| bailout |
[02 Oct 2008|04:06pm] |
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[30 Sep 2008|09:38am] |
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mood |
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 cynical |
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Something I noticed this morning while reading the news... some candidates propose raising the FDIC insurance cap from $100,000 to $250,000. Who are these mystery candidates? Depends who you ask.
Some say McCain and Obama:
Others say it's just Obama:
- CNN
- ABC News
- ...and every other news source I can find.
I wonder what could explain the difference. And actually, seeing MSNBC list both really does surprise me... it makes me wonder if the difference can be attributed in part to how MSNBC canned Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews for being too openly liberal on what was supposed to be objective news.
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[12 Jun 2008|02:25pm] |
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mood |
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excited |
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On the way to church on Sunday, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) morganie said "Let's go to Monterey! And I'm all, um, ok? But I haven't obsessively planned for weeks on end! So immediately after church we went to Monterey. It was ridiculously packed with activities, especially for something done with zero planning. We did the 17-Mile Drive and took lots of pictures. Yay.
Then in two weeks our home is getting fumigated. So I decided that instead of going to a hotel, for the same price we could go camping, and afterwards we'd have a full set of camping gear to show for it. So we're set up for 3 days and 2 nights of camping in Saratoga Springs -- no, not that one, but this one, which is about five minutes from our home (so as to not disrupt our work schedules). I'm completely excited about it. Even though we're just using it as a place to sleep in between work days, it should still be awesome.
Does anyone have any suggestions for camping? We already have a tent, a double sleeping bag, and an air mattress... What else could anyone possibly need?
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| close call |
[20 Dec 2007|05:33pm] |
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mood |
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shocked |
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 Well this was freaky enough to deserve a mention in my LJ.
We had a power outage in two rooms the other night. Then we noticed that resetting the breakers didn't fix the problem.
So we called on our home warranty company to look into it. After a second electrician visit, we found the cause: Under a heavy load, the breakers failed to trip, and the wiring burned all the way through. Thankfully it happened inside this junction box, or else it could easily have started a fire in this building that twenty families call home. (This is one of those cases where I encourage clicking the picture, since the page it's on has some interesting details highlighted.)
The odd part about this is that I've been trying to get our HOA to consider sponsoring a breaker upgrade plan for the complex. Granted, it's not as bad as some of the other Zinsco-related pictures out there (especially this one) but at least it should help underscore the urgency of the matter.
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[19 Nov 2007|03:09pm] |
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mood |
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 relaxed |
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Nothing much going on today. My work gave us all the entire week off, but after I had already booked travel out of here leaving on Tuesday, so I'm enjoying this Monday while doing all the things I'd do if I just had more time.
I saw something truly amazing today. After I got an oil change, I went to AutoZone to pick up some touch-up paint to fix a largeish paint scrape that I had stupidly put on my car after I drove it up against a pole, leaving pole paint on the bumper. The AutoZone guy looked at it, then grabbed some carburetor cleaner and sprayed it on, and the unwanted paint just rubbed right off! The bumper now appears good as new. It was the coolest thing I've seen in weeks. I love AutoZone. Those people are so helpful. (And yes, I've already washed off the cleaner that was left on there. And heck, even if it eats all the way through the original car paint, it won't really look any worse than the scrape did. Only time will tell.)
And now I'm relaxing at Panera, putting in some time on a coding contest. It's really little more than an ad for Intel's Threading Building Blocks library, but it's also an opportunity to brush up the ol' parallel coding skills.
We're heading to New Jersey tomorrow for Thanksgiving with morganie's family, as well as her high school reunion. That could be interesting.
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| finally an earthquake |
[31 Oct 2007|12:18am] |
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mood |
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 okay |
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 So I've been here a year. And finally I experience an earthquake.
Let me just say that it was really lame. For everyone who dares to compare earthquakes to hurricanes... stop.
After it was over, I was thinking, Hmm, were the upstairs neighbors jumping around again? And then I walked around and saw some ceiling lamps swinging. Only then did I think, Hmmmm, that must've been an earthquake. It was such a non-event.
In other news, we carved an Apple pumpkin. It turned out well.
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[26 Sep 2007|07:08pm] |
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mood |
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 dorky |
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So I haven't posted in 5 weeks. Well feh. I guess there's nothing been going on.
Let's see here... I've been working. Lots of moving around going on at work... nothing too major or notable.
 I decided that after 5 years from graduating college, my means have finally improved to the point that my lifestyle can accommodate a printer. So, when one came up on Woot, I got a printer-scanner-copier thing. And as a result, I've finally undertaken that huge project of scanning all the photo albums I grew up with. (It's not so much that I'm just that into myself... it's just that I have all these sitting around, and I know there's at least one person in my family who wants to see them.) I'm even getting the baby pictures -- but don't worry, I've already marked the NSFW ones as family-only. The horrible results are here. I look even dorkier in some of those than I did in college!
I've also found that I can buy groceries cheap online at amazon.com. If I sign up for their subscription service, I can buy meal bars for about as much as they were at Wal-Mart in Florida, which is about 40% cheaper than they are at the grocery stores here in California. Amazon.com rocks my world. The only hard part is that the selection is terrible, and stuff that's either really heavy (pop) or really bulky (paper towels) are actually more expensive than in the grocery store. Oh well.
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[16 Aug 2007|12:09pm] |
Last night morganie and I went to the Stanford Theatre for a double feature of Never Weaken and Speedy, two silent films from before the Great Depression.
They were surprisingly good. They were really a glimpse into another time... a time when baseball was everything (and Babe Ruth was in movies) and when it wasn't an overly uncommon thing to run into people who had fought in the Civil War. In my opinion, the coolest part was seeing how different things were back then, despite bearing a similarity to how they are today. For example, at one point a guy got a brand new suit for a day at Coney Island with his girlfriend, and apparently this was a perfectly normal thing to do. The movie showed some of the rides they went on... A typical log ride, except that it bottomed out into a lake where a guy then paddled the boat back to the shore... A game in which you would get a prize if you could stay for three minutes on a 30-foot spinning disc without being flung off into the crowd of other people who had already been flung off it... A "test your lungs" apparatus in which you would blow on the same tube that everyone else had blown on all day, after the guy running it wiped it off with the same towel he had been using all day... A race horse ride in which you would cling to a mechanical horse running around the track, hoping to not fall off it at high speed and be struck by the other mechanical horses... And a bunch of other things that would never exist today.
This leaves me wanting to see more of these zany old films. Too bad Netflix doesn't carry that sort of thing.
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