The man said, ” ‘Get me the hell outta here!’ so I got him the hell outta there.”
A car carrying the Rev. Al Sharpton led sheriff’s deputies on a nine- mile chase at speeds up to 110 mph before state troopers stopped the vehicle and arrested the driver, authorities said.
The civil rights activist called the sheriff’s report “ludicrous” and accused the Ellis County officers of “embellishing the story.”
“That nine-mile chase is news to me,” Sharpton told The Associated Press. “All I know is that the police pulled us over because they wanted to talk to the driver about speeding.”
Chief Deputy Charles Sullins said driver Jarrett B. Maupin, 43, was rushing Sharpton to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport after Sharpton visited anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Sunday at her camp outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford.
Because the 2005 Lincoln was rented to Maupin, of Phoenix, sheriff’s deputies impounded the car. Maupin posted a $1,000 bond on charges of evading arrest with a vehicle and reckless driving, authorities said.
The car carrying Sharpton and two other passengers was clocked doing 110 mph in a 65 mph zone on the interstate south of Dallas, Sullins said.
He said the driver ignored deputies’ attempts to stop it and weaved in and out of traffic before state troopers were able to get in front of the car.
Bwaaaahhhhhhh! Sharpton had to catch a ride. What the hell was he thinking? The best thing is that you know it’s all on video tape. No racial profiling BS.
Probably all the media crews passed him by at a high rate of speed.
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Seems at some point last night we lost power, or had a surge, or something. Probably lost power for a moment because my workstation and the Domino server running the website my blog is on, were kaput. Had to power them both up.
My last referral was at 6:42 am, so enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS wasn’t down for long. It’s likely Nobody even noticed on an early Sunday morning.
First thing on my mind this morning is Katrina. Be right back…
Hurricane Katrina: You do NOT want any of this!Ooh. Satellite indicate she has not taken a northen tack since truning wnw late yesterday. She is expected to blow ashore less than 200 miles east of where I am at. If she doesn’t turn north precisely as predicted, she could make landfall only a hundred miles east, or closer. If she doesn’t make a north turn at all, which is not likely given all the models, I am in the storm’s direct path.
The predicted path hasn’t changed at all.
That still puts us who live on the upper Texas coast on the dry side, but still, once you’ve been through a hurricane, you tend to keep on eye on what these guys are up to. You do NOT want to jack around and get caught in the brunt of a CAT 4 hurricane.
OK, now that all that initial business is out of hte way, I’m off to see what is going in in the ’sphere.
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I heard on the radio yeaterday that NTB was giving away free Blackberries with the purchase of a complete set of tires. After the commercial, the DJ’s were talking about what they paid for their blackberries: about $300.
So I am wondering how can a set of tires installed with all the bells and whistles that will cost about three hundred bucks, or less, offset the cost of giving away a free blackberry? Then the small print at the end of the ad (or would that be small talk?). One year subscription to blackberry service required… or something like that.
So it seems we are about to see the same model that made the cellular phone ubiquitous do the same for wireless PDAs. Once about a gazillion blackberries are dropped on the market behind this promotion, others will follow suit. Marketers are like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Almost worse than lawyers.
Let’s face it. With the miniturization and convergence of technology happening at such an astonishing rate, in five years we will be wearing the equivalent of a small computer room on a wristband.
EvilWhiteGuy points out that you can also get a free blackberry with a pizza order. He also noticed the NTB give away.
And you can get free iTunes with a Fruit & Salad purchase
The dot com bust in 2001 had nothing to do with the Internet revolution that everyone used to rave about. It is still coming. Most everybody just had it wrong in the nineties.
(Thanks to Basil for the open trackback)
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A Dell “Super Computer”
Dell Super Computer with Eight 20 inch Flat Screen Ultra Sharp Monitors with 1600 x 1200 Resolution and 5.1 Cambridge SoundWorks Speakers with Bass Cube. Windows XP Pro Operating System. The Computer items were purchased new from Dell in 03/2004. The Computer is a Precision Workstation 450 with Two 3.20 GHz Xeon Processors with 2MB L3 Cache 533FSB, 4GB 266 MHz Double Data Rate SDram , Two 146GB SCSI U320 10K RPM Hard Drives, 8X DVD+RW/+R and 16X DVD, Two Colorgraphic Xentera GT 4 Video Cards to run the 8 Screens, Cordless Mouse, Cordless Keypad, Dell 3 in 1 Printer/Fax/Scanner, 3 Ergotron Adjustable Monitor Stands, Surge Protectors, 3 Sets of Smaller Speakers for watching TV or Security System on Individual Monitors. The Monitors can be arranged in any configuration. Over $20,000 Invested. Works Perfect. Great for Photos, Charts, Graphs, Trading Stocks, Security System. I should have all the original boxes for shipping.
Bid on it or you can buy it now for ony $10,500.
Way back in the early to mid-eighties, when PC’s first began to take off on a massive scale, I worked at a local computer store in the small town where I atteneded university. Ten to twelve grand is about what one would pay for a fully souped IBM PC or Apple II. Half the price of an Apple Lisa II was for the ProFile II 5 or 10 meg hard disk subsystem, which was a huge box bigger than an entire PC is today.
Didn’t sell too many of those. Most systems still came in at three to five thousand dollars, though. Ahh, those were the days…
I wonder why the automobile has not become a commodity-type product like the computer? I think such a transition may already be under way, but it wont come full circle until the unions are all bankrupt, which foriegn competition will bring about eventually. When there is very little distinction between products, price determines the purchase. When price is the only deciding factor, a company will not be able to compete paying inflated wages due to strongarm union tactics.
Unions have more to do with sweatshops and outsourcing than cheap labor overseas.
[How do you start daydreaming about super computers then end bitching about unions? -Ed]
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I was spelunking the web today and came across a Dean Esmay essay Asparagirl vs. Instapundit from a couple of years ago, which is an analysis of link blog rolling / link exchange and the merits of a long link list vs a short link list.
Much of his argument is based around the concept of a gift economy, which makes perfect sense to me given the context of June 2003. But I would be interested in an updated version of his link analysis taking in to account the advertising dollars that have been showered over much of the Blogosphere and will supposedly continue to flow in the coming years.
Maybe Dean would stick to the original analysis, but it seems to me that an incoming link has taken on a new value. A value in the real economy. A value called PageRank.
I like Dean’s link strategy, by the way:
So what is the process I go through, to decide if I’ll blogroll someone?
- I don’t assume I have to like everything about a blogger, just something.
- want to see that this blogger seems like a decent being, who trades in the same kind of respect and decency that other bloggers do.
One way to show me that respect and decency is to participate in the same gift culture I do: offering to exchange links with me goes a long way toward making me think you’re the kind of person I’d like on my blogroll. Not that I accept all such requests. But such a request does show me some respect, that at some level you “get it.”
There are certain well-known webloggers who I do not link to. I like their stuff, but I don’t love it. If they showed me that they were willing to trade in the same sort of mutual-respect gift economy I’ve described, my opinion of them would probably go up enough to want to blogroll them. Because I’d at least be able to say, “okay, this is a person who gets it, who wants to give as well as he receives.” Otherwise, I’d have to truly love their stuff. If not, why should I bother? I don’t love their stuff, they obviously don’t care about my stuff. So, who cares?
Update:
Bill Quick has noticed PageRank and has some questions.
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Hugh Hewitt writing over at the Daily Standard is trumpeting the end of old media due to the bloggers draining off the advertising dollars.
It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing–or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly. Other new aggregators are in the works, and the revenue flowing into new media will further strengthen and expand its reach.
He is, of course, correct.
I have been on this soap box for over a year and just wrote about it in a post two weeks ago.
Remember, it was just a few short years ago that the Internet bubble burst. The Internet advertising revenue model was all but doomed. Non-Internet ready concerns who were scrambling to catch up, which included many in the mainstream media, breathed a collective sigh of relief. Saved by the bell. However, it quickly became obvious that the technology bust did not dissuade the marketers from the Internet. Just because large brick-and-mortar concerns cum Internet businesses went belly up didn’t mean that the almighty consumer quit the web. The consumer was still very active on the Internet. Where there are consumers, there will be advertising.
. . .
Newspapers, like everyone else in the news media, make money from advertising. Advertising dollars follow the consumer. The newspapers have always wrongly assumed that they had high-paying advertisers simply because they were the established newspapers. Because they were the elite. Wrong. They had advertisers because they had an audience of consumers. Period. End of story.
While conventional wisdom always seemed to think the Blogosphere would take over as a counter to media bias, I always thought it would be because the money moved. Seems people are starting to come around to my way of thinking.
Although the Instapundit was way ahead of me. Natch.
More…
Tapscott also has a nice analysis of what the heck is going on and why
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Java applets for video seem to crash all instances of the browser. I believe I read somewhere that Firefox does not like the latest runtime environment.
First there is this:
On Windows, Firefox can be used with Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It can not be used with the Microsoft Java VM, as that can only be used with Internet Explorer. Versions of Sun’s JRE older than 1.3.0_01 will not work.
Okay, that means that any versions that came before v1.3.0_01 will not work, implying newer versions will work. Or does it? Because then there is this:
It is possible to install JRE 1.4.2_01 from within Firefox, using XPInstall technology.
By far the easiest way to get Java working is to install Firefox with the Unofficial Installer, then install Java using XPInstall.
If you have already downloaded Firefox as a ZIP file, you can add the registry information that JRE 1.4.2 and later require by hand. To do this, save this registry file to your desktop, and double-click to import it. If you are asked if you want to add the information to the Windows registry, click Yes. After this is done, you can install JRE 1.4.2 if required, then restart Firefox and use Java.
Hmm. Registry info needed for v 1.4.2 and later. That means versions that have came out since. Right?
Oh well. Most likely it is outdated info. All I know is that all the nice weather maps that I monitor daily rely on the JVM to play the satellite loops and it crashes all instances of the browser at random times. Quite the bummer.
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The Pope has a hell of a schtick…
“I ask for your forgiveness, but I have forgotten the most important greeting, the greeting to the pilgrims in the Italian language,” he told them on Wednesday.
He went back inside the palace, only to return again shortly.
“Today, I have forgotten the most important things. One can see that I am already in Cologne. I omitted the most important thing: the benediction,” he said while smiling before giving his blessing.
The Pope so far hasn’t proved to be much of a traveler:
The 78-year-old pontiff’s voyage to his native Germany will be his first journey abroad since his election in April.
Probably keeps losing his keys.
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IdiotProgrammer brings us: New Age Slang. The vast majority of these I have never heard. Guess I must be getting old. A sample:
acrapulate: Word used for describing a large amount of useless junk collected over a period of time .
Example: I can’t believe how much I’ve acrapulated over the years.
face-mail: Term used to describe the daring act of talking to someone in person instead of either leaving a voice-mail or sending an e-mail.
Example: Bill scares me–he knows how to use the phone and his computer, yet just marched right into my office and left me a face-mail regarding the Simmons account.
Good for a laugh; and that is worth a lot, no?
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