‘Undocumented American’ testifying before Senate about Immigration

So this lady,  Gabby Pacheco is a self described undocumented American from Miami.  She is a well known immigration activist and she will now be speaking in-front of the Senate hearing on immigration.     Now, forgive me for sounding a bit harsh, but isn’t inviting her to testify about immigration like inviting a Chicago gang member to the discussion about gun control?

She obviously has no regards for our immigration laws, and to take that one step farther, she actively flaunts the fact that she is willing to break our immigration laws, yet our leaders invite her to have a conversation about how we can better accommodate her and her other ‘undocumented’ friends to become ‘documented’ Americans?

Does anyone else find it unfathomable that we allow the law breakers such as Ms. Pacheco to assist in writing the laws to suit her needs? Or am I just an asshole?

I fully support immigration, its what built this great country.  Tracing my roots back far enough and I’m sure you’ll see where my forefathers immigrated from England, Canada and a whole other host of countries.  There is documentation and approvals for all of them (from what I can tell)

I served in the Marine Corp with many brothers who were not born in this country, but served time to protect the country they wished to become a citizen of, Ms. Pacheco did nothing more than come here and start complaining about how hard it was to come here.   What work did you do Ms Pacheco, before you decided that your first act in this country would be to break the law?

Up next in Congress, we shall allow Drug Lords to testify on how the ‘War on Drugs’ is really inconvenient to their bottom line.

 

Ridiculous.

Read More

Stupid Telemarketers

Its happened no less than five times in the last two weeks.  Home phone rings, not a number I know, so I answer out of curiosity. While I have worked in the call center industry for the last five years, and I’m on the National Do Not Call list, I still get telemarketer calls, mostly looking for someone else, or those really fun ones in Spanish which I lost certainly still do not understand (Sorry Senor Ball).

What made this one call special enough to use my internetless time on a plane to write a blog about it, this was the third in the last seven days from Sallie Mae.  Yes, the student loan company.  Like most, I have student loans, as does my wife, but neither have, or had, a relationship with Sallie Mae.  Being in the call center industry I know the laws around calling, intimatly, deeply and more than I care to know.  Knowing that  collection calls play by different rules, as

Read More

Quicker Easier – DIY Laundry Detergent

 

I had the day scheduled off from work for a planned tripped which we canceled, but I kept the day to my self. In doing so, I had a short honey-do list from the significantly better half. One of those items was to Make the Soap.

We’ve used this recipe, or a slightly different version of it in the past, but haven’t had time to buy everything and put it together.  One of the steps that Natalie hated last time was shredding the soap manually with the cheese grater.

In Bobbi’s post she indicates that you can do it the manual way as Natalie had done in the past, use a food processor to grind it up, or microwave it and tear it to shreds.    I’m always a fan of fire, so naturally I used the microwave method.    After cutting the bar up into pieces I found a recently trashed cereal box as a plate, and placed it into the microwave.  I found about 3 minutes gets all the way through if you slice it into 4-5 pieces.   Now if you dice those pieces further, it only takes about 2 minutes.

Once I removed the soap fluff from the microwave I found it to be spongy and kind of hard to crumble as the article said, but i did find it quite easy to put into the blender.  Thats right, the blender in the upper cabinet that we rarely use, it will make that soap fluff into soap powder!!!!     Since all the other items of this concoction are all powder (and crystals for the smell good) it made since.

Also in Bobbi’s post, she indicates that she layered the items into a big bucket and then mixed it up.    Being a man, I knew there must be a better way, I mean, who has all the time to go back and forth between all those boxes time and time again.  After a quick trip to the garage, I came back with my trusty 18v cordless drill, and a never used Workforce5-Gallon Helix Paint Mixer.

With the bucket on the floor and the drill in my hand, I made quick work of blending all the detergenty goodness into a final product that is well blended, smells good, and took me just a few, tireless minutes to concoct.

Final run down of suggestions for the origianl post:

• Microwave Fels or Zote soap.
• Blend resulting soap fluff
• Use Paint Mixer to Mix it up.
• Bask in the glory of your ingenuity for days to come.

 

 

Read More

Time Based Power Settings

Just recently I was part of an online presentation in which the intended audience was unable to install any of the screen sharing programs which my company had at our disposal (WebEx, GotoMeeting, Join.Me). The prospective client proposed we use their screen sharing program, Adobe Connect to perform the presentation, which seemed like a feasible idea, until our primary presented was unable to get it to connect.

The quick solution was to have someone that could connect to both systems ‘bridge’ the two screens together, essentially daisy chaining the two screen sharing application. Guess who was the lucky ‘tech’ guy on the call. Thats right, yours truly.

One of the problems I had was my multi-monitor, super awesome machine was now under the scrutiny of both my co-workers and our prospects, negating me from doing any multi-tasking on the other screens for fear of letting my lack of attention be known. (Side Note: Normally i’m very well tuned into conference calls, just not so much for presentations I see a few times a week)

Being the enterprising young lad I am, I thought this an opportune time to head down stairs to grab some lunch only to come back and find my monitor had went into power save mode a few seconds before. A quick wiggle of the mouse and we were in business.

Now I’m pondering, how do I prevent this? I could simply change the power settings to a larger time, but that would leave all three of my monitors on for X amount of hours AFTER i quit using the computer. I could setup two profiles and switch between them in the morning and night, thus allowing my screens to turn off quickly when I’m not likely to be there and stay on indefinitely when I am supposed to be there….or I could Powershell.

Of course, Powershell is the answer here.

$a = Get-Date

function SetPlan([string]$Plan) 
{
    $guid = (Get-WmiObject -Class win32_powerplan -Namespace root\cimv2\power -Filter "ElementName='$Plan'").InstanceID.tostring()
    $regex = [regex]"{(.*?)}$"
    $newpowerVal = $regex.Match($guid).groups[1].value
    powercfg -S  $newpowerVal
}

$Plan = if ($a.Hour -gt 7 -and $a.Hour -lt 18) { "Long Term" } else { "Short Term" }
SetPlan $Plan

Now with this handy little piece of awesomeness run hourly by Task Scheduler , my Power Settings are changed to my “Long Term” power saving plan between 7AM and 6PM and to my “Short Term” power saving plan all other hours.

Read More