Major twenty-four hour cable news networks in the United States have failed to bring to their audience a balanced view of the world. Focusing on trivial domestic issues, the same repetitive hodgepodge broadcast every fifteen minutes make viewers assume a slow news day when in the reality of a global context there is more than enough to report.

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Torture is a line that should be drawn clearly in the sand, however the Bush administration has actively worked to distort this line. With the now infamous line of the current administration’s rhetoric “The Gloves are Off,” US led interrogation has led to unlawful detainment of individuals for years without trials, due process or, in many cases, basic human rights.

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I just finished up another website, lauraewalker.com, for a photographer. It’s my first commercial Ruby on Rails application. I still have some tweaks left here and there but for the most part it is complete.

I just finished my redesign of Chattanooga Dance Inc. It’s been using the default Drupal theme since I originally established the website over a year ago.

I had been meaning to create a custom theme for the site for a while, however Drupal provided to be a very frustrating piece of software to work with. This theme took about two weeks and all the photos and graphics I did myself except for the logo which was provided by the national USA Dance organization.

I’ve started working on some other web sites, some for personal and others for professional use. I hope to have a web portfolio of my designs up soon.

The rising cost of health care in the United States is absolutely staggering. Within the hodge-podge of the industry, health care providers and insurers fight a delicate balance between authorizing treatment and preventing providers from overcharging for unnecessary tests and procedures. Universal Health Care efforts have been eroded away by industry lobbyist and a generalized fear of socialism. The consumer is left in the fray in an inflexible system that is weighted towards industry instead of the social welfare of the nation’s citizens.

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This release fixes the issue with mplayer not exiting with the application of it happens to be paused. I also added a check so you can’t add the same file twice. Other small exceptions handlers have been added as well.

I’ve just released my first open source C#/.NET application. It’s written with mono/linux being the intended target. It’s called MplayerBuddy and it’s a media bookmarking utility designed to keep track of your place in videos. It’s great for people like me with limited attention spans who continually flip between different videos.

I’ve finally put my projects back up on the website. They were taken off Freshmeat.net a few years back when I took my old professional website down. I’m currently working on some new open source applications including one written in C#/Mono.NET/Gtk# that works on Linux and MacOS. More details soon

Recently I purchased a 2GB SanDisk U3 Flash Drive. It was on sale and I honestly have never owned a USB flash drive. I’ve always used either a network connection or CD-Rs to transport data. With the prices dropping on flash drives so dramatically, I though it might as well be time to purchase one. However when I plugged it into my computer I was surprised to find this wasn’t an ordinary flash drive.

The USB controller showed two drives when you plugged the stick in, one being a CD-Rom drive. It had an autorun that would install proprietary software for running mini-applications straight from the flash drive as well as encrypting the data on it. It seems like a neat idea in concept, except that I didn’t purchase a crappy application on a stick. I purchased a flash drive. It showed this useless CD-rom drive in MacOS and Linux, and in windows it required the user to be logged in as administrator in order to even gain access to the flash drive, making it completely useless on public PCs such as in libraries.

After doing some research I found a forum topic which discussed the issue at length. After several complaints, U3 publicly released a U3 removal tool to flash the firmware on these devices so that they are once again, simple and easy to use plain old flash drives.

I’ve finally gotten around to updating the assignments page with last semester’s work as well as several of my undergraduate class work. It’s not entirely up to date, but it’s on its way there. The projects and web portfolio should be up shortly as well.