Idiotic McDonalds Obesity Lawsuit

First, check out this article on msnbc.com.

Can no one be responsible for themselves or their children? The plaintiffs are two youngsters who blamed their obesity, diabetes and other health problems on Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. This is utter nonsense. McDonalds forces no one to eat their food. It's not addict-forming like tobacco or alcohol. Plus, if they are going to blame anyone, they should blame their parents who let them eat all of that food.

Now, I'm a big guy. I've been overweight all my life. I ate a good amount of McDonalds in my youth. Even now while I am older and wiser, I stop in at McDonalds at least once a week to partake in the occasional Quarter Cheese or Chicken McNugget. Should I blame my obesity on McDs? More likely I should blame it on a combination of my eating habits and my lack of an real exercise. Even if I ate McDonalds every day like that idiot who made the Super-Size Me movie, should I be able to sue them for selling food that isn't healthy?

That would be like suing beer manufacturers for giving me liver problems from drinking too much. Or, better yet, lets sue the makers of sugary soft drinks (Coke, Pepsi, etc) for rotting out my teeth with all that yummy pop.

Can't anyone in America take some responsibility for their own actions?

Got Geek?

Since my friend Jay did the white trash test over at Fuali.com I figured I would post the one most like myself.

I am 39% Geek.

You probably work in computers, or a history deptartment at a college. You never really fit in with the "normal" crowd. But you have friends, and this is a good thing.

Take the
Geek Test
@ FualiDotCom

Take it and let me know how you turned out.

Ipodding

Wow, two posts in one day. This is a record for me. Must be a slow day at work.

If you ask anyone who knows me, I am a techie. I'm always fiddling with some electronic device. Always have been, always will. And, I love to listen to music. When I was young, it was the tape recorder or the family record player. In the 80's, my first "walkman" was around 2 pounds, had a shoulder strap and took cassettes like a car tape deck. It ate tapes as much as it played them. The 90's came with more money to spend on that kind of thing. First it was the walkmans, real ones this time. Then the CD players. Multidisk CD players, minidisk players, DVD players, etc. After the turn of the century I found myself with a small MP3 player with expandable memory that I bought for $100. With the extra memory I could bring 8-9 CDs with me while I was out.

Last summer I came into some money and decided to purchase an Ipod for myself. I had 3 choices. The Ipod mini, the 20GB Ipod, or the 40GB Ipod. Since I have a fairly good sized CD collection, and my wife has quite a few as well, I went for the 40GB version. Along with that, I got myself a cradle for my car to recharge the Ipod and play the music through my car stereo.

So far I've recorded every CD I have into the pod and around half of my wife's CDs and I still have over 15GB free on it. It was more money than I have ever spent on any music player ($400) and so far it has been worth every penny. I can setup custom playlists. It automatically sorts through everything by artist, album & song title. It was easy to setup and easy to convert all my CDs to it. It can read any MP3 file and I had 4 CDs filled with MP3 files to use with it. It's very convenient to carry around any piece of music I own and have all of it a few keystrokes away. I can re-listen to old albums I have not pulled out in a while. I can shuffle randomly through my entire collection or just through one artist, genre, etc. I love it!

Before I purchased it, I was browsing through different review websites to figure out which large capacity MP3 player was best. I looked at C|Net, Tom's Hardware Guide, and a few others. Each of these sites had reviews on Ipods and on other devices from Sony, Dell, Creative Labs, etc. What really made up my mind was that each review for a product that was not an Ipod had this line at the end: "A well designed effort with good sound and options, but it's not an Ipod." That kind of sealed the deal. Heck, my family became an Ipod family since my wife got one for Christmas. She liked mine so much she wanted her own so I got her a pink Ipod mini with a nice laser inscription on the back.

The only problem I have now is all the music I used to have before CDs. I had a large cassette tape collection but I gave that up when I got divorced. Though I like to look for new music to listen to at the stores, I find that I start to find music I used to have. However, replacing old tapes to CDs can be an expensive process.

Video Gaming and the Youth of America

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a gamer. I play everything from video games, board games, card games, role-playing games, miniatures, etc. I'm always up to playing something. I've been playing games as long as I can remember. I'm also a little outspoken when it comes to the government acting like parents. Parents should act like parents.

So, today I came across this article: Another State Mulls Video Game Ban. Basically, my governor is looking to make it illegal for a business to sell violent and/or sexually explicit video games to people under the age of 18. Now, I'm all for kids not getting their hands on mature rated games. I applaud the video gaming industry for voluntarily adopting the rating system currently in place. What I don't like is when the government thinks it needs to step in and act like parents.

Parents should be responsible for what their child gets their hands on. I have 5 kids, ages 13, 6, 3, 3, and 1. I pretty much know everything they play, watch, read. If my 13 year old wanted a game rated mature, I would look it over before making my decision. What is the game about? What in it causes the Mature rating? Do I think it's appropriate for my son? All of this info can easily be found on the internet. Game publishers give out tons of info on new games coming out. Websites like Gamespot & IGN review new games and give plenty of info for parents to help decide what's right for their children.

unfortunately, many parents don't do that. I was watching a new program about a set of parents who purchased Grand Theft Auto 3 for their 6 year old. The father would play it with his son. The mother was completely oblivious. Both parents were being irresponsible. Is it the government's place to step in then?

Here is a great quote from our esteemed governor:
"If you're 18 or older and you're a grown-up and an adult, that's your business," the governor said. "But I don't believe that my 8-year-old daughter has a constitutional right to cut somebody's head off in a game that she plays."

In my opinion, if my governor doesn't have enough control over his 8 year old that he can't stop her from trying to purchase a Mature rated game, then how is he supposed to keep track of what our state is doing? How is he supposed to get law enforcement to enforce this? Should we get big signs for the stores with a "We Card for M rated games" and put them in all the Targets, Wal-Marts, Gamestops, etc? How is he going to hand out the proposed $5000 fines and 1 year prison terms to a business?

Another great quote from the article: The proposed legislation also would require retailers to label violent or sexually explicit video games. Video games now are rated with general labels such as "M" for "mature." How can this be difficult to understand? Here is the picture for the M rating:



Can't everyone see the Mature 17+ right at the top? Here is the description that comes with the symbol:

MATURE
Titles rated M - Mature have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain mature sexual themes, more intense violence and/or strong language.

These games also have descriptors on the back of the game box that have all sorts of key-words that describe what's in the game. You can see all this on the ESRB's Website.

In short, while I am ranting here, do we really need our state government to act like parents to our kids?

Trip? What trip?

Well, today I should have been in Pennsylvania. Instead, I'm sitting here at work. My week long trip for work was cancelled last minute. It's amazing all the stuff you have to do even when you don't go out of town.

We made arrangements for the kids to be out of school. Had the buses stop trying to pick them up all week. Ran the fridge near empty of Milk and anything else that might spoil, etc. Once I found out the I was not going I had to undo all of that. No big deal, just more work than I figured.

Anyways, back to the old grindstone.

Hard Drive Crash!

Yesterday we found that my wife's hard drive crashed on her computer. It won't boot, can't be read, etc. Her last backup was from a year ago. Doh! Now I have to go out and buy her a new hard drive and get everything installed on there that she likes. It's a big undertaking.

The worst part is losing that years worth of data. All those pictures, emails, files, etc are pretty much gone. There are data recovery services that can get info like that off of dead hard drives, but that costs around $1000. Unfortunately, i don't have that kind of money lying around. So, that will probably have to wait.

So, don't forget. Backup your data! Especially if you have a digital camera and don't print a lot of hard copies.

New Links

I have added links to 4 blogs that I check out frequently. Go check them out as well. I find that I often enjoy reading what other people are putting down in their blogs. You can learn new things about the people you know.

Getting Ready for a Trip

This Monday I get to travel to Pittsburgh for a week. This will be the first car trip I am taking with the entire family. My wife and I have taken a few short car trips with just the baby aboard and each one has been great. This time all four kids will be there. I have to go to Cranberry Township for a week for training. My wife figured it would be easier to take the kids with then for her to take care of all four by herself.

Normally, for a trip like this, I have everything planned out. What time I'm leaving, where I'm going, when I'm going to arrive, etc. I usually know approximately where I plan on stopping on the way there, what I plan on doing each night after work, etc. However, I don't really have a clue on how often we will need to stop with all four kids. Will they be good the entire trip? How much longer will the trip be? Normally, the drive should take 7 1/2 hours. With normal stops maybe 8 - 8 1/2 hours. Now, I'm not so sure.

Certainly I'll have to play much of this trip by ear. This is the first time the twins will be on a long car trip as far as I know. Michael is usually excellent in the car. David is great as well. Each of the three older kids will have games, videos, books, etc to keep them busy. I'm hoping it will be enough to help keep them happy. I know a frustrated or bored kid on a long car trip can certainly make it feel longer. I'm sure me and my sibs did the same for our parents when we would go on trips like this.

Anyways, it should make for an interesting trip either way. If anyone has any suggestions to help, please let me know. Thanks.

Welcome to Winter

Last night the snow started. We're supposed to get over 6" over the next 24 hours. I welcome the snow as we have not had any significant amount of it since Thanksgiving. Being a winter baby (born on the first day of Winter) I find that I love it when it snows. Bring it on. I hope we get all the snow they are predicting and more.

Welcome 2005!

I figured since this is the beginning of the new year I would actually start writing things on here. December is always such a busy time for me. Numerous birthdays and other celebrations take place in December. (Birthdays that I know of in December include David (my youngest son), my Father, my nephew, my brother-in-law, my best friend, and my own.) Add in Christmas and New Years and time just flies by. In January things start getting back to normal. Work 5 days a week, take down the tree, clean up the house. Find places for all the new stuff we got from the holidays. Usually I try to start my spring cleaning a little early.

Kids went back to school today. A rude awakening for one of them. Typically they go to bed around 8:30pm and wake up around 6:30am. However, for the last two weeks they have been off of school so no one has made them get up in the morning. Now, this morning we had to get them up and ready to go like before. It wasn't too bad, except that one of them has gotten into the habit of being totally uncontrollable in the morning. I think one of the reasons that happens is because when he goes to bed he doesn't go to sleep for at least an hour. Then when the morning comes he is not fully rested. He wakes up scream and crying, eats breakfast screaming and crying, gets dressed screaming and crying, but when he goes out to the bus, he is fine. Sometimes I just don't understand it. It can be very difficult to deal with sometimes.

Work is going to get very busy. I'm a software support technician. I take support calls to help solve runtime errors, database issues, etc for my employer. The person I was training to assist me with this is leaving the company at the end of the week. Then I have to go out of town for a week later this month for training, then I have more training coming up afterwards. I have a feeling it's going to be a busy couple of months here at work.

Anyways, back to the grind. If you're reading this, go ahead and put in a comment.