Toluu

Conveniently Misplaced

Musings from the mind of John Cruz

Coming HomeDecember 27 2008

Back in February, I wrote about how I was still on the fence about finding my political home (Time To Come Home. But where is home?), torn between the Libertarian party I’ve been part of since 2001, and the Republican Party with I’ve only become involved in within the past year.

Well folks, after almost a year of deep consideration, I’ve decided that I will not be renewing my membership in the Libertarian Party next April when my years dues are up. A lot of factors went into this decision, but here are my main points.

• In the GOP, rising to power means you will realistically be able to accomplish something. For example, your influence on candidates, the people at large and policy is greater. Basically, saying you’re a “higher up” in the GOP gives you a lot more cloud, within the party and outside, than being a higher ranked person in a third party.
• The people you meet will be able to do a lot more for you as far as people to volunteer, make phone calls and raise money. Even as a Ron Paul republican, I’ve met a lot of people who have been more than willing to help as long as we can do each other right, even if they were McCain, Guliani, or Bush supporters.
• The elections can actually focus on trying to WIN the seat you’re running for. The biggest problems within the LP was that every year we struggle to raise money just to try to make seemingly

Wordpress Upload WoesDecember 20 2008

I love using Wordpress, but this has really bugged me. It’s when three parties who all intertwine come together and neither has a solution. Flash 10 has broken the upload part of Wordpress, and that is ridiculously frustrating.

Here’s the problem: in Wordpress, there’s a little application that powers the upload feature, SWFupload. That’s powered by Javascript and Flash. The new version of Flash Player 10 recognizes me clicking “upload” as a security issue and says “no” when I tried to upload something.

That sucks.

So I went to go check out why and essentially, Adobe made a decision about this that wasn’t fixed SWFupload nor were Wordpress users notified. You just update your Flash player and now nothing works. Essentially, other users of SWFupload have this same issue.

There’s a ridiculous patch for SWFupload in Wordpress available here, if you’re really keen on patching a bunch of files and hoping they work, debugging, etc. I don’t have that kind of time, so luckily, someone made a patch with a new Beta version of SWFupload, but it was only for Wordpress 2.6.3.

Granted a good deal of us have already upgraded to 2.7, and I’m still on 2.5.

So I had to find the legacy version 2.6.3 (available here), upgrade to that, then apply the patch to g

Fastest. Shipping. EverDecember 20 2008

I gotta admit, I’m pretty impressed with what YesAsia.com did for me. This is pretty awesome.

Hi, this is GingerDecember 11 2008

So here’s a funny little story. I met a girl the other day who was talking about making calls over the political season for candidates. She said that her and the other girl she was working with found out that men responded better if you had a name like a stripper or a phone sex operator, and if they got a woman on the phone automatically they were married and just watned to plead for a vote.

So they looked up the top stripper names or something like that and decided that one of them would be “Ginger” and another one would be “Piper”. Apparently the tactic worked pretty well as far as getting people to respond. 

At the time I thought it was pretty humerous and enjoyed the stories. Here’s the kicker: yesterday I was doing some bank shopping for a new account, so I called Bank of America. I hear the little “your call me be recorded” message and a sultry voice answer the phone:

Hi, this is Ginger, how can I help you today?

I almost laughed the girl right off the phone.

Following SuitDecember 9 2008

 Today I sued the governor of Michigan. Here’s how it happened.

Last week at the county GOP convention I talked briefly with my revolutionary comrade Paul about a suit he was going to file, he wanted to get some people together on Sunday and discuss it, and see if anyone else wanted to be listed as plaintiffs. As a result of a system moderation issue, the email he sent out on Thursday about meeting on Sunday never went out, so nothing came of that. I had put it in the back of my mind and just let it go.

Then Paul calls me this morning and asks if I still want a part of the lawsuit. So I asked him to fax it over so I could look at it. After I did and checked all the constitutional stuff it refrences, I decided to go for it and told him i’d be a co-plaintiff and would ride out to Lansing to file the suit.

Here’s the kicker: there are three defendents, Jennifer Granholm Governor of Michigan, The Republican National Comittee, and the Democratic National Comittee.

Why would we do such a thing you ask? The suit, in more simple terms attacks the validity of appointed electors and says that neither Barack Obama o