“I’m only the ‘gay bishop’ when I leave New Hampshire.” Sounds like the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire is doing just fine….
“I’m only the ‘gay bishop’ when I leave New Hampshire.”
Sounds like the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire is doing just fine.
View down from the guest room, showing the new pad locations. Evidently the current regs for deck pads is 36″. Yikes! We had — um — 8? And, yes, upon…
View down from the guest room, showing the new pad locations.
Evidently the current regs for deck pads is 36″. Yikes! We had — um — 8? And, yes, upon examination, the deck was definitely tilting downward.
That said … 36″?! Archaeologists are going to be digging those things up …
Talked with the deck guy about that and about the schedule. Thing may be finished next week; if not the week after. In time for the Ks to be out, which will be nice.
The pad locations are slightly misleading. The deck is going to cantilever out, edged off, from that point another foot or so. Which, again, will be cool. Plenty of deck room for future fun. Will have to redo the rear sprinklers, though, since the heads are all on the back sides of the 2/3-demolished pads. A task for the Spring.
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Discovered that MT 3.2 allows for internal trackback pinging — i.e., if I make a post that points at another post within this same blog, it will issue and record…
Discovered that MT 3.2 allows for internal trackback pinging — i.e., if I make a post that points at another post within this same blog, it will issue and record a trackback ping, which earlier MT versions did not support.
While that tends to crowd the “recent trackbacks” listing, this is an incredibly powerful means of cross-linking posts within the blog. I.e., if I write post A about something, and then later write post B as a follow up that references back to A, then not only do I have that backwards link, but if I go to post B, I will automatically see the reference forward.
As it stood prior to turning this on, if I wanted A to know about B, I had to either manually edit or add a comment. Over a short lead time between posts, the temptation has always been to post comments and hope that folks saw that comments had been updated, vs. now actually creating all-new posts. This is much superior, because it offers the choice.
That’s pretty keen. Indeed, it’s keen to the point that, if I ever dropped trackback altogether, I’d do just external trackback blocking. As an internal device, it’s a real value. Indeed, I wish at this point there were a way to go through and save all the internal posts to force those historic trackbacks through at this point …
Ah, for a relaxing weekend … FRIDAY Assuming I get out of here in a timely fashion today (not a safe bet these days), my number one job at home…
Ah, for a relaxing weekend …
FRIDAY
Fortunately, the Old Tree Trunk neighbors are picking up the bill for that tree’s branches that are all over our driveway. In the back, I could imagine dunning the neighbors for the remains of their trees, but it’s not worth it.
Now all we have to do is get a sitter. Margie made several phone calls earlier in the week, but nothing doing. Rrg.
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
Also on the docket for this weekend — finally got a replacement PC for Margie, who’s been struggling along with her old one. It’s a refurbed Compaq Presario SR1475CL, via CostCo. Should be adequate for 2-3 years (the main restriction on Margie’s PC — RAM limit of 512Mb). Arrived in the mail yesterday. Amongst that things that need doing:
Not sure how much of that will be done this weekend. I can use my external HD for the backup purposes — but I need to do some cleaning of it (it’s got stuff from several laptop backups on it, and some of it is stuff that’s no longer on my current machine).
I think “sleep” shows up on the list somewhere here. Oh, and “relax,” too. We’ll have to see about that.
Surprise!this post enabled by airblogging.com….
Hey, 13 minutes and 26 seconds of missing Serenity goodness — as listed by the British Board of Film Classification (their ratings board) for additional DVD material. Just titles of…
Hey, 13 minutes and 26 seconds of missing Serenity goodness — as listed by the British Board of Film Classification (their ratings board) for additional DVD material.
Just titles of each segment, no actual video, of course. Some of the bits I recognize from the Visual Companion script (one of the comments in the Whedonesque reference for this gives a proposed correlation by page number). Nothing earthshattering. The consensus is that this stuff was removed by Joss for pacing, so it seems unlikely, given his other comments, that a “Director’s Cut” will include this stuff in-stream, but it’s at least being slated for the DVD somewhere on the disc.
Washington, DC: Drink a glass of wine with dinner, go to jail. Yup. Arrested, handcuffed, and tossed in the clink with a 0.03 Breathlyzer result. 0.03. And the cops note…
Washington, DC: Drink a glass of wine with dinner, go to jail.
Yup. Arrested, handcuffed, and tossed in the clink with a 0.03 Breathlyzer result. 0.03. And the cops note they can do it with any trace amount.
Yeesh.
(via the Agitator)
The Princess Bride: The Musical? Great movie, great book, look forward to it. (via BoingBoing)…
Just got word from our contractors that they’re going to come out and start doing some preliminary work on replacing the deck . Huzzah! First off (after clearing it) is…
Just got word from our contractors that they’re going to come out and start doing some preliminary work on replacing the deck . Huzzah! First off (after clearing it) is pouring some new concrete pads for the extended area, plus checking the existing ones to see if they’re up to code.
Need to take some “before” pictures pretty quick …
Fascinating photo gallery of the “ship graveyard” off Staten Island. (via BoingBoing)…
Fascinating photo gallery of the “ship graveyard” off Staten Island.
(via BoingBoing)
This is old hat stuff to sf writers, but evidently something new under the sun (or under a sun) for Official Church Types: what would be the implications of extraterrestrial…
This is old hat stuff to sf writers, but evidently something new under the sun (or under a sun) for Official Church Types: what would be the implications of extraterrestrial intelligence, asks Jesuit priest and astronomer Guy Consolmagno.
Unfortunately, given the history of Christianity and newly-discovered indigenous peoples on our own planet, the answers would not necessarily pleasant ones. Though it might be interesting (in a Chinese curse sort of way) for extraterrestrial evangelists to come here to convert the “heathen.”
The most interesting bit from this news story is that the Vatican has an observatory in Arizona and another at the Papal residence at Castel Gandolfo. Given the long-standing dispute with Galileo, who’da thunk?
(via BoingBoing)
Word is that Micro$oft and Yahoo! will announce today interoperability between their IM networks. Which is great, because, frankly, I’d love to completely ditch my MSN Messenger client and just…
Word is that Micro$oft and Yahoo! will announce today interoperability between their IM networks.
Which is great, because, frankly, I’d love to completely ditch my MSN Messenger client and just use the (more configurably clean) YIM one. Even better, I’d like to go all retro and just use the Google IM client for everything.
It’s amazing the shows coming to DVD. It’s like my entire childhood can be purchased on disc. The Time Tunnel is the latest entry. I had a serious love of…
It’s amazing the shows coming to DVD. It’s like my entire childhood can be purchased on disc.
The Time Tunnel is the latest entry. I had a serious love of this show when I was a wee lad. Indeed, I had a green turtleneck when I was in Katherine’s age (i.e., when I was in Kindergarten) that I called my “Tony shirt.”
I’ve watched the series since then, and it’s craptastic, but I still get a chill when I see the sets, or hear the music, or do anything other than contemplate the threadbare stories. Not sure that’s worth $30 to me for the set, but, still, it’s amazing to think of life before TV series could be so easily recalled from … well … the past.
No running on the playground? Yup. After all, somebody could get hurt! Broward’s “Rules of the Playground” signs, bought from an equipment catalogue and displayed at all 137 elementary schools…
No running on the playground? Yup. After all, somebody could get hurt!
Broward’s “Rules of the Playground” signs, bought from an equipment catalogue and displayed at all 137 elementary schools in the district, are just one of several steps taken to cut down on injuries and the lawsuits they inspire.
“It’s too tight around the equipment to be running,” said Safety Director Jerry Graziose, the Broward County official who ordered the signs. “Our job was to try to control it.”
How about swings or those hand-pulled merry-go-rounds? “Nope. They’ve got moving parts. Moving parts on equipment is the number one cause of injury on the playgrounds.”
Teeter-totters? “Nope. That’s moving too.”
Sandboxes? “Well, I have to be careful about animals” turning them into litter boxes.
Cement crawl tubes? “Vagrants. The longer they are, the higher possibility that a vagrant could stay in them. We have shorter ones now that are made out of plastic or fiberglass.”
To be fair, it’s not just a kill-joy attitude. It’s all about money.
“We could do a lot more if we didn’t have to watch our back every single second,” said Graziose, who has led a playground safety committee for 17 years. “We sometimes get a letter from the attorney before we even get an accident report from the school.”
Since 1999, Broward County schools paid out about $561,000 to settle 189 claims for playground accidents, about 5 percent of the amount the district spent on all injury claims in that time. To keep those numbers low, Graziose said, he needs to keep thinking of ways to make playgrounds safe.
Katherine’s school’s playground has swings, to be sure, but most of it is big multi-function jungle gym things. She has fun — but, then, she’s allowed to run around, despite the obvious danger that she might trip, or run into something, or plow into a wall, or run into the street, or something like that.
Still, it makes me wonder how we survived, or, conversely, how we managed to grow up without my folks filing a huge law suit against, say, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for enough money to put us through college and live in luxury the rest of our lives (after my brother fell off a slide at St Joseph’s Church in Pomona and cut his chin open).
(via J-Walk)
Since we moved into this office building in the insane week between Christmas and New Years, 1999 (alas, pre-blog), I’ve basically been in a single area. I was in one…
Since we moved into this office building in the insane week between Christmas and New Years, 1999 (alas, pre-blog), I’ve basically been in a single area. I was in one office from 2000-2001, then we did a one-office shift in January 2002.
About a year ago, the Powers that Be decided to move the rest of the IT group into the former mail room down on the first floor. They broke it up with cubes and with Gorilla racks and shoehorned the techies down there, so that they could free up the floor space for project task forces. That left just me and a regional server ops manager in offices up here on 2B.
That IT group move included the manager in charge of the local site ops, and she’s been finding being a manager without an office to be a real problem. It’s tough to do confidential chats with (or dressings down of) staff when you’re a thin cube wall from the rest of the team, and conference rooms are sometimes difficult to come by. Which is why, in general, the rule of thumb in our company is that managers get closeable space.
An office recently came free down near the tech corral, and the local manager claimed squatting rights to it, ostensibly to be able to do budget work. The office manager, though, objected, since the two of them don’t really get along, as I understand. Offices are in short supply, and the “need” for the IT site manager to have an office became a matter of dispute, even though the person’s manager (in Calgary) and the other two senior IT managers in the office (incl. Yours Truly) supported the need.
Now … right down in that same corner of the world is a strange corner “suite.” It was an oversized office that got split into a common conference area (complete with table) and three long cube-sized offices with full walls and lockable doors. It was originally configured for the senior management of one of the business units here, most of whom were frequently travelling and who wanted to set a “good example,” noblesse oblige, of efficient space usage. Which made up, a bit, for the cube-and-a-half cube space allocated to the rest of their group staff.
I thought it was the goofiest thing I’d seen, an example of how “eccentric” that particular business unit was. I’ve come since to see it as actually a very clever move, an efficient luxury.
Anyway, times and organizations have changed, and that suite is basically now empty. So we’ve proposed that the local IT manager, the regional server ops manager, and Yours Truly, move into that suite.
Pros:
Cons:
That last isn’t a trivial concern, but it’s not so bad as it sounds. The office is actually well-furnished with modular furniture. It has more file cabinet space than my present arrangement, more desk space, and more bulletin board space. Less easy of an angle to hide my blogging from the doorway, but still doable. Biggest disadvantage is that the bookshelf space is much more limited. And there’s no large whiteboard and no wall space for one because …
… well, it’s a corner office, which turns it back into an advantage. Windows on two sides, and plenty of tree coverage (most of it evergreen), such that I can leave the windows open a lot more.
Other amenities include a kitchen that’s a heck of a lot closer (and where the coffee flavor I prefer, vanilla nut, is also served) and more convenience to the outside.
And, did I mention it’s a ground floor corner office? So good views of the weather and the outside, which will be nice. Slight bit of fish bowl (esp. when I’m there pre-dawn), since it’s on the corner of the wing by the office entrance, but that’s not that big of an issue. Minor reduction in aerobic exercise, since it’s ground floor instead of second, but since I don’t actually get out of my office all that often (which makes lunchtime that much more valuable to me), that’s not a huge impact.
This has been in discussion as a plan for about a month, and I finally got confirmation that it’s actually going to happen, though not immediately. Wanting to avoid a feeding frenzy, the office manager wants to have bodies slotted for our offices at the time we move out of them. Current prognosis is probably before Thanksgiving.
Which is probably just as well, since I’ll need to take a bit of time about packing up stuff to take down and, in a lot of cases, to take home.
But it’s exciting. Frankly, I always find moving exciting and fun — work, to be sure, but a new adventure, a chance to clean up my stuff and to discover new possibilities.
Time to start collecting copier paper boxes …
The new Wallace & Gromit flick is on our list of things to see with Kitten — but, alas, tragedy has struck, as a fire has destroyed 25 years of…
The new Wallace & Gromit flick is on our list of things to see with Kitten — but, alas, tragedy has struck, as a fire has destroyed 25 years of props and sets at Aardman Studio’s archives.
While material from “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” wasn’t lost because it wasn’t yet in storage, the blaze today ruined what should have been a day of celebration for Aardman after the film’s box-office results, the company Events and Exhibitions Manager Kieran Argo said in a telephone interview from Bristol.
“Our warehouse where we store all of our sets, props, story boards and models from earlier productions has been totally destroyed,” Argo said from the southwestern city. “We’ve lost 30 years of history from Morph in the 1970s up to and including the latest series of ‘Creature Comforts’.”
I love George Pal’s 1953 War of the Worlds. Now … with bunnies. (via the Flea)…
I love George Pal’s 1953 War of the Worlds. Now … with bunnies.
(via the Flea)
As noted below … <$MTBlogEntryCount$> says that, at the moment (prior to this post) I have 8,493 posts here at DDtB. But when I go to my MT control panel,…
As noted below …
<$MTBlogEntryCount$> says that, at the moment (prior to this post) I have 8,493 posts here at DDtB.
But when I go to my MT control panel, it says I have 8,503 posts.
No idea what the discrepancy is. I’ve a query in to the MT boards.
I can understand why a lot of folks aren’t happy with the US government and the folks it contracts out to being in charge of the “root” of the Internet….
I can understand why a lot of folks aren’t happy with the US government and the folks it contracts out to being in charge of the “root” of the Internet. Issues of who put it all together in the first place aside, I can see the objections and worries that would stem from that.
And that, said, is anyone better served by, say, China and Tunisia being added to the mix of controllers?
Strangely, I am unimpressed with assertions that governments have no interest in screwing around with technical standards or civil liberties (Hello, China here? The folks who twist the arms of every search provider to limit what sites its citizens can see?), or hearing from EU representatives that, by adding more governments overseeing things, we won’t make things any more bureaucratic …
I’m pretty certain I’d rather not have China — or France, or Russia, or any more folks than absolutely necessary — involved in the “place” where I host my blog. Or do my book and movie shopping, for that matter. The US government is bad enough, and, hell, I get to vote for them.
(via BoingBoing)
Eyewitness information is often critical to police and judicial actions. But not only is it unreliable … it’s notoriously unreliable. Wilson had worked late Friday stuffing envelopes for a membership…
Eyewitness information is often critical to police and judicial actions. But not only is it unreliable … it’s notoriously unreliable.
Wilson had worked late Friday stuffing envelopes for a membership drive for the Western Tennis and Fitness Club in Covedale, where he is part-owner and general manager. Just hours before, he had bought a new maroon Honda Accord. With him in the car were three of his four children, plus one of their friends.
Wilson hurried into the Dalton Avenue post office in Queensgate to drop off the letters, but when he returned to the car and opened his trunk, two of his children surprised him after sneaking into it from the backseat using the trunk’s “pass-through” area. “I said, ‘You guys get back in the back seat,’ ” Wilson said Saturday.
He jumped back in the car and, because it was new to him, stepped on the gas too hard and left the area too fast.
Those events, witnessed by U.S. Postal Service employees, led them to believe Wilson was abducting the children and trying to leave in a hurry.
Which was then followed by calls to the Cincinnati police, an Amber Alert, video footage of the “perp” showing up on the news, and much general brouhaha.
Of course, the police are often in a bind in things like this. In cases like this, an Amber Alert was issued in error. But if you wait until you have facts confirmed …
Earlier Friday, police were criticized by the family of 20-month-old Aliyah Myrick for not issuing an Amber Alert about her disappearance until 3 a.m. Friday, six hours after her mother called police to say her estranged husband had grabbed the girl and ran. The child was found dead about 10 a.m. Friday in a Mount Auburn park.
So maybe it’s better to be safe than sorry — but it’s worth remembering that just because someone saw it doesn’t mean that it actually happened.
(via BoingBoing)
