The agenda for the June 25 Ypsi School Board meeting is out and Tom Reiber has put the following item on the action items list.

     h. Ypsilanti High School Nickname Reinstatement Recommendation (Enclosure #9)

All of us with some common sense need to call Mr. Reiber and tell him that the students have selected a new nickname and it’s time for the adults to start acting like grown ups instead of whiny little babies and get over it.  The kids are.

You can reach Tom Reiber at home at (734) 434-1425 and by e-mail at techtom@comcast.net.  Everyone should come out to the board meeting on Monday night and speak out against this.

I just want to welcome any new visitors coming here as a result of the Ypsilanti Courier article. Please feel free to look around and join in the conversation.

In about a week I’m going to be starting a new part-time gig. I’m going to be doing some writing for car blog that focuses on issues concerning cars, the auto industry and the environment. I know I’ll have lots of stuff to write about, since there are no shortage of issues with global warming and rising fuel prices. If there are any topics that you would like to see me write about, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail.

I am going to be recording and then posting audio and video of the Ypsilanti Mayoral debate tomorrow. In order maximize availability and conserve bandwidth (video is large especially when you are talking about a 90 minute debate) I’m going to make it available by as many channels as possible. This includes ourmedia.org, google and bittorrent. If you are not familiar with bittorrent it is a peer to peer file sharing technology that works extremely well for very large files. It is perfectly legal and ideally suited to distributing something like this. This will be my first attempt at hosting a torrent tracker. When you use bittorrent you download a small torrent file that points to a tracker site. It then gets the information about the file to download and starts getting pieces of the file. As more people download pieces they also share those pieces. The more people who are downloading and seeding a file the faster everyone can get it. I would like to request your help in testing my setup.

If you are already setup to use bittorrent then please download this torrent file for Azureus, a very good bittorrent client. The file is only 7.6 MB. If it downloads OK please let me know.

If you are not setup for bittorrent and you are running windows, and you want to get the debate this way, please download this setup file for Azureus, install it and then download the torrent file and test the setup. If you are not running windows you can find Mac and Linux versions of Azureus here

Please let me know if this works or if you have any problems. Once I post the video and audio files I’ll put the links here. thanks

Henceforth I will always refer to so-called “christian conservatives” as Christian Fascists. According to dictionary.com :

fas·cism Audio pronunciation of “fascism” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (fshzm)
n.

1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

con·ser·va·tism Audio pronunciation of “conservatism” ( P ) Pronunciation Key (kn-sûrv-tzm)
n.

1. The inclination, especially in politics, to maintain the existing or traditional order.
2. A political philosophy or attitude emphasizing respect for traditional institutions, distrust of government activism, and opposition to sudden change in the established order.

Look at these definitions and then consider what the right-wing want to do in America. These people including the leaders of the republican party (Bush, Delay, Robertson, et al) are not conservatives at all. They are fascists and should be identified as such.

If you read many blogs or listen to podcasts you probably know what a frappr map is. Frappr uses the google maps api to allow people to create group maps. I’ve now created my own frappr map over on the right column. I’d like to know where people are reading this blog from. Just go over an click on the map and add yourself to the group.

I upgraded my wordpress installation from 1.5.2 to 2.0.1. Since I was making changes anyway I decided to change the base address too. Previously this blog was located at http://abuelsamid.com/blogs/sam/wordpress. During some recent experiment with my site settings I realized I could create some sub domains. So I set up http://sam.abuelsamid.com. For a couple of months I have been redirecting this url to my original one. Now I have swapped them around, so this blog is at the new subdomain. The original address will re-direct here so that is not a problem. However, if you have been subscribing to the RSS feed you will need to update that. The new feed urls are over in the left hand column with the new standard rss feed icons.
Thanks for reading all the stuff I write hear.

Today is the winter solstice.  It is a day of rebirth, as for the next 6 months the days will be getting steadily longer!

I have moved my blog over to wordpress. Wordpress allows me some more control over comment spam, so we’ll see how this works out. I am still messing around with the layout, so this will be changing in the near future.

If you have never been to Japan, it is a very different place. You can literally get virtually anything from a vending machine. And these vending machines are everywhere. I jsut spotted this item over on engadget

You can buy almost anything from a vending machine in Japan. So it’s no surprise to find a machine fashioned after the old UFO catcher crane-and-claw-based arcade games vending live lobsters in Sapporo. 100 yen (less than a buck) is a bargain price for a potentially tasty dinner — not to mention the hearty guffaws to be had watching children (and Alec Baldwin) scream in horror.