It's not all bad news...

You came for the drugs, and I said nothing, because I had no drugs.
You came for the cigarettes, and I said something, because I saw where this was going.
You came for my food, and I am getting really pissed off.

Slate:

The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

Great. Now we are treating poor people like they are unable to make their own eating choices, so the LA City Council bans fast food for them. This is a huge, HUGE, leap in the direction of government controlling every aspect of our lives. If they can make rules so that poor people can't have fast food restaurants, then they can tell rich people that they have to donate some of the land they own to government projects. Or tell people that commute to work that they can't live more than 5 miles away from work. Really how far are we away from socialism? 10, 15 years?
We need real change in the government, not "Change" like Obama says, but real, freedom loving, change. Republicans and Democrats can't deliver that.

On a lighter note; Playing soccer while wearing binoculars:

Beijing- Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

From Yahoo News:

Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive websites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted on Wednesday.

Brilliant. Whoever let China host the Olympics should be fired. China has done nothing that it promised yet we still let them hold the Olympics. We should just break up the Olympic sports this year and hold them at sites around the world, and let China sit in their Bird's Nest all by themselves.

I guess, unless, this counts for reducing pollution:

Totem Destroyer

I know that you have been looking for a good time wasting game, well look no further, your search has resulted in one result, this one. The name of the game is Totem Destroyer, and it is much like Jenga, but instead of worrying about making the tower fall down your only concern is to keep the golden totem off the ground. Each level you need to destroy a certain number of blocks, the trick of the game is to get the tower to collapse in a certain way to save the idol. Quite fun I do say. Play on!

Buggy

Currently my days at work are training and bug reporting. The first half of the day I spend reading about some aspect of the program and working through the examples that they have. The latter half of the day I spend entering in bugs that I find in the program, or making suggestions about how I think the program can be improved.

Well, last Friday I found a problem were the program was clearly not performing correctly, and this was not a small part either, this was like a major cornerstone of the program that was not working right. At first I was excited, because I found something very important while being at work for only a month. Then I kinda got scared, because if this was actually happening the program has serious issues. It was kinda like discovering a highly communicable deadly disease that eventually will kill everyone, it is a very important discovery -and now we're all going to die.

So I brought the issue up with Danny (programmer/statistician extraordinaire) and asked him what he thought, he got worried about it and had me show him exactly what was going on. So I showed him and sure enough the results weren't the expected results. We ran through all sorts of combinations and possible scenarios about why the program was failing. We couldn't come up with what was going wrong, so he decided to head back up and try to figure it out. As I was closing down the analysis he noticed that I had a check box selected that shouldn't had been way back on an early dialog box.

Dang it. I selected the box early in the morning when I was working with some other stuff and never unselected it because I had just been working with the same analysis all day, and then when I got sidetracked I forgot about it. That box meant that a whole different batch of assumptions were made and the program was actually performing quite well. Call off the CDC that deadly virus was just some soda I spilled on the microscope slide.

Grumble, grumble.

Fruitastic

Fruit is one of my favorite things to eat, so I think it is high time to give credit to the king of all fresh food.





My 10 favorite fresh fruits are:
1. Cherry
2. Strawberry
3. Blueberry
4. Kiwi
5. Guava
6. Nectarine
7. Lime
8. Pineapple
9. Plum
10. Raspberry

Flavorings are a different story, some are very good; here are my 10 favorite flavorings:
1. Melon
2. Apricot
3. Blueberry
4. Goji
5. Peach
6. Acai
7. Loganberry
8. Cranberry
9. Plum
10. Apple

But there are some flavorings that I can't stand:
1. Black Cherry
2. Blue Raspberry
3. Orange
4. Lime (In most cases, in Skittles it is ok)

I also need to give Coconut flavoring a shoutout, it isn't a fruit but it is mighty tasty, and the official flavor of summer.

Hurray for fruit!

Something Strange This Way Comes

Got 5 minutes? Watch this video, it will blow your mind. If you already know about the experiment skip a minute or two, but don't miss the end of the video. I did this experiment in a physics class at K-State, but I never heard of taking the experiment one step further:



After a couple minutes of thinking the best answer I came up with was that the world is based on infinite approximations, and so things that should happen, do happen. However, when we observe something, it isn't an approximation anymore and we see one instance of the process that is usually approximated. So there is something to us that is different than the rest of matter, there has to be, it's not like putting a coffee cup next to the slits makes light act different...

I need to know more about this. I would assume they tested this with the machine that was used for observations turned on and off, and that gave them different results. But what if the data is collected and then immediately destroyed so that no-one can ever see it, then how does the light act? What if the recording machine has a random number generator that turns it off and on, but no one knows the number that it picks, or if the machine is ever off or on. Can we observe how the light particle acted to tell if the machine was on or off?

Some people think that science will at some point eliminate the need for God, to me the more we learn about science the more it proves that there is God.

The universe is more amazing than we can imagine, and we barely know anything about it.

Mighty Cheer

Do you know what is worse than getting a song stuck in your head? Getting a song stuck in your head that you made up during a dream and it isn't good in the first place.

In my dream I am at a stadium attending a cheering contest, however instead of the cheerleaders getting judged it is the crowd that is getting judged about who has the best crowd cheers. (Like the Wabash for K-State.) Well after a crowd cheer of Partyvillie (I don't remember how the cheer goes, but I do remember that each cheerleader had a letter on her uniform that spelled to spell out Partyvillie) came the stupid cheer that got stuck in my head.

The cheer goes: "Mighty the horse was a horse, of course" the tune to sing it too sounds familiar but I can't place it. During the cheer people in the crowd get tossed up by other people and they yell "woah!" when thrown into the air. Yeah, it is lame, but it has been stuck in my head for going on an hour now.

I think the only more annoying cheer than the one I just made up is the "Boomer Sooner".

The Stock Market Game.

This is a game that I thought up of to play at work yesterday. It works pretty well because when the window for the Internet browser minimized the Dow is still displayed and updated about every three minutes on the tab. (At least on Firefox)

You get $1000 to buy stocks of the Dow Profits.

The market change can be found here:

Yahoo Stocks

You can buy and sell stocks at anytime, you just have to use the current price.

So for example the current Dow change is at +61.72, so using my $1000 I can buy 16 stocks at $61.72, with $12.84 left over. If the Dow change ever crosses zero, you lose all of your stocks.

If the prices are in the negative, just play like they are positive, but remember anytime the price crosses zero you lose all of your stocks.

The person with the most money at the end of the day wins.

Yesterday I ended up with about $2 left, hopefully I can do better today.

Charles!

Nicole's mom, Jayme and Baby Nicole came down this last weekend to help out around the house, the big task being to fix the fence. A good time was had by all.
But that is not why I called you here today. You see, Baby Nicole has quite a few uber cute ways to say words. One is "Yesh", another is "Dannie", but the best is:



Kinda reminds me of this.

p.s. work is fine, but nothing to write home about.

real world, day 4

The past couple of days at work has been reading over manuals and books about various aspects of the program. Which, at is best is mildly interesting, and it's worst is very very boring. But today I got a bit of "real work" testing out certain aspects of the program to make sure that they are working right. It's not really something I want to do all the time, but it beats reading manuals all day.

The commute to work takes between 15-20 minutes, depending on the weather... it seems like people in Tulsa are afraid of the rain so when it is wet out the drive drops from 65mph to 35mph. But it really isn't that bad overall.

There are a good amount of 'lunchy' restaurants around the office like Panera, Qdoba, and Quizno's so that gives me a good excuse to get out of the office for an hour each day during lunch time. Most of the people just bring lunch to work, but I prefer to hunt mine down... by ordering a sandwich.

We still are short a washer and dryer here at home which means that, at some point, we will run out of clean clothes, but for now our clothes reserves are still holding out. If we do get low on clothes I am thinking about just buying more clothes instead of going to the laundry mat. I need a reason to get some new stuff anyways.

I know, I'm not a Stat Rock Star yet, but you just wait.

real world, day 1

Today I started my new job down in Tulsa. The day was filled with paperwork and reading up on the software. It wasn't all that interesting, but hopefully as I start to get some actual work the job will get more fun. The worst part, as expected, is the large amount of time that I have to spend out of my day at the job. I'm not sure that the "get alot of money to buy a big house that you never get to be in" is the life for me, but we will see what the job has to offer... it has the possibility to be really interesting, and hopefully soon it will be.

Aunty Em!

It seems that Manhattan (Kansas) threw a tantrum because I left and got ht by a tornado last night. K-State received some heavy damage in parts and there were some houses destroyed, but as far as I have heard there were no deaths or major injuries.


You can read more about it here:
Jenette's blog (and original post about the storm) she has some pics up now.
Manhattan Mercury's website
K-State's website
Kansas State Collegian's website

If The Truck's A-Rockin'

Well all of our stuff is down in Tulsa now, but we are missing a couple of necessary things, like cable TV, the internet, washer and dryer, and a refrigerator... most of those will be solved by this weekend. Hopefully.

The move down was about as least fun as possible. We had to skirt storms all the way down which had very high winds. The truck rocked side to side so much that it "bottomed out" twice and I had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid from tipping over. By the time we pulled into Wichita (the halfway point) the tornado sirens were going off and we got to spend a couple minutes in a basement while we decided where we wanted to eat dinner.

But besides trying to figure things out in a new city without the internet (how did people survive ten years ago?) The rest of the weekend in Tulsa was good. Now were are in Manhattan so that Nicole can defend her master's report on Tuesday. Then it is back down to Tulsa "for good" so that we can be there for the fridge delivery on Wednesday. Then to start the new job on Monday.

This is what it felt like driving the truck, but with more rocking back and forth... and going about 60-70mph. (My tires never left the pavement.)

Move along little doggies

Today we are packing up and heading out to Tulsa, here is the part of the house that we lived in for the last couple of months.

Rural Living

I have some stuff ready for another post, but the recent thunderstorm has knocked out the internet (and cable tv) from the house. So when it comes back up I'll get up a post.