Almost Time!

It's less than a week away now to Gay Days 2008 in Orlando!

I'm pretty excited. I'm still running around doing stuff to get ready. I've already gotten in all the new swimsuits I'll be taking for the trip, and yesterday I got my very dark brown hair highlighted blonde. I'll take lots of pictures, so don't you worry. You'll get to see my "cute" hair as it was called at work today. I also took my car in yesterday for maintenance, since I'm going to be driving down. It's going to cost me freaking fortune.

So, assuming I don't get time to blog while I'm on vacation, I will be leaving you all for a week come next Tuesday.

Reading your [Lack of] Rights

Okay, I know, I've been on a bit of a gay-marriage-slash-equal-rights kick lately, and I know many of you bois out there are either single, too young to marry, don't care about gay marriage, or think that "domestic partnership" or "civil unions" would be just fine. If this sounds like you, this post is for you.

The reason gay couples struggling to get that word marriage, including those in California who won against the state to have their marriage recognized, is not for the social acceptance of the gay marriage in being equal to straight marriage -- that, they recognize, will take years. (Interracial marriage was legalized in 1977 and still couples get a second look by some people. Obama is the son of an interracial marriage, as a matter of fact.) They have been fighting for years not for the social acceptance but the rights bestowed upon straight married couples. Civil unions and domestic partnerships may give gay couples a subset of these rights in the few states they are allowed, but it's nothing near the laundry list of rights enjoyed by their straight counterparts.

Rights Given to Straight Married Couples/Individuals:

• Access to Social Security after spouse's death
  
• Access to health insurance through spouse's workplace
  
• The right to custody of children after divorce
  
• Visitation rights for non-biological children
  
• Joint parenting rights, such as access to children's school records
  
• Bereavement leave after death of a spouse
  
• Burial determination after the death of a spouse
  
• Domestic violence intervention
  
• Sick leave care for spouse or non-biological child
  
• Legal validation of a long-term relationship
  
• Ability to live in neighborhoods deemed "families only"
  
• Access to life insurance in spouse's workplace
  
• Access to survivor benefits in case of emergency
  
• Access to spouse's crime victims' recovery benefits
  
• Ability to file wrongful death claims
  
• Right to shared property, child support, and alimony after divorce
  
• Ability to file joint home and auto insurance policies
  
• Joint rental leases with automatic renewal rights if spouse dies or leaves
  
• Access to adopting children
  
• Automatic inheritance of shared assets after spouse's death
  
• Automatic inheritance of retirement savings tax-free after spouse's death
  
• Automatic exemption of property tax increases on shared assets gained after spouse's death
  
• Ability to file joint tax returns
  
• Access to tax breaks for married couples
  
• Veterans discounts based on spouse's armed forces status
  
• Assumption of spouse's pension after death
  
• Ability to file joint bankruptcy
  
• Ability to collect unemployment benefits after leaving a job to relocate because of spouse's job move
  
• Ability to transfer property from one spouse to another without transfer tax consequences
  
• Access to fostering children
  
• Automatic next-of-kin status for emergency medical decisions and hospital visitation status
  
• Immigration and residency priority for spouses from other countries
  
• Ability to invoke spousal privilege in a court of law
  
• Access to reduced rate memberships at health clubs, social clubs, and organizations
  
• Prison visitation rights

Source: TheTaskForce.org

NY to recognize other states' and countries' gay marriages

New York state will soon recognize other states' and other countries' gay marriages and will grant all the rights and benefits reaped by in-state couples to gay married couples.

Massachusetts is currently the only state that allows same-sex marriage (California will join on June 17), but its residency requirements would prevent New Yorker couples from marrying there. Couples could also travel to Canada, Spain, or wherever gay marriages are legal and New York will soon recognize the marriage.

Yahoo article
NY Times

W00t W00t!!

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Both Fabulous

Think back to your high school English class for a moment. You may have at one point been forced to write a "Compare and Contrast" essay. Let's just call this a Compare and Contrast blog posting -- I'm not going to elaborate or make too many inferences... BUT....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_%28singer%29#Personal_life

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_martin#Personal_life

Maybe if they weren't famous they'd say one way or another. Are all artists like this?? You know the day after we find out we wouldn't care honestly.


UPDATE:

I didn't want to go into too much detail, BUT Greg brings up a valid question.

To contrast they are hugely different artists in demeanor and, shall we say, fantabulousness. Mika is very ... colorful and just wild and fun while Ricky Martin is a chisled muscular, sexy, provocative hunk of a man who looks GREAT in a Speedo next to a friend in a Speedo. The world needs both, quite frankly.

To compare, they both say the same thing about their sexuality publicly. And who could blame them with their careers on the line? Frankly, I don't care either way, but I like to imagine they're gay, because they're both fabulous in their own way.

... and because Ricky is sooo freakin' gorgeous. =)

Intervention...

It's official. I've been diagnosed .... as a Digital Packrat. I know, I hang my head in shame.

At one point after college I had over 15,000 mp3s and decided to delete the ones I never listened to, so trimmed them down to 3,700. But I've still got every paper I've ever written in school since the 6th grade backed up. Hell, I even have this blog backed up on my computer. You never know, this blog could be deleted if I started posting pictures of swastikas 'n shit.

The signs are all there. I...just...didn't know there were other people like me out there!

Find out if you're a digital packrat, and take the quiz

Q. Do you have 20 or more folders and sub-folders in your documents folder on your hard drive?

A. I count 11.

Q. Is your list of Internet bookmarks long and overwhelming?

A. Yea, a bit.

Q. Is your email program nearly full, or do you use more than one email account because of all the storage you need?

A. Hmm, I don't save a lot of emails, but I do use two separate email accounts to serve different purposes - business and personal.

Q. Do you have multiple duplicates of photos, and is it hard to find a photo you need?

A. I have two photo banks - business and personal LOL, but no, it's fairly organized. I'm only a photo whore with my porn.

Q. Is your hard drive 75% full or more?

A. I'm running everything live off of an internal slave hard drive, which every so often I back up to an external hard drive and DVDs when I feel the need. The external is nearly full.

Q. Do you have multiple accounts for similar things, making it hard to find stuff?

A. We've covered emails, favorites, and photos, so I don't know what he means by "things," but I consider myself fairly organized, so I pride myself on being able to find that needle in my haystack quickly.

Q. Are any of your digital file systems overwhelming?

A. They're huge masses of data, indeed.

Q. Do you have email from 5 years ago?

A. I just found one from Amazon to an email account I no longer have from 6 years ago, LOL.

Q. Do you have project files from 2 years ago?

A. Shit, I have project files from 20 years ago almost.

Q. Do you have folders of stuff to read that would take a year to actually read?

A. Yea, there are probably a couple books in here of study material I've never gotten around to reading.

Okay, so I'm a digital packrat, but at least I'm an organized packrat. I guess this means makign the tough decision..... It's time to purge.

You know, I just feel bad for my dad. He's in the process of scanning, tagging, digitally enhancing, "organizing," and putting to DVD every home movie, picture, negative, 8mm slide and 8mm movie that he and everyone else in our family has gotten their hands on. He's got three machines, two huge external hard drives, and DVDs out the wazoo. He's also got duplicates everywhere and an organizational nightmare on his hands. I keep begging him to get a real top notch photo organizer program and to stop fiddling with explorer to do the job. ...I'm definitely sending him this article. =)

By the way, does anyone want a copy of Netscape 7 from 2003? I have the setup.exe.

PS3 GTA IV

So I finally went out and bought a Playstation 3 and GTA IV. I've really just started playing it, and the graphics are really stunning, so I think it was worth it. Plus, I have a BluRay disc player for when the discs get cheaper. And to think the guy next to me was buying an HD DVD player. I wanted to say something, but I bit my tongue. After Walmart picked BluRay, everyone started jumping the fence, so it really marked the death of the HD/BluRay debate.

Here's a lil taste of the new Grand Theft Auto IV game, which has already made more than half a billion dollars in its first week alone.


YouTube Link

California Legalizes Gay Marriage

At about 10 A.M. this morning in California's Supreme Court, the highest court in the state that holds over one-tenth the nation's population, issued a 4-to-3 180-page verdict declaring gay marriages legal in the state within 30 days. Not civil unions or civil partnerships, but marriage with all the benefits already enjoyed by straight couples all around the country. It's a tremendous and brave step forward in the equal rights for those of us in the LGBT community and certainly a time to celebrate, especially for those 4,000 gay couples in San Francisco whose marriages were taken from them in 2004 and the rest of California. The court cited a 1948 ruling overturning a previous ban on interracial marriage in support of the new ruling.

I'm not sure how much buzz this will receive on television and how the presidential race will put their spin on it. Tonight while flipping through the channels I only caught one station that had a very brief, news blip on the matter -- just long enough to say, "Oh, by the way, listen to how much this disgusts me. Now let's get back to talking about the interminable war." The presidential candidates, though, have already been asked their take on the verdict and have offered their predictable responses -- Hillary and Obama both reiterating their fence-riding, mass-appealing preference for civil rights but not "marriage" for gays .... though you have to know they're in the phase where they're saying what won't make them unpopular before the general election. McCain, of course, opposes gay marriage but also thinks the courts shouldn't be making these decisions. I guess he doesn't believe in the Judicial Branch when handling lawsuits filed against the state. The Golden State's own governor, Mr. Terminator, though he twice vetoed gay marriage legislation said he wouldn't support a constitutional amendment to overturn the court's ruling.

And I believe this is where those in California need to turn their attention now, and the rest of us should support those fighting the constitutional ban. Focus on the Family, which is a conservative Christian group, claims it now has enough signatures to put the same-sex marriage ban on the November ballots, but this claim is now awaiting verification. A state constitutional amendment is the only thing that will overturn the state supreme court ruling, and it would be the end of the line since the U.S. Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction in the matter.

So if you have friends or family in California please urge them to be ready to vote in November against the constitutional amendment forever banning gay marriage in their state!

CNN article
Guardian article
Yahoo article

"We done seen the tornada!"

So, we got a bit of a scare this afternoon when we heard a tornado had touched down a ways to our west-northwest and was barreling towards us at 40mph. It kept itself together for a long time, crossing from Lincoln County into Mecklenburg County and passing over Lake Norman, cutting through Huntersville just to our west. There were reports of golf ball and tennis ball size hail raining down from the storm, so I took my car over to my uncle's workshop just in time. The storm actually passed just to our north to where we could see the southern eedge of the anvil cloud. The tornado was at the southern edge about a mile north of us. A camera mounted at the Lowe's Motorspeedway spotted the funnel cloud after it had begun to lift back up into the cloud. Soon, reports from my own town came in of this tennis ball size hail, and one caller went into exhuberant detail about how she "done seen the tornada pick up the dog and set him back day-yown." The news reporter was visibly trying her best to hold in her laughter. Hopefully there will be footage online soon so I can link you guys to it.

Windmill, my ass!!

I waltzed into my mom's little sewing room she has set up next to mine, and stopped dead in my tracks when I looked down and saw a quilt she had made (pictured below). When I held it up and asked, "Ummm.....mom?" she replied, "It's supposed to be a 'Windmill' pattern!"

......

Did she not see what I recognized immediately when she made the first square?? Did she really have to make the entire quilt before it dawned on her what she had created??


I mean...


Honestly....


Doesn't it just pop out at you immediately?






This is the kind of thing I have to put up with. .... It's no wonder they didn't know I'm gay.

What the Hail?

Okay, so today is the second day in a week or so that we have had hailstorms. Twice I have in horror watched beads of ice dropping from thousands of feet and boisterously bouncing off the roof of my newly purchased car (which I love). First it was pea- and bean-sized, but tonight the droplet- and platelet-shaped hailstones were up to the size of almonds. Thankfully, both times I have been home at the time and I have been able to do something about it. Had I been at work when this happened, I'd have been pissed at the dings all over it, but my dad and I both times covered the car in old cardboard boxes and and old quilt to cushion the blows. (How's that for redneck ingenuity?) I'm leaving its shielding on overnight in case any more storms pop up. I should invest in a padded cover, right?

It could be worse. A guy at work actually had a tornado hit his house last night, tossing large trees around both yards, sending one on top of his car, but thankfully, leaving his house unscathed. It was confirmed today to be an F2 tornado that left a 7-mile path of destruction.

Sorry these pics are all motion-blurred, but I was getting pelted on the head at the moment.

Tax Holiday? Gimme a Break

With gas pricing hovering at or above $4.00 across the country, presidential hopefuls Clinton and McCain are proposing a measure that would suspend the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline.

This is a bad idea, and I'll tell you why.

First of all, let me just state it's a political ploy aimed at getting votes, preying on those that accept at face value all the rhetoric of "listening to the hardworking people" and "sticking it to the big oil companies." It's a gimmick to win votes, because it won't work. What Clinton refuses to believe from her economic advisors is that it's not as simple as saying you're going to stick it to the oil companies this summer and put the money in the pockets of hard-pressed commuters. If you do indeed stick it to the oil companies, they will just raise the price to make up the difference, and they have done so in the past. Do you really think they're going to let $10 billion in lost sales just go and say "oh well"? Is an increase in demand going to make the cost cheaper? No, they're going to compensate by raising the price. And if they raise it 18 cents higher in the fall, why should they bump it back down again? Usually it goes down in fall (less demand) but what happened last year??

It will short the government $12 million in federal money, endanger over 300,000 jobs, and cause some people to forget that they should still be conserving their fuel, they should still be buying more fuel-efficient vehicles, and they should still move toward independence from oil. One rainstorm doesn't mean the drought is over.

Thirdly, and this is my favorite part: it won't save us squat. My daily commute to work is a numbing 32 miles one way, and amazingly that is near the national average. Clinton is really stretching her false hope over the underlying problem that eliminating the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal tax on gasoline will save the average American driver a whopping $30.00, period. 30 bucks...over three months. Sure, McCain, that might not seem like much to the weathly, but it sure as hell doesn't seem like much to me either, when that won't even buy me a flippin' tank of gas!

Here's a little extra credit, and your chance to prove to yourself and Hillary in particular that this isn't worth it. How much would YOU save?

Savings in 3 months by Proposed Tax Holiday =
$0.184 saved per gallon TIMES 65 workdays TIMES distance you drive to and from work each day DIVIDED BY your car's mpg

My car's mpg is 26.4 and I drive 64 miles to work and back, so I stand to save $28.99 at the cost of gas going up later to make up for that money I saved and our roads going to shit. What a bargain!!

"The dumbest thing I've heard in an awful long time."


Political Pandering

Intellectually dishonest

Check out this graph of the price fo gas over the last 3 years.

Super Busy Boi

That's me!!

The last few days have all just run right together. I've been running around, doing this and that, and not getting much more than a few hours of sleep here and there. After I got out of work Saturday at 3 AM I drove to Raleigh where I slept in my car for two hours before the start of a Microsoft convention. I was in conferences ALL DAY LONG yesterday and then I crashed at a local hotel for a few hours, stayed up for a few hours then crashed again for another three so I could drive home just in time for a doctor's appointment. In sum, sleep has been sparse and sporadic. ..... I'm nodding off now as I type.

The Microsoft convention was good. It was a launch event promoting Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. I checked out the SQL and VS meetings. The first was a quarter filled with grumpy, old washed up database administrators busy clutching their data in their arms and the second was packed wall-to-wall with a great mix of young, preppie, collegiate, yuppie, tatooed and the obvious computer geeks who responded to cool features with a collective "oooh" and to often with a vocalization of relief. (Some of the new features of Visual Studio 2008 really do lift a burden off our shoulders.) I felt right at home with them. =)

So sorry if my running around has left you with few posts. Maybe I can post some men to make it up to you? Hehe....