SMF Global Moderators Permissions

Having Global Moderators on your forum can help you
as an Admin since they can take of a lot of day today
matters, like moving posts to the correct board or
deleting spam from the forum. With SMF you need
to pay a little extra attention when setting up the
permissions for Global Mods though.

The default settings for Global Mods are missing a
few important things that should be corrected early
on to save you a lot of work and your Mods a lot of
confusion later. GMs can not see the default General
board until you give them permission to view it. You
can fix this by simply modifying General by checking
the box beside Global Moderator and saving the new
setting by clicking the modify button at the bottom.

Next you should probably look at the Group Permissions
for Global Moderators. You can give them a wide range
of permissions that will let them do a lot more. One thing
you will want to do is make sure they have the permissions
needed to view and post attachments if you allow your
regular members to do so. By default that permission is
not checked.

Depending on how comfortable you are with it, you
can also give you Global Moderators some access
to your Admin panel. This can come in handy if you
will be away for an extended period of time but don’t
want to temporarily promote someone to full Admin.
Just remember to give them what they will most
likely need and not give them access to something
where they might accidentally damage something.

If you add any new mods to your forum make sure you
check your Global Moderators permissions too. On occasion
the members will have the needed permissions to use the
new mods by default but the Global Moderators won’t.

The Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin

Let me state again for the record that I hate politics…

However, I feel the need to say a few things regarding this
little matter. I just got through reading about the latest
part of the interview at Digg and they are politely mocking
her into oblivion.

Normally Katie Couric is not one of my favorite journalist
but I have to give her credit for being extremely professional
during the parts of the interview I have seen so far. A lot
of journalists would have been picking their teeth with the
legs of Palin’s eyeglasses after they finished chewing her up
and spitting what was left back onto their plate. She’s lucky
that Tim Russert passed away, he would have eaten her alive
and never broken a sweat doing so.

I have seen people commenting on various sites that Palin
is a “dumb bitch”. I can’t say that I disagree with them
even if it is a less than polite thing to call any woman
publicly. However, anyone presuming to run for the Vice-
Presidency of the United States should be a damn sight more
world wise than she has shown herself to be thus far.

Not knowing what Hamas is is a strong sign that she should
have declined when asked to be McCain’s running mate. There
is also the current matter of her evading the question of
what newspapers and magazines she reads. I skimmed over a
transcript of Couric asking her three times and getting, “all
of them” as a reply each time. All of them? Does she even realize
just how many newspapers and magazines there are currently
published world wide? Nevermind just the ones published in the
U.S. alone.

I’m not even going to go into her remarks regarding Russia
and Putin.

I have also seen her and McCain’s, supporters slamming
Obama and Biden for their own failings. They are politicians.
There ain’t no angels in politics.

I am reminded of a question someone asked regarding her
meteoric rise from small town mayor to Governor of Alaska
to being tapped for VP. How? Most people in politics tend to
take a long road to even get close to The White House. Palin
has gone too far too fast IMHO. And looking at her answers
to Katie Couric’s questions, she needs to stay in Alaska
or run for U.S. senate and gain some much needed experience
before even considering such a thing again.

Right now,I am kind of cringing at what will happen when she
debates Biden tonight. saying it ain’t gonna pretty is putting
it mildly.

Beans and Rice

There are any number of recipes for this simple dish, so here
my contribution to the list...

Ingredients:

Beans: 1 cup of dried beans or one large can if you are
in a hurry. What kind? Pinto or Red Kidney are best due
to their general size. But don't hesitate to experiment
with your own preferred kind.

Sausage: 1 large smoked sausage sliced into pieces about
1/2" to 3/4" long. You can use most any kind you like but
I personally recommend Polish sausage.

2 or 3 Bay Leaves. These can and should be removed before
serving.

One large coarsely chopped onion

One clove of garlic, crushed

One cup of rice, instant or regular depending on your preference
and how soon you want to eat.

Optional:

One teaspoon of hot sauce. If you prefer it extra spicy
add a few dashes on cayenne pepper.

One teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce

One bell pepper coarsely chopped

Cooking instructions:

Add the beans, sausage, bay leaves, onion, garlic, and if you want
them,the bell pepper, the hot sauce and Worcestershire sauce to
your pot. If you are using dried beans, prepare them according to
the instructions on the package. If you are using canned beans,
just cook it until the sausage and onions are tender.

The longer it cooks the more time the flavors will have to mingle
properly. So if you want the best flavor, cook it in a crock pot
overnight, this works best with dried beans rather than canned
beans.

The rice should be cooked separately from the beans and used as
a bed for the beans to be served on. You can also mix them together
after they are both done if you want the rice to pick up the flavor
of the juices from the beans and sausage.

Quick one bowl meal

Ingredients:
California style mixed vegetables: About 2 cups (broccoli,
cauliflower, and carrot slices)
Rotini or egg noodles: roughly two small handfuls
Polish sausage sliced into 1/4" thick pieces
Cheese sauce: Reciepe here

Put the vegetables, noodles, and sausage in a 2 quart pot and
cover with water. let the water just starts boiling and turn
it down to about half and let it simmer. Cooking time is roughly
five (5) to ten (10) minutes after the heat has been reduced.

The cheese sauce can be prepared while rest is simmering or
you can cheat and use Cheez Whiz.

My suggestion for serving is to simply drain the veggies et al
and mix them and the cheese sauce in a bowl and serve.

What is a “fringe” topic?

I’ve noticed that some people have referred to some of the topics
in the forum as being “fringe” topics.

Why?

What makes the paranormal, conspiracy theories, or alternate
spiritual and religious beliefs and ideas “fringe” topics?
Because they don’t follow the “established” ideas? Or maybe
because they make you have to pull your head out of the sand
and consider the possibility that what you were taught as a
child might not be all there is?

It has been my observation that many people falsely assume that
expressing an interest in such things means you must be, by
default, some wacko that wears a tin foil hat and believes that
“they” are watching your every move.

No.

Many people that are interested in “fringe” topics are actually
quite normal. Some would even say bloody boring in their day to
day lives. The part of it that amuses me is that as soon as
some people find out you are interested in such things they
think they need to distance themselves from you or shun you for
fear that they will be seen as “tainted” in the eyes of others.
Or worse, they treat like you are some sub-human creature that
somehow managed to escape a lunatic asylum and need to be treated
like you were somehow ill.

Then there are the ones that use the term “lunatic fringe”. What
makes one person a lunatic and another one normal? Politically
speaking, many consider me to be a lunatic because I think our
current government(s) don’t have our best interests in heart. Nor
do I believe this is how the original founders of the various
governments intended for things to be for posterity.

Looking at my traffic reports has shown me something interesting
about this site, the so called “fringe” topics are of greater
interest than the supposed “normal” topics. And believe me, there
are more “normal” topics here than there are “fringe” topics.

One prime example is the topic Pagnor posted about Odinism,
Asatru, and Heathen. I see many visitors looking at that one so
it makes me have to ask the question, If there are that many
people regularly looking for such topics online, how can they be
considered “fringe”? In fact I just looked, that one topic has
had 484 views since he posted it in January.

Link to Pagnor’s thread

So the next time you see something referred to as a “fringe”
topic, ask yourself, What makes this a “fringe” topic? Because
Katie Couric isn’t blathering about bigfoot on the evening news?
Or they aren’t offering you tips on the Today Show on best way to
set up a cleansing ritual for your house before your new baby is
born? Oh wait, they do that if it is Feng Shui.

Good liberals and good conservatives

In modern (US) politics there are three primary groups, Liberals,

Conservatives, and Pretenders. I’m not going to go into the various
political parties as there are many even though the media acts as
though there are only two, Democrats and Republicans.

Many people automatically associate liberal politics with the
Democrats and conservative politics with Republicans. In my
experience that isn’t entirely accurate. I’ve seen plenty of self
proclaimed Democrats that were and are very conservative in their
views and almost as many Republicans that were surprisingly liberal
in their outlook. Then there are the pretenders. They claim one
name or the other yet their actions tell the tale all too well about
where their loyalties lie. Their loyalties usually lie with themselves or
some special interest group who’s interests are usually at odds with
everyone else’s best interests.

As a general rule I detest politics and politicians. It always seems to
be the same song and dance year after year and election after election.
One candidate points an accusing finger at their opponent and the
other counter attacks by digging up more dirt on the other. This
cycle continues until we go to the polls and cast our votes. After the
election is won or lost we get a little peace and quiet for a while
before they start it over again.

I have been told be people on both sides that I am crazy because
my views don’t conform to either set of ideas. Maybe I am crazy for
seeing both sides as being in error in their thinking. However, I see
that there are good liberals and good conservatives and then there
are just idiots that wear the name without knowing what it means.

A review of Google’s Chrome beta browser

I downloaded Chrome beta after having read a bit about it on Digg.
The general consensus on Digg is that it sucks. So far I have to agree
with them for the most part. It has a few annoying problems and what
I have to call design flaws. These may only be typical beta problems
but they still might discourage a user from dropping IE or Firefox in
favor of Chrome.

Installing it went fairly quick and smoothly except for a hiccup that required
me to shut down Firefox so it could import my settings, bookmarks, and other
information from it. It did offer the option to not import any or all of my
information from Firefox but I wanted to see if it would do it and get
everything right, so far so good on that point.

Several people have commented on Chrome’s UI (User Interface) as being
very clean. It is clean, a little too clean if you are used to having all the
options and normal buttons and tabs readily available. The site tabs are at the
very top but it has only back, forward, and reload buttons next to the
search/address/bookmarks bar. You do have the option of adding the home
button from the options menu under the wrench icon. It allows you to
set a home page or you can just use the default new tab page.

The bookmarks can be a pain in the butt to get to where they are located
if you are used to being able to quickly navigate around your favorite sites. You
do have the option of adding a bookmarks tab to the browser but it is located
to the right side and that is not where most people look for their bookmarks
as far as I know. It will also allow you to drag and drop your most used bookmarks
to the left side but it still leaves a lot of room for confusion until you get used
to the lay out.

It also lacks a constant status bar. This is replaced with a fading tab that
shows you where links lead and if a page is still loading. While this may not
be a problem a lot of the time it is still a minor distraction if you are used
to glancing down and seeing the status bar. Their pop up blocker notification
bar will also display here when a pop up is blocked.

As far as I have been able to determine, the beta version does not support
RSS or ATOM feeds and I have seen no buttons for any kind of feeds. I am
hoping this will be corrected in the final version.

I also noticed that some sites that use a lot of widgets that are dependent
on Flash and Quicktime seem to hang up or drag when trying to scroll. This may
only be a problem with the beta but it does tend to make me want to go right
back to Firefox. On most sites the scrolling is very quick and smooth though.
One other problem I noticed was that if you have only one tab opened and
accidentally close it the entire browser will close.

And finally I will address the incognito window they have come up with
for more private surfing. Personally, I can’t see any real need of it since
you can just as easily clear your browsing data from the controls under the
wrench icon.

In closing, I know there are a lot of things I haven’t addressed but these
are the things that drew my attention. It may be a good general purpose
browser after it’s final version is released but I think Google still has a lot of
work ahead of them if they plan to give Internet Explorer any serious competition.

If you would like to try the beta of Chrome visit:
Google Chrome Beta download

You’re meant to be online for your own reasons not for everyone else’s

“You’re meant to be online for your own reasons not for everyone
else’s.”

This was something a friend told me a few years ago. Ever since, it
has been something I have pondered from time to time. At first blush
it seems a simple enough thing and is fairly straightforward in nature
and it is. But the longer you think about it the more you have to ask
yourself, What is my reason for being online in first place?

Until about 12 years ago the internet and home computers in general
were mostly just a novelty, and a fairly pricey one at that, for most
people. Now though they are pretty much a commonplace thing in
most homes. But it still leaves that question, What are your reasons
for being online? Before the internet we managed to get information
by going to a library and meet people without viewing their “profile” or
MySpace page and sent letters via the postal service or made a phone
call. Or just went to their house for a visit.

Of course before that if we wanted to meet someone from another
country we had to travel to their country unless we met them
traveling in our own. Now, we can have friends on the other side
of the planet that we may never actually meet face to face.

When I first got online it was, for me, a way to find information.
Mostly information that wasn’t readily available to me where
I live. For a very long time I merely wandered the internet,
exploring and lurking, never actively participating. Then one
day I finally took the headlong plunge and started posting on a
forum and got hooked on it. For a long time I contented myself
with merely posting on other people’s forums and sites. For some
reason I still am not entirely sure of I built my first website on
Geocities. Some of my online friends may still remember that first
attempt at building a website. It wasn’t very pretty and it in
retrospect, it looked amateurish. And that is a kind description
IMO. (Hey, my site, my opinion.)

After that I got the wild hair to make my own forum, the
first Bastion. It looked a little rough around the edges too as
I recall it. Ok, a lot rough but not too bad for my first “serious”
attempt at building one. A year and a half later came The
Bastion’s second incarnation, this time as a .com, this site in it’s
first form. It was rushed into service before I was completely
ready because things with my business on eBay went to Hell in a
hand basket due to them jacking their fees up. I scrambled to find
alternative auctions and found one to put my stuff in while I got
The Bastion’s own store online, something that took me two
months of bumbling around to do before I finally got it to work
the way I wanted it to. The rest of the was fairly easy since the
bulk of it was the old SMF forum, the old blog and the gallery.
The other parts came more slowly since I had to make them from
scratch and was still learning.

And we come back the original question, What is my reason for being
online?

Dunno, I’ll get back to you on that when I figure it out myself.

The universe ONLY 14 BILLION years old???

I’ve been reading some of this lately and I am quite frankly, annoyed

as Hell.

I will use the following article as a reference…

New Scientist Article

In part:

2 The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you’ll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This “horizon problem” is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. “Inflation”, for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? “Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred,” says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen, but see Inside inflation: after the big bang.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question “why?” In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

Ummkay, who can point out the problems here?

The first thing that pops out at me is this…

“That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two
edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is
only 14 billion years old.”

Didn’t we go through this a few hundred years ago? As I recall it, it
was Copernicus that stuck his neck out and suggested that the Earth
was not the center of the bloody universe!

Oh, wait, heres a lovely Wikipedia article about it…

Wikipedia article on Copernicus

Now it seems that allegedly modern astronomers have taken a
long step back and decided that our little spinning rock is the
center of the universe.

Hmmm…

Could it be that the 14 billion light years we can see in any given
direction might just be as far as our telescopes can see? Admittedly
14 billion light years is a long damn way to see but it also implies that
logic has been put on the shelf so some jackass can draw a paycheck
for not using the gray matter between his ears! Until someone can
show me empirical data proving me wrong, the Earth is not the
center of the universe!
To think otherwise implies an arrogance that is utterly
mind staggering.

Next up…

”Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there
is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two
horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang
and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.”

Proof? Can anyone prove beyond any doubt that nothing can travel
faster than the speed of light?

Now before you go on about this theory, that theory, and the other
theory take into account that they are theories. With all due respect
to Einstein, Hawking and all of the other brilliant minds engaged in
academic pursuits, theory is fine. Facts and proof are better.
Theoretically, nothing can travel faster than light. This does not
mean that there is something we have yet to observe that could make
light look like a narcoleptic snail in comparison.

In theory I can make your piss turn blue if I focus my mind but
I ain’t countin’ on it.

And finally…

“So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another.
A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem
- but this too is impotent in the face of the question “why?” In
scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation
remains an anomaly.”

So far the only anomaly I see is their lack of logic. I suppose
Cambridge must be paying by the hour so they have to cast
all efforts at logic to the wayside to make a living.

Here is a logical theory for you to chew on Mr PhD, sir….

Some time beyond our feeble comprehension, the universe was
formed and all the matter was scattered far and wide. How far
is hard for us to say as our current level of technology limits us
to a relatively small sphere of the vastness that is the universe
that is observable from our tiny planet. To assume that all we can
see at this time is all there is to see is foolish at best.

What are my credentials, you ask? My credentials are two eyes
and a functional brain. Apparently that is no longer a requirement
for paid cosmologists.

Wartime Wonderland

Wartime Wonderland

I wrote this after having read all the reports of the Georgains
and Russians fighting and all of the other politicians gleefully
rattling their sabers internationally.

(sung to the tune of Winter Wonderland)


Sabers rattle
Are ya listenin'
In the field
bombs are droppin'
Scary sight
We're freakin' tonight
Walkin' in a Wartime Wonderland

Gone away is the blubird
here to stay is a new bird
Dive bombing all day long
as we run along
Walkin' in a Wartime Wonderland

In the basement we can build a shelter
Sit and swelter
When the red cross shows up
They'll ask: Are you injured?
We'll say: No sir
But the troops can do that
When we go to town

Later on
We'll retire
Sittin' by the fire
That used to be our home
And wait for the next air raid
Walikin' in a Wartime Wonderland

In the UN refugee center
we can sit holding the splinter
that used to be the front door
To our house
Walkin' in a Wartime Wonderland

Walkin' in a Wartime Wonderland
Walkin' in a Wartime Wonderland