I want to make something perfectly clear.

I have no opinion on abortion.

The other night, I had a dream. In this dream, I was watching a TV show with a line of enormous dominoes made of dense foam, like the type you see in action game-shows where the contestant has to run across the top or else fall into some kind of disturbing substance that has the effect of breaking the fall of the contestant while simultaneously humiliating them.

These dominoes, though, were titanic. Hundreds of people perched on top of them, jumping from one to the next. Some few were several dominoes ahead of the pack, leaping and leaving an unstable but still standing domino behind them. The bulk of people hopped just one step ahead of the toppling dominoes, unstably wobbling atop their current perch, and many fell into the slime with each falling obelisk.

The dominoes each had labels. The fallen included "Deficit Spending", "Investment Banking", "Savings & Loans", "Dot-Com stocks", "Real-Estate investment", and "Energy futures". Yet to fall were many more, but I couldn't distinguish the label of any given domino until it began to lean under the crushing weight of all the people piling onto it.

In that vein, I just found out some disturbing news regarding the so-called $7500 new-home-buyer "tax credit" as part of the recently-passed Housing Rescue Bill.

FTC Outlaws Pre-Recorded Telemarketing Campaigns. Many of you may remember my previous rant regarding pre-recorded warranty telemarketing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/20/olympics2008.china1

China sets aside four "protest zones" in Beijing during the Olympics. To protest, one had to file an application months in advance.

Two women who filed to protest were sentenced to a year's forced labor in a re-education camp.

Searching through the history of barnson.org it doesn't seem we've ever written about online web conferencing. I'm currently looking for a good solution to do some online meetings because I'm sick of wasting all my time driving around town from meeting to meeting. Also, a lot of people I work with are out of town, and airfare is making travel prohibitive.

I have nothing further to say, but the minimum post length of ten words requires me to say something.

This cartoon says it all.

hey all.. as you might know I have been directing a film called "Ninjas Vs. Zombies" and we just released our third trailer today.

I'd love your you to take a peek.
www.nvzmovie.com

Found an interesting article today...

Ripon College, in Wisconsin, has started offering free mountain bikes and helmets to freshmen, who vow not to bring a car on campus. Private donors have driven the $300-per-student program. Ripon’s initiative represents the rising concern for skyrocketing oil costs.

IM conversation with my brother regarding my appearance on Fox13 news flying a model aircraft and being interviewed at the same time:

(01:26:12 PM) matt-msn: I have a hard time talking while flying a squirrely little airplane like the one they asked me to hover for the camera. I hope I didn't come off like too much of a doofus.

So I had to shut down one of my ESX 3.5 virtual machines today, to remove a virtual NIC that wasn't necessary anymore. When I went to start it up, I get an internal error. So I look in the logs, and see that ESX is claiming my license has expired. Well, it hasn't, so off to the VMWare site I go.