Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Quick links

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

I’m going on vacation soon, and I’m under the gun at work and at home to get specific tasks done before I leave. Therefore, no discussion, just links:

This guy dances salsa better than I can. I’ve probably got it over him in quickstep, though.

Continuing education on the web
.

Nice crochet work.

What do those awards really mean? The user testimonials can be fun, though.

I expect the next version of DDR will have trapdoors and punji stakes, too.

How much of your DNA is alien
in origin? It’s probably easier for most of you to read (if not understand) here.

A simple, yet profound, truth

Monday, August 13th, 2007

Now, this is just my opinion, but if your money-handling skills are so poor that you can’t even make a profit selling sex, then you have absolutely no business getting involved in more complicated financial areas.

People do this willingly?

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

I can’t think of what would make someone believe that this is a good idea. Then again, I’ve got no tattoos, no piercings, and not that many scars. However, even the though of being around someone who had this sort of thing done gets up there on my discomfort scale. I have to admit that bas-relief artwork is nothing I’ve ever thought of looking for in a girlfriend.

UPDATE: It has been suggested that I warn people more clearly that there are disturbing photographs, not for the squeamish, if you follow the above link. Consider yourself warned.

Backlog

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

I’ve allowed some links of interest to accumulate for a few days, and I no longer remember where I found some of them. But here they are, shorn of context, but not bereft of meaning:

100 words every high school graduate should know. I know most of these, but there are a few I don’t, and there are several I know from context, but couldn’t provide with a complete and correct definition without help.

A cheat sheet of cheat sheets for computers: Our favorite cheat sheets.

An open-source grammar checker for OpenOffice.

The Rocky Mountain Swordplay Guild, a branch of the Chicago Swordplay Guild devoted mainly to:

the work of two 15th century masters: Fiore dei Liberi’s Fior di Battaglia (1409), and the De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi of Filipo Vadi (c.1482 – 87).

Next month, they’ll have weekend training in the Fechtkunst from a visiting instructor. Sounds like fun, I may need to join up. Too bad I’m going to be pretty busy at work for the near future. This one originally came from David J.

80 MBytes of storage for under $12K” – Computerworld lists some of its favorite advertisements.

Well, that’s over with

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

I voted this morning. It was a less pleasant experience than I’ve had before. Denver used to have precinct-based polling. My polling place was two blocks away. There were usually four or five voting machines, and I seldom had to wait in line more than 15-20 minutes before voting.

This election, Denver is not doing voting by precinct; there are 55 polling stations scattered throughout the city, and you can vote at any one of them. I was in line for two hours before I got to vote, and the line was longer when I left than when I arrived. There were 20 voting machines, but verifying voter eligibility was the bottleneck – I never saw more than about 5 or 6 voting machines simultaneously in use.

Since anyone could vote at any station, the election workers didn’t have books with listings of people who could vote there; they had laptops that connected to a central server. With 20 voting machines, we had 4 laptops. Verifying a voter took about 3-4 minutes, thus, the bottleneck.

Another innovation was that people voting absentee could drop off their absentee ballots at the polling station. There was a large red wooden box with metal straps and padlocks and an insertion slot sitting near the voting machines. When I got to the head of the line, shortly before 10am, the box was overfull, with envelopes sticking out of the slot. I have to admit that I’m not pleased with that situation.

The only good part was the young woman behind me in line – she borrowed my pen to fill out her signature card. When I filled out mine, she said, “Oh, we’re neighbors.” I asked her address, then said to her, “Oh, you’re just the other side of the highway. If you hear banjo or ukulele music drifting north some warm evening, it’s me.”

Her eyes got large, and she said, “I know who you are! I work for Marion!” So we had a nice discussion while slowly shuffling forward.

I knew that I lived in a liberal stronghold, but I hadn’t realized quite how much. Diana DeGette is my congresscritter, having taken Pat Shroeder’s spot. The last time I looked at the election results, Ms. DeGette was the projected winner with about 78% of the vote. Her opponent had 21%. He’s in the Green party. There was no Republican running … I don’t think any Republican could be elected in my district.

I’ll have to keep track of this

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

While doing web searches on judges (so I can be better informed for tomorrow’s election), I ran across this site devoted to reporting on the Denver Election Commission.

Not a guide to vacation spots

Saturday, September 16th, 2006

This looks like a pretty good map of recent disasters. Clicking on any of the items brings up more information about the disaster, as well as a Google Maps image.

Hello world!

Thursday, August 24th, 2006

I’m finally up and running on the new site. I’ll try to make fairly regular posts, but don’t expect anything long and involved for the next few days (or weeks, perhaps) – I’m on the critical path and behind schedule on a major project at work, so I’ll need to spend most of my time on that, rather than on the blog.

I just didn’t want to have the “generic advertising links page” up any longer.