Archive for July, 2007

The federal government seems uninterested in actively enforcing many immigration laws. People who commit felonies against people who are eligible for deportation are not deported. People who have a history of trafficking in drugs or worse are able to be undocumented an able to live freely in the US. And of course, there are parents who have children who can not afford to provide what they believe their children need, and would do whatever it takes to provide for their children.

I know of several situations that I am using as the basis for this post. The names I am using are fictional though to prevent harassment and not make this an attack on individuals.

I as a father know that I would do just about anything to make sure my children had something to eat. If somebody was attempting to hurt my children I would protect them even if the law prevents me by not considering that self defense. I believe if put in the position of my children’s life or my own - I would choose the children’s. Yes I would steal a loaf of bread so my children could eat if there was no other way. I know I am not the only father that has a strong commitment to his children. The economic realities can not be removed from the problems of how the current immigration system is operating. There is real pain, suffering, and prayers to god for some of the people who have left their county looking for a solution.

A person who I am aware of that was in that type of a situation would be Sara (not her real name); a very personable person. She literally walk though immigration by saying she was an American citizen. She does consider herself an American citizen because she was born on the American continent. Her intention was to find a better life for herself, she had kids and now has legal documents.

A person I will call Glen, was a day labor in Carlsbad. Likely he walked across where there was little border security and walked another 10 miles to civilization. He camped out in the woods to save money, the money he made he sent to his family that he left behind - his sacrifice so his wife and children could eat, living outdoors away from the family he loves. an unable to see his children grow up. Glen was a man with a degree of integrity he would not cheat or steal and tried to make an honest dollar - desperately accepting any work.

The camp he lived at during the Clinton era is now developed into the Walmart in Carlsbad. Unlike some of the camps you will here about in the news the people living in this Carlsbad camp wanted and tried to avoid any problems, that is not to say they could avoid the problems of no water or trash services. Day labors with similar stories still exist in Carlsbad.

I know also that there are people who are here not out of pain and suffering but for easy pickings. Without a care for others and may even have a dislike of the US because it has a higher standard of life than where they call home. They could care less what their actions do to fat Americans, they want to take whatever they can and the current system makes it easy.

Lets call one Killjoy! Killjoy may very well have a criminal record in Mexico for drugs or robbery, so he may have an additional reason for being here of escaping justice in his home county. Killjoy was arrested and deported once because of suspicious behavior in a small boat circling around a location with a hook at the end of a stick - The DEA thought that was strange. He has been reported to the CPS for providing drugs including date rape drugs to minors, and things he has said about underaged children, the CPS promised the action of getting him deported. And at least two others have informed immigration about him and of his location. No action by the government has taken place and he is still causing pain and suffering to innocent people.

Lets call another Godmother, Godmother has documents and a child. She was arrested for using the child’s documents in human trafficking and released. In San Diego if you don’t have at least two felonies they are not very interested in prosecuting on immigration charges. I’m not sure how you would get a felony record if they wont make the first charge? seems you could keep breaking immigration laws until you get caught in a state felony.

And, there are children - many spend most of their lives in the US going to our school system and getting various types of assistance for healthcare, food, clothes … The US society does not accept the idea of people dieing on the steps of a hospital because they don’t have enough money for care. Anybody needed medical attention will be severed by the hospital. Hungry children are going to get food from school and if they need clothes they will be able to get clothes for free. We as a people want to make sure all children get health care checkups and needed shots, these are available for free. There are even programs specific to people who can not get well fare for any reason.

Despite that they are helped with the basic needs the promise of a better job for finishing high school does not exist. We invest a small fortune in these people so they can be productive, as a society it is highly unlikely they would ever be exported having no ties to the country they are citizens of — and after all is said and done they are only able to get jobs that nobody wants. Maybe they don’t even end up paying enough taxes to pay for the public education.

I know about 4 children who went through the public education system who lack papers. All had a legal entry with a parent but don’t have their own papers. 3 dropped out 1 graduated and is flipping hamburgers, one of those dropouts has more experience on the same job.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Today a couple in those professions would have no option to buy a home and may not have been able to care for all the children they had with the cost of health care, utilities, food and other necessities. Vacations, pensions and other extra quality of life considerations are out of the question in todays economy for the same work.

Neither of these professions would be harmed if they did not today have the benefit of lower cost of labor. A few dollars of additional cost per hour would not make people stop making ships or buildings. And, a dollar higher price per meal would not send more people to fast food restaurants.

This couple was my grand parents and they did buy a home 60 years ago. Waitressing was only part time at the Del.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I also discovered Nero 7 which comes with many DVD drives includes Nero Mediahome, is also a Upnp media server. It triggered a copy of a virus scan that was installed with the system back before Microsoft had a service pack to correct an exploit in the Upnp. Uninstalling that program allowed all media sharing functions to start to work correctly.

After getting the sharing working all that is needed to do is locating streaming media and install the codecs that are needed and optimizing the system. Tversity has direct links to more transcoders than I may need:

Some of these include locations of streaming video http://stage6.divx.com/rss/videos/order:rating any rss feed can be added in a few moments to TVersity library.

Popularity: 16% [?]

tgisfw.com Elevator hack, seems to be alot of people who don’t believe users can put a elevator in express mode. I knew a person who lived in a penthouse who told me that you could. Gives people who rent the penthouse an extra service.

Popularity: 18% [?]

I’ve been working on a number of things all at the same time. One is getting the xbox 360 wired up - one of the features it has is being able to get video, music, and photos off of a computer or media center device.

One of these devices talked about by Microsoft (follow the xbox.com/pcsetup/ message) is windows XP media center version of DOS. Well I have the home edition and don’t want to buy a new operating system. They also talk about Zune well it works but only to play content that is on your PC. With some searching I discovered the same functionality is in WMP version 11 both are free. I also discovered tversity It looks like an awsome program, It has the computer be a proxy for internet content, it is also free. I resumed my search and found Twonkyvision (not free but has a 30 day trial) Orb and a few others I’ve not tried.

Twonkyvision is very stable but only adds the feature of internet radio, no video. But has a log feature that I used to see why I’m having problems. Upnp AV sends a request out to a reserved IP address.

16:17:34:187 [ERROR]HTTP:Cannot receive header
16:17:34:187 HTTP:received no header in HTTP_send_receive, propably client closed socket!
16:18:24:750 SSDP:### SSDP sending:
NOTIFY * HTTP/1.1

HOST: 239.255.255.250:1900

CACHE-CONTROL: max-age=1810

LOCATION: http://192.168.2.2:9000/DeviceDescription.xml

NT: uuid:7076436f-6e65-1063-8074-00904bc5db3c

NTS: ssdp:alive

SERVER: Windows NT/5.0, UPnP/1.0, TwonkyVision UPnP SDK/1.0

USN: uuid:7076436f-6e65-1063-8074-00904bc5db3c

My router knows nothing about this special address 239.255.255.250 so like any normally working router sends it to the gateway adress or my ISP. So my next step is to install a hub. I’m not yet certain that will work one of the things I tried was to use windows internet sharing to take the router out of the picture, but the internet sharing by default blocks incoming ports above 1000 on the internet side and may have blocked information on the LAN side as well.

Tversity does have a support forum, searching it shows other people with the same problems of routers or firewalls. Zune, WMP 11, and TwonkyVision modify the firewall settings and appear to keep trying if a data connection is lost.

Update — still no luck, I need an iphone.

Popularity: 16% [?]