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Sunday, March 02, 2008
Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. I'm feeling some warm fuzzies towards Bank of America, that's for sure.
I've been wondering about UT's choice of mascot. Texas culture about boldness. Aggression. I realize the longhorn is significant in Texas history, but why would they name themselves after a prey animal? And not just a prey animal, but a domesticated, ranch-raised one, not even a wild one. It doesn't fit.
¶ 1692 Posted at 04.09 PM ⇒ No Comments ( sports | deep thoughts ) Wednesday, March 05, 2008
It has been brought to my attention that I have (somehow) some readers here that I don't know personally. If that's you, you might not be aware of a recent event in our house.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
There appears to be a world of difference between cheap drill bits and the expensive ones. Maybe I'm just abusive.
¶ 1694 Posted at 10.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( fyi | tips ) Sunday, March 16, 2008
I can't be certain that these are the exact same birds, but there are two of them, they're in the same location, and they look like slightly older specimens of the same species. What's weirder, that they're the same birds or that they are two different birds that are almost exactly the same? They definitely look like the adult Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, just like they looked like juveniles last year.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was the novel that made famous. In 200 pages of unassuming prose he sketched the bizarre world of the foot soldiers of the Cold War in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, submerging the reader so persuasively in the world that occasionally over the last few nights in a sleepless daze I was convinced Kieran's gas was a plot by the East Germans. This work has become the standard by which all other spy novels are measured, and justifiably so. It is a true and enduring classic. 0802714544 978-0802714541
Friday, March 21, 2008
Bill Richardson endorses Obama. He sees the way the wind is blowing and wants to be VP.
Monday, March 24, 2008
My yellow-crowned night herons are building a nest. It's very exciting.
¶ 1700 Posted at 10.06 AM ⇒ No Comments ( science! | house ) There's not much difference between clothes dryers. You've got energy source, size, noise, and whether there's a moisture sensor. They all use the same methods and the same amount of energy; Consumer Reports doesn't even bother rating them on energy usage. Broadly speaking, if you have a working dryer, a new dryer is a waste of money. Where they get you is this idea that washers and dryers come in matched sets. There are all these pretty, sleek, colorful sets out there. You buy a new washer, and they try to take you for a ride on a completely unnecessary dryer. The internals of washers vary. There are lots of reasons to get one washer or another, or to replace the one you have. Dryers are basically all the same. Matching is nice, but is it really worth $500 or $1000 just to get a shiny new box around a machine nearly identical to the one you already have?
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
I made the mistake of doing a load of laundry with a free sample of detergent. They never give out "Free & Clear" samples, or product with no added fragrance1 or dyes. It's astonishing how repellent these odors are once you've spent a few years avoiding them.
1 Note: "fragrance free" and "unscented" are not the same thing. The former means absolutely no stinks; the latter means they may have added some stinks to cover up other stinks
¶ 1702 Posted at 08.26 AM ⇒ No Comments ( observations | consuming ) Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Lexus brand was introduced by Toyota in 1989. According to the Social Security Administration, the name Alexis was the 92nd most popular name in the country that year. Since then, it ascended to #3 in 1999 before falling back down to #14 in 2006. All of the Alex* names have seen similar spikes over the last 20 years, which you can see with the handy Name Voyager. Coincidence? I think not.
Friday, March 28, 2008
As you might have guessed, we got a new washing machine. Two kids in cloth diapers means doing a lot of laundry. It cost $700 regular price (same price at Lowe's and Best Buy). All told, it cost us less:
Overall, our net hit will be something like $380, after figuring in taxes and such. We're currently on a rate of 2-3 loads of laundry per day. High-efficiency front-loaders save you money by using less water, but they also save money because your clothes are less sodden when you put them in the dryer. In the current economy, getting a 5% yield on a safe investment is pretty good; 10% is great. I estimate we'll save between $60 (very conservatively) and $120 (more likely) each year, which is a yield of 15%-30%. We're also saving money by getting our detergent 1 through Amazon's "Subscribe & Save" thingie; that gets us down to $0.15/load2 (which still costs more than we were paying before, but that's because we were using the super-cheap (and quite good) Purex).
1 Generally considered the best widely-available high-efficiency fragrance-and-dye-free detergent for cloth diapers
2 Incidentally, chances are, you're using too much detergent. Their cups have 3 markers on them; intuition suggests that you want to fill to the middle or top one, but filling to the lowest line is usually enough, unless you've had some kind of rotavirus shitstorm in your house (makes it come out both ends; for some reason, I have a vision of one of those double-sided S-shaped lawn sprinklers).
In software, there are two processes for making software support different languages. One is "internationalization," which is where you make the software look up the various phrases and words from external sources (dictionary files, etc.) rather than having them embedded in the source code. That makes the software merely capable of supporting other languages. The other is "localization," where you actually produce the files with the text for Swiss German or whatever and package a version of the software containing them. Some people decided that the words "internationalization" and "localization" were too long. Rather than abbreviate them the way normal people would, they abbreviated them as "i18n" and "l10n," meaning "'i' then 18 letters then 'n'" and "'l' then 10 letters then 'n'" respectively. I figure I can follow that model and abbreviate my name as "k3n g9r" (and put it on my license plate?), pronounced "Ken Gee-Niner." Kieran would be "k4n," and Uma would of course be "u1a."
¶ 1705 Posted at 09.27 AM ⇒ No Comments ( ideas | software | me | names ) |
