I’m selling my Bass & Amp if you’re interested. Or if you just want to hear what I did with the contraption back in high school.
Listening to the stuff again kinda made me want to keep it.
1421 – China discovers America?
My third entry on this site was about Gavin Menzies presenting his case to the Royal Geographical Society for China discovering the Americas before Columbus or other Europeans.
Last night I checked out a DVD from our library that chronicles Menzies’ theory. The documentary, 1421 – the year China discovered America? is split into two hours. The first develops Gavin’s version of the voyages of Zheng He, a eunuch admiral from the Ming Dynasty. Oddly enough – many of the emperor’s officials were eunuchs, and we had to look the word up because, you know – we thought it meant castrated bed chamber attendant. Well, it does in Greece. In China however, eunuchs were pretty much bureaucracy, but castrated.
Anyway, Zheng He sailed around most of the Indian Ocean with the massive Ming fleet. These voyages have been confirmed by stone carvings around the various location. Menzies argues that Zheng He, or one of his admirals, or even one of his deputies sailed past the Cape of Good Hope, up the western coast of Africa, and ultimately across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and on to Florida and maybe even as far as Rhode Island. It was all very interesting and exciting.
The second hour of the documentary was directed by some one else, and pretty much spends its time deconstructing all of Menzies’ arguments, asking experts in their respective fields about the evidence that Menzies has offered. It was somewhat disappointing because it really takes a lot of the wind out of theory. But it also points out the lack of concrete evidence for the theory.
All in all, Menzies has a great theory with some rather large holes. Its certainly a charming one, and the documentary is quite entertaining and informative. The thrust of his argument is that the great explorers that are credited with the discovery of the Americas already had maps of the new world and someone had to already have been there for these maps to exist. Menzies thinks it was the Chinese.
Pot Peak Fire evacuations
My sister called last night to let us know that the Pot Peak Fire ha forced the evacuation of Holden Village and the Lucerne area on Lake Chelan.
My parents have volunteered to stay at the village on the skeleton crew that will be assisting firefighters. Oddly enough, this might include of my sister’s childhood friends who is now on a hot shots crew that is working on the same fire.
My parents insisted that we go stay at the Old Faithful Inn during the Fires of 1988 in Yellowstone. They insisted that we’d be glad we’d seen them, and in retrospect they were right. I was scared stiff, and was relieved to learn that the lodge was evacuated before we visited.
Anyway, I hope they’re ok. Michelle pressed me to get details that I would not have otherwise asked for, and it seems that if the fire danger gets significant, they’ll be evacuated by air. Cool.
Update: – its actually the Deep Harbor Fire that is forcing the evacuation. My mistake.
Blood
Michelle signed us up to give blood today because there was a bus in the neighborhood. We showed up early to Ahmadiyya Movement Inc. Mosque on 35th where the drive was taking place and waited to donate. Two different people that donated had bad reactions to the procedure and one ended up being sent to the hospital via ambulance. Another was just a bit nauseous, and was just hanging out on the bus. Needless to say, there was a bit of a wait.
The food offerings for donors was much cooler than usual, and it was a potluck of homemade Mughal style cuisine. After the nearly 2 hours of waiting to donate, then paperwork and donating, we got to have some of the food, and it was great. It certainly beat the typical krispy kreme glazed donuts.
When told to drink plenty of fluids, I pointed out that beer was mostly water. My bleeder said she would pretend she hadn’t heard that. On a previous visit, the technician said that’s how he and his friends would get a cheap buzz.
Scott Moves In
Saturday Michelle and I helped Scott move in to his new house. Its a fantastic place that looks like its going to be very comfortable. Very, uh, homey. Scott is an excellent packer, so the move was quite easy. It was a little hot, so we took frequent breaks.
After returning the u-haul, Scott took us out to dinner for thanks. We hit the Bagdad theater for pizza, beer, a movie and some air conditioning. Tom was right about Ron Burgundy – it is stupid. But its also hilarious, especially when you haven’t eaten all day, worked the whole time, and precurse the movie with a tall glass of porter.
Bush Dredging for Votes in Portland
The president is in town today to drum up support for his re-election. This morning he pledged $15 million for dredging the Columbia River.
“By deepening the channel from 40 to 43 feet, it will create new export opportunities of Columbia River ports will help our farmers and ranchers, it will help our manufacturers remain competitive, it will protect and restore jobs, really good paying jobs and will help to restore the river’s eco-system,”
In yet another display of his complete lack of understanding of all issues environmental, he seems to think that removing part of the eco-system by dredging, putting it somewhere else, stirring up a century worth of pollution, and increasing traffic on the river will somehow improve the ecosystem.
Environmental issues aside, how can $15 million dollars possibly be enough to fund such a massive undertaking? That’s a lot of silt, much of which probably shouldn’t be used for residential purposes.
Service Pack 2
Microsoft has just released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. Some more prudent folks have been trying out the test releases on computers to see which, if any of their applications are affected. Many of us don’t have that kind of time and some of us just don’t care what it breaks. Its not like we have any recourse except to
- Uninstall the patch – again exposing ourselves to god knows what
- Find work-arounds for all applications that have problems
- Wait for upgrades to all of those applications
Troy is working on updating his office’s computers because running Windows Update should only be done by professionals. He’s tested a number of office functions on the test machine except one of the most important uses of technology in today’s workplace – interoffice junk e-mail.
He recently shared a piece of mail that had been circulating around work. It was a quite a work of unrealistic isolationist crap that wanted us out of Iraq, the UN, Nafta, etc. It was a real gem. I suggested he test out the new service pack by sending an absurdly obtuse political message teeming with sarcasm then say that he was just making sure the new upgrade wouldn’t interfere with normal office tasks.
Listening To: updated
I’ve updated the Listening To section in the menu bar to the left so that it will get updated both when I’m at work and when I’m at home.
At home I’m using a modified version of TrackReporter, an applescript that polls iTunes for the artist and track, then prints it to a small php file that gets dynamically loaded each time someone views the page. It was easy to edit and configure.
WinAmp was another story. I started with Now Playing, a plugin for WinAmp that once again polls the track’s IDv3 tag and outputs to a file. The plugin allows for FTP publishing to a server, but I don’t want to use FTP. Instead, I output a php file, then have a batch file that uses Putty’s scp command line utility to upload the file at 5 minute intervals with Scheduled Tasks. Command line scripting in windows is lame.
Its not perfect yet on the Windows side, but its a start. I can already tell that I’m going to get tired of the command window that pops up when it uploads the file.
Too hot
Its too hot for much of a post. I can barely stand to watch reruns of Red Dwarf. But what else can you do when you’re eating chips & salsa and drinking a cold one?
Dr. Do-little
Michelle’s in Sister’s with her mom visiting a friend, and has left me with 2 dogs and 3 cats to watch over. Its something.
As you can imagine, my diet has taken a change for the cooler. Michelle was starting to get back into normalcy again, and she made some great meals last week. Kind of cruel to set me up then leave. At least I have enough leftover smart-ground burritos to last me through Tuesday. I wouldn’t recommend coming over.