Alright, I'll cop to this one because it was just too dumb. For months, I've had a typo, 'contraditions' instead of 'contradictions' in the banner, and i didn't notice. Someone politely commented months ago and I didn't even notice.

There's a lot of appalling typographical errors out there, but the banner has to take the cake! (and what better way to conclude the mea culpa than a barrage of cliches. Yes!)

I decided that I'd had enough with the old HongPong OS X look so I whipped this one up today. It is based on "web application" here: Web Application | All Drupal Themes. GPL'd and all that.

It is certainly not finished. Or really, even started. This site has been around a long time but it has also been pretty shitty for quite a while. Things weren't going to turn without dumping the theme.

So I put this one up, and experimented with a horizontal stripe background and the weird and somewhat difficult new opacity CSS controls.

Is "recent popular content" relevant? I would like to put the del.icio.us block up front there because I am always thinking how nice it would be to just post bookmarks and not worry about full posts. So this does that front and center. It may be an excessive move for the side pages (but that could be disabled with one code).

Also the new Deep6.hongpong.com Drupal 6RC3 test server is available but can't seem to send those registration emails. I don't get it. Try to register but it may not work.

Please leave some feedback here or via the poll. I haven't even fiddled with many parts of the theme - I didn't even start until 6 PM. So ya know....

Well, everyone, it has been a very busy week for me. I taped Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on HD Video (a loaned Sony HVR A1U to be specific). And we got Target Center rally footage Saturday that's pretty much mind-blowing. My project partner on this was camera guy/editor Andy French.

Here is the Obama rally on Saturday at the Target Center:

Click To Play

Click To Play

There is certainly a lot more awesome footage. Then we filmed Ron Paul's rally on Monday night, but that was accidentally in DV instead of HDV (1080i High definition video). Really, it was pretty damn awesome.

I am also working today on developing a new theme for HongPong.com. That's a little overdue.

Good news all around. Nothing too special that you'd see from the outside, but now HongPong.com is on PHP5, which means that it has a much more modern engine running underneath.

I am involved in some other stuff right now: going to SPNN to get a little bit into community television, and other stuff.

Best to everyone, I'll try to explain later.

It has been quite a while since I rattled at the shimmering electrons which might or might not care about what I have to say. Things are definitely going to shit:

• Turkey is invading Iraq, which will generate internal war #4 apparently. Pakistan is also disintegrating with generous jabs at the hornet's nest from freaggin Obama.
• Evidently our infrastructure is crumbling. I spent quality time at work reading all the wretched MnDOT reports on the I-35W bridge; they were nightmares - more on that later
• The national credit market LSD-fueled HedgeFundMortgageCrackPalooza seems to be crumbling as well. There is a systemic shock or crash emerging which is going to damage the housing/sprawl market for a long time. Literally our urban structures might stop sprawling & generating all that fabulous paper wealth. At least the last couple weeks a sign that the economy might suddenly abandon 'good faith & credit' soon, just in time for...
• The exploding oil market which will finally kill the American Dream of fetid suburban development once and for all. Even Mexican oil production is crashing. Demand is going to rise in these producer countries and they'll quit exporting. Supplies will fall and we're gonna hit that fucked-up time where all these complicated Cheap Oil systems will fail (Wal-Mart's 11,000 mile supply chain is a prime example).

That is enough to keep anyone away from writing. Yet here I am back again, against my better judgment.

No harm; the summer is a terrible time for blogging. I still have to update some Drupal modules, but at least the core is safely up to 5.2. After watching The Bourne Ultimatum and TNT's nifty docudrama miniseries The Company, I had a good whomping of the paranoia and knew it was time to tighten up all the digital angles best I can, so I took the site offline for a couple days to patch it up.

The first week back in town (last week) really rattled me. I haven't quite found my feet yet, I guess.

To top it off some little bastard stole my bottle of French wine from the kitchen over the weekend. It is a lucky stroke of good fortune I saved a backup. It's airport duty-free wine anyway, but fuckall shit I hauled it around the world spewing 90 pounds of carbon to get it here. FUCK. And then they left a filthy, half-full glass in the fridge.

Now back in town, I am at my parents' house in Hudson, Great Wisco, while I ponder getting a new apartment and the absurd amount of gas you gotta burn to live out here.

Tonight I finally gave in and plugged my desktop Mac G5 back together. It likes to scare the shit out of me once in a while and refuses to come back on. The monitor just sits there, glum & dark. I dimly recalled beating this problem before. [Nice thing about Macs: these kinds of shitstorms have a pretty limited complexity. It's about something easier than device drivers and Windows insanity...]

Here I'm making a note to myself: When initially setting up, I need to unplug all external drives and the external speakers (harman/kardon makes a nice speaker, but these old dogs are getting rough - and they tend to cause USB fuckups). Then I had to hit the Mac's special internal reset button, known as the PMU switch, which gives a mega-zap to the PRAM. (these were called CUDA switches back in the day) IMPORTANT: Only press the PMU for One Second While It's NOT plugged in. Otherwise you'll fry it. Too bad I definitely pressed it for way too long.

Then is step 2: plug the computer back in; hit the power button and immediately hold down Command-Option-P-R . This is also a PRAM zap which works at a lesser level than PMU. The G5 first issues its normal startup chime, then you gotta wait, still holding the keys. It chimes again. Wait. And again.

Then finally you let go, and for whatever mysterious reason it comes right back to life, no problem. I really think it's because the USB speakers and maybe the external hard drive hork it somehow.

In any case OS X 10.4.10 has been kinda dodgy in the USB department: my brother's Intel MacBook can't connect to his external music hard drive for shit since the upgrade. Someone discovered that running 'USB Prober' from the OS X Developer Tools gets it to rediscover the drives. I am way too tired to look up links right now.

That is all for now. I promise we'll be back on the gravy train of at least 3 posts a week for a while.

Just wishing everyone a happy national holiday. Yesterday they made HongPong.com the City Pages blog of the day! Too bad I haven't written in a couple weeks. This operation got characterized as:

Dan Feidt blogs on presidential candidate Ron Paul, the Lone Gunmen, Middle East foreign policy, and Rosie O'Donnell as 9/11 conspiracy theorist at Hong Pong.

Hilarious!

Over the last weekend I moved out of my apartment in St. Paul, basically into my friends' basement in Nordeast Minneapolis for a couple weeks. I am going on a family trip to France and England on July 14 until the end of the month.

I got promoted at work (Politics in Minnesota) and I have been extremely busy working on the new Drupal-powered website there, as well as contributing writing. Between the moving and the craziness at work, there's been no time to get much new stuff up here. No matter, there's plenty in the archives to go look at.

City Pages visitors, thanks for stopping by! I would say something more useful, but it's really time to go BBQ over by Lake Calhoun.

A friend of mine uncovered something obvious that had eluded me for a long time.

First a step through the looking glass, circa March 2001:

The Internet Wayback Machine has stashed most of the content of the original HongPong.com, as well as Thwart.net, the other site I ran as a main blog for the first 1.5 years over at Macalester. Somehow I just never noticed the Wayback Machine had all this stuff. I seem to recall looking into it once before without finding much. But hey, whatever, here it is preserved forever! It did not collect the images from each part, but that's not a big deal compared with recovering the text of long-lost missives from Roy, Fatty, Frogisis and Mordred.

Here is most of the Wiki.hongpong.com that met an ugly end from another hard drive crash: this was a very cool page about the geopolitics of pipelines that died badly. It also doesn't have images but i still have those. I had lost the text until today!!



And here is one from Thwart.net around November 2002, just after Wellstone's death



Incredible. Well not really that incredible. But it's a really great find, which basically reverses most of the years of data loss. Furthermore, I have every intention of adding all these old posts to the Drupal system, so that effectively THIS incarnation of Hongpong.com will include all the ancient material. After all, while not operative continuously, this site has been in operation for a very long time in internet terms. Starting up in November 2001 definitely makes it one of the oldest blog-sites around. NewsPro, PHP-Nuke, Wordpress, Scoop, MovableType and today Drupal, Hongpong.com (and thwart.net, which I still own) have run on most of the systems, usually on home-brewed server setups that only catastrophically die occasionally.

Also, for that matter, the hongpong.com I set up nearly seven years ago was actually organized pretty well, in many ways organized better than it is now. So a good swath of the old material will just get grafted right in, as top-level elements of the site design. You will be able to read the whole thing from November 2000 right through to today.

I haven't seen this in one hell of a long time:

AMAZING. And yes I am going to have to add the Groovy Penguins back in.

A special apology to Mr Schwartz out west who noted that Charlie Sheen is not among the most credible of celebrities.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, five real comments over the last week got eaten by the Spam filter and they've only just been recovered. The good news is that most of the spammer activity has tapered off under the tight filter.

I don't know why the filter runs so tight when people aren't inserting links. I have loosened some of its rules so that hopefully these "false positives" will quit harming interested readers. I'm hoping the Recent Comments box encourages people to try one, but having the computer automatically dump them beyond the rules sucks.

I don't care if people go trolling, hey at least there's an effort to Get Involved! :)

Here's the latest from our visitors. If anyone else got screwed post a note on this post (i'll even check the spams on it!!)

Texas Youth Commission

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 2007-04-01 00:15.

This story will receive NO traction until we e-users force the issue. This is so disgusting, I did not believe it when I first read about --esp. Baumann's refusal to indict. It's absolutely revolting to say that 10-17 yr old boys were accepting of assaults! First, they were assaulted...that is what was printed. And secondly, they were under-age of consent. And third, they were assaulted by those with authority over them! It's unbelivable....but the same attorney who arrested the border patrol duo is Baumann;s supervisor! I cannot understand why this hasn't been publicized. Is being a pedophile OK with Texans?

To Anonymous: Yep it is! Next comment, on the poll:

Stupidity.....

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 2007-03-31 06:47.

The voting poll alone doesn`t even give me a alugh. My 9 year old son is more creative. Anyone who would listen to anything Danny Bonadouche has to say is as psychotic as he is. That moron will do anything to get press. He wouldn`t make a pimple on Rosie O`Donnells ass. He`s just jealous my gal pal Rosie is getting laid more than him. Air or print an idiot like that and your ratings go down the tube.

All right. The mysterious Kabul Khan weighed in with an unusual prospect. However I appreciated the directness. This was in the context of my describing "re-ottomanization" neo-con style efforts to divide the Mideast and central Asia ethnically :

New Middle East

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2007-03-27 06:44.

I think Russia must support this new carving up plan of US.

In future Pakistani and Irani military trained Jihadis will attack Russia with help of Chechans.

Breaking up pakistan and Iran those have illegal nukes need to be divided and creating new viable states will help econmic development of region and eridicate state run religious terrorism for ever.

Kabul Khan

I usually suspect that breaking up multi-ethnic states like Pakistan and Iran radicalizes and militarizes the situation, generating more jihadi problems. Yugoslavia's breakup did just that, and those locals started helping the Chechens. Interesting though!

seriously, folks

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 2007-03-26 22:14.

no one takes charlie sheen any more seriously than they did, say, anna nicole smith.

-dan schwartz

One thing about Sheen: Smith's lethal drug cocktail sure as hell wouldn't have killed him! He'd call it a refreshing breakfast course. Finally:

It might just be...

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2007-03-23 13:05.

some guy at the CIA checking out your site on his lunch break.

That is precisely the kind of audience I'm shooting for!

Again, Sorry about the Spam filter problems. Let me know if you're getting bounced!! I'll be keeping a closer eye on it now...

Good news for all! HongPong.com is now running on a new web hosting company - Bluehost.com. It is a lot faster but otherwise basically the same behind the scenes.

Thanks for joining us. There will be major, sweet changes to everything that can actually be carried out with reasonable speed now. Many, many things about this site should have been fixed long ago, and now they will be!!

w0w!

We're running a pretty low-key kind of site here, but it's always interesting how word belts around the world about this little operation, here and there, in unexpected pockets.

We appreciate comments, especially from strange places. How exactly these people ran across my site I have no idea!

A couple weeks ago I noted bLueStar the "Turkish hacker for Islam," whose page I randomly ran into one day. bLueStar stopped by to respond with one thoughtful remark:

bLueStar // For Turkish Hacker

Hi,

Turkey is details : http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/Default.aspx?17A16AE30572D313D4 AF1EF75F7A79681D 9DD78D03148A6E

New Index : http://www.kelebekforum.org/hacked.html

// bLueStar

The recent story about corrupt USIS military contractors murdering Col. Ted Westhusing - and the shady dimensions of the security clearance system - garnered this anonymous comment from a veteran of the military-industrial complex:

Good Post.

USA Today has recently reported in its Washington Section that the CIA plans to utilize more open sources and blogs in its intelligence work and outsource more of its intelligence software development to commercial contractors in an attempt to re-establish itself as the premiere world intelligence agency.

The "Strategic Intent" is posted on the CIA public web site.

Defense Industry Daily further reports that General Electric is gobbling up Smith's Industries for $4.8B. [link]

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak. Let's look at this for a moment and do our patriotic duty by reading along with the CIA (after all, they have announced they are reading this blog)

1. The new CIA approach comes exactly at the formation of the agency’s new "External Advisory Board", which consists of the following:

* A former Pentagon Chairman of the Joints Chief who is now a Northrop Grumman Corporation Board Member

* A deposed Chairman of the Board of Hewlett Packard Corporation (HP)

* A Former Deputy Secretary of Defense who now heads up a Washington think tank with Henry Kissinger

2. Northrop Grumman Corporation and Hewlett Packard are two huge government contractors in the Pentagon and CIA custom software development arena. Their combined contracts with the government just for IT are in the multiples of millions. I wonder what the advisory board is filling the CIA's ear with?

3. Washington "Think Tanks" are fronts for big time lobbies, sophisticated in their operations, claiming non-partisanship, but tremendously influential on K Street. If a lobby cannot buy its way in, why not sit on the advisory board?

4. GE already has the military aircraft jet engine market. In buying Smith's, it takes one more major defense corporation out of the opposition and further reduces the government's leverage through competition. GE now joins the other monoliths such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon with tremendous leverage in the $500B +++ per year defense market.

5. Note the synergy that now exists between the Pentagon and the CIA. Note the influence by the major corporations.

6. Also note the balance in your bank account and your aspirations for the generations of the future. Both are going down.

7. The huge Military Industrial Complex (MIC) continues to march. Taxes and national debt will be forced to march straight up the wall to support it. For further information please see:

http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703

Thank you, anonymous military-industrial Vietnam veteran. (he/she posted four times, no doubt because my website is slower than liquid cheese. No harm at all done!!) While I think he's speaking generally about the CIA scanning websites like this, I have traced openly identified (via DNS/IP#) CIA visits to HongPong.com on several occasions. The CIA's IP addresses were 198.81.129.194 and 198.81.129.193. Don't believe me? Look it up your own damn self (or directly, here)!

IP Address : 198.81.129.194 [ relay2.cia.gov ]

ISP : ANS Communications

Organization : Central Intelligence Agency

Location : US, United States

City : Washington, DC 20505

Latitude : 38°89'33" North

Longitude : 77°01'46" West

OrgName: Central Intelligence Agency

OrgID: CIA-1

Address: OIT/ESG/DSED

City: Washington

StateProv: DC

PostalCode: 20505

Country: US

NetRange: 198.81.128.0 - 198.81.191.255

CIDR: 198.81.128.0/18

NetName: OIT-BLK1

NetHandle: NET-198-81-128-0-1

Parent: NET-198-80-0-0-1

NetType: Reassigned

RegDate: 1997-02-11

Updated: 1998-03-30

RTechHandle: ANM3-ORG-ARIN

RTechName: Central Intelligence Agency

RTechPhone: +1-703-874-5401

RTechEmail: edsn@ucia.gov

Finally we have a really mysterious anonymous chestnut about this really strange Ryder truck photo purportedly taken before the Oklahoma City Bombing, an event about which new and strange FBI ties have recently been exposed, we noted. Our anonymous contributor claims that the truck photo was taken in November:

The Camp Gruber Photos were taken by Carl Schiffman in November 1994, NOT April of '95. He was a passenger in a Cessna 172 and was flying over Gruber looking for deer (it was hunting season). I saw the photos when they were developed by him the next week. He had two sets developed and gave me one set which I put in a safe. This was some kind of DoD exercise that occurred in November and enough VIPS watched the exercise to require a set of bleachers to be set up. Any connection to OKC is tenuous at best.

Fascinating material to follow up, details and all. If they aren't related to OKC, why were they duplicated for our commenter's safe?

To Turkish Hacker bLueStar, the anonymous Vietnam vet, and the guy who has copies of the Ryder truck photos in a safe, thanks for stopping by, and best of luck to ya! The HongCorp International Conspiracy Alliance expands....

We had some snags with the Google Analytics but got it fixed last week. Last week's Google search activity leading here was interesting! These search strings got people to HongPong.com last week! I embedded these in an image to avoid messing with Google's behavior!

Pretty sweet eh?