Lawmakers Set Deal on Fuel Economy Rules – New York Times
Whoopee!!! So 13 YEARS from now, the United States will catch up with Europe and China. Meanwhile, a few hundred million Bangladeshis will probably drown from the climate change that we’re primarily responsible for, and Abercrombie & Fitch will need to find somewhere else to have their clothes made.
I reported earlier this year how I had earned a total of 56 cents in Amazon associate revenues in the previous two years. Well, since I last November, I have amassed $2.20 in associate revenues! One person bought a product I was actually pitching, Alan Bergman’s Lyrically CD. But the bulk of those earnings have come from two sales of an energy product–5 Hour Energy Berry, which is completely random…
Mothers lawyer: Child killed for failing to say please – CNN.com
Trenor [mother], 19, told police she and her husband killed the girl in July and hid her body in a shed before dumping it in the bay.
Stickler [attorney] said Zeigler [father], 24, was overwhelmed by his sudden fatherhood and didn’t know what behavior to expect from a toddler.
Until there are no more “Baby Graces” out there getting beaten to death and similarly tortured and abused by their parents, pro-lifers ought to take a break from having their lives revolve around the unborn and try to focus on the kids this country already has and doesn’t know how to take care of. And then once we have a utopia, and every child can grow up in a loving, prosperous home, maybe they can revisit their anti-abortion crusade. In the meantime, they choose election officials with whom they disagree with on most issues solely because of their fetal obsession.
And on a similar note, when is the last time you heard about those GAY PARENTS who beat their kids to death? I’ve heard plenty of tales of mom and dad starving the kids to death. When is the last time you heard about mom and mom or dad and dad beating the kids to death?
I don’t play video games. I haven’t owned a console since the original 8-bit (or was it 16?) Nintendo with its original Super Mario Bros. (I played on friends’ N64s in college and beyond). This isn’t to say I didn’t used to play an awful lot and can’t get addicted. (I spent a great deal of my senior year playing Wave Racer and too many free evenings in later years playing Tetris. I think my preference may be for simple games. I came across a link to this flash game Desktop Tower Defense while reading the Livejournal of mcsnee. I’ve probably spent about ten hours on it now over the past few days. Experience game players might quickly realize the best strategy, and it’s taken me awhile to figure out how to get better, but I keep improving, and I suppose that’s what makes any game addicting.
Should you read this and begin playing yourself, I created a group called “Toastie”, which, regardless if anyone else ever plays, I can use to keep track of my own scores.
I really ought to be doing a thousand other things, like figuring out what to do with the remainder of my life. But I can’t stop playing this damn game…
I believe there’s a book called exactly that, and I may have read it five or six or seven years ago. I suppose I should look it up and link to it, in case there’s a gold mine to be made by referring folks to it. Hmmm…maybe it was called something else. I don’t think it was this (but Toastiest highly recommends it everyone nonetheless): Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow by Marsha Sinetar. I mean, I thought the whole point of doing what you love is that you’re deciding you don’t quite care whether or not the money follows. Do what you love AND make money, too? I’m not so ambitious. But if you are, I’m sure it’s absolutely a fabulous book, and if you, dear reader, were to purchase a paperback through this link, I’d be well on my way to doing what I love (blogging about whatever the brain synapses deem blogworthy) and rolling in the dough! (Perhaps I could afford a ciabatta roll at Whole Foods!)
Anyway, my point…where was I doing with this post?
Ah, yes, I was just compiling my weekly Toastie Radio Top 25. I do this every single week, even if few listeners bother going to the website (well, you can even do it from this website and never even listen to the broadcast). Why? Because I love playing with rankings and statistics. The geek in me has liked doing stuff like this since I was a kid, when I’d play Olympic Decathlon on my Apple ][ Plus, as six different TV charactes, and keep statistics on their results. And later I’d play Micro League Baseball with mixes of real teams, All-Star teams with real players from various teams, and completely fake team composed of…television characters. I’d play a sixteen-game season and keep stats, with pencil and paper. And then I’d type it all up with my Apple word processing program and print out league stats results.
So getting songs voted on for Toastie Radio and publishing a weekly Top 25 is my way of tapping into this interest.
So maybe I should’ve been an actuary…or a statistician of some kind…or I should’ve…No, not gonna play the coulda-shoulda-woulda game. What do I need to do starting right now to lead myself to a job or career that involves this type of analytical, but fun, kind of thinking? (Actuaries really don’t do anything fun, do they?) This is a rhetorical question. I’m just thinking aloud. Math courses, grad school, books to read? I don’t know. And I’m thinking aloud in Toastiest as opposed to a private journal because I’m operating under the experimental premise that I might be more likely to act on idea if I have these ideas out in the open and not in some sort of vacuum.
Maybe I should’ve done a web search to solve this problem. There seem to be lots of solutions posted. (Alas, I don’t have a potato handy). Well, here’s what I did…
So when I unscrewed the light bulb in the ceiling fixture of my study (officially the front “bedroom”), what my hand held after was just the glass part of the bulb, not the metal-base/screw-part. (I’ll confess that I don’t even know what that part of the bulb is called. Yes, I do need a remedial living-on-my-own-course. But I digress…) Left in the socket was the screw-part and a wire or two dangling out. I thought shutting of the light switch was probably a good idea.
I fumbled around for a good half-hour with a wrench, bending the remaining metal every which way, but not unscrewing it at all. I did persist, though, eventually getting the right grip with the wrench such that I could turn the bulb-part, and I eventually removed it.
I am hoping that this will be the first and last time I ever have to do this, since this was with an old-school bulb, one of the last ones I’ve replaced with a flourescent.
Oh, and I’m back in write-about-whatever-without-regard-to-relevance mode…
It’s like TNT, circa 1999, for those without cable.
Today’s schedule:
Michael (1996) (John Travolta, Andie McDowell (who sings a fine Pie song), William Hurt)
The American President (1995) (Michael Douglas, Annette Bening).
(Well, if it were TNT, the movies would repeat tonight, and tomorrow…and next weekend).
UPDATE Well, if it were TNT, Michael J. Fox’s character probably wouldn’t have to say, “You’re a United States congressman for the love of MIKE!” or “I’m gonna make a list of everyone who tried to STINK us this week!”
No, not really. But my disheveled bungalow winds up in the below-average-appreciation column as Durham does their one-every-seven-years housing revaluations. So my tax bill, paltry as it is now, should go down in a year, maybe like $50!
2008 vs. 2001 valuation: +20.7% (+24.0% for all Durham residential properties)
2008 tax valuation vs. 9/2007 purchase price: +15.4%
And the second figure just means that my disheveled bungalow is indeed disheveled, and I can see how investing 15% of the purchase price into repairs would probably get it valued at the tax valuation. Of course, I have absolutely no idea how much my house is really worth, given the convoluted process by which I purchased my house.
Barry has a popular thread on this topic, for any non-Durhamites who don’t really know what I’m talking about.
At what point do you abandon a hobby you’ve had for six years? Toastie Radio grew out of a need I had to have my music with me at work without bringing CDs or copies of MP3s to work. I’d just stream a playlist from home. When I realized that others from around the world would tune in, I put some effort into it…sometimes. Sometimes, I’ve let the project languish for months without any changes. By changes, I mean playlist changes, new music, promos, website updates, website features, and a general effort to improve the “product’”. I’d measure my success by my Shoutcast ranking, until Shoutcast stopped keeping track. Shoutcast stopped caring a number of years ago. There has never been much in the way of support or documentation for the (free) software.
Over the past year, I’ve tracked average point-in-time listenership. I was getting around 20 back in May, but then it dropped off to around 13 when I changed servers. I used to just pay for renting a Shoutcast server instance on a remote server. Now I rent a whole server, on which I can presumably do much more than just the song streaming. But I don’t now what to do with it all.
I certainly don’t need an online radio station to listen to my music collection. iTunes works just fine for that. And the whole idea of an online radio station, or any radio station for that matter, is a dying one, I think, since one has lots of options for either easily listening to their own music collection or finding a service that streams music specially tailored for one’s own interests. So given the lack of potential for this “medium” and my lack of ability to increase listenership, is it worth the time and expense to main this? I spent a good deal of time this past week trying to implement a new song-rating function which would improve upon the current one by allowing me to house the data on my own server. Mostly, I hoped this would allow me to allow website viewers to rate lots of songs on the site, not just the song currently playing. But my technical skills and patience wore thin, as I found too many drawbacks to the new tool. So no change.
Anyway, I could just dump these thoughts into the TR blog, but no one reads this; typing words into a void is tough for me these days. Despite my constant proclamations of zero-relevance, I manage a few readers here. So, for the vaults, I’ll also present the Toastie Radio Top 25, as of November 16, 2007. This is not to be confused with my own personal Top 25, although I’m a listener, so my votes figure into this.
| # | LW | Song | Avg(votes) | Weeks | Best |
| 1 | 1 | Alan Bergman – The Way We Were | 5.00 (8) | 6 | 1 |
| 2 | NR | Meat Loaf & Marion Raven – It’s All Coming Back to Me Now | 5.00 (7) | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 2 | Richard Marx – Right Here Waiting | 4.93 (14) | 24 | 1 |
| 4 | 3 | Evanescence – My Immortal | 4.92 (12) | 12 | 3 |
| 5 | 5 | Dido – White Flag | 4.91 (11) | 8 | 4 |
| 6 | 6 | Neil Diamond & Barbra Streisand – You Don’t Bring Me Flowers | 4.89 (9) | 8 | 4 |
| 7 | 8 | Everly Brothers – All I Have To Do Is Dream | 4.88 (8) | 16 | 2 |
| 7 | NR | Barenaked Ladies – One Week | 4.88 (8) | 1 | 7 |
| 9 | 11 | Coldplay – Clocks | 4.87 (15) | 10 | 2 |
| 10 | 9 | Ewan McGregor – Your Song | 4.86 (14) | 19 | 1 |
| 11 | 10 | Meat Loaf – Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad | 4.86 (7) | 6 | 8 |
| 12 | 12 | Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart | 4.85 (13) | 16 | 3 |
| 13 | 12 | U2 – Beautiful Day | 4.83 (12) | 16 | 9 |
| 14 | 14 | Alanis Morissette – Uninvited | 4.82 (11) | 19 | 6 |
| 14 | 15 | Barenaked Ladies – Call and Answer | 4.82 (11) | 19 | 15 |
| 16 | 15 | Bonnie Tyler – Holding Out for a Hero | 4.81 (16) | 22 | 1 |
| 17 | 6 | Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time | 4.80 (10) | 5 | 6 |
| 18 | 17 | Deep Blue Something – Breakfast at Tiffany’s | 4.78 (9) | 21 | 13 |
| 18 | 17 | Billy Joel – Piano Man | 4.78 (9) | 18 | 7 |
| 20 | 17 | Celine Dion & Luciano Pavarotti – I Hate You Then I Love You | 4.75 (8) | 8 | 12 |
| 20 | NR | A-ha – Take on Me | 4.75 (8) | 1 | 20 |
| 22 | 20 | Air Supply – Making Love Out of Nothing At All | 4.71 (7) | 3 | 20 |
| 22 | 20 | Coldplay – Warning Sign | 4.71 (7) | 3 | 20 |
| 24 | 23 | Meat Loaf – For Crying Out Loud (live) | 4.69 (13) | 18 | 16 |
| 25 | 3 | Bangles – Hazy Shade of Winter | 4.67 (12) | 10 | 2 |
| 25 | 24 | Bangles – Eternal Flame | 4.67 (12) | 25 | 8 |
| 25 | 24 | Bon Jovi – Bed Of Roses | 4.67 (12) | 19 | 10 |
| 25 | NR | Heart – Alone (live) | 4.67 (12) | 14 | 10 |
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