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Friday, March 13, 2009 

4,000 views
Category: Life

8:52 PM 

Woohoo! I'm a radical!

OK, first a few geocaching pictures.  This is the site of a multistage geocache.  Stage 1 has the coordinates for stage 2. 
Care to guess where stage 1 is located?





If you guessed in here, you guessed correctly.  I'm really a bit large for this space, so I basically had to crawl, although
there was plenty of room for me to do that.





About half of the way through the tunnel, I guess maybe 15 feet from the entrance (GPS receivers don't work so well in
underground concrete tunnels), is this piece of duct tape with the coordinates to stage 2, which is nearby on the
surface.  If you want to know exactly where, you're going to have to crawl through the culvert and find the tape.





Sadly, times are not good for the theater.  I proved the rule "you can't shout 'fire!' in a crowded theater" here.  You can,
in fact, shout fire in a crowded theater.  People near enough to hear you over the din look at you like you a nut and the
rest of the people are too absorbed in their own shouting to pay any attention. 





That was the weekend.  I burned a day of vacation on a Friday to travel down to D.C.  This is a stairwell in the parking
deck at the Shady Grove metro stop.  Sometimes my ideas of what to take pictures of are strange.





Sure, my crawling through a culvert seemed odd, but what does this remind you of?  At least I can walk through here.
And there isn't a two inch thick layer of mud (well, let's hope most of it is mud) on the ground.





Ah, the metro map.  I can usually take the red line wherever I want to go.  But this day I had to transfer.  Well,
maybe I didn't have to, but I did.





I was at the back of the train.  Which actually turned out to be the front.





So I read the Washington Times that somebody had donated to the train while it transported me downtown and on to another
which landed me at the Farragut West station, supposedly the closest to Lafayette Park.





What was there?  The Washington Tea Party rally!  Woohoo!  I'm a radical!





For real!  Here's the man!  Admittedly the man in this case is a woman.  And she's a K-9 officer, which is cool, but I
mean . . . umm . . . they brought the hounds to unleash on us!  I missed taking a picture of the other dude.  He was SWAT.  And, umm,
they were both leaving as I got there.  Or taking more secure positions.  I don't know, I stopped paying attention to them
once I was in the crowd.





There was a respectable crowd.





Young and old people.





Some very young!





The rally was a protest over the ridiculous spending bills being passed by Congress.





There were plenty of American flags (some older than others).





And there were lots of fun signs!  Sad you missed them?  Oh, well, then you are in luck!





Let's start with this young girl.  Her future is already spent, of course. 





Condemning the ridiculous bailouts and onerous tax burden they will shackle us with was the order of the day.





Seriously!  The Soviet Union had a command economy ruled by bureaucrats.  I mean, I know it died like 15 whole
years ago, but Obama and company should be old enough to remember that this stuff is bound to fail!





A bit off topic, maybe, but oh so true.  Al Gore will be happy to leave his mansion and fly on his private
jet to tell you how to live.  All to do something which amounts to nothing to solve a problem which doesn't
exist!





This sign got me thinking.  Taxation without representation.  I know we have representation.  But you know who
doesn't?





If you said D.C. residents, you need to read the Constitution.  But if you said kids and future generations, then
you get it.  If they're lucky enough to escape the Democrats when they come after them in the womb, then they
can look forward to a lifetime of debt thanks to these awful spending bills.  Do the future generations have any
say over how this money of theirs is being spent?  No.  Is that right?  No.  Why do Republicans in general and
conservatives in particular always wind up being the voice for people who really need help?





I know the Republicans have their fair share of the blame, especially under President Bush.  But the arrogance of
this Democrat Congress is amazing.





Read the Constitution.  Good advice.





Unfortunately, this is more like it.





Economist protestors!  There were lots of anti-Fed people at the rally.





The guy who organized the rally said there were 300 pig balloons but the park service wouldn't allow them in Lafayette park.  So
note that if you are having a rally there, balloons are a non-starter.  Inflammatory signs are OK, though!





This guy had three signs!  But like the one says, I guess he has time.





Don't Tread On Me!  Wisely, though, the adult has opted for a stuffed snake versus a live rattlesnake.





This guy had everything.  A sign, a T-shirt, a button, and a tri-corner hat!





This guy, too, was obviously a contender.





There were fiddlers, too!  They were young, but they were pretty good.  Probably home-schooled.





Oh yes, I was among friends in the belly of the beast.  Or given the unmitigated gall of the elected representatives,
maybe it's the liver.





Lafayette Park is across the road from the White House.  I also got harassed by the man for trying to attach my
tripod to the fence to take a steady picture of the White House.  Well, actually, the bike cop that came up to me
was rather polite and told me in a quiet, civil tone that I couldn't attach it to the fence.  But still!  Heh.  I
bothered the Capitol police.  I hope they are ready for the next wacko with a gun as much as they were for me and
my little camera tripod.  Ready, well, and considerably less polite.





Well, for most people, this was a lunchtime rally.  Like I said, I had to take off work to come down to D.C.  The
rally was starting to break up around 1:30, so I went to Chinatown to get something to eat.  And where do I eat
in Chinatown?





At Fuddrucker's, of course.  I ate here when I came down the D.C. Convention Center the last time, too.





After Fuddrucker's, on my way home, I wanted to stop by the Omni Shoreham Hotel.





What was in the Omni this day, you ask?





CPAC, of course.  I saw more than one person at the Tea Party wearing a CPAC
lanyard.





Like I said, it was kind of on the way home, I didn't have a ticket to any of the events of CPAC, although I
did get passed in the hall by Ann Coulter and her entourage.  I wandered around the hotel some, including out back.





The back of the Omni is a really nice oasis. 





Well, that about wraps up my day in D.C.  I headed back home in early rush hour traffic, which for a Friday
night really wasn't all that bad.  Being in D.C. surrounded by conservatives was fun.  I just have to remind
myself that it is not that way.  At all.  Maybe one day . . . .

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 

Woohoo! I'm a radical!
Category: Life

11:32 PM 

Perl Code

Below is the Perl script I used to help me create an index to all of my MySpace blog entries so far. It extracts information from saved copies of the pages and spits out table entries I can use to help build the index.

Unfortunately, doubtless due to security concerns, the MySpace blog HTML editor scrambles certain characters if they are placed next to each other and refuses to encode a backslash.  So I had to resort to picture files to show the code in its proper form.

On the plus side, I found out tonight that MySpace has put up a bunch of songs on the profile for Front 242. I guess they've been slowly adding all artists and are now getting around to some of the more obscure ones I listen to, albeit obscure is a relative term.  I'm listening to the album Front By Front, which was first released the year I graduated high school, and then reissued the year I graduated college.  That means it is way old!

Sunday, March 01, 2009 

Perl Code
Category: Web, HTML, Tech

12:13 AM