Can I Get a Witness?

Jesse Helms, infamous Senatorial hate monger, has finally departed the earth, leaving us better for his leaving, but not for his presence.

Rot in hell Jesse!

tkp wrote an awesome review of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight." Even if you haven't read the book and have no intention of reading the book ... go read this review! (Read the entire post, or you'll miss stuff.)

Current Mood: amused

The rising cost of texting

The really offensive thing is as far as people outside the mobile industry can tell text messages should be basically free to the carrier.

There needs to be an alternative messaging system that works with mobile phones.

Perhaps a minimal web page that connect to computer IM protocols?

Swiped from tkp ... a reading list-y thing she came up with.

1. A favorite book!
2. A book that affected you in your YA years.
3. A favorite fantasy novel.
4. A favorite sci fi novel.
5. An awesome book (possibly a favorite) you think not many people around you have heard of/read.
6. A book you own more than one copy of.
7. An author whose every single book you own/will buy.
8. The worst book you've ever read.
9. A book you dislike that lots of other people you know like.
10. The most difficult book you've ever read.
11. Tell me what kind of books your mom reads/read.

12. What have you read so far this year?

13. What are you reading now?

14. What are you reading next? (list! list! You know you want to)

( My answers )

This is fun ... if anyone on my flist would like to do this, I'd love to see your answers!

Current Mood: curious

O M G

Last night our guest, Maya, made dinner for us. Then she made a few more dinners for us I think. It was one of the most wonderful meals I've ever had. What did we have? Let's see. Some kind of I think it was artichoke pesto crustini with tomato, then a second round of crustini with mozarella and some garlic oil, then an absolutely amazing black bean soup spicy, with chourico, and fresh cilantro and mozarella floating on top. Then two amazing pastas, one with the most incredible tomato cream sauce, spicy with red pepper and onion. And the other a fantastic sun dried tomato pesto. It stretched out for hours sitting around and chatting and drinking wine.

Current Mood: happy

Swiped from everywhere I look on my flist!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read more!

Current Mood: moody

Well friday afternoon I took off and managed to pull a group on Numtini and ended up tanking ZF. It was interesting. I can't say I did very well, but at least I didn't feel completely humiliated. I died twice, nobody else did. So I consider that overall a successful group. I need to work on rage generation, afterwards I looked up some info and I'm playing with some stance dancing to pop into zerker mode to start up a rage bonus. I also need to set up a shield/offhand macro. I have 32 points in fury for dual wield mostly for soloing and really need the second weapon to build up some rage at the beginning.

Like most low level instances, people don't take them seriously, and push all the boundaries. The hunter was level 50 as well and his pet was a better tank than I was for most of it. But between some pet and shaman off tanking, we made out fine and did the whole instance. They calmed down and were more careful about aggro on the bosses.

I need to improve my pulling and get more aggressive and more confident. I'm used to standing in back and healing, not tanking. And I need to just simply learn the instances so I can not look like a total newb not knowing where I'm going. But overall, I love to tank and I love doing it as a gnome.

I am a zombie!

I am so so exhausted. Maya is here for the weekend and a bit more. We went out to ptown saturday and just had an amazing time. We hit the cedar swamp trail and were eaten by bugs. Eaten alive! Carried off into the wilderness! Ok, maybe not that bad, but wow, it was buggy. Very pretty though.

Then was ptown. Maya wanted to visit Aimee's piercing shop and while we were there Janna got a second piercing in her ear and stretched out the primary holes with a pair of beautiful sterling spirals. While I was there, Aimee noticed "the silver booger" and plunked me into the chair and yanked out the nose screw and readjusted it. It's actually quite a lot better. After that we had a long wonderful dinner at The Lobster Pot. We had an hour wait so we got a drink at Vixen while waiting for our electric lobster (pager) to light up. It was, of course, pure heaven. We also got some oysters and had Janna try them and she liked them, which is fantastic!

We didn't get back home until after midnight. It was a thoroughly wonderful day. But exhausting. Yesterday we took it easy. Made Peruvian chicken and watched Big Trouble in Little China. Managed to fit in a little trip to West Dennis beach in the middle of the day though

Current Mood: exhausted

When work becomes not safe The Great Office War.

 I am going to use this blog a bit more to map my cycling progress and exploration North Central Florida.

Today I went to Putnam Hall with Jonathan. It was hot and worse, humid. We both got dehydrated and had to refill water in Melrose on the way back. We were out for less than 5 hours with breaks. 55.5 miles. The start and finish aren't the same point because I dropped the bike off at the shop at the end of the ride for a tune-up.

I'm happy to tell you that we probably agreed to an increase in educational benefits for our veterans that not only gives them  increase in their educational benefits, but if they stay in for a certain period of time than they can transfer those educational benefits to their spouses and or children. That's a very important aspect I think of incentivizing people of staying in the military. -- John McCain

McCain is correct about the details of the new GI Bill. However, he and the Republican Party very actively opposed the bill.

 This article is pretty interesting. Its about Zenn motor company and their deal with EEStor, a Texas company developing light weight ultracapacitor packs. This is a great advancement in electrical storage. Capacitors are vastly superior to batteries in just about every way. If cars became capacitors and gas stations became transformers, then we really will have a car-to-grid system of electrical storage. Capacitors are solid-state, so they don't wear out the same way a battery does, they can be charged as fast as you can put it in there. Currently, EEStor claims that they have a 50kWhr capacitor that they can charge in 5 minutes (Jesus Christ) that weighs less than 300 pounds. Zenn says that they can put it in a car that has a 250 mile range and can go freeway speeds (>80mph).

A technology like this would be the end to the lithium ion battery business and the end to gasoline.

On a side note, I was reading about the ITER today in my down time. ITER, http://www.iter.org/, is the fusion reactor that is currently being built in France. If successful it would be the only positive yield fusion reactor in the world, making helium from tritium (think Spiderman but way less stupid). The technology is solid, and the expected yields are 5 - 10 times the output. The problem with this project is all the stupid politics that are surrounding it. It took more than a decade to decide where to put it, itll take anothe rdecade to get the production done. So with all the insanity surrounding this particular project, I assumed that it was insanely expensive. I was incorrect. It is only costing 5 billion dollars. That blew my mind. Infinite energy for 5 billion and we are 15 years deep and have barely broke ground. What a bunch of stupid fucks.

Whenever the public turns its fickle attention toward energy they really only ask one solid question, "How does this affect my ability to drive my car?" The car companies have realized that saying that the car they want you to buy is environmentally friendly is a great  marketing ploy. Not building a car that is more efficient, just saying their car that they've been selling for years is efficient. A fairy tale. Like a mantra, recite it over and over again and you too will believe that 22 mpg highway is an efficient way to drive your Yukon Denali (incidentally I think Denali is the Hindu God of Stupidity). My 35 year old VW gets about 32 miles to the gallon (or 40 rods to the hog's head if you prefer). This is a very childish problem to solve. Oh sure, we can give people better cars to drive, hybrids, flex fuel, plug-in hybrids, full electric, hydrogen fuel cells...blah blah blah. The problem is deeper than what kind of car you drive. You are the problem.

I freely admit that I am not the average person (biking >100 miles a week running > 20 miles a week), but I have hope for the future. Recently I became a donating member to the Rails-to-Trails group, http://www.railtrails.org/. I recommend everyone go to their website to see what they are all about, or just to see what cool biking / mixed access trails are in your area.  There are a couple of other, more ambitious groups involved with active transportation I'd like to point out. The first, Bikes Belong, is the group responsible for the "Safe routes to School" program, http://www.bikesbelong.org/. Their goal is to make mixed access walking / biking paths to public schools in the United States. The other group, a little more ambitious and by little I mean a lot more ambitious is "Smart Growth America", http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/. Smart Growth is an advocacy group that wants less urban sprawl, to consolidate space so you don't end up 15 miles away from work so you can bike to the store and such. 

As far as I'm concerned. I think gas prices are hilarious. I drive so little and as the price of gas goes higher, I drive even less. I think 99% of everything I do in town can be done on my bike. Convincing Krissi of this is the remaining 1% of that problem. That's not true, the 1% is the weather factor, I dont' like riding in the rain and it rains here (tropical environment). It wouldn't be a feat for me to go several weeks without using the car. I'm hoping that I won't need a car next year. Its a serious goal of mine. No gas, no insurance, no car payments, no oil changes, fuel filters, car washes, air filters, tires, brakes, windshield wiper fluid. Ah the dream.

All of these alternative fuels that people discuss in reference to powering their cars are really a series of thermodynamic problems for morons. Hybrids, what's wrong with a hybrid? Are you asking about the Civic or the Prius? The Civic is worse than the Prius by a lot, at least the Prius theoretically can be 100% electric. The Civic runs the gasoline engine 100% of the time the engine is on. Are they more efficient than the corolla or civic? Yes. But they still suck, a lot. Flex fuel. Watch me bite the hand that feeds me. Flex fuel is the first thermo problem for morons. All Flex fuel pipedreams are little more than moving up the food chain. We are running out of dinosaurs that ate the plants, let's short circuit this carbon sequestration phenomenon by converting the carbohydrates in the cellulose. So let's follow the energy for a minute (by the way I'm excluding all corn based ethanol which is nearly as bad an idea as hydrogen). Sunlight comes to earth, plants absorb the light and use a portion of that energy to run gluconeogenesis, to make glucose, and then a glucose polymer called cellulose and then it makes stalks and seeds and blades of grass and leaves, then we harvest the cellulose containing matter, melt it in sulfuric acid to break it back down to glucose, then we fractionate it to separate out all the lignin and furfurol, and then we feed it to a bacterium that converts glucose to ethanol and then the ethanol is distilled away from the bacteria. Then the ethanol is mixed with the gasoline to lengthen it. This seems familiar. Its like when mom mixed iceberg lettuce in with the ground beef to make it seem like more food. Hydrogen is even dumber. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. In fact MOST of the universe, as far as we can tell, is hydrogen. The problem is that most of that hydrogen is water. The greatest energy source available to us has been stored in all that water! All we have to do to get it is electrolysis. Pass electricity through the water and then separate the H2 from the O2. Is that all? Then the H2 has to be purified and pressurized and transported. Why not just use the electricity to power the car in the first place? Why not use the sunlight that the plants were using to make the cellulose to make the electricity for the cars? The more steps in energy production, the more loss. Go back to the sources. That's what entropy and enthalpy tell me.

Current Music: Streetlight manifesto

Greetings and Salutations!

I'm new to this community, so if posts like this aren't allowed, I apologize.

I was wondering if anyone was able to make it to the Food and Wine Classic in Aspen this year. How was it?

If you weren't able to go or if you don't know what I'm talking about, there's some great coverage here.

Two out of three. This seems rather accurate in general, though a friend of mine insists I never neglect my "little people." Aww! ::sniff::

(And I can spell my own name: DOI. ... Oh shut up, I'm still laughing at that one.)

***

Your result for The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test...

Owl

Take The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test at HelloQuizzy

Current Mood: quizzical

Your result for The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test...

Rabbit

Take The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test at HelloQuizzy

Current Mood: quizzical

I can't remember if I've mentioned it at all, but I finally gave in and bought a GPS for the car. For the huge sum of $119, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. It's a Tomtom One, 3rd Edition. Which is a problem because Janna and I both admitted that we end up humming Pleasure of Love when we're driving with the thing sitting there.

Well I did something to my XP system so I decided to bash my head against a wall again. I partitioned the drive and installed Vista 64 (I have 4 gig) on the new partition.

Count me as shocked. Ok, a bit more than shocked. Stunned?

It works. It works for everything so far. Smooth and responsive. The real test will come tonight when I raid in EQ2. That's a big system stressor, not just because of EQ2, but I run with ACT parsing, Ventrillo, and usually listen to music on Rhapsody. (Music & EQ2 sounds go to speakers, Vent goes to my USB headset.)

Yes, it's a rare in the middle of the weekend, weekend update. So far this has been an absolutely wonderful weekend. Friday night I made a totally yummy spinach salad (the kind with mushrooms and bacon and a warm dressing) and some grilled burgers and we sat and watched our weekly fix of Food Reality TV. I will miss Top Chef until the next round!

Late friday night I got my VOES group and got the update for my epic weapon. And also hit the new Runnyeye instance. I have to say, it's kind of cheesy. It's a nice change from the usual COA/VOES/Maidens etc, but it's pretty clear that EQ2 has been put on the back shelf by SOE's new overlords. For about a year and a half, we had new things very very regularly and to my mind, a retread instance with different higher mobs isn't quite what I was expecting. COX redid a zone because their zone designer had a quiet month and did it in her spare time. Wasn't there supposed to be another high level instance in Kunark that still hasn't been released? On the other hand, people do seem to be filtering back to EQ2 and our guild raids are doing quite well.

Saturday was wonderful. We decided to go to an Audubon nature area that we hadn't been to in years. It's an old pond with a trail around it. There's a colony of barn swallows--I can watch them for hours. And it's just a wonderful walk. We saw several turtles sunning themselves and two bunnies munching on the foliage. On the way we stopped at the local community supported agriculture farm. It's a good ways away from us, but for only $40 a year, we're considering joining. I can't imagine we won't spend three or four days their picking junk enough to get our money's worth. All in all, just a wonderful day.