Life of Dave

Global Weirding and the Economy

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:06:46 GMT

The news this evening on Marketplace was that the weather was making it difficult to tell what the economy was doing. Seeking Alpha also recently did a weather post. What was not mentioned was 'global warming', or, if you prefer, global weirding. If you accept the idea that we will see more frequent weather anomalies as the earth heats up, the implication is that we can expect economic forecasts (already hazy at best) to be even less reliable as extremes of weather affect all sorts of industries. If you don't accept it, well, then, carry on.

Joe Stack and terrorism

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:21:35 GMT

The discussion over the guy who flew a plane into an IRS building has been on my mind for several days now. It's fascinating that some people are calling him a hero. Fascinating because these are many of the same people who are first to label almost anything done by foreigners as 'terrorism'. But the fact is that attacks of this nature have to be viewed in context. Don't get me wrong - people who kill innocent people are, each and every one, crazy. But the question of what made them crazy (however you want to define the verb 'to make crazy') remains.

homecoming

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:00:57 GMT

At home with the family - it's amazing how time just seems to roll back when you come home, or at least when I come home - it feels an awful lot like being in high school again.

Oaklawn races

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:28:23 GMT

Went to the horse races down in Hot Springs over the long weekend. They made it through five of the ten races before calling the whole thing due to cold weather. This actually worked out well for me, as I had managed to predict the winner of the first race, and thus walked away having broke even, rather than lost it all plus some.

Buzz

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:36:54 GMT

Google started a new social networking service, called Buzz, and I am experimenting with it. You can visit my profile here. One of the interesting things it seems to be doing is posting the last entry from my blog once every three hours. So I figured I should at least update the blog to see if that helped....

new tech and blogging

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:12:03 GMT

It's not me, it's the evolution of technology:

In 2006, 28% of teens wrote on blogs and 76% regularly commented on their friends' blogs. Within three years, those numbers had dropped precipitously: In 2009, only 14% of teens were writing blogs and only 52% were regularly commenting.

And yes, I too was embarrassed by the title of the article. BTW - for this analogy to work, I have to count myself as a teen. Which in some ways I do - my work / hobby of keeping as close to the cutting edge as possible means I'm often aware of new trends before 'adults' (and one presumes that the article associates 'adults' with digital immigrants). And in some cases, teens. But against two-year-olds, I don't stand a chance!

RAID

Sat, 6 Feb 2010 16:53:49 GMT

I spent pretty much the whole day today fiddling with a new home storage server I picked up. The idea was to have a backup of my new 2TB drive (or rather, have 2TB of storage available so I could make a backup). That did not succeed - it seems I know less about high level storage than I thought. But I had fun doing it, at least the first six hours or so, which hopefully counts for something!

winter storm

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:48:35 GMT

We had a giant winter storm here this weekend - Thursday night it started raining, and temps dropped below freezing, and then it snowed all evening on Friday. We ended up with about a half inch of ice and two inches of snow. Work was closed on Friday, for both Sasha and me, and the grocery stores even closed on Friday night, leading to a wild run around town looking for drink mixers (given that everyone was off work, many social events occurred instead). By Saturday things had cleared up to some degree, though the drivers around here were still going mighty slowly. Over the weekend we mostly stayed in the house, with the exclusion of a couple runs to the store, once for little items, once for artwork and curtains (we decided to pretty up the music room, making it a bit more livable). Lisa and her David (to keep the confusion to a minimum, we usually identify to whom the David belongs) came over for dinner this evening, which helped to round out a pleasantly social weekend spent mostly indoors.

weekend of local fun

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:41:57 GMT

Lots of random times out and about - dinner with a friend and her (recently returned from deployment) husband, a charity concert at the local bar where friends (and random people I'd never seen before) rocked the house, a tasty alcohol-laden brunch followed by, of all things, furniture repair. It looks like the table we bought with the intention of having big dinner parties may someday (soon!) be able to host big dinner parties. All I need to do is a little carpentry. Which I am feeling more and more comfortable with every day. Crazy stuff!

Long Weekend!

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:31:51 GMT

Had a crazy 3-day weekend last weekend, including a night out to the Oxford American party in Little Rock, which was some of the best live music I've seen in quite a while. The next day we headed down to Hot Springs for some honest-to-goodness horse racing at Oaklawn. The betting was fast and furious (and in our case, quite small, as were the winnings). Now it's back-to-work week for Sasha, and busy as all get-out for me. I'm still trying to get the local pedestrian's association off the ground in a meaningful way, and we have our first meeting of the new year this week. It's also getting towards time to sign up for Spring language classes, or to decide whether I'm going to. Overall just busy!

My Google phone adventure

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:47:28 GMT

I have spent the last few days fighting with my cell phone. I ran right out after the Nexus One (the Google phone) was announced and bought one. It arrived Monday, courtesy of T-Mobile, who in exchange for a two-year contract subsidized the incredibly expensive phone. By Tuesday morning I knew it wasn't going to work - I had no internet anywhere, and most of the time wasn't even able to connect to T-Mobile's phone network. So I decided to return the phone. But as I had gotten my name engraved on it, they wouldn't take it back. And there was the well-publicized three company cross finger pointing. Then, suddenly, a guy at T-Mobile simply ended my contract. Boom! Ten minutes later my number had been disconnected. Which wasn't really how I had hoped things would turn out, but would do (amusingly, another Google service, Google Voice, makes it OK that I lost my phone number). Now I'm waiting for any of the other shoes to drop. Like a bill from (somebody) for the phone that they won't take back. Which I'm frankly not really willing to do - selling me a non-working, non-returnable phone with a $350 surprise penalty is not acceptable. In the meantime, I bought a cheap pay-as-you-go sim card so I would have some phone service. In under five minutes it spent ten percent of the initial balance I had put on the phone, doing whatever internetty things smart phones do when you aren't looking. I have since managed to turn that part off, so the card should last longer than an hour....