We move tomorrow morning.

[silveradept]

Tonight is the last night we sleep here. Tomorrow, we're in a new bed. Kind of scary, you know, moving. But only because of the unknown. And I'm probably going to have to do this again in a year, maybe a year and three months, so I shouldn't be too worried about it. It's just a little strange, you know. At some point, I kind of want to move and know that I'm not going to move anywhere else for a long time. It's almost all packed. Only the machine and its components, really, to go. I'm about as packed as I can be while still being able to LiveJournal.

I played 2dlife at Literati tonight. Even with him pointing out where I could make a 72-point play, I still lost by seven points. On him playing his last letter. Tells me his skill level is much better than mine. Remind me that if I play him at Scrabble at some near point in my life, I should expect to get thrashed soundly. Maybe I should stick to crosswords and Sudoku (*anime-style sweatdrop*).

Some practical advice for landing jobs and/or promotions, or just fooling the masses into thinking you're richer or more powerful than you are, gentlemen - dress up. Wearing a suit outside, as Dan Akyroyd put it in Blues Brothers 2000, "These are unsophisticated men. The only things they respond to are fear and the draw of lucre. We accomplish this using these iconographic type symbols and psychological intimidation. The way we look together now presents a uniform image of strength and organization." A cadre of suits (indeed, the very idea of "the suits") reinforces the idea that gentlemen who are dressed like they have money are perceived to have it, regardless of the truth of their finances.

Speaking of perceptions causing results, although in this case being an extremely negative reaction, there's a story of a teen beaten, sodomized, and bleached because he tried to kiss a girl of another race. So nice to know that there are still people who think that interracial affection is something deserving of violence. I thought America was beyond this. Hell, I thought humanity was beyond this. I really did.

If you ever wanted to know why the sciences need such big things, consider the statistics associated with a neutrino-catching/detecting device - it requires 50,000 tons of water (and the associated atoms and subatomic particles) to watch a neutrino react with a quark once every ninety minutes. Astronomers need big lenses and telescopes, but particle physicists need some very big labs, indeed.

The Sneeze rates (with pictures) of what it considers to be the most embarrassing "tough guy" cookie jars ever. C is for cookie, and regardless of what it's in, that's good enough for me. Even if it is now a "sometimes food".

The Zen of everything is apparently not very Zen, at least as this blog-writer posts. Beginner's mind requires an expert's practice, according to him. We think he's got the Zen part down.

A way of cutting down your power bill, through the magic of dynamic pricing. Draw power from the grid while it's cheap, use the batteries' power while its expensive. If there's enough capacity to run the place through peak hours, then the price tag is probably worth it in savings over the life of the object.

Two (potentially) boneheaded governmental decisions on the way. One - rebates for all taxpayers to relieve gas prices. Umm, where are we getting that money from? Unless the figures on the Iraq War aren't nearly as bad as they've been projected, and there's some sort of magic budget windfall-surplus-thing happening, the defecit spending is only going to grow bigger. Considering the number of taxpayers, wouldn't it be smarter to sink all that money into developing and deploying an effective renewable energy infrastructure? The savings in the long run of producing, say, cheap fuel cells or 95%-efficiency photovoltaic cells would probably be greater than this $100-per-taxpayer rebate check. lordmork, you've dealt with governmental rebates before - how have they turned out in terms of good policy?

The second, and what may be even more stupid than the rebate checks, is a bill proposed to force music webcasters and satellite radio services to use DRM on their streams. Another piece of legislation that benefits the "associations" that seem more dedicated to ensuring their own profits rather than their charges' successes and the timely movement to the public domain for other artists to draw inspiration from. Much like how a patent was designed to provide a limited monopoly to recover costs and provide incentive to innovate, copyright should work on the same principle - sufficient to recover costs and provide incentive to innovate, and then a timely passage into the public domain for more material to build the next generation of copyright-protected works.

That's the dish from me tonight. Moving tomorrow morning, bright and early.

Comments

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

And of course several other points deserve talking about, but I'm trying to cut down on the level of profanity I'm using as I've been wearing out those keys lately. Those subjects don't deserve proper, well thought out curses. Mere derision is barely enough, simply swearing and spitting in the direction of Texas and Washington is about all I can muster. That's tough too because I've got to spit in two directions at once.