If he were still alive, my grandfather, Fridolin Buenter, would have turned 98 today.
For over 50 years, he kept up the morale of many through his work and involvement with marching bands and in the Swiss army. He did the same for those close to him then and long after that as well and I will never forget the impact he had on my musical aspirations.
So let’s raise our (virtual if need be) glass in memory of Adj Uof (Adjt.) Buenter, my grandfather.
Happy new year everyone. I hope yours looks as good as mine from this side. May 2006 bring many more GOP victories and less lib lunacy overall.
Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you will enjoy the time off and get plenty of rest. This goes especially for our men and women in uniform. With any luck a Christmas miracle will shut up those pesky insurgents for a few hours.
Also happy Channukah to my Jewish friends. Remember: Mr. Kirk and Mr. Spock don’t celebrate Christmas either.
As for the Kwanzaa folk: Stop playing the race card and join the real world in celebrating a real holiday!
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” – United States Declaration of Independence
It was today, 229 years ago, that those words formed the beginning of our Declaration of Independence from England. On this anniversary of our nation it is vital to remember whence we’ve come and where we are to go. It is especially important to know what our Founding Fathers intended for our nation to be and become. For this purpose, the United States Constitution is the second very important document. For all the people of this nation, it should be second to only the Bible.
On this day, I first and foremost thank God for giving our nation His blessing and endowing the founders with the abilities necessary to start the greatest nation this planet has ever seen. I also thank our troops for keeping us safe and defending our freedom and liberty throughout the centuries. I am also grateful for the stellar leadership of many a President who have led this nation in the right direction, but at the same time hope that those who did not will be remembered for doing so.
It is important at this point that we honor the architects of our Republic by becoming more faithful to our founding documents and the beliefs of theirs again. Especially the last 40 years have seen a shameful decline in morality, defense mechanisms and social structure. It is therefore my hope that with God’s will, those of us who have retained our sanity will succeed in returning the glory this nation deserves, so that we truly may be the shining city upon the hill.
After some consideration, I decided to swap out the BBC headlines on the left for the front page headlines of the Washington Times. A patriotic site like mine looks a lot better with domestically produced news.
Well, I have managed to get the theme back. The lesson learned here is that you shouldn’t log into wp from two locations with the same account at the same time.
As wordpress has stopped accepting my theme as valid I will be using this theme until wordpress starts acting ityself again.
As you can see, I have finally changed the name of this site and remodeled the design to reflect my personality better.
Over the past few months I have freed myself more from the liberal agenda that’s prevalent here and grown to stand up more for who I am. I have always been a centrist but in the past let myself me dragged down to the level of a progressive or even a weak minded liberal.
So here is a design that represents more of the true me. My personal rule of not letting people “fiddle” with me and my agreement with many libertarian principles is represented by the Gadsden flag on top. The “American in Spirit” line refers to the fact that unlike other foreigners in the US, I abhor and despise anti-Americanism and do not segregate myself off from the general population. It is also an honest disclaimer that is to indicate that while my sense of patriotism and knowledge of US politics are far superior to that of many US citizens, I am not one of them on paper but stand with patriotic Americans in spirit.
Right now, the only thing working is this blog page but I will get to the others one by one. I will also be changing a few more things here.
A few days after the release of the new wordpress I too have now upgraded to wp 1.5.
In other news, a new design for this site is also coming up.
Being fully aware of how long it’s been since my last post, I’d like to wish all my readers and visitors a happy new year. Another year under Bush, of 24 races towards a simple life, a wife and several oscars.
Enjoy yourselves and don’t drink more than you’d trust your uncle to stomach.
In light of this morning’s events, I have decided to finally launch my side project, gainsaying.com.
On the site I will explore the many contradictions that dot the American landscape, starting with the election. Four years of Bush have hurt the nation a great deal and four more will probably not help at all. At least Bush won the elction (mostly) fair and square this time, but the fact that so many people could be fooled into voting for fascism is something of an odd thing.
As you can see, Zytronic Universe News is now the wire and runs on wordpress. This completes my move away from MoveableType. Good riddance you greedy bastards! 
Six Apart today released version 3.1 of Movable Type, the software powering this blog, and simultaneously have thereby finalized my decision to depart from MT as soon as feasible.
When the 3.0 developer version came out the posts on the company’s blogs sounded as though 3.1 was going to be more affordable for the average user who was not willing to pay for the developer version. This has turned out to be a false impression on my behalf and I will therefore be migrating this blog and GeezerBlog over to wordpress in the near future.
Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, yesterday announced their new pricing structure.
While it certainly is better than the initial MT 3.0 pricing structure, it is in many ways still just as bad as some of the new features eliminate the merit of improvements that could have made the new policy a lot better.
One example of this is my situation where I’d be better off if I was a non-profit organization than an individual as individuals using MT for non-commercial purposes pay more than the former.
Also I’d have to again pay $100 to have the freedom I need and that is something I’m not willing to do. Even the limited personal edition still has a far too large price tag for me.
This moves me a lot closer to moving to wordpress for good.
Today I finally upgraded ZU to the next level with a new design. Over the next few weeks I’ll be migrating the older content over as well.
Depending on when a new version of wordpress with true multiblog capability comes out I’ll probably be moving to WP as I’m getting impatient with SixApart (authors of Movable Type).
While Six Apart are taking their time with the development of the personal license for MT 3.0, I have been testing out WordPress, the most likely replacement for MT for me.
I’m somewhat hesitant to move away from MT just yet, but then again it does seem like there will be a point sooner or later where I’ll have to move away from MT due to its proprietary nature.
This post is in response to a call for posts on Six Apart’s blog today in regards to usage of Movable Type.
I personally use MT for three blogs, one for news, one for diary like entries and the third one is a private blog. Of those, I am the only author for two of them and the third has two authors.
Now this would already be almost good enough for the present free version of MT, but it isn’t. While two blogs are at the same URL and I am the only active author, I feel I need the freedom to innovate, to expand as needed and not be restricted.
Seeing as I would need to buy the personal edition 10 author license to have the freedom I need, I am very tempted to discontinue my use of MT as I cannot afford to pay $119 for a software package of this nature.
I am a college student and even though weblogs are an academic interest of mine, I would rather spend those $119 on textbooks or more basic necessities.
I would however be willing to pay a more reasonable amount as nothing is free at the end of the day. I would probably be willing to pay about $40 for that license type based on my non-commercial usage and student status and would definitely pay that same amount again for a major upgrade.
After reading many MT users’ comments on the new pricing structure, I found a few that pointed out that what came out last week was not the true 3.0 release yet and was merely a developer release. They pointed to past posts in the MT deveoper’s blogs where they indicated that there was going to be a less restrictive version of 3.0 for end users.
If that turns out to be true I may end up staying with MT after all. I can still however not get rid of the uneasy feeling the new nature of MT gives me. The fact that it’s not open source does make open source alternatives look a lot more attractive now that I’ve seen what kind of changes Six Apart are willing to make.
I may add the links to those posts later, but for now I’ll simply paraphrase Noam Chomsky: The information is readily available if you bother to look.
Yesterday the authors of Moveable Type, the software this blog runs on, announced their new commercial version of MT and at the same time added that the free version would be limited in functionality from now on.
Seeing as I as an individual would have to pay at least $69 for the full version I’ll paraphrase Six Apart here… It’s about time I moved away from MT and find myself a better blogging software product!
What’s even worse is that in order to have a comfortable setup I’d have to pay $600. That means I have to look for a different product in order to avoid having to pirate the new version of MT.
Well done Six Apart! Smashing!
Update: I totally agree with this post and this one is right on as well.
I have switched the RSS parsing app for GeezerBlog on top of the links bar to magpieRSS in order to get rid of the clutter that was the old RSS parser. I chose this parser over mt-rssfeed in order to retain some independence from MT as I don’t want to be confined to only working on my blogs with MT.
In the near future I hope to add more RSS feeds from outside sources.