Timmerov's Blog
baseball
little league baseball season isn't quite over yet. regular season is finished. now we're on to post season. g's post season ended last weekend. his 8 yo team won two of three games. go kids! b had a choice between playing all-stars or going to great britain for a three weeks. kids today. they have no dedication to their teams. i was in exactly the same situation when i was his age. except it was corning ny. and i wasn't given the choice. but other than that it was exactly the same. so anywho. the beautiful and talented alisa took g off to grandpa's to hang with grannie annie for a few days. i'm home alone entertaining myself with work and post season baseball.
date
onlive launched. yay! we had a launch party last week. we employees got ipads as a sort of bonus. that was cool. so far it's kinda like a really big really heavy ipod. i took the beautiful and talented alisa to the party as my date. the boys stayed at a friend's. it was a really good date. any date that starts with the purchase of chocolate syrup is gonna be a really great date.
ddo
yeah i know i'm the only one in the whole universe who plays ddo. but there's a referral system. so if you decide you want to sign up cause you heard about how much fun i have from me. then by all means refer me. my accounts are timmerov, timmerovN where N is 1 to 5. thanks! and enjoy.
end of school
the beautiful and talented alisa took g to b's last day of school. they helped out with the greek olympics. much fun was had by all. they ran the water balloons. g wasn't sure he really wanted to go. he'd studied the greek history in school. he was pretty sure he didn't want to go hang out with a bunch of naked middle schoolers. mom had to assure him they'd be wearing clothes.
burble dancing
the other day i was watching a little league game in a friendship tournament for 9 year olds. g was invited to play even though he's only 8. there were a bunch of kids. so it was already pretty crowded without him. he decided to pass. but his friend was on the team. and he was staying with us the weekend of father's day so his mother could throw a surprise party for her boyfriend. which may sound kinda off, but is really pretty cool. so anywho, it was a long tournament and i had to go pee. while using the urinal i noticed happy little feet dancing in the stall. and a lot of burbling noises. i couldn't tell if the tot was alone or not. which made me wonder if i should be concerned or not. shortly i hear pee. and some grunts and splashes. i had finished so i peeked under the wall. i was surprised at how high those little shoes were off the ground. satisfied he was alone i left. mom was at the door checking on him. it was a pretty awkward moment. how do i reassure her that her kid's okay without coming under suspicion i'm some sort of perv? fortunately he called for help and i made my escape. yeah you and i are good people. but some folks go completely whackadoodle off the deep end when someone pays too much attention to their kids. weirdly, these are the same people who leave their kids unattended in a public restroom.
fish sticks
so the beautiful and talented alisa wanted to try composting. we're pretty green already. the garbage can already averages half full most weeks. the recycling container only goes out every other week. and the yard waste container is similar. grey water goes on the plants. etc etc yada yada. anywho. we built a simple compost bin. grass clippings and some dinner scraps. and i dumped in a bunch of dry leaves and rose prunings. that wasn't a good idea. apparently stems like that take a long time to decompose. so since i screwed it up, it was my job to fish sticks out of the compost bin. oh. heh.
lists
i keep a list of blogs i intend to write some day. that helps me when i don't have time to write the blog i just jot it down on the list. then when i do have the time i can't remember what i wanted to write about unless i look at the list. so the other day, "fish sticks" was on the list. hrm. for the life of me i couldn't remember what the heck i wanted to say about fish sticks. i haven't had fish sticks in years. many many years. pretty sure i haven't even thought about fish sticks in nearly as long. hrm. maybe i'll put them on the menu. i bet the beautiful and talented alisa could make really wonderful fish sticks. even if that's not what i originally intended to blog about.
gleek
i gleeked. lotta people gleek. some people gleek at will. though i think most people gleek accidentally. in extreme cases it could be embarrassing. do you gleek? are you wondering what the heck i'm talking about? wondering if gleek is a real word? heh. so was my dental hygienist. from whom i learned the word. she only learned it a few months ago. from a patient who accidentally gleeked on her. look it up. it means to shoot spit directly out of the spit gland under your tongue. sometimes for impressive distance. i shared this story with the boys at dinner. after dinner we were doing the usual what do you want to do i don't care what do you want to do nonsense. one of em proposed a gleek fight.
readers
so school has been out less than a week. and b has finished his summer reading list. sheeshum crow, the boy likes to read. the library sponsors a summer reading contest. read a book. write a haiku. b won. not sure if he was the only nutjub who read a book since school left out. but we won't go there. right? go b go!
recap
woo wee. bunch has happened recently all at once. my neice graduated from high school. mom came to see it. had a bit of an adventure getting here. b finished 6th grade. g finished 3rd. damn i'm old. b made baseball all-stars. go b go! but he won't get to play cause he's off to the olde country for three weeks. he'll get to see stonehenge and the blarney stone and rappel from the honest to goodness walls of an honest to goodness castle. lucky kid. g's going to ymca camp for a week. and i'm going to tie up the beautiful and talented alisa and make her take a vacation.
onlive launched. hoo-frikken-yay! i was actually kinda not busy before and during e3. now all of a sudden everyone is kinda looking around for something to do. and i was pretty much the only person thinking about and working on what's next. so today i was busy hopping from department to department getting things done by engineers quick before management noticed.
pilots
my cousin is a pilot for a major airline. sometime after 9/11 the powers that be decided it would be a good idea to allow pilots to carry side arms. lotta commercial pilots learned to fly in the military. course they didn't think that plan all the way through. pilots still had to go through security. they still had to take off their shoes to be x-rayed. sheehs. hello! he's carrying a loaded pistol here. hello? my cousin thought that was funny. but it's sad really. people, even empowered people, can't think. he's the frikken pilot. if he wants to crash the plane and kill everyone on board he can just lock the cabin door and fly the plane into any building he wants. and there's not a damn thing any amount of security theater can do about it. a la flight 990.
dreams
my mind is a very strange place. usually i don't remember my dreams. which is probably a good thing (tm). but sometimes i do. often when they are particularly amusing, frightening, and/or annoying. so anywho, the other night a dream fell into the last category. one of my co-workers was dressed up in a crazy white outfit standing on a podium with a staff. he'd point the staff at a mob of little blue men. they'd wave their fish and shout, tour jete (TOR j-tay)! then he'd turn and point his staff at another mob of little blue men. they'd wave their fish and shout, ronde de jambe (RON d'jzahm)! they went back and forth like a tastes great less filling commercial until i couldn't stand it any more and woke myself up.
define catastrophe
okay so the top kill failed. that's bad news. that means the well is compromised somewhere in the mile or two between the sea floor and the reservoir. the only way to stop the flow now is to drill a new well and tap into the old well below the leak. and kill it from the bottom. in the mean time the well is eroding. it's a race. if we lose, the well fails catastrophically. and gushes oil faster than we can collect it for years. until all 50 million barrels are dumped into the gulf. and yeah we'll be able to collect maybe half. that's still a billion gallons. that's 100 exxon valdezes. it may seem counter-intuitive but the way to reduce the erosion is to open the well. and let the oil out faster. this relieves pressure at the break. and reduces the erosion. so maybe oil was only leaking at 5000 bpd on day one as they said. but it was doing it in a very bad way. so when we see the oil flow increase over the next few months, that's good, not bad. bp and the wh have been silent on this. probably because they fear the media noise machine. sigh. irregardless, the race is on. drill baby drill.
sol
quick! is your standard of living higher or lower than your parents' when they were your age? hell if i know. it's a tricky thing to measure. you are working more hours for your necessities - food and shelter. but fewer hours for the luxuries - your 55" flat screen televisions, cell phones, computers, vacations, etc. it's remarkable really. hell, homeless people have cell phones. weird huh? okay so consider what happens if this trend continues.
dead pets
the original owners of the house next door passed away a year ago. the heirs rented it to a nice family. but they decided to sell it at the end of the school year. i got to meet the new owner yesterday. seems like a nice man. named robin. asian. accent. i had a little trouble understanding him. as near as i can tell, he said he wanted to kill my cat. which is odd. cause my cat is dead and buried many years now. but he was insistent. he was going to poison my cat. with a tent. a poison tent? oh duh. light went on. he's having the house fumigated. and wanted to warn the neighbors to keep their semi-feral cats safely locked up inside and away from the curious death that awaits them next door.
congraduations
my niece graduated from high school last night. woo who! as the chalk said. the boys were good. they sat quietly on the football stadium bleachers. they had books. i was good too. i daydreamed about flyovers by ironman. we all cheered at the appropriate moment. the speeches were full of references to the stanley cup. which i thought was really odd. the party afterwards was fun. good food. saw some folks i haven't seen in a long time. thanks suzy!
vaxfusion
people seem a little confused about how them not getting vaccinated harms others. most people get better on their own after getting sick. so where's the problem? they ask. suppose you're a new born baby. your responsible parents are planning to get you immunized when you're older. and your immune system can handle the exposure to the disease that will give you life long protection. but right now it's not up to the task. and if it's not up to mounting a defense against something harmless... there's no way your immune system can fend off the real thing. your parents need to keep non-immunized people away from you. just in case they are infected. otherwise, you could die. from their ignorance. and/or arrogance.
props
switzerland has an interesting system for voter generated propositions. compared to california, they need a lot more signatures. and more time to collect them. anywho, they get to vote yes/no on a proposition. they also get to vote yes/no on a counter proposition. and finally there's a sort of tie breaker preference if both propositions pass. we often see proposal and counter proposal here in ca. for example, a clean water proposal. and a counter proposal that mandates even cleaner water. but exempts vital industries. vital gross polluting industries. i've seen counter proposals mention the original proposals with language like if both pass then this one wins. i'd be happier if our system was more like the clock makers. but that would make politics a functional enterprise instead of entertainment. and spoil everyone's fun.
praise w
i get flak for constantly criticizing bush the idiot. so let me say something that'll pass as positive with with appropriate colored glasses. nasa. bush canceled the space shuttle program. probably a good thing cause it was way past its lifetime. bush then turned its successor into some bloated monstrosity too fat to fly. and all but canceled the lean mean flying machine that was the ares. um bout now ya'll are supposed to be wondering how that could possibly be a good thing. it opened the door to opportunity for private industry to step in and get the human genome off planet. go spacex go. fly falcon fly.
8yo's
so g and i went to baseball practice for an 8 year old tournament. one of the coaches was pitching batting practice. excuse me. batting rehearsal. apparently it's not politically correct to call it bp anymore. anywho. he suspected one of the players was picking daisies instead of paying attention. so he hollered out some instructions. which ended with, do you understand me? the kid said, i'm not sammy. the coach blinked a few times. said, apparently not. then threw the next pitch.
work
yeah i know it's bad form to bitch about stupid stuff that happens at work. but i'm feeling particularly badly formed today. so anywho, unnamed people (they) at work were using a thing they didn't need to use and were bitching and moaning cause it was affecting the thing they do need to use. so now, the people (me) who need to use the thing they didn't need use can't. fuckin brilliant.
my desk
i mentioned my desk yesterday. it's called orcl. that's an acronym that i'm not going to explain. but it's pronounced ork'l. not to be confused with oracle. anywho. i built part of it myself. well, with help from lilia. the desk is covered with keyboards and mice. above them is a double deck array of monitors. under the desk are only two computers. beside the desk are 3 more plus the a box of secrets that probably shouldn't even mention. but the setup sounds so much more impressive if i do. so i will. so there. usually i only use two of the computers at a time. but i have powered up the entire orchestra for occasional demos.
heavy walking
my "office" at work is a desk against a wall in a big open area. it's generally quiet. except when there are meetings. but it does get a bit of traffic. it's amazing how people walk. yeah some of my coworkers are super sized. but jezum. you have a normal sized 200 pound person walking down the hallway *BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*. it literally shakes my monitors. do people really not know how heavy they walk upon this land? are they that oblivious to the amount of damage they are doing to their meniscus with every step? not to mention their eyeballs. heh. whenever i try to duplicate that much thudding i can't see where i'm going cause my eyeballs are bouncing all around. weird. course i guess that obliviousness extends beyond their feet. people really have no clue how much of an impact we collectively have on the planet. at least most people. at least for now.
reading
this last flu/cold thing was nasty. the beautiful and talented alisa was really good to me. she brought me a book i wanted from the library. it wasn't a good enough read that i'm going to continue with rest of the trilogy. i won't even tell you the title. i only mention it because it was about a barbarian who hooked up with a hot chick to find a cure for his uncontrollable rage. the beautiful and talented alisa quipped i was doing research for my autobiography.
tax cuts
reagonomics is the idea that you can cut taxes for the rich and the economy will boom and everyone will make so much money they'll end up paying more total taxes. it relies on two assumptions. one, rich folks drive the economy. and two, rich folks want an infinite amount of money. the last one is hooey. you don't spend all your time working. you save some time for family and fun. right? rich folks are the same way. it's just the scale that's different. and what they do for fun. suppose i prefer the kind of lifestyle that consumes $10M per year. if the tax rate is 50% i work my ass off and make $20M. then i take the rest of the year off and enjoy my loot. and the government gets $10M. assuming my business has a 10% profit margin, the economy gets $200M worth of business. presumably for jobs, goods and raw materials. now suppose the tax rate is 20%. in order to take home the same $10M for my lifestyle i only have to contribute $125M to the economy. and the government only gets $2.5M. so if you want to boost the economy and raise revenues for the government, you raise progressive taxes on the rich. you don't cut em. cutting them only benefits the rich guy. cause he gets to spend more time on family and fun. meanwhile you, the guy who feeds the rich guy, is standing in the unemployment line.
virgin$
suppose virgins were currency. this is sort of a follow up from the
can't see money post where we examined the economy's boom and bust cycle. here's another take. you've got 100 guys working their asses off trying to score a virgin. the boom time. but there are only 90 virgins. clearly not all guys can have a virgin. so you end up with 90 guys working their asses off to keep their virgins (!?). and 10 guys with no motivation whatsoever. the bust time. the cycle repeats when the next truck load of virgins arrive. but wait a minute. this assume all virgins are retired at the same time. seems to me if you released the virgins a few at a time... you could have all the fellahs working all the time. a permanent boom cycle. heh. so all we need to do to fix the economy is introduce more virgins.
