Monday, January 24, 2005
Kitty-cats!
Here. Yay!
Blah blah blah greenhouse!
Long story, the title. Someday.
So I was a bit behind on the laundry before we even left, and thus came home and put a load of baby clothes in the washer. Took me until I put the wet load in the dryer to realize that I can’t dry the damn things because the dryer exhaust is well below the snow line. I just don’t care enough to wade through hip-deep snow and shovel it out...at least not until the heat is fixed, anyway.
Bleh. If I ever write a memoir, I’ll title it My Comedy of Errors. 
And in other news…
Johnny Carson is still dead.
Yes, he was a much beloved celebrity, but the coverage is at the point where every time I ran through the channels this morning, I wound up giggling. There are only so many times one can see this sort of story before the coverage itself is laughter-inducing, even if the reason for it isn’t.
Sigh.
We’re Back! In More Ways Than One
We’re back from Boston, where the 15th (top) floor of the Park Plaza is a fine place to have to spend an extra night on account of a blizzard. Now when the heating guy arrives and gets our heat working again, we’ll be all set.
We’re back from Hosting Matters having a bizarre billing system and our own laziness at registering the AV domain through HM. See, HM e-mails you a notice 2 days before the payment is due. But they allow payment by check. Normally this is not a problem, as they leave the hosting up for the weeks it takes for a check to arrive and for HM to get around to checking their snail mail and then crediting the payment. In my experience this takes about three weeks from the time the check gets mailed to the time it gets credited. However, with domain registration, 2 days means 2 days. Had we not been in Boston without the laptop, we could have taken care of it immediately. I also didn’t have the IP address on me, so I couldn’t spread the word to use http://hecate.hmdnsgroup.com/~jaysolo/ or http://63.247.141.250/~jaysolo to access the blog. Oh well.
More on the weekend and stuff later. The temp in here has dropped enough to make me need a sweatshirt.
Your Daily Sadie
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Your Daily Sadie
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Your Daily Sadie
Friday, January 21, 2005
Bonus Sadie
A Poll Of Sorts
Who has done more to fuck up this country than anyone else in YOUR lifetime?
His ten choices are quite interesting, and at least some of them would be on mine if I took the time for such a list. Just yesterday I was thinking about the evil of Rachel Carson, but didn’t come up with anything coherent to post about along those lines. Except he said “this country,” and her millions killed are primarily elsewhere.
Easy As ABC
Caltechgirl has a wonderfully laid out edition of Carnival of the Recipes, reminding us that she is a well-lettered individual. Or something like that. Deb is working on perfecting a spicy macaroni and cheese recipe that should go in CotR one of these weeks. Very yummy, but definitely not my father’s macaroni and cheese.
Your Daily Sadie
Light Posting Alert
Expect light posting for the next couple days, as we are going to Arisia through sometime Sunday. I’m not even sure whether we will take the laptop in addition to the metric ton or so other stuff we must bring due to having a teething, opinionated, easily bored little squirt.
This should be interesting. When we took her to Vermont, she was a perfect angel the entire time, so my father and stepmother will forever think of her as such. We took her to a big, crowded craft show and she loved it. There were new, different people and things to look at.
After posting a request for advice on having a four month old baby at the convention and in the hotel on the Arisia staff list, the originator of an SF Parents list suggested I join it. I posted the question there yesterday and got all kinds of helpful advice and anecdotes.
Anyway, there will be an automatic Sadie picture set to show up each day, probably some other posts this morning or set to show up later, and otherwise there may or may not be anything until Sunday. I know, it’s shocking.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Apartment Hunting… Yuck
One of my friends used to have the apartment we are in. She moved when the upstairs neighbors got out of hand, and they were friends of the landlord’s wife, who was handling the property at the time, so never complained or told them why she moved. Since then, the landlord kicked his wife out of things. When she happened to notice the apartment was vacant, knowing I was looking and it met my specs, she referred me. In the meantime, she’s been renting a great little house in the area for not much more than the apartment costs, for much more space. I kept telling her let me know if for some reason she moved, so we could have a shot at it.
Sadly, the house landlord’s son snagged himself a wife and kid and needs it, so she has to move by April 30. Yuck, moving. So she asked me if there was any chance Slacker Dude and Company upstairs might be moving so she could rent the place above us. That would rock!
Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. Slacker Dude has no plans to move, though he is currently unemployed. Which makes it amusing that he has become more slack than normal, completely failing to shovel the steps or walk after the snow prior to yesterday’s.
They have a place in Dedham she might be interested in that I passed along, and they’ll keep her in mind if they have anything else in the meantime or hear of something. She was one of their favorite tenants.
I’d thought in the past that it would be cool to have one of my friends in the other apartment. It’d be all the cooler to have the one who used to live here. I’ll be crossing my fingers that the Slacker Brigade has a change of heart and moves in time.
Doctors Versus Dentists
The Glittering Eye speaks of experiences with dentists versus doctors. The key part:
I’ve got quite a few dentists who are clients. In my professional capacity I have found them personable, respectful, grateful for services rendered, not technology-averse, and extremely hard-working in improving their businesses as businesses. For dentists the greatest business challenge is finding and retaining good staff.
I’ve had medical doctors as clients, too. They’ve been smart, peremptory, technology-averse, knew more than I did about my own specialty (or gave that impression at any rate), jealous of their prerogatives, and slow to pay. I’m not sure what the greatest business challenge for medical doctors is today. It may be reimbursement.
This brought back memories of doing support for Microsoft products and finding that doctors were disproportionately arrogant, impatient, and fanciers of themselves as more experts than you on what they were calling for help about. We all dreaded getting calls from doctors.
This is not to say all of them were like this. Just that stereotypes tend to form for a reason.
Inauguration
I came in about halfway through the inaugural speech, so the first paragraph I heard was:
A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy ... the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments ... the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies. Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives - and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice.
All in all, an excellent speech from what I saw and later read. They even seemed to approve of it on ABC afterward. Which I suppose makes sense when you can make comparisons to that awful yet amazingly revered President Wilson, the martyr Kennedy, and the rather mixed up yet generally worshipped Lincoln. He did a good job delivering it. I was surprised with the apparent reluctance of the applause at times, but I think there was a bit of “it’s cold, let’s get this over with and get the FCC-censored out of here” going on.
Sadie actually sat still and watched most of it from my lap. Then after she started stirring, she stopped again when the band started playing. Sort of an “ooh, I hear music!” reaction.
This term should be interesting. There’s no re-election to worry about. There’s no VP running afterward whose chances the administration can affect. With the disarray in available obvious candidates, being bold, taking chances, thinking big, and making major needed reforms will be as likely to help as hurt a candidate of the same party next time.
Let’s Get Small
Okay, something I have always found curious…
Why do they call it the small of the back?
And if there’s a small, why isn’t there a large of the back?
Hail to Steven Taylor, He’s a Blogger Who Needs Hailing
Oh darn, I thought the lyrics went something like:
Hail to the chief, he’s the chief and he needs hailing...
Thanks to the always enlightening Steven Taylor, now we know there are real lyrics and not simply a hailure of imagination.
Believe it or not, when we spontaneously try to think of something to sing to Sadie to entertain or distract her, that tune pops out with surprising frequency. Very sad.
Sadie and Deb
A bonus Sadie picture that’s also a good one of Deb!
100,000 and Counting
We reached 100,000 Site Meter hits on this blog earlier this morning. It appears that one of our most frequent visitors and referrers, “unknown,” this time using Mindspring as an ISP, put us over the milestone.
Your Daily Sadie
Candidates for 2008
Darn, we didn’t get our submission in for this before it closed. Too preoccupied with other things, and really it was a tough choice beyond a small number.
I must say I am pleased with the results. Our favorite won, and our least preferred lost. Beyond that it’s less clear, though Mitt seems to me like a good choice, if he could run competetively. I think it would be amusing for a Republican governor from Massachusetts to win the Presidency and show up the most recent Massachusetts Democrats to run and lose.
A better choice would be Bill Weld. He totally rocks. There are ways in which the state vastly improved and became less bureaucratic and more efficient that go back to his administration, helped by his successors. The registry of motor vehicles is no longer a laughingstock, for instance; more like a model of efficiency, with pretty decent customer service. It also helps that he’s more of a libertarian Republican, rather than a conservative Republican.
Chances are nobody else would have thought of Weld, so he wouldn’t have gotten enough points to make the list, but he’d have been on ours.
We’re kind of hoping 2008 will be a Rice versus Clinton race. That’ll be fun. It wipes out the female advantage Hillary would have and ups her by black, as Deb pointed out. It guarantees one way or another a woman will be President and gets that benchmark over with in an exciting way. If Hillary runs against most anybody the Republicans can put up the way it appears now, Hillary should win. In this house she’s hated yet respected, and not immune from garnering votes. Against McCain, for instance, there would be no contest.
I’d like to think there is something so personally visceral in people’s reactions to Bush that the next race will shed some of the animosity between sides. It should be interesting to see.
Anyway, the post is a selection by right of center bloggers of their most and least desired candidates for 2008. It’s definitely an interesting selection.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Possible Dirty Bomb In Boston?
Gee, this sounds like an especially interesting weekend to go to Boston.
Update:
The link went dead as soon as I posted it! At least from here it did. Stay tuned…
Update 2:
See here instead, I guess.
Update 3:
Alrighty then; the original link now works again. Still nothing on Fox or MSNBC’s sites. We first heard their was something up because the TV was on while Sadie was eating, and they broke in with a fairly ambiguous emergency breaking news announcement kind of thing.
Update 4:
TV says the FBI is calling it “uncorroborated.” As Deb says, it’s probably a whole lot of hooey, but who knows (besides The Shadow). Is that how you spell hooey? Anyway, guess we’ll see what happens.
Update 5:
Mayor Mumbles was just on TV for a news conference about this. You could make out most of the words he said without mistaking them for other words, if you listened carefully. If you got past the distraction of listening to his caricature of an accent, which was hard because you were trying to focus on catching the words represented by the mumbles, you basically got the info that they are on it, that there is less to it that some of what’s been speculated, and that it’s uncorroborated. If you read between the lines, (as I was typing, another breaking news report came on and didn’t say anything new) you know this flurry of publicity is directed at the suspected terrorists to let them know they should just drop it because the authorities are on them like white on instant rice.
The later breaking news I mentioned emphasized that we should all go about our business, these are not the droids we’re looking for, and that the terror alert level has not been raised. It’s simply an allegation of Chinese nationals (a word which Menino pronounced “nationalists") having been snuck over the Mexican border and a group of these dudes allegedly headed to Boston or New York to gain more disrespect for their cause. Or something.
Changing the time stamp to match the time of the latest update.
Update 6:
I’d wondered when other bloggers would mention this. Not that I went looking that intensively. Turns out Jeff Quinton has posted and includes a roundup of others who have mentioned it. Including one I checked earlier who must have posted since.
It’s a good resource to see what others are saying, and I am about to go offline for a couple hours and may not then have the latest developments.
Update 7:
Including this post in today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
When Hearts Attack
Joe had a surprisingly brief break from blogging during the past week. Planned? No way! Now that he’s rested and recovered somewhat, he tells us the more complete heart attack story.
I’m thrilled that he pulled through okay, and hope he’ll be blogging for many years to come.
Hooray for Blogger Babies!
Another blogger baby has arrived! Go say hi to Draco Eugene Esmay, Drake for short.
He’s so cute! Congratulations to the proud father and mother.
Tipping and Self-Serve Cost Control
The topic of tipping regularly comes up for discussion in the blogosphere. Coyote Blog is no exception, discussing it in the context of a post about reducing costs by outsourcing effort to customers.
I am a strong supporter of tipping well in industries where tipping is the traditional way for the workers to earn much of their money. Restaurants and newspaper delivery, for instance. Been there.
On the other hand, there are situations where it is milked, both by employees and proprieters. The valet service he mentioned is one such instance. Not that it isn’t standard practice to tip the valet, but the sign more or less demanding it is rude. It sometimes bothers me to see tip jars, especially pointedly labeled ones, out in places one might not expect to tip.
Typically in a restaurant where someone is waiting your table or your spot at the lunch counter, it’s tippable service. You expect the employees to be paid restaurant rates and to need to earn the extra to make the job worth doing. Typically in a step up to the counter, order, get food, carry it away place, you don’t expect tips, and if it’s not much more than minimum wage, you can assume the staff is not being paid sub-minimum restaurant rates.
I have mixed feelings about the specific instance. Could you consider the $4 what you would pay for parking anyway, and the tip a standard valet thing? When you go to Arisia at the Park Plaza Hotel, if you use the valet parking it is something like $18 a day with unlimited in/out, which is similar to or slightly more than what you’d pay for do it yourself parking in the closest garage. This seems like plenty of money for them to pay the valet staff, but do they? I don’t know. I do know that when I have used the service, I have tipped at least a couple bucks, might have been as much as five, on retrieving my car. I might actually be less inclined if a sign were visible urging me to tip.
Anyway, the bulk of the post is about putting things onto customers to save money. Paying valets zero and putting up a sign saying as much to provoke tips is an example of a rather offputting way to do it. Cafeteria or buffet style restaurants strike me as another way. Fewer employees, largely self-serve, and the added bonus of less or no tipping expected. In the area we once had a chain called York Steakhouse, one of my favorite places to eat, which was cafeteria style and expressly forbid tipping. Besides the great food and ability to select a wide combination of sides, drinks and desserts, it was unique and fascinating to me when I was a kid. Fast food places do this in a small way with self-serve drink stations. In the scheme of things, that fractional amount of time saved by the employees on each order must add up.
I like the firewood scheme. In fact, I would prefer it to the packaged wood. If it saves the campground own money, all the better. If most of the crates get returned, then there’s minimal offset cost and it works well. I haven’t camped somewhere and bought firewood since I was a kid. If I remember right, it was mostly freeform; just grab a bunch. Though that may have been places where the wood was free.
Anyway, sounds like a great plan. I had never thought about “outsourcing to customers” as a coherent concept before, so in that regard the post provided a bit of a eureka moment for me. Don’t listen to me though. RTWT
Us At Arisia
For benefit of anyone who might be going to Arisia this weekend, when I bought our memberships last year, I put in badge names that match our blog names at the time. Normally I just let them use my real name as my badge name. So my badge should say “Jay Solo” and Deb’s badge should say “Accidental Jedi.” If you see those badges, yep, that’s us.
I noticed they have two panels on blogging. They look interesting in that they are about blogging, but lame in that they appear to be oriented heavily toward LiveJournal. No offense, and it may be wrong of me, but I tend to think of LiveJournal as “not a real blog.” Which is saying a lot, considering I do think of BlogSpot as “real.” One or both of us may or may not be at either of them. I think the second one is at a bad time.
I had proposed the idea of panel(s) on blogging last year, but I didn’t volunteer to run it and it didn’t happen.
Still Poor
Somebody won Mega Millions last night. It wasn’t us. Sigh…
Boxer and Kerry: Pompous Losers
Michael King says “It sounds like Ketchup Boy is still sore over losing the election, and wants to take it out on whomever he can.”
Yeah, I would say so. He’s sent out another one of those propaganda e-mail thingies, with a subject of “Hold Bush and Rumsfeld Accountable!”
I think we did. We re-elected Bush, which would seem to imply general approval for his policy and staffing decisions. Kerry begs to differ. I present here the text of his letter without further comment:
I have just come back from Iraq. After several months consumed by the campaign trail, I wanted to make contact with our soldiers on the ground there. The first thing I want you to know is that, in very difficult circumstances, our brave soldiers are serving America with enormous skill and great courage.
In the Senate, we have a duty during times like these to hold our Defense Department accountable for the well-being of our troops. It’s one of the ways that our democracy makes our military the strongest in the world. And I can’t tell you how comforting it is as a soldier to know even if you don’t have a say over your own situation, the folks back home do.
I knew our soldiers were still facing hold ups getting the equipment they need, but I wanted to see it for myself. American troops deserve the best gear and equipment we can provide. But adequate vehicle armor remains in short supply.
A soldier who spoke up about these problems was told by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, “you have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want."1 Well, it’s been over two years since Rumsfeld planned this war. And whether he has the army he wants or not, he should at least have basic armor for army vehicles.
I’ll say this in the Senate, but I’m asking you to add your voice to mine:
“President Bush, for the sake of our troops, replace Rumsfeld now.”
http://www.johnkerry.com/replacerumsfeld
More than 500,000 called for Rumsfeld to resign during the presidential campaign. I’m renewing my call now—please renew yours too, and forward this email to friends to bring them on board. Add your name to mine here, and add your voice to mine by speaking out in your community as I will do in the US Senate for as long as it takes to remove Secretary Rumsfeld from his post:
http://www.johnkerry.com/replacerumsfeld
It’s a question of competence. Poor planning at the Pentagon is letting American soldiers down. According to the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank, Iraq is now providing the next generation of “professionalized” terrorists with “a training ground, a recruitment ground, [and] the opportunity for enhancing technical skills."2 Our troops need a capable Secretary of Defense. At the very least, they absolutely need that.
I believe that together, the three million of us who worked together on the campaign can help the troops. We not only have a right to speak out against failed Bush policies: we have a duty to defend this country from a President who refuses to recognize the total inadequacy of his own Defense Secretary. That’s how democracy works. And that’s why America has worked all these years.
The campaign season is over, but our citizenship continues. I know from personal experience that citizens and Senators standing up for the truth can be a powerful combination. Now, with email and the Web as citizenship tools, we can make ourselves heard even more clearly. And I can’t tell you how inspired I am that you and I are using these tools to fight side-by-side for the things we believe in.
One more time: please join me in my call for President Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld. He’s the man responsible for the well-being of our troops. He’s neglected his duty. He’s made excuses. It’s time for him to go.
Add your voice to mine in the Senate in calling for President Bush to replace Rumsfeld today.
http://www.johnkerry.com/replacerumsfeld
Thank you,
John Kerry.
_______________________
WHY RUMSFELD HAS TO GO!
1) Rumsfeld Blamed The Troops for Problems in IRAQ
Rumsfeld: “As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.” [CNN, 12/9/04]
2) Rumsfeld Admitted Bush Administration Was Not Prepared for Iraqi Resistance
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that “I am saying that—if you had said to me a year ago, ‘describe the situation you’ll be in today, one year later,’ I don’t know many people who would have described it—I would not have described it—the way it happens to be today. ... I certainly would not have estimated that we would have had the number of individuals lost that we have had lost in the last week.” [Rumsfeld News Conference, 4/15/04]
3) Rumsfeld Failed to Equip Troops in Iraq
Army Study Suggests One-Fourth of Casualties in Iraq Could Have Been Prevented If Troops Were Properly-Equipped at Beginning of War. Newsweek reported, “A breakdown of the casualty figures suggests that many U.S. deaths and wounds in Iraq simply did not need to occur. According to an unofficial study by a defense consultant that is now circulating through the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices, while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks. Almost all those soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means that perhaps one in four of those killed in combat in Iraq might be alive if they had had stronger armor around them, the study suggested. Thousands more who were unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs.” [Newsweek, 5/3/04]
4) Rumsfeld Failed to Plan for Iraq War
In August 2003, the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared a secret report assessing the post-war planning for Iraq. The report blamed “setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process.” It also said “planners were not given enough time” to plan for reconstruction. [Washington Times, 9/3/03]
5) Rumsfeld Failed To Sign Condolence Letters to Families of Soldiers Killed in War on Terror
ABC World News Tonight, “Now on the home front here, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is under fire from some military families and members of the Congress. They’re upset that he has used a machine to attach his signature to some letters of condolence. More than a thousand of those letters have been sent to families who have lost sons and daughters in the global war on terror.” ABC (Yang) added, “After Ivan Medina’s twin brother Irving an Army Specialist was killed in Baghdad last year he got a letter of condolence from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Today, Medina himself a veteran of Iraq said he was angered to learn that Rumsfeld never actually signed the letter or even saw it.” Medina: “Our commanders here in the United States who include the President and the Secretary of Defense don’t care about the troops. We’re just a number to them and that’s the wrong message to send back to our troops.” Yang: “In a statement Rumsfeld said he used a machine.” [ABC World News Tonight, 12/19/04]
Notes:
1. MSNBC, January 13, 2005
2. CNN, December 9, 2004
Okay, some comment after all. I think the dude needs to go back to being an undistinguished Senator who accidentally became a Presidential candidate Wesley Mouch style, by being the big fat zero at the confluence of less mindless if equally misguided influences, keep a low profile, and scramble to try to keep from being fired by the people of Massachusetts next time he runs. I don’t think he has any idea how eye-opening his candidacy for President was, as far as showing what an awful senator we have. His name isn’t Kennedy, so he doesn’t get automatic life tenure on account of a family name martyr mythos. Besides, Kennedy is an infinitely more distinguished man and senator than Kerry.
Arisia Pocket Program
For those wanting a sneak preview if going, or curious if not going, there is a PDF of this weekend’s Arisia pocket program available.
Ignore the weirdness if you can…
Working on the templates at the moment.
Thanks. 
UPDATE: Done for the moment. The long blogroll is now the proud inhabitant of its very own template which is embedded in the main template. I guess I don’t have an excuse for not working on the thing now. Damn. LOL!