AC Capehart capehart

We went to visit the inlaws over spring break. Well, my inlaws; her parents. It was nice. The Philadelphia area is different from Altoona. Plus, they take us out to nice dinners! One of the many family jokes or elements of folklore, or what have you, is my penchant for barber shops. Barber shops are great. They’re almost always a source of local color, and I don’t understand paying $18 for someone at a “salon” to cut my hair when I can get it cut for almost half the price by someone with probably twice the experience.

Every now and again, I look through my awstats for my web logs. It was really fascinating when I first set it up. Now, I look at it maybe once a week. Soon, I’m sure it’ll dwindle to once a month. Mostly, I get a kick out what people were searching for when they wind up on my pages. Usually, it’s stuff that makes sense. My flying info was pretty useful and interesting when I put it up, and I typed up the checklistthat the flight school gave me for the Cessna 152 I was flying.

Well, the “70’s palace” that I talked about herehas been sold. And no, not to us. I went for a bike ride yesterday and rode by the house. The for sale signs were gone, and there was a pickup in the drive way and stuff in the garage. On that same bike ride, however, I went past a house that I’d ridden past in the fall. In the fall, it was a FSBO, that when I finally got around to showing to Carolyn, the for sale sign was already gone.

It should be a surprise to no one given my “north wing” political viewsthat I’m not a big fan of taxes. I just don’t get the justification for the government to take approximately a third of my income. It certainly didn’t make my work a third easier. And that’s just income taxes. Every time I buy something, there’s sales tax. Every time I trade in the stock market, there’s capital gains taxes.

Getting Warmed Up I’ve had a rant brewing on this for over a year now. Every time I try to write something on it, I get angry. I spew. While cathartic, it rarely makes for good reading. I’m going to try again. And I’m going to try to keep this coherent. Whether I succeed is yet to be determined. I am provoked by a recent Reuters news piece which can be read from Wired News here.

I was afraid of this, when I started. Creativity drought. Some of the things I have to say, simply can’t be said yet. Others seem too mundane to say. Still more might be appropriate for this forum but feel like they’ve arrived just so that I have something to say here. I will doubtless have some stories next week though. This weekend will be interesting. I’m going down to Richmond to spend some time with my dad for his birthday.

A couple of days ago, my wife saw my new home page on her computer. As a mac user, she’s used to sites not really being designed with her in mind, so she called me over to ask “It is supposedto look like this?” Unfortunately, it was. It looked just like I had intended it to look. It may be clear at this point, that though I’ve spent just about all of my adult life in front of a computer, a web designer I am not.

According to my recollection of Straczynski’s commentary around Babylon 5or at least as much as I heard before muting it because he started dishing out spoilers, those were the two main questions of Bab5: Who are you?and What do you want?Personally, I don’t think “Who are you?”is a very interesting question, because I think the answer is too complex to be interesting or useful. I don’t think we (or at least I) have a good map for that territory.

When I was a young ‘en, maybe about 16, I lived in (two of) the poorer sections of the richest school district around. A school district my parents had moved into three years earlier – and shortly before their divorce — specifically so that I could go to the good county schools instead of the crappy city schools. All, in all, it was not bad. I got the fancy education, but I was not as insulated in my upper-crust world as other school-mates of mine.

I’m not exactly sure when I first put up the picture of me bicycling on my home page, and titled the page “The (hopefully quite temporary) home page for AC Capehart” — probably some time around 1999, maybe 2000. When did I do the MS 150? I bought the bike I’m pictured on partly for that ride. Anyway, somewhere on the order of 5-6 years ago. I intended it to be a placeholder.