AC Capehart capehart

I received an email recently from a “long lost” almost-relative, Rob. He had proposed marriage to my aunt Donna. She only declined because she was dying of Cystic Fibrosis and didn’t want to saddle him with that. My aunt is now long dead, as is Rob’s second (well, OK, FIRST) wife (also of CF). He’s recently remarried and he and his new wife bought a house. He mentioned in his email that they had 9 particular things that they’d wanted in a house, and this house had them all and then some.

I read an interesting articlethat my mom sent me. She sent me the paper copy from the AARP bulletin that she (apparently) receives. The gist of the article (authored by Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz) is that the free market is good at giving consumers choices, but an abundance of choices can cause decision paralysis and dissatisfaction. These are primarily afflictions suffered by “maximizers” — people who’s goal in decision-making is to get “the best” as opposed to “satisficers” who’s goal is to be satisfied.

[I started this post trying to talk about free market vs. central planning in the realm of garbage collection in Altoona. It started out a little off-topic as I wanted to talk about the environment of discourse at PSU Altoona before delving into this specifically. It went wildly awry from there and never returned. I’ll have to try again later.] What kind of person actively listens to positions that they disagree with?

I’m going to tempt fate again. Carolyn (wisely) suggested “Why don’t you write it offline first?” And that really was a good suggestion. Only, I like to tempt fate — at least with small things that don’t reallymatter. And while I’d like to tell you about my motorcycling, It’s hardly really important. So, here I am again; in the blogger window, writing about motorcycling. (For those of you who are wondering what the fuck is he talking about?

The onslaught of spam bounces continues. After a little further exploration, and discussions with the folks on the chuuglist, we’ve determined that a spammer is using randomstring@accapehart.comas the “From:” address for spam that he/she is sending out. As a result, for every message that is not successfully sent, I get a bounce back from the friendly MTA saying that they couldn’t deliver the message Iwas trying to send. As a result, all legitimate mail to accapehart.

Joe, the author of Dadblog— one of the 2 blogs that I read where I don’t know the author — wrote to me today. Apparently, he was looking through his web log analysis software, and saw a referrer he didn’t recognize (my blog). He checked me out and correctly deduced that we have a common friend in Clinton. This spurred me to check my own logs. Almost everything was as I expected but for 2 things:

The universe doesn’t want me to tell you about my motorcycling. Now, for the second time, I’ve started a post about my history motorcycling only to have the process fail unrecoverably. The first time, submitting the completed post to Blogger, I got a server error page. Pressing the back button, I was faced with an empty page. This time, I was looking for a web image of a Suzuki GS 550 ES (the first bike I bought), and clicking back in a separate tab caused FIREFOX on LINUX to just disappear.

I need to learn to draw. My website needs art. And I need to stop stealing it. :-/ I would love to be able to draw in an anime style. OK, I’d love to be able to draw in any style. I just love how anime seems to be able to do so much with so little. I want to learn to be better with my camera too. As far as music, when I was in middle/jr/high school, when people asked “What do you play?

Every now and again, I’d been seeing little bits of Spanish on the web. But it didn’t occur to me as to whyuntil I was publishing my last blog entry. There is a designer in the Neon Guild1who is proposing to do a site for a client. The designer talked to Jack about doing internationalization for the client. Jack talked to me. I experimented with it (here) to make sure I knew what I’d do.

It’s been a little slow the last few days. Monday night I helped Carolyn arrange her desk in her new office. She switched buildings because they are going to expand the library to use both floors — including the one her office was in. Her new office is smaller than most of the rest, but has a double-expanse of window to make up for it. It’s certainly a step up from the closet they had her in before!