Andy – Page 240

Darcelle XV

Yesterday was Scott’s sister’s birthday. To celebrate, we went to see Darcelle XV & Co., a mainstay of ~40 year old women’s entertainment. At least, that’s what I gathered from the crowd. It was a lot of fun, and despite our being roughly half the age of most of the other patrons. There was a small part of me that was wondering how Rowdy Roddy Piper was doing with his comic debut just a few blocks away. I’ll just have to assume he was awesome.

I was tempted to buy the Polaroid photo they take as you enter with Darcelle himself because my mom also has a photo with Darcelle and my late, great aunt Irvene. That’s three generations! Alas, it was taken before the entire group was there, and $10 for a Polaroid is a bit steep.

A coworker also told me about the day the both Darcelle and his entourage were visiting Rock Creek campus for one celebration, and members of the Bush cabinent and secret service were also there. He said the mix made for an entertaining picture, especially because the girls in Darcelle’s entourage were taller than the secret service agents.

More Fall Yard Work

I had today off because of Veterans Day. It couldn’t have been a nicer day to have off. After wearing out the dog and helping (watching) my sister get her new iMac, we tackled more yard work. The dry weather meant we could shred leaves. So we raked, Barley played, and I mowed the leaves up. It was nice having things be mostly dry. Spent several hours in the yard, which always feels good for the soul. Gorgeous weather too.

America, the Beautiful

This image is a derivative of works by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, Mark Newman and Robert J. Vanderbei.

I must admit that despite its initial ugliness, it is a beautiful thing to see personally when compared to the typical electoral breakdown. This distorted ugly duckling does two things:

It shows counties in a blend of red to blue rather than just a binary representation of presidential vote winners
Then it does an areal distortion according to population, making areas with larger populations appear larger.

So? Well, it softens the polarized view of our country, so it serves a great propagandic purpose in making me feel better. Plus, it does a slightly better job of representing population than does the typical map of the US.

Also – The map of just the blended results shows an interesting pattern. Areas that are predominantly red are also areas with very little water. Are these people worried about their precious bodily fluids? Or are they hydrophobic? If you’re from the DNC, this might come in useful….

Religion Converter

The misunderstood geniuses at The Daily Grind have released an updated version of Faith Converter. Software to change your belief system? No, it converts key words in a text that identify it as belonging to one religion into key words of another religion. Not only is it a useful tool, its also brilliant parody.

Stove installed

Last night our stove problems were finally finished. Only 3 months after first notifying the landlord of the problem. Woohoo!

Anyway, its nice to have a stove that has more than 1 burner. A burner that doesn’t require you turn it on, then jiggle the element until the connection gets seated. And an oven that stuff fits in to.

Relax

I’ve been having trouble relaxing lately. It may have to do what 51% of Americans see as important, or it may have to do with confusion over what the heck happened. Michelle keeps reminding me to take a break from news, issues, etc. that aggravate me and thus interrupt what she’s doing. But its hard. Especially with hope that some great plot or ruse surfaces before the Monday after the second Wednesday in December.

I guess I should relax and partake in some liberal media.

Happy 1.0

Happy 1.0 Firefox!

Seriously, if you’re still using IE, you deserve the problems that come with it.

Fall Yard Work

The beds have been thinned and are soon to be dressed for the winter. Pots have been moved from off the deck and into the shed. Leaves are ready to shred. Lets hope this authentic fall weather holds out a bit longer.

Geography of Africa

I read a summary on the Geography of Africa today. Not the physical layout of Africa, but the geographical research areas of interest of the last 15 years. Its now clear to me that Africa has routinely gotten the shaft from its colonial and post-colonial neighbors. I couldn’t really use the phrase “got the shaft” in the overview of the subject for class, but its hard to think of a more succinct way to paraphrase it since, well, since Aristotle.

I had the impression that Africa was getting taken advantage of by imperial powers and banks, but it was mostly limited to hippie-speak. These were more in-depth looks at the horrible cascading of unforeseen consequences to land use change, the profit exporting of IMF and Worldbank improvement projects, and the dismantling of appropriate medical resources to cope with the diseases challenging the continent. Africa seems to be the test bed for ill-planned projects and poor management decisions.

Fortunately, there are plenty of people aware of this who are interested in fixing many of these problems. Hopefully this includes an understanding that change need not jump from pastoral to industrial in one step, and that the ability to sustain itself rates higher than the ability to raise cash-crops.

iPen is lame

In an effort to determine how best to spend our tech fee, I was asked to try an alternative to the somewhat pricey Starboard. The alternative was a clumsy little device with the somewhat suggestive name iPen. The product was like a prototype to the wacom tablet where the designers realized that it was stupid to put the cord on the pen. I had some fun with it, but it requires that you use it on a little pad with a grid for optical registration. Kind of lame.