Dave's Cars, Computers, Great Links

A Small Contribution to the World Wide Wasteoftime


Dave's World

CAMERAS INFO PGP KEY
SAYINGS PET PEEVES THIS SITE


Virtually The Live Views Out My Window

Pikes Peak dominates the Colorado Springs skyline. I live in the shadow of Pikes Peak (14,110 ft above sea level), and have a great view of it to the west.

To the south is Cheyenne Mountain. It supports a farm of broadcasting towers, is home to our wonderful local zoo, and encases NORAD. I have a great view of it, too.

If you're really into web cams, you simply must check out The Web Cam Recorder.


Information

I'm a fortysomething single male. Caucasian. Born that way, you know.

I live in Colorado Springs, more than 6000 feet above sea level, where the air is thin, usually cool, and rarely moist.

I've lived here in the Pikes Peak region since the late 70s. I never could stand all the hazy summer humidity back East! However, my government's latest 'free lunch' -- oxygenated fuels (oxyfuel is an oxymoron, but well-packaged as a 'free lunch' it 'sold', after the pro-oxy-fuelers hired a public relations firm to 'sell' it) -- may chase me from this region one day. There's a CDH guy in Denver, Kim Livo (303-692-3134), who seems to care, but he claims he's had trouble finding anyone (else) who's affected by this poison, though he does admit that even as the Colorado Department of Health touts the pollution reductions it attrubutes to oxyfuels, the CDH does not even bother to monitor the amount of MTBE in the air here. And, of course, if the CDH doesn't measure it, it doesn't exist, right? One of the cruel 'ironies' involved in this oxyfuels fiasco is that MTBE, whose use is supposed to lower carbon monoxide levels, thermally decomposes into, you guessed it, carbon monoxide.

Now that MTBE has shown up in so many people's water supplies, MTBE is being used less this year (though Congress still thinks it's more important to subpoena a 6-yr-old wetback to testify before them than to amend their bogus law which effectively mandates its use). So I can't help but wonder about our intelligence as a species when people only notice the problem when the water tastes bad, but the bad-smelling air we were breathing was so thoroughly and officially ignored. Now that it's in the water, people are talking about monitoring its levels, but still no one monitors the level of MTBE in our breathing supply.

political definition

And if the oxyfuels don't get me, the population explosion might. (Is it true that our government is still subsidizing baby-making? Is there some fear that folks wouldn't reproduce if the government didn't subsidize it?)

But when clogged overcrowded roads aren't resulting in dense pollution being packed up against the Front Range, this is still a climatically wonderful place to live. The local political climate is another matter...

political definition2

I've been running my own computer business (mainly software design) for 15 years. I've been playing with and learning more and more about Windows lately, though I tend to prefer the chaos of the internet to the randomness of Bill's world. So I've done more server-side programming in Perl and client-side programming in JavaScript than I have on my own computer!


My Public PGP Key


copy/paste
this to a file named dspubkey.asc :

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Version: 2.6.2

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Once you install it on your public keyring, you will be able to use PGP to communicate with me privately. And if you include an ASCII (printable) "armored" copy of your public PGP key in your correspondence to me, I can reply to you privately.



Pet Peeves

Law Enforcement Officers who know it's OK for them to break laws.

Left Lane Bandits!

Daytime Running Lights (especially those of the GM high-beam variety).

People who drive with their fog lights on whenever it's dark out.
(Perhaps they are always 'in a fog'?)

Oxygenated fuels (except on submarines and space ships).

Email and usenet posts that contain lines of text that are longer than the screen width.

When people inappropriately quote an entire 8-paragraph message in their reply,
when that reply consists of 1 sentence in response to 1 paragraph.

When people fail to quote the message to which they are replying, no matter how appropriate.

When people say "math", but that to which they refer is mere arithmetic.

When people pretend to know a slash from a back-slash.

When people use bible references in place of logic and thinking.

When people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less".
These people tend to find digital logic confusing! Duh.
Say what you mean, mean what you say...

Double doors, where one is never unlocked.

Car/truck stereos whose bass frequencies can be felt 1/4 mile away.

When a football league speaks of allegiance, but obviously knows nothing of loyalty.


Favorite Sayings and Observations

Original and otherwise...

Time is the one non-renewable resource.

Oxyfuel is an oxymoron.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

All generalizations are wrong. Including this one!

General Motors is changing its name to Miracle Motors.
Their new motto: If it's a good car, it's a Miracle!

Hate is a disease; don't be a carrier.

Nothing beats a trial like a failure!

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.

Everlasting growth is dependent on everlasting supply

Email moves at somewhere between the speed of light and Pony Express.

My local Wal-Mart no longer sells distilled spring water.


Philosophy Of This Site

This site was designed with your time in mind. Time is, after all, the one non-renewable resource. Sure a picture might be worth a thousand words, but do you really want to wait for a picture to appear when all you needed was a single word?

Someday our modems will be sufficiently fast that graphics-intensive sites will make a lot more sense than they do today. In the meantime, however, I will make the most of the bandwidth resources available to the typical web surfer. If you want pictures, there are some available from the top link on this page.

My time is valuable to me. These days, I rarely wait for web pages that take too long to load, especially those that make me wait for everything to finish loading before I can begin reading anything.

I assume your time is valuable to you, and I hope that you will appreciate my high-performance web pages. (If my host's frames are slowing you down, click on the frame thingie in the upper left-hand corner of this site's home page.) I hope you will also appreciate that I leave the status line, at the bottom of your browser, alone, so you can see what you and your browser, rather than my web page, are up to. After all, I can put whatever I want on the title bar at the top of your browser screen...

This is my first web site, now in its second edition. And I do not have the resources to check to see how it looks on every possible browser. So if some facet of my web page design (especially some of the color combinations, which are obviously experimental) doesn't seem to work very well with your browser, please do not hesitate to let me know.


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