Voder-Vocoder

I’ve resumed the practice of keeping a food journal. It’s helpful to look down on today’s page and see that I’ve already eaten all the food I wanted to eat today and don’t need to keep snaking.

A few years ago, Chapman asked me “How many computers DO you have in your house?” Good question. There is (1) Sloop, the new one that I built last fall (Athlon 64 3500+) inside the old chassis from Lensman, which is now a inoperable mobo+cpu waiting to be recycled. Then there is (2) Olpc, the new netbook, which I sadly don’t use often enough because I rarely leave the house. (3) Dalek is the computer I built in 2001 that still serves as my backup desktop. (4) Mazer is a P3-800 laptop I keep around because Olpc doesn’t have a VGA-out socket for presentations. I’ve loaned Mazer to the housmate until he de-viruses his own computer (windoze user, go figure—and Steve’s a computer professional!). (5) Nimrod is an ancient Pentium laptop that I forgot I had until this year’s housecleaning. It still works, and I intend to get rid of it at some point. Then there’s my old laptop, Hiro2, which has been broken since before I fully paid for it; but we aren’t counting nonfunctional computers.

So yes, I own 5 functional computers. This weekend I found out that Dalek, even though it has a motherboard and processor from 2001 and has a Radeon 9200 GPU from 2004 and is running Linux will run World of Warcraft. Not well, mind you, but usable. Now Shauna and I can play together in my house. We’re such dorks.

I’ve got Dalek set up on my dining room table with a giant 9-year-old CRT monitor and an ethernet cable running across the floor into my room. It’s okay because it’s been so long since I’ve had more than two people eat at my dining room table anyway. The other possibility is to squeeze both computers onto my desk. But that would be crowded. We’d bump elbows.

According to maps.google.com, my longitude is -81.803888 degrees. This puts my house 5.45359253 hours befind Greenwich, England. Call it 5 hours, 27 minutes, and almost 13 seconds. This morning I woke up at 6 AM, Eastern Daylight time, UTC-4; so I got up at 10 AM UTC. This means I got up this morning at 4:32:47 local mean solar time.

Spent the past week or two cleaning my room. The most recent spirt of activity was caused by a search for a CD-ROM I last saw floating around six months ago. It may be lost forever, becasue I never found it. I ended up carting a large box off to goodwill and filling four big trash bags.

Then last night I went through the clothes hanging on my closet. I removed over half of them becasue they were too big; I folded them up and boxed them. Even though they represent almost eighty pounds lost in the past two-and-a-half years, it’s still a lot of money spent on clothes wasted. I think from now on I’m going to try to make do with a lot less clothing and try to purge the closet more often.

Wow, it feels like winter. The temperature got down to 52°F (11°C) this morning.

I went to early vote this morning. This is the first of two Saturdays that the polls are open. It seems to me that they should be open Sundays as well.

There are five early voting locations in this county, so I had to drive a bit to get there, but the convenience of being able to vote on a Saturday morning made it worth it.

I had to wait in line less than half an hour; I should have timed it. The line went out the door of the county supervisor of elections branch office and into the next door, some kind of abandoned store.

Since there were voters from all precincts there (all in different congressional districts, state senate districts, state house districts, county commission districts, fire control districts, and sub-municipalities), they printed out ballots as needed. To get our identity, they swiped the magnetic strip on our state ID (driver license).

After filling out the bubbles on the ballots, we fed them into a machine that read them. There was no feedback on whether the machine read the ballots correctly. I have to hope that somebody performs spot-checks to verify that the optical scan machines are functioning properly.

This was our sail yesterday. The big blue arrow shows the predominate wind. The tide was initially against up as we went downriver. After motoring out of Port Sanibel behind Punta Rassa, we raised our sails when we hit the main Caloosahatchee channel. We sailed almost due south on a beam reach, using the motor for a while against the tide, until we got past the bridge. We use the motor most of the time we go under the bridge, because the wind is unpredictable there and the big boats have a habit of tossing us about.

We made good time all the way down to the Point Ybel Lighthouse on the tip of Sanibel Island. At that point we gybed around to a broad reach and headed for Estero Island. We gybed twice again, beating downwind. This annoyed the hell out of me, so I convinced the skipper to let me rig the jib wing-on-wing using an improvised spinnaker pole made out of the boathook. This let us sail east, directly toward our destination, at about the same speed. This is a lot easier to rig than the spinnaker.

After a while, we decided to head back, beating upwind and making good time, once we realized that the fairleads needed adjusting (again).

about 13 miles total.

Examples of appropriate places for partisan political posters:

• Party Headquarters,
• Campaign Rally.

Example of inappropriate places for partisan political posters:

• The local produce stand.

I’m not arguing against your first-amendment right to free speech. And I don’t want to infringe on that right at all, but you did just lose a customer, if only because I find your politics distasteful.

Get up; get up; the sun is up!
The dew is on the buttercup!
Get up; get up; the sun is up!
Now get your ass out of bed!

Update: I’ve also seen

Get up; get up; the sun is up!
The dew is on the buttercup!
Get up; get up; the sun is up!
…Early in the morning.

Get up; get up; the sun is up!
The dew is on the buttercup!
Get up; get up; the sun is up!
Now get your ass out of bed!

Caribbean Islanders are odd people. They always want to talk religion, even if you met thirty seconds ago.

Last friday: “You look like a priest. Are you a Jew?”

“No”

“You must be a Jew. Are you a Jew?”

I started ignoring him at that point.

And a few months ago, an islander woman started asking me about my religion. When I wouldn’t admit to one, she looked at me like I was the most evil person she had met.

People ask what I eat. Here it is:

The Diet:

Breakfast
• 1 quart of iced tea, prepared the night before and allowed to cool to room temperature before adding ice. (I like to start the day hydrated.)
• 1 cup Uncle Sam Cereal, served with non-fat milk, berries (straw-, black-, rasp-, or blue-), and 1 packet of sucralose.

Lunch
• Salad, prepared before work: Spinach or lettuce, cubed smoked turkey lunch-meat, cheese (reduced-fat feta, cheddar, or blue), nuts (pecans, almond slices, sunflower kernels, or peanuts), sometimes berries, and home-made vinaigrette.
• 1/2 cup unsalted peanuts, mixed with half a box of raisins. (I sometimes make this my mid-morning snack, if I have an opportunity.)
• Two reduced-fat low-moisture Mozzarella string cheese sticks.
• 1 quart of iced tea, left over from breakfast.

Mid-afternoon Snack
• 1/2 cup unsalted peanuts, mixed with the other half of the box of raisins.
• Water.

Dinner
• An identical salad, prepared with lunch that morning.
• Water
• 2 cups of low-cal yogurt (if I’m still hungry).

UPDATE 2010-02-13: Olive Oil Balsamic Vinaigrette.