More Tantrums from the “It’s my right to own an SUV” set.

Today a coworker alerted me to the latest development of Bush and the Christian Right’s bid to declare official ownership of my reproductive organs. Apparently they are considering a ruling that will classify birth control as abortion, making it more difficult to get.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them “abortion.” These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

…

These rules pose a serious threat to providers and uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. They could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They’ll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.

I know it’s a general difficulty to grasp, but please consider that I’m a human being and not a walking fetus incubator. Another more technical post about it here - HHS Moves to Define Contraception as Abortion.

I’ve been encountering more of the “It’s my right to own an SUV” set lately when I listen to Sean Hannity’s show on the way home from work. They were lambasting Obama today because he was suggesting that - get this - people should take responsibility for the maintenance of their cars so they use less gas. Wait, what? Taking responsibility for something?? These people don’t seem to get the idea of responsibility unless they’re shoving it down someone else’s throat. (But then, apparently birth control isn’t good enough. Apologies for missing the patriarchal purity ball, but I’m not interested in abstinence.)

I love the continuous strain that runs through the show of how they (The radical environmentalists and radical left - don’t you know radical is a compliment?) are “taking away our freedoms.” They want to stop you from driving your SUVs! The environmental extremists won’t let us drill in ANWR!!! They’re stopping us from developing nuclear power!!!!! Speaking of ANWR, I found a lovely post the other day on the subject of drilling in ANWR.

Apparently their take on freedom is “I’m a well off white person and they’re not letting me consume as much as I want.” What it takes to maintain this standard of living and carry out these things is apparently inconsequential. That the planned storage site for nuclear waste is Yucca Mountain, Navajo ancestral lands? To be concerned about that would mean you’d have to think of someone other than yourself, and furthermore, people of color. Would also mean you’d have to stop being discriminatory towards Native American religious beliefs, but that’s not something we hear about in the news - especially with a “war on Christmas” to fight. ANWR Drilling would mean possibly destroying the Gwinich’in tribe’s way of life, as it is dependent upon the caribou and their migration patterns. According to the previous link, 229 tribes oppose ANWR drilling. (Shit, now I’m really being a hippy treehugger, huh?)

The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay (This had been a prison for Haitians with AIDs before its infamy - can be read about in Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power.), and Abu Ghraib on the other hand, do not factor into these people’s definition of freedom. At least some of you can sleep better at night thinking that narrowing civil liberties and torturing/raping people will actually protect one’s way of life (As always, others rot for it and bear the brunt of it - but maybe not for long at this rate.) from terrorism. And while we can’t seem to get our dander up over the violation of these living people’s rights and freedoms we’ll count every (white) fetus that has been aborted (murdered!), whether through the procedure itself or goddess forbid - an egg does not get implanted on the uterine lining because of BIRTH CONTROL! (1. There is NO scientific proof of that. and 2. THAT’S THE POINT.)

Squawking about personal responsibility is just fine when you’re trying to force abstinence on women, scoffing at those who can’t get by on their Wal Mart minimum wage or demonizing immigrants. But when it comes to your damn SUV, your American right (freedom!) to guzzle gas, and a fine cocktail of ignorance and manifest destiny, step aside.

Tags: "It's my right to own an SUV", ANWR, Feminism, gas guzzling is an American freedom, human rights, native americans, reproductive rights

Kind of proud of this one!!

This photo missed the mark for me in color.. did some experimental post processing on it last night, and I really like it. The intended goal was to make it black and white but I really liked the washed out colors and upped contrast. Click the picture to see both this and the color one.

Going out in a minute to go get a new lens - Nikon 50mm f/1.8.

Tags: aperture, central park, nikon d100, photo, photography

This is just not my month on the technology front….

I didn’t realize my laptop wasn’t plugged in and just lost half a post to a shut down. ANYWAY.

I promise I’ll get to slightly less boring things in the near future, as soon as I finish chronicling web site failures and hosting issues (and who knows what else at this rate!), dear loyal readers, 1 or 2 that you are. But since sleep and I don’t seem to be friends lately, I figured I’d regale you with the run in I had with luck today. (Of the bad variety.)

Among some of the things I’ve run into in the past few weeks, I had a ton of sensor gook, and it’s shown up in about 600 pictures now which makes me feel like an idiot. I kept thinking I had gotten it in the lenses only to see that I hadn’t. And then realized one of my lens’s polarizing filters is gone. Filters don’t just fall off. The viewfinder rubber piece has fallen off as well. So while these things were irritations, today was just bad.

After five years of owning my lovely Nikon D100 SLR camera I dropped it for the first time today. Usually I’m pretty paranoid and careful about my camera, but today carelessness and stupidity prevailed. I did not close my camera bag after taking a few shots with it, at which point camera hit pavement when I dragged my bag out of the car.

Ugh.

I think the sound must have stopped my heart for a moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: camera, nikon d100, photography, picture

How to transfer your domain FROM ipower

Gradually continuing to untangle myself from ipower and their increasingly atrocious hosting. I foolishly registered the domain of the other site I run with ipower. I wasn’t aware of the risks or consequences involved with this at the time but I successfully transfered the domain to name.com last week. I can now proceed with moving the site to a new host without fear of losing the domain, and should probably do it soon.

Most of what I found on the web were people who were NOT succeeding and losing their domains to ipower, or last ditch efforts that involve threatening legal action and such. Never found anything that outlined how to actually transfer the domain, so I figured I’d write something up in terms of how to do it. (To be clear, I don’t know if people who let domains go to ipower or who “lost” them actually did so because of bad, unfair business practices on ipower’s part, or their lack of knowledge as to how to transfer the domains.)

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Tags: domains, ipower

If Only!

Tags: feminists DO have a sense of humor!!!, video

Yes, it will happen - Murphy’s Law

I got my newest computer two years ago. It was difficult to get the larger photo files off the old one as I thought my only option was to burn CDs, and that can go wrong in all sorts of ways. I finally decided to make sure I had all 7gbs (thousands, from what I can tell) of photos off the other day and began the process of burning.

2gbs in and I need to take a break, so I leave the computer running while I’m doing other things. I get what seems to be the new windows blue screen, a kernel dump. Gotten a couple before, everything was fine, seems ok. So I reboot and I get a blinking cursor. I’m not as knowledgeable as I once was about computers, but I know enough to know this is NOT a good thing. 2 more reboots and another blinking cursor. On the 4th I get that it cannot read the hard drive.

At this point, I’ve just about panicked. A friend begins to walk me through a couple of preliminary steps to begin some sort of disc recovery and nothing seems to be working. A few more blinking cursors of death, and then all of a sudden after a few minutes of one, Windows appears. To my shock, it finally boots up. Luckily, I was able to get everything off in spite of being rather stupid about waiting 2 years to do it. I just thought it rather hilarious that it decided to give me this kind of trouble the night I began moving the remainder of things off.

A Note to State the Obvious

The content of the blog has really begun to shift. It’s reflecting my tendency to hyperfocus on something for a period of time, only to cycle out of that and into something else. I seriously wonder if I have some sort of ADD/ADHD thing. I can’t seem to take up anything without obsessing over it, whether it’s for a few months or a few years. And while I don’t plan on moving away from writing about (or pointing to other writings about them, more often than not) feminism and other human rights type stuff, I just think I’ve needed this break for awhile.

Joni Sternbach: Surfers

Found her work by chance, and I love this group of pictures.

Joni Sternbach: Surfers

(And I love that there’s actually some sort of gender parity!! And all the women look strong… rawr!)

Tags: joni sternbach, photography, surfers

Thoughts on Taking Photos

I lost my photo gallery in the move to a new host. I suppose “lost” is the wrong word to use, as I intentionally did not restore it. I actually forgot about it completely until a friend mentioned it to me one day…. in realizing it was still there, I decided that it would be one more thing to renovate on the site. It was a relic, and an oversized, bloated one at that.

I’ve been alternating between researching new options to display pictures and looking through the first batch of pictures I’ve taken in years (yes, years) while on a hiking trip the other day.

I go through a lot of mental wrangling when it comes to taking pictures. (But then, don’t I with everything?) I switched to a digital SLR a few years back and I feel as though I lost something important in the transition. I don’t think I’ve ever been strong on the technical aspects of photography, but this has really allowed me to slack off. So while the camera has more than made up for itself in the volume of pictures it allows me to take, it allowed me to completely let go of the understanding of the way things work. There was a finite amount of tries to get the shot right with a manual SLR. I had to calculate to get the shot the way I wanted it. I’d like to get that back with my digital.

Another thing is, I adore color. I’ve always found that the pictures taken on my digital SLR have been lackluster in comparison to what is in front of me. I’m being pretty harsh on myself as I look through these shots and recall how deep the colors were when viewing them in person and the comparison to what I captured. I’ve always been frustrated with the idea that one needs to “retouch” the shots in a photo program to get them to look their best. I’m trying to move away from that… Reading through a photo retouching thread last night on Flickr, I came across someone commenting on “purists.” It’s not that you’re doing anything different from the way it used to be with the darkroom process - there was certainly retouching going on there - it’s just that the tools are now different. And you know what, he’s right.

So, I think one of the things I’d like to tackle in the near future is relearning the technical aspects of photography and sharpening my understanding of them - learning to work with my DSLR rather than letting it dull my abilities.

The 27 that made the cut.

I’ve also opened a Flickr account.

Tags: photography, site maintenance

Ok, this is completely frustrating.

I went to upgrade my wordpress blog to 2.5 before doing any more major theme changes so I could be sure that whatever I did was compatible with the new release. Of course, even though there was this nagging little voice at the back of my mind telling me not to use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin, because I trust myself more than some automatic plugin…. I figured I’d take a shortcut, just this once.

Admin panel GONE and in its place a nasty 404!

Restoring backups of site, nothing.

Searching for a solution to the problem turns up nothing but one other person who had the same problem a month ago - with no response to their post.

After toggling a bit with it and getting nowhere, even after purging that damnable plugin off my site I purged the whole thing and did a fresh install. It went off without a hitch until I restored the old blog database. I am now getting blank pages with the main theme. I am hoping the same doesn’t happen with others.

I don’t know what’s up with this, but this past hour has been completely frustrating. I was planning on installing some flickr widgets and some homemade book “widgets” (not really, since they aren’t interactive) but as usual with computing - Murphy’s Law. So if the site is on and off disappearing and it looks like it’s been completely purged, you know why!

Edit: Ok, I should have searched for this problem following the clue I found that tipped me off to change the theme. Apparently this seems to be a known issue, and reuploading the theme fixes it. Of course, this is when my FTP program decides to start acting strange and showing the wrong files. WS_FTP how I miss you.

Edited again: Ok, the upgrade to 2.5 was totally worth it. The new admin interface, particularly the posting one, is wonderful to work with in comparison to the old.

Tags: site maintenance