PIPA AND SOPA PROTESTS

From http://jimmorgan.us

On 18 January many major websites (like wikipedia) and quite a few netizens around the internet are going dark to protest the freedom-infringing and proto-fascist PIPA and SOPA bills before the US Congress.

Due to the nature of this site it will not be going dark but I will be offline except for work related issues.

My protest against intellectual slavery, and the destruction of common sense and the public domain all in the name of greed will come in the coming weeks as I move all of my stuff from the commercial world wide web to more private, less commercial and hopefully more censorship resistant protocols and services.

some links on the Battle of St Albans and the War of the Roses

from http://jimmorgan.us

Some links on the Battle of St Albans and the War of the Roses

Culled from Usenet:

More

An English chronicle of the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Px8IAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA71#v=onepage&q&f=true

Battle of St Albans

http://www.fact-index.com/b/ba/battle_of_st_albans.html

Battle of St Albans – Factbites

http://www.factbites.com/topics/Battle-of-St-Albans

Battle of St Albans – From The Probert Encyclopaedia

http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/F_BATTLE_OF_ST_ALBANS.HTM

Battle Of St Albans, 1455: Anthony Pollard

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5009586945

Battle of St Albans, 1455: Anthony Pollard History Today

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-132241821.html

Battle of St. Albans. William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

http://www.bartleby.com/297/252.html

Battles of Saint Albans (English history) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/516701/battles-of-Saint-Albans

Buckingham’s Retinue – Medieval Reenactment – St Albans 1455

http://www.bucks-retinue.org.uk/content/view/105/247/

First Battle of St Albans procession.jpg – Wikimedia

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Battle_of_St_Albans_procession.jpg

First Battle of St Albans – Ask Jeeves Encyclopedia

http://uk.ask.com/wiki/First_Battle_of_St_Albans

First Battle of St Albans – Definition | WordIQ.com

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/First_Battle_of_St_Albans

First Battle Of St Albans Earl Attack King Warwick Duke Streets

http://www.economicexpert.com/a/First:Battle:of:St:Albans.htm

First Battle of St Albans facts – Freebase

http://www.freebase.com/view/en/first_battle_of_st_albans

First Battle of St Albans

http://slashtheseats.com/rrpedia/First_Battle_of_St_Albans

First Battle of St Albans: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/First_Battle_of_St_Albans

First Battle of St. Albans : definition of first battle of st. albans and synonym of first battle of st. albans (English)

http://dictionary.sensagent.com/first+battle+of+st.+albans/en-en/

First St. Albans

http://ehistory.osu.edu/middleages/BattleView.cfm?BID=1

Image

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Battle_of_St_Albans_procession.jpg

h2g2 – The First War of the Roses

http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/A1150462

Map_for_First_Battle_of_St_Alban’s_by_Ramsay.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_for_First_Battle_of_St_Alban’s_by_Ramsay.jpg

Medieval Wiki – Military > First Battle of St Albans

http://www.shadowedrealm.com/wiki/article/First_Battle_of_St_Albans

Yet More references

Lancaster and York a century of English history (A.D. 1399-1485)
by Sir James H. Ramsay of Bamff, bart.

http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924088011436#page/n232/mode/1up

Wars of the Roses
An Analysis of the causes of the Wars and the course which they took.
By: Michael D. Miller

http://www.warsoftheroses.co.uk/chapter_47.htm

The Battle of St Albans, 1455 – History Today

http://www.historytoday.com/anthony-pollard/battle-st-albans-1455

The Who’s Who of the Wars of the Roses

http://homepages.shu.ac.uk/~conseal/whos_who.htm

PDF Title: The First Battle Of St Albans

http://www.pdfweb.org/the-first-battle-of-st-albans-14383.html

The War of the Roses

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/War_of_Roses.html

Thomas de Clifford

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=20156

Wars of Roses I’m not talking about garden flowers

http://warsofrosesmd.blogspot.com/

Scenarios: Battle of 1st St. Albans (1455), War of the Roses

http://www.fanaticus.org/DBA/battles/stalbans1.html

Politics and the Battle of St. Albans, 1455
C. A. J. ARMSTRONG

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1960.tb02226.x/full

Wars of the Roses: Summary for First St. Albans

http://www.warsoftheroses.com/WRBattleShell.cfm?BID=1&WID=1

Osprey Publishing – Military History Books – St. Albans (22-28 May):

http://www.ospreypublishing.com/articles/st_albans_2228_may/

Medieval Wiki – Military > First Battle of St Albans:

http://www.shadowedrealm.com/wiki/article/First_Battle_of_St_Albans

Battle of St Albans – Wars of the Roses starts

http://www.information-britain.co.uk/famdates.php?id=183

The Wars of the Roses – 1st Battle of St Albans:

http://www.richardiii.net/1st_st_albans.htm

 

Stop the world! I want to disembark!

from http://jimmorgan.us

Stop the world! I want to disembark.

After 20+ years of being “online” and connected to the rest of the world 24/7 I think that I have grown tired of the mighty internet. Partly my mind started wandering down this path because of the impending end of unlimited internet by my mobile phone provider. Most of my internet life is done through a mobile gadget. Some of this road was traveled because I saw one too many posts about the Kardashians. Still another section of this road was taken because Jesus, or some other crusade, dominates the highway. Some of the road was taken because there is always something broken, something new, or something invading my privacy.

I simply needed to face the fact I am a friggin junkie and move on with life.

Over the last few days I’ve come to realize that I will never be able to walk away from email or text messaging. These toys are deeply ingrained into my life, especially my working life. I can’t practically do away with them.

Mindless web surfing, though, serves no real purpose other than killing time. Most of the social networking stuff does nothing productive either. I have a tough time justifying the time spent on these activities.

Rather than frittering away my life and viewing the world through a screen I have decided to take drastic action.

I decided that if it doesn’t come to my email box then I probably don’t need to see it.

The hallowed phone is now as dumb as I can make it without opening it up and cutting wires. The battery saver is set to maximum, which cuts data connections when they aren’t used after a few minutes. Data is only sent and received when I am on wifi. The phone company’s data plan is not used. Pushes, fetches, and syncs are all set at the longest possible times rather than the shortest. Syncing with the Google servers is disabled. Background data is disabled. All the privacy settings are set to max. Any app that automagically connects to the internet has been removed. My web browser will not download images, cookies, or javascripts.

In short the phone is for phone calls and texting.

Even though, knowing me like I do, I will be back online in full force after I am done being grumpy email is the online only thing fully working.

I had the wild hair the other day of doing Twitter by SMS. This is the way Twitter was originally designed to work. I followed about 15 people, mostly local news and weather sources. This even proved to be too much noise. After about a day I turned it off too.

Quiet is a precious gift. It is generally free. It calms the nerves and relaxes the mind and body. We have become so accustomed to noise and the information bombardment that we can’t imagine life any differently.

After three or four days of being “off the grid” I do believe that I will begin using and being quiet more.

Who wants to go through life frazzled anyway?

Ok so i can sms

Ok so i can sms to the blog but not mms? What is up with that silliness?

As far as I recall

As far as I recall this will work.

Yesterday’s snow

From http://jimmorgan.us

Yesterday’s snow in #westtx

My source for this info is the local newspaper which can be found at http://mywesttexas.con and the National Weather Service which is at http://weather.gov/maf

Since December 1, 2012 Midland has received 19.5″ of snow. The old record was 13.9″.

January 9, 2012 is the single snowiest day in our history with 10.6″. The new #2 was 9.8″.

Our snowiest month is now 10.6″ with 1985′s 9.0″ taking second place.

We also got a record 0.69″ yesterday.

We have gotten more snow this year than many cities that set record snowfall amounts last year. So far this year we have had more snow than Chicago, Buffalo, Minneapolis and Aberdeen, SD.

Eight snowplows were brought in to clear the snow. To my knowledge West Texas has no snowplows.

HELP I’VE BEEN EVACUATED!!!

from http://jimmorgan.us

HELP I’VE BEEN EVACUATED!!!

The definition of evacuated is “to be emptied out.” It is one of the most commonly misused words in journalism. It’s most common misuse starts with “X # of people were evacuated….”

The discerning verbivore gets a little nauseous at this statement. While it is humourous it is also pretty gross when you think about it.

Grammar rant: I vs Me

from http://jimmorgan.us

Grammar Rant: I vs Me

I realize that I am incredibly lazy when it comes to matters grammatical. One can probably find hundreds of grammatical errors in this blog and we won’t even try to guess the number of spelling errors here. I try not to be lazy, but, the pace at which my life flows these days doesn’t always lend itself easily to grammatical correctness. Most grammar faux pas, at least the ones I encounter, are generally the result of people in a hurry and meanings are not generally obfuscated by using lie instead of lay.

One grammar sin that is spreading like a cancer in all the English speaking world except for the UK is the misuse of I and me. This cancer is not limited to the lower classes. In fact the misuse of these words transcends all classes. Supposedly educated pundits and newscasters on TV misuse these words every single day. Doctors, educators (who should know better,) writers all misuse them. Misuse of these words is an offense to the ear if not the mind of the listener. In short using these words improperly makes one sound like an inbred hillbilly.

The problem is that this grammatical disease is spreading so that everyone sounds like a hick.

Let me see if I cam simplify this enough so that college educated people can understand it.

I is the first person singular nominative pronoun. Don’t let all those big words scare you. All that it means is that I is the noun we use when we are doing something. For example, I went to the park. You would never say Me went to the park.

Me is the first person singular objective pronoun. Those big words mean that this pronoun is the one that is acted on. For example, The ball hit me. You would not say, The ball hit I.

The problem with these pronouns seems to stem from the use of them with other pronouns. You and I went to the park is a proper sentence and so is The ball hit you and me. In proper English the ball will never hit “you and I.”

So mushing all of our example sentences together we come up with the very proper You and I went to the park where the ball hit you and me.

If it confuses you which pronoun to use just eliminate the other pronoun and see how it sounds. You and I went to the park where the ball hit I hopefully sounds incorrect to you so you know that we need to change the pronoun to “me.”

I am not sure what has happened in the English language and why we need to say “you and I” instead of “we” and “you and me” instead of “us.” I think too many people are trying to be to fancy in their speaking.

The rules for I and me don’t change if one is using a name instead of a pronoun. “Terry and I went to the park where the ball hit Terry and me” is a proper, though not totally eloquent, sentence. A better sentence in this case would be “Terry and I went to the park where the ball hit us.”

Anyway I am rambling so this rant has lost it’s effectiveness.

The Drawing

from http://jimmorgan.us

Ok boys and girls here is the picture I was drawing on earlier today. This is just a shop drawing and not really revealing of how pretty it will be when it is done but you may find it fun to look at.

Then again you may not… all I do is talk and hope it is interesting to someone along the way…

Besides this is just another place for me to store a drawing in case I need it.

Made it to work

from http://jimmorgan.us

made it to work

The roads in the cities are a mess of ice and slicker than pigs on ice today. The main road to Andrews was really clear and I managed a safe 50 to 55mph most of the way to work.

I have been assigned a small drawing task this morning for some dentist’s office in Seminole. Evidently this person is rather picky and The Boss wants them to sign off on everything before we even start the process. The thing that I am drawing looks like some sort of computer centre. Maybe a little fancier than I would expect for a dentist’s office but whatever. West Texas is chock full of what my step-dad used to call $500 a week millionaires. I figure the whole country is full of them these days. I am not sure why anyone would want to be credited to the hilt just for showing off purposes.

I am not that smart when it comes to the ways of the world anyway. I live a very simple, quiet life. I have no money but am very well fed.

I was thinking while I drove to work today that if I lived in the town where I worked I probably wouldn’t even mess with owning a car for myself. I’d probably ride my bike. Now before you go off saying “yeah right” in mocking disdain, that is exactly what I used to do before I got married. I owned a car but rarely drove it. I hate cars and think they are the bane of our existence. Most of our physical ills can be linked to the car. We’re fat because we ride everywhere instead of riding our bikes. Our families are weake because the car allows us to travel far away from one another. The pollution the cars make causes our asthma and the funny smell that is in the air.

I need to find a “Ban the Auto” bumper sticker for my car.

Ok I really need to finish this drawing now…