Lots of the White Stuff

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 06 Feb 2001 13:00:00 GMT
What a snowstorm! At least 15" of the white stuff fell between 1pm and 6pm. Fortunately, most of it is very dry and powdery, like folks in the Rockies get all the time. It was very easy to shovel. Well, I should say that each shovel full was easy. After a few hundred shovel fulls, however, my muscles are screaming. I'm writing this on the night of 2/5. I dug my car out tonite. Tomorrow morning will likely be more difficult, since the late snow is more like sleet, and will probably freeze. Christopher went to a friend's house this morning and is sleeping there tonite. Karla and Victoria are asleep already, and it's only 8:45. I'll crash soon...

Bruce Umbaugh mentioned last week that someone had passed a $200 bill with GW's picture on it. Today, he's got the picture, shamelessly displayed below. "Moral Reserve Note". Hehe. [xray]

Russ Hamilton - It's Really Out of Hand: A letter from Russ about Linda's kangaroo court appearance last week and the rot in Massachusetts police departments and courts. Russ asks people to contact John Ashcroft and "ask him to sic the FBI on Massachusetts." As if the federal state, including the new GW administration, is any less rotten than the Massachusetts state.

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - Faith-Based Initiative Plan Poses Risks to Religious Organizations: Dr. Paul agrees with me that government payments to churches are dangerous for the churches. The right way, of course, is to let people keep their money. Donations to charitable organizations of all stripes will then go up.

The better approach is to abide by constitutional strictures and get the federal government completely out of the business of providing social services. Private charities and religious organizations will flourish in this country if we simply get government out of the way. First and foremost, we must exempt such organizations from regulations which constantly thwart their efforts. Second, we must endorse the proposal by President Bush to allow all Americans a deduction for charitable contributions, regardless of whether they itemize deductions or not. The majority of taxpayers apply the standard deduction, and they should enjoy a tax benefit for giving to charity even in small amounts. We should allow a 100% deduction for all contributions, regardless of whether to a standard charity, a charitable foundation or trust, or a religious organization. Finally, we must massively reduce government spending, so that income taxes can be lowered drastically. Americans are charitable by nature, but they rightfully resent losing nearly half their incomes to various levels of government. American charities would see huge increases in their budgets for providing social services if taxes were reduced to sane levels.

Gosling "is a help system for Java applications. It enables you to create your help files in HTML 3.2, and provides a nice, familiar interface for your users. It was created to be quick and easy to add to your programs, yet still provide a capable help system." And it's tiny. The source jar is only 17K. It uses Java's built-in HTML rendering engine. I got it to work browsing my local copy of billstclair.com. It's usable, though the JDK's HTML renderer is far from ideal. If only he'd used the GNU Library General Public License instead of the GPL virus. Requires JDK 1.3. [meat]

Jetty 3.0.3 is available for download. Jetty is a 100% Java web server and servlet engine. I used version 2.x to build a web front-end for my User Interface Manager. I haven't tried 3.x yet. [meat]

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