Two darling teenage girls out for a walk saw a stack of cages containing feral cats. As a light hearted lark, they poured lighter fluid on one and set it on fire, laughing at their uproarious hi-jinx.
It was 38 degrees Celsius here on Wednesday. It was about 32 today, and about the same on Monday and Tuesday. I like warm weather, but “warm” to me is 25 degrees.
We’d probably have central air conditioning in our house if this kind of weather was common. Instead, we make do. Our house has “top opening” windows, so in-window air conditioning isn’t an option for us either. I bought a portable AC unit a couple of years ago, the type with the big hoses you are supposed to route through the window…but guess what? There isn’t any real way to mount the hoses / vents in top opening windows either. I can jury rig something with tin foil and cardboard (I’m serious), but it is generally more hassle than it’s worth.
I spent an hour or so today looking at xkcd, which is a stick-person comic for geeks. Some of the humour is somewhat esoteric: math and statistics jokes, for example. But there were plenty of gems. This one is my favorite so far:
Apple learned a great deal from the battery complaints that users had about the early iPods. First, instead of just making it challenging to get at the battery in the iPhone, they have actually soldered it in. Second, they have announced the battery replacement cost and policy almost concurrent with the release of the phone itself (Apple: iPhone Battery Replacement Plan Details – Gizmodo ).
I read a blog entry today giving an opinion regarding a book on the topic of whether or not user-created content is killing our culture (Is the web killing our culture? – (37signals) ). My immediate reaction to the topic of the article was that the author of the book is probably a professional writer who resents the intrusion of all the bloody amateurs into his career plans.
As a Canadian, I suffer from every little twitch our American friends make. And as I see more and more evidence of the devolution of that once free (if somewhat arrogant) nation into fear-crippled police state, I feel I have cause to worry.
I captured this photo of an elusive wild mammal in our backyard about three weeks ago
Is it a Sasquatch? An alien? Elvis??!!
It took me over two weeks, which is a long time for me, but I finished reading War and Peace (the Project Gutenberg edition) yesterday. I even wrote a one paragraph summary of my impressions of the book. I’m only a century or so late 🙂
I hear you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. It’s tough trying to look like you can do something to actually solve the terrorist problem. Especially since anyone can be a terrorist: white guys, Asian guys, or maybe Islamic guys. Heck, you need a big list to keep track of whose who, and you need to update it daily…
I’ve been working a lot lately, scrambling to catch up with some application programming work. Part of this is a result of being behind the technological curve in terms of the particular programming environment I’m working in (J2EE/WebSphere/Hibernate/Spring). Suffice it to say I’ve been working some overtime.