I’ve never been to California, but I just spent my first week there. I made my travel and accomodation arrangements so I could make use of the bus and light rail system. The Valley Transit Authority has assembled a much better solution than our Houston Metro system. I was able to get most everywhere I needed to go in a reasonable amount of time. But like our Houston light rail, no one uses it here either. This surprised me, after all, this is the state known for its leftist and environmental extremists. Every other car had some sort of green initiative sticker on it, and usually only had one occupant, the driver. So in the typical left coast fashion, they want us all to use public transportation, but won’t use it themselves. I did see some folks out commuting on their bikes. Given the climate and gas prices, if I lived there, that would be my choice. I was also surprised how dirty Sunnyvale was. there was trash everywhere.

Three inches of rain and winds at 31 Mph gusting to 36 Mph made for a very soggy Scout Fair this year. It rained for the better part of the day, soaking all of the Scouts that braved the weather and setup  their outdoor exhibits. Needless to say, attendance was down a little bit this year. There we still plenty of things to do inside the Reliant Arena, and for the most part, a majority of the booths were occupied.

Our Troop built our annual structure, despite the rain, and occasional interuptions of lighting that made us hve to seek shelter inside. But it has never been said of our Troop that we are or have ever been “fair weather” scouts. Kudos to everyone who participated, and attended in spite of the weather.

Its funny how Google will post some cutesy little graphic for almost any occasion, as a matter of fact, they are known for it. But I guess since this is a Christian holiday, it must not fit the Godless pinko commies at Google’s agenda. I have finally had enough of Google. From Google bombs, Googlewashing, censorship and politically motivated Adsense ad withdrawals, I’m done with Google. The final straw came this past weekend when I noticed that the Google doodle had not changed to reflect the Easter holiday. Now, I wasn’t expecting some depiction of the crucification, it is Google after all. But no bunnies, eggs, or baskets. So I did some research, while they will commemorate the Soviet Sputnik, they take a pass on Memorial Day, D-Day, and many other American patriotic holidays.

There’s nothing new here, even you libs will admit that Google is liberal. In 2005 alone $463,500 was given to Democrats by Google management and employees, while $5,000 was given to Republicans, (or 100 to 1 for those of you from Lake Jackson). They spend their money on “socially progressive corporations” and “influencing public policy,” code words for liberal agenda.

So, I have dropped Adsense, the Google sitemap plugin, the gvisit tracker plugin, and now even Feedburner, a recent Google acquisition. I have changed all the search engines in the house, and the office PC’s to Windows Live, and I host my on RSS feeds. We are now Google free. I even took the bookmarks and search engine off my Blackberry.

The prevelance of Google in the market place is staggering, from Google Earth, StreetView, Maps, GMail etc., and the fact that 60% of all searches are through the Google search engine, the amount of data they have access to is frightening. Nefarious? well you be the judge…

Global warming has finally come to Houston and … it snowed. yep, big fluffy flakes of snow fell yesterday afternoon. Must be all of that CO2 we are releasing from the coal fired power plants and refineries in the area. Yeh, that must be it…

Meanwhile, it never got above freezing the whole day.

Not to be looking a gift horse in the mouth… but a few months ago during a routine series of patches and upgrades, an Ubuntu maintainer slipped a peice of buggy code into the the repository turnig my box at home into an overpowered dumb terminal.  At first, I thought the video card had finally went tits up, but after going through the message boards using my trusty console based browser, lynx, I was able to find out the new video kernel modules were jacked up, and I needed to roll them back to the previous version. After messing with it on and off for a day, I was finally able to get the GUI back, but on just one screen, rendering the second monitor relatively useless. Well today, I had a few extra cycles, so I decided to give it another go. After downloading the latest restricted drivers, I  still had the same problem. I decided to give the factory nVidia drivers another shot,  which wiped out X windows again. After a series of installing and uninstalling, lo and behold I got Xorg working again. And to top that off, my dual screens  are working again. unfortunately, I couldn’t begin to tell you how I did it. Suffice it to say, I uninstalled the factory nVidia drivers, reinstalled the restricted-modules, nvidia-xconfig, nvidia-xsettings, installed the factory nVidia drivers again, and then copied my known working nVidia dualhead xorg.conf backup to xorg.conf.

Moral of the story… keep good backups of our xorg.conf files.

Open source may have it’s issues at times, but I have had shrinkwrapped software go belly up after applying patches, and sevice packs also, and that software, I had to buy.

Every once in a while, if you are paying attention, you can find a little gem off the road less traveled. Such is the case with Yegua Creek. Now I have been there a countless number of times with the boat, but never as a destination for a Cub Scouts. As the amenities go, it is a no frills park that offers RV spaces, tent camping and two boat ramps. I had heard about some of the trails in and around each of the two Army Corps of Engineers sites on Lake Somerville before, but I did not know a whole lot about them. If you are camping with Webelos, be sure you hit the nature trail at Yegua Creek. It is a fairly short hike with lots of our native Texas trees and plants identified through out the enitire 1 mile loop (about 40 in all). It is a perfect trail for teaching the Forester Activity Pin. Maps of the trails are available at the park office. As you are hiking the trail. be sure to point out some of the bridges along the trail, as most were built as Eagle Scout projects, the longest being about 62 feet long, total there are about 53 Eagle Scout projects around the Park. For those Star and Life Scouts looking for Eagle Scout project opportunities, The Army Corps of Engineers parks at lake Somerville (Yegua Creek, and Rocky Creek) provide a good opportunity for those boys looking for construction, or soil and water conservation projects.

Did you know about 2% of Federal lands is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers for use as recreational areas?

If you were out in the early eveneing on Monday December 1st, you would have been able to see the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the night sky. I noticed it coming back from our barn after feeding the horses.

Things to be thankful for…

Life, food, family, friends, freedom, a home, dogs, and good health.

May God bless you and keep you this Holiday Season

A new look, and a new purpose is our goal around here. Blogging, after all, is therapeutic, and with a new job, a new POTUS, and total meltdown of the economy looming, I decided it was time to reclaim this namespace, and put it to good use as my ‘rant’ page. If you are looking for political content, you will find it at www.cementlagoon.com. We don’t talk politics here.