Monday, February 21, 2005
Carnival of the Capitalists
The latest Carnival of the Capitalists is up at The Raw Prawn.
For future hosts and info, check the Carnival of the Capitalists page. There is also a list of past CotC locations.
Next week’s host will be Coyote Blog, a favorite of mine, discovered when he volunteered to host. He also has an excellent entry this week that I planned to link and remark about after I read it yesterday. Send entries to cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com, or use the handy Gongol.com submission form.
Your Daily Sadie
This is from Sunday night, February 20, when I introduced butternut squash. It was the first of the baby foods I didn’t care for, even though I love butternut. To me it suffered the most from the watering down that makes the taste less pure and vivid than the adult versions might be.
Naturally it was her most favorite yet, eclipsing even sweet potatoes and prunes. This is the first time she has demolished an entire container in one sitting and asked for more.
Believe it or not, she really did swallow most of it.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Someone Needs Poofreaders (And Not To Spam)
Papa Gino’s has been resorting to spam, sending out printable coupons for it and D’Angelo.
Is it still spam if it’s something good you might actually want and use? I love Papa Ginos, even without family working at their headquarters anymore.
Well, if you ask me, it’s still unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail and as likely to turn people off as not. I know I’m sure thinking I will start trying the other eight or so pizza places near me, one by one, if I can ever afford pizza again. After all, for one delivery from Papa Gino’s, I can feed the three of us for as much as five days without totally scrimping. But then, I was thinking that before I first got the spam.
Anyway, the funniest thing is the typo. Their slogan is “Pizza at its best.” Check this out:
Come on folks, “Pizza at it is best”? Oops. This is why marketing materials need proofreaders too. Ones who know the language being used, which is recognizably English in this case.
Anyway, if you’re in Papa Gino’s country, the coupons are here (as well as being in the spam itself), as is the full size version of the graphic I shrunk to fit the post. They are essentially the same as coupons you might get when they deliver you a pizza, whereby they encourage future orders.
If you want to encourage spamming from them, that is. I would bet the coupon numbers are distinct and used to track the success of the spam, er, I mean e-mail marketing, campaign.
Laughter? On a Sunday morning?
Why, yes.
Via Jeff at Alphecca, Sean Kinsell on e-mail.
FWIW, I tend to be slower to answer than I once was, and I never answer the phone. I have a machine to do that. What kills me is when someone is like, I know you’re there, pick up the phone...because, you know, what if I were indisposed at the time? Is nothing sacred? But I digress…
Your Daily Sadie
Saturday, February 19, 2005
He’ll Have The Turf, Hold The Surf
Jim doesn’t like seafood. Silly guy.
This led to my leaving an amusing comment, which I read to Deb at her behest. She should know better when I use that tone of laugh.
That led her to surmise I would link to it to highlight my own cleverness.
I told her no, I wouldn’t normally do that. “I think of my comments, even the good ones, as gifts. You know, like the ones your neighbor’s dog leaves in your yard.”
But seriously, I do hope Sadie has no food allergies or sensitivities to speak of. For instance, we wouldn’t want her to be un-American by being unable to eat peanut butter. That would suck. Which is why I am all for introducing things carefully.
I’d also like her to be openminded about trying things. We’ll probably eat things we wouldn’t normally, just to provide range. I can’t wait to be able to make food that is also for her. I think of that every time I make pancakes, which are my thing to make. Deb makes superior french toast, so I leave that to her. Pancakes are so cool when you’re a kid. I know; I can remember that.
Not a problem if she tries but doesn’t like some things. We can’t very well make her eat, say, tomato, when Deb doesn’t care for them. But maybe we’ll have another grilled cheese and tomato fan in the house.
Speaking of things I don’t normally have, I was telling Deb recently that I’d have to make fried eggplant sometime. And fried zucchini, for that matter. Which reminds me I haven’t had fried smelts in years, speaking of seafood. My mother and grandmother used to make all of the above, just not often, and I have made all of them at least once as an adult.
Didn’t mean for this to become a food and child rearing post. It started out more along the lines of an “overheard in our house” post and went tangential, in a related sort of way.
They Honor Him Well
I was quite pleased to be able to buy some of the Reagan stamps yesterday. They are probably the most vivid - that’s the only word I can’t think of to describe the boldness, crispness and depth - stamps I have ever seen.
Bonus Sadie
She loves prunes! Food in general. The last one of these involves apples, when the prunes were gone and she was still hungry.* We don’t have any pictures of the sweet potatoes, her new favorite.
* So far she is very good at stopping when she’s full, which is something I’d prefer not to discourage. I bought the “clean your plate because there are starving children in China” thing hook, line and sinker, and it shows. I remember that most vividly from school, and less vividly but more pervasively from home. Certainly, whatever the reason, it’s silly to encourage your kid to eat and eat and eat and then eat some more, then pick on him mercilessly in later years for always wanting to eat, as I have seen happen.
Your Daily Sadie
Good news!
Drake is home! Yay!
Friday, February 18, 2005
The totally boring why I’m so freaking sleepy today post.
So I had to get up early this morning for a blood pressure check. The result? It still sucks. Apparently I said something right, though, because this time the nurse *sympathized* with me that I was doing everything right and getting no results. She suggested that I might be overtired (you think? heh) and ordered me to nap.
So I’m sitting here posting about it instead of doing it. Don’t ask me why. I have no clue at all.
Grumble, grumble…Caillou…grumble…
I hate Caillou with the fury of 1000 overtired babies.
I was flipping channels one day and stopped on it for some demented reason and made it maybe five minutes in before I turned it off and told Jay that no child of mine would ever watch it. Hell, I’d turn Barney on before Caillou. I hadn’t heard so much petulant whining since I’d last watched the network news.
I didn’t last long enough to see any hidden messages, but who knows? It does air on PBS. Heh.
Received In E-Mail
Fantastic Four teaser trailer.
Woohoo!
Busy Today
Compounded by having slept late, after it being the first night we insisted Sadie sleep entirely in the crib.
I have to go up north and get parts, get them back to the office, get to the bank to cash a check so we can buy important things like diapers, Maalox, and groceries, build a computer, install everything on it and finish installing everything on an older one I brought back from the dead, etc., and do at least part one of the pent up shopping needs.
So posting should be light from me today. Maybe I’ll post some bonus pictures later though.
Mmmmm, recipes.
The Carnival of the Recipes is up, with lots of yummy goodness to choose from for your weekend culinary delight. Or something. Heh.
Your Daily Sadie
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Thoughts and Prayers…
Go out to the Esmays, who have a sick little one in the hospital. Get well soon, Drake.
Computer Guys Have Expenses And Want Something Leftover Too
On a whiteboard in my office, I have a list of places that do similar work and their hourly rates, and at the bottom of the list I have mine. They are $120, $99, $85, and $80.
Today someone sought me out because the $99 place was so expensive, and they estimated cleaning up the machine, malware infested and otherwise in need of attention, would be a three to five hour job.
Instead of being pleased to be saving 20%, I got begged not to charge so much. I was humorous about it, but it offends me. I’m sure the CPA whose employee it was would think I was nuts if I begged him to charge only half his going rates. I can’t imagine someone being all shocked on learning an attorney I work for charges $120 or more.
It’s not that I don’t expect that some people will consider that a lot of money. It’s just that a surprising number, even in business, don’t expect to have to pay real money for computer-related services. Even I think of it as a lot, because of the price level time warp factor I was discussing with Deb recently. Otherwise I might very well increase it to match what my math says would be more appropriate. Not to mention my annoyance when I encounter people who charge more and are less capable. However, competing on price says to leave it the same as it’s been since 1997.
Anyway, I managed to clean things up quite sufficiently in under two hours; none of this three to five stuff. Go me! Now back to the work I interrupted…
And in childbirth news today:
Early Epidural Won’t Raise C-Section Risk
This is good news. Hell, this is very good news.
If you want to do it all natural, good for you. If you don’t, good for you.
Simple, yes?
Why is it that as soon as I sit down with hot food, the baby starts screaming?
I suspect this is one of the questions of motherhood that will forever remain unanswered...a universal mystery, if you will.
Sigh.
Anyone See Last Night’s Smallville?
It obviously had the Lois Lane character in it, and she must have been especially hot. We’ve gotten probably 60 search hits for Erica Durance nude since Smallville aired last night. That’s closer to an entire week’s worth, normally. I’ve noticed the uptick in hits after shows air, especially for Jennifer Finnigan, but nothing this extreme before.
It’s also interesting to note that most of the searches include the word nude, rather than naked. That probably says something about language usage.
Is It Really Worth…
Having Blogads when it regularly makes your site not load? Just sayin…
Beware The AMT
The Alternative Minimum Tax needs to go.
Okay, that will never happen, so let me rephrase that: It needs to be reformed, adjusted, and probably indexed going forward.
Ugh. I used the term “going forward.” That’s like something right out of buzzword bingo. Very sad.
Anyway, via The Ranting Raven, it turns out that strange things can happen when you declare as income your loot from a court case.
First, if you’re over what is now a quite modest gross income, you have to compute AMT and pay that if it’s more. It’s supposed to close loopholes for “the rich,” who greedily use all the tax avoision they can muster, so that they can keep what is rightfully the government’s. Thus it pretty much takes away deductions and recoups a larger share of the government money the taxpayer would otherwise have tried to horde shamelessly.
The problem is, when you win a bunchabux in court or via a settlement, the legal fee is part of your cost of “earning” that money, just like any business expense. Under AMT, they are not an expense, and you pay money on the whole thing, including what it cost you in legal fees. Which is grossly unfair on the face of it, since the lawyers then also have to pay tax on whatever they net out of their share of your winnings. But if the legal fees are a sufficiently large proportion of the total, you can wind up owing more money than you made. Shades of the options nonsense that came to the fore when people ended up with worthless dotcom options during the bubble and owed more in paper taxes than they’d ever be able to pay.
How bad does it have to get before things reform completely?
Your Daily Sadie
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Faux Caramel Samoa Delites
I mentioned a while back that I had this crazy idea to try to create a homemade version of the Samoas cookies, aka Caramel Delites, a legal, addictive item that the Girl Scouts sell in an artificially limited way.
Any advice would be welcome.
The way I see it, I need to come up with a shortbread-like cookie, some caramel, and macaroon stuff. The question will be one of assembly and timing. Do I fully bake the shortbread, then drizzle on a layer of caramel, add uncooked macaroon, bake it again, and drizzle some chocolate stripes? Or do I use raw dough as the base and bake it all once? Or do I partially bake the base, then top and rebake it?
Well, this is what experimentation is for. I have the ingedients on hand, which helps, and there was a macaroon recipe in the last CotR. One of these days…
I have one off-limits box of Samoas for the sole purpose of comparison. I’ll have to hurry up, before they go bad or we stop being able to resist.
Update:
Just went Googling, and looking at the picture and ingredients of the cookie on one of the manufacturer sites, their construction may be a little different than I had pictured, but shouldn’t be that hard. Hmmm…
Update 2:
Here’s one copycat recipe.
Extending the Future
The other day Last week,* Deb blurted out “you know, our kids are gonna live forever!”
I started to say “yeah...” and launch into a discussion of life extension, when she elaborated about our genes.
People in my family generally last a long time, especially the women, with some exceptions. For instance, my grandmother who had a massive heart attack when she was about 65. On the other hand, her sister, a spinster great aunt I always adored, lived to a ripe old age of ninety-something. On the other hand, my grandfather outlived my grandmother by about 14 years, making it to about 84 as a sedentary, heavy smoker. Went from perfectly healthy to complete system shutdown and death in a matter of days. My other grandmother will be 89 this year, and I would not be surprised if she makes 100. My mother had a great aunt who missed her 105th birthday by a week. My other grandfather fell a few months short of 90, though the last several years were pretty bad. That despite many heart attacks and strokes starting by the time he was around 50, diabetes, almost dying of pneumonia and being sick for something like a year when he was in his twenties. He was just too stubborn. My great-grandmother, the Sadie namesake on my side, was in her nineties. Her rogue husband lived similarly long. And on it goes. Not quite the Howard Families, but pretty good for randomness.
I guess Deb’s family isn’t too shabby in that regard either.
That’s what she was talking about. Even going just from that, adding modern nutrition, medicine and all into the mix, yeah, they should do extremely well, barring bad luck.
My first thought was completely different.
I was thinking of the high chances of a relatively near-term singularity in life extension; the point at which the speed of discoveries on how to make people live longer and healthier surpasses the rate at which death catches up. Suppose we find we can add 20 prime years as of 2020. All we have to do is discover how to add more years before another 20 have passed, and so on, to be ahead of the curve. It doesn’t have to be a big bang of instantly millennial lifespans.
The way I figure it, my kids have a good chance of having that enhancement. Since Sadie was born, I’ve not only had what I consider must be normal thoughts about the child being my connection to the future; my infuence traveling through time, but also thoughts of how majestic and far-reaching and fascinating it could be. Even if she doesn’t invent FTL, with a lifespan in the hundreds or beyond, she could still get off the planet and range far. Heck, even without the planet-leaving option, to me it would be nice to have all that time to experience.
Obviously there will always be accidents, murders, things that aren’t treatable, and so forth. I wonder if it would make us all too cautious, knowing how much we are potentially throwing away with a preventably early death.
Even if this doesn’t come about, even if we hit 120 and that’s the upper limit within modest deviation, knowing what this past century has been in the scheme of things, knowing what I have seen in my life, I am in awe of what my children might witness. It would still mean a good chance of peeking beyond this century, into the 22nd. Given how far we’ve come, it’s exciting to think about where we’re going, if the forces of evil don’t stop it.
Starting with life extension itself. Opposition to it is inherently anti-life and anti-human, because if you’re going to object to technology that makes us last decades longer, or hundreds of years longer, or more, then you are objecting to the technology that has already allowed us to add decades, and save lives. Seeing who objects will be quite telling. We’d certainly have to rethink the entire concept of Social Security! We may have been too foolish to adjust for expectations in lifespan previously and created a warped entitlement that was never intended to be that way, but if everyone suddenly could be expected to live healthy decades more, nobody would be able to ignore the trend and the implications.
The sad thing is, whenever it hits, at least if it’s a marked enough leap, there will be a first generation for which it’s applicable, and prior generations for which it is too late. I feel bad for those born just a bit too soon, at the same time I feel joy for those who will have a chance to bend the bonds of time.
Even if none of that comes to pass, even if we do nothing more than muddle our way slowly to centenarians being as common as septegenarians are now, our children remain our gift to and extension of ourselves into posterity.
* I started composing this a couple days after the event. Now it’s been a week or so.
Hey Old Timer…
Grand Rounds Is Up
This week’s Grand Rounds is up, hosted colorfully by Sumer’s Radiology Site, where apparently right-click is rudely disabled, so trying to right-click and copy link location made me have to investigate whether my mouse was dying, but I digress. Check it out if you’re interested in a concentrated dose of some of the latest blogging on medical-related topics. Not to mention some amusing cartoons this week.
Ms. Loveable is moreso this morning.
So last night the baby, having rolled over and awakened me for the third time in four hours, found herself deposited by her father in her much-despised crib, where she promptly rolled over, sighed, and fell asleep.
Go figure.
This while I’m in the middle of a medium-sized stack of “how to teach your baby to sleep” books, too. Heh.
Your Daily Sadie
