codemonkeyx.org

I feel strongly about who is appointed to the Supreme Court, so I have provided some links to information about Samuel Alito and ask that you please take the time to let your respective Congressional and Senatorial representatives know how you feel. I tried to dig up as many different views as possible. With that said here are some links. I encourage you to read both sides of the story, make a decision based on the information available, and express those views to the appropriate parties. If your interested in my views on the Alito nomination then read the entire article.

For Alito:
Boy Scout Blogger
Why Alito’s the Man for the True Conservative Agenda
JudgeAlito.com
Against Alito:
Think Progress
Alito’s America
Pro-choice America
People Of Faith Will Oppose Samuel Alito
Impartial Information:
Samuel Alito
Samuel Alito Supreme Court Nomination

Be Heard:
I Support Alito
I Oppose Alito

So why attempt to hide my views until now? Well I did so in the hopes that it would draw in people from both sides of the fence, and thus give me a chance to express my opinion and attempt to convince a wider audience that Samuel Alito is not a good choice for Supreme Court Justice.I will try to keep this short. After researching a bit I discovered only one reason to support Alito for a lifetime Supreme Court nomination

1. Experience. 15 in the Circuit Courts and 30 years of various related experience.

The only other reason I could find was that he was a Conservative and would push those views at every opportunity. Since I don’t agree with most of those views this of course became a big detractor. Feel free to let me know of a good reason that I may have missed. I will take it into consideration and post it.

I found quite a few more reasons to oppose him though.

1. There exist an abundance of people who have the requisite experience, making this particular quality ‘not so special’.
2. I absolutely hate conservatism, liberalism, and other labels that tend to lock people into particular views to the point of blinding them to anything else. I believe that a Supreme Court Justice should never go into anything decision making process knowing already how he/she is going to vote. They should look at every case as if they had never seen one like it before, review the case and then compare it to other previously decided cases to help put it in perspective.
3. Alito is clearly ‘pro-life’. And by ‘pro-life’ I mean against reproductive rights for women. He has made this abundantly clear many times. I believe my wife and both of my daughters should have rights over their bodies.
4. He would likely attempt to get rid of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Why? Corporation don’t like it.
5. He supported the unauthorized strip search of a mother and her 10 year old daughter by law enforcement while executing a search warrant that only authorized the searching of a man and his home. I don’t know about you, but I would go absolutely ballistic if anyone, for any reason strip searched my daughters and subjected them to that kind of humiliation.
6. He clearly supports racial discrimination and would allow employers of the hook by essentially leaving the judges decision in the employers hands “immuniz[ing] an employer from the reach of Title VII if the employer’s belief that it had selected the ‘best’ candidate was the result of conscious racial bias.” [Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 1997]
7. Disability-based discrimination: In Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania, the majority said the standard for proving disability-based discrimination articulated in Alito’s dissent was so restrictive that “few if any…cases would survive summary judgment.” [Nathanson v. Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1991]

I just stumbled upon this on slashdot.org. DIY Projector Plans released under the Creative Commons License are available via BitTorent download here.

I’ve been quietly watching and fantasizing about building my own projector from inexpensive and readily available components for quite sometime. I remember when I first saw plans like this selling on eBay and wondered if it was really worth it. I was sure that making a projector would be possible, I just wasn’t sure if it was feasible. After reading this PDF I will definitely be taking the next $400-600 dollars of entertainment money from our budget and building one for the second floor in our house.

While reading the document I reached a section that addressed the issues of the LCD usually having only a VGA port style input and most home entertainment devices only having Coaxial, s-video, or Composite outputs. And began chasing ideas of getting a converter, but then remembered that at the heart of my ultimate entertainment center (in my head) lies MythTV and Linux. Then like a little movie all these great little projects began flashing through my mind from years past. Mini ITX motherboards, The Open Embedded Project, various inspiring case mods, projects and tidbits from Make Magazine, my serious lack of experience and know how in electronics.

So I have decided that this will be the next project I will be working on. I am going to design an all in one DIY Projector and MythTV setup in and self contained unit. In my mind (with only a couple of minutes of casual consideration) it will only require a power cable and a Coaxial cable, although it might also be nice if it had a network cable running to it so that databases and external sources of video and audio are available. It could likely use with a wireless network card, but will have to consider bandwidth utilization of various video and audio formats to see if it can ride on the existing wireless network or should put on a separate wireless network.

Anyway…I will be posting the results of my venture into the DIY Projector/Home Entertainment Center project as I go along. If the successive post suddenly stop then I’m probably having too much fun to post, and if they change direction then my incredibly short attention span is probably being diverted away by my family or something else more interesting at the moment.

I was all excited about wiring my house with CAT5 when I first moved in, and stayed motivated up through getting my first run installed. After that the love affair was over.

Soon after getting the first run installed, I realized that there is no clear or easy path to run the rest of the wire through out the rest of the house. All of the walls that I can reach are insulated, and all of the interior walls that are not insulated are impossible to reach with out pulling out sheet rock and insulation. What to do?

[tangent]Every time I mention this to anyone the first and obvious answer is wireless. Believe me I thought of that already and as a matter of fact that is already capart of the grand scheme. However wireless alone will not be enough. I need more throughput than wireless offers. Not much more but the paltry 10Mbits that 802.11b offers will choke when I’m backing up data or streaming video across the network from say a file server, and/or moving various large files
around such as CD/DVD ISOs. 802.11g would be sufficient @ ~50Mbit, but should an 802.11b device connect to the access point then everything slows down to 10Mbits. I want the network to be as accessible as possible. In order to keep my primary throughput from hitting the floor when an 802.11b device enters the picture, I have decided to get a second access point to serve 802.11b/g and then set the existing access point to only allow 802.11g. Since this helps us avoid a network wide slowdown when an 802.11b device is introduced we have partially solved our problem.[/tangent]

Ok, now that that’s over with lets get back to the original post; running CAT5 through the insulated exterior walls. Ultimately the only major issue with running the cable is getting a run through a single point from the top floor to the bottom floor. Once that is done, I can easily run cable to any point on the first floor via the crawl space under the house. I was thinking that I could use some sort of tube, and feed that down from an accessible point on the top floor down to the an accessible point on the bottom floor. But I’m still not completely convinced that this will work as well as it sounds. I’m also concerned about the network cable running past electrical wires that might cause interference. I suppose I could probably find an insulated tube. In any case it ultimately feels like a hacked up solution. But supposing that this works, and I get the first floor run I still have the top floor to deal with.
Since some of the rooms have zero accessible space around them on all side, and the other rooms have zero accessible space on the walls where I would like to install the cable. Short of re-sheet rocking the offending walls in these rooms and their respective ceilings how would you attack this problem?