Timmerov's Blog
reps
so how come congress has such shitty approval rating? why can't we throw the bums out? why do we keep re-electing the same idiots that we hate? heh. i think it's cause i'm kinda happy with *my* representative. i'm really pissed off at yours. and you're an idiot for re-electing that bum. there's nothing wrong with my bum. if there was, i'd throw the bum out. i'm not an idiot you know. heh. i'm thinking this is an extension of the everything-is-someone-else's-fault thinking. how about a constitutional amendment? goes something like this: a super-majority of 60% of national voters can remove any congressman from office. they'd then be unable to hold any public office for say, 10 years. no idea if it'd work. it'd be an interesting experiment.
allstars
g's allstar team lost their first game 5-2. they won their second 11-3. the big kid hit his first over the fence home run. that was kinda cool. they play again tonight. they're just starting to come together as a team. it's kinda nice to watch. unfortunately, it's gonna end soon. ah well. if only we could have started practice games two weeks earlier.
cyanograss
apparently some genetically modified grass went a mutant and started producing cyanide gas. which killed the cows that were eating it. all hail our new grassy overloads. heh. i'm wondering if this sort of thing hasn't happened many times before. there've been reports of carbon dioxide poisoning killing predators scavengers and prey alike. the only survivors would be the ones that walk upright. and can reach down with their long arms to collect the bounty of all this fresh meat. and live. when the competition dies.
certif
so my certificate expired. it's really annoying. this is the thing that let's me connect to the network at work. so i can like get work done from home. probably won't be able to fix it until i actually go to work again. on tuesday. cool! long weekend. not. what it really means is i'll need to go to work today. i'll have to remember to set up a chron job that sends me an email a week or two before the new certificate expires next year. how hard could that be? seems like one could make a fortune selling software to companies that use certificates warning their employees their about to have the weekend off. or maybe i should warn the employ-ers. heh. or both! i'm gonna be so rich.
s'up dawg
s'up dawg? i heard you like s'up dawg posts. so i posted you a s'up dawg post.
t-shirts
a gal in a t-shirt and nothing else is sexy. like smokin hot victoria's secret good times kind of naughtiness. boo-yeah! all day long baby. on the other hand, a guy in a t-shirt and nothing else is a different beast entirely. party on dude. over there. thanks. mental note to self, before sitting, check chair for shitcone.
snoozal
i got portal 2 for christmas. i haven't gotten around to playing it yet. maybe after baseball season. maybe after work calms down. hahahahahah! i'm a funny guy. so anywho, it's the first week of summer break. and the boys are already bored. so they installed portal 2 on their computer. in anticipation of hours of fun. heavy on the anticipation. cause apparently it's taking forever to install. i pointed out that hey! if this title was on onlive they'd be playing now. instead of wandering around the house bashing each other with helium filled mylar balloons shouting stupid things like, there you are. i see you. where'd you go? i'm not even angry.
amendax
so the irs sent us a nice letter notifying us there was a discrepancy between what we claimed on our 2010 taxes and what other people said they paid us. hrm. upon further review, turns out, they're completely right. i blame schwab. we closed one of the accounts we had with them that year. in prior years we imported schwab data directly into turbotax. and everything got there no sweat. that year though they didn't include anything from the closed account. and they didn't send us paper copies. or maybe they did. and we missed them. like, what's this? don't know. don't care. we reliably get our tax info from schwab online. or did. so amending taxes is a pain in the ass. after all the smoke cleared we owe them an additional $325. woot. course when we went back and looked at the states, we noticed the same turbotax bug that nearly burned us in 2011. so we fixed that too. for an $1100 windfall from the state. or will. as soon as the feds accept our amendment. ca will be all like, gee thanks feds. heh. it would have been better for the state to quietly pay the feds what we owe them instead of fixing things. anywho, now we can get on with amending 2011 taxes too. cause all the carryforwards are going to be wrong. wee.
lampshade
the lampshade in our bedroom has pretty much given up the ghost after some 20 years of service. i think it predates our marriage. anywho, i saw a clever and reasonably pretty lampshade on the interwebs made from a soda bottle and plastic spoons. so on father's day i got out the hot glue gun and went to work. let me just say that it serves its purpose. it's hellaciously ugly. now we *have* to replace it. which is the purpose i mentioned earlier. that's mah story and i'm sticking with it.
passwords
a coworker of mine expressed envy about my name. most of our websites are password protected. even though we're on an internal corporate network. which seems kinda weird. but there you go. so anywho, your name is your username. so you end up typing your name a lot. i've never really noticed that my name is particularly easy to enter. he claimed his name is extremely difficult to type. i called fooey. and to prove it, i changed my password to his name for a few days. and yeah, i was wrong. names are not created equal. his name is a serious pain in the ass to type. even with a few days of practice. so here's to you pierpaolo.baccichet. which apparently means mister kissy face. doubly sucks to be you.
tesla
the other day i was yakking with my boss outside of the parking garage. we stopped to watch a green tesla roadster exit onto the roadway. pretty car. well, in general. the dark green was kinda ugly. still though. had no problem imagining the beautiful and talented alisa in one. anywho, the remarkable thing was it was silent. like if i hadn't seen it i wouldn't have known it was there. kinda creepy actually. but in a cool sort of way.
transit
i took some really beautiful completely out of focus pictures of the transit of venus. woot. no i'm not going to share.
mrowr!
here's a fun thing to try. go to
google search by image. drag a picture of yourself into the box. see who you really are. or what. apparently, i'm a cat.
halp pls
so the other day i noticed that chrome all of a sudden started spamming me with annoying audio clips. strange. i popped open the volume mixer in windows 7/64 (home premium, standard user, uac on). and muted chrome. okay all better. but then the very next day, blah blah blah. wtf? it had become unmuted. apparently the volume mixer no longer saves individual settings. well poo. muted. quit chrome. relaunched chrome. not muted. wtf muckrosoft? this is the most popular operating system in the world. fooey. googled. i'm not the only one with the problem. lotta folks are blaming game companies like steam. but i don't think it's them. someone posted a fix. but it didn't work for me. any solutions?
corrigible
my english teacher in middle school made it very clear that flammable is not a word. even though people were using at as a word. and there was a whole lot less ambiguity about this not-proper word than there is around the proper word inflammable. a truckload of inflammable liquid is spilling all over the road. will it catch on fire or not? someone get a dictionary. or call an english teacher. sheehs. so anywho, the other day a player was described as the least corrigible member of the team. at which point an inflammable discussion broke out. does corrigible mean incorrigible like flammable and inflammable? or does it mean not incorrigible? the way it sounds. unfortunately, neither an english teacher nor a dictionary will be any use. we're on our own here folks. cast your votes incomment below.
bloom
scientists have discovered that melting arctic ice leads to algae blooms. apparently this was unexpected. though it jibes with a theory i posted a while ago. heh. "theory". which in this case means wild-assed guess. anywho, the thinking goes like this. once every 100k years or so the earth's orbit gets a bit more eccentric than usual. this causes the earth to move through parts of the solar system it doesn't usually go. places where there's lots of accumulated dust. which the earth scoops up. much of which falls on ice. cause the eccentricity means the earth spends more time farther from the sun. and colder. as the ice melts. this solar windfall of dust and fresh water acts as fertilizer. plants go crazy. earth warms and ice melts faster. it's what i call the fertilizer theory. cause i could be full of shit. as far as i know, no one's actually done any research on it. maybe they will now though. cause the recently discovered algae blooms might just be enabled by nutrients released from melting arctic ice.
uh oh
so if one of the web comics i link to has not been updated in months, and the last entry is called, adventures in depression, should i be worried about the poster?
servicings
there's a very important difference between the sexes. males will consume the last cookie. females will not. some females will go apeshit bananas insane screechy pants when the last cookie is consumed. not the beautiful and talented alisa of course. which is why i married her. but that's a story for a different post. anywho, let me explain the male thought process. the last cookie is sitting in the jar. for days. weeks even. no one can eat it. cause it's the last cookie. and they fear the screeching primate syndrome. so it sits there. and sits there. and sits there. everyone's unhappy. cause *nobody* is eating any cookies. and cookies don't go on the grocery list. cause we're not completely out of cookies. enter the male. he eats the last cookie. the well-trained male will add cookies to the grocery list. it's actually pretty easy to train a male to do this trick. cause the male wants more cookies. within a week or so someone makes a grocery run. and everyone can eat cookies again. so there's the short period between the consumption of the last cookie and the grocery run where everyone is again unhappy cause there's no cookies to eat. but this period of time is much much much shorter than the arbitrarily long period of time it takes for the last cookie to go to mold and be thrown away. see? the male is providing a useful service. so ladies, please remember the value of this service the next time your male eats the last cookie.
safety
after fukushima someone noted that major accidents happen every 25 years or so. based on a sample size of two. nuclear power is 6% of the world's energy production. they calculated that if nuclear power provided all of the world's energy, we'd have a major fukunobyl event every year. and twice most years. hrm. that's assuming people are stupid beasts. which maybe *they* are. but i find the position rather insulting. okay. in 1950 commercial airlines carried some 10 thousand passengers. in 1970 they carried 100 million. in 2010, some 1 billion. in 1950 there were some 100 fatal accidents. if you apply the nuclear accident logic, you'd expect there to be 1 million fatal accidents in 1970. and 10 million in 2010. everybody panic! not. actual numbers were somewhat lower than that. ie about 200 fatal accidents worldwide every year. that's right. aviation safety improved by a factor of 100,000. ie five orders of magnitude. there's really no reason why nuclear power can't do the same thing. course that would mean we'd have to abandon the design that runs on the same highly enriched uranium used to make nuclear bombs. which would rob the military of weapons so powerful they can't be used. which when one thinks about it for an attosecond, is a good thing (tm).
transit
we set up the telescope to watch the beginning of the transit of venus 2012. i re-purposed one of the boys' science project poster boards as a screen. it worked okay. took some pictures which i haven't unloaded from the camera yet. nothing spectacular. did learn a couple of things about using a telescope to view the sun. you can't leave it sit unattended. cause the sun will move. the focus will move off the optical axis. and the telescope will pretty much set itself on fire. which is kinda bad. second kids are stupid. g stuck his face into the end of the tube to see where the smoke was coming from. i said, uh g...? should you look directly at the sun? no of course not. la la la. uh g... ? should you look directly at a mirror that's pointed directly at the sun? oh duh. fortunately i was standing between the sun and the telescope. and noticed the lack of sense unfolding in front of me. and i kept shading him until he got a clue.
mumble
so this morning on the way to school, b said, i wish smore preach tomb afrenz. my boy waxing poetic. maybe. babbling incoherently. maybe. mondegreen. probably. so i repeated it back to him. he gave me a look like, my dad waxing poetic. babbling incoherently. mondegreen. then he repeated himself. without the marbles in his mouth. once more into the breach my friends.
fish
greeks work more hours than germans. so how come the greek economy is in the toilet and the german is pulling the eurozone? you can't explain that. but i can. greeks get paid to fish by the hour. and germans get paid by the fish. this country needs a bit more paid-by-the-fish and less paid-by-the-hour.
deal
i made a deal with my teenager. he can have my old phone if he gets his mother (and me) a smartphone. the problem is choosing. it's like work to go through all the plans and get the best deal. so tom sawyer it. he does the work. and gets rewarded with a crappy phone. it'll make calls and send texts. what more do you want? heh. course the most often used function of my (soon to be his) phone is the clock.
phones
i'm really beginning to hate phones. most of the calls to the house are junk. email is far superior. i can check email or text messages whenever i wish. it's really hard to ignore a ringing land line. most of my important communications have moved away from the phone. which makes the phone even less valuable faster.
