Support for Shall Issue Legislation in Maryland

This petition is an effort to get Maryland legislature to react and hopefully pass or at the very least discuss "Shall Issue" concealed weapons laws. If you live in MD and would like to support it please by all means do so and feel free to push your friends to do so as well.

Some additional gun control vs. violent crime stats.

I'm posting this information primarily due to a debate on engadget.com where a post I made was challenged as non-factual (basically I said gun control doesn't mean lower violent crime and in fact tends to increase it). All of these stats came from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm so I'm not using biased data sources such as the NRA.

Enjoy:

Chart including DC and it's surrounding areas for violent crime for the last several years, grouped by gun laws.


Source data behind the above chart.

Interesting statistics from the FBI and the Brady Campaign People

I collected some statistics from the fbi's website on violent crime rates (which ARE population compensated, crime rate defines number of crimes per 100,000 people) I also found that the Brady people seem to be into ranking states and giving them scores on their gun control laws (higher score means tighter gun laws and therefore "better" in the eyes of the Brady Campaign people). The Brady folks also compare them to other states which is what the rank means, note they do allow "ties" so that's why numbers repeat.

Anyway, quick summary the 7 "best" states according to the Brady folks all are in the top 25 in terms of violent crime, of the ten states with the LOWEST violent crime rates only one of them (Rhode Island) is considered a "good" state by the Brady folks.

Anyway, below is the data decide for yourself.

Fantastic news report

This is from 20/20 and really goes into some good facts concerning gun control, specifically how historically it has been proven that more gun control == more violent crime.

Better Comments on Blogger!?

I noticed on someone else's random blog that they spammed this morning on digg (grrr) that their comments were appearing inline as opposed to the super lame pop-up method that used to be default and apparently the only way to have comments. I dug around in the settings and found something that may change it but I'm thinking it only works on new posts... soooo let's see do the comments appear inline?

New Service to Find/Stream TV Shows

Given the limited time that I have available to chase my tail trying to figure out where to get TV shows from on the Internet, this is a somewhat compelling service. They are trying to put some "community" around loving TV shows (meh), but the big feature for me is that they aggregate links to movie streams and downloads in a variety of formats, whether it be Bit-Torrent, iTunes, or some other means. They're also talking about integrating with your Netflix account. And to top it all off, they recommend Safari and Firefox before IE - yay!

http://www.tioti.com/

The True Secret Behind Web 2.0

Let this be a lesson to all of us in how the proper development environment can yield fantastic results in the end product. I will personally be doing a lot more testing on this theory to properly fine-tune my own, personal sweet spot. Cheers!

http://xkcd.com/323/

I love me some Fios

Color me impressed:







Very fast... So far much more pleased than I was with Comcast, of course I've only had it for a day.

Something is missing from the interwebs

I didn't start this to be a blog, I started it to see if it could possibly be a useful way for me and my friends to collect and share useful tidbits of information with each other. The idea was not to have any specific topic for the site information could range from recipes (as in food) to useful bits of css/js code to a good way to get rid of a giant hornet's nest (more on that later if I feel like it).

I've had various suggestions to use existing things out there: wikis, blogs (hence this page), etc. none of them really seem to fit the bill of what I'm looking to create. Any other ideas out there or do is this truly something missing?

Blogger comments system

Am I the only person that despises the comment system here? It really eats it that to see comments on posts you have to open a new window.... Post your thoughts in the annoying comments section!

More oobgolf stuff

I'm really having fun with oobgolf these days. They are adding a lot of nice features and the guys (Andrew and Kevin) are very responsive to any issues or new feature ideas you have. Here's a sample of what you can embed in a blog. As you can see from the right it's not friendly to re-size but I'm working on something a little better with their XML feed for this site shortly. If you haven't checked out oobgolf you definitely should.

Bandwidth testing

Found a new bandwidth tester (well new to me anyway). The layout is nice and it's very easy to choose where you want to test to go from as they have a pretty cool graphical interface. My test to NYC is as follows:



Someone who lives around the Central Pennsylvania area please post your results if you are on Verizon FIOS as I'm considering a switch.

Margaritas

This is margaritas as they should be, which of course starts with them being on the rocks and never frozen, if you want a slurpee go to seven-eleven.

Ingredients:

1. 1/2 cup of lime juice fresh squeezed from actual limes
2. 1/2 cup of lemon juice fresh squeezed from actual lemons
3. zest of 3 limes
   
4. zest of 2 lemons
   
5. 1/4 cup of superfine sugar (superfine matters, use a food processor to make it if you need to)
6. 1 cup 100% agave reposado tequila (I've had good luck with Sauza which isn't too expensive)
7. 1 cup Triple Sec (I use bols)
8. 2 cups of crushed ice
9. a pinch of salt (use kosher salt)

Steps:

1. Combine the lemon & lime juices, lemon & lime zest, sugar and salt in a container and cover with plastic wrap or a lid if you had the foresight to use a container that has one. Shake or stir to dissolve the sugar and salt.
   
2. Put the above mixture in the fridge for a minimum of 4 hours, ideally overnight.
3. Put 1 cup of the ice into your serving glasses
4. Put the other cup of ice into a pitcher or shaker, strain the juice mixture into the pitcher or shaker (you don't want the zest), add the tequila and triple sec. Shake or stir to chill, pour, consume.

If you need to make these in a hurry leave the zest out and don't bother with step 2, they won't be as good but they will still be far better than any pre-mix margarita you buy. For zesting you will use a microplane. 2-3 limes and/or lemons is around 1/2 cup of juice, buy more make a double batch more margaritas = good. I use a Presto Lemonade making device for juicing things, very convenient and good for making other citrus based beverages, it has marks for each 1/4 quart and as 1/4 quart = 1 cup it's awfully convenient for this recipe.

Decent golf score tracking site

John Daly found this nice golf score tracking site oobgolf. Seems pretty nice so far, stores course information for you so once you enter a course you don't have to do it again and also supports usage of mobile phones for uploading round information.