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 checklist that the flight school gave me for the Cessna 152 I was flying. So that I have a number of searches that are “cessna 152 checklist” makes sense.
Well, the “70’s palace” that I talked about here has 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. I assumed it had been sold. So, I was quite surprised when I rode past yesterday to see that it was again available, and this time it had an agent’s sign out front.
It should be a surprise to no one given my “north wing” political views that 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.
[file under geeky. Why doesn’t blogger have categories for cryin’ out loud? It’s not like most of you want to read this junk.]
Well, that was frustrating. After my friend was cracked, I decided that it would be smart to keep my web content in a revision control system. That way, when some malicious cracker replaced all of my index files with self-congratulatory tripe, all I’d really need to do would be to restore from the repository.
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. The gist is that lawmakers want to extend the “standards of decency” currently in affect over broadcast media to cable and satellite media (including premium content like HBO). Though, as the primary proponent says “No one wants censorship.” But what can enforced “decency” be but censorship?
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. His birthday is January 20th. Every year, on or about his birthday, we would go to (or meet in once I’d moved out) Washington, DC. On inauguration years, we’d take in the pomp and circumstance involved. There’s a picture somewhere of me sitting on my dad’s shoulders at the Carter inauguration.
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 supposed to 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. In her suggestions for improvement, she said something like “Well, you know, the gray, it just, umm.. looks ugly“.
According to my recollection of Straczynski’s commentary around Babylon 5 or 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.
I don’t acquire much news these days. However, I do still often wake to NPR. Today I heard part of an interesting story on comics. I’d already been introduced to my Central PA neighbor Jay Hosler‘s work as well as the darwin collaboration that the story refers to by a comic book buddy and communications professor (all wrapped up in the same dude) on a bike ride together. I already knew that comics could have a profound impact on our thinking both culturally and individually. That’s part of the reason, my Austrian Economic/Libertarian friends are so excited by when Batman saves the VonMises writings., and of course Anarky.
