I also have been terribly busy with school. I am currently trying to write a policy review on something from the Social Security Administration. It is really hard to track down stuff beside the laymen level explanations. I am slowly getting there.

President Obama’s first press conference, courtesy of C-SPAN. Mainly about the economic stimulus package. I am not 100% on his ideas. I believe that while it is good that he is wanting to give money to the people. However, I think that it is important that citizens should begin saving again… It is a long video, but is worth the watch.

Technorati Tags: press conference, obama, president

One way I can tell is the default notification on where you are at if via keyboard navigation, is gone. I personally rely on this quite heavily. If I know I need to hit Tab 10 times to get somewhere, I am forced to count now, versus watching visually. Another thing is since I have the wp.com stat plugin activated, the cursor is by default is placed in the login box for that. While it is cool that I can login with just hitting enter, since that password is saved, but my focus is now halfway down the page. Where will I be located after a few tabs? Who really knows.

The sad thing about this is, I was asked my opinion if WordPress would be a good option for a blind user. At the time, I was still running 2.6.* and said it’s ok, not the best thing to use. I added that if the said user was considered a power user, they could make it work. I don’t think this will be the case anymore. Like I said, this is sad, so many people are using WordPress not only for bloggin but things like a CMS! It is shame that the dev team doesn’t adhere to standards. Going off that, it says they have no interest is accessibility. You can stretch that out to include usability even.

My birthday is coming up, it is actually this Saturday. Yes, the 14^th. My mom, her boyfriend, and my sister are coming up most likely for lunch or dinner. Mom wants to do something at Pike Place Market, but considering it was snowing a little bit ago, we’ll see what happen.:)

Anyhow, I saw that at Sat Feb 14 01:31:30 EET 2009, the Unix time for the given date is: 1234567890, unfortunately that’s only 3 in the afternoon on Friday (Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 PST 2009) here in Seattle. I was so close!

Hi Ryan,

We have investigated the issue that you describe, and have determined that this error is caused by the firewall on your computer. Sometimes computer software will block sites that are important for Facebook to operate. If you temporarily disable your firewall before making profile changes, this should resolve the issue.

Let me know if you continue to experience problems after attempting this solution.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

xxxxx
User Operations
Facebook

I wrote back to them saying how utterly ridiculous such a solution is. I said that if you hovered over the link, the link pointed to home.php, and no firewall can intelligently redirect a link unless I had hand-coded it. I also informed him that for a firewall to block a firewall, the link would have to be something along the lines of: http://iam.goingto.spamyou.com/, then your firewall would nullify the link OR give you some warning message.

Of course I didn’t stop there, I asked why Facebook was telling people to disable their firewall to use their product. Doesn’t sound right to me. Thoughts?

I was going through my bag, and pulled out my usb drive case, and there it was. The usb plug and the chip had came off from the casing, and looked like it had been like that for a while. I went ahead and plugged it in to see what would happen.

The drive was found by XP, but all the files were corrupted. On top of that, in the minute it was plugged in, it got hotter than I could imagine. If I was in dire need, I could probably reformat the drive and use some super glue.

I just updated my Twitter account, and saw that it was hacked via a TechCrunch tweet. I replied to the post, and I said the following.

Sorry but this made me laugh to be honest… Yeah it sucks that they got hacked. But seriously who cares who got hacked, what is the different between a Barack account vs mine vs Joe Smoe vs a friend of mine who isn’t technical at all? I would surely hope that ‘nothing’ would be the answer. Hopefully the Twitter team gets it dealt with.

To step on the Barack’s account being hacked, I just have to laugh. I am hoping most people know that it isn’t actually Mr Obama updating Twitter. I know 5 or so people who worked on his campaign and knew where Obama was within a few hour block.

To continue on, I would need some kind of proof from Mr. Obama saying that he, himself updates his twitter. This should be in the form of a video. However, how could we know it is legit? Most people know president’s and the like have professional speech writers. Ok so that won’t work. Oh! We could have a video of Obama logging in and makiing a tweet. Nope, that won’t work as well. We wouldn’t be able to tell if he was given the instructions 5 minutes before.

Throwing that aside, and there is some way that shows Obama updates his Twitter account himself, it would be quite saddening. During his campaign I recall him saying that being the president is an around the clock job, and he’s willing to work all 24 hours. Taking time to update Twitter is not an acceptable use of time in my mind.

Technorati Tags: twitter, obama, social networking, hack

The class I had the final on was U.S.-China Relations. To most, this seems like a horrifying topic area, but it wasn’t too bad. Only one of the guys, showed up to the Monday morning session. I think the others wanted it to be a literal last minute cram. Since I took the exam before other people, I don’t know if the other two-three showed up. While I spent 8-10 hours on Sunday studying, I was still a bit anxious/nervous 20-30 minutes before the exam, even though I could inter-connect the terms that could be, which was all but two or three.

When I got the exam in front of me, I had a wave of relief came over me. for most parts. The exam had three parts: questions regarding articles in the New York Times, a few terms that had to be defined, then an essay. In the study group, we had covered all the terms and essay prompts pretty in depth. I had gotten up around 5:45 Monday morning. I had just started to review the NYT stuff when I went to have the morning session. Figuring out what articles are important since late October is a bit hard to do. On the terms, I think I did all right, I would have preferred to do some of the others, but what can you do, eh? The essay was the part I was the most nervous about, and that is the part I was the most confident about at the end. I ended up typing a page and a quarter, just about 700 words. The thing I felt great about is that I didn’t BS at all, I guess the conclusion could be a smidge better.

Now back to studying. –Ryan

1. Wait a minute, I thought the “My Web History” stuff was supposed to rearrange stuff for me – yes I know SearchWiki is instantaneously.
2. I thought marking a result as a bookmark also does this.
3. How do I undelete/unremove a search? It’s bound to happen, "Shoot! I meant to hit bump, but I hit the x". I didn’t see an undo button anywhere
4. How much extra do screen reader users have to listen to?
5. Can I turn this off? Kind of cluttersome
6. Are bumped results tied to Google Bookmarks?
7. Will bumped results from all users affect general search results?
8. What happened to the Google Bookmarks or rather, where’d the bookmark star go?

I am sure more will arise, but that is just a few. I know I may find the comments handy to use. Then again, if I added a result as a bookmark, I usually added a comment to it.

Technorati Tags: google, searchwiki

I come to you not as a McCain supporter, or Obama supporter, but as an individual who put facts together. This will be quite harsh of an entry, and will seem like I am a disgruntled McCain supporter. I am whole-heartily not. I already had a person I went to college with call me a piece of shit for not being a pro-Obama guy. So let’s begin.

I am quite sad that the United States has picked Barack Obama for the 44^th President of the United States. Basically he is the lesser of two evils, in my mind. I am not saying that Obama is an evil man or whatever negative connotation you want to spin on it. What I am saying, is out of the two main candidates, he is the better one. Although I do not think that he will be a good president at this moment.

In late 2007/early 2008 I did a few posts regarding the hype surrounding Obama was throwing his hat in to run. I thought it was pretty awesome that this could happen. So what turned my thumbs down? A few things actually. Before there was only two candidates I really wasn’t happy with the selection. Second, Obama’s policies/policy views did not sit well with me. Third, I only was able to watch the third presidential debate, the last time the candidates could address the people. Following that debate, it was a big slap in the face, I thought to myself, crap, this will not be good. One reason for this is his universal health care policy.

While I admit, I didn’t follow things at the end of last year due to my busy schedule. After I heard what his plan was, I couldn’t do anything else, but laugh. From what I recall from the debate is: if your employer offers some sort of health care coverage, you have to take it. If you are unemployed, you can get on the “universal health care plan.”

How does it effect you?

I can see a number of ways. If you are currently covered, you are out of luck. Well I am guessing that the laws will be pretty damn detailed. Companies will try upping their health care eligibility, so that while company x is offering health care, but John Smith cannot be covered. The huge possibility of John getting lost in the system. That will leave who knows how many people with the decision of if I work, no health care; and if I quit, I can get health care (let us just say 6 months). Which is better? As the federal system will grow, it will seek outside help, ie, go to the private companies. Since the government cannot just say American’s now have to pay [more] to the federal system, the insurance companies will say okay and turn to the private companies, and raise the rates. In order to basically stay afloat, the companies will push this onto employees, and the system starts over again.

I did not read the whole thing, there is an article in the Washington Post about Obama’s nominees for various positions that have been announced/leaked. I am a little shocked that names are coming forward.

Technorati Tags: obama