Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

chronicling life in a digital world

Who Hired This Guy??

Washington Post OK, sure, when ever you’ve got billions of dollars flowing around with out a check and balance system, there’s bound to be some corruption. Much has been made about the no-bid contracts, the mis-management of money by the Bremer lead provisional Authority, and finally formal charges have been levied. My question is this? Who their right mind hired this guy Stein to work their in the first place. Talk about fox in the hen house. Guy was found guilty of fraud in ‘96, spent some time in jail even. Hello!! He even paid some of his restitution from the previous crime with the kickbacks he got for this one. His wife paid taxes! 3 years late! I’d love, just love to know who he knew to get the job. And I’d like to hear how it wasn’t thought out on how to hire people to oversee REGIONS without proper background checks. This wasn’t a low level guy getting a few thousand dollars, this was a guy who got .5 million in kickbacks for fixing over 13 million in contracts, which never really were done. And the investigator says 50 more are being looked at. More examples of poor planning by the administration. Thank God though they were able to “negotiate” the deals with Haliburton months before the invasion…

Who Hired This Guy?? was published on Thursday, November 17, 2005 at 10:30pm and tagged Politics, my-site, rants and Iraq. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

Reality Check

One Foot in the GraveThis shit has just got to stop.

*EDIT Just to be clear, the link is to a soldier in Iraq who passed away a couple of weeks ago. You can read his last entry, and then in the comments, see the news. I highly suggest reading more of entries, and look at his bio page. That’s why I said this shit has just got to stop.

Reality Check was published on Sunday, August 28, 2005 at 3:12pm and tagged Politics, rants, Iraq and the-world-at-large. There is currently one comment to this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

When in Doubt, Lie

So I caught part of the President’s speech today at the VFW conference today, and as the pressure is mounting on both sides of the aisle (that was Republican Chuck Hagel, Vietnam Vet, saying that Iraq was looking more and more like Vietnam, right?), and what did I hear him invoke? Ah, the old September 11th mantra. Is he foolish enough to think that people are still buying that, or am I foolish enough to think people have seen through the smoke screen and realize that Iraq has nothing to do Sept 11. Either way, with all the bickering and jostling for election positions, the GOP sure isn’t sending a united message, and the Dems are still figuring out how Dean got elected to head the party. Meanwhile, I feel we are on a ship at 1/2 throttle with the wheel tied off so we just keep going in a big circle. Every once in a while, we see land, and think we are going to be ok, only to veer away, back to sea. Please, can we find someone, anyone, to stand up and take the wheel?

When In Doubt, Lie was published on Monday, August 22, 2005 at 1:55pm and tagged Politics, rants, Iraq and Bush. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

What Would You Do…5 Minutes Alone With Saddam?

While surfing through some blogs, I came across Iraqi Bloggers Central, and the lead post was the same question proposed to several persons, “What would you do if given 5 minutes alone with Saddam Hussein.” There are some poignant answers, some revealing answers, and then this one from Fayrouz:

I would make him wear a Hawaiian costume, force him to drink a shot of tequila — He likes Whisky — then ask him how it feels like to lose his two monstrous sons.
Just for fun, I’ll take Cuban cigars with me and NO, I won’t give him any.
This is my type of 5 minutes torture.

Now, I will say I don’t know who these persons are, where they live, and what direct involvement they have with the tumultuous events of the past few years in that country, but it certainly gave me a loud guffaw when I came across that one. As angered as I am by my countries “reasons” for becoming involved, and the loss of life on all sides, I have to feel that something good CAN come from this. However, with the recent announcement of ethnic militias being OKed, I fear that much more bloodshed will result before true “peace” is achieved.

What would you do...5 minutes alone with Saddam? was published on Wednesday, June 8, 2005 at 8:06pm and tagged Iraq, the-world-at-large and Saddam. There is currently one comment to this article. Share your thoughts by writing your own.

Is Anyone Really Paying Attention?

While everyone in the “E Entertainment” world is fixated on the Jackson trial, the real world is still sorting out the “hows” and “whys” of Iraq. Hundreds of people are dying daily, with scores of Americans in the weekly death tolls. And now amidst the recent British election, new allegations (not really new allegations, maybe new evidence). Read more here, at CNN.

Thanks to TLD for the link.

Is anyone really paying attention? was published on Thursday, May 12, 2005 at 12:41pm and tagged Politics, rants, Iraq and the-world-at-large. Respond to this article by writing the first comment.

← Previous 1 2 3 4 Next →

Just a guy wandering the intarwebs looking to make sense of life.

Watching my cousin get married over the web. Ain't technology grand.

Side Notes

I’m always on the prowl for cheap (read FREE) iPhone apps, and finding a simple source for such is no easy task, at least in my searches. Unfortunately, all the sites I’ve found that cover this type of information are so full of ads and poorly designed, it’s impossible to actually find anything useful. I have however recently discovered at dealmac.com a RSS feed specifically for discounted iPhone/iPod Touch apps.. I can’t say that I’ve actually found any great deals yet through it, (I haven’t had a chance to play the recent “Let’s Golf!” game posted today), but it’s a start. And don’t get me wrong, I have no problem paying for a quality app, and do so with perhaps too regular of frequency, but still like finding a deal when I can, especially on games, which I know I’ll only play a few times, or very rarely.
Do you have any sites or feeds that you’d care to share? Tips on finding apps on sale?
permalink
I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon by a comment left here on the site that my first Habari theme, Mzingi, had been ported to another CMS, WolfCMS. Though I’ve since passed Mzingi off to the official Habari project, and is now owned by the community and part of the official download, it’s a bit rewarding to see it deemed worthy of porting. You can see a demo of it in action as a WolfCMS theme.
It’s also nice they gave attribution on the official site. I’d not heard of the project before, seems like a young project that is a fork of another CMS project, but their site describes the project as something akin to Habari.
permalink
It’s always great to see new themes released for Habari, even if they are ports. Florian has ported the WordPress theme Clean Home to Habari. The theme’s name aptly describes the design, a clean, black and white two column design with contrasting red headings. The theme seems to be coded for trunk, that is, using the areas feature. One thing I noticed is that the theme still has some cruft from WP, calling for a dynamic sidebar (widgets) with some text that also references a text widget and and admin options. I of all people can understand though of wanting to get something out before working out all the kinks, so I’m sure he’ll update it as soon as the areas/blocks feature is fleshed out a bit more. I also don’t speak German, so it’s quite possible he references that in the post announcing the release.
permalink
You’d think “Canada’s best magazine”, The Walrus would at least link back to my bookmarks if they are going to use my graphics in their post about Infinite Summer. Heck, they didn’t even change the name of the image from the 5x bookmark file. Real professional Nav, real professional…
At least they didn’t just hotlink to the image in my post.
permalink
I’ve recently been using Safari 4 beta, mostly because I had been too lazy to get more RAM, and Firefox was just too damn slow with all the apps I’d have open on only 1 gig. Now that I’m at 4 gigs, I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox, especially with the comments I’ve been reading about the speed improvements of the next version (3.5??). Another reason I’ve been contemplating going back to Firefox is that Firebug is just far superior to Safari’s built in inspector. To that end, I’ve recently come across two add-ons for Firebug.
The first, Firefinder, is a handy tool to “find HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression”.
The second is one that Google previously used internally. Today they open sourced it and released, Page Speed. Page Speed allows developers to “evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.”
permalink

Theme Development

I have moved all of my theme development to Beanstalk. If you would like to check out the full svn repository, you can checkout from http://blogworks.svn.beanstalkapp.com/themes.

Recent Changes

Miklb's Mindless Ramblings is proudly hosted on

Stop Spam Harvesters, Join Project Honey Pot