this is just neat:

http://www.eternalmoonwalk.com/

I think he'd like this very much. I know I do.

These are from early this year but I had never heard of them:

http://circa71.wordpress.com/2009/01/21/mysterious-colored-light-columns-appear-scientists-baffled/

and The Moilanen arc : 

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/marc.htm

Coolth!

ETA:  Also, this cool code-cracking by a modern mathematician of a Thomas Jefferson-era code unbroken until now:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html?mod=yhoofront

so if you don't care to read whining, skip this.

The very last thing I did before I left for four days last Sunday was pull the pull-chain to my bedroom ceiling fan/light to turn the lights off, and while it did turn off the light, the chain also just kept coming and fell right out of its socket.  Not having the time to mess with it then, I left it until this morning to call around for repair estimates.  Turns out -surprise! - it is NOT a simple repair, it DOES involve replacing a whole chunk of the fixture and will cost half or more of what it would cost to just replace the entire fan/light apparatus!  

***WHINE*** 

WHY is it this complicated and expensive???  Surely the designers KNEW the mechanical pull-chain system would be the most prone to failure, couldn't they have made it EASY and CHEAP and maybe even DIY-able??  Of course they could have. But that's not the Free Enterprise Way, now, is it?  Somebody - and preferably several somebodies - have to make a profit on the poor beleaguered homeowner.

This couldn't have come at a worse time.  I'm really on a tight budget this summer.  Well, it's a floor lamp for me for a few more months.  The ceiling FAN still works, and even if that craps out on me, too, I have a nice tower fan that will serve as well.

But damn it.

I left three-fourths of a half-gallon of milk sit (lid on tight, and in the fridge) when I left town last sunday, and it's gone off a bit.  Could I use this milk in pancakes? With a little bit of baking soda?  Like buttermilk?

ETA:  Found the answer, and it;s Yes!

http://www.cooks.com/rec/story/121/

Tonight neither my Yahoo Messenger nor the Messenger that came on this Asus eee will work. YIM gies me a blank blue page. the eee Messenger just won't load.  Am I being punished?

ETA: So I got off the interwebs, got back on, and YIM is back. Bur none of my YIM folks are on there. lol

I got an email from amazon.com about my lulu.com story collection, The Outliers. They say they're including it in a pilot program in which they're eliminating their 30% markup.  There's quite a bit of verbiage which, though it's not legalese, I don't really understand the implications of.  Has anyone else received this message, and does anyone know what it's about, and any possible ramifications?  As far as I know, not one copy has sold from amazon.com's listing.  Not sure what this is about or if it will have any effect on me.

*koff koff Linz koff koff*

http://www.asofterworld.com/

I have procrastinated successfully on getting to the back yard this spring.  The grass is about a foot tall, thickly interspersed and in some places, replaced, by a veritable cancer of a mint-family spreading weed.  Its flower stalks stick up about 8 inches and the flowers are pretty little purple things, which the bumblebee likes, but enough already! 

Part of the reason for my putting this task off (aside from flat-out laziness) was because I've been thinking, pondering, studying and cogitating over whether I should start a compost pile this year.  I turned 59 recently, and retirement is much on my mind. I am determined to retire no later than 66 in full knowledge that it's going to be a pretty austere retirement. On the plus side, I own (or will own, as of next summer) my own home with a nice big back yard, and I don't have any debts. And I have lots of interests - writing, dabbling with art, reading, hanging out here (lol), sewing, so I should be able to thoroughly enjoy the lack of an alarm clock in my  life.  I should be able to make it out to California at least once a year to see my son and his family...life will be sweet.  But, austere.  I'm figuring I'm going to have to garden and can & freeze a lot of my own vegetables & herbs & things. However, I don't have a lot of time NOW to garden.  Whenever I started one in the past, by July I'd given up on it - that's my busy field season at work, besides being miserably hot, and the poor garden would just run wild. But I'm thinking, I can certainly start building excellent soil now - the bedrock of organic gardening.

My, this has gotten long.  Anyway, that's why today isn't just a straightforward get out there and MOW day.  I'm using last fall's leaves (mulched by the mower) and this spring's grass clippings to get started. My next door neighbor has a hair salon and I'm going to see if she'll share the hair clippings with me from time to time (nitrogen!) and her hubby's brother has horses on his farm outside town, and the hubby told me he'd be glad to get me some manure whenever I want it. So there are resources.

But I am bone-tired already and I've barely started. It's going to be a nice long yard-work day. Then I can leave Tuesday for a week's vacation with my son feeling good about my yard, and daydreaming on the plane about tomatoes...onions...marigolds...green and/or purple beans...ahhhh. It's what keeps me at it.  That and concern about my retirement. I'm counting on 66-year-old Terry someday thanking me for all this work.   Like working out in  my gym in the basement, the hardest part of yard work s just GETTING OUT THERE AND DOING IT!

Today's the second time someone sent me an email saying they'd "friended" me on Facebook.  The first one, a couple weeks ago, I'd never heard of so I just deleted it.  This one is from Michael Greenhut and I feel like I should know who that is, but my Swiss cheese brain isn't recovering the information for me.  Does anyone know: Do I know Michael Greenhut?  I'm sorry, Michael, if I should but can't remember you - but hey, folks:

I DO NOT HAVE A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT.  I will not ever have a Face Book account.  Let the word go out over all the lands: Quit Friending me on Facebook. 

Or quit spamming/phishing me with these bogus invitations.  I honestly don't know which.

Man, I never get tired of that!

Now I just hope everybody else voted against it*, too.

*gender withheld to keep me from getting sued.


[Edited to add: me happy this morning.]

Complete with a sound bite!

http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/pagenum/all/#p2

CAPTCHA: "CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot."  You know those web sites or vendor sites where you have to read a distorted picture of a word or phrase, and type it into a box before the site will let you read, or buy whatever it is you want?   Tha'ts CAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA:  "is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows."  By using CAPTCHA methods, individual words which aren't decipherable by optical scanning methods, are interpreted by participants and sent back to the people digitizing the materials, ready to take their place in the text.

The web site explains it all:

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

This is brilliant! 

I'm in Ponca State Park outside of Ponca, NE, waiting for the State Envirothon to start. If you don't know what the Envirthon is, google it; it's way cool.  I administer the Aquatics part of the exams. I'm out on a patio with nuthatches, pine siskins, blue jays, godldfinches, mourning doves and robins, some kind of little woodpecker, all flitting around, extremely busy in the trees and at the feeders, donchaknow. And it's cool and sunny, too.

The event starts in a few minutes but I wanted to share the view of the unchannelized stretch of the Missouri River from here.

Hey Lenora - remember this?  I had it on my Yahoo Reminders calendar.



I can't even remember what this was about, but by golly, I get reminded of it every year...

This is from the back cover of a Reader' Digest (remember when they had art back there?) that I cut out many, many years ago. I'd really like a better print of it, but I don't know who the artist is. Anybody here know the artist?


Paris bird market

If you're tired of hearing about her already, skip this, 'k?

No Surprise: There's a fan site.

Nice Surprise.

I'm hoping it won't be long until I'm hearing Susan Boyle songs on my Pandora channel...