TownHall.com has a great article outlining just how bad this current Immigration bill in the senate would be for the United States.

The most detrimental point of it is that it would immediately legalize the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens in the country by giving them "Z-Visas". 

As someone who has spent thousands of dollars trying to get a handful of visas for skilled labor, it's quite an outrage to see the government about to hand out free visas to people who broke our laws. It's simply unbelievable.

But more than that, it would be a disaster for the United States in the long-run as low-skilled labor tends to pay little in taxes but still can reap the benefits of our social safety net. On top of that, as anyone who has recently been to the American South West (or Miami for that matter) can tell you, hispanic immigrants not only actively resist assimilating but many of them are openly hostile to the United States and see the American Southwest as belonging to their native country.

Read the whole article below and contact your senator to make sure they know you do not support this bill.

Raymond E. Feist is the greatest living fantasy author. The author of Magician and the subsequent books, Feist has created a vivid world full of interesting, wonderful characters that are a joy to read.

His latest work, Into a Dark Realm, is book two of a new series. It still exists in the world that has been created by the preceding books but begins a fresh epic.  And boy it is an epic.

In the previous book, readers are given a glimpse into the world of the Dasati, a world in which evil reigns supreme. The sick and twisted Dasati live for cruelty and evil. It is their natural way.  What's worse, they are looking to come to the world of Midkemia and Kelewan (where all the previous books have taken place on).  These unstoppable, evil, super-warriors would love nothing less than to exterminate every living thing on the worlds we've come to know and love.

Magician hero, Pug and his friend Nakor, son Magnus and the mysterious and erratic warrior, Bek have taken a journey to the Dasati homeworld to figure out what can be done before it's too late.

The real joy of the book, however, comes as a great surprise in the form of Dasati characters. Feist builds an intricate backstory and culture for the evil world of the Dasati that is both frightening and exilerating. Seeing how a world of pure evil actually functions and, functions quite well and logically is amazing.

My only gripe is that, being the first book in a new series, it leaves the reader hungry for the next in the series.  It is a must-read for any fan of Raymond E. Feist and not a bad start for any new reader.  Few authors deliver such great characters and worlds as Feist does and this book represents a new triumph for the author.

We have released what we hope will be the final beta of GalCiv II: Dark Avatar 1.6 before we do the official release.

New in this build:

+ FIX: Fixed some alt-tab crashes present in 1.6 beta 5.
+ FIX: Added code to remove AI ship designs from the graphics cache when they are no longer being used
+ FIX: Fixed bug where, in 1 on 1 battles, if both ships kill each other, the stronger surviving ship would have hp restored instead of receiving 1 hp.
+ FIX: Added support for mixed vertex processing which should help some people with older video cards who would normally be running in software vertex processing mode.
+ FIX: Changed the way that vertex and index buffers are created to help framerates for cards running in software or mixed vp mode.
+ TWEAK: Planet Surface Variety Option now defaults to 50%

--

Basically the goal of this build is to "have cake and eat it too" in the sense that all users should experience the new graphics engine (or at least as good as it was before) without any downsides.

We've also reduced memory usage further.

We're still doing more work but hopefully this will be the last beta. Then we'll move onto starting 1.7 which should have new Mega Events, new constructor handling, updated AI, and more.

Please let us know if you have any problems. Assume this is a "real" release.

Update from Cari (6/5/07):  If you are still experiencing slowdown issues, please try this build and turn OFF the Enhanced Ship Rendering option.  You may also need to turn off the Allow Mixed Vertex Processing option.  This build also fixes a memory leak.

http://sd.stardock.com/carielf/da_1_6_rc1.zip

Stardock developer Jeff B (best known for leading the development effort on ObjectDock, ObjectBar, Keyboard LaunchPad, RightClick, and much of DeskScapes) is very ill. 

Our thoughts and prayers are with him.

With the immigration bill fiasco looming (does he understand what he would be signing?) one has to wonder, does anyone support Bush?

Democrats already loathe the man.  Conservatives have no use for him and his incompotence. 

So I'm genuinely curious, is anyone here actually approve of the job Bush is currently doing and if so, why?

Michigan isn't a bad state unless you're trying to run a business. Then it pretty much blows. For years, we had the stupid "single business tax". But on top of that we have horrible roads, Detroit, and apparently brain-dead politicians in the state capital.

Last month, the Michigan house of representatives proposed providing every child an MP3 player for "educational" purposes.  Mind you, we have a $1 billion deficit.  So how to pay for this? Higher taxes.  Unbelieveable. 

Michigan has one of the highest tax burdens in the country and we get the least out of it.  We have a 6% sales tax, a 4% income tax rate, high property taxes.  And what do we get in return? Crumbling roads and businesses fleeing the state for greener pastures.  And what do Michigan politicians think is the cure? iPods for every kid and higher taxes? Good God.

My son and I did our first inspection of our two new hives.  Hive 1 looks pretty good with lots of capped brood and we found a healthy queen running around.  Hive 2, on the other hand, seems a lot less populated and we couldn't find the queen.  Only 3 of the frames in Hive 2 are drawn with comb (about 5 are drawn in hive 1).

Hive 2 was so tame that I was able to work with it without smoking the bees or a head net on.

Hive 2 has some drone cells, couldn't find the queen.

Hive 2 (the one I couldn't find a queen) does have some capped brood.

Hive 1 has a healthy queen and a lot of capped brood in a nice pattern.

Hive 1

Nearby spectators

The point of the first inspection is to see how well the hives are doing.  Do they have a queen? Any diseases? Is there capped brood?  I didn't get stung and in fact it was a lot easier than I thought.  It was the first time I'd ever used a smoker.  I waited 9 days from the time I got the starter hives to do the inspection in order to give them time to settle in.  I plan to do another inspection next weekend depending on the weather to see how hive 2 is progressing (I probably won't mess with hive 1 since it's clearly doing fine).

This week I should also be receiving a Nuc from the SEMBA President (who's also a Canton police officer which is pretty cool).  I don't know how many hives I'll have eventually. If I could, I'd go with 4 or 5 hives total for this year. 

I was surprised how much I sweated doing this. The bee hat stuff really makes the sweat go.  But for now, I was just thankful I didn't get stung.

 Mega Events are a new feature in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar that look at the state of the game and then try to intentionally shake up the whole galaxy (they're optional).  Now that some of you have been playing Dark Avatar for a bit, we'd love to hear what additional mega events you would like to see in the game.  Comment here with your ideas and we'll look through them and add into the game some of the ideas!

Have fun!

It's a beautiful day today, perfect weather for "working with the bees".  Today is the day I do my first inspection of the hive to make sure it's coming along nicely.

Odds are, I'm going to get stung (not a prospect I'm looking forward to).  But with any luck, the two hives I have will be in good shape.

Here in Michigan it's a beautiful day and I hope you all have time to go and enjoy the day too.  On this day, we celebrate the brave sacrifice of our soldiers who have given so much in order for the rest of us to enjoy the freedoms we cherish.

Happy Memorial Day!