A burglar used a brick to break a window and crawled into a home in North Carolina.  While walking around the home, with the residents still asleep, he tripped over something and his gun went off.  Said burglar then thought better of sticking around and headed for the hills.  The residents, upon waking from the sound of the shot, called police who were unable to find the intruder.

So we have an armed criminal, breaking into a home with a gun in his hand, and only left when his gun went off.  If he was just there to grab the stereo and run, why have the gun in his hand?  My guess is he was up to something more than collecting Grandma’s silver tea set. 

If this had gone further, my fear is that either we’d be adding to JayG‘s Dead Goblin Count, or even worse, the residents, who slumbered deeply enough to not hear a window breaking, would have been attacked in their home, with whatever worst case scenario that could bring.  If the burglar hadn’t broken rule 3 (Thou shalt keep thy booger hook off of thine bang switch), someone would have become a statistic that night.

So now the fragrance is wafting
Into my cube of real estate
Don’t mind the incessant coughing
While in your scent, you marinate

An excerpt from a poem “Ode to the Office Perfumer” by Jennifer.  RTWT

Can’t be done. The Internet, due to its openness and ease of search and navigation, is by nature not kid friendly.

Let’s face it, when you let your kids get on the Internet, you may think you’re dropping them off at Disneyland to play or at the library to do homework.  But one block north is the Gay Pride Parade, one block south is Mardi Gras complete with Girls Gone Wild, one block west is a meeting of NAMBLA, and to the east is a Hitler Youth rally.  And let’s not even talk about the sky-writing advertising every bad habit on Earth above them. 
 
A few recent studies highlighted the increasing number of minors who are going on-line and accessing inappropriate content.  They suggest such things as making robust age verification using such information as credit card numbers mandatory.  Good luck with that.  The Internet is truly global, and as soon as you make site owners in the United States pay to use credit cards to verify identity, they’ll move offshore faster than you can say ‘pr0n’ and little to nothing to keep young eyeballs off of their sites.

Folks, there is no magic bullet to keeping your kids away from inappropriate content.  Parents need to use technology as a tool to monitor and control their kids’ use of the Internet at home, but they cannot abandon their responsibilities by installing a piece of software and walking away.

What we do in our home is this:

• The kids cannot use a computer while we are not at home.  Most modern OS’s have parental controls that can limit when a given user can use the computer.
• All computer use by the kids must be done in the dining room or the living room.
• Girlie Bear’s cell phone has an internet browser, but I’ve worked with the phone company to not allow her to send or receive data or text messages.
• Her netbook runs Ubuntu, which not only negates the risk from a lot  of the malware out there, but also makes it harder for her to get advice from her friends on how to thwart my efforts.
• I’ve installed Dans Guardian on her computer, and regularly check the logs of where she’s been.
• I have every password she uses, and check her email and such regularly for hints that anything wrong is happening with her.
• Our library has a librarian sitting at a raised desk that looks out over the screens of all of the computers.  This discourages most people from looking at whatever it is that tickles their fancy in the library.
• I’m raising my child to not disobey me.

That last one is the most important.  I know kids are going to be curious, and I know they’re going to push limits.  And I’m well aware that she can get onto the Internet when she’s at her mother’s house or over at a friend’s home.  But Girlie Bear knows how I expect her to act, especially when I’m not around. Even as she goes through the rebellious teen years, I will work to make sure she knows how a good person acts, including what they do on-line.

Now, if a child decides to be sneaky, they make all of this work useless, or at least more difficult.  Junior Bear found a chink in my Internet armor almost as soon as he moved to Kentucky from California.  He was freely surfing the net after ‘going to bed’ for about 6 months before I stumbled on what he was doing.  I set up filtering and logging, and after a couple of weeks, called Junior into the dining room.  To his surprise, his systems adminstrator dad handed him logs of everywhere he’d been going on the Internet for about two weeks, including passwords, emails, and pictures.  Thus began a multi-year jousting match between us, as I found and cut off ways he was abusing his priveleges to use our network, and he got more and more creative in ways of circumventing me during the brief times he wasn’t on complete blackout from Internet access at home.  On the plus side, he knows how to make directional wifi antennas so he could tap into a neighboring friend’s wireless signal from his bedroom.  On the down side, we fought an exhausting battle of wits during what could have been our best years as father and son.

But the key is that I never gave up, and I never made it easy for him to do things online that I didn’t approve of.  Once a child, even a teenager who’s almost an adult, figures out that you’ve grown tired of the struggle, their behavior will become even more reckless and dangerous.  We kept our technological guerilla warfare up until the night before he left for college. 

Luckily for me, I have the experience of bringing a stubborn, willful teenage boy through those years now that I’m embarking on going through them with Girlie Bear.  Hopefully between raising her to not violate some basic rules, monitoring her activities, and having this experience, her time as a teenager on the Internet will be less stressful to her dad.  I’ll have other aspects of raising a teenage girl to stress me.

Today, in 1960, a scientist at Hughes Research Laboratory created the first working laser.  A lot of our modern world depends on this discovery:

• Fiber Optics
• Optical Media (DVD, CD)
• Micro Surgery and other medical applications

And of course:

• Entertaining cats and cat owners

Now, if y’all will excuse me, I’m going to go get my laser pointer and see which of the three bozo’s have the greatest vertical leap.

To the gentleman who sat at the table next to us at Knob Creek today, wearing bib overalls, smoking a pipe full of wonderful smelling tobacco, and shooting four, count them, four suppressed guns, including a fully automatic suppressed MAC-10:  you are the coolest guy I met today.

To the gentleman who was driving the brand spanking new Porsche in front of me this afternoon:  Nice car.  Maybe someday you’ll learn to drive it.

To the lady in the 1980’s vintage Ford Escort, complete with rusted through body panels and a hood the wrong color:  I am awed by your skill in keeping that piece of crap on the road and passing the douchebag in the Porsche.

And Today’s Winner:

To the young lady who was squeezing zits in the make-up mirror at Target:  Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Camel!  Seriously?  You were cratering your face using a public mirror in a crowded department store?  Really?

Irish Woman, talking to me in her most loving tone:

How did you ever manage to procreate?

If you keel over in the bread aisle at the grocery store, it is bad manners to come to and start screaming at your husband, the passer-by who called 911, the EMTs who are helping you, and the nice police officer who came just to lend a hand.

And we’re all going to benefit from it, again.

Alan Gura and Alan Gottlieb are taking Virginia and the federal government to court with a pretty logical claim:  If someone is legal to buy a gun in their home state, they should be legal to buy a gun in any state.  This is precipitated by the fact that the only FFL in Washington DC is closing, which means that no-one in DC can legally purchase a handgun.   It’s been illegal to cross a state line and purchase a handgun since before I was born.  Hopefully the SAF will be as successful with this case as they were with the Heller and McDonald Cases.

Their argument makes sense to me.  I can go to Indiana and buy a newspaper or participate in a political rally.  Why can’t I go to Indiana and buy that Remington 1911 that I want?  A right is a right is a right, no matter which state you’re in.

A good analogy here would be a situation in which it’s illegal to go to buy a book in a state you don’t live in, and the only bookstore in Kentucky closed its doors.  Remember, up until 1968, you could buy a gun through the mail just as easily as we buy books from Amazon now, and they almost always had to cross state lines to get from Montgomery Wards or Sears Roebuck to your front door.  Imagine if, in an effort to control the accessibility of news, the government made it illegal to order newspapers and magazines through the mail unless you had a highly regulated license as a newsdealer or a collecter of antique books.  And forget about the Internet.  That kind of thing would have to be stopped, for the children.  We can’t have dangerous information passing between people who haven’t been thoroughly checked and regularly inspected by the federal Bureau of Newspapers, Comic Books, Magazines, and Printing Presses (BNCMP).

If you’re not a member of the Second Amendment Foundation, you ought to consider it.  There’s a link for them on the right side of the page.

H/T to Scott over at MacBourne’s Musings on this one.

News Flash – when you get on a commercial airline, no matter where or which carrier, you are walking cargo.  The sooner you realize that, the easier your flight will be.  Your bags are even lower on the food chain.  Pro tip:  Always have your toothbrush and other necessities in your carry-on.

Hint – When robbing a bank, bring your own bag.  They charge a fee for the big canvas ones with dollar signs on them.

This young lady obviously has a few issues, but when I’m buried, they’re going to charge extra for the disco ball and urinal.  Heck, my ex’es will probably hire Paula Abdul to choreograph.

Young dinosaurs probably didn’t eat the same thing as adults.  Heck, I could have told them that.  Boo is in that “only food that can be bought at McDonalds” stage of life.  And a grown man can only eat so many chicken fingers.  Plus it probably helped to keep little dinosaurs from becoming an appetizer.

A study has found that a lot of the CT scans of children done in American hospitals are unnecessary.  What?  Doctors are ordering extra diagnostics in an attempt to stave off lawsuits?  Who knew?

A veterinarian has decided that a glucose monitor used by human diabetics can be used with pets.  Can you say ‘revenue stream’?  I knew you could!

Am I the only one who remembers when the news was about stuff that surprised us?

I’ve always thought the computer in the corn planter population monitors were too smart for the job they had to do. They get bored and decide to themselves “I think I’ll fuck with Frank today” 

— Frank W. James

Looks like you can’t get away from psychotically evil technology no matter what you do for a living.

Frank’s been having a heck of a time getting his crops in this year, and I fear that he’s not unique.  Remember, if the farmers can’t farm, we don’t eat.  He’s a heck of a nice guy.  I was fortunate to meet him in Pittsburgh.