Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
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Clarion Fund isn’t doing a very good job spreading around copies of Obsession. I received a second copy today in one of the crappy local throw-it-against-your-garage-door-in-the-middle-of-the-night newspapers, making it a 2:1 propaganda:resident ratio in this household. This area must be thought of as really important.
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That’s it. rowla.nuxx.net has been turned off, and I’m slated to pick it up tomorrow sometime around lunch. Everything has been moved over and seems to be working great. So, if I host your stuff on nuxx.net and you are having a problem, please let me know so that it may be corrected.
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Tonight Danielle and I rearranged my bedroom, and I think now it makes more sense. In the above photo (also here) the door to the hallway is at the far left side.
The bent blind will hopefully be replaced this weekend. This damage was caused by my sister’s dog Molly on Monday. When my sister was here picking her up, Molly got really excited as my sister carried things to the car, ran from window to window to look out, and jumped up on the blinds bending the bar of one set and tearing the plastics on another.
The blinds were dirty so I guess I don’t have to wash them now, but still…
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Today I received two nifty things in the mail. The first was these Olympus knock-off batteries from Eforcity for my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW.
The second is the winner, though; that DVD up above there, of Obsession The Movie. In order to form a proper, informed opinion of it I’ll be giving it a viewing, but I suspect that it’ll live up to its reputation of being a neocon-backed piece of anti-Islam propaganda. We’ll see, though. My understanding is that its production has a bunch of neocon backers and copies of it are being mailed out en masse in swing states. Yes, that’s how it came to me… Completely unsolicited, via the US Mail.
I guess it’s time to cue Göring:
Leave a CommentNaturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
I wanted to post a few of my thoughts about riding single-track mountain bike trails in the dark, with a head lamp:
· While a decent head lamp (like the Nite Rider Digital Evolution I was loaned) works well, having the light helmet-mounted and thus in line with one’s eyes means that shadows aren’t visible in many situations. This is the same as using camera-mounted flash on detailed textured surface and losing the texture in the final image. The result was that I couldn’t tell the depth of many rocks, gravely areas, and roots and almost fell a couple times.
· It’s basically accepted that riding one-way trails opposite the posted direction is okay after dark when done with headlights. Part of tonight’s ride involved going through The Pines backwards. (Videos of this trail forwards are here: 1 & 2.) This wasn’t hard, seemed to flow nice, but felt like a bad dream. It was dark, my field of vision was relatively narrow, there were bright lights dancing around in the distance, and while recognizable the backwards riding made whole trail feel somehow wrong. A couple of times while riding I had the sort of deja vu which comes about when one flashes back to a nightmare where Things Just Aren’t Right.
· Riding in the dark is a lot of fun. It’s a completely different feeling than the normal everything-can-be-seen daylight riding, and I like it a lot.
· A heavy head lamp (like the one I was borrowing) mounted near the front of my helmet made it tip forward slightly on bumpier sections. This was a bit awkward. It might be nicer to use a lighter lamp with a light Li-ion battery mounted on the helmet for balance, although the battery-in-pack setup I used tonight worked great and wasn’t noticeable while riding.
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Here’s one of the first photos out of my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW which was purchased so that I’d have a decent pocket-sized ruggedized point and shoot camera. It is the business end of my shower head, taken from within the cone spraying water, while taking a shower after today’s bike ride.
I’ve been wanting something like this for when out on my bike, traveling in the expectantly rainy UK, and other random places where I don’t want to bring or risk my DSLR. (Here are a bunch of photos of the Olympus Stylus 850 SW and the SanDisk 8GB microSDHC which make up this camera setup. Thus far it all seems to work well together and holds 1992 of the highest quality photos the camera can take.)
Today was a mostly-day-off from work, in exchange for some rather frustrating work this weekend. While leaving my parents house at 10:30pm on Saturday I was called into an issue which I worked on until 7:30am on Sunday. This was not fun and pretty much ruined my Saturday evening and Sunday, so I needed another day to do stuff. Today worked out well, though, as I ended up…
…buying what I believe to be an undervalued stock.
…getting banstyle.nuxx.net installed. (More on this later.)
…receiving my Stella 180-N head light, which I may return as a better deal may have come along.
…receiving and photographing my new Olympus Stylus 850 SW and the SanDisk 8GB microSDHC card and taking the aforementioned photo in the shower.
…going for a nice evening / night time bike ride at Stony Creek with the MMBA.
…using a bike headlight for the first time, although it was borrowed (thanks, Mike!) as I don’t want to use the one I received.
So, all in all it’s been a good day, even with attending a few conference calls here and there. Now I just need to sort out what’s going on with me and bike headlights, relax a bit more, then get a good night sleep. This shouldn’t be too hard as it’s only 11pm or so.
Leave a CommentI just picked up 740 shares of FNM at $1.75/share (plus $12.99 commission). This means that it needs to break $1.77/share for me to break even. Despite what I said last night I didn’t sell anything else in order to do this. I hope it wasn’t a bad choice.
Leave a CommentSo, I’ve got 10 shares of Google stock (NASDAQ:GOOG) and it’s down 40.92%. In short, I’ve lost a lot of money on it.
I’m noticing that Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) are up a whole bunch since they crashed a few days ago. I really, really can’t help but think that I should dump all my Google stock tomorrow morning, buy a bunch of Fannie Mae or maybe Freddie Mac, wait a few days, then sell that and move it all into an ETF which tracks the Euro.
Do any of you think this is a particularly good or bad idea?
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Danielle just sent me a link to this comic, xkcd #479, saying that it is me. Yes, I don’t like musical cell phone ring tones.
The ringer on a phone is designed to be an interruption. It’s point is to draw your attention to the fact that someone (or something) is calling you. It is to notify you that something requires your attention. For maximum effect the noise doing so should be distinct from other day to day noises, perhaps even slightly bothersome; exactly the same as an alarm clock sound. Therefore, I don’t understand why someone would want a favorite song of theirs to be providing this notification.
I really wonder why would someone want their favorite song’s hook being used as a device to grab their attention and prompt them into action. Are people trying to turn themselves off to something?
This thought doesn’t even begin to touch on how many musical ring tones happen to be in a frequency range which doesn’t do a good job of standing out from background noise, making it so that the user doesn’t hear their phone when it rings. Or what about those which start out quiet enough that the first five seconds of ringing isn’t particularly audible. Isn’t the point of having a phone ring so that one can hear it?
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Over the years I’ve ended up with quite a few sample-size tubes of toothpaste. I dislike the strong, lingering flavors of most of these toothpastes, so I normally use Tom’s of Maine (or Trader Joe’s equivalent, but not Tom’s of Finland) plain mint toothpaste. As a result, I had a bunch of old tubes which were past expiration and needing to be thrown out. 23 tubes (and four small sample packs), in fact.
Before throwing them out I decided to squeeze them all into one bowl. Next I stirred it all together, found that a spoon will almost stand up in it, then put some on my toothbrush and brushed my teeth with it.
This multi-sample toothpaste concoction didn’t taste bad, but was overwhelmingly mint backed by a few other unidentifiable herbs. Even after rinsing my mouth a number of times the taste still lingers, but this matches my experience (and complaint) with all of the Colgate, Crest, etc toothpastes I’ve tried in the past.
Now to figure out how to dispose of it. Maybe dumping it in the trash then attempting to wash the bowl…
Here’s an index of the photos taken of the 23 Tubes 1 Bowl ‘experiment’:
· 23 small tubes and four sample packets of toothpaste from companies like Crest and Colgate.
· The 23 tubes of toothpaste and four sample packs squeezed into a bowl, surrounded by the remaining packaging.
· Labeled image of the bowl filled with toothpaste showing which is which.
· The previous image of the bowl filled with 23 tubes (and four sample packets) of toothpaste, without the labels.
· Closer view of the bowl containing 23 tubes (and four sample packets) of toothpaste.
· The bowl of toothpaste was rather difficult to stir and made an interesting swirled pattern before coming together.
· Mostly homogenized, it is almost possible to stand a spoon up in the bowl of toothpaste. It falls over after two or three seconds.
· Top down view of the nicely mixed bowl of toothpaste.
· Having mixed together all the toothpaste I decided to dip my toothbrush in and try brushing my teeth with it.
· The damage: empty toothpaste tubes, packets, boxes, and a bunch of caps.
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Over the years I’ve ended up with quite a few sample-size tubes of toothpaste. I dislike the strong, lingering flavors of most of these toothpastes, so I normally use Tom’s of Maine (or Trader Joe’s equivalent, but not Tom’s of Finland) plain mint toothpaste. As a result, I had a bunch of old tubes which were past expiration and needing to be thrown out. 23 tubes (and four small sample packs), in fact.
Before throwing them out I decided to squeeze them all into one bowl. Next I stirred it all together, found that a spoon will almost stand up in it, then put some on my toothbrush and brushed my teeth with it.
This multi-sample toothpaste concoction didn’t taste bad, but was overwhelmingly mint backed by a few other unidentifiable herbs. Even after rinsing my mouth a number of times the taste still lingers, but this matches my experience (and complaint) with all of the Colgate, Crest, etc toothpastes I’ve tried in the past.
Now to figure out how to dispose of it. Maybe dumping it in the trash then attempting to wash the bowl…
Here’s an index of the photos taken of the 23 Tubes 1 Bowl ‘experiment’:
· 23 small tubes and four sample packets of toothpaste from companies like Crest and Colgate.
· The 23 tubes of toothpaste and four sample packs squeezed into a bowl, surrounded by the remaining packaging.
· Labeled image of the bowl filled with toothpaste showing which is which.
· The previous image of the bowl filled with 23 tubes (and four sample packets) of toothpaste, without the labels.
· Closer view of the bowl containing 23 tubes (and four sample packets) of toothpaste.
· The bowl of toothpaste was rather difficult to stir and made an interesting swirled pattern before coming together.
· Mostly homogenized, it is almost possible to stand a spoon up in the bowl of toothpaste. It falls over after two or three seconds.
· Top down view of the nicely mixed bowl of toothpaste.
· Having mixed together all the toothpaste I decided to dip my toothbrush in and try brushing my teeth with it.
· The damage: empty toothpaste tubes, packets, boxes, and a bunch of caps.
