it with a grain of salt. Everyone has an agenda.

Apparently Truthed.com has an agenda, too. A forum moderator posted a dubious anti-Israel article and the SITE ADMIN said to ignore it...BUT THEY FEATURED IT ON THEIR FRONT PAGE.

WTF?

A site apparently dedicated to truth FEATURED an article which apparently has little to do with truth and everything to do with inciting people with vaporous claims meant to slant Americans and the world in general against Israel and the Jews.

Hardware Blizzard

Last night I dreamed that I was snowed in by computer parts. Peripherals, motherboards, connectors, and cables. Chipsets, jumpers, expansion cards, and power supplies. RJ-45, slave, master, and , SATA drives. A droning voice dully intoned IDE, AGP, VESA, and USB. DDR, DIMM, CRIMM, and active matrix. WTF?

There were green circuit boards all around and falling down from above. There were black memory chips endlessly slapping down on my dome. There was the smell of PCBs, electronics, and silicon dust.

Remind me not to go to bed right after computer hardware class.

Return to Restaurant Land in the Redneck Riviera

Today begins my return to Restaurant Land. I haven't worked since Nov 1. It's hard to convey how thankful and relieved I feel to have a job again, especially in today's job scene. It wasn't my intention when I quit my job after October to return to waiting tables, but I think it's my best option at the moment.

I love the hustle and bustle of restaurant work. The social aspect meshes nicely with my personality. I feel at home when I'm working in a restaurant. I love meeting new people and interacting with the ones I already know. I like food. I like sweating a little and being in almost constant motion. I like goofing around, too. For me, waiting tables, bartending, expediting, and managing have been like salvation. There is nothing like restaurant work. It's amazing, annoying, taxing, and fun. I like working on the water and being able to enjoy the scene while clearing dishes from a recently abandoned table. The sun like hot glowing brass dipping into a smooth sea and the night steaming and nary a gentle breeze and someone needs some fucking sweet tea.

Waiting tables in the Redneck Riviera is kinda like being on vacation for life, but you have to work, too.

Cheap Phone Chargers and Predictive Texting

In less than a month I've gone
through three mobile phone chargers.

The first one to go kaput on me
was a wall adaptor for an LG
KE970 Shine. To be fair, it's not the charger the phone came
with. The AC adaptor shipped with my phone came from another planet
or something so I bought the only one I could find at Target. It
worked fine for about a year. Then the metal piece that goes into the
phone became loose. It would move inside its little black plastic
housing. I swear I didn't beat or mistreat the thing. Being a budding
electronics technician, I decided to open up the housing and see
what's up. Basically, one of the tiny plastic holders inside broke. I
still used that charger for a few months. I just had to open it up
every time I wanted to use it and get the insides resituated. Right
around New Years, the wires inside the charger came loose from where
they were soldered. I don't have a solder iron and I don't really
know how to do it so that charger was retired.

Fortunately, I had a back-up
phone, a CECT
P168 (iPhone clone) with adaptors for regular outlets and car
cigarette lighters. The home adaptor lasted maybe a whole day. Once
again, I don't think I was being rough with it. I missed the outlet
when trying to plug it in and its plug became loose and unusable.
Whatever. I still had the car charger. That one lasted a few days
before I accidentally yanked the cable and the USB socket it plugged
into became loose. I pried it open and saw that the circuit board had
snapped. Great. I returned to the wall adaptor to see if I could fix
it. I unscrewed it and opened it up nice and professional-like and
had a look-see. Like the adaptor for the Shine, an important little
piece of black plastic had broken. I tried to tape it (!) but my
pathetic attempt was mocked by reality.

So I returned to the Shine. I
went to Best Buy and bought a Rocketfish
USB charging cable. I'm satisfied with its quality. It feels
solid. It's lasted a few days. It seemed to charge the phone faster
than the wall adaptor did. I hope that doesn't lead to my phone
exploding.

While going through my phone
charger travails, I was switching back and forth between the Shine
and the iClone and I got to thinking about the merits of predictive
texting. The iClone's touchscreen worked quite fine. I might even
say it impressed me. I can't compare it to an iPhone's because I've
never used one. I found it a pain in the ass to use versus my Shine's
conventional keypad. It wasn't just a matter of not being used to
using touchscreens. The touchscreen requires more effort. There are
the 26 letters, plus keys for 0-9, and punctuation. The Shine has 12
keys. I don't need separate keys for every number and letter. It's
fine when I have both hands to use as on a conventional computer
keyboard but I don't need all that on my phone. I just need the bare
minimum of big fat keys to press. Qwerty keyboards on phones seem
silly and I prefer the feel of real keys versus touchscreens. I'm
happy to be back texting with my LG Shine. I missed the vast library
of personal and ridiculous words I've loaded into its predictive
text.

And I was thinking about the size
of various phones out there. The Shine is big enough. That iPhone
clone was even bigger. I want a phone that fits easily into the front
pockets of my jeans.

Author's Note: This post was originally created in NeoOffice. I wanted to try cutting and pasting it to see how it'd turn out. I'm too lazy to fix the formatting.