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Long Night–Democracy Safe… For Now… Toast to PEBHO

by ThePete 3:32 am 2008-11-05

OK, so me going down to Times Square to stream live video was largely a bust. If it weren’t for the wonderful personal experience of going down there I’d have wished I’d stayed at home. That said, I did get some video streamed and other video shot on a still camera that shoots video. I also took a bunch of pics. I’ll post those all tomorrow.

But don’t think that just because Obama won that our election system is somehow perfect and not in need of serious overhaul!

There is still PLENTY wrong with our system and the ONLY reason and I mean the ONLY REASON we can trust that Obama really won was because there was a serious lead–4.5 million more voters wanted Obama than wanted McCain. That’s a clear win and no one could fake that many votes. Once again, there is still an awful lot that can and did go wrong in this election and I’ve got the links to prove it. However, I’m too damn tired after having shared this cathartic evening with a few thousand fellow New Yorkers jammed into Times Square. Want to see some of the footage I was able to stream? Head over to 12seconds.tv/channel/ThePete for a few 12 second chunks or head to qik.com/thepete for longer chunks. I’ll post better video and more video (and edited down video) tomorrow along with more links to stories about voting irregularities.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a few 12seconds.tv video clips:


Qik Video on 12seconds.tv


TOAST PRESIDENT OBAMA pt1 on 12seconds.tv


A TOAST TO PRESIDENT ELECT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA on 12seconds.tv

by ThePete 3:32 am 2008-11-05 In TheNews, Politricks, TV.ThePete.Com, ThePete.Com | Tags , , , , , , , , , | $ |

"Why We Fight" Docu-Maker: Voting Is Not Enough

by ThePete 3:39 pm 2008-10-20
utterli-image
A couple years back Eugene Jarecki made a well-received documentary about why America fights its wars today (which happened to feature a clip of John McCain saying bad things about the military industrial complex). Jarecki was on Democracy Now this morning and he wrote a piece at HuffPo, as well, both hyping his new book "The American Way of War" and hyping what he thinks every American should do about our government.

Seems he thinks voting is great, but it’s not enough.

Tell me about it! :P

I’m not very trusting of our election system or our balloting system to expect voting to be enough–but even if the way we elect our leaders was flawless, it still wouldn’t be enough. In his interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman this morning (transcript here: http://www.democracynow.org/…erican_way ), goes into more detail:

But I dare say, no matter how busy people are, we all have two things that we can do that are very crucial. One is to figure out, honestly, candidly, that we all have a bunch of time we waste in life watching American Idol, surfing the internet, whatever we do that’s our version of wasting time. And we all have something, no matter how busy we are. It’s sort of human nature. You’ve got to take some of that time and figure out how to direct it toward social change, because if all you do is vote at election time and sort of wake up and go, “Oh, my god, something’s happening; I’ll throw my vote in,” it services your conscience, it services your feel—your desire to feel like you’re doing something, but the actual practical implications of that are that a single candidate, up against the incredibly tangled corruption of this system, is hopeless. And they’re made more hopeless by the fact that we are disengaged, because without a public mandate, somebody like Barack Obama will enter the White House, and, as you see, it’s already happened in the evolution of his policy paradigms, he’ll enter the White House without a mandate. And if he doesn’t have a mandate, those enormous forces of power will give him a mandate. They’ll give him a very clear mandate.

And which source of support will he support then?

What Jarecki is ultimately saying is that we’ve all got to do more than just "pay the minimum." You know how you’ve got that credit card bill and you just pay the minimum due every month yet the amount you owe never goes down? It’s like that. You can’t vote and expect change.

Voting, alone, pretty much guarantees that the system will NEVER change–it, in fact, promises that the system will stay exactly the same, it’ll just be run by your guy. So, if you think there’s something wrong with the way things are run, you have to do more than just vote.

I do more every day–I blog. I’m broke because I don’t make any real amount of money off of this stuff. I do it because I am trying to change things. Part self-expression/part-picking up the mainstream media’s slack, I’m trying to help make the world a better place by pointing out things you might have missed.

It’s not leading a revolution or championing a law, but it’s SOMEthing to help.

So, on November 4, 2008, when you go to vote, don’t just pay the minimum. Take it further–start a blog, join a cause, do something to help the world be a better place.

Mobile post sent by thepete using Utterli. reply-count Replies.

by ThePete 3:39 pm 2008-10-20 Politricks, TheMiniBlog, ThePete.Com | Tags , , , , , | $ |

Walking on Dreams (Socks)

by ThePete 5:36 pm 2008-10-13


Walking on Dreams, originally uploaded by thepetecom.

So, TheWife picked me up a pair of these cool, uber-warm wool-esque socks to keep my feet from being cold as winter in NYC approaches (1st east coast winter for us!). On the bottom of these socks there are traction, uh, things. They stick to the floor and happen to be made to look like a word. On each sock the word is “dream”. Not sure what the idea is here, but I thought it was pretty ironic. Every time I take a step in them, I’m stepping on my own dreams. o_O

by ThePete 5:36 pm 2008-10-13 ThePete.Com, ThePetePics, ThePeteStuff | Tags , , , | $ |

Today Just Sucks All Around but Tomorrow Could be Worse (Or Not)

by ThePete 8:58 pm 2008-10-06

So, the stock market is in a slow, but generally consistent freefall, but that’s just the economy. The good news is that Obama is pulling ahead in a national poll. I suspect that as the stock market continues TheDrop, McCain’s numbers will suffer similarly. Once this “economic” surge kicks in (assuming it ever does) perhaps McCain can make a McComeback. Something tells me he’s S.O.L. since money only vanishes quickly–it doesn’t return that way and we’ve got less than a month to go until the elections.

But there’s more lame news to sandwich that good news that McCain is losing. I accidentally spilled (like I’d spill on purpose!) nearly an entire cup of coffee on my MacBook today. Luckily, I don’t really go into panic mode for things like this. I immediately moved my poor MB to the floor, stood it up on its side (like an open book) and then aimed our big box fan at it. Then I mopped up the coffee that had passed through it, onto the table that serves as my desk.

After a couple hours of drying in front of the fan, I popped the battery back in (if you ever spill coffee on your laptop, removing the battery is the FIRST thing you should do after unplugging the thing). I tried powering her up, but it was a no go. I took the battery out again, then hit up ifixit.com for detailed instructions on how to take apart a MacBook. I opened her up and saw that the motherboard (or “logic board” as they are called on Macs) had little bits of caked lint around. That was a good sign–if they had been tiny little globs of wet lint, it meant coffee had made it to the board.

My theory is that the way the MacBook’s keyboard is designed, it seems to allow any liquid spilled on it to flow to one side or the other. In my case, I immediately had put it on it’s side, USB-ports-down (this kept the coffee away from the optical drive). I think this was the best thing I could have done. Seeing no coffee damage, I put the whole thing back together.

This time, knowing for sure that the interior was completely dry, I plugged the MB into the wall. Obviously I wanted to make sure the insides were dry to avoid any shorts.

I hit the power button and she turned on just fine. WHEW.

Sadly, it seems the battery is deadish. I tried TheWife’s MacBook battery in my machine and it powered up fine. So, it’s definitely the battery. I was hoping it was the battery socket since I am capable of fixing that. A battery I can’t fix unless I want to risk shocking myself, which I really don’t. There’s a slight chance that it will dry out and start working once it does, but only time will confirm that.

I reeeally hope it does dry since I can’t afford to drop $100+ on a new battery.

I said the battery is deadish because the little power indicator LEDs still light up to tell me the battery is fully charged, so I’m not sure what’s up. Perhaps a call to my electrical engineering dad is in order.

Ah well. After a quick phone call I’m likely going to call it a night. Today’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride.

Of course, tomorrow is October 7, 2008 and two different schools of thought say something huge and bad will happen of 911-proportions. I’m not going to bother linking to either story since odds are it’s full of crap. Still, it’s good to know that things can always get worse, right? ;P

Seriously though, feel free to Google “October 7, 2008 web-bot” and you’ll find hits for one side and then Google just the date and you’ll hit other. If you’re reading this on or after the 7th and “10/7″ isn’t a date that lives in infamy for you, then everything’s probably cool :)

by ThePete 8:58 pm 2008-10-06 ThePete.Com, ThePeteStuff | Tags | $ |

IM Conversation = Sign of the (Economic) Times

by ThePete 9:18 pm 2008-09-29

Earlier this evening a buddy of mine started an IM conversation with me. Here’s approximately how it began:

Him: Shit.
Him: You there?
Me: Yeah, man, what’s up?
Him: My bank got taken over.
Me: HA-HA!
Me: Mine, too.
Him: lol
Me: Which one?
Him: Wachovia. You?
Me:WaMu
Him: ahhh, sucks.
Me: S’ok, I’m broke.
Him: me too. lol
Me: haha

I guess this is where the meek inherit the Earth?

Sign of the (economic) times…

by ThePete 9:18 pm 2008-09-29 In TheNews, TheMoney, ThePete.Com | Tags , , , | $ |

1-888-MARGARITA

by ThePete 4:43 am 2008-08-16


IMG_0128, originally uploaded by thepetecom.

Shot this on the subway last week, I think. It’s an ad in a subway train for a law firm. Now, look closely toward the bottom of the ad, to the right.

Yep, that’s their 800 number. Three lawyers (none of them Latino, by the looks of them) form a law firm and advertise on the New York City subway–what phone number do they pick for potential clients to have an easy time remembering it?

1-888 MARGARITA

You know, I’m a practical man, but sometimes Political Correctnes just doesn’t go far enough.

by ThePete 4:43 am 2008-08-16 TheCultureJam, ThePete.Com | Tags , , , , , | $ |

And Now for Something Fairly Personal

by ThePete 3:50 am 2008-08-15

Some of you may have noticed on my microblogstream (Twitter, Jaiku, etc.), a few posts about getting in touch with my high school sweetheart again. It was very random and ironic since the night before I happened to be doing a typical guy-thing by Googling ex-girlfriends. Although, I evolved my technique that night by moving from Google to Facebook. Lo’ and behold, there I found my girlfriend and, really, my best friend from high school. I looked at her picture, and the fact that she had a new last name (cringe!), and decided not to send her a friend request. She partially represented my past on the east coast (where I once again live). It is a past I have large, bad memories of. Not that my childhood was particularly rough, it was just something I was really quite happy to move on from.

Seeing all of these familiar sites, living in New York, is very surreal. I was excited at first–seeing my first A&P supermarket in about two decades was a strange thrill. Passing the sign pointing to the mall I was a rat in brought warm waves of nostalgia to my heart. For some reason, though, when I got to Manhattan-proper, those waves of nostalgia were replaced with much more negative feelings. It felt like regression, now–like I was “falling” back, instead of simply making a mature, adult choice to move with my wife to the Big Apple so she could pursue a career on Broadway.

The negative feelings got worse when I realized I’d likely have to take a dayjob I really didn’t want to take. I remember, when I was in high school, my step-dad was out of work for a while. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just get a job someplace. I understand now a bit more of what he was going through. I’m not an old man (and neither was he), but I do feel like I shouldn’t be doing certain types of jobs at my age–like retail–like temping–like anything entry-level. So, this added insult to injury.

Then throw in CRAZY heat and CRAZIER humidity (and us not having an air conditioner), a landlord who decided the first 6 months we paid up front would cover the last 6 months instead (eventually we worked it out), on top of being in a huge, unfamiliar city (along with a few other things I won’t even go into) and you’ve got a recipe for one depressed ThePete.

Then, there she was–looking a bit older, but still beautiful–not too different from the way I remembered her.
More…

by ThePete 3:50 am 2008-08-15 ThePete.Com, ThePeteStuff | Tags , , , , | $ |

TheBlurb: "How can one talk about life without saying sometime it's going to end? It makes the value of life all the more precious."
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