| macro |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|07:18 am] |
Dear Americans, EITHER read a book on macroeconomics, OR don't have an opinion. Thank you. |
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| The Garden |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|07:24 am] |
Shauna and I have been landscaping the garden one bit at a time this year. The patio went in a month ago and the landscaping around it is progressing. On the left there, I’m trying to produce wildflowers. |
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| my face is cold |
[Apr. 21st, 2009|05:54 pm] |
Two weeks ago:
![[]](http://halcanary.org/photos/2009-04-08_064728_dscn0417.jpg)
This morning:
![[]](http://halcanary.org/photos/2009-04-21_073058_dscn0418.jpg)
Just now:
![[]](http://halcanary.org/photos/2009-04-21_165730_dscn0423.jpg) |
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| really? |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|07:47 pm] |
I'm going crazy. Today I craved broccoli, bought some, cooked it, and enjoyed it. |
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| How many computers DO you have? |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|07:52 am] |
A few years ago, Chapman asked me "How many computers DO you have in your house?" Good question. There is (1) Sloop, the new one that I built last fall (Athlon 64 3500+) inside the old chassis from Lensman, which is now a inoperable mobo+cpu waiting to be recycled. Then there is (2) Olpc, the new netbook, which I sadly don't use often enough because I rarely leave the house. (3) Dalek is the computer I built in 2001 that still serves as my backup desktop. (4) Mazer is a P3-800 laptop I keep around because Olpc doesn't have a VGA-out socket for presentations. I've loaned Mazer to the housmate until he de-viruses his own computer (windoze user, go figure---and Steve's a computer professional!). (5) Nimrod is an ancient Pentium laptop that I forgot I had until this year's housecleaning. It still works, and I intend to get rid of it at some point. Then there's my old laptop, Hiro2, which has been broken since before I fully paid for it; but we aren't counting nonfunctional computers.
So yes, I own 5 functional computers. This weekend I found out that Dalek, even though it has a motherboard and processor from 2001 and has a Radeon 9200 GPU from 2004 and is running Linux will run World of Warcraft. Not well, mind you, but usable. Now Shauna and I can play together in my house. We're such dorks.
I've got Dalek set up on my dining room table with a giant 9-year-old CRT monitor and an ethernet cable running across the floor into my room. It's okay because it's been so long since I've had more than two people eat at my dining room table anyway. The other possibility is to squeeze both computers onto my desk. But that would be crowded. We'd bump elbows. |
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| local mean solar time |
[Mar. 9th, 2009|05:21 pm] |
According to maps.google.com, my longitude is -81.803888 degrees. This puts my house 5.45359253 hours behind Greenwich, England. Call it 5 hours, 27 minutes, and almost 13 seconds. This morning I woke up at 6 AM, Eastern Daylight time, UTC-4; so I got up at 10 AM UTC. This means I got up this morning at 4:32:47 AM local mean solar time. |
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| empty clsoet. |
[Jan. 29th, 2009|11:29 pm] |
Spent the past week or two cleaning my room. The most recent spirt of activity was caused by a search for a CD-ROM I last saw floating around six months ago. It may be lost forever, because I never found it. I ended up carting a large box off to goodwill and filling four big trash bags.
Then last night I went through the clothes hanging on my closet. I removed over half of them because they were too big; I folded them up and boxed them. Even though they represent almost eighty pounds lost in the past two-and-a-half years, it’s still a lot of money spent on clothes wasted. I think from now on I’m going to try to make do with a lot less clothing and try to purge the closet more often. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 8th, 2009|07:29 am] |
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Wow, it feels like winter. The temperature got down to 52°F (11°C) this morning. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 21st, 2008|07:07 am] |
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Who is still playing WoW? I'm starting to miss it and thinking of reactivating my subscription and jumping back on for a few months. |
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| salvage |
[Nov. 9th, 2008|08:06 pm] |
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While sailing around south of Sanibel, we saw a mast sticking out of the water. Someone sunk a large sailboat there. Photos to follow. |
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| Saturday Voting |
[Oct. 25th, 2008|12:14 pm] |
I went to early vote this morning. This is the first of two Saturdays that the polls are open. It seems to me that they should be open Sundays as well.
There are five early voting locations in this county, so I had to drive a bit to get there, but the convenience of being able to vote on a Saturday morning made it worth it.
I had to wait in line less than half an hour; I should have timed it. The line went out the door of the county supervisor of elections branch office and into the next door, some kind of abandoned store.
Since there were voters from all precincts there (all in different congressional districts, state senate districts, state house districts, county commission districts, fire control districts, and sub-municipalities), they printed out ballots as needed. To get our identity, they swiped the magnetic strip on our state ID (driver license).
After filling out the bubbles on the ballots, we fed them into a machine that read them. There was no feedback on whether the machine read the ballots correctly. I have to hope that somebody performs spot-checks to verify that the optical scan machines are functioning properly. |
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| out, radio spot |
[Oct. 23rd, 2008|07:17 pm] |
"Just as you suspected, Barack Obama is wrong for you." --John McCain radio ad, heard in FLorida.
Think about this for a while. Why might someone be suspicious of Obama? Maybe they don't want to admit out lout that that are afraid of black men. And the "for you" bit: this ties into a segregationist viewpoint where it's okay if Obama wants to be president of black America, but not okay if he wants to be president of you, white America. In fact, it would be wrong for a black man to be president of you.
It's subtle, though. |
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| learning a language |
[Oct. 23rd, 2008|07:27 am] |
So for something to do, I picked up a box of Spanish vocabulary flashcards at the store yesterday. I grabbed a stack an inch tall (letters T-Z) and started memorizing.
After going through the stack four times, I only memorized half of them. I'm really bad at memorization.
The normal way to go about learning a language is to learn a little grammar, a little vocabulary, do some practice, then repeat. Since the vocab is always my weak point, I'm going to spend a lot of time up front on it, to compensate. |
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| our sail yesterday. |
[Oct. 19th, 2008|09:35 pm] |
![[]](http://halcanary.org/images/2008-10-18_sailing.jpg)
This was our sail yesterday. The big blue arrow shows the predominate wind. The tide was initially against up as we went downriver. After motoring out of Port Sanibel behind Punta Rassa, we raised our sails when we hit the main Caloosahatchee channel. We sailed almost due south on a beam reach, using the motor for a while against the tide, until we got past the bridge. We use the motor most of the time we go under the bridge, because the wind is unpredictable there and the big boats have a habit of tossing us about.
We made good time all the way down to the Point Ybel Lighthouse on the tip of Sanibel Island. At that point we gybed around to a broad reach and headed for Estero Island. We gybed twice again, beating downwind. This annoyed the hell out of me, so I convinced the skipper to let me rig the jib wing-on-wing using an improvised spinnaker pole made out of the boathook. This let us sail east, directly toward our destination, at about the same speed. This is a lot easier to rig than the spinnaker.
After a while, we decided to head back, beating upwind and making good time, once we realized that the fairleads needed adjusting (again).
about 13 miles total. |
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| review |
[Oct. 19th, 2008|09:28 am] |
Red Robin, A restaurant review.
I went to the one at Gulf Coast Town Center (how's that for the name of a semi-upscale mall?) last night. The place was way too loud. Hold on I didn't hear you; IT IS WAY TOO LOUD IN HERE. And there were too many choices on the menu, which led my dinner companion to make an unwise choice in hamburgers---she got some sort of Italian-food hamburger with pepperoni and such on it. She didn't finish it. |
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| partisans |
[Oct. 18th, 2008|11:12 am] |
Examples of appropriate places for partisan political posters: - Party Headquarters,
- Campaign Rally.
Example of inappropriate places for partisan political posters: I'm not arguing against your first-amendment right to free speech. And I don't want to infringe on that right at all, but you did just lose a customer, if only because I find your politics distasteful. |
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