BunkBlog

Gloom, despair and repeats on me. Deep dark reruns, excessive reality (shows). If it weren’t for Stargate, I’d have no shows at all. Gloom, despair and repeats on me.

Alex gets a billion new shows on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon showing up on the DVR, while I get…a few episodes of That 70s Show that I missed years ago, and some old Stargate episodes. Hell, I can’t even count on Battlestar Galactica to make the summer “oh hell it’s hot” TV schedule better – it’s supposed to return in October. Thankfully the Dead Zone and 4400 are coming back soon, but what are they running, 10 or 12 episodes? *sigh*

We have a municipal pool here in beautiful San Angelo Texas, which opens tomorrow for the season. The hours are 11am-6pm on Saturdays, 1-6pm on Sundays, and 1-7pm the rest of the week (for open swim, which is all I’d care about for Alex). The pool closes for the season on the 13th of August.  So, it’s open 10 weeks of the year.  In west Texas.  Where it got to 100 degrees in April.  Where we use the air conditioning well into October most years. WTF?

What do you expect for 3 bucks per day, right?  So, what about the local swim & racquet club? It costs over 500 bucks for membership the first year (400 the following years – what a bargain for you). Their pool opened today (a day earlier!), and stays open until the 4th of September (three more weeks!). For five hundred bucks, I want to be able to swim on Christmas freakin’ Day, folks. At least the swim club pool is open 10-9 five days a week, and 1-9 on Sunday (like many things in West Texas, it’s inexplicably closed on Mondays).

The only way to use a pool here for the period when someone would reasonably want a pool to beat the heat is to own your own.  I live in bizarro-world.

Check this out.  The middle-school kids from Wall beat the Army for the first year ever.  They not only ran a total of nearly 104 miles over the course of the night, they also got faster as the relay progressed. Of course, at the end of the event, those 7th grade students were walking like I do when I’m feeling extra old.  hehe

The fact that this article is not accessible on-base is probably just a remarkable coincidence regarding AETC-mandated proxy-server updates or something.  Right.

Probably not safe for work.

Sex Toy or Baby Toy? – Take the Quiz

I got 10 of 15 correct.  Is that good or bad?

Apparently the First Lady is totally enveloped in the infamous Bush Bubble.

“I don’t really believe those polls. I travel around the country. I see people, I see their responses to my husband. I see their response to me,” she said.

Well, of course you don’t believe it. All the people you see around the country are hand-selected for their zeal. Does anyone in the Bush White House live in the “reality-based” world?

Make your own news!
Yes, I am easily amused.  Why do you ask?

For those keeping score at home, the following items are good, but time consuming:

• Sweet-and-sour Chicken tapas
• Glazed halves of cornish hens

The following items are good, and not too tough:

• Grilled shrimp with mango salsa
• Individual baked alaskas

And margaritas, beer, wine, cola, diet cola, iced water – always good things to have around.

And a dinner party down, with many dishes to clean.

BTW, the game “Battle of the Sexes” is rigged. The questions that only men are presumed to know are dead simple, while the questions that only women are presumed to know are so obscure even the women didn’t know them. WTF?

And now Cat has heard “The Doggie in the Window” – only took her 37 years. 🙂

Built one of Yamaha’s papercraft animals this weekend: a macaw. Now to let my hand uncramp from the knife-clenching. Of course, Alex now wants me to build a motorcycle. The macaw took three pieces of card stock; the motorcycles are over a dozen sheets each. Ouch.

So Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly. Maybe it was to be expected, if he’s the person described as the “person who now holds a powerful intelligence post” who is also a former lawmaker, who just so happens to be one of the participants in that whole sex scandal. You remember the Poker Party story, right? C’mon, it’s only been a couple days! You don’t remember the sex scandal that was all over the news this week? Oh, right. It wasn’t all over the news. Of course, that darned liberal media kept it from you. Which is really amazing, considering that the only people implicated are Republicans, but that liberal media is wily. They must just be biding their time, waiting for the next thing they can attack the President with.

What I can’t figure out is why all this stuff keeps happening at the Watergate Hotel. You’d think people would stop going there, what with the whole “every scandal has a -gate” thing. They don’t even have to make a stupid “Plamegate” or “Iran-contragate” out of it – it actually is the Watergate!

This list is the result of letting my coworkers select the music for a party. Uneven?

 

 

For you LJ users, a pack of new userpics.  Go for it, Mike!

Taking a cue from Bob Cringely, I have tweaked my site’s CSS pages so they now are automagically “printable” when used with any sort of modern browser. I rock.

It’s important to avoid licensing problems with potential illegal copies of Microsoft products. Billy Gates has acquired a company named AssetMetrix, which keeps track of your installed programs and snitches on you to the home office (Redmond?). The new version of Microsoft Office (2007, 2008, Vista, whatever) has a completely different interface than has ever been used before, and a new file format. Well, shoot – if you’re going to learn a new piece of software, why not the one that costs you bupkis?
There is no need to risk getting audited by the Business Software Alliance – just say NO to Microsoft.

I have monkey bread and you don’t!

Also, Godiva’s Raspberry Truffle ice cream is fanfreakintastic; pass it on.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. (1918)

Theodore Roosevelt

I can quit any time I want. It’s a good thing most of the programs on my MythTV box are set for “autoexpire when the drive gets full.” Here’s the latest status line.

297 programs, using 242 GB (246 hrs 31 mins) out of 345 GB.

Now, to be fair, I have a truly stupendous number of cartoons for the Boy, as well as a significant number of DVDs ripped to the hard drive (no need to mess with the disks, which is good if you’re six years old).

This week, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was shown driving off in a hydrogen-powered vehicle, and two blocks later hopping out and getting into his gigantic gas-guzzling SUV. Politicians being mendacious and venal is not news. But, the news continues to refer to the hydrogen “energy source” of the future.

Hydrogen is not and will never be an energy source. It is an energy storage system, like a battery that you can charge with a hose instead of an outlet. And, it’s not a very good replacement for gasoline anyway.

Gasoline stores nearly 10 killowatt-hours worth of power in a liter of space. Liquid hydrogen can only store one quarter that density. What’s amusing is that gasoline actually has more hydrogen embedded in it chemically per liter than liquid hydrogen does.  Yes, gasoline is a way to store and transport hydrogen that is more efficient than the raw hydrogen. Brain hurt yet?

If you were wondering about the other alternate fuel vehicles, liquid natural gas (which is an energy source) holds about 75% of the energy per liter as gasoline; liquid propane holds about the same.

So, why do I say hydrogen is not an energy source? Because, unlike natural gas or petroleum or coal, we don’t harvest or discover hydrogen. The way we produce hydrogen today is to create it from other molecules, through electrolysis (splitting water molecules), or microbes exhaling it, or gasification of peanut shells and the like. Regardless, the difference between making gasoline and making hydrogen is pretty stark. We drill for oil, and refine it to make gasoline. This wastes a little energy in the process, but is necessary because crude oil doesn’t explode very well (gasoline does explode under pressure very nicely). Assuming we use natural-gas fired electrical generators to make hydrogen, we would use the entirety of our current natural gas consumption to make the hydrogen to power the current level of transportation that uses gasoline.  Shoot, that leaves no electricity for keeping our houses lit and comfortable.  Well, whatever shall we do?

Current nuclear reactors are considered low-temperature reactors, and produce mostly hot water as waste. These reactors can produce electricity approximately four times more expensively as natural gas (which explains why nukes are so rare still). A new direct thermodynamic conversion can produce hydrogen with only a 30% penalty compared to natural gas (at least with today’s prices for natural gas – as NG becomes more expensive, nukes become more attractive). Japan, Korea, and China are all working on these and also on pebble-bed reactors. The Japanese estimate they’ll have an operational high-temperature reactor producing somewhere around 100-200 tons of hydrogen per day.

So, those hydrogen-powered cars are actually electric cars with hydrogen fuel-cells storing the energy which was originally produced by burning natural gas or oil, more likely than not. Any time you see “hydrogen-powered” in the news, think “hydrogen-battery electric” instead.

V for Vendetta fans (I’m looking at you, Joe) should get a kick out of C for Cookie, the Sesame Street version.  Oscar is the bad guy, Elmo is Evie, and Cookie Monster (obviously) is V.

I want everyone to remember…

Astoundingly accurate Love And Sex Life Prediction quiz. Try it and be amused or amazed. 🙂