Month: March 2006
Here is an interesting idea Let the prisoners pick the fruit one of the arguments for allowing illegal immigrants into the country is that US citizens do not want to do certain types of jobs like picking fruit, landscaping and other hard labor type jobs. So the thought is lets make the prisoners be more productive members of society.
I have meaning to post this for a while. If you have some money sitting in a bank account not earning much interest then I recommend Zions Bank’s Internet Money Market. They are currently offering 4.2%. I have been using them for about 2 years and had zero problems and their interest rate has been consitently high compared to other money market accounts. If you need to make a withdrawl you can phone them up and they will mail you a check or you can open up a free checking account so can move money into the checking account then write checks or use their free online bill pay.
For each person I refer I get a $25 referal bonus, so if you are interested let me know and will give you the info needed so I can get the $$ 🙂
https://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2105404,00.html
Across Scotland, smokers resigned themselves to the new restrictions. John Mckenzie, 80, a veteran of the Korean War and a smoker for 60 years, said in a pub on Dumbarton Road, Glasgow: I never thought Id see the day when a simple pleasure like having a fag with your pint would be against the law.
The only thing that is likely to get up people’s noses is the smell: without the smoke to cover it up, most drinkers will suddenly realise that, after eight pints of beer, their odours are far from attractive and unlikely to win them success at “smirting” — the new craze of smoking and flirting which is expected to give a lift to many a jaded love life outside pub doors.
This is funny since I noticed the same thing in a non smoking bar in Baltimore, you can smell the farts across the bar.
I discovered why my vmware server virtual machines were running so slow. In Vitual Machine Settings, options, advanced there is a little ticket box that says run with debugging. I missed this since you can only change it when the VM is not running. Now my Asterisk and Windows XP VMs are running super fast.
The senate committe has passed a bill 12-6 for a new immgration program. Lets see what happens when it goes to the full senate.
This is going to be interesting to see what happens with the immigration law.
Washington Post
After working inside the system for 8 years I object to any kind of amnisty that allows people to switch from legal to legal without first leaving the country. If they introduce a cheap way to stay in the US then I want the option of using that as well. I have heard that one possibility is that before being able to convert you must pay back taxes, social security etc. This is a good idea but since the people were paid under the table in the first place how would you prove how much they were paid. It would be easier to assume that each person earn 2x min wage x40 hours a week for however long they have been in the US. The next question is how long do you say that someone has been in the US? Again there is no documented date of entry so I could just say I came across the border yesterday.
The USCIS would need to come up with an easy way to to check legal status. Then it would be easy for employeers to check that visa is valid. Then again how do you prove that a US citizen is a US citizen. This basically comes down to a birth certificate and each state issues their own and have probably changed the forms multiple times over the last 90 years. So even that becomes almost improssible.
All I know is that the legal way to stay in the US is broken. I have been waiting since sept 2002 for my labor cert (proves that my company can’t hire a US citizen) which is the first stage in getting an employment based greencard. Its 4 years later and don’t want to spend another 2 years waiting for a greencard. My last H1b extension was filed in September and it was approved last week, that six months for a 1 year visa.
I have been using vmware player for a few months now and was very impressed so I tried the free vmware server at work and now at home. The is server version is the one I really want to use. It allows you to run multiple instances and have them bootup and shutdown with the host computer. I have been noticing some serious hard disk slowness on the server at work. I was originally putting it down to a slow raid driver on linux but after whiching asterisk from vmware player to server this week I am going to blame vmware server. Asterisk was running very well with vmplayer but with server the cpu is sitting at a load of 2-3. Anything above 1 is bad news in linux land. I just created a new instance using asterisk@home 2.7 to see if anything has changed, otherwise I am flipping it back to vmware player till server comes outof beta. I have heard that the debug code in the beta server is to blame for a large chunk of the slowness.
One of my firends sent me this link
