self with corona Travels and Images

WEEK 16 2003

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Picture of the Week

Lancaster Weather

The WeatherPixie

A Year Ago, This Week




Saturday 19 March 2003

Saturday - I meant to get over to the recycling center and drop a couple of things off, but mowing the yard, plus edging and weed-whacking took longer than I thought it would.

My shoulders hurt this evening. The yard looks better. The flowerbed needs a LOT of work now... My bulbs are starting to come up in the little flowerbed.

I read an article on line about the current filibustering about judges (Miguel Estrada in particular) in congress right now. My impression of the article is as follows: the author pointed out that it (the filibustering) was a good thing, because it put a spotlight on something both Democrats and Republicans have been carefully avoiding noticing in public - that the current judicial system not only enforces law and policy these days, but creates it as well. Which is why it's such a contentious issue - if these judges were simply trying murderers, embezzlers, students who download bad MP3's of eighties glam-rock bands, then it wouldn't be a big deal. And so, since the chances of the Democrat's getting any of their candidates passed, after this orgy of partisanship, is just as small as the Republican's current prospective appointee's, a new system will have to be worked out. Either no new judges, or a politically blind test (how?), or the legislative branch will take back the power they have ceded.

I can't remember what blog I read it on. It may have been Glen Reynold's Instapundit or possibly Eugene Volokh's Conspiracy, though I don't actually see it there. Or some other page, lost to all of us now.

I probably got it all wrong anyway, I'm not a lawyer. And reality usually has a way of providing us with another, worse, alternative.

I note that for the second night in a row I can't get to some sites. Some sort of internet foul up, possibly just Verizon. Ah well, I spend too much time in front of a terminal these days as it is.

Downloaded and ran AdAware - it found three spybot type thingies. Including Alexa. Weird. I don't download much of the sort of stuff you'd expect to find spyware in, but who knows? There are still connectivity problems, so that wasn't the problem.

Friday 18 April 2003

Friday - another long day. It's been a while since I missed Easter at my father's, but a combination of things just made it impracticable to be traveling at this time. Next week I'll get up there...

Work proceeds, slowly, as always. Results of some test cases are rather puzzling - it could be a bug in the code, or that I am not using the right parameters, or possibly too coarse a model, or just bad interpretation of the results. Hmmm. Well, time will tell.

Since I'm not on the road, I get to dog -sit some friends pet's. We get along pretty well - they enjoy their nightly walk with me, though it always seems too short for them....

Thursday 17 April 2003

Thursday - long day. Dinner was at the "Downtown Bistro", and was good, if a bit pricey...

Wednesday 16 April 2003

Wednesday - worked late.

Tuesday 15 April 2003

Tuesday - work proceeds, slowly. Installed the power supply and the machine works again. Lots of dust inside there...

Somewhere I found a reference to a book that tells you how to cook, well, locusts and such. Unmentionable Cuisine. Yuck.

How big are science fiction space ships you ask? Or maybe you don't. In either case, somebody named Jeff Russell had WAY too much time on his hands, (Canadian, eh?), and came up with this page on relative Starship Dimensions comparing just about everything (hyperbole alert) in science fiction to everything else. Way cool.... Note that the home page doesn't work for me (Netscape 7.0) but the "zoom" tabs sure do. Thanks to Slashdot for the reference.

Monday 14 April  2003

Monday - the taxes are mostly done. I have found a twelve dollar interest item that I need to include, or else risk an IRS audit. Bah. Once more into the morass....

It has rained, nonstop to the best of my knowledge, all day. Not really hard, but steady. There is snow predicted for the mountains, down to about the 4000 foot level. Cool.

Discovering that one of the PC's was nearly full, I spent a great deal of time cleaning off dead files, and then defragmenting the disk. This took hours. I also changed the allocations for the swap space ( we run BIG jobs here ).  When finished with all this I decided to do a reboot, so that our next job would have a pristine OS state to work with. Well, it stopped OK, but it won't boot.

Heck - it won't beep, buzz, or even burp. Dead power supply, I'm guessing, so I picked one up on the way home and I'll try putting it in tomorrow. Could be a bad switch or motherboard, but it's almost certain to be the power supply.

Late breaking news: the twelve dollar item was for last year! Go figure.

cat helping with taxes...
As usual, Riley was more than willing to "help" with the taxes...

Sunday 13 April 2003

Sunday - Working on the taxes. Which are voluntary. Heh.

My friend paid for and picked up the Ebay car, and it's a beauty. By going and looking at it beforehand, with a trusted mechanic friend, a lot of the uncertainty in buying a car from Ebay was avoided.


Picture of the Week
 soldier getting a flower

Photo Notes: This image is all over the internet. I'm not sure where it comes from, but it's one of the most remarkable photographs I've see of this war.


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