March.1.2009
March is named after the planet Mars, and as such, I will be focusing some of my attention here to Space Aliens and UFO's. There are all kinds of rumors, legends, speculations, allegations, conspiracies and accusations regarding space aliens on Earth.
Can space aliens be photographed? Are carrots really Martian vistors that we cook and eat? Are "weather balloons" really Martian scouting droids? What does President Obama know about space aliens and why isn't he coming forward to tell us? .....This month, I pledge to re-double my efforts to separate fact from fiction.
A strange object in the Hilton Head sky shows up in a photo of me and Bob .... why didn't any of us see it at the time? Why do unexplained depressions show up in crop fields in rural areas where people lead lonely lives and have way too much time on their hands? Where do robots from space movies really come from? Are space aliens breeding with us while we sleep, creating Homer-like creatures?
March.02.2009
from the basement window, 7:11AM .... .
looks like 10" and still falling.
will spend the day writing more of my short story. part 1 is finished (will re-re-redit it after a few weeks of "get-away-from-this-thing"), and just started part2 (it's a mess).
From Part 1 ...
When they grew up, children married whom they wished, but Po Teeko didn't like any of the village boys, so she told people she would marry a wolf, as soon as she could catch one. Then Mama would roll her eyes and shake her head and say "Yeh, me too", and Papa would clear his throat and they would all laugh again.
From Part 2 ...
Papa heard the tribe made new leaders, mostly younger men, and that Hath So was now a tribal leader, and he knew this was good. Hath So had deflected the axe blow to Papa's head, enough so it did not kill him, and saved his life. Papa walked up to Hath So in the meeting of men in the great tent and praised him in front of all the men, when he noticed that some women were also in the meeting. He paused, smiled, went back to his place and listened to men and women discussing tribal affairs. He looked over at the tent opening and recalled when Po Teeko stood there defying him, and saving many lives with her defiance. "Women are good to be here", he whispered, and his old friends sitting with him smiled and agreed.
Space Aliens Resurrect Dead Man
This startling sequence of images shows how space aliens recently brought a man back to life. He was frozen dead in the snow, after calling in sick for work and then deciding to make snow angels ..... he froze to death because he fell asleep in the snow, having stayed up all night re-compiling the Linux kernel on his new laptop.
A save-another-dumb-human alert went out to all local starships, and the nearest spaceship flew in and ....ummmm.... did whatever space aliens do to make dead people live again.
In an interview, he said "Shytt, space aliens are way better than that Life Alert thing they sell on TV!"
Caffeine
i blame D for my condition this morning .... she put the full caffeine bag of coffee on the shelf with the decaf bags (they look identical except for "decaf" at the bottom.
below is the caffeine molecule and my brain on the caffeine molecule .... i hope i can stop twitching before today's JA class !!
well, the twitching stopped and JA class went very well, and i am beginning to understand kids ..... they like to have fun, because they have no idea whatsoever what is waiting for them out here in the jungle we call the real world ! .... so the trick is to teach them using fun, which i did today..... this is exactly the opposite from how i was taught (by the methods of fear, intimidation, beatings, public humiliation, group torture).
One Hundred Years of Solitude
this is the book i am reading now and, i am in awe of this writing. it is absurdly wonderful .... the "story" is simultaneously elemental, down-to-earth and yet laced with imagination and fantasy.
it's so good, i'd call it a blend of me and hemingway.
(that sentence was my short trip into fantasyland)
Did I already say APPLE SUCKS!!
D's $350 Ipod MP3 player needs a battery (APPLE proprietary). Apple website says $75 to replace the battery!!! (my $80 MP3 player uses one $1.29 AAA battery from CVS). Step #1 of the DYI kit i bought over the internet (NOT from Apple.... they don't sell one) calls for heating the $350 Ipod until you melt the glue so you can pry the end cover off ..... o sure i will!
called the boston ipod store, get cheery person .... "would you like to make an appointment?" .... "no, just tell me what you would charge me to change the battery in my wife's ipod".... "sorry sir i can't do that over the phone but i can schedule you for an appointment to come in and talk to someone about changing the battery" ..... "this is a $#%ing joke right?.... make an appointment to get a $#%ing quote to replace the $#%ing battery in a $#%ing mP3 player ???".
(of course i did not use that language on the phone, but that's what was running through my mind when i said "o sure i will" and hung up.)
so today, i will drop $200 on a brand new (NON-APPLE) media player (including pictures) for D, that takes AAA batteries and has an SD card slot (which the ipod doesn't have!)
or .... maybe just heat up D's ipod with a hair dryer and see what melts first.... the glue or the circuits inside..... if the circuits melt, i buy another MP3 player.
March.04.2009 = DaveDay #23,388
If you were born with me ....
- You were born on a Wednesday.
- Your star sign is Pisces.
- Your birthstone is Amethyst.
- The season was Winter.
- You were born in the Chinese year of the Rooster.
- The US President was Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democratic).
- The UK Prime Minister was Winston Churchill (Conservative (Coalition)).
- You are 64 years 0 months 11 days old.
- It is 354 days until your next birthday.
- In dog years you are 448 years old.
- You are 23,387 days old.
- You are approximately 561,300 hours old.
- You are approximately 2,020,680,044 seconds old.
Skeptics, go here: dayofbirth
(i checked .... today is DebbieDay #19,933)
this chart will help you determine what % of my age YOU are !! (you're welcome)
(another piece of stupid data enters the internet!)
+
=
It worked !!! (but Apple still sucks, as a business.)
Mar.06.2009
$30 ( & free shipping), 2Gb with a micro SD card slot..... just ordered one (for myself !) from newegg.
Ukelele Root Beer is Back in Production
(Batch #1-2009, will be similar to #1-2007
thick, chewy and sweet.)
"The Espresso of Root Beer"
From The Book of Dave [3:06:2009]: What Goeth Around Doth Cometh Around
the guy in the photo is not my high school physics teacher, Mr. Hudson, (it's actor Ian McKellen), but it sure as heck looks like him. Mr. Hudson was the classic sci-fi mad scientist type .... way out there, slept in his clothes, was the primordial geek, before "geek" was ever invented.
Mr. Hudson was pretty much deaf, and we abused him seriously. I remember pieces of chalk and paper and spitballs hiting him and the blackboard, and he'd spin around and say "Okay, my friend ....." and we'd all snicker, for some reason i don't quite understand any more.
Fifty years later, I am hear to tell Mr. Hudson (who of course is long dead now) that I have learned from fate how he felt at the time, and to offer my apologies for being a young smartass shytt.
For sure, "what goes around comes around".
Deb's New Tatoo
(she actually did it !!!)
Mar.08.2009
D,C, M and me had breakfast at a new place .... excellent!!
equations
Q: why would there be an equation that no-one understands?
A: an equation in math is simply an extremely elegant way of explaining something. the supreme beauty of mathematics is that it provides a very consistent structure for you to find ("derive") equations that explain how the universe works. the strangeness in this is that you can find equations that are true, but you don't fully understand what they mean.
it's like discovering a message from God, about how the universe works, and not quite understanding what God is trying to tell you.
Latest pictures from Loretta
Ryan (left) and Jake (not-left)
Jack
More Here
UFO Sighting
this being space-alien/UFO month, and also being that it's snowing again and the day kind of sucks all around, and i was bored, i planted myself in the upstairs window and waited for a flying saucer to go by .... sure enough .... 15 minutes later, there's a flying saucer hovering just on the other side of the trees in my neighbor's yard.
coincidentally, this morning, i had filled out my dismal and threatening 2008 tax return, and i called out and asked the space-aliens if they could possibly take me with them, as that would be better than the federal prison i will be moving into soon, but their saucer was filled up with similar pleading taxpayers .... maybe they could pick me up on next week's sweep of the area.
"sweep of the area...?" so that's where all my friends went! .... i thought they died !
Koi
these are remarkable fish. sometime last year i posted here the story of the koi in my pond who survived being starved, frozen and then buried in mud through the winter (because i thought it had died!) and came out just fine and is doing well in my buddy John's pond with 20 other fish.
koi are durable but stupid. just before winter sets in you MUST stop feeding them, despite your urge to "fatten them up for the winter". you must stop because they will eat what you feed them, but because their body temperature has dropped, they cannot digest the food, and will die over the winter. so the best thing you can do for them at that time is nothing !
this week, the pond has thawed and i've been watching for signs of life .... hmmm.... no signs .... but an hour ago, i saw fish #1 moving near the surface ... still obviously in ....um.... metabolic dormancy, i think you would say.... but ALIVE !
so .... wonder how the other 7 are doing? .....
(PS .... this picture is not my pond .... i just snatched it off the internet.)
Mar.10.2009 / Junior Achievement Class
today i was the wizard of psychologically manipulating young minds by tricking them into learning stuff.
i forget what grades i gave my students, but i gave me a gold star for being so smart.
Sci-Fi Theater
the basement is officially finished today after about 2 years of interrupted progress. the stair carpet went in (glad i had Lowe's do it ... took 3 young guys 2 hours of hard work to scrape the old carpet up). and i installed the new receiver/amplifier without frying any circuits. i learned about crossover frequency and subwoofers driven my receivers .... there's something new every day!
the place is now officially called Sci-Fi Theater, and i have no intentions of leaving the basement until the flowers are in bloom.
Hexar Redux
got my konica hexar back with its new leather .... unique for sure .... still getting used to it.... love the camera! .... shown here with an external viewfinder attached.
postscript: days later, i like it's new "retro" look and i'm ready to put some film (film?) in it and shoot a roll.
Breaking Stuff
my → jr. engineer's club lesson today was "bridges part 1", so we started right away to break stuff (made of "craft sticks"), and measuring the breaking force. we tested individual craft sticks and found they held an average of 8# to failure. then we glued up 3 sticks to make an i-beam and a t-section and these each held the scale limit of 50# without breaking (with only 3 sticks!).
→ a good design is better than the sum of its parts.
i sent them home with glue and sticks to make bridges, and told them not to get emotionally attatched to their bridges because next week we will test them to failure!!.
kids-parents-teachers / the unsolvable conflict
it's been a while since i got seriously philosophical, so the intent here is to bleed my opinion all over you (my best advice is that you skip forward to the next topic).
.... obviously you didn't take my well-intentioned advice, because you are still reading this ....
well .... i went on and on and on about this topic (and then erased all my ravings) .... it is unsolvable .... people are just relentlessly, hopelessly, infinitely stupid and always will be ..... kids are smarter than people and they deserve better than the sorry lot of their parents and teachers.
given my choice, though, i say "shoot the parents first".
Mar.15.2009
i hadn't been to bootlegger's for years, so we went last night. sedate, quiet, relaxed ... food is good (not fabulous) .... we'll go back.
compare that to the texas road house (we went there friday) .... there was so much background noise there that D could not hear me (there's a twist!) .... but the food was good and we'll go back there too, but not as often.
mike came by yesterday to borrow my compressor (150psi) to fill a flat tire (30psi). i've been waiting for a call from chris to tell me that mike blew himself across the road when the tire burst. (similar to the time he threw a cup of gasoline on an open fire and was engulfed in a 20foot diameter ball of flaming gas.)
Cult Status for the D2
this month, the Digilux-2 finally achieved the cult status it deserves, when Leica broke out a new forum for D2 owners only. the camera had only one production run (2004 - 2006). those of us who own one get all religious about the camera, despite its outdated specifications (only 5Mp) because the images are just wonderful (because of the lens and Leica's no-nonsense software inside the camera .... you get what you shoot).
a few years back i dropped mine at the Ft. Worth zoo and thought it was gone ... nope .... works great, dent and all.
the paper clips (see image) do a great job of attaching the strap to the camera .... the strap clips that came with the camera utterly suck.
Reporting the Weather to Ryan
Ryan (see picture a few days above) is 3 now and L reports that he is a child of technology. if she tells him face to face that the weather is too bad for him to go outside, that just doesn't sit well with him and he nags endlessly to go out. so .... she hands Ryan a cell phone and calls him on the cell phone and asks him what the weatherman says the weather is like and Ryan then explains that the weatherman says the weather is too bad to go out and he happily watches TV.
i can't decide if L's kid (Ryan) is weird or if my kid (Loretta) is weird for discovering how to call him on a cell phone to ask him that !!!
Jakob, on the other hand has a math dilemma with birthdays.... Ryan was 2 and Jake was 4, now Ryan is 3 and Jake is still 4 .... why don't we all get a year older at the same time ? does this mean that some people are getting older faster than others? will Ryan soon be older than Jake ? happily, at this point i only age 1.6% every year, while a person who is 40 actually ages at a faster rate 2.5% / year and a person who is twenty ages at 5% / year.
such silliness aside, today was beautiful and we went for a walk .... people are out with Spring cleaning (which is very bad this year because of the ice storm) .... winter is dying out and i am making up my endless list of Spring to-do's outside, and i swear the crokus' (sp?) are popping their heads up.
Mar.16.2009
today is gorgeous (sp?).... i was outside cleaning up winter branches and leaves .... we had only one tree majorly damaged (sad, but our neighbors got much much worse) felt fabulous to be out after being caged up for 3 months..... i cut all bushes back about a foot all around, before they leaf out ....
need to move an established bush .... that'll be a trick without killing it..... but must be done..... saw 2 big fish and one little fish moving in slow motion.... still semi-dormant..... nailed a new bird house up in a tree .... got the car washed .... Spring is here i say.
Internet Explorer
this is my annual rant against the IE web browser.
i just looked at my web page (this one) using IE, and it sucks enormously. i use lots of semi-transparent *.png images for background effects, and IE doesn't know how to handle these, so it makes them all solid colors which phuxup how the pages look, as far as i am concerned.
these pages are really only to log my life and not to attract the general web surfer, but i sure would like them to look the way i create them, and i $%#@$ing $%#@$ing $%#@$ing refuse to code special HTML just for IE.
for example, over there on the right side is how the image of the space-aliens above looks in my web browser (and EVERY browser that complies to HTML standards).
if you are using the current version of IE, the image will have a solid white background. additionally, all the solid-colored areas that you see on my pages are actually semi-transparent colored layers above a stoneface background and have (in a decent web browser) a 3-dimensional feeling.
Mission to Mars (The Movie)
send me a self addressed stamped envelope and the DVD is yours.
Obama's Problem of the Day
(Greed Never Dies)
for the record, i am extremely happy that B. Obama won the election, and i think he intends to be a president for all the people. but he inherited the worst financial catastrophe in 70 years, and he reacted quickly to soften (not "stop") the collapse of our economy (which i personally think is inevitable and will take 8 - 12 years to bottom out and recover). a big part of that was a $750Billion bailout, the details of which i will not belabor here.
AIG was one of the giant global enterprises that got bailed out (with your money and mine!!), and one of the first things AIG did was to hand out $165,000,000 in bonuses to the executives who ran AIG into the ground by dealing in toxic, fraudulent garbage they called "investments".
the credible news media is reporting that the president is enraged, is constrained by legal contracts that previously existed with AIG and its executives and that he is hammering congress to find a way to get the taxpayers money back, and i am glad he is outraged because i think the "other presidential candidate" and the previous president would have laughed it off as "free enterprise" and simply folded it into the horrendous debt we amassed during the past 8 years.
"... contracts written in March 2008 guaranteed employees 100 per cent of their 2007 payments for 2008, regardless of their performance." [do you believe this shytt !!! .... did YOU ever get a deal like that ??]
"President Obama lambasted the company for "recklessness and greed" on Monday and has ordered the U.S. Treasury to seek every legal loophole to overturn the bonus payments
.....To kick these problems down the road for another four years or another eight years would be to continue the same irresponsibility that led us to this point.... That's not why I ran for this office. I didn't come here to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation.'" .....
however ... Mr. Obama won the election and he owns all the responsibility that goes with the office .... and that means that he is responsible for how taxpayer money is spent and how the federal government interacts with public and private businesses (at least for the next 4 years). he has congress on his side.
i need to see him fix this shytt ..... seriously.
the photo on the right shows the space-alien that i uncovered this morning while clearing a leaf pile in the back yard.... obviously it is still frozen, and i think it died from the cold, despite hiding itself in a pile of leaves to keep warm over the winter.
the photo on the left is a top secret NASA photo taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander sometime in 2008. (i got it from a waitress at the Cheezeball Diner who has lots of shytt like this pinned up on a cork board over the coffee machine). you can see the picture shows a partially exposed body (uncovered by the extreme Martian winds and dusty soil).
No More Jr. Engineers
this morning, i had to clean out a family of space-aliens that settled into the birdhouse i made for Chris's grandma.
i must watch edward james olmos' portayal of jaime escalante (see right) in the movie "stand and deliver" at least 10 times before next week's JA class.
