Wings of Freedom 2010

"Betty Jane" a World War II era North American TP-15C Mustang.

The Wings of Freedom tour a living history display of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, Consolidated B-24 Liberator, and North American P-51 Mustang… The backbone of American air power in World War II is coming to Connecticut.

Sixty years after their use over the skies of enemy territory, they embark on a new mission over the skies of America to honor our veterans of World War II, promote education of our future generations about the role of the aircraft and the flight crews of World War II, and to preserve these treasures of American aviation history where they belong: the sky.

The aircraft will be available for ground tours and flight experiences at Igor I Sikorsky Memorial Airport from September 7th to September 10th, and at Waterbury-Oxford Airport between September 10th and September 13, 2010.

Visit The Collings Foundation web site for exact times and locations or to book a flight.

No, I’m Not Dead…

I’ve just been swamped and haven’t had the time or the desire to write… and I’m recovering from surgery at the moment.

I swear the next person who tells me how awful our health care system is is going to get slapped… Like most people I try to avoid doctors and hospitals as much as possible, but I couldn’t escape them this time. Everyone I dealt with from my doctor to the nurses aids in the hospital were top notch!

Anyway here’s the short version of the story… I started feeling a little queasy while celebrating my birthday with friends earlier this month… That was Wednesday night, by Thursday morning I was miserable enough to know something wasn’t right so I called my doctor’s office and made an appointment see him that afternoon. Roughly 2 hours later was having CT scan to confirm what training and experience told him was appendicitis… A little more than an hour later is was in the emergency room getting IV antibiotics and waiting for surgery. Truth be told that was the longest most annoying part of the whole process, I spent about 5 hours in an bed ER before I was taken up for surgery at around 10:00 p.m.

There was no fighting with insurance companies or trivial bullshit of any kind… The system simply worked just as it does for vast majority of Americans everyday. There is a fundamental difference between access to health care and access to health insurance… that’s something that’s been lost in the debate on health care reform. Our health care system is not broken, it has faults, but the issue is not access to health care… It’s access to affordable health insurance and there are ways of providing affordable health insurance coverage to those want it without effectively blowing up our entire health care system.

News of the Rebellion: Tax Day Tea Parties in Connecticut

Image: Gasden Flag

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and the Republic for which it stands. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” – Daniel Webster

Mark your calendars for Thursday, April 15 and make your voice heard at one of the Tax Day Tea Parties being held around Connecticut and around the country.

Greenwich Tea Party
When: Thrusday, April 15th, 5:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Where: Greenwich Town Hall, Field Point Road, Greenwich, CT
Website: gstpp.org

Hartford Tea Party
When: Thursday, April 15th, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Where: State Capitol (North Steps), Hartford, CT
Website: thehartfordteapartypatriots.com

New Haven Tea Party
When: Thursday, April 15th, 12:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Where: Long Wharf Drive (Exit 46 off I-95)
Website: newhaventeaparty.com

New Milford Tea Party
When: Thursday, April 15th, 9:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
Where: The New Milford Green at the band stand
Website: ???

Norwich Tea Party
When: Thursday, April 15th, 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Where: Howard T Brown Memorial Park (aka the marina park), Chelsea Harbor Road, Norwich, CT
Website: ct2nddistrictteapartypatriots.com

My schedule’s a mess, but I’m going to try and make it to the New Haven Tea Party… Hope to see you there.

Happy New Year

Here’s to 2010… May she be a whole hell of a lot better than 2009! Lets face it 2009 pretty much sucked… Personally, I lost my dad when it was barely a month old and it was mostly down hill from there… Hopefully, 2010 will be better. I hope you all have, a safe, prosperous 2010. Cheers!

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging…

Whew, I’m back… Ok so I wasn’t really gone I’ve just been swampped over the last week and haven’t been paying close attention to the news.

Anyway, my scheduled seems to have become unstuffed and I’m starting to catch up on the events of the last week… so I should be able to get back to blogging later to today.

Help Rob Simmons Retire Chris Dodd

Rob Simmons needs your help… He’s looking for 400 donors by midnight to help him send Chris Dodd into retirement 2010.

If you can chip in a few dollars, click here.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter

Easter is a celebration of love that never fails…

…And life that never ends.

May your day be filled with joy!

Don’t Let the Sweet Face Fool You…

… She’s a terror.

I didn’t have much time for blogging this weekend since I had my hands full with this little beast:

bonnie-2-copy

I’m puppy sitting while my sister and her family are away on vacation… Don’t let the sweet face fool you, she’s a terror… And completely lovable.

Unfortunately, she’s all of about 9 months old and in her mind the whole world is a chew toy… If you leave her alone for to long you’re liable to find her chewing up a pair of you shoes or ripping the stuffing out of a sofa pillow.

Anyway posting may be sporadic for the next few days while I try to keep my mischievous little house guest from shredding everything in site.

One Year Old Today

Jasetaro.com is one year old today.

I launched this site on March 17, 2008 mainly because I’d out grown the laughable 5MBs of free web space provided by my ISP. I toyed around with free services like GoeCities, MySpace, Facebook and Blogger for a while and I wasn’t crazy about any of them. So after a couple of days of careful consideration this web site was born… The past year has been a combination of fun and frustration and I’ve learned a couple of valuable lessons.

1) Choose your web host carefully – when I launched this it was hosted by Yahoo Small Business Hosting… They were a disaster, in the roughly 4 months the site was hosted with then it was off-line 8 times because of server or database glitches. I moved the site to InMotion Hosting and, knock on wood, I haven’t had a problem since.

2) I you build it they will come – spammers that is… Roughly 95 percent of the comments posted here are spam. It’s never ending battle to keep these pages and the forum free of spam.

Anyway a little trivia, the majority of visitors come from the US, Canada, England and Australia. The top 5 stories of the past year were:

  1. Sarah Palin’s Private E-mail Account Hacked
  2. More Anti Israel Hate
  3. Don Surber 52 Days, 52 Mistakes
  4. Wall Street Journal: Just Say No to Detroit
  5. Poll Question: Who Won The Vice Presidential Debate

The top 5 web browsers are:

  1. Internet Explorer 7.0    35.48%
  2. Firefox 3.0    23.14%
  3. Internet Explorer 6.0    23.03%
  4. Firefox 2.0    6.08%
  5. Safari 525    5.03%

The top 5 Operating Systems used by visitors are:

  1. Windows XP    65.66%
  2. Windows Vista    16.83%
  3. Mac OS X     8.26%
  4. Windows 2000    4.65%
  5. Linux i686    1.04%

Spam Bots and a New Community

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d been working on a few things behind the scenes… Over the last couple of weeks this site has been inundated by spam bots. In fact the number of spam comments has more than doubled over the last month.

For the most part this blog has weathered the storm pretty well, unfortunately that wasn’t the case with forums… Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been seeing roughly 10-15 bot registrations a day on the forum, that made the situation pretty much untenable from my point of view. This web site is more or less hobby, it’s something I do in spare time and it’s something generates little or no revenue so something had to change.

I’ve made some server configuration changes that should help keep many of the Spam Bots away, for awhile at least anyway, and I’ve migrated the forums from phpBB to vBulletin. I suppose I could have just shut the forum down but that’s not something I wanted to do.

Frankly the old forum was the least visited part of the site… Something I’d like to change, which is one of the reasons I decided switch from phpBB to vBulletin. In addition to having better spam fighting capabilities the new vBulletin based forum includes new features like community blogs, member photo albums and social networking in addition to the message boards.

Anyway here we are… Head over to CTLiberty.com… Registration is free and easy and you can be posting and blogging in minutes. :)