Allah be Praised

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Praise Allah for finally deciding to clean up his house! With Obama bin Laden dead at the hands of American soldiers - Navy SEALs no less - this is pretty clear proof that Allah wants nothing to do with the bastard. Together with all the upheavals going on in the Middle East and North Africa, it seems to me that blaming wholesale murder and personal greed on an all-powerful entity was a bad idea.

Let's look at this. When someone tells you to kill other people and live in abject poverty because he claims some all-powerful being told him to tell you to do it, shouldn't you stop and wonder at his proof? How do you know Allah told that guy to tell you to kill people in the most horrible ways imaginable? Why should you live in misery while he lives in a palace? Isn't Allah capable of obliterating anyone he wants obliterated?

And so he has.


Usama Bin Laden was killed in Islamabad, Pakistan, this past Friday. Praise be to Allah for delivering us from the pretender who abused Allah's name for his own personal gain.

The Christians figured out how to stop doing that a couple hundred years ago when the Inquisition was put to rest and the Crusades became passe. Let's hope the Muslims and the Jews figure it out really soon too so we can all play nice and let everyone believe what they want to believe about their Creator.

Now what should we do about Pakistan?

One thing is for sure: let's not do the bastard the honor of defining ourselves and our history with words like pre-bin Laden and post-bin Laden, okay?

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Maps are freakin' awesome

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Right here is your handy dandy list of places I've been. Call it an improvement over this map, plus I can update it fairly easily. Hopefully you can all see it without difficulty, and the link works the way it's supposed to. Let me know if you can't.

It's hardly all inclusive. Really what I should do is create a map showing the interstates and major highways I've been on, since I only drove through most of these places.

45 states, 11 countries, 3.5 continents. And probably 90% of the US interstate system. The only part of Mexico I've been in is Tijuana, but I've been within a stone's throw of many miles of the US-Mexico border. Not so with Canada - I've only been to Niagara Falls, didn't really go exploring, and other than that and when I was in Vermont earlier this year, I haven't been within miles of the border.

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Further information you may find interesting or helpful:
Maps Maps Everywhere!!
Free Wifi Hotspots Accessible to Truckers
Solar System - Sun

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Maps Maps Everywhere!!

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I've had a love-affair with maps for pretty much all my life. I've been able to read road maps since before I could read. (To give you an idea, my Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Mays, gave me a book because I was the best reader in her class at age 5. I still have it somewhere.) I've spent many an hour poring over them. So you could say I like maps.

As most of you know, the more of the world that a map shows, the more distorted it becomes. The only way to show an accurate representation of a sphere is to use a sphere! Not much help when you're on a computer screen.

Several years back, when I was a regular player of the RPG Traveller, I had need to draw maps of entire planets, yet I didn't like all the available projections. None of them did a good job of showing the world I was creating. Then I discovered a wonderful little tool called an icosahedral map. It was awesome! It allowed me to make whole maps with a minimum of distortion, and as a bonus, I could print it out, cut up the page, and fold it into a sphere-like object (an icosahedron) and see what the whole planet looked like! Miraculous!

A few years back, while I was still playing GURPS, I discovered someone had created an icosahedral projection of the Earth! I quickly made use of it, turning it into a hexmap that could be used in a boardgame.

Unfortunately, the results were a bit mixed. I redid it and got much better results, but still, I wasn't all that happy with it. Then, last month, during one of my few breaks, I decided to see if it was possible to make my own ico-earth projection from scratch so the landforms wouldn't be all broken up, and low and behold, I found that someone had already done it! Created by no less than Buckminster Fuller! He calls it the Dymaxion projection, and it's pretty cool.


So here is a site that has scads of earth projections in almost every conceivable projection you can think of. And here's another site that has some blank maps for you to use. I made my own from scratch, and these maps should give you an idea how to do that. Have a good time! I know I did.

For those of you wanting my icoearth maps, I can't post them at this time because they're too big - blogger automatically reduces the size to 1600 pixels maximum dimension, so the above maps will not look right, nor will the maps I made for playing games. Sure, I could break them up, but I don't have time for that kind of work. If you write me, I'll see if I can email them to you. At some point in the future, I want to make an equivalent using the Dymaxion projection, and then use that for the game I'm making from it.

Below, I've found a few interesting maps for sale over at Amazon, plus a cheap one. Buy anything through one of those links to help me keep this site up and always improving; and you don't even have to buy what I linked for you!

Free Wifi Hotspots Accessible to Truckers (Updated)

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Do you drive a truck? Would you like to be able to access the internet for free? Are you sick and tired of the obscenely overpriced options that the big-chain truckstops offer? Then I've got good news for you!

In my travels about the country over the past 4 years, I've gathered together every location I could find that offered free WIFI access to truck drivers. This list has every truckstop and rest area with free wifi that I have encountered, plus a few I got from doing searches on the internet. There are probably still several I haven't found - in 2009 alone I discovered about 20 new ones, and I'm sure more and more of the small-timer truckstops are seeing the value in offering for free something that doesn't really cost them anything to provide. Contrast that with the exorbitant rates the major chains charge - several dollars an hour! - and it's easy to see why the small-timers are still in business.

Best of all, I'm posting this list for free! That's right, I did a ton of work, and I'm giving it away because I'm just that awesome!

I posted earlier renditions of this list before, but now that 2009 is over with, I think it's time I posted my latest rendition of the list of free wifi hotspots on my shiny new website. Consider this my Christmas and New Year's gifts to all you hard working truck drivers. Enjoy! And if you have any comments or information to share about this list, please feel free to let me know so I can keep this list up to date.

In the meantime, you can repay my kindness by passing the word out about my site, ok? Thanks!

Click here to see the list.

A couple caveats: I don't list motels and restaurants that aren't part of the truckstop, first because it's rude to use their wifi, second because in some places it might be illegal for you to do so, and third because sometimes they lock up their airwaves to keep unauthorized users off which would invalidate the list. Also, I don't list any malls or restaurants because you never know when someone's going to get offended about parting a truck in a mall parking lot.

There are a few restaurants scattered about that have their own truck parking lots and also offer free wifi. I didn't list these because most of these places don't want you parking overnight, or even for long periods, and as with malls, you never know when someone's going to get pissy about you parking there, so I'd rather not be the cause of unnecessary grief unless I'm going to profit big time from it. :-)

Most of you are probably well aware of what places like that you can park at or near anyway.

Last caveat: there are a few towns that have city-wide wifi. These were initially going to be free, but almost-free isn't quite free, and so they decided they needed to recoup the deployment costs. I've been to two of these towns, and both of them offered a 5-minute free usage, which was enough time to swap emails and proteins, and check the weather. No point in mentioning them if that's all you can do.

Below I've linked up a few netbooks available at Amazon, one of which is embarrassingly cheap. They should all have the appropriate WIFI devices built in. I personally use a large laptop, but there are so many of them out there that recommending one would be a full-time job. Netbooks are currently pretty simple, stripped-down laptops, and they're really small. I'm probably going to get one soon, as soon as I figure out what exactly I want. That cheap one looks like I might want it.

UPDATE 7/6/12:

I stopped driving a truck for the past couple years, and then over the past few months have been on the road again and found out the free wifi landscape has changed significantly. The biggest change is that McDonald's wifi has become free nationwide, even in California. True, it's almost impossible to connect outside the wals of the restaurant, but the fact that there are so many of them and so many near or in truckstops, or that have truck parking, that it's very easy to get internet access almost any time you want to.

In addition to that, Lowe's also offers free wifi, AND you can park in most of their lots like you can in most Walmart lots (although, good luck with that in California). Most of the time, you can get signal from your truck too.

Because of this, even though I've found a couple more rest areas and truckstops with free wifi, I have decided that I'm not going to update the list any more. I may change my mind in the future, but for now it doesn't look like there's much point to the list or to updating it.
















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Other articles you may find interesting or helpful:
10-4 Good Buddy!
Expose Yourself #1 – Smilin’ Bill
Maps are freakin' awesome

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Where I've been

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"I'm just a-wandering on the face of the Earth" - the Moody Blues

I've been a lot of places, and I'm NOT an army brat to justify it. Even before I had a driver's license, I'd been to 11 states, and been in international waters (which is outside any country). I'm constantly amazed at all the cool places I've been, things I've done, stuff I've seen, and people I've met, and in the coming months, I'll be sharing some of what I've discovered with you.

In the meantime, I'm going to show you on the map where I've been, and as my travels expand, I'll be updating these maps, so check back here once in a while.

My travels have come in four broad phases: before I got a driver's license, after I got it but before I joined the Navy, after I started driving a truck, and the fourth phase will be after I stop driving a truck, a point in time that is rapidly approaching.

Being in the Navy did wonders for allowing me to travel the world. I was a bit hesitant to go on my Med Cruise in 1999-2000, but fortunately nothing bad happened to us. God must've been watching over us, because it was very quiet over there for the coming of the new millennium. I got to do a few things that are generally not possible, or dangerous to do, because it had quieted down for a little while.

Being a truck driver has likewise expanded my travels throughout this great country of ours. Before then, most of my travels were between Indiana, Florida, and Mississippi, with occasional detours to go see something interesting. Since then, though, I've been throughout most of the states I've been in, to most of the major cities, and I've traveled along around 80% of the interstate system, with a considerable number of states in which I've driven every mile of interstate they have.

In the future, I intend to visit every state, territory, and national park in the Union, every continent (though I don't like the cold, so my visit to Antarctica will be short), and possibly every country, though as there are a lot of disputed areas and new countries, some of them will have to settle down and play nice before I'll grace them with my presence. I also plan to sail every sea and ocean.

Enjoy the maps, and enjoy the journey!

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