Perri Nelson's Website

For those we lost, We will not forget 09/11/2001 “We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.”
— Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the Supreme Court in 554 U. S. ____ (2008)

Weekend Linkfest

Published Thu, Apr 19 2007 11:58 PM
Technorati Tags: Open Trackbacks

This open trackbacks post is for April 20 through 22, 2007.

If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.

Just remember the trackback policy.

For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.

Comments (3) | Trackbacks (40)

Relying on third party services...

Published Thu, Apr 19 2007 8:32 PM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Blogging, Annoyances

Sometimes it's just not a good idea.

We've all seen what happens when blogrolling.com runs into bandwidth problems. That's why some of us have moved our blog rolls to where they don't affect page load time.

How about other services though? Currently both Sitemeter and Statcounter are giving me fits. It wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't a premium subscriber to their services. I pay for the extra data that Sitemeter gives me. I pay for the extra log space that Statcounter gives me.

And right now both services are acting odd. At the moment I can't get either of them to work right, and they're impeding the performance of my site.

Technorati's having trouble just now too, but it at least loads correctly. It's just slow... So is alta-vista. So is flickr.

Pinging these sites doesn't indicate much of a problem, although Sitemeter and Statcounter both take over twice as long to respond to the ping (no, I'm not talking about an XMLRPC ping, I'm talking about a TCPIP ping).

Maybe the servers are just overloaded?

Or maybe something else is going on. Meanwhile, the site is slow. Sorry about that.

Update: Well that was relatively quick. Everything's back. Maybe it was just a local bandwidth hog? Maybe not. I know my site was responding fairly quickly, but all of the little widgets and stuff were really slow. Now things seem to be back to normal.

Still, it leaves me thinking just how much we rely on these little "extras". It also reminds me what things were like back in the days of 300 baud modems.

When things are going right, I can generally load my site in under two seconds at my normal bandwidth. But then, I never surf with less than a broadband connection anymore, and I've usually got a lot of images and other stuff in the browser's cache, so they don't have to be downloaded all the time.

I just took a look at a "Web Page Speed Report" for my site though, and it wasn't pretty. So I cleared my browser cache of everything and tried loading the page. Even with a broadband connection it took almost 8 seconds to load.

It wasn't too long ago that I didn't have a broadband connection. I had to surf the web at 28.8kbps, and sometimes it was agony loading a site. According to the web page speed report I ran at that speed it would take over two minutes to completely load my home page. That's entirely too long.

Nearly half of the page load time is for images. At 28.8kbps and with a reasonably quality connection it would take almost 52 seconds to download the images on the site alone. I've gone to some trouble to try to keep them small, but they're still larger than I thought.

Even the HTML takes around 18 seconds to download at 28.8kbps. I guess I'm a lot wordier than I thought.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to do a little comparison between my site, and a few other sites I like to read. Here's the results according to http://www.websiteoptimization.com:

Website	Load time at 28.8kbps	Load time at T1 speed
Perri Nelson's Website	124.05 seconds	9.98 seconds
Woman Honor Thyself	114.41 seconds	8.07 seconds
NW Bloggers	40.64 seconds	4.50 seconds
Blog @ MoreWhat.com	226.68 seconds	10.99 seconds
Dumb Ox Daily News	566.38 seconds	36.15 seconds
The Bullwinkle Blog	313.64 seconds	14.74 seconds
High Desert Wanderer	110.57 seconds	7.04 seconds
Thoughts on Design	45.79 seconds	4.18 seconds

I think it's clear from these numbers that blogging is a high-bandwidth activity. Just imagine visiting a site and waiting nearly ten minutes for it to load! Or even two minutes. Would you even bother waiting that long?

And that's even without the execution time for the scripts we all use to present blog rolls, plug in to traffic counters add snap previews, or technorati widgets and so on to our sites. Or for the time it takes for those services to respond.

When these services are suffering, our page loads suffer. I started this post because at broadband speeds it was taking altogether to long to load my own page when Sitemeter and Statcounter were unresponsive. It was taking a lot less time to load my pages than it does at 28.8kbps and I thought it was too slow.

Imagine what people with dialup are going through when they read our blogs. Even without all these extras we rely on, some people just aren't going to bother.

It's really too bad that along with all of the statistics you can get about a visitors experience from the traffic counters that we can't also get information about their connection speed or page load time. We can find out what browser someone is using, what version of the browser, what screen resolution and color density they're using, what OS they're running, and even what version of javascript they're using. We still can't get statistics on their connection speed.

I have friends that only have dialup service. Maybe that's why I don't see very many site visits from them. Maybe it's not the content, but the agonizingly slow experience of loading the pages.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Right Pundits, Pet's Garden Blog, The Virtuous Republic, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, third world county, Maggie's Notebook, basil's blog, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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U.N. Requests delays in proposed sanctions for Sudan

Published Thu, Apr 19 2007 5:49 PM
Technorati Tags: United Nations

For as long as I've been blogging, and before, I've been reading about the problems in Darfur. I've read descriptions of "genocide" and I've heard horrific tales on the radio. I've watched banners scroll across the bottom of my television screen trying to draw my attention to the evil there.

Maybe I haven't been blogging that long, but this "crisis" is really old news. People on all sides of the political spectrum have something to say about it. The United Nations Security Council has passed resolutions calling for either more troops to put a stop to the violence or economic sanctions for Sudan.

It can't be said that nobody has tried to pursue a diplomatic solution to this mess. For some reason though diplomacy just isn't working. Sudan refuses to cooperate.

That doesn't stop Secretary General Ban Ki Moon from blocking attempts to get serious about the sanctions, or to impose more meaningful ones. The Washington Post reports on this...

President Bush unveiled a new package of sanctions against Sudan yesterday for failing to cooperate with international efforts to end what he described as the "genocide" in the Darfur region -- but promptly postponed it to give the U.N. secretary general time to pursue a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
Until Tuesday night, the White House had been planning to use the speech to impose a "Plan B" for Sudan, a long-anticipated plan that includes new financial sanctions targeting 29 companies owned or controlled by the Sudanese government, as well as three people involved in fomenting violence in Darfur. Bush and his aides have been increasingly frustrated by their inability to prod Sudan to cooperate in efforts to end the humanitarian crisis in the troubled region, where as many as 450,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been made homeless after attacks from government-sponsored militias.
But the administration plan was upended by a last-minute plea Tuesday from Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, requesting more time to work out a diplomatic solution with Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Ban bluntly told Rice that now is not the time to be enforcing new sanctions on Sudan, said U.S. and U.N. sources familiar with the conversation.

This is what I just can't stand about the U.N. It seems that all they ever want to do is talk. Hundreds of thousands of people die and millions of people become refugees and all the the U.N. wants to do is talk. talk.

"The Darfur conflict is not about the partial deployment of troops. It is about ending the genocide, respecting the rule of law, accountability and allowing people to return to their homes," said Ted Dagne, an Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service. "We have declared genocide, but we have not addressed the root causes of the conflict and how to end it. In Rwanda, one million were killed in 90 days; yet in Darfur, it is four years and still counting."

Dagne was complaining about the lack of meaningful U.S. action regarding this mess, and he does have a point. The problem is, it's not the U.S. that is delaying doing anything meaningful here. It's the U.N. The Secretary General says "Now is not the time to be enforcing new sanctions on Sudan".

When IS the time to be enforcing sanctions? After everyone in Darfur is dead? It almost seems as if the Secretary General wants to wait that long. After all, if everyone's dead the problem goes away doesn't it?

Administration officials said they are skeptical of Bashir's intentions, citing the endless haggling over a peacekeeping force for Darfur that is supposed to eventually include more than 20,000 U.N. and African Union soldiers and police officers. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte called Bush from Khartoum on Tuesday and reported that Bashir was defiant and showed little indication that he would be accommodating, officials said.
Bush had already made the key decisions over the past week, accepting most of the recommendations of his advisers after rejecting a package that he viewed as too weak, administration officials said. But then, on Tuesday, Ban called Rice and made what U.S. officials described as a personal and emotional plea for a delay.
Ban noted that Bashir's agreement this week to allow an initial deployment of 3,000 peacekeepers was his first diplomatic achievement as U.N. secretary general and that it had been greeted favorably by other nations, so a U.S. move to impose sanctions now would undercut that accomplishment. He also said that Bashir is convinced that the United States is acting in bad faith, so any move by the administration would simply reinforce his belief that the international community cannot be trusted, sources said.

I'm convinced that Bashir is acting in bad faith. The militias are government sponsored. Lt. Gen Omar Hassan al-Bashir is responsible for the violence in Darfur. He can stop it without the need for a peacekeeping force.

The fact that he won't, and that he's ignored the sanctions so far is a perfect indication that he can't be trusted. It's long past time for diplomacy in Darfur.

The international community cannot be trusted to do anything more than talk. Once again we see how the U.N. has lost its will to fight evil in the world. While they delay more victims are dying and more people are being made into refugees.

The U.N. has failed in its mission to promote peace, because all they do is talk about it and wring their hands.

Originally posted at Reject the U.N.

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Strange Visits...

Published Thu, Apr 19 2007 12:13 PM

Here's an interesting hit on my website. Why would someone from the House of Representatives, or their staff, think I'm an expert on what Justice Scalia thinks of gun control?

Perri Nelsons Website
By Details > Visit Detail
Visit 8,425

[<<]  [>>]

Domain Name house.gov ^? (United States Government)

IP Address 143.231.249.137 ^? (Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives)

ISP Information Systems, U.S. House of Representatives

Location

Continent : North America

Country : United States  (Facts)

State : District of Columbia

City : Washington

Lat/Long : 38.8933, -77.0146 (Map)

Distance : 2,311 miles

Language English (United States)
en-us

Operating System Microsoft WinXP

Browser Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Javascript version 1.3

Monitor

Resolution : 1024 x 768

Color Depth : 16 bits

Time of Visit Apr 19 2007 12:07:45 pm

Last Page View Apr 19 2007 12:07:45 pm

Visit Length 0 seconds

Page Views 1

Referring URL
http://www.google.co...el about gun control

Search Engine
google.com

Search Words
how does justice scalia feel about gun control

Visit Entry Page http://perrinelson.com/

Visit Exit Page http://perrinelson.com/

Out Click

Time Zone UTC-5:00

Visitor's Time Apr 19 2007 3:07:45 pm

Visit Number 8,425

[<<]  [>>]

Visitor Path Duration (s)

Referral how does justice scalia feel about gun control
http://www.google.com/search?hl=...ce Scalia feel about gun control 0

(1) http://perrinelson.com/ 0

I extracted this from the statistics that SiteMeter keeps for me. Some of the links have been "unlinked", but the general content is as you see it. Seems a bit odd if you ask me.

Maybe this fragment from the google search results page for their query explains it...

Perri Nelson's Website

I further applaud Justice Thomas' and Justice Scalia's recognition that that ... that this tragedy should serve as evidence that more gun control is needed. ...
perrinelson.com/ - Apr 19, 2007 - Similar pages

I guess the attempt to highlight the search words in the retrieved results gave the wrong impression. Google took the content from two separate posts on my main page and ended up mashing them together.

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Reaction to the Supreme Court's recent decision

Published Thu, Apr 19 2007 9:07 AM
Technorati Tags: Abortion, News and Politics, Courts, Media

I celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court's decision yesterday to uphold the federal ban on "partial birth abortion". I am glad that this particularly gruesome procedure has been banned. I am also happy to see the separate concurring opinion of Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia. Justice Thomas wrote:

I write separately to reiterate my view that the Court's abortion jurisprudence, including Casey and Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), has no basis in the Constitution.

Predictably, and quite rightly, the news media is reporting on the decision. Equally predictably, the reporting has a slant that implies that women's rights are being eroded, and most of it ignores the concurring opinion of Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia. An example can be found in the Seattle Times:

Sister Sharon Park, a lobbyist for the Washington State Catholic Conference, said Wednesday's Supreme Court ruling "will certainly provide an impetus to seek legislation in our state."

While Sister Park said polls show most state residents want some limitations on abortion, Washington lawmakers and voters repeatedly have been unwilling to support most attempts to restrict women's reproductive freedom. A 1998 initiative that would have created a law similar to the current federal ban was rejected by 59 percent of voters.

Why is it that when attempts are made to restrict abortions it's always portrayed in the media as a restriction on women's reproductive freedom? Can you honestly tell me how killing a developing baby (or a fetus if you insist on not recognizing it as human) enhances reproductive freedom? Women are still free to reproduce when specific abortion procedures are restricted.

Saying that abortion restricts a woman's freedom to reproduce is ludicrous. What's actually meant is that not allowing abortion restricts a woman's freedom not to reproduce, and not to face the consequences of licentious behavior.

"I think their confidence is misplaced," said Lisa Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women's Law Center in Seattle. "They have tried and tried and failed to change our state's reproductive-choice laws."

Reproductive-choice laws? How can they be called that, except to make them more palatable? Abortion is less about "reproductive-choice" than it is about refusing to accept the consequences of licentious behavior.

Don't most women in the United States today have a choice about whether to reproduce? They can, and often do, abstain from sex with men. That's been shown to be nearly 100% effective at preventing reproduction. It would be 100% effective, except for artificial insemination. If a woman isn't inseminated, she can't conceive, except under miraculous conditions.

There are other, mechanical ways to prevent conception. If a physical barrier to the passage of sperm through the womb to where the egg awaits fertilization is present it's pretty darned difficult for a woman to conceive.

Women have access to hormonal birth control. If a woman doesn't produce an egg to be fertilized she can't conceive. If her womb isn't properly prepared for the implantation of a fertilized egg, she can't carry the baby to term.

On the other hand, if a woman chooses to engage in unprotected sex with a man, then she should accept the risk of pregnancy, and accept the responsibility that it implies. Deciding after the fact that taking a life is an appropriate way to deal with poor choices is simply evil.

Of course, women can be, and lamentably are raped with alarming frequency. And, rapes can result in unwanted pregnancies. I can understand when a woman might want to "terminate" such a pregnancy, although I still believe it is adding evil to evil.

In 1970, Washington became the first state to legalize abortion by popular vote, three years before Roe v. Wade. Voters in 1984 rejected a ban on state-funded abortions for poor women, and in 1991 approved the Reproductive Privacy Act, which preserves a woman's right to an abortion.

While I personally find abortion abhorent, Washington's decision to legalize abortion by popular vote was rightly Washington's decision to make. At the same time, decisions by other states to ban abortion were also rightly those states' decisions to make.

That's where the power to decide this issue rightly belongs, at the state level and not at the federal level. Roe v. Wade was an example of overreaching by the supreme Court. Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia recognize that.

Dr. Sarah Prager, who directs a family-planning training school for residents at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said the university hasn't been routinely using the practices specified in the act, which notes that a fetus must be alive when "partially delivered" from the woman's body.

In other words, the procedure is murder, sanctified by the fact that it's performed by a doctor. Historically "partial delivery" has been recognized as sufficient to establish the order of birth for purposes of inheritance. The biblical story of Jacob and Esau comes to mind.

Wednesday's ruling upheld a federal ban on the procedure where a baby is "partially delivered" and its skull crushed or peirced to kill it, before completing the delivery. The federal law, passed by congress and signed by the president, the proper method for enacting federal law, didn't ban cutting up the baby in the womb and extracting it, which is another option done in late term abortions.

Personally, I find both methods barbaric. If it's gruesome to crush the skull of a partially delivered baby, isn't it even more gruesome to chop a baby up and then "extract" the pieces? If the baby can feel pain as it's killed in the process of delivery, can't it feel pain as it's dismembered?

Again, I applaud the supreme Court's decision to uphold Congress' right to enact legislation, and the President's right to sign those acts into law. I further applaud Justice Thomas' and Justice Scalia's recognition that that power does not belong to the courts.

Trackposted to stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Leaning Straight Up, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, Conservative Thoughts, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Perri Nelson's Website

Weekend Linkfest

Relying on third party services...

U.N. Requests delays in proposed sanctions for Sudan

Strange Visits...

Reaction to the Supreme Court's recent decision

Archive

Posts for 4/19/2007

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