Posts from — March 2016

More rain down here, but the nasty stuff is about 100 miles inland along the northern Gulf Coast.

The Belgians are leaning towards the possibility that the real target of the Brussels attacks was the Prime Minister. The majority of the people involved in the Paris & Brussels attacks seem to have met at school and/or prison. The Belgian authorities have decided to extradite Salah Abdeslam to France and concentrate on the other members of the Brussels gang.

As I continue to use it, I get more and more annoyed with Windows 10. It has all of the disadvantages of IOS, and none of the features. They have even managed to screw up Solitaire …

The FBI claims they have cracked the iPhone from San Bernardino with the assistance of an Israeli company. They have dropped their complaint against Apple.

Also of interest: Easter egg hunt at PEZ Visitor Centre descends into chaos as competitive parents run riot. Parents, adults, were mugging 4-year-olds to get the most Easter eggs while their children observed their parents stealing from small children.

At another Easter related event, over 60 people were killed by a bomb in a park in Lahore, Pakistan.

There is nothing like a religious holiday to bring out the worst in people.

This is what happens when you have small children – you dye your kitchen.

Yes, the festival of Easter, goddess of the Spring, is celebrated this time of year with the traditional symbols of fertility, the egg and the rabbit, by the people who settled around the Baltic Sea – the Teutons, Slavs, Finns, Prussians, Letts, et al. It is a festival of plenty after the hardships of winter, with the promise of new growth.

Of course, later groups took the celebration and turned it to other purposes, but I doubt Easter minds.

On Thursday and Friday it was a cold front moving through. Overnight the cold front became a warm front and stalled off the coast. The 2-4 inches on Thursday saturated the ground, so where they have real soil instead of sand, generally in the north county, there is the possibility of flooding.

I have a job I would like to finish, but I can’t/won’t do it when it is wet outside because it involves electricity. The absurd part is that the job is to reconnect the irrigation pump which is rather extraneous with all the rain. I suspect the political satirists have gone to work for the Weather Service since Trump started winning primaries.

New Zealand’s nightmare is over – No New Flag! All ballots counted showed that over 56% voters didn’t want to change the current flag. It wasn’t on the ballot, for good reasons, but a probable majority would like to know why the government spent around $20 million on this process.

I think Prime Minister John Key might have won if he had gone with this flag.

During the Easter/Spring Break period so we had the usual Tornado Watch, Severe Thunderstorm Warning, High Surf advisory, Rip Tide advisory … all of the usual.

It didn’t really rain, it was more like living on the bottom floor of 10 story apartment building and everyone threw their dishwater out the window at the same time. There were red glows that I interpreted as cars on the road, but I couldn’t actually see individual lights, or the outlines to determine what kind of vehicles they were. It wasn’t that the street was flooded – the air was flooded.

This really doesn’t help the tourism industry. Student loan costs had already killed the concept of going somewhere for spring break for a lot of students, so the weather just made a bad situation worse.

The Belgian government is getting more than slightly annoyed by the “advice” being freely handed out by ignorant politicians in other countries.

The incidents in Brussels were carried out by Belgian citizens who were already under investigation and had nothing to do with the refugee crisis or the open borders within the European Union.

Here’s a news flash for conservatives who weren’t paying attention in world history classes: almost all of the nations in Europe had colonial empires that included Muslim nations. For various political reasons, there were Muslim settlers in the 13 colonies, which is why Thomas Jefferson had a Koran in his library.

When you have leaders who borrow slogans from political comedies you shouldn’t expect much.

When you build a wall or fence, you really need to decide if it is to keeps others out, or to keep you in…

While watching & listening to the BBC coverage of the attacks on the airport and a metro/subway station in Brussels, I had some flashbacks of my time in Europe in the 1970s when all kinds of people were blowing things up. We reacted, but we didn’t stop everything and freak out. The big difference was the media and politicians weren’t trying to make everyone terrified.

Actually I have been emptying a couple of boxes of tissues [made from recycled paper] thanks to the pollen from multiple varieties of plant life that is causing my nose to run non-stop. I recycle the empty boxes by putting the used tissues in them.

This afternoon I took my neighbor and the youngest of his cats to the Vet’s for his “before THE operation” visit. I had just arrived home to pick up more tissues when my neighbor called to say he had left the necessary stool sample in my car. If it weren’t for the pollen I would have probably noticed, as the Vet’s receptionist noticed as soon as I entered with it. Smiling when you are apologizing tends to reduce the sincerity of the act.

For no particular reason I updated WordPress to the most current version yesterday evening and managed not to break anything, so I updated my Raspberry Pi to Raspbian-Jessie and got a surprise – it is now a very usable computer with LibreOffice and a competent browser. I use the same wireless keyboard and mouse on the Pi and my Dell XP box by simply moving the transceiver – no installation, no questions, it just works.

As long as I was puttering inside I decided to add some programming to my “SmartTV” [A cold front came through and I don’t want to do the last big fix I need to make outside. There’s always a cold front Easter week.]

The Cable company has been ratcheting up the price on the basic service my Mother had, so I finally cut it off and replaced it with the Internet service I had at my old place. Well, when people come by they expect television, and the wonderful woman who cleans the house likes the TV running in the background, so I signed up with something called Hulu, another called Acorn, and the BBC News. Hulu has a variety of shows that are apparently familiar to people who watch television, Acorn features British TV shows. All of this is costing a third of what the Cable company was charging.

It would have been nice if the people who programmed the SmartTV had included an on screen keyboard to enter account names and passwords.

Cindy Gallea (73) came in 70th at 9:46PM CDT last night, and Mary Helwig (49) brought in the Red Lantern at 9 minutes to midnight AKDT or 2:51AM CDT this morning. Mary brought Spring with her, but the ITC was too busy counting the proceeds to notice.

Mary averaged 3.00 MPH for the race finishing in 13 days, 8 hours, 51 minutes & 30 seconds.

It’s that time of year. Spring arrived at 11:30PM CDT last night, so this is the first full day. You can watch it come at Archæoastronomy.

The air is already filled with pollen and the live oaks are dropping last year’s leaves. The azaleas are peaking and the pear trees are snowy with blooms.

I would note that locally we have had 12 hours or more of daylight since St. Patrick’s Day, and usually do.

The final four teams are at White Mountain waiting for the last run of the their race. There are 10MPH+ winds to deal with, and wind chills of -15°F. Many dogs will refuse to move under those conditions as a matter of their survival instincts.

Standings at 7:30PM CDT:

Finished at Nome
61 Matthew Failor (63)
62 Elliot Anderson (69)^R
63 Larry Daugherty (43)^R
64 Patrick Beall (53)^R
65 Lisbet Norris (7)
66 Sarah Stokey (71)^R
67 Rob Cooke (56)
68 Kim Franklin (34)^R
69 Kristin Bacon (42)^R
Beyond Safety
70 Cindy Gallea (73)
Beyond White Mountain
71 Mary Helwig (49)^R Φ
[Read more →]

This is looking like the final day of the race with all of the active teams between Nome and Koyuk.

Sarah Stokey looks like her team is striking, as is Rob Cooke’s. They must have wind at White Mountain. As a survival reaction a lot of sled dogs will lay down with their tails to the wind if it’s cold. If you don’t have a good weather leader, you are stuck.

Standings at 9:00PM CDT:

Finished at Nome
41 Justin Savidis (46)
42 Cody Strathe (59)^Q
43 Paige Drobny (75)
44 DeeDee Jonrowe (45)
45 Nathan Schroeder (4)
46 Jodi Bailey (14)
47 Monica Zappa (8)
48 Michael Williams, Jr. (40)
49 Melissa Owens Stewart (82)
50 James Volek (15)
51 Tim Pappas (64)^R
52 Becca Moore (22)
53 Alan Eischens (54)
54 Robert Bundtzen (26)
55 Noah Pereira (21)^R
56 Miriam Osredkar (65)^R
57 Tom Jamgochian (78)^R
58 Kristin Knight Pace (47)^R
59 Ryne Olson (44)
60 Trent Herbst (58)
61 Matthew Failor (63)
62 Elliot Anderson (69)^R
63 Larry Daugherty (43)^R
64 Patrick Beall (53)^R
65 Lisbet Norris (7)
Beyond Safety
66 Sarah Stokey (71)^R
Beyond White Mountain
67 Rob Cooke (56)
Beyond Elim
68 Kristin Bacon (42)^R
69 Kim Franklin (34)^R
70 Cindy Gallea (73)
At Elim
71 Mary Helwig (49)^R Φ
[Read more →]

Ellen has the Red Lantern at the coast and Billy Snodgrass scratched at Unalakleet. It’s a shame to get so close and have to stop.

Alas, Ellen has followed in Billy’s sled tracks and scratched been withdrawn by the ITC at Unalakleet. Mary Helwig at Shaktoolik has inherited had the Red Lantern thrust upon her by the ITC.

Nathan Schroeder’s team is having a strike over working conditions, as happened to Brent Sass earlier. The feeling is that the Seaveys may have convinced their teams to run without rest, but not all teams are that dumb.

Nathan’s team finally decided to go to Nome in 45th place.

Standings at 9:15PM CDT:

Finished at Nome
31 Katherine Keith (85)
32 Allen Moore (5)
33 Ed Stielstra (50)
34 Jason Mackey (67)
35 Jason Campeau (24)
36 Tore Albrigtsen (52)
37 Martin Buser (48)
38 Karin Hendrickson (76)
39 Kristy Berington (83)
40 Anna Berington (23)
41 Justin Savidis (46)
42 Cody Strathe (59)^Q
43 Paige Drobny (75)
44 DeeDee Jonrowe (45)
45 Nathan Schroeder (4)
46 Jodi Bailey (14)
47 Monica Zappa (8)
48 Michael Williams, Jr. (40)
Beyond Safety
49 Alan Eischens (54)
50 Melissa Owens Stewart (82)
51 James Volek (15)
[Read more →]