Tonya and PQBON's WebLog
Some time in the next few hours our DSL will disappear and the data center will move to Fremont. Following the datacenter will be us.
We have already moved most non-essential computer hardware and most of our kitched and other misc boxes. My dirtbikes have moved and next is the street bikes and rest of computers. Tomorrow the truck and people show up (thank you people!) and we move everything else from Pacificia to Fremont!
United Press International - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper
The statement cited evaluations by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and National Institute for Drug Abuse, which "concluded that no sound scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States, and no animal or human data supported the safety or efficacy of marijuana for general medical use."
So let me sumerize... The FDA which wouldn't approve the morning after pill despite HUGE overwelming medical evidence that it should due to political preasure is now claiming there is no medical evidence to support medicinal pot. In my mind they have already burned through all their credibility and I don't believe that they aren't pushing the Bush agenda with this conclusion. I just flat don't believe them.
Humuhumu set to recapture throne as Hawaii's state fish - The Honolulu Advertiser - Hawaii's Newspaper
The humuhumunukunukuapuaa officially lost its title as the state fish more than a decade ago, but is set to reclaim the honor.
This is for Scrubs Fans:
Christmas video from the Blanks... You will have to watch an Ad but it is worth it.
Ted's CD [the Blanks] is music and audio tracks from Scrubs.
This was so familar it was scary. I can't even count how often Tonya and I have gone through this dance or some variation
It normally starts with: "Baby, wouldn't it be cool if we could do XYZ? With PDQ we can!" or "Baby, PDQ does XYZ! With XYZ we could end world hunger!"
This normally ends in me spending large ammounts of money... Most of the time we get some semblance of XYZ but rarely have we ended world hunger.
Here is a list of things aquired with this method:
The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights released a new study today of rising gasoline prices in California that found corporate markups and profiteering are responsible for spring price spikes, not rising crude costs or the national switchover to higher-cost ethanol, as the oil industry claims.
So basically this means that oil execs lied to congress. Isn't that purgery? Didn't we (the us) try to impeach a sitting president for lieing to congress?
In cases where there is a small pool of suppliers of essential goods I'm very much against charging what ever the market will bare to maximize profits. I think the oil companies should be punished for this behavior. They won't since the sitting king is an exoil man as is his puppeteer.
I have great memories from my child hood of target shooting. I loved to shoot rifle's, pistols, air guns, you name it. However, so often accidents happen. I don't think gun control will have an effect on crime, at least not for a long time... that cat is already out of the bag. To control crime you would not only have to control the guns but the ammo since making a gun isn't that hard, if you aren't looking for quality. However, accidents like the one in this article point to the bigger problem. Just like every gun owner this guy is "always very safe with the wepon." So safe he shot him self. He wasn't practicing gun safety. If he was he wouldn't have pulled the trigger but opend the gun so that 1) it couldn't fire by simply pulling the trigger, loaded or not, 2) can easily be identified as not loaded. There in lies the problem the one time you don't follow gun safety rules is the one time something happens. Luckily the gun only shot himself. He could have been pointing the gun any where when it went off. Yes, he was pointing the gun toward the ground like he should have been but since he made one mistake (not properly clearing the chamber) he could just have easily not been pointing the gun in the right direction also.
No that isn't to say that I don't see value in guns. While I don't see self, property, or other defense as valid justification for guns. I do see value in hunting and target shooting. Hence my being on the fence.
Linked content copied in extended...
Police were also called to the scene of an accidental shooting early Sunday morning at White Castle, located at the corner of Vincennes and Spring streets in New Albany.
According to a police report, an officer responded and discovered Michael D. Lanham, 26, outside his car in the parking lot with "a large amount of blood" on the side of his leg. An ambulance crew was already at the restaurant.
Lanham told police he was sitting in the drive-thru and ejected a round from the chamber of his .40 caliber Smith and Wesson semi-automatic handgun. He then pulled the magazine out of the weapon, replaced the round, pulled the trigger and accidentally shot himself in the leg. He told police he was talking to his girlfriend, who was also in the car, and "wasn't paying attention."
The bullet entered his left leg through the calf and exited above his ankle.
White Castle employees said he was placing his order into the drive-thru speaker when they heard the gun go off and then a woman scream.
Lanham was taken by ambulance to University of Louisville Hospital where he was treated and released. The police report didn't indicate whether or not Lanham was a New Albany resident.
Police confiscated his weapon, but Lanham was able to pick up the gun after he was released from the hospital.
Lanham had an Indiana handgun permit and according to an NAPD spokesman, committed no crime.
The woman with Lanham at the time of the incident told police the shooting was "entirely accidental" and that he is "always very safe with the weapon."
Jason had had what seemed like an unbeatable, untreatable addiction to, alternately, heroin and oxycontin. It was a heartbreaking, trying and puzzling five-year stretch for me, so I can't imagine how bad it was for him (well, that's not entirely true. Mewes would periodically flash self-awareness with statements like "If I'm still like this when I turn thirty, I should probably kill myself.").
This is a great essay/blog series about Jason's descent into drug addiction and his struggle to return. You can feel the how frustraiting it was to deal with him, and how much dispare he caused for the people that loved him. You can also see that Kevin Smith's wife put up with WAY more shit then most people would have.
My only complaint was how long it took Kevin to post it. He dragged it on and on... each time ending it as a cliff hanger.
Easter turducken
Most traditional holidays are syncretised perversions of even older traditions, which then get secularized into excuses to eat a whole bunch. Christmas falls, not coincidentally, close to the winter solstice, and borrows heavily from earlier winter festivals, featuring lots of gingerbread, candy canes, traditional hams and large family feasts. Thanksgiving, being largely a continuation of post-harvest feasts in Europe, has always been about eating. We have, of course, taken this to ridiculous extremes with turducken, a Thanksgiving dish prepared by...
This is awesome. I know what I'm going to do with my easter candy!
So Katie weighs 13lbs and 1 ounce and is 23 1/4 inches long. That puts her in the 90 and 85 percentiles of babies in the US. Her Dr. was impressed by her strength and that she's already rolling from her belly to back. That doesn't usually happen till about 4 months. Then she had to see the nurse and get 4 shots. 2 in each leg. :-( She started screaming with the first shot and didn't breath again till the final shot was done. She turned bright red. Luckily, she started calming down as soon as I was able to pick her up. She's been very clingy since we got home and had a hard time falling asleep. So she's sleeping in my arms and I'm typing with one hand.
A very cute thing happened today. Katie really looked at Zoe. They looked into each others eyes. Cuteness- Katie smiled at Zoe. It was so adorable. I wanted to get a picture but Zoe jumped down and spoiled the moment.
I'm really looking forward to this weekend. The Easter Bunny gets to visit Katie for the first time. She won't get it at all, but I'm really excited. Plus, she gets to go to Grandma and Grandpa's house and finally meet her Uncle Chris and soon to be Aunt Deidra. I also have a friend who is very excited to meet her this weekend. It will be a very busy weekend.
I just finished building a media center PC. It convinced me to rebuild my media center. I bough mine 3 years ago as a mid/low end setup with the intention of upgrading over time. The upgrades have yet to happen but that is changing. I'm going to replace the TV now that I have a media PC with more to come later...
Open issues: Cable, Digital Cable, or Satalite? Tivo Series 3? DirectTivo? TivoHD? How do you get the Media center PC to work with anything not broadcast HD?
See extended for what I'm doing...
I decided that I needed a new TV. I made a list of things I wanted... I started wanting a 50+ inch screen but after doing some shopping around and talking to my wife it was clear that 50" would be too big for the room. I decided to start looking at 42" TVs. The next thing I wanted was native 1080p support. While there is very little 1080p content right now this TV needs to last many many years. It turns out that there are very few 1080p TVs on the market right now. None of the current crop of plasma less then 50" is 1080p. None of the projection TVs is 1080p. However, some of the LCD TVs are 1080p. The LCD TVs aren't as bright as the plasma TVs or projection TVs, however, they are very clear and sharp. The TV I have settled on is a Westing House 42" LCD TV - LVM42-W2. This isn't specifically a TV so much as it is a monitor. It has no tuner, not digital nor NTSC. All the reviews are good, I like the look, and it works well with computers and DVDs.
OK so here is our media center:
Kathryn is growing a changing everyday. She now gets cranky more often... She doesn't like to go to sleep but gets very tired. She gets cranky when she gets tired. She really seems to not want to sleep when the sun is up. She also gets cranky when she gets hungry. She doesn't seem to believe that we won't let her starve. Along with her new crank, she is also getting happy. She smiles and babbles, and the other day she laughed for the first time.
A big change for her is sleeping in her crib. She no longer sleeps in her bassinet but in her crib in her room. This has led to many changes. For one she will now lay in her crib awake talking to her mobile happy and content. She can also put herself to sleep if she isn't already upset. She doesn't need to be held or rocked to sleep unless she is upset. Then she need to be held and rocked or walked to calm her down and put her to sleep.
She is also getting bigger. She now weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of half a ton... OK, I'm kidding. We have estimated that she is now about 14 or 15 lbs. This is nice because that puts her in bigger more absorbant dipers. In the past if we had her in our bed and she was asleep she would overflow her diaper and wind up wetting our bed. (She never seemed to overflow her diaper in her bassinet just our bed.) There was one week where ever day we had to change the sheets. This is a welcome change. We can now bring her into our bed in the morning to nap and play without worrying about her wetting OUR bed.
Tonya has start buying more and more edutainment toys for Kathryn. She now has the complete library or Baby Einstein. She also has a colection of toys and books aimed at making her a smart baby.
Thats about it. This week she is going have a whole slew of shots at her Dr. apt., go to her first Seder, go on her first long trip over night (Sacramento), and celebrate Easter.
The body that runs it has now decided that it is about time the waterway had a major refit.
It has approved plans for a $7.5bn (£4.3bn) widening of the vital trade route.
Two new 3-chamber locks will be built at the Pacific and Atlantic ends of the canal, creating a third lane of traffic capable of handling large container ships and tankers that have previously been too wide.
Workers will also prepare new approach channels and dredge existing ones, ensuring that the canal can take the biggest cargo vessels.
The project will take about seven years and employ up to 8,000 people.
This will through the classes of large ships out of wack. There is currently a class of ship called a Panamax designed to JUST fit into the Panama canal system. I belive there either are or will be ships that are bigger then Suezmax (the largest class now) in the near future. That will suddenly make Panamax bigger then Suezmax... I wonder if they will introduce a PanamaxII or something. Since they aren't going to retire the old lock system they are just introducing new locks they could just add a new designation for ships not too big for the new locks but too big for the old locks.
From wikipedia:
The following designations are not exclusive to tankers and are applied to a broad range of cargo vessels, however some were developed initially for tankers.CNN.com - Patient's survival bad for business - Apr 4, 2006
A company whose whole bussiness model was buying life insurance from aids victims in exchange for paying life and health insureance premiums has tried to back out now that aids drugs allow much longer life spans.
A woman who contracted aids in the early 90s but had no living family to collect her life insurance bought into the program. The company was expect a quick turn around and a sizeable profit. Now that their contractually protected investment has cost them money they are trying to break the contract.
Cal Trans has shutdown devil's slide.
From the articles it seems like it may be pretty bad. There have been both mud and rock slides including large bolders. However, that isn't the big problem. Apparently the land under the road is washing away causing cracking and sink holes. The new tunnel isn't going to be done for 4 or 5 years (2011, if they meet their schedule).
Coverage focuses on commuting problems however, this also introduces safety problems. HW1 gets closed down regularly for serious accidents. This effectivly will now cut off the communities north of the problem (assuming the closure is north of 92/1 intersection).
Image from KGO
