Van's Hardware Journal

Bill let me know that he was able to order a copy of Robert C. Christian's Common Sense Renewed by calling the Elberton Granite Association and sending them a $15 money order.  The contact information is as follows:

It’s Tuesday, May 30, 2017.  My name is Winnie Smith and I just turned 13 last month.

Our new home is hard to get used to.  It’s real pretty here and the weather is nice right now.  It’s a little like our old home in Arkansas.  I miss that place a lot.

I miss the rain at night and the cool mornings.  I miss the smell of the dogwood and honeysuckle flowers.  I miss the friendly little hummingbirds that were always flying around our shoulders.  I miss fishing in our ponds, working in our garden with Mama, skipping rocks on the Cossatot with Daddy, eating Hope watermelons and swimming in the ice cold creeks under a warm sun.  In a way, I even miss the chiggers, seed ticks and poison ivy which are all usually bad this time of year in the Ouachitas.

Daddy probably misses Arkansas more than anyone else.  He was born and raised there.  Even though I was born in Texas, Daddy managed to find a way to get us back to a good home in Arkansas where we could be safe during the War.  Daddy never wanted to move again, but, when we had no other choice, he told Uncle John that he didn’t want to move too far away from home.  That’s one of the reasons why he and Mom picked this place.

Daddy took us outside tonight for a surprise.  We had a marshmallow roast and told spooky stories around a camp fire.  A little after midnight, Daddy set up his telescope and asked us to guess what we were looking at.  It was a dim yellow star, just a tiny, flickering speck of light, even through his telescope.  It was the sun -- or at least our old sun.  It was hard for me to imagine that our old, green house still circled that little, yellow dot 2,110 light years away.

We had a good time tonight.  Everyone was happy.  Everyone but Daddy.  When he thought everybody was asleep, he walked back to that telescope and looked at earth for a long, long time.  He only quit when he began crying.  I’ve never seen Daddy cry before, even after all that he went through during the War.

It’s very late and I need to go to sleep.  I miss Arkansas a lot right now.   I love you, Daddy.

As we mentioned earlier this week, the Burj Khalifa has been shut down indefinitely to tourists.  An elevator failure is now being reported as the cause of the closure.  One witness described the failure as sounding like a "small explosion."

Labels: Burj Dubai, Burj Khalifa, Georgia Guidestones, shutdown

Mikey sent us a link to a story reporting that the Burj Khalifa has been suddenly closed to the public after being opened only one month ago.  Formerly known as the Burj Dubai, the Burj Khalifa is the by far the tallest building in the world at 2,717 feet or well over 1/2-mile high.  The structure appears to represent a new Tower of Babel as our Georgia Guidestones investigation (see here and here) recently revealed.

My Radio Liberty interviews from Wednesday and Thursday are now ready for download.  You can obtain them in MP3 format by following the links below.

Wednesday is here.
Thursday is here.

Dr. Stan Monteih interviewed me for two hours on his Radio Liberty program last night.  You can now listen to MP3 archives of the broadcast.  Part 1 is here.  Part 2 is here.

Dr. Monteith has scheduled to interview me again tonight at 11PM Central / 9PM Pacific.  You can listen to that interview live here.

I will also be interviewed on his afternoon show tomorrow at 5PM Central and at 9AM on his morning show on February 8th.

In an astounding, disruptive, indefensible and perplexing move, Google sent out a termination of service email today to all current users of Google's Blogger FTP facilities.  We use that service to publish Van's Hardware Journal to our Tera-Byte server located in Canada.

The Google service will end March 26, 2010, giving bloggers less than two months to migrate to another blogging service or to follow Google's solution which is to upload all external Blogger databases to Google's servers and then point associated blog URLs to Google.

In other words, if you have been using Google's Blogger FTP service, which has been around for several years and is used by many now very irate people, Google is holding a gun to your head in order to take control of your content.

Here is a comment I posted earlier on the Google Blogger site:

I do not understand why Google is terminating existing FTP blogging services. Why not simply remove the FTP/SFTP option from new blogs while maintaining current support for existing FTP blogs?

At the very least, why doesn't Google release an open source blogging tool (either web-based or standalone) that allows current FTP bloggers to continue to maintain their sites?

Giving less than two months formal warning to current Google bloggers that their publishing service will be cut off unless they migrate their blogs to Google's servers is a lot like placing a gun to our heads. This is one of the more "evil" things Google has ever done.

There is no valid technical reason for Google to suddenly pull the plug on all external, existing Blogger websites.  This is an outrageous act of Internet piracy in what appears to be a play to take control of hundreds if not thousands of valuable blog sites.