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Category: Barbara

Friday, 13 February 2015

08:51 – Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month. Barbara’s recovery continues. She’ll continue practicing driving over the next few days before returning to work on Monday. I just got back from walking Colin. It’s 23F (-5C) with a stiff breeze.

Congratulations to our friend Steve Childers, who just completed the Herschel 400 list. Barbara and I started working this list more than ten years ago, but quickly gave up on it. From our light-polluted region and using only a 10-inch telescope, it quickly became obvious that we had no chance at bagging all 400 objects on this list. Even the brighter objects were extremely difficult to see. Steve’s 17.5-inch telescope gave him a chance at bagging all 400 objects on the list, but even with three times the light gathering ability of our 10-inch it must have been extremely challenging, to put it mildly. But Steve’s persistence over the last ten years or so let him get it done. Steve joins a very small group of amateur astronomers who have successfully observed and logged all 400 of these objects.

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Thursday, 12 February 2015

08:09 – Barbara is much more cheerful now that the doctor has approved her returning to work. Colin and I will miss having her home all day.

We’ll probably never know what actually happened in that shooting in Chapel Hill Tuesday, but my guess is that the three muslims who were killed ganged up on Mr. Hicks and he was forced to shoot them to defend himself. If he was in fear of his life, he was certainly entitled to use deadly force in self defense.

09:17 – I finally finished the first book in Matt Bracken’s Enemies Trilogy last night. All I can say is that he completely misses the point. His bogeyman is “left-wing” elements of the federal government. The real enemy is the federal government, period. It has simply grown far too powerful. Even well-intentioned politicians and bureaucrats, of whom there are many, take well-intentioned actions that inevitably have evil consequences. Their goal is not to chip away at the freedoms of US citizens; that is merely the result of those actions. I am reminded of Lord Acton’s famous letter to Mary Gladstone.

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

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Wednesday, 11 February 2015

08:36 – Barbara is doing well. We’ll do some driving practice over the next few days. It wasn’t an issue when she had her left knee replaced in October 2011, but a right knee replacement can affect driving. As her physical therapist said, it’s not so much the ability to press the gas or brake pedal as the ability to switch rapidly between them. So we’ll start in an empty parking lot and work our way up to residential streets and then main drags.

I see that NBC News hopes to salvage its superstar. They’ve suspended Brian Williams for six months without pay, hoping that will be long enough for viewers to forget that Williams is apparently a pathological liar. If I were NBC News management, I’d assign Williams for the next six months as an embedded reporter with ISIS forces. The worst that could happen would be ISIS beheading Williams or burning him to death. That prospect shouldn’t scare Brian “Rambo” Williams, since he’s already been a big hero everywhere from the Middle East to New Orleans during Katrina.

12:03 – There are two AT&T cherry-picker trucks parked in front of our house right now, connecting fiber. We should be able to sign up for their gigabit service in the next month or two, if we decide to do so. I may instead just bludgeon TWC into discounting our current cable Internet service on a month-to-month basis. I figure it’s actually worth about a fifth of what we’re paying for it now.

16:27 – We just got back from the doctor, who approved Barbara to drive and to return to work Monday. She’s delighted, and I’m sure the people at her office will also be delighted. We’ll practice driving over the weekend so she can get used to working the brake and gas pedals with her knee, which is still not 100%. It probably won’t get back to 100% for at least six months and possibly a year. But everyone is happy, except Colin, who’s now used to her being home all day every day.

She’ll be getting back to work just as the cold weather returns. Temperatures are forecast to fall over the next several days. Monday’s high is to be below freezing and the low 14F (-10C).

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Tuesday, 10 February 2015

08:06 – Barbara is doing well. Assuming the doctor approves, she’ll probably return to work next week.

I built a new batch of chemistry kits yesterday, lacking only the wire gauzes. I have a few of those on hand, which should be enough to carry us until the new shipment arrives. If not, I’ll just ship the kits without and send the wire gauzes separately when they arrive. Today I’m going to get started on a new batch of biology kits, which we’re running low on.

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Friday, 6 February 2015

09:23 – Yesterday was three weeks since Barbara’s knee-replacement surgery. The physical therapist says she’s doing amazingly well. But sitting around the house reading and watching videos is getting to her, and she’s really looking forward to being able to get back to her regular routine. At least I can keep her busy labeling bottles for science kits until I run out of bottles.

The paper this morning reports that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has released its ratings of individual North Carolina public schools. Only 59% of Winston-Salem schools received a C or better grade. As bad as that is, the reality is worse. Under the stricter grading that will come into use next year, only 34% would have received a C or better. And even those new standards aren’t rigorous enough. Our public schools, like nearly all public schools nationwide, are not just failing but failed. That’s one of the main reasons why so many millions of kids are now being home-schooled.

I was surprised that the paper pointed out the extremely high correlation between each school’s grade and the percentage of poor and minority students in that school. The higher the percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches, the lower that school’s grade. No surprise there for people who see things as they are instead of how they wish they were. In other words, only progressives are surprised. And, given the intellectual dishonesty of progressives, even they probably aren’t really surprised.

On a related note, several of my readers have recommended Matt Bracken’s work. After reading two of his non-fiction articles, here and here, it was clear to me that Bracken is a smart guy who’s read a lot of history. So I decided to give his fiction a try. Yesterday, I bought the Kindle version of the first book in his Enemies Trilogy, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. I got through the first couple hundred pages last night. The guy thinks clearly and writes reasonably well. Recommended.

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Thursday, 5 February 2015

08:56 – Barbara continues her recovery. She’s doing very well according to the physical therapist, but she’s frustrated because she’s not yet back to her normal abilities and forced to sit around much of the time. At least I have kit stuff for her to work on.

I see that the FCC is moving toward enforcing net neutrality, which is a good thing. Foxnews is screaming about new “burdensome regulations”, but then Foxnews always favors the interests of big corporations against the people. Just to be clear here, this isn’t about free enterprise and capitalism. Broadband providers in most of the country operate under government-granted monopolies or duopolies, so it’s only reasonable that the government enforce regulations to control their pricing and behavior. Treating broadband providers as common carriers like the phone company is perfectly reasonable.

The morning paper reports that the Triad region is now at “full employment”, which is completely bogus. As usual, the official unemployment figures exclude anyone who’s given up looking for work and completely ignore the quality of the jobs in question. A Ph.D. engineer who’s serving coffee at Starbucks part-time is counted the same as a Ph.D. engineer working full-time as an engineer at $150,000 per year. What actually matters isn’t the unemployment rate; it’s the full-time non-government employment rate, which is now at historic lows. Working part-time shouldn’t count, and “working” for the government certainly shouldn’t.

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Wednesday, 4 February 2015

10:14 – Barbara is going out this afternoon to pick up the sticks and small branches that fell during the wind storm the other day that caused our power to fail. Right now, she’s in the den watching The Killing on Netflix streaming while she fills 150 bottles of heirloom lima bean seeds for biology kits. After that, I’ll have more bottles for her to label, thousands of them.

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Tuesday, 3 February 2015

08:31 – When Barbara mentioned to her physical therapist yesterday that she planned to go back to work four weeks after her surgery, he said that just didn’t happen with knee replacements. At least six weeks, he said, and often eight. Four was unheard of. She told him that she’d gone back to work four weeks after her first knee replacement in October 2011, and he was very surprised.

The refrigerator is doing fine, so far. Of course, it hasn’t had time for much frost to form and for the auto-defrost function to melt the ice and let it run down into the refrigerator section.

I read a short article on Obama’s proposed $4 trillion budget. I think he needs to simplify things considerably. What if everyone’s paycheck, dividends, interest, profits, and so on just went directly to the federal government, which could then just give each person whatever it thought they deserved? That would eliminate the “income inequality” that progressives are so concerned about, because everyone would have nothing.

12:35 – Well, I’m now running Linux Mint 17.1 KDE, which is an LTS version. The system had been acting hinky for several days. Yesterday the power failed for an hour or so. When I tried to reboot the system it gave some disk errors before it finally booted. I made backups of all my data while it was still limping along. This morning it died completely. The drive was a Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB that had about 18 months of run time on it. I wish I’d had a Hitachi spare, but all I had was an unused Seagate Barracuda 2.0 TB drive, so that’s what I installed.

I had been running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS because Linux Mint didn’t have their LTS version available when I installed Ubuntu. I checked and found that their 17.1 is an LTS version based on Ubuntu 14.04, so I went ahead and installed the 64-bit KDE version. It’s updating right now. I’ll get my data restored to the new drive this afternoon.

All of which reminds me that I need to do a section in the prepping book on using Linux on desktops and notebooks. In a situation where the Internet may be down, the last thing anyone needs is a computer running Windows that decides it has to phone home to Microsoft before it’ll work.

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Monday, 2 February 2015

09:18 – Barbara is doing well, but I think she’s going stir crazy. She has a doctor appointment in about 10 days. Assuming he approves her to drive, she’ll be going back to work the next day.

We cleaned out the upstairs refrigerator/freezer yesterday morning, stored all the stuff in large styrofoam coolers with ice packs, and let the thing defrost completely. It has been leaking water from the freezer compartment down into the refrigerator. You can find anything on YouTube. I did a Google search for ‘Whirlpool gold leaking water from freezer to refrigerator’ and found a couple of videos that illustrated how to fix it. I’m hoping that the drain line was simply blocked with ice rather than foreign material. This morning all appeared dry, so we plugged it back in and reloaded the contents of the freezer and refrigerator. If it does it again, I’ll take more serious steps.

I’ll spend today building subassemblies and science kits.

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Sunday, 1 February 2015

08:10 – Barbara may have overdone it a little yesterday. Her knee is bothering her more than it has been lately. Last night, she tried using 50 mg tramadol rather than 5 mg oxycodone. She said that one tramadol didn’t do much for the pain. Taking a second one helped some, but not as well as one 5 mg oxycodone. But the pain is gradually decreasing and she thinks she has enough oxycodone left to cover the worst of it.

I didn’t get around to doing laundry yesterday, so I’ll do it today. I’m sure Barbara will want to clean house, but she won’t over do it.

Kit sales have slowed down a lot, as expected for this time of year. We did about 73% of our total January revenue in the first half of the month. If history is any indication, this slower pace will continue through June. In the third quarter, our revenue should be more than the first two quarters combined. The good news is that the slower pace will give me more time to do things other than building and shipping kits.

10:48 – I noticed that I’m running low on Zippo lighter fluid. As a pipe smoker, I go through a lot of it. I have to refill my lighter every day or so. I’ve been using actual Zippo-branded fluid, but in the past I’d used everything from 95% ethanol to wood alcohol to Coleman fuel to unleaded gasoline to VM&P naphtha.

The real Zippo fluid comes in 12 fluid ounce cans that cost $7 or $8. Looking at the Zippo MSDS, their fluid is indistinguishable from VM&P naptha, which costs about $8 per quart or $15 per gallon at big box home centers. So, rather than paying three to five times as much for the Zippo-branded stuff, I just refilled my lighter with VM&P naphtha. As expected, it burns indistinguishably from the Zippo fluid. Same flame height and color, and if anything it actually ignites more easily than the official fuel.

I carry a Zippo lighter (or two) routinely, and gave Barbara one of the propane-fueled Zippos to keep in her purse. There’s also a liquid-fuel Zippo lighter in each of our car emergency kits, along with a 4-ounce can of Zippo fluid. But I think for routine use I’m going to keep using VM&P naphtha.

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